Wargame: European Escalation- What You Need to Know

A spectre is haunting Europe- the spectre of good game developers that get no press for no explicable reason.  Eugen is one of those studios, and their most recent title- Wargame- is quite possibly the best modern-era RTS game released in the last decade.  However it has received little to no critical acclaim.  The extent of its fame is essentially a few glowing articles over on Rock Paper Shotgun, including a riveting battle report of one of their own games.

I have played Wargame for over 100 hours solid now, and it shows no sign of becoming less interesting.  This weekend, the game releases its second free DLC package, including more maps, a game mode, and balance tweaks.  It is also going on its second massive discount for a limited time- available for 50% off, a scant $20, this weekend.  At that price, it is a must-buy for any gamer who likes strategy games.  And here’s why.

RTS User Interface Tools

Many moons ago, I blogged about how RTS game designers should be learning from user interface design by searching far outside the narrow box of traditional games. For example, back when I blogged about this, many advanced shaping, drawing, formation, layout and grouping tools had been widely available for years for industrial use in popular apps like Photoshop. The first decent implementation of this sort of UI approach came about two or three years later, when I had all but stopped RTS blogging.

Chris Taylor came out with Supreme Commander, and with it had forged the now iconic strategic zoom. A feature that had been used for years (albeit much more crudely) in graphics and design applications, et al. It changed everything for RTS — we now had space, vision, a sense of awesome scale.

Starcraft 2 Patch 1.4 PTR (Luke’s Thoughts)

First off, this is by far the best SC2 patch to date. It seems to address with little ambiguity some of the biggest concerns voiced by the SC2 community to do with balance issues and gameplay dynamics. It is a bold and daring patch, and Blizzard, in my opinion, should be commended for listening to the players, filtering reasoned criticism from the noise, and then patching the hell out of their precious RTS baby.

Nerfs and buffs a plenty!

Logistics

In this article, I’m going to cover a topic that most RTS games designs won’t touch, and this ‘fifth rail’ of strategy games actually has an immense amount of potential to improve the genre.  I am referring to logistics.

Why Is Strategy Fun?

Why are strategy games fun, and why do we care?  This is the first question that needs to be addressed before any attempt to build a better RTS game is undertaken.  Games like Half-Life were built from the ground up based on questions like this, specifically by trying to create an immersive novel, and with every facet of the game bent towards its ultimate purpose, the result is highly polished.  Whether it’s a success or not is subjective, but I say that Half-Life, and its successors are the Canterbury Tales in the history of single-player video games, and demonstrated what it is that the medium can and should become.  Strategy games are more complex than creating a single linear story because a single game actually embodies a single instance of a solution space that can be immensely large, and using a wide variety of starting parameters such as player skills, preferences, etc.  So if we are to plan what strategy games should become, first we need to figure out their basic elements, and the proper tools and methods used to construct such a game.  Let’s begin by figuring out what has made past strategy games successful.