Great game, technically impressive, but the community can be quite mean and toxic. I played for around a year after having played other TA Spring RTS for a few years prior, and if you don’t follow the exact meta of the month (whatever that might be) in terms of build order and things, people can get really aggro and your team can vote to kick you and take your units.
Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
The drafting for picking map spots is done in order of seniority, and the good players take all the low stress spots which leaves the newer players to take the more difficult spots. This feeds into a loop where the senior players get aggro at the new players for letting the front break down, but simultaneously they won’t take it themselves even though it’s the more important position.
I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game. The front player blames the back player, the back player blames the front player, everyone flames the weakest player.
Hey, PtaQ here, BAR’s Community Manager. I’m sorry this was your experience. There are definitely some very competitive lobbies, but harassment is not acceptable. Please report any players involved, as reports are the only way we can identify patterns and take action. We have an active moderation team and do review them.
For a more relaxed experience, I’d recommend trying less established meta maps. Lobbies marked “rotato” rotate maps after every game and are usually among the chillest. Players tend to be less rigid about roles and expected builds there, which generally leads to more positive interactions.
These days, online public lobbies are almost always hostile. Doesn't matter the game, either. You can ban words, phrases, etc. The hostility is also through actions and not just insults.
The only way to have actual fun gaming is a private group of friends. Think lan party, and definitely not public.
We have support for a variety of ways to limit who can join you (passwording lobbies, locking lobbies etc). I get a lot of value playing with a regular group of friends on a Sunday night in part because of it.
It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves. Every update to every game launches a large scale effort to find the "meta" which is then instantly disseminated to the most try-hard assholes on the Internet. Anyone who dares to develop their own strategy/style/loadout is up against hordes of people (a growing proportion every day) who just copy whatever the Youtubers figured out.
> It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves
I think they might destroy the streaming/online communities, but I wouldn't say it destroys the game itself. I play BAR, but never with random strangers, the game works fine, but I also don't participate in any "video game" communities or watch/play with streamers, so what you're saying sounds very foreign to me, and is more about the communities than the games themselves.
I don't see how your comment makes sense. You're not part of any "community" but you also never play with random strangers?
I only play public matches with random strangers and this is the feeling.
Obviously this wouldn't apply if I had a small community of not-strangers to play with consistently, which you do have but oddly describe as not having a community.
Well, while every group of people is definitionally "a community", you can absolutely have your friend group not be part of "the community" of the game. Just like you can have a LAN and not be "on the net", watch implies the internet.
I think Overwatch and League of Legends are the best examples of this effect. Both games are entirely unrecognizable today compared to 2016.
Somehow Starcraft 2 emerged from the other side of esports mostly unscathed, despite being arguably the most significant progenitor of the entire genre.
Meta-gaming is a natural progression in all human games. Chess players find "metas" like openings. It's just that video games are too simple and have very restricted meta set.
I don’t know but I can imagine many of the levers in games cancel each other out or don’t turn out to be useful while in chess every variable is orthogonal. It’s all important. Complicated versus complex, like how untangling Christmas lights is time-consuming and gnarly but it is not complex fundamentally.
That said, I don’t know if it is true in those cases.
Simple is definitely the wrong term. Chess's simplicity is where its inherent difficulty comes from. It's paradoxically much more difficult to optimize than more complex games like SC.
Agreed on “finding meta” as just being part of any game. But thinking games are more restrictive than chess might just be a lack of exposure to competitive gaming.
It's amazing the degree tencent shills have taken action to stop people in the west from enjoying games online. This is not natural and it didn't used to be this way.
This is a common reaction and the response is common too: this is only the case if you follow the herd to 8v8 and the two club-like maps they fixate on. But if you study the community for 5 minutes first, you can walk past those two “pubs full of toxic jerks fighting” there are a dozen other options. Single player, PvE, 1v1 through 4v4 and FFA. These (smaller) game modes lack the level of drama you see in 8v8. You just have to go into the quiet restaurant with nerds playing chess and other board games instead of the obvious mess of a drunken bar across the street.
In magic the gathering I had dozens of decks trying different things. He had a single deck that he kept tweaking to within the millimetre of perfection.
In overwatch, I would play different characters to experience different parts of the game and try different strategies. He played single character for years, with 10 times the hours in that char than I had in all of them combined.
Heck even in real life, he was a Java developer for decades whereas I was a type of fleeting sysadmin specifically so I could play with different toys in the stack :).
Now, this is a bit side Venn diagram, he'd never be rude on an online game (he does have offline opinions on the meta :). But it let me understand people who have fun in a very different way than I do :). He doesn't see boredom in playing same way over and over (and over and over), I think he sees it as professional athlete being focused and honing their specific craft.
