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What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

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Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#21

Post by blihp »

m463 wrote: post #15

I play older games, the ones without a forced online requirement or telemetry. I wonder if this colors the author's statistics, because he is getting his statistics from games that collect them. I have a library of steam games I downloaded then have been playing in offline mode for quite some time. free to play? (grind or pay) bah. I would love to hear people's suggestions for favorite offline games.

Myth II was my favorite game of the era. There were also a number of community created scenarios created for it. Highly recommended if you can get you hands on a CD for it. Not sure how well it still runs (or not) under Windows but it still runs great on Linux under Wine.

It lives on as Project Magma (http://projectmagma.net/) but the scenarios that shipped with Myth II are what made the game for me.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#22

Post by voldacar »

dchuk wrote: post #2

I don't play games much anymore, but when I did, I always had an affinity for RTS games(Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, Warcraft, etc), and Action RPGs (Diablo, Torchlight). It's exhausting to find games nowadays that don't nickel and dime you to succeed. I like the Kingdom Rush Tower Defense games on iPad when I'm traveling. Any other suggestions?

Check out Path of Exile, it's the most interesting ARPG out there currently

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#23

Post by hartator »

I don’t have an answer either. Playing a lot of SC2 and waiting for Homeworld 3. 2022 ETA though. My main explanation is more recent strategy games have been a let down and as graphics don’t matter as much, players stick to old games discouraging even more game studios to try again.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#24

Post by defertoreptar »

dleslie wrote: 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.

> 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.

Out of curiosity, in what ways in particular did they do this?

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#27

Post by Dylan16807 »

wanderer2323 wrote: post #19

The 'combined arms' approach where your 'macro' is turn-based and your 'micro' is real-time is doing very well in Total War franchise (briefly mentioned in the article). Turn-based aspect of settlement/empire management flows much better than real-time base-building aspect of the classic RTSes. Battles being fought in a separate real-time ux means that you can field thousands of troop models while micro-managing tens…

You say "richer", I say "removes important difficulty". Part of what makes the genre interesting is balancing your attention between these different aspects.

But more importantly, it's critical to an RTS that you can use micro to disrupt enemy resource gathering. If all unit movement is decided on a turn-based world map, you can't sneak around a distracted army to take out a strategic point. Micro still influences who wins a battle, but you have to have a head-on fight. A combat is stuck in one grid cell instead of having access to the entire world.

(The hybrid design can make the macro richer. But troop movement and micro suffer a lot. It's not win/win.)

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#28

Post by kyralis »

defertoreptar wrote: post #24
dleslie wrote: 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.

> 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. Out of curiosity, in what ways in particular did they do this?

Personally, I felt this way about SC2 as compared to SC1.

I think one of the largest changes I noticed was an increase in the hardness of counters as well as an increase in the APM necessary to properly wield certain units.

For the first point, in SC1, if I had suboptimal army composition against my opponent, I would likely lose any battles that ensued unless my tactics were quite superior- but I'd likely due some damage in the process, at least. In contrast, in SC2, it always felt like a failure to properly anticipate army makeup would frequently lead to completely lopsided battles where my force might be completely annihilated without doing measurable damage to the opponent.

This was aggravated by the second point. I'm not a professional player and my APM has never been amazing, and I'm fine with that. But the more complex required army composition put a higher emphasis on APM and in-battle tactics, especially with heterogenous forces and units, like blink stalkers, that really benefit from very high levels of micro. I'll be the first to admit that, when watching replays, the things that skilled players could pull off in SC2 was pretty amazing to see- but that didn't really help my playing experience.

There result was a game that felt significantly more frustrating than SC1, even if my win/loss ratio wasn't actually all that different.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#29

Post by SalimoS »

defertoreptar wrote: post #24
dleslie wrote: 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.

> 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. Out of curiosity, in what ways in particular did they do this?

What I can think of : I remember playing vs my friend a single game of c&c 3 tiberium wars for a 3 hours but seeing starcraft 2 the game end in 15 min in the esports.

Re: What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

#30

Post by Dylan16807 »

kyralis wrote: post #28
defertoreptar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Out of curiosity, in what ways in particular did they do this?

Personally, I felt this way about SC2 as compared to SC1. I think one of the largest changes I noticed was an increase in the hardness of counters as well as an increase in the APM necessary to properly wield certain units. For the first point, in SC1, if I had suboptimal army composition against my opponent, I would likely lose any battles that ensued unless my tactics were quite superior- but I'd likely due some da…

That's an interesting view of the situation. I don't think I've ever seen someone say that APM requirements are higher in SC2. Notable enormous APM sinks in SC1 are the unit selection cap, the inability to give orders to multiple factories at a time, and the inability to make workers rally to the mineral line.

Whether the counters are harder, I don't have enough knowledge to say.

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