Finally decided to play this game a bit. I haven't been looking much information or builds and mostly just customs vs the practice AI to kinda feel out Vanguard. I did end up going 1-1 in matchmaking.
Im liking vanguard so far, they really do feel terran-y. I also didn't really experience too much of the performance issues in game though my computer is pretty beefy and I was only playing 1v1.
So overall my first impression was pretty good. Going to try to explore the other factions a bit as well. I'm not sure if there are plans for more factions but I definitely think at least 4 like wc3 would be really nice if they're trying to have 3v3 be the primary team game format
I also think the game would be good with 4 factions, but it's the kind of the thing that they can't work on until everything else is done.
It also sadly makes more sense for devs to work on campaign missions, co-op commanders, and cosmetics. Adding a fourth race would not be financially sensible. Although it would give all those departments more to work with.
On October 01 2024 14:23 gingerfluffmuffnr2 wrote:
On October 01 2024 01:16 followZeRoX wrote: Numbers I saw are from Steam charts.
I can agree with you. It's not in a good state but unlike SC2 it's new and refreshing. For example I'm fed up with sc2 after more then a decade of playing but I understand why someone won't play an unfinished product.
I'm only bothered that mass of people never gave a chance, played 3 maps and jumped to post negative feedback
I played 5 matches with Inf and that was it for the race. Other race were better but still bad. SG is a terrible product for its 40 mil pricetag. No need to play 10s of hours
The negative reviews were earned by FGS for their scammy behaviour, even if SG was decent
Anything that ends up on Kickstarter is suspect. I don't care what cock and bull story the people make up for why they need money.
The story they came up with for why they needed to do a Kickstarter was pretty good. Too bad they could not come up with a good campaign story in the game.
"uhh guys.. uhhh.. California just outlawed the burning of coal.. so ..uhh.. guys... we need to uhhh .. buy some land that has a steep hill and uhhh we need to buy some some water so we can generate hydro for our servers using a makeshift waterfall... our servers need electricity guys"
Some great kickstarter games in the early years, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, both from developers with prior pedigree.Don't follow it as much as i used to due to time constraints and the amount of games being released nowdays being kind of overwhelming.The reasons for them asking for money were fine, the execution just sucked.
I can't see this thing being saved now, under 200 players online whilst needing the constant microtransactions from a playerbase that small is impossible.This won't even cover server costs, the steam reviews are sitting at 50% positive so even when the full version comes out many are going to avoid it due to that low rating.
On October 01 2024 14:23 gingerfluffmuffnr2 wrote:
On October 01 2024 01:16 followZeRoX wrote: Numbers I saw are from Steam charts.
I can agree with you. It's not in a good state but unlike SC2 it's new and refreshing. For example I'm fed up with sc2 after more then a decade of playing but I understand why someone won't play an unfinished product.
I'm only bothered that mass of people never gave a chance, played 3 maps and jumped to post negative feedback
I played 5 matches with Inf and that was it for the race. Other race were better but still bad. SG is a terrible product for its 40 mil pricetag. No need to play 10s of hours
The negative reviews were earned by FGS for their scammy behaviour, even if SG was decent
I don't really care what alleged salaries they took or how they scammed investors. For open beta it's solid. far better then Counter Strike 2 for example.
Of course then need to polish it more but 12 months is plenty of time and attitude of community hating it won't help.
In what domain is this open beta more solid than CS 2’s? I’ve no familiarity with the latter so this is a genuine query
Community are largely judging the product as it is currently, if anything they were pretty patient and generous for quite some time
For example, CS:GO was imperfect shooter with massive bugs, old engine and sometimes unplayable but competitive CSGO was at solid state.
Until CS2 came out, on a new engine, tickless servers were introduced, anti-cheat was supposed to kick ass, etc. CS2 delivered shittiest product ever where you literally cannot aim someone, hitboxes are terrible due to tickless fraud, movement is atrocious and buggy, shots are random, you sometimes die while you are behind the wall due to poor registration of bullets.
All in all, CS2 is far inferior game to CSGO except Valve made millions on new skins kids buy.
I wrote that as a parallel here, SG is unfinished product but nowadays premature releases are simply a must. It's not 2002 when Blizzard had years to make perfect RTS for the time.
CS2 community complains but still play, numbers went from 500k to 1.3M.
Logically, if SC2 and WC3 communities merged into this one, since the game is a solid merge of both styles, SG would prosper by proper feedback, would financially maintain and I guess FGS listen to it's customers. New patches proved to be a thing.
Keeping SC2, WC3 and other dead titles alive will just polarize communities more and disperse whole RTS genre which is fragile enough to die in a few years, or at least have SG numbers.
OK so CS2 is apparently completely broken despite being one of the world’s pre-eminent games and we just need to abandon our various favoured games and jump on the SG train to save RTS?
Ok sure we’ll all do that
They got shitloads of good feedback. They had 40 million dollars. Beyond All Reason have for my money done a better job as a passion open source project
I think FG needs to be careful with how they implement comeback mechanics. By the sounds of it, you would actually want to be losing by like lets say 49%-51%, just letting your opponent have a little bit more map control/victory points and then you can get a massive buff. And if the meta is to be behind your opponent, it incentivizes doing nothing or doing less... spookeh.
On October 08 2024 14:02 CicadaSC wrote: I think FG needs to be careful with how they implement comeback mechanics. By the sounds of it, you would actually want to be losing by like lets say 49%-51%, just letting your opponent have a little bit more map control/victory points and then you can get a massive buff. And if the meta is to be behind your opponent, it incentivizes doing nothing or doing less... spookeh.
