Author: Justin Bracken
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Monday, April 17th, 2000
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Games/Reviews/Allegiance/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.
Introduction
In the last few years, online gaming has been making leaps and bounds. Internet connections are getting faster all the time, and game development companies are taking stock. Just about every gaming genre has at least one major online game. From RPGs like Ultima Online or Everquest, to action games like Tribes or Team Fortress, online gaming is becoming a huge market. Simultaneously, game companies have been crossing genres and injecting new features into games in hopes of creating a more unique gaming experience. Now entering the fray of online-only gaming is a new company, Microsoft Research Games, with their first release, Allegiance.
Allegiance is one of those games that is hard to place into any particular genre. It might be best described as a space-sim-action-strategy game. You fly through galaxies, engage in dogfights, and do your best to conquer the universe. Being strictly multi-player, you won’t be alone in all of this, of course, since the game focuses on team play and coordinated tactics. Additionally, there is a strategic commander assigned to each of the factions in the game, who is responsible for directing the overall progress of his team. There can be up to 6 different teams, with a maximum of 15 players on each team. The game plays out on a large scale, involving several different sectors within each galaxy, or map. You can choose from three factions, each with its own look, advantages, and disadvantages. You spend most of your time as a combat pilot, flying to different sectors, staging attacks on enemy bases, and trying to “put out fires” as the enemy attacks your inter-stellar outposts. From a general perspective, the game plays very much like an RTS; think of playing a version of Homeworld where each and every ship is manned by a real, live human being. Upon closer inspection, Allegiance plays much like a space-action-sim. Allegiance could easily appeal to old-school strategy gamers and space-sim fanatics, or anyone who likes a good dose of action injected with some strategy.
Introduction Cont'd
To play Allegiance, you first need an account on Microsoft’s Gaming Zone. From there, you go to the Allegiance Zone, where you get a one-month free trial, after which you need to pay the $10 monthly fee to continue playing on the AZ. With the monthly fee, you get more comprehensive game stats, including your own personal rank, and you are able to join squads and take part in a more unified and perpetual type of community. Microsoft Research is also promising new factions, ships, and weapons, to be made available through future downloads. If paying $120 per year sounds a bit steep for a game you’ve already purchased, you can opt for the free games offered on the Microsoft servers. However, there are no rankings on the free servers, and there won’t be tournaments and updates like the ones being offered to paying members. As a wise move by the folks at MS Research, they have provided gamers with a free downloadable server code, so that anyone who has an Internet connection and a capable computer can host their own Allegiance games.
Getting Started
Before you get suited up in your leather flight gear for the first time, you should check out the tutorial provided with the game. The tutorial will take you through the basics of flying your ship, locating and attacking targets, and understanding the game interface. It’s also a good idea to read the Allegiance Handbook in its brief entirety, and to carefully study the keyboard commands found in the Survival Guide. Allegiance is deceivingly complex, so skipping over the tutorial will make it much more difficult when joining your first game. Unfortunately, the tutorial only covers about 10% of the material you need to know in order to be successful in Allegiance. The other 90% will have to be painstakingly yanked from the mouths of the Allegiance veterans. As is typical of online gaming, anyone perceived as a newbie is initially relegated to subordinate and insignificant roles. Just be prepared to get in, sit down, shut up, and hang on, until it hits you as to what you’re supposed to be doing in the game.
Getting Started Cont'd
Once you’ve worked your way through the tutorial and overcome the shock of being completely oblivious as to how the game works, you can settle in and find your niche. Starting out as a scout will give you the opportunity to become familiar with the game interface and flight controls, which are fairly complicated at first. When you join a game, you are taken to a garrison, or docking station, where you can select which ship you want to fly. After choosing from a handful of ships, you load up with the weapons of your choice. Typically, you’ll have a primary weapon, such as a Gatling gun, and some seeker missiles or mines. Currently, there is a maximum of 18 different fighters, 16 capital ships, and 20 weapons in the game, but you’ll typically choose from four or five different ships and half-a-dozen or so weapons. Each ship has multiple weapon mounts and several cargo bays, allowing you to mix your weapons depending on the type of mission you plan on embarking. If piloting a ship proves to be too challenging at first, you can hop into the turret of a docked bomber or gunship, and simply focus on targeting enemy ships while the bomber pilot does all the flying. Each bomber has two turret positions in addition to the turret controlled by the pilot. Other ships include interceptors, which are good for close-range dogfighting, and stealth fighters, which are best used for harassing the enemy without being seen. Additionally, there are several capital-class ships that are good for destroying enemy outposts and starbases.
