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Do singleplayer campaigns in the RTS genre matter to you?
- Thread starter Sankara
- Start date
I only play the campaigns, and against bots . I have never and will never touch the multiplayer.
The way the answers are worded play a big role into this too.
This. I do NOT play RTS multiplayer, I am not good enough and its not enjoyable at all. Really enjoy the campaign.
The SP campaign is the single most important factor for any RTS game. What an obvious question.
there are many many rts players AND developers who think singleplayer in rts was never much of anything and not of interest to players
Over half the people playing HD don't have the achievement for ever winning a multi match.
Over 75% won a skirmish game.
HD has a thriving custom campaigns/scenarios scene due to the Workshop. Best designers (some of whom got recruited by Forgotten Empires rack up 1k+ subs for their stuff the week they release it. Competitive MP on HD isn't a major thing, as anyone who wants to play seriously installs the compatibility patch and plays on voobly with WololoKingdoms.
HD has a core multi-player community, but the best player in the world (Viper) spent the last year streaming his playthrough of all the campaigns (now he's doing Age of Mythology), because that's what his followers were requesting.
The longest thread in the AoK HD steam forum was the long-running speculation thread about next civs to include (and it actually correctly narrowed the discussion down to Central Asia as the "major" area of missing civs, but which is what we'll end up getting with "The Last Khans" ). Large portion of the discussion was "who would represent the civs in a campaign" .
Single-player is a HUGE aspect of HD.
But why do RTS games, as a genre, need to have longevity? I don't want most of my video games to have longevity. I want them to provide a great experience and then go away. Most people feel that way about most games; and even the minority of people who want games to be infinitely replayable only have time for one or two infinitely-replayable games at a time.
Nobody demands that other genres need to have "longevity" or a "community" as a matter of course. Nobody demands that of 3rd person action games, say. Can you imagine someone saying "meh, I don't really count Horizon: Zero Dawn because it has no longevity" or "that single player campaign in The Last of Us is fine and all, but the multiplayer is what really matters, of course". They'd be laughed out of the room.
But when it comes to RTSes, there's an ironclad prejudice in the industry that the multiplayer is what really matters, despite the (apparently) overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Even with the new version of Age of Empires 2, they decided to show it off with some vaunted multiplayer match between two people that I guarantee you 98% of AoE fans have never even heard of. Do they seriously think that most people who buy their new remaster are going to try to climb multiplayer ladder on this 20 year old game? Of course not. The vast majority of purchasers will be people with nostalgia for the campaigns and skirmishes. But the perception that it's all about the multiplayer is so strong, and the small number of serious multiplayer players so prominent and vocal, that it doesn't even occur to the marketers to show the new campaigns or just focus on new features and improvements that affect SP as well as MP.
I really want a developer to announce a traditional-style RTS with no competitive multiplayer of any kind, just to prove that it can be done.
I know there is a couminity for online games but generaly speaking it will be very small.
here are some stats from Age of empires 2 achies
- 43.2% achieved first multiplayer victory
- 33.3% players hosted a multiplayer game
- 4% achieved 50 multiplayer victories
Of all the player base only 4% achieved 50 victories.
If you look at other non RTS strategy games they keep their playerbases not with multiplayer but several SP DLCs. An interesting example is hearts of iron IV that after 2 years its concurrent player count is similar to their launch concurrent players. This effectively means that if you have a good game you can support with content and you can retain a great part of the playrbase.
Another interesting game is total warhammer 2. with around 70k concurrent players at launch has around 13k concurrent players between the launches of SP content. When the content is released the player count usually rises to 40k players for a couple weeks. This has been going for 1,5 years.
Obviously multiplayer can be a big draw as showed by starcraft, however the big majority of the playerbase are not really into PVP content.
I read your post, then I look at the poll results in the OP... nah, sorry. Not buying it.
Era is a pretty diverse place and hardly ever have I seen such a decisive consensus in poll results.
So to your point, though small a sample size, the data strongly suggests otherwise.