Yeah it is a feature that game developers need to be careful with, but it's much less dangerous than snowball mechanics such as veterancy and infest which amplify advantages.
If tuned carefully you can have getting more behind always (or practically always) a bad decision, while still making falling behind less lethal.
The implementation of supply caps and buildings which raise them is a comeback mechanic, as the person building more units or losing fewer units has to spend a larger portion of their income on them.
Upkeep in WC3 is another huge example where stuff gets more expensive for players that control more units in order to help their opponents catch up. Your stuff is more expensive when you're at higher upkeep, but this doesn't mean that you want to turn around and kill your own units - at least not usually. You suffer for eating the upkeep, and you suffer for bypassing it by e.g. investing in other things when you really wanted to build more units.
Non-linear resource income is one as well - having 50% more workers doesn't give you 50% more money in Stormgate, SC2, SC1, WC3 etc. In SC2 you get the peak income-per-worker at 1-8 mineral workers per base - a close patch can be mined around 45-52% by a single worker, while a far patch is typically 30-35%. Likewise on Vespene you get a return of around 40% for your first two workers and only 20% for the third one.
The biggest danger with mechanics like this is that they inherantly mitigate the advantages of higher skill and make it more likely for a weaker opponent or a suboptimal start to ultimately win the game, but IMO it's widely overstated as a problem since players with greater skills still dominate. The greatest RTS's of all time had these defenders advantage and comeback mechanics and went out of their way to avoid and limit the opposite (snowball mechanics).
MOBA do lean heavily into snowball mechanics and i'm of the belief that it leads to much of their infamous toxicity problem and to players not enjoying the average game - especially in a team environment where an individual player has highly limited control over if and how the game snowballs.
This kind of big swing from them is way more interesting than what have ended up being very iterative changes to 1v1 and co-op modes from previous Blizz RTS. It might be too-little-too-late, but I think this kind of highly differentiated gameplay mode gives them the best chance at success (altho I'm still huffing copium for what coop could be with lots more development).
This kind of big swing from them is way more interesting than what have ended up being very iterative changes to 1v1 and co-op modes from previous Blizz RTS. It might be too-little-too-late, but I think this kind of highly differentiated gameplay mode gives them the best chance at success (altho I'm still huffing copium for what coop could be with lots more development).
Yeah I think so, too. This is close to what I actually imagined their whole game might be like. Much closer to the MOBA/ team game crowd than the hardcore RTS crowd. Might just be the saving grace
The C&C games on Steam have single player only mode and 500+ concurrents. Even RA2. I guess people like campaign play. RA3's entire campaign is co op but you can't do that on Steam. Even still plenty are playing the single player with a CPU ally.
On October 08 2024 19:07 ETisME wrote: Dropping to 120 concurrent players. It doesn't even feel like the drop is slowing down when this is pretty much their core player base left
this makes low latency 3v3 games even more difficult to arrange.
This kind of big swing from them is way more interesting than what have ended up being very iterative changes to 1v1 and co-op modes from previous Blizz RTS. It might be too-little-too-late, but I think this kind of highly differentiated gameplay mode gives them the best chance at success (altho I'm still huffing copium for what coop could be with lots more development).
I'd say Battle Aces stepped up to home plate looking to hit a home run. Frost Giant has been taking pitches trying to draw a walk.
This kind of big swing from them is way more interesting than what have ended up being very iterative changes to 1v1 and co-op modes from previous Blizz RTS. It might be too-little-too-late, but I think this kind of highly differentiated gameplay mode gives them the best chance at success (altho I'm still huffing copium for what coop could be with lots more development).
Yeah I think so, too. This is close to what I actually imagined their whole game might be like. Much closer to the MOBA/ team game crowd than the hardcore RTS crowd. Might just be the saving grace
Based on early talk I was expecting them to lead with something like this, it’s definitely an interesting departure now to see how it plays in action
Are people surprised at 3v3 being closer to MOBA gameplay? It's been said basically from the start that it will have heroes, unique win conditions, and no player elimination. It's always read like a moba with armies.
I'm also curious how people will compare it with Battle Aces, a game that stripped RTS macro elements down to it basically not being an RTS anymore.
On October 08 2024 07:19 WombaT wrote: OK so CS2 is apparently completely broken despite being one of the world’s pre-eminent games and we just need to abandon our various favoured games and jump on the SG train to save RTS?
Ok sure we’ll all do that
They got shitloads of good feedback. They had 40 million dollars. Beyond All Reason have for my money done a better job as a passion open source project
Not at all, just making a comparison of communities and situations are similar, yet, we all play 15 yo games
On October 08 2024 07:19 WombaT wrote: OK so CS2 is apparently completely broken despite being one of the world’s pre-eminent games and we just need to abandon our various favoured games and jump on the SG train to save RTS?
Ok sure we’ll all do that
They got shitloads of good feedback. They had 40 million dollars. Beyond All Reason have for my money done a better job as a passion open source project
Not at all, just making a comparison of communities and situations are similar, yet, we all play 15 yo games
One game has millions of players, the other thousands, maybe tens of thousands at the top end. If we’re doing comparisons
I don’t know CS well enough to consider if CS2 is a downgrade on CS:GO, I’ll assume it is, but you don’t pull those kind of consistent numbers if your game is an unplayable buggy mess