Why did RTS die?

Why did RTS die?

Is it simply too hardcore for the average pleb?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Part of the reason is that MOBAs took their place.

Stagnation is one factor that needs to be considered. There obviously have been games that try a bit different things (say, Kohan) but generally speaking the genre was very much where it started mechanically.

But as far as I can tell, RTS games being anything more than a niche interest was a bubble. To me it appears that there really isn't too many people who actually like RTS games and during their golden age bought them because they didn't know better but the situation has now normalized with different types of games having found their audience. A lot of people clearly prefer turn-based format (Civ V for example has consistently been one of the most played games in Steam). Some people want a history simulation/to RP a sovereign and games by Paradox for example are way more suitable for this given how abstract RTS games tend to be. A lot of people want to be a general commanding armies and tactical games with larger scale (like Total War battles) are more up to their interest. Some people want to design cities in peace and an RTS is pretty much the last place you'd look into for such an experience.

I'm bumping the thread now and finish the post later

The drive to get RTS to consoles is the first half of the reason (Supreme Commander 2 being the best of the worst example), Blizzard releasing SC2 and milking the fuck out of it's esports scene is the second half.

The market switch to a focus on console with the ps3 - xbox360 and you can play rts on thoses so the genre die.
Now that publisher realize that rts (thank AoE remasters ) sale on pc they try to bring them back

Death of singleplayer campaigns

It is my belief that most people play most games because they like them conceptually rather than because they like to press buttons in a certain pattern, and stereotypical RTS games don't really cater to any such niche due to how abstract they are and how you only command a few dozen units and such like. And as far as people who like the mechanical aspect of microing units etc, ASSFAGs tend to serve them pretty well. And of course, the best-selling RTS were actually bought for custom maps in the first place, not the RTS bit.

Now, RTS games could be more than that but now we come back to stagnation. There obviously are actual RTS fans who like RTS for RTS and I guess I'd count myself among them too (although I do think games like Kohan had a much better idea of what the genre should be like), but as far as the classic type of RTS game is concerned, I don't think there are a lot of people like that.

If there were more RTS games with a story and characters like warcraft and starcraft had, it would be perfectly fine, but most titles decide to be more of a simulation

They were really fun to play with friends vs bots. Getting good enough to play them online is a waste of time. Especially when there's so many games to choose from.

A lot of people shit on AoE3, but I loved it. I thought trading posts were a neat addition. The graphics were great. The card system added a sense of progression between matches and made for different strategies. I had a lot of fun with friends building huge defensive walls keeping out expert bots with artillery posted at corners with guard towers/castles and forts. We'd line the river with town centers that had the big anti-ship attack, and keep the enemy bot boats from ever crossing over.

I never understood why people hated it so much. I played AoE2 before 3, they were different, but why would you want more of the same from an RTS game?

>Blizzard releasing SC2 and milking the fuck out of it's esports scene is the second half.

I'm curious, what makes you think this? I think the genre was pretty much already dying before SC2 came out. If anything, SC2 showed that there are still RTS players.

Perhaps Blizzard could've handled SC2 better but to say that they single-handedly killed the genre is wrong because RTS games weren't that popular anymore in the late 00s. You had Dawn of War 2, Company of Heroes and Supreme Commander. Those were the games during that time and to be honest you famalam, they weren't big-big RTS games like Red Alert or Warcarft 3 were.

...

I'm one of those sad blokes in between who both wants to design a city as well as defend it, wishing there was an RTS built around expanding your base and taking territory that wasn't just a variation of TD.

Because RTS games became some hardcore multiplayer faggotry that got a bad reputation as being autistically hard. Same thing happened to Arena shooters.

People just want to sit back and build little houses and shit.

They were hard to keep fresh. Eventually they all started to copy each other.
I'm glad they went away, they needed some time off until someone who can revolutionise them comes along.

The appeal isn't immediately obvious. You can't really even tell if an RTS will be any good by looking at gameplay footage. It's also a challenging genre to make games for due to its complexity and need for extensive balancing.

>Because RTS games became some hardcore multiplayer faggotry that got a bad reputation as being autistically hard

This.

