EPTMost importantly, you have to remember all the things Blizzard did for SC in 1.08. Without that patch, sc, and thus wc3 would have been complete failures and I'm not sure if Blizzard would be around now considering how slowly they release games.
[Q] How did other RTS games fail? - Page 9
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peidongyang
Canada2084 Posts
Most importantly, you have to remember all the things Blizzard did for SC in 1.08. Without that patch, sc, and thus wc3 would have been complete failures and I'm not sure if Blizzard would be around now considering how slowly they release games. | ||
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ixion
Sweden81 Posts
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Sunfire
United States9 Posts
On January 03 2009 16:24 SWPIGWANG wrote: Comment About macro-thingys: Almost all the games listed here are micro games. There is no talk of games like Rise of Nations, or even more crazy european econ RTS (aka simcity with troops) like settlers or seven kingdoms, or even Age of Empire series..... Where are the macro-strategy supporters on this forum??? When someone said that Starcraft had the most macro strategy, I felt dizzy~~~~ Though to be frank, I don't think any of those macro strategy games ever came close in market penetration or audience to micro ones. I guess build orders complicated enough to fill a book just lacks mass market appeal.... A game with pure macro cannot be as successful as sc either. Even if a game build orders complicated enough to fill a book, without micro, its skill cap is too low to allow the game to be played competitively. Once two players memorize all the build orders and their counters in the game, the outcome of any match would be decided by either luck or a superior unbalanced build order. | ||
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MamiyaOtaru
United States1687 Posts
Last week I played some AOE3 with some friends. Super boring. Once castles went up, the only thing that mattered was siege weapons. All other units existed to protect them. The game ends right away, or mass turtling happens. Maybe it'd be different if we were better (we were experimenting with something other than SC), but it didn't grab us like SC did. Then we tried some Total Annihilation (by virtue of the more modern and open source Spring engine, which is a cool idea I can totally support and which supports several mods of TA and also has other, completely unrelated games for it). Also, boring. Against human opponents, whoever made more units a-moved. Against a computer, it took me several tries but my winning round was a couple hours of non stop unit production and sending them off to battle to push the front line back a bit. Both were far too macro. I find the opposite (too much micro) to be no better. SC and WC win for their balance. Obviously this is not a new observation. My post was prompted simply by having very recent personal experience with other RTS games and the disappointment that went along with them. | ||
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noxing
16 Posts
look at starcraft and how simple hte design is. completely 2D, everything is aligned to a grid, and stuff like that. all of hte work was put into hte thought. every unit varies in power against different units, like a tank is great vs goons, but poor vs zealots. its like a big circle of strengths and weaknesses, (like in pokemon blue, the first three pokemon you got to choose from worked in a circle charmander>bulbasaur>squirtle>charmandre etc etc.) tbh, thats my main fear of sc2. dont get me wrong its going to be a great game, but i think with the new graphics and 3d stuff, its going to take away from the gameplay. thats just my opinion though. speaking of halo and rts, i think halo wars is going to be jsut as popular as every other rts except sc. + Show Spoiler + im saying its going to be shitty. | ||
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SWPIGWANG
Canada482 Posts
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Hans-Titan
Denmark1711 Posts
Warcraft III: Slow, slow, slow. Too many damn spells, macroing was as easy as tapping 2 buttons. 4 races makes balance very, very hard. (Orc vs UD anyone: when I played UD never, ever won) Very hard to serperate one unit from another. Units have too much HP, slows the game down waaaaaay too much. (I tried a Blizzard runby harass with the archmage; killed 0 peons despite landing it for quite a while) Items, leveling systems, creeps all blow IMHO. C&C series: All I have played, with the possible exception of Red Alert have been dreadfully slow (which in return was horribly balanced). Speed things up. Speed is key. 99% of all RTS's are too damn slow. Superweapons etc. in the later installments absolutely blow. Please don't implement those. Also most things just won't die and the games takes rock/paper/sciccors to an absolute extreme, with VERY hard counters. Populous: A fun game (the way spell works are awesome) but again very slow. Lack of unit variations, and the fights seem too 'random': you lack control over your units. The way you make units blow and building is very random. Lacks a proper resource system. But the awesome, awesome, AWESOME spells make up for all that. Metal Fatigue: If all the other games mentioned have been slow, bow down to the slowpoke of all games. Jesus christ does the units have fat asses in this one. Rushing is absolutely pointless, your enemy will have full tech by the time your units reach the other side of the map. Also horrible, horrible unit production. The 3-layer map is awful as well, and only confuses. You can create your own robots, which is cool in theory, but dreadfully slow and ineffectient in-game. All-in-all, speed (!!!), balance and depth is what's needed. Emphasis on speed: I will die if SC2 is slow, since the most awesome part of SC is the fact that units can go places relatively quick. | ||
