Death of the RTS genre?

[Fanatical Meat]

Its pretty obvious that RTS players want bigger maps, more units and some kind of physics/destructible terrain. Why is it so difficult for developers to get a grasp of this? We constantly see games that attempt to redefine the genre that ultimately fail.

 

[shortylickens]

Its pretty obvious that RTS players want bigger maps, more units and some kind of physics/destructible terrain. Why is it so difficult for developers to get a grasp of this? We constantly see games that attempt to redefine the genre that ultimately fail.

I think the maps in Supreme Commander are more than big enough.
But terrain could definitely be something to work on.

How about real mining, digging, caves, tunnels, and other cool stuff?

 

[Stuka87]

I think it will come down to RTS games going away for a while, and then coming back again.

SC2 came out a long time after Broodwar. I do not think we will see an SC3/WC4 for a very long time. SC2 may trudge on a bit longer, although even now it has slid way down in current player numbers. Its hard to even find some decent SC2 casts these days, outside of LagTV and one or two others.

 

[BurnItDwn]

I think RTS is a hard market because these games have a lot of replayabillity.

I played Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Warcraft 2, and then Total Annihilation was released in 1997. Since then, I have dabbled in RTS games from time to time, but, nothing has truly surpassed Total Annihilation IMO, maybe the grand strategy/real time strategy Hearts of Iron 3 with DLCs ... but in general, most new RTS dont offer much novelty.

 

[Elcs]

I don't know, I'm kind of excited for Battlefleet Gothic: Armada. Probably doesn't bring a whole lot new to the table, but looks fun.

But yea, I suck at these games too. I was decent at W2 and SC1, but I sucked at SC2 and haven't really played any others since.

Because it's more like Stellar Impact, the only MOBA that I gave the time of day to.

The slower pace of ships, turning arcs, the skill needed to apply skills at the right times across multiple ships and have them all working in concert is a thing of beauty and the Tactical Cogitator (slowdown mode) just enhances that.

Clicky and active, yes... spamming clickfest? Nah, not quite.

 

[zinfamous]

Used to enjoy them, until I tried Multiplayer and realized how much I sucked at them. Against the AI I always succeeded, eventually anyway, but I played them more as Base Building than quick Military Unit spamming. So when I see how the good players play these games, I lose interest in the genre.

LoL and all those games are even worse with the spamming. I can see why people enjoy that, the constant on the edge of defeat until someone makes a mistake or does a brilliant move, but it has no appeal to me.

this is me. RTS was probably my first primary genre, and I only ever played them with a D-Day type strategy: build your base, all the research, set your units and battallions, spend your time spying and picking off scouts, defending the AI's shitty little attempts to plink at your army, then move everything across the map in one giant enemy-killing campaign.

multiplayer made it stupid and anti-strategic. I'm sorry, but turning it into pure math to the point where success and failure is simply determined by a greater number of key presses per second than your opponent is not skill. It's insanity. And it's fucking boring.

I enjoyed WC3, but I always thought it killed the genre. There were things that I liked about it--the movable base with the elves, the novel hero thingy...but it never sat right with me. Especially that hero thing. I never could tell what it was then, but then it eventually made sense:

MOBAs. the worst thing ever.

 

[zinfamous]

Rts has always been my fave genre.Although my love and exctement for these games has waned over the years i still buy them.Looking forward to Totalwar Warhammer.

You'll be disappointed then, because Total War is more 4x than RTS 😛

Though I've always liked both genres more or less equally. I coudl never finish a total war campaign, though. Always too long for me.

 

[ImpulsE69]

MOBAs. the worst thing ever.

Oh come now. MOBA's are great, and didn't kill RTS, and not at all the same thing. APS is not a function of them at all. You CAN spam if you want, but you'll lose. The worst thing about MOBA's is the community and how the gameplay itself forces the interactions of said players. RTS communities got progressively worse over the years as more and more people were into computer games (mainstream). I seriously don't remember all the disrespect and bad times in early online multiplayer games as there are now. People are just downright mean for the sake of it.

 

[Silverforce11]

Oh, for those on the fence for Deserts of Kharak, get it when it's on a 50% sale. The SP story is worth that price alone. It is very good, but short.

The Multiplayer is dead. Too few online to sustain it and the maps are too small to cater to the style.

I do think that MOBAs (which tends to be free to play) have evolved from RTS and actually the cause for it's demise. You can't even do an RTS these days without unit perks with exp, making it a RTS with RPG elements. But players want a heavier focus on RPG, hence, MOBAs.

 

[KMFJD]

Oh, for those on the fence for Deserts of Kharak, get it when it's on a 50% sale. The SP story is worth that price alone. It is very good, but short.

The Multiplayer is dead. Too few online to sustain it and the maps are too small to cater to the style.

I do think that MOBAs (which tends to be free to play) have evolved from RTS and actually the cause for it's demise. You can't even do an RTS these days without unit perks with exp, making it a RTS with RPG elements. But players want a heavier focus on RPG, hence, MOBAs.

