I was browsing another forum some months back when EA announced Bioware (not really Bioware just the name whored around due to Bioware having no self-respect these days) had a new command and conquer game in works during the awful spike awards.

The initial response of the users was along the lines of "this is a waste of Biowares time". Like, somehow Bioware was above this genre. The thing I found odd about this, Bioware can't make balanced games. For a strategy game, this is of the upmost importance. So, it doesn't exactly seem that the talent is so far above the genre that it's inconsequential. Which I mentioned. When simply asking people why they had this response, they replied "because I don't like strategy games". "Bioware should stick to what they are good at".

Firstly, this argument that if you make a specific genre of game, in the case of Bioware, RPG's, strikes me as preposterous. Bliizzard make RPGs, very succeful and praised ones such as Diablo and World Of Warcraft. They also make Starcraft, probably the most popular strategy game in existence. Why should a developer, yet unproven in that specific feild "stick to what they are good at"?

Given how formulaic Bioware has become, how focused action games have become with strategy games becoming increasingly rationed, why exactly would this be a bad thing?

The only hypothetical I could come to, is that they were console gamers. With no interest in playing pc games, or specifically, control schemes better suited for the pc. Which seems fair, I suppose.

Or perhaps it's something even fundamentally worse than this, the thinking that strategy games are incaptitible of delivering story telling comparable to that of RPGs.

Well, son, I would point you to Homeworld or Warcraft III. While many people praise Metal Gear Solid for being cinematically groundbreaking, Homeworld was far more ground breaking, moving away from a top down view, using full three-dimensional gameplay and delivering an epic story telling of races fighting against extinction with a cinematic zest that is sorely lacking from mostly, derivative strategy games from today. Homeworld, made you care about the units you were controlling, an emotional attachment to them, through the story telling was developed.

Likewise, when it comes to battles, while games like Call Of Duty and Battlefield or Mass Effect use scripted events to give the illusion of scale, in alot of strategy games such as Sins Of The Solar Empire, or practically any Total War game, when thousands of units are battling on screen at once, it's happening real time with the ability to interact.

I can't really pin my finger on a single reason, it seems to be multiple reasons for this anti strategy game attitude, it seems to be a genre dismissed by mainstream gamers, specifically console gamers along with the mainstream press, that is supposedly suppost to be unbais but really, if it's not Blizzard, it doesn't exist. It is rather annoying and somewat depressing.