|
On June 15 2022 23:52 abuse wrote: Another thing by the way - I hope to god that this game won't have a 200 unit supply cap. Can this outdated practice die already please, our pcs can support bigger armies now.
what use would that be? I can't even micro properly an army of 20. just a click and wait?
|
I don't think supply cap was just introduced to keep the game running smoothly, it certainly has that effect in team games, but there's legit gameplay reasons for there to be a cap, as well. It lets a player who is down on supply to catch up just with enough time. It also prevents situations where someone just masses and masses and masses and very flatly turns an economic advantage into an insurmountable army advantage.
It's kind of like the 12 unit selection cap from BW, in a way. It made games about more than just who has more money or more stuff, you have to find secondary ways of leveraging your advantage, which opens up opportunities for comebacks, and adds another axis of skill to how a player can execute in the game.
|
I like defenders advantage and the ability to retreat.
Yes defenders advantage and ability to retreat are necessities. The current Sc2 TvZ matchup works well atm partly due to that. Defenders advantage is generally quite large with positional units like Liberators, Tanks, Lurkers etc. and both armies can retreat.
That said both BW and Sc2 would benefit from more defenders advantage. While BW can have a high defenders advantage in certain parts of the game, it can be nonexistent in others leading to highly volatile unforgiving gameplay in certain phases.
Yeah no it doesn't, but the pathfinding and hitboxes (+ F2/MUS) creates deathballs in SC2 which is super boring to me.
While pathfinding is a factor, it tends to be overrated. Rather it's much more related to defenders advantage. E.g. you can't attack into Dark Swarm regardless of how many units you have. Ability design and unit design must be thought out well in order to encourage multitasking.
I think we all want a similar thing here when it comes to gameplay (lots of skirmishes all over the map)
I like the building/macro side of RTS,
If the building part is APM-taxing, I believe that game can never popular amongst a larger audience.
Instead the game developers needs to identify what it is the target actually group actually wants and then go all in on that route instead of forcing players to do many things at once.
And I believe there is a solid market for something that gives a similar feeling to a TvZ macrogame (but better) and without the macro requirement.
Most people watching Sc2 seems to have a general shared opinion on what the best type of Sc2 gameplay is. Yet no developers have tried to replicate that. Instead they all attempt the "gameplay must be slower" solution.
And while it can work if you don't slow it down too much and figure out new micro mechanics - I want to see an RTS game that designs the gameplay around "fast movement + production speed and low lethality is fine." And I agree with them that this game can't work either for casuals - unless you remove the APM requirement for macro (and make unit production purely a strategical decision).
I like lethality and speed to be somewhere around BW's.
I am fine with a small increase in lethality as well to adjust for effective path-finding (so effectively closer to BW). I think if it gets closer to Wc3 that will make it less interesting though.
Movement speed though is something that you should be very careful about slowing down. E.g. if we contrast stimmed marines with non-stimmed marines, former is awesome latter is boring and micro-less.
|
Any idea how succesful SC2 launch was? The early WoL had these small, cramped maps and a lot of the early games I played ended up being super awkward stuff. It was a real pain to even take the natural on many maps with the backdoor rocks and stuff.
I definitely hated the gameplay back then and kind of gave up pretty soon, only to come back much later when the LotV free to play was a thing.
So, the early stuff definitely wasn't for me by any means, but did it manage to retain enough players to call it a success at that point?
|
On June 16 2022 03:27 Bacillus wrote: Any idea how succesful SC2 launch was? The early WoL had these small, cramped maps and a lot of the early games I played ended up being super awkward stuff. It was a real pain to even take the natural on many maps with the backdoor rocks and stuff.
I definitely hated the gameplay back then and kind of gave up pretty soon, only to come back much later when the LotV free to play was a thing.
So, the early stuff definitely wasn't for me by any means, but did it manage to retain enough players to call it a success at that point?
It was definitely a success - but game was indeed shit in hindsight. BW people hated it but played it because "it was the new thing".
