How is it possible that an entire genre vanished?

How is it possible that an entire genre vanished?
i remember playing
>red alert 2
>age of empires (all of them)
>star craft 1 and 2

how is it possible that the player base is a tiny tiny community?

>ass burgers ?
nope i knew many normies that fucking played age of empires

how can other genres over shaddow another?

I play sport games, racing games, shooting games etc

star craft 2 is the last remaining RTS with a big enough player base and still its relatively small compared to other games

what is the real reason behind this?

RTS games are too hard, the audiences that want them are too niche. The developers want munny, user.

They morphed into MOBAs. Which are just RTS really, in a different format. People do like that gameplay. Just in MOBA form now.

kek too hard?

could be said about dark souls, could be said about any other game

>star craft 2
>hard

nope, its really not that hard after spending 10 hours

they could literally have an over simplified RTS if that was an issue

i really doubt that was the issue, see age of empires and war craft 3 were relatively simple back in the day

DOTA killed RTS.

user, you can whine at me all you want but the fact remains that learning how to play an RTS or a Souls game is too much effort for plenty of people.

RTS elitist fans boys kill the it. Whenever new RTS come out they just bitch about how much is sucks and is not like the older ones. There are plenty of good RTS out there with a good player base.

They're not hard. Kids played the shit out of RTSs back in the 90s and early 2000s.

Overfocus on multiplayer over singleplayer.

don't say things are "not that hard" when you're barely above average in your platinum league.

RTS is the most tryhard genre which takes the most out of you, it's easy to get frustrated and quit cold turkey

I have agree with this. I have freind who will not play RTS because he said building a base is to hard.

Age of Empires 2 was the first PC game I ever learned to play, doesn't change the fact that this shit is too much effort for the youth of today. In my day things were better, you see.

RTS morphed into ASSFAGGOT

It turns out, there's only a very small niche market for people who want to control a hundred units in combat while also having to keep an eye on their base building for 60 minutes. Old RTS games were STRESSFUL to play.

Many more people prefer to just control one unit and sit their ass in the middle of a lane for 60 minutes. ASSFAGGOTS aren't stressful (you're not having to really DO anything, after all) but they are fantastically RAGE INDUCING.

Because a good RTS needs both great singleplayer campaigns and multiplayer and modern devs can't do both at the same time.

I played rts when I was 4. I had no idea what the fuck was going on but it was neat. Then when I was 7 I got good enough to compstomp.

>Stressful

90% of all RTS single player gameplay was just turtle in base until you've made enough of the most powerful unit and go smash the enemy.

be 10 years old,

go to electronic store

AGE Of empires is a demo

spend 2 hours playing age of empires

kek

I had the added difficulty of not being an English speaker so I had no idea what I was doing either. Though I guess at age 4 you wouldn't be reading much either.
Good times.

Simple

You cease releasing new content.

I hate RTS so good riddance

75% of RTS fans only cared about Blizzard RTS games.

The other 25% only cared about AOE2 and a few Relic games. Relic continues to make them, but obviously Ensemble died.

Then a mod for Warcraft 3 came out and overtook both MMOs and RTS. I speak of MOBAs of course.

Because Supcom:FA showed the world where the future of RTS lay, and everyone decided to ignore it in favour of hard-counter Starcraft style games, which failed because they weren't Starcraft.

Hey, chin up pal!
Rts isn't dead yet, we have some great titles to look forward to in the future such as Halo Wars 2 and Dawn of War III

rts died before the mobas even came
rts birthed mobas at the end of it's life cycle

mmos and shooters rose up and shadowed over the genre before mobas came
you also have console's couch gaming dominating over lan gaming when it comes to multiplayer

a lot of shit caused rts to die
but i believe mobas does not play a huge factor to it's decline

because blizzard killed it

anything that wasn't korean speed gookclick wasn't interesting to people

It's such a weird argument claiming DOTA killed RTS games, all they share is the same perspective, they're nothing alike at all. It's like saying a first person RPG is the same as a FPS game.
Competitive RTS games just aren't that fun for a lot of people, I didn't play much competitive RTS but when I did it it usually is just build orders or some cheese tactic, not really what you imagine with real strategy for the most part, obviously there is real strategy at higher levels, but doing build orders every game just isn't that fun. Also when you lose it's super personal so most people just hate having nothing else to blame but the fact they're worse.

the only RTS games I've played are those fucking army man RTS games

which were actually pretty fun and unlike any video games that exist today. I loves playing in the house with huge everyday objects around me

Halo Wars might have been a breath of fresh air if it had ever gotten a PC release. As RTS games go, it was quite good, just shackled by being a on a console.

spellforce 3

>what is the real reason behind this?