Everything began to boil down to memorizing autistic build orders and clicks per minute instead of any actual strategy. Sad thing is I'm not sure if there's a way to fix this.

Not RTS. Its RTwpS

Blizzard toppled the market with Warcraft and Starcraft then Korean esports and MOBAs festering on Blizzard games destroyed the rest

the best RTS games have already been made, everything that came afterwards was just shitty clones.
RTS is a solved genre, time to move on.

RTS games require minimal multitasking to be successful on even easy difficulties.

>Is it simply too hardcore for the average pleb?
Yes

nobody plays on PC anymore

How about experience?

Playing TA or AoEII happened because that's what was out / marketed. Those enjoying TA, then finding matches of SupCom benefited from zoom and full 3D, a spiritual successor with decent balance and a lot of units.

I enjoy having an economy, developing a huge amount of robots (/ a small amount of really cool robots).. having control of the field.. pulling off cool plays.

>What are innovations
Unit management, zoom, pathing..

not a thing on consoles

High barrier for every to play multi
Extremely rigid meta (build orders are not fun)
Niche appeal (got to enjoy micro management)

That's my guess anyways. Those are all trains I avoid most RTS games. The ones I do enjoy eliminate one or more of those elements (eg love the homeworld games, they have a single resource type and no different building types)

>Getting good enough to play them online..

Based on what? What about other genres, like MOBAs?

This.

Single-player in RTS always takes a distant backseat to multiplayer.

Honestly, most people that bought rts games in the past played single player mostly

Rts these days focus on the multiplayer, which was always more niche

Age of Empires 2 HD Edition has pretty consistently had a daily player count of 10,000

Do you think it's just a nostalgia thing or is there an apetite for more RTS games?

An apetite considering they're still making expansions for AoE2 now. And with the e-sports scene of it growing bigger, we can expect more interest in RTS again.

>build orders
RNG maps, potentially.. A hefty starting economy..

>clicks
SupCom has a pretty basic APM.

The Settlers or the Anno series, maybe?

Fpbp

I'd say both, which is why we need to ignore it. If a developer wanted to make a new RTS, they wouldn't have an existing playerbase to pull from like AOE has. Devs would have to look at fresh, successful RTS IP's.

Which is...

Have there been any new IP RTS that have done well?

>RNG maps,
You'd have to do this extremely well for a competitive environment to tolerate it, I imagine.

Try Zero-K, play vs Chickens. It's almost exactly this.

If you like TA and SupCom try Zero-K. I love all 3. TA holding a special place in my heart though.

I'll attest to this, I never really played RTS anything more than a town building game and watching my caravans travel to and from my village to allied NPC village in AoEII. Fucking loved that.

But something I really do miss was the RTS golden age where it was so big literally EVERY major franchise eventually down the road, after much success, made an RTS out of their games.

>Star Wars
>Lord of The Rings
>Halo
>Dungeons and Dragons
>Might and Magic
>Even fucking Everquest made an RTS out of their MMO focused franchise.

You could try playing the Caesar series, pharaoh or emperor: rise of the middle kingdom
They're city builders with military elements

Anno is great for somebody that likes building but wants some combat to keep things interesting. The production lines might turn some off though.

>built around expanding your base and taking territory
Creeper World 3
>that wasn't just a variation of TD.
fug nevermind

>actual strategy
such as?

its shit genre for nerds and losers

Total War games are doing fine. I presume you are talking about more competitive RTS games, the answer to that is the skill bracket, its the same reason fighting games are practically dead when they were among the most popular games at one point. People get good at them, so good that people who arent as good at them get completely smashed and no longer want to play because they arent having fun, which leaves only the people who got good at the game, which is always very few people.

For a game to be alive and well it needs to have space for shit players to have fun too, see PUBG and any MOBA. There are good players for sure, but bad players can have moments where they can win even though they are bad, be it through their teams competence or just sheer luck, you are absolutely not going to scrape by in an RTS as a casual player against someone who plays competitively.

this but unironically

build orders are strategy though. By saying they're not fun you're basically trashing the whole RTS concept.

