Is the Real Time Strategy Genre dead?

Currently the last champions of Real Time Strategy have been reduced to two significant names, Starcraft 2 that has seen a decline with its e-sports centric audience and Command & Conquer which had its last official released game panned by Critics and abandoned by fans(Company of Heroes 2 is the other other recent RTS example). The attempt to make a Free to Play C&C apparently failed as well, it’s pretty damning to see the two biggest names in a once popular genre fail to keep a foot hold as they once had.

While the 90’s provided a overabundance of games within the Genre we’re now nearly 20 years after the popular period for real time strategy games. A period that arguably began with Command & Conquer Tiberium Dawn (Dune 2 was definitive of course) that ended with a gluttony of early 2000 games, notable late period titles such as the ground breaking Ground control games and Red Alert 2 being among my favourites.

But the Genre hasn't died completely Relic have been holding the torch for some time with the earlier Dawn of war games and the Company of Heroes series. As mentioned Blizzard continued to develop titles over the last few years but the popular Warcraft series is now an MMO and the future is uncertain for Starcraft after the latest expansion is released.

While I wouldn't want an over-saturation of the genre I can’t help but mourn a period which gave us several really fun C&C games, the original Starcraft, Dark Reign(yeah not that amazing), Homeworld, Ground Control, Age of Empires and I’m sure many people could list treasured RTS’s that I've missed here.

On the Horizon we have Wargame: Red Dragon, Etherium(It's said to be a RTS but we've only seen a teaser trailer) and it is believed that Gas Powered Games are working on a Total Annihilation Sequel after a buy out by Wargaming.net, oh and of course Planetary Annihilation is in early access but is still far from complete. In recent news we have OpenRA which seems like one of the most interesting attempts to bring back every relevant Westwood game while re-balancing them and even adding new units. OpenRA has very recently been covered by TotalBiscuit which isn't hard to find if you are curious.

So far I've avoided mentioning DOTA2 and its ilk as they do share relation to the RTS genre yet they are most certainly something else entirely, and personally they don’t have the same appeal. Oh and someone clever might note that the last Command and Conquer release was Tiberium Alliances.. The less said for that the better.

So it would be fair to say the genre hasn't died off completely, rather it has fallen from grace and a popular new genre has seemingly taken its place.

Hopefully it'll come back in full force, but for now I'm willing to play the WC3 and SC2 custom maps. I kind of hope the next big RTS game has a story that doesn't make me want to smash my head into a wall though.

It'll come back. I'm not too worried.

It's certainly stale if not dead. I don't think Command and Conquer has been big for like 10 years. Supreme Commander is your best bet if you want something reasonably innovative (that includes 2, though Forged Alliance is far and away the best version). Company of Heroes is also quite solid/different. Games like Dawn of War II don't really add anything to the genre and take away key aspects of the gameplay. Other than that be on the lookout for Starcraft III in 20 years and Warcraft 4 in 40 or so.

Paradox games are technically RTS and those games are the shit.

@random45: DoTA and indie games killed mapmaking so custom games are pretty terrible compared to 10 years ago.

I think the RTS genre is in a bit of a sad state right now, it would be good to see more fresh, new stuff coming from that corner of games development, but I think it's a big exaggeration to say that it's dead. Say what you will about the uncertainty over Starcraft's future, have you seen how many people that game is still huge for?

All the Dungeons and Dragons nerds grew up

@xalienxgreyx: Oh please do tell me the context for which your comment was made.

There still are tournaments and a few games here but the excitement has died out. I still feel starcraft relevent as the standard, but then it's hard to remind people Heart of the Swarm came out last year.

@xalienxgreyx: That was a pretty random comment in this thread?

It's smaller but not dead. COH 2 was decent but not the hit the first one was. Also those total war games are partially civ but the other half is absolutely RTS. So there's that series that has been going strong for awhile

@sackmanjones: I guess that counts but after Rome 2 I really wouldn't want to use the series as a shining example of the much beloved (at least to me) Genre.

Battle for middle earth III

Could save it all.

LET ME DREAM PEOPLE!

As a person who has played SC2 for 3.5 years, and continues to, I am not necessarily shocked that it has declined all that much. This extends to RTS games in general, but in a competitive environment they can be quite difficult to play, and quite stressful at times due to how unforgiving they are. More so than team games. This can scare a lot of people away in the long term. The thing to keep in mind is that because there is no reliance on a team, all losses and any mistakes are 100% the fault of the player. This leads to a lot of bruised egos. Also because of this difficulty, it is very difficult to play 1v1 in a casual way, especially right now. Most of the lowest level players have dropped out so anyone just starting is going to be facing some fairly tough competition compared to if they started even a year back.

