RTS genre death

I grew up with RTS games in the 90s and 2000s. For the past several years this genre seems to have experienced a great decline. What happened? Who here misses this genre? I would love to see a big budget RTS with a great cinematic story preferably in a sci fi setting.
Do you think we will ever see a resurgence or even a revival in this genre? Why hasn't there been a successful RTS game with a good single player campaign and multiplayer for the past several years? Do you think the attitudes of the big publishers would have to change if we want a game like this?

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RTS died due to elitism and lack of interest of newer generations. It's always been a niche genre.

Right now they're in a lull because quite frankly it's really hard to make an RTS that's not an unbalanced mess. They're also in that cadre of games along with fighting games that are almost solely 1 vs 1 in focus which isn't what's in vogue at the moment.
They'll come back around eventually, like fighting games did a few years ago after their big lull in favour of first person shooters.

Starcraft killed the genre with fast paced 5 second battles that require an overt amount of time to get even slightly good at

Slow paced, big base and huge defensive structure building was the best, it's dead though

The guys that made the Kingdom Rush series are making an RTS

>It's always been a niche genre.
Please, that is blatantly false and you know it.

Maybe in Clapistan it was niche (because Americans hate anything requiring even a miniscule amount of practice or research) but every single other country with gamers had RTSes being one of the most played for over a decade. From mainline games like Brood War, WC3, AoE 2, etc. to lesser known titles like C&C, RTSes were fucking huge everywhere. At no point between the 90s and like 2005 could you call them niche without a mob of people calling you out on your bullshit.

It's just that after the heyday came and went, and the RTS genre came down from its seat up top, nobody could make a good/fun RTS anymore to keep the momentum and shit like Blizzard fucking SC2 in the ass in various ways just killed most interest in it.

Also I blame a lot of it on the shift of the gaming industry moving the RTS fans and potential new RTS fans to WoW and MOBAshits. Now nobody wants to put in the effort to control more than one character. I don't blame them, I personally have a hard time going back to old RTS games even for nostalgia.

Unless a new RTS game comes out that's fun to play and doesn't have shit for balance and mechanics, it's not going to come back for a long while.

Whoops meant to quote and not OP in

- Didn't work well on consoles, which led the industry or at least was a large chunk of it.

- Niche audience and demographic change (majority of early gamers played it, newer generations of gamers did not, so consumer base gradually got smaller and smaller).

- Formula revolution attempt not only failed but backfired, failing to appeal to a larger audience and pissing off core fan base: This was the RTT attempt back in ~2004-2008

- Benchmark difficulty when making the game, meaning small developers had trouble programming it. Unit pathing, AI, it's fairly difficult.

- Death of RTS companies, including Westwood, and Blizzard's occupation with its MMO, meaning significantly less focus in the industry on the genre

Most of these are connected to each other, sparked each other, and intensified each other. I'd say near-PC exclusiveness was the biggest cause that started the tumble.

We need rts titles that are pandering to casuals easy mechanics rng elements ruber band mechanics , i know it sounds bad but games need. Overcrowded casuals monies

Blizzard has the genre completely locked down. Only a handful of people will try something new and then go back to whatever has the biggest population, Starcraft or Warcraft

Unless a really good command and conquer releases, which it won't, there is no chance for change

you just gave me cancer

Stupid competitive garbage on a genre that should have been about the battles and tactics.

The only way I see it ever being saved is removing base building all together and focusing on huge battles and properly balancing around something like the battles experienced in total war games.

Maybe even a points system and continued balancing patches as the game matures especially if it decides to have multiplayer.

Competitive RTS might as well be one of those dance arcade games or clickfest music games since that is the braindead skill it encourages.

Total war.

You're hired!
You're fired!

