What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
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I'm not saying C&C:Generals was a bad game - it was quite popular - but from design point of view it was a Starcraft clone. They abandoned the old, quirky Dune2/C&C design with low count, remote harvesters, multiple factories which only sped up the rate of production, instantly deployed buildings, instant selling etc. These things had some flaws, but also advantages, and most importantly - they resulted in a different experience. I think C&C: Red Alert 2 was the high point of that design. Optimal action speed, counters that weren't too hard, varied units.
But they made it too realistic so the gameplay and units were really slow so games can get long and boring after a while.
Kane as a character holds a place in my heart and memory, as does Tiberium. Soundtracks and cut scenes were great too.
May I enjoy this block of Memory Lane as much as I am able.
Of all the RTS games from C&C, RA2 was my favorite. Tiberium Sun was just a stone throw before my time, so when I played it, I was missing all the new elements from RA2. It's no fault of TS, just that I have already been "spoilt" by that time...
Tiberium Wars was also pretty nice, though I only played some LAN skirmishes with friends, never the campaign. But from the looks of things, it was the last "real" RTS in the C&C series. The latest two RTS installments, RA3 and the last Tiberium one, already forgot what it's called, were just trash, IMHO. In the latter, the publisher (EA?) was obviously trying to kill two birds with one stone, i.e. make a game for both PC and mobile markets, and C&C was the guinea pig brought in. Obviously, the publisher had no idea what C&C is about and where its true value lies. That's some pretty bad management, actually, but that publisher is known for treating their consumers like replaceable goods, completely neglecting any artistic value a game might have and the therefore resulting fan-base/community like consumer-behaviour.
Give it a try both Mobile and pc can install it a.k.a cross platform
> Rusted Warfare is an fully featured RTS inspired by classic real-time strategy games such as Total Annihilation and Command and Conquer.
> A pure RTS with no microtransactions and no DRM, Online and offline multiplayer over wifi and mobile networks
and is rated 4.8 in the android store. As someone who has trouble finding games that aren't shitware in app stores, this looks genuinely worth looking into and on topic.
What happened is that players have become better, better, better. Same as in WoW. It is due to documentation and theorycrafting being more widely available.
That, and the MOBA genre, is what happened to RTS. Multi-player game is also more difficult to pirate, and allows for a cash shop due to vanity items. Means RIP single player. And multi-player RTS is very competitive ie. not casual-friendly. It is not forgiving either.
And still, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation et al were not so long ago.
And OpenRA itself has been somewhat of a success.
BTW, C&C has a Red Alert reboot coming out before too long. It will be classic in design.
Out of curiosity, in what ways in particular did they do this?
I think one of the largest changes I noticed was an increase in the hardness of counters as well as an increase in the APM necessary to properly wield certain units.
For the first point, in SC1, if I had suboptimal army composition against my opponent, I would likely lose any battles that ensued unless my tactics were quite superior- but I'd likely due some damage in the process, at least. In contrast, in SC2, it always felt like a failure to properly anticipate army makeup would frequently lead to completely lopsided battles where my force might be completely annihilated without doing measurable damage to the opponent.
This was aggravated by the second point. I'm not a professional player and my APM has never been amazing, and I'm fine with that. But the more complex required army composition put a higher emphasis on APM and in-battle tactics, especially with heterogenous forces and units, like blink stalkers, that really benefit from very high levels of micro. I'll be the first to admit that, when watching replays, the things that skilled players could pull off in SC2 was pretty amazing to see- but that didn't really help my playing experience.
There result was a game that felt significantly more frustrating than SC1, even if my win/loss ratio wasn't actually all that different.
Whether the counters are harder, I don't have enough knowledge to say.
I put SC2 down and never picked it back up after playing the third timed mission in a row.
Supreme Commander dealt with this by having genuinely large maps and resource flow rather than a fixed amount of resources. If you tried to "rush" someone or go after their resources, you generally ran into units a level higher and got annhilated.
I don't think any RTS game will be able to deal with this naturally, only by adding rules like NR20 or even NR40 can you avoid early aggression and turtle in peace, and even then the winning strategy will always be to expand as aggressively as possible and to defend with units instead of static defenses.
People don’t want to play long online games though, so they don’t set up maps with enough resources to play for hours.
I would argue that they bifurcated into "optimized for esports" and "optimized for whale revenue".
I have played quite a few RTS-like games on mobile which were cool and neat and it was fun to optimize for not spending money. Of course, when whales get beat by players with skill, the whales get angry. So, the games optimize out skill except at the pro levels--which very quickly makes for a really crappy game experience for the rank and file.
> And still, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation et al were not so long ago.
Planetary Annihilation is an abomination that does not belong in that list. And PA is a prime example of trying to optimize for e-sports and forgetting that you need a decent game at the core.
One reason I think I was drawn to the warcraft/starcraft custom games when I was younger was that it just seemed too much effort (and kind of tedious) to get "good" at the main game. Goofing about with strange maps seemed more attractive.
