(commenting here since the author's forum is down)
There's a few points on here I'd like to debate:
- I haven't played an RTS recently, but the last time I dived into the genre there was lots of innovation: World in Conflict had an entirely new resource-based deployment system, Warhammer 40k Dawn of War and Company of Heroes both employed brand-new "capture and hold" territory-based gameplay. You could argue that League of Legends and DOTA both contribute to this genre as well.
- The author mentions several times that they didn't have the time or resources to spend on map creation. Level design is a pretty important aspect of any game development - maybe the Hard Vacuum game would've taken off if they had content?
- "A team like this today can not even hope to create a major blockbuster game". See: decent indie studios all over the world. Maybe it's just that the definition of "major game" has changed since the 90's.
While I agree with the main premise of the article, that game designers need to take a critical, uninfluenced look at the genres they design games for, it feels like the author hasn't attempted to play a game in the last 10 years.
> While I agree with the main premise of the article, that game designers need to take a critical, uninfluenced look at the genres they design games for, it feels like the author hasn't attempted to play a game in the last 10 years.
The article was written in 2005 so that seems like a correct assessment.
Another game, though I haven't looked at it in a while, with a very innovative idea is Achron. Time travelling with all the potential hazards and benefits it implies. Lost a battle? Go back and reposition your units. Cost increased to go back further in time so you couldn't infinitely regress. I fell out of playing video games a couple years ago though so I'm not sure how it turned out. I should download it again and check it out.
If you like to dabble in modding or are a game developer, here are some fairly obscure but quite innovative games:
Heroes of Might and Magic 4. What REALLY is unforgivable in the game is the AI, which - mostly due to time pressure - even its own developers described as "lobotomized". But it has many things new to the serries, including obstacles affecting line of sight in combat, towers that need to be manned (no more turrets that are either too weak or too strong), separate initiative and speed stats (greater flexibility in units). Gone is the notoriously hard to balance Attack Skill, Defense Skill, Spell Power and Knowledge (attack/def got stronger and stronger as turns passed). Heroes4 riped off Master of Magic spell system, which in turn ripped off M:tG spell magic colors. This means that magic schools are actually unique and work in different ways. Heroes 4 is a broken game in a couple of ways, but a library of intriguing mechanics as well.
Nox. Easy to mistake for a Diablo clone, Nox by Westwood Studios (neglected by EA) has no random loot, no chance-based dodge or shield block or hit chance, practically no resists. All spells remain useful thorough the game. Nox has many interesting spells and mechanics. It is skill-based instead and combat is very satisfying. The most noticeable thing in the game is its fun line of sight algorithm. In Diablo, you can anticipate big fights because you can see past walls. Here, you can't. Teleglitch is a new game that also has this mechanic.
Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. Like Heroes 4, it was sunk by bad AI I believe, but is a great game especially in multiplayer. I would describe it like "Heroes 4 done right". Flying units, spells on adventure map, Master of Magic-like research and magic system, the ability to build towns and roads as well as raze&rebuild neutral structures. If an ice witch passes over land, it's permanently covered in snow. Try that over water or enemy city's crops !
And play board games. Board games have many mechanics unseen in computer games. Try ones like Dominion, Neuroshima Hex, Seasons, or Dungeoneer. The last one may appear like just an improved version of Talisman, but it has one wonderful mechanic. Buffs and positive powers are used from a SEPARATE pool. Normally multiplayer games have a problem where by spending your resources on hostile actions you don't help your cause but make the target of your malice easier to beat for others.
- Storm - strategy game, core mechanics was developing your aircraft designs, test-flying them, building them, and defending your flying island with them. Big part of the game was trading in airships parts between factions. It also has arcade 3d-mode fighting system, where you controlled one of your ships, but it was unplayable).
- Net Storm - another game on flying islands - also strategy, but gamplay was very different - it was all about building towers, defensive structures and bridges to contain and defeat enemy flying island. It felt like real-time chess, positioning was the most important. It also had nice multiplayer mode.
- MAX - another strategy game - this time turn-based. It had nice system of resource extraction - you had to scan ground for resources, also your factories, defence systems, mines, etc had to be connected by pipelines for resources and power to be provided everywhere. So defending pipelines was important.
Net Storm only had internet multiplayer in a time when internet multiplayer was very unknown. It is, to me, hands down the most skill involved RTS ever created - requiring both clever maneuvering and fast, correct reactions.