>Do you think we will ever see a resurgence or even a revival in this genre
Ratio-wise less people play RTS than back then but number wise it's as alive as ever. It's easy to not notice how many games we got in just last 5 years

Im watching some sc2 reruns right now out of curiosity and as a former wc3 player I'm offended at how shit the actual gameplay is

both pro players are just marching a big blob of units around and then hitting with raiders at random points. Thats 99% of what SC2 has become
when the big deathballs collide with each other, the fight lasts 2 seconds and theres zero micro involved. The player with more/better units tries to kill objectives while the player with less/worse units refuses to ever engage and just runs around because if he ever fought head on he'd lose no matter how skilled he is because its just a matter of numbers. Finally he gets ground down and suicides into the enemy army and says GG, no dynamics at all

in wc3, you'd have fights that last 2-5 minutes straight of units trading hits as more reinforcements arrive, you're constantly dancing units in and out of the front line and healing them and trying to spread out the enemy's focused damage. A 50 food army could beat a 100 food army if you were twice as skilled at micro and leveled up your hero

sc2 is just so unskilled and microless. You just do some memorized macro build and perfect the build order and okay its rock paper scissors thats it, just move attack big blob of units

Nice pasta, (you).

>Dawn of War Retribution
>Heart of the Swarm & Legacy of the Void
>Planetary Annihilation & PA Titans
>Men of War: Assault Squad 2
>Grey Goo
>Act of Aggression
>Ashes of the Singularity
>Total War: Warhammer (if you count it=
>Wargame: Red Dragon
>8-bit Armies & Horde

They're not all stellar or huge but at least there's effort.

RTS are too fucking hard to make and they don't pay back. Look at Battlefield, its the same game every fucking year but with a different theme and slightly improved graphics, but it makes millions.

And CoH2 + expansion

I wouldn't say that SC2 involves zero micro, but compared to WC3, it’s the equivalent of continually banging rocks against each other until one of them is ground to dust.

That's why I personally prefer watching high level broodwar. It's just so crude and barely functional, that even getting your units into the fight takes a ton of micro.

early starcraft 2 problem's are with the maps
The players bases are all easy to close off and really easy to defend which made agression really difficult and generally not worth it so besides a couple of cheese (who'd make you lose the game if the other player anticipate it) most player would play defensively
They changed that in the expansions by making reapers more available and adding adepts

SC2 has less micro than mobas
thats really saying something

theres some micro going on in the first couple minutes of raiding and one or two drops, then its purely a macro affair from thereon out. Casters had to invent terms like "concave" to try to describe two deathballs mindlessly attack moving into each other as if the players were doing something skillful.

Its telling that SC2 didn't embrace the streamlined resource management of WC3 and emphasis on interactive map control, but instead put it arbitrary buttons you had to click every N seconds like spawn larva and inanimate piles of rocks to block expansions

>that is blatantly false and you know it.
It IS niche. RTS only gets 1-3 games a year, and they all go under the radar due to lack of marketing and of a sizeable consumer base.

>lesser known titles like C&C
C&C is the most well-known RTS. Westwood pioneered the genre with Dune, then popularized it with C&C. Even John Cena said he played it.

>RTSes were fucking huge everywhere. At no point between the 90s and like 2005 could you call them niche without a mob of people calling you out on your bullshit.

They were never above or on par with other genres, apart from Starcraft. They were extremely popular back then but their ever dwindling playerbase showed that it was not meant to stick around for too long.

SC2 doesn't even really know what it wants to be. Does it want to be a macro-oriented RTS like SupCom or a micro-oriented one like WC3 or CoH?

On the one hand, macro>micro pretty much all the time, yet at the same time, that macroing isn't very enjoyable. When I'm playing SupCom, I'm constantly fighting for mapcontrol, expanding my intelligence network and trying to balance upgrading my mexes with upgrading my factories and unit production. The game actively supports me in that regard and tries to make me as comfortable as possible.

Meanwhile SC2 macro is just an annoying activity, that relies on repeatedly activating the same pointless abilities (Chrono-boost/MULE/spawn larvae).

