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Did Real Time Strategy games die? Why?
There were a few years when RTS was a popular genre with games like Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, and Starcraft being very popular examples.
But these games have mostly died out, and I was wondering if maybe I'm just not aware of modern RTS variants, or if there are good reasons why these games died off.
Like, are Tower Defence games a form of RTS?
Are there any RTS games where teams play against each other, so 2v2 rather than 1v1?
There's a lot of great indie entries in the space. They are Billions is great. So is Northgard and Dune (so far). They come from smaller studios, for sure so maybe not at the same AAA level but they are on the level with those other earlier entries gameplay-wise if not quite there in production value.
Also, things have branched out a little bit with things like Factorio which mash more design/management in place of some of the squad tactics but have some common DNA all the same.
Traditional wisdom is that the RTS genre split into MOBAs (tactics-oriented) and grand strategy or 4x games that are more strategy oriented but without the real time.
Studios can still release RTS but typically most players are looking for one formula or the other.
Well, modern grand strategy 4X games are usually an unholy love baby of RTS and traditional turn-based 4X games. Take Stellaris, where a common way to play is to pause, do a bunch of stuff, let it play out to see what happens, then repeat. That's turn based in all but fact.
I find that something was lost in the process. On the one hand, MOBAs are, like you say, very tactics-oriented. On the other, grand strategy 4x games are so incredibly complex that require brains that are much younger and full of energy than mine.
You're right, but if you think about it classic RTS often suffer from the design issue that when you optimize for time there are only a few winning strategies that can actually compete against other players, once you move beyond casual play (if you don't optimize for time you just lose).
These volunteers have been working on a pretty good free RTS for years, give it a try!
I believe that you will find many classic RTS if you look into independent games, but they fell off the zeitgeist. The other day I watched an interesting video about a new Starship Troopers RTS that seems to bring interesting ideas to the genre.
Now that I think of it, something like Overcooked can have a classic RTS vibe... much simpler, yes, but the feel and the time pressure are there.
EDIT: 0ad is running fine on my ancient machine! Got it from flatpak. I think I'll play it further. Also, good or bad, FOSS is keeping the tradition of great programs, terrible names lol.
The ironic thing is 0AD is one of the better names in the foss game world, compared to things like 'SuperTuxCart', 'freeciv', and other clone games.
Other good FOSS games with both good names and good names are Battle for wesnoth, warzone2100, and Zero-K. (the latter two are also RTS's)
I mean a new Age of Empires came out last year and it seems decently popular and a really nice game.
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is still fairly popular, now using a community framework and balancing called Forged Alliance Forever (FAF). It built on Total Annihilation, and while I would absolutely love a remaster or game in its vein, it still holds up pretty well for its age and it's one of my favorite RTS of all time. Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion has strong Steam numbers for a 10 year old game (around 60% of its launch average players a month). The sequel is out soon, but it's going to be limited for some time while it's in early access.
Total War: Warhammer is the most popular series from the Total War games and has a great coop campaign feature. The battles are pure RTS, and you can just play those if you choose if you don't like the turn aspect of the campaign.
I talked a bit about this previously about how I think we’re on the cusp of an RTS renaissance.
The “demise” of the genre is, I think, partly a mirage. The gaming industry in general exploded in growth just after the heyday of RTS and much of that growth was on consoles. So while the market for RTS games didn’t really get that much smaller I think the money went after where the high growth areas were. New gamers weren’t into RTS titles because they’re just impossible to play on the platforms they’re gaming on. The reason MOBAs did well had as much to do with pioneering the FTP business model and being really low on system reqs as anything else.
Secondly its probably due to engines, like Unreal and Unity, becoming really good and commonly adopted. Of course those engines are kind of bad at supporting RTS games, they’re just not built for it. Making an RTS is actually quite difficult because of the amount of AI development (which isn’t really AI) and pathfinding and needing controls to feel smooth. Just play StarCraft and then play a Larian game or anything else with an isometric view and notice how much kludgier the latter will feel when trying to move around a single unit. The level of polish it takes to make an RTS satisfying to play is really high, the bar is much higher than in many other genres.
