Відео

Loved the podcast! Hope to hear more from you soon

Mate Warhammer 3 is not much better than it was at launch - that is to say that it is still dogshit. I'm not sure which community you follow but Warhammer 3 is pretty widely disliked even now.

RTS is less than it was Total Annihilation, Red Alert and War hammer 40k are yet to be beaten for fun and repeat play strong single player is important esp for longer games.

Amazing podcast, you guys just put into words many of the concepts I have in mind about gaming, I can't wait for the next video.

Since I heard about a single horse skin in WoW make Blizzard money than entire life service of Starcraft 2 I know there might be no RTS game from blizzard anymore... not include other issue that unique to RTS in term of development decision. - RTS not easily port/playable on console limit it's market. - F2P RTS is hard to microtransaction in other game they could easily sell skin for single character for 20$+ but in RTS they have to make skin for entire armies while have to sell you the same price or they have to completely design entire game around how they going to milk from it instead of focus on actual game. At least the fact we still see some new RTS release at all even it's can't live up to the past tell me there's still some passionate developer trying to keep it a live somehow. Also I cheer for more people to play "Beyond All Reason" even it's didn't on steam yet but it's completely free and away have people to play with.

AoW4 has flying units and theyre usually weak to ranged (whether physical or magical depends on their type usually)

There's no market anymore. All new RTS games are flopping regardless if they pander to SP people or not. The 90s are gone. Only the big budget RTS games are still around but they are getting old.

RTS went open source a while back, everyone playing beyond all reason (BAR) now. But that's not on these guys radar because it's not on their steam charts.

Can't wait for the next episode!

RTS moved to mobile.

Oh please don't bring up Volound, that baby has been crying about total war since shogun 2. Outside of him being a "true gamer" incel he is also pro-russian, which speaks volumes on his general intelligence. Man is an actual brainlet and anything he says should be ignored and thrown into a garbage bin along with him.

I think RTS is a very very difficult genre indeed. Like unit movement alone, I haven't seen any(I really mean any) modern RTS game made it right than starcraft did back in the 90s. That's how difficult it is.

I don’t play RTS because the multi tasking isn’t fun. I prefer single player strategy like Total War and Paradox titles.

Maybe it's not very popular, but the only which i'm waiting for is D.O.R.F. because it's cool.

Call to arms- Gates of hell Ostront restored my faith in the genre.

Why criticize total war when Warhammer isnt even their mainline title, Pharaoh is.

There is another problem with RTS: they are PC esclusive. You can try to playa rts in a playstation, but it's hard to have a controller work as a keyboard. And the problem with pc is that there is no standard. If you have a console you can play a lot of games, with a pc you can play all of them but you need to have a good pc and that cost more than a console.

Just as book reading is in decline, RTS is in decline. The best genre of something is almost never the most popular. Most players can only buy a video game with a controller that has few buttons, which is limiting. In this case, RTS does not fit outside the mouse/keyboard combo. And because of the hectic modern life, people seek less stressful entertainment, like guided action games, where you just need to press a controller button and the avatar performs a side kick with double jump and tucked landing. This delivers satisfaction to the player who seeks a sense of power.

"They play for 20 hours and then go and look for the next 'cool' game on steam" That pretty much sums up all the kids who spout how HYPED they are about an upcoming release as though they are being given a Ferrari for their 21st or something. They blow their load and prepurchase only to be disappointed the vast majority of the time... but still feel the need to type the cool phrase of the season like "Lets Gooooooo!!!". It's really quite sad. Edit to add: From around the 45 minute mark when mentioning the 8 bit bloke. When I completed my CompSci degree in '91 the first year programming (*programming* - not 'coding' as people love to call it today) consisted purely of ASM and C. Apparently that's to difficult these days so now it's python and java heh. How the hell can anyone understand the bare metal when programing with an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction?

Honestly the funny thing is RTS may be having a resurgence. The problem is Microsoft owns all the recent good ones.

Dorf, tempest rising, dust front are looking promising. BAR is fantastic. currently making my own as well…so much untapped potential in rts genre. Dow 1&2 we’re soo good…need Dow 4.

