Almighty Video Game Designer

Chapter 99: Chapter 98 RTS games

Translator: Exodus Tales Editor: Exodus Tales

It didn’t take long for Legion Conquest to launch after Chen Mo clicked on it.

This was an RTS game that used modern themes. One could easily tell from the loading screen filled with planes and tanks among other fancy high tech weapons.

The UI was quite clear, with Campaign mode and Versus mode as the two main modes.

Chen Mo felt that this game bore some resemblance to Red Alert. However, this game had better graphics and had a much more different weapons system.

This game didn’t have the Apocalypse tank or Prism tank, but instead used tanks that were used in real life, with a few more futuristic tanks.

However, this game didn’t focus on the cold war, and didn’t split the players between the allies and the soviets.

Legion conquest was set in a fictional world after a third world war, where many countries had been subverted as the bigger armies armed themselves for an all out war.

And in the campaign mode, the players would be playing as a leader of one of the countries, with the objective of conquering the world.

There were many weaponry from real life, such as battle tanks and bombers that were available to every player, blurring the lines of the differences between countries. This was likely in consideration of the international audiences.

After registering an account, Chen Mo started Campaign mode.

In summary, the quality of the game was quite high, and the tutorials weren’t bad. However, the story was quite lackluster as the story, with barely any story progression after beating two levels. Basically the player would invade wherever the game told them to, with no attention to the story at all.

Of course, this was likely also a side effect of being set in a fictional world with the line between countries in the movie, meaning that the story was also restricted.

However, the story isn’t important in an RTS game anyways, not affecting its popularity at all.

The controls of Legion Conquest were also quite crude and were quite similar to that of Red Alert. Chen Mo didn’t find that interacting with the world, hotkeys, and clicking to assign orders as particularly intuitive.

Selecting units, moving them, and attacking with them were all done by mouse, and right clicking would cancel the assigned orders, which Chen Mo found very unintuitive.

Chen Mo looked into it deeper as he played.

At this time, an internet addicted teen sat next to Chen Mo, and looked at Chen Mo’s screen while waiting for his PC to load.

Chen Mo controlled a tank towards seven or so soldiers, and under the firing of the soldiers, Chen Mo’s tank exploded.

“What the!” Chen Mo was speechless, it was just as illogical as Red Alert, how would a few soldiers with machine guns defeat my tank? Is the armor on the tank fake?

The guy next to him asked, “Are you new?”

Chen Mo nodded, “Yep, I’m new.”

The teen said, “The tanks in this game are garbage. Either you rush soldiers or save up for air troops or super weapons. The mid game tanks are a waste of money.”

Chen Mo was speechless, “Aren’t tanks the main force of modern warfare?”

The teen replied, “I’ve been thinking about that too, but that’s the way the game was designed.”

The teen also launched Legion Conquest and started searching for an online match.

It didn’t even take a minute of searching to find an opponent. He was assigned into a 4 person map for a 1v1.

The teen stopped chatting to Chen Mo and focused on building and training his army.

Chen Mo decided to pause his game to watch the teen.

Mining, building, training, scouting... the teen seemed as though he was following a script, and was quite serious about it.

Early on, his opponent drew the teen into a corner, luckily had had sufficient defences and managed to hold off a few more waves. After saving up thirty or so pilots, he launched a counterattack to win the game.

“Yes!” the teen said excitedly.

Chen Mo scowled, “This game’s balancing is kinda terrible.”

The teen glanced at him, “You think this is terrible? It’s currently the best RTS game.”

Chen Mo said, “Three tanks losing to twenty or so soldiers makes no sense at all.”

“Well, there’s nothing much you can do. It’s already the most well balanced RTS game, you’ll just have to accept that fact,” replied Chen Mo.

Chen Mo asked, “Why don’t you play RPGs?”

“They are too taxing. There isn’t much skill to those games, it’s just endless grinding, and whoever spends the most time would be better at the game. Unlike RTS games where whoever has more skill wins.”

“Hmm,” Chen Mo nodded.

“If you want to play RPGs, it’s probably better to play in VR. Shooter games and adventure games are best played on VR as well,” added the teen.

“But if you want to play RTS games or business simulation games, most of them are on PC as it just isn’t worth it to convert it to VR. Moreover, these games don’t take up as much time, one game would only take twenty to thirty minutes, and you could take a break afterwards if you want.”

“Is there a ranked mode for this game?” asked Chen Mo.

The teen was shocked, “Oh, there is a ranked mode, I just played that.”

Chen Mo asked, “So the ranking is probably what makes the game so fun then huh?”

The need nodded in reply, “Yeah. You start with the campaign mode then move onto ranked. It’s only fun when you play with the pros. This is similar to how actual war works, and is the core of RTS games. There’s a lot of strategy involved, and has a high skill ceiling.”

Chen Mo asked, “Are there LAN competitions?”

The teen replied, “Of course there are LANs. RTS games are quite popular for LANs. Most of the big ESports clubs have players too, all of them are gods at the game.”

After chatting for a little while more, the teen went back to playing.

Chen Mo on the other hand looked deeper into how the numbers were set in the game before leaving the internet cafe.

What surprised Chen Mo was that his previous world had already left RTS games, and yet they were still quite popular in this world.

It made sense after he gave it some more thought.

VR games applied a lot of pressure to PC games, but PC gamers hadn’t all converted to VR. Compared to RPGs, RTS games were more fragmented and strategic, which was why it managed to stay as one of the mainstream genres.

As for MOBAs? Nothing resembling it!

Chen Mo was a bit hesitant to make RPGs as it would currently take him a lot of effort, but he had found something that would make the transition smoother.