D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
PROLOGUE (mini-rant, not necessary to read as the actual discussion starts afterwards):
_________________________
During the last Steam Summer Sales I decided to do something I rarely do: bought a game for more than 5€ without knowing exactly what it was all about.
The thing is, I've been suffering from something of a (single player, story-telling) RTS drought for quite a few years now, and a single starcraft "episode" every 2 years just doesn't cut it anymore..
That said, I saw Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion with a 66% discount for a price of a little over 12€, went for a very quick metascore lookup (80 something, good enough) and proceeded for the impulse purchase.
Steam told me the the game had a single player mode, so it looked like a solid purchase at the time.
After finishing the new Devil May Cry (which btw is really fun), during the weekend I decided to put that RTS drought to rest and installed the Sins of a Solar Empire game.
By running the game for the first time I was greeted with a quick (and low-resolution..?) intro movie telling that typical "Humans explore galaxy. Humans find hostile aliens. Aliens kick human ass. Humans come back to kick alien ass." overused setting.
"It's okay", I thought. "As long as the gameplay is good and the story-telling is solid, I'll enjoy it just as much".
First, I went through the game settings to max out everything, then proceeded to the "new game" menu and was instantly pushed into the tutorial sub-menu. Since it was the very first time I was going to play a RTS in space, I decided to go with the tutorial.
The tutorial was boring, dense and felt meaningless. Most (good) games tend to embed the tutorial into the storyline somehow, yet this tutorial consisted of no more than a succession of subtitles saying "press X to make this happen".
"It's okay", I thought for the second time. "It's an 80-plus game on metacritic, it should compensate on all the rest".
With the costly tutorial finished, I was eager for that space opera to commence. I started wondering what plot twists could happen, what alien ships I'd have to capture to assimilate their technology and increase my tech tree, what space-stations I'd have to protect to make sure that main character could survive (or not (plot twist)).
Don't get me wrong, I love playing RTSs. But playing the game for the sake of just whining a battle, with no story progress to look up to, just isn't enough to keep me interested.
So I finally press that large "New Game" button and... a screen with a "Choose your map" selection appears.
"Wait.. WHAT?!" I desperately go back and forth through all the menus and sub-menus, looking for that story mode button... and couldn't find any. "What the FUUUUUU...????"
I then went to the internets to see what was going on. I could just be loading a MP-only executable, for example.
But no. It's an exclusively PvP game. All it offers for single player is a skirmish mode with an AI.
A RTS game with a 82 score on metacritic and a 37€ base price on Steam is nothing more than a skirmish game.
I went back to the game's Steam page to see if I had been really stupid or cleverly tricked into buying it, and here's the description:
The description consists solely of talking about the story of the game... that doesn't exist in the game itself.
I was tricked into buying the game. And I feel stupid nonetheless.
____________________
END OF PROLOGUE
But here's the scoop: this RTS game does have a metascore of 82%, and a user score of 76%. This means that the game itself has no story, no "campaign" and yet both reviewers and gamers alike seem to be perfectly fine with that.
Going to the internets to find story-driven, single player RTSs and apart for StarCraft II and Dawn of War (which isn't really my type for the lack of base-building and limited unit count), I couldn't find a single game released in the last 2 years!
So what happened? From the 90s to ~2009 we've had story-driven, base-building franchises like Warcraft, Starcraft, C&C, C&C: Red Alert, The Settlers, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Supreme Commander, Earth 21xx, Rise of Nations and dozen of others.
Right now?
- WoW's success terminated all RTS warcraft development.
- Starcraft is now episodic and they release a game every million years.
- EA raped the C&C franchise with the always-online and consolitis-infested C&C4, and the much anticipated Generals 2 has been announced as a free2play online game. No word on the Red Alert franchise either. Well fuck you too, EA.
- Ensemble Studios, responsible for the Age of Empires and Age of Mythology, was bought by Microsoft and then terminated by their new bosses. The former studio's employees now work on minor iOS games.
- The guys who did supreme commander are now doing age of empires online.. Pfft..
- The guys who did Rise of Nations were bought by Epic and then terminated.
- Looking at the list of RTSes launched in 2011 and 2012 paints a downright depressing scenario.
- and so on
Every franchise seems to be either dead/dying or moving to strictly PvP/Skirmish gameplay. Why?
Were the gamers simply not buying Supreme Commander 2, Red Alert 2 and Age of Empires III in the late 2000s?
Have those greedy, evil publishers just arrived to the conclusion that a RTS won't ever get the same profits as a call of duty so they killed the genre?
Has the story-telling in RTSes become such a burden to developers and ignored by gamers that they eventually ripped off the story from the games altogether? Am I a dying breed?