Although a lot of people had no clue what they were doing and how to properly abuse most of the insane map design stuff. I think the game survived during the early period because players were too bad too realize how bad the game was. (including the pros at the time).
For me SC2 first started maturing around late 2010 where maps began to get larger and slightly more modern playstyles were introduced.
The fact that Sc2 esport can still be so successful despite the initial game being launched with developers thinking "Short rush distances are good because it creates more action" + stupid backdoors and them believing defenders advantages are bad. To me that demonstrates how much potential there is in the genre. Sc2 has so many flaws yet despite that far better than all RTS's released since.
|
I think they understand the principles behind a good RTS, I just hope that they learn from SC2's mistakes.
- Nobody likes dominant aerial armies. Ground armies are always more microable and more entertaining to watch due to it's interaction with terrain.
- Map balance is critical, let the community handle this area.
- There needs to be a balance of defenders advantage and rewarding aggression, too much defender advantage means sitting back and massing will be more optimal, too much aggression reward will stifle macro and defensive playstyles.
- Asymmetry is key, but I think the unit roster shouldn't be bigger then SC2, maybe even a unit or two smaller.
- No, "terrible terrible damage" units like Disruptors, Banelings or Widow Mines. I don't hate these units as much as some people do, but it just strikes me as inherently lazy design to include units that can outright end the game due to a single micro mistake.
- BE RECEPTIVE. If Blizzard were receptive they would have discarded Warp Gate in HOTS and rebalanced Gateway units accordingly, by now we would have 8 + years of no Warp Gate. Things like Blord/Festor would have been promptly fixed, units like the Colossus would have been toned down and balanced vs. having another OP unit in the Viper be introduced.
|
I'd add when lethality or volatility is lower, that doesn't necessarily translate into a lower skill ceiling because there is always room for optimizations in micro (for most pathfinding/hitbox/targetting/blocking../mechanics systems). So whenever the game is paced such that most players can deal with most critical things that happen, there should still be room for the faster or better players to use their extra action time on performing optimizations that won't necessarily turn the game around immediately but still count for something ; and this could also allow different playstyles where some players do that a lot in their own way and others less.
On June 15 2022 18:17 Miragee wrote: Yeah no it doesn't, but the pathfinding and hitboxes (+ F2/MUS) creates deathballs in SC2 which is super boring to me. The high lethalty leads to entire armies dying in seconds and the game is over. Buildings also die so quickly that you can poke in and kill and expo in 2s without any time for the opponent to respond if he doesn't have their army there in the first place. This I agree with completely ngl that's exactly how I felt about SC2 and I stopped playing it quite promptly. I wasn't even doing bad at all I just didn't like it quite as much as other games I played before.
|
Canada10901 Posts
Regardless of lethality, if we want high potential for microbility, I think the main to look in how units shoot. I wrote an overly long blog on A-move by Design... wow, ten years ago already. It's very long and so not worth linking, but the main take away is this:
There's a few things that I would say are necessary for the Micro Plus 1) Burst damage (Front loaded damage, time in between shots) 2) Speed 3) Speed between attacking and moving and moving and attacking 4) Relatively low hit points. (Although with how fast things die in SC2, this point might be moot.)
Continuous rate of fire like Collosi incentivizes some movement to create concaves and the like. But really you want them to be firing continually with only small interuptions, especially if movement cancels their attack. By contrast front loaded damage with a unit that changes direction quickly incentives attack-retreat micro- the marine stutter step, the vulture patrol move, the hydralisk and dragoon hold position retreat. Heck, you can even do with it with unsieged tanks.
The snap turn around is also what makes the microbility so unique from pretty much any RTS past or present that I can think of. Most are really concerned about units realistically turning around in an arc or having to stop and turn in a spot and then move in a new direction. (I just got C&C Remastered and managing vehicles is a real nightmare compared to the snap control of its peer BW (even including fritzing goons and goliaths.) Those snap turn arounds suddenly turns and RTS into a twitch control game similar to fighting games. It's really quite unique to RTS's.
