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On The Ascent And Descent Of The RTS
Thanks to GameSpot for their guest 'GameSpotting' editorial discussing the perceived decline of the real-time strategy genre. The author argues: "While there have been unusual bright spots on the RTS gaming scene, the overall look of it is pretty grim. Most games offer very little when it comes to revitalizing the genre, and eventually they even fail in rekindling old interests that faded away when we let go of Command & Conquer and Warcraft." He finishes with a call to arms, citing Command & Conquer: Generals ("[a] dearth of interesting strategies") and Age Of Mythology ("[offering a] rote formula") as examples of this lack of innovation, and urging: "Only you can stop the market from regurgitating the same old titles, and maybe even encourage it to make a few nudges in the right direction."
Apart from my differing opinion about Generals (which has very good multiplayer, especially with the Zero Hour expansion), I find it hard to trust any article about RTS games that claims that Dune 2 was the first game in the genre.
The author states "But that alone is not the only piece of misinformation regarding the RTS genre" when it is he that is spreading misinformation. Take for example, Hertzog Zwei, a Megadrive (Genesis) RTS that far predates Dune 2.
The entire article seems to be nothing but a badly-constructed collection of ruminations about RTS games. I don't claim this post to be any better constructed than his article, but I can claim that I am not trying to make you think I am important and cool by hinting at things I don't really understand.
Take for example the section marked "The Problem". All he does to establish what he thinks the problem is, is list a group of ancient RTS games, and then complain that they all had a lot in common. Of course they had something in common: they were all members of the same genre. An RTS game without most of the things he lists, "Settle down, collect, build up, expand, destroy" would not be an RTS.
So, there was no real point to that section of the article, unless all he meant to say was "I am bored of the RTS genre." The thing that make this article detestable is the way he then tries to make us think he is clever, and actually has a point. First, he make a parenthetical aside about the old games he lists, hinting that they didn't have all that much of a storyline. Oh, what wit! What intellect! What humour the author commands!
Secondly, he tries to make his idea bigger than they are. For example, the use of the rhetorical question "...need I go on?", when he does, in fact, need to go on, because he has yet to make any point. He instead writes "...need I go on?", hoping that the reader will assume he made an important point.
The rest of this article continues in the same vein. The author comes close to realising the stupidity of what he is writing when he adds, in the section marked 'But still a problem': "but seeing how there are dozens of titles clinging to the same genre".
How is it that the author cannot understand that the non-innovative games that he lists, including Generals and Age of Mythology, are as much members of the RTS genre as the innovative ones he lists, Starcraft and Homeworld?
And again, if one has a flaky and ill-established point, why say there are "dozens" of examples, rather that actually list them?
I, on the other hand, believe that I have made my point, and will forgo listing other examples of the poorness of this article. If you disagree, post a response and I will elaborate.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
Personally, it peaked with Starcraft for me. I'm just now replaying Brood Wars because I realized I had never finished it, and it's *still* a fun game, albeit a little rote.
My wish for an RTS game is the following: the build, collect, search, destroy algorithm would still hold true, but it could actually be expanded over multiple missions. In other words, when you built that command center in the first mission, it stuck around throughout the game. Resources would be harder to get, so that Carrier would actually MEAN something and you would want to protect it at all cost.
What RTS games come down to is you are playing a very small part in the very big picture, and the author's have a hard time establishing a believable storyline with only showing a single battle. Perhaps entire campaigns, where you zoom in on individual battles, or something would be more interesting.
--trb