Most of the people I know who switched from SC2 to DOTA or League did so because they like the team atmosphere and find it less stressful to play. Whether that is accurate for most people, I don't know, but for all of them it certainly was.

For non-competitive RTS, it seems like many of the developers have been stuck in a bit of a rut. The Creative Assembly games have been all kinda bland for the last couple (and I say this as someone who has sunk hundreds of hours into Medieval 2 and Rome), and CnC is basically dead. AoE Online was a bit of a bust (I had fun with it though) so whether or not we will see something new from that series, I don't know. I really hope so. AoE2 is still my favourite RTS.

I think that is part of the problem. All these companies spent so much time trying to innovate on the RTS genre, that it seems like they've lost vision of what people like about RTS. One of the reasons SC2 was so popular when it first came out was that it was a back-to-basics RTS. At the time the only other RTS games around were, for the most part, games that followed the vein of Dawn of War. A lot of people just like building a base and building up an army, not controlling with small teams of hero units, and most of these games focused more on the latter than the former.

+1. Moba's have supplanted RTS for a lot of gamers because of their inherently social aspect and lower skill caps.

I still think the genre is far from dead; it's just become more niche. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

@fredchuckdave: No kidding. I was on the SC2 arcade last night, and there was NOTHING interesting on. Man, I remember playing WC3 custom games for HOURS, and to see how bad they are in SC2 is just sad.

Yep, it is in a really sad state at the moment. Which is too bad, some of my favourite games are RTS'. Warcraft, Starcraft and Myth... I honestly hope Bungie decides to reboot Myth...somehow, eventually.

@xalienxgreyx: I cannot figure out what you are trying to say. There's not a lot of cross over between RTS and Pen & Paper RPGs.

I would also add that since most RTSs are not focused on team, they don't have the HUGE advantage of player retention (or addiction depending on who you ask) that MOBAs and MMOs have. The only reason Brad is still playing DOTA is that a bunch of his friends are playing and he can play it with them. People still play WoW in large part because they have a guild or group of friends in game. MOBAs are a social experiences and they will certainly attract a larger player base than RTSs because of that fact.

After all RTS moved on into the polygon world I declared it dead in my heart. The charm of tiny sprites fighting can never be matched.

Honourable mention: Knights of Honor. While everyone was racing to copy Total War's success (I guess that's the new RTS model), KoH had the balls to make a 2D real-time total war-esque game. Not really a traditional rts but SPRITESSSSSSSS.

Also, whenever people talk about rts games, I have to mention Seven Kingdoms 2.

I can't play them. Like at all. The micro is too much for me. I still suck at controlling multiple units in DOTA 2 after like 300 games.

I miss the resource gathering and base building RTS games. Age of Empires 2 is still my favourite of all time. I think the problem might be the gamers are, or the developers think the gamers are to impatient to do any of that any more and just want to get straight into the action pronto.

To me this just sucks. I would kill for a good modern resource gathering RTS where you have to spend 30 minutes getting things up and running before you start on your military and try and take over.

I've been playing a ton of AoE2:HD. The game still holds up and I never seem to have trouble finding matches when I'm playing with my friends. There are still a few issues that could be fixed in it, but that's a pretty solid product. Doubt we'll see anything "new" from that series though since Ensemble went bust.

Wargame: Airland Battle. Not for you if you need your base-building, but it's the real Company of Heroes. Believe it.

I played a bunch of Starcraft 2, but the way they butchered the story (imo) just makes me not want to boot it up. I played Brood War for years and years, and Warcraft III/FT got a bunch of play, as well. But that story just kills my interest, and it's extended to other RTS games now.

I enjoyed my time with Starcraft 2, fun campaigns and great multiplayer. But the more time I spent with it, the more I started to dislike characters I used to love. And I can't have that.

Yeah, when AoE2 HD first came out it was completely busted, but now it's great. I have a lot of fun playing it, especially now that the workshop mods actually work and I can have vanilla AoE2 music rather than the Conquerors music.

I still have boxes for AoE2 and the expansion somewhere. The old-style super jumbo PC game boxes.

