Objects are made by men and used for many purposes. But we never love objects
It remains a rare gem, though. There are so few RTSs that place you in the world there isn’t even a name for the genre. The only others I can think of are Brutal Legend and Sacrifice. But BZ98 was the one that I discovered first.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1980_video_game)
There's a reason the biggest fans of a game or film or TV series tend to give some of the harshest criticism, and why the most active users of a tool or program tend to have the most to say about it.
I loved the feeling of hovering above the ground and shooting down enemies. Then if your ship was about to be destroyed, you would eject out of your ship and you could try to snipe your enemy's ship to steal theirs. When you were outside your ship, you were very weak and ships could kill you by just running over you or with a single shot so you had to have really good aim to snipe and hijack one of your enemy's ship fast. Then you could literally drive around in their bases in their ship to spy on them and they wouldn't recognize you as the enemy (until you started shooting at them). That way you could check out their positions and defensive infrastructure to decide whether or not to mount an attack and how. Brilliant concept.
I also loved that there was a goal of exploring the map to find and secure geothermal geysers as you could only start a base around those. It was one of the first truly immersive game experiences.
This was many years before counter-strike, but the game mechanics were far more complex. It definitely didn't get the hype it deserved.
They're engaging in their own idiosyncratic experience with software that doesn't work exactly the way they now dream, but is apparently closer to what they want than anyrhing else.
In the general case, their insights are going to be a curiosity and might sometimes happen to coincide with a more broadly experienced flaw in the design. And of course they may be right on target for whatever few other "8000 hour" players.
Playing a game or using software a lot can give you some deep insights into it. But there is a crossover point where you spend so much time with it that your relationship with it isn't very related to anyone else's anymore, and your insights likewise become less relatable.
New eyes will see fresh flaws. The user might not be right about how to fix the flaw, but they are absolutely right about where the flaws are.
The part about why the author spent another 600 hours playing after the negative review is heartwarming as heck: to help other people modding.
Battlezone 98 was an incredible game for me, even if I didn't get far into it. The blend of fps and rts felt sweeping and epic, gave a sense of scale I hadn't experienced. The game ran incredibly smoothly on the Pentium mmx with crappy voodoo banshee.
My hours logged is nowhere near Sacrifice, a game with incredibly different setting (planes hopping wizard currying favor with local dieties), but both games had that blend of first-person and rts that was incredibly challenging & of incredibly neat scale, teaversing huge open spaces. I only play them once or twice a decade now, but they're games that recur in my thoughts a lot.
Interestingly, since I didn't have the internet to participate in the MMO elements of the game, my views of it are entirely rooted in the storyline and campaigns. The community is something I haven't experienced. And none of these netcode or pvp bugs or phantom players showed up there.
I love the game. In the single player modes, you can play as the NSDF (US) forces, USSR, (and later as the Chinese forces too) in a sci-fi retelling of the space race where you discover alien relics throughout our solar system and try to piece together where they came from, and more importantly, where they went. And it did this while combining a first-person vehicle combat mode with a top-down RTS system that, in my opinion, worked really well together. And I still take inspiration from it in hobby game projects I work on.
Now that I've grown up as a software developer I've thrown so many hours into writing Lua scripts to build my own missions and AI, and creating custom maps!
When they've fallen out of love with the game, the best solution is to take a long break or just fully move on.
There’s still some information there, about how the game roped this guy in and where it left him. But like someone who’s just looking to try a bourbon, his review probably isn’t that helpful to you.
1 year of your life playing a game is just plain wrong, sorry to say that, but that's the reality.
The thing that comes to mind is the awful System Shock remake that some middle finger showing snotty kid created. Ruining the atmosphere, by changing the music, the setting, the intro and outro and even the looks. I can understand when Ferrari sues bloody idiots because they mod their cars in an unacceptable way.
It burned me out and I basically quit gaming for the last 10 years, now that I think about it. Some sim or resource games here and there, nothing multiplayer and nothing "reactive". Maybe a few hours a month.
Anyway, I reflected on it as this big waste of time, so I felt I had to grind at life instead. Games are a waste of time, do something productive. I'm only now appreciating the anxiety that caused.
This intern I work with is a gamer and asks me if I play anything. I realize I'm older than his mom so he's really getting a kick of my stories cause "I'm like too old to play games haha, wow that's crazy"
He said something like "you can afford it, how do you not have a gaming computer bro?" I thought, he's got a point.
So I find a tricked out craigslist gaming computer a few weeks ago and download some games on steam. I was floored at A. What games have become and how fuckin good they look B. How much fun I was having and C. How I was able to soothe anxiety
Just do what you like with your spare time, if it makes you happy and doesn't fuck your life up, do it.
Golgotha was to be Crack's second game, but they folded before it could be finished, and released what code and assets they did have as open source (this was when CatB was still fresh).
Wild too that Urban Assault and Allegiance were both pre-xbox Microsoft games.
Don't you think you could do it without being too out-of-touch?
I often think about film reviewers, and how the sheer volume of film they've watched means that their experiences are likely further removed from an average person's potential experience, than basically anyone else.
