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Hello! We've been busier than ever working on our prototype, so apologies for the delay in the response to our previous topic. That said, once again, it’s time to revisit our last discussion topic, “Win Conditions”. As always, we had a ton of excellent in-depth user posts, and we’d like to especially highlight some of them in this month’s response.
First, /u/Maguro did a great job of breaking down three of the most common win conditions found in modern RTS, which he described as:
- Annihilation: Destroy all buildings (Warcraft franchise, StarCraft franchise)
- Assassination: Destroy a key unit or building (Nexus/Ancient/Core in MOBAS, ACUs in the Assassination mode of Supreme Commander)
- Domination/Control Area: Control territory to generate victory points (Company of Heroes franchise)
In both his forum post and his blog on victory conditions, he broke down the pros and cons of each win condition and concluded that either annihilation or a carefully implemented assassination victory condition would be his favorite options.
Speaking of annihilation, /u/Talnir, reframed this win condition as a combination of two objectives: an explicit objective of destroying enemy structures and an implicit objective of military domination. And while our initial topic prompt set up some potential downsides of the traditional Blizzard RTS win condition for the sake of discussion, /u/Talnir did a great job of highlighting its positives based on this reframing:
- It places the focus on combat.
- Its open-ended nature encourages diverse strategies through which players can express their personalities.
- There’s often interesting interaction between the explicit win-condition and the implicit win-condition.
Make sure you check out his excellent post, which includes concrete examples from both Warcraft and StarCraft.
What are our thoughts? Well, for that, let’s back up a bit. Three months ago, in our last response to the topic of “teams”, we talked about “planning to experiment with teams as a fun social mode, with the intention to continue supporting world-class 1v1 for top-tier competitive players”. Our current thoughts on win conditions in a 1v1 mode is that annihilation works, our core audience is most familiar with it, and although we’ll do some experimentation, we probably won’t deviate too much from what is expected.
However, when it comes to team games, we believe there’s greater opportunity to iterate on the standard elimination win condition, which has traditionally been copy/pasted from 1v1. Specifically, we believe a non-annihilation win condition can solve a couple of issues specific to team-based RTS.
First, there’s potential in current Blizzard-style RTS team games to eliminate a player permanently, something which is not commonly found in other team-based esports, where either revive or end-of-round mechanics are commonplace. This can be extremely frustrating, especially to a newer player who is eliminated.
In addition, another common criticism of team modes in RTS is the sheer amount of chaos that can be present in a given game, both for the players and the observers. In these game modes, it can often be difficult for individuals to evaluate the state of the game and what the other player is doing.
In theory, a more strictly defined, less open-ended win condition could be helpful to address both these situations.
With that said, our thoughts on win conditions in team games mirror that of user /u/Shadow_Being. While we’re less likely to make major changes to the formula of our 1v1 mode, we believe there’s a lot of opportunities to experiment with differentiating the rules of our team-based mode from our 1v1 mode. Though there is certainly a complexity cost to desyncing the rules of two modes, we’re hopeful that the potential upsides will be worth the price.
Thanks for listening once again, and we hope to get back to you with a new topic soon!
With that, thanks for following us thus far and we look forward to sharing our next discussion topic soon!
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