It looks really great. Might be an odd thing to be excited about, but I like how the maps look natural. An odd thing, but StarCraft 2's maps were off-putting to me because they felt very much like purpose-built arenas, especially with the perfectly sculpted high-ground and ramps. I'll definitely pick this up some time, I loved Westwood's series.
This is going into my collection when I can spare a few dollars for sure. It looks exactly like what I wanted in the recent C&C games but sadly never got.
looks like every other confusing scifi mumbo-jumbo rts out there
It's hard to innovate in a genre that has been made perfect.
I doubt Grey-Goo will become e-sports material but if anything stands a chance at bringing some competition to Starcraft 2, it's classic Westwood.
Looks solid, but $50 seems like a bit much considering it's relative light weight.
[QUOTE=IceWarrior98;47001929]It's hard to innovate in a genre that has been made perfect.
I doubt Grey-Goo will become e-sports material but if anything stands a chance at bringing some competition to Starcraft 2, it's classic Westwood.[/QUOTE]
The RTS genre is anything but perfect.
[QUOTE=ImperialGuard;47002106]The RTS genre is anything but perfect.[/QUOTE]
You tell me what you would do with an RTS to make it better than all the rest then. Because if you can make one that bests all RTS's, you need to start handing out your resumes somewhere.
There hasn't been a decent RTS in years.
[QUOTE=IceWarrior98;47002152]You tell me what you would do with an RTS to make it better than all the rest then. Because if you can make one that bests all RTS's, you need to start handing out your resumes somewhere.
There hasn't been a decent RTS in years.[/QUOTE]
The RTS genre has been on life support for a long time and is dominated by arena multiplayer games. That's not perfect, it's not something that is enjoyed by everybody, and has serious flaws.
'Perfecting' a genre as diverse as RTS is pretty silly imo.
[QUOTE=ImperialGuard;47002264]The RTS genre has been on life support for a long time and is dominated by arena multiplayer games. That's not perfect, it's not something that is enjoyed by everybody, and has serious flaws.
'Perfecting' a genre as diverse as RTS is pretty silly imo.[/QUOTE]
I think he meant that the concepts of classic RTS genre have been developed to their fullest extent, to their logical conclusion. And that brought about the stagnation that the genre has faced.
[QUOTE=IceWarrior98;47002152]You tell me what you would do with an RTS to make it better than all the rest then. Because if you can make one that bests all RTS's, you need to start handing out your resumes somewhere.
There hasn't been a decent RTS in years.[/QUOTE]
RTS is such a complex genre compared to other games, you need to balance dozens of units and currency and tech levels, while at the same time making sure all 3 of your factions aren't identical.
It's why we keep seeing less and less of them.
I think classic RTS hit its peak but then you started to see the derivatives of that in games like World in Conflict on one end and the Dawn of War system on the other with Supreme Commander being the logical conclusion of classic RTS games.
2004 to 2007 looked really interesting and we got some great RTS games and then it just kinda died because tournaments and E-Sports became a thing.
I really wish Massive was still its own thing they moved onto make something like WiC 2 or another RTS because World in Conflict was amazing in most ways.
Supreme Commander flopped because while the first and its expansions were great, SC2 was utter shite.
Star Craft is really just more of itself except more mixed unit spam is required.
Dawn of War(by extension COmpany of Heros) and its expansions, except for Sthael Rhaine, were fantastic. however DoW2 pulled back the singleplayer from an RTS to squad based tactical.
It was just, there was so much promise and we didn't get to see any of those promises really pan out. I think what ultimately killed the classical RTS was Red Alert 3.
can't really get into any rts that isn't StarCraft II right now; this ALMOST competes with graphics but yikes the UI is shite
You know, for all the cries about the death of RTS, RTT is equally dead. Last time we had anything equaling the depth of Ground Control was Dawn of War 2, which was disappointing in it's own ways. In all honesty, the combination of Red Alert 3 and Company of Heroes 2 (and early punch from Supreme Commander 2) really has ended up scaring AAA devs away.
[editline]24th January 2015[/editline]
The fact that Starcraft 2 is basically a prettied up rehash, does not help, either. I mean, sure, it's successful, but in truth, the effect it had simply butted away any competition out of the limelight.