>I would love to see a big budget RTS with a great cinematic story preferably in a sci fi setting.
sounds like SC2 minus the great part

>It's always been a niche genre.
confirmed for not being alive during the 90s
It basically invented mainstream dad gaming

WC3 did macro better anyway
SC2 tried to copy the SC1 resource and map system but they were garbage, SC1 was about micro in fights. Nobody liked the shitty interface of having to jump through hoops to produce anything
wc3 replaced resource gathering with creeping, added new resources like experience, items, and map control with buildings that did stuff

I feel the growing gamerpopulation, focus on multiplay, and the resulting 'need' for guides/buildorder tactics just ruined the fun for me and the younger generation. I never got into starcraft for these reasons, Although i consider rts my favorite genre.
I dont know whats needed for a revival but i hope it's gonna happen

>in wc3, you'd have fights that last 2-5 minutes straight of units trading hits
this is the worst thing about wc3
every unit takes 5 minutes to kill each other they're so tanky and weak

SC2 killed it by being bad. It kept new people out and only appealed to the pros. Plus, modern games can't handle RTS.

homeworld 3 ploxerino

but thats precisely what made micro matter so much

...

go play C&C generals where everything dies in a fucking instant, it's same shit except actually fun

To much focus on apm. Most people give up without even trying because of it.

RTS would be saved with a simple gimmick.

Let casual players play with you in multiplayer and singleplayer campaigns by controlling a single unit, hero or normal. Even against both sides.

I think it would be pretty fun. Just imagine controlling a single company of legionaries you've decked out through multiple campaigns in a huge battle raging all over the map.

RTS died because companies wanted to simplify the genre and get more people involved.

Hence why we have shit like League of Legends as the most played game for whatever fucking reason.

I actually have fun playing Heroes of the Storm but the engine is fucking horrid and my friend's brand new computer can't even run it without massive FPS drops.

I remember spending so much time on Starcraft 1 UMS maps and making them. Golems was the shit. Or Evolvez. I loved collecting so many units that the map lagged out.

OpenRA feels pretty fresh after all the "modern" RTS games. The graphics are crispy and the game has bunch of quality of life improvements.

Funnily enough, that's why 10v10 battles are so popular in the Wargame series. Everyone gets a little part of the frontline, and you fight in it with your "deck" of units that you built before the game.

It's huge, it's loud, there is usually very little elaborate strategy involved (unless you get 10 people on one voicechat), but it's lighthearted fun. 1v1 is just full of tryhards anyway.

last time I tried to play openRA my basic infantry units had a sight range half the size of their actual firing range
so they would walk around revealing 1 tile of fog while firing at offscreen units

Every time I think about RTS, I still get triggered at what EA did to C&C. Aside from everything else that EA does, I will never forgive them for ruining this series then closing it. The game was so fun up to Generals.

Shit, I have to reinstall Wargame then. I only played like three games with it. Although I bet AirLand is void of players by now.

RTS games have (relatively) recently had the problem of their primary demographics being taken by other genres and their expansion. RTS games have what may be called a problem of trying to simultaneously appeal to two very different demographics that have had increasingly less overlap; the high-APM, skill-gamer demographic and the low-APM, strategy-gamer demographic. The former has lately been drawn more to the explosion in recent years for fighting games, MOBAs (especially with their highly profitable e-sport scenes), etc., and the latter has been drawn to the explosion in recent years for TBS, Grand Strategy, true-roguelikes, etc.

I enjoy RTS, but my manual dexterity/precision, APM, and other skill-associated capabilities have become increasingly worse as the years have passed; I can enjoy making decisions and strategy at the highest levels/difficulties of play without needing 150 APM and precise hands in a much more "pure" experience with the recent renaissance of non-realtime strategy games, and if I ever do feel an urge for something faster-paced, I can just play a match or two of a casual MOBA/dota-like with friends.