IMHO best strategy game! Good old days...
Probably a strong reason why there isn't much competition - why build a new game, when you can weave less competitive mechanics on top of an existing engine and game universe that already has fans?
I suspect I’m quoting a post I read on gamasutra. Very good site for those interested in game industry anecdotes.
I think some people on reddit argued that this happened with fortnite, and was part of why Apex Legends got so popular; the casuals that liked to pvp got driven out by the experts and tried to start again in a new game.
I find this to be a really interesting point. Many people would ask why they are playing a PvP game in the first place, if they're not interested in competing. I think it makes a lot of sense though, because they're not actually all that interested in playing against players. They just want more of a human-like challenge than what AI can provide. The only option there is to play against other players.
The AI in most games is utterly banal and predictible, and as soon as you go past the easy or medium settings it cheats ruthlessly. Of the big recent ones (StarCraft 2, Company of Heroes 2), it's been a very disappointing experience.
For SC2, it just keeps rushing you, so you end up turtling until the AI runs out of resources.
For CoH2, again it just constantly rushes you with much better stuff that you can afford. CoH2 is actually really annoying as you can never afford anything, and so don't get to play with different units, you're always seem to end up playing the same composition.
What this means is that every game is virtually the same, you're just trying to establish a line, wait until the computer runs out of something (or uses the artifical unit cap for stupid things, effectively running out of an army), and then you roll them.
The only game I remember with a little variance was Dawn of War 2.
Maybe co-op Vs AI is something they just don't care about, but it feels as if it's got worse over time, becoming extremely predictable.
This meant that subterfuge and concealing your intentions was legitimately a huge part of the strategy - if you intentionally let the AI see a lot of a certain kind of unit and then build a different kind of strategy, you'd often see success, but because of the way the AI strategised it could sometimes meet you head on with an unexpected surge because it briefly saw you building up from an unspotted recon unit hiding somewhere.
Ultimately it is relatively easy to defeat with a little experience, but I still several years later occasionally boot it up with a friend to try and beat the hard AI 2v4 - we've only managed a handful of times, and the experience of slowly being whittled down back to back is a great experience to have in a friendship
I recall a LAN party where we used two mods, one for the field of view (2x wider), and increased the unit cap (again, by 2x).
It made for some pretty epic (and laggy) games.
Blizzard went off the rails by dumbing down WoW steadily over ten years, appealing to the lowest common demoninator. Modern WoW is boring, unchallenging, and appears designed to provoke the least amount of whining by a vocal but dispassionate player base.
If you look at a chart of subscriptions over time, it peaked with an expansion ten years ago, and has declined steadily since. This coincides with changes to the game that made it require less time, less thinking, and less skill. I imagine they felt they were broadening the appeal, but they turned off the players who made the game a blockbuster. If you removed people who still pay for it but don't play, or people clinging to nostalgia, the numbers would tank even more.
I was surprised when they re-released the original game as "Classic WoW". While I don't know what the subscriber numbers look like, the servers are overflowing, and the player base is even more passionate than when it was released 15 years ago.
I think the same thing happened with other recent Blizzard games. They went for mass appeal in a way that turned off the players who helped build their empire. Chasing the MOBA fad didn't work out for them. I'm glad they're going back to their roots.
Maybe I'm just a crusty old gamer nostalgic for the past, but there are a lot of us out there.
I was around the MMO scene back when Blizzard was developing WoW, and this was the general sentiment around the community even at the time, it was seen as the care-bearest of the all the care-bear MMOs (which is what people at the time called MMOs that weren't hardcore enough for them, particularly in the PvP area). A lot of people that WoW was a step backwards for MMORPGs. At the time MMO developers were doing a lot of interesting things with games like DAoC, Star Wars: Galaxies, Anarchy Online, etc. There was something for all tastes, in particular games like SWG were starting to feature persistent player-build towns, non-combat focused professions that actually made sense to use, interesting skill systems and a more social experience.
At the time WoW felt like a return to the old days of Everquest, only even more simplified and polished (which makes sense since some of the same people were involved). There was even a sort of a competition (more of a shouting match) between Everquest II fans and WoW fans before either game got released as to which would be the future of MMO games. We all know how that fight went.
What I and many MMO fans at the time failed to understand is that WoW wasn't for us. It was for people who had never player a MMO game before. It wasn't an attempt to get MMO fans invested in Warcraft, it was a brilliant move to introduce all the Warcraft fans to MMOs (and the marketing material at the time was very clear about it). It was all designed from the ground up for people who had never even known that MMOs existed, since the MMO market was pretty small back then, and what little there was was pretty divided.
This is also why many people these days have fondness for "Classic WoW," because it was their first, and you never forget your first. Incidentally my first was a pretty shit game called The 4th Coming and I still remember it fondly, while ignoring most of its faults (what kind of casual needs an interactive map anyway, just look at this still picture that roughly resembles the world and navigate using landmarks, much more immersive that way). This is also the reason why all the WoW clones never caught on. The people making them (or changing their game to be more like WoW, looking at you New Game Experience) failed to realize that most WoW players don't really like MMOs, they like WoW, specifically.