Much like how if you're an average person who doesn't really go to magic shows, the opinion of another random person on a magic show is probably going to be more appropriate for you than that of Penn and Teller, who've seen it all before.
“I do,” Dunbar told him.
“Why?” Clevinger asked.
“What else is there?”
Part of the appeal of being a hybrid genre game is that there just aren't really many of them, because after the 90s games kinda settled into some pretty well-defined genres. You have 3rd person action games, FPS, RTS, RPGs, etc, all pretty cleanly delineated, and they all start getting judged based on those genres conventions.
Battlezone is an online PvP game so the intended experience may be similar, I imagine it's intended to be an infinite time sink.
I couldn't even imagine doing that for something I loved.
It wasn’t so much that I got burned out on the game. It just didn’t fit into my life the way it once had, but not for lack of time. A person’s relationship with a video game can be weirdly complex.
There have been 20,000 hour players.
Any particular interesting stories about BZ2's development that you recall? Always interesting to hear how games like this come together, so much of the time it seems like more luck than anything!
That's interesting because I remember being able to do alright in the original BZ98 campaign, but I can't make it past the second mission in Redux. I figured I just am getting old and my skills aren't sharp any more, but maybe not.
> I don't blame people for thinking that something is wrong with me after playing over 8,000 hours of a game only to leave a negative review
I've never played the game under discussion but could someone expand on this?
Why is the genre so rare/unnamed? What is meant by "place you in the world"?
If you see them as long term investments that you intend to give hundreds or thousands of hours of your time, then yes I agree with your stance.
But if you see games more like an expendable medium that gives you a couple of hours of entertainment before they grow stale, like watching a movie, then it's a different thing.
It's funny, you'd probably not default to looking at the fattest glutton, world record cake eater in the world for their opinion on their favorite cake. You recognize that the fact that they ate a lot of that cake is a problem they have, not something that particularly elevates their opinion on what makes it good or bad. A healthy person's negative experience with a cake might boil down to something like the base being too dry or the coating being too sweet, while the gluttonous cake monster's negative experience with it might be that they felt nauseous after three entire cakes due to their nutmeg content.
So if you don't intend to eat three whole cakes in one sitting, their reflection on their negative experience is absolutely useless to you. Similarly, something like 9000 hours reflects an entirely different, unlikely and probably unique point of view, not a 100-1000x more refined version of the 8-80 hours most players will experience.
In this specific case however, the reviewer makes it clear that they feel like they've hade the rug pulled out under them by an update to the game, and can clearly state several concrete reasons why they think it's inferior to an earlier versions that don't just boil down to hating everything new. Whatever your experience is or whether you'll play the game for 9000 hours yourself, the points are mostly made such that their content makes sense to anyone. But I think their review seems reasonable despite their hours spent, not in the slightest because of them. Those are observations any player could have made after 10 or 100 hours.
I'm pretty sure there's some differentiating factors between the two conditions, but I can't really pinpoint where.
RTS players usually like being above the fray, FPS players like not having to think too much ahead.
Battlezon 98 did manage to deliver an amazing experience, but the AI was poor so competitive multiplayer is where it was at. Then obviously in the 1998 world of gaming there is only skill, and skilled players could wipe you off the map well before you have had the chance to learn anything and improve your skills...
I guess this experience can now only be found in some ARMA mods and other mil-sim type games, with well-organized private games, and this is not everyone's favorite universe, nothing sci-fi or fantasy themed that I know of.
Everyone needs a hobby, for many that's video games. For some of those, a single / specific game becomes their singular hobby. See also: special interests.
I for one have been in a specific video game community for twenty years now even though I haven't engaged with the games much myself. But I know people who have, who tore the game apart, found unused content and are making mods to restore it [0], who retranslated the game(s)[1] , turned them into novels [2], D&D campaigns [3], play a poorly received spinoff over and over again for years to finish some levels in seconds [4], etc etc etc.
I think it's a bit sad to pooh-pooh other people's passions tbh.
[0] https://www.shinraarchaeology.com/retransmod.html
[1] https://thelifestream.net/category/lifestream-projects/translations/
[2] https://www.patreon.com/posts/52273334
[3] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ydIyBrJ0diEYzWz28_4y7Z38rzWCvYXQ/view
[4] https://www.youtube.com/@Shademp/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=3That said, the reality for a lot of people living in the US at the moment (and for a while now) is that they have to work multiple jobs and / or gigs like uber to make ends meet.
I love creative games, but each one will make me bored and burned out after a while. Then i take a break and do something else for a while and maybe the itch comes back later and i'll give it another go.
Even the procedurally generated stuff today is so limited in the variety of it. Yeah, there might be a billion planets in something like No Mans Sky or Elite Dangerous, but they're not very interesting to visit and mostly rather similar.
I'm sure this will improve, but it's very hard to make something believable and interesting on a small detailed scale.
I still have dreams of battles I once, long ago, played in Tanarus.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-televisio...
Just do what makes you happy, don't judge other peoples hobbies.
On a side note: I'm actually not sure why games specifically still have such a negative connotation in a day and age where most people spend more time doomscrolling social media or watching reality TV slop every day.
