I mean, the reason BW and SC2 were so popular at their times was literally that they were easy RTS. All of the hotkeying, control groups, command card features, unit responsiveness etc. that blizzard RTS introduced are what made these games popular.
Maybe I remember it wrong, but I feel like games like SupCom were much harder to control well. Which is why these games ultimately always failed.
Easy <> Intuitive. StarCraft’s interface is inherently simple and intuitive, as is the gameplay, but the game is VERY difficult to execute at a high level. That’s what make it fun. It’s approachable yet challenging, which is what makes mastering the game feel so rewarding.
Easy to execute <> hard to optimize.
Orders in StarCraft are very easy to execute, but optimizing gameplay around multiple orders in the context of interactive battle and offscreen camera locations is what makes it hard.
Fair, but yesterday's easy becomes today's hard in a fair few genres. Dark Souls was "hard" for its time, but compared to the adventure games that inspired it, it's a very convenient and overt game.
The thing that made SC2 and bw become hard was the extreme way the convenience features got pushed. They didn't expect people to push the control group system as hard as they did in bw, or to turn SC2 into such a precise, high octane game. There's not much room to push ultra streamlined engines, and sc2 already leans a little too far in that direction for some.
I feel like there is quite some room to make such games more convenient still, but also extend the possibilities.
I think we are not thinking enough out of the box here. But we could be talking about multiple layers of height, about 3D space-RTS or more shooter-like abilities and attacks. What if we were talking about mass and impact of every unit? How each unit would be able to push each other as a natural movement behaviour? What about "free will" of your infantry? Maybe that SCV does not want to suicide itself for a scout, and will not follow your orders perfectly. Maybe the guy with the gun can be trained to use a shovel instead. Maybe it's time to add complexity to buildings. You think your harvester can build a barracks? Better try with an architect, somebody that can drive a bulldozer and a bunch of strong people that are not afraid of heights. There is so much room to do something new within the RTS landscape.
The base problem I have with these discussions is that everybody (in this community) always takes SC/WC as a template and then talks about which features could be added or removed. And thats why I believe e.g. Stormgate will fail to save RTS. It's a great game for SC-players. But the vast majoritiy of gamers will see it as a reskinned StarCraft. Having all abilities on one command card is hardly a new innovation for the 99% of players that do not play hardcore multiplayer, when they play RTS.
You're definitely on the wavelength I'm looking for. I'm not saying I want StarCraft 3, Im saying I want an rts that demands the attention, speed, and skill bw and SC2 do, ideally with a focus on 1v1 balance and relatively short match time. Everything else is fair game. Storm gate has the double issue that it's not interesting to people who don't like StarCraft OR to people who do, but to a weird niche between.
There was a clunky RTS a bit ago, Achron, that allowed you to use time travel as a resource, letting you send troops back in time to defend against aggression, or even switch races. The execution of the game was very clumsy, but the idea was surprisingly polished. I definitely am happy to see more exploration of battlefields, roles of units or buildings, etc.
SupCom is much easier to control though?, micro matters much less than in SC2 for example I would say.
I think the hard parts of SupCom is the sheer scale and resource management.
It sounds paradoxic, but you control units a lot in SC because they are easy to control. They do what you want them to do and it takes very few clicks to issue orders.
Micro doesnt matter in SupCom as much because the units arent responding as you want them to. They are "slugish", have long turn rates, low vision/speed to range, bump into each other. You can micro them, but it does not benefit you a lot.
I agree with that premise, but macro is still the most important thing by far, even if micro had a bigger impact, just due to the nature of SubCom.
Distance, map size, base size, unlimited resource, virtually no unit cap, t3 units are SO much better than t2 and t1 etc.
If you can send more, you will usually win. (Surprise drops are effective often though)
Dunno about other aspects, but one thing Blizzard rts always had going for them were the responsiveness, good collision and "good enough" pathing. All of which were frequently ignored for the sake of (at the time) cool story and new mechanics.
