Ubermetalhed said:
I don't get why people say FPS. There is very little skill in point and shoot, hide/camp shoot again.
PLay a better FPS. Or a good TPS, which also requires more thought and skill than what you're suggesting. Not to mention, twitch reflexes are a skill in their own right.
Off topic a little again, but....
The stonker said:
Trolling is good for the mind!
Naah just kidding I was wondering how many lols I would get ^^ But personally I think turn based RTS games require the most skill. For instance the CIV games.
????
And back on topic...
veloper said:
obliviondoll said:
Turn-based strategy games are as multitasking heavy as RTS games when you're playing a game which gives you time limits on your turns, limits to how many units you can move per turn, or both. Competition-level Chess is a good example of this.
Time limits in a TBS game, doesn't make it multitasking. It means you cannot pick your nose anymore and have to get a move on, but you're still not multitasking.
Except that you have to be planning what you're doing for multiple units at the same time, while also putting those plans into action at the same time.
You could simply do all that sequentially. Nothing changes during your turn in a TBS game afteral.
You'd be right, except for the time limit, which is exactly what this part of the discussion was about....
***EDIT: Also, when there's a limit to the number of units you can move, deciding which unit to move in the current turn pretty much forces you to be simultaneously planning what to do in future turns, thus initiating a requirement for multitasking automatically.
That changes very little. You'll just have to know which piece or pieces you want to move when it's your turn, if you think it through.
All such a move limit means is less time used giving commands (because you can issue fewer commands) and therefore even more time to think things through, so that actually amounts to LESS multitasking.
Except that it actually means the opposite to what you're suggesting in practice, because of exactly what I explained and you failed to provide any evidence to refute.
And few RTS games require as much multitasking as MMO games. Monitoring literally over a dozen cooldowns, tracking your own health, the health of potentially another half dozen players alongside your own, plus any pets anyone might have, keeping track of every enemy in your general area, which gets exponentially more difficult when PvP is viable, managing aggro for NPCs, and who they're currently attacking, requesting help from other players and watching/listening for requests from them...
And those are just the basics that work for almost any MMORPG (most of which are also applicable to non-RPG MMO games), regardless of class, and ignoring the class-specific extras.
Oh you have to keep track of a few things too, while controlling your 1 toon? Too hard?
Now try keeping track of those cooldowns, health, other players, pets and enemies, while issuing commands to multiple units and structures at the same time, scattered across the whole map.
NO RTS (NONE AT ALL. LITERALLY) requires as many concurrent cooldowns to be managed at once as most MMOs, RPGs in particular, ask players to track. And aggro in RTS games is either nonexistent or nearly so in comparison with MMOs, so keeping enemy attacks off your more fragile units is either a waste of effort (kill them faster than they kill yours and repair/heal, rather than actually distracting them and drawing their fire the way you do in MMO games) or incredibly easy (automatically change target when attacked). And how many RTS games require you to keep track of usually at least three other friendly players and any pets they have, as well as literally any enemy who might possibly wander near you, which in the right game and the right area could potentially involve hundreds of enemies? Hmmmm...
Also, You usually have the ability in RTS games to limit the number of approaches to your base quite significantly (walls or placement near map boundarries), whereas MMO games rarely afford you that luxury.
It all boils down to the TYPES of skills required, not the level of skill required. There IS a measure of multitasking required at high levels of play for MANY genres of game.
Shooters (first and third person, and to a lesser degree 2D shooters as well) often require you to keep an eye on multiple players at once, often both friends and enemies, multiple objectives, multiple healthbars, multiple ammo counts, only one of which is actually shown on your screen, and the rest you have to be able to monitor by sight/sound. And many of those games often have up to 64 players (sometimes more. MAG for example, has 256-player games where high-ranked players can actually set objectives for their team to carry out) RTS games rarely cater for those numbers in a single game. 8 isn't the maximum limit, but there are VERY few RTS games which go beyond it. The games which have damage indicators (almost all FPS games since Half-Life, and a large number of TPS games as well) need you to watch out for these to come up as well because they warn of enemies above, below, behind and to the sides, where you can't normally see.
That last point leads to Flight and Space Sims, but particularly Space Sims, and the need for situational awareness combined with spatial reasoning and understanding of the dynamics of flight, many of which are different from ship to ship in these games. Now you not only need to take into account everything a conventional shooter (FPS or TPS) requires, but an enemy can always come from any of 6 primary directions, where most shooters only have you watching a maximum of 5 approaches at once, and you can usually cut it back to 2 or 3, and limit each of those arcs to some extent, and RTSes have a maximum of 4 but it's almost always possible to cut that down to 2, and often even 1. There's also speed tracking, which is basically nonexistent in other games, RTSes being a good example, where requiring a unit to accelerate up to their maximum speed instead of hitting it nearly instantly is considered a novelty. In Flight Sims of any kind, the speed of every vehicle in the air/space is almost constantly fluctuating, and you often (another one that does this) have missile and other weapon cooldowns to watch. Again, Space Sims are a more extreme example, many having cooldowns on every weapon, with different effects for each, as well as multiple shield facings, which you can often transfer power between for an added layer of complexity, and hull damage, which sometimes is divided up as well, with damage to different areas causing different effects which you have to also keep track of.
Location-specific damage having more of an effect than headshot = more damage is also common in mech games, particularly customisable ones like the Mechwarrior and Armored Core games (moreso in the Mechwarrior series, the last 2 AC games don't do location damage, and the older ones are hard to aim). In these games, weapons and equipment are usually equipped to a specific location on the mech, and if that part takes damage, the weapons and equipment in it may decrease in effectiveness, or become unusable. So you have even more to think about by worrying not only about where you're being attacked from, but also what part of you is being hit and how to protect the arm that carries your biggest gun without losing the ability to use it.
