Articles | Apex RTS Concept REV Part 1
Primer - Only Quality Matters
In a world of either developing or consuming content one ever pursues a happy balance between time commitment and quality. Time is a resoure, and all mediums that cost time are henceforth products. There is no such thing as a free game or a free development process, everything ultimately is costing you a resource you cannot get back. As such, ensuring that the quality of the content you consume or produce is as high as possible is the cornerstone of any sensible person in life.
Do you want to grift consumers for money, or do you want to make a quality product? If your answer is the former, then quality will never be something you consider. Quality does not sell. That's not the kind of industry that the Game Industry is. If, however, you want to make a quality product, much less an RTS, then there's a great deal of things to consider.
Quality is objective, and all technical constructs can be reviewed objectively because they can be broken down into pieces that can be compared to likeminded pieces given time, given era, given resources, given experience and given expectations. The composition in itself is also, evidently, a technical construct and is an objective element in turn. As such, all arms of the consumption and development process can be reviewed objectively and no game, mod, map or otherwise steps outsides the bounds of a technical construct. Games are not art and no form of expression therein is equal. A game is composed, ultimately, of 0's and 1's whom are abstracted into various mediums ultimately as high level as visuals and audio, and sometimes gameplay, that an end-user experiences. At no point do these elements escape the bounds of being simple technical constructs, tools at the most, built and developed by a person or persons to serve as a product. The very process is also a product in itself, one that is overlooked by apologists whom refuse to step into it out of fear.
Extremely few things in the world could really be considered art. Art is a term used by the incompetent to sweep responsibility and criticism under the rug. It has no place in considerations of products. The closer a product comes to being perfect the closer a product comes to being art. This is because the objective value of a high-quality product can be appreciated in turn and when all elements henceforth sing together that an end-user can see both the individual passion and the composition's passion and thus feel their investment in the product could not be bettered.
The truth is, of course, making games is not difficult and hasn't been for many years. The technical process has become extremely automated and very rarely do modern game developers ever need to understand the most high level of scripting languages, much less programming languages. Since middleware is doing the speaking to the compiler whom then translates their data into a lower-level language that the developers have never laid eyes upon much less comprehend the actual product they view when building it within platforms such as Unity or RPGMaker never actually represents what the end product really looks like. "Art" assets, such as sprites, models, and sounds, are almost never first party. At the most gracious of times modern developers stick to a specific suite of studios they commission, but most just grab whatever they can find or get away with stealing. To make matters worse most developers don't play games, they're dropouts from bank database management and marketing or HR positions whom picked up computer science on the side and thought it would be an easy industry to jump into for a quick buck. They're quite correct - the game industry has absolutely no standards and the marketing atmosphere is tailored to zero-investment maximum-return hit and run development pyramid schemes, starting with the aforementioned middleware. The end result is, at the absolute best of times, games viewed as a hobby; especially in the West, where most people think of games as toys.
The entry barrier to game development is so low, in fact, that because no one has to invest any energy into the development "product" and yet can easily make money off of grifting platforms like Patreon there is absolutely no drive to actually improve the product that is the development life much less the end result that gets peddled to consumers. Developers and consumers interested in quality content are further and further alienated by the push to shove gaming into mainstream consumption-oriented development cycles, either annual or bi-annual, with emphasis on psychological warfare abuse commonly seen in gambling such as stimulation-oriented "drip" timegating, homogenization of "accessibility", and a perpetual momentum to removing skill expression. The emphasis on marketing budgets should have been the last of the red flags, but it was only the beginning of the endless screech that was the digital world's death cry.
The RTS
The genre to suffer the most from the castration of development ethics and the mental necrosis of players is the RTS. The RTS saw its most major titles released in the 90's and quickly fell off the radar, particularly thanks to the failure of wc3 and the Westerner's need to dumb down games for mass appeal on a broader scale. The interaction of wc3 feeding aimless and lost players into low-effort maps like dota helped the ailing genre kill itself off completely. Only a few products were released in this era that even tried to be RTS' anymore, as most developers followed Blizzard off the ledge like lemmings and blindly copy pasted wc3's innumerable failures, dragging themselves and the entire genre to a watery grave.