Different people get different things out of video games (and everything, really). For some, the fun is learning, and the game stops being fun when you understand it (this is me). For others, the fun starts after they're learned, and starts being good at it, but still have competition with others. For yet others, mastering it and being the best is the fun.
All these groups of people sometimes play in the same lobbies, and what the players "gain" from the session can be very different depending on the person. There is no "right or wrong" way to play video games, or the right/wrong motivation for it, it's just different.
Not my experience at all when I played around a year ago. There were plenty of noob-specific / noob-friendly lobbies with a mix of helpful players and fellow casuals.
This very much depends on the lobby. I don't think this is unique to BAR either - it's just that 8v8 is the most popular mode.
Lots of players mean more chances to get a toxic guy who doesn't recognise their own faults and blames others.
I actually just don't really agree about the assertion on player slots. If anything, the better players get the more likely they are to play a front slot, because they have an outside influence on the chances of their team winning.
My OS floated around 10-15 and I virtually always ended up having to go front in every lobby, which is the position I hate the most because I don’t like playing my strategy game like an RPG - that is, micro-ing just a dozen of units and optimising every rocket or bullet hit or whatever, which is kind of what front is like.
Front has zero opportunity or resources available to build any kind of economy, and once the T2 units start coming through from the other side they feel very expendable. As the front player you build the same 1 or 2 units every single game and never really get to strategise.
What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive, despite everyone knowing the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
As other mentioned it has singple player Scenarios and Skirmish mode, including two special tower defense/survival modes. We are also building a dedicated campaign now.
BAR does have a series of scenarios for singleplayer / offline play.
Or in multiplayer you can arrange a co-operative game with humans against AI opponents, which often has substantially less flaming involved, especially when playing a "survive against an onslaught of enemies" scenario.
Also the account system of course allows for muting, avoiding-being-paired-with, or fully blocking players. For more egregious behavior a player can be reported to moderators and temporarily / permanently suspended if they break the community code-of-conduct.
No campain but there are stand alone scenerios you can play. There is also a fun swarm defense sort of thing(rapters) if you like tower defense style gameplay.
I grew up playing Total Annihilation in the 90s because my cousin worked for Cavedog and got us a CD for free. It is still one of my favorite games to this day.
So many great memories with that game, countless hours playing with my brothers, getting up early to play before school, asking my parents for extra chores to earn more computer time.
Games aren't the same anymore.
I still have the original game and expansion packs. Highly recommend playing it.
TA is the only game I consciously went out to buy a faster machine to play. Upgrading from my 133MHz to a 400MHz so I could run more units in TA.
I rarely played TA vs other people. It was always either the PvE scenarios, or skirmishes.
Against multiple AIs I would strive to take out several of them, leaving one time to build up. Then the game would quickly devolve into "hose on hose" combat where my automatic production with bottomless resources would push out toward the oncoming bot army fueled by their infinite resources.
You could see on the large map how well you were doing based on how close the hose front of clashing machines was to whose base. But that was necessary to open up space to create special armies and other techniques to get around the hose, and flank the base.
All while being blasted to splinters by bots and Berthas and Brawlers and everything else.
But get a good Goliath drop into the rear, and it's just glorious spectacle.
The whole thing, in the end, was spectacle. The sounds, the shrapnel, the rocking of the maps when some wandering commander would wander into the wrong area. Like getting winged by a far off Bertha and giving chase to enact revenge upon it.
I had the most intense battles with my brother, even well into our 30s when we only met a few times a year.
It is sad that there never really was a successor that was as good. They could have lifted the 255 units limit, made the game more balanced, added a few more maps and units (but not too many), enhace the graphics (but keep it 2.5D, I do not want 3D in this kind of games) and make connectivity easier.
Cavedog released a fantasy game after that, which I wanted to like, but it was crap. And the Command & Conquer games were never for me. Tried them but never felt them.
Interesting, tried this game just 2 weeks ago and beat one of the pve modes with a friend just yesterday.
Joined some 8v8 for noobs and some were very friendly but they also wanted to kick me for not knowing the game. After all they let me stay but I stuck to pve or vs bots with friends now
FAF has a good community. it’s clear some people are better than others and you won’t get yelled at for not knowing what to do and can ask for help. the problem with FAF isn’t community, it’s technical. the game and connectivity are so painful that it might take you an hour to get into a game. and then you play 30 mins, get to the core part of the game, and someone drops. it’s a 10/10 experience when it’s good but it might be good 10% of the time. you’ll frequently see comments that it’s a lobby simulator
unfortunately FAF is an evolved TA with better mechanics than BAR. BAR is just modern graphics TA. which just feels old and outdated to me after spending so much time playing FAF which is better across every angle
Do you think the BAR community is good too, if you've played it? I want to hear what you think so I can get a comparison/relative viewpoint across the two games.
