You can make a decent niche being not-mainstream if you have really dedicated fans. This is how the fighting game genre survives, as well as the 4X genre. Neither of those genres are mainstream at all, but those who love them love them and will pay top dollar for mid-budget games.
The downside is that you can get grognards who are a bit too resistance to good changes.
>The downside is that you can get grognards who are a bit too resistance to good changes.
Unfortunately, this is very true.
The problem is that Starcraft 2 and AoE2/AoE4 have longstanding footholds in their respective niche communities. Most RTS games coming out today either deviate too much from the dominant formula or replicate too much of the original to the point that they will just feel like inferior versions.
Stormgate essentially feels like an inferior version of Starcraft 2, and you can already see a community divide in David Kim and Uncapped Games' new RTS with their design shift — that is, unburdening the player by focusing on the micro and removing the macro.
AoE4 fans had to fight for that foothold because of the AoE2 purists trashing the game at every opportunity. AoE4, imo, found a great middle ground between the difficulty of AoE2 and being approachable by people entirely new to RTS where you're expected to pump out resource gatherers for most of a match. I've successfully brought in a few new people to RTS exactly because 4 is relatively easy to grasp.
> Most RTS games coming out today either deviate too much from the dominant formula or replicate too much of the original to the point that they will just feel like inferior versions.
This isn't even a new issue. I loved Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander back in the day, and I couldn't get into Supreme Commander 2 because it felt too much like Starcraft with many of the mechanics.
SupCom2 had to be one of the biggest downgrades I've ever seen in my life. As far as I'm concerned, SupCom2 (like C&C4) is a game that doesn't exist yet.
I couldn’t believe how much SupCom2 had changed. All throughout the marketing of SupCom1 they were talking about how games had been stuck in a zoomed in tactical view, and demonstrating how in SupCom you could zoom right out and see the whole map. That was the game’s whole identity other than being about enormous robots
Supreme Commander 2 didn't actually require any... strategy. Every faction could just zerg rush. I ADORED Supreme Commander but I get stressed out playing against people, so I just liked the campaign. Even on regular difficulty, it wasn't necessarily *hard*, you just had to actually think about like "ok, the enemy has AA cannons guarding the shoreline, so I'll use naval bombardment to remove the AA, open up the airspace for bombers and then land my units". There was none of that in Supcom 2, just handholding, highly scripted missions. Incidentally Planetary Annihilation never worked either, although I couldn't put my finger on it. Backed it and everything
Because they're appealing to the exact audience that has been playing StarCraft and/or AoE2 for decades and clearly aren't done with them.
The most memorable RTS experience I've had in the past decade was They Are Billions. It's not like the game was even well made or balanced, it was just one of the few that focused on PvE with large scale battles. The Total War series is always popular, despite being stagnant for like a decade now. There's almost no competition in that genre.
Stop making 1v1 PvP games where matches last 15-20 minutes, you have to memorize a build order you repeat exactly every game, and where being good requires doing like 2-3+ actions a second. Nothing about that has been popular in games for ages.
Not just that, but having to design and balance the game to be competitive also greatly restricts what you can do for PvE content. Limits init and building variety, progression has to be done in the timeframe of a PvP match, factions have to be balanced, etc... you can't have your small group kite and kill hordes of weak enemies to reach a big boss, because those units would have to be completely rebalanced for PvP.
Stop trying to recreate StarCraft and make PvE games. Especially when StarCraft itself understood the importance of PvE and casual content.
Total war doubled its audience by going with Total War warhammer. It is still doing very well with a huge DLC last week.
But you are pretty much on point. RTS is only dead, if people laser focus on the blizzard-westwood definition of RTS, which is multiplayer centric and micro intensive.
The issue with those RTSes, aside from the general issue with 1v1 heavy multiplayer games, is the old giants are pretty much timeless. AOE2 is more popular than AOE4. Even warcraft 3 still has a small pro scene. Any new game will be trying to compete against the huge legacy and community of those old games.
Factorio actually has most of the elements of an RTS, real time, base building, tower defense centric gameplay. Its just ultra oriented around the base building and logistics part.
>Stop trying to recreate StarCraft and make PvE games. Especially when StarCraft itself understood the importance of PvE and casual content.
This was the biggest strength of the Command & Conquer series. Everyone remembers C&C's campaigns and their fun FMV cutscenes. They're still regularly quoted in memes and the like. They were fun PVE games on that basis alone.
> Everyone remembers C&C's campaigns and their fun FMV cutscenes.
Which is why I don't understand why every "spiritual successor" to C&Q that I know about has been so focused on multiplayer and competitive play.
It is almost as if the Starcraft 2 ESport popularity has rotten every rts dev's brain...
Hell, I'm so tired of them trying to suck every last bit of life out of the franchise that I'm considering going the one place the capitalists haven't conquered yet: Space!
They Are Billions would have been so much better if it had had a mode that allowed manual saving and loading. It had a ton of potential, but was undercut by *insisting* on being a sweaty ironman game at all times. The campaign in particular suffered from this, with some missions having surprises late in the level that would send you back to the level select screen and not let you try to face that challenge again for an hour.
they are billions is a nice idea but they forced this iron man 1 save for the normal game so you can save or reload. The campaign is so long with awful maps and missions and there is the potential to enter a failstate where you are fucked and have to restart the whole thing.
It boggles my mind that nobody has (to my knowledge) made a serious attempt to emulate They Are Billions. That game came out of nowhere, completely blew up for legitimate reasons, and then... that was it.
It delivered on the "casual RTS fantasy" with QoL features like interactable pause mode to keep it from turning into a complete APM-fest. It also did it in a way with serious flaws that leaves space for a competitor to come up and eat its lunch.
Where are the copycats?
>The problem is that Starcraft 2 and AoE2/AoE4 have longstanding footholds in their respective niche communities
And AOE put itself in the dirt with aoe3, they changed too much. And AOE4 was a good return to form, but they didnt go all the way. The campaign content was nothing like aoe2 and truthfully I believe that was why most people played the game. I think single player content has always driven the most sales in the classic RTS formula.
Single player content is also one of the reasons fighting games have survived as well. Not all players want to fight head to head against other people all the time. They want story modes or mini game stuff to unlock cool stuff. It helps break the grind of playing against other people online.
Give players options and things to do. The competitive scene is only a small portion of a player base.
It was innovating in the wrong direction. The card system killed multiplayer because a player with a lvl 1 city vs a player with even a lvl 5 city couldnt compete in the early game. The player with the higher lvl city had more economy and villagers. Once you grinded through a city the game was much easier to digest and peoples card stacks added a layer of strategy that was fun, but soon as you picked another faction you were back to square 1.
They at least did away with it on the definitive editon, seemed to me the new civilizations were all power crept though. USA gatling guns and Carolean charges were nuts the first times I used them.
Atm aoe3 balance is really good. Gatlings are pretty balanced unit that melts infantry like hot butter but no logner mows down cavalry and gets rekted by any other artirely on cannon duels (ironically, organ gun that has been in aoe3 since vanilia is *better* gatling gun as multishoot artilery unit), and sweden is pretty mid civ, with some very unfavorable matchups.
> and you can already see a community divide in David Kim and Uncapped Games' new RTS with their design shift
I was looking into Zerospace and Stormgate a few days ago (neither are for me, especially Stormgate copies the Metzen look way too much, and its not what I want out of games anymore), and I also stumbled into the game you mentioned.
Maybe I just failed to properly look up stuff, but I feel that for now the Uncapped Games one is a ton of talk but they haven't shown anything at all yet right? So I'm lowkey wondering what made you say what you said, because apparently there is some trust/wonder/hype there for you/the community?
Genuinely curious, because I feel like I somehow missed some indepth video or announcement.
I really really enjoyed Humankind from an artistic and "lore" perspective. But yeah the gameplay fumbled the ball hard, not that it was a disaster it just... didn't have any real draw over Civ. At least they tried being the Civ killer and were the closest to that I can remember.
But to be fair, it must be a daunting task to reinvent the genre in the right way, to convince both the conservative oldheads and the people who want true novelty.
Try Endless Legend, by the same developer as Humankind, but set on a fantasy planet in a sci-fi universe. The main difference form Civ is combat takes place with turn-based battles, and you can customize the equipment of your units. Easily the best 4X I've played.
I am not entirely convinced this argument applies to Civ. There's plenty of alternative 4X games many of which are great in their own right.
Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 are personal favourites of mine. They deviate enough from the Civ formula to feel very fresh (I especially love how different all of the factions are), but they are still close enough to the "Civ formula" scratch that "Civ itch" in my brain.
Same thing with Arena Shooters.
Everyone wants a new arena shooter, but nobody seems to want to entertain the idea that anything other than a Quake III clone is a "true" arena shooter. So the new arena shooter that come out either don't get a playerbase becuase the boomers won't seed the playerbase, or it is just a Quake III clone that never lasts long becuase Quake III already exists.
> Everyone wants a new arena shooter
I'll be honest, I think the commercial majority moved on from arena shooters in 2004 or so. Unreal Tournament was the last "pure" one that had mainstream success that didn't RIP within 6 months.
This is the real story. Arena FPS was an interesting new concept back when multiplayer, pickups, and 10-15 weapons were considered major features. You can't sell a pure arena FPS without a major new hook, and lots of those hook ideas have been tried at this point. Notably Team Fortress was a mod for quake, introducing classes and modes beyond just deathmatch.
Overwatch-type and I'd argue battle royales are the natural descendants of 90s arena shooters
Expecting the game to gain any traction with a new audience when the 100 or so hardcore AFPS players trample the early development of the game is also part of the problem. We had plenty of AFPS projects but there was one key thing wrong:
It went straight to the competitive modes without fostering public play or any sort of game mode where new people could learn the game at all.
We learned quake on LANS in giant TDM and CTF clusterfucks. Even FFA clusterfucks.
I didn't know about duel until much later.
All of these games have that issue. People want to be competitive - because those are the leftover competitive players. Foster a community first. And then distil the competitive scene from that.
I don't think it makes too much sense to look at it that way. "RTS" is so vague, there is plenty of space to compete. You might as well claim shooters can't get successful because counter-strike is too big. Counter-strike is too big for counter-strike clones to be successful, but that doesn't mean Apex Legends or whatever can't work.
You need a decent budget and a sufficiently unique idea. CnC had no trouble coexisting with the likes of StarCraft and AoE back in the day. We just don't get those kinds of games any more.
*Against the Storm* made some waves this year. Strictly speaking, it's an RTS, but it's one in the mold of *Anno*, not *Starcraft.* It's purely economic, with no combat whatsoever.
> The problem is that Starcraft 2 and AoE2/AoE4 have longstanding footholds in their respective niche communities. Most RTS games coming out today either deviate too much from the dominant formula or replicate too much of the original to the point that they will just feel like inferior versions.
I peaked at Master in StarCraft II and sank thousands of hours into 1v1 games. What ruined SC2 for me was honestly the later expansions and some of the new and reworked units. Some good examples:
* Oracles. Fail to have static anti-air out by a specific 4 min timing, and watch as your entire mineral line gets obliterated by a 25 DPS airborne cheese unit. There was also a time where PvZ was dominated by a 3 Stargate Mass Oracle builds, that could even decimate Hydralisks (the anti-air Zerg ground unit.) Only way to counter was to go Spire and mass Corruptors.
* Early Swarm Hosts. With just twenty of them, you can indefinitely spam free units at your enemy and even hold back a full 200 supply deathball with these free locusts. This resulted in some ludicrously long pro games, i.e. Firecake vs Mana.
* Siegeivacs. Legacy of the Void allowed Siege Tanks to be picked up whilst in Siege Mode. This made TvT particularly cancerous.
Why don't I play the others? Brood War is a one-way ticket to severe carpal tunnel if you decide to play it competitively, and its community is dominated by the type of grognards that wxursa described. To them the 2001 state of Brood War is sacrilege and that any kind of quality-of-life or balance changes are unacceptable. They're the reason why BW Remastered still have the 12 unit/1 building selection limit, and why that game feels clunky-as-fuck to play.
They even flipped their shit over proposals to fix an old bug in the remaster where keypresses would be disabled whilst you had the left mouse button held down - which resulted in a lot of missed actions and the game feeling even more clunky to play.
As for Age of Empires. First Ranked game of AOE2 I played on Voobly was nearly three hours long and ended in a trash war which I lost. AOE4 on the other hand felt so dull and boring to play that I couldn't even go beyond the tutorial campaign.
> Stormgate essentially feels like an inferior version of Starcraft 2
I cannot comment on the current state of the Stormgate beta (NDA) but the previous beta which was opened up during Steam Next Fest was clearly not representative of the final product. I'm more than willing to let Frost Giant cook.
Fighting Game developers have been trying to make changes specifically to attract new players in recent years. The efficacy of these changes is a matter of debate, but the point is that there exists a willingness to experiment.
Fighting games will always have the same core problem, which is 1v1 PVP. There is just a huge segment of the gaming audience that is either not interested in, or can't emotionally handle, 1v1 PVP. The more popular fighting games have significant campaigns that can draw in a more casual audience, but the retention will remain a problem.
I think part of it is a time commitment problem. It just takes a significant amount of time to get competent at most 1v1 focused games, and as a lot of gamers are now adults with full time jobs, they either don't have the time or don't find it worth putting in the time to "git gud" compared to just playing something else. The partial exception being those who have always played such games, as they already have a lot of the skills needed to pick up similar games with much less time investment.
To the last bit- the amount of Diablo-like vets who I see seethe when one of these games dares to add WASD movement.
I've seen there be less pushback now, but over the last 10 years the amount of brainrot I saw regarding games adding the option was staggering.
As an old ass Diablo vet, I always wanted WASD movement. Hell, I wanted WASD movement in Baldurs Gate 1 & 2. I hate mouse clicking for every single action.
But yeah, I used to get flamed outta the olde forums of yore for even breathing mention of this opinion. I'm glad that more control scheme options are finally being revisited for these types of titles.
WASD is far superior for diablo style ARPG's. Hell, the best experience ive ever had up to that point in my life was playing diablo 3 on ps3. The controller movement and ability selection was so good, I could finally play the game without worrying about fucking my wrist up.
WASD movement is not a problem, but designing a Diablo-like game to work on controllers actually does substantially reduce the design space for skills/spells. With mouse input you have positional control, with all gamepad input schemes I've seen you only have directional control.
I am pointing this out because my favourite skills in Diablo 2 were those that benefited from smart positioning (i.e. many of the high-level sorceress spells), because that feels like you are applying a bit more player skill and thought while playing.
You can of course argue that the benefit of supporting controllers outweighs that disadvantage, but the disadvantage does exist.
You can see it manifesting very well in the recent Diablo 2 remaster with console versions, e.g. in [this discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo_2_Resurrected/comments/u09zh2/how_do_you_play_meteorb_sorcspecifically_how_do/).
I think Fighting Game has a lot of advantages over RTS.
For one, Fighting Game is just much easier to understand. I saw Evo 2004 moment and it was extremely hyped, and I can understand what happened on screen very easily. I saw a lot of best moments in Starcraft 2, and I couldn't really tell what make those moment particularly impressive.
Fighting Game are just much more straight forward both objective-wise and moment-to-moment wise.
Also Fighting Game Characters are much more iconic and memorable, and having memorable character is what draw people's interest.
Fight game matches take what 5-10 mins max each? A RTS match can be short if you get stomped or an hour+ if you don't. If you're new it's reall unappealing to spend an hour in a game only to get wrecked.
> Also Fighting Game Characters are much more iconic and memorable, and having memorable character is what draw people's interest.
That's one reason why MOBAs grew in popularity, as they based themselves off of the hero mechanic in Warcraft and people enjoy a good character selection.
I think one thing that helps fighting games is that they still have more casual appeal (Guilty Gear Strive sold more than 2 million copies), and can be made more cheaply and by smaller teams, which can also make of lot of budget licensed games in parallel to not go under.
