On September 30 2020 05:27 dUTtrOACh wrote: To address the comparitive ease of balancing in C&C RA2 vs that of other competitive RTS games (SC1&2, WC3, AoE2), I would say RA2 is still easier to balance.
At its core, the "racial diversity" of C&C RA2 has two factions (Soviet and Ally). Each sub-faction of the two factions has a unique unit or structure, which seeks to imbalance some aspect of the game into their favour and force some alteration by the opponent if used. It's also quite simplistic from an economical standpoint, so there's no need to even consider things that arise from multi-resource RTS games.
In contrast to RA2, a game like Age of Empires 2 has one race (humans), but each civilization has a number of different numerical modifiers, tech tree options and limitations, as well as unique units. Add to that the multiple resources of AoE2 (wood, stone, food, gold), and it becomes quite apparent that the depth of balance is far greater.
SC and others mentioned above have very distinctive races and are multi-resource. They're more likely to be on the upper end of difficulty than the lower end, in terms of balance.
Browder did decent work at Blizzard for a better wage than many of his colleagues. He achieved his status in the industry through his work and has been rewarded with a ticket off of what is beginning to look like a sinking ship. Wouldn't anybody take it?
and EA put far fewer resources into balancing games after release than Blizzard. Game balancing was essentially out of Browder's hands a few months after the game was released. And Browder knew EA wouldn't put many resources into game balancing.
RA2 came out about the same time as SC64. SC64 featured a 200 mineral academy and fast spawning zerglings. So game balancing was a very different animal in 2000 than it is today.
Well, you can't patch a cartridge on a console with no online capability.
After-the-fact balance not being a concern back then meant that the games definitely needed to feel balanced (and finished, for that matter) before release. The difficulty of that task is directly proportionate to the complexity of the variables involved. RA2 has less variables to consider than the examples I mentioned above. I'm sure there are games that were easier to balance.
On September 24 2020 01:44 Zambrah wrote: Dev teams wouldnt fuck up so much if they weren't made to work way too long hours to hit asinine deadlines.
before ATVI , Blizzard had all kinds of crazy messed up deadlines and processes. Its part of what inspired the name "Blizzard" because the place was total chaos.
i seem to recall Bob Fitch getting locked in a room for 6 weeks to build the engine for SC1. Software projects go awry all the time. My best customer has a service called "Project Rescue". She sends me on these crazy assignments working on projects that have failed 3+ times and have been going on for 5+ years. That is the way the entire industry is. Its not like video games are some special case.
"we were no where near the home stretch". crunch lasted 8 months.
I love doing the hermit coder 24/7 thing. its a blast. its also clear Bob Fitch loved it as well. When the project is a success... you gain legend status.
In conclusion, Blizzard had all kinds of issues before ATVI took over. Bungie also jettisoned ATVI and kept their Destiny franchise. Has Destiny2 gotten much better without ATVI? I'd say its a little bit better. But its not some dramatic night-and-day improvement.
I think Fitch locked himself in that room, he was so frustrated with the (modified?) war2 engine they were using he said this isn't working for what you want to do let me write a whole new engine for this okay then he went and did it like a boss
They went from remaking games from scratch and scrapping games that looked pretty good (Warcraft adventures & SC : Ghost) to releasing Diablo mobile games and a War3 remake that averaged 0.6/10 in user reviews on metacritic.
Splitting off from blizzard is a damn good move at this time IMO.
Also on Browder possibly making new RTS games : Beggars can't be choosers with the RTS market how it is nowdays.
And nothing good happend ever? Or do you just post your negative opinions?
There's nothing 'negative' about my post it's just noting the decline of a once great company.Or are you denying that they have declined in quality standards the past 5 years? The 0.6/10 metacritic user rating for the War3 rehash is a total miscalculation by the reviewers?
A fresh start could mean fresh ideas and better games than what is currently being released by Acti-Blizzard.My opinion.If you want more of what Blizzard has dished up lately go at it.
