It’s not necessarily even more expensive to develop, it just impossible to do with the management techniques brought in recent years. Techniques brought in with the intention of streamlining personnel management and to make lay offs easier.
But you could also make the same argument about graphical fidelity, which has been pushed further and further for decades, greatly swelling the cost of production
Because it is an easy metric and looks good in trailers. Indie games prove again and again, that good games come from good gameplay and not from photo realistic graphics
I agree, but my point was that cost isn’t a sufficient explanation.
I think I particularly agree with @megopie: one reason we see photo-realism instead of more stylised graphics is that it is more generic, and thus less dependent on a specific team.
The more artistic/creative your work, the less interchangeable your workers are.
I hadn’t even thought about preferences for photorealism being a streamlining thing, but it does fit the idea.
I think it’s also a risk aversion thing as well. Few people will complain about a game looking realistic, so it’s very low risk from the point of view of publishers/investors/marketing. Most people will prefer a unique and stylized look that meshes with the game, but investors and marketing teams can’t be sure in any given case, so it’s written off as a risk.
It’s a question of longer development time with smaller teams, or short timelines with big teams. A small team working on content in series is more cohesive, but, requires a longer timeline. A big team can do a lot in a short time by making content in parallel, but this necessitates that content be siloed to prevent needing constant revision. A few long quest lines with lots of outcomes, or a bunch independent quests with simple outcomes.
A small team working longer will cost the same as a big team working shorter (generally speaking). But the priority is short timelines, for the sake of chasing trends and packing the latest greatest tech in. This same kind of priority also leads to spectacular failures of long timeline games, like “black flag” or “duke nukem forever “. The issue there is not the long timeline, but the constant changes in priority to chase trends.
I think even when the companies have a bit of money, they tend to go overboard. I think eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 is actually so long that it’s problematic, I would have been quite happy with it at 2/3rds the length it is. Even worse would be something like Pillars of Eternity 2 - it’s great, but it goes on forever and didn’t make any money. There’s too much of it.
Give us more games like Disco Elysium. Not that long, tonnes of replayability, and more importantly, it’s different. Really different. And the “moral choices” actually mean something.
Yeah I’ve spent considerably more time on BG3 than any other game I’ve played on this console generation, but still haven’t finished it. I could have gone for something shorter, but it’s kinda nice to come back to it every few months and put a few more hours in.
For me, what I like to see in an RPG, is the ability to play a game multiple times and have notably different experiences, both in terms of play-style and narrative. It should make me want to go back and play again to see what I missed or how else I could do it.
The idea of having multiple ways to deal with a quest, and having that impact further story beats in meaningful ways is what I want to see. What i don’t want to see is meaningless scale full of nothing but filler.
I don’t think dagger fall is the best example because much of its size was just procedurally generated landscapes. The ability to actually specialize and complete quests in unique ways, as well as a branching story, is great. Mindlessly massive map, not so much.
I think JRPGs do focus on choice, but usually more in terms of the gameplay and deep combat systems with weird synergies to discover. Story-wise… yeah definitely more linear.
Personally I’ve never been a huge fan of JRPGs, Some I’ve enjoyed, but rarely will I ever play them twice.
Also I think there’s a fair argument to be made that if you cannot play a role, if there are no choices to be made on how you play it, it’s not really a role playing game. It’s action adventure if it’s a linear story with only one way to play it.
That always takes the fun out of games for me. You can do whatever, but there’s a correct way of following the story, which is subconsciously grasped by the community and thrown down your throat if you deviate and complain you are having issues.
Yes, it is fine as long as they dont advertise "a huge branching story", when really there's only a handful of endings. If you dont count random game over screens.
BG3 has a lot of dialogue options, but they rarely change the outcome of the story.
Since most of Elder Scrolls nostalgia today is around Morrowind, it’s always interesting (and a bit funny) to find people (involved or not) who think the series started to derail with Morrowind.
I am not mocking them at all, I get it, Daggerfall and Morrowind are very different games with a different scale and focus. Daggerfall is also… quite overwhelming, and rather impersonal for 99% of its gameplay. I really don’t know what a “modern” Daggerfall would look like.
Honestly I have played only a little of Arena (very late, around the time Bethesda started to give it for free on their site). I think the farthest I went was the second staff piece dungeon.
yeah its just that the race or class or whatever that did not regenerate mana but could get so much mana from items. I was levitating with a forceshield and blasting things before long right into the end. I was like gene grey or magneto just tearing up the place.
