EPTOn July 01 2021 03:40 Waxangel wrote:
wow I was just about to post a public note about refraining from low-effort trolling about david kim
wow I was just about to post a public note about refraining from low-effort trolling about david kim
lol
Battle Aces/David Kim RTS Megathread - Page 18
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BonitiilloO
Dominican Republic626 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26021 Posts
On April 20 2024 03:13 NonY wrote: Actually looking forward to this game a lot. As much as I want to just have a remix of StarCraft to kinda relive the things I enjoyed, I think there’s a huge opportunity to make a new kind of strategy game that is gonna be really fun. And probably my biggest concern for stormgate is that if you try to be like StarCraft but stretch it too much into something else, you end up in a weird spot. So I’m getting excited about games that are changing more drastically and not trying to be a spiritual successor to StarCraft. Of course I hope stormgate pulls it off but I’ve come around to being more excited about more experimental and fresh designs. Yeah same, plus I guess with a couple of interesting projects on the go, the chances that at least one of them nail something cool go up. Interested to see how this one evolves, there’s some decent pedigree on it and they seem to have their heads screwed on in terms of knowing what they’re trying to do | ||
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MegaBuster
167 Posts
RTS stories can be special but man do some of these companies burden themselves with it when they have no vision or don't have the right talent. I'm flashing on the SC2: Nova Covert Ops opening cinematic where they have Nova taken prisoner and say: "Okay Nova test out your suit that makes you invisible." then "Oh my gosh where'd she go, she's disappeared! She's escaping!". Iconic crap story moment, basically Troll 2's 'then they are going to eat me!' scene for games. So cutting out a campaign could make Uncapped so efficient. The late StarCraft team was tied to storytelling without anyone that visionary about it. But they could never break off that commitment to delivering stories. Another reference to SC2, look at how many battlecruiser models there are (15?). These never see any re-use in even the less serious competitive modes (team games). But having 15 Battlecruiser types is also kind of not useful for custom maps, they are all in the anti-goldilocks zone of being too similar for creative use and too dissimilar for spicing up the competitive modes. The whole thing is a weird relic of the time — things that are nearly skins for competitive units which also can't be used for competitive. Blizzard made so much stuff for single campaign use. SC2 is an absolutely maximalist game when you get under the hood. But then there's such a poverty of stuff for competitive players. Even the skins SC2 sells only see use in like <5% of players nowadays (anecdotally). There are whole giant libraries of stuff that no one uses and no one sees. I'm sure many people here have battle chest leftovers and don't realize how low the usage rates actually are. So now imagine yourself competing with a company the uses everything they make for competitive multiplayer while you have on the heavy vest of having to make all these other types of things. You are working at another RTS company working on a campaign story about goblinoid politics, or a romance between a space worm and a floating eyeball or whatever shit. Then you go on the internet and see that you are competing with - David Kim, who talks so fast he can't even pump the brakes when people are responding in these interviews. (Yes yes yes yes. Mmhmm mhmmm! Sure sure.) - MrJack who is pouring units out of his pen in real-time. Who is not only an artist with an incredible capacity, but he is very quick! SHOOM! Rapido! You close the internet. You now have to script a side-quest where your campaign hero has to retrieve some eyeshadow for a floating eyeball alien for its date tonight. Your multiplayer mode is still a mess but you have to get this done. The janitor accidentally turns the lights out for the night. | ||
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teapot_
39 Posts
On April 20 2024 02:38 feardragon wrote: For anyone interested in hearing a little more about the game, I did an interview with David Kim asking about some specific topics people often want to know more about. Thanks! Nice interview, I liked the questions and his honest, grounded, logical answers. Especially on unit lethality and the esports topics. I hope these abstract ideas translate into an actual fun game. But that seems to be the case from the testers' feedback. I just hope the monetization model won't be too much of a liability. | ||
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maybenexttime
Poland5656 Posts
On April 20 2024 01:48 maybenexttime wrote:One thing they could implement, since they're experimenting with the UI, is drawing unit formations/movement. A while ago someone posted a video from a game where you could do that. It was some 2D space fleet simulation or something? That was pretty cool. I meant this sort of UI feature, by the way: Pretty cool! | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26021 Posts
On April 20 2024 07:48 maybenexttime wrote: I meant this sort of UI feature, by the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avGJEmVMpx0 Pretty cool! Where is that from and how is the game it’s used in? Or is it merely a proof of concept I vaguely remember you posting it before and meant to follow up and forgot! | ||
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Southlight
United States11768 Posts
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PurE)Rabbit-SF
United States674 Posts
