Man.. that reminds me of that LOTR-themed turn-based tactics game for the Gameboy Advance.
Sounds like fun! Would you be able to choose a "hero" character like in DoW?
My idea was that you'd create a hero and you'd be able to switch them between different classes/archetypes that would more-or-less simulate the features of doctrines/commanders. There would be light RPG stuff in between battles too, the idea was to have something like Age of Empires Online's Home City that you could also decorate and customize. I also wanted something like Shogun 2's Avatar Conquest for the multiplayer, where your random battles add progress towards capturing territories for your clan/faction/whatever in an overarching conflict. Could even do Helldivers 2-style events and stuff for that level.
Of course, all that is secondary to having a good RTS. But Starcraft proved that even a mechanically uninteresting game can still attract a vast audience based on the stuff surrounding the gameplay. |
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I wonder this myself often, especially after I see people losing their shit over stuff like Stormgat. I look at that and see only an insanely ugly bit of digital trash.
It's really hard to make a proper RTS. I have far too much to do professionally but I've kept a design document buried in my files of a dream RTS that takes the best of Company of Heroes and Battle for Middle-Earth II. I might have enough time to try making something like that in a year or so. |
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That's the real problem - aesthetics is so much more than just how something looks, or visual fidelity, graphics quality, etcetera. With enough time anyone can make an ultra high-resolution model of something with a ton of detail, but if that model is shown in poor lighting with glitchy animations and so on, it's going to look worse than something comparatively lower in quality in a more artistically-unified environment.
The overall feel of a game can get you to overlook areas where the developers have economized. I never noticed the tanks did not have round wheels in Company of Heroes 2 until someone mentioned it here - tiny details become less relevant when they add up to an overall good-quality whole. It is always the sum of the parts as opposed to the individual parts themselves, and that is why I still really don't like Company of Heroes 3. The individual parts might be good, or even better in some respects than Company of Heroes 2, but it doesn't add up to a unified whole that I find to be worth playing. |
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Nobody wants to make RTS games. It takes a lot of effort and a lot of design work behind the scenes before you even get to the coding. They're extremely complex games and there are so many moving parts that all mesh together to make the game "feel" right.
Indie studios largely avoid them for this reason - they also avoid them because they are largely not profitable. Even Age of Empires IV, one of the bigger RTS releases of the past decade, has only a fraction of the sales of anything in a "trendy" genre - battle royale, hero shooter, survival crafting, etc. For this same reason, AAA publishers and developers will not commit to them either, or will only commit where the profit is assured - take a look at upcoming RTS games with buzz surrounding them and count how many are remakes or remasters.
The other problem with RTS games, from an indie perspective, is that they require too much maintenance to remain successful. There were two fairly large attempts at a "Company of Heroes-like" RTS in the last decade - Iron Harvest and Ancestors Legacy. Iron Harvest was pretty shit from the get-go, but Ancestors Legacy was honestly amazing. It nailed the feel of Company of Heroes in terms of unit play and counterplay, and the developers had some competitive aspirations. The problem with both of these was a lack of investment - the developers of Iron Harvest straight up said they weren't really interested in balancing or supporting a multiplayer scene, and Ancestors Legacy just fell off as it wasn't profitable to patch anymore, and the balance was left in a bad place after the expansion faction released.
So it's a difficult road to make an RTS, and even if you make one it's no guarantee that you'll get the profits needed to support it and foster a healthy community. Another big problem is that RTS has traditionally been a Western genre - Japanese developers largely don't make them, and those are the only large development studios that will okay a project purely on the merits of making a game, not for the potential for a profit. |
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Katitof is 151cm but he likes to round up!
Honestly though thank you for giving me a good laugh today, I do love seeing small penis syndrome on full public display. |
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Ah yes, the good old "you're not allowed to have an opinion on the game unless you throw a certain portion of your money and life into its abyss" argument. |
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It's hard to be passionate when you already know you're maybe a month away from losing your job. They probably have resumés out there already. |
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Or, more likely, never. |
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I think the blame falls pretty squarely on the management, and that means the people actually calling the day-to-day shots at Relic. I don't think SEGA had much to do with the game's state at all beyond pressure to release it, which certainly didn't help any.
There has been a steady trickle of Glassdoor reviews on Relic, even after the main round of layoffs, and the one consistent thing that people who worked there actually say is that the management is straight-up incompetent. This should be pretty obvious anyways since Company of Heroes 3 is a game which is entirely lacking in vision. You can tell, from the way things fit together, to the way the game is discussed, that there was no guiding principle to its development beyond "make another Company of Heroes". It doesn't matter if there are talented artists or coders or anyone working on the project if the people actually calling the shots have no idea what to do beyond producing a pale imitation of what came before. |
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That man has the expression of the average Relic employee right now. |
Canada
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cblanco ★ 
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VonManteuffel 
Heartless Jäger 
