When is “Epic” too Epic?

With the recent release of Sins of the Solar Empire, as well as games such as Supreme Commander and World in Conflict, RTS’s have been pushed to a grander scale. Armies now include hundreds of units, and games can sometimes last well over 12 hours. This of course begs the question: When is “Epic” too epic?

Supreme Commander and Sins of the Solar Empire (SoSE from now on) are two of the latest RTS’s which push the envelope of massive battles to new limits. Even today’s high end computers can sometimes lose the frame-rate war when enough units are on the screen.

Too . . . many . . . ships . . .

But why, exactly do we need this many units? Games are no longer fun when you’ve “won” the game, but have to spend the next hour mopping up the pockets of resistance, or when you have to spend thirty minutes trying to move a single fleet from one end of the galaxy to the other. In the pursuit of massively realistic (-ish) gameplay, we’ve sacrificed much of the fun. Playing out a large sized map with decent opponents can take days, and I have to say that after the first 6 hours, the rest is just tedious. You’re basically playing just so you can say you accomplished something in that time.

Maybe you’re not like me. Maybe you like spending most of your video game hours waiting for your tanks to cross the gorge and your hero unit to fully upgrade before launching that “decisive” assault. But me, I like sleeping, and there’s no way to get a good nights sleep, play these games, and do actual day work with these games. I’ll be waiting until Starcraft II comes out, because I know that they’ll keep the battles fast enough to be entertaining, yet large enough to keep people satisfied.