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, but also advantages, and most importantly - they resulted in a different experience. I think C&C: Red Alert 2 was the high point of that design. Optimal action speed, counters that weren't too hard, varied units.
This may be unpopular, but I enjoyed the entire C&C run right to the very end. This includes the first-person shooter stint along with the "mobile MCV" stint.
Kane as a character holds a place in my heart and memory, as does Tiberium. Soundtracks and cut scenes were great too.
May I enjoy this block of Memory Lane as much as I am able.
I loved Generals the most, especially for it's rock paper scissors system where every unit, including the most powerfull and armored ones, had a few it was vulnerable against.
But they made it too realistic so the gameplay and units were really slow so games can get long and boring after a while.
I only played RTS for single player. That is also how I started playing it since Dune II in 1993 as my first (I bought and played C&C, RA, WC2, WC3 when they were released).
What happened is that players have become better, better, better. Same as in WoW. It is due to documentation and theorycrafting being more widely available.
That, and the MOBA genre, is what happened to RTS. Multi-player game is also more difficult to pirate, and allows for a cash shop due to vanity items. Means RIP single player. And multi-player RTS is very competitive ie. not casual-friendly. It is not forgiving either.
Come play starcraft remastered. I've been playing fastest map, BGH, and even some ladder, it's super fun! I feel badly as there are many newer players that I sort of crush, but that's always been custom games. Ladder matches, well I'm the n00b there and I usually lose 80% of those.
If nothing else I feel C&C has remained popular in the internet zeitgeist. The series is very ”meme-able”, especially Red Alert and Generals due to their quirkiness of geopolitical issues that have always remained hot topics to a western fanbase (Russia, China and the Middle East).
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.
> IMHO, the core series focused too heavily on maximizing the experience for esports
I would argue that they bifurcated into "optimized for esports" and "optimized for whale revenue".
I have played quite a few RTS-like games on mobile which were cool and neat and it was fun to optimize for not spending money. Of course, when whales get beat by players with skill, the whales get angry. So, the games optimize out skill except at the pro levels--which very quickly makes for a really crappy game experience for the rank and file.
> And still, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation et al were not so long ago.
Planetary Annihilation is an abomination that does not belong in that list. And PA is a prime example of trying to optimize for e-sports and forgetting that you need a decent game at the core.
I think also that any competitive game over time will optimize for the experts or be optimized by experts. Fighting games is another example, and a lot of rhythm games are. MMOs that focus on PvP too.
I think some people on reddit argued that this happened with fortnite, and was part of why Apex Legends got so popular; the casuals that liked to pvp got driven out by the experts and tried to start again in a new game.
> 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?
> 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.
Total Annihilation holds a big part in my history. It was a great game for one thing, but annihilated.com inspired me to get into running a website.
Thanks to TA and annihilated, I ran my own website based on a game (a Star Trek one), which at peak in 1999 was getting 2000 uniques a day. Taking USD cheques (like $40) from doubleclick into my UK bank in my school uniform in 1998ish was a unique experience.
Thanks to that experience it drove me to where I am today.
As far as actual RTS game play, Red Alert was best in my view. One disc for soviet, one for allied. Tanya, Dogs, and Tesla Coils. So many hours, so little to show for it.
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.
Not sure if you are aware of the community that keeps Supreme Commander Forged Alliances - but this goes on sale for a couple bucks every big steam sale. If you have any version of the game on CD, steam will convert your CD keys into the gold version (both vanilla and SupCom:FA). https://www.faforever.com is an updated set of rules, graphics, patches, multiplayer, etc that totally updates the game to a very playable experience. Even the original single player missions were updated to co-op.
It's too hard for most players. Dota and LoL have similarity in being real time, but you get the comfort to blame teammates for your loss and it's much slower paced. In starcraft, you are literally playing by yourself as fast as possible for the entire match, win or lose, no breaks for respawns or waiting, and you can lose in some spectacularly frustrating ways. Ever move command your army into theirs and lose it all? Ever hit yourself with a spell? Find their hidden tech or hidden base way too late? I love it but it's seriously a masochistic genre of gaming.
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 of 'squads' -- and you don't have to worry about strategic side in the middle of the battle.
Both aspects are richer as a result of separation.
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.)