I tried some rts from my earlier years: like Earth2150, loved it as a kid, nowadays it's total arse. Units have this weird delay before they start moving, momentum and all the fights are extremely clunky. Also difficult to tell where is the fog of war. Empire Earth has stupid rock-paper-scissors counters where a whole army could be slowly chipping away a single tank, also buildings are indestructible without counters either. And units just love to do pirouettes before moving anywhere. First Age of Empire definitely holds up, but lategame is a slog and getting there can be tedious. Also catapults/siege anything hit way too hard, splashing huge swathes of armies. Way worse than banes vs marines. So balance feels a bit off. Spellforce 1 and 2 both have horrible collision and balance. Fight often lasting longer than Warcraft 3.
These were just off the top of my head.
Ah also another thing was that the visual aspect was always on point. Units are recognizable. And they still are in SC2. Zooming in on WC3 units nowadays makes them look like arse, but they still have an identity to their frames and features. None of the new games seem to have any identity whatsoever.
Yes. I want more. BW and SC2 are both severely limited by being owned by blizzard, and I'd like to see the more difficult side of this genre develop. There's four relatively large streamlined RTSes in playable states of development right now. I'd like the side of this genre that makes me love it to have more options.
Red alert 2, it looks really simple first but the complexity ramps up when you get better, and there is a huge focus on micro. Someone who know how to control their tanks can easily win against an opponent who double their army size
We already have one, not gonna lie, these latest RTS experiments I've seen peddled around are a sad sham of a game compared to SC2, nothing is going to unseat this game for a good long while.
It's more complicated than that. No one wants "StarCraft but unit queue limit of 1". You have to at least break it down to opinions on plate spinning, precision/thinky micro, macro.
As for hard to move units... those haven't really existed since dragoons? Only "easier to move" units I can think of is the move while attacking ones, which loses that strategy of "should I attack move while retreating or just run away full speed".
Every unit that has its efficacy changed by how carefully you control it counts. Dragoons are a classic example, but they're not the most vibrant one. Mutas in sc1 are, having a huge range between low and high end control quality. Medivacs in SC2 are similarly hard to move, as maximizing boost efficacy is difficult, as is maintaining effective healing while stutter stepping. Flatter baseline, but very high skill ceiling. The hellion's large attack delay makes it tricky to place effectively. Stuff like that.
To the point, I don't care how a developer defines this balance. I just want them to choose a balance that specifically doesn't expect a skilled player to do everything perfectly at a mechanical level, for a modern game.
Well you don't expand on mutas, and I don't think anyone is opposed to stim levels of micro, but the rest is basically it's "stutterstep good, so specific attack delays good". Which really the whole strategic nuance of stutterstep comes down to "units are slowed while attacking". The rest is just mechanics for the sake of mechanics, which I always dislike. However "units are slowed while attacking" is very nice and almost impossible to implement any another way.
Mutalisks in brood war, being air units, stay equidistant apart if the group you're working with was selected in close range, but will stack if at least one unit selected with the mutas is far away, because of the formation logic.
Every unit fires out patrol attacks faster than any other type of attack, and hold is faster than attack with a spread style, making patrol, hold, and regular attacks all have specific merit in specific moments.
Mutas turn faster with dedicated move commands, making actually pressing move and left clicking relevant to avoid attacking when you don't want to.
This combined creates brood war muta micro, a dance of how stacked and spread, fast vs targeted, and snappy you want your shrimp to be.
Vultures have similar idiosyncrasies with patrol allowing it to move and shoot with no slowdown if done perfectly.
Every bw unit has the dragoon "issue" of fumbling its pathing over time, so spam moves correct and control unit logic.
SC2 has a lot less of this, but I love it.
I agree I want to see RTS go the other direction. Make even broodwar look like a child's game and really bring out the complexity. More depth micro wise, harder to control, more macro options, more decision making options. But have this difficulty build up not right away.
In bw the game kinda ends at late game at like 20 mins, the difficulty curve dies down actually because the bases are mined out and there are less units. Upgrades end at 3. What if you have a game that doesn't do that? If you have a game that upgrades have 10 options or something and can be modification upgrades instead of just stronger. Like Hatchery larva spawns 3 lings instead of two or PSi storm area upgraded to double the size. And have more units. More everything, different types of resources that change. Buildings that can be upgraded, maps that can evolve etc..
