Crate's Grim Dawn Related RTS project

[MedeaFleecestealer]

Medierra's been pretty chatty lately and has let slip info about the RTS project they're working on in this forum thread.

https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/crates-rts-project/109927

[Captain Pentium]

Ooh, that’s some interesting stuff in there! Didn’t know that the dev worked on Empire Earth, either. Interesting.

[MedeaFleecestealer]

More info

"It’s funny because there’s a number of deities in the constellations that exist purely to provide constellations to put points into - but some of them we’re now taking to expanding on for lore / backstory in the RTS."

https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/malazan-influences-on-grim-dawn/109931/18

[Malagon]

Yikes, I really hope they don't focus on PVP with this new game. Cairn deserves an RTS with a robust and engaging SP campaign, not more multiplayer.

[powbam]

Originally posted by Malagon:

Yikes, I really hope they don't focus on PVP with this new game. Cairn deserves an RTS with a robust and engaging SP campaign, not more multiplayer.

Dunno why you would get that vibe if you'd read his first reply in the thread ;) He makes it rather clear how he views it..

https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/crates-grim-dawn-related-rts-project/109927/7

Originally posted by medierra:

Originally posted by pewsquare:

I wouldn’t and would worry about RTS quite a bit. They are a tricky genre to pin down properly. But i feel like we have been gettin a steady stream of RTS trough the years that all fell flat on their face, since all of them seemed to focus a lot on the competitive multiplayer side quite a lot and left the more numerous casual scene barely any content when it came to map making and campaign.
But boy, as someone who followed a lot of RTS, its such a hard genre to do justice. One wrong thing can make the whole game feel off, be it timing, to unit pathing, to progression trough units, building placement. Its quite the challange you guys are going to tackle.

Not sure what this stream of pvp focused RTS has been but I guess I missed it. I'm still playing SC2 and I feel like the only prior RTS really worth playing much were Age and Warcraft. I played a bit of the original Company of Heroes, which was fun but kind of clunky and of questionable balance but the sequel was awful imo. Dawn of War was fun but the squad based style isn't my favorite. SC2 is the most recent of those and it was released 10 years ago.

Which RTS have flopped by being too pvp focused? The only really pvp focused RTS I can think of is Starcraft, which is also the most successful RTS. I don't think it is necessarily successful due to the pvp as it also had a pretty involved campaign and my understanding is, similar to ARPG, only around 20% of the audience tends to play mp - it certainly doesn't seem to have hurt it though. Age wasn't really very pvp focused, although I think it is second to Starcraft in pvp popularity. I felt like the campaigns in Age 2 were horrible but I guess enough people like them.

I have some experience with RTS, as I did a bunch of the early design work on Empire Earth. Fun side-story - I was not happy with the direction the game went in though and got ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ midway through development due to disagreements with the owner, who decided I didn't know how to game design.

RTS is sensitive to pacing, balance, feel of pathing and other gameplay elements, but I'd say less so than ARPGs, at least for sp, and we managed to do okay at that. I feel like the most challenging part of an RTS is design and balance for pvp, which I think we can manage but, again, it's also not where I think the bulk of sales come from, and making a solid sp or coop experience seems more straightforward and is not too dissimilar to the demands of an ARPG.

Plus, as much as I love ARPGs, RTS was my first-love and the genre that I've probably played the most over the years and which launched my career into game dev.