RTS should focus more on single-player campaigns, lore-heavy settings

[Nutmeg]

that make the games too puzzle-like and not strategic enough

What does this even mean?

When something is puzzle like, it means there's only a limited number of solutions, and you have to think hard to get to them. That's what a puzzle is.

The opposite of this is for anything you do to be a "solution" -- any action that feels right manages to defeat the enemy.

So why the fuck is puzzle like a bad thing? And how on earth is it opposed to strategy? Strategy = puzzle like.

 

[Nutmeg]

Games were better when they didn't take themselves too seriously. Made by small teams, basically just a collective of hobbyists who were passionate about really nerdy things most people don't care about.

Now games are products produced by megacorps made by hundreds of faceless corpo drones.

Yeah because corporations really take the proleslop they dole out to the animals seriously and that's the problem with gaming today! Corporations are simply too serious.

 

[Tyranicon]

Games were better when they didn't take themselves too seriously. Made by small teams, basically just a collective of hobbyists who were passionate about really nerdy things most people don't care about.

Now games are products produced by megacorps made by hundreds of faceless corpo drones.

Yeah because corporations really take the proleslop they dole out to the animals seriously and that's the problem with gaming today! Corporations are simply too serious.

Do we not believe that the driving motivation of a corporation is to make profit? Do you think as a whole, gaming companies are not serious about this?

They're not very competent at it, but that's besides the point.

 

[Nutmeg]

My point was they're not serious about the games themselves. They don't care about them at all, in fact, if anything, they view them with disdain or as jokes. Ofc. they are serious about making profits I agree.

 

[BING XI LAO]

SP - only players are casuals and snowflakes.

 

[Tyranicon]

My point was they're not serious about the games themselves. They don't care about them at all, in fact, if anything, they view them with disdain or as jokes. Ofc. they are serious about making profits I agree.

Of course not, why would they care? It's just another product.

They figured out a long time ago that quality is too expensive and elusive to be an effective profit-driver, so they have supplanted it with brand loyalty and marketing. And these days, by being "bravely" political.

 

[sser]

I briefly got into competitive play with Company of Heroes and then C&C: Generals. Either game being largely absent of the Korean menace, I was able to get pretty high up in them both. But, over time, I found the experience to be quite stressful. Competitive 1v1 RTS is crazily draining to the spirit, IMO, and not a lot of people have the mentality for that sort of thing. I think the groundswell around South Korea's SC obsession very well may have misled the direction of the genre as a whole. Prior to COH/Generals, I only played RTS games for their campaigns. There might be some return to this approach with the C&C remasters, Stronghold re-re-remasters, AOE2 aggressively pushing DLCs that come packaged with whole new campaigns, Homeworld 3, etc.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

They never really managed to incorporate RPG elements successfully into RTS

Thank god.

When done well, this can lead to amazing gameplay. See Battle Brothers as an example. That game intelligently wove RPG elements into a turn based tactics game, and the game is 1000 times better for it.

 

[Humanophage]

that make the games too puzzle-like and not strategic enough

What does this even mean?

When something is puzzle like, it means there's only a limited number of solutions, and you have to think hard to get to them. That's what a puzzle is.

The opposite of this is for anything you do to be a "solution" -- any action that feels right manages to defeat the enemy.

So why the fuck is puzzle like a bad thing? And how on earth is it opposed to strategy? Strategy = puzzle like.

Puzzle games typically want you to solve a problem by guessing one of a couple of solutions that the developers had in mind. They usually present you with a series of extremely limited scenarios which you complete sequentially. The whole game is a series of such puzzles.

In strategies, you are not supposed to really find any very specific solution or take any very specific route of action. It's not about "a ha" moments but about general planning. It's not true that "any action that feels right manages to defeat the enemy". You can easily lose in most strategies by doing things that feel right but are in fact stupid, although it tends to happen gradually as you accumulate bad decisions.

