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On October 22 2020 10:19 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
Wow really nice interview, good questions and interesting answers.
This looks to be way more ambitious than I thought it was. Delivering a quality product on all the four pillars (campaign,coop, 1v1 and custom games) as they mentioned will be really hard for a new company even if they have very experienced people and industry veterans. But yeah the truth is a lot of us have lost faith that Blizzard itself could do something like this nowadays either, so maybe this new company is actually the right step.
I wonder how they'll do it engine wise. Not sure if there's something to buy to build an RTS on? Or if they have to do it from scratch. Maybe they could buy the Dota2 one, would love to have NEWRTS-TV to watch pro players perspective from the ingame engine rendered locally. Not sure if the Valve engine would allow for the extra crisp smoothness of unit response that they are aiming for though.
One thing that they did confirm on the Pylon Show is that they're not going to go through the time/resource sink of building their own engine from scratch. RTSes are pretty unique, so I'm sure that they're going to have to build a lot of their own stuff anyways (fixed point logic, memory management), but they'll be building it on top of Unity or Unreal or something else.
On October 22 2020 13:12 ZeromuS wrote:
My passion is returning :O
I'm so excited to finally see a new RTS on the horizon . So excited!!
They're six weeks into development, so the horizon is still really far away--I'd be shocked if we get to see anything at all before 2023.
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Any chance at working with a pre-existing IP?
There's always some chance, and we have considered that possibility. But yeah, we're at such an early stage right now, that we're unable to predict exactly which direction we'll go.
Dominions has a huge IP with almost 100 nations. just taking 6 nations and making the game is easy enough.
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The wait for this game is going to be insane, but I think it will be enjoyable as well. Good luck to everyone involved!
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Finally after all these years SC2GG will claim victory over TL. The future is ours!
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wow nice interview. one thing about warcraft 3 I liked was destructable paths, which slowly made it way to the broodwar pro maps. Hope something small and niche like this evolves so map makers have more creative ways to punish Flash
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Czech Republic12129 Posts
On October 22 2020 08:02 -Kyo- wrote:
You know, reading back some of the people involved in this sort of project I wonder if QXC has ever tried to get involved. I know he made his own board game and it was actually doing pretty well. But, he was one of the people I always thought, even through his rage, had a real passion for design and understanding in RTS games. I wonder if he'd ever be able to get involved, especially as an older pro player.
awesome interview ~! thanks :D
edit:
one other thing ill add that was such a big deal at the release of SC2, for those of you who remember, was how limiting the community engagement was IN GAME.
even new games that come out, I still cannot fathom how much of a detriment they pose to themselves when they fail to implement something like a channel or lobby system where people can either search by rank (GM auto-chat entry) for example to find similarly skilled players, OR, general lobby systems where people can join arcade chats and so on.
Sure, some of the general lobbies are going to be stupidly toxic as some of the current SC2 ones are, but if your argument against community building and access to finding friends is that "some people are dumb" then it just creates isolated players who can never get involved from the casual side - and well - if you leave it to places like TL or discord or whatever, they'll create as great as a community as they can outside the game for sure, but it will never provide the ease of access or algorithms for ranked lobbies that the developers can so easily do.
with a lot of their statements being about community and support, I really hope they think about this sort of thing from the start. even very recent games are failing terribly at this, regardless of their level of success (apex legends for example, insane release, slow updates, over a year later and only now are leaks coming out about possible season 7 lobby support/clan support...nearly 2 years.. for what is essentially a chat/voice lobby system/clan system to find players..)
Imagine a game which is a MMO of small parties without proper guild system. I'm still baffled that some companies can forget such important parts of party multiplayer focused games. And I am extremly surprised they cannot learn from each other.
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This is awesome. Now I have two RTS games I look forward too, Frost Giants game and Age of Empires IV.
Not sure if either will replace SC2 of if I will play those games on the side. Fun and depth will decide.
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Czech Republic12129 Posts
Why is this in the SC2 general section though? I haven't seen AOE IV or AOE II DE beeing discussed here. Both games are RTS and more successfull than this(considering all we have are names, promisses and a logo) Feels weird.
And I know AOE IV was just announced, but still..
Edit> or W3 Reforged, considering that has bigger ties to SC2 than AoE
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Really great to read this. Their comments about BW give me hope that they're in the right mindset. I hope that they manage to produce something really good down the track that isn't just a kind of mix-n-match or slight tweaking of what came before. I think one of my qualms with SC2 (a game which I've followed since the beta and have enjoyed both as a player and a spectator) is that it felt like they were trying too hard to make something "like Brood War, but different". Classic Blizzard games had a vision. My feeling is that "having a vision" is a big part of what's been missing from Blizzard for a long long time.
Having said all that, I'm excited. I really hope that a high quality game comes out of this that reinvigorates and grows the RTS esports scene.