Some of the folks who give running commentaries on matches make it entertaining even if you don't play. Derp, Gyle, Willow; I've spent way more hours listening to their humorous takes on plays and strategies than I would care to admit. And frankly, it's the "average joes" of the game (lower ranked players) whom don't really follow the meta that often make it the most entertaining.
I definitely enjoy RTS more as a spectator sport than as a player(I am probably not competitive enough to enjoy playing vs people) but I do enjoy a good match every once in a while. But... I hate the "casts" I much prefer to watch a single player just play the game rather than inane talking points and jumping all over the place loosing the narrative.
This is such a dissociative experience (what I enjoy vs what everyone wants to provide) I wonder if there is a market opportunity somewhere here for professional sports. Just a cam feed focused on on a single player and their contribution to the game. A second person cast rather than the normal third person view.
Theres been some drama with this game where a few of the core admins have claimed ownership and sold out to a publisher. They are taking the free open source game and selling it on steam with a free demo. In addition to the toxic community, its made the whole thing a bit radioactive. Curious to see how it all plays out.
I'm one of the contributors and from everything I've seen it's not a sell-out situation. The game is GPL so will be remaining open source, the paid-portion of the game will be developed solely by funds from the publisher (I do server stuff so won't be involved in any of that bit.
I'm curious, why isn't the the free version of the game on steam? It'd be a lot easier to get my friends to try it, and setup parties if it used steam friends.
Speaking as an occasional contributor: there's a roadmap towards that, but there's a few components that need to finish baking before we release on Steam. e.g. the current lobby protocol isn't capable of handling Steam levels of traffic, so we are working on replacing it.
You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and if the server melts on release day, that's not a good first impression. :)
The Hooded Horse deal is expected to provide some professional development time to help knock out these blocking items.
The thing the GPL requires is that I also provide it for free. Now, why would anyone buy a free thing? To support the devs. To encourage this sort of business model. To get a build that's known to be working and supported and not have to deal with the hassle of compiling things themselves.
That's not it. They will keep the assets closed and under license. There will be no free version of the full game.
Not sure why we should encourage using open source as a vehicle to market and get free work building your fundamentals. Just to reap the profits yourself later.
Yes they can. Firstly, you can do anything and then someone may or may not sue you for it and they may or may not win. Secondly, if you're the copyright owner you can do whatever you like.
I think their plan is to make assets closed licensed. It's all pretty lame. Now any open source code contribution is packaged up and sold with someone else getting the check.
Fighting fire with fire, what's to stop me from using GenAI "create new versions of all of these assets but with a Norse twist" and publish these under my GPL+CC BY-SA 4.0 fork?
The owner of the copyright can do as they please with the licensing. What I've not seen is someone retroactively changing licensing terms, but even that might be possible.
The blurb in game suggests the multiplayer side of things will be open, the 'premium' thing on steam gives the one closed bit, which is the single player campaign.
Hi, PtaQ here, Community manager for BAR. The idea behind the monetisation is to sell what has been built through the publishing funds. Everything available today and a lot more content will be released for free too and always available.
Basically, the paid content will boil down to a single-player campaign.
The funds help us finish and release the game which still needs a lot of focused effort which is not something you can reliably sustained without commissioning some of that work.
I play Zero-K (a related open source game) a few times a month. I really enjoy their 'cold take' blog series discussing game mechanics and the history of TA derivatives. https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes
I know this is kind of silly, but even though TA's game mechanics are obviously great, I really liked its ambience and story. The sort of a melancholic vibe of a slow-moving neverending war.
BAR in contrast is a bit of a PvP clickfest, which I don't enjoy. I wonder if there's a game mode or another Spring mod that would give me a more authentic feel? Single-player or perhaps PvE.
There’s a very “we’re selling business software” feel to this webpage, which makes me wonder what it would be like for business software to be marketed like a video game.
I used to play the original TA a lot and BAR is very well done. Much harder than the original though - I had no trouble with TA campaigns but I have not even made it halfway with BAR before hitting skill wall. Not a teen anymore so it’s hard to motivate myself to try and push through. :)
You’re right - it’s not a campaign as such - it’s a set of scenarios (currently 22) in increasing difficulty. I haven’t played for a while after getting stuck but checking now I got stuck on the 5th scenario - even worse than I thought. :)
I played Zero-K several years ago and it didn’t stick in my mind as much but maybe worth revisiting it - thanks!
