how RTS games are threatened by technology itself
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- čas přidán 22. 09. 2023
- There has been a LOT of talk about whether RTS Games in 2023 are a sign that the entire Real-Time Strategy genre is dying. But what got us to this point? There are a bunch of upcoming RTS Games in 2024 - how can the genre be "dead"? But whether you think RTS is Dead or just...sleeping...it brings up an important question: Is the death of a genre *inevitable*?
This episode we're looking at the Realtime Strategy Game, and how its origins and the nature of games may have spelled its demise.
Check out the full interview with Martin Melicharek! / voxelshow
Song List:
Age of Empires Soundtrack
Purple Clouds - Sarah, the Illstrumentalist
Powerwalkin' - Future Joust
Title - Dune Soundtrack
The Building of a Dynasty - Dune II Soundtrack
Radio - Command & Conquer Soundtrack
Dota 2 Soundtrack
Tidecaller - League of Legends Soundtrack
Traction - Dylan Sitts
War Declared - Crusader Kings III Soundtrack
In Search of Life - Stellaris Soundtrack
Intro Theme - Battlefield 1942 Soundtrack
Towards the Stars - Planetary Annihilation Soundtrack
'Legacy' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au
The Farmhouse - Silver Maple
Callout - AGST - Hry
There's no such thing as a dead genre, there are only bad games
so true
This
Or bad publishers/developers
Good games is not the same, as "profitable product". Without profit, Dev Team will simply be in debt, on street as bankrupt
There were good RTS that tried to survive in these past years, some communities are just retarded, thats all
A few years ago, another video said that the majority of RTS players wanted a campaign, while the companies focused in multiplayers games. The companies are more interested in catering to the vocal multiplayer competitive crowd than to the core RTS audience.
This has been accurate for a long time; in general, PvP content is about allowing the players to entertain themselves... and sometimes also entertain the developers. I'm not saying it's trivial to create and balance, but it's the easiest way to milk the most player engagement with the least work - and takes less effort at the start than single-player or cooperative content. (You can't predict how the playerbase is going to turn out to want to play the game; as soon as your game's complex enough that people will be publishing and reading guides, anything those guides don't see becomes invisible to most of the playerbase.) It also offers the biggest dreams to both the developer and publisher.
yeah i think the problem with just focussing on pvp as developer is, that you first need a good player base. the most succesfull rts had a good campaign, like starcraft/warcraft Age of Empires, C&C etc. and because the game made so much fun in the campaign, the players were willing to play more and start playing pvp, later come a lot of players only because of the good multiplayer, but you need a big player base and a good base game to make that possible. if the campaign is shit, the most players loose interest in the game and are not willing to invest much time in the game, so there are not a lot player playing pvp so the player´s that only want pvp also not playing this game, because nobody do, even if the game is really good balanced.
Maybe it's dead for you. we are still enjoying new games
true, I've played rts games for like 10 years and I've never played a pvp match
When StarCraft 2 went free, that's how i got into RTS games. Absolutely loved the campaign, it was engaging, fun, even challenging in a unique 'i'm playing Chess' kinda way.
I cannot figure out the multiplayer at all, it's so different from the single player game and not fun at all.
The multiplayer is why i never bought the other 2 campaigns and just went back to Overwatch.
The first game to combine Real-Time Strategy (RTS) and First-Person Shooter (FPS) elements in a significant way was "Battlezone," released by Activision in 1998.
Yeah, I was going to mention this myself, since he brought up so many 90s titles, it was funny to tout Silica as a whole new thing, when it's just the latest release in the sparsely populated, poorly received 25~ year old genre
i think the biggest problem for modern rts is the highly detailed and bombastic graphics we are used to today
in oldschool-rts it was extremely easy to understand whats happening on the screen and distinguish units and buildings from each other and from the background
personally i would really like to see a new interpretation of the dungeon-keeper idea
and something like cnc renegade with more focus on the building
(yes, those commander/fps-games like silica are inspired by this, but i want single-player experiences and 1on1 matches)
You mean dungeons 3?
For identifying units, I really liked how Supreme Commander handled that by using icons over each unit. The shape told you what kind of unit it was, and then a design in side indicated it's role. A narrow triangle was a fast aircraft, and a arch icon within meant it was Anti air, while a radar icon meant scout for example. Once you know the small selection of shapes and designs, it's easy to quickly know what you are looking at
Another Dungeon Keeper would be FANTASTIC. But get out a PSP and boot up What Did I Do To Deserve This, My Lord?! 2.
Old RTS was literally 2D sprites. 3D especially realism requiring so much more detail results in much of that defined appearance lost to blurry low ress pixels on mass amounts of units.
Age of Empires 2: Definite Edition has superior gameplay than earlier ones, but as you say, the game is a lot more difficult to grasp visually. The clarity was downgraded with the newer graphics.
Rts isn't dead, people just need to make better ones, the indie scene is looking real good right now.
I'm partial to beyond all reason, an rts styled after supreme commander, with a robust system allowing 8v8 games with minimal lag with no unit caps, it also has very nice controls making army management easier, and the devs are still adding more.
Im eager for Creeper World IXC. It looks like its following a similar formula from CW2 but with a lot more in depth physics and such. Very hyped. Should definitely check it out if you want something weird.
BAR is crazy good, started playing a couple days ago and im addicted
grey goo was alright
I mean both are good, but it's actually styled after total annihilation. and unfortunate forgotten rts game that added a great deal to the technology of the genre and many of the improvements it made were then incorperated into later games
I like Zero-K, which is pretty similar to BAR, but I've barely played BAR so I'm not 100% sure about the differences, but the free and open source community, as per usual, is making some amazing stuff, including in the RTS scene
Don't forget in the 90s we didn't have that much choice, but we were also very few gamers. Nowadays the market is so big I wouldn't be surprised there more people playing RTS games now than ever before.
There will always be RTS games to play, because there will always be fans, being niche doesn't mean you're dead.
arcade gamers were the general public mostly kids and teens, a cultural shift to home gaming.
@@Tethloach1i think rail shooters are definitely dead.
@@triadwarfareThey are kinda living on with VR.
RTS is by far the most inspirational game genre. whenever I play a game that has RTS elements I wonder “if only this game had x element” and there’s usually a modder who has made a game-sized addition
Cool video. We believe the genre's best days are still ahead and we're excited to continue sharing details on how we're moving RTS technology forward in Stormgate. Stay tuned!
Absolutely
Woot!
Please bring back the hero, item, leveling and custom map system. That same old formular with modern graphics and technology will make the best RTS game we ever have.
LOL you know who's clicking on this!
BTW... love the name, wink wink! A return of the real king of RTS would be appreciated. :)
Yep we agree best times are still to come :)
RTS is definitely not dead. It just needs time to evolve. Even AAA studios are pumping out crap these days. If you look at genres like Strategy RPG , you would have never thought games like Balder's Gate would have been up for Game of the year. Goes to show that all you need is passionate developers who care about their work and respect the players.
Not even evolve. Great RtS’s all have their own styles. Think about how different AoE titles are to Company of Heroes, StarCraft and CnC3
They just need to all stop trying to make Starcraft. All the great rts’s had a vision and a nuance of their own. They may all use similar basics, but they feel different from each other.
@@Jascosaurusikr, i saw a lot of games comming in next year and wonder why they have to make another copy of starcraft and red alert
Bannerlord is an amazing game that allows you to be both a boots on the ground soldier and ALSO a commander at the same time... Its a fine blend of Age of Empires and Dark Souls
@@Jascosaurus That's what killed empire earth. The third game was trying to be a starcraft clone while the second one was very unique.
I forget which ZeroSpace dev mentioned this, but when they announced their new RTS he said something along the lines of "it's time for RTS to learn from MOBAs like MOBAs learned from RTS." And i think that is quite important. The newest RTS's are raising the skill floor while trying to keep the ceiling at the same place. Let me also remind you of international viewership, just because you and your friends dont play SC2 any more, it doesn't mean nobody does. Sc2 this year has had peak viewership of 78,000 on twitch. Sure maybe some games do better numbers, but that doesn't sound dead to me. There a tons of SC2 fans around the world that love watching to this day, even if they havent played. If you looked at a bunch of 35+ year old men that watch baseball a few times a week and ask them if they play baseball anymore, their response of "no" doesnt tell you baseball is dead and its similar with RTS games. I am terrible with matching tone in text, so I dont want this to sound like an attack. I love all of your content. I do disagree with the statement that RTS as a genre is dead though, I feel that's a short sighted viewpoint.
You bring up an important point around the definition of a "dead" genre - it's something I wish I had included in the video. In my eyes, a genre begins to die when games in the genre fail to pull people in - when innovation either creatively or technologically begins to dry up. You're right about SC2 - there are still hundreds of thousands of players (for a 13-year-old game no less!) but the game is nearly the same experience now as it was 13 years ago. Whereas look at the advancement of FPSs and RPGs and what we've been able to accomplish there. Baldur's Gate 3 (as a completely *unfair* example but I'm going to selfishly use it to push my point 😎) has proven to be a genre-smashing hit despite CRPG games existing for...long before the modern RTS was created. We just aren't seeing the same kind of work being done in the RTS space and I honestly wonder if it's even possible to revive it.
I don't want to discount those who are still deeply in love with the RTS genre. In a way...I think I'm one of those people. I'm just waiting for the next game that really proves itself to be worth playing. In the meantime, I find myself drawn to games like Crusader Kings III. So while I'm not playing Baseball anymore, maybe I'm just playing [Insert Sci-Fi equivalent of an offshoot of Baseball here] instead.
P.S. Totally got you on the tone of your message. Trust me after reading the comments left on the Marathon video, I'll take 100 comments like yours disagreeing with me about the death of the RTS. 😉 Thanks for writing in!
@@VoxelShow I'm glad you understood my intentions. I agree that under that definition RTS games do look dead, but I would push back. I would like to make the case for MOBAs being a sub-genre of RTS games. This is what I was trying to showcase with my quote at the beginning, but I didn't explain it further so that's on me for not being clear. MOBAs learned what was challenging and 'unfun' in warcraft three and whittled the game down to its core fun mechanics only. Think about the things that turn players away from the RTS genre: managing your economy while also trying to micro your army and also controlling just your army with all their abilities in the late game. MOBAs simply removed the workers from the game and replaced your economy with being rewarded for combat instead, allowing players the freedom to not constantly be shifting the camera around to all their bases and instead allows a much more stagnant camera. They also took the spellcasters that were in your army and merged them into one unit, but the complexity of that single unit increases over time just like your army would in a standard RTS. You first start with 1 ability and as you level up you eventually unlock all of your spells, but the player can continue to increase the complexity of their character in the match by acquiring usable items that help you in battles, maybe armor with a thorns ability and an anti-spell shield. So when Starcraft II stopped acquiring new players to their game, Dota 2 and League of Legends boomed as a direct result of traditional RTS fans changing over games. So when you say that RTS games aren't innovating, I would disagree, but only because the innovation is just using a different genre tag. It's strange that when other game genres receive innovation they are considered the same genre, but when there is a huge innovation in the RTS space, it is such a good improvement to the genre that people thought it was a completely different type of game. A MOBA game starts and ends exactly like a traditional RTS, players start with a weak economy and are working to ramp up their economy quickly and efficiently enough so that they can gain micro-advantages that lead to more economy that ultimately allows one team to destroy the base of their opponent. You can even destroy the production buildings just like in an RTS and that allows for your follow-up pushes to be that much more powerful. That's why Zerospace mentioned learning from MOBAs because they are the same genre, it's just that the innovations were so good people got confused at what makes the genre the genre. Zerospace wants to make a game that is like a MOBA but allows the player to command an entire army in a much more seamless and calculatable way. It's my belief that saying MOBAs aren't in the same genre as Starcraft would be like saying Call of Duty and Overwatch aren't both in the same genre. They may both be two variants of the shooting genre, but they go about it completely differently than each other.
