Have today's strategy games become BIG, HUGE and BULKY?
I was playing Supreme Commander (PC)(Launched in Feb 2007), one of the big sci-fi RTS of recent times, it is then that I realized how big the scope of today's strategy games have become. This game is created by Gas Powered Games, one of my favorite game companies who got us the Dungeon Seige series. I remember when I had played Dungeon Seige (Part 1), I used to love playing this game and used to enjoy the vast landscapes and adventure this game brought to gamers like me. Imagine a vast topography of unexplored land, WOW! that sounded so exciting back then. These guys were used to create large games, games with vast topography and huge content which kept the gamers busy for long hours.

Not that these guys are the only ones making large scope games which take more than 40 hours to complete. You have Bethesda who gave us the Oblivion series, what a great RPG series!

This makes me think, games have come of age and are expected to give more and more large and imemrsive games for us to play. Comparing the games just 3 years back, today's games have lots more to give and lots more to show to gamers like us. When you check out Supreme Commander just look at the amount of strategy content available. We are talking about huge 80km x 80km maps, the smallest being 8km x 8km. These are huge maps to play any game in todays world. Just the sheer size of armies which are under your control would make you nervous but at the same time powerful. Just imagine what kind of army would you create to attack your opponent via Land, Air and Sea. All these types of armies under one keyboard and mouse control, isn't is maddening?? Well it is thouroughly enjoyable, let me tell you that!

So what would BIG, HUGE and BULKY mean to today's games? BIG would definately mean scope, the amount of content which goes into these games is huge. HUGE would mean what kind of power is available at the players disposal. For example, have you had so many options to kill your enemy? Have you had such great intelligence with which your enemy would pounce back? That is HUGE. BULKY would definately mean sheer game size and hardware requirements. Just look at the hardware requirements of Supreme Commander.....it would bring down and good machine to its knees...( no need to discuss Crysis??). Some of these games take more than 6 GB of memory (including of virtual memory). Now that is BULKY!

But at the end of the day these games thouroughly entertains us as gamers. What else do you need when you have so much power to control and ready at your disposal :) I cannot immagine what could games achieve even one year from now! Well we would have to live, play and watch!