Why did Real Time Strategy genre die out?

[Damned Registrations]

Except that the point of complex controls for an action game is typically to give the player a wider degree of freedom in what he can do- allowing complex combos in Nioh or a fighting game isn't there just to raise the skill ceiling, it's to let people play in different ways- some prefer to use long elaborate combos, while others focus on narrow timing windows for counter attacks, and other focus on precise positioning to bait out moves and counter with specific ones.

Making you select your command centre and build an SCV every few seconds 50 times in a row isn't some kind of expression of style. Everyone does that if they can. The only people that don't are ones so shit they need to queue up 5 in a row so they have time to do other shit.

There are dozens of avenues in an RTS that would raise the skill ceiling and allow for greater variation of styles; the variance between races in Starcraft is already an example. More unit and building types is another. Base layout could be made more important, large scale faction spells like the mass recall of the protoss could be added as well. Mutually exclusive upgrades could be added to the tech tree. Terrain features could be made more complex, allowing players to make a bigger impact by positioning on the map. The fact that things like that are on the table and what you want is 'Make me need to click shit more often to do things everyone is going to do 100% of the time' is mind boggling. It's like comparing Street Fighter to QWOP and saying 'Wow, this Street Fighter game is so lame, no skill expression, it just makes your character stand all on it's own.'

Yeah, some level of dexterity is going to be inevitable. I don't personally find it fun to dick around with workers slap fighting eachother, blocking building placement, or even dealing with shit like early reaper harassment. But I wouldn't suggest taking that shit out of the game because those are example of player expression- not everyone invests time and resources in doing those things. The player that always tries to irritate you early on is different than the one that focuses on scouting or tries some sort of cheese. There's no such equivalent for the busywork inherent in the economies of blizzard games or AoE. There's no way to play the game where you just say 'Fuck it, I'll just spend my effort elsewhere and make 1/3rd less minerals than my opponent by doing 3% more damage in combat with better control of 4 marines!'

 

[tritosine2k]

General audience 100% prefers walling/turtling and it was mainly the thing before BW bought in rushing.
And it shows:
PopCap Games and its assets were bought by EA on July 12, 2011, for 750 million US dollars
(plants & zombies)
So you start with that (walling/turtling) and if some stuff comes out of it you play on mirrored maps too then OK. If you try to knock off BW as it is you'll likely fail.

 

[Johannes]

Making you select your command centre and build an SCV every few seconds 50 times in a row isn't some kind of expression of style. Everyone does that if they can. The only people that don't are ones so shit they need to queue up 5 in a row so they have time to do other shit.

The people that are so shit that they need to queue up 5 in a row so they have time to do other shit, is everyone, including progamers. Once there's enough things going on at a time it just becomes an efficient use of time for anyone to queue multiple units at a time, when you're floating resources.
Of course it varies a lot how often or how early that happens depending on skill. And also playstyle, different players spend their attention differently.

Whether that's fun is subjective ofc, just like, say, in fighting games how much you want to emphasise frame perfect execution being necessary to successfully execute combos or parry. That may be annoying to me, and maybe to you too, but it's not a knock on the genre if I don't like some aspect of some fighting games.

And like in fighting games you got different games for different preferences in that, you got different RTS's where the mechanical tasks you do vary in difficulty and kind. In Total Annihilation and its kind, you only pay for units gradually as they're built so you're free to queue up as many as you like. In other games basebuilding is so simple there's nothing really hard to optimise, and the focus is more on just micro. There's a lot of things people have done to streamline the stuff you complain about, which can have good results, but it also changes the strategies used - whether for better or worse, that's subjective.

You're generalising a lot from SC2 to the genre as a whole, and also your own dislike of it into the genre being somehow objectively flawed.

 

[Damned Registrations]

when you're floating resources.

You're not supposed to float resources though. Yeah, it happens eventually if (big if) the game lasts that long, but floating resources before you've hit the supply cap means you didn't build enough production buildings or whatever and all else being equal, means you're going to get spanked when an army with those resources spent is bigger than yours.

I'm using SC2 a lot because it's what I've played most recently, and yeah, there's variance out there, I've already mentioned AI Wars as an example of what I prefer. But SC2 is also (Along with AoE2 and 4, which is frankly just as bad if not worse) the most popular game out there, and I'm trying to argue that it's not because people love making minute adjustments to their resource gathering hundreds of times each game. I mean, apparently Lyric Suite does, but I don't think he's a valid example of a functioning human being.

General audience 100% prefers walling/turtling and it was mainly the thing before BW bought in rushing.

This was also readily apparent back in BW when half the custom map games were basically just stripping out any need to expand or defend against a rush, turning the game into "Who can design and pilot the best army?" I don't think it's strange that is a popular desire. The strange thing is how bafflingly underserved it is as a market. Total War arguably does that with its multiplayer, but it's also full of such jank and has such a small player base I suspect most people only play it for the spectacle of seeing dinosaurs charge into elves. It's not really viable for the sort of real time battle focused game its multiplayer would imply.