Thanks again for the reply and your content is so relaxing. I love the philosophy of video games and I'm glad I've found a channel and community that also enjoys these things. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this if you agree with my sentiment or not. I could be convinced out of this belief haha.
Well said
@@VoxelShowit just isnt the sale experiencie it was 13 years ago, its a whole Lot faster plays the same but it isnt. Its like saying football in 1960 Was the same as it is today. In both games the meta changed but StarCraft 2 Aldo has balance patches expansions, etc. Its a
completely diferent game
I currently play and watch Starcraft 2 every single day and I follow the professional scene in the same manner that most people follow their favorite sports teams.
What you are missing is that RTS games are not only battle games. And that's something that so many devs get wrong, they remove the "non combat" elements and then they are not sure why their games are dying.
RTS is also a rhythm genre. The real part of it, clicking the correct buttons, following a flow, it's something that remains hidden but brings the joy into the game. Making 12 Battle cruisers is fun. That alone. Building them. Is fun. And that's part of the rhythm side of RTS. And as long as that's missing, those new games would die as fast as they have spawned.
I think there might also be a wider context here, which is the death of all games. At least, all big studio games. Corporate greed set in and destroyed everything. Everything is about profit, and the art died. Which is especially tragic since the art was only in its infancy. However as game engines and 'game makers' get better, I hope indie games can improve to the point they don't need massive investment, someone can make a genuinely great game as a personal project.
this is already happening everywhere, i havent touched a new triple a game since 2015 and i still find gems every week
There's definitely room for innovation. Consider "Radio General" for example. You control units through commands like "move to grid D5" and your map doesn't auto-update: you have to call in to your units and ask them for a report. They might not even know where they are, if they got lost in a forest or scattered in a retreat.
Your comment makes me wonder if different scenarios might be possible...like, instead of an RTS for building or war-making, what if the map was a disaster zone & your rescue unit included humans + robotics the humans could remotely control, maybe add an AI assistant if you want to be near-future., so your team would parachute into the aftermath of an earthquake or chemical plant explosion, have to scout/map/evaluate the disaster on confusing initial reports, assess risks + resources, establish logistics chains + command/ops centres, identify threats that must be contained (eg a power reactor has to be shut down at the source before rescues start bc of downed live wires), make a plan for rescuing survivors + recovering/securing essential valuable materials (financial, knowledge, cultural, etc) & preserving or restoring order while restoring the zone or preparing to raze it if it's un-restorable. You'd command everything from the engineers who run the robots under rubble looking for signs of life or a safe path for rescuers to medical teams to civil enforcement to restoration specialists to logistics planners to communication experts etc etc etc. Campaigns could scale up in complexity, so an avalanche in a Euro resort town could be a first campaign, while a meteor strike would be the post-game DLC or whatever.
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426
A few years ago, there was a game called Offworld Trading Company. Which is about controlling a company responsible for colonizing Mars and you have to buy your rivals stocks to win the game.
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426 Do you know the "Emergency"-Series? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_(video_game_series)
There you control the Fire Department, Police etc. to manage emergency situations. The games are sadly rather janky, but to this day i can't forget the situation where you were called to a crash on the Autobahn, you had to rescue the injured people, divert the traffic and clear the obstruction BUT, if you forgot to switch the digital speedlimit sign to a slower speed, at some point another car will crash into the worksite ^^
Another take on the RTS I love is brutally asymetric factions. For example, the Creeper World series. Where you will build your base as a connected network of energy producers, storage, logistic units for remote power, to operate a few different weapons (from the classic cannon to the remote strike drone), to defend yourself and gain terrain on...
...a fluid. Yep. Emitters producing various amounts of it, sometimes a few units that interact with it, but mostly the fluid. And it is *glorious.* The innovation put by the developer also makes every game either feel like a drastic technical improvement over the last (adding a whole-ass programming language to the map editor in Creeper World 3 and above, or switching from 2D to 3D rednering), or a totally new direction (Creeper world 2 is sideways with terrain excavation rather than top-down. The one currently in development simulates both units and enemies to the pixel, giving a retro look while using the latest optimization tech). Overall, the series never feels stale.
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426 Not going to lie, I really like this idea.
I really like RTS city builder games like Kingdoms Reborn, Frostpunk, and Anno. So many RTS games will start you with nothing and have you build up your base/empire for your military, but it's so easy to build up a great city or civilization just for the sake of the city itself. It seems like a natural expansion of the genre I wish was more utilized.
I liked the building part so much, and didn't like the unit commanding part that well.
That's why I place Factorio.
@@monad_tcpHave you tried Northgard? I think it would be perfect for you
I used to play Age of Empires II like that, I would just build myself a nice city and leave the other (computer players) civilizations alone and live in peace behind my 4 layers of stone walls and make it look pretty. I used to have to make my own custom maps to give myself plenty (more or less unlimited) of gold and stone though. All I ever really wanted that it didn't have was roads.
*edit*
I'm pretty sure there was way in custom settings to disable trebuchets and siege weapons, I had to do that too otherwise I would struggle to live in peace
Indeed great games, but the time they consume is insane :D
Try pioneers of pagonia, spiritual successor of the original settlers series from Volker Westisch Blue byte.
I also like the impression series from Sierra, Caesar 3, emperor rotmk, Zeus
I think that the problem with RTS is mainly broken into three parts:
The development cost to get a game that is buggy but able to be released is higher, so to cut costs they tend to have symmetrical armies, it’s very hard to balance an asymmetric game to make people happy with competitive and thus to make an interesting asymmetrical game interesting it costs more.
Publishers don’t invest in the single player campaign’s story. This peaked for me with Act of War … where they got Dale Brown to write the story.
RTS has been broken up into tower/base Defense, single serve RPG (like DOTA), 4X, etc. while a lot of people that used to play RTS are middle aged now and have no time to play RTS.
I think that the modern cost recovery model of publishers it ultimately to blame. Ultimately 100 DOTA clones could be developed for the cost of a good RTS game, so they cut costs by cutting corners and reducing the value to the player … so less people buy and then they cut even more cost and further reduce the value to players.
I am heartened to see indie gaming bringing RTS back.
This has been tried before ... Battlezone (1998) ... another where it was starfighters with one player controlling the resource allocation ... there are even moments in some Total War games where you can directly control units on the ground (making them usually FAR more effective than set to fire-and-forget). This also isn't the first game that has a commander player issuing orders to (which are often ignored by) other players ... just hopefully one that sees enough success to reboot interest in the overall genre.
And Uprising: Join or Die (1997)
Unreal Tournament 2004. After early 2000s success of RTS games, UT04 has a game mode called Onslaught. Its a vehicle based mode to capture resources and destroy enemy base using vehicles, basically a FPS RTS. Also UT04 was unquestionably the best FPS at that time.
Don't forget Urban Assault from Microsoft. It was literally the game it's comenting at the end.
NONE of these other examples are highly-focused on First person shooting though like Silica will be. You want examples that are: Eve's Dust actually tried to do this. Battlefield sort of does this. Planetside2 let an Outfit leader and base-builders do almost all of the same Logistics things and then summon a gigantic Capital ship on top of that.
@@iller3Carrier Command: Gaea Mission
It got fps and some rts elements, not exactly fantastic in either but certainly focused on both.
I actually love it when games are complex. I think the simplification of games is a big reason why new games don’t do it for me. The key to making it work is to keep the player engaged and having fun while they are learning. The game has to be playable and fun in a simplified state.
That's why I long for RTS games, and the moba genre bores me.
Wouldn't it be extremely frustrating if you have a hard time with thing?
Dota 2 is more RTS than other mobas @@nightmareTomek
Thats why a proper learning courve and guides/tutorials are important, having a hard time can be in a simpler game as well due to unbalancements or bugs @@CognitoTanKhaiiHuitkh9917
fr i love menus and tech trees, stellaris is goated
The issue with the 1+32vs1+32 RTS/Shooter is that when the people who only like RTS get stuck in the FPS mode they just quit. And when no RTS player is around, the FPS players rarely step up to command.
The problem with the genre (like Natural Selection) is that the RTS aspect is so important that experienced players gatekeep the role and prevent newbies from ever even learning
That's exactly what happened to Battlezone 1 & 2
Command & Conquer: Renegade
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
I feel like doing it like Tremulous where there wasn't actually any commander but anyone could just at any point choose to respawn as a builder and build whatever was needed was a great way to do things(first person building placement also allowed for stuff like buildings built on walls or ceilings which was nice too).
@@copperboltwire320Battlezone didn’t have a mixed commander + other players in tanks mode did it? I thought it was strictly either commander skirmishes (where you commanded from a tank) or death match which is where most people played in my experience.
I definitely think the idea of having multiple builders (probably up to a cap to prevent apm advantage) is a good one. It could create team compositions where one person runs logistics, one person runs unit production, one person manages base defense, one person controls the tech tree and so on, but there could also be the opportunity fir having a person run localized bases.
Maybe to bridge the gap for fps and rts style play, each base has an rts player in charge of it, but doesn’t have all of the resources required to tech, so fps players have to go out, secure resource points, then one of them has to transition to rts play in order to manage the new outpost. Could make some cool mechanics for logistics paths between bases which can be interrupted by opposing teams
The concept of Silica (2 commanders, rest of teams in FPS style gameplay) has actually already been done, albeit “unsuccessfully.” The Savage line of games by S2Games had the same systems set in the high fantasy genre. A commander on each team that manages macro elements and some micro, and team players that control individual units and directly impact micro. Ironically, the same company worked with Icefrog to develop the “original Dota 2” (Heroes of Newerth) that did go on to become a relatively successful moba (even with his departure to Valve) but due to mismanagement it fell to the wayside of League and Dota 2.
Ill miss the golden years of RTS from 90s to the end of SC2, and hope that Silica can be a successful endeavor for the dev. I think the Savage games could have been good had S2Games been better managed, but we will never know.
I played a version of this when I was in college that was a sci/fi aliens vs pedator rip off. It was super fun. The "Commander" built buildings that helped the fps players and gave commands to the fps players that would appear on their "hud" as a way points and instructions. So it was up to you if you obeyed your commander.
that's natural selection, it had a paid sequel that released in like 2012 i think, slowly died over time because of developer neglect. @@ryanburkett949
it's also been done successfully. natural selection 2.
Natural Selection 2 has done this with pretty good success. It has been on lifesupport for some time but back in 2013-2016 it was very much alive and well.
Using unity engine was a biiiig mistake. If developer really cared about this game, he would have made it in a custom heavily optimised engine.
Hearing you talk about Silica as if this was a new concept kinda threw me for a loop. Savage (2003) and Savage 2 (2008) by S2 Studios were both RTS FPS games where one player on each team took on the roll of a commander for their respective faction, and playing a traditional RTS style game, while the rest of their team embodied the units and fought in a first person view with unique unit abilities. It was basically exactly what you are talking about.
Funny enough these games also have a small footnote in the development and creation of the MOBA genre. Before either DotA or League were released a little game called Heroes of Newerth was launched into Open Beta. HoN was a more or less Direct port of the original DOTA, it even had the direct backing and support of Icefrog, and was quite popular for its time. The game ported over numerous heroes from DotA and reskinned/renamed them to fit into the world of Savage! However it was a Pay to Play game and at the time F2P was just starting to kick off. During the Beta it even had larger numbers than League, but as soon as the full release went live and players were required to pay for their game it quickly fell into obscurity. Eventually League overtook the game and it slowly faded from relevance.
Any way, cool video. Keep up the good work, and... Maliken Rules!
