My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

[apophispro]

I thought I would post this here because this is one of the most intelligent game communities I've encountered in my forays into gaming. It's partially development related and partially not, but on with the show.

Despite the seemingly vague nature of the thread title, it's a fairly accurate description of the problem I'm having. I'm a long-time gamer. I grew up with games. I'm 24 now so I was about 11 when Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind came out. I was enthralled. The open world with the ability to kill anyone and make an impact on the game. I thought it was amazing that you could actually screw up the game by killing someone you'd need later. Being able to get kicked out of one guild because of their rivalry with another and on and on.

I remember Starcraft becoming popular. I spent hours on Red Alert 2. I rushed to buy Age of Empires 2. I enjoyed finding the Baldur's Gate series and discovering Might and Magic, Wizardry, and Summoner. I remember hours spent with Sonic on Sega Genesis, and Paper Mario and Goldeneye on N64. I started playing games when I was 3 years old on Windows 3.1, and I remember the release of most of the major consoles. Now I'm sure my history barely rivals some folks here who remember buying their first Atari and playing every Ultima as they came out, but the point is simply I've played a lot of games.

When I was 17, almost out of nowhere, I got bored. I could look at the box of any game and simply not be interested because I knew what the gameplay would be. All of these subtle tweaks to mechanics weren't as revolutionary to me as they seemed to be to the rest of the gaming world. I mention this now because I still haven't really recovered. I'm in a state of confusion as to what feels like a love of the medium to me, despite ending up hating most things produced in it.

Now of course I don't actually hate them, but I'm just not interested. I was disappointed with Skyrim. I know this game. I know the routine. There's no clever strategy to be had here. It's just go in the cave, kill monsters, get better stuff, kill more monsters. The writing really isn't that much better than Morrowind, and if all I wanted was great writing, I'd pick up a book.

In the lower strategy games, I'm bored by repetitive situations and gameplay. The higher strategy games (Paradox titles and AI War here) end up confusing me. I have a pretty good grasp of logic, but I've never been a huge math person. As soon as I boot up something like Europa Universalis 3, Sins of a Solar Empire, or even AI War, I feel like I'm playing a math problem. Learning the variables of certain ships so I can figure out which variables they impact on other ships just isn't appealing to me. I think it's brilliant, but it's not the kind of experience I'm looking for. I just don't have much fun trying to properly balance an open-ended algebraic equation.

My inability to deal with the math of high strategy pushed me to look for a more immediate form of strategy in FPS games. Red Faction Guerilla was fun. Homefront was enjoyable as was Dishonored. They don't merit a second playthrough though, and I don't find myself particularly challenged by them. It comes down to learning the enemy mechanics and how best to manipulate them. So even a game like Far Cry 2, I feel that once you've beaten one enemy, you've beaten all of them. I keep looking for an evolving creative gameplay experience, but I'm finding it difficult to find. Just Cause 2 and Saints Row 3 I found painfully repetitive and easy.

RPGs, as mentioned before with Skyrim, I have the same problem with. I also don't like the feeling that I'm just being driven forward by some Skinner reward mentality where I receive more brightly colored flashy things for doing more, but ultimately no better of an actual experience. Adventure games I tend not to like because I like to really 'play' the game if you know what I mean, and I don't tend to be that big a fan of stationary puzzles.

Planescape was great back in the day, but I have a hard time playing through it now. Half Life 2 was fun once for the introduction of the gravity gun. I've been told by a few people that I simply don't like games, but how could that be true when I remember so many so fondly?

Am I crazy? Have games just plateaued and are repeating the same design elements over and over in slightly different forms? Is there an obvious reason to anyone else why I can't find a satisfying gaming experience seemingly anywhere? Is there a game, or even a genre, that I'm missing? I feel like I've tried everything. I know it's an odd problem to be asking others to find games I like, but I miss feeling creatively inspired, intellectually satisfied, or just thoroughly enjoying a gaming experience. I figured if I was going to ask anyone, who better to ask than a group of game develops on this site? At the very least, it might inspire nothing more than an interesting discussion. Thanks for reading!

[x4000]

This feeling, my friend, is why I started making my own games. There are still excellent games that come out each year, but only a handful that hold my interest for long. Some I sample for the experience, then put aside once I "get it." Limbo, for example. Great game. Felt no need to finish. Did not regret my purchase, but did not want to play any more.

Red Faction: Guerrilla was one of the most recent AAA games I have played and enjoyed that was not made by Nintendo. Most everything else I play is indie. Mostly mobile.

A lot of the games you loved, I did as well. Though my history did start with the Atari actually. I don't think that games have plateaued, I just think that different games appeal at different life stages. Do you still read the same books you did when you were 13? Would you read their modern counterparts now? I don't think so. But that doesn't mean you can't read anything; there's a whole array of books aimed at people who are older and have all sorts of interests. The same is true of games, but you have to look harder. The stuff that is most shoved in your face isn't going to be what you want if you're like me.