_________________________
During the last Steam Summer Sales I decided to do something I rarely do: bought a game for more than 5€ without knowing exactly what it was all about.
The thing is, I've been suffering from something of a (single player, story-telling) RTS drought for quite a few years now, and a single starcraft "episode" every 2 years just doesn't cut it anymore..
That said, I saw Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion with a 66% discount for a price of a little over 12€, went for a very quick metascore lookup (80 something, good enough) and proceeded for the impulse purchase.
Steam told me the the game had a single player mode, so it looked like a solid purchase at the time.
After finishing the new Devil May Cry (which btw is really fun), during the weekend I decided to put that RTS drought to rest and installed the Sins of a Solar Empire game.
By running the game for the first time I was greeted with a quick (and low-resolution..?) intro movie telling that typical "Humans explore galaxy. Humans find hostile aliens. Aliens kick human ass. Humans come back to kick alien ass." overused setting.
"It's okay", I thought. "As long as the gameplay is good and the story-telling is solid, I'll enjoy it just as much".
First, I went through the game settings to max out everything, then proceeded to the "new game" menu and was instantly pushed into the tutorial sub-menu. Since it was the very first time I was going to play a RTS in space, I decided to go with the tutorial.
The tutorial was boring, dense and felt meaningless. Most (good) games tend to embed the tutorial into the storyline somehow, yet this tutorial consisted of no more than a succession of subtitles saying "press X to make this happen".
"It's okay", I thought for the second time. "It's an 80-plus game on metacritic, it should compensate on all the rest".
With the costly tutorial finished, I was eager for that space opera to commence. I started wondering what plot twists could happen, what alien ships I'd have to capture to assimilate their technology and increase my tech tree, what space-stations I'd have to protect to make sure that main character could survive (or not (plot twist)).
Don't get me wrong, I love playing RTSs. But playing the game for the sake of just whining a battle, with no story progress to look up to, just isn't enough to keep me interested.
So I finally press that large "New Game" button and... a screen with a "Choose your map" selection appears.
"Wait.. WHAT?!" I desperately go back and forth through all the menus and sub-menus, looking for that story mode button... and couldn't find any. "What the FUUUUUU...????"
I then went to the internets to see what was going on. I could just be loading a MP-only executable, for example.
But no. It's an exclusively PvP game. All it offers for single player is a skirmish mode with an AI.
A RTS game with a 82 score on metacritic and a 37€ base price on Steam is nothing more than a skirmish game.
I went back to the game's Steam page to see if I had been really stupid or cleverly tricked into buying it, and here's the description:
While many were hopeful that diplomacy would finally end the war, differing opinions on what should be done, along with the depleted power of the controlling factions, has led to a splintering of the groups involved.
(it then continues talking about the setting of the game as if it was a story-driven experience)
The description consists solely of talking about the story of the game... that doesn't exist in the game itself.
I was tricked into buying the game. And I feel stupid nonetheless.
____________________
END OF PROLOGUE
But here's the scoop: this RTS game does have a metascore of 82%, and a user score of 76%. This means that the game itself has no story, no "campaign" and yet both reviewers and gamers alike seem to be perfectly fine with that.
Going to the internets to find story-driven, single player RTSs and apart for StarCraft II and Dawn of War (which isn't really my type for the lack of base-building and limited unit count), I couldn't find a single game released in the last 2 years!
So what happened? From the 90s to ~2009 we've had story-driven, base-building franchises like Warcraft, Starcraft, C&C, C&C: Red Alert, The Settlers, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Supreme Commander, Earth 21xx, Rise of Nations and dozen of others.
Right now?
- WoW's success terminated all RTS warcraft development.
- Starcraft is now episodic and they release a game every million years.
- EA raped the C&C franchise with the always-online and consolitis-infested C&C4, and the much anticipated Generals 2 has been announced as a free2play online game. No word on the Red Alert franchise either. Well fuck you too, EA.
- Ensemble Studios, responsible for the Age of Empires and Age of Mythology, was bought by Microsoft and then terminated by their new bosses. The former studio's employees now work on minor iOS games.
- The guys who did supreme commander are now doing age of empires online.. Pfft..
- The guys who did Rise of Nations were bought by Epic and then terminated.
- Looking at the list of RTSes launched in 2011 and 2012 paints a downright depressing scenario.
- and so on
Every franchise seems to be either dead/dying or moving to strictly PvP/Skirmish gameplay. Why?
Were the gamers simply not buying Supreme Commander 2, Red Alert 2 and Age of Empires III in the late 2000s?
Have those greedy, evil publishers just arrived to the conclusion that a RTS won't ever get the same profits as a call of duty so they killed the genre?
Has the story-telling in RTSes become such a burden to developers and ignored by gamers that they eventually ripped off the story from the games altogether? Am I a dying breed?
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