On September 24 2020 01:44 Zambrah wrote: Dev teams wouldnt fuck up so much if they weren't made to work way too long hours to hit asinine deadlines.
before ATVI , Blizzard had all kinds of crazy messed up deadlines and processes. Its part of what inspired the name "Blizzard" because the place was total chaos.
i seem to recall Bob Fitch getting locked in a room for 6 weeks to build the engine for SC1. Software projects go awry all the time. My best customer has a service called "Project Rescue". She sends me on these crazy assignments working on projects that have failed 3+ times and have been going on for 5+ years. That is the way the entire industry is. Its not like video games are some special case.
"we were no where near the home stretch". crunch lasted 8 months.
I love doing the hermit coder 24/7 thing. its a blast. its also clear Bob Fitch loved it as well. When the project is a success... you gain legend status.
In conclusion, Blizzard had all kinds of issues before ATVI took over. Bungie also jettisoned ATVI and kept their Destiny franchise. Has Destiny2 gotten much better without ATVI? I'd say its a little bit better. But its not some dramatic night-and-day improvement.
I think Fitch locked himself in that room, he was so frustrated with the (modified?) war2 engine they were using he said this isn't working for what you want to do let me write a whole new engine for this okay then he went and did it like a boss
They went from remaking games from scratch and scrapping games that looked pretty good (Warcraft adventures & SC : Ghost) to releasing Diablo mobile games and a War3 remake that averaged 0.6/10 in user reviews on metacritic.
Splitting off from blizzard is a damn good move at this time IMO.
Also on Browder possibly making new RTS games : Beggars can't be choosers with the RTS market how it is nowdays.
And nothing good happend ever? Or do you just post your negative opinions?
There's nothing 'negative' about my post it's just noting the decline of a once great company.Or are you denying that they have declined in quality standards the past 5 years? The 0.6/10 metacritic user rating for the War3 rehash is a total miscalculation by the reviewers?
A fresh start could mean fresh ideas and better games than what is currently being released by Acti-Blizzard.My opinion.If you want more of what Blizzard has dished up lately go at it.
It’s very bad, it’s not 0.6/10 bad. If it’s indicative of a wider trend well that remains to be seen. Certainly not a promising sign in and of itself, but despite none of them really being to my personal tastes genre wise the likes of Hearthstone, Overwatch, HoTS are all rather well-made, polished games.
There aren’t many devs pumping out genre-defining classics with any consistency these days, partly because well, most genres are pretty defined and it’s progressively harder to hit much above solid polish.
On September 30 2020 05:27 dUTtrOACh wrote: To address the comparitive ease of balancing in C&C RA2 vs that of other competitive RTS games (SC1&2, WC3, AoE2), I would say RA2 is still easier to balance.
At its core, the "racial diversity" of C&C RA2 has two factions (Soviet and Ally). Each sub-faction of the two factions has a unique unit or structure, which seeks to imbalance some aspect of the game into their favour and force some alteration by the opponent if used. It's also quite simplistic from an economical standpoint, so there's no need to even consider things that arise from multi-resource RTS games.
In contrast to RA2, a game like Age of Empires 2 has one race (humans), but each civilization has a number of different numerical modifiers, tech tree options and limitations, as well as unique units. Add to that the multiple resources of AoE2 (wood, stone, food, gold), and it becomes quite apparent that the depth of balance is far greater.
SC and others mentioned above have very distinctive races and are multi-resource. They're more likely to be on the upper end of difficulty than the lower end, in terms of balance.
Browder did decent work at Blizzard for a better wage than many of his colleagues. He achieved his status in the industry through his work and has been rewarded with a ticket off of what is beginning to look like a sinking ship. Wouldn't anybody take it?
and EA put far fewer resources into balancing games after release than Blizzard. Game balancing was essentially out of Browder's hands a few months after the game was released. And Browder knew EA wouldn't put many resources into game balancing.
RA2 came out about the same time as SC64. SC64 featured a 200 mineral academy and fast spawning zerglings. So game balancing was a very different animal in 2000 than it is today.
Well, you can't patch a cartridge on a console with no online capability.
After-the-fact balance not being a concern back then meant that the games definitely needed to feel balanced (and finished, for that matter) before release. The difficulty of that task is directly proportionate to the complexity of the variables involved. RA2 has less variables to consider than the examples I mentioned above. I'm sure there are games that were easier to balance.
my point is that even by the time that cartridge code "went gold" the cost of an academy still was not settled. balance patches occurred back then. the patching process was much slower. the feedback loop was disjointed relative to today.
