Why didn't games like World in Conflict retain popularity?

[ray245]

Even though there are games like revolutionary games like World in Conflict that offer plenty of new ideas in regards to RTS games, it seems to me that most games like this essentially drop off the radar after a while, whereas games like Starcraft and C&C managed to stay on the radar again and again. There is also the additional fact that all those innovative ideas aren't picked up by other games companies, whereas the C&C(or Starcraft) style of gameplay are still being followed by plenty of game company.

While there are exception to this rule of course, such as the total war series, few companies attempt to mimic that style of gameplay.

So I have to ask, why couldn't these kind of innovative games sustain their popularity and managed spread those new ideas into other RTS games?

[Stark]

1) a combined issue, whereby they are seldom made by big companies, thus don't get marketing, thus never get marketshare, thus never reach online 'critical mass'. They also generally suffer negative 'word of mouth' in the relevant genre for the following reasons.

2) learning curve. Gamers are really pretty stupid, and dislike learning a new take on a genre when there are same-old alternatives. WiC is a pretty basic game in concept, and yet towering military intellects like Sheppard are simply unable to grasp how it's played.

3) innovation = new concepts = complexity = different. Similar to the previous, any game that introduces a new way of handling Well Known Mechanic ABC will take flak from players who see their finely-honed wallshotting or microing or build trees made irrelevant. Even regenerating health took years to penetrate this effect, even with huge names behind it.

4) nobody picks up these features because, honestly, why would they? Genre slaves will always buy their games anyway, and the more standard and branded they are the better. It'd be hard to actually change things, and they'd just get point 5.

5) rapid forum/blog based feedback. Smaller developers generally make innovate games, but their size means they're often very prey to 'player feedback'. This feedback generally boils down to 'make the game Counterstrike' or 'make the game Starcraft'.

In short, big names don't HAVE to innovate, and small names can be pressured out of it by 'fans'. Innovative games are harder to sell and harder to play, and very rarely succeed in multiplayer. Frankly, look at games in general; games die very very fast these days, innovation or not. Only very few stick around even six months in the 'player consciousness'.

[Oskuro]

Why do game companies invest so heavily in advertising campaings? Cause most gamers (and most people) are the mental equivalent of bleating lambs with ADD.

Now, in all seriousness, people often dislike getting out of their comfort zone, and new concepts often scare them, wich explains why game companies often hammer down on the tried-and-true formulas (the EA strategy). Hell, it isn't exclusive of the gaming industry, you see this constantly in other media as well, even in politics or other social dynamics.


Also, fuck you Stark for posting while I was writing

[Stofsk]

2) learning curve. Gamers are really pretty stupid, and dislike learning a new take on a genre when there are same-old alternatives. WiC is a pretty basic game in concept, and yet towering military intellects like Sheppard are simply unable to grasp how it's played.

I'll have you know I just bought WiC Complete Edition at EB this evening based on your recommendation in the CinC thread.

[Stark]

Why do game companies invest so heavily in advertising campaings? Cause most gamers (and most people) are the mental equivalent of bleating lambs with ADD.

Now, in all seriousness, people often dislike getting out of their comfort zone, and new concepts often scare them, wich explains why game companies often hammer down on the tried-and-true formulas (the EA strategy). Hell, it isn't exclusive of the gaming industry, you see this constantly in other media as well, even in politics or other social dynamics.


Also, fuck you Stark for posting while I was writing

Hey I hoped nobody instaposted ME! Joys of replying to ray...

Anyway, the marketing payoff must be HUGE, because games get giant pushes from marketing (even when they suck and vanish quickly) because first-week sales are super-important. How many people bought all kinds of rubbish hype-machine games before anyone realised they were rubbish?

I mean, not all games are as polite as Bioshock, and release a demo before launch that demonstrates that everything they've hyped for the previous four years was a baldfaced lie. And Bioshock STILL made piles of money, despite it's handicaps!

