GeneralJist said:
it does exist:
Yeah, there were already a few such games. Last time i talked about the idea, somebody showed a game like Starship Troopers which was pretty successful at the time. Alien bugs faction was not playable, so all human players had the same enemy and it was co-op, addressing the probably largest problem of chaos because human soldiers do not follow the orders of their generals. Can't remember the name of the game.
Criticizing the game you have shown, there is not much gameplay to see. E.g. i can't see how a general orders soldiers, if that's possible at all, and how those orders are visualized / communicated.
But i can see a major flaw: There is no world. Instead we see generic small levels made from modular building blocks or just empty space.
In other words: There is nothing worth to fight for. The only motivation to play the game is likely curiosity on it's new mechanics.
But that's not enough. World building is important. The world must feel real, and it must have backstory about conflict for motivation, and a working economy we can affect / exhaust / optimize.
As is, the game rather looks like an experiment on mechanics, but not so much as a real game. It's cool people try this out, so it deserves positive votes, but i do not wonder it's not too popular beyond that.
I'm not an RTS player, but on the FPS side i think about something like Quake Wars. It was a very good MP FPS about objectives, which was something new back then instead the usual Deathmatch or Capture The Flag modes.
To win, you had maybe 3 objectives in order - bombing some server mainframe, steal some tech device, stuff like that. Simple objectives, which did not tell a complex story but just a reasonable sequence of events.
The other team had to prevent you from accomplishing your objectives.
To extend this to RTS, i could imagine the general sets up those objectives in real time. Map might be large and complex, with many potential objectives. But the general can figure out a certain plan, treating the conflict as an optimization problem.
FPS soldiers don't need to grasp the larger plan. They likely just run to the closest objective and work on that, getting reward on objectives but nothing on just causing chaos or decimating the enemy.
The general should see good players, and then he might pick one and give orders to him specifically. The usual RTS stuff, telling a unit precisely what it should do.
But in this game specific orders are more of an exception, so when it happens it is something special, building up motivations and team play on both sides.
I lack concrete examples, but what i want is: Specific attention form the general should feel like honor and responsibility to a soldier, building up social effects not yet achievable from current game genres.
Something like that. I guess it's possible to find mechanics which work for both modes and cause order over chaos.
But the real problem seems to be balance across subjective FPS vs RTS preference.
What if all players want to be the general? We need only two of them per match. Or can we have a full hierarchy of generals?
What if no player wants to be the general, e.g. because it feels worse than playing traditional FPS? This could easily happen if those dumb soldiers never manages to execute a simple plan as intended.
I guess that's the reason why this game does not exist. It's likely very hard to get right, but the one who does might not regret the attempt.
Nowadays RTS and FPS games are made using the same engines, making it easier to experiment with merging genres for real.
Just putting some meh mechanics such as skill trees into every action game is not really merging genres. It's more like mix and match what's easy, obviously possible, and low effort - not really interesting at all.
… maybe off topic, but i guess you know already everything about classic RTS and what mechanics they have. ; )
