Well I've played the demo now. I'm somebody who has played Supreme Commander since it's first beta, so I know the game inside out. I'm disappointed - to the point of cancelling my pre-order.
Firstly, the positives:
+ The graphics don't look too bad, and low poly units aren't a concern to me to make the gameplay more fluid
+ The flow field pathfinding makes manouvering large army around the screen effortless
The negatives (there are so many, that I can't really list them all, so I'll stick with the most important ones):
- Simulation speed / unit speed. Everything runs as if in treacle, clearly so it's managable with a fiddly console pad for consoles.
- No "tech levels" just reserch upgrades - it's just not what Supreme Commander was about
- I found it very hard to distinguish where the visibility range ended for my units
- The change in economy so you can't build units till you have the mass is very frustrating. It's a major step backwards, and just makes it like every other RTS in that sense. It's a wierd mixture of Supreme Commander 1 economy mode, and normal RTS style economies, and it just doesn't work for me
- Your commander can't go under water anymore, why?
- Planes,
WTF how slow can you get. The look slower moving on screen than tech 1 tanks in the first game! Again to make it all controllable by consoles.
- The scale is much smaller, to make it console friendly.
I'll be sticking with Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, as I suspect a lot of the hardcore community players will be.
Even if I got over my issues with the game, it's just not as "fun" to play as an 8 players, highly skilled 4v4 game on SC:FA.
I understand GPG's reasoning for doing this, but it's not for me so unfortunately, I'm out...