Lincoln spent his formative years in World of Warcraft, and hopes to someday recover from the experience. Having earned a Creative Writing degree by convincing professors to accept his papers about Dwarf Fortress, he leverages that expertise in his most important work: judging a video game’s lore purely on the quality of its proper nouns.
Back in March, I attended an advance preview summit for Battle Aces, the RTS from Uncapped Games revealed tonight at Summer Game Fest. There, David Kim, former lead multiplayer designer on StarCraft 2 and current Uncapped creative lead, pitched the new studio's ambitious goal: a game that would trigger a"paradigm shift" for realtime strategy games by stripping the genre to its fundamentals. And after two days with the deckbuilder RTS? By god, I think Battle Aces could do it.
Uncapped is hoping to make a game that's approachable for players who are interested in the fantasy of strategic command, but might've been intimidated by the high skill actions-per-second demands of RTS pillars like StarCraft. I think they're already off to a great start.Putting you in the role of a mercenary commander of a sci-fi army of space drones, Battle Aces pares the RTS down to one core base building with one build menu.
If I fired up StarCraft and jumped into a competitive game, I wouldn't even know where to begin figuring out what went wrong when I inevitably get slaughtered. Did I do my buildings out of order? Was I too slow with building SCVs? Did I tech incorrectly? I'd need a graduate-level course in StarCraft esports to start making those calls. But if I've built a Battle Aces deck around the King Crab—a burly, armored robot crustacean with buzzsaw claws—my problems are easier to diagnose.
But by lunch on the first day they couldn't help themselves. It was a flurry of eagerly traded strategies, deck comps, proposed unit counters. I was in a shark tank, watching apex predators delight in the scent of blood: terrified, but fascinated. And thanks to Battle Aces putting strategy on terms I could actually contend with—well, I didn't beat any of them, but I held my own in a handful of skirmishes before being brutally dispatched.
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