It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap...
As much as I've tried, I simply cannot make any sense of the on-screen visual overload of MOBAs like DOTA or League of Legends. Why is it so much harder to find myself engaged by MOBA battles than RTS (mostly Starcraft) battles? I don't really know.
If I understand 50% of how to play a MOBA, I can play the game and have fun. I am gorilla. I have 4 moves: punch, slam, eat banana, and my ultimate ability, get mad. They have cooldowns, but it doesn't matter, I just spam all my moves when I see a bad guy. If I don't see a bad guy, I can kill the enemy turrets and little cpu creatures. If I'm having trouble, I can follow one of my allies and often get into 2v1s which are easier to win. And oh look, he is playing Sword Guy, he's doing pretty well, maybe I should try Sword Guy next time.
If I only understand 50% of how to play an RTS, I'm screwed because I didn't realize that I needed to build a t2 bot factory with my t1 bots, which can then build tier 2 constructor bots which are required to build flak cannons which are the only viable defense against this specific type of gunship-based commander sniping.
I like RTS games better too, but I can see how it can be hard to get into an RTS without a really expensive-to-create campaign tutorial (e.g. Starcraft) and/or a huge time commitment. I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls).
Ofc it’s not always that clear cut and there is a lot in between these examples. But in my experience, RTS and maybe strategy in general, can be really hard to understand what went wrong, even on a basic level.
MOBAs are, imho somewhere on between. High skillcap both in regards or game knowledge and strategy, but also in agility, but also somewhat readable. Sure, you might wonder why your gorillas punch did way less damage than their gorilla, but a look at the KDA or their gear might already give you a hint.
So I guess with the overall growth of the gaming market and games becoming more and more expensive, the small community that actually enjoys RTS isn’t really „worth“ that money.
I wouldn't claim they're quite so opaque, but Quakelike FPS games have a similar problem. They appear to be about shooting, but in fact at least 50% of the game is resource control (and even the combat itself is more nuanced than a new player realises). So when you're a new player losing to an experienced player, it can be super confusing and demoralising. Confusing because you probably don't realise why they are dominating you so hard and what you can do to stop it; demoralising because even if you persist and improve in one or two areas, it'll barely make a difference to the scoreboard. (You've improved your aim and learned to time items? Great, but the other guy knows the maps extremely well and can move around them far quicker than you, knows exactly how to position himself in a fight and when to use each weapon, dodges in unpredictable ways while predicting your own dodging and firing patterns, and so on. Meanwhile your newfound realisation that the armour and health items matter, and increasing ability to keep track of their timers, is making your routes through the map more predictable.)
It got to the point that on such servers I'd protest by refusing to use guns at all and used a crowbar and grenades exclusively. Not sure if anyone really took note of what I was protesting against, but it sure got me on top of some monthly crowbar kill leaderboards :)
Famously one of the Default Taunts on Age Of Empires 2[0] is *You played for two hours to die like this?*
[0] https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Taunts
But can't but agree with the general angle, MOBA's in general are less punishing to players at a deep psychological level, StarCraft 2 "suffered" from what the playerbase called "Ladder Anxiety", which was players simply unable to deal with loss and loss aversion as a consequence of them tying their own ego and self-worth to how well they fared playing StarCraft, to the level that Blizzard on one of the expansions had to release a mode where players simply would not lose MMR/ELO points from loses nor earn them on wins, a ranked-less mode and that alleviated a considerable amount of pressure
> So I guess with the overall growth of the gaming market and games becoming more and more expensive, the small community that actually enjoys RTS isn’t really „worth“ that money.
Yeah, this is very much the case, at least for large AAA productions and companies, tho AA studios such as KingArt Games or Sunspear Games have been making inroads into creating new RTS titles which make me very happy as an avid RTS fan
This doesn't sound like we disagree at all. Although I definitely felt that ladder anxiety in LoL, I never would have thought about playing SC2 or WC3 ladder. Even watching these games I dont feel like I understand whats going on in detail. For some reason that felt "better" for MOBAs. But that feeling might very well be biased cause I played more MOBAs then RTS in total hours.
> tho AA studios such as KingArt Games or Sunspear Games have been making inroads into creating new RTS titles which make me very happy as an avid RTS fan
Oh yeah, reminds me that I still need to play some Iron Harvest...
Losing as a newbie in Starcraft and AoE feels way less bad.
And it kind of fits in the scheme, as MOBAs are, in a broader sense, at least partially, a game of strategy. Not nesassarily when you start as new player, but winnign consistenly also takes thinking ahead a lot. What risks to take, which weakness to exploit, what item to buy. Theres a lot of just in time decisions to make, while also keeping the bigger picture in mind.
