After all, it's not the game engine that makes a game great-it's the gameplay, controls, writing, and user experience that make a game great. So going in I was worried that Ashes of the Singularity would be (if I may use a movie metaphor) more like the technically advanced Avatar rather than the wonderfully conceived Toy Story.
While technical achievements are great, there have been too many cases where the technical advances of a game overshadow the stuff that makes a game fun. The thought of a 'next-generation' RTS game both worried and appealed to me. The big promise of the Oxide engine was that it would unlock all kinds of new possibilities for game developers as it would allow them to build bigger maps, implement better AI, and more importantly allow for gigantic battles featuring hundreds of units. With Ashes, Stardock was going to bring modern technology (64-bit computing and DirectX 12) to a genre that hasn't seen a lot of technical innovation. When the development of Ashes of the Singularity was announced, Stardock said that their goal was to create a next-generation RTS game.
