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Brad Wardell states RTS's aren't dying - just waiting
Posted: 09.02.2013 05:07 by JonahFalcon Comments: 3
Total Annihilation.
Brad Wardell has written a new post on his blog discussing the state of real-time strategy games titled, "RTS’s aren’t dying. They’re waiting."

Wardell states that RTS design has stagnated because "developers have pushed their designs about as far as they can go with the current hardware. We’ve been stuck with a 2GB memory limit for over a decade and limited to 2 or less processors (cores) for longer than that."

He went on to claim that there have been two phases of real-time strategy games. The first was the era of MS-DOS and early Windows titles, which included such titles as Dune, Warcraft, Dark Reign and Starcraft, all of which were sprite-based. The second phase was kicked off by Total Annihilation and started phasing RTS's from 2D to 32-bit 3D.

"In both phases, the hardware drove the design of the RTS. Nothing highlighted the difference between Phase 1 and Phase 2 more than real-time Strategic Zoom. Strategic Zoom gave players the ability to zoom out and control their armies in a truly strategic way or zoom in and take control of individual groups. If Ender’s Game was, ironically, an RTS. You can assume that players will expect these kinds of features at a minimum going forward," he went on to note.

Wardell added, "The third phase games can be broadly described by the technology under them: 64-bit memory, massively multithreaded. And these 3rd phase RTSs will be breathtakingly beautiful to look at, have amazing scope and micro AI (sophisticated rules for units interacting with one another without human involvement) that is astounding."

Unfortunately, the inexpensive PCs aren't numerous enough for publishers to give them the green light. "Publishers aren’t approving these designs not because there isn’t demand. There is. The problem is you can’t make a game that only a fraction of the player base can currently play," he sighed.

Comments

By herodotus (SI Herodotus) on Feb 09, 2013
herodotus
Obviously Wardell doesn't count Russian Developers in his POV. These guys are keeping the RTS and Flight Sim genres alive, and they're really the only ones. Doing quite a good job at it too, BTW.
By JonahFalcon (SI Elite) on Feb 09, 2013
JonahFalcon
I think you're missing the point of the blog.
By herodotus (SI Herodotus) on Feb 09, 2013
herodotus
No I didn't miss the point, but with 1C and others have been successful blending real time and turn-based which is a departure from the norm, which the "Total War" series also has perfected (as far as it can be).

In addition, "C&C 3" bypassed Phase 2 in the main, as the zoom level was hideously small, until the truly big mods came into play (zoom-out to "SupCom" degrees, and zoom-in to third person once again like "SupCom").

Then of course there is the implantation of eSports, first seen in "Starcraft" and more recently in "Wargame: European Escalation" and it's forthcoming sequel. What will "C&C: generals 2" bring as well?
Really, stating that it's technology holding his so called Phase 3 back is nonsense as the average PC gamer has an average to high-end PC.

If a title that required an upgrade was put up for pre-order and it looked as good as he states (with this 'super AI'), then most would upgrade to play it.
We did for "Company of Heroes" and "Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance", and will do so again.. Those that are into the whole eSports seen don't care about graphics so we can exclude them (they turn everything down low for speed, not just in RTS but FPS).

There is already what I consider Phase 3, and that is flash-based/browser-based RTS's, so in all I still don't think Wardell has really taken a concentrated overview of the whole RTS genre by talking about 'next-gen' graphics and AI.

Perhaps it's the title that's a bit misleading....