Much more hope than stormgate at the moment for me. The only sad part is is the parent company is Tencent. Hopefully this wouldn't plagued by the predatory pricing from Tencent | ||
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KingzTig
155 Posts
On April 20 2024 10:13 Southlight wrote: IDK about that vid specifically but line move is used in Beyond All Reason. BAR is the best modern RTS period. I would love one that is more tailored towards 1v1. | ||
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qwerty4w
53 Posts
The Line Move video is from the free indie RTS Istrolid (https://www.istrolid.com/), the dev team has some connections with Zero-K so they share a couple of features such as the Line Move. Multiplayer is mostly dead now but it's still pretty fun as a single player experience. | ||
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Crimthand
15 Posts
So the idea that RTS is and should be mainly a platform of story-telling to be is ludicrous. Back when C&C came out, we all knew the story was silly and not something to be taken seriously. It was just a thin veneer and that was ok. With WC, WC2 and SC, Blizzard actually did a better job at trying to create a story and do world-building. But what SC2 did to the story is absurd. Pretty sure most people don't know or care about the story behind LoL, Fortnite, or Magic the Gathering. And chess has no story whatsoever. You need a good game. And 1vs1 games can be completely fun and casual. The first thing David Kim says is 'We want to make an RTS for everyone', implying that most RTS are specifically made NOT for everyone. What about making an RTS that is so much fun to play that people don't even care about if the game was specifically made 'for them' and not for pro players (or whatever the hell that even means when a game isn't even released and there's no reason to even hold tournaments). | ||
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uummpaa
238 Posts
On April 20 2024 16:28 Crimthand wrote: For those saying that the single player campaign of an RTS is oh so important. Yes, I get the statistic that many players do not even play multiplayer. But the story of SC2 is ABSOLUTE TRASH. I cannot get over how bad it is. As amazing as a job people did on SC2 on level design, creating variable and interesting missions, the story is horrible. So the idea that RTS is and should be mainly a platform of story-telling to be is ludicrous. Back when C&C came out, we all knew the story was silly and not something to be taken seriously. It was just a thin veneer and that was ok. Blizzard actually did a better job at trying to create a story and do world-building. But what SC2 did to the story is absurd. Pretty sure most people don't know or care about the story behind LoL, Fortnite, or Magic the Gathering. And chess has no story whatsoever. You need a good game. And 1vs1 games can be completely fun and casual. you are contradicting yourself here a bit, you said yourself that the missions in the SC2 campaign are good, which makes this mode viable (as reflected by the player numbers) and the achivements added to the replayability as well id say. next you said that story was bad (it kinda is over the top on purpose id say), while you say its ok for c&c, but even if its worse for SC2, the numbers still state that the campaign was very important for the game, thus making it a thing that new RTS devs need to consider. story is just the icing here, but it has nothing (or at least not too much) to do with the need for a good campaign (or single player experiance) | ||
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Crimthand
15 Posts
No, I am not contradicting myself. Level design is not the same as story-writing. It just shows people play RTS for the gameplay. And that often turns out to be single player gameplay. But that's just a decision by the devs. If they don't put in any single player, then there is no issue. Playing a campaign is literally playing through a story. It is the entire concept. Single player can also be just playing 1vs1 against increasingly more difficult AIs. Or the same AI on different maps. Or with different units. Or different game modes. SC2's story wasn't over the top. It was bad in every way. Also, can you please proofread your posts and try to use proper grammar and punctuation? Thanks! | ||
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Crimthand
15 Posts
He is still literally saying that he wants to remove mundane clicking to free up time for more decision making. I can't believe he is saying this in 2024 because this was literally disproven by people on TL back in 2006. And SC2 demonstrated the truth of this over and over. Mules and larvae injects were literally put into SC2 by Blizzard because they automated the game and they wanted to counter criticism that the game was not mechanically demanding enough. And now he is making literally the same argument for removing them. It is so ironic. No SC BW fan ever asked for mule calldowns or larvae injections. They were obviously flawed and bad from the start. Blizzard just falsely thought that the SC BW fanbase asked for these things. Because they didn't understasnd SC BW and they didn't have a coherent vision for SC2. And he is also presenting this as something he is now doing different from all RTS devs before him. But it is literally the same word salad that comes out from Stormgate. Even more wild is this idea that players don't think RTS is fun because they have to practice 5 hours a day to get to GM level. Literally no one playing online chess is worried about how they don't have thousands of openings memorized 20 moves deep. Literally no one playing online chess thinks the game is less fun because they don't know how to play all the different types of endgames, that are described in literal 1000 page tomes in several books. NO ONE. But in RTS, people convince themselves not