Writing this has made me feel pretty old, but I very clearly remember scoffing at WoW players as casuals and their game as an Everquest clone. Here I was playing much better games like UO and SWG and they didn't even know better. Well, time passed and now I'm the one that didn't know better, but I'm still kinda bitter that the success of WoW massively contributed to the death of the type of MMO I liked, and even if it looks like WoWs influence over the newer MMOs is slowly fading, I don't think I'll ever get to enjoy any new MMO the same way I enjoyed the originals.
I think the GP is absolutely right, Blizzard went to far with their streamlining, and every other MMO copied them.
For me the key difference between modern and classic wow is the design approach to challenge. In classic you go at things expecting to fail, in modern you go at things expecting to win. The difference this makes is that classic makes you happy while modern makes you sad when your expectations aren’t met.
Part of what makes that possible is the player freedom. You can make different builds, you can approach content differently and you can overcome challenges your own way. It’s like Blizzard, and I think modern game design in general, forgot that being challenged and figuring things out is fun.
I think I may have forgotten too, because I’ve been surprised at how well classic holds up in 2019.
That said, I kinda understand how Blizzard got to where it is with modern WoW. Blizzard has always been known for taking existing ideas and streamlining them and polishing them as much as possible. That, and not gameplay innovation, has always been their forte. In a way they're analogous to Apple, they take ideas that have been tried by others and combine them into a single polished experience.
Since polishing and streamlining is what they know best, and since it has always brought them success (even the original WoW was very polished and streamlined, or if put less charitably, dumbed down, when compared to other MMOs of the time), it's understandable that when faced with a declining player base they'd continue doing what they know best. Big corporations like that don't really have a good mechanism for changing course and trying something else, so they keep doubling down on their old ways and hoping it keeps working until a breaking point is reached, and then they do stuff like re-release their old games hoping to cash in on the nostalgia.
I'm not sure if I worded things correctly, but it just seems to me that MMORPGs aren't trying to build a game world anymore.
What I'm saying is games are a significant part of daily life experience for many people, and it's fair to judge how it shapes them. I'm not saying all games should be hard, just that they should provide honest rather than fake challenge on the appropriate level.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers this. I find it extremely humorous all the people saying WoW is too spoon fed and they want Classic for a "real challenge".
I remember many friends not wanting to touch WoW because of how themepark it was when it came out. They wanted something _more_ challenging that what they had experienced, not less.
I remember MMOs where you printed out a generic map and had to navigate the world like you would in person (well... a person without a gps these days lol)
Well this is just false.
I would say the mythic raids are the hardest theyve ever been.
Mythic+ offers its own scaling difficulty from easy to hard to impossible.
PvP is as engaging and tough as ever.
Id argue these are all fun too. Maybe you've just moved on. The game has to change overtime.
And the anti-social behaviour and elitism surrounding those groups who do M+ has even become a meme.
The mainstream wow content is ridiculously unchallenging. You are grinding dailys you can join up queues to do your daily/weekly run of the instances and repeat next Wednesday. This is what most of the people playing retail see and do. The most challenging thing about it is not stopping out of boredom.
Most of the game content and mechanics is unchallenging.
A group of people "guarding" the tiny difficult part are difficult.
So, your objection seems to be that players who don't want challenging content are catered to much at all. You don't want those players, who comprise most of the player population, to have "mainstream content".
Viewed in that light, I don't see how your criticism can be viewed as legitimate.
No it's not.
In fact it's the opposite. Many people want to do Mythics. In fact it's required for some professions to make sense. The problem is that if you don't have a raiding guild at hand or have participated in the M+ (or normal mythic) content from day 1 the elite won't take you along. Sometimes you even have to pay to be taken along.
Also: all this relates to the M+ content which is a fraction of the whole game which is unchallenging.
To wrap this up: a fraction of the game is challenging but remains almost unreachable for the general public due to the player base.
Basicly right now the retail WoW can be played as time-intensively and on whatever difficulty you want. There is always something to do, however you hit diminishing returns quite soon. There is tons of hard, engaging content to be done with friends.
I think Classic is kinda fad, something a lot of people think they wanted, but after some time they will realize they did not. Of course, I might be wrong in which case I am happy they got a completely new game to play and hope they enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the two years of WoW Legion(had to stop, because I did not have time to play at the level I wanted).
On the other hand, I can't wait for Warcraft 3 Remastered, that will work by default with most of old custom maps. I am taking a week off for that. :)
This is what burned me out on it to begin with, and I'm still kinda there. Instead of providing interesting and difficult challenges, they introduced vast amounts of repetitive tediousness.
I seek out well-crafted tension and release in my entertainment, but I don't have a lot of free time. On a regular basis, I want to struggle somewhat and maybe need a few attempts to defeat a challenging scenario, then occasionally receive a nontrivial reward for it. It's not a complex formula, just one WoW doesn't provide. If they did, I would be more likely to consider a subscription.