It's a shame it didn't take off more than it did. A re-release with better graphics would likely do very well in current competitive RTS game circles, though. Well as long as it had sufficient marketing and very good tutorials. Free to play with in-game purchases for different tower skins would probably be the way to go...
There is a re-make underway and has been for about two years now [1]. They are making fair progress and I like the graphics. I think their main mistake may be not going for a brower-based version, then again, if the Net Storm legacy lives on, who am I to complain? Also, not sure about the licensing, there were indications of them being closed source a few years ago but I have been unable to find anything explicit, given what happened to the original Net Storm I hope the same mistake will not be repeated.
I was looking for MAX last week, but I couldn't remember the name. I finally found it and was thrilled when I discovered there's an open source clone called MAX Reloaded [1].
MAX was cool, but it tended to turn into a out-range/out-research battle. A lot of the games we played turned into a grind of turtling missile towers into enemy territory, while trying to buff their range faster than the other guy.
You could see the ranges of enemy units, and because it was turn based, you'd also spend a lot of time trying to come up with very conservative hit and run manoeuvres.
I forgot Laser Squad Nemesis and Frozen Synapse. They have simultaneous turns, and in some ways it's the best of both worlds. You get the ability to plan moves carefully, like in TBS games, but don't get the time artifacts associated with them. Like in RTS games, time flows naturally. Try to distinguish between a shotgun and an automatic rifle in a TBS game. Good luck with that. The same thing is very easy in a game like LSN.
I like to compare simultaneous turns to crossbows. Both inventions were very good and have their merits, but (in western world) they came too late to matter.
Also, Laser Squad Nemesis is a game designed by original X-COM's designer. It's from 2003, so and has nice high-res 2D graphics.
It has very nice mechanics. I especially like the unlimited shots of opportunity fire (well, limited by the ammo left in the clip) that allow for fun play while being hugely outnumbered.
It looks promising so far. The game actually explains mechanics to me is a good sign, it reminds me of Debian. Another interesting thing is separate action and movement points. I've been thinking about something like that. Basically the idea is you can move your legs separately from your hands.
+1 for LSN: back in '04 a friend of mine and I must have spent at least 50 hours playing nothing but the hotseat multiplayer of that game.
FS is also a lot of fun, but it just isn't as deep or complex as LSN. Fewer enemy types, less variety in level design. On the flip side, though, this means that most matches are over much quicker than LSN (a one-sided match often took 20-30 minutes, and hotseat games back in the day often took us an hour to finish!)
Crossbow too late to matter (you said "in the West", and my comments are likewise restricted), though... whatchu talkin' 'bout? Crossbows in Europe are over 2000 years old, so "too late" seems a little improbable. And they were the dominant ranged weapon in most of Europe for hundreds of years (roughly 1100-1500), so they totally mattered.
Laser Squad Nemesis is a great game. I remember spending too many hours learning and trying to properly implement the lessons of The Grenadier’s Bible.
Okay what is up with Westwood studios. They produced a lot of licensed games, which usually means "crap" but they made Dune II (and of course Command & Conquer), Nox (I had forgotten that one was theirs), and several very solid dungeon-master like games.
Also, Dragon Strike was a very enjoyable and different flight-sim style game set in the Dragonlance world.
Actually a lot of their licensed point-and-click adventures were quite good (showing my age). I recall the Death Gate game (based on the series by Weis and Hickman) being quite good. They also made the Legend of Kyrandia games, which weren't licensed that I know of, but also stick out in my memory as some of the best games in the point-and-click genre that I played as a child.
Licensed didn't mean "bad" when it came to Westwood back in the day.
I mentioned some licensed games in my list too. EotB 1+2 were both very good DM clones if you're into that sort of thing, but weren't IMO particularly original.
Death Gate was Legend, not Westwood, right? Kyrandia were definitely above average P+C adventures, but there were so many good adventure games from that time-period that I find they stick out less.
Oh, it was Legend. I don't know why I though it was Westwood for some reason. I definitely have fond memories of the Kyrandia games. I feel like I recall their puzzles were a little more consistently logical than some of the "unless you are psychically bonded to the developer, you must drag every object onto every object in your inventory until something happens" variety that a lot of point-and-clicks suffered from. I still have my copies laying around somewhere...I should play them again and see if they still hold up.
