New game studios are making RTS for casuals
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 มิ.ย. 2024
- What makes RTS fun? Can you make it easier for mass appeal, or do you lose the magic?
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00:00:00 Intro
00:05:17 What is a Casual Player?
00:18:32 Initial/Transient Enjoyment Factors
00:31:09 Long Lasting Enjoyment Factors
00:38:08 Uncapped Games "Redefining RTS"
00:44:44 Removing Complexity
00:55:05 People Want Skill Expression
#GrubbyTalks #Thoughts #RTS #Classic #NewGen #Fun - บันเทิง
To be fair, the campaign of Warcraft 3 is a huge part of its legacy. The story is memorable to a lot of gamers, especially Arthas' story. As you said, a lot of casuals only play singleplayer.
This, but also the amazing custom maps. The huge variety of races (including neutral races like murlocs and kobolds), the hero mechanic and the very intuitive map maker birthed so many fun custom maps. Those were played much more than the regular vs-mode.
Even basic multi-player maps have enormous amount of endearing details. This is why I never got into SC2. Unlike WC3, everything just feels like a dead, sterile tile set for sweats to focus on their routine.
Meanwhile Wc3 has all these creep camps with various creature that only belong to specific geography, shops, music, item drops, and gorgeous aesthetic that feels incredibly immerisve for old, low poly RTS.
In the end, not only is the gameplay is fun and having heroes, but it is also fun exploring and conquering the map with all of its extra bells and whistles.
I legit laughed at "It is easier to criticise an RTS game than it is to make them, so I will continue criticising them instead of making them."
Love the self-aware joke. Love the discussion. Thanks for being such a cool dude, Grubby
Your rts video got me into AOE4. It’s now my favorite game.
@@brandon8667 That’s sweet as! Glad you’re havin fun
The issue seems to be more that devs care about RTS and want to make one but are too hung up on the idea that "RTS is a dead genre". I think a game that will "revive" the RTS genre will be one where the devs say "this is the game I've always wanted to play" vs "this is the game we think that everyone wants to play." Your video helped me understand that the 2nd goal is just impossible to attain and is doomed for failure.
The 2nd goal is what most big companies strive for to mitigate risk after dumping a shit ton of money into development. The 1st goal is what most indie developers usually start with because they want to build games that they envision which doesn't necessarily align with what the majority of players want (case in point: Rainworld). Unfortunately some players also do not understand the 1st goal and will attempt to force their own ideals onto game devs who will sometimes cave in to the pressure of appealing to the lowest common denominator or a vocal minority.
Exactly, I am a bit older and I was comparing interviews with game developers today compared to from the early 2000s. Today I feel like I am in a presentation at work where they are defining their player base and what elements will appear to them while being pretty uninterested themselves. In the early 2000s the creators would waste the whole interview happily talking about something they think is awesome not caring about the company strategy or whatnot.
Its not rts specifically but rts is definitely a genre that gets hit hard by modern game designers... the problem being game designers.
Back in the day games were made by gamers and didnt have some dedicated design-only person making decisions.
Nowdays you get people who dont even like games, seeing the game industry is bigger than hollywood, beinf hires as the designer, making games more and more like mobile trash because they make the big bucks.
"casual players are not like dogs, I like dogs!"
also I probably fit as a casual rts player, I usually just play the campaign (also some CO-OP and arcade for sc2), then again I do have like 200+ hours of arcade probably soo
I love the grubby talks channel
Sometimes i miss playing War3 casually. It was my fav game as a kid, and it was never about winning or loosing, it was about enjoying the story of the campaign, trying fun mods with my friends or making a cool army in LAN FFA.
Now, it's still my fav game but for completely differents reason, and can't play with my friends anymore cause i'm too strong, and I only play meta in ranked. I used to play all race for fun, but now i've been spamming Human in ladder for 8 years.
I dream of playing a RTS where i just make a cool army, to fight in a cool story with a gameplay different from blizz RTS so i can just play whithout trying to optimise it
just dont play meta in ranked. Have fun with a smurf if you care about your record, it is what i do and this is pure fun
I like to upgrade everything and make max army then send it to fight
Honestly the old Warcraft campaign was a lot of memories for me as a kid. I thought the story was pretty good and I actually replayed the Campaign every now and then because of how much I enjoyed the story and campaign scenarios.
play custom games theres still a lot of custom games going on every day
Same here. Although I haven’t played for a few years. I may be quite rusty but I’m still leagues above my friend mostly because of apm and unit knowledge. They know the lore better than I do since he plays WoW more regularly.
While it's far from perfect, I think AoE4 is the most successful recent RTS in terms of developing new content and systems without completely stripping the soul out of the genre. Combat is pretty simple with some hard counters and limited micro, but the depth of strategy regarding macro and villager allocation kept me interested. Thanks for the thoughtful discussion Grubby!
The problem with identifying casual players for RTS is that RTS is inherently a complex composite of systems, and people value each individual system differently. Just compare it to the market in general.
People who enjoy micro without macro have MOBAs, people who enjoy macro more than micro have their choice of colony builder, large scale management game, 4X, not to mention there's some overlap with incremental idle games and whatever you call that genre of games where blobs take points to generate more blobs to take points. Then you've got squad based games for those who enjoy complex unit control, tower defense for people who like offensive sim city, city builders again for people who like regular sim city, 4X and incrementals again for people who like tech progression, anything good for people who like the story, and god games for people who like to see large groups of units fight each other.
To say nothing about the dearth of PVP games for people who enjoy that option.
And RTS tries to do all of the above.
It's easy to be confused by what casuals of RTS want because RTS games fulfill such a large niche of interconnected gameplay elements that people may value more or less. At the same time, I hope it's understandable why hardcore RTS enjoyers are such a niche among a niche. Most people don't go 110% on any singular aforementioned system, so the people willing to do so for all of them is tiny by comparison.
I understand fully when a game dev says they want to simplify things for a casual audience because a casual audience for just one component of an RTS's wheelhouse could bump up numbers tremendously. I mean, look at starcraft 2's stats. sc2 pulse shows just over 3k players on april 15-21's weekly ladder activity. Meanwhile, sc2 arcade shows 98k for the same interval.
Sure, you could say that not all arcade games are casual alternatives to the main game, since there are APM practice maps and such. In response, I can say that even subtracting the 3k players from ladder that week, you're left with 95k. Hell, cutting the number in half is still 3k vs 49k.
Grubby should really talk to someone like Sajam in the Fighting Game Community because it's INCREDIBLE how RTS and FGs are having the EXACT same conversations. This is an issue in 1v1 competitive games more broadly. Fighting game developers have been trying to find the secret sauce on how to make their games more approachable for new players and making things easier and not realizing that no matter how easy you make a game to execute, a better player is just better.
SO many of these things Grubby said about what makes RTS fun in the transient and permanent sense, what developers are doing, and how the players feel about them are so uncannily like what's going on in fighting games you could legitimately could not tell which genre you're talking about if you didn't specify which one it was. I'm a fan of both genres, but I guarantee a content creator that heavily understands RTS and the competitive nature therein and one with the same understanding of fighting games could hold hours long conversations about this very topic without knowing anything about the other genre. These concepts are that fundamental.
That's awesome. Has Sajam done any videos like this?
@@GrubbyTalks Yeah sajam is great and he's done a quite a few videos on similar topics. I think you can search youtube for "sajam fighting game difficulty playlist". I'd also just recommend " Fighting Game Strategy & Difficult Execution Are Intertwined (But Not Required)" and "Fighting Game Difficulty & the Skill-gate" as probably most similar to this video. He's pretty kind and thoughtful so if you reach out he'd probably be open to discuss.
@@GrubbyTalks Definitely! He talks a lot about Fighting Games as a genre and the developers that make them AND about getting people INTO fighting games and learning them! Maximilian is another larger Fighting Game content creator that talks about things like this a lot. I mostly mentioned Sajam because he has personal experience in games like League of Legends which is a bit of a bridge into RTS, so a conversation between you two could probably get off the ground with a bit less awkwardness if you ever had to talk about mechanics specifically. But it really is wild how conceptually the two genres are IDENTICAL when it comes to the mindset of competitive players, what makes these games fun and draws people to them, maintaining and growing audiences, and how the developers feel they have to go about doing it!
As a causal, I want variety. I don’t care to max my APS or play the current meta. Wc3 hit like no other thanks to the many viable strategies among the four very different races. On top of that, the heroes add tons of combinations to those strategies and its blend of rpg mechanics made longer games feel fulfilling.
Some of the updates that have brought me back were the change to steam tanks (even though it was reverted) and the recent change to Tauren to tier 2. Shack ups to the current game that encourage crazy and fun builds that differ from the other factions.
also, seeing your hero grow more powerful over time is just a ton of fun ^^
And you get variety by constantly playing new games, that's the whole point of Grubby's argument. Any game where players try hard to win will eventually turn into only a few viable strategies at the highest level. Play games while people are bad and then move on to a new game, there's nothing wrong with that.
I cant wait to see Grubby doing good deeds in the new RTS games
Hahahah yes!
There is a game which is not released yet which I find very fun - The Fertile Crescent. It is slow-paced and somewhat clunky pixel-based units, but has great atmosphere of bronze age civilizations and you really feel like a king who tries to have a succesful colony.
