Single Player Campaign?

[XartaX]

Will the game have a campaign? The store page mentions "PvE Missions", but that could be pretty much anything, from skirmish, to scenarios, to an actual campaign.

If not, it's probably too late to consider adding it now. But that would be a pretty huge mistake since the vast majority of people who play RTS do it for the campaign first.

[Manus]

Heyo! I would love to answer that, but unfortunately we can't talk about future content.

If you would be interested in the lore of the game I recommend joining discord or reading our lore book! We have a vast world developed already :D

[^0^^0sfe]

Ahhhh, I wished there could be similar campaign as SC2 had :( Which won't happen if dev cannot speak about it.

[XartaX]

Originally posted by ^0^^0sfe:

Ahhhh, I wished there could be similar campaign as SC2 had :( Which won't happen if dev cannot speak about it.

Yeah if they can't even say they will have one, they probably won't. I get not disclosing details, but if they can't even say if it exists, I'm going to go with no. In which case it's probably doomed to fail.

[Zardecil]

Originally posted by XartaX:

Originally posted by ^0^^0sfe:

Ahhhh, I wished there could be similar campaign as SC2 had :( Which won't happen if dev cannot speak about it.

Yeah if they can't even say they will have one, they probably won't. I get not disclosing details, but if they can't even say if it exists, I'm going to go with no. In which case it's probably doomed to fail.

To be clear on this:
- We have a lot of lore. It has been developed out for about a decade at this point. We have a metric ton of stories that we want to tell.
- It would be a waste for us to not use the sheer amount of effort that has been put into it. For some perspective: we have 10000 years of history mapped out for the game that has come together in order to help us create our factions, units, immortals, music, voice lines, and more.
- How we are going to tell the stories that we want to tell is something that is still in flux and we are still working out. As such, we simply do not have anything to announce at this time, as it is too early for us to create any sort of expectation regarding what we are doing on that front.

Does this mean we won't do a campaign? Not necessarily. It is possible that we do end up doing one. It is also possible that we don't end up doing one and we choose to do a different form of content instead.

We shall see what happens. :)

[Machiavelli]

Campaigns in RTS are just simple puzzles when you get down to it. It's outdated design. Really don't understand the appeal. Hopefully they do something new.

[ocean pollen]

Originally posted by Honourable Fellington:

Campaigns in RTS are just simple puzzles when you get down to it. It's outdated design. Really don't understand the appeal. Hopefully they do something new.

PvP matches are invariably balanced and on mirrored maps. Add a skirmish AI and it's the same but now your enjoyment completely depends on the AI and you learn its weaknesses and start having to handicap yourself to have fun. RTS campaigns are made up of scenarios that come in two flavors:
1. (WC, SC1, TA, but also BAR and Zero-K) minimally scripted unbalanced matchups with the skirmish AI trying to play like a player would, but given an elaborate setup to do it with. These can be really fun and can either closely resemble PvAI or depart a great deal from it. There's a BAR scenario where you start with a small group of high-tier units and have to dismantle an enemy base with just those units before the enemy AI builds up an army. There are a few Zero-K campaign missions where you have a tiny base and use it to interfere with a giant battle between friendly and unfriendly AIs that own the rest of the map. There's also a tendency, all the way back to WarCraft 1, to limit unit and tech options in the campaign, giving you a PvAI with a smaller scope of the game to have to master.
2. (SC2, SG) the same, but heavily scripted and often forgoing the normal economy entirely and just spawning in units for the skirmish AI to attack with, or generating commands as well so the AI hardly contributes anything. These can still be a lot of fun but IMO are more of a unique investment both for the dev (vs. improving skirmish AI which helps the rest of the game) and the player (learning to counter a single scenario's spawned-unit surprises doesn't help you in pvp games as much as defeating the skirmish AI in disadvantagous scenarios might)
Since there's a reactive AI neither type should be 'simple' puzzles at least, even if the point of a mission is that it's beatable by some method that you can discover as a solution to it. There are also solutions to PvP 'puzzles': the enemy is fielding these units; what should you field to beat them? The enemy wants to take this point; how can you keep it?
But it's not outdated. It's a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun playing StarCraft Reversed earlier this year, which is a custom SC1 campaign that has you play the opposing side of the original campaign.

With type-1 scenarios you could even do it multiplayer with some kind of honor system, spawning one player in the AI's position with some rules on how to play it. Or a handicap system: you start with half the map but you have a hard cap on APM and can only select so many units at a time.

You could say that SG's campaign is more modern in the sense that, after the tutorial mission, it's a series of maps that are set up like SC2/SG co-op battles, with the enemy threatening you and sending waves of units and reacting to you taking objectives, and with ways to trigger assaults by your AI co-op partners. And IMO, that campaign sucks. Type-1 missions are easy to do once you have the skirmish AI. All that's needed are some creative map makers who can set up various underdog or defense situations that people would normally avoid in pvp, and you can do that while telling a story that gives PvP players some context for their actions that makes the game more interesting.