I think what you're experiencing is just a natural part of getting older, and nothing to get depressed over.

[apophispro]

Hi Chris,

I was hoping I'd catch your attention with this one, and I had a feeling your response might start with 'it's why you started making games.' 

I've done the same thing a lot with not feeling the need to finish a game that I think is great. Limbo was one for me as well, so was Braid. I definitely don't read the same books now as when I was 13. When I was younger all I read was fantasy and science fiction. Now I tend to only read memoirs of the sciences, arts, and war. I just haven't found the gaming equivalent to grow into. I keep having the impending doom feeling that I'm not going to find another game I like, but that seems unlikely.

I've certainly considered making my own games, but the programming aspect seems a barrier to me. Being that I don't do so well with the high strategy, you can probably imagine I don't often find myself lost in the numbers that would make a mechanic work. Simultaneously, I do have a few ideas for games that I'm fond of as well a ideas for mechanics. I've done some programming. I think the farthest I ever got was low-level C#.

When it comes to making games, I tend to suffer from the syndrome of opening something like GameMaker, proverbially doodling with it, and immediately wanting to make it do something it's not capable of. Then the alternative of learning a massive completely open-ended programming engine looks fairly daunting. Unfortunately, I'm not a great artist either so the prospect of making it from the visual side also looks daunting, but now I feel whiny. 

Anyway that side of things comes down to I'm still at a very 24-year-old stage of having no idea what I want to do with my life and switching artistic careers on almost a weekly basis. Given AI War, I would imagine you never had a problem with advanced math in programming. Though I commend you quite highly, and you remain one of my favorite developers. AI War is the kind of innovation I'd like to be responsible for, just not in that type of game. I often use it as a benchmark in discussing emergent gameplay mechanics with people to prove linear or top-down events are not all that's possible.

So I won't lose heart and will continue the search! "Once more into the breach dear friends." Thanks for taking the time to respond.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Just to chime in a little something about the creation of games, I actually know a lot of people who are into programming (Well, a nonzero number of them). I'm a creative kind of guy, not at all a logical kind of guy, and programming is so structured that it's really just not for me. It just so happens that my programming friends are really not creative at all (self-proclaimed as well, I'm not talking behind their backs). So, what results from that is somebody who is apparently musically talented and all around devoted to creating fun and interesting things injecting flavor into what would otherwise be an uninspiring and uninspired product. There's also the fact that I absolutely cannot wait to play with actually making music for the thing.
You don't really need to be a programmer to make games so to speak. Talents and some luck, I guess, is all you need to at least contribute in a great way to development. Helps to be working with a like-minded best friend who you've known for like 8 years but hey. It seems like if you knew somebody who felt the same ways that you did, you'd all be able to work together on a great product.

In terms of finding the artistic thing that works great for you, I might too be blessed with a school that provides excellent artistic programs and not much of anything else that's any good. We've got great talented musicians and artists left right and center. Turns out when you spend hundreds to thousands of dollars in one of those classes, you will work your heart out so you don't waste that money. In working so hard, you might well fall in love with what you're doing. If you don't, well, it's just not your calling I guess.
...and I have the misfortune of really loving making music, playing music, and acting. How many of those will provide a reliable income? Exactly none of them.

[apophispro]

Hey LT,

Boy do I ever understand loving things that won't provide a reliable income. I've taken writing classes, acting classes, directing classes, music classes, film classes, and a bunch of others. I did a youth program at the American Conservatory Theater, dropped out of a $100,000 art school, and did 3 terms at AnimationMentor. I've acted in 3 full-length plays and some short films, directed two plays and about half a short film, and even worked on some games here and there. How much did I get paid for all of this? Oh, you know, some transportation reimbursement, a few meals...

I'm actually fairly musical myself, but my career of the week is composer. I've played piano for about 20 years and my running theory is if I actually start training my ear and understanding of theory then I might hit a level of producing something. Other possibilities have included: acting (film, theater, and improvisational), directing (film, theater, and animation), game design (sometimes of the type you describe, sometimes programming myself), writing (novels, poetry, songwriting, musicals, games, etc), and music (film composer, game composer, just plain orchestral composer, pianist, singer/songwriter, etc). Of course, like you, I can't ever seem to drift onto an option that would actually make me money. Except neuroscientist. That drifts in there every so often. Philosopher is more frequent though, and we all know how much money they make. Turns out talking about the value of things has no physical value. Paradox or obvious?

I think if I was going to make games, I'd find a way to make them within my limitations. If all I can do is low-level programming, and I want to focus on complex character choice; then I'd make something as simple as possible in all the other elements. Though I can see how having a programmer friend could be extremely useful. I could go for one of those. However I do have the artistic front covered as my fiancee is an artist. Incidentally, I've heard Michael Giacchino talk about avoiding reading scripts because he starts seeing the film how he would direct it, and that hurts his eventual relationship with the director. Is this career-drifting thing where we like putting our paws in everything just inherent to composers?

