I think Blizzard would put more effort if there was a huge following. They didn’t just let World of Warcraft go to the wayside with the disappointment of the previous expansion. It was still a huge success. The fact that the original strategy team disbanded and moved to other projects (or companies) is pretty telling. There’s no real incentive for them to focus on this (as they have clearly shown) or try again like Microsoft has done with Age of Empires 2… they released some 4 different versions of the same game! With the latest definitive edition being the best.
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Some quick facts: WC3 sold around 1-2 million copies (Wikipedia). Recently Overwatch sold around 50 million copies. Note that Overwatch is a VASTLY easier game to make and polish than an RTS. Making pure RTS games isn’t cost-effective from management point of view.
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FrostGiant will save the day but it remains a couple years away, sadly
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Right. The problem (for us) is that businesses are never satisfied with what they just did and want to make more and more money. And there always is something bigger than what was just created. Blizzard’s standards are rediculously high at this point, that they are looking at bigger things. Strategy games are peanuts to them at this point.
RTS nobody likes to lose 100 pvp matches before start winning if you’r a pure newbie, FPS are also much more fun and relaxing games.
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As a sort of casual RTS player, I can see why the genre was never as popular as some others, like FPS as you mentioned. There’s a lot going on at the same time; it’s impossible to play without multi-tasking. They’re too complicated, even when a company like Blizzard who specializes in intuitive interfaces and gameplay tries to make it more simplistic.
I personally can’t keep up with everything to the degree that others can. I was watching some videos yesterday, and the player was pretty incredible with just how much he could actively do at the same time. He was building, defending, expanding, pushing his army forward, leveling, attacking, using individual heroes and groups, items and spells… on top of all the hotkeys, managing upkeep, watching health bars, and everything else going on. And he was on top of everything. It’s just too much. I can manage but not excell at all this. He was playing like there was 7 different people, each controlling an individual section.
Compare this to any other genre that exists, where you only control one character at a time, and can go at your own pace… RTS games don’t even let you do that! There’s wave of monsters in singleplayer, you gotta expand and keep moving. I always feel on edge, like I have to keep going, only to fall behind or get all my stuff slaughtered and having to start over.
And this is coming from someone who plays RTS games. Imagine how it must be for those just starting.
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Comparing RTS games to shooters is like comparing chess to soccer. It’s not that chess is a worse game than soccer. It’s just that soccer is more appealing to MUCH more people and that makes it MUCH more profitable. When you make a great RTS, you can expect to sell maybe 1-2 million copies. When you make a great FPS you can expect to sell 10-20 million copies. A public company CEO must carefully look at his ROI and it simply doesn’t make any business sense to make a pure RTS. That’s why in recent years DOZENS of new shooters were released and not a SINGLE high budget RTS. Basically SC2 is the only big RTS released in a DECADE.
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It doesn’t help that HOTS didn’t perform well in spite of DOTA and LoL being very successful. They’ve literally stopped supporting every strategy game they have.
It would be interesting if they tried a Total War or Grand Strategy type game. Those are still alive and kickin’.
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Awesome and a very ambitious moves could be: Warcraft 4 followed by WoW 2, or Diablo 4 followed by World of Diablo. I doubt they have the guts to do something like that. The sad part is that in terms of budget and skills they have ALL what it takes.
Hang on now. Note that Overwatch was considered a really good game while Warcraft 3 Reforged got one of the worst ratings ever by players on review sites. Why do you think the sales on a very very badly done game is a good indicator of market interest in RTS’s or Warcraft 3?
I mean look at total war warhammer. Is it a different kind of RTS? Yes but it might show that if the RTS game is done well, it will sell. I think the problem is Blizzard made a bad rework.
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Another thing to consider is that Blizzard is no longer a PC predominant company, while strategy games are primarily focused on the PC. Other than WoW, I don’t believe there is a title currently being supported that’s only available on PC. Even Diablo made the switch to console for all 3 titles + Immortal being mobile. And with WoW taking over the reigns of Warcraft + all the other things mentioned on this thread, the Warcraft RTS is probably done. There’s no real argument against.