Wishlisted
casuals are just people who pick up and play they dont practice hard to get better then others. they just play the game maybe they get better maybe they dont. They may play some custom games some 2v2 or 3v3 likely not 1v1. they are in it to have fun.. Honestly Pros dont keep games alive. Casuals do. Pros are more or less a byproduct of a good game. they dont make a good game though. If a game is 100% fun but completely unbalanced it will be successful. Spectacle is king in this. im a casual TFT and LoL Player. I pick it up and play every now and then I couldnt tell you what the current meta is i dont care. I dont care about new patches or anything liek that.
Yeah it is hard to imagine that warcraft and starcraft was made for pro players in mind. Those game who cater exlusively to comptetive tend to fail.
@@b.d.a.8719 Aren't widow mines an anti-speed unit? Or do you mean how fast it can destroy units?
You're still not looking at this from the correct angle. You're thinking about people who play multiplayer casually. But that is not who a casual RTS player actually is. A casual RTS player doesn't even play multiplayer, let alone competitive PVP. Majority of the people who played Starcraft, Warcraft, AGe of Empires, or any video game every made have NEVER TOUCHED multiplayer aspects of them. That's the people you need to appeal to if you want to make a successful RTS game nowadays. Make a solid, single player video game first, then worry about multiplayer. That's why RTS games stopped being popular, because people stopped making RTS games that were fun to play on your own, and once other multiplayer genres gained more popularity, people no longer had any reason to play multiplayer focused RTS games anymore.
@@Socragames how fast it destroys units when comparing the inputs needed by the Widow Mine attacking player vs the worker-defending player. Widow Mine drops do not give any audio prompts of your workers dying like a Marine drop would (the first Marine would auto attack a worker and trigger the audio prompt, unless they drop far away), and they kill in one big burst, so there's far less time to react.
@@RiskOfBaerI was a casual before being a hardcore, I never touched 1 game of multi-player in all my years of wc3. All campaign done, and only then did I play sc2 multi-player.
People should be willing to give games like Northgard, Riftbreaker, or the Spellforce series a try. They are all RTS games, but of a totally different stripe from what Blizzard created. As much as I like SC/WC3, they (and AoE/C&C) aren't the only RTS out there.
For example, Spellforce 3 has a far more extensive, customizable, and varied RPG system than WC3 ever had; it also has an amazing campaign with great expansions too. Sadly it's not played much on Steam these days.
As a casual player, having to micro-manage with high APM is by far the biggest factor that drives me away from a game.
yeah for me this is due to age and current lifestyle. The only time I have to play is late night hours, after work and all the chores, when kids are in bed... So my APM is 105 tops (SC2) and I am already getting exhausted after 2-3 games...
This is a high missunderstanding when people talk about RTS. High APM is just a thing pros do to maximize fractions of seconds in their gameplay. You totally don't need them to multi-task or play the game!
RTS already help you "busying" things so you don't have to constantly control them. Don't be scared by APM! Muti-tasking is pretty fun and doesn't requiere it!
There is a video called "Real-Time Strategy is incredible and you should play it" that explains all this really well and is by FAR the best tutorial and video to aproach people into the genre.
I always got baffled at to why people are SO scared of it since they didn't seemed that hard, and that video sumarized why pretty well.
Think of it like chess. Understanding strategies, openings and build orders will always make you far better at the game than being able to click things really fast. Does it help? Yeah! But you also have to take into account that everyone else is more like you than you think. I learned that playing AoE4 ladder for a little while. People will break, crumble and fold whenever anything exploits a weakness they have because they don't know how to recover. I don't know how to either because I haven't learned. Exploiting all starts with knowing, not clicking.
@@tgr3423 Not true from my experience, there is not a single game where people don't already have an army twice the size of mine, so tactics don't matter. The average person playing online is FAR better than the average guy because average guys are probably not even trying anymore.
@@RiceLow the real problem is you think they have an army fast because they clicked faster, NO. Units take time to build and they do it automatically, is just that they knew exactly what to do, not because APM.
Been waiting for your take on Uncapped Game's ambitious goal of making something really fresh. Looking forward to this one.
I didn't go super into their game because I'm not allowed to talk about the details of their game yet. The video that I did watch in full, I did so off-stream and off-YT; I don't feel like it reveals a lot, it's mostly an advertisement for their studio and their credentials. Not much to share w/ crowd
One thing to add to the video, at the end automation was mentioned: I think it can be a good feature if used in a limited manner, but it requires the game to function differently than for example the C&C, SC and Warcraft style formula. See Total Annihilation and it's derivatives like SupCom, Zero-K and Beyond All Reason.
Especially in Zero-K's case the philosophy for giving the units better and slightly autonomous AI(e.g. fast raider units will try to juke and dodge incoming projectiles or a group of high burst slow reload units will try to avoid overkill and not all fire if only a few of them are enough to kill their target) was - in a simplified way - that these things would not bog down the player that much in executing their strategy. The player would not have to zip and zoom around the map to babysit every single unit because they possess a limited self-preservation, so a player could turn more attention to macro level instead. Of course if you have good micro you will likely still win more, but in a sense it lowers the skill floor.
There are a bunch of blog posts written by the dev about design decisions of Zero-K called "Cold Takes", I highly recommend reading those to anyone interested in RTS games.
It is worth emphasizing that Zero-K (and the whole TA family of RTS games) does add a major complication to basic combat interactions with the projectile physics simulation (which leads to both dodging and blocking line of sight/cover as micro tools), so even with the Fight-move AI, units in Zero-K benefit a lot from well-placed attention because dodging projectiles well is a very granular task that the AI is only designed (and really able) to automate to a point that it handles battles okay on its own, but doesn't have complex decision trees the player may have to fight against.
Hey, Shadowfury! Loved your ZK casts back in the day. :) Yeah, exactly, it's limited and good micro will even beat it, but in some situations it's taking a bit of weight off the player's shoulder or giving an opportunity to react.
Grubbyyyy, I'm highly entertained by your recent slew of videos!
If we examine Mario, the game starts you out basically struggling to get killed because it's so easy. As a casual Mario gamer, I struggle to finish a Mario game because by the end of it, I'm working "too hard" to achieve the same level of enjoyment that I experienced at the beginning.
Another thing the game does is let me set my own pace. When it comes to RTS though, it's a joint effort between you and your opponent as to the pace being set UNLESS the actual design of the game dictates it for both of you (to a degree).
So when trying to design an RTS, I have to wonder if the systems of management in the genre aren't flawed when trying to cater towards casual players.
I have my own solutions to these (mostly borrowed from existing titles), but some of the "feels bad" elements of RTS's are:
1. Losing your base to an attack and having to build it up again. The point of an RTS does not need to punish someone for wanting to build a cool base. There are ways around this.
2. Running on the premise of finite resources. It instills a feeling of insecurity which disincentivizes the player to move out onto the map...the purpose of the game.
3. Micro. Why do I have to spend any amount of time splitting units? Remove the ability or need to do so altogether and balance the game around the fact you won't. Splitting is not casual.
4. Time. RTS's take too long to achieve what casuals want from them. Give them what they want without feeling the need to stall to get there.
Cheers
Casual player here 🙋♂️
And AoE(2) got me into RTS Games. I am actually so casual, that I never play online, always vs AI, used to play via LAN with friends when I was a teenager.
As a lot of ppl have mentioned before, I enjoy the rather stress-free decision making as in how can I maximize my ressource income while still being capable of defending myself in the early game. Occasionally I rush armies in the beginning too.
What makes a good RTS game for me is a good mix of economy/fighting and well-developed fractions, that ideally differ from each other (even more so than AoE). Heroes really help building up the right atmosphere. Games I enjoyed besides AoE are Age of Mythology, WC3, Rise of Nations, Warhammer DoW, Empire Earth, War of the Ring, Empires: Dawn of the Modern World.
Also, the older I‘m getting, the more I‘m getting into Round-Based-Strategy-Games like CIV IV, especially due to awesome theme-based mods like Fall from Heaven.
I think what makes RTS great is the overall variety of the game.
RTS has a lot of variables by design - who goes where & when and so on. By expanding the variables, like having heroes with different powers and different ways to get those powers, you increase the variety, depth, replay ability, skill ceiling and overall fun of the game.
Basically, expanding on what makes the genre great.
As a self-described-casual-but-probably-more-nerdy-than-I-think player I feel often when more casual people say rts is too hard they mean "a large skill requirement to access the parts of the game I would find fun". Like in sc1->sc2 the unit control upgrades made the game more fun for more people because it made controlling a giant powerful army accessible to those without huge mechanical skill. But sc2 is still too hard for people who like to do multi-pronged attacks and respond to flanks, your units die too quickly for you to control what happens as a newbie so you can't engage in the fun. All games can be too hard depending on what aspects you find fun and how much you have to learn to get to those points.
Although I think part of the "too hard' problem for RTS recently was the lack of focus on campaign/coop. All the best RTS you mentioned all have great campaigns which is how people used to get into all games before 2010-ish. They give you a base level of skill so you can enjoy whatever longterm aspects you like. Nowadays its a mix of singleplayer and multiplayer with friends is how people get introduced to new games (and so RTS is pretty stuck by having 1v1 focus, bad campaigns, and often no coop).
Also totally agree on keeping games deep, complex, and interesting. I recommend you look up the blog "how to market a game by Chris Zukowski" where he talks about PC gaming (mostly steam) as a marketing consultant for indie game studios. He's mentioned time and again the pc/steam audience wants deep and complex strategy games.
