Are Immortals hero units? In short, no. Rather than controlling them as persistent units, Immortals instead act as godlike commanders of your forces, only appearing on the battlefield themselves to use their powerful abilities. Each Immortal also replaces two units with unique Vanguard units to emphasize a particular playstyle.
If this is Free-to-Play, how will you be making money after release? There are a couple of methods we have in mind, but very it’s important to us that our monetization meets two goals: There are no bottomless or paid loot boxes and gambling mechanics We absolutely do NOT want purchases that will undermine competitive play—no pay-to-win!
With that in mind, players will be able to purchase additional Immortals for infinite access! That doesn’t lock our factions behind a paywall, however: Immortals will be on a free rotation so you’ll always be able to play at least one Immortal from any of our existing factions!
In addition, players will be able to purchase skins for their units and Immortals and access to our “Sagas” system: a bundle allowing access to new equipment through (usually) a PvE-focused narrative, and permanent access to co-op maps! Even when they go out of rotation, you’ll always be able to go back and play them again with your friends!
If Immortals can be purchased, how will you avoid Pay-to-Win? The team will be working to balance existing Immortals so that none stand above the rest. As we release new Immortals, they will first be in a testing environment and will be balanced with our internal testing team. Then it will enter a PTR realm where a bigger chunk of the player population will be able to test them out. Afterwards, it enters the quick play and variety modes before it finally enters ranked play, with balancing occurring through the whole process.
I’m not a competitive person. What about single-player content? The world of Immortal is vast and we absolutely want to bring it to life through interesting single-player modes and campaigns. Exactly what we are able to do depends on the budget we have to work with, but we expect to have standalone single-player and co-op experiences as early as Beta.
What makes IMMORTAL more accessible than other RTS games? There are a number of ways we attack this problem. Many of these solutions come from the same guiding principle: “opt-in complexity.”
We love the crazy and intricate little things that make RTS not just fun, but deeply competitive. We want to keep all of the cool unit interactions, control tricks, and neat optimizations we can, without it being a requirement to have fun. This lets new players enjoy the promise of RTS: building a big army and smashing it into another big army.
We achieve this balance through less-than-optimal automation: your workers will be built automatically, for example, but advanced players may want to stop their production to hit a particular research timing. The automation makes it so you can only be so bad at this part of the RTS. Skilled players, however, can easily take over and optimize. Additionally, this lets players focus more on the parts of the game they enjoy the most, be it macro, micro, engineering builds, or reacting to the enemy.
There are other avenues we take as well, like working to make sure that the consequences of missteps and mistakes don’t feel excessively punishing, allowing for cool comeback mechanics, and more! You can read more about our process and ideas here.
I thought the Pylon interview was a little rough around the edges, I kinda wanted them to talk more about their game but they prefaced most things by referencing starcraft. They had a fair bit of interesting stuff to say, and I liked how dedicated they seem to be to the idea of longer engagements, split map situations, but still keeping attrition a real thing. Just felt overall the talk meandered more than it should have and made it hard to follow some of the topics.
Overall seems to have potential, time will tell of course. Alpha seems to be slated for later this year so should be able to see sooner than later.
On March 19 2021 05:57 Tictock wrote: Feeble troll attempts aside...
I thought the Pylon interview was a little rough around the edges, I kinda wanted them to talk more about their game but they prefaced most things by referencing starcraft. They had a fair bit of interesting stuff to say, and I liked how dedicated they seem to be to the idea of longer engagements, split map situations, but still keeping attrition a real thing. Just felt overall the talk meandered more than it should have and made it hard to follow some of the topics.
Overall seems to have potential, time will tell of course. Alpha seems to be slated for later this year so should be able to see sooner than later.
Trolling? How? In what world are those kickstarter games any good?
darkest dungeon, hyper light drifter, superhot, shovel knight, banner saga, pillars of eternity... need more?
Doesn't seems to have a dedicated single player campaign, which might be a bit too much for a kickstarter game. Solo play might be standard play vs AI with some twist, which I'm not sure how they can make it interesting
On March 19 2021 12:46 Alpharius wrote: Doesn't seems to have a dedicated single player campaign, which might be a bit too much for a kickstarter game. Solo play might be standard play vs AI with some twist, which I'm not sure how they can make it interesting
The developers said there will be single player and co-op missions - as far as how much content and how fleshed out it is has yet to be seen. Right now I think they are focused on getting eyes on the project and have passionate play-testers give feedback on the gameplay loop before releasing any information on single-player content.
