Do you think there is a too great focus on balancing everything to perfection in modern games?
And citing online competitive games is cheating. I don't think anyone wants to go back to the broken imbalance that was Red Alert.
And that is where you are wrong.
I loathe games like SC2 where everything is done for perfect balancing that removes anything of interest.
Take a look at games like Warlords Battlecry 3*. 13 races. 13! And most of them quite varied in how you play them, sure with their own identity. Add to that your hero who could chose from.. uhm... at least 20 classes if I remember correctly.
That is some interesting stuff right there, I don't think I played any RTS game as much as WBC 3.
Was that game perfectly balanced? Hell, no! Some race/class combinations were clearly stronger than others. Some races themselves were stronger to begin with.
You could impose on yourself a challenge if you wanted, or play it safe. Or you could just play Faeries, because goddamn those cute high-pitched guys are powerful when massed.
Was this good for competitive multiplayer?
It barely had a functioning lobby, so... Let's just pretend it had a functioning lobby, would it have been good for competitive gameplay then?
Nah.
But...
Fuck. Purely. Competitive. Gameplay.
I am so sick and tired of inviting friends to play some RTS games for some fun only to hear "nahh, I'm not good enough" and "I don't want to invest the time to git good."
They are absolutely right. No sane person wants to spend all of their rare free time getting gud at something just to play with some friends every once in a while.
But they feel that they would have to because most companies put such a large weight on competitiveness instead of just enjoyable co-op time.
How many more people just played the campaign(s) of SC2 and maybe some fun custom maps online (like TD) than people who play competitively? 2x? 5x? 10x? 100x?
Those games are missing their audience by such a large margin it's absurd.
All they'd have to do is focus on interesting stuff and variance instead of balancing everything into the ground.
Playing most RTS games with friends who are of a different skill level than you is absolutely impossible. Playing against them is out of the question.
Playing with them means people will either be bored because the AI level is below their skill or they will be overwhelmed because it is too high.
And all of that would be so easy to solve if at least some RTS devs would put more importance on co-op and just interesting variance than competitiveness.
Seriously, the lack of creativeness of devs (especially in my beloved RTS sector) really makes me angry.
And yes, I do blame the balancing madness.
UGH!
[/RANT]
*Yeah, WBC3 had serious issues, by far not a perfect game, by some standards not even a very good one. Yet it is the one RTS game that showed what
could be possible if it was done right.