LaLuSh put in a lot of effort to pin down what made BW units so microable (without any spells) and despite some wonky pathing:
On November 04 2012 06:37 LaLuSh wrote: I've been trying to pin point what's different about unit control for a long time. I've probably made some not 100% correct claims in trying to figure it out previously. *snip
After 2 years what I can say is: The only fundamental difference between SC2 and BW unit control seems to be that SC2 air units rotate around their axis to "lock on" to their targets while still gliding in their original direction, whereas BW air units must face and travel towards their target before being allowed to fire. You can see it in the chinese god tier muta micro; the mutas have to fully turn around. They very briefly travel toward the scourge before firing and turning back.
SC2 attack conditions: Facing target BW attack conditions: Facing and travelling toward target.
The rest all comes down to attack animations, turn speeds, acceleration etc. All of which can be emulated through the SC2 editor. It's just been Blizzard's choice to design immobile and clumsy air units with long animations and relatively slower turn speeds.
The cases where you are most likely to fuck up moving shot micro in SC2, is when you are not perfectly aligned with the target you're firing at. Why? Because the air units are rotating around their axis while gliding in a slightly different direction than they're facing. Before they can be "snapped out" of their movement in a fluid manner, they must first rotate back to the direction they were originally gliding towards. It's noticeable in your SC2 muta micro video. The instances where the mutas are the most non responsive and pause the most before acting out your next move command, is when they were not perfectly aligned with their target before firing.
*snip
I'm not convinced Blizzard's developers ever really identified what made BW battles so exciting considering all the tinkering they did with the Phoenix that really only managed to get it to fly backwards and still shoot. I don't know if Frost Giant will be any different, but maybe they'll come up with something cool. We'll see.
|
If this game becomes anything close to feeling like sc2 then i wont play it.
It has to have sc:r feeling.
I think many can agree sc2 feels terrible to play coming from sc:r.
I can tell you what makes sc:r good but its a big list and it involves bugs existing for it to work. This in itself involves buggy pathfinding as an example.
The feeling of always click once and it always works is unenjoyable. Look at snow hunting workers with his probe, abusing unoptimized pathing to get closer to kill.
Small quirks like this is what makes the game good and a lifetime to master.
|
On June 16 2022 02:21 NewSunshine wrote: I don't think supply cap was just introduced to keep the game running smoothly, it certainly has that effect in team games, but there's legit gameplay reasons for there to be a cap, as well. It lets a player who is down on supply to catch up just with enough time. It also prevents situations where someone just masses and masses and masses and very flatly turns an economic advantage into an insurmountable army advantage.
That all sounds fine to me. An economic advantage should end up in a won game unless the losing player does some damage or takes some risks to catch up. It shouldn't just be given on a silver platter by limiting the power of the player who's ahead.
|
On June 16 2022 13:44 MeSaber wrote: If this game becomes anything close to feeling like sc2 then i wont play it.
It has to have sc:r feeling.
I think many can agree sc2 feels terrible to play coming from sc:r.
I can tell you what makes sc:r good but its a big list and it involves bugs existing for it to work. This in itself involves buggy pathfinding as an example.
The feeling of always click once and it always works is unenjoyable. Look at snow hunting workers with his probe, abusing unoptimized pathing to get closer to kill.
Small quirks like this is what makes the game good and a lifetime to master.
If we want anyone except people who are already committed to BW as their game for life to play StormGate, then the devs would be wise to not listen to a word of this sort of post
SC2 feels beautiful to play. It just works. Trying to play many other RTS games feels like fighting the controls more than the opponent. In the modern post-SC2 era that just won't fly.
You can create many interesting micro interactions without having bad controls and optimization.
|
On June 16 2022 04:13 Beelzebub1 wrote: I think they understand the principles behind a good RTS, I just hope that they learn from SC2's mistakes.
