On RTS Games

[Nazz3]

But the point is, what about real time strategy? Is there a way to combine that with the other, more direct play styles? Forgetting about the omnigame concept, could you just have a game where one player is playing an RTS and the rest are on the ground playing, say, Battlefield? This is another thought I know I'm not the only one to think: Team Fortress 2 most notably was messing around with the idea of a "commander" player very, very, very early on in its extremely long development.

Battlefield 2 has commanders. You can tell your teams squads to do something like attack this place, fix the artillery, defend this place etc. It works fairly good, if the squad doesnt do what you ordered them you can tell stuff like 'Follow orders, soldier!', though thats about it.

 

[Crazy Ant]

Battlefield 2 did try its hand with a variant of the concept of having a commander. Then again, the commander didn't really have any control over the squads, beyond being able to drop supplies, send out UAVs, do satellite scans, send air strikes and issuing orders, which the squads were free to disregard at their leisure.

In any case, if the players had any sort of idea regarding tactical playing, they saw the commander as an asset more than some dictator bossing them around. This was very rarely the case, but every now and again, it seemed to work and this put the game on a whole new level.

 

[The Amazing Tea Alligator]

I somewhat agree. All the reviews for Starcraft 2 are glowing and say it's perfect, but none have said it will win over people who aren't RTS fans like myself. Plus, I think the ad campaign is wrong. Looking at promos it comes off as an action/shooter title not an RTS. I can imagine young players not familiar with 1 getting it and be seriously dissapointed.

I'm an RTS fan and to me Starcraft 2 represents all that is wrong with 'critics' like IGN and Gamespot where they judge a game on presentation instead of gameplay. Real men play Men of War.

 

[curelightchild]

Food for thought: One game has tried an interesting RTS mix. Soul Caliber 3 has an RTS section for it's created characters.

For those who haven't played the game - The way it works is you create your own character like you would normally do, except they only appear in this mode. Then the story starts up, which is set in the Soul Caliber world, except you never interact with any of the main characters (aside from optional side missions). Instead you become the general of your army, attempting to protect your home. Gameplay is very very simple RTS; You have about four unit types and maybe five units on the field at once. However, when one of your units and a enemy unit clash you can choose to zoom in and fight it Soul Caliber style. So if you want a simple RTS you play normally, but you also have the option to fight every encounter Fighting Game style.

It's an interesting mix to be sure, and one that I like. It's more Fighting Game then RTS, but if all you want is a sprinkling of RTS-style gameplay then it's perfect.

 

[HentMas]

I thought about such a type of game to where your people on the ground are actual players, it just wouldn't work. Well, it wouldn't work outside of a small community (hint hint escapist).

I suppose their is a the potential mix of both normal npc units and players on the battlefield. You control an army of npcs, then have some special units which are players.

Might be worth thinking about, i'd love to be involved in such a thing but I think it would need to be small scale with a closed off community of very dedicated people rather than just everyone.

2 players for each team, one the commander and the other guy a special trooper

the trooper can do whatever he wants, except that, being in the "area of effect" wich will be set by the commander and will be carried by the manin group of troops gives the trooper special abilities, say, you want your "special" guy to flank the enemy while you put all the npc´s in the front gates?? set the area of effect at the rigth side of the enemies, that way the guy controlling the troopers haves no option but to follow the "beacon" because outside the area of effect he is as strong as a wet piece of paper

there will be yelling and coursing "HEY MAN!!! GET THE AREA A LITTLE FARTHER DOWN THE ROAD, THEY ARE OUT OF RANGE!!!" but it can be solved by the commander moving the area of effect

also, if the trooper wants to do something specific, like say, steal that chopper and bomb the enemy zone, he can call for "command override" and it gives him 30 seconds (or some time) to go outside the area of effect, into the chopper, once inside the chopper is up, the chopper will have its own life bar, that way he can fly as long as he can mantain the chopper up, once destroyed, he haves another 30 seconds untill the "area of effect" is deactivated, enough for him to get back into the zone, or the commander to move the zone over him.

i think that might work, for skirmishes or small battles

but more people... i dont know... colored patterns for each special unit??

it would also be amazing for "1 on 1" battles against each special troopers, while the commanders try to hold their possitions or take over such stronghold.

 

[MasterRahl]

So, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation of why Yahtzee hates RTS; he sucks at them. Of coarse you can't 'get' games that you suck horribly at. He had a good analogy that RTS are basically chess games, and everything that he suggested would make those games SUCK! Way to have a vendetta against RTS's Yahtzee.

Still, if someone could get him to play Dungeon Keeper 2, then I would wager his whole opinion would be changed about RTS's. That actually allow you to posses and control your troops. I loved controlling the imps and destroying the map. (DAMN YOU TO HELL EA FOR CANCELING DK3!)

~MasterRahl

 

[Phoenixlight]

I'm very dissapointed that he won't be reviewing starcraft 2

 

[sketchesofpayne]

They need to combine Mech Commander and Mechwarrior!!!

Or at least make a co-op Mechwarrior game.

 

[Sikachu]

Of course they abandoned it because, of course, it wouldn't work.

Does anyone read this stuff a second time before it hits the website? If The Escapist doesn't have a sub-editor I'll happily offer my services for a small wage. Expect 'American' English to be corrected though.