If you're a beginner in shooting games, you try to aim well and the better you aim the better you get. Then you learn positioning, and you use that to improve. Then you achieve an intuitive gamesense, learning where your opponents might be, how to feint and throw their gamesense off. That all builds upon the intended gameplay of "point crosshair at enemy and shoot him". Moreso, insane reflexes can save you if you have less than optimal position and superior positioning can help you overcome an enemy that can aim better than you can.

RTS became this unholy beast of resource micromanagement where the timing of doing the correct action of all things became the most important thing. A beginner might think clever feints, superior tactics and a chess-like n+1 battle of wits are what will lead you to victory but RTSes are NONE of that. It's learning a meta that you sure as shit didn't come up with and practicing your timing. It still has an insanely high skill ceiling but in a far less interesting way and lightyears away from the intended or expected gameplay of a STRATEGY game. That's why they fizzled out and why MOBAs, even though you only control one unit, exactly filled that resource-management, action timing and meta learning-by-hard niche. And also why MOBAs are shit

he's not saying build orders aren't fun, he's saying highly rigid ones aren't.

Company of Heroes, Men of War and Wargame?

yo. this.

CoH is barely alive fueled only by autistic community. MoW and Wargame are deder than ded on top of not being RTS.

this but ironically

they're never rigid, not even in in the much maligned Starcraft. If they were, why would scouting be a thing?

what's your metric for being alive? They were no doubt commercially successful and daily 1k+ concurrent players seems fine enough by me.

>all those old, innovative RTS games from the late 90's - early 2000's that are forgotten

MoW is still being kept alive somewhat, but literally only because of Star Wars Jedi Poopy autists/modders.

>create new RTS where you rule a nomadic tribe
>have the map be one giant open world with different resources.
>No instancing at all, just one giant map that will take you through the entire campaign and starts off completely covered
>have certain limitations as to how far you can move with your screen away from the center of your tribe to cull the resources demand.
>no fucking multiplayer.
>have some story about the gods and other stuff taken from what we know about ancient tribal societies.
>have an enemy in the form of the first agricultural empire who has taken over some anciant holy area and you must banish them and their offshoots
>have living world elements where different animals migrate and have predators
>have seasons as well
>have other enemy and allied tribes that you come in contact with or fight.

Spellforce 3's gonna be shit, isn't it?

I enjoyed the kerrigan campaign in sc2, the talky bits were cool and it was a good tone and fun using her as one woman army

much better than the fucking EU diversity cultural suicide of the third chapter

seriously wtf was that?

Alternatively you can become a settled tribe yourself and conquer and subjugate other nomadic tribes.
Have an open ending.

remember earth 2150?

because micromanaging a million things in real time is too draining, ASSFAGGOTS stripped away all that micromanagement except for just sitting with your thumb up your butt waiting for your Pylons to be constructed so you can run in and press I Win. Plus, once you could look at the internet and see the autists breaking down the meta for RTS games, you realized "oh that's how you're supposed to play," and it loses some charm compared to the innocent naive way you used to play before you got spoiled on NOOOO YOU'RE PLAYING IT WRONG.

1 & 2 already were so I fail to see how the 3rd one could be any better.

> RTSes are NONE of that

Absolutely. A good competitive game has gameplay that is supplemented by its meta. For RTS, the gameplay got replaced by the meta - leaving secondary activities to be the primary gameplay now.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games

MOBA and E-Sports.

RTS are dead because they are shit multiplayer games.
It's all about online multiplayer now. And making walking simulators and movie games sells much more.

BECUASE FOR SOME FUCKING REASON THE INDUSTRY EQUATES RTS=WARGAME.

YOU CAN DO SO MUCH MORE THAN JUST BASE BUILDING SAND SENDING TROOPS TO DIE.

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX PEOPLE.

god bless this guy

I'm so sick of military sims. Where are the fantasy creatures? Where are the monsters?

Yes

They're even too hardcore for people that claim to actually like them.

I will bet you 10 dollars that in this very thread there will be pussies claiming that campaigns is where it's at and the focus on the multiplayer killed their interest in RTS because they couldn't play City Builder.

