Shattered Steel by BioWare 1996
Historically, BioWare are most famous for their cRPGs such as Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. However, their first computer game was not a cRPG, but rather a mech-sim.
Shattered Steel is a mech-simulator developed by BioWare and released in October of 1996 for IBM PC MS-DOS and Windows 95.
The first computer game developed by BioWare was Shattered Steel, which employs real-time 3D texture-mapped environments displayed in square-pixel SVGA 640x480 at 8 bit color depth. However, the explosion effects and "skyboxes" are 2D.
Real-time Terrain Deformation
Impressively, Shattered Steel landscapes feature real-time terrain deformation (destructible terrain) and light-sourcing. Graphics detail as well as texture and terrain draw depth are tailorable; terrain lighting is toggleable.
The draw distance is limited even when maxed out, but MechWarrior 2 has the same issue. Also released in 1996, Quake's draw distance was superior. However, we must bear in mind that Quake did not tackle undulating and deformable 3D landscapes; Quake was about high-performance rendering of rooms, halls and aggro.
It is the deformable terrain that makes Shattered Steel interesting to revisit in 2024: the ability to crater the landscape and flatten hills with mech-firepower is not only technically impressive, but entertaining as well. And tactical - it's not a gimmick.
Otherwise, Shattered Steel plays similarly to the MechWarrior computer games.
Shattered Steel takes place in the year 2132, during an era of deep space exploration and colonization. The player assumes the role of an interplanetary mercenary under contract with a mining corporation. Piloting Planet Runners (mechs), over the course of various missions the player is charged with patrolling the surface of planets and pacifying an alien threat.
Gameplay-wise, Shattered Steel features:
- 16-player network support (coop, team play, anarchy)
- 50 single-player missions staged on five planets
- 40 multi-player missions
- 25 animated enemy models
- 7 player-controlled Planet Runners (mechs)
- 25 weapons
Shattered Steel requires at minimum an i80486DX2-66 MHz CPU, 8 megs of RAM, 1 megs of vRAM and 33 megs of HDD space, but 16 megs of RAM is recommended for its 16 bit audio. The Shattered Steel graphics engine runs under the VESA VBE driver.
Control-wise, Shattered Steel supports keyboard-only and kb/m as well as generic 2-axis joysticks, Flightstick Pro, Gravis Phoenix/Firebird and ThrustMaster and Wingman Extreme.
The controls are good, collision detection is fine, but the difficulty can spike occasionally. Like all mech-sims you will have to knuckle down to get into Shattered Steel.
Still, Shattered Steel is more of an action-based sim in comparison to MechWarrior 2.
It would have been difficult to compete with the FASA Corp. BattleTech license of the MechWarrior series in its prime.
However, Shattered Steel shows that BioWare were already a professional and promising computer game developer, pre-Baldur's Gate. Shattered Steel is a polished and full-featured computer game powered by an innovative engine coded by a team of ten programmers.
There was no Shattered Steel 2. If there was, who knows, maybe Baldur's Gate would not have been made.
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A part of: History of 1990s Computer Games.
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