Why did Real Time Strategy genre die out?

[Lyric Suite]

Also, notice how all the competitive online games that have been "fixed" to level the playing field between high skill players and low skill players usually take the approach of making things worst for both.

BTW, isn't Starcraft 2 like, super popular?

Since the topic was about why the genred "died" out, isn't it a bit odd to claim that last game to achieve an high degree of success actually did it wrong? If Blizzard fucked up by making the game run on faster instead of normal, how come everybody is playing this shit?

Imagine you are a nu-dev and you want to try to make a successful RTS today. Would it make sense to look at the last games of the genre that were actually successful and then reason: you know, the genre died because of what those games were doing, let's change everything!

Keep in mind that SC2 is also popular from a spectator point of view. This seems to resemble sports, doesn't it? Would people actually watch SC2 matches so much if the game was neutered?

 

[Damned Registrations]

It's not a matter of being smart enough to realize you should do something, it's about having enough time to do all the important things you know need to be done.

Yeah, because RTS games are action games.

It's half and half.

If it were half and half I'd be thrilled. It's like, 90/10. Something like DotA is 50/50, as ironic as that is. It's far more dependent on situational awareness, predicting behaviour, synergy between players and within builds, effective counter tactics for specific items and heroes. And yet nobody would ever claim that dota is all strategy and no action, even though you can easily do quite well with fuck all APM. Because it doesn't include a shitton of extra busywork in the background. For dota to be as action oriented as SC2, you'd need to make it a 1v1 game where each player controlled an entire team of 5 heroes.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Arguing APM doesn't matter and arguing APM means everything in RTS is fucking retarded Jesus.

There macro game in RTS, opening, build sequence train sequence and so on and so forth and those are 100% important. APM enable you to do those things MUCH more efficiently, especially after the phase where you have at least one troop-producing building. Good micro also means less resource loss, RTS fundamentally is a game of resource and one who has advantage over it will more likely also win. Micro enables you to survive more, and kill more, especially important in the early phase of the game. For Blizzard RTS with a bunch of active abilities it is also a matter of utilizing them effectively.

Macro game is important but if you have a slow reaction time/shit apm, you will never eventually hit a cap. APM is also not about mindlessly clicking shit but also making those click count, about the moment to moment decision making, processing information, and putting them to action.

The question is why any of this needs to be changed for the genre to be "resurrected" when this is how those games worked when they were at the peak of their popularity.

They don't. I said several pages ago that making RTS simpler will simply fail because it will be boring to play for both casuals and veterans.

RTS is not Fighting Games who managed to actually "casualize" while maintaining it's core audience. There are certain degree of compromise you can make but it will never make the genre casual-friendly.

Since the topic was about why the genred "died" out, isn't it a bit odd to claim that last game to achieve an high degree of success actually did it wrong? If Blizzard fucked up by making the game run on faster instead of normal, how come everybody is playing this shit?

Momentum. Here is the thing: the more player you have, the more "balanced matchmaking becomes". A game with 100,000 active players will give you a decent chance to play with people of the same level. A game with 1,000 players or even 5,000 players will have MASSIVE skill disparity and matchmaking will be shit simply because of natrual selection. At one point as number of people online is getting smaller, it's impossible to get balanced matchmaking as a scrub, thus the scrub quits, thus the game died out.

Blizzard has momentum on their side: people play Blizzard games because they are Blizzard games. Also why the only recent RTS to have pretty big success is AoE 4: it's momentum and the name carried over from the franchise. Being a decently designed game while having momentum is the important thing.

Of course this is not everything, if your game is so dogshit then momentum means nothing (see C&C 4).

 

[Lyric Suite]

If you can do well with no APM means DotA is no action game at all.

 

[Johannes]

It's not a matter of being smart enough to realize you should do something, it's about having enough time to do all the important things you know need to be done.

Yeah, because RTS games are action games.

It's half and half.

If it were half and half I'd be thrilled. It's like, 90/10. Something like DotA is 50/50, as ironic as that is. It's far more dependent on situational awareness, predicting behaviour, synergy between players and within builds, effective counter tactics for specific items and heroes. And yet nobody would ever claim that dota is all strategy and no action, even though you can easily do quite well with fuck all APM. Because it doesn't include a shitton of extra busywork in the background. For dota to be as action oriented as SC2, you'd need to make it a 1v1 game where each player controlled an entire team of 5 heroes.

