Why did Real Time Strategy genre die out?

[Johannes]

If there was just a single correct way to open, why would people bother scouting?

It's not a single correct way, but a handful of them, and you scout to find out which one the opponent did. Though there have certainly been times when a particular opening for a given matchup was so dominant it wasn't even really necessary, aside from avoiding cheese.

Again, you can't alter these timings because it makes the entire build irrelevant. You need your relevant upgrade to happen before you reach the enemy base, and doing it any earlier than that means you didn't build as many units as you could have. In either case you effectively just lose right there. You can't upgrade your marines with stim after they're all dead. You may as well try adding ingredients to a lasagna after it's in the oven.

These people literally figure out what build the opponent is doing by looking at their gas production and checking the amount of gas left vs the clock. The only way that conceivably works is when the builds are incredibly predictable.

Matching your upgrade timing to your attack is just logical, there's still room to alter the timing you sync them at.

Scouting isn't a one off thing, but something you constantly want to do to know what the opponent is doing minute to minute, builds aren't set in stone as you commit into this or that. You have a lot of opportunity to catch your opponent off guard in the early game, in SC2 too.

 

[goregasm]

It's definitely a genre I miss and still go back to the classics, I will agree with most above and say consoles. I played C&C on Playstation but look..RTS was always a niche genre with consoles taking a huge chunk of the game market in general, and the goal being to move numbers, the genre which was always small outside of a small handful of series, just struggled.

Hopefully with the rise of more moderate sized studios we will continue to get some interesting games like terminator and even starship troopers, but I don't ever see the genre being on par with anything like rpgs or action games, it seems to have more "general" appeal than point and click adventure games but less than rtwp rpgs.

 

[tritosine2k]

RTS was always a niche genre with

Bad take, BW started e-sport, thousand upon thousands gaming cafes opened bc BW and CS was the less intellectual choice.

That's without counting LAN stuff.

 

[Beans00]

C&C, one of the very first RTS, I played on console. Everything has been done on consoles

Lol, we know this guys origin story on why he made autistic mods now. 100% this guy was too retarded to micro any rts properly. Definitely why he couldn't figure out how to code his unreal mod into an actual mod.




OT- My opinion, the genre peaked with AOE 2 and Starcraft, cnc was killed by EA. Seemed like most rts franchises never became super popular besides age of, westwood and blizzard.


I don't think consoles killed RTS, since RTS peaked during the late 90s/early 00's. The genre simply failed to innovate and later entries were universally bad.

 

[tritosine2k]

There's some gossip about RTS elements in Titanfall code.

Titanfall "deleted scenes": Orbital strike, Titan shotgun, Nuke satchel, RTS-like commander, Titan repair drone, Extra gamemodes

Unrelated but pretty:

 

[Beans00]

This is a another Codex cope. It's not just about how fast you are, it's also knowing what you are supposed to do, what tactics you are supposed to use against what at any given time.

There's some truth to what you're saying but you're coping a bit too. If you have two evenly skilled players, then obviously strategy matters more. As someone who played aoe 2(1900-2200 depending on the platform), Starcraft 2(master 4v4's, diamond 1v1's) at a fairly high level, aswell as being decent at a few others like ra2 and tib sun, wc3.

I'll use aoe 2 as an example. I'm using times from 10-15 years ago, since as far as I'm aware people are way better now. Back in 2010 if you couldn't castle age by 15:45-1630(at the latest), you lost in high level games. It was that simple. If it was a 1v1 you needed to be able to micro and harass or fend off enemy harassment, but if you weren't fast you were dead.

I got diamond in starcraft 2 basically by roach rushing 99% of the time. For anyone unaware roach rushing was a quick 3-4 minute rush where you did very simple micro to get 7 mid tier units around the 330-4 minute mark. Easy, simple and I won countless games just by being faster then whoever I was playing against. If I went against someone playing protoss it was almost a guaranteed win because of how slow they were.

 

[tritosine2k]

Cool stuff wasn't high skill ceiling but 3v4 because desync drop. I even played 1v5 BW in LAN and won kekeke.

 

[vota DC]

C&C, one of the very first RTS, I played on console. Everything has been done on consoles

Lol, we know this guys origin story on why he made autistic mods now. 100% this guy was too retarded to micro any rts properly. Definitely why he couldn't figure out how to code his unreal mod into an actual mod.