to play a fun game because they don't want to practice 5 hours a game and try to become world champ. According to chess.com: "A total of 12.5 billion games have been played on Chess.com in 2023. " How many of those people who started a game almost decided to not start it because they were worried they would never become a chess GM? It literally makes no sense. He is also saying that 20 years ago people had the wrong idea about video games. In that that they would become like professional sports (this is the only correct way to use 'like', btw ), where people would watch and not play. He uses NFL as an example. I am watching F1 right now and I don't even have a driver's license. I will never drive an F1 car in a Grand Prix. Yet still I watch. I actually have a lot of criticism for F1 and motor sports, but I am watching and tons of people are. Sure, sports could be different from video games. But is David Kim literally living under a rock and has never heard of this thing called Twitch? We literally have a platform for watching people play video games now. In fact, I bet tons of people started to play chess after watching people play chess, when they themselves didn't play. So it is not even that it is false. It is that the reverse is true. People watch others play a game they don't play. And then they start playing it because they were first only watching. But David Kim somehow claims this is not really a thing and people only watch video games that they play themselves. Which is wild. Yeah, the ratio of watchers vs players won't be as big as in pro sports. It is not identical. But compared to what we knew back in 2006, we completely know the truth now that people do watch video games they don't play. Doesn't mean you can build a successful RTS game out of just this fact. But it is completely wild to me that someone who was the lead balance dev on SC2 can have these takes. Then David Kim ends with an outright attack on RTS fans and how they don't have 'an open mind'. And then he even tries to gaslight them into claiming they won't be as good at his RTS if they think they know better than him what is good or bad about his game. And we learn nothing about the game itself. Still, I am interested in hearing about what these innovative gameplay concepts that he has are. Because he 'literally had like 10 or 30 decades' to think about it. And they weren't in that interview linked earlier on this page. Hopefully he is a better game dev than he is a communicator. Also, if David Kim was my friend. I would have a limit. At some point I would tell him "David, I love you bro. But if you say 'like' one more time, I am gonna punch you in the face." | ||
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qwerty4w
53 Posts
On April 20 2024 17:05 Crimthand wrote: He is still literally saying that he wants to remove mundane clicking to free up time for more decision making. I can't believe he is saying this in 2024 because this was literally disproven by people on TL back in 2006. And SC2 demonstrated the truth of this over and over. If you want to see how RTS with less mundane clicking works, you need to have some experience in RTS games designed around this direction, such as Zero-K: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/334920/view/3887234011192023190 Quote a player's comment on this kind of design: "I'm inclined to agree with the idea that simplifying basic mechanics is a tradeoff, not an unalloyed good. It's something you have to design the game around in order to keep it engaging long term, and that compensatory design usually ends up being much more about high-level fundamentals, since the low-level mechanical stuff isn't a differentiator, and having to play more around the more cerebral side is often just as hard to play well, but harder to learn in a structured way compared to mechanics." | ||
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maybenexttime
Poland5656 Posts
On April 20 2024 08:55 WombaT wrote: Where is that from and how is the game it’s used in? Or is it merely a proof of concept I vaguely remember you posting it before and meant to follow up and forgot! Actually, someone else posted the video in the StormGate thread a while ago. I can't take credit for that. :-) @Crimthand Yeah, I was worried about some of the things he said in the videos but what Artosis said about the game is quite reassuring. I wish someone would ask David Kim about some of the things that SC2 got wrong compared to BW, such as the high ground advantage, defender's advantage, the maps, etc. In BW, expanding is like stretching a rubber - the more you stretch it, the harder it gets. It's an organic way of making players in a lead more prone to harassment. If you make the game too mechanically easy, there is a risk that getting an early lead will often snowball. | ||
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Crimthand
15 Posts
That's just puzzling. Then David Kim again has this anecdote about how a Diamond SC2 player beats a Master SC2 player over and over in his game because the Diamond player is doing 'crazy multitasking moves' that he wasn't able to do in SC2 as they were 'so focused on other things'. But now he could 'do what the pros used to do'. While the Master player is stuck in SC2 type RTS dogma thinking. Removing mechanical demand does not add strategic depth. And like Nony said, you can't really make a game where you can just outthink your opponent. You just make a certain decision, and you are stuck with that. And then you lose because you made decision A instead of B. It can be really lame. You actually need to have a deep think on what decision making means in an RTS. What is good and what is bad. What is gameplay/strategy rich or poor, and what is fun and what is not fun. I am all for game devs coming up with new gameplay principles that give richer decision making in RTS. But all they do is use this as a crutch talking point for when they add QoL. Or as an explanation of why people don't like their previous game. Gonna watch the Artosis thing. I don't rule out that this game has some very good things. I like the idea that they focused on 1vs1 and to make that fun. And that they started from basics. If I were in charge of a RTS game and we were making a 1vs1 game, I would first make sure the game is fun to play on a completely blank slate map with only the first basic units. And apparently they did that. | ||