It's not 90/10 tho. Really, you have to be reasonably close in skill for motor skills to matter or you'll just get caught with your pants down.

 

[Johannes]

If you can do well with no APM means DotA is no action game at all.

You control just 1 hero mostly, so that can't require very much APM, at least not consistently over the length of a match. But you still have to be precise and well timed in the actions that you do take.

 

[Lyric Suite]

So while i'm googling DotA i stumbled on this video by Grubby arguing he quit the game because the community sucks:



So let me get this straight. They created a game where, just like in Overwatch, individual player skill is less important and it's all about the role you have in the team, and performing that role well, whether it involves high levels of skills or not. The net result of trying to downplay personal failure or glory is that now everybody is paranoid about everybody else and blaming their fellow members for the failure of their teams lmao.

 

[Damned Registrations]

If you can do well with no APM means DotA is no action game at all.

There are other types of action besides frantically doing 5 things at once, 4 of which are extremely repetitive. DotA is about finding key moments to act with maximum effect during constant chaos. It's like comparing juggling to throwing darts at a moving target. Both require physical prowess; but only one demands constant frantic action.

 

[Lyric Suite]

If you can do well with no APM means DotA is no action game at all.

There are other types of action besides frantically doing 5 things at once, 4 of which are extremely repetitive. DotA is about finding key moments to act with maximum effect during constant chaos. It's like comparing juggling to throwing darts at a moving target. Both require physical prowess; but only one demands constant frantic action.

So basically DotA is 90% meta and 10% player skill.

 

[Multidirectional]

So let me get this straight. They created a game where, just like in Overwatch, individual player skill is less important and it's all about the role you have in the team, and performing that role well, whether it involves high levels of skills or not. The net result of trying to downplay personal failure or glory is that now everybody is paranoid about everybody else and blaming their fellow members for the failure of their teams lmao.

All team games that I've played were full of whiny bitches who constantly insult their teammates. In SC2 as well, there are way more douchebags in team games than in 1v1, where people are mostly friendly.
Didn't play DOTA 2 but I did play 3 matches of League of Legends and in all 3 of them there were people whining about me. In very first game a dude actually said he reported me. Anyway, that gameplay didn't appeal to me so I went back to SC2.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Reminds me of that one time i was playing a WC3 2v2 match, and in the middle of the game my team mate calls me a dirty Jew and quits. BTW, we were winning lmao. Haaa, good times.

 

[Lyric Suite]

BTW, what does anybody thinks of Stormgate?

This is a game with momentum (as much as a new dev team can have momentum), 'cause it's ex-Blizzard and looks like Starcraft. Yet, it seems like they simplified everything. According to this guy for instance, his high APM means nothing because he has nothing to do with his fast actions:



Will those changes resurrect the RTS genre, or will this game just flop?

 

[Damned Registrations]

They created a game where, just like in Overwatch, individual player skill is less important and it's all about the role you have in the team, and performing that role well, whether it involves high levels of skills or not.

There aren't any roles that don't involve high levels of skill. The guys with the best K/D ratio get all the glory, but it's not like everyone enabling them to do that can sit on their ass and let themselves get killed all day long. Staying alive when you've got 1/4 the health of the guy next to you is a fucking artform all of it's own, and being convincing bait that just barely gets away every time has a huge, invisible impact on a match.

So basically DotA is 90% meta and 10% player skill.

There's nothing 'meta' about making a split second decision about a situation nobody has ever seen before; which is what wins or loses fights on a regular basis. The meta is a big factor too, but it's so insanely complicated that nobody is ever near the skill ceiling on that part of the gameplay, and people who are at the top of the pile there can be at the bottom a month later.

All team games that I've played are full of whiny bitches who constantly insult their teammates.

Yeah, anyone who is actually a decent teammate makes friends to play with regularly and so the pubs are mostly just the dregs nobody wants to play with; often the kind of people that start a game 15 minutes before they have to leave, or who quit out of a game because they died early and won't get to be the MVP.

 

[Multidirectional]

BTW, what does anybody thinks of Stormgate?

It's too early to tell with Stormgate, game is very far from finished. But I did play it during that access week and managed to have fun with it. The main simplification that I can see there is quick macro panel that lets you build buildings and units. So you don't have to put your production buildings on control groups to produce army and I'm fine with that. Losing games because you miss clicked while updating a control group and suddenly you cannot make units anymore until you go over the map and re-add all your buildings to a key is some of the worst shit ever. Don't think quick macro panel makes the game too easy. There are other problems right now with the game, such as poor readability of battles. Remains to be seen if they fix that.