EDIT - Stofsk, I was in EB and saw it's like $25 bucks. Everyone should buy it! If only there was some way to play the Golden Age of WiC 1.005.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

Well, I think much of what Stark said is true - but I also think Massive Entertainment is a bit of a special case in that they totally failed at marketing. I mean their previous game, Ground Control 2, actually had a very similar multiplayer system to World in Conflict, if I recall correctly. But exactly the same thing happened to it. Few bought it and even fewer were still playing it online a month after launch.

Though the strange thing is... Massive actually does seem to put lots of effort into marketing, just in totally the wrong places. Go to the World in Conflict page on Gametrailers and check out some of the trailers. There are loads of unique trailers of pretty high quality - some of them are even purpose made full-blown CG affairs (check the Soviet Assault Red Menace trailer for a nice example) which don't even appear in the games.

The trouble is that these seem to be all they do for marketing - there appears to be little done to actually just let people know that the game even exists. Many of my friends who are RTS fans, and who also dislike the current state of the genre, simply had not even heard of the game. Once they see those various trailers they get excited about it, as you would.

So yes - gamers fail for appreciating Massive's style of RTS games more, but Massive themselves also get a special award for Underachievement in Marketing. Hopefully now that they are owned by Ubisoft and apparently working on a Clancy RTS the full screaming weight of Ubi marketing will get behind them.

I mean, not all games are as polite as Bioshock, and release a demo before launch that demonstrates that everything they've hyped for the previous four years was a baldfaced lie. And Bioshock STILL made piles of money, despite it's handicaps!

In fairness, the success of Bioshock was mainly on consoles - to knarled old PC gamers like ourselves who have played the various System Shocks etc... it seems pretty run of the mill, but console gamers really had not seen that particular type of game before, and especially not one with good marketing and impressive artistic direction.

I see this as a fairly universal problem in gaming right now. So many ideas, many of which were actually very useful/clever, were tried in the "olden days" of gaming. But that was before gaming hit mass popularity in a big way, especially with consoles, which means the vast majority of the current gamer market think these old ideas are actually brilliant and innovative new ideas - and so we have to sit by and watch as they are re-invented in extreme slow-motion.

Once these older ideas have become "re-established" with the new gaming public, perhaps we will start to see new things again. Alternatively, in the nightmare future of 21st Century gaming, I think there is a chance we may end up in a perpetual state of "idea churn" where old ideas (once suitably forgotten) bubble back to the surface and become the new "innovative" feature of the moment.

Maybe I'm being a bit too cynical, however.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I've slowly come to the conclusion that indie developers need digital distribution and to make a game very cheaply so that it only has to sell a few thousand copies to break even. That means graphics that look like something from a few years ago, but luckily games looked really good a few years ago. You can still make innovative games these days, you just have to keep your costs down and use low cost marketing. Mount and Blade is a good example of an awesome game that never would have come from a commercial publisher, was made by one guy and his wife, and sold almost solely on word of mouth.

[Thanas]

I didn't buy WiC due to the hardware requirements. I do not want to upgrade my computer to FPS standards just to buy one RTS, when I can only play Rome with all its mods and no upgrades.

Oh, and the story didn't make sense, which is very important to me.

[Samuel]

Oh, and the story didn't make sense, which is very important to me.

For RTSs no story involving the US post world war 2 and any warfare will make sense due to both its overwhelming military superiority and the ocean protecting it from anything resembling a sneak attack.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

WiC's story made sense internally, it just wasn't historical. There's a difference between being ahistorical and not making sense.

[Steel]

I've slowly come to the conclusion that indie developers need digital distribution and to make a game very cheaply so that it only has to sell a few thousand copies to break even. That means graphics that look like something from a few years ago, but luckily games looked really good a few years ago. You can still make innovative games these days, you just have to keep your costs down and use low cost marketing. Mount and Blade is a good example of an awesome game that never would have come from a commercial publisher, was made by one guy and his wife, and sold almost solely on word of mouth.

