W FEATURE
RIGHT:There’s
nothing cowardly
about hiding behind a
big hill.
BELOW:Sacrifice’s
creature designs were
fever dreams brought
to life.ome of strategy gaming’s most influential titles were
developed for consoles, but by 2000 the genre had
been synonymous with PC for a decade. The launch
of the PlayStation 2 saw more and more people drift
away from their PCs, prompting Microsoft to make
the Xbox, which appeared the following year. It might
have looked like a PC, but when it came to traditional
strategy games, it was just as hostile an environment
as any other console. The audience was shrinking,
publishers were becoming increasingly risk-averse,
and players were coalescing around
stalwart franchises.
Out of this came oddities, hybrids, spin-offs, and
more experiments with 3D maps and cameras, like
Massive Entertainment’s real-time tactics game,
Ground Control. Similar to Relic’s
Homeworld, it gave you free rein of
the camera, letting you zoom out for
an overview of the battle — though
not quite as far, given the smaller
scale — and then all the way up to
your beefy sci-fi units, watching them
from ground level as they bombarded
enemy fortifications or stormed
bases. It looked great, and it boasted
plenty of other noteworthy features,
like 3D terrain that could modify
accuracy, foliage that could hide
troops, and customisable units.
At the same time, Shiny
Entertainment introduced the world
to Sacrifice. In another reality,
Sacrifice is probably hailed as an
important and influential RTS, but
for some reason we’re stuck in the
one where it’s more of a brilliant,
overlooked curio. With a library that
included Earthworm Jim and MDK,
Shiny’s games were typically strange
and inventive, but the studio had
never worked on anything close to a
strategy game. That might have been
an advantage, as Sacrifice ripped
apart RTS conventions.
Sacrifice looked nothing like
an RTS, borrowing its perspective
from third-person action games and
keeping the screen devoid of clutter.
Players directly controlled just one
character, a wizard, who could cast