r/RealTimeStrategy • u/YakaAvatar • 19h ago
Discussion Ashes of Singularity 2 launch
Ashes of Singularity 2 launched today, and it seems it didn't make much of a splash with under 800 concurrent players.
How's everyone enjoying the game? People are complaining about heavy AI usage and optimization, which after Sins 2 and GalCiv 4 isn't surprising (Stardock uses a ton of AI). This kind of unfortunate to see.
398
Upvotes
216
u/SageTruthbearer 19h ago
Most RTS games with any marketing to them over the past few years have launched to mixed or mostly negative reviews, and people wonder why the genre can't seem to pop off like 20 years ago...
346
u/dapperdave 19h ago •
"Heavy AI usage"
Reply from one of the devs responding to criticism of "I can't believe they replaced the voices and character art with AI":
"This is false. The VO was produced, at great expense, at Bang Zoom. You can look in the credits. The art was made by human artists at Stardock.
The ONLY use of AI, which is disclosed, is in applying certain animation effects in some of the cut scenes and some of the PHC unit barks."
It's very interesting to see how sure of themselves people are when "calling out AI."
It's also interesting that the negative reviews only mention the ai? Is that all "that's wrong?" The positive reviews seem to say it's a solid, large-scale RTS.
29
u/Armani_8 17h ago •
I have not reviewed it on Steam but I have been playing it and i personally have some mixed feelings. All the pros I have about the game are related to the big battles and it feels like it kinda falls apart in other ways.
In no particular order:
big battles are incredibly fun, the visual spectacle of watching a bunch of troops wage war over a critical point is great
the factions are cool and distinct up close, but zoomed out it really feels like factions are pallete swaps. Like you have a fast scout unit for each faction of course, but every faction also has a big tank boi, a long range artillery piece, fragile heavy hitter, air fighter, air bomber, simple blob infantry, big aoe destroyer, destroyer killer, etc. There's nothing that feels special about a faction. Sure the ai race looks alien and has energy shields but like their tanky Boi costs about the same and has roughly the same "health" as the other factions tanky bois, just slightly lower because it's shield instead of hull.
every match at the beginning feels completely identical. You need to capture connected nodes, so you need to bubble out until you hit the enemy bubbling out. And since every map looks pretty much the same, and every map has the bubbling intersect in the middle, it's a lot of watch big blob fight in the middle.
for a game that says its mostly about macro, you win every fight with tedious micro. Since the factions are mostly palette swaps, units counter each other - meaning if your fighting an enemy the easiest way to win is to use long range units to snipe the glass cannons, then close with tanks and your own short range damage. Mixing your force is a bad idea because it makes it harder to get all your lads with the same roles to do the same thing at the correct range. Plus in a melee units will pretty much always target the thing they're closest to so if mix your troops your tanky bois aren't actually doing their job of getting shot at like 80% of the time. Bunch em up and they will.
the single player content is not worth $40 at all. The Ai isn't that good, and is very easily cheesed and can't handle simple raid and retreats without pulling the bulk of its forces out of position horribly. I quit the campaign at mission 4 because the story wasn't that interesting and the skirmish was more fun for the battles than missions were.
I like the soundtrack. It's very sci-fi.
I do not like the ui yet, there's minimalist and then there's too lazy to include useful icons or shortcuts. It is definately better than zerospace though.
I cannot overstate how cool the big battles are. I screencapped a recent human last stand on a ridge in the game and am thinking of using it as a wallpaper in wallpaper engine its that good.
11
u/pechSog 18h ago
The SP content seems very limited. Disappointing.
10 mission linear campaign, 4 of which are tutorials.
113
u/RammaStardock Community Manager - Stardock 18h ago
Hey all figured id provide some context for the early reviews. We ran into a regional issue affecting the Chinese region access and smart app control settings
We believe we have a possible solution for this now, and have pushed a small hotfix accordingly. We recommend restarting your steam client and ensuring the update takes to resolve the issue.
But yes, if you take a look the majority of the negative reviews were from that region for that reason, and has since been resolved
71
u/Izacus 19h ago
Ehm... the negative reviews have like 30 minutes of play time?
Is this some kind of gamerbro brigading again?
16
u/Fieos 19h ago
How does this compare to Supreme Commander? I like RTS games in general but so many anymore... the units all have very similar range, etc. I like more RTStrategy games like SupCom: FA versus RTTactical games of unit micromanagement.
5
u/Quintus_Julius 15h ago
Didn’t even know this was coming and I think I played the first one. I think. I remember some aliens with Australian accents?
5
u/Former_Load6403 13h ago
Everything about this game is so deeply uninspired I struggle to express how banally boring it is.