I played StarCraft 2 for nearly a decade after it came out. It was always a solid experience. It is surprising that in all that time, there hasn't been a serious competitor to SC2 in the traditional RTS format. This article does a great job of breaking down why that might be. I mean, the mobile revolution did take some steam and excitement out of PC gaming for a while there. As the author points out, game devs tend to chase the trends and in some cases, they have to. I agree with the author's conclusion that the industry is missing out on a big opportunity. They remain to this day my most satisfying gaming experiences. And if they're done right and well balanced, people will play the same RTS for decades, so they have a lot of staying power.
Small shoutout for 0AD which is a fully open source RTS in the style of age of empire and now very polished (my little brother, who was used to starcraft, is now playing it happily) : https://play0ad.com
- RTS games, since the first C&C, used an interface for selecting rectangles and pointing them at a single target. It scales extremely poorly. Innovations in this area have failed to catch on. Keyboard used for shortcuts only. Come on, we can do better than that. We have Vim. Action, range(movement key). Alternatively, the Kakoune way: selection first, action second. Either way games lack a fast way to select only certain types of units, and especially - to point them at targets of certain types. Harvest: Massive Encounter is a low budget tower defense games which allows you to set targetting priorities for each type of your tower, but RTS games need much, much more systems like that.
Meanwhile Starcraft has been busy embracing and glorifying primitive user interfaces. It has its caveman charm, but - by design - it scales only by clicking faster.
- RTS games were popular at a time when computers were predominantly used by nerds. RTS games appeal mostly to people willing to get better at a game. Publishers discovered less demanding games sell better.
- RTS games are highly demanding to make from technical point of view. You get all the joys of pathfinding at large scale. Optimizations are very important.
- RTS games are not that immersive. This is true for all "topdown" perspective games.
You should look at the later TA style games then. Supreme Commander and SpringRTS (open source!) based games have many innovations when it comes to managing your units. Check out Zero-K for a game that is I think one of the most advanced RTSes in terms of gameplay and controls. It's not looking too pretty by today's standards, but the inner values make up for it if you are willing to invest some time to learn.
'Either way games lack a fast way to select only certain types of units'
- I remember this being a key to why I loved 'Empire Earth 2' so much. Selecting all of type X in view, or worldwide and such I think was a thing.
I'd love to have a remake of the Empire Earth (1 and 2) - and to have a mashup with some of the things from Populace on the Amiga would actually be very cool.
I've heard the RTS genre described as three sliders.
1. Amount of control over units
2. Amount of control over a hero
3. Amount of control over building infrastructure
By that definition, RTS is still alive and well. It's just that the particular position of those sliders has changed over time. We have MOBAs which set all the sliders to zero except the hero one. Mobile games like Clash of Clans and Clash Royale provide two more popular configurations.
As for what happened to the classic RTS config many grew up with in the 90s and oughties? My best guess is snuffed out by shifts in game dev economics. AAA single player games only work on consoles (where the controller never played well with RTS) and the near-requirement for every PC multiplayer game to present as an esport raises the buy-in too high
I've been waiting for Warcraft 4 for 15 years now (can't believe it's been that long!).
Warcraft III/Frozen throne are quite simply the best games that I've ever played, none have ever come close. I'd give honourable mention to Age of Empires/Rise of Nations.
I think it was killed due to the success of World of Warcraft.
Same here. It has everything and more character than any other RTS ever made. The damn menu music puts me into Warcraft Meditation Mode. When playing on a CRT monitor the particle effect are "lickable". Major sense of accomplishment playing hard in single player too.
You're probably correct.
Given the amount of mental energy you need to dump into a game to win against your opponent is high, albeit short lived. These bursts of cerebral fortitude can be exhausting and annoying if you are the loser (which there always will be one of).
Given that risk to reward I can totally see why more gentile games like MMOs, Minecraft, hell even MOBAs have taken over. They are a lot easier to slide into (and out) at every skill level, which also equates to more money to the developers due to a lowering of the bar.
My first RTS was the first RTS, Dune. Warcraft 3 is very late stage in the genre and I preferred Warcraft 2 far more. WC3 was a disappointment for me. The genre was mostly exhausted by that time. Today it's all about SC2 for a traditional experience but most people I know are playing League of Legends.
Warcraft III was the start of RTS genre downhill, all that micromanagement of heroes made it pseudo-rts, it was probably where Blizzard got it's WoW idea.