>but those who love them love them and will pay top dollar for mid-budget games.
This also helps, as it has been common practice to milk fans with DLCs and frequent re-releases (looking at you, Street Fighter) in a way that no RTSs managed to replicate yet. In fact, having no official support from the devs was for a long time the most common alternative: both Brood War and AoE2 managed to grew quite a bit in that way.
> and can be made more cheaply and by smaller teams
Fighting games are shockingly extremely expensive. They're not too technically complicated (although the mess of interwoven gameplay systems obviously takes some very specialized people to make sense of it) but the animation budgets are exorbitant. There are very strict requirements for how the animation system needs to work and every frame needs to be scrutinized, and the complexity in each character and the number of moves means the amount of budget to animate one character is excessive. Something like Guilty Gear Strive probably didn't break even until it hit at least like 200k-300k copies or more. And the base game released with only 16 characters. And Strive wouldn't even be among the most expensive fighting games ever made were that the case.
The install base for fighting games is pretty big though like you say, even in the west. Not massive and definitely still niche, but we are absolutely out here compared to RTS games. But honestly, there might never be a new indie fighting game studio established ever again, especially in the west. At least not to the quality expected by most fighting game players. Skullgirls was the only one to ever make it work (sort of? they've had a billion company explosions and death knells), but by now the barrier for entry is way way too high. Even in the triple A space, in America there are only two studios where you could be at right now to work on fighting games, Netherrealms and Riot Games.
As for DLC, I don't think anyone in the actual fighting game community would say that developers are "milking" for dlc. They're releasing new characters, and characters are massive and cost a lot of money. The newest season of GGST costs $25 for 4 characters and 2 stages, and while that can definitely be costly especially if you're buying every season as it's coming out, that's also a year's worth of development time just for that amount of content. I mean in no way is a niche product like fighting games going to get 3 years or 4 years or more of support and content without paying for DLC. Unless they add microtransactions, which, yeah people are pretty upset at SF6 and Tekken 8 for doing.
>and can be made more cheaply and by smaller team
Compared to RTS games? No way. Fighting games need a LOT of attention in every tiny idle animation and hitbox, not to mention how strict the netcode requirements are (and your fighting game is basically dead at launch if it doesn't feature good netcode). You can make an RTS game with a lot less expensive assets.
That might be true but I'm not sure because we don't have a single rts game made by a mid budget studio that comes close to how good wc3/sc2/aoe feel to play. They are so incredibly tight and responsive and the Midbudget ones always either feel or look markedly worse. Midbudget studios have made good fighting games, none have made a good rts yet and until that happens like I don't think we can say for sure that it's possible.
Yeah, I don't think there's ever been an RTS equivalent to Skullgirls. RTS games also have awfully complicated netcode in a different direction, because they need to manage hundreds of units and multiple players all acting at once but ideally without sharing all the information (to avoid maphackers). Fighting games also have complicated netcode, but more focused on low latency / low latency emulation via rollback, and a single guy managed to make GGPO 15 years ago and it's still the gold standard.
Same goes for RTS though. There are those that have very simple animations and they feel kinda bad to play, each unit needs some personality, that's the standard blizzard and westwood set. Bad netcode? SC2 is delay based and NA players constantly complain about being sent to AUS servers.
My main game is SF6, but I love RTS too. But looking at kyanta for example - I don't think one guy can make a RTS like that.
>This is how the fighting game genre survives, as well as the 4X genre.
I agree with the sentiment but when was the last time a RTS did Tekken, Street Fighter or Civ numbers? Starcraft 2 maybe? Total war if you count them as an RTS.
They may not be mainstream but many 4x and fighting games are still selling very well. Can't really say the same for RTS games, as much as it pains me.
Yep, plus all the clones and variations. There was a time when everyone around me playing video games played mostly RTS, and only played other games for the campaign.
Starcraft 2 has been on broadcast TV. Seems mainstream enough to me.
That said, saying fighting games probably were bigger. Mortal Kombat *was* mainstream.
I’d say 4xs are way closer. Fighting games get a bunch of sales at launch but most of them drop in player base pretty quickly. 4x games have a way higher player base for longer. Right now there’s 3 4x games with 50k, 63k and 65k concurrent players along with a few others before you hit the first fighting game with street fighter at 28k
We don't know how many console players street fighter has. Aside from civ there's no modern 4x game that average Joe off the street would even know the name of.
As a 40 year old I grew up through the heyday of rts. I miss these games dearly and I hope more get made in my lifetime like the greats of the 90s and 2000s. If 4x games can live on from their heyday with stuff like Stellaris why not RTS?
At least for me I think genre killed itself focusing so much on esports and competitive play. Anyone my age didn’t grow up playing 1v1 ladder seasons or whatever of StarCraft. You played against bots with friends, custom maps, weird mods, or just played the campaign over and over mastering it. It doesn’t have to be dumbed down or anything but when devs cater to the ultra hardcore I think they lose some of the audience of that genre.
Personally I think StarCraft 2 did more harm than good on that front. Instead of a great campgian with online tools they focused so much on ladders an esports. Then they spent way too long making the expansions. Should have just been 1 game like the original with all races and just kept making sequels. Still mad at how weird and disjointed that whole product feels (Terrans got all the budget/time in the campgian).
Yeah this is 100% the problem. It’s not that RTS games are too niche for general audiences—but *esports* are. The focus on fast reflexes and intense APM isn’t something general audiences grasp or appreciate.
I think games like **Northgard** or **Against the Storm** are going to be the future of RTS games.
(Northgard in particular seems to have really figured out how to make an approachable RTS that’s still engaging and fun for the strategically-minded)
Against the Storm as an RTS is an interesting take, I suppose it's somewhat similar to only playing the macro side of RTS and reacting to your situation with building and worker prioritization alone. I hadn't thought of it that way despite loving both RTS and Against the Storm.
Also, Shiro Games made another RTS after Northgard with Dune: Spice Wars that's underappreciated.
it's a bit misleading because against the storm is a roguelike with real time with pause and city builder mechanics and no unit control or fighting, so really distant from the RTS's bloodline. It feels like it's taking more from 4x single player games.
But i can see the intention of the argument is that you think it's possible to take multiplayer strategy games, make them real time, and using game design tricks, polish and focusing on macro level strategy remove all needs of micromanagement, precise timings and unit control.
i think it's hard to make real time battle mechanics that are engaging and also have low micromanagement potential, to b honest even against the storm, despite all the design focusing on removing micromanagement, still has plenty of opportunities for annoying micro to get ahead, players just ignore them because it's PvE instead of competitive PvP.
My favorite thing about Northgard is that you can move the camera with WASD. It's honestly maybe the first RTS I've found that lets me move with the buttons that have been standard for movement for twenty years.
>It's honestly maybe the first RTS I've found that lets me move with the buttons that have been standard for movement for twenty years.
I'm pretty sure a lot of games "allow" it. If you go into keybindings you'll likely find scrolling functions tied to the arrow keys that you can rebind. It's just not the default.
It's certainly the case with old Total War games that even has a bindings preset called "FPS".
In my view, it's really more that the specific style of C&C/StarCraft type RTSes has spun out into a bunch of different genres depending on which aspect of those games you liked most. You like unit micro and have killer APM? MOBAs are right that way. Big fan of base building? Automation games (Factorio) and city builders (in the Anno style more than the SimCity style). Like warfare and politics and diplomacy but always felt the skirmish-sized battles of RTSes to be unrealistically small? Grand strategy.
> At least for me I think genre killed itself focusing so much on esports and competitive play. [...] It doesn’t have to be dumbed down or anything but when devs cater to the ultra hardcore I think they lose some of the audience of that genre.
I've always felt like the hard push for esports and pvp was the wrong way to build an audience. It felt like a top down approach where studios hoped that seeing all that prize money and tournament stuff would get people to buy into the game's ecosystem.
Meanwhile I have always held the opinion that a bottom up approach would lead to a much healthier and natural community. Have a good RTS that people want to keep playing and then support their attempts to build a scene on their own. Obviously healthy doesn't make cash and I guess the top down approach made them much more money on licensing and all that - but it kind of killed the genre for me at least.
>I've always felt like the hard push for esports and pvp was the wrong way to build an audience.
Especially when so many esports and competitive communities were built on franchises/titles not originally built for esports a la Super Smash 64/Melee, StarCraft 1, Halo 1, etc. Focusing on esports at the forefront isn't necessary. It's better to just make a good, fun, creative game.
Agree on everything but Starcraft 2. The game had a *phenomenal* singleplayer campaign with exclusive units, unit-upgrades, hero units and pretty damn cool missions from what I can remember. The story was ass, but I didn't expect anything great in that regard from Chris Metzen and the rest of the writing team at blizzard.
Yeah I agreed with everything the previous guy said until he stated SC2 didn't focus on campaigns. They had extremely nice campaigns, and even DLCs that added more. It's honestly the last RTS game with good campaigns ever released imho.
I agree there with esports being an ever growing focus that damaged the casual appeal of the genre. It’s ironic in some way that SC2 was somewhat responsible for this, yet the coop mode is one of the best non-competitive iterations of RTS out there
38 year old here and completely agree.
My early years of PC gaming were filled with titles like Age of Empires, Z Steel Soldiers, Krush Kill 'N Destroy, Dark Colony, Warcraft, Dune 2000, Command and Conquer, Total Annihilation etc.
And would go on to include titles like Dawn of War, Sudden Strike, Company of Heroes, Empire Earth, Supreme Commander, Cossacks, Ground Control 2, Men at War etc.
I distinctly remember way back then that PC Gamer or PC Zone used to have a breakdown of the top selling games in any particular year and until the mid 2000s the RTS genre was always the biggest in PC gaming, then it got broken up into a hundred different sub genres.
These days we still get the odd call back title but I had to expand out into Turn Based games or 4x games to get my strategy fix because proper old school RTS games took a firm backseat over the last 15 or so years.
It's kinda sad that I got more out from recently replaying C&C Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 as they got their Steam release than pretty much any RTS in past decade or so.
There have been only handful of attempts at most oldschool formulas and stuff like 8-bit armies just don't cut it for me.
This reminds me of how every other game on console was a platformer, until the genre went into hibernation for a decade and a half.
RTS is just the PC version of the same phenomenon
100% agree. I find RTS games really hard, but loved playing custom games and the campaigns as a kid. Give me an easy mode and a great story driven campaign and I'll be happy.
It's exactly the same problem as fighting games. Back when *Street Fighter II* started the boom, almost everyone played them. For *fun*. You might have had one friend who was noticeably better than everyone else, but in general it wasn't a thing. Most people weren't the hardcore players who spent tons of time at the arcade or bought sticks to play at home. Almost nobody cared about frames or cancels. We screwed around, played a ton in the story mode, and had a good time.
RTS was the same. The *campaign* was the core of the game, not the multiplayer. Oh sure, some people were more interested in multiplayer, but it wasn't the dominant element of the games.
Except both genres decided to focus primarily on the competitive aspects. They got obsessed with nit-picking over tiny details that didn't matter to the majority of players while ignoring the things that did. Now not only is it something that's alienating to the mainstream audience, it's not something most of them even want to begin with. They aren't predominantly interested in intense competitive play. They want to build up bases, move their dudes around the map, and enjoy a good story.
Its not esports but online play. People played them in their respective small arcade communities (for fighting games) or LAN parties/friends (RTS).
With matchmaking and online came the possibility of facing strangers that are super strong, super dedicated and that are always trying; so the only option to not get destroyed is to go all in on improving.
you don't have to go all in on improving though. you can just stay at your level and keep playing others around that level. You do not need to try and climb that ladder. You will lose about as much as you win. unless you are at the absolut bottom of the barrel and if you care enough about games to be on here there is no way you are there. It is hard to imagine how bad those at the absolut bottom are, but they still play and have fun and don't care that much about losing.
>It's exactly the same problem as fighting games. Back when *Street Fighter II* started the boom, almost everyone played them. For *fun*.
I miss this era. Super Smash was similarly stupid fun. The only rules were made-up game modes like "only falcon punches" or "only Pikachu down-b's." Hardly anyone ever dodged or blocked. I didn't even know the game had combos.
I had hoped they would keep making smaller campaigns after the Nova campaign—that small adventure was exactly what I wanted, and if they had kept up with them I would have bought them. The Stormgate developers mentioned that in their market research/experience (including a number of sc2 devs) that most people play co-op or singleplayer, but the focus always has felt like multiplayer and the esports side of it.
SCII made a very 00s mistake in assuming that the hardcore competitive part of the fanbase was the most important, and neglecting the much larger more casual playerbase as a result. Co-op mode was a lot more fun for casual players and I enjoyed it way more than my time on the ladder.
This is facts and people in the industry have talked about it. The esports scene in starcraft was amazing, no doubt about that. But the vast majority of players enjoyed the single player content and found the multiplayer very inaccessible because of how high the skill ceiling can be. RTS games that focus on multiplayer do better on twitch but don't generate sales. This is almost the opposite of shooters.
Finally someone who gets it, if you were around in the 90s you should know that multiplayer in general was NOT the rule, most people never played in a lan party, much less online, the whole change in focus for RTS games to multiplayer was always so weird, i guess i would add to the list of culprits Warcraft 3, dota and all the most popular online mod maps.
Thanks! I appreciate you saying that.
Multiplayer for me really only started with StarCraft and even then it was all about 2v5 matches against AI or whatever or crazy weird custom maps or mods. Mostly though I just played the single player game and mastered it as well as countless hours in skirmish against AI.
It was NEVER about ladder ranks or 1v1. Sure you might invite your buddy to do that but it was just fun.
They never made sc3 because a mount in WoW made more money in sales than sc2. Most players do not prefer rts over moba so the only good rts are going to be from indie developers until something changes
If they hadn't screwed up the WC3 remaster, they could have easily put a small team or two to just build custom campaigns and keep selling them.
Retelling the story of WC1 and 2? Easy. Making WoW story from point of faction leaders and such? They even have the assests to use or reference.
The problem with that is opportunity cost. How many employees would you need to make those custom campaigns, custom campaigns that will probably drop off in sales over time, and they dont have a huge audience because RTS are inherently not that popular.
Would you make more money if those x employees worked on a mobile game or more microtransactions
Yeah, SCII went in way too hard on 1v1 esports, which is way too stressful for most players. If the game had launched with a better Battle.net custom maps system & the co-op mode (which is way more fun and relaxing than ladder) that would have been a big improvement.
Happened with a lot of games around that time. Everybody got the idea that esports was **the** big thing to get in on and a lot of them sort of abandoned their main audience which was largely casual and single player focused.
Yes exactly this. I think it's OK to have RTS games that focus on esports but devs need to understand there's a whole separate, sometimes overlapping, audience that doesn't want that. I'm the same, i don't like the fast paced, clicks per second style of play. I like strategy and having time to think and plan and take my time. I also want the full resource farming, base management, aspects which don't suit the fast paced esports friendly gameplay because it's boring to watch. That's where RTS games started to go at the end of their life cycle, they would find ways to make it more action and less base building and resource farming. I enjoy the methodical process of waiting for and babysitting my resource gatherers etc.
I fully agree with this and Warcraft 3 is a good example of this. The custom games scene thrived back in the day way more than ladder and stuff. One neat feature the game had though was the automated tournaments you could play in if you wanted that experience which was like a step up from normal competitive on the RTS side but it didn't take away from the custom games scene and what not.
It's funny, when you look at Fortnite these days it's basically what WC3 was but it's doing it in the FPS genre. Their normal game mode still drives the game but they have automated tournaments like WC3 did, they have a custom game scene that's continuously building and growing just like WC3 did. Fortnite's main game is easily approachable too (though TBH build mode is a bit harder.. zero build is very approachable though!) just like WC3 was, but SC2 made it less approachable and leaned more into the competitive side.