[x4000]

I can't really advise on not being a programmer and being an indie, as that's something that has never been the case for me. However, the general sense is that if you don't at least understand some programming, you will always be at the mercy of potentially unethical programmers. Really that's true of any discipline in game creation, I'd you don't understand it.

I also do not wish to be the bearer of bad news, but when it comes to music in games there is a sense that musicians are "a dime a dozen" and "coming out of the woodwork." Which in a literal sense, is sort of true. There is such an over supply of musicians that even though we say we have no openings on our site, we get emails usually multiple times a month from musicians. A great many of them offer to work for free in order to get credentials for later work, and to gain some experience. If I wanted to be unethical (and have rocky soundtracks), I could go from musician to musician on each game, getting a free or insanely cheap soundtrack and then dumping them. Some studios do this; as soon as their contractor wants more money, they dump them. Ow. The big names in indie music have made names for themselves enough to escape this cycle and get presumably excellent contract fees. And then there are the ones who start with a team from the ground up, like Pablo at Arcen, and the situation there tends to be very different as well. Groups that start like that tend to be very tight-knit, versus the "lone gunman" type of indie tends to go out of the way to keep contractors at a distance. From what I've observed and heard.

All that said, creating games isn't the only way to go. Obviously there's a lot of kinds of creative expression. I am not the best to advise on how to make a living on those other disciplines, though.

The other thing I will note: I, too, currently enjoy reading biographies and science books that once I would have found very dry and dull indeed. I probably got into that more starting around 27. At 24 I was still too busy with work and figuring out my future path, among other things. At any rate, many biographies are a challenge to read, right? They don't come about with the ease and speed of reading a popular novel. So you have to choose a book, commit to it for a while, and really sink into it. Something like AI War, or other in-depth strategy games, is the same way.

That said, that doesn't mean that hardcore strategy is the thing for you. There's simulation games, which often have the sense of being non-fiction, and have varying degrees of challenge to learning them. Everything from train simulators to flight sims to battleship sims to city builders to dwarf fortress. There are also roguelikes and tactical games: these are smaller in focus in terms of numbers of moving parts compared to a strategy game, making them seem less daunting. They are still very hard and tend to be very interesting, though.

Going a completely different direction, there are "experience" games. Limbo. Journey. Silent Hill 2. These games make an impression and give you something to think about even if you don't finish them. They make you "feel" something unique and interesting.

There is also what I call "bubble wrap popping fun." For me, Far Cry 2 was a great example of this. I didn't care about the story or the lack of variety or any of that. That's not why I was there. I was there to mindlessly blow off stress by having fun shooting dudes. Being able to fire a rocket into a checkpoint and see it blow apart and the guards come pouring out for me was a big bonus.

Then there are creative games, where you can just sink in and do your own thing for hours or days or years. Minecraft. Any game with a sizeable level editor.  Any game with a deep crafting component backed up with compelling enough gameplay. I got into game development by starting out with level editors for years, by the way. Being a decent level designer is a much rarer talent than being a decent musician, artist, or programmer. Being a great anything is obviously rare. But being decent or better at multiple disciplines related to game development is both rare and valuable. Most indies who start out on their own are at least passable at every aspect of development.

Anyway, I would not give up hope just because a few specific games do not hold your interest like you hoped. There are a lot o kinds of options.

Hope that helps and was not too depressing.

[LaughingThesaurus]

So, wow, you have a ton more in the way of experience than I do. All I've really got under my belt is some really accomplished musicians saying that me improving as quickly on piano as I have is unprecedented. Having started like... a few months ago, About 10 weeks into the semester I was basically performance ready. I auditioned, I'm up for May 5th to play disney music at a student showcase where all the students show how lovely and talented they all are before being disillusioned by the real world (apparently).

I've been involved with that every semester in the area of acting, but never really get to participate in full length plays. As great of an artistic community there is here, the theatres are really tightly knit groups which is super intimidating. There are also a lot of musicals going on, and I need to actually be able to dance before I feel ready to go auditioning for those. Having spent an entire semester singing, I'm pretty adequate in that area, so maybe I can go further there as well, and maybe that gets me actual consideration for musicals.

Now unlike what I actually started a thread over a couple months back, I've gotten with sort of a best-friend sort of group of people. One person is really good at programming, we have a really solid idea that we're pushing forward with every day. It's something we're very much in love with, so he's tackling a lot of the programming side of things while we come up with monsters, balance them, make them unique. All the while I'm brainstorming music and taking notes on any design decisions made. Don't get me wrong, we're all thoroughly inexperienced in terms of putting anything out there... but I'm actually really excited about making mistakes, learning, growing, eventually being able to put out products that are really great. I guess the difference is that we're best friends about equally inexperienced in the grand scheme of things, we'll all be learning to put forward excellent products hopefully.
The trick is I need to actually keep both of us under control. We've kinda got what I think of as the ol' Chris Park problem, where he's actually working on 3 nonprofit projects simultaneously, we're working on one nonprofit project and this full game idea at the same time. We're just too excited about making stuff... but with no discipline at all even.