RA2 and Generals were the best C&C games and they were both made by EA

rts games are difficult. Gamers dont want to play difficult games

Nostalgiafags ruined it
>B-But muh status Quo

You will NEVEREVER see a positively received RTS

Explain DS popularity.

if you are okey with playing super good players and stuff and are actually good and not just an attention whore who is just yelling "oooh i like rts games i am so cool but no one plays them" then you can play on iccup server which has quite the community, i am talking about broodwar just download mca64 google it and it will do the rest of the work, well have fun playing with gooks, i just hate people who can't even play sc2 effectively and cry how broodwar was so good and and stuff and talk about game on the technical level when they cant even beat gooks who just play instead on ranting,
and rts games are all about competition people will play games which have the most players and complaining about how a game destryed the genre because after release of a new rts everyone play it for a while and just go back to sc2 is just stupid, and sc2 is quite alive instead of crying just play that or play broodwar on iccup servers

youtube.com/watch?v=2HUGrYAsoY0

it's not difficult

yeah, you'll want to get the latest one, since that's where all the players are. Considering how niche the game itself is, it has a surprisingly stable playerbase.

RTS evolved. Only losers play 1v1s alone all the time.
MOBA takes more skill, reflexes and more importantly teamwork. The social aspect of playing with your friends alone makes it superior.

Running with Rifles is by far the best modern RTS.

>Casters had to invent terms like "concave" to try to describe two deathballs mindlessly attack moving into each other as if the players were doing something skillful.
Setting up a concave is an important tactic in SC2. It literally makes the difference between winning and losing a big fight. It allows all your units to get their initial shots off at once and snowballs into a big advantage. Not everything needs to be ridiculously micro intensive to be important

>The social aspect of playing with your friends alone makes it superior.
That vast majority of Moba players play solo queue. So that doesn't explain anything

Yeah that guy is seriously retarded. Splitting your amry to minimize splash damage is critical, and setting up a concave is the difference between winning and losing, especially in mirror matchups.
Yes mobabies just need to have their dunning kruger effect hit in full force, so solo queuing will always allow them to blame losses on their "retarded teammates wow i even had the hhighest gpm wtf" etc.

RTS games aren't intuitive at all, a person new to the genre who watches a game most likely won't be able to tell what's happening, a person who plays the game can lose without even realizing what she did wrong.

RTS are too demanding, it requires a grasp on general militar strategy which is esoteric for most people, on top of that it requires learning each specific game's mechanics and particularities, an average game will last half an hour and can easily go on for more than a hour, and all that time you must be engaging with the game both on a very high mechanical and intellectual skill level.

RTS are too unforgiving, make an small mistake and the enemy gains an advantadge that can not be reversed unless he commits a mistake as well, even worse the fact that you fell behind makes it more likely that he will be able to pressure you into worse mistakes and things just snowballs from there, contrast this with a fighter or shooter where your avatar is always capable of using the same abilities and doing the same amount of damage no matter how much hits you've taken, losing in an RTS is a unrelentless painfunl and humiliating experience, you get to watch from a vantage point as you are picked apart piece by piece with only the most minimal chance of a reversal.

Its just too much to ask from the average person who just wants a quick and fun 10 minutes match with friends.

One problem is that these kind of games aren't immediately fun when you pick them up. They require a substantial amount of practice and analyzing game mechanics before the game allows you to have fun. Like in sc2 i felt that i basically played the game against myself until at least platinum league.

