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On January 08 2024 18:50 Comedy wrote:
After having paid close attention to both stormgate and zerospace, to me personally it seems like making everything easier and things like auto hotkeying isn't the way to go. Both games have almost zero macro compared to sc, especially bw.
It sorts of feelings like playing an arcade map in UMS, rather than playing a real game. Huge part of the game is just missing when you remove macro from the game, which seems to be the solution to all these developers to make the game more accesible to casuals.
Why does nobody realise that Macro and base building are actually a fun part of RTS?
I fully agree. This is one of the main reasons why Dawn of War 2 failed miserably at being fun to me. The Coop-Campaign was great fun but the 1v1 was so fucking boring.
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Great game design comes down to composing a big game out of lots of smaller games, and making all of the smaller games fun. Nintendo is the grand master of this - they put serious effort into making every little part of a game fun on its own, while all hanging together to make a fun overall experience.
I think this approach could be taken with macro. While performing macro well in BW and SC2 can be satisfying, it's mostly not that fun for most players. I think the average player sees macro as a chore that has to be accomplished to do the fun part, which is stomping your opponent with your units.
Like Comedy and Miragee are saying above me, it seems like the current batch of RTS games are trying to get around this "chore" feeling by reducing the role of macro in the game, but that's going to radically change the type of game you're playing. Without base management, RTS just isn't the same thing at all.
I wonder if the Nintendo approach couldn't be taken with macro. What could you do to make the macro mini-game more fun? What if, whenever you ordered a batch of units, the building presented you with a little puzzle to solve? Or what if base construction itself were a puzzle game, with buildings gaining bonuses or other attributes from their neighbors? Or... really, I'm not the person to come up with the ideas for this, but I find myself wondering what sort of fun and satisfying interactions might be built into the base management minigame of an RTS that would make the act of constructing a base and building up your army is, in and of itself, a fun game to play?
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On January 08 2024 23:41 AmericanUmlaut wrote:
Great game design comes down to composing a big game out of lots of smaller games, and making all of the smaller games fun. Nintendo is the grand master of this - they put serious effort into making every little part of a game fun on its own, while all hanging together to make a fun overall experience.
I think this approach could be taken with macro. While performing macro well in BW and SC2 can be satisfying, it's mostly not that fun for most players. I think the average player sees macro as a chore that has to be accomplished to do the fun part, which is stomping your opponent with your units.
i agree.
Some people love macro and others do not. Currently, no single game satisfies this disparity in personal taste. If you like macro play Brood War. If you like economy building and macro minmized then play something like Red Alert 3.
If David Kim can come up with something that satisfies both camps while making the combat great then his company can take my money.
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On January 08 2024 18:58 Miragee wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2024 18:50 Comedy wrote:
After having paid close attention to both stormgate and zerospace, to me personally it seems like making everything easier and things like auto hotkeying isn't the way to go. Both games have almost zero macro compared to sc, especially bw.
It sorts of feelings like playing an arcade map in UMS, rather than playing a real game. Huge part of the game is just missing when you remove macro from the game, which seems to be the solution to all these developers to make the game more accesible to casuals.
Why does nobody realise that Macro and base building are actually a fun part of RTS? I fully agree. This is one of the main reasons why Dawn of War 2 failed miserably at being fun to me. The Coop-Campaign was great fun but the 1v1 was so fucking boring. What does DoW2 have anything to do with it? DoW2 is an extreme. Are you comparing it to DoW1? Because if so, then both SG and ZS (especially SG) has a lot more macro than DoW1.
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On January 09 2024 18:33 _Spartak_ wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2024 18:58 Miragee wrote:On January 08 2024 18:50 Comedy wrote:
After having paid close attention to both stormgate and zerospace, to me personally it seems like making everything easier and things like auto hotkeying isn't the way to go. Both games have almost zero macro compared to sc, especially bw.
It sorts of feelings like playing an arcade map in UMS, rather than playing a real game. Huge part of the game is just missing when you remove macro from the game, which seems to be the solution to all these developers to make the game more accesible to casuals.
Why does nobody realise that Macro and base building are actually a fun part of RTS? I fully agree. This is one of the main reasons why Dawn of War 2 failed miserably at being fun to me. The Coop-Campaign was great fun but the 1v1 was so fucking boring. What does DoW2 have anything to do with it? DoW2 is an extreme. Are you comparing it to DoW1? Because if so, then both SG and ZS (especially SG) has a lot more macro than DoW1.