First of all, thanks for making these interesting videos! I am a huge fan of such games and channels! Second of all, I watched your stream where you demonstrated playing Warcraft 3 with somewhere around 80 apm, demonstrating that Warcraft 3 multiplayer is adequate for casual gamers. It is really nice to hear and see tips from a player of your experience and caliber! I like Warcraft 3, but I do not possess the 1vs1 experience and skill that you have managed to gain over many years. I would like to point out certain things though. I should point out that I have played and watched Starcraft 1 1vs1 games the most, but I actually like RTS games generally. I tried to play with and versus some of the better Starcraft 1 players, but I had lots of difficulties. My APM usually doesn't go above 100-110, strangely my so to say average APM just doesn't seem to wanna go above that, although I am not a huge fan of spamming ctrl groups (or anything like that) and I prolly could play faster possibly somewhere around 150-160, but I just don't find that likeable nor comfortable. I would like to say that these so called built in APM counters are bit of an annoyance and imo they do not reflect talent, nor speed, nor intelligence, they are just a built in tool that is a pump tool, that works like some kind of pump, if you start spamming certain keys a lot then it goes higher and it will stay there for almost like 30 seconds or more. I do not consider these APM counters nor good nor admirable. In Starcraft 1 there are of course the 3 main races: Terran, Protoss and Zerg (just like in Starcraft 2). There are many interesting things one can point out about Starcraft 1, and I have some subjective opinions about this game, for example it is one of my favorite games. It is a game that is both simple and smart imo, which is nice, because it gives it that peculiar charm. If you play and watch enough 1vs1 Starcraft 1, you will notice something interesting about the 3 races and their difficulties. The 3 races are obviously different from each other, but they also share some similarities. Starcraft 1 however is not any kind of mere RTS, it is also a unique spiritual game! Some competitive players might just forget this. Usually it is hard to tell which race is the easiest to play, and it seems to be totally subjective. But I have a theory. From what I have noticed, most people still wanna think that protoss is prolly the easiest race to play. Although protoss seems to have big and heavy units, which should mean a potential decrease in necessary APM, these units are also kinda precious and require decent micromanagement ideally, and because of that, people will have a kind of a spiritual inclination to want to increase their APM. For example Bisu is a protoss player who pretty much plays with excess APM, he can play with 350 APM kind of easily, but bunch of such APM goes to just being more precautious, the guy is fast enough to basically double check units and productions, so he can just do it, cause why not, it is kinda helpful actually in most of these hasty and mind-blowing 1vs1 matches. This of course also insists that Bisu is both pretty darn fast and sharp and smart at Starcraft. He is of course not the only super gamer from South Korea, but I am not here to introduce people to South Korean Starcraft players, I am European, I still kinda relate to European gamers a bit more.
The other two races, Terran and Zerg, also have their appeal, but they seem more troublesome and micro-heavy to play (at least they kinda seem to be, right?). But there is an interesting question about Starcraft 1 races. Isn’t there a so-called “primary star” race, which is meant to be the main star (like a lead actor in a movie) of the game?! People keep forgetting about this thought, meanwhile they gladly keep thinking of rock-paper-scissors approaches. When Starcraft 1 was created Blizzard wanted to push the issue, wanted to push their limits in game design, to be both appealing to the greatness of hollywood-like charm (like awesome movies) and also to strategical genius (like chess). Starcraft 1 (just the game itself!) possesses both the aura of an artist (hollywood-style artist) and also the aura of a chess genius. Something that was kind of unheard of before, or at least never done like this before, because if you think of it the main prequel was basically Warcraft, which was still more of rpg and fairytale in its own unique setting.
There was one more game though, and that was Dune 2. Dune 2 did have somewhat of a hollywood-style and also somewhat of a chess style, but it was just somehow kinda shallow and minimalistic and awkward compared to Starcraft 1. So imo the first great and new star was actually Starcraft 1, unless I missed out on some other strategy game that had such potential (I know that Red Alert also started to push some vibes, but somehow still didn't seem to reach a Starcraft 1 level). The truth is that just the game itself already gives me the shivers till the very day. It prolly gonna haunt me for my entire life. By the way, I play and think of many games, not just fast paced RTS games. Sorry if this comment was a bit long, I obviously didn’t say all I can, but one thing I am gonna add, I adjusted my comment according to Grubby mentioning that his wife liked Starcraft. You see, that's how much this game means to me, and because of that I got emotionally affected, before that I didn’t even want to write a comment like this.
Hope my english and thoughts were kind of understandable. Feel free to reply or react to my comment, but please keep in mind the things I have told, I haven’t checked out the Grubby discord yet, I might do it in the near future.
p.s.: I have pretty much nothing to do with Blizzard itself or anything like that. I do not work in any of the areas of game industry. I am just a wannabe gamer, who has some extra thoughts and ideas.
Grubby's quantum theory of supervision of casual players: when a player is not observed, they behave like a casual noob, but once Grubby 'puts his eyes' on them, they behave like a semi-pro.
True
This is a really great video. You are grubby, very insightful, and damn, you are really intelligent. Well, that's expected of an ex-pro of an RTS game, lol. I'm now getting interested in RTS again (in terms of watching it, lol), thanks to you and the league gameplay you did, which allowed me to discover you and your content. I think I can self-identify as a casual player but can still try to become competitive, depending on how interested I am in the game. I have played LoL for almost a decade, and I sucked at it at first, but I had fun learning the game and becoming better. I tried all sorts of wacky builds and different playstyles with different champs while still trying to win back when I was still learning and invested a lot in LoL. Nowadays, I'm a casual player since, as you grow up, you have a lot of different responsibilities, but I still try to make time for games I think are worth investing my time in. Fighting games and RTS games are two of my favorite genres of games that I suck at, and I personally don't think it's worth investing my time into learning them a lot since they're niche and hard-to-learn genre types of games. It also requires you to play alone most of the time, and I enjoy playing with my friends as the casual guy I am. Though I managed to enjoy playing league alone back in the day, since I've had a taste of it with my friends, it allowed me to try to play it alone due to how much I was having fun learning and playing it, and I pretty much became a hardcore player after that. Here is the thing: I'm now interested in playing a fighting game and think it's worth investing my time into it. What fighting game? It's Riot's upcoming fighting game, which is 2xko, which is a lot more accessible and easy to learn but still hard to master and has a lot of complex combos. I have always been overwhelmed by fighting games since it requires a lot of investment to just try to learn the inputs of the combos, and I have a hard time remembering those inputs. In Project L, they completely removed those hard inputs, and now you just have to learn about your footsies, decision-making, etc. From what I've seen from the good players from the FGC that tried it, they said that despite the simple inputs, it is still complex to do stuff and has a lot more cool combos to pull off, and that's probably because it's a tag fighter where you control two characters at once. Here is the crazy part, though: you can play with a friend as an ally, where both of you control your own characters to fight off two players or a single player controlling both. You can also play both characters if you want to. With this, as a casual player, my friends and I became interested in the game because the barrier to entry of having hard inputs was removed, and it allowed you to play with your friends and not only against them. If I found the game fun, then I would try to play it alone, just like I did with League of Legends. As a casual player of RTS, I kind of want something similar to 2xko to happen to an RTS game. Like something with buttons that will allow me to cycle through different structures with just pressing one button, like maybe pressing Shift F on this structure first, then pressing it again on another structure. If you press F, your field of view will transfer to the first thing you shifted F on, and if you press F again, it will now transfer to the second structure you shifted F on, or something like that. Also, maybe 2 players can control the same stuff, like one is in charge of managing the resources and the other one on armies so that micromanaging stuff becomes easier and more fun because you have a friend to play with controlling the same stuff and maybe adding even more depth to managing resource so that it isn't boring and still allows skill expression, something like that. They can also make a separate queue if two players get more advantage than the single player who manages all the stuff alone. They can also add an easy-to-play race that is strong in low elo since it is easier to play and micromanage but can still have skill expression but is weak in higher elo since they are easy to play against due to how easy they are to play around, just like easy-to-play champions in LoL like Garen. Also, content creation and the viewer experience will be interesting since it is possible for two players to control the same stuff. It also needs to be like 2xko and League of Legends, which are forever type of games where they will be updating it forever and will have no second installment unlike other games, though this is just my own preference rather than an objective suggestion that will make the RTS genre more accessible. As a casual player, I would love to see more and more types of structures and units added to the game. Although it is possible for one race to get bloated and harder to balance as more stuff gets added, it is fixable by factions having different tribes. I think SC2 has this. I'm not sure, but I remember picking a "leader" and each leader having exclusive units despite both of them being in the zerg faction. I have always wanted for an RTS to be modernized by making it more accessible, similar to League and the upcoming riot fighting game with the idea of an "easy to learn, hard to master" type of game. P.S. I have been praying for a RTS set in the universe in Runeterra for a long time now.
Blizzard & Westwood former devs have to go to new studios, start new IPs, and work with a new/different team. I think what's happening is we're between the generations of WC, C&C, SC to a the new titles that will have to upskill the devs with the new engines (taking advantage of new technologies). These games will be refined and patches to be their own unique game, which also gives pros a chance to become high level with the mechanics specific to that game. Of course devs and designers are going to make things as accessible for as many new/returning RTS players.
I think right now the key is patience, and constructive communication. We're not going to get a new RTS in the form of SC, WC, C&C (tiberium or red alert series). And even if they did, the talent has long since left. So let's work with the studios, and reward those that work with their customers.
