Kammak said:
"It also has some glaring weaknesses, which is why it remains a niche product with a very small fan base."
:angry: This is the quote that makes me bristle. The implication is that it is weak, and therefore has a small fan base and is a "niche" product, not a mainstream wargame product. I find this statement inaccurate and unsupported. I think it is clear from the quote that niche is indeed meant in a derogatory fashion.
First, wargames themselves are a niche product. The PC gaming industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, but our particular segment of it is so small that "companies" often consist of only one or two guys! A joke compared to the development teams for even small companies in other types of PC games. The term "niche" is not in and of itself derogatory. It's entirely appropriate here.
Did I say
TacOps was not a mainstream wargame product? Yes I did, and dealing with wargames is my business. Again, that's not the same as saying it's a bad product or a bad game. Wargames themselves are a niche. Modern wargames are a niche within a niche.
I don't think the fan base is any smaller than other wargame in its class - POA2, DA, and ATF. I KNOW it has a larger fan base than DA - and I strongly suspect it is larger than ATF, but don't honestly know. From what I can see in message boards and websites, Tacops has the most active user community of the four titles mentioned. And I'll reiterate that the primary customer for Tacops is military forces of various nations. Not a one time buy, but continual contracts for updates, enhancements, and equipment adds. If its good enough for the USMC, I think it can handle my wargaming needs too.
TacOps has a fan base that is roughly equivilent to the other wargames you mentioned.
ATF, DA, and
POA2 are all niche products as well and they will remain so because they simply lack a full fledged development team that could turn them into a shiny, top-of-the-line product. Graphics stink. Sound stinks. Can't even buy most of them at a real store, etc. I know our hobby doesn't receive the kind of attention that other PC games get, and no I'm not talking about the "twitch" crowd. There are a lot of PC games out there who's fan base is dominated by older, well educated players. Flight simming is a good example. If you have ever hung around with hardcore flight sim enthusiasts, then you know just how high tech and incredible the support for that community is (not to metion how large that comminity is). That's one example and I could offer more, but the point is that almost all of our hobby products are low-tech, enthusiast efforts.
To say you don't like a game is one thing, but to then claim NO ONE else likes it, and it is an obscure little niche game because of its "faults", is quite another issue.
Quite true, but that, in fact, is not what I said. I said
TacOps had "an impressive level of detail, in some areas" and that is was a "good system." I also said it has some glaring shortcomings, which in my mind is true. I also said it is a niche product, which it is.
Are there mainstream wargames on the market? Sure. The
Campaign Series sold more copies than every title HPS has offered to date combined, and then some.
TOAW, which is by any standard a hardcore wargame, has sold enough copies almost to be considered a non-niche product. It has an incredible fanbase from all over the world. The
Steel Panthers games and
Close Combat (which is used by the US Marine Corps) have each sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Most of the modern wargames we're talking about here are considered a success if they sell 5,000 copies. I don't have direct access to the data, but I suspect civilian sales figures for
TacOps are a few thousand (5,000-10,000) copies at best.
ATF, POA2, and
DA may have even sold less. All these are niche products due to their very real limitations, poor graphics, and small potential fan base.
But I think you're missing my point. What I was trying to say is that I really think
TacOps (and some of the others we mentioned) could go "bigtime" if they had larger development teams that could afford to really spruce them up. How would a version of
TacOps sell that had great 2D maps and graphics, a fabulous and user-freinly interface, support for multiple time periods and nations, a full featured scenario and map editor, an accessible OOB editor, the full range of multiplayer options, and was available for sale in game stores everywhere? I bet it would sell fairly well. Not
Doom III mind you, but it would have a pretty good fan base. That's all I'm saying and you could say the same about
ATF, BCT, POA2, DA or any number of other wargames.
Unfortunately, the reality is that we're saddled with a situation in which development teams consist on one guy, no professional graphics programmer, no professional multiplayer programmer, hardly any investment capital, slim to none marketing efforts, etc. That's the current state of wargames.
POA2, ATF, TacOps, and
DA are not mainstream wargames like
SPWaW, the
Campaign Series, etc. Those games have sold big time, but modern "niche" products are unlikely to ever break 5,000-10,000 copies because they are targeted at a very small audience. The fact the various military forces use them as a quick and dirty training tool is irrelevant. The military uses all kinds of wargame simulations that you have never heard of, but they all remain "niche products" with all too real limitations of what they can do.
No one is aying
TacOps is a bad system (at least I'm not). But I do think it's fair to say that it has limitations, and these limitations keep it from being more widely accepted by wargamers. Again, you could say the same of other titles. Look around at the plethora of dedicated webpages, discussion forums, and such that exist for "mainstream" wargames. There are a lot of them and they are active. How many pages exist for the games we're talking about? Hardly any. Visit the official TacOps forum at Battlefront lately? It gets a few posts per week!