Another aspect which could give the 'more challenging yet not too time intensive single player campaign' a better chance in the market is making minor tweaks to such campaigns so they're also playable by a couple. There are tons of couples who have played this game together over the years (probably most of whom have limited interest in coordinating lengthy raids with strangers in their limited free time). It seems to me like a win-win to provide them and solo players something interesting to do that doesn't require too much grinding.
And you know what? I didn't even play Vanilla. But I have played a plethora of games where community was important, including SWTOR.
I had a similar feeling in Legion (the cross-realm pulp is terrible but PvP was decent). I was attached to one character, and no more split farm. However the RNG fest of legendaries and the mega grind of AP were not my cup of tea. I kinda liked the relic system and the augmentation aspect of the legendaries.
(I quit hardcore raiding end of WoD.)
Also, WC3 custom games will be my time sink for a LONG time again. I loved them so much growing up.
So they had a choice: just write off most of that large and lucrative audience, or adjust the game to cater to them. Arguably they didn't go far enough in that.
The argument that the game declined as it was made easier, and therefore making it easier caused the decline, is a great example of confusing cause and effect. The game was made easier, or at least was made to have easier elements, because non-hardcore players were churning out. The alternative scenario, that keeping the game exclusive would have retained players better, is absurd on its face. How does content that a player does not do, and that tells that player they are bad, retain that player? If anything, that content is a net negative for that player.
Thanks to TA and annihilated, I ran my own website based on a game (a Star Trek one), which at peak in 1999 was getting 2000 uniques a day. Taking USD cheques (like $40) from doubleclick into my UK bank in my school uniform in 1998ish was a unique experience.
Thanks to that experience it drove me to where I am today.
As far as actual RTS game play, Red Alert was best in my view. One disc for soviet, one for allied. Tanya, Dogs, and Tesla Coils. So many hours, so little to show for it.
The nukes in RA were also just plain pitiful and not really worth the time to build.
I tried to fire up my TA disk in a Win7 machine a few years ago, but the graphics came out all wrong :( any suggestions for reviving it?
Turn-based aspect of settlement/empire management flows much better than real-time base-building aspect of the classic RTSes. Battles being fought in a separate real-time ux means that you can field thousands of troop models while micro-managing tens of 'squads' -- and you don't have to worry about strategic side in the middle of the battle.
Both aspects are richer as a result of separation.
But more importantly, it's critical to an RTS that you can use micro to disrupt enemy resource gathering. If all unit movement is decided on a turn-based world map, you can't sneak around a distracted army to take out a strategic point. Micro still influences who wins a battle, but you have to have a head-on fight. A combat is stuck in one grid cell instead of having access to the entire world.
(The hybrid design can make the macro richer. But troop movement and micro suffer a lot. It's not win/win.)
Sure you can. In civ for example, sail your fleet one way under fog of war, move your army another to suck in units.
I would argue that sneaking based on "the human playing the video game was focused on something else" is a less compelling dynamic than sneaking based on "real" dynamics.
That's not getting around a distracted army.
Even if we ignore player focus, and pretend everyone can multitask perfectly, you're still losing options. You can't engage in a big fight on one side of a map just long enough for a flanking force to hit a critical target, then immediately retreat out of the main fight to avoid losses. With turn-based movement, that big fight is either unnecessary or it's likely to get your army crushed by the non-split-up force from lack of retreat options.
And you can't dodge an intercepting force with most forms of turn-based movement.
If there's a time limit before you can retreat, it all seems rather... artificial, compared to having full control on a single map.
But what you seem to describe are tactical operations, so they are happening on a tactical map. Sneaking up a group of units with stalk/forward deployment behind enemy lines then hitting the backline with it in an opportune moment when the main lines are engaging is a staple in a tactical engagement. As are the flanking maneuvers. You might not be hitting the workers or the production buildings but taking out an artillery piece is just as important and satisfying. Cavalry play has alot of the 'dodge the intercepting force' moments, etc.
The high-end TW multiplayer play is not the same and it might not be as difficult as high-end Starcraft play but I have never found the apm requirements and the need to control both macro and micro at the same time an appealing challenge. And the single player campaign is just straight up better because of a sheer variety of what you are doing.
There was Command & Conquer: Red Alert Mobile, then....
The only other one I remember was an actually really good StarCraft clone by Gameloft (I forget the name).
I always thought mobile would be great for RTS and then it just wasn't. Though when I think about it, the keyboard is pretty important and that kind of fast control is really difficult on a touchscreen, so maybe that explains the lack of 'classic' RTS games on touch devices.
Do you (or anyone) know of any iPad games that fit the bill these days? I played Vainglory for a while but that’s not a RTS - it’s a MOBA (and was fun and worked super well on touch).