The point on environment made me think of Civ, though turn based, in which affecting the terrain and fighting are somewhat linked : clearing terrain for faster transport, nuking an enemy city.. But it's nowhere near what's described in the article. Then you've got the total war franchise in which terrain is essential to tactical fighting, but still, terrain can't be modified to affect the fighting itself (and there are bomb units and cliffs, so the opportunity would be here). Maps are still very shallow in the strategy genre, it seems that they have resources and movement properties and that's often pretty much it.
While we're talking oldies, this made think of Master of Magic (turn based), which had parallel universes, another concept that is very much under-utilized. And 'parallel universe" is a theme up for the round 2 of voting for the upcoming ludum dare.
In the Civ lineage, Alpha Centauri does have far more extensive terrain modification. Not using the mechanics mentioned in this article, but you can raise and lower terrain, and doing so raises/lowers surrounding terrain too. It can be highly effective to use modifying territory as a strategy.
Not only does it alter movement points, it also alters weather patterns, and so resources gained.
A highly successful strategy (especially when playing agains the AI, which doesn't understand this pattern) can be to create straits up against stronger enemies to force them to rely on seafaring troop transports (that area easy to take out). And when your land units are strong enough to create land bridges wherever you want to go and build railroads instead of sending naval units and transports to attack enemy cities.
What about Bullfrog's Magic Carpet? It had resource gathering and terrain modification as core mechanics. I think it also had base building. It was first-person though.
By the way, Magic Carpet is returning as Arcane Worlds. It's looking very good, and has some new effects like good looking water spells. I described it in more detail here:
You might like TA Spring (a full 3D remake of Total Anihilation). It features fully deformable terrain, some of the games on top of the engine even let you terraform! Elevation plays a part in combat mechanics - high ground makes a difference. You can also block enemy shots by terraforming the land since everything runs on a physics engine.
When it comes to innovation in RTS games, it's really hard to beat Kung Fu Chess !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azzsuss-swo
(Princes of Babylon - Meaningless Conversation)
It's chess without turns. Yes, you can actually dodge other pieces if you click in time and your piece is not currently on a cooldown.
The idea is both innovative and very simple. How come no one thought of this earlier ? The idea is also very elegant, if you can look past chess rules quirks like en passant and castling.
Why is this game so godlike? I think people might have missed it because they are too used to thinking about what could happen on a real board, where arms would get tangled and whatnot. The strategies in place, like leaving your king wide open to get taken, but dodging at the last second to bait a power piece in are awesome!
While I like the idea of changing the shape of the map during the game I think the point about player created content falls flat.
There's significant modding, mapmaking, AI etc. communities for many games. In fact in this day and age I'd say it's smart to outsource that to the users to a good degree and provide excellent tools+some support.
Then again this seems to be a 2005 article about a 1993 game and I don't even recall what the situation was like in 2005. Probably a lot less modding etc.
I don't know how it compares to the modern scene, but there was definitely a large amount of RTS modding and mapmaking going on long before 2005. Particularly for the old Command and Conquer games, which were much more accessible to modders than modern, full 3D titles. It's much easier to plonk down some 2D or isometric tiles, carve a vehicle model out of voxels, or edit the "ini files" of those games than it is to create a similar experience with a full fledged 3D modeler and modern toolset.
It may not have really been programming, but modding Tiberian Sun and making simple websites from plain HTML were my childhood "I can make the computer do what I want?!" moments. They were such limited environments, but the ease with which a kid could do interesting things with them really opened up new worlds to me.
People talk about the "little coder" problem a lot. I wonder if it's better to start a child with "making your own pong," so that they are confronted with actual programming from the beginning, or to give them a powerful but inflexible tool so that they can do impressive things right off the bat, before starting to think "why can't I do this? If I had made it, it would be like this..."
> I don't know how it compares to the modern scene, but there was definitely a large amount of RTS modding and mapmaking going on long before 2005. Particularly for the old Command and Conquer games, which were much more accessible to modders than modern, full 3D titles. It's much easier to plonk down some 2D or isometric tiles, carve a vehicle model out of voxels, or edit the "ini files" of those games than it is to create a similar experience with a full fledged 3D modeler and modern toolset.
I recall giving Tanya the cruiser gun via those .ini files. Good times.
