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What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

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101–110 of 214 posts

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#102
post #3

IMHO, the core series focused too heavily on maximizing the experience for esports, and that spoiled the genre for the mid-range gamers that were its bread and butter. 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.

You seen to either get games where the multiplayer scene is non-existent, or hyper competitive like SC2, where you feel a bit brutalized. 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.

Check out the SC2 arcade and co-op missions. They perfectly target the 'mid-core' strategy gamer and Blizzard has pushed a lot of content into them over the past years. I would not be surprised if it dominates the normal ladder in hours played, just like the old Brood War UMS maps.

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?

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#103
post #76

> 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…

I am not sure I buy into this narrative so much anymore. The game is old and the original userbase has moved on. I am not convinced that WoW could ever have kept catching new players and retaining the old ones however they chose to proceed. The burst of excitement for Classic will last a while and then fade too. I think , at least.

I think Classic will fade, because it's hyped up to be more than it really is. Old WoW was difficult, but part of that difficulty was that people just weren't as good at the game back then (or games in general?). Many people were already doing Molten Core just a few days after release of Classic.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#104

It makes me sad to see no mention of Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander anywhere :( IMO both are far superior to Starcraft or even AOE

Supreme commander was the first RTS I really sunk my teeth into. Planetary Annihilation is an excellent spiritual successor and still gets updates.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#106

Theres a really good community made client for 'Supreme Commander' https://www.faforever.com/

This is pretty cool. Did they fix issues that caused games to crash after a few hours? Even loading up the state of a game that had been long would cause it to crash again. My guess is a memory leak.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#107
I like RTS games just as the next guy and I am also disappointed that cult franchises such as Age of Empires, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc stopped releasing new games. But I like Turn Based Strategy even more, franchises like Heroes of MIght and Magic, Age of Wonders, Civilization, Total War are my favorite and they are also consistently releasing new games all the time.

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.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#108
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked TA much more than RA. The strategy felt deeper, plus I liked the idea of the Commander unit representing you on the battle field. Sending him into battle was a risky move. The D-Gun made him extremely powerful, but if he died, you lose. The nukes in RA were also just plain pitiful and not really worth the time to build.

we used to play TA at lunch...but cut it off abruptly after an hour.. . so we'd spend 55 minutes building up epic armies then send them to apocalypse for the last 5 minutes :) 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?

There is also the spring project. http://www.springrts.com/

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#109
post #72

Am I the only person missing the old C&C style games, before Generals? 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,…

You can install called rusted warfare, its same like C&C generals but more heavy vehicle.

Give it a try both Mobile and pc can install it a.k.a cross platform

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#110

> 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…

>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…

I find it interesting that MMORPGs didn't actually develop in the direction that MMORPGs portrayed themselves as. The idea of an MMORPG was to be an entire world and the player would simply be a participant in it. Ultima Online, at first, tried to have some form of an ecological system where carnivores eat herbivores etc. This didn't work out, but you can clearly imagine that the goal was to create a world. However, somewhere between that and modern day MMOs things seem to have changed. The goal doesn't seem to be to create a world, but to simply provide a multiplayer game with a bigger map. It's as though it's meant to be social media with a game attached.

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.

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