Yes, Savage! I liked those games
A few corrections about Dune and Dune II:
1) Dune and Dune "II" were developed at the same time originally due to a miscommunication about which studio was supposed to be making a Dune game. Both games turned out so well that the publisher decided to publish both. If Cryo had taken too long, their game would have been Dune II and Dune II would have just been Dune.
2) The Dune II developers had never heard of Herzog Zwei or seen the game until over a decade later. The original inspiration for the gameplay of Dune II was Military Madness on the Turbografx 16. The Herzog Zwei non-connection was hypothesized by journalists, but Herzog Zwei isn't even the first Herzog game, and Herzog wasn't the first RTS game.
3) The Dune license was specifically for the movie and not the books, so they could only make content based on the movie. House Ordos is only briefly mentioned in the movie. This gave the devs the chance to essentially make their own faction, but the name is prior canon.
Most of my info can be found in interviews on this channel: www.youtube.com/@BoredWithNelly
As for what killed RTSs, it absolutely was not MOBAs. The fact that MOBAs were designed to be eSports and sprang out of RTSs may have been part of the conversation, but the only RTSs that conversation actually harmed were Sacraboar and Dawn of War III.
What actually killed RTSs for about a decade (they weren't actually dead, just absent from AAA) was Starcraft II and the idea that RTSs had to be giant eSports to succeed.
As for Silica, I hope it does well, but it's far from the first game to attempt Commander + Teammate RTS gameplay.
The amount of damage eSports has done to gaming as a whole can still be felt to this day
One word: Highfleet
Play it.
It's the best Dune based RTS I've ever played in my life aside from Kharak and Emperor of Dune, seriously.
Funnily enough, the best showcase of an RTS + FPS game I've ever seen is...a game from 1998, called Urban Assault. It has its flaws, some could even say the gameplay is unrefined, but what it managed to do back then is something that can rarely be found even today. Battlezone did something similar but it did not feel quite as good as Urban Assault did, though that's subjective.
Either way, I encourage RTS fans here to give that game a try and look. It has been remade from scratch by a dedicated fanbase and is now completely compatible with modern hardware.
I fully agree with the last bit. The rts games which are the most fun for the average gamer are terrible for esports.
The most popular mode in sc2 nowdays is commanders aka coop pve. With cool abilities that aren't balanced for pvp.
@@user-kr6ih2gz5l Highfleet seems fun, but it isn't really a pure RTS - seems like there's a lot of shoot'em'up elements in there too.
As many others have commented, it's more a factor of AAA only catering to the most profitable % of every audience which has resulted in a vast homogenisation of genres, playstyles, and mechanics. RTS isn't part of the most popular 5% of gaming so no developers will finance making more of them, same as music games, beat em ups, point and clicks, etc. (unless they're part of an established IP). RTS has plenty of potential to it, but right now it's been discarded as a sacrifice to the publicly owned gods of profitability.
who plays triple a anyways??
Indies are the beauty of gaming that way. A few good indie games can take all that money AAA passed up, often for a tiny development cost (in terms of direct capital).
Ah yes discarded in favor of profitability. Truly smooth brained languages.
Video games aren’t a charity bud. The reason the same slop is offered is because that’s what sells. It’s not the 5%, it’s the vast majority.
@@Chairman_Wang Then it just need to stop. I say - close all the AAA studious. They are useless and can't produce anything of actual value.
@@ScienceDiscoverer lol if you gonna troll at least be subtle ffs
Silica is exactly what I always thought Halo Wars *should* have been - one player as the commander watching from an orbiting ship, the others as the boots on the ground leveraging the series' already tried-and-true fps formula. I remember late night when playing Halo 3 multiplayer with my brother, a weird glitch put the lobby into a sort of hybrid-forge gamemode, where it was regular TDM but one person on each team could turn into guilty spark (the editor mode) and drop items and vehicles. It was amazing, and I've been trying to find games that scratch that itch ever since.
That sounds sick
A game where a bunch of grunts play a MP FPS while one or more people plays the resource management of the team sounds really awesome
I wish more people relied more on slower paced RTS Games where you build up units/base, spread, make alliances/enemies (Like Stellaris).
Also wish more games would take advantage of destroyable environments / interactable environments. It seems like most games nowadays rely on static maps that don't change unless its already pre-scripted. Just wish more effort was put into better spots than just graphics. :)
Stellaris is a 4x game (like civilization), not an rts
@@Jet-ij9zc Same difference, no need to strawman haha
@@Jet-ij9zc They play around the same, you command units, get resources, manage a government. Sorry I got the name of the genre wrong xD
Wasn't even the point of my comment. Was saying I wish more games were like Stellaris, nothing to say there?
Game speed is the main difference between 4x and rts.
4x are played turn by turn, slow and methodical. Rts are played in real time, if you're slow you'll fall behind your opponent and eventually lose.
Saying rts should be more like 4x in regard to speed is like saying fps should be more like horror games and reduce the amount of gun being shot. It goes against the very nature of the genre
@@Jet-ij9zc Christ man. I'm saying more games in general should be. You don't need to strawman me. You're taking one thing and correcting it rather than expanding on the comment, thanks for the correction though thank God I know the difference between 2 niche game types.
I only wanted to say I liked Stellaris and that I wish more games were like it. You really needed to pick on someone today eh?
I think you're correct about newer genres drawing players away from RTS games and the genre no longer benefiting from technological advancements, but I think your point about RTS games having too high of a skill floor only speaks to the competitive sides of these games and underestimates the value of content like single player campaigns. There are plenty of casual players who play the campaigns but don't get into the competitive side, and the focus on RTS games as primarily competitive experiences leaves out this portion of their audience who would still be interested in a game that catered to them a little more. If you haven't already seen it, the video "The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why" by GiantGrantGames does a really good job of explaining this with some pretty comprehensive survey data gathered from the RTS community.
Yeah I mean I was literally a kid playing Command and Conquer games heavily all through the 90's. I was not skilled in any sort of major way, but I also wasn't going online trying to compete. I just knew that the fun of the game was building a cool base and army and then squaring off against the AI in skirmish. Take some land, build another cool base, and move units around. The mode never forces you to have fun doing stuff like that even if the maps seem to imply in some way that you can do such things, so it's like a sandbox to enjoy if you so choose.
RTS games online got to focusing on what I never thought of as the 'fun' of such games: optimized openings, learning the various metas, hyper fast clicks per second, etc. with the focus on quick and efficient winning. As a competitive game it was never really about the actual thematic 'fun' of the game with things like "how can I build the most badass base, or amass the most impressive army and crush the enemy?" because the optimal way to play was to ignore that crap and just stick to doing the same practiced strats every game and hoping your clicks were faster and more precise than the other player's clicks. There was no surprise left, you weren't spending each game trying to probe out the map and figure out the ideal strategy to use against a new enemy, it was chess. Everyone knows the moves, the strats, the maps, the plays, etc. (I'm sure there's a lot more nuance there at the competitive level but still)
Unfortunately I don't know how one could make a game that had compelling and rewarding multiplayer that was still able to be played more 'organically' or 'realistically' without it ultimately going to the sweaty scene where people have min-maxed each map and faction and so-on. You'd have to introduce a lot of random map generation, put more abstraction between the clicks and the results, etc. And at some point then it makes it too hard to play for casuals I think? Very hard to strike a perfect balance.
@@scottwatrous You're speaking from my heart on this one. Online games in general feel like they've all gotten to this point. The fun of raiding in WoW used to be discovering the boss mechanics, developing teamwork and communication, and trying over and over and over again until you finally got it. These days, WoW expansions and raid bosses are datamined before the expansion even releases to the public, DPS can be simulated by machines to tell you which talents to take and which gear you need to equip. Something about having all the answers tends to suck the fun out of the experience.
The response of course is to never look anything up. But in competitive games you're at a disadvantage if you don't follow (or better - improve beyond) the meta.
I wonder how much our modern internet plays a role in whether games feel fun. Where metas and datamining and strategies can be uploaded within minutes to a Wiki page or CZcams and boom - you're given the "best" or most efficient way to play the game. Lately I've found myself completely isolating from conversations around specific games, so that nothing about the gameplay can be spoiled for me. Yet...as a games writer...it feels like I do myself a disservice at times by not having my finger on the pulse of the games I play.
I have never done open pvp in rts games. I think the fun it that at least how I got it was building the badass base then squaring off against a friend. We haven’t looked up the meta we had only fought against AI.
I'm not much of a "gamer", but I feel like lately gaming is all about skills and competition. The rise of MOBAs and battle royales, FPS franchises dropping campaign modes, speedrunning old and new games, the lack of co-op game modes in favor of PvP, the dislike for PvE or bots, the mocking of NPCs and enemy AI... Everything points towards a competitive, online future where you HAVE to be skilled and focused to play games. Meanwhile I just want to chill and so I play SnowRunner and fool around doing offline hauling missions in a leisurely pace...
Yeah, as much as I love RTS, I've never been interested in competitive PvP. In fact, the competitive focus that Starcraft garnered and is now sort of baked into RTS games is what's pushed me away from them. Also, as mentioned in the video, it means they have to compete with RTS-adjacent genres that are easier to get into, more popular, and more marketable.
What RTS does have going for it but doesn't get enough attention (in most genres, really) is the potential for replayability. Sure, a linear story campaign is nice once, but what about after that? There needs to be something other than skirmishes to give me a reason to keep playing.
I remember when the turnbased strategy game was declared dead, when we hardly ever saw any TBSs, be they tactical games or 4X games. Nowadays we get a lot of turnbased strategy games and we live in an era where the genre is presenting a lot of new and interesting twists on the formula, as well as a fare few traditional ones as well. What was once considered a very niche genre that at best received a small handful of games in any given year is now in what feels like a golden age.
I think there's still plenty of room left for innovation in the RTS genre, and also many old ideas that could be expanded upon, but the feeling I get from playing RTSs is that it's also a genre that's pretty hard and expensive to make. There's a fare few indie RTSs out there, but many of them are more frustrating than fun to play because of reasons like questionable game balance, pathfinding and pacing issues. It's an expensive genre to make and it's also one that hasn't done so well on consoles, so there's not that much interest in publishers to sink a lot of money into them.
That's kinda the thing about RTS games. Because of the super high standards of it's fanbase, the quest to "innovate" the games become too convoluted and no one wants to play those anymore while the hard to please fan base just keep complaining.
Meanwhile, stripping it down to the bare minimum instead of being too complicated and we get games like We are Billions and other auto battlers spawning a new sub genre of rts games.
Yep. People said TBRPG is dead until Persona 5 came out to thrash those opinions to dead dropping.
@@tr1bes Tbf, turn based rpgs never died. It's just that they were hidden from mainstream because all of them were low budget japanese games that are practically invisible to your average gamer that only looks at graphics.
But then the west mocked japan about releasing low budget games that looks like shit, and poof, games like P5 and nier automata came out.
@@belldrop7365 That's is what the Western media think, but Japanese hold on to TB for such a long time. Most of the RPG went to ps3 and Nintendo handheld DS, DSi, 3DS. It's easier to make on low spec, low graphic on Nintendo but have extensive gameplay/story. Switch is just another one for indie developers to make available games on.
Remember how video game crash in US in the mid 80s. It only happen in the US. It never happens elsewhere like Europe, Japan, and S. America.
Ive been playing and collecting RPGs since SNES days. The most valuable genre for the most part is RPG. Horror is next in line. In the 90s, US consumers/gamers want whatever in Japan. The West/gamers want so hard core on realistic games but they sacrifice story telling and fun.
One word: Highfleet
Play it.
It's the best Dune based RTS I've ever played in my life aside from Kharak and Emperor of Dune, seriously.