The domination of StarCraft has always bewildered me. I really loved the Battle for Middle Earth games back in the day as they were much more slow paced than SC. I absolutely loved spending an hour in total silence frantically constructing a base or two with massive armies before sending them off en masse against my opponent(s) - usually a friend or two connected via a LAN so you could hear their occasional grunts and chuckles, before cries of dismay or triumph. So fun!
Actually, when my son was little 10 years ago, we used to play Lego Battles on the Nintendo DS, which was a mini RTS and that was surprisingly fun as well! Definitely sad the genre disappeared.
Battle for Middle Earth 1 is definitely one of my favorite RTS, I love how the constraints on buildings played into the mecanics of the game (not a fan of the second one which was more classic).
I'd count Paradox's games (Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis, Stellaris, etc.) as "real time" strategy; they're certainly not turn-based. And as far as strategy games go, they're nowadays the gold standard, IMO.
Looking forward to Homeworld 3. Fingers crossed for a Linux-native version, but if not, then hopefully it's as Wine/Proton-friendly as Homeworld: Remastered (and more so than Deserts of Kharak).
2004, 2006, and 2007 for Dawn of War, CoH, and SC respectively. More well known titles like Red Alert 2, Command and Conquer Generals, and Warcraft 3 were even earlier than that. Starcraft 2 was the last "AAA" RTS game that I can think of. Deserts of Kharak is probably the only RTS game I've played in the last 8 years that I really enjoyed. I tried CoH 2, but the micro transactions put me off. Eugen's Wargame series and Steel Divison had interesting and deep nuanced mechanics, but single player was very rough and the multiplayer player base wasn't big enough to sustain a good matchmaking experience.
Personally, I think the main culprit is that MOBAs like DotA 2 and League of Legends are too similar in genre and won over much of the RTS player base. Anecdotally, most of the people I knew that were into SC 2 started playing League or Dota 2.
Edit: I totally blanked out on the Total War franchise. That's definitely a staple of mine, and still playing Rome 1 and Medieval 2 mods to this day.
The most popular, recently released RTS I can think of is Factorio. It seems like RTS game elements have been splitting into their constituent parts and forming a game around those.(e.g. production to Factorio, or combat to DOTA) It may be that way there’s a greater ROI on smaller/simpler games than building out all the components involved in an RTS game.
Today gamers don't like to multi-task and Starcraft(and its clones) is a multi-tasking monster(scouting,economy, building, combat), so similar RTS which force multiple issues at same time are outfoxed by simpler game mechanic games where attention is more deeply focused and players can gain skills easier.
Another factor is RTS are anti-casual, they don't forgive mistakes and only a tiny % of gamers can handle the stress of constant losing/failing, in context of highly demanding, multitasking heavy game. The genre doesn't accept game style variations either - a single cookie-cutter build order is the best one, the rest is suboptimal and loses you either time or money.
I never liked the move to really fast-paced, micro-intensive play. Real Time doesn't have to mean such a flurry of movement and clicking. From Starcraft on it seems like the genre has pushed more and more towards the micromanagement game. Heroes exemplified that in WC3.
A battle with more, slower moving units and simplified commands makes for a more tactical match-up that's less about hotkeys and razor-sharp reaction time and more about the art of war.
Does anyone know if there's a franchise out there moving in that direction?
I blame the rise of more effective DRM and the removal/demoting of lan play in favor of hosted servers. All of my favorite RTS games were discovered while at a friends house. We’d do a quick copy and have an epic game session, creating a legend game that I’ve bought multiple times since.
Studios should allow copying of games for some purposes like local multiplayer, but protect single player and internet content with IAP, so that the game spreads virally, creating a large market and a strong brand.
This was exactly how many of the classics got started, but back then it was in spite of the studios intentions. I think a good rts could still spread that way but now players would welcome the IAP, as long as core mechanics are available and it’s not pay-to-level-up.
> Some people from Relic split off to found Blackbird Interactive. They made a prequel to Homeworld which is apparently really good. They’re now also working on Homeworld 3.
Said prequel is Deserts of Kharak, and is indeed quite good. Am replaying it right now, and despite being land-based and 2D rather than space-based and 3D, it still feels like the original Homeworld in terms of pacing and strategy.