 

[Egobrain]

That was the COOLEST sounding game Ive ever heard of.
It would be like MAG, only better... and FUN!
I would love to see what its like to merc then to run an army and try to bribe guys like me.

It would be hard to mix the damage/hit between rts and fps though. A merc with a snipe would expect his headshot to kill the lieutenant, but how would that correlate to the lieutenant being a good strong character in a mob of rts fighting?

Would contracting a merc make it easier to win fights against mobs? If they were allowed to easily kill key, important figures on the battlefield, that would ruin a commander's vat grown soldiers? Creating the idea of "is paying and arming a merc more or less worthwhile than using the same resources to make more troops?"

This concept has me so excited. Im sad I don't know how to program, or own a company that'll do that for me.

 

[RobThePrezodent]

I' probably not the first person to have mentioned this (and there's no way I'm reading through 140 comments to find out) but although the idea could work, I think FPS' and RTS' are fine the way there are; kept seperate. I wouldn't buy an FPS so I could play rts elements as well and I wouldn't buy an RTS..... but if I did then vice versa.

 

[thepj]

terry pratchet refrences ftw!

I honestly prefer the idea at the ned with the free agent style people and the rts commanders, sounds like a great way to ruin freind ships if you're playing with mates though. otherwise with some refining it could work. it'd probably have to be more of a MMO for the mercinary bit though, so it'd probably just end up as a fusion of starcraft and WoW. Plus it's be a total compete and utter flop of you didn't take quite a bit of care with it, but if you did it right it might work.

the main problem i can see is the acctual games, if there's no rts players the mercs have nothing real to do, so you could probably set up a bunch of servers that would allow the rts players to drop in and out as they pleased and let their bases function or be taken over by another player. The only trouble there is that it encourages turtlling so my solution would be that your base will micro manage and deffend itself if you put it into afk mode, but that resorce production will drop to very low levels while you're gone until you come back, add to this a maintainace feature, something where you pay a certain charge depending on the building level and type and if you can't pay it you get that building demolished or knocked down a level. make sure that the resorce colection level is enough to support a level 1 infantry making building, a base, and a couple of resource harvesters. then you give the ability for the rts comanders to drop out for short periods of time and come back in, or hand control of their base as-is to another player who requests it. also i'd give the rts commanders the ability to price the equipment they sell, add an element of competition and keep the tech prices dynamic sort of thing. but ah well this is all hypothetical

 

[LimeJester]

I would play that game. Unless it turned out to be Bladestorm+.

 

[Dave Brohman]

I too can't really get on board with RTS games. I find I tend to get a sort of tunnel-vision, focusing on carefully building and crafting one small area while the rest of it goes to hell. When I get told there's a battle going on it takes me forever to find it, and by the time I do I've already had my ass handed to me.

And is the prospect of being hung up beside a raisin scone really that frightening?

 

[G-Mang]

Natural Selection is exactly what was described: an RTS/FPS with a God's-view commander and FPS-playing individual troops on the ground. It was a great game that really deserved more attention than it got; granted, it was "just" a HL1 mod, but so was Counter Strike. I feel like so much of this article/discussion here acts like the RTS-FPS hybrid thing is a hypothetical just to ponder about, when NS--and some other games, from what I hear--have actually done it, and quite well. The article basically went "wouldn't it be neat if we could do X? Well, it's impossible, so we'll settle for this other idea, Y," even though X was successfully done years ago.

Admittedly, Natural-Selection probably does demand more teamwork than most FPS games, and it might be more than some gamers are willing to give (particularly those that are the cliche X-Box Live players), so maybe the game was better off as a niche title instead of a major release.

 

[paragon1]

That's an interesting idea that I've always wanted to see done. I've always thought that might be interesting to do that within a medieval fantasy setting. Basically, you'd have the RTS player running a kingdom or something (think Age of Empires, or maybe a Total War game), and have other people playing as adventurers ( you could even have D and D style classes, encouraging people to form groups). The RTS player posts quests and bounties and stuff. RTS players are trying to meet some kind of Civ style victory condition(s), while first/third person players want to level, get loot, etc. You could add in even more factors for quests. For example, have a bunch of kobolds harassing one of your cities, but you can't spare the troops to clean them out? Post a quest. You could create fetch quests by littering the world with baubles that provide a benefit to the side that gets them. Put in the family/general system from the Total War games, and you've got potential assassination/escort missions. There's a lot of possibilities there.

 

[Alandoril]

I for one force myself not to believe the hype. I don't see anything about SC2 that makes it any better or worse than any other AAA title out there. As for the reviewers only giving positive impressions, well don't get me started...

 

[Atlus0016]

I have to say that I agree, I will not be getting Starcraft II wither. {Unless my wife decides to get it for me because the trailer has played over every single video I have watched on this site for the past few weeks. Yes, she has threaten to get it.}
A MMO war game is interesting. I would hate to see the development cost of such a thing, but something of that nature could rival World of Warcraft.

 

[MasterSplinter]

Isn't yahtzee a professional reviewer? He should at least give it a try before tossing it aside. I'm not saying he should be forced to play any given game, but when some game stirs up the gaming beehive like this it's kinda weird to just ignore it because it's not your cup of tea.

You could at least put a *subjectivism ahead* warning. Also RTS's are only mind bogglingly difficult when you go online, there is always the *build tons of units and attack* approach.

 

[MaVeN1337]

I hear ya Yahtzee, I don't give a shit about SC2 either.