- Nobody likes dominant aerial armies. Ground armies are always more microable and more entertaining to watch due to it's interaction with terrain.
- Map balance is critical, let the community handle this area.
- There needs to be a balance of defenders advantage and rewarding aggression, too much defender advantage means sitting back and massing will be more optimal, too much aggression reward will stifle macro and defensive playstyles.
- Asymmetry is key, but I think the unit roster shouldn't be bigger then SC2, maybe even a unit or two smaller.
- No, "terrible terrible damage" units like Disruptors, Banelings or Widow Mines. I don't hate these units as much as some people do, but it just strikes me as inherently lazy design to include units that can outright end the game due to a single micro mistake.
- BE RECEPTIVE. If Blizzard were receptive they would have discarded Warp Gate in HOTS and rebalanced Gateway units accordingly, by now we would have 8 + years of no Warp Gate. Things like Blord/Festor would have been promptly fixed, units like the Colossus would have been toned down and balanced vs. having another OP unit in the Viper be introduced. All great points, and I agree. As a long-time SC2 mapmaker, I felt the interplay of air unit balance and map balance was handled particularly poorly. I'm of the belief that it was the driving force behind a lot of the homogenization of map design. Any map that allowed the game's super strong air units to be even a little more effective than usual was thrown out, and that forces the pathing and terrain of maps to converge into a "web", where ground units can go in any direction at any time, to try to match the overpowered air units and keep them in check. So every map has to have essentially the same design to avoid air units being too strong.
Air units are supposed to be useful because they ignore terrain, but they should be weak in other areas to compensate. Bad in straight up fights, expensive and slow to build if not, or have no attack at all and be purely a utility unit, that kind of thing. SC2 basically eliminated that trade-off. They're so fast and so strong that all the rest of the balance is warped around it.
|
I think a major reason that BW battles were so interesting to watch and had such variety, is because it has several mechanics in place that made it more difficult to make sure your units are attacking optimally, especially as your army gets larger and larger. 12 unit selection combined with wonky unit pathing made it relatively easy to get a few units to do what you wanted, but if you had 20 or 30 marines/dragoons/etc. That gets tricky very fast. I think that was a by-product of quirks of the time, like said pathing, especially for the infamous dragoon, and it created opportunities where players had to micro and position more, and an extra layer of execution was required to actually get good unit engagement in a fight. That's why it's possible to increase the efficiency of units by anywhere from 2-10x or more just by microing them in BW, as opposed to a 1.5x multiplier that is closer to what you have in SC2, which has much more efficient unit clumping and pathing.
I think it's possible to create this dynamic without necessarily having "bad" pathing, but BW is probably still the best example of good battle dynamics and player skill ceiling that we have. SC2 has had some good micro interactions, marine/baneling probably being the most iconic, but in general it just matters less. So I will look forward to seeing if Stormgate tries to iterate on the depth of micromanagement, and see if they've learned those lessons from Starcraft.
|
On June 16 2022 22:19 NewSunshine wrote: I think a major reason that BW battles were so interesting to watch and had such variety, is because it has several mechanics in place that made it more difficult to make sure your units are attacking optimally, especially as your army gets larger and larger. 12 unit selection combined with wonky unit pathing made it relatively easy to get a few units to do what you wanted, but if you had 20 or 30 marines/dragoons/etc. That gets tricky very fast. I think that was a by-product of quirks of the time, like said pathing, especially for the infamous dragoon, and it created opportunities where players had to micro and position more, and an extra layer of execution was required to actually get good unit engagement in a fight. That's why it's possible to increase the efficiency of units by anywhere from 2-10x or more just by microing them in BW, as opposed to a 1.5x multiplier that is closer to what you have in SC2, which has much more efficient unit clumping and pathing.
I think it's possible to create this dynamic without necessarily having "bad" pathing, but BW is probably still the best example of good battle dynamics and player skill ceiling that we have. SC2 has had some good micro interactions, marine/baneling probably being the most iconic, but in general it just matters less. So I will look forward to seeing if Stormgate tries to iterate on the depth of micromanagement, and see if they've learned those lessons from Starcraft.