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ETisME
12513 Posts
On April 20 2024 18:09 Crimthand wrote: I am not against less mechanically demanding RTS games. It is just funny that David Kim literally has the same talking point that they had back during the development of SC2. About how freeing up more time would allow the players to play more strategically. Then they also have a guy in one video talking about unit composition and claiming that this should be a reflection of the personal taste of the player, not set in stone by the game itself. That's just puzzling. Then David Kim again has this anecdote about how a Diamond SC2 player beats a Master SC2 player over and over in his game because the Diamond player is doing 'crazy multitasking moves' that he wasn't able to do in SC2 as they were 'so focused on other things'. But now he could 'do what the pros used to do'. While the Master player is stuck in SC2 type RTS dogma thinking. Removing mechanical demand does not add strategic depth. And like Nony said, you can't really make a game where you can outthink your opponent. You just make a certain decision, and you are stuck with that. And then you lose because you made decision A instead of B. It can be really lame. You actually need to have a deep think on what decision making means in an RTS. What is good and what is bad. What is gameplay/strategy rich or poor, and what is fun and what is not fun. I am all for game devs coming up with new gameplay principles that give richer decision making in RTS. But all they do is use this as a crutch talking point for when they add QoL. Or as an explanation of why people don't like their previous game. Gonna watch the Artosis thing. I don't rule out that this game has some very good things. I like the idea that they focused on 1vs1 and to make that fun. And that they started from basics. If I were in charge of a RTS game and we were making a 1vs1 game, I would first make sure the game is fun to play on a completely blank slate map with only the first basic units. And apparently they did that. removing mechanical demand allows more players to get into the strategic depth, which is extending the different kind of fun for players of different skill level. WC1 had 4 units max per control group, you won't say BW is removing mundane clicks and dumbed down, right? WC3 was already overtaking BW in most netcafe in SEA, and eventually Dota everywhere and then replaced by league. Not to mention SC2 is nowhere close to be mechanical easy, and extremely successful across the globe, to the point that we haven't seen real competition for decades. at the end of the day, rts is similar to fighter genre, where new players are dropping off (even worse for fighter) and only a few pros are getting all the views. RTS at least has more than "execution" type of fun, while fighter is more on iframe and combos/positioning/distance etc, which is significantly harder to 'reduce' for new players. new RTS will need to be around players first, not esports viewership. The latter does not guarantee a esport scene, the former generates income. | ||
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Crimthand
15 Posts
Second, you are grossly simplifying how mechanical demand works. This argument about "Hey, in WC1 you could only put 4 units in a control group. So by that logic, WC1 was a better game than SC BW" was made over and over back in 2006. And it was stupid then. Also you misuse the word 'dumbed down'. A game is 'dumbed down' by removing skill separating elements without adding new ones to replace them. I am not even going to argue about unit selection limits any deeper. Just read what people wrote here in 2006. WC3 was only more popular than SC BW for like 1 or 2 years after release. SC BW overtook WC3 in popularity and has been more popular ever since. Not sure why it is relevant or why you bring it up. Yes, players are not playing as much RTS and fighting games. Maybe RTS is just inherently less fun to a modern audience? What about that for an argument? Also, you claim that SC2 having no competition means it was successful? In the same way as no one tried to make an MMORPG after WoW because WoW was just too successful? There's a reason very few game devs made RTS games after SC2. And it isn't because SC2 was so extremely popular and profitable. I think SC2 failed. But this is not a 'SC2 has failed' or 'SC2 is dead' thread. So I am not going to debate it. It is not really relevant either. I am just referring to the discussions about the nature of RTS, strategy, decision making, mechanical demands, automation, interface we had here in 2006. And how David Kim is pretends to be completely obvious to all that. Also has nothing to do with esport viewership. If enough people play a game, you get esports. That's it. You just need to make a fun 1vs1 RTS game. And that just isn't achieved by stripping gameplay mechanisms from the game, automating the interface, reducing mechanical demand, and free up time for 'decision making'. Everyone and their dog tried that since the release of SC BW. And they all failed. Including Blizzard with SC2. And it literally killed the RTS genre. | ||
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qwerty4w
53 Posts
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