On March 23 2023 11:03 Manit0u wrote: In any case, somewhere along the way Blizz seems to have lost some of it passion in pursuit of money. When WoW blew up they pooled most resources into it to the detriment of their other IPs, which is now kinda biting them in the ass with WoW being on the decline and having increased competition.
Thankfully there are still some passion projects out there for the RTS fans. There's a pretty dedicated Total Annihilation fanbase that's working on reviving the franchise (since Supreme Commander wasn't enough).
I realise it wasn't well loved at release but Planetary Annihilation is absolutely incredible. It's 100x better a game than Sup Com and playing it feels epic as all hell.
Well, I guess most of it comes down to the fact that small studios tend to make games they'd like to play themselves while big studios have to focus on recouping the costs and making big bucks for the shareholders. It can be clearly seen in how Blizzard started approaching their own games, with D4 being the most recent example. Some stuff in there is good but quite a bit of it seems completely unnecessary and made solely for the purpose of adding monetization (extensive character customization in a game where you barely even see your character?). Those are resources that could've been spent on improving more vital areas (like character run/attack animations for example).
Just like the BAR video by Winter shows how important it is that the game is done with passion for it, where devs are also players and have added features he didn't even know he needed before he found out about them but are absolutely brilliant from the gameplay perspective. Or when people keep asking people behind Last Epoch why they don't have gender select on characters or customization and they explained that they're focused on developing gameplay first and adding more options to your character is just a lot of dev time spent on duplicating and adjusting assets and animations, time they'd rather spend polishing the core experience.
It's often small details like that which tend to get lost for big studios who just keep flaunting their amazing cinematics, graphics and customization options but their game is just disappointing in practice.
I don’t think your point has merit. If we look at other games in the genre, they offer the same kind of customization options.
You mean like auto-splitting units into any formation you want, keeping formation while moving, repeating complex waypoints forever, auto-assigning groups and auto-adding new units of the same type to the group, automatically dividing work between multiple builders for multiple buildings, building in grid where you can control the spacing of the grid, automatically sending excess resources to allies etc.?
Personally I haven't seen much of that in too many RTSs.
Ultimately the game has to pay for itself. Game studios aren't charities. Some decisions end up becoming "spend X resources developing skins so we can make money".
On March 29 2023 16:42 iPlaY.NettleS wrote: Haven't been following it super closely, any video footage yet or will we need to wait until beta is supposedly out in 2-3 months?
Regarding the beta in mid 2023 and this discussion of small studios versus large studios...
Small studios can't have "Bonfire" style 7+ year development cycles. They have to begin bringing in money in less than 5 years.
A cool thing about Dreamhaven is that they're funding a bunch of small studios. Some of these many ambitious projects will probably fail. Hopefully, some will be a tremendous success.
I don't mind flawed games with ambitious goals that end up fulfilling a few of those ambitious goals. SC1 was one of those games. It took about a year for Blizzard to fully flesh out the game and make it great. It had huge flaws when it was first released. Patrick Wyatt did a blog series on SC1's rough road in development hell.
on release it was liquid gold? LOL. March 31, 1998? really?
The Medic, an iconic Terran unit introduced in StarCraft’s expansion Brood War, was initially meant to be part of the original game. Bob Fitch says that they simply didn’t have enough time to put her in. "In a lot of ways, Brood War was like the first official update, the first real balance patch for StarCraft,” Fitch says. The team started to design and build units to specifically serve as counters, or to simply shore up specific race’s weakness. Adding a healing unit made a lot of sense for the Terran, the race that leaned toward more defensive play styles.
I remember the Academy was 200 minerals and upgrading marine range was something like 200 seconds... while Zerglings spawned 20% faster than they do today.... it was brutal.
The game was not close to being balanced until mid 2000. SC1 was released March 31, 1998.
To keep this in context... it was a great ambitious goal to have 3 different diverse races that fought in a balanced way against each other. It took Blizzard a long time to get it right... but they eventually did.
On many occasions by several metrics SC1 was an abysmal failure... but Blizzard kept on plugging away and eventually they nailed it.
Above all, they had the balls to commit to such a big lofty goal.
On March 30 2023 12:36 JimmyJRaynor wrote: on release it was liquid gold? LOL. March 31, 1998? really?
On many occasions by several metrics SC1 was an abysmal failure...
What the fuck are you talking about? I thought you were the one here to give the business perspective over the gamer perspective, and yet you're calling the best-selling game of the year it was released "an abysmal failure"? A game that was both commercially successful and had a huge, still-lasting cultural impact, the game that is the reason most of us are here on these forums?