I have never in my life tried a moba, is it the same with those games?

everyone in this thread is wrong

Mobas killed rts. The low skill level makes it easy to play and think that you're good at something. People don't want ot work to get better at anything, they just want everything to be handed to them. This is why you see so many autists on games like lol or dota2 complaining about their low rank. The pros who grew up on rts had to learn how to find and abuse advantages. That's the difference in rts you have to think or else you'll never win. In mobas you just play and blame everyone else because you're to stupid to think while you play.

in assfaggots you feel like you're playing against your teammates instead of your enemies.

this
you literally can't lose ds

you pray that you dont get retarded teammates

What killed RTS is the whole E sport shit it is going to kill a lot of shit cause now if its not e sport most company's and people do not care about it.

in wc3 you would constantly be shuffling units in and out of the front line of a fight. You select a footman, deactivate defend, run it away while using 2 other units to fill the gap it left so enemies can't chase it due to bodyblocks, then hit it with a holy bolt to heal it, then return it to the line. You had targeted heals like death coil, toggleable skills like druid form, you had survival tools to defocus enemy fire like hide, burrow, phase shift, etc.

The result was that individual player skill was a MASSIVE force multiplier, so even a small army could take on a much bigger army if you outplayed them. Add in heroes leveling up from experience and you had a stabilizer so getting surrounds on the enemy was far more important

All people do in SC2 is what, "divide your army so when you attack move into the enemy you hit from more sides". Then the armies die instantly, many fights over in literally 2-3 seconds, then sure, you snowball into a big advantage and theres no coming back.

SC2 was horribly designed, and SC2 took over the genre and killed it off.

I don't think so.
Developers aren't mathematicians, so there will probably never be an rts with a competent ai. This means multiplayer is the natural direction in that the genre can evolve. When people want to win in multiplayer you get "esport".

Warcraft III/DoW was probably the pinnacle era: Warcraft both invented the concept of modern Dota-style hero units but still allowed you to succeed if they weren't your cup of tea.

youtube.com/watch?v=69r5X3qJV3c

Total Annihilation will always be the singular best game.

I never even played SC1 properly, I just did custom retarded shit like Golems Madness, Cat and mouse. Evangelion and DBZ dogshit. The Moba genre couldn't come soon enough.

...

Internet and "esports". Before you could just chill in StarCraft with your friends doing custom map 3v3s and everyone had fun no matter how terrible you or your friends were. Mistakes became sources of hilarity.

But thanks to YouTube and esports everyone, no matter how newb or casual (bronze sc2) is expected to watch YouTube strategies and practice relentlessly the "metagame" and strategies for their role/class/hero/race.

There is no longer a culture of "yo bro lets play some 3s fastest - yaaay!" but instead a culture of "Oh we do not play with Jimmy, his APM is only 50 and his didn't master the 4 required metagame builds"

tl;dr culture changed from fun to faggots

>Standard 4v4 end game

I don't know if you realize this but making an AI that wipes the floor with the human is easy as shit.

The hard part is preventing that from happening while keeping the AI not too dumb/borning to play against.
It is always set up so you can and should win even at the highest difficulty, that's why stuff like the "1vMAX num of opponents at the highest difficulty" stunts are possible.

once the bloodmage hits level 6 all bets are off
phoenix made every other ultimate look like a joke
stats of a flying infernal, but it had huge aoe splash damage, you could keep it alive indefinitely since it respawned and dealt aoe damage to everyone just by existing and did it in a huge aoe and lingered even if you left it, unlike immolation

Lol you must suck

Sc2 queue takes around 15 sec to find a game. Not dead yet.

Well i've implied that the same rules apply to both the ai and the player. Sure you can give infinite resources to a dumbfuck ai and that will make it hard, but an ai playing smart under the same rules is something that requires a lot of thinking to make.

>lesser known titles like C&C
top fucking kek
all the other games you mentioned in your post exist solely because of c&c series success

Phoenix can be focused down so easily though and it's almost never at full health. I love blood mage but I can think several more useful ults (in team games)

Meh, never liked them. I was much more into turn-based strategy games.