I mean, the Idea that Sillica is following is over 20 years old, probably even more.
The first one of its time I personally know about (there might be older ones) is "Savage: The Battle for Newerth" which existed back in 2003.
I'd be really curious to hear what you think about where the _Homeworld_ series fits into all of this. When the first one came out in the late 90s, the idea of having an RTS in open space was quite revolutionary (even if, in practice, your units almost always stayed on the same plane). It had a lot of nostalgia, and when _Homeworld 2_ came out, the improvement in graphics technology alone really sold it.
But then we thought there wasn't going to be much coming after it, for a while, but now they've released _Deserts of Kharak_ , which was well-received, and _Homeworld 3_ , to everybody's surprise, is coming out soon.
That game, after the _StarCraft_ series, was my first real love, and from there I moved on to EVE Online (following, I suppose, the trajectory you describe of moving from the entire strategic picture to a focused tactical experience). And yet, the _Homeworld_ series, almost thirty years later, is still going strong.
homeworld 2 is still my personal favorite rts
For me the most enjoyable part was the struggle to break out of the 2D mindset and really use 3D tactically and strategically. HW3 looks like they’re tripling down on that aspect and I’m thrilled!
Regarding innovation in the RTS genre and the Homeworld series, Homeworld 3 will be including a mode that introduces rougelite/like elements.
I saw the title of this video and right away thought about HW3. Very excited, playing through HW2 and deserts of kharak rn in anticipation
why were you keeping your units on the same plane?
Some of my first time games on pc were RTS games, Starcraft, Warhammer 40k. The genre and me just fell out of love and while i wish for others to try it out, the main point to add is that we never forget a genre.
I dont think a genre can die, it will just finds its way into its own catergory within retro gaming.
It's just limited content and the new rts are of lower quality. If age of mythology could be bottle it would be competitive vs moba
@@mdb45424 there are some very promising rts is development and looks like the quality will rise again. 🤞
RTS games aren't dead, they're just evolving - but there will come a time when we get another RTS with the style we know and love. The indie market is too big for it not to be the case.
This
I recently picked up Age of Mythology and Age of Empires 2 again after decades and played through them and those games are still amazing. Age of Empires 2 Definitive edition has co-op campaigns that you can play and I haven't had that much fun in an RTS in a long time, playing with a friend and being able to coordinate in a challenging but still casual/not PvP environment was absolutely awesome. I would love to see more classic RTS games with co-op
I think the game industry as a whole is beginning to come to terms with a lesson that any artist eventually comes to when they begin to take art seriously and move beyond the fundamentals towards real understanding and application; limitation breeds creativity. For pretty much the entirety of the games industry's existence technology has been constantly developing at a blistering pace. Every few years new consoles, better computers, more graphical detail and processing power were on the table tempting developers to push the boundaries of what is possible further and further, opening the flood gates of possibility cyclically. But things are slowing down, development is taking longer, and what I am seeing in the indie scene is what gives me hope, something which began about a decade ago in force; developers are moving backwards and embracing the limitations of specific eras of game technology and creating new, exciting, unique creations instead of chasing the realism simulation dream.
It really began, in my opinion, with pixelated style games coming back as a "retro" theme that people were drawn to. There's also some incredible games built in the doom engine that have had great success in the last 3 years. But there's a slowly boiling crop of PS1 and PS2 style games that are slated to be releasing in the next few years which I anticipate will be massive hits when they release, utilizing the style and limitations of the hardware era they chose to guide their creativity. What makes this more exciting to me than "just a fad" or a "style" is that as an artist the most important thing to truly being creative is to limit your options. Because technology moved so quickly developers never felt limited, they were instead drowning in potential. They've since learned to swim in the slowly stabilizing depth of the pool but there's so much more to the depths that never got explored that can enrich the entire genre on all levels. Exploration and limitation is what will keep the industry from stagnation and shiny new technology is rapidly becoming true fads where people whose name rhymes with Clod Boward feel justified in rereleasing the same game in 20 different iterations, each incorporating a singular new technological development as the selling point instead of exploring alternative stories, characters, settings, and mechanics.
the biggest problem I see with silica is that it fragments the player base, fps and rts are very different styles of gameplay, and the odds of pulling of both to an extent that you attract enough players interested in either of the two modes that you can fill a lobby is a bit of a long shot.
Silica is not a new concept.
@@znail4675 and in which part the comments says it is ? Sílica problem of fps and rts having different player base is something that these kinds of games always had , reason why fps+rts is even more niche than rts
Not to forget we already got 4 largely dead games, they died within 1-1½ years of their release:
Battlezone 1 & 2
Command & Conquer: Renegade
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
People forgot them quick it seems, judging by the people who made this video...
@@copperboltwire320 if i recall c&c:renegade died a lot because of hardware rec at the time and bad network code made it hard to work without tunneling
@@znail4675rest in piece natural selection 2
My problem with many modern rts games is that they are just too damn fast paced and the maps are too small so the end game is always one death blob duking it out with another, so my solutions would be to make units bit slower and sturdier, make the maps bigger while lowering the amount of troops you can have, this way you need to think strategically where you position your troops since you cant just fill the entire map with tanks and instead have to spread your units across the frontlines while having units in reserve ready to stop heavy push from your opponent
That's how Wargame series works. Maybe Supreme Commander too, but it isn't so recent and I didn't played it enough to know for sure.
@@Allianser Supreme Commander had very large maps and very large numbers of units. There was a lot of strategy, but if you were the economically ahead one hordes of deathblob tanks were pretty common.
That's how warcraft 3 was. Very slow-paced fights with few units.
they want that quick gameplay loop that makes money with other types of games trying to "appeal to a wider audience" and lose their soul
The problem with your suggestion is that it's not esports friendly, even though I do think that it would be more fun to play. Comp games nowadays are as much about the spectacle and excitement for the audience as they are about player fun. It's why modern FGs simplify mechanics that old players tend to dislike, but add a bunch of flashy art effects. They also add comeback mechanics that skilled players hate because it lets scrubs steal a win now and then (never enough to do more than an occasional bracket upset, but still) and it's all because the devs want the audience to stay on the edge of their seats. As long as RTS is esports, a slower and more methodical game will never take off. esports kind of killed comp games tbh
BAR is great and has a lot of potential, which is based on the Total Annihalation/Supreme Commander games, AoE4 was pretty successful and in recent years there’s been a lot of promising projects such as the upcoming game Tempest Rising. Sure, the RTS genre has been in an almost 2 decade long stalemate and will likely never reach the top again but it’s future is finally… promising again.
Monetization is hard and the amount of effort it takes to develop an RTS is a lot comparatively so the aaa industry isn’t very interested in the smakker potential ROI however on the other hand, AI is so important in RTS games, whether that’s AI enemies, scripted campaigns or simply pathing or well, even development and it has made massive leaps in recent years.
I don’t think it’s a creative problem, it was actually a lack of investment of technology because it’s hard to monetize, and now technology itself is catching up.
RTS is far from dead. The thing is, AAA studios are basically the only companies capable of producing satisfying new RTS titles and they have no interest in doing so.
A good RTS would be a very complicated project, far more so than most of the other tired genres having new games released for them constantly. You have to design dozens of different units with unique mechanics, give them clear roles, and balance them against the units of an entirely different faction.
You have to program path finding and scripts for dozens if not hundreds if not thousands of units on a map. And you have to design maps that are more than just the flat plains of yesteryear RTS's - gamers will want interactive lines of sight in the form of hills, forests, buildings, etc that can stop projectiles, mask units, etc.
Then you have to do all the math involved with unit cost, production time, etc.
And on top of all that, you need a really solid single player campaign and comp stomp scene, because a lot of RTS players don't want to play competitively. You will need a level of writing and world building that simply doesn't exist in video game writing (at the AAA level at least) right now. You will have to decide: is this going to be a fun campy game with local theater production tier actors in silly costumes in front of an FMV style camera ala Westwood studio games? Is it going to be moody and somber fully animated cutscenes?
A really good RTS that would appease most RTS players is out of the realm of indie development atm (though there have been some admirable attempts: for example, me and my friends currently play Beyond All Reason quite a bit), and unimaginative AAA studios have no interest in creating the style of games that built the industry in the first place and prefer to fart out the same tired product over and over again relying on an ever decreasing pool of whales to bring in massive microtransaction profits. Look at how lively the Age of Empires 2 DE scene is.
There is a huge potential audience for an RTS game, but it can only be captured by a studio that goes into the project with the same level of passion and competence Larian put into Baldur's Gate 3, because anything less will result in failure. Unfortunately, as the studio's responses to BG3's high quality show, these studios aren't interested in putting the time or effort into making RTS at the moment.
I liked World in Conflict's take on RTS, where it became more "tactical". You focused less on resources and more on map capture. Instead of large, open maps you fought in tight cities and open fields. It added a good counterpart to how RTS can be done versus Supreme Commander where you have thousands of units and massive maps.
Yes. We can't have another World In Conflict game soon enough.
Its multiplayer also tried to solve the most important problem of RTS: that they are fundamentally a duel genre. They look dead not because "tEcNoLoGy," they look dead for the same reason Quake gameplay is dead: they offer only human enemies, but no human allies.
Playing as a team is simply fun, and I believe WoC team-vs-team Multiplayer has a huge potential that one day somebody will get right.
World in Conflict is not a rts, it's an RTT. Any game that tosses resource collecting and base building heavily lean towards RTT brand.
@@zonetropper Isnt that just a subsect of RTS? Kind of like Calculus falling under Math/ Maths?
@@zonetropper doesn't really matter tbh. RTT and RTS are kinda in the same boat, and in WiC you have a semblance of auto-building stuff
(TBHd the base building part has always been just a strange and fundamentally stupid convention. There is simply no place to build something in combat anyway, unless we're talking deploying barbed wire or far future stuff like Supreme Commander.)
Literally not an RTS, thats an RTT or something similar.
I don't really think a genre can die, and RTS isn't quite dead either. For one, a genre can't die, much like an idea can't die. It might not be popular at the moment, but its not like that can't change. Personally, RTS games aren't as good to me as the greats once were. CnC for instance had not only great gameplay, but the story was equal parts interesting as it was hilarious with its over the top concepts. All of the great RTS games were not just fun to play, but had fun stories backing them up. The games that have come out since though? Many feel pretty paint by numbers types which are content to copy without even a good story to back them up. This coupled with the fact that the gameplay is usually only a fraction of what came before it leads to lost interest.
Now I'm not saying theres nothing out there. I'm sure theres some decent RTS games that have been made, but it feels like its one of two types, be it Scifi or Modern/realism typically. Which, unfortunately isn't quite enough for me to want to invest in.
"might not be popular at the moment" Starcraft broodwar is really healthy and popular right now in South Korea. It's not insanely popular or anything but it's big in South Korea.
Tooth and Tail had a fun story, is very different from other RTS games and is not modern or Sci-fi but I didn't find it that fun past the campaign but I didn't feel like the actual multi was that fun to play.
The wave of technological progress mentioned in the video, where for examples FPS shooters in the WW2 genre kept having success because they looked "significantly visually better" than the prior games in the series is what has put a strain on RTS.
It is very easy to see the wave of progress over the last 30 years, as a kid playing Goldeneye up through Halo LAN parties in high school, to COD4 in college, and on from there. What isn't as easy to see is the technological progress of RTS games...because the camera is so zoomed out.
A zoomed out camera is necessary to move troops around, to make those "real-time strategy" decisions. But when the camera is so zoomed out it is much more challenging to digest technological progress over time. Because everything is so much smaller on the screen. And the visual distance that gets rendered in an FPS includes so much detail for the player to see, whereas an RTS camera is top-down pointed at the ground.