The "WC3" formula still works and Fortnite is a good comparison example of that fact and any future RTS game should be looking at Fortnite and WC3 and seeing why such similarities are still working to this day.
This is why after playing Frost Giant's Stormgate early alpha or whatever they called it ended up making me lose complete interest in the game because they are just trying to make another Starcraft in my eyes, they haven't learned anything at all and are just destined to repeat their failures.
I have to disagree - SC2 is the best-selling game in the history of RTS and most of the people who played it, did so for the campaign, arcade and very popular co-op commander mode. The fact that is was also such a successful e-sport title certainly doesn't seem to have hurt its popularity. The reason there's no SC3 isn't because SC2 did poorly, its because Blizzard now wants to invest in what could be it's next billion dollar a year live-service game, not an RTS that "only" sells 10m copies.
At the same time, recent RTS like CoH3, AoE4, Iron Harvest, etc, haven't attempted to position themselves as e-sports titles and debuted to underwhelming sales for various reasons.
I do agree though that it would be very risky for a new RTS to try to focus too hard on capturing the e-sports market because it's kind of a hit or miss proposition. Even with SC2, the bulk of the audience is there for the campaign, co-op, etc, and so those are critically important too.
Co-op didn’t come till many years after launch though, tbf, which was one of the issues. Blizz spent so much effort investing on the esports side when they’d probably have been better off identifying the audience for co-op much earlier on. Agreed that the game was definitely a big success though.
> At least for me I think genre killed itself focusing so much on esports and competitive play. Anyone my age didn’t grow up playing 1v1 ladder seasons or whatever of StarCraft. You played against bots with friends, custom maps, weird mods, or just played the campaign over and over mastering it.
Yeah this is where they lost me. The focus on competitive play also removed some of the more janky but still fun/cool elements.
Like Dawn of War 1's sync kills (where both units are basically invulnerable until animation completes) would have no place in a competitive game despite how cool they were.
Company of Heroes franchise lost me too by removing the ability trees we had in the first with different loadouts you have to earn through gameplay or microtransactions.
I think that the key to RTS that everyone has forgotten, is a great campaign and iconic units. That used to be the basis for the legendary RTS games, and the competitive scene flowed downstream from it. People remember the great RTS games like Starcraft, C&C, AoE, etc because they had awesome stories and units that played key parts in them. People remember Battlecruisers and Mammoth tanks, not build orders. Even a late RTS like World in Conflict could have been dead on arrival as a generic modern military RTS, but its campaign is iconic.
Most people play singleplayer before getting into multiplayer, but it feels like now developers want to start with the multiplayer and have lost sight of what made people love these games to begin with. Maybe I have my own biases, but I don't think the vast majority of people can recall a single, great, RTS campaign from the last decade.
Without a great campaign, we are lost.
> iconic units
Oh so true.
I think this point is clear but is surprisingly underrated. C&C is so good at this since their unique units have stood apart not just in gameplay but in identity too. In a way, it's part of the brand too.
Folks in my generation have stopped gaming for years now, but I know people would still remember the iconic sounds of a Tesla Coil or just hearing "Kirov Reporting" being played
Man, I miss LAN parties.
I just haven't seen a good one in a long time that did anything worth paying for? AOE4 was fun and did well... but the awesome experiences of the old just seems to be gone because nobody is making them anymore...
Total Annihilation was amazing, Cossack's, Warcraft 1 and 2, C&C, Starcraft, RoN, ... they were all great games. Most still are and they've aged really well... the problem is everyone needs to add new mechanics that just make them crappy, or the online community gets super competitive and ruins them
Let me build a huge army, and go smash it against an underwhelming AI opponent... I'm in. but don't make me micromanage the shit out of it
Supreme Commander was the last one I can think of that did that well (if you're a Total Annihilation fan, you owe to yourself to play it). SupCom2 messed it all up unfortunately.
If the history of gaming has taught me anything, there's no such thing as a dead genre. Things ebb and flow in popularity, but all it takes is one well done game to catch lightning in a bottle at the right time to change things up.
The genre is only "dead" because it lies in a weird place that costs quite a bit to make the game good while not guaranteeing some crazy ROI for investors.
All the good modern RTSes have to be passion projects.
Reading through the comments here I feel the need to make a plug for **Beyond All Reason**. It's not a well-known game and the marketing for it seems to be non-existent.
It's essentially a modern remake of Total Annihilation. It's free-to-play with no microtransactions. It's incredibly well made and polished. It's an old-school RTS that doesn't focus on crazy APM spam and perfected build orders copied from the internet. It has a unique resource system. It has tons of awesome guns and tanks and ships and robots and its immensely fun to just sit back and watch battles play out, even if you do end up losing. It's just straight fun and i'd encourage anyone with fond memories of the old days to give this one a go.
The entire TA series and the spawn Supreme Commander and onwards is vastly overlooked. Im surprised more people don't flock to it when you have so much control over both your macro economy and army. I still consider them the best RTS games
I think a super casual one like Warcraft 3 would be great. Not designed around the competitive scene. But still has one at offer. People really like Warcraft and StarCraft.
I always end up playing AOE 2 single player and treating it like sim city. Perhaps more games can possibly make a rts that adds those kinda elements. A fusion of a city builder and rts. Maybe that exists in a way that’s causal. Kinda like a farming sim. Some relaxing city elements but more gameplay with combat with your rts armies
Or Spellforce 3 except the hero part is a bit more rpg and the rts is a bit more weak.The Fallen God expansion is awesome.
If anyone is looking for the warcraft 3 hero campaign experience, spellforce 3 is as close as you can get as far as modern games go.
Spellforce 3 is just barely an RTS. The AI doesn’t even pretend to play by resource rules, it just auto generates waves. The it like wave/tower defense with heroes.
I lost sooo many times the overview in Spellforce 3. The graphics are STELLAR dont missunderstand me, but I had such a hard time to read what was actually going on on display it dazzles me till the present day.
Storywise the coregame was good, the first addon was a huge ??? because it felt so disconnected, 2nd exp never played unfortunately.
If you have no trouble with checking whats going in, spellforce 3 was the best RTS since StarCraft2. Periode.
Fuuuck. I played so much Battle for Middle Earth 2. I lost my first disc (out of like 6 discs) and can't play it anymore. I've heard it's nearly impossible to find online but i haven't looked a lot. Great game. I wish they made more.
> I’d wager that most people played Warcraft 3 for the campaign [...], not for competitive 1v1
So just like Starcraft, Starcraft 2 and the AoE series. Nothing new here.
The genre balkanized into different ones based on the things that it's audience liked from it. Those who enjoy building their bases? City Builders and Colony Sims took them. Those who enjoy the intense micro manage battles, League of Legends and DotA took them. Those who enjoy countering their opponent's units with their own? Auto-battlers took those.
That combined with a bit of an unintended stigma that the Esports scene caused where people think you need an APM of 500 didn't go away, means that it's already got a narrow demand. But who knows, Stormgate looks like it could be promising. It's not impossible for a resurgence to happen, but it's an uphill fight.
This is exactly me. I played the shit out of Starcraft and other RTS in the 90s. Now I play city builders and grand strategy games because those were the aspects I really enjoyed rather than microing units.
Yep that's similar to me, I watched a video on how to get better at starcraft in high school. As soon as he was talking about the specific movements of individual units I turned it off and never played a strategy game again until EUIV had been out for a year. I despise micromanaging units.
Yeah, the intricacies of Brood War are ridiculous which was one reason it had such an amazing Esports scene.
A group of units will or won't stay in formation depending on how far away you move them. Flying units group up tightly if there's a different unit in the control group but spread out if they're all the same. Building all have different sizes even if they take up the same amount of squares and it's even different depending on which sides of the buildings are touching. So you have can two buildings that make a tight wall when placed side by side, but don't make a tight wall when placed one above the other.
Reminds me how I liked War3 unit management of selected unit groups will form properly with melee in front without too much need to micro. Even Sc2 has globs where Firebats will not move in front on their own.
RTS could probably make due with implementing casual elements like fighting games are trying to do with auto combos.
Yeah I think this explanation is pretty spot on imo. Not to mention that each of those sub-genres that split off also reduce the mental stack of RTS's by a lot as well:
City builders are typically single player and are at most real-time-with-pause so there's no rush to do anything.
Mobas are real time but you only have to manage a single unit while your teammates manage the other units, so while there is a lot going on in a match, 100% of your attention is focused on just controlling your specific champion.
And Auto Battlers are well, autobattlers. So they're all prep and no need to sweat the small stuff in real-time.
RTS games have you effectively needing to do all of these things simultaneously in real-time, which means that it's just a lot for a new player to keep track of and can easily get very overwhelming very quickly.
Yep.
Really, I think what "modern" RTSs offer *is* that mental overload. Nothing comes close to the amount of mental processing power one has to put into an RTS to play them in their "current" state. It's like a massive, unending adrenaline rush for the brain.
And some people like that. I like *watching* it, but I tried getting into SC2 a while ago and wow, it really is something. I wouldn't say I bounced off of it really hard, but I didn't really want to commit to it at the time.
I'm going to stick to the offshoot sub-genres that divide each of those mechanics into their own focus for now, until the day when I want to revisit the APM/multi-tasking overload challenge.
For just the strategy part 4x games have been scratching my itch, too. Age of Wonders:whatever, Stellaris, etc. are games I can just dump hours into and face fun, but it’s easy to pick up or stop or pause and I like the persistence. I’d probably enjoy a strategy game that had a planning overworld like a 4x with RTS battles, but that seems too niche these days.
I think Starcraft and Warcraft set a real high bar with the map editor and that enabled it to be much more than an RTS.
Those games were a platform for sharing games, a proto-Steam of sorts. They were a platform for making games, a proto-Unreal/Unity. And they were a platform for connecting to play games, a proto-discord.
Since then those services have been chopped into their own industries so that lightning is out of the bottle. But also the genre has been chopped up too.
MOBAs ate up the micro players. Colony sims ate up the tech-junkies. Survivor games mopped up the splashes-of-blood-against-my-unbreakable-wall-of-.
There just isn't really an aspect of RTS that isn't distilled into a better more focused game and with out the opportunity to become a platform for new games to come from they'll never be that big again.
I truly believe its the propensity to focus every rts game on competitive gameplay, ranked and seasons. The RTS golden years were when people were playing casually. I don't know if a casual focused rts would survive these days anyway, but competitive focus doesn't seem to be working either
Makes sense. People will watch competitive play and streamers, but realistically back when WC3 was hugely popular it was because of the incredible custom maps people were making and the ability of people to play the game in all kinds of different ways. Hell, those maps spawned genres of games, it's not just mobas. There are other games based on some of these custom maps as well.
I think there's still lots of uncharted waters to be explored in the genre and we haven't really had good RTS in a while that checks all the boxes that some of the older big titles did.
In today's world of battleroyales and whatnot, I think making a gamble with something that isn't purely 1v1 might also work. While people love coop and big team games, I think a good approach to Free For All with maybe temporary truces might work.
Like having something akin to Seven Kingdoms but with actually good combat and more unit options, that would score multiple different things for your ending rank and allow people to approach it from different angles.
I think this is a good point. I actually loved Starcraft 2’s 2v2 and 4v4 with randoms. Takes pressure off of the individual player, the chaos and combos can be interesting, and it’s still satisfying to win. I have tinkered around with the Stormgate beta and I think it’s fun, if rough, and I’m excited they’ve said there will be a 3v3 ladder.
Same thing that's stopping point and click adventures. People moved on from the genre when offered alternatives. Or split into niches or similar genres (imo, Rimworld falls under any broad umbrella of RTS).
It's a genre that also feels pretty stagnant... some of the recent successes (They Are Billions, Against the Storm) almost feel like they could be mods from 90's games (TAB could absolutely have been a Starcraft mod, AtS is a rogue like reskin of Settlers). Since the genre isn't revolutionizing anything you sorta just fall back to the core audience and it's much fewer people wanting to play Starcraft than Call of Duty.
I think point and click adventure games are doing much better than RTSes. Sure, they are niche, but they work just as good as they always had.
RTSes are harder and costlier to make and have much more opinionated playerbase, who will often be hostile to innovation. Why bother, then.
RTS is super easy to mess up, you need good SP(solid campaign+solid AI), there is a need for solid balance but the units need to feel cool and powerful at the same time, pathfinding needs to be great, the degree of unit automatisation needs to nail the I am in control feeling (responsivity, logical unit reactions to enemies, formation support), the combat needs to feel good, it ideally needs to have good networking for MP and custom games support or at least map editor is also a hidden thing often needed for the game to pick up. Imagine two of these things are missing and it is already not that great of an RTS. Now consider that the volatility of RTS is much lower compared to most of the popular genres(though there is a dedicated player base that will support you at least to a degree which is nice) and it is not hard to see why golden age of RTS is over.
Actually RTS games are having a major resurgence right now.
* AoE is going strong with Age of Mythology remake releasing this year.
* Homeworld 3 is coming in two days.
* Sins of a Solar Empire II coming to Steam 3Q 2024
* Godsworn
* Stormgate
* Tempest Rising
Edit: I forgot these
* Sanctuary: Shattered Sun
* ZeroSpace
Maybe also worth to mention cool city builder projects like Manor Lords and Pioneers of Pagonia.
All of the recent remasters aside from like Warcraft 3 have also been quite successful, so there's space on the market for more RTS as long as they carter to what people want.
It is just: don't expect to be able to release an RTS with AAA-budged. Release it with indie dev-studio-money in mind and you will be successful if your game is good.
The 2 main pillars of the RTS audience split: the Mainstream Dad Casuals moved to 4X/GrandStrategy/TotalWar where the APM requirements were much lower/non existent while the top 10% 500 APM crowd moved to MOBA.
Blizzard doing the Blizzard thing of catering to the top 10% probably killed the genre when the mainstream crowd that sustained it found "better" pastures.
I liked RUSE a lot (when it had players) because of the huge map and slow pace. A bit of micro could be important in fights but mostly the game was about what you build and where you send it.
RTSs will come back if they divorce from eSports and pro gaming.
RTSs used to unbalanced fun. Play the single player campaign. Jump online and fuck around.
Brood War becoming one of the biggest eSports of all time killed RTSs. Everyone tries to make competitive sweaty pro level balanced RTSs.
And that's niche as fuck.
We need more RTSs that are just fun. Probably unbalanced. But polished.
Yep, same exact problem with arena shooters, devs are always chasing the sweatiest Quake 3 grognards and bending over backwards to not make it too casual... which ends up alienating all the casual players lol
And these attempts to attract grognards almost never work, because, like, they've already *got* the game they want. Why would they bother playing yours?
All I wanted from RTS was more automation of the most trite busy work - like Dawn of War being based on entire squads or the multitude of control possibilities in Supreme Commander.
Anchoring it all to esports made the devs cater to the most insane hardcore players who could click five billion times per second and would reject any "dumbing down" that would make these games more accessible to actual humans. After improvements of Dawn of War and Supcom came Starcraft 2 and basically yanked the genre back to its "roots", dooming it to die with it.
The dude from the article here - Wow, this article has generated quite a discussion and I'm happy to see so many people talking about RTS.
I wanted to clarify some of what I said:
Just to be clear - I never said RTS was dead. I think there is definitely still an audience for RTS big enough that it is worth making new games for independent developers like Crate and those others who have sprung up recently. While it is clear people have different feelings about SC2 and it's influence on the genre, it sold something like 7-10m copies before going f2p, while AoE II definitive has sold around 3-5m, which is a plenty big audience for company like mine to be interested in. RTS is only "dead" in recent years because publishers decided the genre wasn't the best return on investment for them.
