alt Hacker NewsI recently discovered Beyond All Reason, a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. There have been several of these, but I think BAR is by far the best. It's open source, but looks nice and is polished. It has amazing quality-of-life features I haven't seen in any other RTS. And it supports insanely huge battles with hundreds of players and tens of thousands of units.
150-player match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQJujiZ-oz0
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Yeah, let me add that it’s a wonderful community. They won’t flame you for failing the frontline because your opponent has been playing the game since day 1.
If you just started, just stay in the backlines and do “eco”, people will be ok with that.
It's better in just about every way, and if you have a copy of TA (such as from GOG), you can load the soundtrack from TA into BAR's music folder and it'll change the soundtrack to the TA soundtrack.
This is often recommended here, but I find BAR to have too much of an “arcade” feel compared to many other RTSes. It seems to be competing with modern Starcraft, not the rest of the TA lineage.
I’m sure many will like it, but if you’re expecting it to be like TA or FAF then you may be disappointed.
I was struck by something else about Beyond All Reason.
There's a popular Starcraft 2 commentary-and-gameplay streamer, Winter, who spent some time posting commentated BAR games. Videos from this period include direct pleas to his audience to take more of an interest because it's a better game with a better development model.
Then he took BAR off of his main youtube channel because that didn't work. He now seems to operate a separate variety channel with some BAR content.
I think about what this says about the role that marketing plays in people-in-general's choice of pastimes.
Can confirm, BAR is what you want...
I have a very strong opinion about everything not having the 2.5D viewing mode as TA cannot be a worthy successor for TA. The 2.5D mode was part of the fun.
I keep meaning to try this game when I see it mentioned. It looks fun!
BAR has quietly become the best RTS to release in years and is a huge amount of fun. It really feels like the version of TA that my nostalgia remembers even though the game and units are a bit different.
My group don't play competitively, we hop on for a bot bash once a week and the AI is a lot of fun to play against. I'm excited for them to finally release on Steam because that will lower the barrier to entry and increase exposure because the game definitely deserves success.