Think e.g. solving a labyrinth puzzle vs playing poker. Or solving a chess puzzle vs playing chess.

 

[Nutmeg]

It's a false dichotomy. Either there are few solutions to a problem, or there are many solutions to a problem. If there are many solutions, it's easier to come up with one. If there are few, they are harder to find. Everything else being equal.

general planning.

Good puzzles involve a lot of planning.

 

[mondblut]

RTS should focus on staying dead. And the only "campaigns" a strategy game needs is how YOU decide to conquer the world.

 

[-M-]

They don't take them seriously now either, but unfortunately, it's all sarcastic, quippy zoomer Marvel humor.

"We were particularly inspired by what the Marvel Cinematic Universe was able to create"

-Frost Giant Studios CEO Tim Morten on STORMGATE

 

[Riddler]

I was looking at some info given out by someone, perhaps a Blizzard rep; they found that out of their RTS players, something like 80% enjoy the story, and never bother with multiplayer.

Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 were both big multiplayer titles (as well as Diablo 2) and they did really well. They also had strong campaigns, but it only proves it doesn't have to be either or type of deal. I immensely Emperor: Battle for Dune as a singleplayer experience, while playing a lot of multiplayer games in Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3.

So, maybe an old take, but I think the focus on multiplayer in RTS was a mistake from a commercial point of view, as these interesting mission briefings and cutscenes were driving a lot of the fun.

Yes, having a strong campaign is great for an RTS. But so is a good multiplayer, because with good multiplayer the game can keep being active for a very long time, even when the campaign itself is long spent.

It also means everything must be balanced for MP, and you can't have assymetry.

Wrong. Look at Starcraft 1 or Warcraft 3 (both of which had very distinct races to play in a multiplayer). It is not about having assymetry. It is about how you handle it.

I think that the issue isn't so much multiplayer as the focus on giga-sweaty 1vs1. A very large part of multiplayer is hanging out with your bros, which is why pretty much every single multiplayer game is team based. This is true for sports in general too, team games are massively more popular than solo sports.

1v1 RTS is stressful, turbo autistic and lonely. It's really funny to me that Blizzard were surprised that Co-op was a hit in SC2.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

What I like about Command & Conquer and Tiberian Sun with regards to world building, story and lore:

*The alien substance Tiberium that at an increasing pace transforms the Earth into something unrecognizable
*Tiberium is a great resource but at the same time very dangerous. Should humans embrace it or eradicate it? Is there a middle ground?
*The mysterious character Kane who seems to have lived on Earth, stranded, for a very long time, biding his time in anticipation of the arrival of Tiberium (Kane is apparently inspired by this Asimov short story)
*The biblical stuff
*The dynamic where Kane wants humans to embrace tiberium and let it bring the next step in the human evolution whilst GDI wants to control tiberium and possibly get rid of it
*Cool units
*The artstyle
*Tiberian Sun introduces "the Tacitus" a device of Alien origin that keeps knowledge of Tiberium. Useful if it can be decoded
*Kane has used the Tacitus to build alien stuff
*Who are even these aliens?
*Who is the mutant leader Tratos and why was he able to translate the Tacitus for Kane?

There's a lot of mystery to the whole setup but unfortunately EA kind of ruined it with Tiberium Wars that's just basically War of the Worlds without the interesting stuff from the two former games. However it's unknown if Westwood themselves could have pulled off that great story-based sequel? I don't think they treated the story and lore with respect with what they did with C&C Renegade which could have been a great opportunity to flesh out the story and lore of the first C&C.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

Regarding the topic:

Just to be clear, I wasn't saying RTS games should ignore multiplayer, or have no multiplayer mode. Having both is fine. I was just saying that 'multiplayer first' is wrong. It should always be 'campaign first'. To specficially design an RTS as a multiplayer platform, is to target the wrong audience, when demonstrably most people play for SP, and never bother with MP (i.e. some Steam achievements showing only 2% played MP) - RTS probably always has been principally a single-player story genre. Their next most played genre is RPGs.

