Hacker News Reader

Comment by Grombobulous | Hacker News Reader

Blizzard being a generally terrible developer aside, I don’t think you’re right about this.

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. The IP and story would work well for many game genres that haven’t been explored.

If StarCraft 3 comes out it would only be popular in South Korea and possibly not all that popular at all even there.

View on HN

> 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...

> You also can’t play RTS games on consoles.

You can, see StarCraft 64.

Starcraft 64 is infamously terrible and is evidence that RTS games don't work on consoles.

I rented it at blockbuster, loved it, bought it, and then played many hundreds of hours on it. I don’t know if I agree with your statement as written.

That said, I don’t know if I would even touch a RTS on a console these days. So maybe I agree in spirit.

I did the same thing (minus buying it).

It was super fun but definitely not the same competitive experience. But it was really impressive how well it all worked.

SC64 has an 80 on Metacritic. Re-evaluate your statement with evidence.

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).

> You also can’t play RTS games on consoles.

You certainly can. See Halo Wars.

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.

I also think the RTS genre is very much less popular today and then it was at that time.

> 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.

> You also can’t play RTS games on consoles.

Pikmin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com