Gameplay
Allegiance offers several different types of gameplay, including Capture the Flag, Death Match, Artifact Hunting, and the most popular – Conquest. The objective in Conquest is to capture and hold all of the sectors within a galaxy, and is where the strategic aspect of the game comes into play. Each Allegiance map consists of several different sectors connected by Alephs, which are like black holes that transport ships from one sector to another. If your commander is doing his job well, you will also be able to transport to different sectors using a “ripcord” feature. Ripcording allows you to instantly hop to any sector that has a teleport receiver. This comes in handy when you’re trying to get to the front lines very quickly, or find yourself surrounded by more enemies than you can handle. When the game first begins, almost all of the sectors are unoccupied and open for exploration. The first 15 minutes of any game is therefore a race to see which side can find all of the sectors first. Once the sectors are located, the commander can start building outposts and starbases in the best strategic locations.
Gameplay Cont'd
The commander, incidentally, is the only person on your team who has the authority to build structures. He may be assisted by the person who invests your faction’s income, in order to concentrate on directing the battlefield. There are several different tech trees that will have to be researched before your faction has access to advanced weapons and ships. It is the commander’s responsibility to choose which tech tree is researched. Research requires money, which is donated to the commander by each player on payday. Any player can decide to keep his or her money rather than donating it to the commander, but to attain maximum efficiency and ultimate success, it’s necessary that everyone’s paycheck go to the commander. Additionally, resources must be mined to keep a steady supply of money for your expansion. Helium3 is the primary resource, and often becomes a critical factor in winning or losing. It’s the commander’s job to make sure there are enough miners working to keep your faction from running out of money. The commander also researches the technology for a structure, and assigns that structure to be built on an asteroid. All the major structures in the game have to be built on an asteroid, and each sector contains different types of asteroids. Helium asteroids are for mining, while other asteroids are for building structures. Eventually, under your commander’s direction, your faction will have several sectors occupied with starbases, garrisons, shipyards, teleport recievers, and other buildings.
All of this adds up to a lot of strategy, which is perhaps the most appealing part of the game. Thus, it’s only natural to want to try your hand at commanding. Just think – you’re in charge of the galaxy, you decide what ships are going to be researched, and you assign your teammates to places they are needed. But getting into the commander’s chair is more difficult than out-witting Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise. For one thing, the learning curve of Allegiance is pretty steep. Also, your veteran teammates are usually less than enthusiastic about showing you the ropes. But if you have a fair amount of patience, and don’t mind taking a few tongue lashings each time you mess up, being commander can be fun. Besides, you can’t really appreciate the scope of the game unless you command once or twice.
Gameplay Cont'd
Because commanding has its ups and downs, you might decide to take a simpler approach by focusing on becoming a talented dogfighter or bomber pilot. It takes a fair amount of practice to get very good at dogfighting.
The flight modeling in Allegiance incorporates a drag feature that takes some getting used to, and is especially hard to overcome if you’re playing with only a keyboard and mouse. The mouse is only used to select menu items in the game, so if you don’t have a joystick, the keyboard is your sole means of flying a ship. The difficulty lies in the number of keyboard commands required to operate the ships. For example, if you’re in hot pursuit of an enemy ship and it suddenly banks to the left and upward, you would have to keep one finger on the left-arrow key, one finger on the up-arrow key, one finger on the V key (which allows you to turn tighter), one finger on the Shift key (so your ship will roll), one finger on the Numpad 4 key (thrust left), and your thumb on the space bar (fires primary weapon). More simply put: if you don’t have a joystick, you’ll be playing Twister on your keyboard. Therefore, a joystick is mandatory for anyone wanting to get the most enjoyment out of the game. Once you get the hang of flying a ship, the game gets very addictive, and you’ll be looking for dogfights anywhere you can find them. Skirmishes will often break out between two scouts early in the game as they search for undiscovered sectors. The really fun dogfights involve several squads after the game is well underway. Teams are always on the lookout for unescorted bombers, which require a lot of work to destroy before they do any major damage. Any time your ship gets destroyed – provided you don’t get killed – you eject and fly home in a space pod.