I strongly disagree. Limiting control groups to 12 made the game very hard. Bw is too hard and if you would launch a carbon copy of it today (without an existist bw) it would fail so hard it goes out of top20 in twitch.tv/directory after first 24hours of launch. I think people put too much emphasis on how to make game hard, harder, hardest, then nobody will play it. I mean, you can see the # of viewers in twitch right now on bw, it is as you wish it was yet nobody plays it. wonder why. I start to think that bw is all about nostalgia in today's world and people who push for a game similar to it are either delusional or lost the grip with your average teenager.
truth been told, all rts fail today, none of them make any break in top10 games on twitch anymore. bw,wc3,sc2 all combined still don't get top 10 if you add the average viewers.
maybe, just maybe there is something completly wrong with them and we should think what it is.
on the contrary:
lol was released before sc2 cs:go was released before HOTS expansion in sc2.
yet they are top top top every single night 365/365.
Why? many reasons.
|
On June 17 2022 16:54 xsnac wrote:Show nested quote +On June 16 2022 22:19 NewSunshine wrote: I think a major reason that BW battles were so interesting to watch and had such variety, is because it has several mechanics in place that made it more difficult to make sure your units are attacking optimally, especially as your army gets larger and larger. 12 unit selection combined with wonky unit pathing made it relatively easy to get a few units to do what you wanted, but if you had 20 or 30 marines/dragoons/etc. That gets tricky very fast. I think that was a by-product of quirks of the time, like said pathing, especially for the infamous dragoon, and it created opportunities where players had to micro and position more, and an extra layer of execution was required to actually get good unit engagement in a fight. That's why it's possible to increase the efficiency of units by anywhere from 2-10x or more just by microing them in BW, as opposed to a 1.5x multiplier that is closer to what you have in SC2, which has much more efficient unit clumping and pathing.
I think it's possible to create this dynamic without necessarily having "bad" pathing, but BW is probably still the best example of good battle dynamics and player skill ceiling that we have. SC2 has had some good micro interactions, marine/baneling probably being the most iconic, but in general it just matters less. So I will look forward to seeing if Stormgate tries to iterate on the depth of micromanagement, and see if they've learned those lessons from Starcraft. I strongly disagree. Limiting control groups to 12 made the game very hard. Bw is too hard and if you would launch a carbon copy of it today (without an existist bw) it would fail so hard it goes out of top20 in twitch.tv/directory after first 24hours of launch. I think people put too much emphasis on how to make game hard, harder, hardest, then nobody will play it. I mean, you can see the # of viewers in twitch right now on bw, it is as you wish it was yet nobody plays it. wonder why. I start to think that bw is all about nostalgia in today's world and people who push for a game similar to it are either delusional or lost the grip with your average teenager. truth been told, all rts fail today, none of them make any break in top10 games on twitch anymore. bw,wc3,sc2 all combined still don't get top 10 if you add the average viewers. maybe, just maybe there is something completly wrong with them and we should think what it is. on the contrary: lol was released before sc2 cs:go was released before HOTS expansion in sc2. yet they are top top top every single night 365/365. Why? many reasons.
BW was never that big in the west to begin with. BW was pretty much only a big esports in South Korea. It was forcefully killed by Blizzard over there. In the west, Blizzard didn't have to do much because there was no scene of well earning pros and team houses. Generally, RTS will not compete with the likes of CS, LoL etc. in terms of popularity because those games are incredibly easy to jump in. I think RTS are harder to start because of their inherently more complex starting point. The reason RTS seemed more popular back in the day is that the gaming audience was more hardcore (precentage wise). Today a lot more people are gaming casually so the audience for twitch for example is much bigger. However, a more casual audience will also be interest in more casual experiences they themselves can play/identify with. This scews the number in favour of games such as LoL. One of Frost Giant's devs even said something along those lines. Paraphrasing but it was something like "I don't think the RTS audience is smaller but a lot more people are gaming these days and while other genres grew in numbers, the RTS genre stayed about the same." And I don't think this is going to change. I doubt any RTS has the chance to get anywhere near the "success" of the top twitch titles in the past 10 years.
