I think you hit it dead on with the power fantasy of the general. I think games which deliver on that fantasy will never be dead, because the fantasy never will be.

Dune 2... the first RTS by westwood studio. I was 15 or 16.

I wishlisted 40 great upcoming RTS's for 2025. So no.

no.

bad take, blaming workers for the games not being as good anymore. Also you guys literally said that people arent built the same now because they don't want to make a game with a funny anti-soviet propaganda medicore acting lmao like there is nothing special in that game besides being that

Such a shame. I love RTS. They are fun to play. I mostly play single-player campaign and every often i replay them. Co-op can also be fun if only i had people to play. I never touch mp.

Coh 3 is a lot of fun, and the best modern RTS imo.

ICBM Escalation is a great innovation in RTS…

1:30:43 Couldn't agree more on this whole balance section. The more unusual ideas you try, the more cool options you give the player, the harder it is to balance. Whereas if everything is homogenous, it's automatically balanced because it's all the same. Rather than having unique races with their own styles and features, it's much safer to have them all be clones of the generic default army. A couple of examples from Relic games, because that's my background. One of the coolest things about Homeworld 1 is the salvage corvette. A ship you get literally from mission 1, and it's arguably the most powerful because it lets you steal enemy ships. One benefit is that by the end of the game, your fleet looks unique: you've got whatever assortment of ships you managed to capture from each enemy faction, minus the ones you weren't able to keep alive. What's more, capturing ships would let you go over the cap for each type of unit. If you were trying to achieve perfect multiplayer balance, that idea would get a veto immediately. Of course, in the campaign it works fine because of the dynamic difficulty: if you have too many ships, the enemy's starting fleet will be reinforced to match. It's not so much giving you an advantage as it is letting you play with cool ships. It's a similar story with Dawn of War 1. Apparently, the multiplayer scene was furious that the Eldar were too powerful. Yet when I play the game, I enjoy all 4 (or 5, or 7) races. None stands out as much easier or harder to play, or to play against. Maybe you can abuse the Fleet of Foot ability when dancing your units in and out of range... but I don't do that, and the computer doesn't do that. If there's a neat interaction like that, I might deploy it once in an encounter where it would turn the tide of battle. But none of the "Eldar OP" complaints cause a problem for me, and fixing them would make that race less interesting to play as or against. The hardcore competitive multiplayer enthusiasts might want to nerf something, and maybe all twelve of those people would be happy when the nerf happens. But the best case scenario is that nobody else cares, and it's more likely the average player fires up the game one evening without having read the patch notes. He doesn't know anything has changed, but the game is less fun than yesterday, and he can't put his finger on why. A week later, he's playing a different game and doesn't look back. Ten years later, he thinks about how fun that old RTS was, and wonders why he suddenly stopped playing it.

many of us RTS people are old school wargamers and prefer deeper games , newer games tend to be nerfed. I remember when AOE III came out , I tried it and you couldn't castle drop the enemy. I closed the game right there and never loaded it again.

Single player has become where to learn mechanics for multiplayer to fight sweats. No thanks.

I think it's just a genre that peaked early due to how graphics were already good enough in the 90s to perfect its gameplay aspects. It's kinda pointless to create new RTS because there's so many good classics to go back to. And modernity does not have any major competitive advantage over the past unlike on the FPS scene, or any novelty for that matter.

What? Not going to mention Beyond All Reason? BAR is free to play ffs and it's amazing.

RTS is not dead, but its a genre that has become hard to make a pitch for in a AAA setting, its hard to do micro-transactions, its hard to sell skins, its difficult to turn into a live service etc. A modern RTS would have to be from a AA or indie studio and there you find a lack of resources, so they end up doing stuff like either making a forgettable clone of an existing game or not making a single player mode. The multi-player aspect of RTS is majorly overblown, most people who played RTS games back in the day played the campaign and then maybe against their friends at a LAN. Few actually played competitively.

Loved the podcast! Hope to hear more from you soon

Mate Warhammer 3 is not much better than it was at launch - that is to say that it is still dogshit. I'm not sure which community you follow but Warhammer 3 is pretty widely disliked even now.