What a great video, I agree on all points! I want to add one thing: the "tedious tasks" that make the game fun for veteran players are not even considered by new players because they aren't obvious. Adding things like automated build orders and control groups actually makes it *harder* to get casual players into it because it exposes them immediately to a part of the game that they otherwise wouldn't have had to think about until playing a number of games. Trying to reduce the number of things a player can do, and encouraging players to do all of them makes the game more complex for beginners and less deep for long-term players.
Shout out to my first RTS. "Total Annihilation"
Thanks for the video! Definitely aligns with a lot of my instincts as an RTS dev. Hopefully content like this gets more conversations started now that RTS is "back"...
Terrific video Grubby. I agreed with a solid 85-90% of your views here. Very comprehensive & true (IMHO). I identify as a "Casual" BTW. LOL
really enjoying your talks, cheers
I feel so influenced again! Will need to play the new rts games
I totally agree with not wanting to automate games so much. I feel like those "housekeeping tasks" like building workers impact your decisions because you must pay attention. Which automatically makes you not pay attention to something else in the moment and what to pay attention to is always the most important choice in RTS.
Something that drew me towards blizzard RTS initially (and something I still find fun with all of them) is how much character there is for each unit. I think the unique themes between races and identities of units that make them up are critical to an attractive RTS. I think of DOTA and how it was so fun to just play as a single one of these RTS characters.
You are very good at explaining. Great video, thank you for sharing this.
I am a RTS semi-casual have beaten W3 and SC and SC2 all on the hardest difficulty. I am dying for some more good single player RTS campaign.
I really love the "Stress overloard to strive to execute faster" for the SC1 ! Relatable as hell ! :)
All that I want from an RTS game, are these things:
- Strategic zoom. When I zoom out, don’t limit me!
- Flux economy. I want to start building something without having 100% of the construction costs in the bank.
- Large armies. Give me an army size >500 and we’re talking.
- Asymmetric combat units between factions. If a combat unit is 50% similar to another combat unit, the game failed in the originality department.
- Realistic physics. If I shoot at something, I do expect an obstacle to block the shot if it is in the way.
- Macro over micro. The game should focus on MACRO (base building and planning) over MICRO (mechanical skill over unit control).
- Quality of Life automation. I want to give orders to my units, not hold their hands on how they should best accomplish these orders. “Attack Move” is the most famous example of this. A similar example is “auto cast” of unit abilities. To me, next generation QoL automation means when I want to build a structure, all I need to input into the game is the location and desired building, leaving the units to figure out who (and how many) is best suited to accomplish my order.
- Map interaction. Have terrain be meaningful in determining strategy. Have points of interest (not just vanilla objectives) that incentivise the players to use the entire map.
- Advanced customisation settings. This can range from UI tweaks, to unit conditional behaviour modifications to make them act in situations how the player wants.
- 3 or more factions. Variety is the spice of life.
- A solid and engaging campaign that supports split screen and LAN co-op.
- A campaign where the choices you make matter. If you slaughter a neutral faction’s populace, expect them to oppose you later. If you save an enemy defector, they give you a mission what alters the story in a meaningful way. Stuff like that.
- BOTH PvP and PvE multiplayer. This isn’t as critical I think as the campaign, but is still a nice to have.
If anyone else has something they’d like to see in a next generation RTS game, please let the internet know about it by replying to the comment!
The beginning portion of asking “what a casual gamer is?” Is a fantastic question. And I think someone can be “hardcore” but also “casual”.
I am a hardcore Rocket League player. But I casually play sim racing games such as Dirt Rally or Assetto Corsa. I enjoy both game types as much as the other but I enjoy different things for them. I learn through experience in the games, but often study how to go faster or how to setup a car. I do this casually because I enjoy learning something new.
I can also think of one other game I’m casual in, and that’s Armored Core 6. I play the game to fight in really cool mechs! I don’t know the meta, the best combo’s weapons or what’s weak or strong I just enjoy making cool mechs and maybe doing a multiplayer game or a campaign mission.
I will say as a casual gamer (until I decide to become a hardcore gamer in the game) I enjoy a game that has multitudes of complex things to learn. If the game is to simple I often find my self getting very bored quickly.
This will be a hot take but one example of a game like this is CoD. And specifically within the game zombies. I get bored so quickly and only play with friends when they play it.
Great video so many awesome takes! Been enjoying the GrubbyTalks videos while I’m driving!
This is very insightful, I have my own views on what makes a good game, but it was great getting the perspective from a different point of view!
I think the most important thing to understand is that RTS, at its core, is about Multitasking. When you think about what the core gameplay loop of a game is, in the case of FPS games, the core gameplay loop is aiming properly. The better you aim the better the results. This applies to all FPS games. In card games the core gameplay loop is making a decision every turn that will hopefully improve your chances of winning, based on limited information. This should be obvious.
In RTS games the core gameplay loop is multitasking multiple things at once, as efficiently as possible. The more efficiently you multitask the better you get at RTS, just as aiming faster and with more accuracy will make you a better FPS player.
The components of RTS games, like base-building, worker management, or army control are all just different methods of forcing out that necessity to multitask different things at once. There is value in simplifying some of these mechanics, such as the game automating how workers are managed, but there are some downsides to it as well. If too much of the game becomes automated, then the number of total things to multitask decreases, and the game eventually stops being an RTS. Dota 2 is a game that automated or removed things like base-building and army control, and is not an RTS, although there are some individual heroes with heavy RTS elements like Meepo or Arc Warden because they require heavy multitasking.
I agree, but it doesn't mean simplifying macro and economy management is a bad or good thing by default. Its possible to shift the focus from macro or any aspect of an rts to something that is more fun. I think the perfect example is wc3, in wc3 the macro is much easier, but the micro and the fights are so much deeper then almost any rts imo. In stormgate I feel like they just simplify everything and don't make up for it with anything.
RTS became a "dead genre" because the skill floor to become a decent to good player is too high for most people. Although Grubby is technically correct in the specific points he makes in this video, the genre will remain beneath the tombstone unless it's made more casual-friendly, atleast initially.
Genres don't exist in a vacuum either. An RTS would have to complete with many other online games that far surpass it in accessibility. Even Dota 2 only became a massive E-Sport because League popularised the genre first with a much simpler game. These issues combined are why investing in an RTS is likely a bad move for most companies.
completely incorrect. multitasking is not a "gameplay loop", neither is aiming in a shooter. that's like saying salt is at the heart of what makes a meal. you're reverse engineering what you think RTS is about from what people feel about it and see about it today.
@@adamastor9869 I don't really agree. The PvE of Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 was never particularly difficult, and you could always lower the difficulty in the settings. It makes no sense to say that high difficulty became the reason why RTS popularity declined. As for PvP, the intention is for two opponents to be approximately equal in skill when they match up. I don't see how difficulty is the reason why RTS stopped being popular.
And how exactly is RTS lacking accessibility? The 12 unit cap in Warcraft 3/SC1 was extremely annoying, and it is not present in Starcraft 2.
@@SelusGravius I think aiming in a shooter is the pure core of the gameplay loop, although each individual shooter does something to vary this up. Overwatch is a team game FPS where the core gameplay loop is not just aiming, but also utilizing special hero-based abilities. Similarly each RTS tries to vary up the experience of multitasking.
If you have a different definition then I'm all ears.
to me the best rts game will be 6x6, with 2 player managing base+troops and 4 players controlling heroes (moba-like), with neutral enemies, objectives spread on the map, itemization and skill build (rpg characteristcs). I dont have the agility to play war3, starcraft 2... but i would like to play something similar but less apm necessetity and more dinamic ( in my opinion this is a problem in classic rts, i play dota and the matches feels less similar and this helps to keep me playing and dont feel boring after few matches .
I actually did a video on this topic, and honestly the best example of what a Casual is I can give are VTubers. Their vods are all over TH-cam and watching them in the background REALLY gives a lot of insight as to what the casual viewer actually does and enjoys.
Dad of 3 here, played games since before I could walk. I really like RTS but heavy micro gives me anxiety. My fav RTS are ones that focus on macro like Dawn of War where I don't need to click 10,000 times per minute to play successfully, however, watching heavy micro games is super entertaining.
19:55. That's exactly me. Total War games are my jam because I can press pause to let my old man brain catch up.
A wild CASUAL PLAYER appears!
GRUBBY uses IN-GAME KNOWLEDGE!
…
It’s super effective!
The mans playing the Rimworld P-Music mod music in this video. What a chad
this might be way too much, but here I go...
I was a fan of RTS games since I watched my uncle play some of the first command and conquer games. It was one of the first genres I fell in love with as a gamer. I played pretty much all of them to some extend, definitely all of the games that were mentioned in this video at least, and I play them pretty regularly by which I mean for maybe a week or two every couple of months. I don't know if that alone makes me hardcore or casual, but I have some friends that are a little scared when I try to recommend some RTS games we could play in coop or together in some other way, because they get are scared of not playing on my level, so I guess in their eyes I'm the most hardcore RTS player they know.
I haven't played a game of online RTS PvP in my life, outside of testing it out for at most two or three matches per game to try it out and deciding, again, that I hate to be put in a situation where I'm playing 1v1 against another human being. I've played a lot of the WC3 custom maps and the SC2 arcade, most of them some form of coop RPG with a big map, some form of quests and a big item pool that I can play with a group of friends or a tower defense map where we try to send each other waves after waves of enemies together with the regular waves the map throws at you. There is of course the campaigns as well, I can't tell how many times I played through WC3 and SC2 alone, or the entirety of the DoW1 and its expansions as well as the many scenarios of AoE2, as well as all the different C&C games or even more niche titles like Battle Realms and Emperor: Battle for Dune (to name a few).
