I recently discovered Beyond All Reason, a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. There have been several of these, but I think BAR is by far the best. It's open source, but looks nice and is polished. It has amazing quality-of-life features I haven't seen in any other RTS. And it supports insanely huge battles with hundreds of players and tens of thousands of units.
150-player match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQJujiZ-oz0
BAR has quietly become the best RTS to release in years and is a huge amount of fun. It really feels like the version of TA that my nostalgia remembers even though the game and units are a bit different.
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.
First time seeing the words bot bash but instantly recognized it as a synonym to comp stomp :).
Yeah, let me add that it’s a wonderful community. They won’t flame you for failing the frontline because your opponent has been playing the game since day 1.
If you just started, just stay in the backlines and do “eco”, people will be ok with that.
That's pretty good to hear. I've taken interest in it from time to time, and downloaded it at one point to spectate matches. It seemed really intimidating to my extremely casual RTS playing self with how much is happening.
Maybe I'll give it another look.
There are some single-player missions and modes that you can play to try it out. And I heard there's going to be a commercial release with a full single-player campaign coming out eventually. https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...
Highly depends on the mood of the day tbh, but you will see this positivity from lot of players (the Academy on Discord is a great place to find these guys). You’ll also get flamed by others.
We have allsorts. If you can put up with the occasional misery there’s a lot of fun to be had.
The sarcasm isn't warranted
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
Is command and conquer considered casual?
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 think very much so.
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).
Zero Hour is played quite a lot competitively, but the scale is tiny versus SC2. It is quite balanced actually.
Zero Hour might be better (as my CnC knowledge drops off at RA2 and Tiberian Sun), but mass Allied tank and mass GDI Titan was the dominant strategy.
This experience might uh, might not be universal. I found the 8v8 community unhappy when I accidentally threw games while trying to learn. I will say the 1v1 community is very relaxed though. Starting 1v1s or vs bots might lead to a better experience.
There are noob lobbies, the problem for me was that I just happened to be on the winning team a couple of times in a row, and suddenly my rank was too high for noob games, even though I still was one.
As someone who has played BAR, it's hard to read this as not being maximally sarcastic.
ya, this drips with the common noob complaint that people flame you for being a noob.
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.
"It's simple" followed by an on-boarding routine more complex than some paying jobs I've had.
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.
Having experience of a distant past competitive multiplayer FPS game.
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.
It's simple...
Pretty reasonable advice for interacting with others in any capacity. If your jobs haven't provided stuff like this, maybe that reflects more on them.Thats if you're sensitive to being flamed. I jumped in after playing against bots for 30s no previous TA experience and I was a complete terrorist for 5-10 games. Then I started just being a "bad" player and going unnoticed.
The operative word was "friendly" and I feel like "getting flamed" is generally understood to be the opposite of friendly.
That's fine! But. Again. Own it instead of pretending it's something it's not
yeah they did exactly the opposite of the advice...
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.
Sorry you got me wrong, i want new players to have a great experience and games with mixed levels of players can be more fun. Im not saying you have to have done xyz before you should be allowed to play online.
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.
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Man, I got flamed hard even for losing against one of the game developers, the community is cooked.
I find small team games to be non toxic. Just find others with same skill level..
Heh. The thing with BAR is the game only exists because the developers like the game and have been building it for years. This means they regularly play the game.
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.
Yeah, BAR is a technical marvel. I haven't been in a 150 player match, but I recently hopped in a 40 vs 40 match, and the engine just handles it, it feels the same, except there's 80 teams on the map. The game doesn't even have unit caps, practically speaking.
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 have been in 50 v 50 .. and that is mervelous .. none of the AAA Game company can do a RTS SMOOTH as butter at 140 FPS while whole map is filled with 100 player explosions.
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It's better in just about every way, and if you have a copy of TA (such as from GOG), you can load the soundtrack from TA into BAR's music folder and it'll change the soundtrack to the TA soundtrack.
This is a great game, I will note however that I'm not sure what the future of the project will look like with the dark horse publisher getting signed
I worry that they may be looking to take it closed source
They can't, they do not own the copyright to the engine code, and are bound by the terms of the open-source license. They cannot legally distribute the game as 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.
Every time I played one of these SpringRTS games, the AIs would over-micro to dodge projectiles. Does this game have one of those properties? I'm sure there's people who are expert Starcraft etc. players who do enjoy that style of play but I didn't.
Yeah, I (noob) was able to win 3v3 with bots on both sides, but 1v1 with a bot was insane and from what I've seen people need some meta strategies specifically for that, so imo not viable for casual play. Bigger battles with bots also kind of feel all the same (and boring). I think you+friends vs bots would be fun
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This is often recommended here, but I find BAR to have too much of an “arcade” feel compared to many other RTSes. It seems to be competing with modern Starcraft, not the rest of the TA lineage.
I’m sure many will like it, but if you’re expecting it to be like TA or FAF then you may be disappointed.
I disagree, it feels like TA to me.
You might be missing an important detail: every shot counts. In early game, at least.
Late game is kinda janky tbh
What's the difference? Looks the same to me.
FAF in particular has a slower, more gradual pace, and is grander in scale, although this latter complaint may just be the smaller scale of the FAF units on the map. BAR also feels “cartoonish” somehow, the units have exaggerated animations (like Starcraft) and when they explode the physics feel off. Finally I just prefer FAF’s mechanic of a commander death ending the game for that player, it raises the stakes for protecting that unit and adds interesting strategic options.
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.
> Your target audience isn’t former FAF players who like to coordinate epic multi-hour games
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 mean the epics between top tier players. There are some streamers who cover these from time to time. (It doesn’t help that system lag and server issues can slow large games to a crawl.)
Right, which is why Bar is typically described as a TA successor, not a SupCom/FAF successor. Both solid RTSs that serve different play styles.
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Unexpected Winter, but a welcomed one.
I was struck by something else about Beyond All Reason.
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 think this says more about how the youtube algorithm works and how people want it to work.
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.
Starcraft 2 is a 16 year old game that's a sequel to a 28 year old game. In my limited exposure that's a crowd of people who know what they like and want to stick to what they know, not a crowd of people looking for new things. Probably one of the most now-marketing-resistant groups you'll find. Marketing in 1998 may have been able to change it, though. ;)
You could also say that BAR is a spiritual successor to a 29 year old game.
The Total Annihilation fans are probably even more marketing resistant than Starcraft fans.
> Starcraft 2 is a 16 year old game that's a sequel to a 28 year old game. In my limited exposure that's a crowd of people who know what they like and want to stick to what they know, not a crowd of people looking for new things.
So, in your opinion, Beyond All Reason is getting more new players than Starcraft 2 is?
Also bunch of vids by a guy called drongo. Haven't seen any recently (7 months) though
Can confirm, BAR is what you want...
I have a very strong opinion about everything not having the 2.5D viewing mode as TA cannot be a worthy successor for TA. The 2.5D mode was part of the fun.
This seems trivial to prompt in with Claude, especially considering it's open source.
I keep meaning to try this game when I see it mentioned. It looks fun!
i both love and hate seeing this here, knowing it will grow BAR's noticeability.