This is where games like Silica (or C&C Renegade) will succeed, because it allows RTS to take advantage of the stunning visuals we see in modern FPS games while also letting control overarching strategy from a top-down perspective when you want.
I wouldn't use co-op like Silica. I would instead prefer something like Supreme Commander where it lets you zoom all the way out to view the entire map to manage unit production and moving your armies around the world, and then zoom all the way back in to micro individual combat situations. Only instead, "zooming all the way back in" would mean zooming down to 1st person.
This would also solve one of the biggest skill floor problems of RTS games, micro-ing units in combat. If they configure it so manually FPS'd units controlled by the user can be much more powerful than the rest of the units in the battalion, that would encourage players to control single units during combat instead of micro-ing entire armies and multiple control groups around.
It would revert back to an older style of combat. Where you zoom out and tell your archers where to go set up, and tell your knights to hold back but attack on this arc back to the enemy's archer line after 2 minutes, and then tell your men-at-arms to charge....and then you go take over one of the men-at-arms for battle.
I'm imagining now a Game of Thrones type game where you can control unit production and battalion movement like a traditional RTS, but then when you get in battle you ultimately zoom all the way in to control Jon Snow or Jamie Lannister type hero units as part of a massive battle going on around you. And again the game is structured to where you are encouraged to control those hero units FPS instead of zooming out to micro other units around all the time etc.
So I have been playing Tiberian Dawn, Tiberian Sun, Red Alert, Age of Empires 2, Warcraft 2 and Starcraft in recent years. Some of them for the first time, and they still hold up.
The stories are solid, the campaigns varied and have a solid sense of escalation accross the missions. The artstyle, the musuc, the world building, all of it is great.
The old games also have one strong advantage over 4X games, breakoff points. You have an evening, you play one mission.
You advance, you get an impression of accomplishment, you take a break.
4X games are amazing at the start, and slowly become worse and worse as you progress the map. I have thousands of hours in Civilization V, and I never completed a level.
Silica sounds like that game I dreamed of when I was a little kid. I always wanted to see an RTS where you can have a top down command mode and a simultaneous boots on the ground mode.
Never played dungeon keeper ? Not your typical rts I give you that but it close enough.
there is also a game called eximius that is pretty much and fps-rts hybrid. 5 players, 1 commander, that build units and assigns them to the other 4 "officers" with destroy the opponent or capture the flag based objectives
Silica is not a new type of game, I have played several like it.
Command and Conquer did something similar in the early 00's. But games like Halo kinda overshadowed it. Silica looks cool but I don't think splitting the genre is really going to pull many people in especially on the arcade type style. The strategy part and coordination of RTS's was the more interesting mechanic to me. I think a deeper strategical experience would be the way to go.
Well then you haven't searched for that game you wanted hard enough 😄. Here are some of them that you could have been playing in your childhood, depending on when it was:
Battlezone
Savage: The Battle for Newerth
C&C Renegade
Nuclear Dawn
Silica is not a new idea at all.
I don't know if you mentioned it, but shout-out to Battlezone 98 doing the FPS/RTS meld 25 years ago, pretty impressively if you consider the limitations at the time.
First thing I thought. Amazing game, played it back to back several times.
There's another pretty good one I played only as a demo back in the day, it was called Urban Assault, I don't know if it reached any success.
Was going to mention Urban Assault combining rts/fps as well.
Also a little confused. RTS/FPS hybrid games are far from a new idea. Nuclear Dawn came out in 2011 and also tried to accomplish it.
Battlezone 98 on ps1 was mind boggling for me as a kid and I spent a long time mastering the game. However I try to play it these days and forgot the non standard controls and the PC version has me lost because of the lack of controller support. I remember not being able to put the game down because nothing else offered that same experience at the time.
Also Wars and Warriors, Joan of Arc in 2004
I've often wanted something similar to this happen with the Dynasty Warriors: Empires franchise, where we actually control things at the home base more at the scale of ROT3K, combined with some RTS base-building elements, and then when you commence battle, you can deploy troops however you like (within reason), and start doing all your hack and slash shit, while also be able to guide the battle and set objectives as the warlord in bird's-eye view (or have the CPU guide it for you). It would probably takes several years for Koei to develop some like that, but I would have a BLAST with such a game.
Have you played the Total War series?
When you associate low entry barrier with Dota, a game notorious for its tremendous hurdle and complexity, I feel conflicted. You can't play real Dota if you only know one hero, and you can't play proper RTS if you only know one unit.
I feel that the RTS genre must strike a balance between existing RTS and grand strategy. Where you don't have to command every unit but still have authority over the battlefield, and where it's not just a map and numbers but real units command by your subordinate AIs. Current RTS gameplay is more similar to an abstract board game like Chess or Go but real-time, than the ideal RTS battle simulation.
I think where many RTS go wrong are:
- only having two factions
- only having one resource
- designed around having very few harvesters
artificial limits that are copied and pasted basically.
yes
Well the most obvious exception to this is StarCraft (3 factions, 2 types of resources, you can have as many harvesters as you need).
One of my favorite RTS games back in the day was Dark Reign. I loved how the story set you up as this hidden faction pretending to be one of the others, able to use both their units at the same time.
And there were cool things like scouts that could mimic trees and stuff and phasing transports that could travel underground, so you could sneakily popup trees and bushes at your enemies' bases. And you could impersonate enemy units and sabotage stuff. Really fun campaign. Messing with each army, like baiting one to attack another all while you plot to best them both to save your people.
Aside from that, I really loved the elaborate structure of Total Annihilation. You could do so much with the tools you were given and the ability to direct units to automatically carry out complex tasks was amazing. Like having one builder create a specific series of things, and others roaming in patterns that will stop and help build or repair things.
Or like, you could tell builder, like a flying one for example, to patrol the aftermath of a battle and it will just automatically salvage and repair units.
You just described Red Alert
Natural Selection did that ages ago. Nuclear Dawn, Uprising, Battlezone, Warshift, heck a game in a series you mentioned - Command and Conquer: Renegade.
It's been done quite a lot. It's a very natural marriage.
C&C Renegade did it for me. I was part of one of the best clans, always tried to be a team player. Too bad it hasnt retained an audience like RA2
renegade has no commander mode
i wouldn't call it a rts-fps-hybrid
its pretty much a simple fps
(nevertheless one of the best fps)
my favorite rts-fps-hybrid is dungeon keeper (although it has a heavy focus on the rts part)
hell, even TF2 was originally going to have a class that you played in a similar manner
I have no idea what this creator is driveling about. The individual points might make sense? But in aggregate they're incoherent.
Battlefield 2142 even had a commander position that was similar to RTS play
Ah that game at the end sounds really cool, I've imagined something similar in the past, like a total war mount and blade crossover where you have one or two players managing an army, and then more players leading the individual units. Like a real battle where commanders order units to take an objective, and then the leaders of the unit have to figure out exactly how they will take the objective
Starcraft has had custom games that mimic silica to a certain extent. Where the game is splits macro and micro between two players, so one player handles the base building while the other controls the units.
curious thought:
You mentioned the "investment to begin" trouble with most RTS's...
What if a game came with multiple "competitive" game modes, with varying unit counts that sort of build on top of each other, albeit likely balanced slightly differently for each one to account for missing/present units?
Sorta like how with a board game like Go, it's considered a lower investment to start playing on a 9x9 board as opposed to the 19x19 board that is used in professional games
Another example is War Thunder's Arcade/Realistic/Simulator modes that are progressive more hardcore (less casual/arcade).
You can actually just turn the speed down if you want to. It makes everything easier and smaller. Unfortunately I don't think any dev would make a competitive mode of or player would want to play a hard RTS game but slow.
@@yaboykirby7789 also unfortunate is that slowing down also doesn't remove the tech tree knowledge and unit comparison knowledge that comes with dealing with the whole tree
Age of mythology made my childhood.. and I've never seen any better. Soundtrack, resourcing, maps, history. Simply a masterpiece
Just as Rise of Nations exploited the complexity of the mechanics I think
Vulome
@@YanYanicantbelievethistakenffs Etimoes
@@YanYanicantbelievethistakenffs prossstagma!
Atlantean Giga-workers FTW. . . . Maybe that's the greeks, but either way! @@erick1369
@@erick1369Isvoli!
I would love to see a RTS with voice command AI macro and APM clicking based micro.
Voice commands interesting 🤔 Sounds like a cool concept / feature. -noted-
I think, that Total Conflict: Resistance is much closer to classical RTS than Cilica. Because you know, building your industry on every battlefield is an unrealistic abstraction to make games possible to run on PCs in the '90s and early 2000s. In Total Conflict, you still need to build industries and units, but on the global map, and then you run your battalions on the tactical map.
This was a weird watch. I never thought of RTS games as inherently multiplayer experiences, but that's what you are painting them as.
I never got into multiplayer - so this was strange.
If you're not playing multiplayer, you can just go ahead and throw the "strategy" element out of the window. RTS AI has always been trash, so it kind of invalidates the entire point of the game
@@C3R341K1LL3R i will politely disagree
The whole problem of this video is that RTS doesn't equal Starcraft
Another game that mixed the RTS and FPS genres was Battlezone 2: Combat Commander. The FPS element was more vehicle-based but shooting while running was also a thing. They released a remaster in 2018 if you're interested. I'll check out Silica.
Battlezone 1, while originally from 1997, is also fresh and engaging (and remastered version is out on Steam)
@@n1vz3r And is better than the 2.
Finally I met someone else that plays Bzone 2.
I love that game, the artstyle, it's story AND the gameplay.
@@jamespaguip5913 RTS games are not what? You left out the last word.
BZ2 was a lan party favorite of mine for some years. Anyone remember giants: citizen kabuto?
The problem is only viewing rts games through a competitive lens.. when rts games were big it was about fun with your friends and great campaigns, only a small percentage played competitively.
Savage was a game that had combo FPS and RTS play (while some others like Battlezone had hybrid play, but still symmetrical roles) it was a good game but fizzled out super quick and was not popular. I expect the same for any game that goes that route in the future as well.
I just recently bought Red Alert 2 again. Im a mad fan of turtling up a defensible base and strategically striking emenies, cutting off power, sending in spies to access special units, using engineers to take over an enemy con yard and redeploying it in your base to build their buildings.
Ive got pretty limited experience with other rts games but id love to find more like that.
RA2 and Generals: Zero Hour are the best two imo. A lot of overlap in the itches they scratch but people usually prefer one or the other.
One word: Highfleet
Play it.
It's the best Dune based RTS I've ever played in my life aside from Kharak and Emperor of Dune, seriously.
The free version of RA2 has players all the time. YR i play every other night to get the juices flowing.
maybe look at dungeon keeper 1 or 2
maybe look at the openRA engine and it's many mods
(a remake of RA2 is in the works)
I absolutely loved turtling in all the old RTS games, simply because they actually allowed for it, as well as the base defences holding up rather well. Modern RTS's seem to have completely done away with turtling as a viable strategy and replaced that strat completely with zerg rushing and micromanagement...
I really do wish devs would bring back turtling.
This comes off as a long ad for silica, which is a remake of the 1998 battlezone, with only very minor changes. It isn't something new or the next step, it's a very long, far step back that ignores the evolutions that occured in that FPS+RTS genre in games like Savage.