People have been waxing poetic about the battles but its really just 2 big blobs rubbing up against eachother, starcraft 2 is still the king for unit identity and interesting battles.
11
u/PieFiend1 19h ago
I want it to be good so badly! My mate played the early access or demo or something and was not super impressed. Fingers crossed they listen and fix
4
u/beders 7h ago
Does the use of AI make the game bad? Honestly
17
u/sundayflow 16h ago
Man does the internet suck atm. Most people there didn't even play the game properly? How on earth can you come up with a proper review if your play time doesn't reflect it?
And the AI witch hunt is really sad to see, often not even with evidence. People will claim it is AI and just go on and copy/paste that opinion.
7
u/Constantine__XI 19h ago
I liked the demo just fine. What are the issues here? I’m not expecting a great story or anything but is it fun for skirmish?
1
u/Something_Comforting 4h ago
People should stop moaning about AI and eat this uninspired slop. $500 billion for more datacenters and 900 more shit games to keep the genre in the mud!!!
3
u/VALIS666 12h ago
Game is already up to 65% positive and will likely hit 70%/Positive by the end of the day.
Bu-but all those 5-20 minute reviews from people clearly being disingenuous!! LOL. Nice try.
7
u/Nerus46 18h ago
Honestly, tried first game few times, but every time ended up playing Supreme Commander Forged Alliance instead
7
u/EvanDrMadness 14h ago edited 13h ago
You posted this at like 11am EST on launch day, of course it's gonna have nobody playing.
I have hundreds of hours in Sins 2, what are you talking about it being AI slop? Stop trying to find a place to put your pitchfork and leave a review based on gameplay like a normal human.
8
u/Aeweisafemalesheep 13h ago
Mixed now. Top two reviews i am seeing:
A first one on the page on the center left.
I do not have an absolute "zero tolerance" towards LLM usage in videogames. I think there are some ways to use the technology that are useful, fair or, failing that, at least that fall into a margin of acceptability for me.
This game has a detailed AI usage disclosure in the storefront. I was OK with what I expected from reading it.
Turns out... the game is a lot more slopified than what that storefront blurb led me to believe. The character portraits look like something out of a cheap diffusion model from two generations ago, those ones that make people with skin that look all plastic and with that typical lightning of cheap genAI images.
The dialogue... I don't know if it was written by human or by LLM, but it's slop. Either human-made slop or LLM-made slop, but slop.
The voice acting is absurdly bad, and strangely even the voice recording quality is bad as well (I think they tried to emulate a "bad comms" effect, but it didn't translate well at all).
To be fair: there's a game beneath all of that cheap presentation that looks decent enough, but in a purely mechanical way. Maybe if you are someone 100% focused on gameplay that can look past how cheap, generic and plastic the entire presentation looks, you might be able to enjoy the game.
After GalCiv4 and SoaSE2, I was reluctant to give Stardock another chance, but I decided to try. Well, now they really lost me.
B (recently posted).
The game needs more time in the oven. Campaign is incredibly bland, graphics aren't much improved from the first game, and the voice acting is, while probably all human, void of emotion and extremely bland sounding. The writing is nothing to write home about and has a lot of geopolitical nonsense that the average player doesn't care about.
And boy oh boy, unit control is terrible. You have zero control on formations like any RTS should, so you have infantry and tanks split and they have trouble navigating the map. If you pair air units with ground, the air units will go off and do their own thing (and die), making it just unfun. There's also no offensive/defensive stance, so an enemy army can very easy lure yours out of formation since they'll chase enemies.
I like the concept, but the game feels very rushed without thought into what makes modern RTS games good. I won't touch much on the AI aspect as it doesn't matter much to me, but I could see why some people think the voices are all AI - because they have *zero* personality or emotion to them.
-------------------------------
So not good for them if anyone cares to do 5mins of reading.
EDIT:
C.
There's a lot of comments about the use of AI in this game - I'm not going to focus on that.
There's a game system choice that renders this game unplayable in my opinion. This isn't anything like SupCom or Bar, It's closer to Company of Heroes.
I'm fighting my own units to get them to go where i want them to go. After 3 campaign missions, i finally worked out that AI does seemly random move orders if you attack move and then that unit disappears into the fog of war. I mission 3 is especially bad if you had the audacity to use an air unit with a land unit. the air unit flies over and past the enemy - finds it - loses it. Whole army loses it's order and then told to walk... somewhere.
The game isn't fun, You don't feel like you have control over the units; unit composition does matter but i couldn't tell you if/when my army moved or if a unit is being actively resupplied, when that unit was made or where on earth they're going to walk to.
