2011: An AI War Odyssey – Day 0

WHY I GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ARCEN GAMES AND WHY YOU SHOULD, TOO

Christopher Park seems like a solid dude. He’s the CEO and founder of Arcen games (that’s pronounced “Ar-ken”, according to their website) and so far as faceless Internetmen go, the words purportedly coming out his mouth have the same effect on me that a sleeping cat has.

If you’re not familiar with Mr. Park’s work, let me wash the filth of ignorance from you with a brief hosing down of history:

Arcen’s first game was released under the slightly inauspicious title AI War: Fleet Command in June of 2009. It performed well on Impulse and received a Steam release on October 16, 2009. It’s a sort of 4X RTS game that boasts dynamic AI opponents and TENS OF THOUSANDS OF SHIPS.

I remember seeing it hit the Steam store around the same time as Gratuitous Space Battles and often got the two mixed up. Gratuitous Space Battles is also a 2D kaboom-‘em-up (in SPAAAACE), but it’s a whole different kind of cool that I don’t have time to go into right now.

Rrrrrrrr.

I picked up AI War on a whim, completely forgetting that I’m largely shit at RTS games. I believe this is because I’m too single-minded. When I used to play Starcraft, my entire strategy revolved around building Carriers, because I thought they were neat. If a problem couldn’t be solved by more Carriers then it wasn’t worth solving. When I played Red Alert 3, my entire strategy hinged, it absolutely hinged on attack bears. It was a psychological thing. The thought of solving an international conflict by dropping hundreds of fucking BEARS on someone was crippling to me. I was utterly stonefaced while watching 2012 over the holidays. There’s absolutely no need to panic until the sky goes dark with a rain of bears.

I am also shit at Starcraft 2. My sense of unit composition is awful. I can’t micromanage for shit, so I can’t even BULD MOAR MARNIES TIL U WAN, as one of my opponents helpfully suggested.

First time I booted up AI War, I was hopelessly lost. I spent 5 minutes playing the game before I realized it played very differently from most any other RTS game I’d ever encountered. I then realized that I couldn’t build attack bears and found myself miffed at Christopher Park’s inability to create an RTS game that clearly understood the importance of attack bears in a post-RA3 society. You can’t just go back from attack bears without repercussions, Mr. Park.

Arcen’s next title was largely dismissed as a vanilla match-‘em-up. It was called Tidalis and in spite of terrific reviews, it was lost amid the brightly-coloured shovelware that comprises the majority of the genre.

It really is a shame, because Tidalis is a wonderful little game and you are all terrible, awful humans if you elected to not pick it up.

During this time, however, Arcen was steadily improving upon AI War’s core mechanics and expanding on the core game with DLC.

Now, I have a slight condition when it comes to DLC. For a while, if I owned the original game, I’d usually pick up the DLC without much question – whether I played that game or not. As AI War collected digital dust on my hard drive, it would occasionally get a nice brush off with the Zenith Remnant expansion and other updates. Admittedly, I was still holding out for space attack bears.

As time went on, there would be upswells of Internetmen and Internetwomen singing the praises of AI War. They’d say stuff like “AI War is like no other RTS you’ve played!” and I’d bitterly scream at my screen, “Well, of course it is. It doesn’t have attack bears.” Then I’d pout and draw pictures of Chris Park’s face being space attacked by space attack bears.

CHRIS PARK ATTACK BEAR ATTACK

The truth of the matter: I was scared. Every update added more things to the game. More stuff to be at least vaguely aware of. It all sounded kind of amazing, though. I didn’t know what a “Hive Golem” was supposed to be, but it sounded vaguely Carrier-ish. But after a little digging, I found that those things were usually limited to 1-per-game and needed to be found and repaired or something. What? An RTS where you FIND dudes instead of build them? I was afraid that if I booted the game up, it’d just kick me to my BIOS screen and tell me to take my pants off.

Then Arcen released Children of Neinzul to celebrate the birth of Chris’ son. The content list was full of impressive-sounding words that simultaneously excited and worried me. What’s more, the money didn’t even go to Arcen at all, but instead went directly to Child’s Play. It’s around this time that I started paying more attention to what Chris was saying in the press releases and hesitantly paused my meatspace Space Attack Bear development program at the prototyping stage.

See, Child’s Play is a charity run by the guys at Penny Arcade. Its main goal is to put video games in the hands of terminally ill children at hospitals all over the place. One of the registered beneficiaries is the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. I did a stint in that place when I was a wee one. I was holed up in an oxygen tent for a few days and by god, was it ever dull.

And then Arcen posted a pretty frank press release saying they were in rather dire financial straits. Mostly thanks to Tidalis not performing as they’d hoped (again: a shame. It’s a helluva game.) In spite of this, they maintained that Neinzul proceeds would still go to Child’s Play, which is a pretty classy move, if you ask me.

They also talked about AI War 4.0. See, all along the way, Arcen was putting out near-weekly updates of tweaks and balance changes and new ship types and responses to suggestions from the community in an act of transparency that is still baffling to this day. Baffling, but wonderful. Everybody likes the underdog, and Arcen knows this better than most, having made a game where you absolutely are the underest of dogs. I mean, you’d need to look up to see a Chihuahua’s nipples. I’ll get to that in a bit.

What was absolutely crazy about 4.0 was the fact that the whole game had changed engines from whatever they started with to Unity. None of this made a lot of sense to me, mostly because I don’t know the difference, but when I booted up 4.0 after nearly 6 months of forgetting it was on my hard drive, I was dumbfounded at the difference. The UI was a lot more streamlined and the game featured a more comprehensive tutorial system.

At this point, AI War has been out for over a year, with a stream of steady updates. I also signed up for the beta updates and committed myself to learning what its bits were all about. Barren as it was of bears.

Then, as seamless as it always is, I suffered a case of late-year dissociation from reality. The holidays hit, and I experienced reality from the perspective of a spaceman strapped into a shuttle and experiencing either one of the worst acid trips ever, or what happens after you crest an event horizon and then meet yourself as an old man in that vault from the end of Inception.

This brings us to 2011.

In what felt like a blink of an eye, we were suddenly at AI War 5.0, replete with a new expansion: Light of the Spire, which boasted a more directed campaign. (To further confuse things, Gratuitous Space Battles also recently received a single-player campaign of sorts. It’s also pretty neat.)

I’d at least kept a wary eye on the beta updates and would boot the game up intermittently. Even though a coherent tutorial system was provided for, I got the feeling it largely covered the vanilla game. So even if I find a Zenith Dyson Sphere, it probably won’t tell me what I need to do with it.

This brings me to now. Light of the Spire impacted Steam on Monday. It’d been out from Arcen and Impulse and some other places probably for a donkey’s age.

2011: An AI War Odyssey

All of this has agglomerated in my mind to make AI War as threatening as the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is on par with a metaphor for the technology that will inevitably destroy us, even as it allows us to survive as a dominant species: This game has changed engines, been the subject of patch notes that probably make Infinite Jest a little insecure and had countless new units and game styles added through THREE expansion packs.

I bet even HAL is a little freaked out by it.

Which means I’m going to do A Really Crazy Thing.

I’m going to play AI War. I’m going to prove to myself and everyone else that AI War is not the inscrutable slab of black rock jutting up from the RTS landscape. I am going to enable all 3 expansions, and with any luck, sample a wealth of the content contained therein. I will feast on its juicy innards like a proverbial attack bear.

Next: Of Panic Attacks and Galaxies.