Reading about it seems to suggest that it’s even deeper in terms of strategy and tactics so I will probably struggle even more. :(
The game is very mature and well thought RTS. The user experience and performance is beyond anything on the market now. It beats all well known AAA studios attempts at it by far.
It's still actively developed and very free to play.
I love watching BAR multiplayer games but definitely felt a bit overwhelmed in the midgame with this one. How anyone can comprehend a 40v40 in real time is beyond me haha. I guess it's just a muscle to build.
Looking forward to a break where I can get into BAR, I've been utterly nerdsniped. Uthermal's VODs are good stuff [1].
Yeah it's very sad for me as well, I was a big fan of supreme commander and I really wanted to play BAR. They have a special Notice for Mac users, which explain that they don't support Mac because:
1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple.
2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures.
The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate it all to Metal automatically at runtime. Surely performance will suffer a bit, but it should be playable.
The second one is quite absurd though, ARM processors is not something exclusive to Mac, Windows-on-ARM laptops are becoming increasingly common, ARM market share in the broader PC space is forecast to approach 20-30% in the coming years as Windows-on-ARM software compatibility matures. This prevents a huge number of people from playing the game due to the ancient streflop library, and really this notice should be "Notice for ARM users" not "Notice from Mac users"
UPD:
Actually there is a guy who is trying to invent a direct OpenGL-to-Metal translation layer just to play B.A.R. it seems, and the progress is pretty huge at the moment:
The challenge with arm64 is that Recoil Engine does deterministic lockstep simulation using actual native floats for performance. Porting all of those operations (which were implemented using the mentioned library) to work on arm64 and produce the exact same bit-perfect results as on x86_64 has been challenging.
It's completely free to play (though they/we have recently signed a publishing deal and there will be a paid for campaign mode later) with a combination of GPL and MIT source code.
What do you not actually like about the site? I'm not a big fan of the trope of "hero" image slideshows taking up the whole screen, but if it's justified anywhere, it seems justified here where they're trying to make a game look cool, and the cards seem reasonably informative and not just vacuous. Yes, it is a "polished" design, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started with a template. What should they do; bad design to show amateurism? Would that be more or less slop?
Great game, technically impressive, but the community can be quite mean and toxic. I played for around a year after having played other TA Spring RTS for a few years prior, and if you don’t follow the exact meta of the month (whatever that might be) in terms of build order and things, people can get really aggro and your team can vote to kick you and take your units.
Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
The drafting for picking map spots is done in order of seniority, and the good players take all the low stress spots which leaves the newer players to take the more difficult spots. This feeds into a loop where the senior players get aggro at the new players for letting the front break down, but simultaneously they won’t take it themselves even though it’s the more important position.
I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game. The front player blames the back player, the back player blames the front player, everyone flames the weakest player.
Hey, PtaQ here, BAR’s Community Manager. I’m sorry this was your experience. There are definitely some very competitive lobbies, but harassment is not acceptable. Please report any players involved, as reports are the only way we can identify patterns and take action. We have an active moderation team and do review them.
For a more relaxed experience, I’d recommend trying less established meta maps. Lobbies marked “rotato” rotate maps after every game and are usually among the chillest. Players tend to be less rigid about roles and expected builds there, which generally leads to more positive interactions.
These days, online public lobbies are almost always hostile. Doesn't matter the game, either. You can ban words, phrases, etc. The hostility is also through actions and not just insults.
The only way to have actual fun gaming is a private group of friends. Think lan party, and definitely not public.
We have support for a variety of ways to limit who can join you (passwording lobbies, locking lobbies etc). I get a lot of value playing with a regular group of friends on a Sunday night in part because of it.
It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves. Every update to every game launches a large scale effort to find the "meta" which is then instantly disseminated to the most try-hard assholes on the Internet. Anyone who dares to develop their own strategy/style/loadout is up against hordes of people (a growing proportion every day) who just copy whatever the Youtubers figured out.
I wish LLMs played games, I'd never need to see a human again.
They do, to a degree. See e.g. PUBG's latest AI teammate addition.
AI players in games go back all the way to the dawn of computers. But I still prefer them in Quake and Starcraft to humans. Humans are awful.
> It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves
I think they might destroy the streaming/online communities, but I wouldn't say it destroys the game itself. I play BAR, but never with random strangers, the game works fine, but I also don't participate in any "video game" communities or watch/play with streamers, so what you're saying sounds very foreign to me, and is more about the communities than the games themselves.