Anyway... I will absolutely come back and respond in a way that isn't just telling my story, and that is hopefully helpful. I don't know very well that I CAN be helpful. It's like the both of you are in entirely different leagues. All I could really say is what I plan to do. Pick something, plow towards it as strongly as possible, and take every mistake with at worst stubbornness and at best a laugh. Put every skill on show, put everything you have into it. That's a common theme I've gathered at 'self employment in the arts' sorts of conferences.

[apophispro]

Hey Chris,

Thanks for all of your input! It has mostly seemed to me that if I was going to do games, I would have to really want to do programming. That's why I've mostly ruled it out at this point. I wouldn't compose something and have someone else write the score. I wouldn't outline a book and then have someone else write it for me. To me, doing game development without programming seems rather similar. It's like trying to create something without actually speaking the language. That's not impossible, but it's not something I really want.

Man, being a musician in games sounds like a nightmare. Fortunately, when it comes to music I have a good amount of options. One of the things that I started looking at more recently is something I do naturally but that I feel there's always something to learn about. That's really important to me. I don't want to be doing something where I feel behind on the basics, but I also don't want to do something where my interest in it is so narrow that I feel like I've done everything I want to do in a few days. There are also certain things in terms of lifestyle that I'm looking for.

The reason that I've come down to music at the moment is it seems to offer most of them. I can play piano and sing at a high intermediate level. With a little more training I could do both of those at an advanced level. With a little more training than that I could be writing orchestral scores. I already have a good ear both for listening and creating. So it would offer me a lot of opportunities in the sense that I could do anything from piano accompaniment, playing in a bar or hotel, doing arrangements for a small orchestra, or composing for a film or a game. There are a lot of others besides, and I like the versatility of that. There's a lot I can learn, a lot of experiences I can have, and I'm not dependent on one small, probably unreliable, corner of the profession to make me money.

The list of game types is really helpful. I've gone in a number of these directions. I did push my way up to about 40 hours each in AI War and Crusader Kings 2. I know that's not much in terms of really grasping it, but the thing I kept coming back to was, even though I felt that they were great games, I just didn't have that sense of wanting to come back and play them when I wasn't. I've had similar experiences with a lot of great tactical games.

You mention experience games though, and it's funny as I just did a run through of my book collection to try to find the common trait that has maintained over going through thousands of books and keeping only a few. It turned out to be subjective experience. The ones I liked best in any field are the most insightful subjective commentaries (Feynman in physics, Sacks in psychology, Pelton in journalism, Tim Burton in film, and so on). It did occur to me to look for the most experiential games at the time, but I wasn't really sure where to look. My first thought was something like F.E.A.R. which may not have been quite as experiential as I was looking for.

I think I've avoided experiential games to a degree because I hated even the idea of them when I was younger. I wanted something with "gameplay." Now every time I play something with "gameplay" I find myself frustrated with the repetition of it and just want to have something intriguing to interact with. Minecraft I felt was too open for me because in that instance I wanted more of an experience, but when I play a lot of other games I start feeling like I've "experienced" the entire game in the first ten minutes just because I know how similar the rest of the gameplay will be to that. So that could definitely be an avenue to try. I'll have to look into that more.

Anyway thanks again for all your help, and it wasn't too depressing.

[apophispro]

Hey LT,

That's great about the student showcase! Most of my performances have been pretty informal. I did my recitals back in the day, but other than that I tend to just play for groups of people here and there. I can rely on getting a good reaction. I started playing by ear when I was 3 and then started classical lessons when I was 7 so it's been a long thing for me. I think I wrote my first composition when I was 8 or 9. It was just some tiny minimalist piano composition, and it's evolved a lot since then.

As far as the Disney music goes, I'm a huge Alan Menken fan. Although my tastes have tended more and more away from words and towards exclusively orchestral as I've gotten older. My current favorites are John Williams, Danny Elfman, Howard Shore, Ilan Eshkeri, Joe Hisaishi, Hans Zimmer, and Michael Giacchino. In older composers I'm a fan of Beethoven and Tchaicovski. That's probably along the lines of the kinds of music I'd want to create. I'm so impressed with their work, and I have the rare pleasure with them of hearing something I never noticed before every time I listen to a piece of theirs (which is quite often).