|
On June 17 2022 17:17 Miragee wrote:Show nested quote +On June 17 2022 16:54 xsnac wrote:On June 16 2022 22:19 NewSunshine wrote: I think a major reason that BW battles were so interesting to watch and had such variety, is because it has several mechanics in place that made it more difficult to make sure your units are attacking optimally, especially as your army gets larger and larger. 12 unit selection combined with wonky unit pathing made it relatively easy to get a few units to do what you wanted, but if you had 20 or 30 marines/dragoons/etc. That gets tricky very fast. I think that was a by-product of quirks of the time, like said pathing, especially for the infamous dragoon, and it created opportunities where players had to micro and position more, and an extra layer of execution was required to actually get good unit engagement in a fight. That's why it's possible to increase the efficiency of units by anywhere from 2-10x or more just by microing them in BW, as opposed to a 1.5x multiplier that is closer to what you have in SC2, which has much more efficient unit clumping and pathing.
I think it's possible to create this dynamic without necessarily having "bad" pathing, but BW is probably still the best example of good battle dynamics and player skill ceiling that we have. SC2 has had some good micro interactions, marine/baneling probably being the most iconic, but in general it just matters less. So I will look forward to seeing if Stormgate tries to iterate on the depth of micromanagement, and see if they've learned those lessons from Starcraft. I strongly disagree. Limiting control groups to 12 made the game very hard. Bw is too hard and if you would launch a carbon copy of it today (without an existist bw) it would fail so hard it goes out of top20 in twitch.tv/directory after first 24hours of launch. I think people put too much emphasis on how to make game hard, harder, hardest, then nobody will play it. I mean, you can see the # of viewers in twitch right now on bw, it is as you wish it was yet nobody plays it. wonder why. I start to think that bw is all about nostalgia in today's world and people who push for a game similar to it are either delusional or lost the grip with your average teenager. truth been told, all rts fail today, none of them make any break in top10 games on twitch anymore. bw,wc3,sc2 all combined still don't get top 10 if you add the average viewers. maybe, just maybe there is something completly wrong with them and we should think what it is. on the contrary: lol was released before sc2 cs:go was released before HOTS expansion in sc2. yet they are top top top every single night 365/365. Why? many reasons. BW was never that big in the west to begin with. BW was pretty much only a big esports in South Korea. It was forcefully killed by Blizzard over there. In the west, Blizzard didn't have to do much because there was no scene of well earning pros and team houses. Generally, RTS will not compete with the likes of CS, LoL etc. in terms of popularity because those games are incredibly easy to jump in. I think RTS are harder to start because of their inherently more complex starting point. The reason RTS seemed more popular back in the day is that the gaming audience was more hardcore (precentage wise). Today a lot more people are gaming casually so the audience for twitch for example is much bigger. However, a more casual audience will also be interest in more casual experiences they themselves can play/identify with. This scews the number in favour of games such as LoL. One of Frost Giant's devs even said something along those lines. Paraphrasing but it was something like "I don't think the RTS audience is smaller but a lot more people are gaming these days and while other genres grew in numbers, the RTS genre stayed about the same." And I don't think this is going to change. I doubt any RTS has the chance to get anywhere near the "success" of the top twitch titles in the past 10 years.
but this is not true at all, dota was not easy to begin with. I could not even make a strength brace for the first month when I played it and it implied so much shit. Download wc3, download a map (you get insta kick if you dont have dota map apriori to joining a loby), you needed to know what items combine in which way, hotkeys were miserable, champions had very wierd abilities. It only got better by progressive improvement. I don't see a reason why rts can't do the same.
