What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

They Are Billions is amazing.

> Blizzard had a long distraction with WoW, then they made Starcraft 2 followed by the MOBA Heroes of the Storm. They’re still insanely successful. Now they’re remaking their old games, recently releasing a HD remake of Starcraft 1 and are about to release a remake of Warcraft III.

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.

If you're looking for a modern derivative of Railroad Tycoon, you may enjoy Transport Fever. You'll find its demand-driven economy familiar, and staying solvent in the early game is tricky. Fever places a bigger emphasis on terrain—managing grade and turn radius to improve the speed (and profitability) of your vehicles.

My take on this is that RTSs are generally unpopular because of their long feedback loop. In an FPS game, or even a modern MOBA, the decisions you take result in an almost immediate death (yours or the opponent's). If you're doing something wrong, you'll know pretty much immediately, rarely will you have to wait more than a minute between doing something wrong and getting punished for it. This also means that you tend to know what exactly you did wrong, maybe you shot too soon, maybe you aimed wrong, maybe you didn't jump enough, etc. In most game genres you go through encounters quickly: spawn, die, repeat until you get good.

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.

>Blizzard went off the rails by dumbing down WoW [...], appealing to the lowest common demoninator. [...] WoW is boring, unchallenging, and appears designed to provoke the least amount of whining by a vocal but dispassionate player base.

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.