Maybe MOBAs are just "direct action" enough to cater to a wider audiance, but strategy enough to share some of the same problems?
On the other hand you can abandon starcraft game at any moment with no consequences and it doesn't last for 50 minutes. If you got toxic teammates in DOTA you are pretty much stuck with them for almost an hour.
This community was completely destroyed by SC2, multiplayer really only appealed to serious competitive players. It sucked unless you only wanted to grind ladder. That community kept the game as a whole alive and acted as a gateway.
Competitive RTS is very stressful. I would say, more stressful than other competitive games as mistakes, or rather, the absence of great moves, compounds quickly into a disadvantage.
I was in the same camp when I only played RTS games, but after my friend got me into dota I have to admit there's a lot of depth there that I wasn't aware of.
Also the win conditions are much more obvious in RTS games, just after I switched I had no idea that pulling, stacking, wave cutting, denying was important. Also the vision battle is more involved in MOBAs.
But that's kind of the point: you don't have to be aware of it to have a good time. Sure, all of that stuff matters in competitive play, but it can still be fun to just run around killing things if you don't know what you're doing. On the other hand, seeing artillery blasting your base from afar and having no idea what to do about it is really demoralizing.
FWIW, I think this applies more to Dota 2 than it does to LoL. I haven't played the latter in many years, but I remember it being much more rigid and cookie-cutter strategy-wise than Dota, and the micro decisions mattered a lot more, which meant that sub-optimal play was more obvious. In Dota 2, your poor item build can still win the game with a single good team fight or just generally better awareness.
If you win, you can feel really good because you had a 17/2 K/D. If you lose, you can blame your teammates. You can also play with your friends. With starcaft even though team matches are supported, they are unpopular, and there’s no easy way to look at the stats for the game and feel like a badass if you win.
Brood War also has custom maps with relatively crude, but still use programming (loops and triggers) that allowed players to build thousands of various custom maps. MOBA genere and (probably) tower defense comes from StarCraft Brood War custom maps. There were many other categories (e.g. bound maps, puzzle maps, control maps) that are poorly represented even nowadays.
Just as a specific example. If you take two teams of equal MMR and one had all the character counters so they "should" win. If the team with the better characters doesn't know how to pull the safelane, they will just straight up lose. Full stop. They will get gold starved and unless the other team throws (which is very common lol) they should lose.
Also, losing like this in dota is anti-fun. Its really not a good time for like anybody, the winner of the loser. Its just one team dumpstering another and it happens at all levels.
I see someone's played Supreme Commander. I love the game but it's the archetypal example of what you're talking about: winning depends on detailed knowledge of dozens of different units across four factions and simultaneous maximally-efficient economy building. Building a tutorial for it is impossible. It's only playable by the sort of people who will read wikis and watch videos and lose and lose and lose until they have some idea what's going on.
This causes the other problem with RTSes: the (small, dedicated) community has been running for fifteen years and is incredibly unfriendly to new players. Having less than ~150 hours playtime is often grounds for being kicked from games, which doesn't help expand the playerbase.
Unfortunately, RTSes simplified enough to avoid these problems aren't nearly as fun. The genre just works better as a community passion project than a commercial enterprise.
One day maybe there'll be games with just one move... just to dumb games down to the lowest common denominator and not leave anyone out.
surprisingly a good amount of depth from just one move, if played right
Used to play DotA (as in, the custom WC3 map) and LoL. I downloaded Pokemon Unite last week. Instantly understood pretty much everything except the individual feel and tactics of each character.
That's a big initial bite to get down.
I played Dota for at least a year until I finally felt like I even understood the baseline. The skill cap on say SC2 is indeed as high as you can take it, but learning the tech tree and counters is comparatively trivial. It's not that Dota is chess or such, there's just a huge volume of material to get through.
But that's also what makes it so rewarding. Dota is the only video game where I feel the same sense of accomplishment when winning as a game of go.
I think the world is wide open to a new awesome RTS game. Just, no one has thought up something good enough.
To OP's point, you don't have to know the entire 100 hero roster and all of their abilities to have fun, just the general things they can do "Oh I just got stunned by that ability, might want to dodge next time"...
Obviously to be good you need to know them all, but not to get started and have fun at lower levels of play.
Respectfully, OP doesn't know the game. You can indeed have fun playing casually like that, but your win rate will reflect the lack of what you don't know. You can't even see the game until you get some months under your belt, imo. Sound is another underrated aspect: you need to know exactly what spells are going off, how your allies or enemies will position them, based on nothing but hearing it and knowledge of the game.
