You think you do, but you don't.
I can’t tell if this is too late a move though or if there will be a void and a desire still by the time this releases.
Is there any other studio working on releasing a similar game already since it was obvious Destinys life was short lived for a while with Bungies focus on Marathon?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIpLl2W2chg
I'm still amazed that Blizzard dropped the ball on recreating the same environment that enables dynamic play, instead it's always a formation of rock paper scissors with very little nuance in between.
The balance team had no idea of the game they wanted StarCraft 2 to be. By the time it all settled down the community went back to SC:BW.
I'm positive there was some combination of SC2 patches that was amazing, if only the patch/balance team stuck with it. I don't know which set of patches that was though.
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I have ranted before about deathballs. Beginners want deathballs but advanced players want something deeper than a deathballs.
For all of their faults, SC:BW and AoE2 are anti-deathball. SC:BW is somewhat "accidentally" anti-deathball because of map bumping and poor patching.
AoE2 has incredible siege and defensive emplacements (castles and bombard cannons and siege onagers) that counter deathballs, above and beyond SC2 anti-deathball options.
The AoE2 deathballs unit, the Crossbowman (line) needs like 30+ units before it really starts to feel oppressive, and universally everyone has rams and mangonels to kinda deal with them (or Skirmishers).
Nailed it. People want patched versions of the same RTS. AoE4 came out a few years ago as an IMO fantastic RTS which smoothed over many of the idiosyncrasies of AoE2. From a multiplayer perspective, it was doomed from the start, for not being AoE2. I couldn't even convince my friends to play it with me. (Everyone is still playing AoE2, and expansions + patches are still regular)
RTS is not a very popular genre all things considered, and the ARTS/MOBA variants are dominated by DOTA and League of Legends.
You also can’t play RTS games on consoles.
A lot of fans of StarCraft still wish they saw StarCraft: Ghost see the light of day. Arguably the franchise is very much underdeveloped. The IP and story would work well for many game genres that haven’t been explored.
If StarCraft 3 comes out it would only be popular in South Korea and possibly not all that popular at all even there.
If you’re trying to launch a cool new shooter, why use SC IP?
They may be alienating the core audience that made them who they are, but I don't think they're disconnected from their customer base, which has changed. RTSes are not popular and they are not platform-agnostic like an FPS is.
Halo was originally conceived as an RTS, then turned out to be a successful FPS. Then they made a fairly successful RTS too.
Everything Blizzard does is met with such absurd hostility. Gamers pay $60 for 100+ hours of entertainment and still feel like they’re getting screwed at every turn.
> At the very least, what we are building right now is not a seasonal game.
Why even bother to announce this now? I only see downsides in mentioning something that far out.
20-25 years ago I’d be certain Blizzard has some aces up their sleeves. Today not so much. They probably do this to respond to pressure from corporate overlords.
2030 though... isn't that like 8 years away?
"From Glory To Goo" is a small indie RTS+tower defense+base building+automation which has great value for its price. WARNO is pretty great nowadays, if you're into "modern" military RTS, online community is a bit up their own ass sometimes though, but what online community isn't, better with friends! Beyond All Reason is also great and entirely free and open source, and runs great even for really huge maps and games, totally worth a try if you've never played it and like RTS.
> Anything worthwhile on mobile?
Never heard of anyone playing RTS games on mobile :P Sorry
Don't get me wrong, I'm excited for a StarCraft shooter despite it not being StarCraft at all (I enjoy the universe). I wanted StarCraft: Ghost back in the day, and this feels like a taste of that dream.
That said, targeting a release of 2030 is wild to me. Look at the Astra game dev hype that's hitting twitter right now. Yes it's all filtered to the best possible examples / yes people are not one shotting these things, but still it's very clear that LLMs are beginning to be very capable at game dev in a way that doesn't look/feel like ass.
LLMs are going to become more capable over time. I think most of us can agree that eventually they'll be competitive with AAA developers given enough GPU cycles. I would argue that given rate of improvement, we're looking at that point coming in the next year or two.
To emphasize this point, a year ago GPT-5 got released. This was the type of game it would make: https://youtu.be/yTHo7tMborY?t=324
This is the type of game Astra is making: https://youtu.be/GuO_Eo34C8E?t=348
It's just starting to be capable of making assets in blender / unreal. Given this rate of advancement, what is the state going to be like 4 years from now? It really feels a bit like the "travelling to distant stars" problem, where at some point it's faster to wait for better engines than to leave now. I worry that by the time this gets released, the market is going to be flooded with fully custom AAA games that are hyperniche. 4 years out is a long, long time to wait, and it's a longer time to bet on success / market dynamics.
It just makes me sad that every decision nowadays is driven by profit and there is just very little courage left to do something else.
For me, two things:
1) Going to Diablo 5 without even having Diablo in Diablo 4 is strange. I don't know the reasoning behind this. I'm assuming the recent acquisition by Microsoft made them have ot put out a set of new titles and this was one of them. Anything to please the shareholders to prevent themselves from getting canned. I don't know for sure, just a hypothesis.
2) Starcraft's trailer, to me, was WH40K in almost every way. It was uncannily not Starcraft. This is partly because, while Blizzard basically killed Starcraft from inside, Warhammer grew massively and now has a presence across many game genres (and table top of course). In a lot of cases, franchises such as Dawn of War, Space Marine, and so on and so forth. WH40K took the gamers "back" from SC, in a sense, since Starcraft and Warcraft cribbed too much from WH early on anyway.
It is very strange to see Starcraft lean into a competitor like this rather than stand on their own with the character and narrative development they have established. The trailer was very off-putting in it's tone and somewhat uninteresting. At the very least WH40K has a grimdark vibe with it's whole "there is only war" attitude. Starcraft never had that as part of its cachet.
strbean•25m ago
ModernMech•18m ago