Warzone 2100 is my favorite RTS. LAN play a lot with my kids.
What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
111–120 of 214 posts
Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
#112IMHO, the core series focused too heavily on maximizing the experience for esports, and that spoiled the genre for the mid-range gamers that were its bread and butter. And still, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation et al were not so long ago. And OpenRA itself has been somewhat of a success. BTW, C&C has a Red Alert reboot coming out before too long. It will be classic in design.
I think also that any competitive game over time will optimize for the experts or be optimized by experts. Fighting games is another example, and a lot of rhythm games are. MMOs that focus on PvP too. I think some people on reddit argued that this happened with fortnite, and was part of why Apex Legends got so popular; the casuals that liked to pvp got driven out by the experts and tried to start again in a new game.
>the casuals that liked to pvp got driven out by the experts and tried to start again in a new game.
I find this to be a really interesting point. Many people would ask why they are playing a PvP game in the first place, if they're not interested in competing. I think it makes a lot of sense though, because they're not actually all that interested in playing against players. They just want more of a human-like challenge than what AI can provide. The only option there is to play against other players.
Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
#113I like RTS games just as the next guy and I am also disappointed that cult franchises such as Age of Empires, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc stopped releasing new games. But I like Turn Based Strategy even more, franchises like Heroes of MIght and Magic, Age of Wonders, Civilization, Total War are my favorite and they are also consistently releasing new games all the time. Recently I've been playing Total War: Three Kingdo…
If you like the Civ and HOMM series, you might wish to try Endless Space 2 as well.
It's perhaps the best TBS I've ever played, and I started with the original Civ.
(Actually, before all that I played Might and Magic on my C64, but that wasn't TBS.)
Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
#114Not RTS, but certainly real time, and as old as the hills. Railroad Tycoon The sequels never really did it for me. Transport Tycoon sucked up the hours, but nothing really did it as much as the feel of that first game. Maybe it was the time — the CGA monitor (which couldn’t cope with Civilisation), no mouse of course. I did play it years later and it want the same. I doubt that feeling can be recaptured. It probably…
You might want to check out Railway Empire, it’s considered a spiritual successor.
The map missions in Railway Empire make it a lot less like Railroad Tycoon than what I'd want. What really made RT great was the open ended ways to succeed, while the very focused missions in RE too often forces me to build specific things in specific order. I really miss the freedom the map objectives in RT3 gave me.
That said, it is a great game and it is one of the highlights of the railroad-building genre.
Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Blizzard went off the rails by dumbing down WoW [...], appealing to the lowest common demoninator. [...] WoW is boring, unchallenging, and appears designed to provoke the least amount of whining by a vocal but dispassionate player base. I was around the MMO scene back when Blizzard was developing WoW, and this was the general sentiment around the community even at the time, it was seen as the care-bearest of the all…
I find it interesting that MMORPGs didn't actually develop in the direction that MMORPGs portrayed themselves as. The idea of an MMORPG was to be an entire world and the player would simply be a participant in it. Ultima Online, at first, tried to have some form of an ecological system where carnivores eat herbivores etc. This didn't work out, but you can clearly imagine that the goal was to create a world. However,…
The only game that successfully did that was eve and I always find it amazing that nobody else tried it.
Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the core series focused too heavily on maximizing the experience for esports, and that spoiled the genre for the mid-range gamers that were its bread and butter. Out of curiosity, in what ways in particular did they do this?
Everything in SC2 is about the RUSH . Turtlers are not welcome. I put SC2 down and never picked it back up after playing the third timed mission in a row. Supreme Commander dealt with this by having genuinely large maps and resource flow rather than a fixed amount of resources. If you tried to "rush" someone or go after their resources, you generally ran into units a level higher and got annhilated.
You can turtle in Starcraft and people do it all the time.
People don’t want to play long online games though, so they don’t set up maps with enough resources to play for hours.
Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
#117I think it boils down to four things: - RTS games, since the first C&C, used an interface for selecting rectangles and pointing them at a single target. It scales extremely poorly. Innovations in this area have failed to catch on. Keyboard used for shortcuts only. Come on, we can do better than that. We have Vim. Action, range(movement key). Alternatively, the Kakoune way: selection first, action second. Either way g…
Let's make a RTS with Vim shortcuts/commands!
Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
#118> Blizzard had a long distraction with WoW, then they made Starcraft 2 followed by the MOBA Heroes of the Storm. They’re still insanely successful. Now they’re remaking their old games, recently releasing a HD remake of Starcraft 1 and are about to release a remake of Warcraft III. Blizzard went off the rails by dumbing down WoW steadily over ten years, appealing to the lowest common demoninator. Modern WoW is boring…
"Modern WoW is [...] unchallenging"
Well this is just false.
I would say the mythic raids are the hardest theyve ever been.
Mythic+ offers its own scaling difficulty from easy to hard to impossible.
PvP is as engaging and tough as ever.
Id argue these are all fun too. Maybe you've just moved on. The game has to change overtime.
Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
#119Don’t know if it counts but did anyone else like the close combat series? I only ever played the first one because the others were PC only. I’ve even bought a few of the later ones recently on GOG, but I can’t get them to run with WINE.
I've played a few of these; I think I liked the Battle of the Bulge episode best (pacier than the preceding episodes). The first was really slow-moving. A Bridge Too Far was annoying.
Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
#120> Blizzard had a long distraction with WoW, then they made Starcraft 2 followed by the MOBA Heroes of the Storm. They’re still insanely successful. Now they’re remaking their old games, recently releasing a HD remake of Starcraft 1 and are about to release a remake of Warcraft III. Blizzard went off the rails by dumbing down WoW steadily over ten years, appealing to the lowest common demoninator. Modern WoW is boring…
>Blizzard went off the rails by dumbing down WoW [...], appealing to the lowest common demoninator. [...] WoW is boring, unchallenging, and appears designed to provoke the least amount of whining by a vocal but dispassionate player base. I was around the MMO scene back when Blizzard was developing WoW, and this was the general sentiment around the community even at the time, it was seen as the care-bearest of the all…
I think that the "just nostalgia for your formative years" argument, being fundamentally ad hominem (doesn't mean it's not relevant though!) is a little flawed against actual criticism. I never really played MMOs apart from some F2P titles back in middle school, but I believe that "dumbing down" games is a real thing and detrimental to people playing. When I emerge from a longer playing session of some challenging game where I'm really on my own when it comes to controlling it and winning (I'm thinking Nethack, a game way older than me), I feel... not productive, but intellectually capable. No regrets. Whereas after a session of something where 1) the devs really want me to win and God forbid not feel lost or overwhelmed by anything! 2) there's a clear intention to continually suck time and preferably money, I feel dumber myself, my time wasted and sadder about doing anything else. And of course they make it at least somewhat addictive to make it harder to stop.
What I'm saying is games are a significant part of daily life experience for many people, and it's fair to judge how it shapes them. I'm not saying all games should be hard, just that they should provide honest rather than fake challenge on the appropriate level.