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Oxide has always loved RTS games that go BIG. Big maps, sprawling bases, units all over the place - the whole chaotic sprawl. While we certainly love more ‘tactical’ RTS games as well, with Ashes of the Singularity, Oxide wanted to go BIG, harkening back to genre stalwarts like Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander.
However, as we prepared to develop Ashes of the Singularity II, we wanted to tackle the core problem of “BIG”. One key challenge was that the controls (and the amount of micromanagement those controls demanded) got in the way of the BIG being really fun. Yeah, it’s great to have multiple bases and massive armies, but when you’re still forced to order around individual vehicles or construct tens of tiny buildings, you find yourself working SMALL and not enjoying the bigger picture.
So, we worked to change that.
But what fundamentals would we change to let us enjoy the BIG without a control scheme that screamed SMALL? The principal we chose to guide us was this:
What if you had to play Ashes of the Singularly II, with all the scale and chaos of Ashes of the Singularity I, with only a gamepad controller? No hotkeys. No queuing up hundreds of individual orders, units, or construction tasks. No relying on 100+ actions-per-minute. To be clear: we are NOT going to actually do this. We just want to see if it’s possible.
When designing the UI, understanding that most people will play with keyboard and mouse, we wanted to see the game could be played with just a gamepad. How would you do that? By thinking about how orders are given.
For example, in Ashes of the Singularity II we have changed it so that orders can be given at the region level. Select a region, choose what buildings you want built, and the regions, seemingly, manage themselves with the construction units going off to handle the order given.
So why do this? It’s not just about wanting the game to be playable on a Steam Deck. We don’t even have a console version of the game in the pipeline. The reason was scale – we want our battles taking place across entire continents and we can’t do that if players are forced to micro-manage everything. It also forces us to make the UI better for those playing with a keyboard and mouse.
There are more than a few things we’ve done to make gamepads play more intuitively. Inputs to select all your units, inputs to quickly zoom out to strategic view, etc., were all planned into a “gamepad controls” scheme from the get-go. Mouse+Keyboard is great because it offers you a lot of buttons/inputs to manage gameplay. Using the gamepad as a lens really forced us to really think about what the core actions are for an RTS and what actions we absolutely had to facilitate, without access to all those juicy buttons.
Similar to how the gamepad lens has shaped how we think about gameplay, it has shaped our UX and UI. Ashes of the Singularity I’s interface would present the player with up to ~15 orbital powers at the same time, and that approach isn’t super accessible to a gamepad. Our solution isn’t simply to come up with a way to make choosing from ~15 orbital powers more intuitive; we fundamentally are reworking both the # of Orbitals to which each faction has access and completely redoing how those orbitals are activated. We’re implementing entirely new HUD elements, radial menus, and everything it takes to make it fun, clear, and accessible to select-and-target an Orbital power. This has the side benefit of forcing us to be more focused and impactful with each Orbital we make, as well as generally making it slicker to use in the heat of combat.
Being honest, we’ve surprised ourselves at how well the game already plays on a gamepad and, as we add in more systems and features, it’s only been getting better. We’ll cover more on our path to BIG and accessible in future developer journals as it shapes many key aspects of the game, especially the Army system.
(An early mockup of a new UI approach, layered on top of Ashes of the Singularity I)