Oh yeah, RTS is hella dead. I think some of the random shit that was popular on PCs like pre-2000 was mostly a complete fluke that will never happen again, because the only people really into PC gaming at that time were the kind of supergeeks who like really complicated games. Sure, there was populist stuff like DOOM. But Jesus, remember how there were like a zillion competing flight simulators and RTSs out each year? Once more of your average Joes owned computers, the percentage of PC owners who were likely to spend hours properly learning those genres became much lower, and that's when you finally started getting the real mass market successes like The Sims and WoW and whatever browser games and console game ports. Real lowest common denominator kind of stuff with a much better RoI. I doubt RTS or flight sims will ever get back to what they were like in the 90s.

While the state of the genre is a bummer, I don't think it's actually dead or dying. However, I do find it somewhat ironic that it has come to this, as it was only a few years ago that people were claiming turn-based games were antiquated and on their way out. RTS games could be in for a revival down the line. The right games just need to come along. And hopefully EA will be nowhere near it.

I just want a glorious return to a base building, steamroll army making RTS. I want to make a nice base, wall it with layers of bullet/missile/laser defenses, then make a giant army for half an hour.

Still playing CnC3, Red Alert 3, CoH (+expansions and a mod), and a bit of Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance.

I played European Escalation and found that pretty damn good. Really need to boot up AirLand Battle and give that a try, as it seemed awesome but I never got around to playing it.

I loved Company of Heroes 2 but I don't think they've released the map maker, and then they stripped mod support from it and there's only so many times I can replay those maps and campaign, whereas CoH1 has a crap load of campaign and skirmish maps, with mod support.

Suppose I'm just tired of the "hey, you control like 6 dudes for the entire game, maybe call in powers or something" stuff.

@xalienxgreyx: oh my first idiotic commenter! I must be doing well.

@capum15: I've been playing CnC 3 over the last few days and feels pretty nice, though placing buildings on the 3D map feels a bit frustrati still. Also. Air land battle is pretty great as it does scratch the same itch except the whole base building part. In fact a 5 v 5 game feels like a cross between Traditional Rts and Mobas as each player focuses on a lane or a front.

I was going to say I'd be down for WC4, but after thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Knowing the Blizzard of recent history, it'd probably be completely terrible and "accessible" and be almost nothing like WC3.

I think, honestly, I just wish they had another vehicle with which to tell more Warcraft lore that wasn't WoW.

Me too. I always preferred to turtle up and build a nice impenetrable base for 30 minutes before working on massing an army of the same few units and a-moving them at my opponent's base. It's why I spent most of my RTS time in the late 90s/early 00s playing LAN with friends against the AI in Red Alert 2, Cossacks, and Stronghold, and why I never could get into StarCraft (too much early-game aggression for me and WHY CAN I ONLY SELECT LIKE 12 UNITS WHAT THE FUCK BLIZZARD).

@ajamafalous: I tend to not attack-move since they usually stop and shoot, where I would want them to just be a blob of drive-by tanks and shit. Also if units don't auto-attack buildings, I roll up all in an enemy base with everything, make sure the blob is relatively in the middle, and then turn on "attack all" and watch the fireworks.

I also had a habit of trying to make my base as neat as possible, following ground textures (like, if a road suddenly starts, I'd put a vehicle creation depot at it) when possible.

But yeah, I just wish there was a new RTS base building game. I thought CnC4 was okay, but definitely not what I want in a Command and Conquer game. Still beat it twice (GDI+NOD) because the story was dumb/great and I wanted to see what happened after 3.

If space sims can make as crazy of a comeback as they have, then RTSes will have their day as well.

Wargame Airland Battle has a pretty bad singleplayer campaign. Mostly due to the fact that you're forced to use certain battlegroups that are complete garbage (no tanks).

Heh, I just reinstalled the C&C bundle right before the Christmas holidays and had a nice cozy time playing through Red Alert 2 and it's expansion, still awesome. Planned on going through the main C&C titles but I'm was having a nasty graphical bug in Tiberian Dawn and RA1 sadly with the Origin bundle that I was unable to solve, probably going to have to turn to torrents to replay them again at some point.

It's really too bad EA killed Westwood, how would have things turned out these days if we still had the Westwood/Blizzard/Ensemble RTS competition going on? Back then with the rise of the RTS this competition was super healthy for the genre, there were so many other developers trying to copy those games, just like today so many are trying to copy the Dota model.

I just feel like there was some sort of inflection point when RTS's tried to make a move from 2D to 3D, Westwood got put down, AoE3 spelled the death of that franchise; which all coincided with the decline in PC gaming and the rise of home consoles. Only Warcraft 3 had success and that was awesome, but then came WoW and as much as loved WoW it really took over Blizzard's time and overshadowed everything, making even them go dormant in this area for the longest time. So we suddenly had this RTS wasteland where the 3 biggest names and brands were just gone from the market, MMO's were the hot new shit and the original defense of the ancients mod was slowly starting to take over the PC gaming clubs under the radar.