Oh, kind of like the Sorcerer default class in Daggerfall and the Atronach sign in Morrowind and Oblivion then (and sort of Atronach stone in Skyrim too, though this one is just less regen, not no regen at all).
Yeah, those are fun. You’re basically a magic sponge.
I can tell you. It would be HUGE absolutely generic open world with AI generated characters and quests, virtually zero human made and interesting quests and gameplay would feel like filling excel spreadsheets. Somewhat like Ubisoft recepe :-D
At least that’s what original Daggerfall 's spirit would be. It was at the time where “the biggest” was simply the catchphrase and Daggerfall was exactly that. The biggest. But also very shallow and empty. Sure there were billions of quests but what for? When for one interesting there were dozens of generic ones? Don’t get me wrong, it was still a great game at the time, because players weren’t as spoiled and something was always better than nothing. At least that’s my impression.
daggerfall is so messed up that the legitimate strategy to beat the game is go in and out of dungeons and waiting for the quest item to randomly appear next to the front door
That’s honestly what I am worrying it would be, and what I meant by a huge part of the game being “impersonal”.
Daggerfall has parts that are fascinating, even long after its time.
Its custom class creator is rather fun. Its magic effect system too… despite some of the most intriguing effects not even working at all. Seriously. You can craft those spells, they just don’t do anything.
Its dungeons are intimidating in scale, and the 3D automap is both a feat and almost no help at all.
There are freaking linguistic skills, plural because there are like 8 different languages or so. They are mostly useless, because they just add a slight chance a monster won’t attack you, but since you don’t know when it works you’ll murder them anyway.
And then there’s the undistinguishable random quests and the grind.
I think, at this point, most of the nostalgia is for Skyrim, despite being the newest one in the series, it is nearly 14 years old now and way more people have played it. It had issues, and lost a lot of what was great in Morrowind, but it’s a beacon of quality compared to what came after.
It’s started to impact their success though, starfield has only sold like 3 million compiles so far, compared to the 12.5 million of fallout 4 on launch day. Hell, Morrowind has sold 4 million copies, albeit over 23 years.
It’s probably to late for Bethesda to turn things around, but, it’s a great example of what not to do for other studios and publishers.
Even as an RTS fan, I’m starting to think the genre is dead. AOE 3 actually had some nice updates to the genre, they abandoned most of it though. Sc2 improved on the DoW2 campaign, but it’s been nothing since.
Part of the problem is the focus on competitive formats. Pretty much everyone admits it’s the least popular format, but it also gets the most attention. Campaign, comp stomps, and co-op are by far the most popular formats, but they get little or no support. Part of it is the pressure to release so early, and competitive is just easier to focus on while fleshing out mechanics and factions. Another problem is listening to pro players of other games, they don’t know shit about making a good game, they know what they like about an existing game and want that as much as possible.
Another big problem is focusing on players of well established games. The people still playing ladder on SC2 or AOE2 aren’t moving anywhere, there’s probably 20x players that have stopped with those games that would love something new. Instead all that gets released are shallow copies trying to get players to move off a game they’ve played for a decade.
Slightly different, but I stopped playing Rocket League not long after they abandoned all the cool weird arenas because it got boring playing exactly the same map with a different skin.
They standardised the arenas after listening to what the pro players wanted.
Which kinda proves that Nintendo is right with how to balance Smash Bros: it’s a game to be played for fun, not for pro player tournaments (no items final destination fox only).
It must be playable for casual and single player gamers for sure.
I’ve never seen a casual friendly multiplayer RTS I believe. The FPS genre manage to do this, so I think it should be possible. Hmm… Nothguard, Dune: Spice Wars, Line Wars and maybe Total War. These could maybe be considered casual friendly multiplayer RTS.
Though I must admit I want a good e-sport RTS I can watch and maybe dip my toes in, now when SC2 and AOE both feel quite dead. It’s the only e-sport that really entertains me. (we’ll maybe chess is an e-sport as well nowadays)
There’s plenty of “evolved” RTSs in the indie scene:
Against the storm is trying a roguelike approach
Kingdoms and Castles is a banished-like survival with RTS elements
Endzone is also a sort of survival-crafter with some strategy mixed in, albeit with some issues.
Beyond All Reason is an open source RTS that’s expanding the Total Anihilation formula.
Manor Lords is a fantastic medieval strategy
8/9 bit armies are colourful, fast paced strategies.
