Profile of CombatMuffin

I like Starcraft as a game...

I hate Starcraft as a Strategy Game, but not because its Starcraft, but because it has all the elements of an old and IMHO obsolete game design.

Starcraft, AoE and the like have little to no force projection* whatsoever. That means numbers are the key to win, and that means strategy only plays a part IF your macro skills are on par with mine. If you have better micro but worse macro, you lose almost always.

What it is doing to promote esports though, is awesome.

EDIT: My bad. Its not Force Projection, its called force multiplier. A CoH and real life example are snipers. A single sniper can kill many, many more times its unit size and composition, if used properly.

It's a bit pathetic that Hollywood is so married to brand recognition that stunts like this get pulled. Every movie that comes out is a sequel of something else, or an adaptation of an already recognizable intellectual property. It's gonna make it real tough for new storytellers to get the support to tell new stories.

See, the new formula in Hollywood goes like this: You don't want to risk being creative, so you base yourself off a book or, nowadays, a comic book. Otherwise, do a remake/reboot. Creativity is for french art cinema.

In videogames, the formula goes something more like: Make something you've seen in Hollywood (explosions, car chase, slow mo), make a sequel to squeeze more money. If all else fails, do a remake of an old classic. Creativity is for the Indie crowd.

@Riggs:

Dont confuse Relic with THQ. While Relic is in charge of the game outcome, they are not in charge of keeping it alive and kicking, not when they had to get that stuff approved by their parent company (THQ). Keeping those servers up, producing anti-cheat measures, keeping watch over cheaters, etc., costs a lot of money. Relic was hired to make a game, and maintain that game for as long as the publisher pays. I'm willing to assume that THQ stop paying for patches a long time ago, with few exceptions, and only paid for stuff like the CM and the servers (it costs around $40,000.00 to patch a game on a console, considering salaries and stuff, PC cant be far behind)

You gotta remember, Relic isn't just necessarily working on Company of Heroes. They could have two, three or four projects at different stages. Some of those may not even be outside the drawing board, others, like the mysterious one announced during the THQ bankruptcy, may be i the middle of development. Many times, studios will have games that you never heard of, and never will hear of, simply because they never released that info to the public. For all we know, they already have homeworld 3 concept art done, and basic game loop design jotted down, but we know nothing about it.

Just saying that in reply to your "why should I bother with a new game when they dont even bother maintaining the ones they already have" (heavily paraphrased).

Read the whole article here. Are AAA Studios DOA?

Don't get me wrong, the article is fine. I simply want the ideal gaming method. The closer to free while developers earning their pay is ideal to me. There's two sides to every coin though: Small studios have regained strength, like I mentioned, through mobile games mostly. The other niche has been indie games, where gameplay has trumped graphics (they are following the formula that made games successful in the first place).

The real issue with AAA games, is that they've started to pump them out like Candy, once every year. Most of the big hits follow the good old formula: 3 years of development. Bethesda does this, Bungie does this, Epic Games, Infinity Ward used to do this, DICE used to do this. Not even going to talk about Valve and Blizzard because they are special cases, but they sort of follow that mentality.

Of course, there's also the big shots that develop for gazillions of years and their games suck. Some people aren't as good developing as others. Such is life.

while if you base a tournament on mirror matches except it will be a failure in esports measuring terms because significant portion of the fans wont watch it , it will require 1 match for the wehrmacht and one for the soviets and unless its played on a chessboard to ensure no map side favoring it will require 4 games istead of 3 , this is not shooting yourself in the foot its shooting yourself in the head with a bazooka or a panzerschreck to ensure you wont miss the hit .

You entire post comes down to one simple point though: That a significant portion of the fans won't watch it.

What if... and I mean this as a big what if (brace yourselves!): They deliver Mirror Matches and they actually DONT suck? What if they aren't THAT badly balanced, and most people actually end up liking them?

But that is impossible in the eyes of nay-believers. Its not a huge possibility, but it is plausible at the very least. You simply cannot assume people are going to hate it, just because of what they say right now, based on an incomplete version. Hell, most of them haven't even played it!