Problem is that Mount and Blade, and to a greater extent those other innovative games you're talking about havent become popular. Mount and blade I've heard good things about, but the first time I ever saw it in a shop was yesterday in a bargain bin. Did it ever get a proper commercial release?

Its all well for these innovations to exist in small indie products, and better there than nowhere, but the problem is that they arent picked up by bigger studios who should say "hey thats a great idea!" if they had any sense, but then for various reasons in this thread and the other the big names keep going back to starcraft/counterstrike.

I think the principal reason innovative games dont become popular is the fact that they are made by smaller studios and thus have much less marketing. Secondary reason is gamers are stupid.

Is there greater 'feature inertia' on consoles or PC? We've recently seen a decline in both development for PC and innovations in gameplay. Do the developers have an image of console players as retards with ADD who need something they can just pick up and play, thus requiring it to be familiar so they dont have to learn anything, or is an army of clicks per second pro gamers fighting change a greater impediment to progress?

What about piracy? Is there a dev fear that if you go and make something thats cool and new people will pirate it more?

[Losonti Tokash]

Thanas, why should the story affect multi, which is the reason we play WiC anyway?

Also, my two year old laptop runs it just fine but I guess it's up to FPS standards even though it chokes on half life 2.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Problem is that Mount and Blade, and to a greater extent those other innovative games you're talking about havent become popular. Mount and blade I've heard good things about, but the first time I ever saw it in a shop was yesterday in a bargain bin. Did it ever get a proper commercial release?

Its all well for these innovations to exist in small indie products, and better there than nowhere, but the problem is that they arent picked up by bigger studios who should say "hey thats a great idea!" if they had any sense, but then for various reasons in this thread and the other the big names keep going back to starcraft/counterstrike.

I think the principal reason innovative games dont become popular is the fact that they are made by smaller studios and thus have much less marketing. Secondary reason is gamers are stupid.

Is there greater 'feature inertia' on consoles or PC? We've recently seen a decline in both development for PC and innovations in gameplay. Do the developers have an image of console players as retards with ADD who need something they can just pick up and play, thus requiring it to be familiar so they dont have to learn anything, or is an army of clicks per second pro gamers fighting change a greater impediment to progress?

What about piracy? Is there a dev fear that if you go and make something thats cool and new people will pirate it more?

That misses the point I was trying to make. Innovative indie games will never be as popular as big retail titles, that's not the point. The point is you can make a pretty good game (and one with pleasing 3D graphics) these days with a very small staff, sometimes even one person. Sure, it'll look like a game from 5 years ago, but Half Life 2 is 5 years old now and it still looks great. With digital distribution and viral marketing, you can make a living selling a game like this without needing it to be picked up by bigger studios. If I'm right and this is what happens, we'll see PC gaming basically split into big budget shlock for the unwashed retard masses and intelligent games for the sophisticated gamer.

[Stark]

I didn't buy WiC due to the hardware requirements. I do not want to upgrade my computer to FPS standards just to buy one RTS, when I can only play Rome with all its mods and no upgrades.

Oh, and the story didn't make sense, which is very important to me.

WiC actually scales downward very well; you can run it on quite low-end systems well just by turning things down, something many games don't do well at all. It certainly has better performance overall than Total War games. I'd be very surprised if you could play Rome on reasonable settings and couldn't play WiC at all.

Arthur's point is good - small groups, making decent but low-budget games (due to the relative ease of development these days) can afford to be 'innovative' without expecting giant returns or marketshare. Speaking of failed marketing, Stardock's Demigod is another example of an RTS that totally sank due to poor marketing (and a generally fucked launch, with netcode that simply didn't work). It's non-standard but not 'innovative' (since 80% of it's gameplay is stolen from a Warcraft 3 mod) but it has also essentially vanished from the 'gamer consciousness' despite good reviews.

