Uprising: Join or Die Harder Another Decade

"Join or Die!!!"

Freakin' amazing marketing slogan right there. Sure puts John Romero making you his bitch into context, don't it? Anyway:

___________________________________________

 

"If you could flick the switch and open your third eye
You'd see that we should never be afraid to die"

 

Muse - Uprising

___________________________________________

 

Among WH40K: Mechanicus' better features, it nailed the parallel campaign structure, advancing each NPC's quest chain while weighing the risks and rewards against each other's offerings skewed toward higher level troops or extra deployment slots, etc. That division of campaign resources among hero, unit or logistic upgrades rang a bell all the way back to 1997.

 

Narrowly predating Activision's better publicized Battlezone (and presumably inspired by Atari's 1980 tank-themed arcade game Battlezone) Uprising was one of the first RTS/FPS titles, a hybrid genre which sprang up so quickly alongside its inspirations that it was clearly always the next logical step in expanding their potential. While this convergence of genres toward something greater petered out over the next decade in favor of MMOs' similar (and more promising) combination of RPG/RTS, MMOs' abject failure to live up to expectations over the past eighteen years now leaves room for an RTS/FPS revival, prompting me to reminisce about what made Uprising so engaging.

I did play Battlezone 2, and where its campaign was more heavily story-based, with all the cutscenes, lengthy voiceovers and combat encounter over-scripting that entails, Uprising homed in squarely on the combat commanding. Your tank is not only the most powerful weapons platform on the field, but a mobile teleport beacon calling in troops, tanks, dogfighters, bombers and satellite laz0rz of DOOOOM from a shared resource pool accrued by your bases like the one pictured above.

The teleport gimmick was largely mandated by primitive 3D graphics with their very close fog barrier and pathing algorithms that would make a first-generation Roomba look like Sacagawea. Nevertheless, while in close proximity to their objectives, units acted more independently that those of contemporary RTS or FPS titles, picking targets and chasing or circling around each other. Due attention was paid to balance, with infantry in their role as cheapest, weakest cannon fodder also being able to dynamite reinforced structures in place of more expensive bomber runs, or interceptors specializing in bomber defense but also making a dandy distraction for their evasiveness. The AI was also more proactive than you'd expect from its era, launching multi-pronged attacks and escalating its response to your presence.

 

While this "scatterwhelming" experience as I once characterized it overemphasized hyperactivity, it also made Uprising one of the early games to feel alive instead of just <YOU><THE-HERO> ambling from room to room shotgunning each baddie in turn or building up two dozen ogre mages to throw at the enemy's one dozen paladins. While simulation games (see Maxis' old run of SimFarm, SimAnt, SimEarth, etc.) always carried this quality, it took almost another generation for it to gradually seep into other genres (see Majesty for an early example; fights between marines and aliens were also one of the original Half-Life's more frequently applauded moments) and even now it's most obvious in city/village simulators where you set goals to be indirectly completed by NPC mooks.

 

To anyone interested in bringing back RTS/FPS hybrids, I'd say you can't copy that original formula from 1997; it's passé. A straight-up Uprising remake will flop and rightly so. Instead look at what captured players' imagination back then in relation to plain-Jane FPS or RTS:

1) that divergent long-term resource investment into troops, logistics, heroes, god powers, hovertank arsenal, what-have-you lending both continuity and personal choice to your campaign

2) take a page from city sims and let storytelling grow out of gameplay. Do NOT over-script a game like this, because you're in fact cutting into the player's relation to the wider action all around. The player should not be able to do everything, but should select where to throw his considerable weight upon a field of many other, interweaving battle lines, personally directing only some of the various potentially subordinate troops. You are "A" combat commander not "THE" combat commander.

To some extent games like Bannerlord already display de facto successful application of these ideas (buy yourself some lordly armor or fifty new troops, attack a new castle or rush over to save Saneopa because that idiot Lucon's about to lose a siege, man a mangonel or hold a stairway against enemy reinforcements, etc.) and many others besides, but I'd say the more focused RTS/FPS niche, maybe with a mission-based (randomized or not) campaign mode, might once again have some room to grow.

 

And, from there... dare we hope... multiplayer? I haven't tried Eximius (we should be outgrowing the DotA 5v5 limitation, which was only ever dictated by Warcraft 3's 6v6 (5+AI) multiplayer restriction to begin with) but this was always a genre perfectly geared toward teamwork... which is partly why it died out as multiplayer vaporized in favor of gear grinding and score farming. Will GenZ prove more capable of cooperation?

 

_______________________________________________

 

P.S. While I'm linking GoG's version of Uprising out of habit, be warned it will simply not work on most modern computers. It took me dozens of tries on two different boxes before managing to get into the first mission for a screenshot. (And for nostalgia, damnit.)