I didn't like wc3 and aom because of the heroes/god units, that was the death of the Golden age of rts imho

 

[datalink7]

I didn't regret buying Desert of Kharak for the full price, though some of that is probably due to fond memories of Homeworld.

Total War: Warhammer also has RTS battles, and looks to be a big hit.

 

[Majes]

I didn't like wc3 and aom because of the heroes/god units, that was the death of the Golden age of rts imho

Warcraft 3 was the Golden age of RTS for me...
I agree that it also killed it by creating the MOBA and the tower defense genres...
But man, the battles in W3 were the best in any RTS ever...
Just the skill level required to compete on ladder was insane.
I do realize a lot of people didn't like the high skill requirement though...

 

[Sonikku]

WC3 was my first and I was shocked at how different people played compared to the ai on insane. Blademaster would swoop in and call all my precious peons. 🙁 Then when I'd teleport the forces back to deal with him he ninja vanished. Bastard. 😡

 

[moonbogg]

I think if they would have simply made C&C Generals 2 and not try to make it free to play and all that nonsense, it would have done just fine. A direct and clear cut sequel to Generals with all the basic things a sequel usually has, like improved visuals, new units, interesting new maps and so forth, would have done well IMO. Act of Aggression tried to be a spiritual successor to it but made it over complicated and burdensome to play in an effort to make the game "deep". A good, super fun RTS doesn't have to be "deep". It just has to be fun, and using Generals as a basic template would do well I think.

 

[Denithor]

I think the maps in Supreme Commander are more than big enough.
But terrain could definitely be something to work on.

How about real mining, digging, caves, tunnels, and other cool stuff?

Now we're talking.

Not RTS, TBS instead, but one of the more interesting games I've played was Master of Magic, waaay back in the day. There were two "planes" to the world, light side and dark side. You started play on the light side and could find portal pillars to move into the dark side. Dark side had much harder enemies to defeat with correspondingly better loot. Resource nodes also tended to be significantly more concentrated on dark side, so cities established there could grow at a faster pace and generate far more resources. This game mechanic also created interesting/challenging cases where an enemy could raid you from a portal without you seeing the movement coming (less advance notice than if whole world is one surface).

Caves would provide this same aspect to play. Being able to tunnel to link caves or pop up wherever you wanted to would be even better.

 

[local]

Give me an updated SupCom:FA and I will be happy. Only other game that I have had any fun with since it came out was the Wargame series but no bases so no turtling so I cannot get my father to play. Act of Aggression (Same devs as Wargame) was pretty disappointing as I wanted something a little closer to Act of War which I found quite entertaining.

Thinking about it I guess I don't like games where to have to go get a limited resource to build stuff. In SupCom you can just make your own resources and Wargame gives you a budget to spend. The US Army wasn't capturing oil derricks in Iraq to fund their next push and I don't want to have to find and acquire red crystals to build a better tank.

 

[shortylickens]

Yeah Act of Aggression was kinda meh from a company that did better work before. But thats life.

 

[zink77]

The RTS genre "didn't die", game developers lost their imagination. The reality is RTS games had serious design flaws. The rise of so called "moba games" (aka rts games with one unit you control in pvp /w rpg elements).

Moba's are basically single unit RTS games that you pvp with other players with. People want to be attached to their fighting unit when pvp'ing, games like supreme commander you're looking down at icons from orbit so you are taken out of the action. Supcom is everything that went right and went wrong with RTS games. All the sides in supcom are prettymuch clones with no interesting properties. Air dominates on large maps, sea units are mostly useless. There's tonnes of redundant units.

RTS games as a game design are caught between full blown action games and more slower turn based affairs but does neither well.

Dragon commander was an interesting experiment in combining small civilization 4x with really super basic rts. It was the greatest idea poorly executed nobody played because the game was unfinished.

https://www.gog.com/game/divinity_dragon_commander

"MOBA" (I hate that term) is just code for warcraft 3 hero arena/dota gameplay mod type games. They are just one or few unit rts games.

I really hate league of legends/DOTA F2P because you can't add maps, custom characters or anything because the games are locked down. They are basically where RTS went - down the drain with the rise of the next generation of gamers, most gamers are too reflex challenged and dumb to handle more complex RTS games. Which is why RTS is on life support outside of say starcraft.

 

[DeathReborn]

In my view the curtain began falling on RTS when EA bought Westwood, kinda killed the C&C & Red Alert franchises with that. Blizzard then had no reason to rush out either WC4 or SC2 hence 1 being AWOL and the other turned into a money grabbing "episodic" title.

During the golden era (90s) we had C&C, Red Alert, Dark Reign, Starcraft, Warcraft, Total Annihilation, Warzone, Homeworld & Dune. If even half of those titles were to return (as in properly) I'd swim the Atlantic to buy them.