[CaptHawkeye]

WiC not only scales down very well, but even looks good at mid-low settings. More importantly it is still able to perform its detailed terrain deformation. Something plenty of newer games still don't grasp.

I remember I was one of the people who approached WiC the wrong way back when it came out. I was thinking of it in terms of "lolcraft" or bigger-scale Company of Heroes. At first I found the game boring but I suspect like many of its true fans I just found myself more and more addicted to it. Why? WiC's basic gameplay formula is incredibly simplistic, but the game's "limited" content is so well placed and designed that it really doesn't matter because it succeeds on pure cleverness and individuality alone. You have to approach WiC with an unbiased attitude to really understand it.

I'll never forget the screaming hoardes of retards on the Gamespot forums bitching about the game's shittiness due to "zomg no base buildin" or because their was no resource gathering. That was about the time you came to truly understand just what a conservative fanboy is, and why they do SO MUCH DAMAGE to video games every day.

Is WiC perfect? No. Plenty of the units were never properly balanced, some aspects of the gameplay are really TOO simple and limited. But ultimately none of these issues came close to killing the gameplay. Besides that, WiC's issues are not unique in the context of all Unit Command games. At least WiC is substantially different in design and execution.

[Thanas]

Thanas, why should the story affect multi, which is the reason we play WiC anyway?

Because I don't play mult, something that should have been clear the minute I posted that the story was important to me.

And no, the story was not only ahistorical, it made zero sense. The soviets suddenly staging an invasion of America makes the US Navy/Air force/intelligence agencies either a) nonexistent or b) complete morons.

WiC actually scales downward very well; you can run it on quite low-end systems well just by turning things down, something many games don't do well at all. It certainly has better performance overall than Total War games. I'd be very surprised if you could play Rome on reasonable settings and couldn't play WiC at all.

I don't have a desktop PC (well, not one I care to use for gaming anyway) and that at the time, I was playing it from a laptop with only a 64 MB graphics card. Which is fine for Rome on decent settings, but not enough for the minimum requirements of WiC.

[Jade Falcon]

Has anyone had any really screwed up server rules in any WiC servers. Two examples I've came across are...

Server style 1-No one can have more than one heavy arty or two medium arty. If you have mobile AA you can not put mobile AA near your arty.

Server style 2-No one under the rank of General can use heavy arty.

Then there was the one the other night where there was some arsehole who decided he wasn't just going to manage his own squad, but micromanage everyone elses and ranted and raved if they didn't do exactly what he wanted. This was on a type 2 server.

[Stark]

Those rules are lame (and Hav got kicked once because he was using medium arty 'wrong') but they exist because of all the idiots who spawn double heavy arty and a HAA and sit still the whole match, firing uselessly at nothing while everyone gets chewed up by choppers.

Really, support players need to either be REALLY GOOD with arty (ie cooperative, using medium to rape infantry, etc) or be using AA and repair, which are far more useful 90% of the time.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Yeah, those rules are stupid, but more because they're trying to police stupidity. Back in the early days of WiC everyone and their fucking retarded dog would just drop heavy arty and sit there pounding neutral points into oblivion ad infinitum, making it nigh-impossible to capture said points with my ready-and-waiting infantry units. This was in addition to generally being useless and serving the team in no way shape or form.

[Ohma]

I've slowly come to the conclusion that indie developers need digital distribution and to make a game very cheaply so that it only has to sell a few thousand copies to break even. That means graphics that look like something from a few years ago, but luckily games looked really good a few years ago. ...

Well really all you need is good art direction. I mean, a lot of games from the mid 90s still look pretty good (a lot of the vga Sierra adventure games for example) even though they're full of massive pixels simply by having most of the visuals drawn or painted by hand. Similarly, Dungeon Keeper 2 had pretty kicking visuals because while they did use at the time cutting edge 3d graphics, the team making it was more driven to find a consistent and appealing visual aesthetic, rather than just use as many shinies as possible.

[Stark]

If only Nvidia hadn't broken DK2?

