Gadgetory

hey everyone this is steve from gamers nexus that we were at the grey goo booth here at PAX Prime 2014 i'm joined by pat one of the lead designer on gray goo and that you worked with westwood studios you worked with a lot of RTS in the old days and coming up to now absolutely and so there was a lot of RTS in the 90s wat r GS in the late to late 90s early 2000s where did it go so RTS gotta split in two directions on the one hand you have the ultra complicated micro intensive you know unit abilities a whole lot of stuff to keep track of and it kind of turned a few people off there's a lot of people authors are really good at it but for the more casual crowd they just couldn't get into it because it was just too much the other direction when it was mobis a lot more simple single character unit abilities and upgrades through itemization a leveling but it gets a little repetitive after a while because you know you got your characters if you want to try something new it's the same map over and over again the original RTS County got lost in there somewhere and so we just to give the viewers an idea of what you worked on what were some of the earlier RT has titles you worked on my original starting design position was tiberian sun i was a lead designer of the firestorm expansion for that game i worked on a few other tunnels for west with students before it closed down and started working for petroglyphs so i've been a designer on empire or forces of corruption universal war and now Bray goo where do you see RTS as a genre going in the near future um I think RTS is here to stay and it's really up to the player to pick what kind of star they're looking for grey goo is more of a simplistic old-school kind of feel to it no unit abilities all the things that units can do are built in you don't have to worry about not a lot of micro it's still micro there there isn't any RTS you don't have to have uber micro to actually play the game what is it you think that makes RTS such enough healing genres have people like us who played it for whole lives so when I first started history has explained to me by bretts / he was the president of Westwood he's like RTS is like toy soldiers that you play with as a kid that you can move around in real time and that's really i mean the ultimate fun of RTS is getting a whole bunch of stuff and attacking your friends blowing stuff up and having a good time big big giant battles lots of explosions and cool stuff to play with and it sounds like you're sticking to kind of that philosophy or three gear yeah definitely yeah i gue is something I haven't personally seen anywhere else it's just a big giant ball protoplasm that rolls are on the screen eat stuff splits into new units and ssf breaks all the rules you can climb up the sides of cliffs and mountains the only thing can't do is build aircraft so that's its one weakness and as a genre with RTS do you feel like there's a lot of competition out there right now do you feel like it's a kind of open market for you guys um well there's always the big behemoth Starcraft and they're not going away and we don't want it to because it's an awesome game but for this level our chest I don't think there's a lot out there right now there's been a couple that are in the works on steam machine but I don't think there's anything really that kind of scratches that bread beer at Brussels kind of feeling so you comparing between something like Starcraft grey goo fall on the difficulty spectrum do you see that's a little easier for users to get into or yeah I think so we tried aim somewhere between the original command conquer and starcraft so it's not nearly as fast pace to starcraft is you're not going to be measuring actions per minute when you're playing but for those people that are new to the game they can sit down get into it have some fun if you're a skilled player you're going to find those little tricks and tips that you can exploit and become a really good player in terms of macro and a great do what's the what's the macro play like so it's the basics of RTS right you have your resources you have your unit production and then you have a combat the there's a lot of map control and grey goo we have elevation we have line of sight and then we have factions like the goo that can actually break the rules they can climb over things that break line of sight and look down on anyone you can't see them so it depends on the faction matchup is how much macro you're going to have to worry about were you able to borrow any design elements from your command and conquer command conquer experience it's a great year oh absolutely i mean always call Artie has experience right so when we were building the factions we wanted to build a play styles rather than just a mill defection from scratch so we looked at the play styles of RTS players and there's your turtle guy you got your rusher guy and then you got the people that are somewhere in the middle so we built the factions around those ideas the goo is a massive aggressive rushing style the humans are very much a turtle defensive style and then the beater some kind of somewhere in the between where where can viewers go to learn more about it what's the release date all that information we're looking at early 2015 on steam it is steam multiplier and lands so those of you that wanted is to LAN parties offline you can go ahead and do that you can visit w WG I am to find out more very cool so check the links in the description below if you need more information we thank you for your time and I will see you all next time