Everything afterwards felt lame and was geared too much towards multiplayer balance, which does not interest me the least.
If I watch YT videos a la "New RTS games 2025/2026" there are very interesting projects which give me hope that SC2 is not the end of RTS games.
Starcraft and Starcraft II, and Warcraft I,II,III had great campaigns. So it is kind of ironic that a lot of the games copying them cut the campaigns for the esports focus.
It was particularly visible in how, if you edited the map so that every pile of resources was 50k, so essentially endless, you'd arrive at a stalemate.
Given (effectively) unlimited resources within base distance, Zerg undoubtedly have a fairly substantial advantage and will probably win. Assuming comparable player skills, of course.
Their remax time is 1/3-1/4 that of Protoss/Terran, they can tech-switch near instantaneously, and they have some of the most powerful endgame meta. This was true for SC1 and Brood War, and it's even more true for current SC2.
Tempest Rising is a newer RTS (this year) that's also in the C&C style, its highlight is the campaign. (Multiplayer I think is basically in the go-to-discord phase already.) The real problem is that RTS is just an unpopular genre, whether it's taking design inspiration from the C&C branch or the SC branch.
And Aoe2 is consistently getting official updates, there's 3 Indian and 4 Chinese civs now.
For example, getting to the 3rd age in AoE 2 ASAP is basically mandatory, but in AoM you can potentially start attacking from the 2nd age. On top of that, getting to the 3rd age in AoE 2 takes much longer than AoM. So there's basically a whole lot of wasted time at the start of an AoE 2 match.
It was sad to see the slow and steady enshittification with 2 and 3. The online community is pretty toxic too.
I love that they don't take themselves too seriously in this series. RA3 had some hilarious cutscenes with characters barely holding it together (the Soviet Premier was an underrated Tim Curry role IMO).
barely holds laughter back and takes a break
SPACE!"
It's the opposite of C&C3, which had a good campaign but the theme was a step back from the scifi of Tiberian Sun. Especially the GDI/NOD units were way less futuristic, and the alien ones were a bit too similar to each other in style. The cutscenes were also mostly boring compared to earlier games.
If I recall correctly, the expansion pack for C&C3 was much more interesting in these aspects, but the gameplay suffered.
A more innocent time tbh
They're technically challenging to make and creatively hard to balance.
The public doesn't want to pay $60 upfront for a campaign when fun freemium games exist.
The UX does not work well on controller so a huge amount of console players will be out of reach.
Games tend to be quite long and because it's not team play matchmaking matters a lot. This push multiplayer into being highly competitive and not pushes out the casual players.
Seems like Clash Royale likes are the best we've come up with to modernize the genre but of course its very different.
We’d start the game up in one computer, then pop the CD out and start it up in the next one, and so on.
I do remember having to install IPX to play over LAN.
Keygen was also easily available.
The "we made units this way because it's fun" philosophy is sorely missed. Every game feels like it goes through a tuning phase just for esports. Even if the game isn't out yet.
I'd probably lose another week if I had easy access to RA2 modding. Or let's say "experimenting and watching the AI burn" not to disrespect the real modders.