What has happened to the RTS genre?

[D_West]

Starcraft happened. It beat the competition pretty badly, and has been on top ever since.

 

[Sir Shockwave]

It's a problem caused by the gamers and the industry.

On the one hand, the industry regards it as a second rate genre. It's something overlooked, like Puzzle and Point-and-Click Adventure games, despite games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent having success in some capacity. A few (like Achon) try some new weird mechanics, but it simply doesn't work or revolutionise the genre. Attempts of this type started back with Universe at War and SunAge (to the best of my knowledge), but to date neither have been successful either though any combination of Balance Issues, Executive Meddling or even Bugs.

On the other hand, Gamers are severly hampering it. As soon as you mention "no base building, no resource management", the average RTS player WILL fly off the handle, and in nine out of ten cases won't even have tried playing the game in question, by Demo, Beta Testing or even Renting it. The examples that come to mind are Dawn of War II and Command & Conquer 4 - for the record, I regard Dawn of War II as the one that did it better, though C&C 4 had some good ideas to move things forwards (the Crawlers were a good idea - on paper. In practice, there was barely any differance between the "classes").

So really, the entire genre is getting raped by both the Industry and the Players. I wouldn't be too surprised if the Genre simply implodes in the years to come.

PS: I also take it nobody has played or tried RTS's SubGenres, like DOTA or Tower Defence?

 

[Nouw]

is company of heroes 2 really happening? if so then i will shit in my pants, the first one is probs a very close second to my fav RTS of all time

Yes it is but it's not even in development yet. It's still in the 'creative' proccess.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

And don't forget SCII which is a genuine RTS gem

It's a glorified Starcraft expansion. It's good because starcraft is good.
It's NOT a gem. It does nothing new. I'm not saying it's bad, you'd be stupid to think I was. it's a solid RTS game but it has no innovation. Oh, and the story isn't on par with the original's either. That isn't to say that the campaign is bad. It's not; the campaign's gameplay is fine, but the story that the campaign tells is not good.

DoWII: Retribution was a masterpiece. Sure, it had a single campaign but you could choose to play it as Space Marines, Chaos Marines, Eldar, Imperial Guard, Orks or Tyranids. Each had their own characters, units, gear and motivations for hunting down Kyras but I never actually got bored of playing the same missions with completely different races.

Yes, every campaign is almost exactly the same. Oh and don't forget they didn't make a single new map for it; The entire campaign uses maps from chaos rising.
The multiplayer, where a game's balance shows itself is also horribly broken. If you're not Chaos they you're NOT going to win. At all.
Lastly, Memory leaks. Not as bad as the original DOWII, but they are there.

And I never found Supreme Commander to be any good either.

Depends; SupCom Vanilla or Supcom Forged Alliance. Each has its own, different, problems.
They are good RTS games though, even from a solely mechanical perspective. I mainly love them for the scale and that sexy, sexy user interface. No other RTS game has an interface that good.


The highlight of recent RTS games for me has been R.U.S.E even though you can smell the console on it it's a new, solid RTS game with a nice twist. Unfortunately the PC version's community was brutally murdered by Valve Anti-Cheat.

Really though, I think the problem is twofold:
FPS is dominant at the moment. It creates a positive feedback loop. Devs make FPS games, these games sell, people like them, data is collected, better FPS games are made, FPS development kits are created to make it easier for other developers to make FPS games, so more FPS games are made, more data is collected, FPS games are shown to be profitable, so on, so forth. There are less devs making other games.

Second part is publishers and developers wanting games to "appeal to a wider audience." What this ends up doing is dumbing down games so the RTS fans don't want to play it, but it's still too much for the casual market. The end result is that the game doesn't have much appeal to any intended core audience. Even though I like the game, I will admit RUSE has a foot in this trap-filled field.

This is in relation to Dawn of War 2.

Really I don't remember Chaos being overpowered in Retribution now I haven't played multiplayer for about 4 months but they were never a big threat to me. I play Eldar. In fact I beat a good few Chaos players who said that Eldar were imba just because I managed to beat them without them successfully keeping a Vicotry point as they only got about 20 points. That said I did lose to Chaos as well but I never felt wow this fuckers imba.

 

[Zack Alklazaris]

Empire Earth was my favorite, but even that ones pretty much gone too.
I sense an untapped market. Someone might make good money creating an "proper" RTS.

 

[MammothBlade]

Heh, I like how this thread has turned out, everyone has pretty valid points.

It's like anything else, it ebbs and it flows.
Maybe once RTS is released on the consoles...and sales...it'll make a resurgence.

At least you're not a 4X player.
Crap bro, it sucks.