my belief is that it is not about the genre but the way ppl developed games within this genre that was horrible and isant fitting today. also, if fg stay true to what they say, they will improve with every season, meaning that it can really be on top and nto let things as they are if they are bad in some ways.
|
On June 17 2022 16:54 xsnac wrote:Show nested quote +On June 16 2022 22:19 NewSunshine wrote: I think a major reason that BW battles were so interesting to watch and had such variety, is because it has several mechanics in place that made it more difficult to make sure your units are attacking optimally, especially as your army gets larger and larger. 12 unit selection combined with wonky unit pathing made it relatively easy to get a few units to do what you wanted, but if you had 20 or 30 marines/dragoons/etc. That gets tricky very fast. I think that was a by-product of quirks of the time, like said pathing, especially for the infamous dragoon, and it created opportunities where players had to micro and position more, and an extra layer of execution was required to actually get good unit engagement in a fight. That's why it's possible to increase the efficiency of units by anywhere from 2-10x or more just by microing them in BW, as opposed to a 1.5x multiplier that is closer to what you have in SC2, which has much more efficient unit clumping and pathing.
I think it's possible to create this dynamic without necessarily having "bad" pathing, but BW is probably still the best example of good battle dynamics and player skill ceiling that we have. SC2 has had some good micro interactions, marine/baneling probably being the most iconic, but in general it just matters less. So I will look forward to seeing if Stormgate tries to iterate on the depth of micromanagement, and see if they've learned those lessons from Starcraft. I strongly disagree. Limiting control groups to 12 made the game very hard. Bw is too hard and if you would launch a carbon copy of it today (without an existist bw) it would fail so hard it goes out of top20 in twitch.tv/directory after first 24hours of launch. I think people put too much emphasis on how to make game hard, harder, hardest, then nobody will play it. I mean, you can see the # of viewers in twitch right now on bw, it is as you wish it was yet nobody plays it. wonder why. I start to think that bw is all about nostalgia in today's world and people who push for a game similar to it are either delusional or lost the grip with your average teenager. truth been told, all rts fail today, none of them make any break in top10 games on twitch anymore. bw,wc3,sc2 all combined still don't get top 10 if you add the average viewers. maybe, just maybe there is something completly wrong with them and we should think what it is. on the contrary: lol was released before sc2 cs:go was released before HOTS expansion in sc2. yet they are top top top every single night 365/365. Why? many reasons. Uhm, ok. I'm not talking about MOBA's, and I'm not talking about Twitch viewership. I figured this was a topic for people who care about RTS games to talk about a new RTS game, not to point at LoL as an example of why all RTS games are bad or something. I would start by pointing out that Twitch viewership is not a metric of whether a game succeeds, it just indicates that right now people like to stream the game and people like to tune into those streams. That's a tertiary statistic. A ton of games aren't CS:GO or League or DotA. Are those the only successful games ever made?
I will also point out that I was merely dissecting what made micro, positioning and battles so deep in BW. You're free to feel that it's hard to play because of things like 12 unit selection. I didn't comment otherwise. I basically agree with you, in fact. I even said it's probably possible to have interesting micro mechanics in an RTS without necessarily having things like bad pathing or 12 unit selection. That it's possible to have a game with exciting moments even in small battles, that is still accessible to play.
I don't necessarily understand why you replied to me to bash RTS games, to make a point that's basically irrelevant to what I said.
|
On June 17 2022 22:38 NewSunshine wrote:Show nested quote +On June 17 2022 16:54 xsnac wrote:On June 16 2022 22:19 NewSunshine wrote: I think a major reason that BW battles were so interesting to watch and had such variety, is because it has several mechanics in place that made it more difficult to make sure your units are attacking optimally, especially as your army gets larger and larger. 12 unit selection combined with wonky unit pathing made it relatively easy to get a few units to do what you wanted, but if you had 20 or 30 marines/dragoons/etc. That gets tricky very fast. I think that was a by-product of quirks of the time, like said pathing, especially for the infamous dragoon, and it created opportunities where players had to micro and position more, and an extra layer of execution was required to actually get good unit engagement in a fight. That's why it's possible to increase the efficiency of units by anywhere from 2-10x or more just by microing them in BW, as opposed to a 1.5x multiplier that is closer to what you have in SC2, which has much more efficient unit clumping and pathing.