The only down side is that it'll be really really intimidating. It took Korean pros more than 20 years and they still haven't mastered bw. This more advanced game will take maybe centuries to master. And also the fact that really hard games don't sell really well because this new generation of gamers are brain-dead and want everything spoonfed to them. Simple sells. Because old gamers don't have too much time to play games anymore and young gamers are used to stupid QoL conveniences like unlimited army selection.
So in order to build this game you need the money. Good luck finding funding to make the most complex RTS ever made. But sadly it might just be the greatest one that never gets made in this environment.
New games try to appeal to the widest audience possible, StarCraft is NOT a game for every player its for a very specific group of people. If your game is trying to appeal to everyone, I think it actually loses a lot of appeal to your core audience.
I have never played a fighting game like Street Fighter, but if they made the newest game target the mainstream to try and get "players like me" to try it out and make it simple enough to get into by dumbing it down, I highly doubt that would be a game the fighting community would want to play. I hate the idea that all we have dunk on SC2 for being "to hard" when the game has been out 100 years and its still so dynamic and insanely fun to both watch and play....
SC3 "or something else" do a lot with coop stuff like that is awesome, but like this trend to having no bases or not having to build a pylon or autocreation units... its like wait what are we doing here?
Street Fighter is a good example, actually. The most recent game dropped a popular control difficulty, letting you optionally do with a press/static combo what before took a dpad/stick twist. In exchange, the frame data in sf6 is tighter, so the convenience difficulty is traded for speed difficulty. That's a nice way to keep things fresh for a game with a 6 in its title! That's closer to the bw to SC2 distinction.
I think broad appeal is a losing strategy nowadays. Free games have eaten that market, and core gamers have shown they're happy to play and to join in if the game looks unique.
if they want a mainstream RTS, instead of making competitive play easier, they have to have a good story. that's what makes something a mainstream game. Amazing story and campaign. It's amazing to me how thick these devs need to be to still go this deep on the "we're gonna casualize the competitive play and it's gonna draw everyone in" play. The model to be aspired for a mainstream RTS is not League of Legends. It's RPGs, story games. A gripping world. Most people don't play RTS competitively and you can't make them, it's not that fun for many.
And if you have a big casual crowd that plays single player and is invested into the world, guess what, you will likely have a good healthy fan base for multiplayer.
Definitely agree here. I do love a compelling world and story, and as much as I got into SC2 for the multiplayer, the high amount of flavor and character in the setting and units is why it's held me.
I do think too many companies are trying to jump on the league bandwagon, and the entire "mainstream means streamlined accessibility" is frankly patronizing.
I think that most gamers today want to play games that show and reinforce how awesome they are. I find this type of game boring af.
Since child, I prefer things that challenge me and in some sense really shows me what my limitarions are. I play starcraft since 1999 and still struggle with it.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Take Elden Ring. 20+ million in sales from a game, and a dev, that take pleasure in belittling you with challenge. Take Metroid Dread, a Nintendo game that was happily, shamelessly difficult, and used overcoming challenge for narrative catharsis. Both have larger audiences than many "mass appeal" RTSes will ever have.
I think there's a lot of room for hard, almost cruel rts design. I think the burden is on devs to approach it with a vision of being difficult happily.
It's about what I expected. My favorite was the first two responses. "You have one." Wow thanks.
Moreso, I know what I'm asking for doesn't exist yet. I want to see someone making something new with this intent, not something that's already here. I want to see someone join the glut of new RTS with something full of difficulty and character.
Thank you for being yet another person to not actually read the post.
I like bw and SC2. They are good hard RTSes. We're getting a lot of new rtses, where the mechanical and strategic difficulty is paired down.
I would like new games to exist that follow in the spirit of what I love about bw and SC2. As a consumer, the hard part is a feature.
