Caeltos wrote:You don't build a game around being a e-sports from day 0, you need a product that's fun first and foremost, the competetive aspect will come naturally if there's a demand for it, or if it's passable. Forced e-sport games rarely do well. Or even struggle to find their identity.
Starcraft wasn't an omg wtf esport game day 1
CS was not an omg wtf esport game day 1
DOTA was not omg wtf esport game day 1
LOL was not omg wtf esport game day 1
Street Fighter was not omg wtf esport game day 1
Smash was not omg wtf esport game day 1
Do I fucking need to go on?
Oh yeah, so let's just sick back and 'allow' a game to become competitive just incase the casuals who we are designing it to attract like the look of it. Those other games were fortunate to become as popular as they did as far as I'm aware. I really have no idea how LOL or CS become Esport territory but the other games are quite defining for their genres. We have retrospect on our side as game designers now. So you can very much design a game to facilitate it working competitively. Obviously you don't need to legit hope and put all eggs in one basket that it will get million dollar prize funds at some point as that's absurd. But actively recognising that balance and competitive play is important and chasing top-down balance rather than bottom-up balance is a good starting point to facilitate such. Any signs of Relic doing so? No.
We already know the balance will be terrible. Add in the fact now that they admit they are focusing more on campaign than multiplayer and don't really want to design it to be competitive. Sounds like it will be a great game.
In contrast Creative Assembly have placed a heavy emphasis on multiplayer - the beta for example was multiplayer after all. We know they have a far better history of balance - and their constant patching and free updates on warhammer total war are a proof of that (although it is hard to balance a game with so many races, fortunately halo wars 2 will only have... 2! albeit 6 heroes I imagine). They have multiple gamemodes for multiplayer announced, over 4 in fact already the purpose of which is to make the multiplayer appeal to a wide variety of players from casual to competitive.