And finally, the monopoly power of StarCraft basically sucked all the nutrients out of the soil and made it hard for new or different types of RTS games to take root. The popular perspective on StarCraft, and this was something the community itself sort of leaned into, defined RTS as this competitive genre that requires a hundred gorillion actions per minute and big brained strategy. That’s not really true, but it’s how it ended up being depicted and people got it in their heads that this is how RTS games are supposed to be. That and SC2 got so big that nobody else could really compete and there ended up being a lot less experimentation and innovation within the genre since it’s dominated by a pair of 10 and 20 year old games.
The RTS genre died because it basically exploded and died off.
There was a point that if any given game was released for the PC it was almost entirely certain to be an RTS. And it was horrible. There were so many games being released with the same basic formula that it was just sickening. A number of studios building them folded. It was so bad that to this day I still automatically turn off whenever I hear about them.
My least favorite was the extremely limited RTS. There were/are some on the market where the build limit was 100 units. 100 units? In Total Annihilation, would build 100 units just to probe an enemy's defenses if I was feeling cheeky.
I mean, unit limits do serve as a potential way to guide gameplay.
By forcing a lower limit, in theory you're sending those units to fight ASAP so they die to make room for more units. And that you can more easily balance 'mass of small units' and 'small number of big units'.
In that same vein, Starcraft's low units-per-group and bad pathing meant strategies other than BBoD were the most viable.
My comment is mostly going to echo @NaraVara's, but I think something of an RTS revival is on the horizon. I don't think we will ever see the RTS genre dominate like SC2 dominated early esports, but I think a breath of life is coming for the genre. I've been on the newsletter for Stormgate for about a year now and it looks really good and has a ton of industry titans working on it. I've been drooling over Immortal: Gates of Pyre.
If you're interested in a 'short' (25m) youtube video about the genre, I strongly suggest Why the Next RTS Will Fail. Made by a veteran creator in the RTS space, it looks at the rise and fall of the RTS genre, what the creator thinks are the problems with the RTS genre, and where to go from here. I have a lot of fond memories of playing RTS games growing up, and the video really nailed a lot of the things I liked most about games and what I miss the most in current releases.
I'm going to take a small aside for a game that isn't purely an RTS because it is adjacent to an IP I really enjoy. The new Total War: Warhammer game is, IMO, insanely good. It has a really solid tutorial system to help players learn all the systems. Which it needs, because holy fuck is it a complex game. Really fun, definitely not for everyone. But also, it is in the Warhammer Fantasy universe, which 'recently' (jesus christ it has been 7 years already what the fuck where did time go ∑(O_O;) ) got retired and replaced by Age of Sigmar. I will stop myself from writing 100000 words about why Age of Sigmar is great and just focus on how it relates to RTS's. Basically, Age of Sigmar is Games-Workshop's new fantasy setting and it doesn't have any real good video game releases to get new fans hooked. Storm Ground exists and was fine but IMO isn't even remotely comparable in scope or quality to Total War: Warhammer. And with how much really sick lore and different factions there are in AoS, I think you could get a really really solid RTS/TWW game out of it. Anyway, that's my RTS Fanfiction.
Like all other comments here, I don't see a really dying scene for the RTS genre. But I definitively see it as a rather small community. For example the player base for Age of Empires 2 seems steady enough and with enough players to have a competitive scene, even the steady number of players of Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition now is the peak number of players of the old steam edition of Age of Empires 2.
But I think the genre has always suffered of its initial complexity, it will always have a rather long on-boarding of new players. So each game is trying to attract new players with specific settings which appeal to different players. I think the Total War series is applying this rule and often changes its settings to attract new kind of players.
I am not really a RTS fan, but I played and continue to play a lot of Age of Empires 2 now because as a kid I liked its medieval setting, and after stumbling on the communities games run by T90 on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGVjiUKVQd70bCkfsjf0cqac4HMrvuDWc) 2 years ago, I re-fallen into it with its Definitive Edition. But I would have never did that if it was for a new RTS where I did not have any knowledge of it before hand.
I even tested (totally legally obtained hum) Age of Empires 4 and was not hooked, mainly because it broke the similarity I was reaching for with Age of Empires 2.