- RTS games, since the first C&C, used an interface for selecting rectangles and pointing them at a single target. It scales extremely poorly. Innovations in this area have failed to catch on. Keyboard used for shortcuts only. Come on, we can do better than that. We have Vim. Action, range(movement key). Alternatively, the Kakoune way: selection first, action second. Either way games lack a fast way to select only certain types of units, and especially - to point them at targets of certain types. Harvest: Massive Encounter is a low budget tower defense games which allows you to set targetting priorities for each type of your tower, but RTS games need much, much more systems like that.
Meanwhile Starcraft has been busy embracing and glorifying primitive user interfaces. It has its caveman charm, but - by design - it scales only by clicking faster.
- RTS games were popular at a time when computers were predominantly used by nerds. RTS games appeal mostly to people willing to get better at a game. Publishers discovered less demanding games sell better.
- RTS games are highly demanding to make from technical point of view. You get all the joys of pathfinding at large scale. Optimizations are very important.
- RTS games are not that immersive. This is true for all "topdown" perspective games.
It's a doable thing, people just haven't tried (aside from the above) very hard.
[P]lanes [A]ttack [T]anks
[T]anks [C]rush [I]nfantry
[I]nfantry [M]ove Co[v]er
A[r]tillery [A]ttack [B]ack
A[r]tillery [A]ttack [D]amaged
A[r]tillery [A]ttack B[u]ildings
A[r]tillery [A]ttack [S]pread
[D]amaged [M]ove [R]epair
Basically there is a ton of potentially useful commands that can be issued with words (keyboard) and don't need the precision of mouse, especially when you target or select multiple units. There can be commands which target or select not based on unit type, but on role (attack anti-aircraft units), state (damaged, fortified, carried, loaded), position (flank, rear, front, high ground, low ground).
- I remember this being a key to why I loved 'Empire Earth 2' so much. Selecting all of type X in view, or worldwide and such I think was a thing.
I'd love to have a remake of the Empire Earth (1 and 2) - and to have a mashup with some of the things from Populace on the Amiga would actually be very cool.
Cannot wait for the sequel. I spent so many hours playing HW1. Great balance of macro and micro strategy.
IMO both are far superior to Starcraft or even AOE
1. Amount of control over units
2. Amount of control over a hero
3. Amount of control over building infrastructure
By that definition, RTS is still alive and well. It's just that the particular position of those sliders has changed over time. We have MOBAs which set all the sliders to zero except the hero one. Mobile games like Clash of Clans and Clash Royale provide two more popular configurations.
As for what happened to the classic RTS config many grew up with in the 90s and oughties? My best guess is snuffed out by shifts in game dev economics. AAA single player games only work on consoles (where the controller never played well with RTS) and the near-requirement for every PC multiplayer game to present as an esport raises the buy-in too high
Warcraft III/Frozen throne are quite simply the best games that I've ever played, none have ever come close. I'd give honourable mention to Age of Empires/Rise of Nations.
I think it was killed due to the success of World of Warcraft.
Given that risk to reward I can totally see why more gentile games like MMOs, Minecraft, hell even MOBAs have taken over. They are a lot easier to slide into (and out) at every skill level, which also equates to more money to the developers due to a lowering of the bar.
I remember having fun with WC3 so I'll probably give it a try.
Actually, when my son was little 10 years ago, we used to play Lego Battles on the Nintendo DS, which was a mini RTS and that was surprisingly fun as well! Definitely sad the genre disappeared.
By the way, if someone is still playing out there, the dwarf hold mod was a great extension to the base game : https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dwarf-holds
Looking forward to Homeworld 3. Fingers crossed for a Linux-native version, but if not, then hopefully it's as Wine/Proton-friendly as Homeworld: Remastered (and more so than Deserts of Kharak).
Personally, I think the main culprit is that MOBAs like DotA 2 and League of Legends are too similar in genre and won over much of the RTS player base. Anecdotally, most of the people I knew that were into SC 2 started playing League or Dota 2.
Edit: I totally blanked out on the Total War franchise. That's definitely a staple of mine, and still playing Rome 1 and Medieval 2 mods to this day.
A battle with more, slower moving units and simplified commands makes for a more tactical match-up that's less about hotkeys and razor-sharp reaction time and more about the art of war.
Does anyone know if there's a franchise out there moving in that direction?
This was exactly how many of the classics got started, but back then it was in spite of the studios intentions. I think a good rts could still spread that way but now players would welcome the IAP, as long as core mechanics are available and it’s not pay-to-level-up.
Said prequel is Deserts of Kharak, and is indeed quite good. Am replaying it right now, and despite being land-based and 2D rather than space-based and 3D, it still feels like the original Homeworld in terms of pacing and strategy.
I thought the missions were quite tedious tbh. I gave up after the 3rd case of "where is the last enemy unit on map" hunt
The demo of the British one (CC2 maybe?) was the one that got me into it.
I think they were remade by another company a few years back actually - but I’d definitely throw money at a modernized take on a similar concept.
Does anyone know other similar games?