On October 01 2020 23:12 WombaT wrote: There aren’t many devs pumping out genre-defining classics with any consistency these days, partly because well, most genres are pretty defined and it’s progressively harder to hit much above solid polish.
this is a fascinating perspective...
there will always be new genres emerging. because overall video game revenue (consoles and PC) is not growing at the pace it did in the 80s and 90s it is harder to find those new genres.
On September 30 2020 05:27 dUTtrOACh wrote: To address the comparitive ease of balancing in C&C RA2 vs that of other competitive RTS games (SC1&2, WC3, AoE2), I would say RA2 is still easier to balance.
At its core, the "racial diversity" of C&C RA2 has two factions (Soviet and Ally). Each sub-faction of the two factions has a unique unit or structure, which seeks to imbalance some aspect of the game into their favour and force some alteration by the opponent if used. It's also quite simplistic from an economical standpoint, so there's no need to even consider things that arise from multi-resource RTS games.
In contrast to RA2, a game like Age of Empires 2 has one race (humans), but each civilization has a number of different numerical modifiers, tech tree options and limitations, as well as unique units. Add to that the multiple resources of AoE2 (wood, stone, food, gold), and it becomes quite apparent that the depth of balance is far greater.
SC and others mentioned above have very distinctive races and are multi-resource. They're more likely to be on the upper end of difficulty than the lower end, in terms of balance.
Browder did decent work at Blizzard for a better wage than many of his colleagues. He achieved his status in the industry through his work and has been rewarded with a ticket off of what is beginning to look like a sinking ship. Wouldn't anybody take it?
and EA put far fewer resources into balancing games after release than Blizzard. Game balancing was essentially out of Browder's hands a few months after the game was released. And Browder knew EA wouldn't put many resources into game balancing.
RA2 came out about the same time as SC64. SC64 featured a 200 mineral academy and fast spawning zerglings. So game balancing was a very different animal in 2000 than it is today.
Well, you can't patch a cartridge on a console with no online capability.
After-the-fact balance not being a concern back then meant that the games definitely needed to feel balanced (and finished, for that matter) before release. The difficulty of that task is directly proportionate to the complexity of the variables involved. RA2 has less variables to consider than the examples I mentioned above. I'm sure there are games that were easier to balance.
my point is that even by the time that cartridge code "went gold" the cost of an academy still was not settled. balance patches occurred back then. the patching process was much slower. the feedback loop was disjointed relative to today.
On October 01 2020 23:12 WombaT wrote: There aren’t many devs pumping out genre-defining classics with any consistency these days, partly because well, most genres are pretty defined and it’s progressively harder to hit much above solid polish.
this is a fascinating perspective...
there will always be new genres emerging. because overall video game revenue (consoles and PC) is not growing at the pace it did in the 80s and 90s it is harder to find those new genres.
There is that too, just with the passage of time it gets harder to put novel twists on things. Doesn’t preclude making very good games mind. Just with Blizz I mean if they dip their toes into RTS again (especially one intended to be played competitively) its hard to really see them doing anything wow-inducing. Best case scenario you’d get something recognisable in systems and quality to a WC3 or the two SC games.
Last dev I can really think who did something both novel and with long-lived success was From with their Soulslike games
On September 24 2020 01:44 Zambrah wrote: Dev teams wouldnt fuck up so much if they weren't made to work way too long hours to hit asinine deadlines.
before ATVI , Blizzard had all kinds of crazy messed up deadlines and processes. Its part of what inspired the name "Blizzard" because the place was total chaos.
i seem to recall Bob Fitch getting locked in a room for 6 weeks to build the engine for SC1. Software projects go awry all the time. My best customer has a service called "Project Rescue". She sends me on these crazy assignments working on projects that have failed 3+ times and have been going on for 5+ years. That is the way the entire industry is. Its not like video games are some special case.
"we were no where near the home stretch". crunch lasted 8 months.
I love doing the hermit coder 24/7 thing. its a blast. its also clear Bob Fitch loved it as well. When the project is a success... you gain legend status.
In conclusion, Blizzard had all kinds of issues before ATVI took over. Bungie also jettisoned ATVI and kept their Destiny franchise. Has Destiny2 gotten much better without ATVI? I'd say its a little bit better. But its not some dramatic night-and-day improvement.