Wc3 was a failure of a product, both from a development and a player standpoint. The inner conflicts that Blizzard's incompetent staffing allowed to destroy the game only echoed into the product line as a whole. It released using a 1997 3d engine lifted from Blizzard North that Blizzard continues to refuse to part with to present day, bringing with it needless performance problems, poor visuals and clumsy UX. Blizzard's staffing were confused with what they wanted to do with this mess - make an RPG, or try to make an RTS? At the end of the day they ended up with neither, just a sad mess that no one remembers to any extent except for the very few players who sat at the top of the competitive food chain and milked Blizzard's compulsory tournaments endlessly.
What is an RTS, exactly?
RTS stands for Real-Time Strategy. The first set of words, Real-Time, insinuates realworld problem solving. It implies that the player has to think on the fly and deal with an ever-changing game world, changing opponents, and changing situations without a static goal or time to abstract a static goal. "Strategy" insinuates a large-scale platform in which the former occurs. Strategy insinuates long-term problem solving, competitive problem solving and broad application of skills.
At the heart of the RTS is the defining elements of the genre. In as much as a First-Person Shooter requires a first-person perspective and some nature of shooting, an RTS requires resource gathering, base construction and large-scale unit-to-unit control. Games that deviated from this formula, like using clean vocals in a Black Metal song, are no longer a part of the RTS genre. For example, Warcraft 3 introduced hard counters and extended fight length from seconds to minutes, which eliminate both the real-time and strategy components of the formula by watering the game down to a turn-based simon says. Warcraft 3 also introduced heroes and a very basic item and experience system, neither of which belong in an RTS and turned the title away from strategic elements, especially since item drops are random.
Some times focused mostly on units and removed macro play, like Dawn of War and Company of Heroes. These titles are cargo cult shovelware copying earlier titles such as Ground Control. They are best referred to as RTT's, or Real-Time Tactics. Some games tried to automate portions of the RTS through introducing "squads" groups of units that alleviated unit-to-unit control and dumbed down the real-time emphasis, or through automating economy and base construction. These games were, evidently, failures as a result. They failed to become RTS' and they failed to become meaningful games because they tried to take shortcuts and peddle superficially competitive software to non-competitive consumers. Worse yet, in some cases they gained amounts of traction - just enough to introduce disruptions into the playerbase that drove more developers to copycat their flounders and drive actual gamers away. Again, wc3 makes for a prime observation of this, but the success of dota spiraled outwards into countless clones, like League of Legends, that many uneducated individuals pandered as "RTS" games. Once league took the early worm there was little room for competition, and prospective developers threw up their hands and either cargo culted League or gave up on what they perceived to be the RTS genre altogether. It's probably for the best - a genre being dead is better than the alternatives that happened to genres like FPS, where nearly all titles in the last 20 years have been nothing short of abominably bad and recent attempts to "re-capture" old ideas are watered down and distilled into mass-marketable pre-chewed crud.
Indeed, setting clear genre-defining characteristics is important. TPS, FPS, and RTS all have important cornerstones in their naming conventions and founding titles that determine what those genres are. Attempts to break away from those genres aren't necessarily folly, but they require one to fully grasp the genre they're trying to break away from if they want to do so in a meaningful way. For example, all RTT games to date have been failures competitively and deferred their single-player experiences exclusively to forgettable gimmicks. Not that the RTS genre has seen any real break from that - but we'll visit that subject later.
RTS, simply by the defining elements of the genre, is an intrinsically competitive platform. Just by being real-time most games conjure competitive elements. For example, Half-Life is a corridor shooter filled with chores that try to trick you into thinking there's more to the game than there really is. At any point you can just decide to stand up and walk away to make coffee. In a Counter-Strike match, however, opponents are actively seeking to either attack you or take objectives on the map. Thus, though both titles are ultimately FPS', only one is real-time and the other is not.