I don't like Starcraft 2's version of strategy. I am a slow, but meticulous, RTS player. Thus, games like Company of Heroes are great for me. Grey Goo looks like it could be a good fit.
But honestly? Favorite RTS of all time? Tiberium Wars/Kane's Wrath.
[QUOTE=Swilly;47002810]Supreme Commander flopped because while the first and its expansions were great, [B]SC2 was utter shite.[/B][/QUOTE]
?
I think many AAA don't make RTSes because they are really hard to make multi platform without sacrificing something. It is a mostly PC genre.
[QUOTE=Zatar963;47003215]?[/QUOTE]
I'd say that's a bit of an overreaction. Awful Single Player, reduction in scale, removal of that "specialness" of experimental units aside, it was still an okay RTS.
[QUOTE=gufu;47003175]You know, for all the cries about the death of RTS, RTT is equally dead. Last time we had anything equaling the depth of Ground Control was Dawn of War 2, which was disappointing in it's own ways. In all honesty, the combination of Red Alert 3 and Company of Heroes 2 (and early punch from Supreme Commander 2) really has ended up scaring AAA devs away.
[editline]24th January 2015[/editline]
The fact that Starcraft 2 is basically a prettied up rehash, does not help, either. I mean, sure, it's successful, but in truth, the effect it had simply butted away any competition out of the limelight.[/QUOTE]
Company of Heroes has the potential to explode onto the main market, but there are so many bad design decisions that are holding it back. Expensive DLC commanders, terrible game performance (top end rigs struggling to run the game at 45 fps on the highest settings!?), micromanagement disparity between the allies and axis, and the 4v4 imbalance are all big issues that Relic doesn't seem interested in fixing. They are trying to push the game forward with 1v1 centered multiplayer, and as a result the balance gets worse the bigger the match size gets. Company of Heroes really doesn't have a big e-sports following so there really isn't much of a reason to focus all of their efforts on balancing and improving small 1v1 and 2v2 arena style matches. If anything they should be focusing on the larger 3v3 and 4v4 matches as that's what players will be playing when they introduce their friends to the game.
[QUOTE=amos106;47003292]Company of Heroes has the potential to explode onto the main market, but there are so many bad design decisions that are holding it back. Expensive DLC commanders, terrible game performance (top end rigs struggling to run the game at 45 fps on the highest settings!?), micromanagement disparity between the allies and axis, and the 4v4 imbalance are all big issues that Relic doesn't seem interested in fixing. They are trying to push the game forward with 1v1 centered multiplayer, and as a result the balance gets worse the bigger the match size gets. Company of Heroes really doesn't have a big e-sports following so there really isn't much of a reason to focus all of their efforts on balancing and improving small 1v1 and 2v2 arena style matches. If anything they should be focusing on the larger 3v3 and 4v4 matches as that's what players will be playing when they introduce their friends to the game.[/QUOTE]
Relic seems to have a soft spot for uh... How can I put it best? A cinematic approach for the RTS genre? The units aren't perfectly consistent DPS machines with fully responsive micromanagement capabilities like in Starcraft, AKA the 'real esport' RTS, but rather seem to try and emulate the way a real tank/human would move and shoot (within the limits of the sometimes dodgy pathfinding at least) with things like missing shots and cover and all sorts of other bells and whistles that make their games quite immersive, but also unpredictable enough that it can never be regarded as a "skill-based" game on the same level as SC.
[QUOTE=Destroyox;47003925]CoH is definitely skill-based. SC is mainly unit spam, which is fast paced and micro intensive. CoH is all about positioning, timing, managing resources and not spamming abilities, upgrades changing how a unit is used, and pretty uniquely unit conservation. This conservation is a key point, even for your most basic of units.
There's also off map calldown abilities and other ways to smash an enemy from a very long range, which is not seen in many RTS.[/QUOTE]
I'm not saying it isn't skill-based, in fact I love CoH way more than I ever loved or will love Starcraft, but it'll never become an e-sport on the level of Starcraft due to being much less arcadey in nature.
Ah, that's the word I was looking for. Arcadey.
