Poll: Why was Halo Wars considered a bad RTS?
- Thread starter Dogstile
- Start date
Recommended Videos
Well because it is on consoles, RTS game work much better on PC's with a keyboard and mouse. For a console RTS I guess it was ok, but that isn't saying much.
Even before any real details were known about Halo Wars, it was tacitly recognized as the pinnacle and face of all console strategy games. After all, it's a Halo game. And it presumably has more resources invested in it than any similar titles. Is this good reason to present it as the pinnacle that console strategy games can achieve? Even knowing nothing about it or similar titles in the genre? It was good enough at the time; good enough for every significant source on the subject I was exposed to.
And then we got the game. It was- weird. It was the most conventional RTS imaginable, but gutted, and played with half the buttons missing. Is this the best game that a console RTS can be? It must be. It's Halo Wars. And so Battle for Middle Earth II was forgotten with all the other successful titles. They were erased from popular imagination by the assumption that they could never have existed. The official review on this very website declared the console RTS was not viable and Halo Wars, declared foremost among them with no reasonable justification, was proof. The author admitted having no previous experience with any console RTS this generation. Check the comments. I'm there, clawing my eyes out.
Before Halo Wars, I perceived the console RTS as a growing genre slowly building an audience. Now I see it dwindling away. I don't blame Microsoft for hyping their game or for the way it was received. And I know this isn't a significant cause of hate for the game on the community level. But for me, this is the legacy of Halo Wars. The fair and odd RTS whose existence killed the console RTS genre, for which I had so much hope.
And then we got the game. It was- weird. It was the most conventional RTS imaginable, but gutted, and played with half the buttons missing. Is this the best game that a console RTS can be? It must be. It's Halo Wars. And so Battle for Middle Earth II was forgotten with all the other successful titles. They were erased from popular imagination by the assumption that they could never have existed. The official review on this very website declared the console RTS was not viable and Halo Wars, declared foremost among them with no reasonable justification, was proof. The author admitted having no previous experience with any console RTS this generation. Check the comments. I'm there, clawing my eyes out.
Before Halo Wars, I perceived the console RTS as a growing genre slowly building an audience. Now I see it dwindling away. I don't blame Microsoft for hyping their game or for the way it was received. And I know this isn't a significant cause of hate for the game on the community level. But for me, this is the legacy of Halo Wars. The fair and odd RTS whose existence killed the console RTS genre, for which I had so much hope.
Unfortunately many RTS players dont play this way, hence their dislike for Halo Wars or the dubbing of the title "Baby's First RTS", great for someone who has never played it before but when your ready to stop riding that tricicyle and want to ride a bike, there are better options.BlastedTheWorm said:
Provide proof (if your actually going with the commercial rip-off opposed to the idea rip-off). Otherwise your quoting the wrong source. They are taking ideas from H.R Giger's art, every military story ever told but first having power armour first popularised by the Starship Troopers novel. In terms of of ancient race in tune with high forces (nature, psychic etc), thats Scandinavian mythology.BlastedTheWorm said:
Nobody is ripping anyone off otherwise I can accuse everyone of ripping off cavemen since ultimately these stories and concepts are so old that its probably sourced from them.
It was on a console and it was Halo so no matter how good the game was, you'll get answers like these.
IamSofaKingRaw said:
Eh, I played it but it wasn't bad. There are cirtainly worse games.
The main problem I had with it was the controls. I've played PC RTSs and the "click and drag" functions are dearly missed. Also holding shift to deselect preselected units without deselecting all of them. And assigning teams. Nitpicks, I know, but annoying nitpicks when you use them all the fucking time on other games...
Smaller issues I had were with buildings and unit caps. You can only build bases in cirtain areas (unlike other RTS I have played, with the excpetion of Celtic Kings: Rage of War [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Kings:_Rage_of_War], but that's more of a "Civilization in real time" game than an RTS.). This means you can only build turrets next to you bases, not at the critical choke points. So you build some tanks instead, but soon run out of people because of the unit cap (which most RTSs don't have, or its so fucking high, you will never hit it unless you build 50000000 units). Take Red Alert [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Alert] (1 and 2, I don't have 3...) for example. There is a unit cap. It's just hidden and has to do with the game not being able to address a million billion units because of memory issues. I actually hit the RE2 unit cap once because I was building hundreds of GIs and deploying their heavy machine guns all around the enemy's base. If he tried to leave, death ensued. Or Supreme Commander 2 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander_2]. There normally is a 500 unit and building cap (which you hit easily once you get good at it, also done for memory reasons). You can also easily edit the game xmls to raise it to, say, 5000. The AI can't handle that many units (probably another reason for the cap, he just piles anything over 500 in his base), but you can. It tends to fuck up saving and loading, but it sure is fun.