This element is only enforced by the "strategy" term. Strategy implies, again, long-term mental activity focusing ultimately on a single objective of overcoming your opponent. This aspect in particular is not respected in the single-player experience of titles in the RTS genre. For example, in the Starcraft and Brood War campaigns your opponents do not construct bases, do not defend themselves properly and only attack you once every 15 to 30 minutes at the most. All of your opponent's assets are preplaced on the map and they are injected tens of thousands of free resources, and they do not even make the slightest attempt to play the same game the player is playing. As opposed to following even vaguely the same rules as the player, the opponents are seen as a chore for the player to overcome in a given time allotment. Ergo, the campaigns in a traditional RTS (and by end-users in turn) are conventionally and intentionally designed to be chores and reject strategic interactions entirely.
This is why most players for successful RTS games like Brood War focused on competitive play, even if it was only at a casual level between friends. These individuals purchased a product with their time and money for the purpose of playing an RTS. The single-player content provided by the products is not RTS content. It's a chore added on the side that only, at best, serves to distract what the product is actually about. Even warcraft 3 - an RTT centric around heroes - fails to make the campaigns even superficially feel like building and improving your hero units. It's simply a series of gimmicks, distractions, and long corridors that permit you to watch polygons slowly wiggle at each other over the course of an hour until one side's numbers deplete more than the others and you're awarded with a feels-good ceremony in turn.
Individuals whom prefer single-player experiences for any reason have been cheated and robbed of the opportunity to experience the RTS outside of poorly supported skirmish modes, which only even exist in a few titles. Those seeking strategic-level writing have been outright attacked by firms like Blizzard, whom invested special effort into making their product's writing as incoherent and amature as possible. In the history of the RTS a relevant, much less good, single-player experience has yet to be attempted by any firm and only an extremely few number of users.
I am a person whom pursues quality. As such, I've been attacked and abandoned by the game's industry, because most developers simply don't make the effort to pursue quality. The value of a product is not measured by likes on data mining platforms like Twitter or sales. The value of a product is measured by quality. Quality is the only thing that matters when concerning a product. Quality is objective. At times, people have called me an "elitist" for pursuing quality products. While I'm not sure how asking for meaningful returns for my time makes me an elitist, I'm quite happy with the title because it separates me from the cruft of consumers whom buy products simply to own them and buy into marketing simply to identify as gamers.
However, the entire point of the pursuit for quality, and what makes an RTS, much less a good RTS, has become muddied by zoomers and millenials whom have refused themselves the chance to stop, think, and consider the world around them. Individuals whom thrive on moment to moment stimulation and can't stop even to unbuckle their pants to take a shit. Individuals whom defer to sites like Reddit and consider updoots the arbiter of an individual's value, and "followers" a community.
An RTS can only be of quality if it's really an RTS. Any attempts to cinrcumvent the formula or sidestep it at the very best render your product not an RTS. There's no tongue-twisting or penis-stretching when it comes to technical definitions. In as much as maps are not mods and vis versa, an FPS is not an RTS and an RTS is not an RPG. From thereon, quality is measured by the execution of elements. UX, pathing, graphics and audio, readability, so on and so forth.
Many modern games start with an intent to either cargo cult an existing game or make some superficially advertised effort to be new and quirky. Neither mindset is particularly valuable, and the RTS genre being so set in stone might make a prospective developer feel pressured to explore. One could visualize the teenage Blizzard employees, hopped up on prozac and cheap beer, filling their heads with such delusions when faced with the prospect of advancing from wc2 to wc3 with sc between them. The problem is that the effort to focus on strengths before introducing new vectors of failure never crossed their mind. Wc3 wasn't simply a failure because they added heroes, it was a failure as an RTS long before any marketed avant-garde elements came into play. The entire mindset behind the product was destined for failure.
The RTS being a competitive genre sets it apart from most others. This will alienate potential sales because today's playerbase is adverse to challenge and competition. Firms like Blizzard have done everything from remove losses on records to removing the ability to communicate with your opponents entirely. This is all part of a long campaign to diminish competitive drive and shift the consumerbase to modern, dominantly left, individuals whom have a fear of personality responsibility and failure. Critical Thinking has been steadily eroded from the Western education system and self-reflection has been all but abolished in favor of participation awards and terminology such as "everyone is special". The very concept that one can fail at something has become controversial, and to see it surface in games is something that most westerners with purchasing power are terrified of today.