There's no way I would have learned Dota without a friend to pull me along. It's a big problem with the genre as a whole. LoL is a bit more forgiving and ability spammy, but has all the same issues. And I say this as someone that got near the top of the 2v2 ladder in LoL beta (RIP original twitch malphite combo).
But that's something that MOBAs can do that RTS games can't. Which is another reason why MOBAs ate RTSs lunch. I'm not sure why you're focusing on win rate when there are plenty of people who play MOBAs who are quite frankly garbage at the game(s).
You can just play single-player Starcraft 1 or Age of Empires or Red Alert against the AI or the campaigns, and it's a fun little experience.
I stopped playing Starcraft 2 (or any Blizzard games) because of the Hong Kong controversy but I do miss some good multiplayer RTS. Preferably a little less APM-intensive than starcraft.
That's not really true. A typical player can watch the replay of their losing match and see the proximate cause of the failure ("my army got blown up"), but looking at the game analytically to find the ultimate cause is/was much more difficult. The art of doing so was a regular feature of the Day[9] daily videos.
That complexity is part of what makes strategy games (real time or otherwise) compelling: seemingly simple choices or optimizations compound into a much larger advantage later on. However, those small-scale advantages are rarely highlighted by the game itself as important, and optimization usually asks a lot of the players.
Also arranged teams have a very strong advantage over random teams, you can really punch above your weight if your teammates understand how to support you.
RTS games tend to have a standard opening minutes setup where you just do your own thing and then follow a flow chart of how to progress based on how things develop.
If you're playing someone decent, and are not a top tier player, you don't actually get to experiment and do interesting things so much as try to execute better on your original book of plays.
I do play some AoE3 still since they released the DE for that one and I will say there’s been one players running around pulling off victories that shatter the meta, and ofc the establishment players have referred to that as “toxic”.
This is precisely why RTS is dead. Every victory or defeat is solely in your hands. In the MOBA format, you can always get carried by your team/cuss out your team for being failures.
Ashes of the Singluarity: https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/
I haven't played them, but they are in my Steam backlog. I've heard jokingly that Ashes is mostly played by people doing benchmarks.
I have played Planetary Annihilation. It's like Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander (same people, different studio): https://planetaryannihilation.com/
It was certainly interesting though with the experience of not having anyway to "put your back against the wall" though.
* Ex blizzard RTS devs have gone to a few different studios. Frost Giant has the most hype, but there's also one of the Dream Haven studios IIRC, and Uncapped Games.
* A bunch of SC2 modders made a new studio, SunSpear, and their new RTS called Immortal: Gates of Pyre had a successful Kickstarter and has been getting a fair amount of hype from the StarCraft community.
Then there is Age of Empires 4 that is nearing completion which might be an Age of Empires 2 DE contender or might be an AoE 3 dud.
AoE2 does so many things wrong by 'modern game' standards. The graphics are 2D. Pick any two civs, they're 80% identical. New, goofier mechanics (Flemish Revolution) are disliked by the players (although still used). It's still an incredible game.
SC2 co-op mode took a big step in that direction, and it was well received and has become fairly popular...but a game built around that as its primary locus could be so much more.
I know many more traditional core gamers would practically vomit at this idea, but I think there's room for plenty of different styles under the RTS umbrella. And bringing in tons of money with one style might well benefit the others.
Company of Heroes 3 was recently announced, and its launch will probably get a lot of old players back into the multiplayer lobbies.
I see Warhammer 40k and Starcraft having much more in common with each other than either has with Halo, despite the very obvious surface level trappings. And I think X-com has more in common with CoH than either have in common with modern warfare or call of duty. I really despair for a broader grouping of strategy and tactics games, that may or may not exclude 4x games, in hopes that it could build a bridge between the various niche styles and cross promote the bigger genre.
It's remarkable on its own that a 20 year old game is still getting balance patches. I suspect this is a due to a mix of evolving strategies, a changing skill-level distribution, and feedback loops from subtle changes, catalyzed by added units and civs.
Likewise, most of the biggest pros and casters started their careers 5-10+ years ago working on community tournaments and other grassroots events. Even though there's a lot more money now with investment from Microsoft, Red Bull and others, that grassroots core has stuck around and feels (at least to me) more fresh than the very corporate machinery around Blizzard RTSes. It's funny to think that the most anticipated LAN tournament is literally held in someone's apartment (https://www.ageofempires.com/news/nac3-tournament/)!