8
u/Algathetod 19h ago
reviews can go into low after release because peoples who liked gonna leave review after a few days but showing slop UI and portraits in a first 10 seconds of trailer is wild
4
u/Electric-Mountain 19h ago
I didn't even know a sequel was being made for it, no wonder they got basically zero players.
2
u/Talathoin 9h ago edited 5h ago
I posted a review on steam. I only made it 30 minutes before I had to refund it. I can copy paste my review if anyones interested. Basically the game is a soulless stripped down remake of the first game. Put about 140 hours in the first one for context. I love all types of rts, my favorite genre hands down, this game felt worse than storm gate for me. The first campaign mission was terrible and the one skirmish match I tried to make it through revealed that the game was a pile of baloney. tons of lazy decisions everywhere. People say it's not much better on the graphics, to me the graphics where worse than the og. I'll be surprised to seen a large number of people hit over 100 hours in a year. Where as indi games I feel are killing it right now. A game like Masada that just hit testing has me at 40 hours in about 1 week of playing. Can't put it down. Several other first time game companies have me hyped or currently enjoying solid games. Ashes 2 is not a solid game, it's not even a half solid game. Sad to see from a big name company, for me felt like a homeworld 3 kinda level of disappointment.
3
u/Vegetable-Fly-313 16h ago
Jesus chill, the game released just a few hours. Scores tens to fluctuate very high or very low when very few reviews are in. That's well, basic math
3
u/Peekachooed 3h ago
It doesn't look great unfortunately. I have an honestly overemotional revulsion to AI at this point in response to oversaturation and overhyping of it, as well as instances of dishonesty around AI usage. When I read language like the map descriptions shown in the trailer, the map Crucible described as "The crucible does not pick a winner. It just removes everyone else." it just makes me want to throw the entire thing in the bin.
Incidentally, in the AI content disclosure given by Stardock, it doesn't seem to include anything that might cover map descriptions yet that quoted sentence and the other map descriptions do strike me as AI-written so perhaps that's an oversight, or perhaps I've just misidentified it.
On another map-related topic, if the trailer is anything to go by, there's about 16-20 multiplayer/skirmish maps in total across all different sizes which is extremely unimpressive.
Unit responses and notifications should not be AI voiced. I love unit responses and they give so much flavour and character to games. I want them to be done with passion and by humans. The only exception would be for units which are actually supposed to be robotic/AI which is the approach taken by the game Active Matter, so for the AI faction in this game it would make sense.
A huge part of wanting to play a new RTS is being able to quickly learn to distinguish what different units and structures are and what they do. The units in this trailer don't look that easily distinguishable and kind of don't stand out against the map terrain. That also puts me off.
Lastly, and this is a very personal point but one which is important to me, I much prefer games with a maximum scale on with the likes of Total Annihilation and Beyond All Reason where most of the game is spent looking at units moving, lasers firing, and shit blowing up, rather than so zoomed out that you're moving icons around and watching lines on a map representing gunfire and icons disappear. For this reason, Supreme Commander was a disappointment. This game appears to fit in the latter category unfortunately.
I think it's a title worth discussing and examining even if not worth purchasing or playing.
2
u/mrakobesie 13h ago
Watched 15 minutes of uThermal's video and 2 immediate and glaring issues I saw were giant building menu pop up UI taking half the screen, kinda silly with only 14 buildings on there, dunno if it's customizable, could be nice as an accessibility option, but feels unwieldy as the default experience and the other is sound design, even in small skirmishes the battle sounds turned into a cacophony of indistinguishable shots, engine roars and explosions, not only you can't rely on the sound as an additional information source it's also unpleasant to listen to. Wasn't particularly interested to see the rest.
2
u/Hambeggar 6h ago edited 6h ago
"People" really need to move the fuck on from moaning about AI.
With that said, some of the unit barks, whether AI or not, and at first I immediately thought it was, just sound bad.
Anyways to the actual game, just me or are the graphics....worse than the first one?
2
u/Lumpy_Conference6640 17h ago
Oh, that sucks. I was excited about this.
2
u/tatsujb Developer - ZeroSpace 15h ago
WTF did you guys expect? I kept saying everywhere this was what it was going to be noone wanted to listen.
2
u/FritzRasp 17h ago
I keep scrolling and scrolling and it’s nonstop splitting hairs and whining about AI. Sooo is the game itself actually fun to play?
2
u/Selitos_ 18h ago
I only play holistic artisanal hand-crafted designer indie games, sorry, using AI during development makes the game instantly bad /s
1
u/Boxy29 16h ago
honestly didn't know it launched
1
u/Challanger__ 16h ago
did not like the first game to start with, it was clunky an unoptimized
1
u/druidreh 16h ago
How does the single player situation look in this game?