Read the subject of your thread

But there's still RTS games coming out. The fuck are you on about?

literally was playing red alert 1 & 2
4-5 years old
played star craft age of empires till like 10-11
etc

i played all sorts of games on the side

i played mostly console games in early 2000's and discovered cs in like 2003 and got hooked

i dont get how RTS was abandoned,

the same friends of mine that were playing metal gear solid, tekken and soul caliber 3 also played RTS,
Yes when age of mythology came out one of my friend spazzed out and he never wanted to play anymore

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak was excellent, yet no-one seemed to play it. Damned shame.

SC2 is what killed RTS, the genre is difficult to get into or decent at in an age where people want instant gratification. SC2 was also a shit game.

>New RTS came out
>BUT STARCRAFT
>another new RTS came out
>IT ISN'T STARCRAFT FUCK OFF!
>Another new niche RTS came out
>OH GOD ACTIBLIZZ PLZ LET ME SUCK YOUR COCK

B-B-B-BUT MOBA KILLED RTS.

Act of Aggression is okay.
But it needs a lot of work
Pic related is still populated

Today's demographics are different. People don't want to learn how to play games. They want something you can pick up and play for quick gratification.

The only reason Dark Souls is popular amongst normies is because you can co-op the entire thing, and beating it gives you "gamer cred".

Lot SC player are not RTS fans, most don't even like RTS games.

>single player gameplay

There's your problem, user. Games these days need to be multiplayer experiences. All of them. The multiplayer for an RTS would be too hard to learn, no matter how simple you make the single player missions. People nowadays throw gigantic tantrums when they get W+M1'd in TF2 or Overwatch, how are they going to act when they get destroyed by koreans 1 minute into the match when they try to go online?

This.

replace starcraft with supreme commander, and we are good to go.

Not even Jesus could raise this genre from the dead.

Elitists didn't directly kill RTS', what happened was that the internet happened, and it let casual players see what good RTS players played like, and then casual players didn't want to play the game anymore because they learned they were playing the games poorly and wrong the whole time, even though they were having fun and thought they were good.

The same thing happened with fighting games. As someone who has played in so many fighting game communities, it's extremely common to see a new player join, thinking they're decent because they can beat hard AI and being proud of themselves, and then quitting soon after getting beaten and realizing the effort it takes to actually be good and having their confidence shattered.

I prefer single player games though. Always have, always will.

MOBA didn't kill RTS, RTS committed suicide

One contributing factor is that Riot was pouring insane amounts of money into its tournaments while Blizzard was taking a hands off approach to them during the Wings of Liberty days. The talent and audience saw where the money was and left.

We got more Starcraft threads compare to Supcom.

dota had its fetus in brood war so stop whining about custom mod games

Imo it is because every new game keeps trying to be a fucking esports hero instead of comfy co-op base building vs ai like AoE2 could be.

I just want to build farms, build a really nice looking city, then wipe out the enemy. Is that too much to ask?

Grey goo was pretty fun

Me to man

i guess i was

i never remember turtling down in a camp. i guess in retrospect that WOULD'VE been the smart way to play instead of having to fucking fret over everything.

let me guess, there's a secret trick to actually making those fucking Total War games playable instead of pulling your hair out trying to micromanage too fucking many units?

>people lost interest
>this is clearly Blizzard's fault!

If isn't starcraft, then its shit.

The genre never died. The brief popularity it had just shifted over to MOBA, because that popularity was very much dedicated to the competitive aspect of it to begin with. But the majority of people who enjoyed the genre outside of SC / the competitive scene are still here, and never made a big display.

You think the genre is dead, but that's only because you're looking for some big active community to be a part of. If you look at the games and the small private forums / communities out there, it's not dead.

Grey goo is great game, but the skirmish ai sucks

Blizzards set the bar too high, they even failed in their own game to make SC2 more popular than BW.

Probably because they weren't strategy games,they were autism apm simulators

If its not SC, then its dead.

Planetary Annihilation was fucking awful.

I really dont get this "DS is so hard xd" menatlity

Is this some kind of meme to make retards feel superior? People are not aware that ds1 was a popular normie game but people dropped it becauae it was shit?

Only good asnwer ITT

"fucking awful" is a huge exaggeration. It was disappointing at most if you're easily hyped up by trailers and marketing copy, and very good if you aren't.

