Whatever happened to the Triple-A strategy game?

[Atmos Duality]

Strategy games has always been a kind of niche and some companies excepted this generation has turned away from niche titles. PC has become more relevant then ever so I believe its only a matter of time before new strategy games come out.

"Always niche?"
No, not really. There was a time when strategy games were pretty big. Gaming was a smaller place back then, so in that sense they could be considered "more niche". But relative to gaming itself? Hell no.

The genre had a peak period in the late 90s through early oughts (like most of old PC); Back when Blizzard still made actual games rather than mindless grinders and always online digital flypaper.

Their earlier entries, (Warcraft 3 and Starcraft esp) were IMMENSELY POPULAR back in their day and not even remotely "niche" for their time. League of Legends (and the entire MOBA genre) owes its existence to Warcraft 3's popularity alone, since the original DOTA started as a map for WC3.

Beyond that, there were far more strategy games being produced around that time, including those that are very VERY niche (show of hands: who actually remembers Mech Commander and Metal Fatigue without resorting to Google-fu? Thought so.)

After that...well, consoles started hitting their peak, and you couldn't put RTSes onto console very easily.
Today, all AAA does is milk the same 3-4 winning blockbuster formulas and their minor variants over and over.
If strategy were still a major genre, you'd see it suffering from the same self-derivative degenerating process everything else suffers from AAA these days.

 

[DoPo]

I'd say that Strategy games fell out the mainstream sometime around the shut down of Westwood studios and in the time between the release of Starcraft 1 and 2.

Isn't SC still pretty big in East Asia, though? Sure, not that mainstream as far as the more western world is concerned but still not dead.

I don't know how popular Warcraft 3 was back then, but I felt that it gave rise to a new genre (The hero focused action strategy that would become MOBAs) rather than extend the mainstream life of Strategy games.

This:

Their earlier entries, (Warcraft 3 and Starcraft esp) were IMMENSELY POPULAR back in their day and not even remotely "niche" for their time. League of Legends (and the entire MOBA genre) owes its existence to Warcraft 3's popularity alone, since the original DOTA started as a map for WC3.

Not only was DotA born back then and it popularised an entire new genre, but others had it pretty good, too:

- the tower defence, as a whole, I'd say was as popular as DotA, if not more. The TD maps were swarming the custom games. Moreover, TD received somewhat of a makeover, too - introducing heroes in it. Nowadays we have Dungeon Defenders, Orcs Must Die, and Deathtrap (among others) that do the same thing but WC 3 custom maps were there before - even if the concept wasn't invented in a Warcraft custom map, it certainly gained A LOT of popularity there.

- to expand on MOBA - the term is mostly applied to DotA/LoL style of play but there were a lot of other maps that could fit the MOBA label even though the had nothing to do with DotA (or Aeons of Strife and the other ancestors of that). Those were the "Hero Arenas" - you pick a hero and fight other players, usually deathmatch or team deathmatch. The legacies of that are still around in games like Nosgoth and the upcoming Blizzard game Overwatch incorporate the reason why these were popular. Sure, there aren't as many games that take after the hero arena style but it only baffles me why - my guess is because the concept is similar to DotA and DotA was more popular. And it's a great mistake if that's the case.

- asymmetric multiplayer (think Evolve) - not actually as massively popular, but the maps that employed it tended to be well liked. And with good reason - is is fun. If you don't know what I mean, here is an example: one map I remember well had most players take the role of vilagers and one was a vampire. The idea was simple - the vilagers had pretty much nothing and the vampire had powers and could actually fight and so on - the vamp had to kill everybody else. Sounds boring, perhaps, but it was loads of fun to play as either

More offtopic, there were two other genres in custom maps which were quite popular and I just can't figure out why they didn't catch on:
- Footman Frenzy - alright, I actually haven't played it[footnote]well, only, like, twice, and I didn't really do anything there[/footnote] and I'm not too familiar with what the actual objectives were aside from the map being team based (two teams, I think) and...there being footmen in it. At any rate it was huge - while TDs did rival DotA, they did it as a collection of all maps under that banner[footnote]though there were some vastly more popular than others[/footnote], while Footman Frenzy did it as a single map.

- hero/line defence - it's similrar to TD but there are no towers. Some of these were called "line defence" because you literally pick a hero and go defend one line. In general it's "pick a hero and defend against hordes of creatures" - but while "hero defence" is more appropriate but, to my knowledge, it was less used term. At any rate, the genre existed and it was quite popular - not to the magnitude of DotA/FF/TDs but it was still popular. And it never really caught on. The closest I've seen to this in recent years was a Dota 2 limited event (the Wraith King one). I suppose it is similar to both ARPGs and hero based TDs, hence why it may not have been picked up, but it had a different niche and it was pretty good at it, too.

Bottom line - WC 3 was not only big itself, it also managed to popularise other games and even genres. It was so big, we can still see the ripples it left more than a decade ago.

 

[sXeth]

Has there ever been a triple A strategy game? That is to say, has there ever been an RTS with as bloated a budget and novelty focused design as main stream triple A fare? I don't think so. Most strategy games actually has effort put into their design.

Command & Conquer was pretty hefty in its time, with actual actors in cutscenes and stuff. While not necessarily simple, it was also definately the more basic, semi-spammy alternative to Warcraft/Starcraft's increasing micromanagement tendencies. WC/SC themselves would generally be considered AAA. Although it didn't necessarily have the glitzy cutscenes or storyline focus, Age of Empires would also have to be considered AAA, I'd think.

But yes, for a window of time in the late 90s/very early 00s, those 3 titles were so ubiquitouss and main stream you could buy the box sets in chain bookstores or at Costco, you didn't even have to venture into some real game store.


The other obvious one, as mentioned, is consoles. Xbone and PS4 won't handle it well without plugging in KB/M (at which point, you may as well be on PC, and I'm not sure either can support mouse). Wii-U can actually do RTS reasonably well (play Pikmin 3), but will never get the titles from third parties.

 

[Mutant1988]

Command & Conquer was pretty hefty in its time, with actual actors in cutscenes and stuff. While not necessarily simple, it was also definately the more basic, semi-spammy alternative to Warcraft/Starcraft's increasing micromanagement tendencies. WC/SC themselves would generally be considered AAA. Although it didn't necessarily have the glitzy cutscenes or storyline focus, Age of Empires would also have to be considered AAA, I'd think.

But yes, for a window of time in the late 90s/very early 00s, those 3 titles were so ubiquitouss and main stream you could buy the box sets in chain bookstores or at Costco, you didn't even have to venture into some real game store.

Those really were different times. Not even sure if today's concept of Triple-A would be applicable in any capacity back then. But I suppose those might be as close as it got. Good games still though, to this day, even if Starcraft isn't really my cup of tea (Too fast, too much micro-management).

I just don't think a bloated budget, rushed development and marketing departments, as is the standard for Triple-A these days, would do Strategy games any good.

Good games are still being made though, and probably precisely because they aren't Triple-A.

 

[Bad Jim]

Good games are still being made though, and probably precisely because they aren't Triple-A.

Lol that's pretty true.

Actually I can think of quite a few strategy games that were released after 2000 that did really badly, and not all of them deserved it. Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Sacrifice, Hostile Waters, Battle Realms, Heroes of Might and Magic 4 etc.

One problem I guess is it's hard for suits to recognise a bad game. They look at a shooter, they see it looks good, has a decent story, and any problems with the game mechanics they don't see probably won't sink the game. But strategy games live or die on their game mechanics, it takes a lot of playing to understand them, and it's also quite subjective whether a mechanic is good or bad.