I guess they’re wanting to go after the void Bungie left with Destiny?
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?
Let's not kid ourselves that it would be a good RTS. Starcraft 2 + expansions is a very poor game compared to brood war. If you haven't watch the ASL it's definitely worth a gander:
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.
Can you explain why this is your personal hell? I don't see it as any different than sports like tennis or games like chess. Some things can have extremely long lifespans with dedicate player bases, what's the problem that video games have adapted for this too?
Or is it more about unwilling to try newer things? As someone who plays video games I can agree with this, I always felt odd about the modern "forever" games like fortnight or dota or lol. At some point you want to move onto newer things, I understand that feeling.
If you mean career wise, that I understand but these types of things happen for niche interests. How would you prevent personalities from developing in decade long cultural events? I suppose that's the problem with niche hobbies, new blood is exciting but uncommon while sometimes you want people to move on and let others get their moment in the sun.
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)
BTW AoE4 is nowhere near doomed, i play AoE4 multiplayer regularly and hear this often. AoE4 has about half the number of daily players (12-15K) that AoE2 does, but it’s easily enough to play multiplayer. It also gets regular DLCs and updates and has had a stable playerbase for years now. Basically its less popular and many AoE2 players will never switch, but it’s an active game.
You realize people said the exact same stuff before SC2, right? Saying it's a dead genre, nobody is going to buy it so they won't make it, etc. And yet SC2 was extremely successful. I predict SC3 would be equally successful if Blizzard can do a good job making it (which is not certain these days).
Halo Wars sold 16.7% of Halo 3’s first week sales according to Wikipedia.
It was commercially successful but not in a mainstream mass audience kind of way.
Yes, it proved that RTS can be done on a controller (arguably, StarCraft 64 kind of sort of proved that, too), but if you’ve ever played StarCraft 2 I think you’d agree that particular style of RTS is really not possible without a keyboard and mouse. The game is almost entirely revolving around maximizing your actions per minute.
Halo Wars is also not much of an RTS. While it does have base building, the SP campaigns are full of RTT-like missions. It is actually a very fun game that stands way above compared to a more “by the numbers” implementation of, for example, Command & Conquer 3. Halo Wars found a much better balance and is a much more polished console experience.
> The game is almost entirely revolving around maximizing your actions per minute.
Maybe for top tier play, but apm wasn’t really needed for regular play.
Just to debunk this myth, it used to be possible to get to diamond with 80-100 apm (which is very easy to achieve), efficient builds, fundamental rush defense, and a-move.
Not sure about now, but it was doable for many years.
I found that StarCraft 2 multiplayer wasn’t fun at all if you weren’t nearly giving yourself an anxiety attack trying to perfectly execute a laundry list of moves as fast as possible.
I have never felt so stressed while gaming, even when we talk about fast paced online shooters.
Maybe I wasn’t using the right strategy, I dunno.
It kinda looks like Blizzard is trying to build their own Borderlands-like game which would likely be a lot more fun and mass-market friendly.
> If StarCraft 3 comes out it would only be popular in South Korea and possibly not all that popular at all even there.
Given that StarCraft 2 still hasn't fully displaced BroodWar, I shudder to think of the uphill battle a StarCraft 3 would face.
Really, in this era of live service games, it would make more sense to release a client refresh (multithreading + anniversary graphics) for SC2, and an expansion pack of new campaigns...
Honestly as someone who grew up playing SC, WC3 etc... it gets kinda old. If you have played one, you have played them all. I totally welcome an FPS in the Starcraft world and something fresh from Blizzard.
There is also a disconnect between "customers" and "players". I am under the impression that RTS games have proven harder to monetize in an ongoing manner, or at least harder relative to the effort required to build and maintain them. That doesn't mean there isn't a solution, and this is just one person's limited perspective... but it seems to be the case thus far.
In the very same conference they announced WoW Forever. So whatever it is, it's not necessarily systemic, because they seemed to have nailed that audience.