From all the RTS Ive ever played, I never actually enjoyed PvP. It always required too much effort to become reasonably decent and the lobbys were extremely hostile to non-tryhards. So I basically only stuck to the story mode / campaign. And there were actually many games that delivered in that regard (Warcraft, Starcraft, Dune, Command and Conquer, Age of Mythology). But nowadays, studios just dont bother with that. Because its quite costly to develop decent single player campaign and it doesnt really pay for itself - someone who just plays the campaign once isnt going to stick around to buy skins and battle passes etc.

Ik i'm posting a lot of comments, but the one more thing i wanted to weigh in on is the notion of ultra-balanced faction equalized/parallel design, and i think this is completely ridiculous. Asymmetrical gameplay is extremely potent to drive imagination, creativity, and problem solving. If you want to make a perfectly balanced tournament, people can just use the same faction against eachother. Imo, nothing is cooler than having like one faction that is so overpowered you have to use some galaxy-brain strats to win, or team up against it. It makes it like a boss fight or humans vs super advanced aliens or whatever. ... The big thing is that you have to make a game that is structurally cohesive and has a great sort of attack-parry-counter system, where everything is survivable if you play your cards right (no click to delete base and easy victory without any way to block or counter it, which is the biggest failure of later C&C games, no Ion shields or missile defence). A well made good game will construct it's own audience, instead of catering to an existing embittered one.

Units routing way around the map when caught in bottlenecks happened in all of the C&C games mind you. The C&C games were considered really high end in pathfinding innovation but they had a lot of these issues.

It's always super important for units in RTS games to be very distinct and recognizable, and most of them fail at this. Many of the really grandiose, and even Supreme Commander 2 really had this issue, in that so many keep making just rectangles with turrets on them, everything is way too samey, both in appearance and function. This is an issue in a lot of RTS mods too, is they don't really understand having design where every unit has a purpose that complements others and is instantly obvious. One of the issues that RTS games often have is where an entire faction is all one ultra uniform design palette - people want visually cohesive factions, but if they all look wayy too much the same, it compromises the per-unit distinction.

RTS isn't dead, it's abandoned, and existing in limbo. It's not coming back largely because nobody is making new good iconic memorable rts games like C&C, AoE and Starcraft, which pretty much were the pillars of the genre. None of them innovated, if anything they devolved throughout their iterations, and were simplified into the ground. They had no motivation to try and fractalize the gameplay at all, with designs that can be used simply or complexly depending on how the players plays. I have a long term plan to try and rectify this, but it'll be many years before any of this comes to fruition. I want to see and build something that's like a fusion between C&C, Earth 2150, UAW, Supreme Commander. Each faction primarily focussed on different gameplay, like one with lots of little units, one that is almost all epic units, that kind of thing. Earth 2150 and Universe at War Earth Assault both have a lot of design principles that are neglected but have such massive potential, and it's a shame they are not brought forward in the genre. Really get into E1250 and you realize how many things you can actually do in that game; the ability to make custom units with the assembler is just the tip of the iceberg... It added so much strategy like hiding in the dark with your lights off, or repainting and IFF spoofing your units to make them look like an enemy's to sneak attack or trojan horse, weapons are all projectile, damage types...

Broken Arrow?

