Supreme Commander Interview & Progress Report

Like many real-time strategy games, Supreme Commander has an economic aspect to it, as you must accumulate resources (in this case, energy and mass) and use it to churn out war machines. What makes Supreme Commander different, though, is its enormous scale. Battlefields will be hundreds, and even thousands, of square kilometers in size. Don't worry about it being too big, because the quick pace of the combat will have you busy directing armies, navies, and air forces around the map. To get an update on the game, we caught up with creator Chris Taylor.

GameSpot: It's been a few months since we got an update on Supreme Commander. Where's the game at currently? How much work is left?

Chris Taylor: Supreme Commander is getting very close to being complete, but as we approach the finish line, some of the toughest challenges remain. These include tuning and balancing, debugging, optimizing the game for performance, and, lastly, we are finalizing the code to run on DirectX 10 in Windows Vista.

GS: The trailer for Supreme Commander generated an incredible amount of buzz. What was the reaction like to the reaction to the trailer? Does the buzz make you a bit nervous now that all these expectations are out there?

CT: We were very happy to see the reaction, and like you suggest, it made us work harder because we certainly don't want to disappoint those who are excited to play. Nervous, heck yeah, this whole process is pretty hard on the nerves, but we love it.

GS: What can you tell us about the campaign structure? Are there three campaigns that allow you to play as each faction? Will you have a linear set of missions that take you from planet to planet? Or will there be some kind of top strategic layer to link the battles together?

CT: We do indeed have three campaigns, where the player can choose the United Earth Federation, the Aeon Illuminate, or the Cybran Nation. Each campaign is quite huge and follows the story to the conclusion where the player plays a key role in ending the Infinite War.