On RTS Games

[Squilookle]

Yahtzee, your game has already been made. Twice. There aren't mercenaries but the action players can still muck around doing what they want. In short you really should check out (or even just check a youtube video of) Battlestations Midway and Pacific to see that RTS and 3rd person action can coexist, at the same time, and extremely well, too. It's actually kind of embarrassing seeing you go on about this idea of yours when even I knew it's been out for years...

Personally I cannot stand RTSes either, to me they'd be more interesting if the computer did everything for both sides and the whole affair was turned into an entertaining screensaver. That said, I did actually get pulled into Company of Heroes. A well told story tied to gameplay so extensively play tested and refined that I just couldn't find anything wrong with it.

 

[martin's a madman]

I was thinking having a RTS, but have player characters play the "Heroes" in Starcraft 2 missions there were times when the hero was controlling themselves, or rather the AI was. What would be wrong with say: Letting a player character play that hero, while the commander creates all the support grunts. Having a hero would certainly strengthen your army, but the hero can't do much alone unless he has the support grunts.

 

[tehroc]

I would play this war omnigame. I think the idea of a third person sandbox shooter in someones RTS game would be an interesting innovation to the genre. Racers could play logistics, supply lines and transports.

 

[Daemian Lucifer]

What youve described is majesty(btoh 1 and 2),except that there you have ai mercenaries fighting monsters.So I guess you could make that into a multiplayer game.It would be a fun experiment.

Or,you could make one player control the bots,and the rest fighting them in order to get to something.

 

[Softnum]

So, nobody that I saw has mentioned the excellent Microsoft game Allegiance, which follows the Savage and Natural Selection mode of 'One guy is the commander, everyone else are troops.' It's more like if you mixed Savage with EVE, with less MMO Grindy BS.

Empirically, in Savage and Savage 2, cooperation and tactics worked. Your commander generally kept you abreast of which tech he was going for. He could mark certain people as leaders, and they would have a flag, so the grunts might follow the right person. Griefing wasn't a huge problem, and it seems to happen as a commander-grief as anything else.

Another problem with this genre I haven't seen mentioned is that most everyone wants to be the commander. The worst parts of Savage and Allegiance were the between round spat of 'Do we kick out the commander who's doing pretty well to give someone else a go, or do we let someone else take the helm.' Allegiance at least let you switch commanders in the middle of the game, and both let you vote to kick commanders (iirc, it's been a while for both games).

Edit: Also, I would like to voice here: I love RTS games, and I hate FPS. I get lost easily, and after a short period of time it doesn't seem like I'm making any difference. I enjoy almost any other genre of games, but I'm pretty sad that PC Gaming = FPS most of the time.

 

[SultanP]

As a few others have said, Savage and Savage 2 did the RTS guy controlling the big picture, and other players being the major part of the soldiers very, very well. I never did do the RTS part very well, but it was very fun being some other guy's soldier.

Also, Battlefield 2 did the FPS with a commander player extremely well. And as a great incentive to do well as the commander, the commander player cannot acquire points on his own, while he is the commander, but rather gets the mean[footnote]I think? The score of all the players on his team, divided by the number of players[/footnote] amount of points for all the other guys on his team, meaning that if he helps his team do well, he does well. Also the whole team can vote to replace the commander if they are not satisfied.
I have personally had some great moments with some commanders who decided I was their pet project since I often went on my own to capture objectives, spotting guys for me and giving me supplies while still supporting the rest of the team.
It brings a whole new level to a multiplayer RTS having a guy whose only job is to look out for you. Commanders must be the thing I miss most in Bad Company 2.
Also, the non-commander players could hinder or help the commanders by blowing up the enemy commander's toys (making him unable to call down bombings or UAVs), or repairing their own commander's toys.

Edit: Oh great! My post took so long to write that I got ninjaed.

-snip-

I was also really baffled that nobody mentioned Battlefield 2. When I read the article I immediately thought "Does he not know of Battlefield 2 and Savage?". Lots of people mentioned Savage, but no love for BF2, so weird.

 

[GonzoGamer]

No, Yahtzee will not be reviewing StarCraft 2.

We don't need you to review games at all if you ever start making these awesome big budget titles you have ideas for. I like this one even more than that one you came up with in the Saints Row 2 review.

Your rts idea is what they should do with Dawn of War 3 when that eventually gets made.

 

[Loonerinoes]

Hah. We share opinions on the Warcraft story.

And as for the combination of FPS and RTS - one game did actually do its best to try and pull it off. Battlezone 1 and Battlezone 2, the latter developed by the now deceased Pandemic, both published by Activision. They had an okay story...though the voiceover of the person you played was class-A cheese, but then again...I kinda liked it as that.

It had loads of awesome unit voiceovers...simply awesome terrain for its time. Problem was that it was very hard to implement any forms of advanced tactics because you were still playing a 1st-person space planet battle while dealing with RTS mechanics such as resource scavenging, base building and unit production. It was cool that, if you died, you had to eject and then either call another unit to come pick you up or just walk all the way back to base but...well bottom line is I had a lot of fun with it.