Yes, I was comparing it to DoW1 but more in a larger sense, a trend if you will. The reason DoW2 almost had no macro was exactly the same as here: The macro side of DoW1 was deemed to boring and they wanted to have more of the "fun stuff" which is unit engagement. The fact that DoW1 has a lot less macro than ZS or SG makes it even more clear that this line of thinking seems to be more of a logical fallacy because even for DoW1 they felt the need to reduce the macro component even further, even though macro in this game was arguably very casual already. The result can be seen in DoW2. Yes it's an extreme but it goes to show that reducing macro components doesn't necessarily make the game more exciting nor accessible. This argumentation is, imho, a bottomless pit which almost inevitably ends with an RTS degrading into a MOBA experience.
Now, I realise this a bit too much black and white thinking but in general my point is that I think the vast majority of players who don't enjoy macro in RTS and don't play them because of that won't be incentivised to play if you reduce the macro component by a bit. You will still retain more or less the same audience as before.
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Stormgate doesn't really remove any macro components, it just streamlines the UI a bit. But everything is still there: unit production, base building, resource gathering. ZS removes some stuff like constant worker production but again, it is not comparable to DoW2 which removed basebuilding entirely.
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Stormgate has incredibly little macro, probably even less wc3 which was the first game which really removed a lot of macro (compared to games like BW/Aoe2) and focused on unit management (even adding heroes.)
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Heroes don't exist in 1v1 in SG and there is a lot more macro than in WC3.
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So the unconfirmed rumour is that the big RTS content creator's event that occurred in LA recently was possibly David Kim's new RTS?
Some of the people that attended:
Tasteless
Artosis
PartinG
Clem
Rotterdam
ZombieGrub
Feardragon
Wardii
Lowko
Crank
Info from a couple reddit posts, including this one
including twitter photos here: crank's twitter
I guess we'll just have to wait and see what it was all about.
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It seems it was for stormgate tho ?
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Oh, well that would be interesting if it was. Seems others said it wasn't Stormgate. Nevermind then!
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Who knows, Rotterdam said last weekend it wasnt Stormgate nor Sc2.
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I am excited about this. In contrast to Stormgate who believes a the classical 90s RTS type of game is a well-proven model and just needs to be tweaked a bit, this game is more likely to attempt to innovate. And the genre needs real innovations to survive.
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Could be something, could be nothing. Non of Uncapped Games social media or Website has any content
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Flying all of those people out to LA sounds like it would be beyond Frost Giant's budget, so if it isn't SC2 related, this would make the most sense.
Based on what little they said, I am guessing it will be a game with SC-like combat but Dawn of War style economy/base management. Basically a bigger budget ZeroSpace. I am not sure if there is a niche for that though.
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On March 09 2024 00:32 _Spartak_ wrote:
Flying all of those people out to LA sounds like it would be beyond Frost Giant's budget, so if it isn't SC2 related, this would make the most sense.
Based on what little they said, I am guessing it will be a game with SC-like combat but Dawn of War style economy/base management. Basically a bigger budget ZeroSpace. I am not sure if there is a niche for that though.
What makes you think it will be dawn of war style economy and base management? That seems very random.
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Northern Ireland27464 Posts
On March 08 2024 05:24 Kreuger wrote:Who knows, Rotterdam said last weekend it wasnt Stormgate nor Sc2.
Colour me intrigued now!
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On March 09 2024 23:39 CicadaSC wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2024 00:32 _Spartak_ wrote:
Flying all of those people out to LA sounds like it would be beyond Frost Giant's budget, so if it isn't SC2 related, this would make the most sense.
Based on what little they said, I am guessing it will be a game with SC-like combat but Dawn of War style economy/base management. Basically a bigger budget ZeroSpace. I am not sure if there is a niche for that though. What makes you think it will be dawn of war style economy and base management? That seems very random. Just a hunch based on the things they said in the past:
As for what they want to execute, Kim describes it as "the most action-packed PC RTS that has the lowest barrier to entry that is still impossible to master."
"So what we want to do is modernize a lot of it, and make it so any gamer can play this game. And to play at a competitive level, you don't need to practice the mechanics of it for a decade; you have to be good at the strategy, or countering what you're seeing on the enemy's side. We wanted to make a real strategy game rather than one where who can click the fastest is the best player."