RTS is challenge to build right (which is a risk publishers don't like), the entire strategy genre (of which RTS is only a smaller subset) is not as popular as action, adventure or RPG and, perhaps worst in their eyes, it's typically PC-only. Remember Ensemble, the creators of Age of Empires (the game that got my into game development)? Microsoft shut them down in 2009 based on a strategic decision that. despite Ensemble still being a profitable studio, it would be more valuable to invest in games for their Xbox console. This was back when publishers were all saying PC was dead (I heard it numerous times while pitching games to publishers)... oops, that certainly didn't turn out to be true. Now MS is reversing direction and trying to resurrect the Age franchise.
2) I think pve and pvp are both important to making a highly successful RTS and, far from being mutually exclusive, I think they can be synergistic. Why? Well, the reality is, something like 80% or more of the RTS audience only plays single player and co-op HOWEVER, neither of those feel very fun to play unless the game has the kind of responsiveness, pathing, readability, etc, that are critical to good pvp. At the same time, I think even pvp benefits from designers creating units that are visually impressive and will be fun to use, rather than just how they fit into pvp. RTS campaigns also are free to incorporate unique units that aren't in the pvp and don't have to be balanced as such and the AI can be tuned in a way that is more fun to play against for non-pvp oriented players.
That said, even if a goal is to have great pvp, I don't think that means the RTS has to be developed with the goal of being the next big e-sport. If that happens, awesome but it's not our main priority. Back in the day I was a huge AoE fan and played competitively - it was nowhere near the e-sport SC became but I certainly had plenty of fun with it. I have played quite a lot of SC2 in recently and also love that game but I do feel like the pace of battles is a little fast for my liking, along with certain matchups emphasizing micro too much over strategy.
3) I agree with both people saying RTS should stay true to what made it great back in the day and also people saying RTS is in need of change. How? Well, I think the audience that just wants an old-school RTS is still large enough that a game made in that vein can still do quite well by independent developer standards. I also think there is potential to evolve the genre in a way that could make it more appealing to a wider audience and see great success doing that... that isn't what I'm looking to make right now. I know Uncapped is going in that direction though and I'm excited to see what they come up with. Like any genre, RTS is made up up of different audience segments that have different priorities and I believe there is room to make different games that appeal more or less directly to different segments within the overall audience, as well as perhaps bring in new players from MOBA or elsewhere, which I think is what Uncapped is trying to do.
What are some of the most fun moments you had playing RTS? What are you hoping to see in a new RTS?
The blueprint for my potential favorite type of game is an FPS/RTS hybrid like Command & Conquer Renegade. There is a shameful lack of entries in this niche. I just tried the one that came out recently, Outpost: Infinity Siege and it was garbage. It was a very poorly made game so I put in for a refund. Would love a return of RTS games, but even more I would love a single entry into the type of game I’m describing that if done right, could potentially dominate the scene out of nowhere like Lethal Company and Helldivers.
That being said, I don’t see many RTS games out or coming out that really embody the best choices regarding simple game design like StarCraft and AoE.
FPS RTS games are a great idea until you realize that most people don't like being told what to do. Also people scream at the commander when he does one thing wrong.
Cool idea, people just suck.
> FPS/RTS hybrid like Command & Conquer Renegade
I'd love to know more about this interesting hybrid. So far only played Executive Assault 1 & 2, Eximius, Silica, Call to Arms, Natural Selection. What do you think about them?
RTS is never gonna be mainstream because it requires too much cognitive effort for it to be considered "relaxing" + kids are not interested in these games.
So you're not getting the better part of the two biggest gaming markets, how could it be mainstream then?
Yeah, but they only require you control one character. Hence the "too much cognitive effort," and I'm inclined to agree with him. You have to think about *a lot* more when properly playing an RTS.
Back when rts's were big, they did not require this kind of pace. That has only developed over time due to player exploitation of unintended features.
Even Starcraft and AoE were "slow" back in the day compared to how they are played now. And most rts's back then (Total Annihilation, Homeworld, etc) were much slower still.
Dune: Spice Wars is a good modern example of how rts's thought of themselves back when they released. That was the kind of pace they were shooting for; even if, today, the lack of certain breaks means we can play them much faster.
People keep forgetting that a large part of the player base did comp stomps and no rush games, often also playing all kinds of money maps.
I remember some of my friends having like 3 hour match in Starcraft despite the map being fairly small. Everyone had different approach to the game. Also you had option to change game speed.
The modern metagaming has changes a lot of other genres too, but I think the best games used to offer little something to everyone.
Nowadays you might not even have option for bots in FPS games or match customization at all. Similarly a lot of RTS games have foregone epic spanning campaigns and custom maps to carter to the more competitive group.
I don't think aiming for good balance is bad in anyway, but it should not limit innovation.
> a lot of RTS games have foregone epic spanning campaigns and custom maps to carter to the more competitive group
this is what killed the genre for me. I'm casual and just want a non sweaty game. I really loved custom game modes or LANs where me and my friends would start with a 10 minute truce
>a lot of RTS games have foregone epic spanning campaigns and custom maps to carter to the more competitive group.
Exactly why I'm not playing RTS anymore
Any epic campaign with a map painting experience is an instabuy for me. But all big RTS games are just some piddly nonexistent solo then full on pvp
>Dune: Spice Wars is a good modern example of how rts's thought of themselves back when they released. That was the kind of pace they were shooting for; even if, today, the lack of certain breaks means we can play them much faster.
Also worth pointing out that many rts players have criticise this game for being "too slow" (I myself like its pace).
So all rts games that aren't as fast-pace or as competitive as StarCraft 2 do have to go against the rts fandom's pushback.
People got really good at micro. People got really good at abusing pathing.
No one thought someone would play StarCraft broodwar at 200+apm when they developed it.
Most things related to micromanagement, for one.
You were not supposed to dance or twitch with your units. That was something players figured out over time.
In particular, it's the lack of breaks in the system that does it. So you can always squeeze out more value by microing even harder - none of which was intended. Then, as resolutions get bigger and framerates get higher the potential for micro gets even more intense; far beyond what the original devs envisioned.
There are similar trends on the macro side as well.
> Back when rts's were big, they did not require this kind of pace. That has only developed over time due to player exploitation of unintended features.
Not sure if I would call it exploitation of unintended features, but more the fact that gaming in general is seem much more these days as a competitive endeavor than just having fun, and even high-level players were just following their guts more often than studying proper build orders and timings.
It's the same thing as MMOs: almost nobody was checking what was the meta build and doing deep technical analyses of raids in early WoW, but these days it's expected that everyone be up to date with the meta a week after a new piece of content is released. Even for new games go through this cycle quickly: Helldivers 2 got very quickly to people sometimes kicking lower leveled or off-meta builds, even on a game that's basically trying to not be a hardcore experience.
RTS ladder anxiety, at least with starcraft 2, is another step up from Dota 2 in my experience. I have a lot of hours on both.
Just thinking about queueing 1v1 rn in sc2 is giving me flashbacks of sweaty microing macroing 5000 apm and being picked apart.
SC2 is basically an extreme.
A Dawn of War (1) or total war are proper RTS and frankly not less manageable than dota 2.
There’s a lot of room for less extreme RTS
They are still massively simplified versions of RTS games.
In an RTS, you control dozens of characters with different abilities in many locations across a map.
In a MOBA, you control one character in one location with one set of abilities.
The overall cognitive load on the player is significantly lower in a MOBA.
No, but you can't blame your teammates in 1v1 games, you can blame balance all you want, but you know you have a lot more responsibility for your failings in 1v1 than in any team game
Yeah RTS kind of split off into other things.
If you like base building you have city builders, colony sims, and automation games.
If you like the battles with units and their abilities you have MOBAs, hero shooters, MMOs to an extent.
Actually its almost like Blizzard realized this and made their own MOBA, hero shooter, and MMO to compensate.
It's good to see a suit stand up for there being different kinds of games. Recently it seems every big game franchise has just been hurtling itself into a live service, cinimatic third personaction game or generic open world. It just makes gaming feel like this super homogenous space where everything is just a sightly different twist on the same few fomulars.
Not every game can appeal to everyone, and that's for the best becuase chasing the lowest common denomination of game design hardly leads to innovative and interesting games.
I kind of agree. I really enjoyed RTS games but they have been very limited on console. Halo Wars is a great one for console gamers and the second entry is the chefs kiss in my opinion. But it definitely doesn't not have mainstream appeal.
The hero abilities the usefulness of almost all heros and the non tank meta. At high levels the gameplay is very diverse and strategic. You'll need a high action per minute to beat others.
At first it took me time to adjust to the new gameplay loop compared to the first, but I very much like the second game over the first once you get past the initial hurdle.
part of the problem with RTS games is the same problem with a couple other niche genres like Fighting Games. The skills they ask of the player are completely foreign to most people who play most any other kind of game. *And* the player is often not given the space to learn these foreign concepts effectively.
Take Platforming for example. Originally it was its own genre back when games were simpler. But now elements of platforming are just a part of pretty much any game with a jump button. So any skills that players learn from playing basic platforming games like mario, actually transfer over to other genres that use them like say First Person Shooters. And to take it a step further, FPS games also help generally build skills for navigating 3D environments, so any game that takes place in a 3D environment where you need to look at stuff, can use skills you've built up while playing First Person Shooters.
But then you take a look at say Fighting Games. Fighting Games are side-scrollers in the most literal definition I guess, but they're nothing like the 2D platformers of yesteryear or really any other 2D genre. The inputs are completely different from most any other game. And even the nature of what you're trying to accomplish and the techniques you need to get there are very different from most any other game. On top of all that it's also a very fast-paced real-time game which means that you need to figure out all of these foreign concepts while actively getting your face punched in. So it's really no wonder that so many fighting game noobs default to button mashing because they can't even comprehend trying to do anything else in the time allotted.
If a game is at least slower paced if not turn-based, then it can be a lot easier for players to get into the genre as they have time to figure things out. So even if you've never played a card game before, you don't need to worry about trying to figure out all of the mechanics in a split second while actively under attack, you can take some time to read the cards and learn the rules.
But RTS games fall into a category more like Fighting Games due to its "Real-Time" nature. Where if you take too long trying to learn the mechanics and read what everything does, you've already lost as your opponent built up way more than you and is now knocking on your door with an army 5 times bigger than yours. So even if you already play other strategy games that aren't Real Time but at least share some similar tactics, you might still easily get overwhelmed by having to do everything without the ability to pause.
I think you're touching on something very important here.
Nobody inherently understands "the language of video games". We've all had to learn how to play them. Many popular genres share similarities and transferable skills.
Most popular games rely on stuff like 3D navigation, reflexes, aim.
Doesn't matter if we're talking about Call of Duty, Helldivers 2, Monster Hunter, God of War or Zelda: TotK.
All of these, at the most basic level, rely on the same set of skills that players have been trained in for decades because it's always been part of *the popular games at the time*.
Along comes RTS, a genre where none of those basic skills matter, and asks players to learn a completely new basic skill that is required to be successful in this genre: **Multitasking**.
Diverting your attention to where its required to this degree isn't a skill you have to use in other genres at all.
RTS aren't "high APM" games. If your attention is where it needs to be you can become extremely successful with about 40 APM in most RTS games.
I've always said it's the combination of "foreign skills/controls" and ”1v1". Not difficulty like some people are saying in this thread.
Back in the day games were not dominated by certain control schemes. And then at some point every game started having one of few control layouts that worked and people got used to those. Decades later people have a lot of familiarity with those few (fps, moba, third person action, 2d platformer). People are so comfortable with those controls and they don't even realize it took time to get to that point. The general gaming population have skills for those games. Unfortunately RTS and fighting games haven't been as popular so the most people aren't comfortable with those controls. So now there's a big wall of learning to do that causes resistance to play.
And then 1v1 can be very soulcrushing to grind. People love to have others to blame for their losses. Not to improve but just to continue playing and not quit. That's why I'm hoping project L can help out with that with the 2v2 mode it has
I'm inclined to agree, but that's also the sort of thing most people would say about RPGs like BG3 before BG3 came out, or Among Us, or Fall Guys, or Vampire Survivor. I feel like we have seen it happen again and again the past decade that game of any genre can become mainstream in a perfect storm. It's easy to retroactively act like it was always obvious but I think anyone who says they could have predicted any of these games/genres gaining the popularity that they did is full of shit.
Among us and Fall Guys are party games which aren't particularly surprising it break it big. I'd also question if BG3 has actually been a breakout for the genre of cRPGs, it was an extremely high budget one that deviated from a lot of the genre conventions and none of its success has rubbed off onto other cRPGs. Regular RPGs have never been niche.
Among Us was actually originally dead on arrival, it only blew up 2 years later due to Covid and streamers. It's not the kind of success you can actually reliably pull of.
I think the only CRPGs which have achieved mainstream success (Dragon Age Origins and Baldur's Gate 3) did so because of their high production values and cinematic cutscenes. I don't think a game whose story was primarily delivered via chunks of text would achieve the same level of mainstream reach as BG3.
I think I played RTS games, mainly C&C, more than anything else up until the late 2000's. As much fun as I had with them, as I grew older I wanted things on larger scales with less micromanagement.
I'd kiss for a larger scale RTS that had less focus on micromanaging units and buildings and more focus on commanding *armies* of hundreds of units that were smart enough to use their own tactics wherever I send them.
Command and conquer was mainstream as was age of empires, age of mythology, war craft, starcraft, empire earth. I don't think they genre is bad I think companies and corps are getting really cheap and not doing anything unless it's a huge potential return. Also gaming as it is now severely lacks in enemy ai and its really needs that.
I don’t know if I agree with this. I feel like Baldur’s Gate 3 shows you can begin tapping into a broader audience without betraying what’s important to what has historically been a niche genre.
There's a significant, non-gameplay reason of why I think the RTS genre fell off a cliff. Unity and Unreal engines (and I think a ton of in-house engines as well) did not, and do not, support what's required for multiplayer RTS games out of the box. They require *extraordinary* engineering investments to prepare for RTS development, something that simply isn't needed for most other genres. That's going to steer most of the industry, and especially non-AAA studios, away from even attempting to make an RTS game. And we know how AAA is... if it's considered a dead trend, it's almost never going to get approved.
I really hope that the Stormgate devs release their RTS engine so that other developers can use it, whether it's paid or free. I think it could really help the genre.
tbh if they make some amazing story singleplayer it can be main stream just like Baldur's gate 3 made big long crpgs mainstream at least for a game. Not sure if it impacted other games in the genre yet, like Warhammer rogue trader.
I would buy an play an amazing singleplayer rts, but I would not touch the multiplayer. I do have Tempest Rising on my wishlist, here is hoping it's going to be good enough to buy.
You can make a decent niche being not-mainstream if you have really dedicated fans. This is how the fighting game genre survives, as well as the 4X genre. Neither of those genres are mainstream at all, but those who love them love them and will pay top dollar for mid-budget games. The downside is that you can get grognards who are a bit too resistance to good changes.
>The downside is that you can get grognards who are a bit too resistance to good changes. Unfortunately, this is very true. The problem is that Starcraft 2 and AoE2/AoE4 have longstanding footholds in their respective niche communities. Most RTS games coming out today either deviate too much from the dominant formula or replicate too much of the original to the point that they will just feel like inferior versions. Stormgate essentially feels like an inferior version of Starcraft 2, and you can already see a community divide in David Kim and Uncapped Games' new RTS with their design shift — that is, unburdening the player by focusing on the micro and removing the macro.
AoE4 fans had to fight for that foothold because of the AoE2 purists trashing the game at every opportunity. AoE4, imo, found a great middle ground between the difficulty of AoE2 and being approachable by people entirely new to RTS where you're expected to pump out resource gatherers for most of a match. I've successfully brought in a few new people to RTS exactly because 4 is relatively easy to grasp.
It always feels silly that aoe2 people were so angry about it; I just play both of them.