Yes, they manged to carry over essential design elements into their land based setting: there are no stationary bases. You have a huge, unique carrier vehicle instead of a mothership. The harvesting mechanics are almost identical. The biggest difference really is the terrain. The game has an easier time shaping the challenges by making use of terrain. In space, breaking the uniformity of the map was more challenging and the original Homeworld series didn't do too well in that regard. Finding in-universe reasons to make space non-uniform is apparently hard. There are resource spots and regions which affected ship systems, but that's it.
[+] [-] b0rsuk|6 years ago|reply
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, but also advantages, and most importantly - they resulted in a different experience. I think C&C: Red Alert 2 was the high point of that design. Optimal action speed, counters that weren't too hard, varied units.
[+] [-] SeanBoocock|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drdeadringer|6 years ago|reply
Kane as a character holds a place in my heart and memory, as does Tiberium. Soundtracks and cut scenes were great too.
May I enjoy this block of Memory Lane as much as I am able.
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|6 years ago|reply
But they made it too realistic so the gameplay and units were really slow so games can get long and boring after a while.
[+] [-] Fnoord|6 years ago|reply
What happened is that players have become better, better, better. Same as in WoW. It is due to documentation and theorycrafting being more widely available.
That, and the MOBA genre, is what happened to RTS. Multi-player game is also more difficult to pirate, and allows for a cash shop due to vanity items. Means RIP single player. And multi-player RTS is very competitive ie. not casual-friendly. It is not forgiving either.
[+] [-] Dumblydorr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eswat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexhutcheson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newbsProG|6 years ago|reply
Give it a try both Mobile and pc can install it a.k.a cross platform
[+] [-] dleslie|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nitwit005|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bsder|6 years ago|reply
I would argue that they bifurcated into "optimized for esports" and "optimized for whale revenue".
I have played quite a few RTS-like games on mobile which were cool and neat and it was fun to optimize for not spending money. Of course, when whales get beat by players with skill, the whales get angry. So, the games optimize out skill except at the pro levels--which very quickly makes for a really crappy game experience for the rank and file.
> And still, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation et al were not so long ago.
Planetary Annihilation is an abomination that does not belong in that list. And PA is a prime example of trying to optimize for e-sports and forgetting that you need a decent game at the core.
[+] [-] Noos|6 years ago|reply
I think some people on reddit argued that this happened with fortnite, and was part of why Apex Legends got so popular; the casuals that liked to pvp got driven out by the experts and tried to start again in a new game.
[+] [-] defertoreptar|6 years ago|reply
Out of curiosity, in what ways in particular did they do this?
[+] [-] sha666sum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caymanjim|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] isostatic|6 years ago|reply
Thanks to TA and annihilated, I ran my own website based on a game (a Star Trek one), which at peak in 1999 was getting 2000 uniques a day. Taking USD cheques (like $40) from doubleclick into my UK bank in my school uniform in 1998ish was a unique experience.
Thanks to that experience it drove me to where I am today.
As far as actual RTS game play, Red Alert was best in my view. One disc for soviet, one for allied. Tanya, Dogs, and Tesla Coils. So many hours, so little to show for it.
[+] [-] Sohcahtoa82|6 years ago|reply
The nukes in RA were also just plain pitiful and not really worth the time to build.
[+] [-] heelix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dumblydorr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wanderer2323|6 years ago|reply
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 of 'squads' -- and you don't have to worry about strategic side in the middle of the battle.
Both aspects are richer as a result of separation.
[+] [-] Dylan16807|6 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] chrisco255|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nestorD|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0rsuk|6 years ago|reply
- RTS games, since the first C&C, used an interface for selecting rectangles and pointing them at a single target. It scales extremely poorly. Innovations in this area have failed to catch on. Keyboard used for shortcuts only. Come on, we can do better than that. We have Vim. Action, range(movement key). Alternatively, the Kakoune way: selection first, action second. Either way games lack a fast way to select only certain types of units, and especially - to point them at targets of certain types. Harvest: Massive Encounter is a low budget tower defense games which allows you to set targetting priorities for each type of your tower, but RTS games need much, much more systems like that.
Meanwhile Starcraft has been busy embracing and glorifying primitive user interfaces. It has its caveman charm, but - by design - it scales only by clicking faster.