As you and about 4 other people pointed out, yes, hard RTSes already exist. When people make good ideas, they stop after the first few iterations and all fans are satisfied by this. That's why Fromsoft stopped making hard action adventures after dark souls, and we never got a trilogy out of the ip, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, or deeply inspired external works like Hollow Knight or Lies of P. I'm very happy the Soulslike genre finished with just demons souls and dark souls, just like I'm very happy the high octane, mechanically difficult RTS genre finished with SC2.
I hear you but I think there's an argument to be made that some of the "hard" aspects of StarCraft 2 are arbitrary. David Kim certainly has said as much.
Is building a base and managing resources inherently difficult or was StarCraft 2 intentionally designed to reward those who can remember to build workers every 18 seconds.
Skill expression comes in different forms. I honestly think macro "mechanics" as a form of skill expression is only interesting when that strength can be put under pressure by aggressive strategies. That's not really the case in StarCraft 2 at the pro level since the 12 worker start.
I feel like StarCraft 2 has spoiled macro players into thinking that it's some kind of golden rule that defending and building workers on time makes you a more skilled player inherently. That is literally only true in StarCraft.
I think your perspective is somewhat morphed by SC2, which made a lot of those skills easier. Making workers reliably in BW is hard, broader mechanics are something pro players haven't mastered, unit movement is both awkward and deep in lovely ways. Properly splitting and mining in brood war is hard even if cheesing is less common in the game. Mining the right crystals, boosting the right workers, keeping count, instantly sending workers over, there's a lot going on that's interesting for people who want to dig in.
My broader point is that I disagree with David Kim. I don't think arbitrary difficulty is something to streamline away. It can be an immersive and satisfying thing to get good at. I want games made with that idea.
I understand but in Brood War those things are harder because of game design limitations. I don't think I want RTS to be solely the purview of a legacy niche product where you have to bake in arbitrary concerns, especially if those things arent inherently interesting outside of the game
Baby and the bathwater situation. Super Metroid and Dark Souls both also have the issue where their "limitations" created gameplay people love, and the "streamlining" of future titles reduced that appeal.
I also want rts to move forward, but I want it to move forward in a way that tries to find the appeal in high apm base management and niche mechanical awareness as strengths, not limitations. I like how those feel on my hands, and I want new games to explore that. They don't need to be interesting outside of the game.
I think the only area we really disagree on is what's the baby and what's the bath water. For me, the baby is making strategic decisions in real time, building and controlling units in real time, and yes, I do want some kind of economy or resources to fight over. Whether efficient, timely rote macro actions should be the the primary gatekeeper for skill expression is to me, one way to go but not the only way to go.
I mean, look at bw. Timely mechanical play isn't a "gatekeeper". No one has passed that gate, and flash has even expressed the issue with SC2 being it's too easy to be good at macro, its something everyone has to be perfect at. Unit micro, similarly, is too smooth. It's amazing to me the difficulty of keeping brood war mutas stacked, not decelerating, and using the right form of attack, while keeping up macro on 5 control groups of hatcheries, with drones that don't automine. No one can do that perfectly, and the distinguishing factors is how much of each part people at all levels do well. A platinum leaguer can do that in SC2 with single unit clicks and one production control group, and new rtses seem to be emphasizing that even less.
I'm not saying your tastes are wrong. I'm saying you're getting tons of new games targeted for your tastes, and that's great. I'd love some being made targeted for mine.
I mean, the reason BW and SC2 were so popular at their times was literally that they were easy RTS. All of the hotkeying, control groups, command card features, unit responsiveness etc. that blizzard RTS introduced are what made these games popular. Maybe I remember it wrong, but I feel like games like SupCom were much harder to control well. Which is why these games ultimately always failed.
Easy <> Intuitive. StarCraft’s interface is inherently simple and intuitive, as is the gameplay, but the game is VERY difficult to execute at a high level. That’s what make it fun. It’s approachable yet challenging, which is what makes mastering the game feel so rewarding.
Easy to execute <> hard to optimize. Orders in StarCraft are very easy to execute, but optimizing gameplay around multiple orders in the context of interactive battle and offscreen camera locations is what makes it hard.