They are THAT of a brainlets, to say that rushing is what kills an RTS. They're so slow that any confrontation is a rush for them. They're so coward that they play RTS but in the lowest difficulty, only in campaign, against AI, with their mom watching and with the lights on. That pussified is the average videogame player.
>B-but I will lose! build orders and meta strategy isn't strategies because I can't build and shit

RTS were killed by all means by brainlets. No point in trying to sell them to them, and are hard to balance too.

Dark Reign and only a few others had you set unit AI parameters.

no one fucks with unit AI, and just treats units like just an extension of the player rather than their own autonomous infantry or unit.

would be cool to have different units with unique temperments, or even better random temperments.

Autistic playerbase like in WC3. Every unmannered noob thinks he's hot shit.

Build orders aren't a thing when you know the game, they're only a thing when you're fucking shit and only know a cookie cutter build
Never post in RTS threads ever again.

>Sad thing is I'm not sure if there's a way to fix this.
make good rts games

I prefer turn-based, got 2000+ hours across Civs IV - VI

they're going to turn it into a glorified MOBA, so that's an automatic yes

So what you're saying is that RTS games are more fun when you play with a group of people or moderate but equal skill level who don't really know or follow any accepted meta.

...

minmaxing was a mistake

of course they're still a thing. That's like saying grammar stops existing once you're a decent writer.
Build orders just become precise and fluid once you attain skill.

>minmaxing
this is what casuals call optimal play

and the other one

I've got fond memories of 1 & 2. Got them both plus all the expansions for £5.

>optimal play
this is what NEETs call videogames, a literal child's pastime, when they are their only source of self-esteem

games aren't restricted to children and competition isn't restricted to NEETs, stop projecting

>just want to have comfy slow playing strategy game
>koreans find it
>genre dead within a few years

1.Badly translates to consoles
2.Most RTS developers got eaten by publishers for their IP
3.RTS is NOT a single niche but a collection of several small niches that you can't fill at the same time

Is there an RTS game that doesn't have extensive micro? I don't mean no micro at all like something turn based, I just think it kills the immersion a bit if after sending soldiers to attack I have to click the mountains around the enemy and then the enemy and then the ground next to the enemy so my units can do a fucking waltz while firing because it will give me a health/attack advantage over someone that doesn't.

closest thing is grand strategy games like hearts of iron
technically an RTS if you dont pause

CoH

can you disable the pause?

>tfw the only MoW game that is still alive is AS2
I fucking hate Assault Squad 2, it plays more like a CoH clone than a RTT game.

Total War.

You click a few times and wait. C I N E M A T I C RTS for you.

>Some people want to design cities in peace and an RTS is pretty much the last place you'd look into for such an experience.
I disagree with you. I love designing and building cities, but combat is a big part of it for your overall goal to give you an enemy.

If I knew how to develop I would be making isometric RTS games for the rest of my life probably.

Wargame has no actives and is playable at a high level with less than 60APM.

RTS were popular because they were amazing value per buck. Back in the days when vidya was scarce, getting to fuck around in an RTS campaign, skirmish, world editor, custom maps,... that sort of thing was fun.

Then internet expanded, games became more accessible and RTS got boiled down to the games they really were, most people simply did not like what they saw.

Traditional Dune clones don't have any future. They are by definition the APM and memorisation-heavy affairs with rushes, build orders and all that stuff that most people hate about RTS. It' why the only RTS that do well and will do well are those which do something completely different, like Relic games, Total War games or Wargame.

Hell yeah, all four Sudden Strike games are on Steam now.

>Ctrl + f "stronghold
>0 results
Plebs

Northgard is a pretty fun game, and it's getting a single player campaign this winter.

too bad the only interesting part is the economy, combat sucks ass

I'm not paying 20 bucks for some early access indie shit

I second Wargame
also
Majesty and Majesty 2
instead of clicking to attCK YOU HAVE TO PLACE BOUNTIES ON THINGS YOU WANT DEAD AND PLACES YOU WANT TO EXPLORE.
sorry for the CAPS