 

[pakoito]

We're a gazillion spergs into this thread and I've barely seen any mention RTS whose lineage are not War/Starcraft or AoE.

Supreme Commander? Offworld Trading Company? Dawn of War? Company of Heroes? APM is a ton less important in those games.

 

[BrainMuncher]

Also, notice how all the competitive online games that have been "fixed" to level the playing field between high skill players and low skill players usually take the approach of making things worst for both.

BTW, isn't Starcraft 2 like, super popular?

Since the topic was about why the genred "died" out, isn't it a bit odd to claim that last game to achieve an high degree of success actually did it wrong? If Blizzard fucked up by making the game run on faster instead of normal, how come everybody is playing this shit?

Imagine you are a nu-dev and you want to try to make a successful RTS today. Would it make sense to look at the last games of the genre that were actually successful and then reason: you know, the genre died because of what those games were doing, let's change everything!

Keep in mind that SC2 is also popular from a spectator point of view. This seems to resemble sports, doesn't it? Would people actually watch SC2 matches so much if the game was neutered?

I think SC2 was only successful because of the pre-existing Korean led competitive scene. There were podcasts, streamers, pro players, casters etc., a whole ecosystem just waiting for this game to drop into it. Add to that the terminally loyal Blizzard fandom and this game got a massive amount of unearned exposure. There was also curiosity/excitement about professional esports in general which wasn't really a thing yet outside of Korea.

If SC2 was released by another company under a different name/art/lore with the same mechanics it would have been a completly different story.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Lol, nothing answers the OP question of the thread like 2 "pro" autists debating the genre minutiae.

Autism... Autism never changes...

 

[Lucumo]

Also, notice how all the competitive online games that have been "fixed" to level the playing field between high skill players and low skill players usually take the approach of making things worst for both.

BTW, isn't Starcraft 2 like, super popular?

Since the topic was about why the genred "died" out, isn't it a bit odd to claim that last game to achieve an high degree of success actually did it wrong? If Blizzard fucked up by making the game run on faster instead of normal, how come everybody is playing this shit?

Imagine you are a nu-dev and you want to try to make a successful RTS today. Would it make sense to look at the last games of the genre that were actually successful and then reason: you know, the genre died because of what those games were doing, let's change everything!

Keep in mind that SC2 is also popular from a spectator point of view. This seems to resemble sports, doesn't it? Would people actually watch SC2 matches so much if the game was neutered?

I think SC2 was only successful because of the pre-existing Korean led competitive scene. There were podcasts, streamers, pro players, casters etc., a whole ecosystem just waiting for this game to drop into it. Add to that the terminally loyal Blizzard fandom and this game got a massive amount of unearned exposure. There was also curiosity/excitement about professional esports in general which wasn't really a thing yet outside of Korea.

If SC2 was released by another company under a different name/art/lore with the same mechanics it would have been a completly different story.

I already answered that. The main issue in this thread comes down to what I wrote on page 3:

Honestly, people in this thread seem to not have much of a clue about RTS games. Same when it comes to the multiplayer aspects.

I guess one can remove the "seem" now. Funnily enough, on THE international Starcraft forum back in the day, a moderator once wrote that when someone with actual knowledge speaks, people should shut up and listen. This is definitely not the case here. It's people with no or extremely limited knowledge talking to each other for no gain or even degradation.

 

[Morenatsu.]

I guess one can remove the "seem" now. Funnily enough, on THE international Starcraft forum back in the day, a moderator once wrote that when someone with actual knowledge speaks, people should shut up and listen. This is definitely not the case here. It's people with no or extremely limited knowledge talking to each other for no gain or even degradation.

Well, moderators are useless faggots, and retards are incapable of listening by definition, so that's actually a pretty pointless comment.

 

[Lucumo]

I guess one can remove the "seem" now. Funnily enough, on THE international Starcraft forum back in the day, a moderator once wrote that when someone with actual knowledge speaks, people should shut up and listen. This is definitely not the case here. It's people with no or extremely limited knowledge talking to each other for no gain or even degradation.

Well, moderators are useless faggots, and retards are incapable of listening by definition, so that's actually a pretty pointless comment.