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phexac
United States186 Posts
Map, race diversity, and balance all contribute to the depth of gameplay. Take C&C3. The game is just so shallow. There is a straight-forward way to play, and most people use it. In addition, maps are very plain with no terrain features, and are small compared to bases to the point where you can actually have two opposing bases within sight of one another. There is simply no room to be strategic there. In earlier patches the most popular map was, literally, a small football field (I mean an actual football field, not just a flat rectangular map), and players started in opposite corners. New patch made is somewhat better, but just not enough. And they went overboard with toning down econ. Now you have enough money to make like 20 units all game. For people familiar with C&C, it should be evident how retarded such low unit count is in the context of those types of games. One RTS I did like was Company of Heroes. It is very different from SC, but it seemed to me that there was a lot of tactics involved and a lot of room for skill. It seemed that one of the complaints from the the competitive community was poor balance and luck big luck factor involved in scoring successful shots. Say two tanks shooting at one another, and one scores a glazing hit that does almost no damage, while the other nails it right on and takes most of its health in one shot. The next important factor is the battle.net. I don't think the importance of being able to quickly log on to a very easy-to-use, fast and reliable match-making and chat service can be overstated. To this day, even the ancient battle.net of BW is better than anything else out there. War3 battle net?--it's just on entire other plane of existence than everything else. People mentioned myth 2. It was, in fact, a great multiplayer tactical game. A friend of mine in high-school was quite good at it, and it had bungie.net, which was easy to use and had a decent community. But guess what? bungie died, and so did the game for most part. Today, only about 500 people still play online. Battle.net?--still around. So the two factors that are needed are depth of gameplay and online media for people to intaract with one another that actually stays around. Most games lack depth. The few that don't usually die because of lack of proper support. In short, most other RTS are made with little thought put into them and little care devoted to them once they are out. In summary, dumb people who don't care or can't afford to care make shitty games that die fast. | ||
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ImgGartok
United States216 Posts
SC wouldn't be where it is today if the game wasn't graphically appealing and the presentation top-notch for its time. It's easy to talk about gameplay > graphics considering how big SC is now, but if the game doesn't dazzle you in the first 15 minutes how do you expect it to stick around for 15 years? | ||
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freelander
Hungary4707 Posts
On January 30 2009 18:08 Oc wrote: Like how most games 'fail' in the long term: they fail to achieve balance, fun factor, accessibility and depth. All of this while introducing something NEW. SC wouldn't be where it is today if the game wasn't graphically appealing and the presentation top-notch for its time. It's easy to talk about gameplay > graphics considering how big SC is now, but if the game doesn't dazzle you in the first 15 minutes how do you expect it to stick around for 15 years? sc fails at accessibility imo it's too hard for noobs to get in | ||
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Undeadhunter
Belgium40 Posts
Also the "races" in AoM were pretty ballance in my oppinion they all had their strenghts and weaknesses | ||
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exDreamDuck
Germany4 Posts
Other than that it is pretty stupid to say SC/WC3 were the only RTS games that ever succeeded. Many RTS games came out since then and even before and quite a lot of them sold really well and were a huge profit for both the publisher and developer of those games (C&C alone is a huge brand). Just because it is not played as crazy as games on battle net, that does not mean people are not playing it, IMO most games are still played offline. Online gaming is quite fun and I prefer it, but most people I know never or very seldom go online to play games. So if we talking about hugely successful competitive RTS games, then all arguments in this thread are quite true, but do not forget all the other games that sometimes did not even sell many million copies but still could have been played by many million people (pirating is much more an issue for singleplayer games). I like to play other RTS games from time to time, sometimes even older games I disliked before. For example I currently play a bit of Earth 2160, a horrible competitive RTS game and even the controls are a bit strange (3D camera and left click), but after adjusting settings, fixing the camera and playing a few hours, it is quite fun and has one of the longest singleplayer stories I have ever seen in a RTS game. After I'm done I will throw the game away, but much rather have 10 not so good singleplayer games than just 1 good singleplayer games, because they get boring either way. | ||