I don't see how your comment makes sense. You're not part of any "community" but you also never play with random strangers?
I only play public matches with random strangers and this is the feeling.
Obviously this wouldn't apply if I had a small community of not-strangers to play with consistently, which you do have but oddly describe as not having a community.
Well, while every group of people is definitionally "a community", you can absolutely have your friend group not be part of "the community" of the game. Just like you can have a LAN and not be "on the net", watch implies the internet.
He could be playing with his real friends.
I think Overwatch and League of Legends are the best examples of this effect. Both games are entirely unrecognizable today compared to 2016.
Somehow Starcraft 2 emerged from the other side of esports mostly unscathed, despite being arguably the most significant progenitor of the entire genre.
it's because sc2 is usually 1v1.
and also it's a lot harder
A lot harder than Beyond All Reason? How so?
Meta-gaming is a natural progression in all human games. Chess players find "metas" like openings. It's just that video games are too simple and have very restricted meta set.
The point is not that games have meta, it's the attitude of players.
Wait, are you suggesting BAR or StarCraft are simpler than chess? I can't imagine that's true.
I don’t know but I can imagine many of the levers in games cancel each other out or don’t turn out to be useful while in chess every variable is orthogonal. It’s all important. Complicated versus complex, like how untangling Christmas lights is time-consuming and gnarly but it is not complex fundamentally.
That said, I don’t know if it is true in those cases.
Simple is definitely the wrong term. Chess's simplicity is where its inherent difficulty comes from. It's paradoxically much more difficult to optimize than more complex games like SC.
Agreed on “finding meta” as just being part of any game. But thinking games are more restrictive than chess might just be a lack of exposure to competitive gaming.
Video games have a lot more entropy than chess, I think you have that backwards.
You and the parent comment just described academia in a nutshell
It's amazing the degree tencent shills have taken action to stop people in the west from enjoying games online. This is not natural and it didn't used to be this way.
This is a common reaction and the response is common too: this is only the case if you follow the herd to 8v8 and the two club-like maps they fixate on. But if you study the community for 5 minutes first, you can walk past those two “pubs full of toxic jerks fighting” there are a dozen other options. Single player, PvE, 1v1 through 4v4 and FFA. These (smaller) game modes lack the level of drama you see in 8v8. You just have to go into the quiet restaurant with nerds playing chess and other board games instead of the obvious mess of a drunken bar across the street.
Wow, that sounds awful. That's beyond optimising the fun out of a game, it's straight up refusing to have fun. One wonders what they get from it?
My best friend is the great optimizer.
In magic the gathering I had dozens of decks trying different things. He had a single deck that he kept tweaking to within the millimetre of perfection.
In overwatch, I would play different characters to experience different parts of the game and try different strategies. He played single character for years, with 10 times the hours in that char than I had in all of them combined.
Heck even in real life, he was a Java developer for decades whereas I was a type of fleeting sysadmin specifically so I could play with different toys in the stack :).
Now, this is a bit side Venn diagram, he'd never be rude on an online game (he does have offline opinions on the meta :). But it let me understand people who have fun in a very different way than I do :). He doesn't see boredom in playing same way over and over (and over and over), I think he sees it as professional athlete being focused and honing their specific craft.
> That's beyond optimising the fun out of a game
I'd even dare to say it's beyond all reason.
Different people get different things out of video games (and everything, really). For some, the fun is learning, and the game stops being fun when you understand it (this is me). For others, the fun starts after they're learned, and starts being good at it, but still have competition with others. For yet others, mastering it and being the best is the fun.
All these groups of people sometimes play in the same lobbies, and what the players "gain" from the session can be very different depending on the person. There is no "right or wrong" way to play video games, or the right/wrong motivation for it, it's just different.
Imaginary superiority
Not my experience at all when I played around a year ago. There were plenty of noob-specific / noob-friendly lobbies with a mix of helpful players and fellow casuals.
This very much depends on the lobby. I don't think this is unique to BAR either - it's just that 8v8 is the most popular mode.
Lots of players mean more chances to get a toxic guy who doesn't recognise their own faults and blames others.
I actually just don't really agree about the assertion on player slots. If anything, the better players get the more likely they are to play a front slot, because they have an outside influence on the chances of their team winning.
My OS floated around 10-15 and I virtually always ended up having to go front in every lobby, which is the position I hate the most because I don’t like playing my strategy game like an RPG - that is, micro-ing just a dozen of units and optimising every rocket or bullet hit or whatever, which is kind of what front is like.