Some of the online things that actually have RTS gameplay I remember the most vividly were:
-Modding DoW Soulstorm to have even more Units and Factions, bigger maps, AI that is according to the mod creator "impossibly hard" and having a massive war of attrition against one of the many AI teams while playing Coop with a Friend.
-Putting more realistic mechanics (which is arguable) into Company of Heroes and holding of the enemy assault over a bridge with a single Tiger tank while my friend made sure the AI didn't bring anything that could deal with it while he dealt with his own warfront that I sent my soldiers to help with.
-Playing in a team of three friends in Supreme Commander against a singe Sorian AI cranked up to the maximum difficulty (or at least the maximum we could handle), trying to figure out how it works and how we could possibly gain a foothold and make progress just existing in the map without getting blown up.
-Playing the SC2 Coop mode. I don't mean the arcade here, but the character based coop mode where you get repeatable missions to level up and unlock more and more skill points. Whenever I mention this everyone seems to forget it exists. As a side note, whenever I mention SC2 to people that I know to be very competitive with all other games and play pretty much anything that has a ladder, they think I must be talking about ranked play and are instantly disinterested because they say it's too much to get into. Just something interesting I encountered.
Even some custom PvP variants of those types of games, I have played. Many of the custom maps and arcade games were PvP based, Footmen Frenzy and Dota come to mind, and I liked those a lot. I'm playing league a lot to this day, so it's not like I don't like PvP in general and, while I'm at it, many other games I play are also exclusively PvP. Just not in RTSs.
Almost all the things mentioned in the video that grubby says he likes mean nothing to me. I like to improve, sure, but almost none of the situation I like to put myself in are the kind of RTS game that is being played in ladder or wherever you play them. The campaigns only give you access to certain units until you unlock them all, sometimes there are even units that aren't even in ranked play in the first place. WC3s campaign has heroes that maintain their level between missions, so that whole concept didn't really exist for me and SC2 and most other games give you upgrades for your units that you can unlock and last for the rest of the campaign, so learning things like statistics is pointless if it not only changes next mission, but also doesn't compare to how things are at all in ranked play. My way to improve in a mission I beat is then just doing something different until I beat it. In the next mission the rules then have changed and I have to adapt and try to figure out how to beat it again, and that was never not fun for me, because the difficulty the game gave me was either enough, or the game had some type of mod that had an upgrade for the AI, like DoW or Supreme Commander as I mentioned above.
Getting better at the core game and actively working to improve my APM for example would surely make things easier in the long run and I would be able to challenge myself further, but it would also take the fun away from me. The things I like to do in an RTS would not be challenging enough anymore. I might be already better on a technical level then most of my friends, but even that is making it harder for some of them to enjoy the genre with me.
I have found the casual and I'm glad you left your thoughts here. I hear this sentiment more than you may think - you are far far from alone - perhaps even the majority! SC2 coop was very popular. Stormgate tries to recapture that with their 3 player mode, in which you play vs AI
Great video, spurred a bunch of thoughts!
Would like to add "proper/ongoing balance" to "permanent enjoyment factors" as balance is basically what allows for a high degree of variance in competitive games.
i feel like Total Annihilation (mass production) and Homeworld (freedom of movement) are archetypal RTS too
You ever thought about consulting or game designing on an rts? You have a lot of valuable insight
I need to fill my head with a lot more useful thoughts before I do that!
My favorite RTS ever is Dawn of War 2, which didn't have any base building or worker component. I don't enjoy the base building or worker component of RTS games, I just want to produce units and get to fighting, and that's exactly what that game gave me. There were a lot of people back then who argued DoW2 wasn't a real RTS because it didn't include those elements. Likewise, my favorite MOBA is HotS, because I don't like last-hitting as a mechanic or item shops. Pull those out and I had an incredible time.
I tend to think of Casual gaming in terms of Casual vs. Competitive. Either you are playing the game to have fun (Casual), or you are playing the game to win (Competitive). Now, Casual players are still trying to win because that's how you have fun. While Competitive players are still trying to have fun, but they have fun by trying to win. So in essence, both players are doing the exact same thing. In fact, neither player actually cares if they win. A Competitive player is happy to lose a game if it was a fair match against a tough opponent. While a Casual player is happy to lose a game if it was a fun match against any opponent. Where we tend to run into issues, is with how different players define a 'fair match' and a 'fun match'.
For me, a fun match is one where I get to play the game. So ask yourself, "What is 'the game'?". In Warcraft 3, I think the game is building a base, building units, and attacking with those units. So if I play a match, and I don't get to do a lot of those things, I'm not going to have much fun. But I also don't want to play the same game over and over again. So if every match I build the same base, and the same units, and attack the same units, I'm going to stop having fun real quick.
As for what people might consider a fair match, I honestly have no idea.
Oh, and I think your attempt to categorize Casual players by their hours played is a Red Herring. There is absolutely no connection between the two. You can play 10,000 hours of a game casually, and you can play 1 hour of a game competitively. What matters, is how you play the game.
I am a bit late, but to the point of ‘RTS being Hardcore’ I concur with the sentiment a LOT.
It’s not as simple as having an even playing field by just facing similar opponents, because for a more casual (less skill, lower time commitment, lower ambition) player, every match becomes a struggle to just ‘feel/look’ competent.
I absolutely adore the idea of playing Starcraft 2
I watch every single big tournament that comes out (and have been for many years), I feel like I have a deeper than average grasp of the strategies and tactics behind it all
When it comes to actually trying to implement ANY of it, I feel like a fish trying to swim on land.
Really ugly flopping, getting beaten by people who “don’t know what they’re doing” but having better or more consistent macro or micro after some point and just punishing me while I thought I was doing well.
I want to feel cool playing the game at that more accessible skill level, but I feel that Starcraft 2 requires more effort to feel that way than I want.
I legitimately lose track of the different APM+attention juggling and fumble
That’s why I’m looking so forward to Uncapped Games’ RTS. It promises to give exactly what I’m looking for, that isn’t there right now
The way I define "casual" is: someone who plays the game, but does not try to be competitive, much less a professional player. So I personally don't think time is really a factor in it (though people who spend more time on a game are more likely to begin to want to go competitive with it). So Grubby's "relatively unambitious" bullet point fits that pretty well. Of course, there could be a lot of grey area between someone who is casual and someone who is fully competitive, but people can just come up with more terms if they want to to fill it in (casual competitive, newbie tryhard, etc etc).
To add in my own two cents on the discussion, as a self identified casual RTS player (I played WC3 and Stronghold Crusader on a single-player level, and that's it), what makes RTSs fun even without multiplayer are the small things. If unit 1 does different things than unit 2? Great. Amazing, even. But unit 1 should then have a different model from unit 2, say different things when you click on them or attack with them, maybe have different production center that makes sense to their different models, etc. I heard that this is what people are calling "polish" as of recent.
And on the note of trimming down on mechanics to "make the game more appealing to casuals," please don't. I may not have the highest proficiency in WC3 micro, but that fact that it is there shows that there is still more to the game that I could potentially explore. Even with things like automatically making workers, I don't quite like the sound of. When I play games, especially RTS games, I like to be in charge of everything the games hands over to me. Clicking the peasant icon five times could be called "tedious," but clicking the build icon, the altar icon, the archmage icon, fighting creeps, and choosing skills every time you level could also be considered "tedious" as well. Should those be automated as well? Because I've seen a handful of mobile games that do have similar processes be automated; just press the "battle" button five times and suddenly you have a level 10 hero with various different skills unlocked for you!
To bring in a casual audience, you don't strip down the competitive parts of a game. Because most casuals, by default, don't care much about those parts. And the ones that do care, such as myself, _love_ to see experienced competitive players show off their skills. To attract casual players, you first need that polish thing I mentioned a bit ago. Then you add things _outside_ of competitive PvP that might bring non-RTS players in. I heard Warcraft and Starcraft have a good amount of followers because of something called a "campaign" that introduces "lore" and a story. Or outside of campaigns, Stronghold has this mode called "Castle Build" that lets you just build without any opponents. That mode is fun because you can just observe the people in your base going around and working on their jobs. Showing off the polish that the game has. That mode _would not work_ if you couldn't watch bakers bake their bread, watch the hunters explore around and hunt gazelles with their canine companions, or spam click the peasants at the campfire and hear "Morning m'lordship" 5 to 10 times.
Casual players want a game with deep mechanics and extra polish just as much as hyper competitive players, but they each want that depth and level of detail for different parts of the game. So devs need to flesh out aspects for _both parties_ instead of stripping away parts that are more catered to one.
The bit about people transitioning to turn based games and card games really feels like the discussion I had about Hexarchy, which is literally 30 minutes multiplayer pvp card game 4x strategy. there were people who felt that timer in pvp gave it RTS feeling and required higher APM (15-20+) than typical card game (
Great insight from Grubby.
It’s almost like everything else in common life.
“We’re doing this for ordinary people.”
But who are “ordinary people”?
To be completely fair here old RTS games wasn't made to play professionally by design. Especially WarCraft III and Brood War. These videos are fantastic.
