Joystiq E3 eyes-on: Stormrise
Real Time Strategies have never been a good fit for consoles, thanks to their over-reliance on a mouse and keyboard. The Creative Assembly are hoping to change that with Stormrise by creating a fully intuitive, pad-based control system. Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to try the controls out for ourselves, but from what we saw it has some potential.
Selecting units is as simple as flicking the right analogue stick. Holding it in any direction will bring up a radar screen, showing your troops throughout the level relative to your currently selected unit. Rotating the right stick will let you highlight your units and, letting go of the stick, select them. Quickly "whipping" the right stick in any given direction will select the nearest unit in that direction, allowing you to switch between units swiftly.
Once selected, the game's viewpoint switches to above and behind the unit, allowing you to see what they see. They can then be moved to any visible ground using a 3D cursor. This seemed to work well, but there are also other methods of controlling units that seemed to work even better, depending on your play style.
"Verticality" is The Creative Assembly's favorite buzzword for Stormrise. Units will be on varying vertical levels, giving them different viewpoints of the battlefield. This allows a single ground unit to command the rest of the army from a rooftop, controlling their movements without switching around the battlefield. This allows you to keep an eye on a battle from afar, sending in reinforcements as necessary with just a few clicks. Again, this worked effectively and the choice of different methods of unit control might be the way to finally crack RTS controls on a console.
We won't be fully convinced until we get our hands on the game ourselves, however. There was no indication of how easy the controls were to learn or how effective they were in frantic mid-combat. Playing as a single character felt more like a third-person action game than an RTS, but with the added control of troop manipulation. Units vary drastically in size; the 10 minute demo we were given started with groups of infantry troops and ended with a huge battle between giant mechs.
Gameplay doesn't just rely on troop control, though. Like any RTS there's plenty of resource management, too. Stormrise utilizes a node-based system, with towers jutting out of the ground throughout the level. Controlling these nodes gives you access to a constant supply of resources to create new units. These can also be upgraded with weapons and armor to keep enemy scavengers at bay.
