The RTS genre is dead. Now, not dead Rome Empire dead sense, but in the sense that Flight Sims are dead. Sure, a few will always be made, but the genre’s hayday has past, and the gaming industry and public has passed it by, and it will no longer meaningfully contribute to the game industry. Or, not in the traditional sense anyway - what will remain will less and less be a recognizable RTS game than ever before.
I’d like to go on to write a wall of text, starting with a historic summation about the rise of the RTS genre, the big three developers and their different backgrounds and apparent game design philosophies (Blizzard, Westwood, and Ensemble), and how all three of them eventually died out, which in Blizzard’s case is evolving into a higher form of game developer. How other companies took up the RTS baton but only Relic managed to survive the transition, and only by aligning itself with a popular intellectual property.
But Quake 2 and Starcraft were released at about the same time. Think about that, if you don’t understand why RTS games are dead. The most popular RTS game of all time, still selling well on the top 20 charts, vs. one of the grandfather FPS games, a game that probably hasn’t been seen in a store in over half a decade or more. When you see that massive cinematic games like Modern Warfare 2 are the descendants of the Doom and Quake, and Starcraft is the descendant of… itself, you see the problem. Is the problem that Starcraft is that good, or that the RTS genre can’t go anywhere else with the RTS concept?
Because, imo, that’s the RTS genre’s ultimate, and fatal, problem. RTS is about grabbing a bunch of guys and moving them and playing army man. RTS is about strategy. This is not a natural marriage. This is the mythical Russian Troika being pulled by a swan, horse, and fish.
I’ve though about this hard, and i believe that it’s a problem that is not resolvable. Think about Starcraft and let me give an example. I want to load a Dropship with a strike force, and hit my opponent’s expansion at the exact moment his main force hits my defenses. This is a sound and interesting strategy. But actually doing the strategy in an RTS game requires a nightmare of hotkey mashing, switching screens between two active fronts, and desperately trying to keep up with microing a massive battle. No developer has ever solved this dilemma. They’ve tried and evolved and invented all sorts of ways around it, but it’s still there, and is inherent to the genre itself.
And while FPS games can go cinematic, and stop being about the rules of the game, and become about the experience of the game, RTS games are much more artificial and the rules much more prominent in the experience. And that combination of control vs. strategy has just never ever evolved past Starcraft. Starcraft “solved” the RTS genre. Like watching the sport of boxing teeter on in dotage while all the money and fame goes to the hot, fresh new UFC, Starcraft is a graying champ, undefeated and unbowed, but with the audience shrinking year by year.
The move to consoles is also a big factor (and you can thank Microsoft and their plan to kill PC gaming, which is also another thread ^^). Cost of AAA games, a factor as well, and one reason why Blizzard made WoW; give them all credit, for not only do they know the games business, they completely pegged the future marketplace direction, for the knew when they saw the Warcraft 3 sales numbers that they had to change direction.
Starcraft 2, as an aside, is a luxury project. In fact i’m not sure if there has ever been in the history of gaming projects quite as unusual as SC2 and Diablo 3. It’s more philanthropy than game design, the rich man giving back to the community from where his industrial empire began. There is no rational or financial reason or incentive to make these games compared to making another MMO.