Look i skipped over some parts but what i expected you to talk about was actually something very different, and it may be a topic for a future video. The technology improvements that have made RTS turn messy are improvements into individual unit AI. In very old RTS games, many of them don't even have staples like "attack move" we think of today, they won't necessarily automatically engage an out of range enemy they can see unless you tell them to. Nearly everything they do requires heavy micromanaging, or their pathfinding will get stuck on each other, they won't be able to execute complex maneuvers etc. Herzog Zwei itself is perhaps one of the ultimate examples of this, with much of the game involving literally carrying your units around, because they are so dumb. But in modern games that isn't the case, units can gracefully maneuver together and around obstacles leading to things like "deathball" tactics where you might as well spam one unit in a huge blob because you no longer have to worry about them getting stuck on each other, being at the wrong firing ranges or whatever. Similarly, now that units CAN do complex things on their own if the developer wanted them to, it starts to raise a question in the mind why am i, the general commanding this operation whispering into the ear of individuals to tell them to walk two steps to the right? Shouldn't i be focused on the strategy, on telling them what flank to go to, and they can figure the rest out themselves like they would in a real conflict? This is part of why titles like company of heroes moved to squads that abstract things a bit more, that aren't as responsive to individual commands and don't perfectly act out your commands like a robot. If you tell them to take cover, which individual soldier will stand by which bit of sandbag can have quite a few combinations, and it's quite finnicky to try and take direct control of that if you want them to be at a very specific angle or spread out in case of grenades. A unit in command and conquer is like a chess piece, but now with new technology our units can go beyond being chess pieces and its leading to new design challenges about how to make use of that intelligence. One of the most common tactics in RTS games is kiting, to have units fire, move backwards, then fire again. In the past, this absolutely had to be done manually, much like if you wanted units to patrol before "patrol" commands were common, you would have to order it back and forth yourself, but later that could be automated, it is possible to code an automated kiting system today, where units are instructed to try to maintain maximum firing range whilst leading the enemy on a chase. But some players considered kiting a skill, is automating it dumbing the game down? Or is it making it more convenient or more realistic? It can be all three, and balancing those three elements can be difficult. If you are making it less skill intensive to perform maneuvers, do you either put more of the games difficulty into the strategy instead, or do you use the freed up time to let players do some other mechanical input they wouldn't have had time to focus on in another game? Won't a different type of player like the type of game where precision mechanical input is valuable to the one where you shift things more to strategy being what's important? You can circumvent many of these issues by simply not making your units any smarter. By leaving them only as smart, agile and functional as something like starcraft 2 and never bothering to go beyond that. But players do know, they do feel it when you aren't making use of those new technologies. They know units can be smarter, because they've played other games like say FPS games and watched as the men with guns there have evolved over the decades, it becomes clear to them you are just doing the same old thing without innovating, that there's this big set of new tools you aren't touching. Many of the attempts at RTS "revivals" by companies like petroglyph games absolutely bring new mechanics, but they don't try to take advantage of this new technology, meanwhile company of heroes 2 was back in the day bragging about true line of sight, and how its soldiers would see and shoot things the same way as enemies in an FPS game would. I once played a half life 2 mod that converted it into an RTS, the units were slightly altered version of the FPS games enemies, so they had the same kind of line of sight, dynamic movement, individual AI behavior etc as a half life 2 enemy, moving around cover, being subject to physics and all that. When i play a game like dark souls and i watch a summoned npc fight an npc enemy, I always wonder why in RTS games, combat like that isn't done with the enemies having proper moves and hitboxes, reactions and tactics rather than just them swinging at each other, or being locked in premade 1v1 animations like in total war. Total war warhammer does come the closest, its attacks certainly do have hitboxes and physics components, but due to their very large number of units for performance and clarity reasons they don't go very far. I'd like to see something like warcraft 3 with units that fight like dark souls npcs.
very interesting write up mate! do embrace paragraphs for the next one
for me, the biggest problem with RTS is that it is extremetely taxing to play competitively. mobas, for example, can be, depending of the character and function you play. but RTS like age of empires 2 is ALWAYS taxing. when I played it with some friends, some years ago, I remember just not wanting to rematch. yes, it was fun, but it was very exhausting. in my opinion, for an RTS to be enjoyable to play consistently it would have to automatize most of the economic side of the game. I'll give an example in the form of how I would make the "perfect" aoe2 for me.
all technologies would be passive and acquired once you progress to the respective age. instead of making and controlling villagers, you would set an "economic policy" on the town center, and it would adjust. for example, you pick a predetermined build order, and automatically the town center will begin creating villagers and sending them to gather resources. you would scout around, and mark what are your desired resource gathering places for each town center. if you don't do, villagers will seek the nearest one (the nearest tree for wood, gold mine for gold and so on). for buildings and repairs, you get builders instead. these are the most important changes, the ones that would take your focus away from micromanaging economy. this would create more mental room for players to concentrate into the military aspect of the game. better yet would be if the macromanagement mode were slightly less efficient than micro, so it would still reward execution and skill. but not so much to make it a skill barrier. lastly, the combat would have to be GREATLY improved. I wouldn't take anything less than mount and blade bannerlord levels of combat. I don't care if the graphics would have to be downgraded for that. if they used advanced individual AI for the units and created overall strategies that can be associated to groups (like a group of cavalry archers and pikemen, to have the archers attack and fall back behind pikes when enemy cavalry chases) it would truly be a next generation of RTS. I just wouldn't be able to miss that. they tried making aoe4 into an e-sport, when they could have made the next generation of RTS. they had the name and resources for that.
Now i know for sure that my phone is listening to me all the time, because i had a conversation about missing rts about an hour ago, and now this is my top recommended video.
Real talk - this happens to me all the time. It's legit scary.
Really appreciate the love for Age of Mythology and Supreme commander, both games that are far too often overlooked
You need to check out Zero-K man. It's a bit ismilar to Supreme commander except the UI, while a bit ugly, is infinitely more powerful.
I had a slightly different view on why rts is struggling so much recently. I think the lack of focus has a lot to do with that. RTS tries to do a lot of things, but often fails to give those things propper depth. There's often many different things that fight for the players attention and so none of those things can have propper depth. SC2 I think is a decent example: You do make important decisions about your economy at some points, but the most of the time you'll actually interact with your economy you're doing the repetetive task of building workers. Building workers isn't really fun or engaging, it is a thing you have to do. But the economy also can't be more complicated, cause you need time to fight your opponent.
Genres that developed out of rts often realise this intentionally or not and focus on specific aspects, like mobas do on the small scale combats for example. Another strategy is having things go slower or at the players pace, which is where 4x games usually are at, with many popular ones being round based, like civilisation.
So I think rts games are probably one of the genres that struggle most with having to balance the players attention between different systems and trying to make those systems interesting and engaging, while having them not be to complicated. An interesting idea how to solve that is to have multiple players play a faction together and take on different roles and I was excited to see dwarfheim try that, but that game definetly wasn't a success.
That's something I've only really seen Immortal: Gates of Pyre address out of the crop of SC2 spiritual successors, which addresses it by making worker production automatic (though toggleable in the event of harassment) and making unit production not need a secondary population cap structure, along with the UI letting you do a lot of training and research stuff while looking at your army. Basically bringing in the really helpful global UI tools of the C&C games while streamlining the repetitive stuff.
In The Fertile Crescent workers are also trained automatically
@@kriiistofel Oh neat, looks like Fertile Crescent is applying the same principles to AoE-style games.
That's a really interesting point. I think about the difference between Crusader Kings III and Victoria 3 - where Crusader Kings is much more about controlling territory through various means (warfare, diplomacy, intrigue) and the game's economy - while important - is abstracted from the player through the improvements system. Whereas Victoria 3 is a very heavy economic game where you need to micro-manage the individual economic sectors of your empire and because this takes so much of your attention, other elements of expansion are more abstract.
One RTS I think did co-op management well was Anno 1800. Two players could control the same faction and so when my girlfriend and I played the game together we were able to focus our individual attention on different parts of the gameplay.
@@VoxelShow Stellaris is also introducing the ability to play one empire with multiple people. You can even some empires be played by mulitple people and some by one. Tho atm it has a lot of desync problems in my experience, but it's still in beta.
Tho I think stellaris is generally trying to handle that problem in a different way generally by introducing a lot of automation options. Which allows the player to focus on the things they like and automate others. Basically coop with ai.
I still really hope to see a game that heavily leverages different player roles tho, similar to dwarfheim, but probably even more so, as dwarfheim gave even the economy players some units to do combat with. SC2 had a few mods in that direction, but outside of that I don't remember any other game going that direction.
Speaking of Supreme Commander, there's a game called Sanctuary that's currently in development that is trying to take on that specific RTS formula. Time will tell if it manages to last.
And Beyond All Reason!
BaR!!! Best RTS at the moment. Incredibly intricate 1v1/2v2 and hella fun 8v8s.
Ground Control is a cool strategy game that has no base building, you just go in with you troops and complete the missions. I liked it back in the day because of its different ideas, strange that it only got one sequel.
I remember this! they should update it
GC was great, I loved the multiplayer too, the drop ship mechanic where you got new units every X minutes during the match was a really good idea.
Giving players even more instant gratification is honestly sad, as it's going to kill their drives even more.
Savage and Savage 2 did introduce this style of RTS and FPS or first person slasher years ago but due to technical limitations with game sizes and innovation hurdles like making the commander relevant they stalled out. Glad to see another good try at this genre hybrid
Ah man that game. So janky, but so cool.
This video popped up in my feed at an interesting time, because I have been thinking about this exact topic. I used to love RTS games when I was younger but fell away due to the stagnation in the genre you described in this video. I ended up migrating to tactical action multiplayer arena games like World of Tanks, which have kind of developed in parallel with MOBAs. While there is still plenty of technological room for growth in these arena style multiplayer games, they are very vulnerable to heavy anti-consumer monetization that publishers can't resist pushing. It's really starting to choke the whole genre and I'm not seeing many genuine new players coming to these games at all, leading to an increasing barrier of entry for those that do try it and creating a feedback loop resulting in weird kind of stagnation afflicting the whole genre, much like what RTS' have experience. Ironically, RTS games are much harder to monetize that aggressively, which is causing a lot of players like myself to rekindle some interest in the genre, but it really seems like there's a huge hole in the market for something that blends more complex strategic interactions between players while have fluid and accessible gameplay like the more popular genres of shooters and action games. Once someone figures out how to do that really well, it'll blow up.
I think the topic of whether the RTS genre’s “death” / decline was inevitable is really interesting. On one hand, you’re absolutely right that the lack of innovation and new ideas is utterly gutting to it. The starcraft 2 expansions brought innovation in the sense of them expanding on starcraft 2 itself, but they didn’t add anything new that would bring interest to a non-starcraft player.
However, I don’t think it’s certain that this is a inherent problem of RTS games. It’s certainly possible, but I think it also could be a hesitancy of RTS developers to break away from the classic dune gameplay. Rather than designing for gamers of all kinds, they’re designing for RTS players. And that means shoe horning themselves into making the same game over and over again.
Stormgate is a great example of this. They clearly are looking to be the successor to SC2, but in doing so, are finding themselves just building that same game again. If RTS devs want to continue the genre, they need to be willing to take some risks to excite new players.
💯 well said
Hate to admit it, but it doesn't help that most fans, myself included, just want another new game that plays like CnC, AOE SC (base building, army building, resource gathering, Attack-Moving, etc.). Any major shift from those formulas would be a turn off.
@@apeculiarmingvase3800 Right, and unfortunately that's the problem. The hardcore RTS fanbase is both shrinking, and also unwilling to branch out. As a dev, you can either cater towards the fanbase, and have the same problem as all the other RTS games. Or you can try something new, and disinterest your core playerbase. It's a lose-lose.
There was a game called Nuclear Dawn which did a similar idea of merging FPS + RTS Games. It was actually a very fun game but never got off the ground, it had some pretty bad balancing issues.
What I personally want to see is an RTS that actually emphasizes the strategy aspect more than the "real-time" aspect (aka just being fast). A slower-paced game that's more about thinking ahead and making large-scale decisions like upgrade, tech, army composition, and economic choices rather than micromanaging units. As much as I loved Starcraft, Warcraft, Red Alert, Dawn of War, I've never had a game scratch that strategy itch that wasn't turn-based, like a Civilization or Axis & Allies.
