The differences between SC1, Forged Alliance and SC2

[Katsuni]

As we're into the steam sale you may be wondering what the differences are between these titles, so let's do a quick walkthrough of each of them.

First off, Supreme Commander 1 is the biggest of the big in terms of raw gameplay. The super weapons are truly super (experimentals), and the combat is the most diverse. The missions are interesting, if challenging, but the story's kind of lacking. The skirmish mode, which is of absolute importance for strategy games, is very good, if a little weirdly balanced.

Forged Alliance is the stand-alone expansion for Supreme Commander 1. The campaign mode's kind of generic and limited compared to the original. Yes, there's a campaign there, but it's just simply not as good pretty much across the board. Fortunately, the skirmish makes up for this - there's more units, some really interesting stuff added, and the game balance is the best by far out of all of these three titles. The downside is that the greater balance comes at a bit of a cost of making the various factions a little more similar to one another in various respects, such as giving all of them a T3 gunship for example. Overall though, if you want to play skirmish mode, Forged Alliance is the best of the group by a pretty big margin overall. It's also the worst campaign mode by far.

Supreme Commander 2 has the worst mechanics of the lot. The gameplay's kind of suck and mostly involves just spamming out tech upgrades and waiting to build up enough points to get the units needed to actually do much of anything. In skirmish mode, it's boring as hell. The experimentals really aren't that impressive, nor unique. The tech tree's bland. As a whole... no real replay value. However! The single player campaign is the best by far. The writing's better, the voice acting better, the unique mission-specific mechanics the most interesting and so on across the board. SC2 is simply the best for a story by leaps and bounds above the other options.

So, with all that in mind, you can now make an educated decision upon which one's best for you. Or you could just get them all. That works too. They're worth it in general, especially while on sale. =3

[Kapraomoosub Kaidao]

Messaggio originale di Aelies von Saladir:

I was about to agree that SC2 story is the worst - then I saw the post about CC4.
So, yeah, Supreme Commander 2's story and writing is the SECOND worst of all RTS ever.
But it's bad in a way that makes you remember that it's bad. CC4's story (and everything else about it, really) is bad in a way that you want to forget about its existence, else your brain explodes.

Why I forgot about C&C4. They put the commander's wife as an important character. Included love stories in the game which is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. And where the ♥♥♥♥ Kane goes? Does he succeed, or fail. No one knows. He just entered the Scrin portal... and gone.

[Ceejay]

I really tried to just plow through C&C4's dreaful gameplay, just to see the storyline, in the end after just a few hours, I gave up and watched them on youtube, I have gone back and tried to play it again to give it another change, but its just so bad.

Considering I have over 850 hours in Supcom2, more in supcom1 and fa, and prob the same if not even more in the rest of the C&C games, I have just a few hours in c&c 4 which says it all, I personally know of no-one who liked it. Rumours are they were working on a sequal to a totally different game, then due to budgets, they quickly switched to c&c. Which makes sense as if your play Universe at war:Earth Assault, the mechanics are similar, Im not saying it was defo that game, but the gameplay does have similarites, well its more similar to that than previouis c&c games anyway.

Supcom2, while I love the multiplayer and skirmish, and I do replay the campaigns now and then, its purely about the gameplay, the storyline is dreadful, full of plot holes (well if you overlook its a sci-fi and not real anyway) and the voice acting is just awful.

[Bladiumdragon]

The experimentals sucked? But I liked King Kriptor. :C

[Katsuni]

A fair number of people have brought up their dislike for the writing in SC2, so I'd like to clarify the statement that it has the best writing of the series.

First off, individual preferences don't much matter to be blunt. 50 shades of grey and twilight are best sellers after all, so just because you like something doesn't mean it's well written, nor does disliking the story mean it's poorly written.

To that end, the story for SC2 is very poorly chosen in that it's basically a drama/soap opera set in a sci-fi background. The story revolves around interpersonal dichotomies of pairings of individuals, a brother and sister, a husband and wife, and a father and child. The plot is delivered with the character's interactions being the primary storytelling method rather than putting the plot first and foremost. Their lives are examined rather than the major events of the story, where the major events just provide a mechanism for their personal interactions and relationships to be moved forward.

To be honest, that's not bad writing, but it was the wrong target audience to present such to. RTS players tend to favour focusing on the plot first with a central character to focus upon with the larger scale factions being the important part. Each faction in SC2 is broken down to just two individuals though with no real connections to the larger scale issues present. This was intentional to humanize the war, bringing it to a personal scale, but to be blunt, that's not what players wanted in a game like supreme commander. It works fine in this war of mine, but it's a different kind of game.

Now, is the writing good on an objective scale? Yes and no. "Writing" is a blanket term which covers dozens of skills and facets and no one writer has ever come even remotely close to mastering all aspects of what writing entails. J.R.R. Tolkein, for example, was a masterful world builder - but his storylines were rather weak and he had one of the worst cases of poor pacing the world has seen.