From Blizzard's perspective, this "we" isn't worth the trouble in terms of sales figures. The audience for RTS has fragmented quite a bit into other niches and Blizzard wants to do huge releases with great ROI for their IP, not pay fan service to us.
What evidence do you have that this is the general sentiment among 'customers' rather than your own? Genuinely asking, I too would have preferred an RTS but my sense is the player base for RTS is much smaller than a shooter.
Are they disconnected from its customers in current year?
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.
What’s wrong with doing different things with an IP?
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.
People may not want to admit this, but RTS is a thing of the past. There haven't been a big, successful release of a brand new RTS for years. Most recent releases are remasters of games from decades ago. There is no money in another RTS, and Blizzard understands that.
If you don't believe me, read some books and articles -- this has been well analyzed and discussed.
Sorry but you are the one disconnected from the reality of today's gaming market.
RTS isn't a popular genre anymore. Big studios don't care anymore about RTS. I think the last RTS from a big studio/publisher was the Age of Empire definitive editions ? 6 years ago...
Well, Blizzard IP started off from failing to acquire a license with Games Workshop, and did infringement-avoiding changes to release their own games. StarCraft is a subset of Warhammer 40k, which is an expansion of influences from Starship Troopers.
Edit: The IP story seems unsubstantiated (albeit likely), but regardless the similarities between terrans/empire, zerg/tyranid, protoss/tau, etc are certainly there.
No gameplay footage and a release date in the next decade. Blizzard is just testing the waters to see if there’s any interest in yet another shooter. Or rather if the StarCraft franchise still has clout.
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.
> What is everyone’s favorite RTS right now? Hobby / non-competitive
"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.
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.
I just started playing with building a game in Godot with Fable 5.1 last weekend and the pace is crazy. Obviously there's a world of difference between what looks playable on my machine and what a AAA studio with the best human artists and developers can put out, and I appreciate that they still exist and put in the first class effort, but... yeah. A 3-year timeline while this is going on seems out of touch with what's going on in the world.
I'm not a gamedev so I might be wrong, but my friend showed me in 2020 a quick 30 minute tutorial in unity. In this time he made a basic 3d shooter game. The first video is the type of game a teenager would have made 20 years ago and the second one is of course a lot more impressive, but I believe the game engine is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there.
I just read the book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment by Jason Schreier (without having played any of their game or being aware that BlizzCon is around the corner). It seems they'll repeat their own mistakes.
I am getting more and more pessimistic about these studios and their AAA works. Every game is now a gamble with multi year effort with hundreds if not thousands of staff behind it. If a game doesn't sell, and that happens more than once, layoffs are coming. And for Blizzard specifically, it'd better be an online game that's going to be a multi billion dollar cash cow they can keep milking for years. If not, they would not work on the game in the first place.
Of course they have released many great games (I have been hearing about them despite with no first hand experience), but as the history has proven, you can't keep coming up with new games that are original, fun if not addictive and also make money, especially with the fierce competition today.
Which makes me think I should spend more money/time on indie games than the action/adventure game from big studios that are increasingly repetitive and boring.
Matches my experience. Indie games can be delightful, full of Easter eggs and heart that the dev(s) build for the fun of it. I just played through Hollow Knight for the first time and man, what a great experience.
Apparently 6 years is not an uncommon development cycle for AAA right now. For a random example, Ghost of Yotei which is also an open world game, was in development for 4 years. That game is a sequel too, and I think Sucker Punch is probably less dysfunctional than Blizzard at the moment. Still it might have been premature to announce it at this stage.
Starcraft 2 is the only game I still play from time to time. Yes, you can probably make more money making a shooter, but there is a reason Starcraft is such a cultural phenomenon.
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.
4chan's /v/ has been slamming Blizzard pretty hard. It is interesting to see but not at all surprising. The current roster of Blizzard leadership is chasing something that alienates their core fanbase (as opposed to core audience), whatever is left of them.
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 to put out a set of new trailers 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. Nowadays a new genre could be invented and Warhammer would have some random developer able to license their IP and build a game around it, and it would have a fan base from day one. As an IP, Warhammer fucks.
