150-player match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQJujiZ-oz0
My group don't play competitively, we hop on for a bot bash once a week and the AI is a lot of fun to play against. I'm excited for them to finally release on Steam because that will lower the barrier to entry and increase exposure because the game definitely deserves success.
If you just started, just stay in the backlines and do “eco”, people will be ok with that.
unfortunately that is a totally fair assessment. its a deep and detailed game with lots of units, commands, mechanics and a few maps that have extremely developed meta.
this is only a problem if you think you can drop into multiplayer on literal day 1 without even doing any of the local/non ai learning options the game provides and expect your team to just deal with you not even knowing the basics.
And even then if you start in "noob" lobbies people are pretty helpful, to the extent that they are trying to play the game and give you tips and can only do/type so much.
so its simple... 1. play the scenerios/vs to learn the basics. also watch some yt basics guides 2. join noob lobbies. 3. when people try to help you and they sound mad/terse/short it helps to assume they are just busy with their own match and are doing their best to play and help you learn. if they give you advice try to take it. 4. do your best and ping out when things are going bad in your lane.
the community on there really is very much "nicer" to noobs that many games, especially ones that are co-op team based. but you do need to have realistic expectations. people will get upset if you mess up their games bc you havent at least tried to learn how to play at all.
You are way out on the edge of the bell curve. You only want to play with similar people. That's fine. But own up to it and don't pretend it's friendly to newbies.
1. do the tutorial, maybe watch a guide
2. follow the dedicated onboarding track
3. give people around you the benefit of the doubt
4. point things out even if you don't know how to deal with them
I started multiplayer mostly with a popular mod. I think the mod was popular for a multitude of reasons, one of them being classes and some classes were easier for the newbies to play (and also easier with bad internet connection, this game is old). You wouldn't need to master everything, some classes were more about just spamming explosives, some about aim, some about movement, some about prediction etc.
Then we got into the base game. It was quite sparse and not so fun as a team game at first. But it turned out, 1on1 was great fun if your opponent was about the same level as you (and with a proper map). Only then after that it started making more sense as a team game.
I think many games would benefit from some newbie-friendly format or mod or what you call it. In an FPS a mode where you are some class and already spawn with some decent weapon etc. So then you can concentrate on that.
In an RTS, don't know what it would be, maybe just have a lot less buildings, units and game mechanisms to choose from for newbies. Like a simplified mod with no air or sea units and no special buildings.
That's fine! But. Again. Own it instead of pretending it's something it's not
And id bet they put up with it because "getting flamed" in bar is like 1000% less toxic than most online games and so i stand by 'friendly' on the relative scale of competitive online games today.
however, installing the game and jumping into multiplayer and selecting the first open lobby is just not a good experience for anyone.
It is still a game with a learning curve and tons ways to climb it. For as steep as that curve is I might suggest that bar is one of the more newb friendly player bases.
Its like if you showed up in cod and literally didn't know how to move your character and somehow naded your team to cause them to lose. Do you think those players would be like "good on ya try harder next time, maybe use the joystick if you wanna move around"... no way.. But i see something like the bar version of that in noob lobbies all the time.
Still, it's a competitive online game, people can get frustrated with you if you literally don't know how to play. You will get frustrated with them trying to help you but not being especially nice about it. and it will be a bad experience.
It's a legit criticism that bar doesn't have a lot of guardrails to help you in the first days. in that sense its absolutely not noob friendly, nobody says it is. If a game has to be candy crush level simple to be "noob friendly" then bar is far to complex for that either, its just not that style of game.
follow my (probably still a bar noob) advice or not, im just trying to help you have a good experience in your first weeks in the game.
... and if suggesting that before you go into competitive play you literally just play the tutorial or vs ai is "complex" then bar is probably not the game for you, but if you ever end up in a lobby with me id still try to help you anyway.
And, you know, I'm a bit of a BAR developer myself. I added a UI widget that shows the number of active "Pinpointers", and now anyone can install it with one in-game click, if they want.
Maybe I'll give it another look.
We have allsorts. If you can put up with the occasional misery there’s a lot of fun to be had.
It's very much a game of team coordination where the power curve is exponential but also can have huge turnarounds since buildings are fragile but drive the economy entirely
So naturally you have to know how to play your specific role or it can throw the game for everyone else
It's not casual like Command and Conquer or something, but nor is it incredibly sweaty like StarCraft or DOTA
I feel like whether a game is considered sweaty or casual is more dependent on the game mode (e.g. ranked vs normal, UMS vs ladder etc).
I have a few friends who used to really get into C&C games, and factional balance is basically nonexistent (with the resident 'good guy' faction being the best), and usually the winning strategy is to just mass produce whatever bang for buck unit that faction has (basic tanks most likely).
Edit: Just realised I might've fallen for the satire--thats on me.
There's a popular Starcraft 2 commentary-and-gameplay streamer, Winter, who spent some time posting commentated BAR games. Videos from this period include direct pleas to his audience to take more of an interest because it's a better game with a better development model.
Then he took BAR off of his main youtube channel because that didn't work. He now seems to operate a separate variety channel with some BAR content.
I think about what this says about the role that marketing plays in people-in-general's choice of pastimes.
I can't speak for everyone but at somepoint I find myself wanting to watch a sc2 game so I "turn on" wintersc's channel. Because I want starcraft. It doesn't really matter how good BAR is if I'm looking for sc2. I might want to watch BAR at some other moment, but that's a different behaviour mechanism, if you see what I mean.
The Total Annihilation fans are probably even more marketing resistant than Starcraft fans.
So, in your opinion, Beyond All Reason is getting more new players than Starcraft 2 is?
One of my favorite moments was in this 40 vs 40 match, and I pressed pause and typed "door" in chat. People started to complain, but nobody unpaused it. A few seconds later I said "j/k" and unpaused myself--but for a brief moment, I felt the joy of having _79_ people waiting on me to go answer the door. I guess I'm just a troll at heart, the absurdity of it is funny to me.
I also love the lack of sophistication in the game that would allow a single player to pause a 40 vs 40 game. Anyone can pause, and anyone can unpause, and yet somehow the community is respectful enough to make that work.
The lack of sophistication doesn't mean the game is broken and crashes, it just means there's technical oddities which I appreciate as a programmer and old school gamer. There's even opportunities to script the game, add new widgets, and share them with others. It's an open-source game after all.
I’m sure many will like it, but if you’re expecting it to be like TA or FAF then you may be disappointed.
You might be missing an important detail: every shot counts. In early game, at least.
Late game is kinda janky tbh
BAR feels to me like someone took the various noob complaints about FAF (commander sniping, complex tech trees, slow pace) and applied them all to reduce the scope of the game.
People who compare BAR to FAF don’t seem to understand that. Your target audience isn’t former FAF players who like to coordinate epic multi-hour games, it’s players of fast-paced lobby RTSes.
Multiplayer FAF games are fast, like 20 minutes, sometimes much more, but usually not too long.
Are you talking about FAF single player? Where you can noodle around for hours and the AI exists for the sole purpose of giving the player something to shoot at?
I worry that they may be looking to take it closed source
What they are going to do is develop a single player "mod" that runs in the same engine, and they are using their money to help develop the game in the process.