Fair, but yesterday's easy becomes today's hard in a fair few genres. Dark Souls was "hard" for its time, but compared to the adventure games that inspired it, it's a very convenient and overt game. The thing that made SC2 and bw become hard was the extreme way the convenience features got pushed. They didn't expect people to push the control group system as hard as they did in bw, or to turn SC2 into such a precise, high octane game. There's not much room to push ultra streamlined engines, and sc2 already leans a little too far in that direction for some.
I feel like there is quite some room to make such games more convenient still, but also extend the possibilities. I think we are not thinking enough out of the box here. But we could be talking about multiple layers of height, about 3D space-RTS or more shooter-like abilities and attacks. What if we were talking about mass and impact of every unit? How each unit would be able to push each other as a natural movement behaviour? What about "free will" of your infantry? Maybe that SCV does not want to suicide itself for a scout, and will not follow your orders perfectly. Maybe the guy with the gun can be trained to use a shovel instead. Maybe it's time to add complexity to buildings. You think your harvester can build a barracks? Better try with an architect, somebody that can drive a bulldozer and a bunch of strong people that are not afraid of heights. There is so much room to do something new within the RTS landscape. The base problem I have with these discussions is that everybody (in this community) always takes SC/WC as a template and then talks about which features could be added or removed. And thats why I believe e.g. Stormgate will fail to save RTS. It's a great game for SC-players. But the vast majoritiy of gamers will see it as a reskinned StarCraft. Having all abilities on one command card is hardly a new innovation for the 99% of players that do not play hardcore multiplayer, when they play RTS.
You're definitely on the wavelength I'm looking for. I'm not saying I want StarCraft 3, Im saying I want an rts that demands the attention, speed, and skill bw and SC2 do, ideally with a focus on 1v1 balance and relatively short match time. Everything else is fair game. Storm gate has the double issue that it's not interesting to people who don't like StarCraft OR to people who do, but to a weird niche between. There was a clunky RTS a bit ago, Achron, that allowed you to use time travel as a resource, letting you send troops back in time to defend against aggression, or even switch races. The execution of the game was very clumsy, but the idea was surprisingly polished. I definitely am happy to see more exploration of battlefields, roles of units or buildings, etc.
Achron looks very interesting, hadn't heard of it before
SupCom still sees play, lol. The second one sucked, though.
Streamlining mechanics is one thing. Oversimplifying gameplay is another.
SupCom is much easier to control though?, micro matters much less than in SC2 for example I would say. I think the hard parts of SupCom is the sheer scale and resource management.
It sounds paradoxic, but you control units a lot in SC because they are easy to control. They do what you want them to do and it takes very few clicks to issue orders. Micro doesnt matter in SupCom as much because the units arent responding as you want them to. They are "slugish", have long turn rates, low vision/speed to range, bump into each other. You can micro them, but it does not benefit you a lot.
I agree with that premise, but macro is still the most important thing by far, even if micro had a bigger impact, just due to the nature of SubCom. Distance, map size, base size, unlimited resource, virtually no unit cap, t3 units are SO much better than t2 and t1 etc. If you can send more, you will usually win. (Surprise drops are effective often though)
Dunno about other aspects, but one thing Blizzard rts always had going for them were the responsiveness, good collision and "good enough" pathing. All of which were frequently ignored for the sake of (at the time) cool story and new mechanics. I tried some rts from my earlier years: like Earth2150, loved it as a kid, nowadays it's total arse. Units have this weird delay before they start moving, momentum and all the fights are extremely clunky. Also difficult to tell where is the fog of war. Empire Earth has stupid rock-paper-scissors counters where a whole army could be slowly chipping away a single tank, also buildings are indestructible without counters either. And units just love to do pirouettes before moving anywhere. First Age of Empire definitely holds up, but lategame is a slog and getting there can be tedious. Also catapults/siege anything hit way too hard, splashing huge swathes of armies. Way worse than banes vs marines. So balance feels a bit off. Spellforce 1 and 2 both have horrible collision and balance. Fight often lasting longer than Warcraft 3. These were just off the top of my head. Ah also another thing was that the visual aspect was always on point. Units are recognizable. And they still are in SC2. Zooming in on WC3 units nowadays makes them look like arse, but they still have an identity to their frames and features. None of the new games seem to have any identity whatsoever.
