Back to News
Advertisement
Advertisement

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

67% Positive

Analyzed from 1603 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#rts#starcraft#games#still#game#trailer#base#player#marathon#years

Discussion (66 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Setheck•1 day ago
They just abandon the entire RTS fan base. This feels just like the diablo immortal announcement disaster where they announce a product that is completely outside the target audience.

I hope it's good, but it's really disappointing to not just have starcraft 3. Instead we get diablo 5? I wish I could feel positive about any of the blizzcon announcements, but it all feels like an out of touch joke.

jm4•1 day ago
RTS is pretty much a dead genre these days. There have been indie releases but nothing did well enough for a big studio to take notice. They tested the water with a Command and Conquer remaster a few years ago too.
bob1029•about 19 hours ago
I think RTS could continue to work if someone made a massive leap of faith and put all the modern infra around it that a AAA extraction shooter would receive in 2026. The biggest problem with RTS is the matchmaking and onboarding experience.

The game itself doesn't have to be dumbed down (i.e., removing base building, etc.). Making the RTS simpler is NOT the solution to player adoption. Starcraft II has some extremely complex mechanics (Zerg production) which have survived for 16 years without significant changes.

The reality is that RTS is very much alive if you are willing to get your ass beat constantly. What I think many people are actually asking for is that nostalgic experience where everyone kind of sucked at these games and they could cheese their way to easy wins. RTS felt better when everyone was kind of bad. In a shooter you can still get lucky shots and catch people off guard. In an RTS, if someone is 1000 ELO better than you, the chances you defeat them are essentially zero.

AngryData•1 day ago
The most ive done with RTS the last decade is watch some mass Beyond All Reason videos (I dont have the hardware for mass battles myself.) LoL and other moba dota-likes I think took the a bulk of the rts competative crowd. Now I feel like the traditional rts community has to butt heads with other strategy genres to take players if they want to approach old school rts levels of success. Trying to pull moba players back seems like it would have massive diminishing returns.
oefrha•1 day ago
That’s fine, just let it die. But they gotta milk the goddamn IP dry.
nozzlegear•about 23 hours ago
It's been like 11 years since the last game, it seems a bit reactionary to call that "milking the goddamn IP dry."
Gud•about 18 hours ago
According to?

I play AoE2 and it’s still growing.

spwa4•about 17 hours ago
Have you tried playing the Command and Conquer remaster? They barely upgraded the UI and it just doesn't feel like you're in command. Games move like your wading through molasses and you just win basically everything (except the online mode, where you have no chance whatsoever)

And there isn't much variation.

The cutscenes were almost the best part of the original game. Now they're really the only reason to even look.

nozzlegear•about 23 hours ago
> They just abandon the entire RTS fan base

They did announce a new Warcraft 3 expansion at Blizzcon too.

FanaHOVA•1 day ago
What would be the point in making SC3? SC2 is free to play, great game, and still barely gets any players. I play against the same 30-40 people every time in ranked.
TiredOfLife•about 17 hours ago
They literally released a 30 hour Warcraft campaign yesterday.
999900000999•1 day ago
I have absolutely no faith in Microsoft to make anything decent with its legacy IPs.

Ohh well

pokstad•1 day ago
Meanwhile, Nintendo with a tiny fraction of MS market cap is absolutely killing it with their legacy IP.
Insanity•1 day ago
For all the flaws in how Nintendo treats fans of their IP, the games they put out themselves are consistently fun. Mario Kart still feels like Mario Kart even decades later, and not in stagnating/bad way.
pitched•1 day ago
The original creators of Mario Kart are still involved in the latest entries (a 34-year run!) Thats not common outside Nintendo.
firstordefault•1 day ago
I was wondering what do they exactly mean by "open-world shooter", and checked that Dan Hay guy:

> Executive Producer on Far Cry 5

So it's safe to assume that's what they are aiming for.

poulpy123•1 day ago
« as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced »
htrp•1 day ago
Wasn't this starcraft ghost?
Waterluvian•1 day ago
Kind of. That one was closer to C&C Renegade.
jzig•1 day ago
biglyburrito•about 15 hours ago
I've heard this story before, and from the same people... no thanks.
joshu•1 day ago
we are definitely getting AGI before a new starcraft
blueoranges•1 day ago
Release dates is why Rust implemented the Never type https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49625056
whicks•1 day ago
is this “Helldivers 2”, but StarCraft?
geoffpado•1 day ago
Helldivers 2 isn't open-world, so probably not.
fomoz•1 day ago
The trailer looks really good! Accurate.
PorciiVorbesc•1 day ago
The trailer != the game, since there was no gameplay footage.
gleezard•about 23 hours ago
Blizzard is getting a lot of vitriol and I don’t think it’s unwarranted. Yes, some of it might be melodramatic but I remember when Warcraft 3 was coming out. Or even Lord of the Clans. People were mega hyped.

This is a huge turn of the tide. Very little of the core fan base, if they even still have that, is interested. Both Diablo 5 and StarCraft 3 getting panned. Very strange of Blizzard to do this, especially as a fuck-you to people who bought Diablo 4 and now there’s no Diablo in it, unless they release a surprise expansion pack which would just be weird.

As for the trailer, it looks like a grimdark Warhammer 40K thing. I don’t know why they are releasing trailers so early. I’m guessing they’ll spend the next 3-4 years in constant marketing mode to drum up sales?

I don’t even get this company anymore. Who the fuck is in charge around here? And where’s our air support?

