I remember really enjoying the FPS/RTS component of Giants: Citizen Kabuto, but have found nothing since then that bottles the same magic. I tried Sacrifice, but for some reason it just didn’t grab me at all. Somone mentioned Savage: Newearth, but it was an online-only deal and was already waiting for the fork to be stuck in it by the time I seriously considered buying it.
Imagine Diablo where you can built permanent walls and forts, go out and build mines with defenses, use the resources to build your own monster generators, and so on.
Replace Diablo with pretty much any simple action RPG (or FPS, for that matter), and you get what I’m after. Any suggestions?
Have you tried any of the Battlezone games? They combine FPS and RTS pretty nicely.
Warcraft III is the best example I can think of of an RPG/RTS hybrid, because I don’t play RTS’ and have only recently gotten into RPG’s.
Cool blend of Diablo-style role-playing and real-time strategy; huge single-player campaign with lots of quests to pursue; nonlinear maps mean you can jaunt back to places you’ve been at any time.
I second the recommendation for Field Ops. What I saw of it at E3 looked pretty damn slick. I fondly remember Battlezone and the developers of Field Ops did too.
I can imagine multiplayer in Field Ops will be a lot of fun if can operate as smoothly as the single player mode looked.
I had the same reaction my first time or two with Sacrifice. It’s one of those games that just “clicked” for me one day and I was completely grabbed by it. You might give it another shot sometime.
If it doesn’t have to be good, you could always get Once Upon A Knight, which is a couple years old. It tried to meld RTS and RPG but didn’t do a very good job of it (and all I recall from the demo was that one of the resources you needed to cultivate was Milk!).
Does Natural Selection count in this catagory? In that sort of vein there’s also the newer Empires mod for hl2, and the upcoming Nuclear Dawn mod that was advertised on a steam update (and sounds pretty damn cool).
BattleZone was exaclty what you’re talking about. It was essentially a C&C type RTS where you commanded everything from an FPS tank cockpit. You could even eject, snipe and steal other tanks, or request your own vehicles come pick you up if you were blown up. The premise was also amazing… it was the Cold War 70’s on the moon, fighting the Russians. It was loads of fun, but the visuals would be very very dated now (1996?).
Battlezone 2, trying to address the low sales of BZ1 (I guess people didn’t know what to make of it), went more action oriented and less strategic, which was a bad move. They also blew the story, making it some generic fight-off-the-green-aliens plot.
Otherwise, Dungeon Keeper was another similar hybrid, you being the evil dungeon overlord commanding your forces, building cavern villages, and jumping into your minions’ bodies to fight.
Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War will be released very soon, allowing strategic command of large bronze-age armies, boats, catapults, etc while playing first person viewpoint of a powerful warlord. Picture Total War-style battles commanded in the viewpoint and character of God of War. Looks to be pretty neat.
Savage is not dead yet. There are often 30-40 player games going on. More important, it’s gone freeware. I recommend checking it out - the price is right, after all. Savage 2 should be coming out within a year.
Allegiance is similar to Savage but it’s sci-fi instead of fantasy. It’s also gone freeware, and it also has an active community.
Dropteam just came out, and it looks like a hardcore version of Battlezone. You call in your forces via dropship rather than build them, as in Ground Control. The damage model supposedly considers deflection angles, armor thickness and facing, and internal subsystem locations. I haven’t played it, though.
Finally, you should give Sacrifice another chance. Don’t forget to pause for commands.
The Outfit would have been game of the year, for me, if they put a sandbox/conquer/skirmish mode in. As is, there are two modes:
Super linear single player. As in, you get all these nice toys, but you have to take them all through a narrow twisty corridor of a map, from beginning to end.
Multiplayer, which is great. Think building AT emplacements, machine gun nests, designing kill zones, fields of fire, etc. Then, to top it off, you can call in artillery right before rushing an area with infantry or armor. I only wish intead of the “Destruction Points” they had some kind of “Buy points”, where you both got say, a certain number of points to start, and no more after that. Kind of like a RTS/3PS Combat Mission. Random maps would have pushed it into the stratosphere.
I really hope Relic takes their idea with The Outfit and expands on it, making it more freeform in the next one.
Giants: Citizen Kabuto had some of the “FPS hero that can build RTS stuff” aspect to it, but they never realized it as much in the gameplay as they could have. Which left the game feeling oddly unfinished to me; just as it seemed as if I was going to get into the FPS/RTS part, the game moved on to something completely different.
Only ones I can think of which haven’t been mentioned yet are the Uprising games: kinda like Battlezone, in that it was a scifi action-RTS where you controlled a tank, but the mechanics were a bit different. It was fun back in the day (97 &98), though not as good as BZ. I’m not sure they’ve aged well and I dunno where you’d find them now, since they were 3DO titles.
FYI, this was recently re-released under its original title, Knight Shift. Why? shrug Beats me…
