We Should Think More Critically About The "Heyday of RTS"

Nostalgia has its limits

Recently, I was pleasantly surprised to read a deep dive into the origins of Frost Giant from The Washington Post. Like a lot of press coverage around RTS, this piece casually took the perspective that the RTS genre peaked some twenty years ago:

The genre has always been popular, but its undeniable heyday spanned from the ’90s to the mid-aughts. Frost Giant, founded in 2020, boasts a staff with decades of combined experience working on RTS titles, and a single-minded drive to create a successor to the genre greats of yore.

This perspective shows up pretty often, even among fans of RTS games, so I think it’s worth writing about why I think it’s both inaccurate and unhelpful.

It’s A Good Time To Be A Fan

I’ve covered a lot of great new real-time strategy games in recent memory - They Are Billions (early access review), Northgard (impressions video), and Age of Empires IV (recent article), just to name a few examples. Company of Heroes 3 just came out last month, and then there’s Pikmin 4 coming up in July. Plenty of old games continue to see regular updates, too - Age of Empires I, II, and III were all recently remastered, with Age II getting ready to release a massive new expansion pack in the next few months. And while the king of RTS, StarCraft II, hasn’t seen a content update in years, it did get a quality of life balance patch a few months back, it continues to be really successful, and it’s still the game I would recommend to someone looking to get into the genre.

The smaller indie scene is doing well, too. Not a week goes by that I don’t see some interesting game show up on the RTS subreddit. I randomly picked up Dune: Spice Wars the other day and had a blast. Not everything is a gem, but there’s a lot of quality games out there.

My point is to say that if you’re looking for something new to play, there’s a ton of quality new games that were recently released, and there’s a ton of quality new games coming soon. It’s an amazing time to be a fan of this genre!

But what about the glory days?

I mean, sure. Thinking about the time period mentioned above (“the ’90s to the mid-aughts”), we saw the birth and growth of a lot of great franchises - StarCraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, and on and on and on.

That was a great time to be a fan, too!

But when people say it was the height of the genre, I wonder to myself whether they actually remember these games. The RTS development landscape has improved a lot since the early 2000s.

Take Age of Empires II. It’s easily my favorite game of all time. But the version of Age of Empires II that is popular today is worlds apart from what was released in 1999. The pathing has been revamped so thoroughly that it fundamentally changed the game’s balance. There’s a cooperative campaign, an in-game modding feature, and a ranked ladder that doesn’t consist solely of Huns Mirrors on Arabia. Then there’s all the other stuff you’d expect, like running properly on modern machines, better graphics, a multiplayer that doesn’t require Microsoft Zone, and an endless number of new single-player features and content packs.

I would much rather be a fan of Age of Empires II in 2023 than I would in 1999, or 2000, or really any other year in its development history. It’s just straight up better now, and that’s largely true across the board - even games released in “the heyday” have benefited from more modern game design practices. As much as older folks like myself like to dunk on modern game design, the industry as a whole is simply much, much, much better at producing video games than it used to be. And that includes the RTS part of the industry.

Aha! So even with all your new choices, you’re still playing Age of Empires II! That just shows how much better the older games used to be!

I mean, setting aside the fact that modern Age of Empires II is almost unrecognizable compared to what came out twenty years ago, the fact that I continue to play it doesn’t somehow diminish, say, They Are Billions - a title that I probably will still be playing decades and decades from now, because it’s a great game with endless replay value.

StarCraft II was updated regularly until late 2019, and still sees millions of monthly active users, most of them casual coop or custom games players. Are all of these players just wrong? Should we all be booting up Red Alert?

I would genuinely encourage anyone who sees these older franchises as the peak of RTS to go back and actually play them. Sometimes, through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, we forget things like the prevalence of build-a-base-itis in campaign design, a sometimes unbearably slow pacing, or simply primitive technical design relative to what’s available today. Perhaps most importantly, we remember all the legendary games, while forgetting there were also a lot of pretty forgettable ones.

(Not Rise of Nations, though. That game aged like a fine wine.)

Ah, To Be Young Again

Not to be too much of an armchair psychologist, but I think what people really mean when they talk about the “heyday” of RTS is the feeling they had during that time, the continuous sense of excitement about something new and legendary just on the horizon. Which is to say, what they’re really talking about is the feeling of being young; of sitting around your bedroom over summer break with nothing but time and lots of games to play.

You’re absolutely right that it felt better to be an RTS fan in 2003. My back didn’t hurt in 2003!

Jokes aside, I really do get it: gaming preferences have changed. RTS may be bigger than it’s ever been (by virtue of the fact that everything is bigger than it’s ever been), but it’s no longer dominant in the marketplace. The reality of a larger and more diverse industry is that it produces a wider variety of games better tailored to people’s preferences. And a lot of the people who might have previously booted up Age of Empires or Command and Conquer are now playing MOBAs or management simulations or 4x’s or one of the many other types of games that are similar to but not quite the same as RTS. And more important than that, there are a lot of new players in the market who don’t want to play any sort of strategy game at all.

The industry has changed, too. Major players that might have put together a strategy game twenty or thirty years ago see larger opportunities in market segments that essentially didn’t exist back then, like mobile titles or “after-school games” or the endlessly-expanding list of shooter sub-genres. That Blizzard specifically falls into this bucket, I think, drives a lot of the cynicism about the genre and its direction.

None of that means RTS is in decline, or that its best days are behind it. I repeat myself, but more people than ever are engaging with and enjoying this genre. We just can’t escape the fact that as gaming has gone more mainstream, the distribution of popularity has changed since the 1990s. Every form of entertainment, from movies to music to literature, has stuff that’s more popular and stuff that’s more niche. We should judge RTS by how it’s doing in absolute terms, not by how it compares to Candy Crush.

And by that yard stick, the material reality and direction of the genre is solid. There’s new and fresh ideas coming down the pipe all the time, from cooperative missions to mutual random to the innovative immortals of Gates of Pyre. Lots of great new games have come out, lots of great new games are on the horizon, and lots of great old games are doing better than ever.

And that’s why I find this perspective - its undeniable heyday spanned from the ’90s to the mid-aughts - to be not just inaccurate, but unhelpful. We shouldn’t be going out there and promoting or tacitly agreeing with people who think RTS is dead, because that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many people are justifiably unwilling to get emotionally invested into things that are on the decline. But RTS isn’t on the decline. Age of Empires grew by 60-80%, just over the past few years! StarCraft II is doing great! Northgard sold 2 million copies!

There’s never been a better time to be a fan of this genre. Even if the 90s were pretty awesome.

Until next time,
brownbear

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