Trying to create a game witha proscene in mind is just a terrible idea. In the last 20 years there have been a plethora of RTS that tried to be the next starcraft and they all failed because people don't actually care about how hard a game is to play. Starcraft didnt become popular because you need 300 apm to play it, it became popular because the game was fun. Make your game fun first and then even if its a completely broken mess, players will still want to compete in it
@@blacklotus561 I know few RTS which died because they got abadoned, though they had great potential.
I played starcraft 1 and then I played the starcraft 1 dlc. I loved playing complete defence until I amassed an army of 50ish fully upgraded zerglings and send them into an enemy base and just watch the carnage happen in campaigns. I do this defence-ey strat in every game I can because that is my way to play starcraft 1 and I love every second of it.
I see myself as a casual gamer because I have never identified with any of those popular strats that PvPers do during ranked or unranked and because I wholly dedicate my playtime to the campaign.
What I want is starcraft 1 but developed upon and simply... more of starcraft 1's essence in other games, or simply more of starcraft 1!
I remember liking WC3 when I was young but I lacked the skills to play it (same thing with AoE2 I just suck at expending resources and managing large groups of units). Then DotA came out and I just got hooked because that was the game for me.
That's why I always played games like CS, WoT, LoL not because they are for casual players but because it was stressful for me managing something more than myself.
Okay. Completely finished this video.
I want to answer grubby's question what I like the most on these games or at least one of it.
I will start with my favorit game Age of Empires 2.
I like the most the team play and the ways how I can support my team members with building defensive structures like walls, with resources through the market, through tactical decisions like harassing so the reinforment of the opponent stops or is lowered and to send units to my friends to help them protecting their base. Through these possibilities Age 2 works a bit like a football game where exist different rolls. Usually we have one player in our team that is booming, one is protecting the booming guy and the third guy in our team stress the opponents with harassment etc. in order to buy time for the booming guy. This way of playing the game I can't do in SC or WC or C&C games. That is the reason why I like Age 2 the most.
After Age 2 my favorit game is C&C Generals, because there are 3 asymmetrical factions and each of it has 3 additional slighty other versions. It is really fun in C&C Generals to chose between different unit combos and the general abilities make combacks possible so you have more often a back and forth in many matches. That's makes it interessting.
In SC and WC you also have asymmetrical factions, but I have the feeling that combacks are less possible. In Age 2 I have the feeling a comback is more possible, especially in team games. In SC 2 team games are almost impossible because team mates got rushed from 2 or more opponents and you haven't the time or possibilities to protect them before the ally got criticial damage. In WC3 you have something similiar because of the heroes. So when a hero dies the opponent's hero becomes even stronger because of the experience. So a comback becomes even more unlikely. In addition I haven't the micro to be much better in order to compensate this. I have not the feeling that I can decide something that give us enough time to comeback and I also have no tools to get a comback like C&C Generals-like abilities.
SC1, SC2 and WC3 has too weak defending tools that can buy time like stone walls in Age of Empires 2 or 4. And thats the main reason why comebacks are really unlikely in these games. So players need an easy tool to buy time even when they lose their main army 1-3 times. Players should only be allowed to win if they can beat my army 4 or more times in one match.
Otherwise it is like you win a football match when the first goal is done. That would be boring. That is how SC2 and WC3 feels to me. With skill you probably have these options, but causal players need an easy tool that is not too strong in a pro players hand. And I think walls can be that.
Let's say they attack, and you're not ready. So you build walls to keep them out. They see this, and decide OK fine - we won't commit to an attack. We'll just sit outside your base and then take over the rest of the map around you. Soon you'll starve out of resources while they build up a massive war chest and continue to race up the tech tree. It sounds to me like this building walls thing sounds pretty casual and not something you'd see in high-level play.
you make to many negative assumptions. That's why your example works. For example you assume that the walled in guy will not use the extra minutes to harass and to force the enemey to wall to or the walled in guy have seen the opponent's unit composition and will use the extra time to build more counter units etc. So walls give you time to make decisions. You can still made bad decisions like never go outside with your army. But you can also made good decisions. In Age 2 there are also pro players and they use walls.
I would love to see Grubby share his thoughts on a game like Beyond All Reason. It's so different from these rts games and I think the TA style games are pretty unexplored for the most part.
I used to play the crap out of SC2, even made top 8 internationally back in beta. However due to other changes in my life I stopped playing in HotS, but to this day I still watch competitive SC2 through Winter and LowKo. However I know by now that SC2 requirements has far surpassed my mechanical skills to be competitive and since I'm a competitive mindseted player I no longer play that game. That makes me not play SC2 but still enjoy the dynamics of the game, the patch notes that change the meta and the cool micro battles from pros in early game etc.
Same can be said for WC3. I never played it online for real (only a few super casual no brain fun 4v4 games) but I'm aware of a lot of tactics, micro battles and little things that I can spot that can be described as skill expression from watching every single of your WC3 videos :D
To me that is what makes RTS fun to watch and overall a good game. For me a good RTS simply NEEDS to have something that can be translated into skill expression, I think that is the top-top priority for the type of gamer like myself. I'm not casual enough to not care about these things, but not hardcore enough to actually try to do them, little in-between.
That is why I still think that nothing can beat WC3 and SC2 in the genre. Nobody managed to produce anything like it where the Blizzard phylosophy is just superior which is:
"Easy to learn, hard to master."
What I would long for in an RTS would be basically a mix of SC2 and WC3. Better game engine and QoL things in the UI, etc but with an added hero/rpg/creeping/upkeep/anything that comes to mind mechanics that break the mathematical approach of SC2.
Furthermore don't forget that for SC2 by far the most played game type is Co-op, which is in my opinion the perfect way to keep a casual gamer playing your RTS that is something - as far as I know - no other RTS has. It is the perfect gamemode to be casual, try weird things, throw the meta out the window and just have pure fun on different type of maps with different commanders/strategies... but also have the possibility to add super hard content to appeal to the thrill seeking audience as well with mutators.
I could think of a game mode in SC2 that would try to elevate the Multiplayer aspect of the game into this commander like gamestyle, where you could also choose 2 power-ups on ladder to modify your race mechanics, that would imrpove SC2 replayability and add some different type of randomness to the current mathematical approach of high level play. That would be immersly hard to balance, but would be really fun to play and watch
(Imagine TvP , but terran has automated refineries as a power-up, and they just hide random refineries in the corner of the map to make gas heavy builds, while Protoss has warpable Immortals making their early push hit much harder and the terran having to focus the warp prism by any means, etc.)
Just a though experiment.
Anyway I love the talk channel, this is the only YT channel currently that I never miss any uploads, so please keep it up, you have such a good take on many aspects of games etc.
Pet Logan for me plz. :)
Done, he did not react as he was asleep
I remember commenting about this on another Grubby talks:
If you remove aspects of a game but add nothing to it to spice it up, all you are doing is babying the game down.
Even dota(allstars) took army control away from the player but in exchange added several layers to the game like shop buying, and some heroes even become mini army commanders like Holy Knight and Chaos Knight.
And Meepo. Man Meepo players have the same APM as a SC player at the lower levels.
Good analysis
I'm a casual player. Sorry for my bad english. English is not my native language.
In an rts I want something that I want in every game --> A lot of choices and each of my decisions shall matter!
Decision making vs. decision execution
Do my decisions matter if my skill to control the game matters more? (as in SC2 for example)
--> Probably not.
Base building
Do I have many choices when it comes to building up my base in SC or WC3? Do I have more choices in Age 2 or Age 4?
--> probably yes
Resources
Do I have many choices when it comes to choosing the resources on which to build my army in SC/WC3? In these games there are only 2 resources and most of the units/structures need both resources. In Age 2 and 4 I can at least decide between trash (food/wood) and quality (gold) units and my available resources can decide which I should to go for the moment. (Not to be forgotten is stone for defensive structures.)
--> In SC and WC there is no real decision
Scouting
Do I have many choices when it comes to scouting? In SC and WC3 I know the map, where the opponent is, where all expansions are and where all other interessting locations are. In age 2 and 4 maps are auto-generated. So in Age I have to scout the map and where the interessting locations are and not only what my opponent is doing. Interessting locations are not only the "expansions", but also the narrow spots for defending and attacking? So do I have more to scout in Age than in SC or WC?
--> I think yes. So I have to make more decisions that matter. What I want to scout first, second etc.
Map Design
Do I have many choices to defend my bases when I have just 1-2 little entries to my base? (SC ramps for example!) Or would be a more open map better so I can decide which side of my base is more or less defended through buildable, destructable walls or defensive structures instead of undestructable cliffs? So the map decide that for me!
--> So In my opinion in terms of decision making the map design of SC and WC is aweful. In Age 2 and 4 there is much more map variety. How cool are nomad maps for example? Would nomad-like maps cool in WC3 or SC? In my opinion yes! But only in combination with auto-generated maps.
Pro Players vs. Causal Players
So I think there are players like Grubby and many other pro players that have more fun with challenging the control of all this stuff instead of welcoming more decisions that matter.