If 80% of people on Starcraft 2, even today, play just to see the campaign, the campaign should get the majority of a developer's attention, when it comes to budget, spectacle, etc. It should be a single-player game with a multi-player mode joined on, not the other way. That YouTube guy is a competetive multiplayer sort, but is pointing this out. Campaign, world-building, lore, military spectacle, shouldn't be an afterthrought, or a side-show to the multiplayer, and arguably units should be designed with campaign in mind rather than to easily fit multiplayer roles later.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

Also, I don't mean "plot" neccecarily when I say single player focus.

Like I wouldn't want some shit melodrama, where war took a back seat. What a lot of people played C&C for, was to see inside one of those 1990s 'history channel' war documentaries. Frankly, no matter how pacifist you are, most humans are fascinated by the logistics of WW2, when entire continents became fronts with thousands of tanks. I'm trying to get at something different here. I think I'm talking about something more along the lines of "world-building" a setting that sci-fi/fantasy/military/history afficionados want to explore, to learn about, to research, to think about when they arn't playing. To teach to some degree; have unit descriptions in a codex, well-judged reasoning and lore.

C&C1 presented something like an alternate 1990s where Hitler had never existed, leaving no third-position in the 1940s, just NATO and the Warsaw Pact, or something like that (I can't remember), and Tiberium (a hugely efficient energy source) had begun to spread from an asteroid impact maybe. A global alliance of liberal nation militarists, the GDI, fight with a global religious cult backed by energy-trading in Tiberium, the Brotherhood of Nod. That is really handled in a much more interesting way than how I've written it.

But the units, the buildings, the map, all make sense internally, within this 1990s Gulf War era world, with divergant technology, devastated by Tiberium growths. The units aren't just filling some niche for a multiplayer side, they make sense as representative of their faction, and culture. The NOD have buggies like the "technicals" that fighters in third world paramilitaries employ (like the legendary Toyota Hilux). Their blitzkrieg operations begin in places like Africa, and find most support within third-world nations. They have a lower regard for life, so use chemical warriors, etc.

All that stuff made for a world that pulled players in. Some RTS games eschewed lore, plot, reasoning, distinct cultures, military logistics, spectacle, sci-fi high concepts, history, etc. They boiled it down to two or more nondescript factions duking it out on a map. From a pure gameplay perspective, that has it's appeal, but it was never the principle reason why people bought into a given RTS.

 

[Alienman]

What I like about Command & Conquer and Tiberian Sun with regards to world building, story and lore:

*The alien substance Tiberium that at an increasing pace transforms the Earth into something unrecognizable
*Tiberium is a great resource but at the same time very dangerous. Should humans embrace it or eradicate it? Is there a middle ground?
*The mysterious character Kane who seems to have lived on Earth, stranded, for a very long time, biding his time in anticipation of the arrival of Tiberium (Kane is apparently inspired by this Asimov short story)
*The biblical stuff
*The dynamic where Kane wants humans to accept tiberium and let it bring the next step in the human evolution whilst GDI wants to control tiberium and possibly get rid of it
*Cool units
*The artstyle
*Tiberian Sun introduces "the Tacitus" a device of Alien origin that keeps knowledge of Tiberium. Useful if it can be decoded
*Kane has used the Tacitus to build alien stuff
*Who are even these aliens?
*Who is the mutant leader Tratos and why was he able to translate the Tacitus for Kane?

There's a lot of mystery to the whole setup but unfortunately EA kind of ruined it with Tiberium Wars that's just basically War of the Worlds without the interesting stuff from the two former games. However it's unknown if Westwood themselves could have pulled off that great story-based sequel? I don't think they treated the story and lore with respect with what they did with C&C Renegade which could have been a great opportunity to flesh out the story and lore of the first C&C.