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Plethora
United States206 Posts
Keeping in mind that there has always been a pretty big divergence between pc games and console games, I can state subjectively that SC vanilla came out when I was a junior in high school and for anyone who did in fact play PC games, SC was the must have game at the time. I played it a ton with lots and lots of different people. We all often forget here because of the emphasis on the pro scene and the like, but the single player mode in SC kicks ass just as much as the multiplayer one does. It was recently recognized on gamespot (yeah, I know, say what you want about the site) as having one of the very best stories ever, and was one of only a bare handful of non-rpgs on the list. So yeah, the notion that SC started as some niche thing and grew is pretty categorically false is all I'm trying to say here. lol | ||
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anotak
United States1537 Posts
mass 1 unit in wcg finals... | ||
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D10
Brazil3409 Posts
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L
Canada4732 Posts
mass 1 unit in wcg finals... That's the equivalent of comparing SC vanilla 1.0 to like.. BW. | ||
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armed_
Canada443 Posts
On February 12 2009 05:32 D10 wrote: I think the biggest reason other RTS games failed (to surpass BW) is because, no other company has the blizzard mentality of making only AAA+ products whose purpose is more than to be a game, but an experience, that and the fact that, it seems most companies have completely wrong views of how competitive play works. If anything the problem with other RTS games is they focus too much on being an experience and not enough on actually being a good game. | ||
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The Storyteller
Singapore2486 Posts
On February 12 2009 05:32 D10 wrote: I think the biggest reason other RTS games failed (to surpass BW) is because, no other company has the blizzard mentality of making only AAA+ products whose purpose is more than to be a game, but an experience, that and the fact that, it seems most companies have completely wrong views of how competitive play works. Which is really because there's no incentive for companies to make really good games like SC... Blizzard really has not made very much money from the SC game in the past 5 years, even though the pro scene is so popular. You buy one copy and never need another one. So companies like to push out a game that's just good enough for some people to play, then come up with an expansion pack, then come up with a sequel. That probably makes them more money than coming up with one really good game. Blizzard has found a way to break that model, though. They've been smart enough to capitalise on the SC franchise, licensing the rights to novels. That's the benefit of having a truly long lived game. | ||
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Plethora
United States206 Posts
On February 12 2009 11:52 The Storyteller wrote: Which is really because there's no incentive for companies to make really good games like SC... Blizzard really has not made very much money from the SC game in the past 5 years, even though the pro scene is so popular. You buy one copy and never need another one. So companies like to push out a game that's just good enough for some people to play, then come up with an expansion pack, then come up with a sequel. That probably makes them more money than coming up with one really good game. Blizzard has found a way to break that model, though. They've been smart enough to capitalise on the SC franchise, licensing the rights to novels. That's the benefit of having a truly long lived game. I would question this in some sense. Blizzard must be making something off SC because it is still stocked and sold everywhere you can buy pc games, be it gamestop, best buy or walmart. Many places will only stock a handful of titles and SC battlechest is always among them. It wouldn't be if it didn't sell, particularly when new titles are often pulled from those same shelves after being out for a month. | ||
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D10
Brazil3409 Posts
On February 12 2009 09:01 armed_ wrote: If anything the problem with other RTS games is they focus too much on being an experience and not enough on actually being a good game. I think we are with different interpretations of what would be the "experience" in this case. You seem to see it as games focusing on flashy graphics, cutscenes, and stuff who sounds interesting in theory but eventually fails at the execution. I meant it in the sense of community support (maybe one of the largest factors why blizzard games are so loved, from the moment the beta is released, the best minds playing the game start to shape it into something beatifull), Blizzard listens, in wow they added a shitload of addons to the base UI, and tho sometimes they are slow, they NEVER did anything that hurted the potential growth of theyr games, each in its niche is a amazing sucess. Theres no super magic secret, Blizzard's commitment at making each game they sell the best it can be is what has led them this path, they realized you will get more in the longterm (such as all the free publicity they had for wow because everyone knew them) if you try to make a timeless game, and not just the fotm. Add continuity and consistency to the format and voala, you have the Blizzard game model. | ||
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