RTS is less than it was Total Annihilation, Red Alert and War hammer 40k are yet to be beaten for fun and repeat play strong single player is important esp for longer games.

Amazing podcast, you guys just put into words many of the concepts I have in mind about gaming, I can't wait for the next video.

Since I heard about a single horse skin in WoW make Blizzard money than entire life service of Starcraft 2 I know there might be no RTS game from blizzard anymore... not include other issue that unique to RTS in term of development decision. - RTS not easily port/playable on console limit it's market. - F2P RTS is hard to microtransaction in other game they could easily sell skin for single character for 20$+ but in RTS they have to make skin for entire armies while have to sell you the same price or they have to completely design entire game around how they going to milk from it instead of focus on actual game. At least the fact we still see some new RTS release at all even it's can't live up to the past tell me there's still some passionate developer trying to keep it a live somehow. Also I cheer for more people to play "Beyond All Reason" even it's didn't on steam yet but it's completely free and away have people to play with.

AoW4 has flying units and theyre usually weak to ranged (whether physical or magical depends on their type usually)

There's no market anymore. All new RTS games are flopping regardless if they pander to SP people or not. The 90s are gone. Only the big budget RTS games are still around but they are getting old.

RTS went open source a while back, everyone playing beyond all reason (BAR) now. But that's not on these guys radar because it's not on their steam charts.

Can't wait for the next episode!

RTS moved to mobile.

Oh please don't bring up Volound, that baby has been crying about total war since shogun 2. Outside of him being a "true gamer" incel he is also pro-russian, which speaks volumes on his general intelligence. Man is an actual brainlet and anything he says should be ignored and thrown into a garbage bin along with him.

I think RTS is a very very difficult genre indeed. Like unit movement alone, I haven't seen any(I really mean any) modern RTS game made it right than starcraft did back in the 90s. That's how difficult it is.

I don’t play RTS because the multi tasking isn’t fun. I prefer single player strategy like Total War and Paradox titles.

Maybe it's not very popular, but the only which i'm waiting for is D.O.R.F. because it's cool.

Call to arms- Gates of hell Ostront restored my faith in the genre.

Why criticize total war when Warhammer isnt even their mainline title, Pharaoh is.

There is another problem with RTS: they are PC esclusive. You can try to playa rts in a playstation, but it's hard to have a controller work as a keyboard. And the problem with pc is that there is no standard. If you have a console you can play a lot of games, with a pc you can play all of them but you need to have a good pc and that cost more than a console.

Just as book reading is in decline, RTS is in decline. The best genre of something is almost never the most popular. Most players can only buy a video game with a controller that has few buttons, which is limiting. In this case, RTS does not fit outside the mouse/keyboard combo. And because of the hectic modern life, people seek less stressful entertainment, like guided action games, where you just need to press a controller button and the avatar performs a side kick with double jump and tucked landing. This delivers satisfaction to the player who seeks a sense of power.

"They play for 20 hours and then go and look for the next 'cool' game on steam" That pretty much sums up all the kids who spout how HYPED they are about an upcoming release as though they are being given a Ferrari for their 21st or something. They blow their load and prepurchase only to be disappointed the vast majority of the time... but still feel the need to type the cool phrase of the season like "Lets Gooooooo!!!". It's really quite sad. Edit to add: From around the 45 minute mark when mentioning the 8 bit bloke. When I completed my CompSci degree in '91 the first year programming (*programming* - not 'coding' as people love to call it today) consisted purely of ASM and C. Apparently that's to difficult these days so now it's python and java heh. How the hell can anyone understand the bare metal when programing with an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction?

Honestly the funny thing is RTS may be having a resurgence. The problem is Microsoft owns all the recent good ones.

Dorf, tempest rising, dust front are looking promising. BAR is fantastic. currently making my own as well…so much untapped potential in rts genre. Dow 1&2 we’re soo good…need Dow 4.