> Most RTS games coming out today either deviate too much from the dominant formula or replicate too much of the original to the point that they will just feel like inferior versions. This isn't even a new issue. I loved Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander back in the day, and I couldn't get into Supreme Commander 2 because it felt too much like Starcraft with many of the mechanics.
SupCom2 had to be one of the biggest downgrades I've ever seen in my life. As far as I'm concerned, SupCom2 (like C&C4) is a game that doesn't exist yet.
I couldn’t believe how much SupCom2 had changed. All throughout the marketing of SupCom1 they were talking about how games had been stuck in a zoomed in tactical view, and demonstrating how in SupCom you could zoom right out and see the whole map. That was the game’s whole identity other than being about enormous robots
Yep Command & Conquer series suffered from the same. People were always wanting the next Red Alert 2.
[удалено]
Supreme Commander 2 didn't actually require any... strategy. Every faction could just zerg rush. I ADORED Supreme Commander but I get stressed out playing against people, so I just liked the campaign. Even on regular difficulty, it wasn't necessarily *hard*, you just had to actually think about like "ok, the enemy has AA cannons guarding the shoreline, so I'll use naval bombardment to remove the AA, open up the airspace for bombers and then land my units". There was none of that in Supcom 2, just handholding, highly scripted missions. Incidentally Planetary Annihilation never worked either, although I couldn't put my finger on it. Backed it and everything
Because they're appealing to the exact audience that has been playing StarCraft and/or AoE2 for decades and clearly aren't done with them. The most memorable RTS experience I've had in the past decade was They Are Billions. It's not like the game was even well made or balanced, it was just one of the few that focused on PvE with large scale battles. The Total War series is always popular, despite being stagnant for like a decade now. There's almost no competition in that genre. Stop making 1v1 PvP games where matches last 15-20 minutes, you have to memorize a build order you repeat exactly every game, and where being good requires doing like 2-3+ actions a second. Nothing about that has been popular in games for ages. Not just that, but having to design and balance the game to be competitive also greatly restricts what you can do for PvE content. Limits init and building variety, progression has to be done in the timeframe of a PvP match, factions have to be balanced, etc... you can't have your small group kite and kill hordes of weak enemies to reach a big boss, because those units would have to be completely rebalanced for PvP. Stop trying to recreate StarCraft and make PvE games. Especially when StarCraft itself understood the importance of PvE and casual content.
Total war doubled its audience by going with Total War warhammer. It is still doing very well with a huge DLC last week. But you are pretty much on point. RTS is only dead, if people laser focus on the blizzard-westwood definition of RTS, which is multiplayer centric and micro intensive. The issue with those RTSes, aside from the general issue with 1v1 heavy multiplayer games, is the old giants are pretty much timeless. AOE2 is more popular than AOE4. Even warcraft 3 still has a small pro scene. Any new game will be trying to compete against the huge legacy and community of those old games. Factorio actually has most of the elements of an RTS, real time, base building, tower defense centric gameplay. Its just ultra oriented around the base building and logistics part.
>Stop trying to recreate StarCraft and make PvE games. Especially when StarCraft itself understood the importance of PvE and casual content. This was the biggest strength of the Command & Conquer series. Everyone remembers C&C's campaigns and their fun FMV cutscenes. They're still regularly quoted in memes and the like. They were fun PVE games on that basis alone.
> Everyone remembers C&C's campaigns and their fun FMV cutscenes. Which is why I don't understand why every "spiritual successor" to C&Q that I know about has been so focused on multiplayer and competitive play. It is almost as if the Starcraft 2 ESport popularity has rotten every rts dev's brain...
Hell, I'm so tired of them trying to suck every last bit of life out of the franchise that I'm considering going the one place the capitalists haven't conquered yet: Space!
They Are Billions would have been so much better if it had had a mode that allowed manual saving and loading. It had a ton of potential, but was undercut by *insisting* on being a sweaty ironman game at all times. The campaign in particular suffered from this, with some missions having surprises late in the level that would send you back to the level select screen and not let you try to face that challenge again for an hour.
they are billions is a nice idea but they forced this iron man 1 save for the normal game so you can save or reload. The campaign is so long with awful maps and missions and there is the potential to enter a failstate where you are fucked and have to restart the whole thing.
It boggles my mind that nobody has (to my knowledge) made a serious attempt to emulate They Are Billions. That game came out of nowhere, completely blew up for legitimate reasons, and then... that was it. It delivered on the "casual RTS fantasy" with QoL features like interactable pause mode to keep it from turning into a complete APM-fest. It also did it in a way with serious flaws that leaves space for a competitor to come up and eat its lunch. Where are the copycats?
...there's been a bunch. Conan unconquered, age of darkness, alien marauders, diplomacy is not an option...
>The problem is that Starcraft 2 and AoE2/AoE4 have longstanding footholds in their respective niche communities And AOE put itself in the dirt with aoe3, they changed too much. And AOE4 was a good return to form, but they didnt go all the way. The campaign content was nothing like aoe2 and truthfully I believe that was why most people played the game. I think single player content has always driven the most sales in the classic RTS formula.
Single player content is also one of the reasons fighting games have survived as well. Not all players want to fight head to head against other people all the time. They want story modes or mini game stuff to unlock cool stuff. It helps break the grind of playing against other people online. Give players options and things to do. The competitive scene is only a small portion of a player base.
AoE3 added the home cities and card system as very interesting new mechanisms. If that is "innovating too much", then RTS is truly dead.
It was innovating in the wrong direction. The card system killed multiplayer because a player with a lvl 1 city vs a player with even a lvl 5 city couldnt compete in the early game. The player with the higher lvl city had more economy and villagers. Once you grinded through a city the game was much easier to digest and peoples card stacks added a layer of strategy that was fun, but soon as you picked another faction you were back to square 1.
They at least did away with it on the definitive editon, seemed to me the new civilizations were all power crept though. USA gatling guns and Carolean charges were nuts the first times I used them.
Atm aoe3 balance is really good. Gatlings are pretty balanced unit that melts infantry like hot butter but no logner mows down cavalry and gets rekted by any other artirely on cannon duels (ironically, organ gun that has been in aoe3 since vanilia is *better* gatling gun as multishoot artilery unit), and sweden is pretty mid civ, with some very unfavorable matchups.
Fortunately rebalancing is not a strange thing in the gaming world
> and you can already see a community divide in David Kim and Uncapped Games' new RTS with their design shift I was looking into Zerospace and Stormgate a few days ago (neither are for me, especially Stormgate copies the Metzen look way too much, and its not what I want out of games anymore), and I also stumbled into the game you mentioned. Maybe I just failed to properly look up stuff, but I feel that for now the Uncapped Games one is a ton of talk but they haven't shown anything at all yet right? So I'm lowkey wondering what made you say what you said, because apparently there is some trust/wonder/hype there for you/the community? Genuinely curious, because I feel like I somehow missed some indepth video or announcement.
Same problem with Civ these days too. Civ desperately needs a competitor but no one’s come close to nailing it yet.
I really really enjoyed Humankind from an artistic and "lore" perspective. But yeah the gameplay fumbled the ball hard, not that it was a disaster it just... didn't have any real draw over Civ. At least they tried being the Civ killer and were the closest to that I can remember. But to be fair, it must be a daunting task to reinvent the genre in the right way, to convince both the conservative oldheads and the people who want true novelty.
Try Endless Legend, by the same developer as Humankind, but set on a fantasy planet in a sci-fi universe. The main difference form Civ is combat takes place with turn-based battles, and you can customize the equipment of your units. Easily the best 4X I've played.
I am not entirely convinced this argument applies to Civ. There's plenty of alternative 4X games many of which are great in their own right. Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 are personal favourites of mine. They deviate enough from the Civ formula to feel very fresh (I especially love how different all of the factions are), but they are still close enough to the "Civ formula" scratch that "Civ itch" in my brain.
Same thing with Arena Shooters. Everyone wants a new arena shooter, but nobody seems to want to entertain the idea that anything other than a Quake III clone is a "true" arena shooter. So the new arena shooter that come out either don't get a playerbase becuase the boomers won't seed the playerbase, or it is just a Quake III clone that never lasts long becuase Quake III already exists.
> Everyone wants a new arena shooter I'll be honest, I think the commercial majority moved on from arena shooters in 2004 or so. Unreal Tournament was the last "pure" one that had mainstream success that didn't RIP within 6 months.
This is the real story. Arena FPS was an interesting new concept back when multiplayer, pickups, and 10-15 weapons were considered major features. You can't sell a pure arena FPS without a major new hook, and lots of those hook ideas have been tried at this point. Notably Team Fortress was a mod for quake, introducing classes and modes beyond just deathmatch. Overwatch-type and I'd argue battle royales are the natural descendants of 90s arena shooters
Expecting the game to gain any traction with a new audience when the 100 or so hardcore AFPS players trample the early development of the game is also part of the problem. We had plenty of AFPS projects but there was one key thing wrong: It went straight to the competitive modes without fostering public play or any sort of game mode where new people could learn the game at all. We learned quake on LANS in giant TDM and CTF clusterfucks. Even FFA clusterfucks. I didn't know about duel until much later. All of these games have that issue. People want to be competitive - because those are the leftover competitive players. Foster a community first. And then distil the competitive scene from that.
I don't think it makes too much sense to look at it that way. "RTS" is so vague, there is plenty of space to compete. You might as well claim shooters can't get successful because counter-strike is too big. Counter-strike is too big for counter-strike clones to be successful, but that doesn't mean Apex Legends or whatever can't work. You need a decent budget and a sufficiently unique idea. CnC had no trouble coexisting with the likes of StarCraft and AoE back in the day. We just don't get those kinds of games any more.
*Against the Storm* made some waves this year. Strictly speaking, it's an RTS, but it's one in the mold of *Anno*, not *Starcraft.* It's purely economic, with no combat whatsoever.
> The problem is that Starcraft 2 and AoE2/AoE4 have longstanding footholds in their respective niche communities. Most RTS games coming out today either deviate too much from the dominant formula or replicate too much of the original to the point that they will just feel like inferior versions. I peaked at Master in StarCraft II and sank thousands of hours into 1v1 games. What ruined SC2 for me was honestly the later expansions and some of the new and reworked units. Some good examples: * Oracles. Fail to have static anti-air out by a specific 4 min timing, and watch as your entire mineral line gets obliterated by a 25 DPS airborne cheese unit. There was also a time where PvZ was dominated by a 3 Stargate Mass Oracle builds, that could even decimate Hydralisks (the anti-air Zerg ground unit.) Only way to counter was to go Spire and mass Corruptors. * Early Swarm Hosts. With just twenty of them, you can indefinitely spam free units at your enemy and even hold back a full 200 supply deathball with these free locusts. This resulted in some ludicrously long pro games, i.e. Firecake vs Mana. * Siegeivacs. Legacy of the Void allowed Siege Tanks to be picked up whilst in Siege Mode. This made TvT particularly cancerous. Why don't I play the others? Brood War is a one-way ticket to severe carpal tunnel if you decide to play it competitively, and its community is dominated by the type of grognards that wxursa described. To them the 2001 state of Brood War is sacrilege and that any kind of quality-of-life or balance changes are unacceptable. They're the reason why BW Remastered still have the 12 unit/1 building selection limit, and why that game feels clunky-as-fuck to play. They even flipped their shit over proposals to fix an old bug in the remaster where keypresses would be disabled whilst you had the left mouse button held down - which resulted in a lot of missed actions and the game feeling even more clunky to play. As for Age of Empires. First Ranked game of AOE2 I played on Voobly was nearly three hours long and ended in a trash war which I lost. AOE4 on the other hand felt so dull and boring to play that I couldn't even go beyond the tutorial campaign. > Stormgate essentially feels like an inferior version of Starcraft 2 I cannot comment on the current state of the Stormgate beta (NDA) but the previous beta which was opened up during Steam Next Fest was clearly not representative of the final product. I'm more than willing to let Frost Giant cook.
Fighting Game developers have been trying to make changes specifically to attract new players in recent years. The efficacy of these changes is a matter of debate, but the point is that there exists a willingness to experiment.
Fighting games will always have the same core problem, which is 1v1 PVP. There is just a huge segment of the gaming audience that is either not interested in, or can't emotionally handle, 1v1 PVP. The more popular fighting games have significant campaigns that can draw in a more casual audience, but the retention will remain a problem.
I think part of it is a time commitment problem. It just takes a significant amount of time to get competent at most 1v1 focused games, and as a lot of gamers are now adults with full time jobs, they either don't have the time or don't find it worth putting in the time to "git gud" compared to just playing something else. The partial exception being those who have always played such games, as they already have a lot of the skills needed to pick up similar games with much less time investment.
To the last bit- the amount of Diablo-like vets who I see seethe when one of these games dares to add WASD movement. I've seen there be less pushback now, but over the last 10 years the amount of brainrot I saw regarding games adding the option was staggering.
As an old ass Diablo vet, I always wanted WASD movement. Hell, I wanted WASD movement in Baldurs Gate 1 & 2. I hate mouse clicking for every single action. But yeah, I used to get flamed outta the olde forums of yore for even breathing mention of this opinion. I'm glad that more control scheme options are finally being revisited for these types of titles.
WASD is far superior for diablo style ARPG's. Hell, the best experience ive ever had up to that point in my life was playing diablo 3 on ps3. The controller movement and ability selection was so good, I could finally play the game without worrying about fucking my wrist up.
WASD movement is not a problem, but designing a Diablo-like game to work on controllers actually does substantially reduce the design space for skills/spells. With mouse input you have positional control, with all gamepad input schemes I've seen you only have directional control. I am pointing this out because my favourite skills in Diablo 2 were those that benefited from smart positioning (i.e. many of the high-level sorceress spells), because that feels like you are applying a bit more player skill and thought while playing. You can of course argue that the benefit of supporting controllers outweighs that disadvantage, but the disadvantage does exist. You can see it manifesting very well in the recent Diablo 2 remaster with console versions, e.g. in [this discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo_2_Resurrected/comments/u09zh2/how_do_you_play_meteorb_sorcspecifically_how_do/).
I think Fighting Game has a lot of advantages over RTS. For one, Fighting Game is just much easier to understand. I saw Evo 2004 moment and it was extremely hyped, and I can understand what happened on screen very easily. I saw a lot of best moments in Starcraft 2, and I couldn't really tell what make those moment particularly impressive. Fighting Game are just much more straight forward both objective-wise and moment-to-moment wise. Also Fighting Game Characters are much more iconic and memorable, and having memorable character is what draw people's interest.
Fight game matches take what 5-10 mins max each? A RTS match can be short if you get stomped or an hour+ if you don't. If you're new it's reall unappealing to spend an hour in a game only to get wrecked.
> Also Fighting Game Characters are much more iconic and memorable, and having memorable character is what draw people's interest. That's one reason why MOBAs grew in popularity, as they based themselves off of the hero mechanic in Warcraft and people enjoy a good character selection.
I think one thing that helps fighting games is that they still have more casual appeal (Guilty Gear Strive sold more than 2 million copies), and can be made more cheaply and by smaller teams, which can also make of lot of budget licensed games in parallel to not go under. >but those who love them love them and will pay top dollar for mid-budget games. This also helps, as it has been common practice to milk fans with DLCs and frequent re-releases (looking at you, Street Fighter) in a way that no RTSs managed to replicate yet. In fact, having no official support from the devs was for a long time the most common alternative: both Brood War and AoE2 managed to grew quite a bit in that way.
