Planetary Annihilation has come a long way since it first appeared on Kickstarter and have done
numerous live streams to keep everyone up to date with the development. In these days of beta tests being used not as betas but as a demo or pre-order incentive it is refreshing to see.
Last night (Your Time Zone may vary) Uber Entertainment did another live stream. It was short but was the first to feature gameplay. Have a watch after the jump.
So what can we take away from this?
First, an announcement of when the alpha is going to start, around the end of May (dates to be finalised and subject to change).
Second, Planet size. The planet shown was stated to be about 1/4 of the way up the diameter slider, this means that the largest possible planet will have 16 times the surface area. Even with the huge units we would expect from a successor to Supreme Commander that is one hell of a big battlefield, not to mention the fact that maps will be able to contain more than one planet and moons.
Finally, they talk about it being a client-sever based game. They did confirm that this is from a technical point of view not a business model. They will not be insisting that *they* host the servers like EA and Blizzard have done with Sim City and Diablo III respectively. From your point of view if you start a single player game it will all run on your computer, it is just that the rendering and interface are run on a different applications. I imagine this process will be entirely behind the scenes and the user won’t even notice. It does mean that single player and multi player are exactly the same game though.
The game is certainly looking good so far and has come a long way in a few short months.
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