As for the game, I'm eager to see more. I wasn't blown away by the battle report posted on their YouTube page, and I cannot tell whether there is one race with variable units, or if there are multiple races with variable units. I hope it's not the former because then the game is going to turn into mirror matches with slight differences here and there. Watching the battle report had situations that reminded me of boring roach/hydra mirrors where players are jockeying for position but getting nothing done. Also I hope that with more time testing and improving, the movement and microability of units becomes smoother and cleaner because right now it is looking a little dated on that front. Not hard to draw comparisons to WC3 micro/movement, but in 2021 units should be responsive and move without much problem.
It also seems like pyre resource locations are going to be what drives map control and movement. I also cannot tell whether units are automatically produced at times or if they are manually queued up.
Don't mean to sound overly critical with this post, because I am intrigued about the project and what could happen with it, but I'll need to see more going forward to make an honest interpretation of the game.
I don't really foresee this making a splash in the RTS scene.
If you're going to make an RTS is today's world you really need to start at the unit interaction / tug of war phases then look into systems. Combat looks very bland and uninteresting. I'd like to see something being outplayed, outmaneuvered, or just being owned.
A big picture approach is just going to result in running into the wall of constantly having to give X resource/building/etc a purpose.
Description and goals seem more in-line with a mobile game, might be a better direction to steer it.
Their plans/vision for the game sound interesting. The actual game footage has shown the same weaknesses of many other mid/low-tier RTS games, but this is pre-alpha and there was only one race. Personally I am really excited for the game and would love to try it out. I think it is too early for predictions
On March 19 2021 12:46 Alpharius wrote: Doesn't seems to have a dedicated single player campaign, which might be a bit too much for a kickstarter game. Solo play might be standard play vs AI with some twist, which I'm not sure how they can make it interesting
The developers said there will be single player and co-op missions - as far as how much content and how fleshed out it is has yet to be seen. Right now I think they are focused on getting eyes on the project and have passionate play-testers give feedback on the gameplay loop before releasing any information on single-player content.
As for the game, I'm eager to see more. I wasn't blown away by the battle report posted on their YouTube page, and I cannot tell whether there is one race with variable units, or if there are multiple races with variable units. I hope it's not the former because then the game is going to turn into mirror matches with slight differences here and there. Watching the battle report had situations that reminded me of boring roach/hydra mirrors where players are jockeying for position but getting nothing done. Also I hope that with more time testing and improving, the movement and microability of units becomes smoother and cleaner because right now it is looking a little dated on that front. Not hard to draw comparisons to WC3 micro/movement, but in 2021 units should be responsive and move without much problem.
It also seems like pyre resource locations are going to be what drives map control and movement. I also cannot tell whether units are automatically produced at times or if they are manually queued up.
Don't mean to sound overly critical with this post, because I am intrigued about the project and what could happen with it, but I'll need to see more going forward to make an honest interpretation of the game.
I've been following the game for almost a year now, so I can explain some details about the game.
The game is currently designed to release with five factions at launch, each with 3 immortals. The immortals work similar to SC2 co-op commanders in that they have a set of actives/passives. In addition, two base units of the faction are replaced with unique units called vanguards, which only that immortal has. In the game's current pre-alpha state, there's one faction at the moment (Q'rath), and two immortals to choose from, which is why the games are always mirror matches. However, each faction is designed to be fully different from each other, both in aesthetics and gameplay, so when the next factions and subsequent immortals are implemented, you will see a lot more variety. Also, army units are manually queued up, while workers are auto-produced, though the intention is that this can be toggled off if the player wishes since the automation is made kinda dumb on purpose.
