The heckin happened to RTS games?

[DoctorKaizeld]

Anyone else wonder what happened to games like Command & Conquer (pre-EA) and Age of Empires 2? these days it seems we only get Starcraft style zerg rush games or super in-depth and detailed games like Total War. I'm not saying those games are exactly bad just they are mostly the same and are getting stale. I remember playing AOE II (still do actually) and spending hours on a single skirmish match with the AI or playing Command and Conquer and enjoying the base building and slower take on the Starcraft style.

 

who else wants this middle ground part of RTS back? I sure do.

[montky]

An excellent question, Qwerty!

The sentiment in post #1 needs to be on a TShirt somehow.

 

 

 

I want my MidRTS, MidRTS, MidRTS please <--- to the tune of "babyback ribs"

 

Or, the "MidRTS of the Gaps", the missing link of RTSs. (with 8bit as the quelle ancestor and a techno-ified one as the descendant).

 

 

 

It's a tricky thing to confine, the midRTS in gametheory etc,

fans all have their own aesthetics etc.

 

 

thanks for your eloquent approach, Qwertz.

I hope you'll collab and make something in that niche.(I'm sure it'll be ^_AWESOME).

 

8bitguy of Youtube, and SunBunz etc,

they also lament the change of the RTS landscape.

It's not isolated to any particular tech-framework either;

it's even in retrogaming and other communities.

 

here's my prerogative on the subject;

I enjoy complex-dense games,

like RTS's etc.

But, the niche you're talking about - the mid-range RTS,

there are so few worldwide really, it's a what the of the vanishing mid-range RTS.

It is the go-to option, which you can then decide if you want more detail in a similar area, or less, and move to those,

but that "middle-of-the-road' option is often awesome in its own right.

I don't know why that polarization to 2 options happened.

deGaris' own reflections on that are interesting actually, in "The Artilect War Revisited".

 

So, the RTS, they evolved over time;

folks like the following

Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, Sid Meier, Angela Graissman, I mean, we could be here all day if I list all the projects.

(I hear that M Giustina wants to collab on some game projects, so those'd be awesome).

They pushed the boundaries on what was possible.

a lot of the audience for RTS's also wanted more complexity-density I suspect.

that selection bias caused the audience and features-utilization metadata from mid-range RTS,

to skew towards that split.

 

So, stuff like SPORE, UniverseSim, StarDockGames's stuff,

a lot of these emerged.

Though, we also see RPG/FPS-RPG's wanting to pivot to RTS, and increasingly doing a lot of what those mid-range RTS's used to do,

They're like a 'swiss-army-knife style game", highly adaptable.

stuff like ARMA, FO4's WaroftheCommonwealth etc.

--------

 

A lot of the mobile-app RTS's are not quite that middle of the road.

They're 30-40%, but they're lacking a lot of those midRTS features, so the mobileAppRTS' are closer to the light RTS.

 

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midRTS's were the core of gaming-nightclubs and LAN Parties/Computing Societies for a very long time.

these were games that were often the first games new-to-club members would play,

and I would argue, are metonymic symbols of many a LAN club worldwide.

a lot then shifted to FPS's, such that in the 00's, a lot of LAN clubs began to advertize only the games you'd be able to play there as part of the overall awareness of the club.

today, LAN Clubs have specialized away from stuff, so now what was once a staple at all LAN Clubs,

has become somehow a niche only to be found at "specialized RTS-themed LAN Clubs" etc...

 

 

 

 

So, I think a lot of Stardock and SPORE or Civilizations are great examples of that middle of the road.

of course, DUNE and Command & Conquer, 7thLegion etc too, (though they can get fairly complex).

with mods, you can pivot those and adapt them into High-complexityRTS.

It seems --- avg aggregate mods per capita of userbase --- is the metric which helps most in defining that MidRTS.

 

How do folks interpret stuff like ProgressQuest or these hybrid RTS-FPS games?

can they be regarded as 'true RTS's" and, can they become midRTS if so?

[DoctorKaizeld]

yeah and mobile apps are the worst direction for the genre as they remove any form of real speed and take a week to do anything.

[HeyYou]

Several of the really good RTS games turned into MMO's, either that, or they got 'updated' to the point of unrecognizability..... (yeah, I just made that word up.) Some simply disappeared when the companies that made them evaporated. Others were bought up, and shelved. I very much enjoyed Startcraft, that was fun. Warcraft 3 was a blast as well, but, with 4, they changed way too much. (water is no longer an obstacle???? Really?????) and then it went MMO. C&C was a blast, and there are still folks out there modding for it. No idea what happened to my disks though.... I still have Empire Earth installed on my games drive. :D

[DoctorKaizeld]

Yeah a lot of the good ones failed in various ways. Westwood (blessed be their name) got bought out by EA and given to "Top Men" then mothballed.

 

Age of Empires devs (lion gate?) changed the gameplay far too much and ticked off the fans. Honestly the changes were frequently stupid and made the game honestly far too easy compared to 2.

[HadToRegister]

Genres come and go.
Thankfully the latest Genre "Early Access Unfinished Zombie Survival Games" is falling out of favor and RPGs seem to be making a small comeback with Pillars, Age of Decadence, Tyranny etc

I heard that there was a Starcraft 2, but I never found out where to buy it, so I just skipped it.

There's a Free Giveaway on Steam right now 5/24/2018 for Galactic Civilizations II Ultimate , which includes Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords, the expansion pack Dark Avatar, and the newest expansion pack Twilight of the Arnor.

[DoctorKaizeld]

 

Thankfully the latest Genre "Early Access Unfinished Zombie Survival Games" is falling out of favor and RPGs seem to be making a small comeback with Pillars, Age of Decadence, Tyranny etc

yet still few decent survival zombie games...

 

 

I heard that there was a Starcraft 2, but I never found out where to buy it, so I just skipped it.

any store that sells PC games still (walmart for example) and the Blizard website.

[kthompsen]

Honestly, I never liked them to begin with.. except for C&C's soundtrack. Heh

 

I've been bemoaning the lack of TBS over the years, so now we're all in the same boat.

[DoctorKaizeld]

More TBS games along the lines of old school XCOM would be nice. Even dumbed down "stream lined" versions would be nice to have.

[Alexzaster]

What about turn based games like the Total War Series? Pretty much all of these were fantastic IMO, excepting RTWII, and the FPS situation.