So how does that apply to SupCom2? Well, the issue is that part of the game's writing is really quite good. The world building is much better in SC2 than previously, where the concept of what it's like to actually live in the world is explored much more fully. How the various individuals of factions think of one another is presented in a much more humanistic manner rather than being held at arm's length. The missions connect from one to another in a far more organic manner, where it makes sense that each mission follows the last instead of being pulled randomly from one situation and dumped into an entirely different one without context.

Now, the actual dialogue is, oddly enough, better than in the previous games, but the required level of writing to pull off what they were trying to do is a much higher bar to reach, so even though the dialogue quality is higher, it feels weaker. SC1's dialogue was very limited in value - mostly comprised of just being given orders or making note of events occuring. There wasn't any real attempt to really build character development or have personal issues and emotionally charged situations crop up, and as such it was okay that the dialogue sucked - you didn't notice it because it wasn't trying to put it at the forefront of the story. If we go all the way back to Total Annihilation, the precursor to the Supreme Commander series, the only writing there was a little blurb at the start of each level which basically said "The Core commander beat the crap out of the Arm commander" in past tense and that was more or less it. SC2 is much more ambitious in that it wanted to tell highly personal stories for the individuals involved in the story, and that takes a vastly higher level of writing skill to pull off.

In general, if you look at it overall, SC2's writing really is leaps and bounds higher than SC1's, but it tried to do a vastly more complex and difficult task and fell short, so it feels worse than it actually is. To further exacerbate the issue, the type of story was aimed for the wrong target audience, and as such most players just won't like the kind of story they were trying to tell, and most players can't distinguish the difference between something they don't like and something that's bad. It's akin to bringing someone who only likes hamburgers to a 5 star restaurant and them saying the cooking sucked. Except it's more like a 3 star restaurant trying to do 5 star cuisine and not really being able to do it justice. It's still better than mcdonald's, but it's trying to appeal to the wrong audience and not really doing a good enough job at what it's trying to do in order to win them over by brute force.

Now, that being said, if you want to see a war at a personal level, where each individual is emotionally invested in what happens, and they make flawed, human decisions and suffer for their mistakes, then you'll probably enjoy the game, though you may find the writing to be a bit too weak to handle what they were trying to accomplish. If you just want to see stuff blow up then you're probably going to be largely bored and disappointed just as a whole.

It really comes down to whether you appreciate the style of choice and are willing to give the writing a bit of leeway for its ambition despite biting off more than it could chew or not.

[Ceejay]

The uef did not know one of its own commanders was married to an illuminate, do they not keep any kind of records in the future?

An illuminate commander takes orders from a total stranger and attacks thier own side without any orders from above........

Just two examples of the utterly appalling writing in two, I'm not even going to get into the dreadful voice acting..

[Katsuni]

Military intelligence is an oxymoron for a reason. =P

And if we look at the illuminate, they very specifically had a notable habit of following orders blindly in SC1 and much of the story of FA was heavily centered around that very fact and the fact that they turned against their own leadership on a whim, so it's completely keeping with the established behaviour.

Out of context? Sure, it's weird, but in context it makes perfect sense.

[Ceejay]

Messaggio originale di Katsuni:

And if we look at the illuminate, they very specifically had a notable habit of following orders blindly in SC1 and much of the story of FA was heavily centered around that very fact and the fact that they turned against their own leadership on a whim, so it's completely keeping with the established behaviour.

Not really, in sc1 Marxon basically performed a coup, in fa it was still overspill from what happened in sc1, there were still forces loyal to Marxon fighting the queens forces, though they had the backing of the Seraphim. Though its revealed that the illuminate leader kael was behind it all, but they are still following orders from above in the chain of command, just two different sides.

In SC2 some total stranger from a totally different race just pops up out of the blue and orders you to attack your own side, and you do not do 1 thing to clarify the orders from above, and blindly attack.

Its just bad writing.

[Aelies von Saladir]

For me, I don't think that SC2 story is great, even without considering the gameplay and world it's set in. It's just all about 3 whinning people betraying somethinfg for some shallow, contrieved reasons that are excused as 'personal'.
Personal stories in war game can be done right and has been done right before. HoMM 5, for example, tells many personal stories and still the campaign doesn't suck, and the personal stories blends well with the war story. That isn't the case with SC2. The two parts of the story jar badly and diminish each other (or, as the case is, the drama part diminishes the war story part).
Two completely different stories can be told in one media. It's been done and done right many time, with good enough writing. There were even strage combinations like gangsta with Shakespeare or something like that. It takes good writing to pull that off. The only reason that the war story and the personal story conflict badly in SC2 is bad writing.

[Sgt.Apples]

supreme commander 1 : it's a beginning

supreme commander forged alliance : same as 1 but with more stuff + a new faction

supreme commander 2 : dissapointing, they could've put the 4th faction in it