"""I think one of the very interesting things about modern single-player game development is that it creates exceptionally expensive content designed to appeal to everyone and be played exactly once for 8-10 hours. As anybody who plays European board games will tell you, making a game (read: the body of rules, the mechanics and dynamics) is cheap - all you need is creativity and a lot of playtesting. AAA videogames are entirely different, though - millions are spent on voice acting, scripting, graphics, etc. This is why I'm excited for moderate-budget games like Bastion that can publish interesting and challenging gameplay with a budget lean enough that it doesn't have to sell to absolutely everybody."""
The problem I tend to have with user created maps in RTS games is they often don't work well with computer AI at all.
The AI in these games often relies on certain "trigger points "on the map for example "try and hold this area", "try and attack this way" , "build a base here" etc rather than having a truly generic AI.
When using user created maps these points are often either not put in or are not used in a way that is not as tested and thought out as those that ship with the game.
This results in AI that either sits there and does nothing or will just play very badly on a particular map.
Of course most advanced players are not interested in playing against AI, but it is a good way to learn a new game or to try a particular technique etc.
Real AI is hard. It's not that developers don't try, it's that they can't make it better.
About the best the developers can do is give players access to the same interface they have. If you look at the StarCraft community you see amazingly complex AI scripting using what's fundamentally a very simplistic trigger interface. But it's only the top epsilon% most polished maps where the creators put in all the effort needed to make that work.
Magarena and Unity of Command may not have a true AI, but it's still very good. Have fun checking them out.
Unity of Command is an old-school looking hex-based WW2 game. Magarena is a free program to play Magic: The Gathering. It has a few downsides and doesn't deal with fuzzy logic, but most of the time it plays like a bastard. If you underestimate it or hope it doesn't notice something, you'll regret it.
AI always seems much better in turn based games than in real time games.
I guess because turn based games are more able to say "stop everything until I recalculate all of the path finding" whereas a real time game has to deliver so many game updates per second and will maybe have to run AI in a separate thread which might not yield a good solution until the AI has already had to make a decision based on stale information.
Chess AIs are often scary good for example and FPS AIs are notoriously dumb.
When you bring in FPS games, keep in mind single player in most of them don't treat AI players as first class citizens. This is what C-Evo developer calls "AI liberation".
Examples of FPS games with decent AI are Unreal and Unreal Tournament. The latter also has the best bots to date, I think.
True, UT had reasonable AI but it did always seem to perform much better on deathmatch where it could just run around shooting things than on CTF maps where you could quite easily camp outside of your base and just snipe it when it tried to come in.
Of course AI is getting better now that we can offload stuff onto other cores without tying up the game loop so much.
I don't know to what degree the UT bots qualify as AI players... their strategies are coded into the level, not the bots. (disclaimer: I read guides to making UT levels, but never actually made one. Details may be misremembered. However, the fact that two levels with identical topography might be treated entirely differently by the same bots (owing to different bot-path placement in each) doesn't leave me filled with awe at the bots' decision-making.)
Placing paths manually or having them auto-generated by the map editor is standard practice. It's mostly because it would be expensive/silly to calculate at runtime -- calculate it when it changes, save it in a format bots can parse; the bot AI still makes decisions based on that path. How is that different from first calculating it?
Can the paths be usefully autogenerated (at whatever computational cost)? Or do they have to be done manually? The latter puts us a good deal further away from "real" AI.
(Again, to the best of my knowledge) the paths UT bots follow through a map are laid down by the author of the map. You can go into existing maps and change the bot paths.
I don't know what happens if you put bots in a level that doesn't have bot paths, but it wasn't advised.
>Then again this seems to be a 2005 article about a 1993 game and I don't even recall what the situation was like in 2005. Probably a lot less modding etc.
Just a few anecdotes from the FPS genre: Team Fortress was a Quake mod released in 1996, Counterstrike was a Half Life mod released in 1999, and Natural Selection was a Half Life mod released in 2002. It's pretty amazing all these are still around in incredibly polished sequels.
The author says that after doing graphics for this game Hard Vacuum, he went to Epic to draw sprites for Tyrian, so it's no surprise they have a similar look. :)
- Player created landscapes: (Walls, base building, supply lines, and advanced terrain modification)
Disclosure: The last RTS's I got into were Age of Empires II, Total Annihilation, and a little of Warcraft 3...
The innovations above don't seem like innovations to me...they seem like features that got ditched because of limitations (still present today) in AI and game-testing:
* Walls made it too easy to turtle against AIs and more importantly, play havoc on pathfinding AI. They also make no sense whatsoever in games that take place after the age of (gunpowder) cannons.