The genre is far from dead, but the problem might be audience. When they demand “evolution” that means it should pander to recent trends like survival crafting and roguelikes and whatnot. Problem is some of these formulas don’t usually pan out well for RTS games. Then there’s multiplayer and, like other commenters mentioned, ranked multiplayer usually devolves into a bunch of strangers playing the same few maps over and over, but gamers still demand multiplayer.
Alas, I see the genre as not dead but in a “doomed if you do, doomed if you don’t” spot. Meanwhile I’m sitting here waiting for a regular old historic RTS like Empire Earth or Rise of Nations.
I’d add They are Billions as another evolutionary branch that’s doing something different. Starting to see some clones of this formula.
That said, I don’t think Against the Storm or Manor Lords are the kind of games Pottinger is talking about. Against the Storm doesn’t even have combat. Those are more in the city builder realm.
True, they’re a bit off the mark, but they were the ones off the top of my head. Also, in my defense, I don’t think Pottinger knows what he’s talking about either. The man glorifies Age3 like crazy, saying they had to scale back some features, fearing they’d prove too revolutionary. I love Age3, but the game was hardly world-shaking. Take its contemporary Rise of Legends, now that was a title that went balls out.
Still, I’m curious what they’re cooking up in that new studio.
They are Billions is a very interesting game, but stupidly stressful. It takes ONE fucking zombie getting past your defenses to completely fuck your base
I just want an RTS I can actually play with my wrist in its current condition. I can do the earliest C&C campaigns, but that’s partially because the AI isn’t good enough to require fast and precise mouse movements. I just physically can’t do micro anymore and attempting it hurts, but most RTS games are designed in such a way that micro is required.
I hear you! Stopped playing RTS when starcraft came out :-/ For me it’s like another type of game based on adrenaline and quick mouse movements. Guess it sells better.
Loved the old Warcraft, ough-da! and C&C & Red Alert ofc. The golden age.
Ashes of Singularity tends to be easy on the action-per-minute requirement, since there’s no micromanaging individual units, unless it’s the larger ships, so you can probably have a good time with it.
Beyond All Reason (open source with FOSS engine), Stormgate (proprietary but made by ex-SC2 devs) are separate attempts at what I would call innovating the RTS genre.
AoE2 DE by Microsoft is tried, true and super popular still but many aspects are still from the original game 20 years ago. AoE 4 seems to kind of be the attempt at improving the formula, seems okay.
The Starcraft 2 engine is amazing but now under Microsoft ownership, I was hopeful initially but it looks as though it will continue to be left to rot. If only they could give it a Halo makeover using the same engine that would be awesome.
As someone who loved sc2 and had high hopes for Stormgate, it’s pretty hot garbage in its current state. Micro-transaction central before it’s even in a close to finished state.
Micro-transaction central before it’s even in a close to finished state.
10 Euro for 3 missions isn’t even a micro-transaction. If one mission was 1 Euro, we’d ad least get full campaign for regular price but that shit’s just a lazy ripoff.
How is Stormgate innovating? Genuine question–I’ve been avoiding it largely because it looks so much like StarCraft (and Pottinger even calls it out specifically in the article as something not innovative).
Hey you bring up a good point. I consider it innovative because they are trying to develop a non-Microsoft owned IP story/lore behind the Stormgate characters, even if in terms of game mechanics they are trying to achieve “Starcraft 2 with a new coat of paint and business model”.
If they pull off what they are promising, it could be interesting, but it doesn’t look like that will happen.
At best it did a good job with the quick macro system. It’s a good way to allow players to have better macro without hurting the skill ceiling for pros.
I don’t know what you mean, do you mean the advanced layer on holding space? Sc2 also has that for building, and it makes the game significantly more ergonomic, the new ui makes it a lot more clear too.
i had a few people who have never played rts play it and nobody had a problem with that.
It’s been a while since I played but from what I remember build/train/upgrade command each had a second page you had to tab to, so some things took 3 buttons instead of 2. This felt really awkward instead of having dedicated basic/advanced buttons.
it’s a hold space for advanced, too, so it’s at most two buttons at the same time, plus you can see both pages, so it massively improves ergonomics and doesn’t really matter in terms of intuitiveness.
i’ve played with 3 people who have never played an rts and they had no problems with this, and they reported having a great time, and two that are diamond sc2 players who also didn’t have a problem with it.
there is a setting for accessibility to make it a toggle instead of a hold that might’ve been enabled for you, I can see how it would be a problem then, but that’s off by default and only really for the disabled.
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