Did Femine won that battle against Pyrene?! That looked like a hard fight to win

<3 Thanks for the Shout out of Santurary

Giant Grand Games made a video about the same topic a while back called: The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why. He made the argument that the genre isn't dead, but the developers are just not putting in the work to give the new RTS games a solid foundation. And that's something RTS games need far more than other games. Though you are right that I can also see the problem being a lack of expertise. There are a few other problems, like trying to cater too much to multiplayer and E-Sports and ignoring the single player and campaigns. 18:15 I agree with the readability, though I do think that Starcraft is not that bad with it's readability. It might be because I played it more than Age of Empires, but I can distinguish the Starcraft units better than the Age of Empire ones. Screenshots are always harder to get a read on because the units don't move. If you see the units in the actual game they are far more distinct due to movement. But yeah, there are definitely games that focus too much on looking nice. I have one game that is basically Conquest of Elysium in 3D and the unit all looks so similar that you have no idea what is what. One old RTS game I love to play from time to time is Warzone 2100. 1:14:04 There are some pretty big difference in power levels between single and multiplayer in Total War Warhammer. You can boost low tier units to absurd level with lord skills and technologies, which are both missing in the multiplayer battles. Also for multiplayer there are unit limits. For example you can only bring a certain amount of big monsters. 1:16:46 The multiplayer games are definitely also tactically. There are some pretty hard counters and just throwing your big monster into the wrong blob on infantry can easily lose you the game. Total Warhammer is definitely not immersion breaking for me as it's a high fantasy setting and you have lore characters performe even more absurd feats than you can do in the game. I think one of the issues might be that the Warhammer series had a very silly start. Case in point: The naming convention for the Lizardmen. 1:34:59 The one problem I had with Age of Wonders 4 is: Too many decisions that matter too little. I want a game that lets me make impactful decisions. And not having to constantly tweak things for a minuscule outcomes. I enjoy Planetfall a lot more in that regard as it allows me to make decision who's impact I can feel. I agree, it isn't dead. Especially since there a lot of older RTS games that are still played a lot. Age of Empires 2. Supreme Commander Forever. Probably quite a few more.

So glad we have this new podcast!! I hope it's here to stay

@30:00 At a fundamental level I think the big problem is the needs of the industry as it exists in its current form. People blame F2P models, phones, culture wars, and they are all cancer but the more I think about, it the more it seems it is simply a function of the size of these companies. There is very little room for creativity in a place like EA or Activision. There can't be. The cost of failure is too high. Hell, we're seeing exactly that sort of failure play out across the industry pretty much at time of recording. Ubisoft is pretty much staggering around the room tripping over its guts like a zombie at time of recording. The hypercompetitive market that the big titans operate in forces them to try and latch on to any sort of success and ride it into the ground. Anything that can't meet that bar, simply cannot exist. Games out of those studios have to be live service, because it allows continued 'line go up' long past the release of the game for very little effort. They have to work that way though because they are publicly traded companies and the investor class needs an ever growing slice of the pie. Problem is though and Ben hits on it at the 35 minute mark is that the market they are trying to capture with a live service game simply doesn't exist. Most people want to play their 20 hours and move on. They don't want to play the same game for a thousand hours... but the publishers need the live service to survive because games cost so flipping much to make that they need the ability to churn out cheap content for the next two years that people will buy in order to make the line keep going up, while they shovel money into the next big shiny... And then people wonder why they grind their staff into dust. Then Lucid's point on the difficulty of AI programming for pathfinding means that the game can't be cheap, because it is very hard to do. It's the same reason why complex turn based strategy games will always be niche. It's hard to do good AI. The AI for some sort of cover shooter/action adventure/stealth/FPS can be 'good enough' by simply not being completely brainless, recognizing where the player is in relation to themselves, knowing what cover is and finally, which way to point the loud end of their sharp object. Give bosses a pattern for the player to work out. Think everything from Assassins Creed, to Call of Duty, to God of War to Cyberpunk to that Chinese game about the magic monkey that got real popular for a while... Name a big banner game from one of the big studios and it will probably fit that box. They only work because they DON'T spend money on AI can therefor spend money on cool shiny things like the lighting effects on the weaponskin you just unlocked and blow peoples minds with the graphics.

Just chilling here 4am on boxing day listening to this :)

RTS is not a dead genre as in it's lacking a fan-base. It's just that most studios and publishers are more attracted to genres that are more financially attractive. Currently, and for the last few years, most publishers have been almost obsessed with 'games as a service' green-lighting titles like MMO's and team shooters.

Is not dead, we just need a good new game. But since Developers cant cash in on the genre they wouldnt make. You cant microtransaction a RTS, neither can you create a Season pass of it. Well, they could try, but wouldnt make any ficking sense. Since a RTS should be working and finished completely.

Pretending you don't know why larger game companies can't produce quality games anymore devalues your channel. Be brave.

Stronghold and Stronghold Crusaders, Empire Earth, Age of Mythology, Army Men (rts), Rise of Nations, Pretorians a few lesser known rts games from early 2000s

RTS is really hard to learn and grasp upon. Not a game for the laid back types of gamers. Not a game for the fast action pack shooter. Definitely not a game for newer players entering the gaming world. It's a game for the niche audience. Even I get bored after 1-2 hours of playing.