I play some 4X too. Galactic Civs, Civilization, Alpha Centauri... then there is an overlap with games such as Total War and Paradox grand strategy, which kind of fall into a class of their own.

Admittedly, Anno 2070 looks interesting... but I'm not sure where that falls.

Empire Earth was my favorite, but even that ones pretty much gone too.
I sense an untapped market. Someone might make good money creating an "proper" RTS.

The problem with Empire Earth, I think, is that it's built to a low standard. Not sure about the first, but 2 had terrible pathfinding and awkward voiceovers, amongst other things. I enjoy playing it, but there is considerable room for improvement.

And... that awful monstrosity Empire Earth 3, that's very much part of the problem. *shudder*

As a side note - I love your avatar.

Yuno Gasai says thanks

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Yes, every campaign is almost exactly the same. Oh and don't forget they didn't make a single new map for it; The entire campaign uses maps from chaos rising.
The multiplayer, where a game's balance shows itself is also horribly broken. If you're not Chaos they you're NOT going to win. At all.
Lastly, Memory leaks. Not as bad as the original DOWII, but they are there.

Bullshit and you know it. Retribution uses the same PLANETS as Chaos Rising (since you know, it's the same place), but none of the maps are from the Chaos Rising campaign.

 

[Worgen]

In short, consoles happened, you cant make rts games for consoles, it just doesn't really work so publishers decided to just make more fps games.

I had commander and conquer red alert on the PS1

Oh they still tried to make rts games on consoles but they never worked anywhere near as well as they do on the pc and gamers know that so they tend to sell pretty poorly on consoles.

 

[Zipa]

Check out matrix games, they have some great RTS games like Distant Worlds. I think they are available via Gamersgate to now.
Also Paradox have some good RTS and turn based strategy games available.

 

[bobmus]

All the classics like Age of Empires are things like browser-based games now, which is obviously better because it's way more 'social'. /sarcasm

 

[veloper]

What happened with the genre was that there's alot of perfectly good (old) RTSes on the market already and there's only 2 options for a developer left:

1. Do the standard old RTS, but with new graphics. This is the approach Blizzard took with SC2. It works (millions of sales from existing fanbase and at full price).

2. Try something new and risk disappointing fans of the old. Then you either get a reduction like Relic did (COH and DOW2) or you get non-RTS material added, like Stardock did with SOSE. This also works and caters to a different subsection of the market.

Pick your poison.

 

[Hargrimm]

Really, I'm disappointed at the state of RTS today.

Once upon a time games such as Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Warcraft, and Command & Conquer under Westwood, were staples of RTS. They had a great feel to them. Quite a few had decent campaigns balanced with multiplayer. They had some depth, a wide variety of units, but were also reasonably accessible to newcomers. It seems as if RTS has become a much more competitive, elitist affair, everything is neurotically balanced out, a lot of online RTS communities are very hostile to newcomers or less competent players, more so than others - though nothing has changed there, but elitism seems to be built into game mechanisms this time. Some former RTS series have turned into real-time tactics. Tiberian Twilight, how is that even C&C anymore without base-building? Or Dawn of War II, that was a massively disappointing change.

World in Conflict was ok, but I enjoyed Command & Conquer Generals far more whilst my copy was still functional.

If you are looking for something with more emphasis on strategy and less on tacics I would recommend the grand strategy games from Paradox Interactive, specifically Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis III, Victoria II and Hearts of Iron III with all their various expansions. Most of them can be bought in bundles with their expansions for cheap on steam or on amazon(or just order directly from PI).

Although I must warn you that they are pretty spartan in their presentation, because you are playing on a worldmap only.(think total war series without the real time battles, but more in-depth economy and diplomacy)
Also they can be overwhelming in detail for newcomers, so you will need some time to get the hang of it, but once you do, they play very smoothly.

There are even fanmade savegame converters that let you import your savegame from a game that takes place in an earlier timeperiod.

trust me there is nothing more statisfying than playing an epic 900+ year campaign starting from CrusaderKings all the way to Hearts of IronIII.
It will probably take about a year to complete, but oh man is it worth it.

EDIT: If you are looking for other suggestions go to the forums on tacticular cancer, they can help you better than me. Though be warned, it's a rough place and you'll probably get insulted for your taste in games, but the people there really know their strategy games.(and for gods sake avoid general discussion)

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

well for me personally, i NEVER play rts's online, i hate 1 v 1's and i hate how overly competitive it gets, so for me i stuck to campaigns 100% of the time, and until age of empire 4 comes out or if empire earth makes a comeback, i probably won't be touching rts's...ever, just never liked any other one that i've played, and it took way too much time before anything became fun.

granted after all that, i will say i do miss playing rts's...*off to play empire earth*

 

[MammothBlade]

Really, I'm disappointed at the state of RTS today.