* Deformable terrain has the same issues as above...it's a good feature because it adds realism, but ultimately, it seems to require a much higher level of programming sophistication and game mechanics to implement in such a way that it didn't make the game too cumbersome to enjoy. I personally don't think it would add much to a RTS unless terrain deformation was the focus of the strategy...that would be an interesting game. Adding full-featured terrain deformation to a standard RTS? I think it would just make things unnecessarily complicated.
* Supply lines: I think this was essentially handled through the use of "peasants" traveling from the townhall to the town center (in Warcraft and AOE). In Total Annihilation and other such games where mines/power generators wireless send you resources...you still had to allocate resources to protect the lines. In any case, it was a welcome form of streamlining.
* Variable Height Terrain: It seems a lot of games do have this, even Age of Empires (hills and such).
For me, if we're mining old games for innovation, I wish designers would be more open to incorporating more turn-based mechanics instead of making everything real-time twitch based. I still go back to X-Com and Jagged Alliance time and time again.
I call bullshit on your pathfinding AI excuses. A* is A*, it doesn't matter if you dynamically modify the terrain, and it's easy enough to check if a path would end at walls or impassable terrain, and have the AI deal with that accordingly.
Yeah, that's kind of the problem I alluded to, isn't it?
But you're right, I don't know the state-of-the-art in pathfinding...as I admitted, the most recent RTS I played was Warcraft 3. It just seems to me to be a very common complaint in most modern games. I still play Team Fortress 2, and even though they've implemented AI, the AI only works on certain pre-designed levels. Yes, I know that a FPS is generally more path-computational than a RTS, but if you're proposing that an RTS have 3D terrain then, well, that makes it a 3D game, no?
And it's been awhile since I've designed a game but I think you're underestimating the computational power it would take for an AI to dynamically generate efficient paths with every change to the terrain. IIRC, a lot of early AI compensated by having pre-calculated paths for each level (and I think virtually all of them only pretended to be encumbered by a fog of war).
My point still stands though...these aren't really innovations...again, I'm not in game development, but I'm guessing that some of these are ideas that teams consider and then drop in lieu of their difficulty of implementation. In other words, the innovation would be the actual implementation of the idea, not the idea itself.
Using a tile or node based A* map, there's no additional cost for altering heuristics on the fly. All paths are always dynamically generated on the fly.
The only reason early AI had 'pre-calculated paths' (an assertion I am dubious about, to be honest) would be that it was running on processors that could barely push the graphics of the time to begin with.
The trouble with dynamic terrain--and especially walls--is that it's hard to place a cost on destroying walls to get to where you want to get. A* is simple enough, but adding tactical considerations to it is much harder. It's a balance of "I will have a harder time hitting the opponent" vs. "I get to do damage right now, before my opponent gets to do any more tricksy maneuvering."
C&C was particularly terrible with walls; if there was any path at all, it wouldn't destroy walls, which made it easy to ambush.
I think it's pretty standard that if you issue a move command, units will not attack and will go around. Players have come to expect this since Starcraft I. The whole idea of tower defence that was made popular stands a testament to the fact that we can place walls and change terrain and units WILL change their path on the fly. If you have played a tower defence in Warcraft III, you know that units can be lured into taking the A* optimal path, and you can block it off just before they get there, forcing them to recalculate a new path (which may be a long way away from where they currently are). Then, you can destroy the new tower you just placed and block off the path they had just changed to, forcing them down the old path again. You can repeat this as long as you have resources to build your cheapest tower (this was an exploit that made certain user-created maps really easy). Tower Defence designers now know about this and most of the well-made maps prevent you from building during level.
TL;DR: Path recalculation has been around since Starcraft I.
EDIT: And probably before that
You're missing the point of his post - he was saying that while path recalculation exists, it's hard to make an AI that makes proper choices when it comes to following the current path and creating a new path - especially when it's opponent can also modify the available paths in the future.
I'm saying that players have come to expect that issuing "move" will make AI take the shortest path without destruction, and we know that if there is a faster way, we have to tell the AI to attack through the wall if we want to break it. I guess the TL;DR didn't cover that though.
I just watched Penny Arcade's excellent summary [1] of how game genres should be broken down. If you find this article interesting, I highly recommend you check it out -- it pretty much carries off where this article left.