I used to like rts while I was younger, but now I find them too gamified, in the sense there is too much of abstract ion. You give a building order and a fully built ship materializes in seconds. Each of your men-at-arms are having the exact same stats, personal lity and skills. Individual units are pea-brained. The number of units are too less to how historical battles actually happened.
Sometime I thought paradox style grand strategy was the answer to these flaws. But playing them now feels like playing cashgrab mobile "waiting games", you essentially set something up and are just waiting most of the time for the clock to tick till the progress bar reaches 100%, that is, it had kind of ended up even more gamified.
Perhaps there is a divergence in player interests, some want simulations with toy soldiers, while others want a competitive experience, and may be there is no easy way to cover both these aspects in a single game.
It's exhausting to find games nowadays that don't nickel and dime you to succeed. I like the Kingdom Rush Tower Defense games on iPad when I'm traveling. Any other suggestions?
https://kotaku.com/you-should-be-playing-the-brutal-city-bui...
Northguard is amazing and very much a successor to the games you mentioned.
https://kotaku.com/northgard-demands-that-you-take-winter-se...
On mobile you probably would like the Auto Chess game Dota Underlords. The are the next evolution of the RTS games, that grew out of Warcraft like League of Legends.
Has anyone made an up-to-date Archon lately? I know there was The Unholy War on the original PlayStation, but that was a long time ago.
For ARPGs, the elephant in the room is Path of Exile: https://www.pathofexile.com/
Neither is really viable for mobile, but I didn't quite catch whether that was a major criterion for you.
The remastered edition (“Definitive Edition”) of AoE2 is coming out in November.
The tower defense element (thousands of zombies spawning and storming your settlement) makes it a pretty punishing game: you try to frantically build out your settlement while protecting it from early waves for about two hours before the inevitable overwhelming final wave comes. You don't know until the very end whether you are doing OK or not.
Recently I've been playing Total War: Three Kingdoms. Total War is a hybrid game - adventure man is turn based, but battles are real time. I was both skeptical and curious about this approach, but when I tried it I liked it. Then I read somewhere the reason of why the creators did it this way - it's because controlling a huge map with 10+ armies, economy, diplomacy, etc real time would be impossible. So essentially TBS allows the player to go at their own pace which could be one of the reasons of why RTS lost it's popularity.
It's perhaps the best TBS I've ever played, and I started with the original Civ.
(Actually, before all that I played Might and Magic on my C64, but that wasn't TBS.)
I bought an iPad excited for a generation of touch-optimizes RTS games and have been...disappointed. I played around with some of the MOBAs (Vainglory, etc) but that genre isn’t for me.
Are there any great (or even decent) iOS games that fit the RTS bill? I see a ton in the App Store that match the description but most just end up being free to play micro transaction gambling/monetization pits of despair, not actual RTS.
Suggestions appreciated!
One of the best games I have played in recent years is Hidden Paths Brass Tactics.
I really don't understand why this game didn't get more attention than it did.
AOE-2 has a HD version for large screens, but DE with pretty graphics are coming this November(2019).
Even though I haven't played games for years, coming back to AOE was nostalgic and last Friday I was lost in the game for 5+ hours, still as fun as ever. (:
*DE - Definitive Edition
I wonder if this colors the author's statistics, because he is getting his statistics from games that collect them.
I have a library of steam games I downloaded then have been playing in offline mode for quite some time.
free to play? (grind or pay) bah.
I would love to hear people's suggestions for favorite offline games.
It lives on as Project Magma (http://projectmagma.net/) but the scenarios that shipped with Myth II are what made the game for me.
To this day, though, I don't think a better pair of games has been made, and I will always be sad about Bungie abandoning the franchise during the Microsoft purchase.
Gyle's channel on Youtube has some of the best replays around if you're like me and just like watching competitive RTS gaming.
The original Supreme Commander is not bad as well and interesting if you want to see the storyline that Forged Alliance sprang from.
SupCom 2 was hot trash. An attempt to make an RTS xbox friendly. Some of the worst voice acting in decades of gaming.
- https://www.adityaravishankar.com/projects/games/command-and...
For a minute I got excited...
Once the masses fell for mainframe/dumb client, companies now controlled the software and could insert bs monetization.
All game design has been effected since game companies took control of game software starting from 1997 onlward with the release of ultima online.
The whole project was to undermine game ownership from the very get go.
Here's the game industry gloating of it's great victory of the PC gaming masses:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-01-making-pir...
Railroad Tycoon
The sequels never really did it for me. Transport Tycoon sucked up the hours, but nothing really did it as much as the feel of that first game. Maybe it was the time — the CGA monitor (which couldn’t cope with Civilisation), no mouse of course. I did play it years later and it want the same.
I doubt that feeling can be recaptured. It probably never existed - its a sepia tomes memory of a feeling from a different time with different expectations - but for some reasons the original Railroad Tycoon really stuck with me.
That said, it is a great game and it is one of the highlights of the railroad-building genre.
I never player Railroad Tycoon, my first in that genre was Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but I feel pretty much the same way about it, and I'm pretty lucky that OpenTTD exists.