Front has zero opportunity or resources available to build any kind of economy, and once the T2 units start coming through from the other side they feel very expendable. As the front player you build the same 1 or 2 units every single game and never really get to strategise.
What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive, despite everyone knowing the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
Does it have a solo mode?
As other mentioned it has singple player Scenarios and Skirmish mode, including two special tower defense/survival modes. We are also building a dedicated campaign now.
BAR does have a series of scenarios for singleplayer / offline play.
Or in multiplayer you can arrange a co-operative game with humans against AI opponents, which often has substantially less flaming involved, especially when playing a "survive against an onslaught of enemies" scenario.
Also the account system of course allows for muting, avoiding-being-paired-with, or fully blocking players. For more egregious behavior a player can be reported to moderators and temporarily / permanently suspended if they break the community code-of-conduct.
No campain but there are stand alone scenerios you can play. There is also a fun swarm defense sort of thing(rapters) if you like tower defense style gameplay.
Yes, it also has a lot of co-op mode and a non-trivial portion of the player base focuses on that instead of PvP/competitive modes.
Yes!
I feel like many team games would benefit from full mute by default. I played Valorant like that for a while and my experience was infinitely better.
Welcome to any competitive game ever... Your team isn't winning within within the first 3 minutes of the game? Better forfeit and go next.
This is amazing to see TA on HN.
I grew up playing Total Annihilation in the 90s because my cousin worked for Cavedog and got us a CD for free. It is still one of my favorite games to this day.
So many great memories with that game, countless hours playing with my brothers, getting up early to play before school, asking my parents for extra chores to earn more computer time.
Games aren't the same anymore.
I still have the original game and expansion packs. Highly recommend playing it.
TA is the only game I consciously went out to buy a faster machine to play. Upgrading from my 133MHz to a 400MHz so I could run more units in TA.
I rarely played TA vs other people. It was always either the PvE scenarios, or skirmishes.
Against multiple AIs I would strive to take out several of them, leaving one time to build up. Then the game would quickly devolve into "hose on hose" combat where my automatic production with bottomless resources would push out toward the oncoming bot army fueled by their infinite resources.
You could see on the large map how well you were doing based on how close the hose front of clashing machines was to whose base. But that was necessary to open up space to create special armies and other techniques to get around the hose, and flank the base.
All while being blasted to splinters by bots and Berthas and Brawlers and everything else.
But get a good Goliath drop into the rear, and it's just glorious spectacle.
The whole thing, in the end, was spectacle. The sounds, the shrapnel, the rocking of the maps when some wandering commander would wander into the wrong area. Like getting winged by a far off Bertha and giving chase to enact revenge upon it.
And a special Flea scenario is hilarious fun.
Loved that game.
Not to mention "Buy 1 game, 2 OTHERS can play against/with each other for free"
I had the most intense battles with my brother, even well into our 30s when we only met a few times a year.
It is sad that there never really was a successor that was as good. They could have lifted the 255 units limit, made the game more balanced, added a few more maps and units (but not too many), enhace the graphics (but keep it 2.5D, I do not want 3D in this kind of games) and make connectivity easier.
Cavedog released a fantasy game after that, which I wanted to like, but it was crap. And the Command & Conquer games were never for me. Tried them but never felt them.
Interesting, tried this game just 2 weeks ago and beat one of the pve modes with a friend just yesterday.
Joined some 8v8 for noobs and some were very friendly but they also wanted to kick me for not knowing the game. After all they let me stay but I stuck to pve or vs bots with friends now
If you are into playing with others, you might find a more stable community with FAF.
https://www.faforever.com/
What's the toxicity level of the FAF community?
FAF has a good community. it’s clear some people are better than others and you won’t get yelled at for not knowing what to do and can ask for help. the problem with FAF isn’t community, it’s technical. the game and connectivity are so painful that it might take you an hour to get into a game. and then you play 30 mins, get to the core part of the game, and someone drops. it’s a 10/10 experience when it’s good but it might be good 10% of the time. you’ll frequently see comments that it’s a lobby simulator
unfortunately FAF is an evolved TA with better mechanics than BAR. BAR is just modern graphics TA. which just feels old and outdated to me after spending so much time playing FAF which is better across every angle
Thanks for the feedback.
Do you think the BAR community is good too, if you've played it? I want to hear what you think so I can get a comparison/relative viewpoint across the two games.
Some of the folks who give running commentaries on matches make it entertaining even if you don't play. Derp, Gyle, Willow; I've spent way more hours listening to their humorous takes on plays and strategies than I would care to admit. And frankly, it's the "average joes" of the game (lower ranked players) whom don't really follow the meta that often make it the most entertaining.