I think Fitch locked himself in that room, he was so frustrated with the (modified?) war2 engine they were using he said this isn't working for what you want to do let me write a whole new engine for this okay then he went and did it like a boss
They went from remaking games from scratch and scrapping games that looked pretty good (Warcraft adventures & SC : Ghost) to releasing Diablo mobile games and a War3 remake that averaged 0.6/10 in user reviews on metacritic.
Splitting off from blizzard is a damn good move at this time IMO.
Also on Browder possibly making new RTS games : Beggars can't be choosers with the RTS market how it is nowdays.
And nothing good happend ever? Or do you just post your negative opinions?
There's nothing 'negative' about my post it's just noting the decline of a once great company.Or are you denying that they have declined in quality standards the past 5 years? The 0.6/10 metacritic user rating for the War3 rehash is a total miscalculation by the reviewers?
A fresh start could mean fresh ideas and better games than what is currently being released by Acti-Blizzard.My opinion.If you want more of what Blizzard has dished up lately go at it.
Are Metacritic User objective?
When you can't even run a tournament because the game constantly disconnects people, seems pretty right to me. Blizzard released this game in that state, remember that.
But the first major tournament for Reforged post-launch has finished under a cloud, with the tournament beset with regular disconnects that forced matches to be restarted. And the problems only got worse as the tournament went on, with a potential upset win in the quarter finals against one of the world’s best Warcraft 3 players denied – twice – thanks to desync bugs.
It wasn’t just Moon and ThorZain that had suffered from desyncs, though. Apart from the two drops on the main stage, six separate matches across the group stages and playoffs also had to be restarted, some of which was captured on the main WC3 stream.
Nobody can claim that the War3 rehash was a success, sorry.And not interested in getting into some long arguments about it with someone who just posts one sentence rebuttals.I'm pointing out that Blizzard put out this, when 20 years ago they cancelled games that actually looked good.No quality control anymore, they don't care.OK?
On September 24 2020 00:19 JimmyJRaynor wrote: so much for all those crazy unsubstantiated theories that Blizzard hated the job Browder did on SC2. Browder got promoted to VP and Morhaime brought him into his new company. It is clear Morhaime thinks highly of Browder.
Yeah, because Blizzard doubled down on all his ideas in HOTS and LOTV... oh wait. No they didn't.
On September 24 2020 00:19 JimmyJRaynor wrote: so much for all those crazy unsubstantiated theories that Blizzard hated the job Browder did on SC2. Browder got promoted to VP and Morhaime brought him into his new company. It is clear Morhaime thinks highly of Browder.
Yeah, because Blizzard doubled down on all his ideas in HOTS and LOTV... oh wait. No they didn't.
Did someone say constructible rocks?
They never touched terrible terrible damage, which imo was one of the larger issues of Sc2. Overall Browder has a fairly good career though with the exception of Heroes ots maybe.
And if Morhaime thought that Browder was bad he wouldn't have hired him for his new company. Just because the design directions changed a bit doesn't mean they don't respect Browder or the base game.
On May 28 2021 16:39 Harris1st wrote: Unreal Engine 5? For RTS? Wow
Are there even any RTS in UE3/ UE4?
I mean there are barely any RTS in the last decade anyways. Couldn't immediately find what engine iron harvest is running on, but most RTS apparently run on studio engines.
Immortal: Gates of Pyre is developed on the UE4 afaik. Naturally Unreal was built for shooters, but like Unity you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. Fundamentally what changes between RTS and FPS are mainly controls and number of units, so if they can get performance running and a decent ai the rest isn't that hard mechanically.
On May 28 2021 16:39 Harris1st wrote: Unreal Engine 5? For RTS? Wow
Are there even any RTS in UE3/ UE4?
I mean there are barely any RTS in the last decade anyways. Couldn't immediately find what engine iron harvest is running on, but most RTS apparently run on studio engines.
Immortal: Gates of Pyre is developed on the UE4 afaik. Naturally Unreal was built for shooters, but like Unity you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. Fundamentally what changes between RTS and FPS are mainly controls and number of units, so if they can get performance running and a decent ai the rest isn't that hard.
pretty sure iron harvest is running on unity engine.
EPT
