On RTS Games

[RC1138]

RTS and play, like I said, is not new or old. There are MANY games that have both. BF2 like I said did it as did 2142. Battalion Wars and it's sequels did it. That KF mod has it. And in a manner of speaking the Rainbow 6 games (not counting Vegas) were very RTS as you could order around your teams to locations, blow up doors, rescue hostages and the like.

 

[Jackel86]

Natural selection had a commander playing an rts style game with player controlled first person troops, and that was awesome.

Yes it was. I played that game way more than TF back in the day.

 

[Agent_PoRK]

we don't give two shits what u think Yahtzee review it anyway.

 

[Quorothorn]

"I think what it's that I've never liked games where the main character is just some kind of amorphous, otherworldly entity pulling the strings from on high."

For the record, the Age of Mythology campaign put you in the role of a group of heroes. The control scheme was the same as any other RTS, but there were actual, clearly defined main characters like in a RPG. For that matter, a couple scenarios from the Age of Empires series were the same, and Warcraft 3 did that, too.

 

[Mukil]

"Has any major battle in history been decided by an illegal street race"

Chh the battle for my loved ones heart!

 

[snowman6251]

Honestly I'm a little surprised. I thought Yahtzee would review Starcraft 2 as part of his "broadening my horizons" plan, but I can't disagree with his decision. I personally don't give a shit about RTS's or Starcraft 2 so I'm not heartbroken over this but honestly what criticism could Yahtzee give to SC2. It has a hugely devoted fanbase and they know they like it. He can't change an opinion on the game. Not only that but he isn't exactly in a position to criticize the game on its merits not being familiar with the RTS genre.

The same thing he said about The World Ends with You applies here. He doesn't know about RTS the same way he doesn't really know JRPG so why bother.

The same applies to me and racing games and sports games like Madden. I don't like them. Never have. Never will. Any criticism I have on the genre regarding gameplay is really void because I'm coming from a different world.

 

[Skyy High]

we don't give two shits what u think Yahtzee review it anyway.

Wow. That's so contradictory I can't tell if it was intentional.

I'll also chime in with a "Natural Selection was awesome" comment.

 

[Squilookle]

Yahtzee, your game has already been made. Twice. There aren't mercenaries but the action players can still muck around doing what they want. In short you really should check out (or even just check a youtube video of) Battlestations Midway and Pacific to see that RTS and 3rd person action can coexist, at the same time, and extremely well, too. It's actually kind of embarrassing seeing you go on about this idea of yours when even I knew it's been out for years...

Personally I cannot stand RTSes either, to me they'd be more interesting if the computer did everything for both sides and the whole affair was turned into an entertaining screensaver. That said, I did actually get pulled into Company of Heroes. A well told story tied to gameplay so extensively play tested and refined that I just couldn't find anything wrong with it.

 

[martin's a madman]

I was thinking having a RTS, but have player characters play the "Heroes" in Starcraft 2 missions there were times when the hero was controlling themselves, or rather the AI was. What would be wrong with say: Letting a player character play that hero, while the commander creates all the support grunts. Having a hero would certainly strengthen your army, but the hero can't do much alone unless he has the support grunts.

 

[tehroc]

I would play this war omnigame. I think the idea of a third person sandbox shooter in someones RTS game would be an interesting innovation to the genre. Racers could play logistics, supply lines and transports.

 

[Daemian Lucifer]

What youve described is majesty(btoh 1 and 2),except that there you have ai mercenaries fighting monsters.So I guess you could make that into a multiplayer game.It would be a fun experiment.

Or,you could make one player control the bots,and the rest fighting them in order to get to something.

 

[Softnum]

So, nobody that I saw has mentioned the excellent Microsoft game Allegiance, which follows the Savage and Natural Selection mode of 'One guy is the commander, everyone else are troops.' It's more like if you mixed Savage with EVE, with less MMO Grindy BS.

Empirically, in Savage and Savage 2, cooperation and tactics worked. Your commander generally kept you abreast of which tech he was going for. He could mark certain people as leaders, and they would have a flag, so the grunts might follow the right person. Griefing wasn't a huge problem, and it seems to happen as a commander-grief as anything else.

