Wow, brilliant.

I mean after someone misses various dimensions of nuance, insists that I didn’t provide information that I wrote a paragraph about in my first post, somehow misinterprets “long-lasting competitive scene” to mean any game with a competitive scene (especially after I talked about Chess and how it’s been a competitive…

Gotta love the ole’ “I have no more time for this conversation.” I’ll accept that as a concession. Thanks for the discussion. I don’t have the time either, but I engaged anyway (I actually tried to post last week but comments were pending approval since I’m new to Kotaku). If you wish to read my final points (that…

The comparison was not to single player games here - that should be obvious. You’ve named some of my favorite single player games in this list. The comparison is between games that have a competitive multiplayer component as well as single player.

Yeah sure, but you asked what WC3 has that AoE doesn’t. WC3 is both a great game for casual play as well as a great game for expert-level competitive play. I think AoE is great but I think in order to be in the next tier above (I’ll use “truly great” here), a game needs to have both qualities.

I loved AOE but you have to look more at the competitive scene to assess the quality of the games. Pro RTS players didn’t choose and aren’t choosing AOE as their main game. AOE doesn’t have the kind of depth and qualities that lead to heavily interactive, exciting gameplay and a super high skill cap. Blizzard’s RTS…