OT- My opinion, the genre peaked with AOE 2 and Starcraft, cnc was killed by EA. Seemed like most rts franchises never became super popular besides age of, westwood and blizzard.


I don't think consoles killed RTS, since RTS peaked during the late 90s/early 00's. The genre simply failed to innovate and later entries were universally bad.

They aren't console but doing a ooga booga version that would play the same on PC and consoles. You use a console port or a very difficult game to play without mouse....but in late 00 they chosen to dumb down games instead of making multiple versions. Moba too were generated by a wc3 mod.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

C&C, one of the very first RTS, I played on console.

I have C&C and Red Alert on my Nintendo DSi. They're homebrew ports, requires the original PC files to work, but they work. Even does the cutscenes.

 

[pakoito]

The game in my signature, Sangokushi Taisen, is one of the last bastions...except it can only played in japanese arcades

 

[Hell Swarm]

RTS were like JRPGs in that they offered more complexity in exchange for a much slower pace. Now we have faster games with as much complexity and they no longer feel necessary. The build up time of getting the action started and repeating the almost exact same steps of base building with a minute or two between buildings being complete isn't appealing. It's like playing Magic the gathering but the early turns are both players playing lands and passing then on turn 5 you shit your hand onto the board, ram it at each other and whoever winds turn 5 wins the game. Why not just skip the land playing and get right to turn 5? That's MOBAs or top down CRPG games like Baldur's gate, but the later can add relationship wankery to appeal to women and broaden the market beyond autistic men in their teens and early 20s or 50 year old guys with a dead wife waiting to die.

There is still a niche and dedicated RTS community so the genre still survives and still makes decent money. It's in better health than some genres so I wouldn't expect it to ever truly die. It's unlikely to hit the mainstream again unless some mobile game does it well.

 

[JarlFrank]

What does it mean that a game is "figured out"? It doesn't mean anyone can just simply check what the best strategies are, and then focus on the execution. No, it means that the top people are so good at understanding the strategy of the game, that it comes to really tiny nuances - not just differences in unit control, but ever developing better understanding of what to do when you see your opponent doing this or that.

Yep. In the Age of Empires 2 multiplayer scene there's constantly new strategies popping up. The meta keeps changing, and not just due to patches introducing balance changes or players getting better at executions, but because players keep playing around with the mechanics and figure out new working strategies.

Perhaps someone discovers a good use for an underrated unit, or finds a new way to leverage a civ bonus, etc etc. AoE2 matches aren't predictable at all.

 

[tritosine2k]

Ideally you balance around influx of new players hence prevalent 3v4 and so on. In BW "clan"-s served this purpose very well, and 3v4 also resulted from disconnect and it was a blessing in disguise and matches were even aborted when the DC made an obvious win/onesided match. We played TONS of 3v4.

 

[Lyric Suite]

After a bit of thinking, i think there's two problems going on with how nu-devs approach the question of resurrecting this genre.

The first of course is the usual boring corporate notion that dumbing shit down will lead to better sales. Cater to the "new" players, the people with no experience with the genre. A certain number of casuals have a tendency to join this general chorus out of a mistplaced resentment against online play. Those are the people who bitch endlessly about APM and shit like that despite the fact the "real time" nature of those games implies there's always going to be a level where APM matters, even against the most scrub of AI.

If you check out some of the shit nu-devs are saying regarding the way they wish to simplify the genre, it's always about removing "tedium" or complexity, whatever that means. Now, there's two things that prove unequivocally that this approach is simply nonsensical.

First, that the most successful RTS games out there are among the most difficult ones (all the Blizzard RTS games up to and including SC2), and those who DID dump down a lot of the complexity of the genre, like MOBAs, are still plenty complicated for new comers to get into (and yet they are still massively popular). So what gives, how come the most popular RTS games are the ones that HAVEN'T been dumped down?

The second problem with this idea is that developers already have all the data. Now according to Blizzard telematry that was leaked some years ago or something, 80% of the people who bought SC2 never played the multiplayer. This means that the vast majority of people bought the game for the single player. Now lo and behold, all the Blizzard games had some of the best campaigns on top of having the best multiplayer. One would assume the devs making RTS games today have this data, and yet they think the best approach is to dump the mechanics while focusing on the multiplayer? To me that seems the most failed approach they could take. Dumping the game down will alienate the pros, while it won't do anything to shift that 80% of casuals away from the single player into the multiplayer since multiplayer is hard because people make it hard. You can simplify the mechanis and add all the QoL shit you want, casuals will always get buttfucked by dedicated online players so you are back to square one, except now the pros won't stay because the game sucks and the casuals won't buy the game because the single player sucks too.