Advertisement
ZiiS•1 day ago
Even a half hearted RTS would be better recived, how can they not know that?
PorciiVorbesc•1 day ago
Couldn't be more wrong. The market for new RTSs is too tiny and saturated to turn a profit on any new IP. The small existing player base is too entrenched to move away from the old established IPs that are still popular to something new and unproven.
promano•1 day ago
Starcraft III would be as far from a new IP as you could go while still making an RTS. Except for a Warcraft IV, I guess.
PorciiVorbesc•about 8 hours ago
>Starcraft III would be as far from a new IP as you could go while still making an RTS

What are existing players missing from Starcraft 2 to justify buying Starcraft 3 so that Blizzard can justify the money to develop it?

Razengan•about 20 hours ago
Guy you're out of touch

There's quite a few new RTS games coming out

PorciiVorbesc•about 10 hours ago
>There's quite a few new RTS games coming out

And how many copies are they gonna sell? How big is their player base?

All important things bean counters want to know before they pony up north of seven figures of investor money into another RTS and not into another looter shooter instead with a 100x revenue and 100x player base.

gamblor956•1 day ago
Tempest Rising made more in profits than Marathon, despite selling a fraction as many copies.

Given that Marathon is unlikely to ever make a profit, Tempest Rising technically made infinitely more in profits than Marathon did.

PorciiVorbesc•about 10 hours ago
>Tempest Rising made more in profits than Marathon

Choosing the biggest flop as your benchmark is a very poor argument. If you lose half as much money as Marathon, you're technically twice as good, but it's still a flop and investors and publishers want successes, not half flops.

Marathon existing does not justify the investments into new RTS games. Quite the contrary. Marathon got hundreds of millions in cash because the shooter genre was making billions (at the time) so for them it was worth the gamble even if they lost. But the RTS genre is not making nearly enough money to justify Marathon levels of gambling on new IPs.

detritus•1 day ago
Go on?
Ralfp•1 day ago
Tempest Rising was taunted as the old school C&C RTS comeback and it ended as niche game with small player base and 9.5k player peak on Steam.

Probably best RTS game going on currently is Beyond All Reason, and that's because guys are doing it as an open source clone/followup to Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander Alliances and not actual business (but they started to look for a way to monetize it to fund future development).

PorciiVorbesc•1 day ago
Gon on, as in you mean like to explain the obvious? Just google/chatgpt sales of RTS games vs shooters and other shit.

Good luck convincing an exec to give you 200 million $ to make a new RTS for the 50 player based market out there who's playing the oldies anyway: AOE, RA, SC, etc.

It's a small and saturated market that's long been fished out and no point investing into, other than HD remakes/remasters of previously mentioned established IP.

bob1029•1 day ago
StarCraft 2 is really hard to beat.

This is probably the safest thing they could do with the genre from a business perspective.

mikenew•1 day ago
There is no one left at Blizzard with any RTS experience. They've long since left for smaller studios.

SC2 is my favorite game of all time and I would love nothing more than an SC3. But if there ever is to be a real spiritual successor it won't be from Blizzard.

tempestn•1 day ago
Problem is I don't want a spiritual successor. I want an actual successor that would build on the Starcraft universe, but in an RTS.
greazy•1 day ago
If you're a fan of single player checkout the mod scene. It's very good. UED First Light is excellent.
jayd16•1 day ago
Financially incorrect, it seems.
gamblor956•1 day ago
An RTS game would generate lower revenue but higher profits. Low risk but low reward.

A shooter is a high risk high-reward endeavor. The track record for shooters for the past 5 years is actually much worse than it has been for RTS games, but the ceiling for success is much higher. In 2026 alone, several AAA shooters have failed in the market. Most of the shooters released in the past 2 years have failed to survive. The few that succeeded made a lot of money.

cyanydeez•1 day ago
this will only be cool if the open shooter is a submeta game of some random south koreas going for gold at the olympics.
ares623•1 day ago
you can milk anything with nipples.

Companies still announcing big AAA games as if their customers will have the hardware necessary to run such games in 2030.

And people say I'm the one huffing copium.

Waterluvian•1 day ago
Consoles sold at a loss before. They can do that again if it enables selling software, which often has pretty fantastic margins.
fc417fc802•1 day ago
This is easily the most depressing thought I've encountered in a while. It's entirely accurate and combined with talk of AI regulation it paints a picture of a very bleak future indeed. Locked down hardware given away almost for free, permits and AI based monitoring required for anything with the computational power of a GPU from 10 years ago, and market prices that place 64 GB of RAM in the same ballpark as a brand new vehicle from the dealer.
Waterluvian•1 day ago
Please drink Verfication Can™ to continue playing PEPSI™ Presents: Bubsy 3D™ Legends™
nozzlegear•about 23 hours ago
Idk I had a lot of fun playing Halo 2 as a teenager
caidan•1 day ago
Clowns
59percentmore•1 day ago
Well, I suppose it's something that a Verge article held back from spoiling the trailer until just before where they embedded it in the article. Usually they put it right in the headline.

I wish people would stop supporting this trash site and let it die.

3eb7988a1663•1 day ago
!SPOILERS!

The trailer shows nothing. Mentions a couple of factions that have previously been established from the lore and shows some Space Marine montage footage that could have been a cutscene from the prior games. It is not gameplay and just as easily could be promotion material for a Starcraft 3 RTS.

drfuzzy89•1 day ago
They also claim the trailer follows the United Earth Directorate from Brood War when they clearly mention the Terran Dominion in the trailer. It's a minor thing, but do these sites not have editors?
beepbooptheory•1 day ago
How did they spoil the trailer for you? What's an example of them doing it in the headline?
mcmcmc•1 day ago
It’s a trailer, you really think that’s something that can be spoiled? Do you get mad if someone spoils a Super Bowl ad?
plorkyeran•1 day ago
I have no idea what you could consider a spoiler for a three minute trailer that's nothing but vibes.