- RTS games were popular at a time when computers were predominantly used by nerds. RTS games appeal mostly to people willing to get better at a game. Publishers discovered less demanding games sell better.
- RTS games are highly demanding to make from technical point of view. You get all the joys of pathfinding at large scale. Optimizations are very important.
- RTS games are not that immersive. This is true for all "topdown" perspective games.
[+] [-] b0rsuk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmueckl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenicr|6 years ago|reply
- I remember this being a key to why I loved 'Empire Earth 2' so much. Selecting all of type X in view, or worldwide and such I think was a thing.
I'd love to have a remake of the Empire Earth (1 and 2) - and to have a mashup with some of the things from Populace on the Amiga would actually be very cool.
[+] [-] the_gipsy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brunoTbear|6 years ago|reply
Cannot wait for the sequel. I spent so many hours playing HW1. Great balance of macro and micro strategy.
[+] [-] chanon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomc1985|6 years ago|reply
IMO both are far superior to Starcraft or even AOE
[+] [-] someexgamedev|6 years ago|reply
1. Amount of control over units
2. Amount of control over a hero
3. Amount of control over building infrastructure
By that definition, RTS is still alive and well. It's just that the particular position of those sliders has changed over time. We have MOBAs which set all the sliders to zero except the hero one. Mobile games like Clash of Clans and Clash Royale provide two more popular configurations.
As for what happened to the classic RTS config many grew up with in the 90s and oughties? My best guess is snuffed out by shifts in game dev economics. AAA single player games only work on consoles (where the controller never played well with RTS) and the near-requirement for every PC multiplayer game to present as an esport raises the buy-in too high
[+] [-] farah7|6 years ago|reply
Warcraft III/Frozen throne are quite simply the best games that I've ever played, none have ever come close. I'd give honourable mention to Age of Empires/Rise of Nations.
I think it was killed due to the success of World of Warcraft.
[+] [-] pcdoodle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Romanulus|6 years ago|reply
Given that risk to reward I can totally see why more gentile games like MMOs, Minecraft, hell even MOBAs have taken over. They are a lot easier to slide into (and out) at every skill level, which also equates to more money to the developers due to a lowering of the bar.
[+] [-] BuckRogers|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Giorgi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexgmcm|6 years ago|reply
I remember having fun with WC3 so I'll probably give it a try.
[+] [-] russellbeattie|6 years ago|reply
Actually, when my son was little 10 years ago, we used to play Lego Battles on the Nintendo DS, which was a mini RTS and that was surprisingly fun as well! Definitely sad the genre disappeared.
[+] [-] nestorD|6 years ago|reply
By the way, if someone is still playing out there, the dwarf hold mod was a great extension to the base game : https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dwarf-holds
[+] [-] yellowapple|6 years ago|reply
Looking forward to Homeworld 3. Fingers crossed for a Linux-native version, but if not, then hopefully it's as Wine/Proton-friendly as Homeworld: Remastered (and more so than Deserts of Kharak).
[+] [-] Steven_Vellon|6 years ago|reply
Personally, I think the main culprit is that MOBAs like DotA 2 and League of Legends are too similar in genre and won over much of the RTS player base. Anecdotally, most of the people I knew that were into SC 2 started playing League or Dota 2.
Edit: I totally blanked out on the Total War franchise. That's definitely a staple of mine, and still playing Rome 1 and Medieval 2 mods to this day.
[+] [-] sueders101|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FrozenVoid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyhc99|6 years ago|reply
A battle with more, slower moving units and simplified commands makes for a more tactical match-up that's less about hotkeys and razor-sharp reaction time and more about the art of war.
Does anyone know if there's a franchise out there moving in that direction?
[+] [-] clord|6 years ago|reply
This was exactly how many of the classics got started, but back then it was in spite of the studios intentions. I think a good rts could still spread that way but now players would welcome the IAP, as long as core mechanics are available and it’s not pay-to-level-up.
[+] [-] azernik|6 years ago|reply
Said prequel is Deserts of Kharak, and is indeed quite good. Am replaying it right now, and despite being land-based and 2D rather than space-based and 3D, it still feels like the original Homeworld in terms of pacing and strategy.
[+] [-] gmueckl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|6 years ago|reply
I thought the missions were quite tedious tbh. I gave up after the 3rd case of "where is the last enemy unit on map" hunt