 

[Johannes]

when you're floating resources.

You're not supposed to float resources though. Yeah, it happens eventually if (big if) the game lasts that long, but floating resources before you've hit the supply cap means you didn't build enough production buildings or whatever and all else being equal, means you're going to get spanked when an army with those resources spent is bigger than yours.

You're not supposed to make mistakes, but you will. All else is never quite equal so you can still win while playing imperfectly.

The impossibility of doing everything right, is in big part what allows for people to have radically different playstyles.

 

[tritosine2k]

Well it can be even argued RTS lost initiative against its own sub genre and SC2 would be better off this way:


Making this quite a kool aid story...

 

[Johannes]

This was also readily apparent back in BW when half the custom map games were basically just stripping out any need to expand or defend against a rush, turning the game into "Who can design and pilot the best army?"

What maps are you thinking of? Fastest map at least doesn't make the game less rushy or less eco focused, it just makes the eco more one dimensional. Which makes the battles more straightforward as well, as you're not fighting across a whole map trying to maneuver to attack expansions and defend your own, just trying to straight up kill your opponents army or snipe their workers all stacked together in 1 spot.

But I'm no scbw custom games aficionado, maybe that's not the kind of map you had in mind at all.



And I agree a game of one off battles in total war style, but with design from the ground up made with multiplayer in mind, could be interesting - but probably not a blockbuster hit even if done well.

 

[Damned Registrations]

What maps are you thinking of?

People made custom maps with thing like enforced 'no rush 15' rules or even zero build time and starting with massive resources so workers weren't even necessary beyond building your tech. Even among people that didn't there were plenty that would put it in the title of the match, or have maps with such good chokepoints that rushing was pretty much off the table because it'd be impossible to fight up a ramp single file prior to getting siege units. Obviously balance wasn't a priority here.

Actually, speaking of custom maps, a lot of the more creative ones were indicative of this style as well- stuff like Golem Wars, Bunker Wars, Evolution or even MTG: Arena all changed the game up so you had an incredibly well defended base and accumulated more resources only over time gradually, and by killing enemy units in a free for all. These maps were incredibly popular back in the day, and again, basically distilled the game down to piloting an army and making a few key decisions about how to upgrade or add to it, with none of the fussing over economy required. They still required plenty of skill to micro properly, but there would often be pauses in the action as well, because picking the right moment to engage was more important than being relentlessly active.

 

[BrainMuncher]

There was a moment there, I forget when exactly but it was shortly before RTS dropped off sharply, probably early-mid 2000s. All the gaming press and commentators were bleating loudly about base building in RTS was boring tedious and outdated, because you had to rebuild the base on every level of the campaign. Then there was a brief period where people started releasing RTS with reduced or removed base building but it didn't last since RTT games had always existed and were never popular. Then there was a long period where not just base building RTS but also city builders were severely undeserved, only indies have started to reverse the trend.

So I think part of the answer is that for some reason base building became uncool in the minds of the press and the suits and became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that base building games would fail.

It's not surprising to me that AOE2 with the ability to build walls and towers being one of the most turtley buildiest games survived all this time.

 

[Socrates]

I think the overall reason is two-fold.

RTS titles have largely failed to innovate over the course of the genre's lifespan leading to stagnation. Additionally RTS typically has a higher skill ceiling than other types of genres which tends to scare people curious of the genre away.

I think in terms of when I would probably say RTS really started to slow down around the time SC2 was finished with it's final 3rd expansion. The AOE2 community is going pretty strong however but that is by no means a new or innovative title by now. RTS in general I think needs to completely rethink the entire genre and try something new and bold and not be afraid to experiment.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Do you really think most of the players care about that?

That's nothing to do with the genre. Most people are casuals in any genre.

Though a difference seems to be, a lot of clueless people too have hot takes about what RTS's are really about.

RTS is about building cool, symmetrical bases with one building each.
RTS is about making bizarre unit compositions that'd make enemy AI blush.
RTS is about being told by surprisingly charismatic bald men to commit war crimes and gleefully doing so.
RTS is about having sick soundtracks that have no biness being that good.
RTS is about having cool as fuck cutscenes as a reward for beating missions.

RTS is NOT about apm, multiplayer or gookclicking.

This is the only comment in this thread I can understand.

I don't know what people have in their mind when they think of an RTS but the comments here are depressing.