22 Years of RTS Development
For those familiar with my work or whom have followed my commentary in such subjects, none of this is particularly new to you. Yet even I had no idea just how far the overall mentality of the userbase for gaming had sunk until I started to get more active in industry development circles with Unreal, and when I began talking with a medical practitioner in New York.
For those of us whom seek quality entertainment and avenues to make the most out of our own products, we stand very much alone. If we want to be financially successful doing so, a very long and difficult road awaits. The financial success of titles like Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 demonstrates to us that brand loyalty alone will sell for decades and only a shoestring budget is actually necessary for development. The quality of the product has absolutely no bearing on its ability to sell, only marketing and brand. Evidently, I'm not writing this because I want to spare my thoughts on financial success. No small number of offers have been sent my way for many skills I practice, and few of those skills would I have considered myself presentable in much less commercially viable. I'm writing this because there is virtually no advice for individuals looking to make quality RTS products, only countless examples of what not to do.
In my eyes, it is a vain effort to make a competitive RTS product today. Not strictly from a financial perspective, but because besting Brood War requires a very significant amount of investment and education, and the resources to competitively veto a successor would also be costly to obtain. Companies like Blizzard simply abandoned the idea of trying to make competitive titles not just because they didn't know how to approach the challenge but because it was a folly venture to begin with. Instead, Blizzard exercised their legal power for the first time to exact as much of a killing blow on the BW scene as possible so they could forcefully roll in sc2 as a replacement. The resulting failure to do so only further alludes to the difficulty in besting this ancient product, flawed as it may be.
Even so, BW offers unparalleled resources to retrace its steps and learn from its successes and failures, as well of those of the elements that lead to its enduring legacy. BW is a product not simply of a firm that has moved on but of countless individuals and organizations that gave life to the competitive legacy it upheld for over twenty years.
Part of the reason why I've considered BW difficult to approach when building successors competitively is at the time I was actively building BW projects the tools and knowledge to break the game apart simply did not exist. Middleware for project development wasn't readily available to end-users and I had more exciting project prospects for independent engines when I got into them. I took a long break from BW and from the multiplayer-oriented RTS before I began to become superficially involved again during the beginning of 2022 with loosely following Pr0nogo's CMBW project. As the first BW project that featured reverse engineering more extensive than that AO had, it broke a lot of the boundaries that prohibited exploring outside of the base game. This allowed me to really rethink what BW established and what meaningful growth beyond it in any given direction might actually look like. Over 20 years later, and the RTS genre looked like that it might finally see meaningful development. A near-decade of testing concepts in sc2 and reaching technical dead-ends and I was finally starting to see some of the results coming to life.
What I would like to focus on in this and future discussions is making use of that information and the core tenets of the RTS genre to emphasize strong single-player products in turn. I firmly believe that RTS single-player content is entirely unexplored and just waiting to be cracked open, and it's in no short part because no one has bothered to make a product that caters to the RTS in single-player.
Quantifying Quality
What is quality? What makes something "correct"? In technical constructs the measurement of quality is considered between proficiency in the element's construction and what that proficiency compares to in regards to other elements of its era. For example, Metal Slug is a stand-out franchise in its early installments because of its exceptional visuals. Decades later and no sprite-based or so-called retro game even attempts to meet the standard set by Metal Slug all those years ago. As a result, no such game today has quality placed into its visuals.
Typically, although not always, quality is standards-defining. Brood War set the standard for competitive RTS gameplay and that standard hasn't been challenged by any title to be released well into 2022. This does not, however, necessarily mandate that BW's competitive gameplay is high quality. A correlation does not necessarily mean cause. Standards are objective, and what defines standards is generally the completion and feature fulfillment of a quality product. Brood War shipped with voice acted campaigns, skirmish mode, a basic map editor, LAN and online multiplayer and for the most part wasn't fucked around with that much by the developer when it came to balance. There was no pursuit for "esports", and the competitive sene was almost completely organic. This is the standard to be expected of all RTS titles to come thereafter - an RTS should ship with graphics and visuals that build upon BW, a voiced campaign that improves from BW, skirmish features more fleshed out than BW, an editor with better UX and power than BW, and even more refined multiplayer.