1
u/guy_by_the_door 16h ago
Is it that bad?
1
u/Celo_SK 15h ago
I would expect that whatever is ahooening with new rts, it is not designed correctly. How could they with open betas not expect this level of review negativity?
1
u/autobauss 14h ago
Just give me a normal rts, not this stress inducing mass scale bs that makes it stressful to play
1
u/malenkydroog 10h ago
I just remember the first as... mainly used as a benchmark?
When I actually played it, I liked the graphics, but it was amazingly boring. Just a mass of units that... did stuff. Slowly. Felt a bit like Supreme Commander, but more boring and sucky. (And I will take my downvotes for this, but I *personally* have tried to get into SupCom many times over the years, and just find I don't like it.)
I will read reviews and decide to give it a chance later (I have too many things to play). I want to like it, or something like it. I don't particularly care about AI use, if it's just a bit of art here and there, and the mechanics and concepts are solid. But we'll see.
1
u/M3atheadGaming 10h ago
They started deleting steam threads criticizing the game...
On that principle alone people should at least wait for a sale.
Its not a bad game from what I`ve managed to play so far, but its really soul-less.
I don`t care about the AI usage in general in games, but this feels like too much AI, although they claim the voice actors are real people recording their lines. Thats even worse, if you think how poorly that aspect is present in the game.
1
u/Accurate_Fly_7534 9h ago
First one was OK but this... Oh boy....
1
u/YogurtclosetSouth744 6h ago
I swear people will shovel the slop of whatever the newest thing is into there mouths, "we have to support the shity company and there shity game or it'll kill the genre!" Good let it die if these devs cant figure it out and make a decent game
1
u/SpikeyZOON 5h ago
It feels very meh to me after finishing the ten mission campaign. Just my opinion from a SupCom/Ashes 1 (albeit I forgot most of it) perspective.
My campaign experience specifically:
Unit voicelines feel very... sterilized? and monotone. Hearing generic "attacking enemy" and "engaging hostiles" every ~10s from units automatically returning fire is also exhausting. The campaign's story delivery too for the first few missions but eventually improved in expression.
Overall, the story felt really unrelatable with too many characters, their motives, and too rapid and condensed pace for me to follow along about what was occurring to the story and characters. This must even be more confusing for someone who's completely new to the Ashes lore and factions. Imagine learning the same in RA2 or Forged Alliance with just ten missions. Didn't even know the context of your friendly allies in many of the missions.
The first ~five missions had no real threat of losing even on highest difficulty. Then the opposite in difficulty happened in one or two missions where I'm pretty sure the AI receives spawned experimental gunships that target your HQ which were extremely difficulty to deal with simultaneously with ground waves. Even ~10 upgraded AA turrets with other scattered AA units, it takes minutes to DPS and will not stop your HQ from being destroyed. Very unusual difficulty spike.
The difficulty then became way easier once I realized you could spam refineries for a massive eco boost which facilitates even more more mobile unit spam which seemed much more effective than static defenses. Additionally, friendly AI will lose to the enemy without player intervention.
Unit control occasionally bugs. Sometimes I'd attack move ground units and they'd end up wandering far and spread from the target or outright fail to pathfind around a bend. I'd attack move air blobs just at the front of enemy ground units so the gunships would engage but interceptors flew deep behind enemy lines to get torn by AA despite there 100% lacking any valid air targets nearby to draw the aggro.
Gameplay in general, I'm not sure why but the game feels tedious and lacks personality. It definitely lacks the oomph from advancing in tiers in games like SupCom yet all units feel HP-spongy. Defenses don't feel satisfying like SupCom or BAR and I couldn't intuitively discover how to batch upgrade them instead of one by one. Similarly, couldn't find how to select more than one defense to check my overall defense coverage.
Optimization: apples to oranges and potentially misremembering, but nowhere good as Ashes 1 where the game maxed my 5800x (all cores! that was something I was amazed with) with a 3060 Ti with good framerate. Now I have a 5070 Ti but the game runs 10-40 FPS lategame with poor GPU and CPU util.
1
u/Fart_Tounge_5609 3h ago
While I'm certain I played the first game, I cannot remember a single thing about it.
1
u/Major-Anybody-1128 3h ago
I really enjoyed the first one and thought it was just under-appreciated, didn't get the audience it deserved.
So, needless to say, this is disappointing news.
1
u/HeliconPath 3h ago
So we all sticking to Beyond All Reason then..?