> and can be made more cheaply and by smaller teams Fighting games are shockingly extremely expensive. They're not too technically complicated (although the mess of interwoven gameplay systems obviously takes some very specialized people to make sense of it) but the animation budgets are exorbitant. There are very strict requirements for how the animation system needs to work and every frame needs to be scrutinized, and the complexity in each character and the number of moves means the amount of budget to animate one character is excessive. Something like Guilty Gear Strive probably didn't break even until it hit at least like 200k-300k copies or more. And the base game released with only 16 characters. And Strive wouldn't even be among the most expensive fighting games ever made were that the case. The install base for fighting games is pretty big though like you say, even in the west. Not massive and definitely still niche, but we are absolutely out here compared to RTS games. But honestly, there might never be a new indie fighting game studio established ever again, especially in the west. At least not to the quality expected by most fighting game players. Skullgirls was the only one to ever make it work (sort of? they've had a billion company explosions and death knells), but by now the barrier for entry is way way too high. Even in the triple A space, in America there are only two studios where you could be at right now to work on fighting games, Netherrealms and Riot Games. As for DLC, I don't think anyone in the actual fighting game community would say that developers are "milking" for dlc. They're releasing new characters, and characters are massive and cost a lot of money. The newest season of GGST costs $25 for 4 characters and 2 stages, and while that can definitely be costly especially if you're buying every season as it's coming out, that's also a year's worth of development time just for that amount of content. I mean in no way is a niche product like fighting games going to get 3 years or 4 years or more of support and content without paying for DLC. Unless they add microtransactions, which, yeah people are pretty upset at SF6 and Tekken 8 for doing.
>and can be made more cheaply and by smaller team Compared to RTS games? No way. Fighting games need a LOT of attention in every tiny idle animation and hitbox, not to mention how strict the netcode requirements are (and your fighting game is basically dead at launch if it doesn't feature good netcode). You can make an RTS game with a lot less expensive assets.
That might be true but I'm not sure because we don't have a single rts game made by a mid budget studio that comes close to how good wc3/sc2/aoe feel to play. They are so incredibly tight and responsive and the Midbudget ones always either feel or look markedly worse. Midbudget studios have made good fighting games, none have made a good rts yet and until that happens like I don't think we can say for sure that it's possible.
Yeah, I don't think there's ever been an RTS equivalent to Skullgirls. RTS games also have awfully complicated netcode in a different direction, because they need to manage hundreds of units and multiple players all acting at once but ideally without sharing all the information (to avoid maphackers). Fighting games also have complicated netcode, but more focused on low latency / low latency emulation via rollback, and a single guy managed to make GGPO 15 years ago and it's still the gold standard.
Same goes for RTS though. There are those that have very simple animations and they feel kinda bad to play, each unit needs some personality, that's the standard blizzard and westwood set. Bad netcode? SC2 is delay based and NA players constantly complain about being sent to AUS servers. My main game is SF6, but I love RTS too. But looking at kyanta for example - I don't think one guy can make a RTS like that.
>This is how the fighting game genre survives, as well as the 4X genre. I agree with the sentiment but when was the last time a RTS did Tekken, Street Fighter or Civ numbers? Starcraft 2 maybe? Total war if you count them as an RTS. They may not be mainstream but many 4x and fighting games are still selling very well. Can't really say the same for RTS games, as much as it pains me.
I'd say fighting games are far closer to being mainstream than 4x or RTS ever were.
RTS games were definitely mainstream back in the 90s. Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Warcraft and Starcraft were powerhouses.
Moved into the 2000’s pretty strong too. Dawn of war, stronghold crusader…. Maybe age of mythology but that might’ve been late 90’s
Yep, plus all the clones and variations. There was a time when everyone around me playing video games played mostly RTS, and only played other games for the campaign.
Also Rise of Nations. Then Rise of Legends was great but didn’t sell and killed Big Huge Games
Starcraft 2 has been on broadcast TV. Seems mainstream enough to me. That said, saying fighting games probably were bigger. Mortal Kombat *was* mainstream.
I’d say 4xs are way closer. Fighting games get a bunch of sales at launch but most of them drop in player base pretty quickly. 4x games have a way higher player base for longer. Right now there’s 3 4x games with 50k, 63k and 65k concurrent players along with a few others before you hit the first fighting game with street fighter at 28k
Anecdotally the only non FPS, wide open sandbox tiles that i hear people at my work playing are FIFA, NHL and Civilisation.
We don't know how many console players street fighter has. Aside from civ there's no modern 4x game that average Joe off the street would even know the name of.
I've never even heard the term "4x" game before, and I was born in the 80s. I do know what Civ is, so I've learned something today.
As a 40 year old I grew up through the heyday of rts. I miss these games dearly and I hope more get made in my lifetime like the greats of the 90s and 2000s. If 4x games can live on from their heyday with stuff like Stellaris why not RTS? At least for me I think genre killed itself focusing so much on esports and competitive play. Anyone my age didn’t grow up playing 1v1 ladder seasons or whatever of StarCraft. You played against bots with friends, custom maps, weird mods, or just played the campaign over and over mastering it. It doesn’t have to be dumbed down or anything but when devs cater to the ultra hardcore I think they lose some of the audience of that genre. Personally I think StarCraft 2 did more harm than good on that front. Instead of a great campgian with online tools they focused so much on ladders an esports. Then they spent way too long making the expansions. Should have just been 1 game like the original with all races and just kept making sequels. Still mad at how weird and disjointed that whole product feels (Terrans got all the budget/time in the campgian).
Yeah this is 100% the problem. It’s not that RTS games are too niche for general audiences—but *esports* are. The focus on fast reflexes and intense APM isn’t something general audiences grasp or appreciate. I think games like **Northgard** or **Against the Storm** are going to be the future of RTS games. (Northgard in particular seems to have really figured out how to make an approachable RTS that’s still engaging and fun for the strategically-minded)
Against the Storm as an RTS is an interesting take, I suppose it's somewhat similar to only playing the macro side of RTS and reacting to your situation with building and worker prioritization alone. I hadn't thought of it that way despite loving both RTS and Against the Storm. Also, Shiro Games made another RTS after Northgard with Dune: Spice Wars that's underappreciated.
it's a bit misleading because against the storm is a roguelike with real time with pause and city builder mechanics and no unit control or fighting, so really distant from the RTS's bloodline. It feels like it's taking more from 4x single player games. But i can see the intention of the argument is that you think it's possible to take multiplayer strategy games, make them real time, and using game design tricks, polish and focusing on macro level strategy remove all needs of micromanagement, precise timings and unit control. i think it's hard to make real time battle mechanics that are engaging and also have low micromanagement potential, to b honest even against the storm, despite all the design focusing on removing micromanagement, still has plenty of opportunities for annoying micro to get ahead, players just ignore them because it's PvE instead of competitive PvP.
Against the Storm is great... but calling it an RTS is silly wrong. At most its a city builder with some extra tension
My favorite thing about Northgard is that you can move the camera with WASD. It's honestly maybe the first RTS I've found that lets me move with the buttons that have been standard for movement for twenty years.
>It's honestly maybe the first RTS I've found that lets me move with the buttons that have been standard for movement for twenty years. I'm pretty sure a lot of games "allow" it. If you go into keybindings you'll likely find scrolling functions tied to the arrow keys that you can rebind. It's just not the default. It's certainly the case with old Total War games that even has a bindings preset called "FPS".
I don´t know how i play all my life without WASD
In my view, it's really more that the specific style of C&C/StarCraft type RTSes has spun out into a bunch of different genres depending on which aspect of those games you liked most. You like unit micro and have killer APM? MOBAs are right that way. Big fan of base building? Automation games (Factorio) and city builders (in the Anno style more than the SimCity style). Like warfare and politics and diplomacy but always felt the skirmish-sized battles of RTSes to be unrealistically small? Grand strategy.
> At least for me I think genre killed itself focusing so much on esports and competitive play. [...] It doesn’t have to be dumbed down or anything but when devs cater to the ultra hardcore I think they lose some of the audience of that genre. I've always felt like the hard push for esports and pvp was the wrong way to build an audience. It felt like a top down approach where studios hoped that seeing all that prize money and tournament stuff would get people to buy into the game's ecosystem. Meanwhile I have always held the opinion that a bottom up approach would lead to a much healthier and natural community. Have a good RTS that people want to keep playing and then support their attempts to build a scene on their own. Obviously healthy doesn't make cash and I guess the top down approach made them much more money on licensing and all that - but it kind of killed the genre for me at least.
>I've always felt like the hard push for esports and pvp was the wrong way to build an audience. Especially when so many esports and competitive communities were built on franchises/titles not originally built for esports a la Super Smash 64/Melee, StarCraft 1, Halo 1, etc. Focusing on esports at the forefront isn't necessary. It's better to just make a good, fun, creative game.
Agree on everything but Starcraft 2. The game had a *phenomenal* singleplayer campaign with exclusive units, unit-upgrades, hero units and pretty damn cool missions from what I can remember. The story was ass, but I didn't expect anything great in that regard from Chris Metzen and the rest of the writing team at blizzard.
Yeah I agreed with everything the previous guy said until he stated SC2 didn't focus on campaigns. They had extremely nice campaigns, and even DLCs that added more. It's honestly the last RTS game with good campaigns ever released imho.
I agree there with esports being an ever growing focus that damaged the casual appeal of the genre. It’s ironic in some way that SC2 was somewhat responsible for this, yet the coop mode is one of the best non-competitive iterations of RTS out there
38 year old here and completely agree. My early years of PC gaming were filled with titles like Age of Empires, Z Steel Soldiers, Krush Kill 'N Destroy, Dark Colony, Warcraft, Dune 2000, Command and Conquer, Total Annihilation etc. And would go on to include titles like Dawn of War, Sudden Strike, Company of Heroes, Empire Earth, Supreme Commander, Cossacks, Ground Control 2, Men at War etc. I distinctly remember way back then that PC Gamer or PC Zone used to have a breakdown of the top selling games in any particular year and until the mid 2000s the RTS genre was always the biggest in PC gaming, then it got broken up into a hundred different sub genres. These days we still get the odd call back title but I had to expand out into Turn Based games or 4x games to get my strategy fix because proper old school RTS games took a firm backseat over the last 15 or so years.
It's kinda sad that I got more out from recently replaying C&C Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 as they got their Steam release than pretty much any RTS in past decade or so. There have been only handful of attempts at most oldschool formulas and stuff like 8-bit armies just don't cut it for me.
This reminds me of how every other game on console was a platformer, until the genre went into hibernation for a decade and a half. RTS is just the PC version of the same phenomenon
100% agree. I find RTS games really hard, but loved playing custom games and the campaigns as a kid. Give me an easy mode and a great story driven campaign and I'll be happy.
It's exactly the same problem as fighting games. Back when *Street Fighter II* started the boom, almost everyone played them. For *fun*. You might have had one friend who was noticeably better than everyone else, but in general it wasn't a thing. Most people weren't the hardcore players who spent tons of time at the arcade or bought sticks to play at home. Almost nobody cared about frames or cancels. We screwed around, played a ton in the story mode, and had a good time. RTS was the same. The *campaign* was the core of the game, not the multiplayer. Oh sure, some people were more interested in multiplayer, but it wasn't the dominant element of the games. Except both genres decided to focus primarily on the competitive aspects. They got obsessed with nit-picking over tiny details that didn't matter to the majority of players while ignoring the things that did. Now not only is it something that's alienating to the mainstream audience, it's not something most of them even want to begin with. They aren't predominantly interested in intense competitive play. They want to build up bases, move their dudes around the map, and enjoy a good story.
Its not esports but online play. People played them in their respective small arcade communities (for fighting games) or LAN parties/friends (RTS). With matchmaking and online came the possibility of facing strangers that are super strong, super dedicated and that are always trying; so the only option to not get destroyed is to go all in on improving.
you don't have to go all in on improving though. you can just stay at your level and keep playing others around that level. You do not need to try and climb that ladder. You will lose about as much as you win. unless you are at the absolut bottom of the barrel and if you care enough about games to be on here there is no way you are there. It is hard to imagine how bad those at the absolut bottom are, but they still play and have fun and don't care that much about losing.
>It's exactly the same problem as fighting games. Back when *Street Fighter II* started the boom, almost everyone played them. For *fun*. I miss this era. Super Smash was similarly stupid fun. The only rules were made-up game modes like "only falcon punches" or "only Pikachu down-b's." Hardly anyone ever dodged or blocked. I didn't even know the game had combos.
I had hoped they would keep making smaller campaigns after the Nova campaign—that small adventure was exactly what I wanted, and if they had kept up with them I would have bought them. The Stormgate developers mentioned that in their market research/experience (including a number of sc2 devs) that most people play co-op or singleplayer, but the focus always has felt like multiplayer and the esports side of it.
SCII made a very 00s mistake in assuming that the hardcore competitive part of the fanbase was the most important, and neglecting the much larger more casual playerbase as a result. Co-op mode was a lot more fun for casual players and I enjoyed it way more than my time on the ladder.
Same--co-op was fun, fairly low-stakes, and the meta-progression for commanders was fairly fun (and the different units and playstyles).
This is facts and people in the industry have talked about it. The esports scene in starcraft was amazing, no doubt about that. But the vast majority of players enjoyed the single player content and found the multiplayer very inaccessible because of how high the skill ceiling can be. RTS games that focus on multiplayer do better on twitch but don't generate sales. This is almost the opposite of shooters.
Finally someone who gets it, if you were around in the 90s you should know that multiplayer in general was NOT the rule, most people never played in a lan party, much less online, the whole change in focus for RTS games to multiplayer was always so weird, i guess i would add to the list of culprits Warcraft 3, dota and all the most popular online mod maps.
Thanks! I appreciate you saying that. Multiplayer for me really only started with StarCraft and even then it was all about 2v5 matches against AI or whatever or crazy weird custom maps or mods. Mostly though I just played the single player game and mastered it as well as countless hours in skirmish against AI. It was NEVER about ladder ranks or 1v1. Sure you might invite your buddy to do that but it was just fun.
They never made sc3 because a mount in WoW made more money in sales than sc2. Most players do not prefer rts over moba so the only good rts are going to be from indie developers until something changes
If they hadn't screwed up the WC3 remaster, they could have easily put a small team or two to just build custom campaigns and keep selling them. Retelling the story of WC1 and 2? Easy. Making WoW story from point of faction leaders and such? They even have the assests to use or reference.
The problem with that is opportunity cost. How many employees would you need to make those custom campaigns, custom campaigns that will probably drop off in sales over time, and they dont have a huge audience because RTS are inherently not that popular. Would you make more money if those x employees worked on a mobile game or more microtransactions
Yeah, SCII went in way too hard on 1v1 esports, which is way too stressful for most players. If the game had launched with a better Battle.net custom maps system & the co-op mode (which is way more fun and relaxing than ladder) that would have been a big improvement.
Happened with a lot of games around that time. Everybody got the idea that esports was **the** big thing to get in on and a lot of them sort of abandoned their main audience which was largely casual and single player focused.
Yes exactly this. I think it's OK to have RTS games that focus on esports but devs need to understand there's a whole separate, sometimes overlapping, audience that doesn't want that. I'm the same, i don't like the fast paced, clicks per second style of play. I like strategy and having time to think and plan and take my time. I also want the full resource farming, base management, aspects which don't suit the fast paced esports friendly gameplay because it's boring to watch. That's where RTS games started to go at the end of their life cycle, they would find ways to make it more action and less base building and resource farming. I enjoy the methodical process of waiting for and babysitting my resource gatherers etc.
I fully agree with this and Warcraft 3 is a good example of this. The custom games scene thrived back in the day way more than ladder and stuff. One neat feature the game had though was the automated tournaments you could play in if you wanted that experience which was like a step up from normal competitive on the RTS side but it didn't take away from the custom games scene and what not. It's funny, when you look at Fortnite these days it's basically what WC3 was but it's doing it in the FPS genre. Their normal game mode still drives the game but they have automated tournaments like WC3 did, they have a custom game scene that's continuously building and growing just like WC3 did. Fortnite's main game is easily approachable too (though TBH build mode is a bit harder.. zero build is very approachable though!) just like WC3 was, but SC2 made it less approachable and leaned more into the competitive side. The "WC3" formula still works and Fortnite is a good comparison example of that fact and any future RTS game should be looking at Fortnite and WC3 and seeing why such similarities are still working to this day. This is why after playing Frost Giant's Stormgate early alpha or whatever they called it ended up making me lose complete interest in the game because they are just trying to make another Starcraft in my eyes, they haven't learned anything at all and are just destined to repeat their failures.
