Poll: Would you play this RTS-FPS game?

[signingupforgames]

So with the recent amount of Yahtzee's bashing of the RTS i took it upon myself to come up with an idea that would blend RTS and FPS in a way that would make for interesting gameplay (that and i want him to read this(very very very very small chance of that) and look at himself and sigh that he couldn't come up with this). Underthoughts aside i think this would be a decent game if done properly. Thank you for reading this completely arbitrary intro paragraph.

The basic chain of command would be like a pyramid, with hundreds of individual soldiers, dozens of squad leaders and so on with less people as you go up and up until you reach the commander. Each officer would have an extended health bar, damage upgrade, larger size, greater mobility, and defense. HOWEVER it is only very small at low rankings(a squad leader being barely distinguishable from a soldier) but the bonuses get progressively larger as the higher up the chain of command you go ending with the commander being able to leave his spaceship safety zone and wreak havoc as a giant destructive boss-like monster.

As i just said you a general,lieutenant,etc. would be able to come out of orbit and play soldier too. But this makes it incredibly difficult to command your forces and insure you stay alive especially since as in soldier-mode you can't see the world map. Also the extras would be leveled out by the re-spawn time it took for each officer(progressively higher of course for each rank) and that every officer would have to spawn close to or at home base.

A secondary goal for each side would be to capture nodes/bases/outposts to gain ground and re-spawn points. Each soldier would be free to 'go Rambo' and attack the enemy or stick with the group. Each officer could relay orders to their troops or decide to disobey and follow their own strategy.

The primary goal of the game would be to destroy the commander/home base. Resources would replenish automatically but would increase in frequency or amount for each node/base/outpost captured. Buildings would be set but no players would need to 'build' it.

You could choose which to be at the outset (soldier/officer) with it being decided randomly but a greater chance of getting a high ranking officer part with more victories in those positions.

Does this sound interesting to you? I have no programming skills so please don't expect this game anytime soon(but if you work for a game company try presenting it(free of charge of course)). I just want to know does this sound like a good genre blend?

Would you play this RTS-FPS game?

 

[ohgodalex]

No, not really. It sounds like the extra features would just distract me from the RTS elements and make the game nigh-unplayable.

 

[TerranReaper]

There is a mod for Half Life 2 that somewhat fits your description of this hybrid. It's quite fun, but here's the main problem, in my time on the Escapist, I'm willing to bet you that people will not listen to their commanders and just do whatever they want, thus costing the game. The thing about that mod is that the commander tends to be more knowledgeable about the game while the team tends to be filled with less experienced players, and it's hard to manage a team that refuses to listen to you. Sometimes it works the other way, bad commander but good team.

 

[im-white]

looks like bf2

 

[10zack986]

Savage 1 and 2 did it. Iron Grip: The Oppression was a HL2 mod that did it, but I think the dev team moved on to something else.

 

[Flying-Emu]

I'm pretty sure they made that game. It was called Savage.

It sucked.

 

[Vicarious Vangaurd]

A way to prevent people from going off and doing things on their own would be to give players that follow the orders more XP than those who go do their own thing.

 

[The Root Beer Guy]

Actually, there is a game coming out soon that sounds almost exactly what you described.
Here it is:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/17710/

 

[Escapefromwhatever]

You don't read Extra Punctuation, do you?

 

[Vrach]

snip

sadly it was canceled.

You just made me die on the inside C&C actually managed to pull off a half decent shooter while having a long line of awesome RTS games (which sadly got worse with the latest Tiberium games but nothing lasts forever I guess) so they might know enough to make at least a decent ice breaking step in it (even though it'd probably mostly be shit, it'd be easier to work from there for further devs).

Anyway, sorry the concept you describe doesn't sound awfully appealing. The only workable blend of the two genres I can imagine would be something like a Battlefield style-game (as far as FPS is concerned), meaning loads of people, land, sea and aerial vehicle combat, all of that, with RTS guys pushing in extra troops to the battlefields, directing artillery strikes, moving in fresh aircraft carriers etc. There would be plenty of 'bots' in a lot of cases, to support the fact that RTS guys do get stuff done one way or another, but FPS players could choose to enter a certain 'team'/unit and help from there.

I can really see that working and I can see the FPS and the RTS guys communicating, the FPS guys calling for backup, requesting certain things and the RTS guys could help them... or not. Likewise the RTS guys could request more focus in certain battlefields, suggest overall strategy from above (try to prioritize capturing certain areas, downing some bombers/ships, etc) and the FPS players could base their priorities on that if they wished. I mean you can say the FPS players wouldn't care, but there are gameplay ways after that and after all, soldiers don't always obey commands IRL either, so while it would be more prominent, it's not exactly far fetched and/or necessarily game breaking.

Here's where the trouble comes in. First off a small technical glitch - I don't know about you, but personally I've never played an RTS that starts and ends with a battle. People make bases, upgrade their tech, depending on the RTS there's usually loads, but even in the 'best case scenario' ie. lowest amount of base building, you still have some downtime for the FPS guys. Playing the workers/bulldozers and building shit is not really an FPS player's idea of a good time

Now for the proper punch - while you can have 100 players on the FPS battlefield on each side at a time (if not more in a game like this), RTSs don't generally host more than 8 people. So you'd have to attract a huge amount of FPS fans and just a few RTS guys, which is kinda impossible if you wanna make the game good.