Check out Stellaris, (or really any Paradox Interactive game) It ticks basically every single one of those boxes- and then some.
Have you never tried Supreme Commander? It's basically exactly what you're asking for. Still holds up graphically/performatively, imo.
You could try a game called "Beyond All Reason". It's a free RTS in early development that places a greater emphasis on macro styled game play rather than micro. It's very similar to Supreme Commander, both of which spawned from the Total Annihilation style of RTS games.
try out a pikmin game! i recommend 3 or 4 mostly (though 2 is my favorite) definitely a game you can take you time with (sorta) if you want to. but you can definately be fast if you want to. alot of it is planning out your in game day and what you wanna accomplish in that day. its not super complex but its alot of fun
RUSE came closer to this than to being a microfest
When it comes to RTS genre, I really love the combination of RPG/RTS, like Warcraft 3 and SpellForce. I believe that specific subgenre wasn't really explored as much, when you compare it to standard RPG genre.
If you're not shy of checking older/not-that-polished games, check Warlords Battlecry 2 & 3. They did the RTS + a hero before Warcraft 3, and the RPG element is much deeper. You first create your hero, and the go with it in battles, either campaign, skirmishes (local vs bots) or online.
In WBC2 you have a level cap of 50, and you have to choose what you want to train in - there's 4 categories - attributes (Str, Dex, Int, Cha), skills (10 of them, each a combination of 2 attributes, but you can also individually level up them more), abilities and spells. That's right, you don't simply get access to spells (except for some classes, like Fighter), you also have to spend skill points to learn them. The abilities are some custom things, predetermined by your race & class (3 from race, things like bonuses leading (playing) with your race and 4 from the class with class-related stuff, like mastery and grandmastery of the school of spells for pure mages or higher damage and resistance for fighters).
WBC3 is the same engine, with several improvements and even more races (16, up from 12 in WBC2). The RPG elements changed a bit though, that's why I recommended both games. In WBC3 you gain XP directly in the battle too and you can level up on the spot, while in WBC2 your hero only gains XP at the end of a battle. In WBC 3 there is no longer a level cap, though realistically speaking, level 100 is about as high as you'll get. The level up system, sadly, got more simple and less interesting, in order to allow this infinite scaling. You still have the 4 attributes, and you have 10 skills/abilities (not the same as the WBC2 ones) where you can improve them endlessly. The spells also allow endless scaling, and this part I kind of like, though unfortunately you can't choose which spells. Say, if you level up the ability/skill necromancy casting, for each point/level, you learn a new spell. When you learn all 10 spells, the extra points will level up the spells. So if you have 12 points/levels in necromancy, you'll be able to cast the first 2 spells at level 2, and the rest of 8 necromancy spells at level 1. When casting a higher level spell, it's better in some way, shape or form, but also has something like 30 or 40% less chance to be casted. But if you fail to cast it as a level 2, it then checks if you can cast it at level 1 (where you might have 100% chance). I kind of like thiis, I wish there were more games with this kind of mechanic.
While speaking of RPG, the units themselves have XP too, but can only gain several levels, and you can't choose anything on their level up, their stats simply increase, to predetermined values. But, especially for weak units, the increase, procentually can get quite big. Like a high level vs a low level, the HP can be more then double the damage as well, and faster too.
It also has other neat things, like your hero giving bonus stats to the units that are around. And this around area is based on the command (or simply Charisma in WBC3). After a battle, you have a small list of your highest level units still alive that you can take into your retinue and bring them in other battles. There's still other stuff too. These games really need a remake, they had so many interesting things. But, as I said, they were not polished, as they were done by a small team, with probably 1/50th of the budget something like Warcraft 3 had. If you wanted to play competitive and fair, the matches had to be same race, no heroes, because the balance between the races is horrible (they're all fun to play, but really different, they're really thematic. But with some, you can get rushed with no chance of winning). And heroes in general, if you get to know to use them well, they're basically overpowered. Hence the no-hero rule.
@@Winnetou17 WBC3 has had a fairly consistent cult following for years to the point that it has an entire overhaul mod that acts as a stand alone with even some of the original devs getting involved and greenlighting the mod and I believe its now in the process of being ported to steam as a standalone outside of WBC3
@@cormacmcmahon5988 Oh, that's nice! I haven't been in touch for some while. Is this standalone thing the Protectors ? Or it's something else ?
@@Winnetou17 Yes it is the protectors. if you look up "Warlords Battlecry: The Protectors of Etheria" you should be able to find it
One thing to so consider is that RTS games are not just complex from the get go, they also get exponentially more complex the more buildings and units you produce.
This is completely different from the real world where you have different people governing different departments of society. You also have essentially individuals among the "units" that can make their own decisions.
In RTS games you are one brain that tries to micro and macro manage a growing system.
Maybe this is the place to put an AI compagnions. I'd love to see advanced (intelligent!) unit behaviour systems. Simple "defensive vs aggresive" is just super dumb, duh! I like the idea implemented in old Earth 2150 where you can choose for any single unit, it's sets of behaviour. You can have basic go - attack - stop functions or you can assign advanced instructions like retreat at HP level or no ammo, holding position vs chasing vs defend nearby area. It worked pretty well 20 years ago, now it should work like a charm.
@@djzatorze The better idea might be for a team of actual players to manage different parts of RTS. Like one is managing economy, other manages air units, another land units etc.
Silica sounds a bit like Microsoft Games’ Urban Assault from 1998 which I think had a multiplayer mode where one person could command and someone else could jump into the vehicles (anyone could jump in and control anything in normal single player mode). Also reminded me of Renegades multiplayer though that’s much more restrictive.
MOBAs are definitely one of the causes of the relative decrease in RTS popularity, especially among the casual playerbase (also other sub-genre games like They Are Billions, and even mobile games, e.g. Clash of Clans) but I don't think the current state of gaming tech has much to do with it. A lot of people have nostalgia for the early RTS, but wouldn't like those games if they were released today, since classic RTS probably wasn't ever the ideal genre for them and now there are more options that give them the experience they want. There have actually been a lot of recent RTS that tried to mix genres or innovate in various ways; some failed, but others have done very well and managed to pull in players who wouldn't normally play a standard RTS. Sure, maybe no recent RTS has been a mega AAA hit, but I think that's just the nature of the genre at this point: not dead, but not one of the top mainstream genres either. Honestly, that might be a good thing since we're seeing more RTS made by small to medium sized companies which are more willing to experiment than the huge publishers.
That being said, the most popular traditional multiplayer RTS games of today are all sequels or remakes that stay close to the gameplay of their predecessors. (The ones that do well tend to be the ones that stick to a tried and tested formula, and the ones that heavily innovate often aren't noticed by most consumers, or aren't considered to be true RTS.) Existing IP always have a marketing advantage compared to new games, but there's an additional problem in that RTS games have a lot of unique gameplay quirks so game knowledge doesn't translate as much between different games that aren't in the same franchise. (also true for 4X) As a result, the RTS playerbase is more fractured than many other genres. I don't think there's really as much of an overlap as you might expect between the core Starcraft fans and Age of Empires fans and Homeworld fans, and so on. (At least in my experience when you make an RTS, you get a lot of conflicting feature requests/praise/complaints from the different factions of the RTS fandom.) Combine that with the higher skill floor and increased number of games coming out every day, and for multiplayer RTS especially, it's very hard to get a sustainable number of players at launch.
Doesn't help that RTS has had this "smart person game" reputation to it, which lead to a lot of bickering over which game was the "smartest" game, IME mostly sniping between StarCraft and SupCom players. Add to that it's been seen as an Esports genre since SC2ｰmeaning a lot of people are turned off of everything not the biggest because the biggest is where the money is, and it's no wonder the genre is having a hard time finding its feet as a genre.
I am somewhat hopeful that the next crop of RTS games being similar to SC2 will create a similar situation as fighting games, where a massive subgenre is basically variations on Street Fighter 2, since that makes transferring skills a lot easier between games, thus making it easier for people to play more than one of these games, reducing the splintering.
How is they are billions not a straight up rts?
You build a base to build units to stop enemies
@@andrewgreeb916They are billions does not have classic skirmishes where the enemy likewise builds a base and you can target their economy and tech as opposed to just combat units alone.
@@andrewgreeb916 The player has all of the elements of a standard RTS, but the opponent operates on an entirely different rule set and the gameplay is focused just on the turtling aspect of RTS since you can't attack an enemy's base or fight with them over the same resources the way you would in something like SC or AoE. It's still real time strategy in a technical sense, but I think because you aren't playing against a player or AI that can really change its strategic decision-making based on your actions, those kinds of games (I'd call them "defensive RTS" or "survival RTS") play like they're almost a different genre, somewhere between standard RTS and tower defense or a city builder.
On the technology point: Yeah, that whole bit was bait & switch. The ONLY time tech was mentioned was in regards to Silica... and the point was BS. Basically came down to 'advances in computing power are able to do FPS physics & RTS gameplay'... except of course genres other than FPS can & have leveraged realistic physics at scale already, & if we're talking an MP experience logically developers would subdivide the computing work onto the clients for the FPS players anyway. How exactly the decline of RTS is related to the 'technology leapfrog' is left very, very unclear... probably because the derp is pulling nonsense out of his butt.
EDIT/ADDENDUM:
"The player has all of the elements of a standard RTS, but the opponent operates on an entirely different rule set and the gameplay..."
I have to point out that a central thesis everyone holds is that RTS declined in part because lack of innovation on gameplay... but any variation on gameplay then gets labeled a subgenre. This is frankly a bit silly... it's like saying FPS died in the early 00s when Counterstrike started to become uber-popular
RTS isn't dead, the community on old RTS games are still very strong even after 15 years of released. It won't go away, it will just transform or be mixed with others. Kind of like dubstep.
Kane lives !
There's a good way to make the issue of skill floor less severe, which has been around for decades but is also present in every MOBA out there - teams. 1v1 fights are much more stressful and skill-based in games of every genre. Beyond All Reason, a very nice TA-like RTS does it well with 8v8 matches being one of the most popular format. The game's system also heavily rewards specialization, resulting in emergence of fronts, which act similar to lanes in MOBAs, as well all different roles, including front-liner, economy, naval, air support, etc.
There was a RTS game back in the day that let you take direct command of units. I can't remember what it was called though and can't seem to find it again. I only remember playing the demo.
The game with exactly the same premise as Silica is Savage 2. One player takes a commander role to build and give orders, while everyone else is controlling individual combat unit. I remember having good times with it like 15 years ago 😢
Not sure how much of a Savage 2 community still exists today, but Silica's is pretty hot right now. You can pop into the Discord to see if the community is your style but gotta say - driving some of those vehicles around in first-person is 👨🍳👌
there's also microsoft allegiance. very very old game but the same premise of mixed fps and rts
There's two games I can think of in the true RTS genre that were quite refreshing in terms of mechanics and expanding RTS, and weren't named in the video:
- Earth 2150, where units are comprised of multiple individually researched parts and a separate underground layer allow for large amounts of strategies.
- Beyond All Reason, which is a community made successor of Total Annihilation updated to modern ish standards with innovative unit command and control capabilities. I mean the unit formations and reclaiming and other area control from Supreme Commander are improved to the point that putting units in a ball or line formation can be done in a second by simply drawing the shape. BAR allows the scale of RTS to grow through it's controls beyond what most other games can.
"units are comprised of multiple individually researched parts" also warzone 2100
He also forgot Battle for Middle Earth where your bases were entirely pre-determined in terms of location, with Mordor and Isengard not possessing any walls and Mordor getting access to free units.
