Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Long Live the RTS.

Tom Chick recently put out a pretty neat read regarding Ensemble Studio’s recent closing. I highly suggest heading over to Quarter to Three and reading it. Check out Fidget while you’re there, he’s got some cool ideas about games.

Anyhow his essay regarded Ensemble’s closing. Chick said it was the final nail in the coffin for real-time strategy as a genre, and he had some valid points. It has taken some hits lately. Blizzard has been delaying Starcraft 2 like it’s getting its first tattoo, and most of the major RTS releases of late have either been lackluster or broad departures from the genre.

This led Chick to make a Nos-like declaration that, with the death of Ensemble, one of the mainstays of the industry, RTS as a genre is going to die. And it’s kind of a reasonable declaration to make. Few gamers of this generation didn’t play at least one Age of Empires game. And let’s face facts, Age of Empires was great. All of the Age games were.

Age of Empires 2 offered up an immersive and impressively balanced set of factions, Age of Mythology offered an intelligent and interesting counterpoint to Warcraft 3’s heroes, and Age of Empires 3 blended turn based card games with the real time strategy genre. Ensemble made great games. But they made a pretty narrow set of games, games that, while impressive, didn’t do anything to push the genre forward.

As Supreme Commander proved, strictly traditional RTSes still have a lot to offer. But they aren’t the genre entire. And pushes that failed years ago could very well revive the strategy and tactics genre.

Myth, way way back in 1997, tried to revolutionize the genre with things like physics and a focus on tactical engagement, things that are becoming mainstream a decade later. In fact, physics engines in contemporary real time strategy games are less functional than the one Myth showcased. Starcraft 2 and Dawn of War 2 are just now trying to utilize the same concepts that Myth put to work back in 1997.

In fact, most of the ideas of Myth I find represented anew in Dawn of War 2. A focus on formations, cover, and a balance between ranged and melee troops without a slavish dedication to a rock-paper-shotgun model were all central to Myth. When I found myself stuck in Myth I found that I didn’t have to just use one unit in order to move forward, but instead understand how all of these factors worked together in a given scenario. The game taught me how to improvise within a set system instead of how to simply utilize a system.

Dawn of War 2 offers me a good deal less of this improvisation and a good deal more of the rock-paper-scissors balance we’ve all come to expect in RTSes. And this, for the most part, is the sort of play most real-time strategy games offer. Homeworld, Warcraft 3, even the first Dawn of War, are all dedicated to this trend. Sometimes they’ll mix it up. They’ll make it a four or five item game of rock paper scissors. And no game series in my memory seemed more intent on this than the various Ages. That’s the unfortunate path that Ensemble was traveling down.

And, while Ensemble was venerable, the loss of this thought process isn’t the worst thing to happen to the industry ever (that was probably the purchase of Bungie by Microsoft). I don’t want to imply that Ensemble is the only studio to ever release this sort of advanced rock-paper-scissors simulator. Almost every major studio is guilty of it to some extent. Even Relic did it with Homeworld. The game could be reduced to fighters vs. cannon and missle cap ships vs. ion cannon cap ships and super cap ships.

And this is what’s killing the genre. It’s not bad, per sec. It’s just how certain genres work. They reproduce successful gameplay models. First person shooters do it, survival horror games do it, third person action games do it with a passion. This is what’s strangling the industry. Its what killed Too Human, its what broke the Prince of Persia franchise and it’s the reason most of the first person shooters released since Halo have strongly resembled it.

But people still innovate. And this is what breaks down, blends and, through erosion, sustains genres of games and games as a media and an art form. A genre’s ability to change and reshape itself doesn’t represent the death of a genre, but rather its growth. Tom Clancy’s EndWar, for example, is a game Chick passionately recommends in another Rush, Boom, Turtle, and is about as far away from Ensemble’s design philosophy as you can get. And RTS, of late, is changing like crazy.

Even if the rock-paper-scissors model can be applied to most games the approach to this model is starting to differ widely. Communities are reshaping games to their liking in immense, immersive mods like DotA and, in doing so, breaking out of the melee-missle-air balance of Warcraft 3. And Dawn of War 2, while it certainly has elements of rock-paper-scissors play, is just as much about understanding and effectively utilizing each individual unit in the right situation.

And games like EndWar, Civilization Revolution and Halo Wars are all trying their hardest to show that real-time strategy can survive in other places and be controlled in new and interesting ways, that you don’t need to stay married to the keyboard-mouse model if you want to see RTS make it as a genre.

Of course the flip side of most of the examples that I’ve mentioned is that each of them, except Halo Wars, could be classified as something other than an RTS. EndWar and Dawn of War 2 could both be called tactics games, or fusions of real-time strategy and tactics. And Civilization Revolution is a turn based 4E game, so despite its similarities to many RTSes it is, at best, a TTS and really not even that.

But both of these genres are becoming part of real-time strategy as it matures. Sins of a Solar Empire and Sword of the Stars have both expanded what it means to be a 4X game by adding real-time strategy elements to their models. And Dawn of War 2, as well as Company of Heroes before it, resembles a streamlined RTS more than a tactical game, with its light economy and retained focus on acquiring and spending resources.

And Starcraft 2, if it ever comes out, promises to be an amazing addition to the genre, one firmly rooted in tradition with an eye towards expanding RTS-dom. When one of the founders of the genre as we know it today is still making new games with new ideas and new mechanics, it’s hard to see RTSes as dead.

So what I’m essentially saying in the same way Aesop Rock responded to Nos (in both my goal and in the attention I expect to see this rebuttal receive) is that RTS isn’t dead. It just got here, and it’s going to be here for a while.

Ensemble had a lot of problems. The made games that were more difficult to understand as a whole than they were to master and be able to play effectively. They made games that had a compulsive focus on economic micromanagement, something not every player is going to be interested in. They’d gone a decade without making a real engine update and moreover without updating the core game play of their series. And let’s not forget, Ensemble has always been a subsidiary of Microsoft (which explains their creative output, or rather their lack thereof) and Microsoft is doing a lot to ham-handedly kill the games industry as it tries to make its mark.

So I’d say that Ensemble’s death knell is, if anything, a rallying cry for real-time strategies. One of the giants has fallen. We all saw it coming, and its a shame that they won’t be stomping around anymore, but now there’s plenty of room for the little guys to step up and thrive. Who knows what we’ll see in their wake.

A renewed focus on tactical play and a streamlining of economic management? Or a revival of immersive economies with a more refined system which allows units to interact? Maybe we’ll see games completely separating themselves from the conventions RTS has been held down by for decades.

But the one thing I doubt we’ll see is the end of the real-time-strategy game, whatever the talking heads in the game industry say. The only thing that can really destroy a genre, as was proven with adventure games in the first half of this decade, is a conscious decision to stop making games. And judging by the companies which still flock to make RTSes, there’s no sign of that happening any time soon.