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Greetings! It’s been two months since we introduced our last discussion topic, “Teams”. Specifically, we asked you about your experience with team games in RTS and your thoughts on whether we should focus on solo or teams as the primary competitive mode for our game. As always, we received a ton of responses, and the following posts, which did a great job of highlighting the pros and cons of each potential path by aLepH_n0ught, _Spartak_, Fluffy_Maguro, pshchegolevatykh, and Talnir caught our eye.
To get everyone on the same page, here is a list of what we gathered as some of the strengths of each mode, many of which were explored in greater depth in the posts we linked above:
Solo Mode Pros:
- “Pure”: When talking about 1v1, we keep seeing “pure” used as a descriptor. What determines the winner of a game is almost always individual skill and not meta-skills such as communication and teamwork. This can be very attractive to current 1v1 RTS audiences.
- Proven Model: 1v1 is a proven competitive game model for RTS whereas team-focused RTS is less explored and thus riskier.
- Ease of Spectatorship: It’s much easier to follow around two armies on the map rather than four, six, or eight.
- Lower Levels of Toxicity: A byproduct of having teammates is that you can not only receive bad-manner from your opponents but your allies as well.
Team Mode Pros:
- Ability to Deflect Blame: When you lose a solo game, it’s always your fault (or perhaps it’s the balance?). When you lose a team game, it’s always a teammate’s fault. The ability to deflect blame onto others can make it easier to keep playing.
- Lower Stress Level: As a corollary to the above, team games are often less stressful, which can help alleviate the dreaded “ladder anxiety,” an affliction most associated with 1v1 games, specifically in the RTS genre.
- Greater Social Experience: As a result of COVID, players are increasingly attracted to social gaming experiences that they can enjoy with friends. A shift towards a team-based game could more greatly capture this audience.
- Ease of Entry: It’s very difficult for most people to jump into competitive games by themselves. In contrast, it’s easier to both learn a competitive game from a friend and recruit friends to play alongside yourself.
- Stickiness: Not only is it easier to recruit friends, it’s easier to retain players when they feel like they’re part of a group. Though this can be achieved to some degree via robust clan features, we feel that the necessity of having teammates naturally leads to a much higher degree of stickiness.
- Greater Cohesion with Co-op vs AI Modes: This is not something anyone on Reddit mentioned, but it’s something that we thought about quite often on the StarCraft II team. Often, we felt like we were supporting two separate game modes in 1v1 competitive and Co-op, and any way we could service both at the same time provided us with more content to all of our modes.
Generally, feedback seemed in agreement as to the pros and cons of each mode. When it came to preference between the two, however, responses were varied. As RTS games have traditionally focused on 1v1 as the core competitive mode, our team expected the responses to be overwhelming in favor of 1v1. We found that subreddit opinions were very mixed with even a slight preference for a primary mode that is team-based.
In private feedback sessions with RTS pros and influencers, there was a notable split between what participants wanted on a personal level versus what they thought was best for the game. While a majority of participants said they would personally prefer to play a 1v1-focused RTS, a meaningful number felt it made sense to move towards teams since it could broaden the audience. Still, some flatly rejected the idea of an RTS that isn’t primarily focused on 1v1.
Our perspective on all of this is rooted in two beliefs: we firmly believe in the potential of social gaming, and we are huge fans of the proven 1v1 model for RTS. We're planning to experiment with teams as a fun social mode, with the intention to continue supporting world-class 1v1 for top-tier competitive players.
As we’ve mentioned in our heroes discussion, experimenting with a direction does NOT imply that we've made firm decisions. Game development is an iterative process, and we’re still building out tech. It will be quite a while before we draw hard conclusions, but we intend to share our thought process along the way.
With that, thanks for following us thus far and we look forward to sharing our next discussion topic soon!
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