I do agree with everything, except that last part. Do you think it's ruined because they introduced the aliens? It did feel like it was building towards that point.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

Call me old-fashioned, but my ideal multiplayer RTS experience is a few players turtling for the first half of the game and then meeting in the center of the map/ storming eachothers' castles with as big of an army as they can muster for an all-out free-for-all that will decide the fate of the game in one or two big pushes. The issue with RTS multiplayer is you get turbo-autists who play the game all day, everyday that know exactly what to build/ focus second to second to where they can pump out 10 units in the first minute to murder all your builders. It's like going out of your way to rob yourself of the best part of the genre which is being the general and commanding a huge army.

Miss me with all the resource harassment/ timer-APM spergery. Doesn't interest me even slightly.

 

[Gerrard]

Nuke Korea.

 

[destinae vomitus]

However it's unknown if Westwood themselves could have pulled off that great story-based sequel? I don't think they treated the story and lore with respect with what they did with C&C Renegade which could have been a great opportunity to flesh out the story and lore of the first C&C.

The C&C 3 we got was in large part (if not entirely) based off of the concepts, design docs and builds that Westwood had come up with prior to getting shitcanned, i.e. GDI vs Nod being back to the old status quo with tech & aesthetics more comparable to something inbetween Renegade/TibSun and the alien invasion premise was all their idea, along with CABAL and that whole plotline being relegated to instead re-appear in a potential expansion pack (though they'd intended for him to be a fourth faction, so there's that).

 

[Feyd Rautha]

However it's unknown if Westwood themselves could have pulled off that great story-based sequel? I don't think they treated the story and lore with respect with what they did with C&C Renegade which could have been a great opportunity to flesh out the story and lore of the first C&C.

The C&C 3 we got was in large part (if not entirely) based off of the concepts, design docs and builds that Westwood had come up with prior to getting shitcanned, i.e. GDI vs Nod being back to the old status quo with tech & aesthetics more comparable to something inbetween Renegade/TibSun and the alien invasion premise was all their idea, along with CABAL and that whole plotline being relegated to instead re-appear in a potential expansion pack (though they'd intended for him to be a fourth faction, so there's that).

It could have been told differently and I don't like how they retconned or ignored things from Tiberian Sun. The gameplay is fine it's just that the story had more potential.

What I do like is Kane setting up a trap to lure the Scrin to Earth. It's also nice in the Scrin campaign when the Supervisor finds out about Kane and becomes stressed out, what did they know about him?

 

[Louis_Cypher]

Call me old-fashioned, but my ideal multiplayer RTS experience is a few players turtling for the first half of the game and then meeting in the center of the map/ storming eachothers' castles with as big of an army as they can muster for an all-out free-for-all that will decide the fate of the game in one or two big pushes. The issue with RTS multiplayer is you get turbo-autists who play the game all day, everyday that know exactly what to build/ focus second to second to where they can pump out 10 units in the first minute to murder all your builders. It's like going out of your way to rob yourself of the best part of the genre which is being the general and commanding a huge army.

Miss me with all the resource harassment/ timer-APM spergery. Doesn't interest me even slightly.

Agreed. Like someone said on the first page, it turns something fun into a chore, for me. How better to suck the life out of a game than to have to account for every second, follow specific build orders, etc. What I enjoy is the sandbox aspect of the genre to a big degree. "Meh, good enough" rather than rushing units.

 

[Tyranicon]

You know, after looking at Homeworld 3 and it's "focus on muh narrative" and the fact that it has pretentious positions such as "managing director of narrative properties" despite being an AA game and begging for gibs on Fig...

We probably shouldn't have single player campaigns in RTS games anymore. Nothing good will come from the modern dev machine. It's over.

 

[Volrath]

Anyone remember the name of that Czech(?) RTS where you got transported back in time?

 

[Dreed]

Anyone remember the name of that Czech(?) RTS where you got transported back in time?

Original War?