Once upon a time games such as Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Warcraft, and Command & Conquer under Westwood, were staples of RTS. They had a great feel to them. Quite a few had decent campaigns balanced with multiplayer. They had some depth, a wide variety of units, but were also reasonably accessible to newcomers. It seems as if RTS has become a much more competitive, elitist affair, everything is neurotically balanced out, a lot of online RTS communities are very hostile to newcomers or less competent players, more so than others - though nothing has changed there, but elitism seems to be built into game mechanisms this time. Some former RTS series have turned into real-time tactics. Tiberian Twilight, how is that even C&C anymore without base-building? Or Dawn of War II, that was a massively disappointing change.

World in Conflict was ok, but I enjoyed Command & Conquer Generals far more whilst my copy was still functional.

If you are looking for something with more emphasis on strategy and less on tacics I would recommend the grand strategy games from Paradox Interactive, specifically Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis III, Victoria II and Hearts of Iron III with all their various expansions. Most of them can be bought in bundles with their expansions for cheap on steam or on amazon(or just order directly from PI).

Although I must warn you that they are pretty spartan in their presentation, because you are playing on a worldmap only.(think total war series without the real time battles, but more in-depth economy and diplomacy)
Also they can be overwhelming in detail for newcomers, so you will need some time to get the hang of it, but once you do, they play very smoothly.

There are even fanmade savegame converters that let you import your savegame from a game that takes place in an earlier timeperiod.

trust me there is nothing more statisfying than playing an epic 900+ year campaign starting from CrusaderKings all the way to Hearts of IronIII.
It will probably take about a year to complete, but oh man is it worth it.

EDIT: If you are looking for other suggestions go to the forums on tacticular cancer, they can help you better than me. Though be warned, it's a rough place and you'll probably get insulted for your taste in games, but the people there really know their strategy games.(and for gods sake avoid general discussion)

I do play Paradox games, actually. EUIII, Victoria II, Hearts of Iron II, I love them. However, they are grand strategy which are much closer to the duration and mechanics of a turn-based game. They are not what I have in mind when I mean classical RTS, which balance tactics and strategy quite well.

 

[Zanaxal]

Get Starcraft 2, it has the biggest community, livestreams and proscene of rts. Also if your bad you get to play with equally bad ppl always and vice versa.

Companies seems to be obsessed with reinventing the wheel with rts's now days. Trying to change it into some Rpg squads game. Probably dumbing down for console is a major factor here.

Teamgames in rts has always been a bad idea.

Just wait when starcraft 2 becomes a massive success your gonna see the hundreds of want to be starcraft clones like that of what World of Warcraft spawned.

 

[boag]

Well theres that Gameof Thrones RTS that is going to come out soon.

and why hasnt anyone mentioned Europa Universalis?

 

[F4LL3N]

I seriously cannot wait for a good RTS to come out, not that my computer could handle a new generation RTS. RTS is what I miss most after turning into a console gamer.

Age of Empire 1, 2 and 3 with every expansion except number 3's (only played the demo of number 3's expansion).

Command & Conquer Generals and Tiberium Wars.

Rise of Nations/Legends.

Company of Heroes (Best battle system ever/maps(destructable buildings), but poor base building and resource collecting).

I also remember an old Star Wars RTS that I played about a year ago. Plus more, but I can't remember right now. I tried Sumpreme Commander 2 on the console, didn't like it. Never a big fan of Starcraft/Warcraft/DoW2, etc.

RTS is one genre that should have never died down. If only someone used their brain and came up with something new and original I bet it'd come back into popularity. I have no interest in playing one on a console. It's not a console genre. It's one of the few genres that should never be put on a console.

 

[MammothBlade]

and why hasnt anyone mentioned Europa Universalis?

It has been mentioned, a few posts above yours =/

I did like Supreme Commander's epic scale and massive variety of units, but it seems to suffer from the same balance obsession that other games do. Plus it has a tech tier system which proves to be quite... annoying and restrictive.

RTS is one genre that should have never died down. If only someone used their brain and came up with something new and original I bet it'd come back into popularity. I have no interest in playing one on a console. It's not a console genre. It's one of the few genres that should never be put on a console.

I have plenty of ideas. Now give me £10 million so I can create a masterpiece.

 

[boag]

and why hasnt anyone mentioned Europa Universalis?

It has been mentioned, a few posts above yours =/

I did like Supreme Commander's epic scale and massive variety of units, but it seems to suffer from the same balance obsession that other games do. Plus it has a tech tier system which proves to be quite... annoying and restrictive.

Agh, I got ninjad.

Well glad to see someone mentioned it.