You can argue to divide the control of the RTS part, but the fact is, to keep one RTS guy engaged, you need a disproportionally larger number of FPS guys to 'do his bidding'. And that's where the mixed genre flops as far as I can think about it, cause it's just impossible to do as it involves controlling your game population on a scale that's just too ridiculous to consider.

 

[Stoplesteimer]

CCP is working on a fps/rts/mmo ...thing

http://www.ccpgames.com/en/products/dust-514.aspx

 

[Thedayrecker]

I'm sure they've tried this somewhere before.

And wasn't he (that is Yatzee) complaining that he didn't like Brutal Legend because it was an RTS disguised as a 3rd person game (which might as well be 1st person)?

I don't know.... I'm having a hard time thinking, seeing how it's 2:15...

 

[Yostbeef]

This whole idea of uniting a battlefield into one single player experience and collaborating with 2 different types players in one multi-player mode sounds like an awesome concept,to actually design it and properly execute it would be a monumental task especially where the multi-player mode and the fact that a major publisher canceled this idea with an established IP makes me wonder maybe where just not ready for it yet,maybe the technology just isn't up to it but we shall see what the future holds possibly someone on this thread will make it?

 

[TerranReaper]

I can really see that working and I can see the FPS and the RTS guys communicating, the FPS guys calling for backup, requesting certain things and the RTS guys could help them... or not. Likewise the RTS guys could request more focus in certain battlefields, suggest overall strategy from above (try to prioritize capturing certain areas, downing some bombers/ships, etc) and the FPS players could base their priorities on that if they wished. I mean you can say the FPS players wouldn't care, but there are gameplay ways after that and after all, soldiers don't always obey commands IRL either, so while it would be more prominent, it's not exactly far fetched and/or necessarily game breaking.

There's always the problem with players not following orders, if a game is to be made, it must promote the fact that you need to win by doing the objective as opposed to K/D ratio.

Here's where the trouble comes in. First off a small technical glitch - I don't know about you, but personally I've never played an RTS that starts and ends with a battle. People make bases, upgrade their tech, depending on the RTS there's usually loads, but even in the 'best case scenario' ie. lowest amount of base building, you still have some downtime for the FPS guys. Playing the workers/bulldozers and building shit is not really an FPS player's idea of a good time

In the mod I mentioned in my post (Above) as well as Savage 2, there isn't really a downtime for the FPS players, since there is one commander in a RTS perspective. The early-game consists of players, both infantry classes to take out enemy units and an "engineer" that can build up the buildings that the commander places down, and they would scatter out to take resource nodes and attempt to hold it. This "early-game" takes about 5-7 minutes, possibly longer if both teams are really persistent to taking the resource nodes. The team that takes the resource nodes will have the money to construct additional structures (Barracks for closer spawning to the front lines) or research better tech (Savage 2: Better combat classes; Empires Mod: Better vehicles and weapons). Essentially, it is possible to minimize the downtime to something almost not worth noting.

 

[TK421]

Sort of makes me think of MAG, or that new C&C game. It does sound interesting though.

 

[Valiance]

As people already said,

Tiberium (not made).
Savage 1+2.
Battlefield 2, to an extent.

Here are few that have not been mention:

C&C Renegade. (Basically.)
Battlezone, especially Battlezone 2.
MAG
Planetside, to an extent.
Star Alliances, to an extent.

Battlezone 2 is the biggest example, though. It's an RTS from a first person perspective. That said, you can build a communications tower and physically go into it and command from a "traditional" 3/4s birds-eye view. When you're inside the communications tower, however, you aren't in a tank or fighting personally. Obviously, the player can do more with a basic tank than the AI does, and every unit that you can build can be commanded and customizable to a point.

 

[Vrach]

There's always the problem with players not following orders, if a game is to be made, it must promote the fact that you need to win by doing the objective as opposed to K/D ratio.

Ofc, but the K/D ratio can still be used in the sense of it destroying the RTS 'units'. Am talking about the Battlefield's ticket system, think for example, an RTS player sends in a foot soldier unit, that unit has say 10 tickets, after 10 deaths, the unit is destroyed and you move on to something else (numbers are random, in gameplay they'd correspond to the usual ratio of FPS players and the amount of units sent, the scenario I'm thinking of for a 'battle' is something like two aircraft carriers with special plane units, loads of infantry units etc.). Ultimately however, you need to complete the objectives to do it with the amount of units you have or you've basically failed the battle.

In the mod I mentioned in my post (Above) as well as Savage 2, there isn't really a downtime for the FPS players, since there is one commander in a RTS perspective. The early-game consists of players, both infantry classes to take out enemy units and an "engineer" that can build up the buildings that the commander places down, and they would scatter out to take resource nodes and attempt to hold it. This "early-game" takes about 5-7 minutes, possibly longer if both teams are really persistent to taking the resource nodes. The team that takes the resource nodes will have the money to construct additional structures (Barracks for closer spawning to the front lines) or research better tech (Savage 2: Better combat classes; Empires Mod: Better vehicles and weapons). Essentially, it is possible to minimize the downtime to something almost not worth noting.

Fair enough, that sounds pretty awesome as a solution to it, though I'm still having trouble seeing the average FPS player go for it. Still, it shows there's certainly things that could be done for that. Still, my largest concern is the disparity between RTS and FPS players, the numbers would just have to be ridiculously different, at least in the kind of scenario that I'm imagining. I'll look into your examples now and see what they're like

 

[Hazzaslagga]

couldn't you have something that would kick the player if he didn't do the order. It would be hard to impliment as the player may be under fire and trying to fend them off. This sort of thing would need to kick players taking absolutely no attention to orders