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Im so hyped up for this, I can barely contain myself  RTS's and starcraft 2 in particular has been a HUGE part of my life for years. If they can nail the formula, it will literally be life changing for me and many other people as well. I can't wait to see what they have cooking up for us.
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Thank you for the interview and additional insight. A lot of my concerns were addressed about the direction they plan to take.
It's still however a long road ahead and I hope things come together as smoothly as possible.
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Great interview. This is a really good answer.
The seed money of $4.7m is already probably higher than the total budget of some of the notable indie RTS games that have come out in the previous few years like Frostpunk or They Are Billions. And you say you're trying to make a "triple A" game. What specifically are you trying to do that's different or bigger than the indie RTS games that have come out post-StarCraft II?
Tim M: Just in terms of scope of SC2, for example, there were four main pillars coming off Legacy of the Void. Those were campaign—campaigns are time consuming to build, and require voice acting, require cinematics—so campaign is a pillar. Cooperative is a completely separate gameplay mode that's open-ended and takes a great deal of effort to design for, as Kevin can attest. Competitive is, again, in some cases has different units, in all cases has different balance values, different maps, different technology behind the ladder. It's just a tremendous amount of work to build a good competitive mode. And then, Arcade, for user generated content. Again, a completely different experience, different work that has to go into building that set of tools.
The scope of a StarCraft II relative to the scope of some of the other indie RTS games that have come out is substantially bigger. For us to really follow in the tradition of Blizzard RTS, it means that we really have to be thinking of that scope and not just pick one of those four pillars, but really be thinking about all of those pillars.
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Northern Ireland26700 Posts
Purely based on their ideas, their grasp of what was both good and bad about their previous work and their articulations of this, pretty exciting potential is there at least. The standard gripes about deathballs etc, but also the less-mentioned but interesting differences in WC3’s harvesters for example, that aren’t big community talking points. Tells me they’ve really thought a lot about what made Blizz RTS games great in a lot of detail and are still thinking of how to mesh everything together.
Far more tangible than x person working on x game in the past anyway.
Good interview Wax, why are you fuelling the hype machine? :p
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France12911 Posts
The timing is quite nice when you think about it... we have 2 more years of ESL sc2 right? So in 2 years they will probably be relatively advanced in the development so the wait in case there is no more sc2 esports won’t be too long
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This level of optimism from everyone was what we felt back when they announced SC2..
I'm still hoping for the best, especially with that strong finish :D
Hopefully I won't have material to write another stupid *ustin *owder blog post hahaha
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They really seem to understand that makes an RTS game good. I'm slightly more hopeful now, but there's going to be a long wait.
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Northern Ireland26700 Posts
On October 22 2020 17:50 neutralrobot wrote:
Really great to read this. Their comments about BW give me hope that they're in the right mindset. I hope that they manage to produce something really good down the track that isn't just a kind of mix-n-match or slight tweaking of what came before. I think one of my qualms with SC2 (a game which I've followed since the beta and have enjoyed both as a player and a spectator) is that it felt like they were trying too hard to make something "like Brood War, but different". Classic Blizzard games had a vision. My feeling is that "having a vision" is a big part of what's been missing from Blizzard for a long long time.
Having said all that, I'm excited. I really hope that a high quality game comes out of this that reinvigorates and grows the RTS esports scene.
A problem with modern development is too much chasing of trends (so by the time you ship that trend may have moved on), and perhaps listening to community backlash too much.
Sometimes you just have to trust your gut, talent ideas and have faith that people will like what you’re trying to do.
Wasn’t a huge forum browser when I was 12/13 and Warcraft 3 came out, but even via gaming magazines I remember there being a lot of skepticism about an RTS with heroes and less traditional resource management. But Blizzard then was confident with the ideas and, while not to everyone’s taste can’t really be considered anything other than an all-time classic.
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Now i m pretty sure the term RTS doesn t fit enought to this kind of game because of Esport developpement.
Real Time and Tactics would be more suitable : R2T, you can let the strategy to turn by turn games and boardgames.
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If they make a good game with responsive units and high skill cap I will play it and it might very well be better than Sc2.
However, I don't believe the game can ever become really big without larger fundamental changes.
The best thing about Sc2 are controlling simple but infinitive skillcap units like Marines and playing a macro-game with spread out units all over the map with frequent engagements. However, the skill requirements to play such a game will always be too high without larger underlying changes.
I want the average gold league LOL player to be able to pick up a new RTS game and <50 hours he will be able to experience the same type of feeling that a Masters Sc2 player feels when he is taking part in an action-packed macro game. (while still keeping a high skill cap ofc)
I am thinking of changes such as completely changing resource-collection/base-building/unit production etc. to allow players to focus on the unit-control side instead.
If a company manages to do that well it could have a similar learning curve as MOBA's with the skill-cap of Sc2 + a better and more consistent gaming experience.
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EPT