From all the RTS Ive ever played, I never actually enjoyed PvP. It always required too much effort to become reasonably decent and the lobbys were extremely hostile to non-tryhards. So I basically only stuck to the story mode / campaign. And there were actually many games that delivered in that regard (Warcraft, Starcraft, Dune, Command and Conquer, Age of Mythology). But nowadays, studios just dont bother with that. Because its quite costly to develop decent single player campaign and it doesnt really pay for itself - someone who just plays the campaign once isnt going to stick around to buy skins and battle passes etc.

Ik i'm posting a lot of comments, but the one more thing i wanted to weigh in on is the notion of ultra-balanced faction equalized/parallel design, and i think this is completely ridiculous. Asymmetrical gameplay is extremely potent to drive imagination, creativity, and problem solving. If you want to make a perfectly balanced tournament, people can just use the same faction against eachother. Imo, nothing is cooler than having like one faction that is so overpowered you have to use some galaxy-brain strats to win, or team up against it. It makes it like a boss fight or humans vs super advanced aliens or whatever. ... The big thing is that you have to make a game that is structurally cohesive and has a great sort of attack-parry-counter system, where everything is survivable if you play your cards right (no click to delete base and easy victory without any way to block or counter it, which is the biggest failure of later C&C games, no Ion shields or missile defence). A well made good game will construct it's own audience, instead of catering to an existing embittered one.

Units routing way around the map when caught in bottlenecks happened in all of the C&C games mind you. The C&C games were considered really high end in pathfinding innovation but they had a lot of these issues.

It's always super important for units in RTS games to be very distinct and recognizable, and most of them fail at this. Many of the really grandiose, and even Supreme Commander 2 really had this issue, in that so many keep making just rectangles with turrets on them, everything is way too samey, both in appearance and function. This is an issue in a lot of RTS mods too, is they don't really understand having design where every unit has a purpose that complements others and is instantly obvious. One of the issues that RTS games often have is where an entire faction is all one ultra uniform design palette - people want visually cohesive factions, but if they all look wayy too much the same, it compromises the per-unit distinction.

RTS isn't dead, it's abandoned, and existing in limbo. It's not coming back largely because nobody is making new good iconic memorable rts games like C&C, AoE and Starcraft, which pretty much were the pillars of the genre. None of them innovated, if anything they devolved throughout their iterations, and were simplified into the ground. They had no motivation to try and fractalize the gameplay at all, with designs that can be used simply or complexly depending on how the players plays. I have a long term plan to try and rectify this, but it'll be many years before any of this comes to fruition. I want to see and build something that's like a fusion between C&C, Earth 2150, UAW, Supreme Commander. Each faction primarily focussed on different gameplay, like one with lots of little units, one that is almost all epic units, that kind of thing. Earth 2150 and Universe at War Earth Assault both have a lot of design principles that are neglected but have such massive potential, and it's a shame they are not brought forward in the genre. Really get into E1250 and you realize how many things you can actually do in that game; the ability to make custom units with the assembler is just the tip of the iceberg... It added so much strategy like hiding in the dark with your lights off, or repainting and IFF spoofing your units to make them look like an enemy's to sneak attack or trojan horse, weapons are all projectile, damage types...

Broken Arrow?