Theater groups are ALWAYS tight-knit like that. Don't be too intimidated. It's a natural facet of the medium. You work with each other constantly. You're rehearsing. You go through all of the show's disasters together. You end up with a million inside jokes. Acting is tough though. I've nearly taught it a few times. There's so much to the profession, and there's so much unreliable information that floats around about it. For instance, method acting was a propagation of Lee Strasberg, which he only claimed is derivative of Stanislavski, but he never actually studied under Stanislavski.

To learn the basics, I'd recommend reading both volumes of "The Great Acting Teachers and Their Methods." That will give you a good idea of the essential different approaches to the profession. A personal favorite of mine is, following those two, "How to Stop Acting" by Harold Guskin. He trained Kevin Kline and Christopher Reeve, and I just really like his approach. Beyond that, Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler are both great reading. Meisner's focus on "live truthfully under imaginary circumstances" has definitely shaped the field, but I find his approach to emotions somewhat limiting. Then if you really want to get into it, read Michel Saint-Denis (Juilliard training is based on his work) and the new translations of Stanislavski's three books (the old translations are virtually indecipherable in content due to poor translating).

The making stuff approach is great. It doesn't really matter whether you end up a game designer, a composer, or neither, you'll still have a fun project. I've done lots of things that I ended up nowhere close to that profession. Sophomore year of high school I was a pre-engineering major in a vocational program, and we made a synthesizer from scratch. I'm nowhere near being an engineer, much to my grandfather's chagrin.

[x4000]

Cheers, glad I could help.

[LaughingThesaurus]

The student showcase is pretty informal as well. I mean, you do have to audition and you're expected to do well, but it's in such an intimate almost home-y setting rather than being in a big concert hall or anything like that. Now, there is something wonderful about that in acting. Having acted in the showcase a few times, and then a bit on a proper stage, there's a really big difference between being in such a packed room as opposed to feeling more distant from the audience. It's like, everything that happens, everything that you do, every feeling in the short play, it's all magnified tenfold. It's powerful to watch, powerful to act in, no matter how you look at it. However, I've never played music in that setting. I don't know if you have that intimate level of communication still when it comes to music. There's so much I have actually not experienced at all.
Regarding the piano playing, I'm really trying to maintain a bit of distance from the notion of 'talent' until I really understand what it means. I mean, I'm a quick learner usually, but nothing comes to me just naturally and instinctively. It always comes from learning. The best comparison I have is with people in the piano class who haven't practiced much outside of the curriculum. I play with other songs (A Whole New World is the one I'm keeping fresh for the showcase, but I'm learning Somewhere Out There as well), I improvise, I try to find the most beautiful chords in the sheet music and in semi-random key presses. In the meantime, all the people I know are practicing their scales and harmonization and only in-class because that's all the time that they have. So... how do you compare talent between somebody who practices a lot, and people who don't practice much at all? Is being able to dive into reading music and maybe even identifying notes by ear after 3-4 months far above average? If I practiced and learned for 20 years, would I be at your level? Lower, or higher than your level? Talent's something I don't understand, but musicians think I have it with just piano. I might ask tomorrow.

Regarding music, I suppose I have far less refined tastes. I don't tend to listen to much classical music. I'll listen to orchestral pieces, video game music, and everything in between. I love hearing piano, and trying to pick apart the left and right hands. I love to single out and listen to exactly one instrument in a song I'm familiar with to hear all of the fine details. But, I do all of this with pretty much any kind of music at all. It's just whatever happens to tickle my fancy at the time. As much as I'd love to actually look through all of those composers and consciously check them out, listening is something that I don't want to just be passive about if that makes any sense. I doubt I could put on some Hans Zimmer background music and go about my regular business with it on. I'd feel bad for not really listening to it. I do recognize some of those fine fellows, and John Williams is the man. It's just that while I love all kinds of music, unless I can really invest the time and love I can into listening to it, I probably won't.

Yeah, I actually am familiar with some of that stuff about acting and about those theatre groups. I just want to not do anything unless I can put my absolute best foot forward. There's this thing about me that has come up recently so I'm sharing it a lot. If I put forth something that is meant to be judged, I feel the need to make it pristine. If it's a bit less than perfect, then it's fine. If it's a relative disaster, or if I feel like I didn't measure up, or that I was a failure, then I feel bad for who knows how long. That's a big part of why the tightly knit groups intimidate me. It's not necessarily the audition process, it's feeling like I'm not accepted, that I'm not as good, and that sort of feeling snowballs down really badly for me. Recently it came up in concert choir, where I tried to get stupidly ambitious and go for a duet. I sing bass, the original singer was a tenor, no transposing was done, I'm sure I don't need to say any more. I didn't even want to face the choir again after the weekend, even though most of them didn't hear it.
But like, I've definitely taken quite a lot of acting classes. I guess I haven't quite devoted myself wholesale to the art, but I'm working towards expanding my skill set to look more appealing, so that I can feel more successful. I get the sense though that I probably should just try. Maybe to get over the tremendous fear of being judged as terrible, I need to screw up a few more times and find a greater appreciation for success. That, and I need to start working with the warmups and tools of the famous men and women in the field, Stanislavski was the really big focus for the acting classes I've already taken, as I'm sure is no surprise. No reason I can't study the system more.