I think it would be great if they could figure out a way to make strategy games on a more epic scale to appeal to more players, and to have something new. Open world, massively online and social friendly games are all the rage now. Even Diablo 4 is adding some of those elements. Why can’t strategy games be more massive (but not more complicated on the individual level)?
WC3 ladder players have always mocked people who were playing a mod controlling just one unit… guess what happened then^^
The appealing problem is that when RTS game were a “thing” the average internet user had a total different background. There weren’t also the capabilities to produce the same graphic quality that a FPS has now. Even if you may not like the genre, playing a FPS is much more immersive than 20 years ago.
On the other hand I doubt you can see players capable of recreating some amazing space battle on Homeworld these days. They would most probably get lost the first week on how to rotate the camera and give up.
Ye, you can’t expect a RTS game to become a national sport right?^^
The real problem is that they never really evolved. When Blizzard was making SC2 they stated that they didn’t want to do “Starcraft BUT 3D”, so their forum was full of ideas given by the community. They ignored them all. They just went for a 3D version of Starcraft. They did good, because Starcraft was good. Everyone invited me to the game back them was saying “It’s like SC but 3D!”.
So, one side, it’s good to have this kind of quality standard of AoE, SC and so on. On the other side, this standard didn’t move in more than 20 years.
Instead look at the first UT and a game like Overwatch now.
And in all this, Reforged has just set RTS games 30 years back.
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This seems to happen with them a lot. Then they turn around and say we were going to make all these major changes, but the players have said they didn’t want them. I don’t remember everyone being up in arms about the changes promised for Reforged, but they definitely were for not including them. Who are these imaginary “players” they keep speaking of who don’t want these games to change?
I remember everyone being excited because Warcraft 3 was originally supposed to be a hybrid between an RPG and RTS. There was a lot more RPG planned early on. Then Blizzard decided to change it to be more like Warcraft, and people were disappointed. It got knocked for not being original.
I’d say it’s more likely that they don’t know how to evolve them properly. All their games have taken core elements from other games. The one time they tried something drastically different, like with Titan, it was a complete disaster and got canned. Or became Overwatch which isn’t at all like the other multiplayer shooters.
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In the far 2008 (more or less that year) we implemented a 3rd person view for tft units. It didn’t work on RoC, but in TFT you could actually move the character like a FPS. There were obvious problems like targeting behind walls and stuff like that, but if you apply it to DotA, you basically have a non graphical version of Overwatch.
That’s just how it goes buddy its not personal just business but wow is not far behind as far as genres go its just already developed the reason you see less MMOS now or at least good ones is the cost to develop is huge and when you can make more money off selling gems with a game like clash of clans why would you? I don’t blame blizzard times are changing and the current generation of gamers wants to play something a few weeks/months maybe a year tops and move on not exactly ideal for strategy games.
if that’s the only **** that is given to them, you can’t pretend they can play anything else no?
Am I the only one who sees the paradox in this? (Not you saying it, but the fact that it’s true.) People are playing these massive online games, intended to be played for years, yet they jump from game to game.
The crazy amount of options available probably doesn’t help. My backlog is insanely large, to the point where I just want to play and complete stuff, then move to the next. I just so happen to be on Warcraft 3 at the moment.
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You wanna know what’s REALLY funny?
I’m having more fun playing the same set of offline single-player RPGs since 2013 than I ever did playing WoW or any other Blizzard game that’s designed to have a shelf life of two years.
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What i would like to ad to it is that you need to be physically rdy to raise and maintain apm while doing all this and there are days when you are simply tired and want to have fun playing games and if you don’t play couple days your clickity goes down and you start to make more mistakes or click rly slow and life will get you sooner or later
It’s just unbelievable how fast some people are. I used to get slaughtered in multiplayer games, and after watching some of the video streams out there, I can see why. All you hear is repeated clicking at an incredibly fast and frequent pace. I’m sitting here just chilling and taking my time, and they’re over there queing up 20 buildings and units, leveling heroes, scouring the entire map, building towers next to the enemy base, fighting and expanding, completely controlling their individual heroes… within the first couple of minutes! I give them a lot of credit for being so efficient, but I doubt the majority of gamers can do this. It takes me like 10 minutes just to get out of bed. lol