Instead, titles released after BW removed features. Graphics became worse for almost all products thereafter, especially those that pursued 3d, audio was hastily abandoned, RTS campaigns shifted more and more into RTT/RPG designs, customs support dropped off the face of the planet and LAN soon vanished from gaming, resulting in colossal embarassments like sc2 tournaments. Firms, including Blizzard, saw BW's success as something to force and orchrestrate and never put any effort into researching its growth or the circumstances that lead to its existence. Hint - BW was a fluke. All attempts to repeat that fluke were failures. It's the same story for Dota and League.
A product can only be of any value if it improves on something. When building products, an individual learns things along the way that improves the product, acquires resources or staffing or otherwise pushes a product to be greater than it was when it began. In kind, future installments, sequels, spin-offs, etc. are all expected to be superior to the initial product. Refinements in graphics, improved voice acting, more precisely tuned SFX, better map design, and adjustments to the gameplay to improve on weaknesses in the former. A product doesn't necessarily need to be extremely innovative or avant-garde. In fact, such pursuits are folly. A successful product was successful for a reason and future products learn from that success. This is the case in the financial arena - micro transactions are a successful business model because firms like Blizzard and Valve have successfully ejected gamers from the market and replaced them with hipsters who want to identify with gamers because "gamer" is now a trendy identity. As far as quality products are concerned, however, the formula is more intricate and careful - another reason why firms don't pursue it. It takes much more effort to make a quality product than it does a financially successful product. This is what happens when no one has any standards.
A simple comparison can be made between Brood War and Warcraft 3 or Starcraft 2. The latter two products have objectively inferior graphics and audio. This is something demonstrable in every front - performance, detail, readability, character and identity. When you factor in the era in which the games were created, BW was average for its day whilst wc3 and sc2 were dated about 10-20 years when they were released - both products resemble era 90's 3d products, with the exception of sc2 that applies 2005 post-processing to tone map and blur the image. The expectation of games released in 2010 and beyond is that their visual assets will not improve, usually degrade, and the use of post-processing to hide laziness becomes more abundant in turn because it's much faster to apply chromatic aberration through middleware than it is to hire a firm to create new models for you. Most egregous of modern examples is Doom Eternal, a game with graphics that are poor even by 2003 standards, whom uses TXAA and sharpening filters to try to hide a mountain of blurry textures, UVW seams, texel inconsistency, shadowless lights, clipping and backfaces.
Since 2010 the idea of what constitutes as a modern game in terms of graphics has become blurry because so few games try to produce good graphics. The screenspace and deferred rendering systems have successfully allowed non-artists to develop graphics for products and allowed firms to publish products with assets from libraries decades old, and hipsters can't tell the difference between ghosting, camera shaking and blur filters like FXAA and TXAA. Most people in the games industry won't even know what the term "TXAA" means, much less just how destructive it is to visuals.
However, anyone applying standards from games predating the blur filter craze will immediately notice that nearly every game after a certain year looks blurry and out of focus, has crazy ghosting and shimmering issues, and everything just seems to be lower and lower resolution. They may not know the technicals on why, but it's something your eyes can't be tricked out of. The reality is that modern products look worse and perform worse than older counterparts, regardless of genre. In fact, it's a common practice for many products today to use Chromium or Electron, browser software containing an operating system's worth of code from a company most well-known for manipulating search results and data harvesting to try to play kingmaker with American elections amongst other things. These massive libraries of software can gobble up to gigabytes of memory, and developers use them for the sole purpose of displaying menu windows. The exact same process that Brood War could accomplish nigh instantly now takes multiple seconds for the average product to accomplish. Once you started seeing spinners in local software - for me that was HoMM6 - you knew that gaming was dead.
