The fast-paced real-time strategy (RTS) game Battle Aces was inspired by an idea that game director David Kim had while working on StarCraft 2 at Blizzard Entertainment.
“Why can’t there be an RTS game that gets rid of all these tedious clicks and focuses on the fun factors?” Kim recalled thinking. “There was a point during Legacy of the Void’s development where we seriously considered cleaning up all of those things and made an RTS game that’s really focused on the fun. But the conclusion was that we should not switch up what StarCraft 2 is on the last expansion of the game.”
Legacy of the Void was very faithful to the core tenets of StarCraft 2 and is beloved because of that, but Kim hoped to return to that idea for a future Blizzard RTS game. Kim says he prototyped a new RTS game at Blizzard for about six months after Legacy of the Void, but that it was canceled “due to company goals,” joining a myriad of canceled Blizzard Entertainment projects.
Kim has always wanted to return to the RTS space to answer his lingering question about the RTS genre, so he eventually left Blizzard, like many other developers. Now, Kim is leading the development of Battle Aces at Uncapped Games. Revealed at Summer Game Fest earlier this year, it boils down the core concepts of competitive RTS into 10-minute, bite-sized matches. And without all that Blizzard-related baggage and association with the StarCraft IP restraining them, Battle Aces could be one of the most approachable RTS games ever.
Removing what’s not fun
As my Summer Game Fest preview of Battle Aces pointed out, this RTS does a great job of stripping the RTS formula back to its basics. The game clearly lays out every option available to players, making building and commanding units snappy and quick. While Kim says StarCraft 2 is still his favorite game, he admits that parts of the traditional RTS formula likely aren’t anyone’s favorite aspect of the genre and could be removed to create a more fun experience.
Upon closer investigation, Kim believes that people don’t love playing RTS games because they have to constantly remember to manage supply depots, click a build worker button, or manage their amount of production buildings in order to not fall behind and lose. Kim calls those kinds of things “tedious clicks” and stripped them out of Battle Aces. In Battle Aces, players don’t have to worry about building workers, production buildings, or supply depots. They have to keep an eye on the resources they are automatically generating and spend them properly on units they can then be offensive with.
Kim says the ultimate goal of Battle Aces is to create the “most fun RTS” that’s available. This means Battle Aces isn’t as hardcore as something like StarCraft 2 or Stormgate, but that gives it a pick-up-and-play nature that I don’t usually see from RTS games. If you’ve never played an RTS before, Battle Aces will be a good on-ramp as a free-to-play, simplified title in the space.
Building on the fun
While Battle Aces removes some complexities of the RTS genre, Kim did want to stress that Uncapped Games worked hard to retain what worked so well in games like StarCraft 2. Kim wants to meet the bar StarCraft 2 set on things like combat feel, which is why Battle Aces is so snappy and responsive and still keeps a bit of multitasking in terms of how players must decide where to send their units or what kind of units to use.
In Battle Aces, players have to build a deck of units to bring into the battle. These units are now separated into four different types that all have advantages over one another. Anti-Big units counter Big units, Big units have an advantage over Splash units, Splash units can beat Small units, and Small units are effective against Anti-Big units. That square of unit counters is a core part of Battle Aces’ strategy, as an effective unit deck build and commanding the right kind of unit at the right time are keys to victory. Battle Aces might not be as complex as StarCraft 2, but it’s not as simple as Warcraft Rumble.
Kim has had an idea for an RTS game like this for over a decade, and it shows. Many live service games have touted themselves as the long-awaited approachable entry point to the genre. None of those efforts have panned out, but Battle Aces could because of how aggressively it focuses on stripping away any aspect of RTS gameplay that isn’t fun. It would have been interesting to see that effort pan out with Legacy of the Void, but now is better than never.
The next closed beta for Battle Aces begins for PC on November 7.