But yep, twas not exactly a cohesive franchise. Still, twas the closest I ever got to a mix of FPS and RTS I think.

 

[TWEWER]

Natural Selection.

 

[David Bray]

Shame. I would have liked to see your view on this ridiculously hyped game. But whatever. Here's to the next one. Hopefully Limbo

 

[TitsMcGee1804]

to be fair, SCII is about as polished and noob friendly as an RTS is going to get, so if you want to start somewhere then you should start there

I loved the game, but i get what you are saying, its shortcomings are not from game design, story or whatever, i think it is just the RTS cliche's that exist in the genre, boring base building, unit massing

even then, about 90% of the missions have some form of urgency about them, pushing through to a location before your enemy does, so its never a case of turtle up, max out 200/200 supply and steamroll the whole map

if you play it on hard difficulty, the levels and objectives are cleverly designed so that turtling and steamrolling is not an option

 

[TitsMcGee1804]

additionally, i bought savage 2, i have never played such a badly designed, barren playerbase, awfully optimized inaccessable game

the creators of that game need to be hung for stealing my money

 

[Arvind]

Natural selection had a commander playing an rts style game with player controlled first person troops, and that was awesome.

I agree.

 

[Giest4life]

Interesting read. I can see how the concept of mixing several genres into one mega-game might be as appealing as it might be disastrous.

You've already addressed the initial problems I immediately thought of so instead:

Adding Racers to the game: Make them war time delivery boys or something. They need to deliver X component/ officer/ etc in a certain amount of time. Maybe while being chased in a NFS: Hot Pursuit style. Oh and add weapons (like Wipeout or even Mario Kart).

EDIT: Also, if you don't review RTS because you admittedly aren't well-versed in them, why do you review JRPGs?

He says, it's not just that he sucks at them, but because "it's not [his] cup of tea." I'm pretty good at RTS', but the last one I played was Age of Empires II: The Age of Conquerors. And even that was a while ago.

 

[Dexiro]

I'm surprised that someone like you who bashes his viewers/readers because they stick it 'safe' 'with games is not even willing to give rts's a try.

He has given RTS's a try, he just doesn't want to play Starcraft :3

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

I plainly don't enjoy RTS games. They are frustrating exercises in compulsive micromanagement. The bulk of the "action" consists of camera placement, resource gathering, and troop deployment - all at the same time, all under a stopwatch. I can't help but feel that I should be paid for subjecting myself to that kind of stress. Manipulating troops in battle, the actual "fun" bit, is a relatively minor portion of the game. How is that something people want to play?

Personally, I think Blizzard's insanely high production values rope people into what is otherwise a rightfully niche genre. How many folks would honestly enjoy this game without the story and cinematics backing it up? Is SC2 single-player remotely engaging without the admittedly pretty act breaks?

Multiplayer is obviously a huge draw, but that trades more on the competitive instincts of human beings than the actual objective entertainment value of an experience; people fucking eat competitively, and that shit doesn't looking very fun at all. SC2 is the latest "agreed upon battlefield". This is where the latest and greatest competitions will be held, so you know you'll be there almost in spite of the genre if that's your psychological makeup.

I'm surprised that someone like you who bashes his viewers/readers because they stick it 'safe' 'with games is not even willing to give rts's a try.

What's the correct term for this? Faux logic? Backwards logic? You're essentially saying Yahtzee, as someone who places a premium on originality, should be more open to the original experience of playing a game that is clearly not very original. "If you like freedom so much, you should respect other people's freedom to limit your freedom", right? You've basically warped functional language to your purpose. Congratulations on the destruction of effective human communication.

 

[Pearwood]

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I'm not sure an omnigenre game would work, it'd be very hard to come up with something that's challenging to all genres without being impossible for some approaches. I'm not really sure about the chess comparison either, I see what you mean but a lot of the experience of Bioshock comes from your mission to defeat Andrew Ryan so in effect you're just playing to win in virtually all games. Having said that I'm glad you're not going to review the game; if you don't get what makes an RTS a good example of an RTS game reviewing it would be a Brawl-esque barrage of hate mail with a game as popular as SC2.

 

[chinangel]

a few years ago while I lived in the UK, I actually played a game online that was just like what yahtzee described. It was FPS mixed with RTS. Units got experience and levelled up by doing what they were told. (if you were told to go somewhere a bright beacon of light appeared that only you coudl see) and it was quite fun. you could mine, build buildings and blast baddies. Shame I can't recall the game though...

 

[Jared]

Dosnt surprise me...after the revirw of Halo wars...well, I dont think it will be missed. At least hes honest to his principles!

 

[ionveau]

This is a good choice for Yahtzee.
wouldn't be funny when he made up a review of how good the game was

Its always better when reviewers keep things real rather then when they make up reviews E.G "This game is so good it feels like robbing blizzard wearing a sky mask"

respect for Yahtzee


The RTS/RPG/FPS game yahtzee was talking about is savage 2 its a cool game