 

[Lyric Suite]

There was a moment there, I forget when exactly but it was shortly before RTS dropped off sharply, probably early-mid 2000s. All the gaming press and commentators were bleating loudly about base building in RTS was boring tedious and outdated, because you had to rebuild the base on every level of the campaign. Then there was a brief period where people started releasing RTS with reduced or removed base building but it didn't last since RTT games had always existed and were never popular. Then there was a long period where not just base building RTS but also city builders were severely undeserved, only indies have started to reverse the trend.

So I think part of the answer is that for some reason base building became uncool in the minds of the press and the suits and became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that base building games would fail.

It's not surprising to me that AOE2 with the ability to build walls and towers being one of the most turtley buildiest games survived all this time.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

Much of the reason i'm opposed to the idea of introducing too many QoL features is that the rationale developers are using is based on the same idea. They want to sell more copies and they assume if they dumb the game down and make it "easier" for new players or casuals they'll make more money. The result is always invariably the reverse. The neutered games don't end up selling all that much and the genre becomes tained.

QoL features aren't always "bad" and in fact they can even make the game better but they need to be introduced for the right reasons.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Additionally RTS typically has a higher skill ceiling than other types of genres which tends to scare people curious of the genre away.

Do they though?

Because if we are talking about online play, the skill level is set by the people, not the game, and if itsn't it, it means the game was ruined by artificially capping skill expression, which invariably also means the games aren't worth playing to begin with. If skill doesn't matter when you are competing with others, it means there's not even a "game" in there anymore. At that point it would be like playing a racing sim with all the assists turned on. Why bother.

If we are talking about singleplayer, i can't think of anything that is easier to play than an RTS. In most of them, the AI is so dumb you can literally just turtle in your base and then send out a massive army comprised entirely of the strongest unit you got. Blizzard tried to introduce a greater digree of complexity in their single player maps but they also gave you difficulty options so the casuls can still set their game to easy and just autopilot through the campaign.

 

[Lyric Suite]

RTS titles have largely failed to innovate over the course of the genre's lifespan leading to stagnation.

They failed to innovate because the general trend has been to dumb them down.

 

[Lyric Suite]

BTW, as a counter point, how do casuls get into games like Dota 2? I never played a MOBA, but as far as i can gather they aren't particularly demanding in terms of manual skill, APM and all that stuff. However, i know Dota 2 for instance has the reputation of being ridicolously overhwleming in terms of the number of things you need to know to be good at the game. How do the casuals deal with that? Last i checked, the game was super popular on steam. How did it achieve those numbers, given the learning curve is so off the charts?

So the skill ceiling for Starcraft is too high, and the learning curve for Dota 2 is too tough, and yet we are talking about the most popular games in their respective genres. If you are gonna say it's just the name Blizzard and Valve that is attracting the casuls, than it seems to me it's irrelevant whether the game is hard or easy.

 

[Johannes]

There was a moment there, I forget when exactly but it was shortly before RTS dropped off sharply, probably early-mid 2000s. All the gaming press and commentators were bleating loudly about base building in RTS was boring tedious and outdated, because you had to rebuild the base on every level of the campaign. Then there was a brief period where people started releasing RTS with reduced or removed base building but it didn't last since RTT games had always existed and were never popular. Then there was a long period where not just base building RTS but also city builders were severely undeserved, only indies have started to reverse the trend.

So I think part of the answer is that for some reason base building became uncool in the minds of the press and the suits and became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that base building games would fail.

It's not surprising to me that AOE2 with the ability to build walls and towers being one of the most turtley buildiest games survived all this time.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

Much of the reason i'm opposed to the idea of introducing too many QoL features is that the rationale developers are using is based on the same idea. They want to sell more copies and they assume if they dumb the game down and make it "easier" for new players or casuals they'll make more money. The result is always invariably the reverse. The neutered games don't end up selling all that much and the genre becomes tained.

QoL features aren't always "bad" and in fact they can even make the game better but they need to be introduced for the right reasons.

As a general rule I'd say QoL features are good, while removing complex features is bad. Which are the two ways you make a game more Accessible. Not a hard and fast rule ofc, axing some unnecessary mechanic can give a game tighter focus and some QoL ideas can make the gameplay loop duller.

Look at for example the QoL changes between scbw and sc2. Multiple building selection, unit selection not capped at 12, smarter casting for abilities with multiple casters selected, workers go to mine automatically, smarter pathing... For scbw I they shouldn't be changed since those limitations are a big part of the game balance as we know it. But for making a new game, all those things make total sense imo. I don't think sc2 is as entertaining a game as the original, but not because it's dumbed down, it just doesn't have quite as interesting unit roster and stats.
Mostly I dislike how fast everything dies in sc2, makes battles too quick and dependant on reaction time. More tense when you have a back n forth fight where there's more time to maneuver and the dps:hp ratio is lower.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Couple of days ago i ended up watching this as i was curious to see what the issue was with SC2 as i remember there was a lot of complaining even coming from the pro-players:



That story about the two pro Zerg guys getting into a stalemate for 3 hours then going AFK during the match to go tell Blizzard if they were watching that shit was kinda of hilarious.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Strategy took a backseat to APM ability spamming bugmen faggotry.