Actually, it’s “Extra Credits” summary. PATV just hosts them now after they had a falling out with The Escapist involving a fundraiser for covering medical bills.
A game from that era that I wish would inspire some clones is Robosport. I believe it was a Maxis title and was turn-based, but was really clever in that it didn't just feel like a board game that got ported to a computer with some animation tacked on.
The version I played was on the Amiga and supported TCP/IP networking (kinda, I actually wrote my first public tutorial to help people get the networking running).
> Supply Lines: When you built a mining tower on a resource deposit, there was no need to manually build and manage drones to carry the minerals back and forth. Instead, a road was built from your base to the mine. Drones were automatically created when the mine had a full load and sent along the road to your base. Enemies could blast your supply line and interrupt your flow of resources. So protecting fixed supply lines became a bit part of the strategy.
I always hated this mechanic, and loved Total Annihilation's (and Supreme Commander — not 2)'s resource flows, and necessity of regulating resource flows in order not to gridlock an economy.
In most RTS games, an arbitrary Resource Mine generates resource X at a fixed rate, but the resource is delivered into your resource pool in fixed-rate chunks. 100 units of X per minute, delivered at the top of the minute (for example). You can't purchase Unit Y until you have all 300 units of Resource X, so you wait 3 minutes.
TA employed a continuous economy system where you were more concerned with your resource Bandwidth rather than total quantity available. Energy or Metal mines added +X of their respective resource to your pool, but it was continuous and if your pool was full, excess resources just vanished.
The unique aspect to this system was that the player could begin constructing any building whether or not he had the resources available to finish it. The player didn't need 300 units of Resources X to start constructing Unit Y -- he just started building it. The construction units would open up and start taking in Resources at their fixed rate. If the resource pool ran out of resources, aka your construction needs outstripped your gathering capabilities, all construction slowed to the maximum rate at which you were able to gather resources.
A liquid economy, still one of the most fun I've ever played.
I absolutely love these graphics. I am currently derping around with WebGL etc., making a super simple "space shooter" ala Galaga, and so far the enemies are colored circles haha. There are a lot of objects in that archive that will make rather neat spaceships and collectibles, in a graphical style I adore -- thank you so much!
In 2005? Yeah. At that time, I remember that my obsession with RTSes was to go back to older games, on the recommendation of gamer friends. I ended up jumping ship completely into MORPGs for a while. I guess this is why I like doing World v World in GW2 nowadays.
Some retro games that I think had great mechanics:
Deadlock: turn-based strategy game, like Civilization, but in a sci-fi setting. You had to manage resources and colonizer during each turn, but there were cut-scenes for battle events.
Dark Colony: very fast paced RTS game. Different than most, you couldn't place buildings anywhere in the map, only control access to resources and deny area to rivals using your units. Well balanced units. I think it had amazing graphics and sound design for the time (1997).
Wow, this + MOAI is going to be a fun week .. ;) Seriously, thanks for the Artwork, its exactly what I need to get things happening in a more creative way on a couple of my MOAI projects. If we make something nice, we'll definitely let you know!
He would call me up on pay phones to talk about game design. Every few minutes he would have to play a series of tones from his little blue box to get another few free minutes of talk time.
Correction: That would have been a "red box". ^__^
Desert Strike and (it's even better sequel) Jungle Strike were amazingly well designed. I think they were on the Sega and circa 1992 & 1993. The Hard Vacuum game looks like it might have been even better.
Ummm... Why you think that I still play DooM . It's the best FPS game of all times (if you play a source port, of course).
It's very fast, with hordes of enemies, and very easy to mod and make maps.
There's a few points on here I'd like to debate:
- I haven't played an RTS recently, but the last time I dived into the genre there was lots of innovation: World in Conflict had an entirely new resource-based deployment system, Warhammer 40k Dawn of War and Company of Heroes both employed brand-new "capture and hold" territory-based gameplay. You could argue that League of Legends and DOTA both contribute to this genre as well.
- The author mentions several times that they didn't have the time or resources to spend on map creation. Level design is a pretty important aspect of any game development - maybe the Hard Vacuum game would've taken off if they had content?
- "A team like this today can not even hope to create a major blockbuster game". See: decent indie studios all over the world. Maybe it's just that the definition of "major game" has changed since the 90's.
While I agree with the main premise of the article, that game designers need to take a critical, uninfluenced look at the genres they design games for, it feels like the author hasn't attempted to play a game in the last 10 years.