I think it's possible to create this dynamic without necessarily having "bad" pathing, but BW is probably still the best example of good battle dynamics and player skill ceiling that we have. SC2 has had some good micro interactions, marine/baneling probably being the most iconic, but in general it just matters less. So I will look forward to seeing if Stormgate tries to iterate on the depth of micromanagement, and see if they've learned those lessons from Starcraft. I strongly disagree. Limiting control groups to 12 made the game very hard. Bw is too hard and if you would launch a carbon copy of it today (without an existist bw) it would fail so hard it goes out of top20 in twitch.tv/directory after first 24hours of launch. I think people put too much emphasis on how to make game hard, harder, hardest, then nobody will play it. I mean, you can see the # of viewers in twitch right now on bw, it is as you wish it was yet nobody plays it. wonder why. I start to think that bw is all about nostalgia in today's world and people who push for a game similar to it are either delusional or lost the grip with your average teenager. truth been told, all rts fail today, none of them make any break in top10 games on twitch anymore. bw,wc3,sc2 all combined still don't get top 10 if you add the average viewers. maybe, just maybe there is something completly wrong with them and we should think what it is. on the contrary: lol was released before sc2 cs:go was released before HOTS expansion in sc2. yet they are top top top every single night 365/365. Why? many reasons. Uhm, ok. I'm not talking about MOBA's, and I'm not talking about Twitch viewership. I figured this was a topic for people who care about RTS games to talk about a new RTS game, not to point at LoL as an example of why all RTS games are bad or something. I would start by pointing out that Twitch viewership is not a metric of whether a game succeeds, it just indicates that right now people like to stream the game and people like to tune into those streams. That's a tertiary statistic. A ton of games aren't CS:GO or League or DotA. Are those the only successful games ever made? I will also point out that I was merely dissecting what made micro, positioning and battles so deep in BW. You're free to feel that it's hard to play because of things like 12 unit selection. I didn't comment otherwise. I basically agree with you, in fact. I even said it's probably possible to have interesting micro mechanics in an RTS without necessarily having things like bad pathing or 12 unit selection. That it's possible to have a game with exciting moments even in small battles, that is still accessible to play. I don't necessarily understand why you replied to me to bash RTS games, to make a point that's basically irrelevant to what I said.
sorry for being that aggressive, I just think that rts as a genre can be so so much better if we improve constantly like any other genre instead of reinventing the wheel. I pray to God, FG will make this possible. also, my only objection in general was that rts does not have to be hard or noob unfriendly and this implies that harder does not make a game better. <3 won't discuss twitch anymore since probably you are right it is a bit offtopic.
|
No worries mate, I agree with you, and I also hope that FG succeeds. It's certainly an ambitious undertaking, making a new RTS targeted at Starcraft and Warcraft fans, who have lots of varied and strong opinions and high standards for sure. I'm cautiously optimistic.
|
Agreed on the other points, but
On June 16 2022 04:13 Beelzebub1 wrote: - No, "terrible terrible damage" units like Disruptors, Banelings or Widow Mines. I don't hate these units as much as some people do, but it just strikes me as inherently lazy design to include units that can outright end the game due to a single micro mistake.
I hope for literally the opposite. More units like Disruptors, Banelings and Siege Tanks, fewer bland, generic units like Dragoons or Roaches. Nothing's lazier design than that.
They punish bad engagements much harder than they punish 'a single micro mistake', and it's that kind of territorial control and map movement that I want to encourage. I want moving somewhere you shouldn't to be punishing, that's the core strategic element of the game, the very one you mentioned yourself when talking about aerial armies.
|
|
|
|