 

[Johannes]

Strategy took a backseat to APM ability spamming bugmen faggotry.

First we must define, what is an strategy?

 

[InD_ImaginE]

APM just enables you to execute strategy better and more efficient

If your build order, scouting, and prioritization is retarded it won't save you at all. Understanding what the enemy is doing, countering them, and so on and so forth.

Of course there are certain "problematic" build that basically just punish low APM players (Zerg Rushing in general), but past certain point saying "I just lose due to APM" is a cope

 

[Borelli]

I feel that the old school style RTS got its peak with the holy trio of Starcraft, AoE and C&C (sorry never played TA) and i don't see how you can improve on this formula without major changes (Rise of Nations was good though).
Sort of a similar situation with boomer shooters, after the late 90s peak everything else is a well made clone at best, it is no wonder the RTS genre changed into War3 style and MOBAs.

There are even some super low Elo players (below 800) who regularly play and have fun playing incompetently against each other. There's a streamer/youtube commenter who comments on AoE2 games, and he has a series called Low Elo Legends where he casts games played by weak players with a low Elo, and they're so much fun to watch because nothing they do is meta, it's just two dudes playing the game in their own style.

I have a very middling Elo of around 1000. I'm not bad at the game, but neither am I great. Just middle of the road competent-ish player.
And I don't really want to get much better than this. I'm comfortable in my zone.

I liked playing Starcraft 1 multi on my low skill level because of this exact reason, the imperfection of players means you can experiment with new strategies despite even 15 years ago most of the puzzle was solved and it was either follow the strats that korean pros made for you or GTFO.

 

[Ba'al]

BTW, as a counter point, how do casuls get into games like Dota 2? I never played a MOBA, but as far as i can gather they aren't particularly demanding in terms of manual skill, APM and all that stuff. However, i know Dota 2 for instance has the reputation of being ridicolously overhwleming in terms of the number of things you need to know to be good at the game. How do the casuals deal with that? Last i checked, the game was super popular on steam. How did it achieve those numbers, given the learning curve is so off the charts?

So the skill ceiling for Starcraft is too high, and the learning curve for Dota 2 is too tough, and yet we are talking about the most popular games in their respective genres. If you are gonna say it's just the name Blizzard and Valve that is attracting the casuls, than it seems to me it's irrelevant whether the game is hard or easy.

Speaking as someone who has played LoL: these games have a bunch of mechanics that all add to variance; new characters with new abilities, new items, rebalancing old characters and items, different possible team compositions, different levels of retardation of teammates and so on. All of this means even a pro player can easily misjudge whether a particular play is in his favour or not. Casual players usually just randomly commit to fights without much thought making it a coin flip. All this variance means that bad players get to randomly win, while good players "randomly" lose (through no fault of their own, like retarded teammates or a counter matchup). LoL also has a bunch of comeback mechanics that make wild swings in team power common.

Another thing that "hero based" games have is character skills, more importantly ultimate skills. These are strong skills on a large cooldown, basically a participation award. I think the most ridiculous one is by some cowboy in Overwatch that gets a guaranteed kill if an enemy is on his screen at the time of casting or something like that. With skills like these, shit players can just wait and get a chance to make some sort of impact on the game.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Described like that it seems like utter decline.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I would say that playing a MOBA is akin to playing poker- any retard can win once in a while because he got lucky, but being good enough to calculate your odds properly while also judging the human factor of the other players is an artform. Obviously the MOBA also has the dexterity factor of precise timing and positioning.

The thing is, if you suck at a MOBA, as long as you're trying to get better, losing doesn't feel that bad because you learn something. "Oh wow that character is so good, I'll try him next" and then you get stomped as that character and know a way to fight against him next time. You can also learn a ton about the game by spectating before even playing, and it will help you out immensely.

If you suck at SC or AoE, it probably means someone sent an army to destroy you that was 3 times bigger than what you had, or killed half your workers with one or two units or a cannon rush. There's nothing to learn from that. You can't turn around and try to harass someone with a rush yourself because you'll kill like 3 workers, forget to build 8 and get supply blocked because you were too distracted. You just need to practice until you can micro well enough to match them. Your decisions and knowledge don't matter at all if you can't actually accomplish the plan you chose. Knowing that splitting units to dodge AoE attacks is effective is utterly pointless if you can't execute well enough anyways.

 

[Johannes]

If you can't actually accomplish the plan you chose, your decisions and knowledge just might not be very good. I don't see the difference to skill issues in other games, including in turnbased strategy games. A strong player will optimise their economy better and have more troops, and on top of that control those troops better.