The Future of RTS

The 3 species in Starcraft are quite distinct in many key areas, whereas in Age of Kings and AOE3 (the only ones I've played) the differences between the factions were limited to a handful of units and buildings, but ultimately they all played pretty much the same.

I just watched a retrospective on 20 years of Double Fine. Tim had some interesting comments in there about how BL came to be. They were avoiding very hard to make or market the game as an RTS because the genre already had a big stigma at the time.

It might kinda explain the weird state of the game. It was definitely a fun and interesting experience but it was also flawed .. way too many games packed into one for its own good.

I mean, the current monster of the genre - SC2 - can trace many of its gameplay mechanics and units back to a game that came out in 1994, which was of course primarily designed for single-player gaming.

An RTS basically expects a player to learn multiple games with completely little intersectionality between them - an early-game, a mid-game, and a late-game, wherein you use completely different units and strategies. Given the fact that the designers have to figure out how to make the "core loop" fun in several completely different gameplay modes, and players have to learn all of them, is it any wonder that RTS isn't more popular?

I love the RTS genre - the combinations of base-building and unit command and creativity and intensity scratches all the right itches for me. But every RTS game I play feels like it's bogged down in far more complexity than the game really needed. For a while I had a lot of fun playing with the Cambrian explosion of simple RTS games on mobile because they don't feel the need to bolt on so many mechanics - they figure out what their core loop is and stick to it... but the mobile gaming world has been ruined by F2P mechanics.

I've been enjoying Zero-K lately, which does reduce some of the RPGishness that I think hurts the genre - no upgrading, no teching, no tech trees... you just plop a factory and you start building units. But its mechanics are still incredibly complicated, grown organically over a decade of experimenting within the genre of Total Annihilation-style RTS play. But even then, it's still very tied to Total Annihilation, another mid-'90s RTS game.

I'd love to see more first-class attention to the "core loop" of RTS games, but I'm worried the only people who are truly experimenting with the genre are the mobile developers, and the economy of mobile gaming is an ugly place.

actually, the game "world in conflict" has no macro - you get free units (in limited quantities), and you micro the set of units to take control of points in the terrain (which leads to more reinforcements/units).

Quite an interesting RTS, i would say. It's completely about tactics and micro, no macro at all.