Looking at the latest PS4 line up, there's no strategy games. I realize consoles aren't the most conducive to strategy games due to controller design. But I could really play some good strategy games on my PS3.
Has anybody found a solution for the controller issue? What about PS Vita? If you were releasing a game for PS3/4 how would you do it?
Xcom made it onto PS3. I don't know what it's sales were like, but I thought the game was a success, though maybe not on consoles. Maybe that's why we haven't seen any decent clones.
I think one way to do it is via hybrid games. Valkyria Chronicles, the basic gameplay is sound, I think it just has so much other stuff that is terrible or very niche. Something like AirMech or the Pandemic Battlezones might be cool.
Sub menus ?
The N64 had a good layout for Command And Conquer .
Everything was easy to get to, and assessable within 1 or 2 button presses.
Also note that the PS4 controller has far more buttons than the N64 controller did.
I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
While the controller is part of it, I don't think that is the defining factor.
The current marketplace, both the vocal players and the vocal game critics, have decided they don't like actual strategy.
Most have moved away from real strategy to the MOBA-style games that can be completed in minutes, before ADD kicks in and the person gets a text or something else that distracts them.
Strategy takes time and effort. Tactical games, be they first person shooters or MOBA, can be played in very short sessions with little mental power. Strategy typically means controlling a large battlefield with many clusters of units. Tactics is controlling an individual or small group for a single small task. Tactics is usually a single maneuver, strategy is a larger collection and series of maneuvers, often concurrent and interdependent.
Combine them and there is very little motivation to build strategy games: The broad marketplace sucks at them, players are not clamoring for them, critics are not asking for them, the ones that appear get very negative reviews because they are too niche or are compared to the gold age of strategy, they don't lend themselves to server-based processing so they are more likely to be pirated, and they are a very high financial risk. There is easier, less risky money to be made in other genres.
I personally dislike MOBA games as they are more tactical than strategy, controlling a main unit in specific tasks rather than issuing strategic commands to groups of assorted units across a large battlefield. I would love to see a reintroduction of the style common during the golden age of RTS, or even the later strategy games like the LotR strategy games. I'd love to see more games where you could have a multi-hour marathon session of actual strategy, especially on LAN games or a mix of multiple sites with friends at each.
Most MOBAs are sadly, not quick I think the norm is somewhere around 30-40 minutes. This random link i found via some googling shows game lengths for tournaments:
And you'll notice StarCraft 2 is actually shorter than both Dota2 and LoL, by 15 minutes.
Now, that said, the problem with realtime multiplayer strategy games is that they usually are one on one, and require juggling lots of attention as well as quick reflexes and rote memorization. The reason MOBAs tend to be more popular, is that they are group affairs, less juggling of attention, less reflexes required and to a degree, less rote memorization.
Turn based games? I have no idea why we don't see more. Out of flavor with the population at large?
I disagree with the claims that MOBAs require less juggling of attention, less reflexes, and less rote memorization. If you want to be successful as a team, you have to pay just as much attention as solo multiplayer games, and there's a substantial degree of reflexes required to maximize xp gains, and to throw another wrinkle into the equation, the most successful teams are able to pull together coordinated actions across multiple teammates that still require a substantial degree of reflexes.
On the memorization front, there are dozens of playable characters, each with their own unique abilities, and you better be at least fairly familiar with all their abilities if you're going to play with or against them.
If you're playing with less attention, less reflexes, and less memorization of character abilities, you're going to have very limited success and potentially very unhappy teammates... which is the primary reason I don't play them.
Most MOBAs are sadly, not quick I think the norm is somewhere around 30-40 minutes. This random link i found via some googling shows game lengths for tournaments:
I was about to mention the same thing. League of Legends matches (the only MOBA I've played) regular ran 30-50 minutes, and I'm an amature not some tournament player.
Length of the match isn't the biggest problem for me. Ideally for me, a game match (for any game) would be ~30 minutes. But if I have time and if the game is enjoyable, if it lasted longer that would be a good thing as long as it remained enjoyable and as long as I still had time.
I try to enjoy RTS games and TBS games. I really do enjoy some of them, but it's enjoyment mixed with aggravating annoyances.
I recently bought and played several TBS games for the DS. I enjoy them but also get annoyed at them.
For me personally, the reason why I don't like strategy games and turn-based tactic games is because I'm not too good at them, and when I start losing at them, it's not a quick death and quick respawn, it's a slow agonizing death and then restart from the beginning. Where's TBS and RTS checkpoints? Having to replay a 45 minute battle because I made a mistake at the last 5 minutes and went from victory to loss.
Many tower defense games (when they are survival-styled) are like this as well.
Often times they are wars of attrition, and wars of attrition suck, enjoyment-wise, and doubly so if you're the one bleeding the most resources.
MOBA's are fun, and team RTS and team TBS games are fun, because you're losing as a group. It's less psychologically "I suck, and have no excuse for it", it's "I suck, but my team will carry me so I'll have a fun time anyway", or "I suck, and my team along with me, we're all going down together but we'll put up a real fight.".
With RTS and TBS games, I also have to manage anywhere from half-a-dozen to five dozen units, and if I'm not paying attention to *all* of them, then I suffer losses that lead to more losses that lead to more and more and more, and... ten minutes later, I lose. And I know I'm going to lose, way earlier. If confident about this, I just restart the match (another 20-40 minutes wasted replaying the same level). Other times, I think I can recover and so press onward, but take more and more losses, slowly, gradually. I'm talking mostly about single-player vs the AI matches, not rage-quiting online matches.