You're so desperate to cape for ATVI you're twisting yourself in some terrible knots here. Starcraft, an abysmal failure, all because it had some balance issues? Delusional.
on March 31, 1998 the game was in bad shape. i explained exactly why. i also explained how their lofty goal of 3 diverse races battling evenly in a competitive game did not happen on March 31, 1998.
The game was not "liquid gold" upon release. Attacking me won't change that.
On March 30 2023 13:24 JimmyJRaynor wrote: on March 31, 1998 the game was in bad shape. i explained exactly why. i also explained how their lofty goal of 3 diverse races battling evenly in a competitive game did not happen on March 31, 1998.
The game was not "liquid gold" upon release. Attacking me won't change that.
By your standards of what makes for "an abysmal failure", every game under ATVI-Blizzard also released as one.
On March 30 2023 13:24 JimmyJRaynor wrote: on March 31, 1998 the game was in bad shape. i explained exactly why. i also explained how their lofty goal of 3 diverse races battling evenly in a competitive game did not happen on March 31, 1998.
The game was not "liquid gold" upon release. Attacking me won't change that.
By your standards of what makes for "an abysmal failure", every game under ATVI-Blizzard also released as one.
On March 30 2023 13:16 Turbovolver wrote: You're so desperate to cape for ATVI you're twisting yourself in some terrible knots here. Starcraft, an abysmal failure, all because it had some balance issues? Delusional.
Wyatt, Fitch, Morhaime et al have gone into excruciating details exactly how and why SC1 was in bad shape upon its release on March 31,1998. Your claim it was "liquid gold" is incorrect.
I never stated the game was an unqualified abysmal failure. I stated Blizzard failed miserably at attaining some of the ambitious goals they set for the game at the release date.
It is hilarious that i even included the full context of my criticisms and you ignored it.
I think its amazing Blizzard had such lofty ambitions.
"Liquid gold" is a subjective claim, and a strong one. You can disagree with it all you like (that doesn't make it "incorrect", but neither would I claim it is "correct").
Observing that Brood War improved the balance is much more objective. You'll get no disagreement from me here.
None of that changes that you are distorting yourself to try to reconcile the idea that Blizzard may have produced a good game without Daddy Bobby involved. And to demonstrate it, rather than some fruitless, subjective discussion of your opinion versus mine, let's look at your opinion versus your opinion. I didn't have to look very hard through your old posts to find an inconsistency, because you've been caping hard for ATVI since looooong ago.
On October 17 2015 22:15 JimmyJRaynor wrote: Greg Black: EALA and worked on 4 C&C games and became balance designer of RA3 and did a great job
Now, did RA3 release in a well-balanced state? It certainly had extensive balance patches (1.08, 1.11) that do a lot more than changing a few costs around by 25% (200 minerals -> 150 minerals).
So how is it that this person did a "great job" balancing the game when you want to defend the SC2 team that Activision-Blizzard hired, but that Blizzard produced "an abysmal failure on several metrics" for making the Academy cost 200 minerals instead of 150, when you want to justify it to yourself that Blizzard was such a struggling company before Activision?
EDIT TO YOUR EDIT: Yes, Blizzard failed to 100% achieve their lofty goal of a fully balanced clash between 3 diverse races. If only you'd actually said that initially, instead of comments like "Starcraft had huge flaws on release". Major goalpost shifting going on here.
We've had tons of new "next big e-Sport" titles come out in the last few years whose main selling point was that they were unbelievably balanced and had a high skill cap. Almost all of them fail super hard because they focus so much on e-sports buzzwords that they forgot a game needs to be fun. Nobody's going to care enough to get to a top level of play in your game, and nobody's gonna want to watch other people play, if the game is boring and uninspired. Period.
So we can argue about whether SC1 was perfectly balanced on release. Not much of an argument, though, nobody ever said it was. I mean, talking about games in the 90's, and Starcraft, the game that would go on to be the very first e-sport ever, is it even reasonable to judge it a failure in any sense because it wasn't super competitively robust on release? People didn't even talk about that shit yet.
People booted up Starcraft for the first time and saw how fucking cool it was. They got sucked into this awesome fantasy of sci-fi and strategy. The thing that made Starcraft stick had nothing to do with competition or balance, it was the fact that it was just a fucking awesome game.
People loved SC on release as a game. People loved BW on release as a game but hated it balance wise because of Dark Templars. It took some patches and a lot of experience before we got a grip on how to handle them. In early WCGs people were still winning top matches with slow ov - lurker drops. Games were played on maps like NeoJungleStory etc. it took many years of tournaments, metagame evolution and map design before some sort of balance was found.
