New RTS Masterminds Episode – Upcoming RTS Overview 2023-2024

Eaerlier this year, NakamuraRTS (Balint Marczin) and myself started a podcast called RTS Masterminds, which I announced in this blog: Introducing the RTS Masterminds Podcast.

Our goal, and what we think is the unique niche we occupy, is offering the perspective of professional game designers working on strategy games (and related genres), on the state of strategy games. We feel that, as dedicated players of RTS as well as content creators (videos and articles) and also working on these games, we offer a perspective that has breadth and depth, and we certainly hope that people find our impressions interesting and valuable.

Table of Contents

1. Table of Contents
2. Introduction
3. COH3’s Road to Redemption
4. Stormgate Part 1
5. Will Realms of Ruin be good?
6. Our Thoughts on Upcoming RTS

Introduction

If you want to see our latest episode, go to #6 in the table of contents: Our Thoughts on Upcoming RTS.

Since our initial annoucement back in June, we’ve released episodes on Company of Heroes 3, Stormgate, and Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin (youtube embeds below). And most recently we did a single whirlwind episode covering ZeroSpace, Homeworld 3, Terminator Dark Fate: Defiance, and Last Train Home.

On a personal note, I am having a blast recording these with Balint (I hope he also feels this way!) and am going to make an increased effort to get out episodes on a more regular basis. This project is really meaningful to me since, as I said above, I’m the target market for these games as well as being professionally interested in seeing more RTS games succeed in the marketplace. I’m certainly going to be buying/playing ZeroSpace, Stormgate, Homeworld 3, Last Train Home, and at this point have already preordered Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin which I expect to at least get my money’s worth out of when it releases.

On a positive note, in the months since our podcast started it seems that Company of Heroes 3 has bene on a long slow climb back into its players’ good graces, and I remain hopeful that it will end up in a good place. It’s less clear what will happen with Realms of Ruin once it launches.

See our episodes below:

COH3’s Road to Redemption

In this episode, Balint and I talk about Company of Heroes 3 and its rocky launch, as well as the ways in which a generous portion of the community feel like the game has let them down. This includes the state of the campaigns at launch, graphics and audio, and the inclusion of a store and daily missions early on in the game’s life cycle before other bugs and issues were addressed. All of this overshadows the solid core design of the game, arguably the best in the franchise. We discuss the long uphill road that Relic has to improve the game and prove to the community that it’s worth sticking around.

Stormgate Part 1

In this episode, Naka and I talk about some of the Stormgate reveals, discuss their marketing plan from their initial reveal going forward, and our hopes, fears, and observations about the game.

Will Realms of Ruin be good?

the Realms of Ruin multiplayer beta, Nighthaunt reveal, and other game features are the topic of this episode. In spite of a very impressive feature set, both Naka and myself are concerned about the game’s longevity due to some of the very rough edges of the game’s mutliplayer beta, including melee lock and Bastion defenses which really mess with the pacing of multiplayer matches, as well as input delay on orders and frustrating UI/UX. Frontier seem dedicated to improving the game, so I personally remain hopeful, but it’s possible this will be more of a single player experience than something that will keep people coming back to its multiplayer again and again.

Our Thoughts on Upcoming RTS

We didn’t have the time to cover each of these individually, so we decided to rapid fire reactions to Temrinator Dark Fate Defiance, Last Train Home, Homeworld 3, and ZeroSpace in one whirlwind episode. Lots of good stuff in this one!

And lastly, if you’re interested in catching us on Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/show/4IZ4A5ld3kmYxxgxZVZ8uh?utm_source=generator

If you are interested in us tackling a specific game or topic, or to have a particular guest on the show, please comment below! Thanks for watching and reading.

See you on the battlefield.