Did Femine won that battle against Pyrene?! That looked like a hard fight to win

<3 Thanks for the Shout out of Santurary

Giant Grand Games made a video about the same topic a while back called: The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why. He made the argument that the genre isn't dead, but the developers are just not putting in the work to give the new RTS games a solid foundation. And that's something RTS games need far more than other games. Though you are right that I can also see the problem being a lack of expertise. There are a few other problems, like trying to cater too much to multiplayer and E-Sports and ignoring the single player and campaigns. 18:15 I agree with the readability, though I do think that Starcraft is not that bad with it's readability. It might be because I played it more than Age of Empires, but I can distinguish the Starcraft units better than the Age of Empire ones. Screenshots are always harder to get a read on because the units don't move. If you see the units in the actual game they are far more distinct due to movement. But yeah, there are definitely games that focus too much on looking nice. I have one game that is basically Conquest of Elysium in 3D and the unit all looks so similar that you have no idea what is what. One old RTS game I love to play from time to time is Warzone 2100. 1:14:04 There are some pretty big difference in power levels between single and multiplayer in Total War Warhammer. You can boost low tier units to absurd level with lord skills and technologies, which are both missing in the multiplayer battles. Also for multiplayer there are unit limits. For example you can only bring a certain amount of big monsters. 1:16:46 The multiplayer games are definitely also tactically. There are some pretty hard counters and just throwing your big monster into the wrong blob on infantry can easily lose you the game. Total Warhammer is definitely not immersion breaking for me as it's a high fantasy setting and you have lore characters performe even more absurd feats than you can do in the game. I think one of the issues might be that the Warhammer series had a very silly start. Case in point: The naming convention for the Lizardmen. 1:34:59 The one problem I had with Age of Wonders 4 is: Too many decisions that matter too little. I want a game that lets me make impactful decisions. And not having to constantly tweak things for a minuscule outcomes. I enjoy Planetfall a lot more in that regard as it allows me to make decision who's impact I can feel. I agree, it isn't dead. Especially since there a lot of older RTS games that are still played a lot. Age of Empires 2. Supreme Commander Forever. Probably quite a few more.

So glad we have this new podcast!! I hope it's here to stay

@30:00 At a fundamental level I think the big problem is the needs of the industry as it exists in its current form. People blame F2P models, phones, culture wars, and they are all cancer but the more I think about, it the more it seems it is simply a function of the size of these companies. There is very little room for creativity in a place like EA or Activision. There can't be. The cost of failure is too high. Hell, we're seeing exactly that sort of failure play out across the industry pretty much at time of recording. Ubisoft is pretty much staggering around the room tripping over its guts like a zombie at time of recording. The hypercompetitive market that the big titans operate in forces them to try and latch on to any sort of success and ride it into the ground. Anything that can't meet that bar, simply cannot exist. Games out of those studios have to be live service, because it allows continued 'line go up' long past the release of the game for very little effort. They have to work that way though because they are publicly traded companies and the investor class needs an ever growing slice of the pie. Problem is though and Ben hits on it at the 35 minute mark is that the market they are trying to capture with a live service game simply doesn't exist. Most people want to play their 20 hours and move on. They don't want to play the same game for a thousand hours... but the publishers need the live service to survive because games cost so flipping much to make that they need the ability to churn out cheap content for the next two years that people will buy in order to make the line keep going up, while they shovel money into the next big shiny... And then people wonder why they grind their staff into dust. Then Lucid's point on the difficulty of AI programming for pathfinding means that the game can't be cheap, because it is very hard to do. It's the same reason why complex turn based strategy games will always be niche. It's hard to do good AI. The AI for some sort of cover shooter/action adventure/stealth/FPS can be 'good enough' by simply not being completely brainless, recognizing where the player is in relation to themselves, knowing what cover is and finally, which way to point the loud end of their sharp object. Give bosses a pattern for the player to work out. Think everything from Assassins Creed, to Call of Duty, to God of War to Cyberpunk to that Chinese game about the magic monkey that got real popular for a while... Name a big banner game from one of the big studios and it will probably fit that box. They only work because they DON'T spend money on AI can therefor spend money on cool shiny things like the lighting effects on the weaponskin you just unlocked and blow peoples minds with the graphics.

Just chilling here 4am on boxing day listening to this :)

RTS is not a dead genre as in it's lacking a fan-base. It's just that most studios and publishers are more attracted to genres that are more financially attractive. Currently, and for the last few years, most publishers have been almost obsessed with 'games as a service' green-lighting titles like MMO's and team shooters.

Is not dead, we just need a good new game. But since Developers cant cash in on the genre they wouldnt make. You cant microtransaction a RTS, neither can you create a Season pass of it. Well, they could try, but wouldnt make any ficking sense. Since a RTS should be working and finished completely.

Pretending you don't know why larger game companies can't produce quality games anymore devalues your channel. Be brave.