I've played quite a few Real-Time Strategy games over the years, and have decided the main aspect of design that should be considered, that exceeds more than just writing the idea down on a piece of paper.
In every Real-Time strategy game there's some sort of paper-rock-scissors (or scissors-rock-paper?) battle scenario if each given unit is in similar attacking/defending circumstances. Typically vehicles beat infantry, infantry beats air units, and air units beat vehicles or something similar to that. It can even be scaled down to different units from the same building.
But the biggest problem is when you can't see the effectiveness of each unit in that paper-rock-scissors relationship, visually. Instead, the game will just tell you what is good against what, but on the battlefield it just looks like a bunch of similar units shooting each other and you can't tell what is doing the most damage versus what. Might as well just mass units to one location and hope you win at that rate. In those kinds of games all I can help doing is just making every kind of unit in the game and massing them into an army, and flooding the enemy.
That's all well and good if you don't want to boil a real-time strategy game down to also micromanaging your battles. But it kills the game if you want to make it a long-lasting RTS like Starcraft.
In Starcraft, you can easily tell what groups of units or what each unit is individually doing. Nobody is going to have a firebat and a marine side by side and wonder what the hell each of them is doing.. it's pretty obvious. But in Rise of Nations, another actually decent RTS, you can make guys that throw spears and archers from the same building, and on the battlefield you can't even begin to comprehend their effectiveness because they seem to be doing basically the same damage to any unit it fires at.
Real-Time Strategy games are such a deep genre, and in order to be a long-lasting game you need depth in every area. Typically a Real-Time strategy game will come down to gathering resources, building structures, creating units from those structures and then managing your units on the battlefield. Starcraft has created depth with each facet of the game (except maybe gathering resources which isn't really all that important to create depth in, honestly, but at least they have unit count, and two different kinds of resources, along with energy for specialty units and shields for the Protoss). I just recently picked up Halo Wars and it has no depth for resources, no depth for building buildings (you have to build all of your buildings in pre-set locations) and very little management of units on the battlefield. Halo Wars also suffered from telling you which units do what on the battlefield but then you can't tell what each of them is doing when the fight is going on.
It's such a tricky genre to approach and after figuring out what makes RTS games good, it's no surprise that Starcraft, being released in 1998, has a more active community of players (arguably) than any other RTS game ever made.. even ones with better graphics, newer ideas, etc. Starcraft just took the idea and knocked it out of the park. It could have been luck or they could have really known what they were doing and had excellent designers with proactive ideas.
Nowadays it seems like if an RTS game is released it has very basic ideas, very little evolution or problems with depth in some facet of the game, making it not much more than gather resources, make units and patrol them into the enemy base until you win.
I don't know if people just don't understand what separates a good or bad RTS game, or if they play a good one, make something similar and don't have any attention to detail.
Whatever it is, at least Starcraft got it right from the beginning and ran with the idea as far as it could go. Pop in your disc of Brood Wars right now and I'd be surprised if there were less than 25,000 concurrent players at any time of the day. Not too shabby for a game that is almost 12 years old.
No comments:
Post a Comment