I'm on a video game website calling other people nerds, I'm either kidding or retarded. You have figured the latter, congratulations you caught me.

@mirado: Right, and I've been waiting for the kickstarter for an awesome new RTS. How about something that does the same type of voxel graphics that Red Alert 2 but in a more advanced engine.

@xalienxgreyx: I was being fairly hopeful. Its how you measure how visible you are on the internet right? By the number of dumb comments.

At some point I really found the Paradox style grand strategy games were more my speed than the relentless clicking of RTS games.

Also, I'd have to disagree with the opening sentence. Totar War is a far more relevant name in contemporary RTSing than C&C has been for a while now. C&C might have broader mainstream acknowledgement, but as an active series it's not even close.

Disclaimer: I'm not a pro at the genre so this is my uninformed guesses/theories as to why the genre is so stale.

I think the RTS genre is "dead" because the genre evolved in the wrong direction. So much of these games is based around building bases and gathering materials that it doesn't leave a lot of room for actual conflict. I liken the RTS genre to a Jenga tower. You're constantly taking pieces from elsewhere in the tower to try and maintain stability while also growing your pool of resources and available units. That probably sounds like fun, though, right? Well now imagine playing Jenga competitively and the goal of the game is to build your tower the highest while also doing it as fast as you possibly can. RTS games put a lot of pressure on the player to be gods of multitasking as well as gods of quick clicking. You need to constantly know what you're doing and there's little to no room for error. I'm not surprised that turns a lot of people off considering most people suck at multitasking and most people can't click a mouse button 300 times a minute. Things like build orders and micro management of units don't matter if you can't get a decent handle on the fundamentals; that being multitasking/relentless clicking.

Until someone manages to popularize a form of RTS that reduces the necessity of multitasking/god-tier left clicking then I think the genre has hit its ceiling. The people who are going to be into these games are already into them, and without a fundamental change in the formula this is as big or as good as it's going to get.

Rome 2 totally works now, you guys, you should try it again if you bought it.

To the OP, I'd say that the C&C and Starcraft model of base-building RTSes may very well be on their way out. The only example I can think of of a franchise that has some anticipation for a sequel would be Halo Wars, though I suppose a new Dawn of War would get a lot of attention also, and who knows whether DoW III would be more like like 1 or 2. You used to have to give Relic credit for doing something totally unexpected with each game, but that changed with CoH2 (which was a transparently desperate last gasp by THQ trying to keep its operations afloat).

If I had to guess, I would say the genre will continue down its current path of separation - for the most part, I think players either want to build bases and not micromanage the troops (see: the Castle Doctrine, Tower Defense games, Paradox) or manage the troops and spill blood without worrying about bases (like in DoW2 or MOBAs). Anyone who wants both has a game, and that game is and probably will continue to be Starcraft, though Total War combines the two aspects in a totally different way.

@forkboy: Technically the Total war series was a late comer to the genre and only half that series is real time and even then it doesn't up hold the values that the genre started with.

@oldirtybearon: I think Command and Conquer already achieved this in a pre starcraft world and personally I find something really satisfying about managing a base while ordering my army about.

I switched largely because I was bored of the stale metagame in SC2. Towards the end of WoL I got tired of seeing the match-ups play out the same way every time - particularly the poorly designed ones like PvP.

I don't think the genre's dead, it's just at a low right now. Like fighting games were in the mid 2000's prior to SF4, and like RTS games largely were immediately prior to SC2.

I'd say it has less to do with poor growth, and more to do with the worst fanbase ever.

There has been plenty of growth in the RTS market, from mobas ( which spun into their own thing ), to squad based games ( dow/coh ), to card/unit focused games ( world in conflict, wargame, ruse ), to quicker paced base building games ( rise of nations/legends, command and conquer 3/red alert 3 ). We've had movie tie in games ( battle for middle earth ), and even attempts to make RTS games have varied campaigns on par with games outside the genre ( armies of exigo ). Hell, we've even got RTS civ games ( total war ), and shipflying games ( homeworld ).