Another problem with this genre I haven't seen mentioned is that most everyone wants to be the commander. The worst parts of Savage and Allegiance were the between round spat of 'Do we kick out the commander who's doing pretty well to give someone else a go, or do we let someone else take the helm.' Allegiance at least let you switch commanders in the middle of the game, and both let you vote to kick commanders (iirc, it's been a while for both games).

Edit: Also, I would like to voice here: I love RTS games, and I hate FPS. I get lost easily, and after a short period of time it doesn't seem like I'm making any difference. I enjoy almost any other genre of games, but I'm pretty sad that PC Gaming = FPS most of the time.

 

[SultanP]

As a few others have said, Savage and Savage 2 did the RTS guy controlling the big picture, and other players being the major part of the soldiers very, very well. I never did do the RTS part very well, but it was very fun being some other guy's soldier.

Also, Battlefield 2 did the FPS with a commander player extremely well. And as a great incentive to do well as the commander, the commander player cannot acquire points on his own, while he is the commander, but rather gets the mean[footnote]I think? The score of all the players on his team, divided by the number of players[/footnote] amount of points for all the other guys on his team, meaning that if he helps his team do well, he does well. Also the whole team can vote to replace the commander if they are not satisfied.
I have personally had some great moments with some commanders who decided I was their pet project since I often went on my own to capture objectives, spotting guys for me and giving me supplies while still supporting the rest of the team.
It brings a whole new level to a multiplayer RTS having a guy whose only job is to look out for you. Commanders must be the thing I miss most in Bad Company 2.
Also, the non-commander players could hinder or help the commanders by blowing up the enemy commander's toys (making him unable to call down bombings or UAVs), or repairing their own commander's toys.

Edit: Oh great! My post took so long to write that I got ninjaed.

-snip-

I was also really baffled that nobody mentioned Battlefield 2. When I read the article I immediately thought "Does he not know of Battlefield 2 and Savage?". Lots of people mentioned Savage, but no love for BF2, so weird.

 

[GonzoGamer]

No, Yahtzee will not be reviewing StarCraft 2.

We don't need you to review games at all if you ever start making these awesome big budget titles you have ideas for. I like this one even more than that one you came up with in the Saints Row 2 review.

Your rts idea is what they should do with Dawn of War 3 when that eventually gets made.

 

[Loonerinoes]

Hah. We share opinions on the Warcraft story.

And as for the combination of FPS and RTS - one game did actually do its best to try and pull it off. Battlezone 1 and Battlezone 2, the latter developed by the now deceased Pandemic, both published by Activision. They had an okay story...though the voiceover of the person you played was class-A cheese, but then again...I kinda liked it as that.

It had loads of awesome unit voiceovers...simply awesome terrain for its time. Problem was that it was very hard to implement any forms of advanced tactics because you were still playing a 1st-person space planet battle while dealing with RTS mechanics such as resource scavenging, base building and unit production. It was cool that, if you died, you had to eject and then either call another unit to come pick you up or just walk all the way back to base but...well bottom line is I had a lot of fun with it.

But yep, twas not exactly a cohesive franchise. Still, twas the closest I ever got to a mix of FPS and RTS I think.

 

[TWEWER]

Natural Selection.

 

[David Bray]

Shame. I would have liked to see your view on this ridiculously hyped game. But whatever. Here's to the next one. Hopefully Limbo

 

[TitsMcGee1804]

to be fair, SCII is about as polished and noob friendly as an RTS is going to get, so if you want to start somewhere then you should start there

I loved the game, but i get what you are saying, its shortcomings are not from game design, story or whatever, i think it is just the RTS cliche's that exist in the genre, boring base building, unit massing

even then, about 90% of the missions have some form of urgency about them, pushing through to a location before your enemy does, so its never a case of turtle up, max out 200/200 supply and steamroll the whole map

if you play it on hard difficulty, the levels and objectives are cleverly designed so that turtling and steamrolling is not an option

 

[TitsMcGee1804]

additionally, i bought savage 2, i have never played such a badly designed, barren playerbase, awfully optimized inaccessable game

the creators of that game need to be hung for stealing my money