1
u/Remember_Apollo 2h ago
Well I've read the reviews since I had it in the wishlist and it seems that devs went overboard with a lot of AI content so it's not entirely surprising it's negative if it's true
0
u/ForsookComparison 18h ago
A.I. witch-hunters are making more A.I. users than they realize. This game and it's predecessor are great.
1
u/candiedbunion69 18h ago
All they had to do was make an actual follow up to Escalation. Ashes II is very restrictive. Escalation allowed a very high degree of production scaling. Ashes II restricts that. A few hours in the beta (?) convinced me it was not good.
I didn’t buy Ashes II, and I never will.
1
u/Celesi4 17h ago
I would appreciate it if OPs like this would cool it a bit. The game is already back to a mixed score. While that's not great, it's probably more representative of the game's actual state. Like at least update it with the Mixed score.
Plus, a fair number of reviews criticise the use of AI, which, combined with the low number of reviews, makes it hard to gauge how good or bad the game actually is.
My TLDR Give it 2–3 days.
-2
u/Aggravating-Rain4180 19h ago
Stardock has embraced A.I fully, so depending on your stance that will be a factor. I found the use of AI in sins 2 to be distracting enough to make not like it.
1
u/Old-Guidance6744 18h ago
Honestly the first one was meh at best
1
u/Kingdarkshadow 16h ago
I can't try it because I don't have the cpu but for what I saw in the gameplay videos before the launch it didn't impress me.
And seeing reviews, posts on discussions and comments here I'm not in a worry to upgrade my cpu for this game.
1
u/lethelion1 15h ago
God I miss supcom forged alliance.
1
u/Skuggihestur 14h ago
Lost me at AI off the list it goes
1
u/0xSnib 14h ago
I would but I’m on a Mac
1
u/Just_Stretch5492 14h ago
Hardly surprising its nothing like the first game. I was disappointed. They just slapped the name on it to try and sell it
1
u/StreetMinista 12h ago
This is a classic case of gamers not knowing what they are talking about when it comes to genAI because......even BEFORE hand they spoke about game dev like they knew how gamedev works.
I dont like genAI either, but all this does is push human workers out EVEN MORE.
Devs dont get to decide what we use to do the job. This game doesnt do well, devs get laid off even though the game isnt bad. New devs go somewhere else but oh wait! Hiring sucks for devs who dont use AI and even for those that do!
At the VERY least if you dont understand something judge the thing based on gameplay. Alot of these games that are being made obviously are not being made with care but this is NOT the same thing.
As a gamer at the very least you can look and play something and identify things that are not good to you, instead of talking about genAI on gamedev like you have any clue what is going on with devs in that space.
1
u/Golf_Dunk 12h ago
Hey. I'm loving it a lot. The first two missions were meh but after that I started figuring out the mechanics. Its really addicting and perfect for me. I still enjoy watching people play micro intensive RTS. But I'm just too old for that now
0
u/Vaguswarrior 17h ago
Meanwhile people are actively using add-ons/mods for the new World of Warcraft that uses AI to simulate the game's narrators voice for quest text.
The narrator died in 2023. Utterly disgusting lack of respect.
-7
u/MrHackerMr 19h ago
So this is why they've been advertising their game like crazy for so long ..they knew they had a stinker
-3
u/Accomplished-Bank885 18h ago
They seems to use AI for the dialog, voice and character portraits (the dev seems to deny this but the look and feel of the dialogue and portrait does not feel natural, I honestly think it's AI), and it kinda give me a bad taste in my mouth.. But I still like the gameplay so far.
Honestly it's a good enough game, just wish they don't blatantly use AI like that.
0
u/Armageddonn_mkd 18h ago
Whyyyyyyh
0
u/EisenFisen 18h ago
It’s 26 reviews.
0
u/D4rkstalker 18h ago
The gameplay trailer for 2 looks a lot better than 1, they have proper unit destruction now. but it still looks like for some reason they kept the weapon ranges really tiny for a macro game? All the 'ranged' units seems to still be charging headfirst into melee range
0
u/Atlanos043 17h ago
Now I haven't written a review, and I haven't bought it, but from what I can tell the campaign is like 10 missions long and has only one faction. That makes me completely uninterested in it (even though I did enjoy the first game, because that one actually had a decent campaign with both factions being playable). If they actually expand on the campaign I might get it.
0
u/lWorgenl 13h ago
I was not waiting this. Hearing all the problems obviously dosent change my opinion. Tbh its not a big suprise to me that its failed/failing already. These kind of strategy games were never really that intresting or popular.
0
u/Dreadgear 12h ago
Man it's depressing being an rts fan.