As a person that's never really liked real-time strategy games because they aren't strategy. I really think they're poised to make a huge comeback. You don't actually do strategy as much as you do tactics in an RTS. You only have tactical control. Aka, clicking units. With AI, I can voice command instead, and let the AI handle the tactics, while I think strategy and big picture. Same thing with real-time 4X games, like like X-4 Foundations. And space sims like X-Wing/TIE Fighter.

Subscribed. I like the subjects and the insights. Since Lucid asked for honest feedback, here it goes: I don't know the names of the other two guys it would be nice if the guy on the left had a greenscreen, Lucid had a camera and everyeone had their nametags. It is hard to understand the guy on the left. It would also be nice if the games you were going to talk about had the gameplay showing on the screen instead of searching for it real time. The searching for information and images should be done in a different screen and it only put on the shared screen if the information or image is found. In general, everyone should be more high energy.

1:15:00 the conversation gets kinda weird and inconsistent here. They start with criticizing TW as being silly and not-grounded what with the fantasy warmaking going on but then in Conquest of Elysium there're all kinds of broken techniques and he's praising it all. It comes across as merely praising the game you like rather than making a meaningful critique.

More of this! Thanks! You forgot about Zero-K. It deserves a mention. I would like to hear a podcast about how open source can create new technical, mechanic and content baselines. Especially for hard stuff like RTS.

Abuse me Frag ♥️😉♥️

What a MAJESTIC beard

Subscribed as well. Will finish listening as I have time. Yea on the guests! I was lucky enough to see this because I’m subbed to Lucid and he had an announcement video on his channel, otherwise I don’t think I would have seen this. Maybe announcements / community messages on your channels might get the word spread out. Oh, and good name for the podcast.

Subscribed as well. Will finish listening as I have time. Yea on the guests! I was lucky enough to see this because I’m subbed to Lucid and he had an announcement video on his channel, otherwise I don’t think I would have seen this. Maybe announcements / community messages on your channels might get the word spread out. Oh, and good name for the podcast.

I find all this pathfinding talk kinda funny since one of the more popular RTS games, Starcraft Brood War has a lot of janky pathfinding itself! Good luck getting your squad of Dragoons down the ramp nicely :) I do agree that it feels like a lot of art has been lost in game dev in general and RTS games are incredibly hard to make. I personally think classic RTS genre isn't dead, but it was too successful at spawning new ones to it's own detriment. Back in the day if you wanted to play a MoBA, a TD or an auto battler, you played RTS. Like I think back to Stronghold's economy missions and honestly is there much difference between that and Factorio/Mindustry? You collect resources and build up a base while defending from occasional attacks from enemies. So is Factorion an RTS? Mindustry even has PvP, and mission selection. Basically my point is that most of the casual RTS players have found their own more mechanically niche genre that they switched to and have little reason to go back to playing RTS games that might come with a lot of extra things they don't enjoy. There is a good video that talk more about this called: Why are some new RTS not fun? Are they even proper RTS games? by GrubbyTalks Since this is the first episode I wish you guys talked more about what this podcast will be about. Just gaming in general? Also ending the episode with an announcement of what the next one will be about is always nice since the listener can 'prepare' for it in some way. Also please put links to videos that you reference in the description. Overall good episode, looking forward to the next one

My biggest problem with the newer rts games is there’s too much invested in the multiplayer component at the expense of single player experience. The last few weeks I’ve reinstalled homeworld, DoW, AoE 2 and are having a great time. The essence of these types games have been lost in newer games to dull first hour of boring chores or the fun sucked out of them to keep them balanced for multiplayer.

Aaaaand... subscribed.

Main reason why I don't prefer RTS strategy games is the required apm skills for high level play. I can just pour some coffee/tea and relax while playing turn based ones and be just fine. If I want to play a game that requires continuous attention, I go for Mobas(only Dota 2) as it requires way less apm. I used to average ~170 apm in Starcraft2 but as I lost my youth It became harder and harder for me to keep up and I eventually lost interest as it became very tiring. Edit: I am not interested in playing RTS games single player after finishing campaigns.