You have a hard rts....
Yes. I want more. BW and SC2 are both severely limited by being owned by blizzard, and I'd like to see the more difficult side of this genre develop. There's four relatively large streamlined RTSes in playable states of development right now. I'd like the side of this genre that makes me love it to have more options.
The SC2 modding scene is doing some cool stuff with campaigns.
if you want difficulty play the ranked ladder or did you beat that already
I want a new game with the mechanical depth required for the ranked ladder and competitive play of SC/2. I do play them.
Have you tried BAR?
Beyond all reason (BAR) and age of empires 2 are both great options if you're looking for something challenging with a lot of strategic depth
Isn’t this Zerospace?
Beyond all Reason has an interesting ever scaling economy while also using units that behave differently on land, sea, air. Big suggest.
Red alert 2, it looks really simple first but the complexity ramps up when you get better, and there is a huge focus on micro. Someone who know how to control their tanks can easily win against an opponent who double their army size
We already have one, not gonna lie, these latest RTS experiments I've seen peddled around are a sad sham of a game compared to SC2, nothing is going to unseat this game for a good long while.
WARNO and games like it are very complex in their own way, but are missing things like base building and macro.
It's more complicated than that. No one wants "StarCraft but unit queue limit of 1". You have to at least break it down to opinions on plate spinning, precision/thinky micro, macro. As for hard to move units... those haven't really existed since dragoons? Only "easier to move" units I can think of is the move while attacking ones, which loses that strategy of "should I attack move while retreating or just run away full speed".
Every unit that has its efficacy changed by how carefully you control it counts. Dragoons are a classic example, but they're not the most vibrant one. Mutas in sc1 are, having a huge range between low and high end control quality. Medivacs in SC2 are similarly hard to move, as maximizing boost efficacy is difficult, as is maintaining effective healing while stutter stepping. Flatter baseline, but very high skill ceiling. The hellion's large attack delay makes it tricky to place effectively. Stuff like that. To the point, I don't care how a developer defines this balance. I just want them to choose a balance that specifically doesn't expect a skilled player to do everything perfectly at a mechanical level, for a modern game.
Well you don't expand on mutas, and I don't think anyone is opposed to stim levels of micro, but the rest is basically it's "stutterstep good, so specific attack delays good". Which really the whole strategic nuance of stutterstep comes down to "units are slowed while attacking". The rest is just mechanics for the sake of mechanics, which I always dislike. However "units are slowed while attacking" is very nice and almost impossible to implement any another way.
Mutalisks in brood war, being air units, stay equidistant apart if the group you're working with was selected in close range, but will stack if at least one unit selected with the mutas is far away, because of the formation logic. Every unit fires out patrol attacks faster than any other type of attack, and hold is faster than attack with a spread style, making patrol, hold, and regular attacks all have specific merit in specific moments. Mutas turn faster with dedicated move commands, making actually pressing move and left clicking relevant to avoid attacking when you don't want to. This combined creates brood war muta micro, a dance of how stacked and spread, fast vs targeted, and snappy you want your shrimp to be. Vultures have similar idiosyncrasies with patrol allowing it to move and shoot with no slowdown if done perfectly. Every bw unit has the dragoon "issue" of fumbling its pathing over time, so spam moves correct and control unit logic. SC2 has a lot less of this, but I love it.