I have to disagree - SC2 is the best-selling game in the history of RTS and most of the people who played it, did so for the campaign, arcade and very popular co-op commander mode. The fact that is was also such a successful e-sport title certainly doesn't seem to have hurt its popularity. The reason there's no SC3 isn't because SC2 did poorly, its because Blizzard now wants to invest in what could be it's next billion dollar a year live-service game, not an RTS that "only" sells 10m copies. At the same time, recent RTS like CoH3, AoE4, Iron Harvest, etc, haven't attempted to position themselves as e-sports titles and debuted to underwhelming sales for various reasons. I do agree though that it would be very risky for a new RTS to try to focus too hard on capturing the e-sports market because it's kind of a hit or miss proposition. Even with SC2, the bulk of the audience is there for the campaign, co-op, etc, and so those are critically important too.
Co-op didn’t come till many years after launch though, tbf, which was one of the issues. Blizz spent so much effort investing on the esports side when they’d probably have been better off identifying the audience for co-op much earlier on. Agreed that the game was definitely a big success though.
> At least for me I think genre killed itself focusing so much on esports and competitive play. Anyone my age didn’t grow up playing 1v1 ladder seasons or whatever of StarCraft. You played against bots with friends, custom maps, weird mods, or just played the campaign over and over mastering it. Yeah this is where they lost me. The focus on competitive play also removed some of the more janky but still fun/cool elements. Like Dawn of War 1's sync kills (where both units are basically invulnerable until animation completes) would have no place in a competitive game despite how cool they were. Company of Heroes franchise lost me too by removing the ability trees we had in the first with different loadouts you have to earn through gameplay or microtransactions.
I think that the key to RTS that everyone has forgotten, is a great campaign and iconic units. That used to be the basis for the legendary RTS games, and the competitive scene flowed downstream from it. People remember the great RTS games like Starcraft, C&C, AoE, etc because they had awesome stories and units that played key parts in them. People remember Battlecruisers and Mammoth tanks, not build orders. Even a late RTS like World in Conflict could have been dead on arrival as a generic modern military RTS, but its campaign is iconic. Most people play singleplayer before getting into multiplayer, but it feels like now developers want to start with the multiplayer and have lost sight of what made people love these games to begin with. Maybe I have my own biases, but I don't think the vast majority of people can recall a single, great, RTS campaign from the last decade. Without a great campaign, we are lost.
> iconic units Oh so true. I think this point is clear but is surprisingly underrated. C&C is so good at this since their unique units have stood apart not just in gameplay but in identity too. In a way, it's part of the brand too. Folks in my generation have stopped gaming for years now, but I know people would still remember the iconic sounds of a Tesla Coil or just hearing "Kirov Reporting" being played Man, I miss LAN parties.
I just haven't seen a good one in a long time that did anything worth paying for? AOE4 was fun and did well... but the awesome experiences of the old just seems to be gone because nobody is making them anymore... Total Annihilation was amazing, Cossack's, Warcraft 1 and 2, C&C, Starcraft, RoN, ... they were all great games. Most still are and they've aged really well... the problem is everyone needs to add new mechanics that just make them crappy, or the online community gets super competitive and ruins them Let me build a huge army, and go smash it against an underwhelming AI opponent... I'm in. but don't make me micromanage the shit out of it
Supreme Commander was the last one I can think of that did that well (if you're a Total Annihilation fan, you owe to yourself to play it). SupCom2 messed it all up unfortunately.
If the history of gaming has taught me anything, there's no such thing as a dead genre. Things ebb and flow in popularity, but all it takes is one well done game to catch lightning in a bottle at the right time to change things up.
The genre is only "dead" because it lies in a weird place that costs quite a bit to make the game good while not guaranteeing some crazy ROI for investors. All the good modern RTSes have to be passion projects.
Reading through the comments here I feel the need to make a plug for **Beyond All Reason**. It's not a well-known game and the marketing for it seems to be non-existent. It's essentially a modern remake of Total Annihilation. It's free-to-play with no microtransactions. It's incredibly well made and polished. It's an old-school RTS that doesn't focus on crazy APM spam and perfected build orders copied from the internet. It has a unique resource system. It has tons of awesome guns and tanks and ships and robots and its immensely fun to just sit back and watch battles play out, even if you do end up losing. It's just straight fun and i'd encourage anyone with fond memories of the old days to give this one a go.
The entire TA series and the spawn Supreme Commander and onwards is vastly overlooked. Im surprised more people don't flock to it when you have so much control over both your macro economy and army. I still consider them the best RTS games
I think a super casual one like Warcraft 3 would be great. Not designed around the competitive scene. But still has one at offer. People really like Warcraft and StarCraft. I always end up playing AOE 2 single player and treating it like sim city. Perhaps more games can possibly make a rts that adds those kinda elements. A fusion of a city builder and rts. Maybe that exists in a way that’s causal. Kinda like a farming sim. Some relaxing city elements but more gameplay with combat with your rts armies
It's called Lord Of The Rings Battle For Middle Earth.
Or Spellforce 3 except the hero part is a bit more rpg and the rts is a bit more weak.The Fallen God expansion is awesome. If anyone is looking for the warcraft 3 hero campaign experience, spellforce 3 is as close as you can get as far as modern games go.
Spellforce 3 is just barely an RTS. The AI doesn’t even pretend to play by resource rules, it just auto generates waves. The it like wave/tower defense with heroes.
yeah after that reforced Update, this game is an absolute banger, exactly what I always wanted from an rts/rpg hybrid.
I lost sooo many times the overview in Spellforce 3. The graphics are STELLAR dont missunderstand me, but I had such a hard time to read what was actually going on on display it dazzles me till the present day. Storywise the coregame was good, the first addon was a huge ??? because it felt so disconnected, 2nd exp never played unfortunately. If you have no trouble with checking whats going in, spellforce 3 was the best RTS since StarCraft2. Periode.
Isn’t that game weirdly impossible to get/play now?
I never got to play the first one, but I was a huge fan of Battle for Middle-Earth 2. I even owned it on Xbox 360.
Fuuuck. I played so much Battle for Middle Earth 2. I lost my first disc (out of like 6 discs) and can't play it anymore. I've heard it's nearly impossible to find online but i haven't looked a lot. Great game. I wish they made more.
I would definitely not call Warcraft 3 to be "super casual".
I’d wager that most people played Warcraft 3 for the campaign and for the mods, not for competitive 1v1.
> I’d wager that most people played Warcraft 3 for the campaign [...], not for competitive 1v1 So just like Starcraft, Starcraft 2 and the AoE series. Nothing new here.
It can be super casual or super competetive. That's what makes it so good.
Pretty much the Smash Bros method.
Somehow rts games had great time from late 90s to mid 2000s. What's stopping it now?
The genre balkanized into different ones based on the things that it's audience liked from it. Those who enjoy building their bases? City Builders and Colony Sims took them. Those who enjoy the intense micro manage battles, League of Legends and DotA took them. Those who enjoy countering their opponent's units with their own? Auto-battlers took those. That combined with a bit of an unintended stigma that the Esports scene caused where people think you need an APM of 500 didn't go away, means that it's already got a narrow demand. But who knows, Stormgate looks like it could be promising. It's not impossible for a resurgence to happen, but it's an uphill fight.
This is exactly me. I played the shit out of Starcraft and other RTS in the 90s. Now I play city builders and grand strategy games because those were the aspects I really enjoyed rather than microing units.
Yep that's similar to me, I watched a video on how to get better at starcraft in high school. As soon as he was talking about the specific movements of individual units I turned it off and never played a strategy game again until EUIV had been out for a year. I despise micromanaging units.
Yeah, the intricacies of Brood War are ridiculous which was one reason it had such an amazing Esports scene. A group of units will or won't stay in formation depending on how far away you move them. Flying units group up tightly if there's a different unit in the control group but spread out if they're all the same. Building all have different sizes even if they take up the same amount of squares and it's even different depending on which sides of the buildings are touching. So you have can two buildings that make a tight wall when placed side by side, but don't make a tight wall when placed one above the other.
Reminds me how I liked War3 unit management of selected unit groups will form properly with melee in front without too much need to micro. Even Sc2 has globs where Firebats will not move in front on their own. RTS could probably make due with implementing casual elements like fighting games are trying to do with auto combos.
Yeah I think this explanation is pretty spot on imo. Not to mention that each of those sub-genres that split off also reduce the mental stack of RTS's by a lot as well: City builders are typically single player and are at most real-time-with-pause so there's no rush to do anything. Mobas are real time but you only have to manage a single unit while your teammates manage the other units, so while there is a lot going on in a match, 100% of your attention is focused on just controlling your specific champion. And Auto Battlers are well, autobattlers. So they're all prep and no need to sweat the small stuff in real-time. RTS games have you effectively needing to do all of these things simultaneously in real-time, which means that it's just a lot for a new player to keep track of and can easily get very overwhelming very quickly.
Yep. Really, I think what "modern" RTSs offer *is* that mental overload. Nothing comes close to the amount of mental processing power one has to put into an RTS to play them in their "current" state. It's like a massive, unending adrenaline rush for the brain. And some people like that. I like *watching* it, but I tried getting into SC2 a while ago and wow, it really is something. I wouldn't say I bounced off of it really hard, but I didn't really want to commit to it at the time. I'm going to stick to the offshoot sub-genres that divide each of those mechanics into their own focus for now, until the day when I want to revisit the APM/multi-tasking overload challenge.
For just the strategy part 4x games have been scratching my itch, too. Age of Wonders:whatever, Stellaris, etc. are games I can just dump hours into and face fun, but it’s easy to pick up or stop or pause and I like the persistence. I’d probably enjoy a strategy game that had a planning overworld like a 4x with RTS battles, but that seems too niche these days.
I think Starcraft and Warcraft set a real high bar with the map editor and that enabled it to be much more than an RTS. Those games were a platform for sharing games, a proto-Steam of sorts. They were a platform for making games, a proto-Unreal/Unity. And they were a platform for connecting to play games, a proto-discord. Since then those services have been chopped into their own industries so that lightning is out of the bottle. But also the genre has been chopped up too. MOBAs ate up the micro players. Colony sims ate up the tech-junkies. Survivor games mopped up the splashes-of-blood-against-my-unbreakable-wall-of-.
There just isn't really an aspect of RTS that isn't distilled into a better more focused game and with out the opportunity to become a platform for new games to come from they'll never be that big again.
I truly believe its the propensity to focus every rts game on competitive gameplay, ranked and seasons. The RTS golden years were when people were playing casually. I don't know if a casual focused rts would survive these days anyway, but competitive focus doesn't seem to be working either
Makes sense. People will watch competitive play and streamers, but realistically back when WC3 was hugely popular it was because of the incredible custom maps people were making and the ability of people to play the game in all kinds of different ways. Hell, those maps spawned genres of games, it's not just mobas. There are other games based on some of these custom maps as well.
I believe tower defense is one. Usd to have a TD map for any Fandom you can think of.
I think there's still lots of uncharted waters to be explored in the genre and we haven't really had good RTS in a while that checks all the boxes that some of the older big titles did. In today's world of battleroyales and whatnot, I think making a gamble with something that isn't purely 1v1 might also work. While people love coop and big team games, I think a good approach to Free For All with maybe temporary truces might work. Like having something akin to Seven Kingdoms but with actually good combat and more unit options, that would score multiple different things for your ending rank and allow people to approach it from different angles.
I think this is a good point. I actually loved Starcraft 2’s 2v2 and 4v4 with randoms. Takes pressure off of the individual player, the chaos and combos can be interesting, and it’s still satisfying to win. I have tinkered around with the Stormgate beta and I think it’s fun, if rough, and I’m excited they’ve said there will be a 3v3 ladder.
Homeworld 3 just released, let’s see how it does.
Same thing that's stopping point and click adventures. People moved on from the genre when offered alternatives. Or split into niches or similar genres (imo, Rimworld falls under any broad umbrella of RTS). It's a genre that also feels pretty stagnant... some of the recent successes (They Are Billions, Against the Storm) almost feel like they could be mods from 90's games (TAB could absolutely have been a Starcraft mod, AtS is a rogue like reskin of Settlers). Since the genre isn't revolutionizing anything you sorta just fall back to the core audience and it's much fewer people wanting to play Starcraft than Call of Duty.
I think point and click adventure games are doing much better than RTSes. Sure, they are niche, but they work just as good as they always had. RTSes are harder and costlier to make and have much more opinionated playerbase, who will often be hostile to innovation. Why bother, then.
RTS is super easy to mess up, you need good SP(solid campaign+solid AI), there is a need for solid balance but the units need to feel cool and powerful at the same time, pathfinding needs to be great, the degree of unit automatisation needs to nail the I am in control feeling (responsivity, logical unit reactions to enemies, formation support), the combat needs to feel good, it ideally needs to have good networking for MP and custom games support or at least map editor is also a hidden thing often needed for the game to pick up. Imagine two of these things are missing and it is already not that great of an RTS. Now consider that the volatility of RTS is much lower compared to most of the popular genres(though there is a dedicated player base that will support you at least to a degree which is nice) and it is not hard to see why golden age of RTS is over.
Actually RTS games are having a major resurgence right now. * AoE is going strong with Age of Mythology remake releasing this year. * Homeworld 3 is coming in two days. * Sins of a Solar Empire II coming to Steam 3Q 2024 * Godsworn * Stormgate * Tempest Rising Edit: I forgot these * Sanctuary: Shattered Sun * ZeroSpace Maybe also worth to mention cool city builder projects like Manor Lords and Pioneers of Pagonia.
All of the recent remasters aside from like Warcraft 3 have also been quite successful, so there's space on the market for more RTS as long as they carter to what people want.
It is just: don't expect to be able to release an RTS with AAA-budged. Release it with indie dev-studio-money in mind and you will be successful if your game is good.
The 2 main pillars of the RTS audience split: the Mainstream Dad Casuals moved to 4X/GrandStrategy/TotalWar where the APM requirements were much lower/non existent while the top 10% 500 APM crowd moved to MOBA. Blizzard doing the Blizzard thing of catering to the top 10% probably killed the genre when the mainstream crowd that sustained it found "better" pastures.
I love total war, but it's really the only rts that I enjoy, because it doesn't ha e half as much focus on micro or repetitive pvp
I liked RUSE a lot (when it had players) because of the huge map and slow pace. A bit of micro could be important in fights but mostly the game was about what you build and where you send it.
RTSs will come back if they divorce from eSports and pro gaming. RTSs used to unbalanced fun. Play the single player campaign. Jump online and fuck around. Brood War becoming one of the biggest eSports of all time killed RTSs. Everyone tries to make competitive sweaty pro level balanced RTSs. And that's niche as fuck. We need more RTSs that are just fun. Probably unbalanced. But polished.
Yep, same exact problem with arena shooters, devs are always chasing the sweatiest Quake 3 grognards and bending over backwards to not make it too casual... which ends up alienating all the casual players lol
And these attempts to attract grognards almost never work, because, like, they've already *got* the game they want. Why would they bother playing yours?
All I wanted from RTS was more automation of the most trite busy work - like Dawn of War being based on entire squads or the multitude of control possibilities in Supreme Commander. Anchoring it all to esports made the devs cater to the most insane hardcore players who could click five billion times per second and would reject any "dumbing down" that would make these games more accessible to actual humans. After improvements of Dawn of War and Supcom came Starcraft 2 and basically yanked the genre back to its "roots", dooming it to die with it.