On April 01 2023 05:25 _Spartak_ wrote: New Washington Post article on Stormgate, featuring developer interviews, some prototype images from a year ago, and a new in-game image:
came to post this article. pretty good read which gives me hope for a renewal in the genre if they stay true to making it more accessible for new players.
"At Frost Giant, the Tims agreed, it was liberating to be able to think in advance about how to make an RTS game not just comprehensible, but inviting to new players. When Blizzard released “Legacy of the Void,” an expansion to “StarCraft II” on which Morten was co-producer, a cooperative mode released as part of the package became the most popular mode in the game. But the team never designed any kind of onboarding for new players, assuming that the vast majority of players would already be familiar with StarCraft’s mechanics by the second expansion.
The result, Morten said, was that the quality of a new player’s experience depended entirely on how good of a teacher the friend who invited them was. And that’s not to say the default RTS onboarding experience had ever been that great. In many cases, Campbell said, tutorials for RTS games were designed last, after the rest of the game was completed."
Catching up to (and skimming over a lot of) the stuff from the past few months. The engine/SnowPlay update was cool, having mass live spectating in addition to the focus on good netcode and replays is great.
Although it's hard to tell exactly how the game is going to feel, how similar to SC2 it will be casually and competitively, how hardcore War3 and SC2 players and new RTS players are going to feel about it; I like it. It looks just kinda nice and a little comfortable. I like that they have a lot of trees and will have hero units, and the factions are shiny space humans versus (surprisingly clean) actual demons in what otherwise looks a lot like SC2 with a bit more Overwatch style and somewhat toy-like clean visual design (so far). The simple daytime screenshots are lacking for me but still nice too see. I wonder if they're being too comfortable/predictable in too many ways, though. Maybe they haven't reached the stage of development when they can start making things more unique.
I wonder how many people nowadays get excited about photos of smaller studios and people working on random, very early assets. The graybox screenshots are actually the most interesting to me, I'd love to see more of those whenever they ramp up their marketing, or a mini-doc that covers different phases of that stage of designing and testing. It seems like they're still a ways off from making/mastering much music for the game and producing videos which makes the news boring but that's probably a good thing at this point? It's hard to tell what the "mid-2023 beta" is going to be, like if it's using the term like everybody else does (early access, demo, highly-polished vertical slice) or the way it's supposed to be (playtesting, proof of concept vertical slice).
I've had so little time for playing and watching games for ages now so all I really hope for personally are a few different PvE and PvP game modes on release, or a few decent PvP maps and a campaign with good tutorialization and not-terrible writing that makes it really easy to suggest it to other people who never touch RTS or at most occasionally play MOBAs. (Actually, imagining them hosting a community map contest or any kind of map pool playtest before or during the game's launch does get me excited the same way it used to for SC2. Just a daydream on my dinner break, for now.)
The new player experience, including the transition from single-player to PvP (and even with a friend walking you through everything), is still pretty bad for basically every RTS and MOBA. For example Dota 2 has had so many comics and an animated series out-of-game, and loads of custom maps and official dungeon crawls and mini-adventures, but there's a massive void between being able to finish the tutorials and knowing what you're doing in PvP. Or, the tutorial and campaign tutorialization for Company of Heroes 3 which were so shallow (granted, not as easy in this example due to its grand strategy overworld, but still a shock for everyone I watched play it from brand new players to classic RTS casuals and MOBA players). Maybe it just isn't worth the effort when the game will either grow naturally because it's fun and finds the right people at the right time, or not. I like to think/hope otherwise despite the lack of evidence, although I also don't expect small studios to have anyone with the spare time to really hammer away and make it happen. Edit: They say they're working on it so maybe I'm mistaken about the number of people at Frost Giant, or how flexible their roles are.
Honestly, there isn't much to see but I'm still looking forward to the next time I forget then remember this game exists is in development and there's new batch of screenshots or a video or replay commentary to soak up.
It's hard to tell what the "mid-2023 beta" is going to be, like if it's using the term like everybody else does (early access, demo, highly-polished vertical slice) or the way it's supposed to be (playtesting, proof of concept vertical slice).
Beta means feature complete, if that's not what they mean then they should use another term like "alpha" or "early access"
It's hard to tell what the "mid-2023 beta" is going to be, like if it's using the term like everybody else does (early access, demo, highly-polished vertical slice) or the way it's supposed to be (playtesting, proof of concept vertical slice).
Beta means feature complete, if that's not what they mean then they should use another term like "alpha" or "early access"
Indeed. I guess many companies are overusing the term now when they effectively release an unfinished product. Beta means it's complete but might need to iron out some kinks.
EPT