The biggest problem with systems like Chromium is that they lower the entry to game development, and that always comes at the cost of the quality of the product to the end-user. This is exclusively because of the kind of people who prusue game development and financial posturing in today's industry. In the days of Brood War it was a mix of executives and hobbyists. In the days of sc2 it's a mix of diversity hires, computer science freshmen and marketing arms, few of which ever even talk to each other during development. The mindset changed, the goals changed, and the products changed. It's no surprise that the quality of the end result stagnated and then regressed - the pursuit of quality, much less the application of standards, died out.
Set standards for yourself. As a consumer, as a developer, standards give you a measurement to weigh investments and resources into.
Dispelling Terminology Nonsense For My Casting
QTE, "Quick Time Event" - QTE's fundamentally are prompts to push a specific button or buttons in an order. Common practice is to break gameflow and provide a prompt because a developer didn't know what to do with a certain part of their game and threw up their hands in frustration. Another common application is for object interactions to be needlessly annoying because a developer felt their game didn't have enough engagement and couldn't be bothered to improve the game instead. Another common application is hardware vendors realizing their products were too durable and asked developers to introduce ways to induce more wear and tear on them (e.g. Planned Obsolescence).
Other such mechanisms that fall into these classifications can still be constituted as QTE's even if the characteristic flashing prompt doesn't come with the interaction. The way quest design can be outlined in games, mandating constant running back and forth, how boss fights can be designed with rotation-specific interactions like attacking a spot three times to open up a weak spot, all of these fall into an interaction concept that feels arbitrary and whose purpose is largely to waste time. Rotation-centric play - seen often with RPG's following World of Warcraft - is intrinsically QTE based because you're always pushing buttons in a fixed sequence.
What ultimately defines a QTE is the arbitrary nature of its implementation. You should need to push a button to open a door - having to hammer a button repeatedly is utterly needless and offers absolutely nothing to the game at all. One has to interact with a menu to get into a game's content - having to sit through or repeatedly skip logos/cinematics to get to the menu is utterly needless and offers absolutely nothing to the game at all. One has to push a button to engage an attack to finish off an enemy - having to perform a QTE during an animation offers nothing to the game at all. Just let the player kill their enemies, man. Stop having cinematics kill them for you. This particular interaction literally takes the satisfaction of ending a fight away from the player completely.
Polish - Polish isn't a thing. Something is done correctly or it isn't. There's no such thing as polish. A product is not "polished". A product is "finished" or "unfinished". The measurement of a completed versus incomplete product is based on the experience. If there are gaps in any asset or element visible to the player then it's incomplete. The larger the product the harder it is to achieve completion. Consider than 20 minutes of R-type has more unique assets, more unique experiences and more memorable gameplay than all three of the Starcraft 2 campaigns combined. R-Type 3 is a complete product and Starcraft 2 is not. What would a complete Starcraft 2 look like? Well, it wouldn't have the Blizzard logo, for starters.
Gameplay Loop - It's a term used to broadly define gameplay motions in a circular and henceforth repetitive and grindy manner. Where ever the term originally came from its use in modern times has been exclusively to water down concepts and worse yet imply that certain interactions in a game are intentionally built to be predictable and static, much like quick time events. Regardless of the authentic merits of this terminology I never use it because it sounds utterly silly and distracts from the identity a developer should be attempting to accomplish with each individual player decision made in the product. If those decisions are as such that you can summarize them with a term such as "Loop" you've done something terribly wrong. An example I gave in a presentation was resource harvesting and early game in BW. This may appear like a gameplay loop in the sense you always start games with a CC and 4 workers. However, you make many decisions in this time period that break the "loop" concept. If you were to add dedicated scout units or automate economic play then the result will indeed be more loop-like because all openers would be homogenized, and you've broken the entire point of early game to begin with. If you find yourself using this term it's time to re-address the product and your interactions with it. If you still find yourself able to summarize a game experience as a "loop" then you've found a shitty game.
Future subjects when I give a shit if I am still alive -
- Hard Counters Are QTE's
- Micro Maps Are Self-Fulfulling Prophecies of Abandonment
- League of Legends, Team Skill vs Expression vs Decisions
- Feet And Why Their Fungus Is An Acceptable Alternative To Bugs For Your Diet