Generals was the last original work conducted primarily by the old C&C team, with the remnants working on C&C3: Twilight had nothing to do with Westwood or anyone that worked on the previous games at all, and was half-assedly retooled from a different game to wrap up the series because at that point EA didn't know how otherwise without any of the developers left. Though John Riccitiello was questionable in many ways, he loved C&C as a game series and not merely as a revenue enhancer, and when he left, all hell broke loose.

its a flying unit and it has huge max hp and spell immunity so its extremely hard to focus it down
ensnare and web maybe, but thats about your only option

As long as the AI can see the map, it has all the info it needs to whoop your sorry ass.
It only becomes a problem when you deny it that but every notable RTS released until today has not done so.

The AI is beatable because, just like with every other genre, the developers designed it to feign impotence... basically try and emulate a shitty player because that's what is most fun to play against.

Problem with that is you usually have 1-2 shitters that leave as soon as the game starts. At that point, one team steamrolls, or the Red team ends up losing because of the Red accuracy meme.

Its a twinstick shooter, my dude.

It is fucking fun though. The mods are great.

Wargame is better described as an RTT, that's why its actually good.

Why make an rts when a shooter will make you more dosh? It's as simple as that. Overwhelming majority of people don't like to think while doing stuff, playing vidya is not an exception

It's called MOBA.

>I have never in my life tried a moba, is it the same with those games?
given how 90% of the playerbase in both lol and dota are stuck in the lowest ranks, yes

people keep crying about muh bad team while there's people that keep reaching the top leagues solo over and over again on both games

mobas killed rts not because they are easier (they actually have much more going on than the average rts, yes even lol) but because they allow you to shift blame when you lose, in sc2 if you get btfo you only have yourself to blame, in dota/lol you are stuck with ther 4 people no matter what so you can always delude yourself it wasnt your fault, notice also how these games barely never offer any 1v1 modes

this is deliberate on the developer's part, especially in f2p games, if it's clear you're just too bad at the game you might just drop it and go elsewhere, mobas keep giving you the hope the next time will be better, it's just a matter of playing more, so you keep playing (and getting exposed to the in game shop)

Movieshitters are at fault.
>waah why do i have to press buttons in order to play a videogame?

>people keep crying about muh bad team while there's people that keep reaching the top leagues solo over and over again on both games

Not everyone has time to play 10 hours per day. or to play when all the kids are asleep.

Let me make a point. I really want to see what you think about it:

The real issue with RTS games is that every decision stacks and influences your future success. If you fuck something up (build order since you want to try something new or are new to the game, or just lose an early battle), then every competent player is going to have an advantage over you. If you fuck up during the early game then you'll have a disadvantage throughout the whole game.

This is the macro issue that SC2 has. Every mistake or success stacks. (This also applies to 4X games like Civ, by the way.) If you're both playing to win and have about the same skill level, then you're probably going to lose, simply since the enemy has more resources than you.

Do we agree on this? How would you fix this issue? More micro? Somehow ensure that mistakes don't affect the rest of the game as heavily?

pretty much this desu

I'm sad that C&C ended up dying because that was the only type of RTS I could get into. Starcraft was just too hard for me to get into. I'm just a shitter when it comes to those kinds of games. If I had all the time in the world to practice, maybe I'd enjoy it more, but after I realized that no matter what I did, it'd take a while for me to take out an easy AI and a medium AI would already attack me before I could get my first marine out, I just plain gave up trying.

What if you had a MOBA where people where players were controlling the lane creeps, and lane creeps were given variety?

You know, something more like Footman frenzy.

Except mobas have the same shit and have a massive playerbase.

>Do we agree on this? How would you fix this issue?
I wouldn't. Why would I want to reward a player for his mistakes or punish him for playing properly?

>What happened
>mfw EA ruined bullfrog, westwood C&C and syndicate

after C&C got fucked up I got into Total war, I know it is not the same but both strat and RTS elements make it a really good series,

I just want a pre EA takeover C&C game again

I don't think it's purely because every fuck up can create a snowball effect because the same applies to MOBAs which are very popular (or to CS to a lesser extent) the real reason is it simply takes more time to learn and be good at strategy games than other genres.