[0]: https://play0ad.com/
Found an SQL Injection too, reported it and got a license for Supreme Commander 2 as a bounty. That game was way worse than the original, too simplified but I guess it was the logical path as people complained about SupCom's difficulty/complexity.
IME very few games have a strategic view, or let you zoom out at all, what other games are doing this?
As I said, spent a lot of effort getting good at SupCom and didn't feel like learning everything again for the expansion.. For me a perfect SupCom would be a SupCom 1 with better performance and graphics. Prefer games that are focused on economics and construction than rushing and getting some land resources, which was the focus in SupCom FA and I guess is better for most people. SupCom 2 I played like 5 hours so I don't even remember much other than I didn't like it.
Haven't played any games, other than VR, in years but I will install SupCom and play a few hours for the memories..
In 2017 I overheard my physics TA who was like 6 years older than me mention SupCom to another TA during a lab. Was so weird to hear somebody mention it in the wild. I talked to him about it a bit, he ended up whizzing me straight thru all the labs the rest of the semester.
While there might be less of an SC2 eSports bonanza going on right now, there is Age of Empires that is pretty active (as was posted here as well).
I think one of the major impacts to the 'visibility' is the fact that 'generic' or 'casual' games have social buy-in that is orders of magnitude bigger than what we used to think of when talking about 'big games' or 'big communities' or 'active genres'. 10000 players or even 100000 players used to be top-tier. Now that's less than 1% of any of the 'big' games out there right now.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/40100/Supreme_Commander_2...
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/244160/Homeworld_Remaster...
My friendgroup did SupCom1+FA. Then SupCom2. Then botbashed SupCom1+FA+FAF for aaaaages. FAF is a community donation-ware client that adds mods/units/maps/multiplayer-options galore. Fantastic if you want to configure what you want exactly.
Wargame Red Dragon announced a South Africa themed DLC.
* Supreme Commander & Planetary Annihilation
* Sins of a Solar Empire
* Zero-K
I've tried some mods, but Star wars Interregnum seems to crash for me after a while. I think it's a known issue on Linux: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/265#issuecomm...
These mods seem nice, but I am not so much into these other universes, and the base game is pretty solid already. I might try them again at some point for more variety, notably Sins of the Prophets.
In terms of new games, yeah it's pretty dead. AoE4 looks cool, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if its near as fun to play competitively as AoE2. Wacky civ specific strategies make games more predictable, and 2d is more ergonomic than 3d.
Definitely managing my expectations due to what I've seen graphically regarding the micro/non-intuitive unit design as well as potential balancing issues due to the vastly divergent civ play styles/age-up mechanics (e.g. Mongol nomad movement & the dynasty system).
It's an Open Source RTS heavily inspired in Total Annihilation, with nice graphics and great balance.
There’s also a few new studios cropped up that have announced intention to produce new, competitive RTS games in the Blizzard tradition (in contrast to models like Company of Heroes/Dawn of War, SupCom, or C&C).
These include: - Sunspear Games, which is making a game called Immortal: Gates or Pyre based in an SC2 mod called Vanguard that was well received by the pro scene.
- FrostGiant games, a new studio just set up by a bunch of SC2 team alumni
- A new studio by David Kim, head honcho of design and balance on SC2, being bankrolled by TenCent.
Over the next 2 to 3 years there’s going to be the biggest wave of new, competitive RTS releases since SC2 first launched.
I don't know how to interpret this other than "it'll be a destroy-your-mouse high APM obsessed click-fest that will ignore all lessons and modern inventions in the RTS genre over the last 20 years."
IMO the worst thing that could happen for the industry is 5 more Starcraft remakes.
Insofar as there are barriers to entry to the game at lower leagues, the challenge is more the mental challenge of keeping track of a bunch of different variables and keeping up with the multi-tasking. It's not nearly as execution dependent, at that level, as most fighting games or even a Soulsborne. It's a mental acuity and habit-formation challenge rather than a dexterity one. Better players will have more actions per minute (assuming they're not spamming), but it will be because they're making decisions more quickly, not because they have concert pianist fingers. I got up to Gold league playing mostly with a trackpad. I know someone who got to Diamond on a trackpad as well.
There's lots of problems with SC2's design, but they mostly center around a poor onboarding experience, doing a bad job of communicating the ripple effects of early decisions, a surfeit of high-lethality units that settle battles or games in a second, and the availability of multiple "cheese" strategies for each faction that are much much easier to execute than they are to defend against. But those are all addressable within the broader framework of a Blizzard-style RTS with better unit design, UI/UX, and tutorial or single player game modes.