Even in MOBA games I still have an opportunity to do something clever and help the team; and I only have to pay attention to my avatar and a few objects under my protection (while also noting the positions of enemies and allies - but you have to do that also in RTS and TBS games). There's still, even for a poor player, room for great achievements giving a nice enjoyment and feelings of pleasure. And also room for fighting alongside others (friends or complete strangers), creating pseudo-camaraderie even in suffering. "I got your back, neofacist21! I gots ur back!"
Often times they are wars of attrition, and wars of attrition suck, enjoyment-wise, and doubly so if you're the one bleeding the most resources.
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I love old RTS / TBS games. Some of the best gaming memories I have were old classic games that took over 5 hours per match ( Alpha Centauri for example ).
These games were far more challenging, and require a lot of thought and planning. Dealing with 300+ active units while fighting a war on 2 fronts, and managing resources is exiting !
Modern strategy games are more along the lines of "click button, watch things fight each other" . The games are not engaging, and seem to be made for people with very short attention spans.
I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most MOBAs are sadly, not quick I think the norm is somewhere around 30-40 minutes. ... notice StarCraft 2 is actually shorter than both Dota2 and LoL
Sadly, yes. SC2 was an RTS but it was part of the downfall of the golden age. Those short games were common on BattleNet but jeered by many players. I hated visiting there when people would crank the speed up to maximum and quit after 20 minutes, entering all kinds of profanity to players who "turtle" to build up, preferring a quick defenseless rush to real comprehensive strategy.
Compared with the older RTS games, even 30-40 minutes was a very fast game.
Go back and look at C&C:RA2, where some of the advanced items had cooldown times of 10 real clock minutes, and skirmishes between skilled players took well over an hour, sometimes over two hours. In tournament games these mega-items with massive cooldowns, the atomic bombs and such, were often deployed multiple times over the course of a game.
At a LAN party a group ending an AOE game in 45 minutes meant it was probably a lopsided defeat, the games that lasted multiple hours gained all kinds of spectators.
The BIG games at tournaments often took three or four hours before a victor became clear. At the peak of the game these games often had several thousand active units on the map at once, being controlled by just the 8 players. These were epic battles.
I disagree with the claims that MOBAs require less juggling of attention, less reflexes, and less rote memorization. If you want to be successful as a team, you have to pay just as much attention as solo multiplayer games, and there's a substantial degree of reflexes required to maximize xp gains, and to throw another wrinkle into the equation, the most successful teams are able to pull together coordinated actions across multiple teammates that still require a substantial degree of reflexes.
Strategy is different than tactics. It is not about maximizing your XP gains. It is also not about memorizing maps.
MOBA is about tactics. You are looking at controlling a small number of characters doing a small number of tasks. That is very much a tactical game.
Strategy is about larger scales. It is about a long series of events, done by large numbers, in many places, all at once.
Tactics is your SWAT Team (hence the "T" for "Tactics"). It is your ten member strike force each with a specialized duty.
Strategy is a map of a countryside that is covered with markers representing armies and strategically deploying thousands of units to hundreds of places and following up based on their tiny little skirmishes.
Early games in the era had lower caps: Warcraft 2 had a unit limit of 200 per player or 1200 globally. Games like Age of Mythology had unit caps of 300 units per player.
Each unit was produced by its own building. In addition to the hundreds of units, you also had many buildings, depending on the game it varied from 20-30 buildings to seemingly endless rows of barracks and tank-building facilities, large airfields with twenty or thirty runways and nearly as many helipads.
Later in the Golden Age of RTS, games like C&C3 had no unit cap, adding more units would slowly bog down the lower-end machines and it was common in games for the epic LAN games to reach 800, 900, or even over a thousand units for a single player. Globally there could be 5000 or 6000 units all engaged in various stages of combat, from running to the front lines to deploying into formation to actively fighting, all at once.
End of game statistics for some of these tournament games would show that each player created (and usually lost) tens of thousands of units over the conflict.
That was the era that got articles like 1500 archers on a 28.8. It was at a level we don't see in today's games.
Now, that said, the problem with realtime multiplayer strategy games is that they usually are one on one, and require juggling lots of attention as well as quick reflexes and rote memorization.
Yes and no.
You could play alone or one-on-one, but this was the era of modems and LAN parties. For most people the 28.8 and 36.6 modem was the normal way to connect, and games would directly connect. But usually for this it was a lan party, where you and twenty or thirty others were all together and playing as teams, with a 10Mbps Ethernet card at a party. Or if you didn't have other options, would practice against AI and play over a modem against one of your friends for a 2-3 hour session while tying up your phone line on the modem.
Many times these were scheduled among co-workers as an after-hours party on Friday nights running into Saturday mornings at offices around the world. At my workplace at the time we had a large room with 35 machines and comfortable desks and an open floorplan. We had a standing arrangement where people arrived around 6:30 and we played well into the morning.
The rote memorization and fast action is not so much because of UI problems. The memorization had do with dynamically dropping waypoints all over the map so you could jump anywhere the action was taking place, and so that you could bounce around on your 800x600 monitor to control several hundred units both independently and as groups.
You really cannot control several hundred units simultaneously without some seriously fast hand motion. So yes, it does require a lot of that, and that is part of the reason it is somewhat niche compared to more modern general-play games.
There is a night and day difference between the control schemes of the MOBA hero versus controlling several hundred units plus a hundred or so production buildings.
Looking at the latest PS4 line up, there's no strategy games. I realize consoles aren't the most conducive to strategy games due to controller design. But I could really play some good strategy games on my PS3.
Has anybody found a solution for the controller issue? What about PS Vita? If you were releasing a game for PS3/4 how would you do it?
Endwar tried to solve the issue actually. It's not half bad, but it is a bit simplistic.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