I wonder if as a rule team stuff suffers. Yes, CS is teambased, but everyone who's played it knows how much teamwork there is on a pub server. You can have fun while ignoring your teammates, and that's what arty noobs do in WiC. Demigod is similarly a teambased game requiring cooperation.

[CaptHawkeye]

Some people just policed the arty noobs themselves. In the old days of WiC it wasn't strange to see guys laying down tank busters on their own team's arty noobs. Since most Arty Noobs are too god damn stupid to watch their own units they're obscenely easy to kill with the cheapest TA. Regardless of which team was throwing it down.

Though it's a myth that only support could be used poorly. On 98% of the servers you will play in, the "Dumbest Motherfucker" award usually ends up going to Armour. A role which frequently fails to engage the most given targets in order to uselessly go "pew pew pew" at the enemy's tanks.

Or the Air player who runs like a sissy boy from ONE Heavy Anti Air. Oh no, I might lose my scout chopper!

Or the infantry player who makes sure to keep all of his units grouped as closely as possible, so that a single light artillery barrage can wipe out his entire stack.

Ultimately the real people that pissed me off were the clanners. I imagine they did a good job at scaring off other people from the game too. No, it wasn't the clan stacking douche bags on the opposing team that piss me off. It's the server owning Clan RETARDS on YOUR TEAM who try to micromanage players...not in their clan. It's fucking funny to watch some faux professional commander tell you EXACTLY where to place your units, what path they should follow, how it's all your fault if you didn't react to their commands in .2sec, etc.

[Stark]

That's exactly it. Most players never BOTHERED to learn how to play, they just followed their gut feeling/RTS standard. Armour should avoid other armour, because the fights take so long, make you vulnerable to TA, and choppers do it way better so you should kill the AA with your light vehicle-killing attack. Tanks? Penetrate the front line and disrupt the enemy's rear areas and support elements? IMPOSSIBLE!

EDIT: Hilariously if you DID play properly, arty noobs would NEVER move their spawn, so you could camp behind a hill in the enemy spawn zone, wait for the artillery to spawn, roll to the top of the hill, pew pew pew, then roll back down. No teamwork means nobody will send choppers after you and noobs means they'll keep repawning every 45s to give you unlimited TA.

[Jade Falcon]

Those rules are lame (and Hav got kicked once because he was using medium arty 'wrong') but they exist because of all the idiots who spawn double heavy arty and a HAA and sit still the whole match, firing uselessly at nothing while everyone gets chewed up by choppers.

Really, support players need to either be REALLY GOOD with arty (ie cooperative, using medium to rape infantry, etc) or be using AA and repair, which are far more useful 90% of the time.

Oh I agree, I found one server that didn't have restrictions. What I did was spawned a single Heavy arty, douible is really overkill on the splash damage, especially is you're using the US or EU rocket arty, a single repair tanks, and a couple of AA vehicles. I kept the AA in firing distance, but made sure I wasn't just saturation firing and doing more damage to my team than theirs. I kept the AA near the rear for friendly air squadrons to use (I think I got a good chunk of my points from that) and sent my AA on a roving patrol and did well.

In contrast on one map, a guy spawned with nothing but three heavy arty and killed more of our own team than anything else.

Sometimes I think the reason certain games don't retain popularity can be due to technical issues. Examples include Army of Two on the 360. Now, I know this game has faults, but I think the potential was there to have a good game. However, I can't think why the hell EA made distinct EU and US versions that can't cross-play.

[Uraniun235]

If only Nvidia hadn't broken DK2?

I wonder if as a rule team stuff suffers. Yes, CS is teambased, but everyone who's played it knows how much teamwork there is on a pub server. You can have fun while ignoring your teammates, and that's what arty noobs do in WiC. Demigod is similarly a teambased game requiring cooperation.

Battlefield 2 really shone when you had good teamwork going. It was beautiful.

Of course, good teamwork tended to be non-existent.