Uncapped Games, Tencent’s new studio founded in 2021, revealed itself to the world this week in a documentary by Noclip’s Danny O’Dwyer (embedded above). The studio is working on his unreleased RTS game in hopes of sparking a “paradigm shift” in real-time strategy by shifting the emphasis away from memorization and execution speed.
That’s a lofty goal, but if you have to take on the task, Uncapped has the roster you’d want. Its team includes veteran RTS developers who helped create genre classics at Blizzard, Relic, and Blackbird, as well as senior designers, artists, and engineers from games like StarCraft and Dawn of War. At the heart of the game’s creative direction is David Kim, previously StarCraft 2’s lead multiplayer designer and now Uncapped’s senior game director. For more than a decade, he has been refining his RTS concept, which the studio will soon release.
In March, I attended a private preview summit at Tencent’s offices in Los Angeles, where Uncapped laid out the vision behind three years of development for the as-yet-unnamed strategy game. Comparing it to the influence World of Warcraft had on his MMOs, Uncapped hopes to redefine RTS by making the genre more approachable to a wider player base without sacrificing the genre’s depth. thinking about.
I played the game for two days with streamers and professional RTS players, and I was asked not to share any details about the game’s design until it’s fully released later this summer. However, I can say that I was impressed by the thoughtfulness behind his Uncapped strategy of reimagining RTS. Games can have consequences.
At this event, I had the opportunity to ask David Kim about how he and Uncapped Games are driving big changes in RTS. In other words, Kim said, “We wanted to take on the challenge of designing not the most challenging RTS ever made, but simply the most fun to play.” It was a desire that grew out of a nagging feeling that came with his work on Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm: the feeling that RTS development was overly focused on high-level play to the detriment of the player base. did.
“Look at StarCraft 2,” Kim said. “This is one of my all-time favorite games, but I often wonder: Is this really a real-time strategy game, or is it something closer to real-time execution?”
He believes that RTS development, by focusing on the speed and precision of professional-level competitive play, overcomplicated the core gameplay and alienated players who might otherwise be interested. Masu. “Why are we making RTS games? You have to be really good at things like playing the piano as quickly and as efficiently as possible,” Kim said.
Instead, Uncapped Games seeks to design an RTS that’s as much about approachability as strategy. “As a developer who has been working on RTS for many years, the saying that RTS is easy to learn but difficult to master is never true,” he said. “We really wanted to challenge ease of learning.”
To that end, Uncapped de-emphasizes the kind of gameplay design that lends itself to high APM execution and remembering build orders, which can be daunting for casual players. “We want to reduce or eliminate as many tedious clicks as possible to experience the game,” Kim said. Instead, studios focus on moment-to-moment strategic decisions (decisions like which units to bring in and when to expand) rather than arbitrary complexities in execution.
No matter how much Uncapped deviates from the standard RTS model, Kim says the “core fun factor” involved in strategic decision-making remains the cornerstone of the studio’s design. “We don’t want to change these things, because at the end of the day we’re trying to make an RTS game,” he said. “There’s no way around it.”
Uncapped Games plans to announce its upcoming RTS at Summer Game Fest in June. I have more to share then.