But, reading the review, the critic is on most parts not about the actual game, but changes which came with the (then latest?) patch and supposed bugs which were introduced. And here it becomes a bit more problematic, because as an outsider we do not know whether most of them are real bugs, or just a change which the writer didn't liked or understood. It might be something which was good for many other players, but broke the writers habits/experience, so they got a bit salty.
So at least one should contextualize the review to say for sure whether its a fair and useful review for them, or not.
At 8000 hours played, this guy should have the privilege of posting a review which is both more visible and less weighted in terms of good/bad. After a certain amount of engagement, you're implicitly thumbs upping a game. However, players with that level of commitment and sunk time feel disempowered when a game changes to betrays their expectations. They should just have a different kind of review that at the same time as it takes away their ability to thumbs down the title, it gives their thoughts visibility to the developers and community.
So if you assume 8 hours sleeping, 8 hours working, and 8 hours of free-time per day, this means spending virtually every waking, non-working hour playing Battlezone 98 Redux for 3 years. Wow.
I worked on 3d modeling/texturing and mp maps, though my time was divided between BZ2 and our other game Dark Reign 2 and other duties, so I was never full-time on BZ2. Of the games I worked on during my 3 years at Pandemic, BZ2 was my favorite.
I was very young when I joined Pandemic, having interned my senior year of high school and then joining full-time that June. It was a wonderful company to work for and had just broken free from Activision 6mo prior so there was a lot of early startup company culture being built. Witnessing how to build a company the right way was very informative to my later career.
Iirc I think we got a bit ahead of our skis with BZ2's engine rewrite, and in retrospect should have treated BZ2's tech as more of an expansion of BZ1's instead of a whole new game. The engine caused a lot of headaches and bugs, and it taught me early in my career that rewrites and new tech aren't always the right decision.
I think the decision to be more ambitious was due to the rapid transition in graphics going on in the late 90s, it was the age of early graphics accelerators like 3dfx Voodoo & Riva TNT. Hard to hit a moving target.
BZ2's codebase had quite the lineage, pieces of it transmogrified over the years from MechWarrior 2 -> Interstate 76 -> BZ1 -> BZ2 -> Dark Reign 2 & Star Wars Clone Wars. Getting ambitious while also dealing with the legacy bits I think contributed to the many early bugs. I wasn't an engineer but did futz around with the particle system which was one of the new fancy parts that got more attention.
BZ2 came in hot for Christmas 99, it wasn't exactly ready and needed a lot of patching over the next several months. If we'd had been less ambitious with the tech I believe it'd have been a decently polished release and had more success, since art, design, and gameplay were not behind. I remember feeling sad we were releasing before it was ready, and the lesson that better planning and tech choices were the way to avoid that feeling.
Unfortunately Activision wasn't a great partner for us as a publisher, there was some bad blood as they didn't like that we'd broken off as a studio rather than stay under their wing, so they didn't do much to promote the game. We were pretty pissed with that. Same thing happened with Dark Reign 2.
As far as design goes, towards the end of 99 I dove into making BZ2 maps, building Ground Zero and I think a few others. Later the engine became known as the Ground Zero or Zero engine, not sure if it was named after the level or just chosen independently. I remember being particularly motivated to work on BZ2 because I really loved the game and it was getting close to release. I had some freedom to decide my time as DR2 was going through a rough spot, so I just decided to throw myself into BZ2.
There were some multiplayer maps I didn't get to finish, including one that was basically a big 3d asset I built in Softimage that was a rock formation with multiple levels that would have really pushed the boundaries of what was possible in BZ2 maps. I'd have loved to see that come together in time, tho I'm not sure what the AI pathfinding would have done with it - I think I designed it specifically for PvP tho. Once BZ2 was released, attention immediately turned to shipping DR2, which had gone through some team turnover and needed a near complete redesign in 6 months. I wound up making all the multiplayer maps for that, and having a great time with that team.
I hope to write up more war stories at another time. It's been 25(!) years now since release. Crazy.
That doesn't mean there's any sense in adapting terminals for haiku usage.
Absolutely a tongue-in-cheek example, but "there's something for everyone" doesn't mean that something is something everyone should implement.
I remember playing unreal tournament, counterstrike, etc. It’s not like servers were honest about skill level even 20% of the time lol
I didn't realize that I was such a big deal.
I wish there wasn't so much so I might actually read it. It's paralyzing.
My vision was a mix between a FPS where where you have a squad with you that you can order around with say quick wheel actions. Then you could "zoom out" to the battlefield to give more RTS style commands.
One key thing was any of the members of your local squad could be multiplayer real people instead of NPCs and also others could fill out the squads you are commanding.
Then daydreams about a hierarchical command structure where the player in the game with the highest "rank" is the highest in command. His "tactical RTS" view is just controlling say a few platoons but nothing more specific than general orders. Then say each platoon would have a commander (highest rank again, etc) who would have to implement orders from above using both his FPS view or using his tactical RTS view which now let's him control squads. Then down the line a squad commander who can control members of his team and so on.
I think it would be a bit rigid and I know of games which check off a few boxes but I would love something like this.