Welcome to part two of Not So Massively’s in-depth impressions of the recent open beta of multiplayer RTS ZeroSpace. In my first piece, I covered the incredible complexity of ZeroSpace‘s core systems through the lens of its competitive play. Today I’m going to talk about the MMO-inspired Galactic War mode, as well as other co-op and versus AI game modes within ZeroSpace.
Galactic War is arguably ZeroSpace‘s defining game mode. In Galactic War, three alliances of player vie for control of a galaxy map. Planets are captured by playing matches to earn points for your alliance.
In the long term, the developers plan for a variety of PvE and PvP game modes to contribute to Galactic War, but right now you can participate only via two-player co-op missions. These play pretty much like the co-op missions of StarCraft II, which is a good thing. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Right now you seem to face the same enemies each time you play a mission, which hurts replayability a lot, but hopefully that will be fixed later.
Just as in SC2, you choose playable commanders, who earn XP to unlock new units and bonuses. There are two right now, both of which play pretty much like the multiplayer versions of their respective factions with only minor tweaks. I think that’s fine as long as future commanders are more creative. It makes sense to have one vanilla commander per faction as a bridge between co-op and PvP and an option for those who are already happy with the basic version of the faction, but you don’t want to repeat the mistake of Stormgate, where all the commanders are just the basic faction with only minor tweaks.
The co-op missions are more approachable than the PvP. The talent system is gone entirely, with some of the bonuses it might have provided baked into the commanders. Personally I’d have kept the talent system and gotten rid of unit upgrades, but it’s definitely the right call to just have one or the other.
Mercenaries are also removed from co-op, sort of. On some maps you can recruit some mercenary units as a bonus objective, but you don’t get the choose the mercenary faction, nor do you get access to their talents or top bar abilities, which in my view defeats the purpose of the customization mercenaries are meant to add.
What I would like to see for mercenaries in co-op is for them to be converted into commanders. They already have nearly enough units and abilities to fill a commander’s toolkit. It wouldn’t take much to fully flesh them out.
For example, from the few campaign teases we’ve seen so far it seems the hero from the Arandi mercenaries works with the human protagonist. Make her a commander for the human Protectorate faction that mostly uses Arandi units. Boom, a fun and unique co-op commander.
I was a bit dismayed to see that a number of players have already played co-op so much they can speed run mission and spawn-camp enemy waves, and it did reinforce my impression that this is a game targeted toward the sweatier end of the RTS community.
Fortunately, I did find some refuge in the fact you can also play the co-op missions solo with an AI partner. The AI is pretty much useless, so you’ll want to turn down the difficulty if you go that route, but it is refreshing to have an option to play at your own pace when you want to.
Right now co-op missions feel very disconnected from the wider Galactic War. Your alliance gets some passive buffs based on the planets it controls, but these aren’t really noticeable in-game. I’m going back and forth on whether this is good or bad. On the one hand it feels weird that co-op missions are exactly the same no matter what planet you’re fighting over or what the state of the war is, but I also think it’s nice that you don’t have to get stressed over how well your faction is doing. The fact that Galactic War is basically just a score tracker with no in-game relevance helps keep co-op a relaxed game mode.
I would at least like a clearer picture of how my actions impact the war. Does playing on a harder difficulty help my faction more? It’s unclear. Really, almost every part of ZeroSpace could benefit from greater clarity right now. There’s so much that isn’t explained well, or at all. I earned “mastery” while doing co-op missions, but there’s no indication I can see of what that is or what it does.
I do like the sense of investment Galactic War fosters in your team. In preparing this column, I logged in to take a screenshot of the war map and saw that the Keeper Council had taken a bunch of territory off my faction, the Eden Accord, and I was immediately seized by the urge to dive in and get some of our planets back.
Beyond Galactic War co-op missions, PvE players can also play skirmishes versus AI and a two player co-op survival horde mode. Oddly the horde mode uses the mechanics of competitive play rather than co-op missions. It seems like the intention of the horde mode is less to win and more just to see how long you last, as the latter waves seem virtually unbeatable even on lower difficulties. That’s fine, but I do worry about the potential for toxicity if all players aren’t absolutely clear on that point.
The horde mode is a fun idea, but it does feel disconnected from the rest of the game. I’d like to see it plugged into Galactic War, with your contribution to your faction being based on how many waves you survived, or even just a raw kill count. That way it’s not too frustrating if you can’t make it all the way to the end.
The skirmish mode features 11(!) AI difficulties plus four match difficulties (it’s unclear why there are two different forms of difficulty setting or how they interact), and the AI is actually tuned pretty well. It tends to be fairly passive in the early game but ramp up considerably later on, making it a great learning tool and fun for smashing together big late game armies. There doesn’t seem to be a way to control what faction the AI plays as, though, which is frustrating.
Finally, there is of course the campaign to consider, but it wasn’t included in this beta build. We know it’s drawing a lot of inspiration from Mass Effect, with a customizable player avatar, choices that affect the story, and even NPC romances. Calling it now: Mera best girl.
That wraps up my look at ZeroSpace‘s versus AI modes. In my final piece, I’m going to deep dive the design of its many and sundry factions and give my final thoughts on the game as a whole.
The world of online gaming is changing. As the gray area between single-player and MMO becomes ever wider, Massively OP’s Tyler Edwards delves into this new and expanding frontier biweekly in Not So Massively, our column on battle royales, OARPGs, looter-shooters, and other multiplayer online titles that aren’t quite MMORPGs.
