4 ms·

Not only advanced A.I. is basically dead knowledge in modern games, also Bots. Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament and many more games had offline bots with whom

by frik 10y ago

Not only advanced A.I. is basically dead knowledge in modern games, also Bots. Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament and many more games had offline bots with whom you could play multiplayer maps. Most relied on predefined paths added with the map editor, but some of them worked without paths as well. It was impressive how good Unreal Tournament 2004 bots handled cars and vast open maps. Also RTS games category is dead, it usually also featured advanced A.I. to play against bots on random generated maps. Sadly, games like Age of Empires, Empire Earth, Command & Conquer are dead. (before an off topic comment derails the conversation: I know about the 8 year old SC2, I know about other kind of strategy games but they are not RTS, I know about Moba and tower defence but they are not RTS)

alextheparrot 10y ago
I miss Empire Earth... spent hours and hours on that game as a kid. Super advanced map editor, tons of variety in gameplay, even the single player scenarios were great. Thanks for reminding me of it.
idonotknowwhy 10y ago
You need to give 0ad a try: https://play0ad.com https://play0ad.com It's very much alive and well, and the AI gets better with every release. I'll be able to beat it on the hardest difficulty, and then the next release comes out and I have to come up with new strategies...
- frik 10y ago
  0AD was great two years ago, still in alpha though. I try it once a year but the progress is very slow, and things are more broken (AI) than two years ago (tried it in Dec 16). Don't get me wrong you can play many map styles, and get hours of gameplay out of it. It's an open source project, so one shouldn't compare it with other triple-A games, for a open source game it's superb and very much comparable to Age of Mythology . The project needs more supporters. Though 0AD is my biggest hope, maybe a sister project forms that use the same graphics engine and code base to develop a C&C Generals inspired game as well. In the era when Triple-A studios forgot about RTS, it's time to solve the problem of no new games through the community.
wingerlang 10y ago
AoE seems pretty active though. Last expansion was like 2014 and I know people still play it.
- frik 10y ago
  Wrong. After Age of Empires 3 (2006) there was no new Age of Empire worth to mention. (Age of Empire online was a Free2Play/whatever game based on the years older Age of Mythology engine. Microsoft closed the Ensemble Studios. Lately Microsoft asked a small unknown studio to recompile old Age of Empires 2 and Age of Mythology and add some community patches and rerelease those 15+ year old games as HD (not really any graphical changes, beside minor stuff, ad bigger resolution), and some new missions/campaigns. But we know the game and it runs still fine with community patches on Win7. And replaced the network lib with Steam, but it's a buggy mess - the original game run more stable. What the AoE community wants are real new games, not old games one played already for 15 years and hundreds of hours know very little secrete.)
  - wingerlang 10y ago
    Wrong about what? (Actually the year 2014 was wrong). But releasing a HD version with 3 expansions (they are named expansions on the wiki) in 2013, 2015 and as late as Dec 2016 (less than 6 months ago) definitely sounds to me like a game which is not dead. Might be buggy but recent releases + active community isn't really dead at all.
izacus 10y ago
Do you know about the newer good RTS games like Eugen Systems' games (Wargame series), new Homeworld game, Grey Goo and perhaps a few other excellent additions to RTS genre after Starcraft?
- frik 10y ago
  I had great hopes in Act of Aggression which tried to be a C&C Generals clone. Sadly even after the second redux release it not a good game. And sadly beside all gameplay deficites the graphic engine looks as often worse than the 2004 original, and buildings cannot be freely built, and only in 90 degree steps and aligned like a chess board. A big let down. The other clone either Star Craft 2 (I dislike SC2, liked SC1 back then, but nowadays prefer realastic historic or modern era gameplay not SciFi/fantasy/etc) or are non-traditional-RTS-style gameplay.
jchassoul 10y ago
It seem to me now that both Quake 3 Arena engine and of course the best RTS that our civilization have been able to make and really balance with some kind of magical equilibrium between 3 truly different races are well and alive in research labs and currently both styles of games with comebacks in the pipeline the champions nonsense in the FPS side of things and the new broodwar from blizzard. One can argue that Chess or Go are friking old games and that we need to make Chess 4000 and or invent a new go, same apply to the good old broodwar from 98.

by frik 10y ago

alextheparrot 10y ago

I miss Empire Earth... spent hours and hours on that game as a kid. Super advanced map editor, tons of variety in gameplay, even the single player scenarios were great. Thanks for reminding me of it.

idonotknowwhy 10y ago

You need to give 0ad a try: https://play0ad.com https://play0ad.com It's very much alive and well, and the AI gets better with every release. I'll be able to beat it on the hardest difficulty, and then the next release comes out and I have to come up with new strategies...

frik 10y ago
0AD was great two years ago, still in alpha though. I try it once a year but the progress is very slow, and things are more broken (AI) than two years ago (tried it in Dec 16). Don't get me wrong you can play many map styles, and get hours of gameplay out of it. It's an open source project, so one shouldn't compare it with other triple-A games, for a open source game it's superb and very much comparable to Age of Mythology . The project needs more supporters. Though 0AD is my biggest hope, maybe a sister project forms that use the same graphics engine and code base to develop a C&C Generals inspired game as well. In the era when Triple-A studios forgot about RTS, it's time to solve the problem of no new games through the community.

wingerlang 10y ago

AoE seems pretty active though. Last expansion was like 2014 and I know people still play it.

frik 10y ago
Wrong. After Age of Empires 3 (2006) there was no new Age of Empire worth to mention. (Age of Empire online was a Free2Play/whatever game based on the years older Age of Mythology engine. Microsoft closed the Ensemble Studios. Lately Microsoft asked a small unknown studio to recompile old Age of Empires 2 and Age of Mythology and add some community patches and rerelease those 15+ year old games as HD (not really any graphical changes, beside minor stuff, ad bigger resolution), and some new missions/campaigns. But we know the game and it runs still fine with community patches on Win7. And replaced the network lib with Steam, but it's a buggy mess - the original game run more stable. What the AoE community wants are real new games, not old games one played already for 15 years and hundreds of hours know very little secrete.)
- wingerlang 10y ago
  Wrong about what? (Actually the year 2014 was wrong). But releasing a HD version with 3 expansions (they are named expansions on the wiki) in 2013, 2015 and as late as Dec 2016 (less than 6 months ago) definitely sounds to me like a game which is not dead. Might be buggy but recent releases + active community isn't really dead at all.

izacus 10y ago

Do you know about the newer good RTS games like Eugen Systems' games (Wargame series), new Homeworld game, Grey Goo and perhaps a few other excellent additions to RTS genre after Starcraft?

frik 10y ago
I had great hopes in Act of Aggression which tried to be a C&C Generals clone. Sadly even after the second redux release it not a good game. And sadly beside all gameplay deficites the graphic engine looks as often worse than the 2004 original, and buildings cannot be freely built, and only in 90 degree steps and aligned like a chess board. A big let down. The other clone either Star Craft 2 (I dislike SC2, liked SC1 back then, but nowadays prefer realastic historic or modern era gameplay not SciFi/fantasy/etc) or are non-traditional-RTS-style gameplay.

jchassoul 10y ago

It seem to me now that both Quake 3 Arena engine and of course the best RTS that our civilization have been able to make and really balance with some kind of magical equilibrium between 3 truly different races are well and alive in research labs and currently both styles of games with comebacks in the pipeline the champions nonsense in the FPS side of things and the new broodwar from blizzard. One can argue that Chess or Go are friking old games and that we need to make Chess 4000 and or invent a new go, same apply to the good old broodwar from 98.