Are Consoles Finally Ready for Real-Time? (Part 1)

Real-time strategy games, as a genre, have not been very kind to me these last several years. The last RTS I ever dug into with any aplomb was Blizzard's Warcraft III. It was then, as I dutifully built my bases, harvested wood and cranked out countless units all armed with special abilities, that I really began questioning my actual liking for the genre. More recently on the console side of things, I've always felt compelled to play more RTS games on the Xbox 360, more as a way of balancing my gaming diet over actually having an affinity for this style of game. Consequently, my experience with RTS titles on the 360 often begin and end with a game's demo.

Given my spotty history with RTSs, it's been a surprise to catch myself feeling much more optimistic about the genre. But what is it about this genre that has me being pulled in one moment and pushed away the next? Why now, of all times, am I suddenly feeling bullish about real-time strategy, especially on the consoles?

To understand my optimism, we need to take a quick jaunt in our time machine. Real-time strategy is a genre that began in 1992 with the seminal Dune 2 and has, shockingly, changed very little in the last 17 years. Seventeen years. That period of time in the games industry is equivalent to the birth and passing of a star (as an aside, I've been rewatching bits of Danny Boyle's Sunshine and I do relish my space ship disaster movies!). It's amazing to consider just how very little has changed in seventeen long years within a genre that would seem so rife with possibilities. When it debuted, Dune 2 established a new way to play strategy games by combining the combat-driven goals of traditional hex-based war games with the empire-building and "play god" qualities of games like Populous and SimCity. While there were already games on the market that held similar ambitions, none of them had Dune II's sense of immediacy of allowing you to control your armies in real time. Leisurely turns played against the AI or against human opponents over play-by-mail systems were a thing of the past. Strategy was now a real time affair and the gaming public (including yours truly) ate it up.

Dune II's basic formula of harvesting resources, building a base and amassing a massive army to destroy the enemy's base was perfected in the years to come. Westwood Studios, the studio responsible for creating the RTS template, followed up Dune II with Command and Conquer, while PC games upstart Blizzard entered the market with their wildly successful Warcraft games. By the time we approached the late 1990s, the PC games market was literally overflowing in RTS titles. The Westwood and Blizzard franchises quickly became the gold standard against which all other pretenders to the throne were compared against. Unfortunately for us, there were far too many pretenders and consumers were soon awash in mediocore "me-too" experiences.

I want to skip ahead several years to the present day in order to show just how little has changed with RTS games since the '90s. The genre really has evolved into a very niche genre, not unlike the fighting games that seem to be going through a renaissance right now. RTS adhere to a very particular set of rules and conventions and demand a relatively high level of performance from its players. To the average player, your typical RTS presents a rather daunting task. Even with the luxury of a keyboard and mouse, most RTSs play out like a multi-tasker's wet dream. There are tech dreams to memorize, workers and harvesters to manage, not to mention a war that needs to be waged, sometimes on multiple fronts. What results can be described as a glorious marriage of fast reflexes, even faster tactics and true panic-induced strategic thinking. On a less favourable day, your typical RTS can devolve into a mind-numbing arms race, as each player blunders through their production tree so as to build up the largest army of the strongest (or cheapest) units and send the entire mob en mass to the enemy's front gates. All of this unfolds admist a cacophonous flurry of hotkey strokes and mouse clicks.

As if it comes as any surprise, this style of of game play and interface design has transitioned rather horribly to the home console. Thumb sticks are no substitute for even the worst mouse. We've also pretty much reached the conceivable limit of buttons we can comfortably fit onto a game pad. While recent advancements have streamlined common tasks like unit selection, preparing build queues and creating hotkeys, playing console RTSs remains a cumbersome, labour-intensive venture. (In light of this grim fact, I'd like to give out big props to the developers of Command & Conquer for their hard-headed insistence on fighting this uphill battle)

Oh, but times, they are a'changin'. I've recently been sucker punched by Ubisoft Shanghai's EndWar, a Tom Clancy property that puts the player squarely back into the army commander's boots: an army commander, I might add, who has also bee relieved of his middle management and junior accounting duties. This game, despite it's rough edges, has impressed me to no end. Also on the horizon, I am looking forward to the ever mysterious Halo Wars. Both EndWar and Halo Wars point the way towards a very bright future for strategy games on the console and I'll be going more in-depth in my next post about how they have the potential to change our opinions about RTSs forever.