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/blizzard-vets-start-up-rts-studio-with-tencent-backing
So they want a game where players don't have to practice mechanics or click fast to succeed but they also want the most action-packed game possible. It stands to reason they will make economy management less mechanically demanding and provide more incentives to go out on the map. David Kim also worked on DoW before he joined Blizzard.
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On March 10 2024 02:32 _Spartak_ wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2024 23:39 CicadaSC wrote:On March 09 2024 00:32 _Spartak_ wrote:
Flying all of those people out to LA sounds like it would be beyond Frost Giant's budget, so if it isn't SC2 related, this would make the most sense.
Based on what little they said, I am guessing it will be a game with SC-like combat but Dawn of War style economy/base management. Basically a bigger budget ZeroSpace. I am not sure if there is a niche for that though. What makes you think it will be dawn of war style economy and base management? That seems very random. Just a hunch based on the things they said in the past: Show nested quote +As for what they want to execute, Kim describes it as "the most action-packed PC RTS that has the lowest barrier to entry that is still impossible to master."
Show nested quote +"So what we want to do is modernize a lot of it, and make it so any gamer can play this game. And to play at a competitive level, you don't need to practice the mechanics of it for a decade; you have to be good at the strategy, or countering what you're seeing on the enemy's side. We wanted to make a real strategy game rather than one where who can click the fastest is the best player."
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/blizzard-vets-start-up-rts-studio-with-tencent-backingSo they want a game where players don't have to practice mechanics or click fast to succeed but they also want the most action-packed game possible. It stands to reason they will make economy management less mechanically demanding and provide more incentives to go out on the map. David Kim also worked on DoW before he joined Blizzard.
To add to that quote:
As for what they want to execute, Kim describes it as "the most action-packed PC RTS that has the lowest barrier to entry that is still impossible to master."
And I agree with this. Even though Sc2 isn't as hard as BW, I still think you need 80+EAPM to actually "play the game". If you have anything below that, you tend to play a completely different type of game than the one that is played at master+ level.
Many new Sc2 players find some type of enjoyment in all-ins/cheeses, because that's how they can figure out a style to win. But they never actaully "learn the game" that way and eventually the fun goes away and they switch to games that are better designed for their skillset.
In my opinion, a new type of fun and satisfication first takes place after many hundred hours of practice when you reach a certain level of EAPM and mouse precision.
To capture a larger audience it needs to be possible for new players to experience real "micro" at a consistent basis and play an actual macro-game with multiple bases taken without hundreds of hours of practice.
Accomplishing that - while maintaining a high skill cap, requires real innovation.
Even though Stormgate is "easier" than Sc2, the 1v1 mode is far from what I consider to be "beginner"-friendly. Frostgiant is probably aware of that, hence why they focus on 3v3 and co-op. I am sceptical of whether that will work.
(I think Stormgate got the worst of both worlds. They reduced the 1v1 skillcap significantly but didn't reduce the skill floor by a large enough margin)
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On March 10 2024 02:32 _Spartak_ wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2024 23:39 CicadaSC wrote:On March 09 2024 00:32 _Spartak_ wrote:
Flying all of those people out to LA sounds like it would be beyond Frost Giant's budget, so if it isn't SC2 related, this would make the most sense.
Based on what little they said, I am guessing it will be a game with SC-like combat but Dawn of War style economy/base management. Basically a bigger budget ZeroSpace. I am not sure if there is a niche for that though. What makes you think it will be dawn of war style economy and base management? That seems very random. Just a hunch based on the things they said in the past: Show nested quote +As for what they want to execute, Kim describes it as "the most action-packed PC RTS that has the lowest barrier to entry that is still impossible to master."
Show nested quote +"So what we want to do is modernize a lot of it, and make it so any gamer can play this game. And to play at a competitive level, you don't need to practice the mechanics of it for a decade; you have to be good at the strategy, or countering what you're seeing on the enemy's side. We wanted to make a real strategy game rather than one where who can click the fastest is the best player."
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/blizzard-vets-start-up-rts-studio-with-tencent-backingSo they want a game where players don't have to practice mechanics or click fast to succeed but they also want the most action-packed game possible. It stands to reason they will make economy management less mechanically demanding and provide more incentives to go out on the map. David Kim also worked on DoW before he joined Blizzard.
The game is already doomed then. Look at the trajectory DoW took from 1 to 3. They basically reduced the "base management" to be on the same level as a MOBA. Their focus to create a RTS with less mechanics and less macro to have fun with armies led to and RTS without macro, without micro and without strategy.
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EPT