Otherwise I can't explain while people are satisfied with the base building in WC3 or the scouting possibilities in SC2 or prefer hand crafted maps instead of auto-generated maps or appreciate a good unit control instead of complaining that 2 resources, both of which are always needed, offer too little freedom of choice. Of course, a good unit control is important, but base building with more decisions that matter, a more complex resource system, more interessting stuff to scout and more map variety is just as important as that. So in sum and in my opinion Age 2 is a much better game as WC3. In WC3 you have this cool hero and micro stuff and the controls are very good, but all decisions that are important in this context depend massively on the player's ability to control the game very well, which means that many important decisions cannot be made at all by casual players, because there is not the time for. And I like it to control a few knights in Age 2 to harass my opponent. Especially good with mounted archers. I love that this is possible in Age 2 and 4, but that is not everything. It is just an option to show micro. Of course, it would be cool if the controls would be as good and the units and upgrades would be as recognizable as in SC2, but besides that it is not much Age 2 can learn from SC2 or WC3. There is much more stuff SC and WC can learn from Age.
Conclusion
That is the main problem of these games for casual rts players who appreciate strategy and less the real time part. The real time counteracted (in german: kontakariert) the strategy part and the challnge is to find the right balance between these two things.
Casual players need more time to make and execute a decision. So give us options to decide something important before and after a battle, where we had time. After losing a battle I want time to decide something that can compensate for my mistake. In Age 2 the overall pacing is slower and we have stone walls. So we have more time to decide something that matters.
Great thoughts.
The core characteristics of an RTS are being in real time and having some kind of combat mechanic, otherwise it would be a city builder or a turn based game. i like the definition GiantGrantGames created for RTS as being Real Time Sandbox, as the most played/most acclaimed RTS games are maintained by user created content
After playing WC3 from 2004 to 2012, I found enjoyment playing at Paradox Games. Hoi4 (Hearts of iron 4) is now my favorite game among them all.
What the "Decision making > APM" crowd tends to miss is that APM is not just about having the highest number. In AoE4 there is a pro-ish player called Don Artie whose APM is almost half of that of an average diamond player. He doesn't click fast, he thinks fast, which allows him to act really efficiently. And that's what the "RT" in "RTS" is really about. It's a brain exercise where your smartness is divided by time. There needs to be plenty of room for skill expression in that department. Stripping that is like turning every chess piece into a rook.
I'm a big casual gamer and to me that means that I'm not interested in putting an effort into becoming good at the games I'm playing. I love the dark souls series, I've played 2500h+ of dota, wc3 and a bunch of other games you've mentioned. But to me the meta is uninteresting and I like to play a game for the enjoyment of it and not for my self-improvement of it, even though I like difficult games.
The thing I like the most in a game is feeling the impact of the damage values of your choices. All of the enemies in the dark souls series will kill you in a few hits, but you can also do the same to them with the right items/build. The same goes for dota and wc3. And seeing an epic visual effect that emotionally resonates with that damage value and might be considered over the top makes it satisfying to watch as well.
You brought up the spectacle of a game in some other video, and to me the spectacle is lost in a lot of these new games. They mostly look kind of dull really. Where are the grand sorceries and oversized fat axes? Where are the op ultimates you need to run from? It's just not there.
And maybe the hardcore player base doesn't like playing rts games with op heroes like in wc3 or want anything spectacular that tickles the childish part of your brain. But they already have a big palette of games to choose from. More than a lot of other genres of games and they're outnumbered 4 to 1.
The only thing I was missing in this video was the spectacle. I greatly enjoy listening to your well hashed out thoughts and would love to see what you make of what I've said.
This is really useful feedback and I will be incorporating it in some future video, thank you
Games like Supreme Commander allow a lot of automation and nice shortcuts, that makes a game more enjoyable, as the actions are not "mechanical" difficult, but you can more intuitively do them, like drawing a circle with your mouse around a large amount of units, or having a massive zoom level gives you an easier time to view the battlefield.
However, if a game allows such things, it needs something else to be difficult and the player will shift attention to other things, or the scale gets larger, so even while you do things more efficiently, you do many things at once, and micro in a battle becomes less game-breaking important, if you can out-macro your opponent in a equally strong manner.
A real problem of old RTS is that some "cheese" exists that will make games of newbies extremely one-sided. Players that use the cheese tactic will win artificially more games, they dont get better, but the moment the opponents can beat the cheese, they fall a long way down as their skill is not real.
So modern RTS have to make sure you have a reasonable learning curve and avoid cheese strategies, as newbies will have a much more narrow strategic options if all there is that someone tries a cheese and either wins or fails.
Comeback potential is also something that a lot of RTS simply dont offer. You snowball a game, as small wins early can have drastic consequences, so the games are not forgiving at all.
Warcraft 3 has that with experience and all its mechanics provide a snowball effect.
In Starcraft, if you get a rush in when someone is not perfectly ready for it, they just die, its game over.
Especially casual players like the 10 minute - no rush and building up before they get pressured.
Stormgate has a massive problem with that, as the early pressure is way too strong against the casual player.
I found some of the logic about casualness quite flawed, I would liken “pala rifle” to more of a person preference. The player probably knows he will never be the best he can be with such rigidity, but he enjoys that strategy the most. By my definition, that’s not some sub category of casualness, because you can still be a veritable hardcore gamer, and yet not take the game (or your progress in it) that seriously.
Having said all that, it’s a very interesting question and analysis.
Yeah, I think my definition of casual is anything but ironclad. This video and the comments it sparked was really helpful. Someone on my Discord says, casual/hardcore is something only a person can emotionally evaluate about themselves. It's about their emotional investment or even orientation. No measurable metric could determine if someone is casual or not, when arguing in good faith
The thing about appealing to casuals, that I really like, is that everyone starts out as a casual.
Like with league of legends, I started out just playing Morgana support just never leaving lane and having no idea wtf im doing.
Then because I had fun, I continued.
Theres no games that I didnt start out playing casual, that I didnt drop really quickly.
(Depends on your definition ofc, like in WoW i started after watching content and learnign alot, but I definitely never installed addons nor changed my playstyle to help me progress until I was deep into it).
We also got Sanctuary: Shattered Sun somewhere on the Horizon!
I Identify as a casual player in general, but especially regarding RTS. I like to relax while I play, and for that reason the last time I played RTS online was several years ago, because, I do not want to play competitive, which is what most RTS-players want, I want to play inefficient builds, not because I want to play bad, but because I want to play something I find fun! I usually play different campaigns from different RTS-games in a variety of ways to make it none repetitive, also some custom maps at times, or with some mods. (If you look for custom campaigns done by people, Jayborino / JayborinoPlays is the very man to follow here on TH-cam, that I know of). Maybe soon the AI will get good enough to be a worthwhile option, but we are not there, yet.
Maybe I would play more online if I would know that others also want to play none competitive, I have not reflected to much about it. But I think that variety is more important to me then human human interaction, and therefore custom campaigns with lots of differences is more appealing to me, where things are not the same all the time, and you can experience something new.
Then there is also the Issue that I use a Linux-distribition as my main operating system, and that makes it always more difficult to play RTS-games. STEAM is a very good platform for Linux gaming, but, it does not go all the way, and there are so many RTS-games that are none steam compatible that makes them a turd to play at times. For me personally I would play RTS much more if I knew a good and reliable way of playing them on a Linux based platform.
I am also one person who does not mind a long lasting game what so ever. A game that takes 10 hours to finish is not a problem for me. I pause, or save, and resume later when I have time (however, I agree that playing with players would make such a playstyle much more difficult, because I doubt most people would deal with it, even if it is fully possible to do so).
One other thing I like with RTS is huge unit counts. Empire Earth is one such game where you with just a small modification can increase the maximum unit count to 0,1 million units. That was so much fun to play with one of my friends, the armies where enormous, but, it also took a very long time to play the game, we played for several days resuming from saves with regular breaks.
Every clip I see of Stormgate looks more aggressively mediocre than the last. It looks like a Warcraft 3 mod to put in the Starcraft 2 units and the team gave up halfway through.
I really enjoy listening to a Grubby Talks while on a walk.
the perfect RTS for me would be a marriage of Starcraft 2 and DotA 2 - for campaign, skirmish, and custom games: be it ORPG, altered melee, survival RPG, tower defense, or etc.
with all their modern functionalities like vector targeting, unlimited (and configurable) max selection, convenient control group assignment, extra unit resource (mana, energy, fury, egonergy, whatever), extra configurable resources (wood, stone, etc. other than gold or minerals), convenient stat scaling, extra configurable tabs (top bar call-downs), video within in game, vector targeting, proper area of effect indicators, chat wheel with voices, arcade authorization and certification, lobbies within maps (nexus coop), buffable training/construction time (chrono-boost), cooldown reduction, configurable custom game options and race selection (direct strike), custom campaigns, and etc.
(maybe just have quickcast disabled on ranked)
Great video as always Grubby!
I feel personally there seems to be a disconnect from modern game developers, perhaps by being too close to the thing they are trying to create. I mean, growing up in the 90's, I played RTS games because they were fun and awesome. Half or more of the terminology we now associate with the genre didn't exist back then, because as players continued to play (much like in Fighting Games) they created the terminology like macro, micro, 'cheese,' etc that has now become common place.
I also think this modern distinction of 'hardcore' and 'casual' players is an odd thing to me because when we played these games as kids, at least to my knowledge, people didn't associate themselves with one or another. We were all just players, without these restrictive labels, and played games because they were fun, not because they were 'balanced' necessarily, but because (in the case of Warcraft 3) commanding an army with a cool hero at the head of it was awesome, and it still is.
I'd prefer it in all honesty if modern game dev's would make the game they want to make, first and foremost, rather than trying to please an imaginary player base, or somehow trying to make the genre more accessible, even though it was already accessible to begin with?