Interface
The interface in Allegiance is a mixed bag. It gives you all the necessary information, and then some. Ships are viewable from a third-person perspective, but first-person is the best view for controlling the ships and keeping track of enemies. The heads up display (HUD) gives you information on your ship’s energy level, ammunition level, fuel level, percent of thrust, shield value, and armor value. Additionally, you’ll be able to tell how fast you’re going in meters-per-second, whether or not an enemy has spotted you, and how far away the nearest target is. Virtually everything in a sector, besides asteroids, is viewable somewhere on your HUD. Ships and far-away structures are represented by a small floating icon with a brief description.
At the top of the screen is the chat area, where players in the game communicate. There are also several menus that can be called up using keyboard commands. These include the mini map (which shows you what sector you’re in), team statistics, ammunition levels of your ship, and a huge list of available voice commands which are sent to other players. All of this information is useful, but when there are a dozen ships on the screen in a mosh-pit brawl, things tend to get a little cluttered and hard to identify. You’ll see text overlapping text, and icons overlapping icons. On top of that, you need to keep track of the nearest enemy by watching a little red arrow that points in the enemy’s general direction, while simultaneously slapping away at various keys on the keyboard. Another aspect of the interface is the command center. Hitting the F3 key brings up a strategic map showing the entire sector laid out across a grid, which is helpful in basic navigation and scouting. The commander has access to every explored sector via the strategic map.
Graphics
Adding to the deep gameplay, Allegiance sports some wonderful graphics. You will witness some of the most cinematic explosions in computer gaming. Each faction of the game has its own look and feel, and all the ships are beautifully rendered with detailed texture maps and special lighting effects. When a pilot hits his boosters, his ship will leave a vapor trail that is very nicely animated. Maps consist of intricately simulated three-dimensional backgrounds with splashes of color, similar to that of Homeworld. Many sectors have at least one large planet that looks as real as any NASA photograph. And there’s nothing like doing a fly-by in a large dogfight, allowing a close-up view of the enemy ship as it whizzes past. Going into a large, swirling Aleph (black hole) is fun to watch no matter how many times you do it. Overall, the graphics in Allegiance are top-notch.
Sound
The sound in Allegiance is quite well done, particularly when you’re in a dogfight with enemies doing corkscrews around your ship as you try to avoid their seeker missiles. It often becomes necessary to listen for the direction of enemy fire, so that you know from where you’re being targeted. The sound of space itself is low and rumbling, adding to the atmosphere. Explosions could stand to be a little more earth-shattering, but the visual effect more than makes up for the lack of sound as you blow up a capital ship or starbase. Voice communication is another aspect of Allegiance that adds a lot to the gameplay.
The many pre-recorded voices sound similar to the marines in Starcraft. You can use voice commands to taunt other players, coordinate an offensive, or call for help when you’re stuck in a pod after being ejected from your ship. Rather than incorporate real-time voice communication, Microsoft Research opted for an in-game voice chat that uses keyboard commands to send pre-recorded messages to other players. This reduces bandwidth and makes it easier to communicate when there are several dozen people in a single game. If everyone used a headset, the chaos would be enough to kill the game.
Lag Time
One of the first questions that comes to mind with an online-only game of potentially close to a hundred players is “How much lag do I have to suffer through?” After playing several 32-player games with a 56k modem, I can say the lag is minimal. This is likely due to Allegiance’s lack of any real AI (almost every ship in the game is manned by a human pilot). The game code has been optimized for handling several different types of Internet connections without choking the game or causing players to warp. I did, however, experience several lockups while trying to log on to a server, or playing the game.
Conclusion
Allegiance is an ambitious game with a lot of potential. The gameplay is uniquely addictive, and the visuals are excellent. The concept of fighting with real opponents for inter-galactic dominance has some definite appeal. The fact that the game offers strategy, action, tactics, and simulation all rolled into one will strike a positive chord with many gamers. When Microsoft Research envisioned Allegiance, they likely envisioned a huge user-friendly online community that anyone – from the hardest hardcore space-simmer to the casual action gamer – could get into, and preferably, stay with for longer than a month. Whether or not Allegiance develops into anything as big as the designers dreamed is yet to be seen. First, it’s going to require some diligence on the part of anyone serious about learning the dynamics of the game. Although MS Research has made it easy to get started playing Allegiance, it is only a small step toward immersing yourself and making the Allegiance Zone your weekend hangout. The complexity of the game will weed out a few would-be commanders and new players wanting to jump right in and start kicking some butt. Allegiance may be a good example of why single-player games and skirmish modes are created for RTS titles, even though multiplayer is the real attraction.
Overall Score: 80%
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