I may be taking a different opinion, but I think SC2 was great in its own right. It's not the spiritual successor to SC1 everyone expected or wanted, but the gameplay was streamlined in a way that anyone could pick it up and play it, and was overall quite enjoyable.
I honestly bounced right off the CoH series. Game looks amazing but the WWII setting did nothing for me and I wasn't a fan of how it combined RTT games (like dawn of war) with a traditional RTS structure. The game was a bit too confusing for me to figure out how to do well in at the time and I always got either steamrolled from an attrition standpoint or steamrolled from an out-micro'd standpoint.
Starcraft I don't like because its too fast and has a ton of arbitrary bullshit built into its design to force a high micro/APM skill ceiling. I just want to make cool armies and feel like a bad ass, not have to babysit micromanage everything.
For these reasons classic C&C was really my jam back in the day, plus the setting/fiction behind them was awesome. I also LOVED supreme commander, despite all of its balance flaws that were largely solved in the 2nd game (but then ruined by a complete lack of scale and art style that the first game had).
I honestly never played the Total War series but from what I've seen of those games I'd hardly call them RTS's in the traditional sense.
[editline]25th January 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=Tasm;47004577]I may be taking a different opinion, but I think SC2 was great in its own right. It's not the spiritual successor to SC1 everyone expected or wanted, but the gameplay was streamlined in a way that anyone could pick it up and play it, and was overall quite enjoyable.[/QUOTE]
I agree TBH. SupCom2 was much better balanced and games played out much better overall than they did in the first game. It simply had much better match flow to it with a lot of interesting interactions between the factions, and a lot of interesting options.
It's biggest issue was it sacrificed a lot of what made supcom 1 so awesome to get there. The scale, the art style, the "OH SHIT BAMF" experimental units, etc. SupCom1 was just a bigger, bad-asser game with a much stronger vision behind it.
[QUOTE=RichyZ;47005226]hard to call coh completely skill based and blow sc2 off as spam when in coh you need to spam tanks to win a match against anyone decent[/QUOTE]
Well thats kinda how it went in WW2. CoH is very down the middle, it has lots of realistic aspects to it, but is also arcadey enough to try and not make it niche. Real tactics actually work in CoH which is something you couldn't say about Starcraft.
This means if you try to do ill advised tactics you get stomped. (ie: blobbing infantry, relying to heavily on static defense)
I think that while there hasn't been a big wave of new and innovative RTS these past few years, you still get surprises like Wargame.
[QUOTE=Destroyox;47005959]Well thats kinda how it went in WW2. CoH is very down the middle, it has lots of realistic aspects to it, but is also arcadey enough to try and not make it niche. Real tactics actually work in CoH which is something you couldn't say about Starcraft.
This means if you try to do ill advised tactics you get stomped. (ie: blobbing infantry, [B]relying to heavily on static defense[/B])[/QUOTE]
Unless you're playing the Brits. Then you just go EHAHEHEHAHEHEHHUHEUE as the enemy's half of the map turns into one gigantic crater
There have been several innovative RTS games since 2007, just noone has taken particular note of them, and the demand at the moment is for RPG's, survival/open world games and to a lesser extent than previous years, fast paced shooters
SoaSE, Wargame EU/ALB/RD, Men of War, they're all fresh ideas and takes on the genre. Problem is, they're too difficult to learn and are uninviting for most people, especially those with no RTS experience at all
I still think MoW is waste of my time to even try because despite years of playing RTS' I get smashed in it when holes in my micromanagement open up say because a tank rolled into view on the other side of the map and destroyed the entire flank while I needed to babysit a force moving up. If I can't get into it, how are genre newbies supposed to?
SoaSE also suffers from being a complex idea made into something too simple and formulaic, ultimately. You look for planets, research the colony tech needed, get the tech to cross systems, build capital ships and watch them fight on a ridiculously flat representation of space. Build a titan. Wipe the floor with the AI a planet a time. Rinse repeat a hundred times. I found that boring after a few hours. Experienced RTS players, particularly those who've played HW2 in that instance are going to be left unimpressed.
Wargame RD just isn't beginner friendly, starting from scratch with the series would be difficult.
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