The modern RTS died because modern RTSes don't exist

All modern games are the same as they were 20 years ago, all that changed is the graphics

Really i just think RTS has been done to death, there are very few things you can introduce to the genre. Huge risk developing a new RTS franchise for almost certain fuck all returns.

I always find those games insanly hard. I just hate the fact that i cant use every unit effectivly, because i miss CDs, microing and macroing. Its such a strange gameplay feeling

>real time strategy
>little to no actual strategy involved
>barely any innovations in the genre
>focused around multiplayer
Also, I don't know if you noticed, the industry is on a very shitty situation right now.

This is what killed the RTS. The "APM" issue. Years ago before online gaming was really a huge thing, you could play an RTS with some buddies and everyone would have their own little fun "unique" strat. Whether that was spamming walls, or building a fuck ton of a single kind of unit - everyone had their own play style, even if it was a shit play style. Even in the early days of online vidya, it was still a little like that and everyone had fun with it.

Now, it's a fucking APM autism guitar hero simulator where it's basically 1 strat to win with 0.5% deviation and whoever can APM it the fastest wins. No unique strats, no fun, just cookie cutter technique every fucking game and it's boring as shit.

That's the problem with hard counter systems. Soft counter rts promotes creative tactics, hard counter penalises them.

rts games are too metagamey to be fun, or fun to learn, in a competitive multiplayer environment.
In a Moba I can pick it up, and once I understand the basic game mechanics I can just improve from there. There's a very high skill ceiling, but a low skill floor.

In a FPS I just run around and shoot people, and eventually get map knowledge through play that helps me understand reliable routes to take, good angles, camping spots, etc. The finer parts of the game take years to properly hone the mechanical understanding of the game, even if most shooters are basically the same thing. Again, it's a low skill floor High Skill ceiling scenario.

In a RTS, you can have an understanding of how the game works at a mechanical level, but if you don't understand exactly what to look for, you will just get steamrolled by powerful meta all-ins that win every game against an unprepared opponent. Not to mention the inherent difficulty in mastering micro/macro/resource managing mechanics that makes it really daunting for a new player to even want to learn the game in the first place. Because of this barrier to entry, unless you are playing against bronze-tier players that also don't know a thing about the game, you will never win, or likely even be able to learn what you did wrong because of how stompy all-in games are to a new player. This creates a high skill floor and Ceiling which makes the game less appealing to people that want to get into the genre.

There is no way to just have fun in a RTS outside of gimmicky custom games because everything is designed to counter another, and unless you see it coming and are prepared/able to prepare you will just lose every time. There are very few "uphill battles" that you can still win by comparison to the moba or the fps genre, in rts you are either coasting along or hitting a wall, and unless you "know the meta" you can't even see those walls coming before they smack you in the face

This.

I managed to have some fun on online Warcraft 2 and 3 with strangers. Anything else it was just pure no fun getting rolled on or having to learn to rush.

it vanished for a couple of reasons.

1. starcraft 2 was trash

2. starcraft 2 had the worst fucking mod/custom game support ever

what made rts's good was the ability to mod them and easily play those mods online.

with that gone, everyone just went their separate ways.

rts's had an over inflated market because of strong custom game support, most of sc1 players played mods more than the actual game.

Read the comment above yours. You're talking about Starcraft style RTS as opposed to Supcom or earlier C&C titles.

Supreme Commander got it spot-on, losing a few units means nothing in the long term since it's all about the bigger picture, and most units are effective against most others if used correctly.

Unfortunately, the style that popularised the gnre to begin with has been eclipsed by the Blizzard approach which has shaped everything that came after. A solid RTS that went back to basics like that might well work.

this is the stupidest argument that always comes up

MOBA and RTS are not similar

they didn't disappear, they just stepped out of the limelight

I've loved RTS games since the original C&C came out. But I watched them go through a rise to greatness and then die a slow and agonizing death.

In my mind Red Alert and Red Alert 2 bridged across the peak of the genre. I remember applying actual strategy in multiplayer games in Red Alert 2 - meaning there were things you could actually do against someone just doing a tank rush. There were tank busting units that actually could decimate tanks. I remember leveling up a small team of chrono troopers that I would send to pick off resource gathering units and scouting parties which would ill things off and vanish before they could be attacked, then a tam of air units that would tear apart the inevitable rescue party that arrived to late. You could sit down and actually come up with small strategies like this which, when combined and played over the course of a game, would have major impact.

