I’ve been into video games since the Atari 2600. And I’ve played all kinds — shooters, sports, role-players, what have you. But, for the last decade or so, my real weakness has been real-time strategy (RTS) games. Back in ’98, my bandmates and I were so addicted to Starcraft, we put a Zerg hydralisk on one of our posters. Even today, my fiancee, much to her annoyance, has the catchphrases from Age of Empires III memorized, she’s heard ‘em so many times coming from my laptop.
But, as awesome and as challenging as these war simulations can be, they’re not particularly realistic. David Wong wants to change all that. So he’s developed his 20-point checklist for the “ultimate” RTS… one that’ll give experienced players “Thousand-Yard Stares.”
3. Every War Sim has a “Fog of War” that obscures the map in darkness until units scout the landscape. Well, I want a hazy, brown “Fog of Bullshit” layer below that. I want it to make a village of farmers look like a secret armed militia, I want it to show me a massive enemy fortress where there is actually an Aspirin factory. I want to never know for sure which it was, even after the game is over…
5. I want that “Public Support” meter to rise and fall according to Troops Lost, Length of Conflict, Innocents Killed and Whether or Not There is Anything Else On TV That Week. I want to lose 200 Public Support points because, in a war where 8,000 units have been lost, one of my Mutalisks happened to be caught on video accidentally eating one clergyman. Then, later, my destruction of an entire enemy city goes unnoticed because the Nude Zero-Gravity Futureball championship went into overtime.…
7. I want my Mission Objectives to change every 30 seconds, without anyone letting me know. I want little talking heads to pop up on my screen — commanders, politicians, allies, military intelligence — each giving me different sets of victory parameters, all of them conflicting and many of them written in bullshit ass-covering doublespeak.
(Big ups: Kris)
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
David Wongs wargaming is a must read, i first read it a few years back but cant help but read it again ever few weeks its so damn good.
Old news.
But I would think a better game would be to have a RTS where every time you try to attack a structure, your orders take ten seconds before “your actions are cleared in Washington” or “at the Pentagon”. Then while that happens, your men begin to die. That or spontaneously losing control of your units as lower level commanders do things you didn’t want them to (which happens often enough when it comes to pathfinding).
Better would be losing control of your builder units as KBR builds strange useless structures at random and charges you triple (I need /that/ many power plants?!)
oh oh I got it and if you shot someone who was carrying a gun but not yet shooting at you your public support would drop even farther because the news would report you were shooting civillians. YES I LOVE THIS IDEA