I definitely enjoy RTS more as a spectator sport than as a player(I am probably not competitive enough to enjoy playing vs people) but I do enjoy a good match every once in a while. But... I hate the "casts" I much prefer to watch a single player just play the game rather than inane talking points and jumping all over the place loosing the narrative.
This is such a dissociative experience (what I enjoy vs what everyone wants to provide) I wonder if there is a market opportunity somewhere here for professional sports. Just a cam feed focused on on a single player and their contribution to the game. A second person cast rather than the normal third person view.
Theres been some drama with this game where a few of the core admins have claimed ownership and sold out to a publisher. They are taking the free open source game and selling it on steam with a free demo. In addition to the toxic community, its made the whole thing a bit radioactive. Curious to see how it all plays out.
I'm one of the contributors and from everything I've seen it's not a sell-out situation. The game is GPL so will be remaining open source, the paid-portion of the game will be developed solely by funds from the publisher (I do server stuff so won't be involved in any of that bit.
I'm curious, why isn't the the free version of the game on steam? It'd be a lot easier to get my friends to try it, and setup parties if it used steam friends.
Speaking as an occasional contributor: there's a roadmap towards that, but there's a few components that need to finish baking before we release on Steam. e.g. the current lobby protocol isn't capable of handling Steam levels of traffic, so we are working on replacing it.
You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and if the server melts on release day, that's not a good first impression. :)
The Hooded Horse deal is expected to provide some professional development time to help knock out these blocking items.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/development/steam-release#M...
https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...
Well, they can't sell out the game code. That's not how GPL works.
Yes they absolutely can? Anyone can. I can.
The thing the GPL requires is that I also provide it for free. Now, why would anyone buy a free thing? To support the devs. To encourage this sort of business model. To get a build that's known to be working and supported and not have to deal with the hassle of compiling things themselves.
That's not it. They will keep the assets closed and under license. There will be no free version of the full game.
Not sure why we should encourage using open source as a vehicle to market and get free work building your fundamentals. Just to reap the profits yourself later.
I'm pretty sure you can. But if it's GPL, you need to provide source to the buyer, and the buyer can publish that source for free.
Yes they can. Firstly, you can do anything and then someone may or may not sue you for it and they may or may not win. Secondly, if you're the copyright owner you can do whatever you like.
I think their plan is to make assets closed licensed. It's all pretty lame. Now any open source code contribution is packaged up and sold with someone else getting the check.
Fighting fire with fire, what's to stop me from using GenAI "create new versions of all of these assets but with a Norse twist" and publish these under my GPL+CC BY-SA 4.0 fork?
The owner of the copyright can do as they please with the licensing. What I've not seen is someone retroactively changing licensing terms, but even that might be possible.
The blurb in game suggests the multiplayer side of things will be open, the 'premium' thing on steam gives the one closed bit, which is the single player campaign.
(In theory!)
What do you mean?
Hi, PtaQ here, Community manager for BAR. The idea behind the monetisation is to sell what has been built through the publishing funds. Everything available today and a lot more content will be released for free too and always available.
Basically, the paid content will boil down to a single-player campaign.
The funds help us finish and release the game which still needs a lot of focused effort which is not something you can reliably sustained without commissioning some of that work.
The post below explains it in detail.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...
I play Zero-K (a related open source game) a few times a month. I really enjoy their 'cold take' blog series discussing game mechanics and the history of TA derivatives. https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes
I know this is kind of silly, but even though TA's game mechanics are obviously great, I really liked its ambience and story. The sort of a melancholic vibe of a slow-moving neverending war.
BAR in contrast is a bit of a PvP clickfest, which I don't enjoy. I wonder if there's a game mode or another Spring mod that would give me a more authentic feel? Single-player or perhaps PvE.
The engine website shows some other games which might be closer to the original TA: https://recoilengine.org/
Looking at this website, BAR seems to have oodles of lore, but it’s giving an LLM-written voice.
There’s a very “we’re selling business software” feel to this webpage, which makes me wonder what it would be like for business software to be marketed like a video game.
Isn't that most business software these days?
Honestly it feels like someone whose used to internal metrics and management at Large Company made this.
