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What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

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Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#151

Post by pfdietz »

caymanjim wrote: post #73

> 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 tried very hard to get WoW players to be hardcore. That attempt largely failed. They even admitted it in the New York Times.

So they had a choice: just write off most of that large and lucrative audience, or adjust the game to cater to them. Arguably they didn't go far enough in that.

The argument that the game declined as it was made easier, and therefore making it easier caused the decline, is a great example of confusing cause and effect. The game was made easier, or at least was made to have easier elements, because non-hardcore players were churning out. The alternative scenario, that keeping the game exclusive would have retained players better, is absurd on its face. How does content that a player does not do, and that tells that player they are bad, retain that player? If anything, that content is a net negative for that player.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#152

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Kiro wrote: post #70
eihli wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Supreme Commander? It's the spiritual successor to TA and is amazing. There's a community lobby, Forged Alliance Forever, that has a solid number of active players.

Should I play 1 or 2?

Not 2; that's a whole different beast that was not well received. Play Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, which is more or less v. 1.5, and widely considered to be the pinnacle of the series.

The original Supreme Commander is not bad as well and interesting if you want to see the storyline that Forged Alliance sprang from.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#153

Post by mattmanser »

Mirioron wrote: post #112
Noos wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chall…

A friend and I used to keep in touch by playing RTS Vs the AI while chatting over the mike.

The AI in most games is utterly banal and predictible, and as soon as you go past the easy or medium settings it cheats ruthlessly. Of the big recent ones (StarCraft 2, Company of Heroes 2), it's been a very disappointing experience.

For SC2, it just keeps rushing you, so you end up turtling until the AI runs out of resources.

For CoH2, again it just constantly rushes you with much better stuff that you can afford. CoH2 is actually really annoying as you can never afford anything, and so don't get to play with different units, you're always seem to end up playing the same composition.

What this means is that every game is virtually the same, you're just trying to establish a line, wait until the computer runs out of something (or uses the artifical unit cap for stupid things, effectively running out of an army), and then you roll them.

The only game I remember with a little variance was Dawn of War 2.

Maybe co-op Vs AI is something they just don't care about, but it feels as if it's got worse over time, becoming extremely predictable.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#154

Post by all2 »

sha666sum wrote: post #124
dleslie wrote: post #3

IMHO, 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.

Dawn of War hasn't aged very well for me. The camera is super zoomed in and the user interface takes up huge swathes of screen real estate.

There are several mods floating around that improve this.

I recall a LAN party where we used two mods, one for the field of view (2x wider), and increased the unit cap (again, by 2x).

It made for some pretty epic (and laggy) games.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#155

Post by slfnflctd »

axython wrote: post #125
caymanjim wrote: post #73

> 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…

I'll disagree so, so very much with this and I am certain this comes from someone who hasn't played the game for a while or played very casually. Yes, doing quests and just roaming around has became way easier than before, however the game has tons of room for anyone who actually wants a challenge. I don't want to go super deep, but high end raiding is still alive and finally started getting monetized/sponsored plus…

> what WoW lacks right now is difficult solo content

This is what burned me out on it to begin with, and I'm still kinda there. Instead of providing interesting and difficult challenges, they introduced vast amounts of repetitive tediousness.

I seek out well-crafted tension and release in my entertainment, but I don't have a lot of free time. On a regular basis, I want to struggle somewhat and maybe need a few attempts to defeat a challenging scenario, then occasionally receive a nontrivial reward for it. It's not a complex formula, just one WoW doesn't provide. If they did, I would be more likely to consider a subscription.

Another aspect which could give the 'more challenging yet not too time intensive single player campaign' a better chance in the market is making minor tweaks to such campaigns so they're also playable by a couple. There are tons of couples who have played this game together over the years (probably most of whom have limited interest in coordinating lengthy raids with strangers in their limited free time). It seems to me like a win-win to provide them and solo players something interesting to do that doesn't require too much grinding.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#156

Post by 0xDEFC0DE »

EForEndeavour wrote: post #131
the_gipsy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's make a RTS with Vim shortcuts/commands!

Allow the user to choose between vim and emacs key bindings. Their choice determines the appearance of their units and buildings.

We can add :ragewq too

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#157

Post by heelix »

isostatic wrote: post #33

Total Annihilation holds a big part in my history. It was a great game for one thing, but annihilated.com inspired me to get into running a website. Thanks to TA and annihilated, I ran my own website based on a game (a Star Trek one), which at peak in 1999 was getting 2000 uniques a day. Taking USD cheques (like $40) from doubleclick into my UK bank in my school uniform in 1998ish was a unique experience. Thanks to t…

Not sure if you are aware of the community that keeps Supreme Commander Forged Alliances - but this goes on sale for a couple bucks every big steam sale. If you have any version of the game on CD, steam will convert your CD keys into the gold version (both vanilla and SupCom:FA). https://www.faforever.com is an updated set of rules, graphics, patches, multiplayer, etc that totally updates the game to a very playable experience. Even the original single player missions were updated to co-op.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#158

Post by RugnirViking »

empath75 wrote: post #115
Mirioron wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh people tried. It's just that the effort required to develop these kinds of game worlds relative to the amount of fun gained is often very poor. That's not to say it's nonexistant, it's just that its easy to say something like "I want NPCs to go about their lives in the world convincingly and be affected by player actions", but it's quite another thing to program such a system, pay voice actors, hire writers to write thousands of possible permutations of dialog, with high chances of it ending up having little concequence for the players except as an idle curiosity while they wait for something else.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#159

Post by loktarogar »

Krasnol wrote: post #134
Madmallard wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Yeah but Mythic+ is not the mainstream content most of the players experience in the game. And the anti-social behaviour and elitism surrounding those groups who do M+ has even become a meme. The mainstream wow content is ridiculously unchallenging. You are grinding dailys you can join up queues to do your daily/weekly run of the instances and repeat next Wednesday. This is what most of the people playing retail see…

So..... the game is both difficult and unchallenging?

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#160

Post by vasili111 »

AstralStorm wrote: post #96
nitwit005 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seen to either get games where the multiplayer scene is non-existent, or hyper competitive like SC2, where you feel a bit brutalized. One reason I think I was drawn to the warcraft/starcraft custom games when I was younger was that it just seemed too much effort (and kind of tedious) to get "good" at the main game. Goofing about with strange maps seemed more attractive.

That is the main reason I liked Total Annihilation, you could be decent with only some practice, and the scene wasn't hypercompetitive.

> Total Annihilation

IMHO best strategy game! Good old days...

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