A few veteran developers are trading in their ancient empires for towering robots.
At this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, developer BonusXP unveiled Servo, a sci-fi mech game for PC that tweaks the real-time strategy (RTS) formula for modern tastes. Gone are battles that take 45 minutes or longer to complete — Servo matches last around 10 minutes. It places a huge emphasis on hero units called servos, customizable mechs that players use on the battlefield.
An Early Access version will arrive on the Steam digital distribution platform later this spring for $20, followed by the release of the full game in the fall. Incredibly, BonusXP only started making Servo less than a year ago.
For those working in the Allen, Texas-based studio, however, building an RTS game is long overdue. Half of its 20-person team used to work at the revered Ensemble Studios, the maker of classic RTS series Age of Empires and Age of Mythology. Microsoft shut down Ensemble in 2009.
“It’s a good group of people that have worked together for quite a while. The average industry experience for people in our studio is over 12 years,” BonusXP CEO Dave Pottinger told GamesBeat. “It’s a pretty senior staff, which honestly makes it easy on us. People know what to do, and they have fun doing it.”
I met with Pottinger and chief designer Bruce Shelley (they’ve known each other since their days at Ensemble) for a hands-off demo of Servo. During our conversation, I found out why they thought now was the time to return to RTS games and how they’re building Servo for today’s audience.
Above: A servo squad defends their base from the Bloomspawn.
Why they needed a clean break
At Ensemble, Pottinger said they tried to make other types of games — including a massively multiplayer online game set in the Halo universe — but they “just couldn’t figure out how to do it.” After the studio closed, the last thing on anyone’s mind was making another RTS. It wasn’t until a few years later, when BonusXP started working on an upcoming strategy game for mobile devices, that they changed their minds.
The unannounced project forced them to “rethink what a strategy game was,” and it reignited their enthusiasm for the genre.
“If we’d jumped right back into a strategy game, I think we would not have come up with Servo. We would have done things the way we had been doing them for so long,” said Pottinger. “It was good to take a break. You do something for — jeez, what was it? Fifteen years? We became our own worst enemies. It’s easier, too, to start over and do something new. With Age, once you start a franchise, you do a sequel where everybody expects all the features from the previous game [while also] expecting something new. And after you do that three or four times, you have this game that’s pretty unwieldy, and it has almost too many features.
“But we love Age. The opportunity to work on that for so long was a gift. But the chance to start over with something new — we’ve always wanted to make a sci-fi game that was our sci-fi game. Halo Wars was sci-fi but not really ours. I think that’s fun, too.”
Shelley also found comfort in coming back to a genre he’s been so instrumental in popularizing. When he was a kid, video games didn’t exist yet, so his love for strategy came from playing board games. He honed his game design chops with Sid Meier on Railroad Tycoon and Civilization before joining Ensemble and creating the Age of Empires franchise.
“I like games that make me think. It just feels right,” said Shelley.
Above: You can use drones to either support your mechs or to act as the front-line.
Rock’em, sock’em robots
Servo takes place in a future where humanity is living among the stars. Mercenaries are pillaging the ruins of a long-abandoned Earth for Bloom, a precious energy resource. This sets off a mad rush for Bloom mining as competing factions arrive on the planet. Controlling these mines enables you to build bases, research new upgrades, and build drone-producing factories that support your mech pilots. Your main goal is to defend your territory against other mercenaries and the Bloomspawn, monsters who aren’t too happy about people stealing their stuff.
“Gameplay-wise, there’s a lot of Age of Mythology in here,” said Pottinger. “The way you get servos into the game is like the Age of Mythology minor god model. The whole focus on powers — that’s straight out of Age or Warcraft III, in terms of how the units work.”
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.”