Similarly there's a game called Star Reach (also known as Space Federation) that was the first strategy game I played. In retrospect, it was pretty bad, but sometimes I want to play a space game and not even much superior games like Masters of Orion or more modern games like Sins of a Solar Empire will satisfy the particular craving like Star Reach.
Then I was lucky to find TTD on some abandonware sites, shortly thereafter, the first TTD-Patch became available, and a few years later OpenTTD development started. I still remember playing it on a Nokia 5530 XM, they had actually ported it to the Symbian OS.
A few years ago, I learned that Chris Sawyer had programmed the entire thing in Assembly. It ran super-smooth on almost anything.
Too bad that I overcomplicate everything I try to do and accomplish nothing...
Anyway, great post! This guy is very right, hopefully we start getting good strategy games soon.
But I suspect people went to mobas like League of Legends because they wanted a more social, team based experience and they liked playing a hero.
I expect any modern non-AoE2 AoE game to be just as bad as any other modern RTS. Even AOE2 DE was/is probably going to be requiring Win 10 just to force people to upgrade. MS is still MS.
A large fraction of the player population is in countries without access to large purchasing power or modern computing equipment. If it requires 10 then a large part of the playerbase will simply stick with AoE2 AoC on voobly or HD on steam. So DE will only be new players or players in rich western economies. MS is showing they either don't care or don't understand the AoE2 scene.
One thing Microsoft does need to do is offer an ad-supported, Microsoft Store only, free-of-charge Windows-S 10 to everyone to download. Since it would only support their stuff, it could be optimized to run on lower end hardware.
Do you think a pay subscription using up bandwidth like that is going to work for the vast majority of the low income, very international, old hardware AoE2 scene? It won't. Just like trying to force them up upgrade to 10 won't. They don't care because they don't think they can make money off those people. You don't care because you don't understand. But both you and MS don't understand that they are the AoE2 pro and ranked scene and that by ignoring them AoE2DE is going to be a flash in the pan and everyone will go back to playing AoE2 patched on voobly.
There's plenty of old hardware scenes and gamers, and has been for a long time before AOE2. It is important if MS can make money off people, because without that incentive there never would've been an AOE2 to begin with. So I'd save your dinars for that upgrade.
MOBAs are then the natural step from fast-paced micro-heavy RTS - strip out the base building part and make it 100% about micro, abilities, and squad control. It's the evolution of what happens when RTS gets ADD. In a way, I think Blizzard basically gave kids candy instead of vegetables and now the mainstream player attention span isn't there for traditional RTS games anymore.
WC3 was more hero focused, like MOBA's, which of course had their start in WC3 as custom maps.
It is of course ironic that Blizzard inadvertently spawned a genre that ended up crushing them in a field that arguably they also pioneered, e-sports.
For me, the test of a good game is if it's fun even if you're losing, which is the case with LoL but not as much with most traditional RTS.
Recently I went to a PC Cafe after having stopped playing games about 10 years ago. I started off playing CS:GO due to having loved CS 1.6 as a child, but I didn't find the modern version fun, and after an hour I was bored. Then I played a game of Warcraft 3, and next thing you know I spent the next month completely addicted to the game, watching professional commentaries and playing nonstop. It got to a point where I literally had to uninstall the game since it was taking over my life.
The reason I think I found CS:GO boring was because it felt like there was little to no strategy. It's basically just a game of reflexes and hand-to-eye coordination, and you only control a single unit. Meanwhile I think I found WC3 so fun because there's so much to it - what buildings/units to make, whether to harass, rush, and/or turtle/tower up, scouting your opponents and adjusting to their strategy, when to expand, whether to creep / level up your heroes or go in for an attack, etc. It's like a game of chess on steroids, where your opponents' pieces are completely different (if they're a different race), yet somehow the game is remarkably balanced.
I hate to sound like an arrogant old crank and my RTS bias is definitely clear, but I feel like most of the mainstream games today suck, and are of a lower intellectual bar. I can't understand the whole MOBA thing (eg. League of Legends) - I never got into DOTA because I always found it extremely boring, and I think it's just less intellectually stimulating (and also probably because the games are an hour and a half).
I'm glad that WC3 and AOE2 are being remade and released this year (though unfortunately I'll probably have to opt out due to how easily I get addicted). I hope that more game developers will see this and try their hand at the RTS genre. As much as I love WC3 and AOE2, they certainly have their flaws as well. For example, I feel the beginning in WC3 is too slow, making buildings/units is a bit too slow, and I find it a bit too micro focused (particularly for orcs). But I absolutely love the RPG element of heroes, and it's probably one of the main reasons why I've spent more time playing WC3.