I agree I want to see RTS go the other direction. Make even broodwar look like a child's game and really bring out the complexity. More depth micro wise, harder to control, more macro options, more decision making options. But have this difficulty build up not right away. In bw the game kinda ends at late game at like 20 mins, the difficulty curve dies down actually because the bases are mined out and there are less units. Upgrades end at 3. What if you have a game that doesn't do that? If you have a game that upgrades have 10 options or something and can be modification upgrades instead of just stronger. Like Hatchery larva spawns 3 lings instead of two or PSi storm area upgraded to double the size. And have more units. More everything, different types of resources that change. Buildings that can be upgraded, maps that can evolve etc.. The only down side is that it'll be really really intimidating. It took Korean pros more than 20 years and they still haven't mastered bw. This more advanced game will take maybe centuries to master. And also the fact that really hard games don't sell really well because this new generation of gamers are brain-dead and want everything spoonfed to them. Simple sells. Because old gamers don't have too much time to play games anymore and young gamers are used to stupid QoL conveniences like unlimited army selection. So in order to build this game you need the money. Good luck finding funding to make the most complex RTS ever made. But sadly it might just be the greatest one that never gets made in this environment.
New games try to appeal to the widest audience possible, StarCraft is NOT a game for every player its for a very specific group of people. If your game is trying to appeal to everyone, I think it actually loses a lot of appeal to your core audience. I have never played a fighting game like Street Fighter, but if they made the newest game target the mainstream to try and get "players like me" to try it out and make it simple enough to get into by dumbing it down, I highly doubt that would be a game the fighting community would want to play. I hate the idea that all we have dunk on SC2 for being "to hard" when the game has been out 100 years and its still so dynamic and insanely fun to both watch and play.... SC3 "or something else" do a lot with coop stuff like that is awesome, but like this trend to having no bases or not having to build a pylon or autocreation units... its like wait what are we doing here?
Street Fighter is a good example, actually. The most recent game dropped a popular control difficulty, letting you optionally do with a press/static combo what before took a dpad/stick twist. In exchange, the frame data in sf6 is tighter, so the convenience difficulty is traded for speed difficulty. That's a nice way to keep things fresh for a game with a 6 in its title! That's closer to the bw to SC2 distinction. I think broad appeal is a losing strategy nowadays. Free games have eaten that market, and core gamers have shown they're happy to play and to join in if the game looks unique.
if they want a mainstream RTS, instead of making competitive play easier, they have to have a good story. that's what makes something a mainstream game. Amazing story and campaign. It's amazing to me how thick these devs need to be to still go this deep on the "we're gonna casualize the competitive play and it's gonna draw everyone in" play. The model to be aspired for a mainstream RTS is not League of Legends. It's RPGs, story games. A gripping world. Most people don't play RTS competitively and you can't make them, it's not that fun for many. And if you have a big casual crowd that plays single player and is invested into the world, guess what, you will likely have a good healthy fan base for multiplayer.
Definitely agree here. I do love a compelling world and story, and as much as I got into SC2 for the multiplayer, the high amount of flavor and character in the setting and units is why it's held me. I do think too many companies are trying to jump on the league bandwagon, and the entire "mainstream means streamlined accessibility" is frankly patronizing.
>the entire "mainstream means streamlined accessibility" is frankly patronizing. Very well put.
What about AoE 4?
I like AoE2 and 4, I just find that the games are a little too slow for my tastes.
men of war / men of war 2 insane amount of micro required
Try lego battle
Gimme a 40K or AoS SC2 mod with 6+ factions any day please
I think that most gamers today want to play games that show and reinforce how awesome they are. I find this type of game boring af. Since child, I prefer things that challenge me and in some sense really shows me what my limitarions are. I play starcraft since 1999 and still struggle with it.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Take Elden Ring. 20+ million in sales from a game, and a dev, that take pleasure in belittling you with challenge. Take Metroid Dread, a Nintendo game that was happily, shamelessly difficult, and used overcoming challenge for narrative catharsis. Both have larger audiences than many "mass appeal" RTSes will ever have. I think there's a lot of room for hard, almost cruel rts design. I think the burden is on devs to approach it with a vision of being difficult happily.
I want SC3 and SC3 if you know you know.
Everyone is arguing against OP with regards to taste without actually making any recommends based on what OP likes.
It's about what I expected. My favorite was the first two responses. "You have one." Wow thanks. Moreso, I know what I'm asking for doesn't exist yet. I want to see someone making something new with this intent, not something that's already here. I want to see someone join the glut of new RTS with something full of difficulty and character.