I'm looking forward to when these new games come out, though my main worry is they will all just be lesser versions of the classics, without a discernible identity of their own to stand the test of time.
We shall see!
I think the way to go is making a typical RTS but focus on certain niches of players. For instance, some players prefer micromanaging troops, but other prefer base building, or economy management, or roleplay, or diplomacy better.
It seems like as SC became the golden standard for RTS games, all games became more and more focused on micromanaging combat, and those other aspects became neglected.
The big trouble is that Warcraft 3 plays so well, strikes the right balance of units and variety of races, and has a semi decent story. I think upkeep is a really fun concept too.
StarCraft 2 just felt too vanilla to me in PvP after enjoying heroes in Warcraft.
They dedicated the right resources to this game and the spent the right amount of money. The box art was so good and i remember going to the mall to buy it. Truly an amazing game, but the learning curve is so difficult these days for multiplayer warcraft that I just prefer to watch now. 😅
I really liked AOE 1+2 as well but Warcraft 3 will always be number 1.
i like both wc3 and sc2. as a game at its core, i slightly prefer wc3. but everything else i prefer sc2 a lot as a package. its so timeless, it has a nice client, it has so many quality of life features that has become the industry standard by now, the way they merge campaign with achievements and motivation.
you know what would have been awesome?
take wc3 tft. as it was. 1:1 dont change anything about it at all. but then you give it the sc2 treatment, and modernize the back and frontend under the hood, so you basically have the sc2 client with all of its features and options and achievments and whatnot, but if you hit play, you re playing wc3 instead of sc2. THAT should have been reforged tbh.
@@MaybeTiberius that would have been amazing. Clearly they don't think rts is the future of gaming or profits sadly
I swear Grubby if not for Warcraft 3 would have been a teacher and now he is like a teacher of RTS
28:12
Starcraft 2 (and Warcraft 3) has a very good single-player campaign, that is not just a glorified tutorial for multiplayer, or couple of skirmishes against the AI (which tends to be the case with a lot of smaller RTS projects). I would play an RTS with a good story campaign similar to SC/WC even if it didn't have a multiplayer component at all.
SC2 also has difficulty options, which lowers the barrier for entry for more casual players, and can give a challenge for more experienced players.
i hope this goes full circle. they build casual big playerbase first, when it is big enough then there is room for more complex ones.
For me AoE4 had the best initial approach. They were clearly focusing on competitive multiplayer (though you can argue how successful they were with it), but they always had the goal to make it more accessible than AoE2. So they did not necessarily cater to 'casuals' but they tried to bring more beginners into the genre.
In my case, AoE4 was successful and where I previously failed to get into AoE2 or Starcraft, I am now much more open to ambitiously get into new RTS.
Waiting for the next rts games 😊
18:30 Fun is enjoying something even when you lose.
Great video, with a lot of good talking points! I think it's super interesting how there's a lot of similar conversations happening in the RTS community right as there are in the Fighting Game community (skill expression vs approachability, casual vs hardcore, Single player vs Multiplayer, ect...) which makes sense because both genres have been branded my gaming at large as "try hard" or "sweaty" genres.
Personally, I really enjoy both genre's casually because playing either genre is extremely exciting in their own ways. In RTS the frantic energy that high speed multitasking while strategizing creates is an experience truly unique to the genre, and for Fighting Games the mind games paired with the skill expression of combos creates so many fun and unique situations. I think both genre's are awesome despite me being stuck as a gold level player in both!
"This question and more do I set to answer in this video"
@grubby u know "Beyond all Reason" ? rly nice new rts with very nice ideas and concepts
Eternal Return (a Korean MOBA Battle Royale) was close to dying because it was a sweaty korean game until it made a bold move and removed solos mode entirely, and the resulting mixing of casuals and strong players and forcing them to play as team completely fixed the game's problems of a few strong solo players exterminating the lobby and leaving you with no resources to feasibly defeat them with.
I think the same should happen to RTS; focus and balance around teamplay, thereby allowing players to not have to be good at every part of the game in order to see any success. This also lets you not need to dumb the game down as much, because it's no longer critical to be good at every aspect of the game to not get crushed, and you can instead focus on different stuff like economy, spellcasters, naval/air, etc. to supplement whatever your ally is doing, and making stuff like scouting valuable even when you're too noob to know what to do with the info you collect.
Grubby, I played a lot of SC2, peaked Gold with toss like 6 years ago, but I also play a lot of fps.
And my point is I would want to play an rts game in online pvp, a game where the best players are performing optimally at an average 100apm (meaningful clicks) and not require more apm to further their ceiling.
A game that actually relies on strategy much more than in SC2, where in most ranks a player with slightly better mechanics will dominate over over a player with slightly better strategy.
I agree whit Grubby's standpoint. Many games in many different genres have made this mistake in the last decade. Making things more easy takes away the enjoyment of getting better or overcoming strife. This basically mirrors real life too we tend to enjoy things a lot that are considered hard but fair and get bored real fast whit easy tasks/jobs. Go watch any documentary about the space race where they let the people talk who worked for the program at the time for a great example. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Games should ideally have a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. I want to watch top players do some things I can never even fucking dream, but people don't want to be too overwhelmed. I say this as a not casual gamer, I am Conq in aoe4
The space race was people doing their jobs, and trying to make history. Hardly something that refers to general hobbies for people. Considering how many people like to watch movies and shows in their (often limited) free time rather than learning an instrument or other challenging skill, I kind of doubt what you're saying. There is also the big difference between challenge as something that requires focus and effort and challenge that requires a long learning curve and a lot of time investment.
IMO the main problem of any complex, mechanically deep game, including hardcore RTS, is that tutorials are laughably bad and they are treated as an afterthought.
For example, losing - or winning, for that matter - a PvP match isn't actionable. The game should highlight your mistakes and offer you, say, a set of training missions that improve your weak areas.
Also AI opponents aren't all that good and usually aren't customizable. Ideally, the game should also offer you a bot that imitates the style of play of a player that you lost to, so you can actually safely practice and "do your homework" before continuing your multiplayer journey.
I think this was also a similar issue for the fighting game genre, especially a few years back. Thou most of the new fighting games that has done this are pretty successful and arguably made a new golden age for the genre, since more mainstream people paid attention to fighting games more than the last few years.
One popular example is like Street Fighter 6 adding a classic and modern control scheme, which had some mix reaction, but for the most part did not ruin the game with most people still playing the classic controls whether it is a pro or casual player, plus modern has its own advantages and disadvantages compared to classic.
So, I wonder if RTS will thrive again at some point in the next few years. Whether it's from designing a new RTS to be easy for casual or just making a full packaged game that players liked, I don't know.
Smash bros is basically simplified fighting games, except it has a lot of depth in the finesse and controls. The genius is in making something simple to play and pick up but having a lot of depth. Any RTS could do this if they lowered the mechanical floor and useless macromanagement, "smart" controls and have the option to switch etc. ; have guides...
Fighting game genre is a great example because it's overall an unpopular niche genre, but Smash Bros is one of the most successful game franchises of all time and hardcore fighting game players don't even consider it a real fighting game, choosing to disown their biggest W.
@@Nuvizzle The creator of Smash doesn't consider it a fighting game either. The whole idea of Smash was to not be a fighting game.
I can tell you what I want as a casual player, Grubby: pause. I want to pause the game, issue orders, and then unpause. That's pretty much it. I'm old.
Definitely one of the best ways to preserve what an RTS is, while still offering a concession to allow players to enjoy the game more. Total War: Warhammer 3, and Dune: Spice Wars offer this option will still have enthralling RTS gameplay!
Dawn of War 1 was absolutely GOATed
As a casual player, I want a good editor and cool arcade maps. More RPGs with save/load system etc
banger of a video!
I identify casual as someone who, in their little free time, wants to have fun and get quick rewards. A casual player normally doesn't like to compete, and if he competes he will only have fun in defeat if he wins something in the game even though he loses. If he enters a game and doesn't win anything right away, he leaves. That's why games have become relatively easier over time. No casual person wants to enter a game to lose to someone else or to the machine and win nothing. Mobas work in a way for casuals because even if they don't learn properly they will still be placed by matchmaking on a team that wins for them, even if at a very low elo and then they receive the reward. And you usually also get rewards just for playing. I believe that the casual person cares much more about the reward than about improving and feeling like he is good at the game. That's why many pay for elo job or boosting. When my girlfriend gets stuck somewhere in a game, she usually asks me to take her place and pass the part thats "impossible" for her. Because the game stops being fun if you just die and get nothing more. There are still some more aspects for the casual player, but the text is getting huge.
I've played sc1, wc3, and sc2 when they released over the years and I've never enjoyed pvp in those games. I played the campaign and custom maps for sc1 and wc3 and with sc2 I still play and enjoy the co-op (2 player pve) mode.
Actually, if you haven't grubby, give sc2 coop a try.
Concerning your difficulty comparison in an rts and elden ring. I would like to note that people would be surprised if they actually showed an RTS game to a non-gamer at all. People that have never played games intuitevely learn to control a character in 3rd or 1st person modes in a few minutes. If someone hasnt played MOBA or RTS ever, actually learning that the camera moves or learning and not forgetting the functions of like 5 basic buildings is an actually difficult task. Very interesting video and breakdown!
I am starting to learn the same thing from a video someone showed me,
th-cam.com/video/Rl4myN8q_KM/w-d-xo.htmlsi=tse0bmksh7Hw6A1D