Depends on the forum and time frame. Not to mention that international spaces are far, far worse in general. Of course, with the spread of "social" media and the internationalization of everything, the general culture of discussion has much degenerated.

 

[Anomander]

The last few pages of this topic answer the OP question.
You are talking about shit that almost nobody cares about. And that's what happened with RTS in general.

 

[Lyric Suite]

We're a gazillion spergs into this thread and I've barely seen any mention RTS whose lineage are not War/Starcraft or AoE.

Supreme Commander? Offworld Trading Company? Dawn of War? Company of Heroes? APM is a ton less important in those games.

The topic is about why the RTS genre died, and some of us are speculating about what could be done to resurrect it, the first step being to understand why the genre collapsed in the first place.

Some people here are arguing the reason the genere died is becucase of shit like APM and the skill ceiling being too high. So following that line of thinking, how come Supreme Commander wasn't able to resurrect the genre and make it big again?

Company of Heroes is also an interesting case because this is a game that was well made and also relatively popular, but it wasn't "Blizzard" popuilar. Maybe the reason the game never became as big is because they removed some aspects of the RTS genre?

Maybe the reason the genre died out is not because the formula needed change, but because nobody made a good game based on the traditional formula? What was the last good RTS that anybody made? Supreme Commander was made in 2007. What have we gotten since, aside for AoE4?

 

[Nutmeg]

It's not dead.

Just because there aren't a gazillion RTS games being released a year doesn't mean the genre is dead, rather it means it has matured.

Is Chess dead? Is Bridge dead? Is Go dead? Is Mahjong dead?

Fucking cultural capitalists fuck off.

 

[Lucumo]

The last few pages of this topic answer the OP question.
You are talking about shit that almost nobody cares about. And that's what happened with RTS in general.

No clue if you are talking about me since you didn't quote but whatever people are talking about is stupid shit. Heck, you are one of those uttering total nonsense:

Because the devs (or the execs) completely misunderstood players or just ignored them in pursuit of profit. After Starcraft every RTS (I mean war RTS C&C style, not some city builder or something) has been developed with multiplayer focus. Multiplayer was a huge minority interest and most of the players played only the campaign. After Starcraft focus shifted on multi, so the players left. Additionally creating a good campaing is hard and costly.

And it's not like the question wasn't answered before...it wasn't even that long ago.

Then in 2008 PC gaming in general dies. The number of PC releases, let alone PC exclusives, is really quite pitiful, across all genres. A combination of the GFC, and the Xbox 360 (with MS putting up huge sums as incentive money, especially to big publishers, and investing heavily into tooling to lure smaller developers) seem to be the main reasons. Already in 2007, Tiberium Wars and Universe at War were released on Xbox 360 as well, and in both cases the console release was clearly a box ticking exercise to get the incentive money -- the games were not designed around console play at all. 2009's Halo Wars OTOH was clearly designed for console first.

As for the hypothesis that consumers lost interest in RTS games around this time in favor of MOBAs and this affected things? Could be true, it certainly is a common anecdote. It would need numerical analysis of some kind, and it is a different matter if it affected revenue expectations. Even if players don't spend their gaming time on RTSes as much as they used to, that is entirely separate from if they spend their *money* on RTSes as much as they used to. Lots of people buy games and don't play them much or delay playing them. This is also assuming that game makers are primarily chasing profits, as opposed to simply looking to recuperate costs and fulfill creative desires -- another possibility is that the people making games in the genre ran out of inspiration.

(We were talking about 2005/2006 here).

Both are tied together. A small part comes down to lack of innovation/been there, done that and the spread of the internet aka people playing online all the time. That meant that people played games for much, much longer and as such did buy less and less new games. That was especially true for RTS and FPS but MMOGs (including browser games) generally tore into all genres heavily. The gaining popularity of the internet also allowed for free games and the spread of those (like RPG Maker stuff, Battle of Wesnoth etc). More and more draconian DRM for PC games didn't help either (online activation, limited installs etc).

 

[Anomander]

The last few pages of this topic answer the OP question.
You are talking about shit that almost nobody cares about. And that's what happened with RTS in general.

No clue if you are talking about me since you didn't quote but whatever people are talking about is stupid shit. Heck, you are one of those uttering total nonsense:

I am talking about guys discussing APMs, macro, action, meta, skill etc.