In that way, Red Alert 2 to me was the pinnacle of multiplayer RTS, but Red Alert 1 was great in terms of single player. It was one of the first to really offer interesting missions that weren't "build up enough units to rush the enemy." You had objectives like getting a spy into a base that was simply far too powerful for you to overcome with the meager resources you had, or being forced to use a commando properly in order to secure the victory.

A lot of that is nostalgia talking, but the core fact is that RTS became, like others have said, all about APM. Who can get the most units in the shortest amount of time. Every mission, every multiplayer, everything came down to that. You didn't have games where the smarter player did something brilliant that secured the victory. And that shit sucks.

blizzard fucked it up. sc2 sold millions as a full price AAA title, it had a very active playerbase, one of the biggest titles. was relased when esport was about to blow up in the west with justintv/twitch

new bnet client had less features than the previous from the 90s. during the era of the peak of every social network (fb, tumblr)
they failed to balance. focused only on 1v1, only cared about the sport scene. arcada, which supposed to bring the more casual players was a complete failure
they had so many opportunities but its all mobas now

>brief popularity

this is the truth

So many hidden gems in the genre. Pic related.

Anyone here actually play Original War? One of the freshest RTS games ever made and barely anyone played it.

5% are true RTS fans, like if you agree, like and share if you are a real rts fan

/thread

Why can't we get warhammer 40k wargame/supreme commander edition? Why can't we get homeworld or sins of a solar empire on nexus battlefleet gothic edition instead of that shallow turd that we did end up getting? Why can't we get a supreme commander style ww1 game? Why can't we get a space strategy game based around some of the Ian Banks novels?

I still remmeber first time i found the game. It was at frys electronic for 95 cents.

People enjoy shitting on the new generation for meme reasons but generally missing the point.
RTS genre died because rts games lost it's strategy part and turned into APM race instead.
The core RTS audience turned their face to GS genre because of strategy aspects. Honestly i had more fun playing new Wargames, Total Wars and Grand Strategies than any other RTS in the last 10 years.
Also in age of empires HD edition they removed LAN. Why the fuck i have to be forced to play a 18 year old game with your broken netcode?

Is there any point to the HD edition if you can still play the old version? The graphics are fine.

I was going to bring up BFGothic being a pile of sludge when they literally had the genre-redefining Homeworld to draw from and go "we want to do THIS, but with 40k", and people would have eaten that shit up without hesitation.

>Why can't we get a space strategy game based around some of the Ian Banks novels

I've got some design documents down somewhere for an RTS based on as-realistic-as-possible space combat. There's a show on Netflix called the Expanse - episode 4 has a hard-science space battle that I honestly think is one of the most ridiculously fucking awesome scenes in sci-fi history.
A game based on careful firing of missile volleys, ECM and hiding drive flares, heat signatures (a bit like submarine combat), and then balls-to-the-wall, bullets everywhere CQB when ships get within mass driver range would be awesome, as well as giving a really interesting flow of battle, trying to find the enemy and do as much damage as possible to their ships before the inevitable clash.

>ASSFAGGOTS aren't stressful (you're not having to really DO anything, after all
Oh boy, you sure talking out of you ass, you fucking retard.

Me and my friend bought it to show our support for RTS genre to Microsoft.
I didn't know it was that bad.

lol "support"

The only thing you're supporting is nostalgia cashgrabs

>he fell for the support your favourite devs/genre/franchise meme

okay ill be honest
im relatively young (20) but played a lot of settlers and warcraft when i was younger
tried it again and it was so.. stressful
maybe its me because i have anxiety issues but it was a completely different level than playing dota and just laning with people

It's called Dota, it started the end of the RTS genre.

>Game gets rereleased
>People buy it, it does well
>Producers greenlight something similar since there's obviously a market for it

Publishers are moneygrubbing jews, and that's exactly how they operate, stop talking out of your ass.

Settlers isn't really RTS though, it's more of a management sim with a little bit of combat.

Holy shit! Is that Battle Realms?

ill probably never have so much fun with vidya than i did with settlers 3 though
i know everybody loved the classic 2 but for me 3 was just so comfy

Settlers games have always been comfy as fuck.

>focused around multiplayer
This is where the most promising franchise of the recent years failed spectacularly. Wargame could have been the fucking game of the decade if Eugen had added a map and campaign editor. I would have clocked fucking thousands of hours playing around with those and beating other people's campaigns. Instead they decided to cater to the pants-shitting esports crowd and that went just as well as you'd expect.

>assmad assfaggot is assmad

wow what a surprise