While he briefly flashed Company of Heroes, he didn't discuss their mechanics at all, nor the cousin game in Dawn of War 2 which had incredibly distinct mechanics - no resource collection and extremely limited base building. The victory condition relied almost entirely on territorial control via capturing flags, with the ability to destroy the enemy base being rendered almost entirely impossible.
I'm certain there's a lot more innovation that could be pursued in RTS, but as another youtuber demonstrated, the focus would need to be on the single player campaign. The vast majority of the RTS interested demographic are casual players who don't even bother engaging with the multiplayer aspect of an RTS game (which this youtuber almost entirely focuses on).
I was wondering how far I would have to scroll to find Beyond All Reason, reignited my love for the genre.
Thanks for your comment! I already knew and loved Earth 2150, but never heard about Beyond All Reason. I will give a try!
Warzone 2100 is abandonware. You should be able to find it somewhere online. Replayed it a few years ago. Graphics are basic, but unit design part still fun.@@NexionSE
You should also take a look at Falling Frontier. It is a new space RTS that leans heavily on logistics based combat.
Playing an average of 1-3 hours of Beyond All Reason (successor to Total Annihilation) every night, with 2-5 friends. Beyond All Reason (BAR) is open-source. Genre isn't dead, but publishers have abandoned it.
For anyone interested in a game like the classic Total Annihilation... have a look at the game called Beyond All Reason. It's free, open source, and created by people who understand what made the classics challenging and fun.
Beyond All Reason got me playing RTS again. Absolutely fantastic game.
Zero-K is still on Steam for free!
@@royasturias1784Yeah, when Voxel starts talking about a lack of advances in technology and a lack of physics in strategy... it's here. It's been good for a while. Just no one knows about it because it looks ugly and it's an obscure indy.
The thing with true RTS is that not many people had the patience to learn all it takes to master its gameplay. Even back in the day I used to spent hours daily playing AOE2, finishing the campaings over and over, going into random maps and random civilizations to learn all of their perk, developing tactics that best worked with each of them to counter the enemy ones, learning keyboard shortcuts, etc. So, the few times I played against friends they kinda hated me because I would obliterate them, but that was mostly because they pick it up once a week or less to play. And today´s gaming scene seems to reward players with quick progression and fast matches. So a kid that only plays fortnite would most likely feel overwhelmed if he had to play few weeks to have a decent level against someone who knows what its doing on a RTS.
It's not just the new gamers. I grew up playing RTS games. Now, as an adult, I don't have the time or the patience to try to learn a new RTS game.
I haven't found an RTS game that's similar in nature to Generals Zero Hour. It had fast gameplay, base-building, voice acting, and its setting looks like it could take place in the current era.
Each faction also had its own unique playstyle and identity, strengths and weaknesses, units, buildings, voices, and even the music is different for every faction. I play Rise of the Reds mod that adds Europe and Russia as well, and the modders still managed to keep each faction unique.
@@Muhammad_Nuruddin Zero Hour is still probably my favourite RTS, and yes, the completely unique factions and sub-factions via each general is what made it great for me.
You don't need to master Zero Hour.
"not many people had the patience to learn " like racing game... all the game you have braking/race line assisted turn on my default. Come'on part of the racing game is to learn how to drive... not "try to follow this like, break when is red."
The idea of 1 player as the commander and the rest as the soldiers is a concept as old as 2003 with "Savage: The Battle for Newerth", was a great game
You know battle arena had been done on C&C1, right? Look up a little game called Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor.
I've seen indie games like Executive Assault and bigger games like Divinity: Dragon Commander experiment with RTS and other genres (ex. FPS and TPS) l, but it often felt half complete and not fully realized at best, or self-defeating at worst. I feel like, much like platformers, the genre is devolving from a whole genre to a gameplay element.
I think there is definitely still a huge demand for new old-school GOOD rts games. Tempest Rising and D.O.R.F. are two very promising upcoming titles that are worth keeping an eye on
the problem of the past 2 decades is corporate execs using sales as a metric for success and funding ads as a means to gain sales instead of good products. its got nothing to do with hardware or genres. big companies didnt know gaming could be big money and then they learned that it could and took it over. the enshitifcation of gaming
Holy shiet!!! Just a minute before Silica was mentioned I had the idea pop up of an rts hybrid where one player is the commander and the rest of the team take control of the 'heroes'! I however was then immediately doubting whether having a 'dm' style role would work since there'd be a disconnect of perspective between players and had a half idea of no central commander and have it be a mode all players could tap into as a group project kind of thing. That was only a half idea since it felt wrong in that there's too much potential for resource clashes between players trying to simultaneously take control.
I still think it's not quite a complete idea, so maybe the best approach is to do it but have faster games to force players to rotate roles more often. The biggest weakness of RTS compared to MOBA is duration of matches. Where MOBA is chess, RTS is a go board game. Neither is extrinsically better, but the entry level is so much contrasting because early mistakes ruin the entire game yet longer playtimes means those mistakes become much heavier. Also forcing players to at least try the commander role let's them understand the game better since I could easily foresee lots of arguments over the impossible.
Then the game doing exactly what I was thinking got mentioned and it felt surreal to get yet another game idea already in development. I had a similar phenomenon happen with spore and other such evolution games. My idea ended up showing up almost beat for beat in "that time i reincarnated as a slime" with a slime eating stuff and unlocking special evolutions from the material properties. I've got an instinct for coming up with decent ideas for cool stuff that then shows up in media. I mean I had a whole story about a mech gaining sentience only to sacrifice itself by throwing it's pilot to safety. Such an emotionally impact filled scene ended up as a story beat in a AAA game! I don't what to do with this superpower since even though I came up with the ideas on my own, it keeps being revealed that it's always been long in development already! If I ever follow through there's a sneaky fear that it'll just seem like I stole it.
Yay for Stellaris! I love it, love RTS, but don’t really see it as one. Just doesn’t seem to fit in the same genre as Command & Conquer despite a few vague shared elements like gathering resources so you can build units and fight enemies.
Yeah, I would put both in the overarching Strategy category, but Stellaris doesn't feel like RTS.
@@brutusthecat6044
That is because Stellaris isn't real-time. You can speed up, slow down, and pause.
Stellaris is a 4X game. That's really the genre it falls under, rather than RTS.
Amazing video, this is something, that more and more people talk about recently, RTS seems to have lost a lot from it's popularity, although we now have a game from Star/Warcraft creators (Stormgate) and a C&C spiritual successor (Tempest Rising, I mean, GDI--> GDF) in the works.
I also think many people don't talk about mobile gaming when discussing RTS, because many RTS-like casual mobile games have great success, although one could say, it's not "hard RTS", and also there are more and more casual games, assymetrical, single-player ones (They Are Billions).
Also some lesser known titles:
Immortal: Gates of Pyre: I think this has a very original world, somewhere between magic and technology, very different from any fantasy or scifi world I've ever seen.
BlackChain: A small, but very cool game, very retro-looking, but fully modern, and it was developed by only one person!
Liquidation: Scifi-fantasy, and it looks absolutely amazing, it has a very interesting art style and backstory, reminds me of DoW.
Also, congratz for the 10 000 subscribers!
Honestly i didn't know there were mobile rts and i can indeed see mobile touch screens being perfect for the genre.
@@Sorrior Best traditional RTS experience I've found there is Land Air Sea Warfare, though I'd recommend playing it on a tablet, rather than a phone. Also I haven't looked in a few years, so it's possible something better has come along. The touch screen does make a lot of sense, you're right about that.
All we need is one great game to revive the genre
RTS games are perhaps the most important genre of all time. They gave us MOBA, Tower Defense, World of Warcraft and all of their derivatives including auto chess, games like clash royal, bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting at the moment. I would love for Blizzard to make Warcraft 4, but at this point I dont even have faith that they won't mess it up. I can only see myself getting into a new RTS if it has the 'Hero' mechanic, where you can level it up with exp - it makes it feel losing units has more consequences and increased focus on micro.
I'm still very much looking forward to Homeworld 3. Iirc it's going to be a rogue-like/RTS but fundamentally based in RTS. I don't think RTSs are dead while a competitive scene and the desire for compelling story driven single player experiences exists.
Homeworld 3 and Manor Lords are easily my two most-anticipated games in the genre. Fingers crossed here that they both turn out as good as they look!
@@VoxelShow until Blizz gets their heads at out of their butts and deliver Warcraft 4
@@smoothkid765 LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
@@VoxelShow I was combing through the comments and could not see a single one about Mount & Blade. I know several other games were mentioned and one cannot encompass everything, but how has nobody in the comments mentioned the quite popular go-to RTS/"FPS" combination that M&B is? It has such a thriving community right now, and so few people seem to know about it still...
While House Ordos wasn't mentioned in the Dune novels, they first came up in 1984's Dune Encyclopedia. Still kudos to Westwood for doing their homework, because House Ordos was pretty obscure before their game.
Yeah.. To be fair though they did change the house heraldry and invent a faction identity for Ordos, so it's really only the name that came from the Encyclopedia.
The problem with MOBAS is that they took away the Map-Editor.
So now there can be no more change through the community.
The problem with Warhammer or GW is, that they throw to much different games on the wall and see what sticks, just because they can, because the Empire of Man is just to big to fail in this market, while having two or three completely different revenue streams to fall back on. Namely Tabletop, Books and Film.
As long as there are Space Marines, the Emperor demands that people buy.
you might be interested in a game called kenshi, it's primarily an rpg but moment to moment gameplay plays more like an rts and because of this you can control up to 30 characters at once all with their unique stats (which almost always start at 0 btw so you need to forge them) and there's a mod for it that allows you to have up to 256 characters and it's a lot of fun to just watch the squad you trained so hard go to town on a town. (btw kenshi has no story so you lowkey gotta make it yourself but if you take out something like a diplomat you affect the state of the world) if youre interested then i advise looking more into it
I LOVED Kenshi. I'm a big city builder/colony management player so the game scratched so many itches I had. A piece of me wishes the game was a bit more polished and intuitive - but the sheer number of choices available to players is outstanding.
@@VoxelShow worry not, kenshi 2 is in the way just dont count on it coming anytime soon, if you know anything about how long kenshi took to make that should tell you how long kenshi 2 is going to take, besides chris hunt was never too good at predicting release dates
Beyond All Reason and AoE4 are great arguments that the genre is not dead, and I didn't really hear them mentioned. Planetary Annihilation got a lot of things wrong I agree. Give BaR a shot its the BEST RTS right now!!
BAR players represent!!!
Good game indeed!
BAR is GOAT
GOAT?@@JacopoSkydweller
Greatest Of All Time. Hyperbolic a bit, but Beyond All Reason is REALLY good. @@aliendoggy1
i've had a similar idea as Silica for a long time now, but never had the skill or resources to make it
i am so glad someone is making it, it's literally my dream game
It was made long long ago and better, check out Savage: Battle for Newerth, or you can still play (free) the community version that works flawlessly, called Savage XR, still an incredibly fun game to this day, definitely unique gameplay.
I mean if you want you can try Battlezone II or it's kinda remake Battlezone Combat Commander for a first take on this idea, but I mean it has been a good amount of time since then so there is room for technical improvement.
I grew up on rts games and now barely touch them, but I do miss it sometimes. 4X and grand strategy definitely have me in a chokehold nowadays
The very idea that RTS needs to have multiplay is dumb. Give me a good singleplayer story to play through and I'm happy. Honestly, multiplayer doesn't interest me at all on RTS. The biggest failure of Grey Goo was that it wasted a fantastic storyline on just being a setup for multiplay with only 5 missions per side. Had they fleshed that out, it could've spanned 15 missions per side and never _needed_ multiplay.