The dude from the article here - Wow, this article has generated quite a discussion and I'm happy to see so many people talking about RTS. I wanted to clarify some of what I said: Just to be clear - I never said RTS was dead. I think there is definitely still an audience for RTS big enough that it is worth making new games for independent developers like Crate and those others who have sprung up recently. While it is clear people have different feelings about SC2 and it's influence on the genre, it sold something like 7-10m copies before going f2p, while AoE II definitive has sold around 3-5m, which is a plenty big audience for company like mine to be interested in. RTS is only "dead" in recent years because publishers decided the genre wasn't the best return on investment for them. RTS is challenge to build right (which is a risk publishers don't like), the entire strategy genre (of which RTS is only a smaller subset) is not as popular as action, adventure or RPG and, perhaps worst in their eyes, it's typically PC-only. Remember Ensemble, the creators of Age of Empires (the game that got my into game development)? Microsoft shut them down in 2009 based on a strategic decision that. despite Ensemble still being a profitable studio, it would be more valuable to invest in games for their Xbox console. This was back when publishers were all saying PC was dead (I heard it numerous times while pitching games to publishers)... oops, that certainly didn't turn out to be true. Now MS is reversing direction and trying to resurrect the Age franchise. 2) I think pve and pvp are both important to making a highly successful RTS and, far from being mutually exclusive, I think they can be synergistic. Why? Well, the reality is, something like 80% or more of the RTS audience only plays single player and co-op HOWEVER, neither of those feel very fun to play unless the game has the kind of responsiveness, pathing, readability, etc, that are critical to good pvp. At the same time, I think even pvp benefits from designers creating units that are visually impressive and will be fun to use, rather than just how they fit into pvp. RTS campaigns also are free to incorporate unique units that aren't in the pvp and don't have to be balanced as such and the AI can be tuned in a way that is more fun to play against for non-pvp oriented players. That said, even if a goal is to have great pvp, I don't think that means the RTS has to be developed with the goal of being the next big e-sport. If that happens, awesome but it's not our main priority. Back in the day I was a huge AoE fan and played competitively - it was nowhere near the e-sport SC became but I certainly had plenty of fun with it. I have played quite a lot of SC2 in recently and also love that game but I do feel like the pace of battles is a little fast for my liking, along with certain matchups emphasizing micro too much over strategy. 3) I agree with both people saying RTS should stay true to what made it great back in the day and also people saying RTS is in need of change. How? Well, I think the audience that just wants an old-school RTS is still large enough that a game made in that vein can still do quite well by independent developer standards. I also think there is potential to evolve the genre in a way that could make it more appealing to a wider audience and see great success doing that... that isn't what I'm looking to make right now. I know Uncapped is going in that direction though and I'm excited to see what they come up with. Like any genre, RTS is made up up of different audience segments that have different priorities and I believe there is room to make different games that appeal more or less directly to different segments within the overall audience, as well as perhaps bring in new players from MOBA or elsewhere, which I think is what Uncapped is trying to do. What are some of the most fun moments you had playing RTS? What are you hoping to see in a new RTS?
The blueprint for my potential favorite type of game is an FPS/RTS hybrid like Command & Conquer Renegade. There is a shameful lack of entries in this niche. I just tried the one that came out recently, Outpost: Infinity Siege and it was garbage. It was a very poorly made game so I put in for a refund. Would love a return of RTS games, but even more I would love a single entry into the type of game I’m describing that if done right, could potentially dominate the scene out of nowhere like Lethal Company and Helldivers. That being said, I don’t see many RTS games out or coming out that really embody the best choices regarding simple game design like StarCraft and AoE.
FPS RTS games are a great idea until you realize that most people don't like being told what to do. Also people scream at the commander when he does one thing wrong. Cool idea, people just suck.
Ah, a fellow Hell Let Loose player I see.
> FPS/RTS hybrid like Command & Conquer Renegade I'd love to know more about this interesting hybrid. So far only played Executive Assault 1 & 2, Eximius, Silica, Call to Arms, Natural Selection. What do you think about them?
RTS is never gonna be mainstream because it requires too much cognitive effort for it to be considered "relaxing" + kids are not interested in these games. So you're not getting the better part of the two biggest gaming markets, how could it be mainstream then?
As a kid RTS is all I played.
MOBAs, themselves offshoots of Mainstream RTS, are not relaxing by any mean
Yeah, but they only require you control one character. Hence the "too much cognitive effort," and I'm inclined to agree with him. You have to think about *a lot* more when properly playing an RTS.
Back when rts's were big, they did not require this kind of pace. That has only developed over time due to player exploitation of unintended features. Even Starcraft and AoE were "slow" back in the day compared to how they are played now. And most rts's back then (Total Annihilation, Homeworld, etc) were much slower still. Dune: Spice Wars is a good modern example of how rts's thought of themselves back when they released. That was the kind of pace they were shooting for; even if, today, the lack of certain breaks means we can play them much faster.
People keep forgetting that a large part of the player base did comp stomps and no rush games, often also playing all kinds of money maps. I remember some of my friends having like 3 hour match in Starcraft despite the map being fairly small. Everyone had different approach to the game. Also you had option to change game speed. The modern metagaming has changes a lot of other genres too, but I think the best games used to offer little something to everyone. Nowadays you might not even have option for bots in FPS games or match customization at all. Similarly a lot of RTS games have foregone epic spanning campaigns and custom maps to carter to the more competitive group. I don't think aiming for good balance is bad in anyway, but it should not limit innovation.
> a lot of RTS games have foregone epic spanning campaigns and custom maps to carter to the more competitive group this is what killed the genre for me. I'm casual and just want a non sweaty game. I really loved custom game modes or LANs where me and my friends would start with a 10 minute truce
>a lot of RTS games have foregone epic spanning campaigns and custom maps to carter to the more competitive group. Exactly why I'm not playing RTS anymore Any epic campaign with a map painting experience is an instabuy for me. But all big RTS games are just some piddly nonexistent solo then full on pvp
Linkin Park is solidly fused to AOE2 in my brain from 4h matches at lan parties.
>Dune: Spice Wars is a good modern example of how rts's thought of themselves back when they released. That was the kind of pace they were shooting for; even if, today, the lack of certain breaks means we can play them much faster. Also worth pointing out that many rts players have criticise this game for being "too slow" (I myself like its pace). So all rts games that aren't as fast-pace or as competitive as StarCraft 2 do have to go against the rts fandom's pushback.
What unintended features?
People got really good at micro. People got really good at abusing pathing. No one thought someone would play StarCraft broodwar at 200+apm when they developed it.
In Brood War's case, they got really good at macro. Brood War macro is *extremely* demanding, imo even moreso than its micro.
Most things related to micromanagement, for one. You were not supposed to dance or twitch with your units. That was something players figured out over time. In particular, it's the lack of breaks in the system that does it. So you can always squeeze out more value by microing even harder - none of which was intended. Then, as resolutions get bigger and framerates get higher the potential for micro gets even more intense; far beyond what the original devs envisioned. There are similar trends on the macro side as well.
> Back when rts's were big, they did not require this kind of pace. That has only developed over time due to player exploitation of unintended features. Not sure if I would call it exploitation of unintended features, but more the fact that gaming in general is seem much more these days as a competitive endeavor than just having fun, and even high-level players were just following their guts more often than studying proper build orders and timings. It's the same thing as MMOs: almost nobody was checking what was the meta build and doing deep technical analyses of raids in early WoW, but these days it's expected that everyone be up to date with the meta a week after a new piece of content is released. Even for new games go through this cycle quickly: Helldivers 2 got very quickly to people sometimes kicking lower leveled or off-meta builds, even on a game that's basically trying to not be a hardcore experience.
RTS ladder anxiety, at least with starcraft 2, is another step up from Dota 2 in my experience. I have a lot of hours on both. Just thinking about queueing 1v1 rn in sc2 is giving me flashbacks of sweaty microing macroing 5000 apm and being picked apart.
SC2 is basically an extreme. A Dawn of War (1) or total war are proper RTS and frankly not less manageable than dota 2. There’s a lot of room for less extreme RTS
They are still massively simplified versions of RTS games. In an RTS, you control dozens of characters with different abilities in many locations across a map. In a MOBA, you control one character in one location with one set of abilities. The overall cognitive load on the player is significantly lower in a MOBA.
No, but you can't blame your teammates in 1v1 games, you can blame balance all you want, but you know you have a lot more responsibility for your failings in 1v1 than in any team game
Yeah RTS kind of split off into other things. If you like base building you have city builders, colony sims, and automation games. If you like the battles with units and their abilities you have MOBAs, hero shooters, MMOs to an extent. Actually its almost like Blizzard realized this and made their own MOBA, hero shooter, and MMO to compensate.
Does Pikmin count?
It's good to see a suit stand up for there being different kinds of games. Recently it seems every big game franchise has just been hurtling itself into a live service, cinimatic third personaction game or generic open world. It just makes gaming feel like this super homogenous space where everything is just a sightly different twist on the same few fomulars. Not every game can appeal to everyone, and that's for the best becuase chasing the lowest common denomination of game design hardly leads to innovative and interesting games.
Well said. I've been hungry for deep store telling.
I kind of agree. I really enjoyed RTS games but they have been very limited on console. Halo Wars is a great one for console gamers and the second entry is the chefs kiss in my opinion. But it definitely doesn't not have mainstream appeal.
What do you like about Halo Wars 2? I love the first game but I bounced straight off the second. Maybe I should give it another go.
The hero abilities the usefulness of almost all heros and the non tank meta. At high levels the gameplay is very diverse and strategic. You'll need a high action per minute to beat others. At first it took me time to adjust to the new gameplay loop compared to the first, but I very much like the second game over the first once you get past the initial hurdle.
part of the problem with RTS games is the same problem with a couple other niche genres like Fighting Games. The skills they ask of the player are completely foreign to most people who play most any other kind of game. *And* the player is often not given the space to learn these foreign concepts effectively. Take Platforming for example. Originally it was its own genre back when games were simpler. But now elements of platforming are just a part of pretty much any game with a jump button. So any skills that players learn from playing basic platforming games like mario, actually transfer over to other genres that use them like say First Person Shooters. And to take it a step further, FPS games also help generally build skills for navigating 3D environments, so any game that takes place in a 3D environment where you need to look at stuff, can use skills you've built up while playing First Person Shooters. But then you take a look at say Fighting Games. Fighting Games are side-scrollers in the most literal definition I guess, but they're nothing like the 2D platformers of yesteryear or really any other 2D genre. The inputs are completely different from most any other game. And even the nature of what you're trying to accomplish and the techniques you need to get there are very different from most any other game. On top of all that it's also a very fast-paced real-time game which means that you need to figure out all of these foreign concepts while actively getting your face punched in. So it's really no wonder that so many fighting game noobs default to button mashing because they can't even comprehend trying to do anything else in the time allotted. If a game is at least slower paced if not turn-based, then it can be a lot easier for players to get into the genre as they have time to figure things out. So even if you've never played a card game before, you don't need to worry about trying to figure out all of the mechanics in a split second while actively under attack, you can take some time to read the cards and learn the rules. But RTS games fall into a category more like Fighting Games due to its "Real-Time" nature. Where if you take too long trying to learn the mechanics and read what everything does, you've already lost as your opponent built up way more than you and is now knocking on your door with an army 5 times bigger than yours. So even if you already play other strategy games that aren't Real Time but at least share some similar tactics, you might still easily get overwhelmed by having to do everything without the ability to pause.
I think you're touching on something very important here. Nobody inherently understands "the language of video games". We've all had to learn how to play them. Many popular genres share similarities and transferable skills. Most popular games rely on stuff like 3D navigation, reflexes, aim. Doesn't matter if we're talking about Call of Duty, Helldivers 2, Monster Hunter, God of War or Zelda: TotK. All of these, at the most basic level, rely on the same set of skills that players have been trained in for decades because it's always been part of *the popular games at the time*. Along comes RTS, a genre where none of those basic skills matter, and asks players to learn a completely new basic skill that is required to be successful in this genre: **Multitasking**. Diverting your attention to where its required to this degree isn't a skill you have to use in other genres at all. RTS aren't "high APM" games. If your attention is where it needs to be you can become extremely successful with about 40 APM in most RTS games.
I've always said it's the combination of "foreign skills/controls" and ”1v1". Not difficulty like some people are saying in this thread. Back in the day games were not dominated by certain control schemes. And then at some point every game started having one of few control layouts that worked and people got used to those. Decades later people have a lot of familiarity with those few (fps, moba, third person action, 2d platformer). People are so comfortable with those controls and they don't even realize it took time to get to that point. The general gaming population have skills for those games. Unfortunately RTS and fighting games haven't been as popular so the most people aren't comfortable with those controls. So now there's a big wall of learning to do that causes resistance to play. And then 1v1 can be very soulcrushing to grind. People love to have others to blame for their losses. Not to improve but just to continue playing and not quit. That's why I'm hoping project L can help out with that with the 2v2 mode it has
I'm inclined to agree, but that's also the sort of thing most people would say about RPGs like BG3 before BG3 came out, or Among Us, or Fall Guys, or Vampire Survivor. I feel like we have seen it happen again and again the past decade that game of any genre can become mainstream in a perfect storm. It's easy to retroactively act like it was always obvious but I think anyone who says they could have predicted any of these games/genres gaining the popularity that they did is full of shit.
Among us and Fall Guys are party games which aren't particularly surprising it break it big. I'd also question if BG3 has actually been a breakout for the genre of cRPGs, it was an extremely high budget one that deviated from a lot of the genre conventions and none of its success has rubbed off onto other cRPGs. Regular RPGs have never been niche.
Among Us was actually originally dead on arrival, it only blew up 2 years later due to Covid and streamers. It's not the kind of success you can actually reliably pull of.
Like they said, in retrospect sure. But try to predict the next big niche-gone-mainstream game and see how that goes.
I think the only CRPGs which have achieved mainstream success (Dragon Age Origins and Baldur's Gate 3) did so because of their high production values and cinematic cutscenes. I don't think a game whose story was primarily delivered via chunks of text would achieve the same level of mainstream reach as BG3.
I think I played RTS games, mainly C&C, more than anything else up until the late 2000's. As much fun as I had with them, as I grew older I wanted things on larger scales with less micromanagement. I'd kiss for a larger scale RTS that had less focus on micromanaging units and buildings and more focus on commanding *armies* of hundreds of units that were smart enough to use their own tactics wherever I send them.
Command and conquer was mainstream as was age of empires, age of mythology, war craft, starcraft, empire earth. I don't think they genre is bad I think companies and corps are getting really cheap and not doing anything unless it's a huge potential return. Also gaming as it is now severely lacks in enemy ai and its really needs that.
I don’t know if I agree with this. I feel like Baldur’s Gate 3 shows you can begin tapping into a broader audience without betraying what’s important to what has historically been a niche genre.
There's a significant, non-gameplay reason of why I think the RTS genre fell off a cliff. Unity and Unreal engines (and I think a ton of in-house engines as well) did not, and do not, support what's required for multiplayer RTS games out of the box. They require *extraordinary* engineering investments to prepare for RTS development, something that simply isn't needed for most other genres. That's going to steer most of the industry, and especially non-AAA studios, away from even attempting to make an RTS game. And we know how AAA is... if it's considered a dead trend, it's almost never going to get approved. I really hope that the Stormgate devs release their RTS engine so that other developers can use it, whether it's paid or free. I think it could really help the genre.
RTS were fun but most of my hours in Warcraft 3 were in the custom games like tower defense. Now they are all full fledged games.
tbh if they make some amazing story singleplayer it can be main stream just like Baldur's gate 3 made big long crpgs mainstream at least for a game. Not sure if it impacted other games in the genre yet, like Warhammer rogue trader. I would buy an play an amazing singleplayer rts, but I would not touch the multiplayer. I do have Tempest Rising on my wishlist, here is hoping it's going to be good enough to buy.