Pretty much. Blizzard supported the hell out of that game. Tweaked everything until it was perfect. At launch, it was as good as anything else at the time, but it wasn't knife-edge balanced like it became.
Modern Blizzard isn't capable of that anymore, and neither is anyone else. The genre can still innovate and provide perfectly good experiences otherwise, but it will always have this spectre of "not balanced like Starcraft" hanging over it.
Exactly! Tower Defence, MOBA, and all the other games built out of the RTS engine in custom maps replaced it, and this all happened years before Zoomers were even walking much less playing advanced video games.
Blaming the RTS genre dying on zoomers would be like blaming them for killing 90s rap, they had nothing to do with it and it's downright ludicrous to suggest.
Maybe what we miss is battle.net. It was essentially an endless games playstore and you didn't need to pay for any game modes. It was gamer paradise and we didn't even recognize it back then. We live in a gaming dystopia now
fake news from anon. The problem is that we hit the supply cap/population limit/CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS so no more RTS... sad.
Just kidding, forget about all of those, we have Beyond All Reason: a free and open source RTS game set in space. Actively in development, cross-platform and has a unit cap way higher than any of the RTSs from the 2000s.
In what world is RTS dead? Strategy games in general have been making a huge comeback in the past five years or so. I would aks if this dude (because we all know it's a dude) lives under a rock, but he's on 4chan so we know he does.
RTS is pretty dead at the moment. The most popular titles are over a decade old. Anything newly released has failed to gain traction. There's a couple games in development that are promising, but they aren't close to releasing.
Strategy in general is pretty popular, but it's really not the same as rts, which has mostly come to mean shitty mobile games.
I mean, it's pretty remarkable that a game that old is still so popular. I mean, in hindsight 1998 was a good year for video games, but how many people are still playing Golden Eye?
I like AoE2 but it feels like there is just one Way you can play the Game. It's not much about Strategy more about "How fast can you follow these callculated Steps to Win". Or Maybe i play with the wrong People
Maybe give Aoe3 a chance. The definitive edition is the latest remake. It is a quite unique spin on traditional RTS genre.Strategy is usually stronger than clicking fast (though people say that as a criticism of the game).
4x had been dead for a decade before their rebirth. RTS is not even dead. Total war warhammer has great real time tactic and several RTS have been out. Aoe4 came this year. I don't understand what people are missing.
The ongoing support for Age of Empires 2 is proof that the RTS will continue to endure, and they got it 90% perfect a couple decades ago. Microsoft was even able to do it without ruining the previous versions of the game... looking at you warcraft.
Reminds me of how when Animal Crossing New Horizons released, there were loads of people who would change their console time to accellerate the game's time progression feature and then they were complaining about a lack of content merely weeks later
Huh? Play the way you want and have fun. 500+ hours in ACNH, never did timeskips so I missed out on a bunch of content I'll never go back and do, simply because I didn't play on a particular day or month or even a particular time on Sundays.
That's not my point. Whether or not you want to play like that, the game is designed to be played in real time. This also spaces it out and makes it last longer. So it was funny having people time travel and then complain about lack of content. They couldn't be patient enough to play the game as intended then whined when it didn't cater to them
They didn't specify new games. That one has an active community and still gets updated.
But I'm not sure what he means by dead genre either. RTSs still get made and people still play them. Might not be many AAA games though so I can at least agree it's not as popular.
Does it have longer legs than starcraft and warcraft 3? It is amazing how they got that one game perfect, and they still tweak and add more civilizations to it.
I used to like RTS when i was younger, Starcraft, Age of Empires 2, Rise of Nations, Empire Earth, Warcraft 2&3, command and conquer red alert.... nowadays RTS just stresses me out. I think it's the multitasking. I do enough multitasking in my job I I'd like to let my brain rest when I'm done working. I also don't play Sim games like city builders for the same reason. I have had Starcraft 2 installed for years and am only like, 5 missions into the Terran campaign. I want to play it for thr story but the game play just doesn't grab me anymore.
RTS has been on life support for a long time, but there are some community holdouts. People have mentioned AoE already, but check out Supreme Commander which is cheap on Steam and can be played via the Forged Alliance Forever community servers with a custom client, community bug fixes, balance patches, maps, mods, ranked ladder mode, co-op campaign maps, you name it.
Civ 6 is huge. Cities Skylines is great. Age of Empires is still huge and got republished. Company of Heroes is excellent. Total War never ends. Ridiculous.
I'm gonna nitpick you here. Civ 6 is not an RTS. City Skylines is not an RTS, although it has some nontraditional RTS elements. Total war is like a hybrid RTS.
Age of empires and company of heroes are RTSs. The thing that makes an RTS is the Real Time Strategy.
Civ is a turn based 4x. City Skylines is a city builder. Total war is a hybrid turn based 4x and RTS.
My favorite part of Red Alert 2 is that from the moment you put the disc in it was a game. You weren't installing it, you were establishing a mobile command link. The characters called you on their video com links for mission sit reps and debriefs. Made it all really kinetic.
BfME 1 is quite nice with the regularly updated Bfme Launcher
I just wish we could get a similarly maintained C&C3 TW modding and CoH 1 engine improvement / new engine for it (to alleviate the infamous desync issues with bots and lots of units).
Well, a Stronghold Remake (Remaster?) just dropped and it's exactly what I was looking for. It's probably the nostalgia speaking, but it's still a damn good game.
nearly every time I hear one of my friends talk about it it’s always “my game crashed” or “it’s all so unoptimized” and worst of all is when I get told a game or series only gets good after investing 200 hours, my life savings and the blood of my first born.
I don’t have that much time to invest into one game. I have a whole Steam library filled with Steam sales backlogs from a decade plus. Some days I straight up scroll through my library to see a game I don’t remember even getting.