[Wingflier]

@OP - It sounds like you enjoy the kind of strategy games that big developers aren't making anymore. It sounds like you enjoy the strategy aspect, but don't like excessive micromanagement, and you also don't like over-complexity. Unfortunately, most of the "grand scale" strategy games being developed these days that don't require ridiculous amounts of micro are extremely complex to compensate.

There are some games that fall into the "middle-ground" category however, most of them being mods made by third parties.

Company of Heroes - The CoH basegame (+expansions) by itself is good, but it suffers from several problems. The AI is quite lacklaster, and the gameplay itself leaves something to be desired. The builds/skill trees aren't overly complex, but you find yourself taking the same routes over and over, and the game just seems like it could be a lot better. Most of the people who play online are hardcore players who have been around for years, so that option is more or less out as well.

There are dozens of mods for this game, but the two I have found which are the most noteworthy, and give the kind of gameplay it seems you're looking for are:

Blitzkrieg - This may as well be a new expansion to the game. It takes the rather simple Commander Trees and makes them much more complex. All 4 factions are completely redone, while still attempting to keep their original flavor. The combat is EXTREMELY realistic, it's probably what Relic/THQ was going for when they actually made the game, but never quite achieved. In fact, it's possibly realistic to a fault. Your infantry are incredibly vulnerable. Each member of any given squad will die if they are hit by any type of ammunition basically, which means that forward reconnaissance and heavy use of cover is incredibly important for survival. Heavy machine gun squads, Snipers, and Mortar Teams are a lot more powerful than before, but also more expensive, and have about the same effectiveness that you would expect in real war. In other words, they absolutely demolish squads of infantry if used correctly.

Probably the most enjoyable aspect of this mod is the redone vehicles/tanks aspect. Tanks actually feel like tanks. If any tank comes in range of any infantry squad in the open it will simply begin mowing it down. Though tanks are basically invulnerable to rifle fire, they still die in 1 or 2 shots to other Tanks (depending on their strength). They just feel much more authentic and enjoyable than the vCoH tanks, which seemed more like the product of a balance triangle than the actual beasts of battle you would expect. Another really interesting aspect of the tank rebalance is that it tries to be true to the way tanks actually were in WW2. In other words, if the Germans get an overly expensive Tiger Tank, you should probably just crawl into a corner in hide, or hope you can somehow flank it/surround it because the Allied technology just isn't up to snuff in that regard. 

My second favorite thing about this mod are the visuals and sound effects. They've done an extremely good job with that. The map zooms out much further than vCoH, giving you a great "Commander Perspective", instead of feeling claustrophobic like the original game. Everything makes you feel very connected on the battlefield, and overall, it's a huge step up from the original game, even if I don't agree with all the decisions they've made on it (some things are overly complex).

Modern Combat - As the name says, takes the Company of Heroes concept, and rehauls the entire game into a modern-day military simulator. Interestingly, the two factions become the American and the Chinese.

This mod is my favorite so far. Partly because I'm not a big fan of the WW2-era combat, but also partly because the mod is much more simplified than the Blitzkrieg mod. I've played 3 multiplayer games with this mod against people so far, and it has been some of the most fun I've ever had in video gaming...and I've been playing games for even longer than you have. The combat is extremely visceral, the units and strategies are very intuitive, and the Commander Trees aren't overly complex like in Blitzkrieg. However, it does have some drawbacks compared to Blitz. The camera isn't zoomed out, so it stays kind of claustraphobic (though considering the intense, visceral combat they were going for, this was probably intentional). The sound and graphical effects certainly aren't as good. There are only 2 factions instead of 4, which kills some of the diversity and replayability. And while the simplicity of the entire system greatly improves and streamlines the game while playing, it also kills some of the long-term replayability as well.

Even still, this is a freaking amazing mod; they both are. I would say in terms of balance and pvp, Modern Combat comes out on top with flying colors, but in terms of replayability and environment, Blitzkrieg wins with flying colors. They are both still being actively developed, though the MC site is temporarily down

You can install both of these mods simultaneously (they have different shortcuts). I would highly recommend it to anybody who enjoys Strategy Games.

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Supreme Commander 2 + Expansion - Somehow, many RTS gamers seem to have missed this one. But if you haven't tried it, it seems like it would be right down your alley. It's basically the perfect combination of micromanagement and grand-strategy on an epic scale. It's still being actively developed by some of the old team. A new patch was released not that long ago. The game is like $12.50 on Steam with the expansion. There's also a demo. I probably won't go into that much more detail because you have to try it.

However, it suffers from some of the same problems as vCoH - crappy AI, hardcore players, and not enough replayability (though a lot more than vCoH to be fair).

