The MMORTS - Why Is It So Hard to Make an MMORTS? - Extra Credits

[Music] there's a DieHard contingent of you out there who ask us every week to do an episode on rtss this is going to set a terrible precedent but all right you win here to help us out today is artist cat Z check out her site she's pretty darn good as a general rule we try to only address a genre when something new and interesting is happening within it but unfortunately there just hasn't been that much going on in the RTS world of late in fact to me the most interesting thing that's happened in the last year with regards to the long-term future of the genre and games as a whole hasn't been the release of major games like Starcraft 2 great though they may be but rather the widespread commercial adoption of RTS mods such as defense of the Ancients and Tower Defense but we'll save discussion of the modding community and its growing commercial effect for another day it'll be a great discussion to have but the data just isn't that clear yet when we've heard more numbers and fewer opinions we'll jump into the discussion instead today we're going to be talking about the MMO RTS millions of

have been wasted trying to build an MMO RTS and most of the attempts have either withered on the vine or died shortly after they saw the light of day does that mean it's impossible to build an MMO RTS definitely not so what's been the problem thus far the problem has been that most of the MMO rtss out there have basically just tried to lift the mechanics from Starcraft and then cram them into a World of Warcraft style Overworld and that can't really work whenever we do get a successful MMO RTS it's not going to play like Starcraft it can't for an MMO to work it has to have progression things which grow as you put time into them and for an RTS to work it has to have strategic play balanced systems that can be unbalanced through the thoughtful application of the rules and the mechanics but in a Starcraft Style game where you can collect resources and build units there's no way to include player progression because there's no way to balance the benefits that progression provides against the open-ended nature of the game balancing a Starcraft style RTS in which you can build a variable number of units is already a daunting task adding MMO progression to the mix makes it a nightmare we don't have nearly enough time to explore the ramifications at length but here's one really really

oversimplified example just to give you an idea in an RPG if a player levels up and gets plus three to their attack damage that always means one thing they do three more damage in an RTS if you give all Marines plus three damage when the player levels up there's no way to tell how that's going to affect any given match some games that could mean you're getting a bonus of 3,000 DPS in other games it could mean nothing because your opponent played a strategy where Marines just weren't very useful to you now if you add to this the fact that you don't even know if both players are going to be playing with the same bonuses it makes the already remarkably hard task of balancing an RTS darn near imposs possible and throwing a Starcraft RTS into a World of Warcraft style open world runs you into a host of other balance problems that keep your game from being strategic the first and most obvious is that if you let players build units over time in general players who've played for longer will always be stronger than those who played for less time meaning the best tactical decision will be to always pray on the week that's no good Eve online solution of having safe and unsafe space works for them but it doesn't really solve our problem because unlike an eve where the player is represented by a single ship the logistics of having players move bases all around gets pretty cumbersome you could try and avoid the problem by

not letting players move their bases but then you run into another dead end because now you need an amazingly vast and unwieldy new barria as more and more players fill it with permanent bases bases which you can't even delete if you want to have any chance of drawing back in lapsed players you could try going the oame route of only allowing tiered interactions only letting players who are closely matched in power fight each other but then not only are you splitting your community but you're also creating impossible pathing problems as high level armies have to wind their way all around the low-l players they can't attack to get at each other I mean imagine the scenario where you built your amazingly powerful Army only to find yourself surrounded by low-level players you can't engage and whose bases you can't march through then of course you run into the question of what to do with a player stuff when they disconnect does it disappear if so does it reappear when they log back in what happens if I happen to be marching my Army across what I thought was open space and all of a sudden the player occupying that area logs back in what happens if someone pulls the plug when they're being attacked I could go on for hours rattling off all these problems and hours more trying to explain why the surface solutions to some of those problems only add new complications or just tend to fall apart but enough

problems we can take that discussion to the forums later let's talk about Solutions I'm fairly convinced that the first successful mmts isn't going to involve resource collection rather it will allow the player to bring a finite amount of resources to a given match those of you who play tabletop games like Warhammer or war machine will be familiar with this model in this type of design every character or unit is assigned a point cost and players get to bring a pre-specified number of points worth of units into battle once in battle no new units can be created this is the kind of system the old myth games used and it's a fantastic system for ensuring balance even if you allow player progression you can simply increase the cost of improved units or characters to keep them balanc this means the higher level players may have a bit more versatility but not more raw power since the designer can know exactly how many points the player has to work with in the system they can actually adjust for the effects of progression on play additionally in my opinion the first successful mmts will have instanced battles that somehow affect a larger economy or strategic map this simply means that when you play a game you'll be participating in a one-off RTS battle with a limited number of players much akin to what we see when playing multiplayer RTS matches today

but at the end of that battle you'll earn metag game rewards that affect your progression and overall status of the world you're playing in so like perhaps when you play you might start out looking at a big 2D map of the entire game World this map would be divided into areas that players could control or influence selecting one of these areas might select a game type or it might simply select what area you want to get points toward influencing if you win so you might select an area and hop into a random fouron four battle and at the end you get awarded with currency to spend on equipment or unit upgrades which are still balanced by the point system discussed previously you'll also get random loot drops such as equipment and control points for the territory which when you reach a certain number gives you a bonus for controlling that territory if you want to see a glimpse of the future you should check out the multiplayer and Shogun 2 it's the first game that I feel really takes the right approach though it does so a little clumsily nonetheless it has almost every feature we listed in some form or another except an overarching economy to tie the player base together and it's certainly worth a look if you're into Grand strategy or just want to see what an mmts might look like someday if they just added a little more MMO to the mix so that's our thoughts on the MMO RTS over the next several months we'll see the release of end of nation the highest

budget MMO RTS title in quite some time I'd be shocked if they didn't do instantiated gameplay with an overarching metag game and hopefully they've saved themselves a hassle and done away with real-time resource collection either way it'll be an interesting case study in the future of the mm RTS anyway hope you enjoyed that see you next week [Music] n [Music] [Applause] [Music]