Avoiding Panic Attacks

Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri July 21, 2010

The release of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D dominated what was a milestone year for PC gaming, but 1996 also saw the appearance of another FPS just as well-loved by fans, if not the wider market, as its attention-seeking contemporaries. 

Having explored the depths of gloomy claustrophobic horror two years before with System Shock, Looking Glass Studios changed tack ambitiously with a game they hoped would kickstart a brighter era after a baffling spate of poor sales. 

Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri was a windswept, big-world strategic shooter worlds apart from the Boston studio’s cyberpunk masterpiece. 

It quickly attracted a following of its own, particularly among a section of shooter fans weary of narrow level-based dungeon crawling which, since Doom, designers had been nervous about straying too far from.

Against a background of Heinlein-esque militaristic dystopia, the story charted the rise of Nikola ap Io, a space marine of the classic mould, through the ranks of an outfit of interplanetary pirate hunters. 

At the controls of one of three powered suits ranging across scout to heavy classes, Nikola was drop-shipped into 37 missions to fight enemies with an expanding arsenal of satisfying weaponry. Commanding of a squad of up to three fellow soldiers, battles were fought across massive, sumptuously rendered landscapes, ranging from tree lined hills and sandy shores to the barren lunar surface. 

Shining moments came at the start of each mission when Nikola descended through the atmosphere, affording the player time to savour vast draw distances. Those lucky enough to be running a Pentium 100 enjoyed worlds of richly textured terrain and parallax-scrolling skies with incredible depth.

Hiking between waypoints meant combat came often at the head of an unnerving crescendo, allowing time for complex orders and tactics. 

Meticulous planning was usually rewarded with dependable AI from squadmates. Long before Halo’s RTS-inspired revolution began challenging conventions, Terra Nova had already been described as ‘Command and Conquer, up close.’

Just as frequently – and more likely had Nikola not scouted the strength of opposing forces with the remote recon drone – encounters descended into breathless, scrappy dogfights. Luckily, suits came with a gift of superhuman spatial awareness. 

Soldiers of the SFC were using realtime battlefield monitors years before the concept was re-introduced underwhelmingly by GRAW’s crosscom system. Uniquely, Terra Nova allowed the heads-up display to be configured for a 360-degree view, particularly useful during chases or point-defence duty.

The complexity of the interface, along with incidental similarities in the wide-area gameplay, drew first-glance comparisons with Activision’s Mechwarrior 2, which was still selling by the truckload. The comparisons did not bear scrutiny. 

“In terms of gameplay,” Looking Glass Studios founder Paul Neurath said earlier this year, “what is being played today is pretty much the same as what was played a decade ago.”
“My sense is that the game industry tends to be more conservative creatively than other creative media. There can be great reluctance by game publishers to try anything that is actually new, and I think that has held back the development of the industry.”

If the same pioneering spirit motivated him 14 years ago, the roots of Terra Nova’s genre-spanning brilliance can be seen to emerge. 

For its great achievement was in striking a perfect balance between the technical simulation of Mechwarrior 2 and the frenetic arcade action of Doom – at once a thinking man’s Quake and thrill-seeker’s Shattered Steel. 

While a keen tactical mind was essential to defeat the fiendish difficulty of later missions, there were few sweeter experiences than finding yourself suddenly surrounded, jump-jetting 100 feet into the sky, twisting acrobatically mid-air, and deftly delivering a double payload of pulsar to finish off a flat-footed pirate.

Unjustly, the studio’s cursed commercial performance held true and the planned franchise, and eventually Looking Glass itself, evaporated.  Terra Nova’s failure to make a meaningful profit, despite shifting a respectable 100,000 units, was a key factor in the studio’s demise in 2000. 

As with System Shock before it, Terra Nova failed to turn a creative risk into bankable reward. Without no financial incentive, a promised multiplayer patch never appeared, robbing players of the chance to go toe-to-toe in a landscape they so relished just at the moment when big-party multiplayer was gathering pace.

Yet the game opened up the ambition of the FPS genre and cemented the squad-based tactical shooter as a category in its own right. We had to wait another five years for the Master Chief’s debut to experience the same thrill of being out in the open.