 

[Hell Swarm]

First, that the most successful RTS games out there are among the most difficult ones (all the Blizzard RTS games up to and including SC2),

Please be quiet. You have no idea what you're talking about when you consider Warcraft and Starcraft to be even close to the most difficult ones. Neither in game challenge or mechanic complexity. They are the baby versions made for casuals.

 

[Lyric Suite]

First, that the most successful RTS games out there are among the most difficult ones (all the Blizzard RTS games up to and including SC2),

Please be quiet. You have no idea what you're talking about when you consider Warcraft and Starcraft to be even close to the most difficult ones. Neither in game challenge or mechanic complexity. They are the baby versions made for casuals.

The casul cope in full display.

 

[Lyric Suite]

RTS were like JRPGs in that they offered more complexity in exchange for a much slower pace.

Bro, do you even know what an RTS is?

 

[Lyric Suite]

I got diamond in starcraft 2 basically by roach rushing 99% of the time. For anyone unaware roach rushing was a quick 3-4 minute rush where you did very simple micro to get 7 mid tier units around the 330-4 minute mark. Easy, simple and I won countless games just by being faster then whoever I was playing against. If I went against someone playing protoss it was almost a guaranteed win because of how slow they were.

This seems more like an issue with SC2 though. I never played it because the campaign made me vomit and that was it, but it's still popular online so i just assumed that part at least was good (guess i was wrong).

In either case, there's no question that speed makes a difference in those kind of games, and in a sense that's expected. They are real time games. The action is just as important as the strategy. Remove the action part, and you might as well make a turn based strategy game.

RTS are action games, and speed matters in action games. My argument is more that speed still doesn't preclude there being steategy or tactics, or the necessity to learn all the meta. Even in your example, you still needed to know about this specific tactic (roach rushing). If it was so successful that no counter was possible, that seems like a fault on the part of the devs. The fact still remains you had to employ a tactic to win, you didn't just brainlessly mash buttons around, which is how a lot of casuals think online game works.

The last RTS game i played online was WC3 and in that game there was a shit ton of stuff i had to learn. What tactics to use and what counter there was for each and so forth. From a casual perspective, it's a fairly complicated game to learn. And then of course there's the APM stuff, the micro, the multi-tasking which is all part of it as well. Even in the single player that stuff matters. There's some missions in TFT that has the normies screech too lol:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Warcraft3R...campaign_sentinels_ep_5_balancing_the_scales/

 

[Multidirectional]

I got diamond in starcraft 2 basically by roach rushing 99% of the time. For anyone unaware roach rushing was a quick 3-4 minute rush where you did very simple micro to get 7 mid tier units around the 330-4 minute mark. Easy, simple and I won countless games just by being faster then whoever I was playing against. If I went against someone playing protoss it was almost a guaranteed win because of how slow they were.

This seems more like an issue with SC2 though. I never played it because the campaign made me vomit and that was it, but it's still popular online so i just assumed that part at least was good (guess i was wrong).

I don't see anything wrong with somebody being able to reach Diamond by rushing every game. Players below Diamond generally aren't good at dealing with cheeses. Most rushers get stuck when reaching Diamond too, because suddenly they are encountering players who can shut down their builds and also macro way better than them. Basically Diamond is where the real game starts, more or less. I'm one of those players who reached Diamond by playing mostly defensive macro and I encounter these poor cheesers a lot. It's obvious how lost they become at what to do next if their first wave of aggression gets shut down. If you want to rank up by playing rushes every game you'll only end up hurting yourself in the long run.

 

[Raghar]

I got diamond in starcraft 2 basically by roach rushing 99% of the time. For anyone unaware roach rushing was a quick 3-4 minute rush where you did very simple micro to get 7 mid tier units around the 330-4 minute mark. Easy, simple and I won countless games just by being faster then whoever I was playing against. If I went against someone playing protoss it was almost a guaranteed win because of how slow they were.

This seems more like an issue with SC2 though. I never played it because the campaign made me vomit and that was it, but it's still popular online so i just assumed that part at least was good (guess i was wrong).