RTSs are almost unique among game genres in that you're forced to make decisions quickly but the results of those decisions don't become apparent for anywhere between 10 minutes to an hour. A single "encounter" takes a good chunk of your time and your reward for that time can often be that you get to watch for 10 to 15 minutes as your best laid plans are ripped apart and everything you've built up is methodically destroyed, and at the end of it all, you can't even be sure what is it that you did wrong because you made so many decisions without seeing their immediate result. Add to that the fact that most RTSs are pretty unbalanced at any level above absolute beginner. So in the end, you're left wondering if the other guy won because you built too many kbot factories too early, or because you didn't scout enough, or because he rushed you with Flashes and those are overpowered? Did the map favor him? How do you counter a Flash rush? All those questions crop up and are really hard to answer. This makes for a frustrating experience for new and medium-skill players alike.
That said, I don't think RTSs got less popular with time in an absolute sense, I think they only got relatively less popular because gaming itself has become more mainstream. It is my belief that it takes a certain kind of personality to enjoy RTS games, which represents a certain percentage of the total human population, which is much less than the percentage of the population that can enjoy video games in general. As gaming became mainstream, the number of people enjoying RTSs stayed roughly constant, but as a percentage of all games it became smaller and smaller, thus it made no sense to keep developing RTSs. Multiplayer RTS has always been a niche genre that few people enjoyed, but when gaming was also niche it still made sense to make RTS games.
Now, when it comes to the question posed in the article, why did Blizzard's RTSs, Brood War and later WC3, got popular and stayed popular? Some people will say is that it's because it's balanced, quick and varied, but Starcraft didn't start out balanced, and it didn't get balanced until map makers learned to make balanced maps. In a sense, Starcraft is still not really balanced because you can easily make a map where one race will dominate (just try to find an Island game anywhere on ladder and you'll see what I mean, for example).
My theory for why Starcraft (and later WC3) succeeded where the others failed comes down to two things: Use Map Settings and Battle.net. I said earlier that few people enjoy multiplayer RTSs and I stand-by that, and if you spent any time on Battle.net in the early 2000s, you would see that most people didn't play Starcraft the way it was intended. UMS always had a lot more games going than regular Melee, and a large percentage of regular Melee was 7v1 computer or Faster Map Ever, No Rush 20 minutes or other things that changed the base mechanics of the game to make it a lot more forgiving. The amount of people playing actual, competitive 1v1s or 2v2s was tiny in comparison. So why didn't all those people who didn't really like RTS stuck around in an RTS game? Well because their friends were there, and all the other UMS maps were fun, if you got stomped in a bunch of 1v1s and got frustrated, you could go play some Bounds, or a Cannon Defense. Maybe an RPG or an Open RPG map, maybe The Thing, maybe Aeon of Strife for that early MOBA experience. Everything was available within that same game, and the best part was that all your friends were just an /f m away, later on even if they were playing Diablo 2 or WC3. It was pretty seamless, and other gaming services couldn't really compare until things like Steam and Xbox Live came about. You could stay in the game without ever touching the RTS portion of it, and I know a lot of people who did, and you could meet people and become friends without ever needing another method of communication besides Battle.net, all from within Starcraft (unlike most other gaming services of the time). Somewhat ironically, what made Starcraft (and later WC3) so popular are all the parts that weren't an RTS, it was a do-everything game that had a little something for everyone. All the balancing and the e-sports came later, after Starcraft had already gotten big enough and gained enough of an audience for people to learn to make balanced maps. Brood War was released in 1998, and the patches where they finally nailed the current balance came somewhere around 2001 (1.08), and by that time it was already pretty popular. I'm not sure Starcraft would have ever gotten to 1.08 without UMS and Battle.net.
This got a little long-winded, because I've spent considerable time thinking about this very topic, but my main point is that RTS (particularly the competitive multiplayer kind) as a genre has always been niche and will remain a niche genre, and the wild success of Starcraft and its successors is specifically due to the fact that it had a lot more to offer than just RTS.
Certainly F2P, and genre-mixing happened, but those players could still come back to playing RTSs. My main point is: what truly distinguishes Brood War from everything else is the level design and gameplay. Which is what games like They Are Billions is bringing back even if only in part. RTS level design peaked with BW it seems, and is only now making a come back. Over the past ~20 years, you can see the evolution in action/RPG/platform/sim/puzzle/TBS games as they have added to level design and gameplay where RTS games didn't and thus lost out. Focusing on what made BW good; make better level design and gameplay than BW, and you'll get people playing again.
I played Warcraft 2, SMACX, AOE2, and SC pretty much when they came out, and I've only recently played Paradox games, Homeworld and Total Annihilation. People have their favorites, and I can see liking any of these games based on the type of gameplay and story you enjoy the most. I just hope AOE4 has enough new ideas in level design and gameplay compared to AOE2 like the difference between Civ 2 and Civ 4.
You can also see what the major studios have been up to: Valve went into publishing tech, Blizzard is going more and more into F2P (Tencent is almost all F2P), but it's the studios/publishers like Square Enix, 2K, Sony, and Ubisoft and indies which keep making games that aren't lootbox filled.
Once the masses fell for mainframe/dumb client, companies now controlled the software and could insert bs monetization.
www.faforever.com www.massgate.org
they milked that cow and then cut it up for meat.
Total Annihilation