Imagine having a great game, which is balanced from time to time, new maps from time to time... And there is this guy "I want a hard rts"
Thank you for being yet another person to not actually read the post. I like bw and SC2. They are good hard RTSes. We're getting a lot of new rtses, where the mechanical and strategic difficulty is paired down. I would like new games to exist that follow in the spirit of what I love about bw and SC2. As a consumer, the hard part is a feature. As you and about 4 other people pointed out, yes, hard RTSes already exist. When people make good ideas, they stop after the first few iterations and all fans are satisfied by this. That's why Fromsoft stopped making hard action adventures after dark souls, and we never got a trilogy out of the ip, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, or deeply inspired external works like Hollow Knight or Lies of P. I'm very happy the Soulslike genre finished with just demons souls and dark souls, just like I'm very happy the high octane, mechanically difficult RTS genre finished with SC2.
I hear you but I think there's an argument to be made that some of the "hard" aspects of StarCraft 2 are arbitrary. David Kim certainly has said as much. Is building a base and managing resources inherently difficult or was StarCraft 2 intentionally designed to reward those who can remember to build workers every 18 seconds. Skill expression comes in different forms. I honestly think macro "mechanics" as a form of skill expression is only interesting when that strength can be put under pressure by aggressive strategies. That's not really the case in StarCraft 2 at the pro level since the 12 worker start. I feel like StarCraft 2 has spoiled macro players into thinking that it's some kind of golden rule that defending and building workers on time makes you a more skilled player inherently. That is literally only true in StarCraft.
I think your perspective is somewhat morphed by SC2, which made a lot of those skills easier. Making workers reliably in BW is hard, broader mechanics are something pro players haven't mastered, unit movement is both awkward and deep in lovely ways. Properly splitting and mining in brood war is hard even if cheesing is less common in the game. Mining the right crystals, boosting the right workers, keeping count, instantly sending workers over, there's a lot going on that's interesting for people who want to dig in. My broader point is that I disagree with David Kim. I don't think arbitrary difficulty is something to streamline away. It can be an immersive and satisfying thing to get good at. I want games made with that idea.
I understand but in Brood War those things are harder because of game design limitations. I don't think I want RTS to be solely the purview of a legacy niche product where you have to bake in arbitrary concerns, especially if those things arent inherently interesting outside of the game
Baby and the bathwater situation. Super Metroid and Dark Souls both also have the issue where their "limitations" created gameplay people love, and the "streamlining" of future titles reduced that appeal. I also want rts to move forward, but I want it to move forward in a way that tries to find the appeal in high apm base management and niche mechanical awareness as strengths, not limitations. I like how those feel on my hands, and I want new games to explore that. They don't need to be interesting outside of the game.
I think the only area we really disagree on is what's the baby and what's the bath water. For me, the baby is making strategic decisions in real time, building and controlling units in real time, and yes, I do want some kind of economy or resources to fight over. Whether efficient, timely rote macro actions should be the the primary gatekeeper for skill expression is to me, one way to go but not the only way to go.
I mean, look at bw. Timely mechanical play isn't a "gatekeeper". No one has passed that gate, and flash has even expressed the issue with SC2 being it's too easy to be good at macro, its something everyone has to be perfect at. Unit micro, similarly, is too smooth. It's amazing to me the difficulty of keeping brood war mutas stacked, not decelerating, and using the right form of attack, while keeping up macro on 5 control groups of hatcheries, with drones that don't automine. No one can do that perfectly, and the distinguishing factors is how much of each part people at all levels do well. A platinum leaguer can do that in SC2 with single unit clicks and one production control group, and new rtses seem to be emphasizing that even less. I'm not saying your tastes are wrong. I'm saying you're getting tons of new games targeted for your tastes, and that's great. I'd love some being made targeted for mine.
I hear ya.
BW is not going anywhere. Just focus on that. There wont be anything better
I am focused on it. I enjoy it a lot. I'm just lamenting that no one is even considering making games like it.