Above: Concept art of mech parts in Servo.
Whether you win or lose, finishing battles in any of Servo’s modes gives you new parts (such as new heads or arms) for your mechs. Their abilities come from both their pilots and their weaponry, so you can customize them however you want. In the demo, the developers had a mech that could turn a single Bloomspawn into an ally, while another could give a 50 percent speed boost to his teammates.
Ideally, you want your servo squad (up to three at a time) to have complementary powers. Pottinger described a situation where if a servo knocks back an enemy with their shield, a second robot can trap it with a stasis beam, leaving the third one free to destroy it with missiles.
Personalizing your servo is similar to building a deck in a collectible card game. Some parts are different colored versions of what you already have while others might be new weapons. They have different rarity levels, too, and if you buy a crate of parts from the in-game store, you’ll receive at least one rare item. You can buy these crates using credits you get from selling parts you don’t need.
While you can also bolster your army with autonomous drones that can stun enemies or heal your units, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your servos is a key part of battle. If you jump into multiplayer and face mech combinations you’ve never seen before, you better hope your servos can counter them. The developers want players to “out-think and out-execute” their enemies.
“Our goal was to take all the fun and the big decisions from an Age game and boil those down so that they could be managed in a shorter time frame,” said Pottinger. “We want you to spend time with the servos.”
Above: Some of the servo designs look like they’re straight out of Transformers.
Building an RTS game in 2015
RTS games aren’t as dominant as they were when the Age games scorched the sales charts. A few big names like StarCraft and Total War are still around, along with fresh new faces like Grey Goo. But they don’t have the wide appeal of today’s blockbuster shooters and open-world adventures. Shelley partly attributes that decline to RTS’s reputation for long matches.
“I think people wanted a shorter experience. I think they really got into playing first-person shooters,” said Shelley. “And those are quick, intense experiences. Strategy just unfolded a little too slow for them: the economics side, the exploration, finding the enemy, and then closing with the enemy. It was all telescoped very quickly in these other genres.
“We’re trying to telescope some of that experience in this game. You get to the really challenging parts quickly. Soren Johnson, a friend of ours, has built an economic game, Offworld Trading Company. There’s economies in that game, and there’s intense activity in this game, so you can say they’ve been split apart.”
“I think people just got tired of playing them,” added Pottinger. “They went the [multiplayer online battle arena] route. … Those games are long, too, but they’re a much more intense, quicker 40 minutes. The thought of sitting down and playing a 40-minute game is too much for me. I’d rather play four 10-minute games.”
Above: As this piece of concept art shows, servos come in different shapes and sizes.
MOBAs immediately came to mind when I saw the way Servo prioritizes its robots. They represent a fork in the RTS family tree: The genre began with a fan-made mod of Warcraft III. Over the years, the free-to-play MOBA business grew tremendously thanks to League of Legends and Dota 2, which continue to bring in millions of dollars (and eyeballs) every year.
“It’s funny. I have two boys, 11 and 13. When their friends come over, they play League,” said Pottinger. “They don’t understand that League came from strategy games, and their understanding of Warcraft is [World of Warcraft]. … [Servo] is a chance to definitely leverage some of the massive appeal of something like League and the fact that it has proliferated so far. Everybody plays League.”
Servo isn’t directly competing with League of Legends, but you can see the effect MOBAs — and in terms of personalization options, even Call of Duty — have had on its design. The first thing Pottinger’s 11-year-old son bought in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was a panda backpack. So naturally, Servo has one, too, along with zombies and other skins.
BonusXP will soon find out if this new breed of real-time strategy will stick with gamers.
“It was a great genre 15-20 years ago. Really popular,” said Shelley. “I don’t see why we can’t redo it to suit the tastes of current gamers and make it a popular genre again.”