Stardock CEO claims RTS games aren’t dying, just held back by tech
By Tim Colwill on February 8, 2013 at 1:41 pm
Sins of a Solar Empire developers Ironclad games recently claimed that the RTS genre was “a dying market” and had been relegated to a niche interest. Well, Stardock’s CEO Brad Wardell isn’t going to take that lying down, and has hit back in a post on his own blog that claims RTS games are simply waiting for technology to advance enough for them to be able to try something new.
“So what about real-time strategy games? Why has their design stagnated?” asks Wardell. “The answer is that 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.”
Wardell mentions that as a publisher, he sees that innovative RTS game designs still cross his desk — but they’re just technically completely infeasible and won’t sell. “Their design requirements revolve around a player with DirectX 11, a 64-bit Windows OS and 4 cores (minimum),” he says. “They could do their innovative design with much lower visual fidelity and get most of what they want but then it becomes a ‘budget’ title.”
“We’ve been through two phases of RTS’s already. The first phase was the DOS and early Windows era games. Dune, Warcraft 1/2, Dark Reign, Starcraft. Sprite Based. The first game of the second phase I’d argue was Total Annihilation. Even though it didn’t make use of 3D hardware, it was the first game to deliver real-time rendered units. Think of the second phase as the age of 32-bit, 3D RTSs. Supreme Commander, Warcraft 3, Sins of a Solar Empire, Starcraft 2.”
“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.”
Source: Little Tiny Frogs
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‘Supreme Commander, Warcraft 3, Sins of a Solar Empire, Starcraft 2.”’
Except only Supreme Commander and SoaSE actually take advantage of that tech to do something meaningful with the scale; Blizzard do not. Starcraft 2 could’ve been done 10 years prior easily with lowered visual fidelity, but SupCom most certainly could not have nor SoaSE.
The way I figure the ‘third phase’ would be would include a significant amount of automation, and would include a grander scale: Think closer to grand strategy but with real units.
PA appears to want to allow this to occur by having lots of factories and the like across a single planet (if Total Annihilation is indeed an inspiration) which requires a degree of autonomy not unlike SupCom (with its truly impressive waypoint system) and to be able to direct them to attack other planets or the likes.
Really, all I want from PA is something like SoaSE that allows me to start in a different wormhole than another player (or in this case, another planet seeing as the ‘galaxy’ is a multiplayer thing) and being able to heavily extract resources from my domain before voyaging into theirs (or hell, let us start in the same wormhole and let me quickly leave to go into an uninhabited one).
rapid101,
You may dislike blizzard but they bring a hell of a lot to the table when it comes to connectivity, matchmaking and community support. Warcraft 3′s custom maps are still played to this day. If you don’t call that impressive tech IDK what else there is. Sure Starcraft 2 on the surface isn’t that impressive.. but the engine IS rather well done and the custom maps you can make are games within themselves.
As much as people dislike it the cloud support for the game and online profile are also really impressive features.. the matchmaking support and ladders are unrivaled!
Isn’t quad core, 64bit and at least decent dx11 support fairly standard now? I also get the feeling what he’s looking for in a third phase rts is supcom with better polish.
irritus,
oh I hope not. SupCom sucked.
%40~ of users on steam, which really is not that great of a saturation for you to try and market a new I.P too that could cost from like $1M-$130M
Well Planetside 2 is a massive processing-hog but that hasn’t held it back at all, its got a huge global player base.
First of all, it’s f2p which usually do better than sub games; second of all, my cousin’s 8 year old laptop can run it at 40+ FPS.
Third of all, steam harware survey is not even remotely close to the actual market base and what their hardware is capable of for gamers (assuming the ‘average’ game statistically has steam is naive).
I’d like to see strategy games with a little more strategy and less in “clicks per minute” measurements.
rapid101Really, all I want from PA is something like SoaSE that allows me to start in a different wormhole than another player (or in this case, another planet seeing as the ‘galaxy’ is a multiplayer thing) and being able to heavily extract resources from my domain before voyaging into theirs (or hell, let us start in the same wormhole and let me quickly leave to go into an uninhabited one).,
Man sounds like you just want a 20min “treaty timer” :P
No doubt this will actually be in the game though to prevent any form of rush etc. great mechanic, personally I prefer getting thrown in the fire, getting the poop burnt out of me, rolling in some sand standing back up and running right back in n.n
May have something to do the with the butchering of the genre in the past few years, In saying that… don’t get me wrong, I love trying new things, but what on earth was going through the teams head with CnC Tiberium Twilight? and In my opinion, DoWII? And they had a chance with the new CnC Generals title, but it looks like that has gone down the drain following the “Hey…. lastime we tried something new, it totally sucked ass… so lets do it again!” idea. I cant help but feel they have all forgotten the most basic rule of them all, K.I.S.S. What did we love about the old RTS? building our base, tactics, units that counter/are ineffective against others, If I had the backing, I would simply do one with a polished look like SCII, but with a crazy amount of fun stuff to do like in RA2:YR.
This is a bit of a mixed response I know xD