I don't see anything wrong with somebody being able to reach Diamond by rushing every game. Players below Diamond generally aren't good at dealing with cheeses. Most rushers get stuck when reaching Diamond too, because suddenly they are encountering players who can shut down their builds and also macro way better than them. Basically Diamond is where the real game starts, more or less. I'm one of those players who reached Diamond by playing mostly defensive macro and I encounter these poor cheesers a lot. It's obvious how lost they become at what to do next if their first wave of aggression gets shut down. If you want to rank up by playing rushes every game you'll only end up hurting yourself in the long run.

On the positive side the round would be over in 5 minutes instead of 30. You can play A LOT more.

 

[Multidirectional]

On the positive side the round would be over in 5 minutes instead of 30. You can play A LOT more.

Yeah but what are you playing? Shitty tier 1 units every game and never practicing with late game tech. I generally prefer games where I end up having 80-90 workers and lots of production capability so games are decided over multiple epic battles instead of one attack in early game.

 

[Lucumo]

This seems more like an issue with SC2 though. I never played it because the campaign made me vomit and that was it, but it's still popular online so i just assumed that part at least was good (guess i was wrong).

Nah, SC2 sucked. It got popular because of the brand "Blizzard", Blizzard killing professional BW by suing the Korean companies and the WC3 community looking for something new, as it was slowly but surely dwindling. So they combined two fanbases + all the casual gamers and it still was a relative flop. Even with them propping up the professional scene by pumping money into it, it failed. Heck, BW is magnitudes more popular and played than SC2 to this day.

 

[Multidirectional]

Heck, BW is magnitudes more popular and played than SC2 to this day.

Then why are search times for BW matches way longer than SC2 matches? I don't see how it is even possible for most people to prefer playing BW with its utter garbage controls from hell. Most people aren't autistic tryhards, they just want a game that feels smooth to play.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Things i liked from SC2 after playing Wings of Liberty:

1) The engine. I thought the game played really well, everything was smooth and looked clean. Granted, i never played the game on release so all the bugs and performance issues were ironed out by the time i started playing but this is an aspect that is important because normies don't respond too well to jank.
2) Single player maps were actually well designed, and it was one of the few games where achievements were actually well integrated (they felt like extra mission objectives).

The things i despised and made me not bother with the game anymore:

1) Battle.net 2.0 and the absurd down grade that was over original Battle.net. Unforgivable sin as far as i'm concerned and the reason i never touched the multiplayer. Maybe they fixed it, i don't care. It's the principle of the thing (especially since we know why they removed basic shit like chat etc).
2) The writing. The most soulless, made by committee retardation i've EVER seen in a game. Sadly, most normies didn't care about the quality of the writing and i bet a lot of that 80% of casuls who just played the single player actually enjoyed the story of the campaign.
3) Sounds of units. While the visuals were pretty good, the sounds were a mixed bag and in a lot of cases they were downright terrible (Zergs in particularly). Another unforgivable sin coming from a company like Blizzard which excelled in this kind of shit above all else.

All in all, this was the first Blizzard game that didn't feel like Blizzard to me. Well, this and Cataclysm i guess. Whatever their faults, old Blizzard had a way of doing things that made their games feel very high level, at least in terms of production values. You could feel there was a lot of expertise behind those games, even if some aspects of them sucked (writing usually wasn't the best even early own, though i guess it was more than adequate compared to SC2 lmao).

That feeling was gone with SC2. I have a feeling normies saw the same as well which is what made Blizzard so big in the first place back in the day. Any game trying to tap into the vacuum left by Blizzard has a lot of ground to cover. You need high production values, a good single player campaign, and good multiplayer meta to extend longevity of the game. Maybe it's not that the "genre" is dead but nu-devs just aren't up to the task?

 

[Lucumo]

Heck, BW is magnitudes more popular and played than SC2 to this day.

Then why are search times for BW matches way longer than SC2 matches? I don't see how it is even possible for most people to prefer playing BW with its utter garbage controls from hell. Most people aren't autistic tryhards, they just want a game that feels smooth to play.

I don't play BW:R, so who knows? You probably live in some bad region where people don't care to play. As such, waiting before the area of search is extended takes some time.

1) Battle.net 2.0 and the absurd down grade that was over original Battle.net. Unforgivable sin as far as i'm concerned and the reason i never touched the multiplayer. Maybe they fixed it, i don't care. It's the principle of the thing (especially since we know why they removed basic shit like chat etc).

It wasn't called Battle.net 0.2 for nothing.