David Kim, former lead multiplayer designer on StarCraft II, is working on a real-time strategy game at new studio Uncapped Games.
Kim gave some interesting quotes in the article that suggests the direction Uncapped's RTS may go in.
"RTS has been in this place where a lot of the very basic and core fundamental things in the game have not yet been modernized, so it's very difficult to play an RTS," he says. "You need hundreds of actions per minute to play a competitive RTS game.
"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."
While those quotes are bound to make hardcore StarCraft fans bristle, he offered a more nuanced comment in another interview with Wowhead.
At the esport level, players being able to show off their incredible micro / high APM skills that normal players can look up to and learn from, is awesome. We want to keep this while creating a game that is the easiest to get into for any PC gamer. One example of a high level goal here is to allow players to play the way they want in terms of APM intensive armies vs. low APM armies. We will have more specifics on this as well as other specific ideas to achieve our goal once we prove out more of our game vision.
Jason Hughes, Uncapped's lead producer and another Blizzard veteran, repeated a sentiment we've heard a lot lately, particularly from Frost Giant:
"That doesn't mean dumbed down or simplified," Hughes notes. "That just means lowering the barrier to entry for more people to expose them to what's great about RTS games."
Their goal seem noble, but probably controversial for many SC fans. I'm skeptical how they will manage to achieve their goal but would probably be great for RTS overall if they succeed.
It some what seems to me that SC2 devs leaving Blizzard caused a race for making RTS that can replace SC2 as its support ends. So in five years situation can be very interesting.
On July 01 2021 03:40 Nakajin wrote: Thanks David Kim
wow I was just about to post a public note about refraining from low-effort trolling about david kim
If I beat you to it, can't it be considered high-effort trolling?
But more seriously, glad to see there's a lot of people going back to RTS games, it's a lot similar to what happened with isometric RPG, a bunch of people deciding at the same time to start non-related indy project and it worked great from them, hopefully it will be just as good to us.
I really do trust and believe David Kim when he said he wanted to make a new RTS for 10 years. He always seemed like a passionate fella. And as he was someone who was GM with random I trust he can make a great RTS
I guess it’s nice if more studios with former Blizzard employees wanna make RTS, we could have another great RTS with that much competition, hopefully!
I'm optimistic about this. DK is one of the most experienced RTS designers and i'm sure throughout his tenure of blizzard/exiting the sc2 team that he has realized what gamers actually want from an rts. Here is to hoping for a high skill ceiling rts!
"That doesn't mean dumbed down or simplified," Hughes notes. "That just means lowering the barrier to entry for more people to expose them to what's great about RTS games."
Curious what that actually means. Guessing they are dumbing down the macro / automating it.
"So what we want to do is modernize a lot of it, and make it so any gamer can play this game.
Any gamer can play Starcraft. The thing is, that there's always somebody who can do all of the things faster, whether you dumb the game down or not.
Actually it's not that fun to do repetitive things like hatchery injection or chrono boosting nexuses a few times per minute and building new bases/structures as much as you can. So I think it's time to make RTS less mechanically based and more entertaining and it's good to see that our beloved oldies/veterans moving to that direction finally .
"So what we want to do is modernize a lot of it, and make it so any gamer can play this game.
Any gamer can play Starcraft. The thing is, that there's always somebody who can do all of the things faster, whether you dumb the game down or not.
Actually it's not that fun to do repetitive things like hatchery injection or chrono boosting nexuses a few times per minute and building new bases/structures as much as you can. So I think it's time to make RTS less mechanically based and more entertaining and it's good to see that our beloved oldies/veterans moving to that direction finally .
Games are only as entertaining as the players make them.
EPT
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