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 its tone and somewhat uninteresting. At the very least WH40K has a grimdark vibe with its whole "there is only war" attitude. Starcraft never had that as part of its cachet.
Compared to SC2's "Hell it's about time" which ties nicely into the campaign that actually makes sense, this trailer leaves a lot to be desired.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadYou 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.
Or is it more about unwilling to try newer things? As someone who plays video games I can agree with this, I always felt odd about the modern "forever" games like fortnight or dota or lol. At some point you want to move onto newer things, I understand that feeling.
If you mean career wise, that I understand but these types of things happen for niche interests. How would you prevent personalities from developing in decade long cultural events? I suppose that's the problem with niche hobbies, new blood is exciting but uncommon while sometimes you want people to move on and let others get their moment in the sun.
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.
If StarCraft 3 comes out it would only be popular in South Korea and possibly not all that popular at all.
> You also can’t play RTS games on consoles.
You certainly can. See Halo Wars.
It was commercially successful but not in a mainstream mass audience kind of way.
Yes, it proved that RTS can be done on a controller (arguably, StarCraft 64 kind of sort of proved that, too), but if you’ve ever played StarCraft 2 I think you’d agree that particular style of RTS is really not possible without a keyboard and mouse. The game is almost entirely revolving around maximizing your actions per minute.
Maybe for top tier play, but apm wasn’t really needed for regular play.
Just to debunk this myth, it used to be possible to get to diamond with 80-100 apm (which is very easy to achieve), efficient builds, fundamental rush defense, and a-move.
Not sure about now, but it was doable for many years.
I have never felt so stressed while gaming, even when we talk about fast paced online shooters.
Maybe I wasn’t using the right strategy, I dunno.
It kinda looks like Blizzard is trying to build their own Borderlands-like game which would likely be a lot more fun and mass-market friendly.
You can, see StarCraft 64.
Pikmin.
Given that StarCraft 2 still hasn't fully displaced BroodWar, I shudder to think of the uphill battle a StarCraft 3 would face.
Really, in this era of live service games, it would make more sense to release a client refresh (multithreading + anniversary graphics) for SC2, and an expansion pack of new campaigns...
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.
If you don't believe me, read some books and articles -- this has been well analyzed and discussed.
Sorry but you are the one disconnected from the reality of today's gaming market.
Why even bother to announce this now? I only see downsides in mentioning something that far out.
Edit: The IP story seems unsubstantiated (albeit likely), but regardless the similarities between terrans/empire, zerg/tyranid, protoss/tau, etc are certainly there.
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
Doesn't it look like a copy of Factorio? Is the game play different?
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.
I am getting more and more pessimistic about these studios and their AAA works. Every game is now a gamble with multi year effort with hundreds if not thousands of staff behind it. If a game doesn't sell, and that happens more than once, layoffs are coming. And for Blizzard specifically, it'd better be an online game that's going to be a multi billion dollar cash cow they can keep milking for years. If not, they would not work on the game in the first place.
Of course they have released many great games (I have been hearing about them despite with no first hand experience), but as the history has proven, you can't keep coming up with new games that are original, fun if not addictive and also make money, especially with the fierce competition today.
Which makes me think I should spend more money/time on indie games than the action/adventure game from big studios that are increasingly repetitive and boring.
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 to put out a set of new trailers 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. Nowadays a new genre could be invented and Warhammer would have some random developer able to license their IP and build a game around it, and it would have a fan base from day one. As an IP, Warhammer fucks.
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 its tone and somewhat uninteresting. At the very least WH40K has a grimdark vibe with its whole "there is only war" attitude. Starcraft never had that as part of its cachet.
Compared to SC2's "Hell it's about time" which ties nicely into the campaign that actually makes sense, this trailer leaves a lot to be desired.
StarCraft now also has its own figurine tabletop game. No idea what it's worth though: https://starcraft-tmg.com/
But really, aren't there enough first person shooters? But a huge lack of RTS's. Lets have a new Star Craft Real Time Strategy game.
Maybe if the First Person Shooter works out, they will spend the money on an RTS.