Revamp Mod- Basically the only good SC2 mod out there, but to be fair, it's freaking fantastic. It basically makes the game into a hybrid of SupCom 1 and 2, keeping the best aspects of both games intact. If you like original SupCom2, you'll like this mod. My friends and I are always looking for more people to play it.

The current patch (v1.1) is more of a "proof of concept" more than anything. Though it's fairly well-balanced, and certainly playable (and definitely a lot more fun than the vanilla game), the first major patch for the game is the next one (v1.2) which still doesn't have a definite release date. However, when that patch comes out, it will go from being a great mod, to most likely becoming godlike.

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Since it sounds like you aren't afraid of the first-person genre, let me recommend Natural Selection 2 as well.  I already made a thread about this, but this is the best FPS/RTS hybrid that has come out in a LONG time. Even if you aren't the traditional FPS fan, it will still probably appeal to you. The "Commander" mode is unlike anything I've seen in any other game, where you get to command actual players in real time. The gritty sci-fi humans vs. aliens combat is the best you will find in any game. (Well any FPS game anyway, Starcraft 2's Human vs. Alien combat is pretty bad ass).

If you're not a big FPS fan, and aren't playing the Commander role, there are unique roles you can take in game that aren't your typical "twitch shooter" which are still fun and contribute to your team. The Gorge is a good example. The Gorge is the support lifeform for the aliens, who can heal allies, create living turrets, breed a small vicious alien army, and bombard human structures from afar.

The game uses its own engine and is constantly being developed. It is made from the ground-up to be modded, and I highly recommend it to anybody with even a cursory interest in the Sci-Fi or RTS genre.

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All of those games fit into the category of the kinds of things I LOVE to play:

1. Huge strategy aspect
2. Not micro-intensive
3. Not overly complicated
4. Good AI or enjoyable PVP gameplay
5. Lots of replayability
6. Very moddable
7. Still being developed

Two more upcoming games that you may be interested that fit into this category:

Wargame: Airland Battle

Planetary Annihilation

Add me on Steam as Wingflier if you're interested in playing any of these with my friends and I.

[x4000]

It sounds like you enjoy the strategy aspect, but don't like excessive micromanagement, and you also don't like over-complexity. Unfortunately, most of the "grand scale" strategy games being developed these days that don't require ridiculous amounts of micro are extremely complex to compensate.

Also, not to toot Arcen's own horn, but the above is more or less what we're aiming at with Skyward Collapse.  Whether or not you'll agree on if we've achieved our goals of making it not too complex is yet to be seen, but I think we're in the ballpark.  I've been having some cravings for that same sort of strategy experience lately as well, hence this game.  But we all have different thresholds for complexity, so YMMV obviously.

[apophispro]

Thanks Wingflier! I did get tired of Company of Heroes, finding it too repetitive for my taste. I definitely appreciate your recommendations. It's hard to explain what I'm looking for. I feel like Red Faction: Guerilla was close to what I'm looking for. It's just not quite difficult enough. The same was true of Homefront and Dishonored, but it's hard to explain what I mean by difficult. I'm looking for a very creative challenge.

For instance I enjoyed Plants vs Zombies because it set me up with a problem and gave me some freedom in how to solve it. Also it was just plain addictive. However I liked Crayon Physics a lot more because I could challenge myself to think up something way beyond the obvious solution. On a similar level I enjoyed SpaceChem and those inventor games where you're given a puzzle and parts and have to put them together with real engineering principles. The problem is eventually I get bored with the puzzles. I don't want to play that kind of puzzle anymore.

On the FPS front, I found Dishonored fun but didn't feel a desire to find a more creative way around after one playthrough. Homefront was the same way. I just don't want to play back through something where the guys always come from the same direction. It's also pretty easy for me on the hardest difficulty. RF:G was closest because of the versatility. I can find a variety of ways to achieve an objective including knocking down a building, setting up proximity mines, bailing out of a jeep at the last minute as it careens into an enemy base with mines attached to it, just snipe them all, etc. The only problem is eventually I feel like I've tried everything, and at that point it was never difficult enough to begin with. Changing the difficulty doesn't really alter the play strategy, just some base requirements (e.g. rush strategies become off-limits in favor of distance ones that I already used on lower difficulties).

I guess I could explain a potential in what I'm looking for as Scribblenauts for killing people. I like the concept behind Scribblenauts. I think it's an outstanding creation, but I want opposition. Simultaneously the Far Cry series, despite its open-ended nature, doesn't feel very creative to me. I feel like I always have the same mission and basically end up killing someone the same way. Not only am I not afraid of first-person, I prefer it, but I want something that really forces me to think creatively. I was just looking at Incredipede today which is a lot of fun. It demands a creative solution to its problems and rewards solutions the more creative they are. SpaceChem is the same way, but puzzles aren't what I'm looking for.