As for the gameplay itself, the devs have expressed Brood War as their biggest inspiration, and LaLush's "Depth of Micro" post as a primary guide to design their units around, so in the final design, the game is fully intended to encourage players to micro their units to the fullest and pull off all sorts of crazy plays. The main reason why you probably don't see that level of play in the battle report is because the game's pre-alpha state is still very much a work in-progress. At the time that Battle Report was released:
- There were no control groups, so deep micro was ridiculously hard to pull off since you pretty much had to keep everything in one hotkey - Pathing was buggy at the time. There's still work to be done as their goal is to make pathing more spread-out ala BW but without the sheer clunkiness of it - No damage/armor types existed, so the meta hugely shifted to dervish-heavy armies (the ranged unit with a blink) - Animations and control were much clunkier. This was just recently smoothed out a few days ago, but of course there's still more polish to be done since it's still early in the dev cycle - Balance wasn't a high priority, and that still remains true today since the core systems need to be built. Tech trees didn't exist in the build that Battle Report was recorded on for example, so that led to a lot of "mass late-game units in the first few minutes and A-move to win"
Some of these were fixed, while others are being worked on still. The team is working to get a lot of core features in so that they have more footage to show off, since it's pretty difficult to show off the crazy micro the team hypes up while the game isn't currently in a state to express it, so the skepticism is understandable. But I definitely encourage you and others to keep on eye on this game as it starts implementing more factions and core features in, because then we'll really see all that it has to offer.
On March 19 2021 12:46 Alpharius wrote: Doesn't seems to have a dedicated single player campaign, which might be a bit too much for a kickstarter game. Solo play might be standard play vs AI with some twist, which I'm not sure how they can make it interesting
Don't expect some Starcraft/ C&C level movie awing cinematics and stuff but there will definitely be a campaign. They also said they have a ton of lore already.
The idea is that everyone can play like they want kinda. So if you are a silver leaguer you can focus on micro while macro (auto build workers and other stuff) will not get you too far behind. We'll see how it turns out
I like the general idea this game has. Imagine a third ressource in SC2 which you need for your spellcasters ( Vipers, HT's, Ghost,...) Means you can't turtle up and go into lategame because you don't have casters then. There have to be constant fights for this third ressource. Sounds pretty awesome if you ask me. Someone make a Sc2 mod for this
On March 19 2021 12:46 Alpharius wrote: Doesn't seems to have a dedicated single player campaign, which might be a bit too much for a kickstarter game. Solo play might be standard play vs AI with some twist, which I'm not sure how they can make it interesting
Don't expect some Starcraft/ C&C level movie awing cinematics and stuff but there will definitely be a campaign. They also said they have a ton of lore already.
The idea is that everyone can play like they want kinda. So if you are a silver leaguer you can focus on micro while macro (auto build workers and other stuff) will not get you too far behind. We'll see how it turns out
I like the general idea this game has. Imagine a third ressource in SC2 which you need for your spellcasters ( Vipers, HT's, Ghost,...) Means you can't turtle up and go into lategame because you don't have casters then. There have to be constant fights for this third ressource. Sounds pretty awesome if you ask me. Someone make a Sc2 mod for this
Well, I don't expect a high quality cinematic or deep lore/story campaign. I only wished they can come up with cool designs and mechanic like Firewall of doom or support your champion with unit in SC2 campaigns, instead of a standard multiplayer map with some story behind it. But considering the big number of faction/sub-faction, that might be impractical to cover everyone. So I believe they will do something like Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, standard maps, combine with some hand-design mission.
On March 19 2021 19:27 Alpharius wrote: Well, I don't expect a high quality cinematic or deep lore/story campaign. I only wished they can come up with cool designs and mechanic like Firewall of doom or support your champion with unit in SC2 campaigns, instead of a standard multiplayer map with some story behind it. But considering the big number of faction/sub-faction, that might be impractical to cover everyone. So I believe they will do something like Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, standard maps, combine with some hand-design mission.
That brings up a thought: Who actually prefers the BW, resp. the SC2 campaign? I played both and I think they both have their strengths and weaknesses, but I actually slightly prefer the BW one. In SC2 they tried to distance themselves quite a lot from standard multiplayer and invented a lot of stuff, that in my opinion did not really fit into the game, but just made it more complex (too much fan service imo). I personally like the minimalistic and more macro based approach of BW, it just would need more refinement. I totally get though why someone would prefer the modern version, because the BW campaign story was barely told by the mission itself and more by the sparse dialogs around them, so it is was hard to really engage in/emphasize with the story.
EPT