My point is I didn't like the controls or the unit cap.
I do like the squads of soldiers, the upgrades, and the units themselves. And you can make Spartans. Win.
Overall, OK; fun, but annoying at times. Would have been better on the PC because then I could mod everything bad about it out.
On that note, does anybody know of an Xbox 360 emulator (for the PC)? Because it would be cool to do what I just said.
The main problem I had with it was the controls. I've played PC RTSs and the "click and drag" functions are dearly missed. Also holding shift to deselect preselected units without deselecting all of them. And assigning teams. Nitpicks, I know, but annoying nitpicks when you use them all the fucking time on other games...
Smaller issues I had were with buildings and unit caps. You can only build bases in cirtain areas (unlike other RTS I have played, with the excpetion of Celtic Kings: Rage of War [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Kings:_Rage_of_War], but that's more of a "Civilization in real time" game than an RTS.). This means you can only build turrets next to you bases, not at the critical choke points. So you build some tanks instead, but soon run out of people because of the unit cap (which most RTSs don't have, or its so fucking high, you will never hit it unless you build 50000000 units). Take Red Alert [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Alert] (1 and 2, I don't have 3...) for example. There is a unit cap. It's just hidden and has to do with the game not being able to address a million billion units because of memory issues. I actually hit the RE2 unit cap once because I was building hundreds of GIs and deploying their heavy machine guns all around the enemy's base. If he tried to leave, death ensued. Or Supreme Commander 2 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander_2]. There normally is a 500 unit and building cap (which you hit easily once you get good at it, also done for memory reasons). You can also easily edit the game xmls to raise it to, say, 5000. The AI can't handle that many units (probably another reason for the cap, he just piles anything over 500 in his base), but you can. It tends to fuck up saving and loading, but it sure is fun.
My point is I didn't like the controls or the unit cap.
I do like the squads of soldiers, the upgrades, and the units themselves. And you can make Spartans. Win.
Overall, OK; fun, but annoying at times. Would have been better on the PC because then I could mod everything bad about it out.
On that note, does anybody know of an Xbox 360 emulator (for the PC)? Because it would be cool to do what I just said.
Because RTS fans are pretty hardcore... and the only way it works on console is to soften it up a heck of a lot.
Also a lot of bad blood around how Microsoft treated the studio that made the game. I mean firing them ALL right after it goes gold, that's cruel.
Also a lot of bad blood around how Microsoft treated the studio that made the game. I mean firing them ALL right after it goes gold, that's cruel.
There are not really any good Console RTSs out there from what I have seen. Halo Wars sold well because M$ could count on Halo Fan-boys (Myself Included) to but it, and we did. Ensemble studios was officially shut down about a month before the game's release. There were several inconsistence plot elements. The most infamous being the presence of the flood, being that Halo Wars should take place before the Fall of Reach (Halo: Reach) and that the Flood was accidentally released by the Covenant on the 6th mission of Halo: CE. This is also where the Master Chief meets the Monitor of 'Installation 04', 343 Guilty Spark.
This combined with the fact that the game was not very good or fun was the reason for it's decline and is generally disliked among fans and excluded when discussing the Halo Timeline.
This combined with the fact that the game was not very good or fun was the reason for it's decline and is generally disliked among fans and excluded when discussing the Halo Timeline.
Well, I don't know how much in depth I can really "prove", I suppose it's just the impression I get.kingcom said:
But here goes...
Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine
Starcraft Terran Marine
Warhammer 40,000 Tyranid Hormagant
Starcraft Zergling
Warhammer 40,000 Tyranid Ravener
Starcraft Zerg Hydralisk
Although as you yourself alluded to, both of these species are heavily inspired by Giger's works, but if you ask me, they share more characteristics between eachother than Giger's alien.
Although there are more comparisons to be made (Starcraft's Protoss with Warhammer 40,000's Eldar and Tau factions), I am honestly too tired to hunt down more pictures, and quite frankly don't care anymore. StarCraft to me is more of a rip-off of Warhammer 40,000 than Halo is of Starcraft, but hell, they all come from the same damn place down the line.
Because, despite how bad most PC games are, RTS's are one of the few things that PC games do better than console games. And any RTS on a console will undoubtedly be compared to a PC RTS which has a mouse, which is much easier to use than a cursor moved by the analogue stick.