I like being forced to think on my feet. I like having to make a split-second decision, see immediate results, improvise, come up with a new tactic, etc. In that sense I like shooters and open world RPGs. It's just that the only strategy I think Skyrim really demands is basic weapon/shield or weapon/weapon. There's not much in the way of tactics so all my fancy ideas of using invisibility for a surprise attack and switching from a crossbow to the spell equivalent of a flamethrower once they figure out where I am just turn out to deal some damage instead of turning into the shock and awe combination I saw them as in my head. Furthermore that's all me. The game doesn't even really encourage that kind of thinking to me.

RF:G encourages more of that kind of thinking, but it doesn't take me too long to find the boundaries. Magicka is actually a game that did this really well with it's hundreds of element combinations that you could make on the fly. I'd still like to see it in more of a first-person weapons sense though. Just Cause 2 and Saints Row 3 seemed to be headed in that direction, but both of them turned it into a joke rather than a challenge. I want freeform highly creative first-person improvisational tactical gameplay, and I want it to be challenging in a creatively and intellectually demanding way. I'm not sure anything like that even exists. RF:G seems closest, and it barely scratches the surface.

It's also why I get so frustrated with strategy games. The kind of strategy I'd really like to play is the real-world kind. Where I have intelligence agencies, special forces teams, military, navy, etc. I have all kinds of technological equipment. However the goal is not anything to do with resources or land. The goals are dynamic based on the conflict and desired result. I want to be able to think up the absurd solution. Set up a low-level grunt in the enemy group to make it look like he killed the second in command. When the commander makes a spectacle of his execution to set an example for traitors, publicly release evidence that irrefutably demonstrates the innocence of the grunt and plant evidence saying the commander knew the whole time. Use a new uprising in the public to riot three of his primary compounds while sending a special forces team after his hiding place. This is how I think, but no game offers me the opportunity to think on this kind of tactical level. I just don't like variable-management strategy or shooting hordes of enemies while ducking behind barriers as a substitute.

P.S. LT I'm not ignoring you! I'll respond to your post soon. I just felt like making this one first.

[Wingflier]

It's also why I get so frustrated with strategy games. The kind of strategy I'd really like to play is the real-world kind. Where I have intelligence agencies, special forces teams, military, navy, etc. I have all kinds of technological equipment. However the goal is not anything to do with resources or land. The goals are dynamic based on the conflict and desired result. I want to be able to think up the absurd solution. Set up a low-level grunt in the enemy group to make it look like he killed the second in command. When the commander makes a spectacle of his execution to set an example for traitors, publicly release evidence that irrefutably demonstrates the innocence of the grunt and plant evidence saying the commander knew the whole time. Use a new uprising in the public to riot three of his primary compounds while sending a special forces team after his hiding place. This is how I think, but no game offers me the opportunity to think on this kind of tactical level. I just don't like variable-management strategy or shooting hordes of enemies while ducking behind barriers as a substitute.

Yeah, there's a reason why nobody is making a game like these.

First of all, the audience probably wouldn't be very big. When you get past the console/CoD audience, what's left are people who want some intelligence and dynamics in their game-making, but still aren't looking for things to be overly-complex. That's why extremely complex games like AI War and most 4X games still have a pretty small audience.

Secondly, the kind of AI you would need for this kind of game would be incredibly complex. The standard gaming AI wouldn't work for this kind of idea, simply because if it wasn't dynamic and evolving, you would simply come up with the best strategies quickly, then use them over and over each time to win. You would need an AI with a fair bit of "random thinking" to it, but it would have to be random in such a way that the entire decision-making process wasn't based on luck.

The situation you're describing sounds great on paper, but how do you implement it into the game without making it a step-by-step process? What ever-changing obstacles do you throw in the player's way to prevent him from manipulating the same variables every time? In your paragraph you mentioned a sequence of events that led to a specific conclusion. How do you manage the game so that this sequence of events becomes difficult to achieve?

Do you make it so that your grunt can be discovered? Do you make it so that the second-in-command never actually died? Do you make the enemy commander smart enough to find a way to prove his innocence? Can your whole operation somehow be unveiled by the enemy? How do you do these things without some kind of completely random number generator? It scenario you mentioned sounds difficult enough to implement, but that's not even taking into account all the variables you would need to implement to make a game like this even feasible. I think at best, you might be able to make a game of this nature that works against other players, who can actually understand and respond to the type of strategies you are trying to employ. In that sense it would become an "intellectual warfare" type of game. Unfortunately, by making it PvP only, I'm pretty sure you'd be alienating the majority of your potential playerbase for these kinds of games.

I actually have a friend that thinks just like you, from what you're describing; very innovative thinker, and gets bored quickly of doing things over and over. Unfortunately people who think in unique ways as you two do probably don't make a huge audience. I would suggest earning a gaming degree and making your own games