Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Watered-Down Features
So many of these games have a number of moves that have nearly identi-
cal effects, which are only differentiated by visual representations. They
often have features such as jumping and ducking that have, at best, shaky
relationships to the core mechanisms of the game. Even combat moves
generally have very little gameplay identity to distinguish them from
each other. If you have two sword swings that both do the same thing,
one of them should be cut out. And as with brawlers, combos need to
go unless performing combos requires strategic planning and has an ele-
ment of ambiguity.
Real-Time Strategy
Examples:
StarCraft
,
Warcraft
(not
World of Warcraft
),
Command &
Conquer
,
Total War
The genre of real-time strategy games is fundamentally flawed First, let
me say that I essentially dedicated my teens
and
my twenties in large
part to RTS games. I first started with
Warcraft II
, which I played on
my dial-up modem online through an early online gateway called Kali.
I then played
StarCraft
and
Red Alert
intensely for years. My attach-
ment to the genre peaked, though, with
Warcraft III
. I not only played
it, but also did audio commentaries on replays for it, and even wrote
articles about the game and posted them online. (In fact, that's how I
got started writing about video games. My first article, which I wrote for
a site called WCReplays, was translated into several languages and got
hundreds of thousands of views.) When
StarCraft
II
came out in 2010
I played it pretty intensely for about six months, and then it clicked—I
realized then that I would never play this kind of real-time strategy game
ever again. That's not because these games are all bad games; in fact, they
have a huge leg up on many other video-game genres because they stress
multiplayer, competitive play. But with this said, I also must observe that
strategy games should not be in real time.
he term
strategy games
is a bit blurry, since all games involve strat-
egy. But usually when we say
strategy games
, we're actually speaking
loosely about war games. War games are about moving a number of
units around a map to overwhelm an opponent. Now, real-time strategy
games have two totally distinct elements to them: your strategy (which
is a conceptual plan that you have chosen to undertake) and your execu-
tion (which is essentially you telling the system what it is you want to do).
In games, execution—meaning actually communicating what you
have chosen to do—should never be what's difficult Execution should be
