Sigh, sadly prices seem all over the place:
Wow, some of those folks are selling individual disks. Maybe you can buy a disk to replace the one disk that’s bad…
OMG Why is the expansion going for $100 or more!!! Criminy…
If I recall, the CD keys tie into your old EA (now Origin) account, so just buying the discs gives you nothing but discs. New copies with unused keys are ridiculous, because they’re rare as all hell.
Oh? I did not realize that. I suppose my plan would not have worked anyhow. I wonder if I’d even be able to load them, I’m quite certain if it had a log in it is long forgotten.
Wait what? My CD keys worked just fine when I recently installed my copy.
Give it a few months and I’m sure it will be “Free on us” in the EA STORE.
Yeah, that’s not going to happen since the game’s lack of availability has to do with IP licensing rights.
A shame, since I never picked it up.
Oh, the Tolkinen estate making problems?
I think it had to do with the movies more than the Tolkiens directly. New Line Cinema and all that. EA had a time-limited arrangement with them and they shut down everything related to BfME2 when it ran out.
Well I can’t remember exactly how it worked :) I was reasonably sure that was the first time I encountered an EA account. Maybe not.
There are MOBA’s and MOBA’s, Heroes of the Storm, the Blizzard one, is probably the easiest to grasp, and IMO, much simpler than for example Starcraft.
It’s a matter of focus. Most people aren’t that great at dividing it, at keeping multiple things in focus, on juggling loads of different things at once, multitasking. And there’s less of a need to multitask in a MOBA.
Soren is a perfectionist. :) Which is one reason why his games are so good. It’s coming out in 3 weeks from today!
EA did shut down the BfME2 servers in 2011, maybe the key isn’t even necessary except for installation now.
I HAVE NO IDEA.
That’s an interesting position. This seems like a good threat to extrapolate on why you believe that.
For me, as someone who plays and buys RTS games, the fundamental problem has been that RTS games could not offer anything new.
As much as I like Supreme Commander: FA, I am not willing to go back to 2007 era graphics and massive stuttering when I play a game. And I want to play strategy games where there are zillions of moving parts and paced in such a way that I feel like I’m building up epic strategies to win.
I’m not sure what alternative you imagine. Many of us are just not interested in another game where we go around shooting people in the face.
I totally agree with that sentiment and I think, generally, the market has gone that way.
Right now, the market seems to be split between disposable but very enjoyable games (Undertale for instance) and games that people end up living in for the long-haul (Skyrim, Civilization V).
Thanks for this interesting follow-up.
I have some thoughts on this as well which I’ll try to be succinct on:
“RTS is about pushing little groups of soldiers around a board that have essentially no agency of their own. Without direct instruction they remain where you left them, waiting for you to push them around again. Therefore immediately there is a control limit as to how many units you can feasibly manage”
I absolutely agree with you. That’s the reason in the article I talked about how important AI is.
For example, this was one of the first design challenges in Ashes of the Singularity. Having 3,800 units running around (for instance) a world is a tech demo unless you have a design that lets you effectively manage them.
So how we do solve that in the real world? We have companies/divisions/armies that are expected to act on their own to a certain degree. In Ashes, there’s the Meta unit (the army). You take your unit mix and turn it into an army. It then becomes ONE unit. Because of multi-core, the AI can then look through that army and have it act together intelligently.
Thus, the number of things you need to pay attention to remains the same. However, the depth of it is greatly expanded.
The result of this is that RTS is a very lonely, hyper aggressive, hyper competitive gameplay that develops a very long, complex bell curve with a long, slowly descending tail of skill level. That was its hook back in the day.
Frankly, that could be said of any genre that has an online component.
An RTS game does not need to be MP centric. Ashes, for example, is not. Most of the maps that come with the game were based on the idea that players would be playing against AI opponents.
Why not have an RTS where you can have subcommanders, AI’s that you can order around? Attack this area, hold that other area, no you can’t build factory X, etc…
Allow the player to delegate as much or as little as the player wants. Let me focus on what I want to do, and delegate what I don’t to the computer. Focus on the fantasy behind the RTS, being the general, not on being some sort of multitasking machine ordering brain dead minions around.
Those sorts of games tend to deliver the best value for money. RTS’s can fit into that category, but only for a certain number of players- which is the limiting factor on the budget, unless you can make compelling single player fluff.
That sounds a lot like Kohan, which is a big reason why it ruined other RTS’s for me- being able to form armies isn’t enough, I want an inability to command individual units.
Sounds like Scourge of War to me.
That sounds like an intriguing idea. Set an AI commander with a set number of troops to guard a region, or assault from a particular location, and have the computer do all the micro? That’s cool. Of course, you go from Commander in chief to delegater and chief, but I can get behind that.
Heck, like resources and troop count, Commanders could be a very interesting resource. You have 3 sub commanders, how do you use them?
The Ashes team (some of whom worked on that) would be pleased to hear that. :)