I used to play the original TA a lot and BAR is very well done. Much harder than the original though - I had no trouble with TA campaigns but I have not even made it halfway with BAR before hitting skill wall. Not a teen anymore so it’s hard to motivate myself to try and push through. :)
There's also Zero-K on steam and it has an actual campaign. Last time I checked BAR had none, but it was on the roadmap
You’re right - it’s not a campaign as such - it’s a set of scenarios (currently 22) in increasing difficulty. I haven’t played for a while after getting stuck but checking now I got stuck on the 5th scenario - even worse than I thought. :)
I played Zero-K several years ago and it didn’t stick in my mind as much but maybe worth revisiting it - thanks!
Reading about it seems to suggest that it’s even deeper in terms of strategy and tactics so I will probably struggle even more. :(
The game is very mature and well thought RTS. The user experience and performance is beyond anything on the market now. It beats all well known AAA studios attempts at it by far.
It's still actively developed and very free to play.
Here's a cast of 40 vs 40 players by a former Star Craft 2 pro player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1a5dkjUq3o
I love watching BAR multiplayer games but definitely felt a bit overwhelmed in the midgame with this one. How anyone can comprehend a 40v40 in real time is beyond me haha. I guess it's just a muscle to build.
Looking forward to a break where I can get into BAR, I've been utterly nerdsniped. Uthermal's VODs are good stuff [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBIBYkD7tyY
I think that's the point of those massive RTS games, your attention is like a resource you must manage
This person is a former Starcraft 2 commentator, not a pro player.
A real former Starcraft 2 pro does play though. HuK is ranked now: https://www.beyondallreason.info/leaderboards
He's actually both [0]. Probably better off as a commentator though, so you've got a point there.
[0] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Winter_(American_player)
Been wanting to play this. Alas, macOS support is table stakes for me.
Yeah it's very sad for me as well, I was a big fan of supreme commander and I really wanted to play BAR. They have a special Notice for Mac users, which explain that they don't support Mac because:
1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple.
2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures.
The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate it all to Metal automatically at runtime. Surely performance will suffer a bit, but it should be playable.
The second one is quite absurd though, ARM processors is not something exclusive to Mac, Windows-on-ARM laptops are becoming increasingly common, ARM market share in the broader PC space is forecast to approach 20-30% in the coming years as Windows-on-ARM software compatibility matures. This prevents a huge number of people from playing the game due to the ancient streflop library, and really this notice should be "Notice for ARM users" not "Notice from Mac users"
UPD:
Actually there is a guy who is trying to invent a direct OpenGL-to-Metal translation layer just to play B.A.R. it seems, and the progress is pretty huge at the moment:
https://appgl.pages.dev/
That notice is not worded in the best way and hasn't been updated for a while. However, progress has been made.
On the Recoil engine releases (https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/releases) page, we have had experimental Linux arm64 builds since March of this year.
Additionally, several people are trying to get the graphical pipeline and overall build working on Mac; you can follow their progress at https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/issues/936
The challenge with arm64 is that Recoil Engine does deterministic lockstep simulation using actual native floats for performance. Porting all of those operations (which were implemented using the mentioned library) to work on arm64 and produce the exact same bit-perfect results as on x86_64 has been challenging.
Been playing BAR for couple of years now. Do not sign up if you have a minor addiction problem to fun things.
This looks really slick and also very detailed. Is it free as in beer or free as in freedom?
Built on the Recoil engine: https://recoilengine.org/
Which is a fork of the Spring RTS engine: https://springrts.com/
It's completely free to play (though they/we have recently signed a publishing deal and there will be a paid for campaign mode later) with a combination of GPL and MIT source code.
Fairly freedom-y by the looks of things:
https://github.com/beyond-all-reason
Both, as I learned from 5 min browsing the site.
It was. Not anymore though.
Is that AI ?
Everything is AI, you are AI, I am AI, my kettle is AI and soon atomic particles will be AI.
Looks great
>All development updates, tech support, finding friends and all player and developer communication takes place on Discord.
[ eye rolling emoji ]
It's unfortunate, but what can you do? It's where players are, for better or worse.
At least bridge to something the freedom-loving folks will use, e.g. Matrix, or (better IMO) Jabber.
The game itself notwithstanding, is this website marketingslop? I don't think it's AI but it's definitely not written by the developers.
No? It's almost certainly not AI overall despite the Webflow badge; it's pretty similar now to how the site looked in 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20200806131653/https://www.beyon...
What do you not actually like about the site? I'm not a big fan of the trope of "hero" image slideshows taking up the whole screen, but if it's justified anywhere, it seems justified here where they're trying to make a game look cool, and the cards seem reasonably informative and not just vacuous. Yes, it is a "polished" design, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started with a template. What should they do; bad design to show amateurism? Would that be more or less slop?
And your evidence for this is what exactly?