The problem is nobody wants to move. Blizzard has put so much money into Starcraft that it's the game you play if you play RTS games. It's where all the leagues and tournaments are held, and has all the teams behind it. Not because it's the most balanced or best, but because it has the most money and is the best known. CoH at various parts of it's life was as balanced as Starcraft. Wargame is as balanced as Starcraft, and I'd honestly say a much better multiplayer game. RUSE was as balanced as Starcraft, and even had some cool ideas behind it. But nobody played them, and the immediate response by reviewers/the fanbase was "this is cool, but it's not Starcraft 2, so eh." And so nobody knows about them for years until they go on sale and get picked up/get played for their campaigns.

OIddirtybearon's post encapsulates this perfectly. The RTS genre has never been wholly about APM. It's separated into two distinct camps, micro and macro. Starcraft is ENTIRELY APM, and your macro game matters far less then your micro game. It's entirely built about how well you think on your feet, and how quickly you can get things running based on the current best build order. Wargame, RUSE, World in Conflict, and Company of Heroes are all macro games. You can spend over a minute not clicking and still be winning because winning is about thinking in the long game, and whats going to be your next move a few moves from now. It's about positioning, ambushes, and figuring the best way for your slow moving army to hit their slow moving army so your tanks are avoiding their destroyers, and your infantry isn't going to get shredded by a HMG in a building. That's where RTS games are right now outside of a single game. Nobody knows this though, and will immediately assume RTS = bases/APM/zerg.

Why would anybody make an RTS game right now is the better question. If you attempt to make something different it'll be ignored in favor of Starcraft no matter how well designed/balanced it is because you lack money. If you make a Starcraft clone, you'll be mocked, derided, and ignored because Starcraft exists. Hell, go watch any RTS video on GB for a good example of this. It's the dudes sitting there going "well, this looks kind of cool." followed by a "yeah but it's not Starcraft." by Brad. And then it's never talked about again.

Sadly, that's already happening again in HOTS. For the first 4-5 months there was a ton of variety in each matchup, but they kept doing these kinda questionable balance changes and it caused some matchups to lose a lot of variety. Maps are partly to blame but sadly those in charge don't seem to see that as a problem.

People have basically given up on Blizzard's efforts towards SC2 at this point. The credibility of the balance team is being called into question by everyone from the community to casters and pro players. It's getting so bad that even pro players are publicly calling them out for what they perceive as a lack of understanding of their own game, and not just the typical whiny pros, but players like TLO who never complain about anything and are usually quite positive. At first I always just chalked up people who blamed Blizzard for the game being in a bad state as being whiners, but in this case it is completely their fault. They released a patch a few months back that nobody thought was a good idea that had the opposite effect of what was intended and it only made things worse. Now they have a potential patch that could possibly break a couple matchups completely if it goes through. They proposed to halve the gas cost of hydralisks so they could be used more in ZvZ and ZvT. If it goes through, there is a timing in ZvP (where you go for mass zergling/hydra to pressure the third base, then immediately transition into mass mutalisk) that will likely become unstoppable, and pro players are saying as much. The timing is already brutally hard to stop because of the muta buff a while back, with this it will be nigh impossible.

I thought Dawn of War 2 despite having a pretty derivative story had great moments (the last mission of Dawn of War 2 has a great "FUCK YEAH" moment after what was seemingly a last stand of sorts) and overall I love the story it told.

For now, it certainly seems to have been swept under the *niche* rug.

I believe however that VR of all things, will eventually lead to a return of the genre to the mass appeal stage. I can imagine being hunched over a virtual Battlefield, moving units around with a virtual representation of my arms, maybe even holding some haptic feedback devices in my hands, while doing so.

VR could be a real game changer for RTS games.

i know what's not dead. "Is ______ dead?" threads lol

@billymagnum: Well it grabs peoples attention and its fair to suggest that their are issues with the genre.

You are essentially describing the reasons why a lot of people went away from SC2 and flocked towards games like LoL and Dota. It doesn't make those games any less complicated that's why it still has a high skill ceiling but the barrier to entry (though it is still pretty high compared to other competitive genres like the FPS genre) is much, much lower than a traditional, competitive RTS like SC2. Your pretty much splitting off the tasks amongst 5 teammates and resource mining is no longer dependent on actual resource mining but has been transferred to ones ability to attain kills. If you are looking for something that actually did evolve from the RTS genre and met great success then it'd be the team-based ARTS/MOBA genre.

I only play single player, so things like balance aren't of great importance to me - however, Total War was only balanced in Shogun where all factions had the same units. I'm not sure which features you're referring to - family trees and trading provinces? Certainly both true and maybe a minor nuisance, but not things that keep the game from being fun to play, like totally passive campaign AI and broken sieges were.