I’ve seen a couple of articles that argue that real time strategy games (RTS’s) are “dying”. They’re not. They’re waiting. Waiting for the adoption of the hardware to implement the next generation RTS designs.
Hardware drives innovation
It is easy to forget how closely tied video game innovation is to the technology that it runs on top of. We didn’t even have “first person shooters” until Castle Wolfenstein 3D because the computing horsepower wasn’t there. The hardware drove the creation of an entire new genre of game.
Another hot market is “MOBA” (mobile online battle arena). This first got started as an RTS mod called Defense of the Ancients (DOTA). But this market only came into existence once low latency, high speed Internet became mainstream. It’s not as if the concept for MOBA had eluded game designers. Popular MOBAs like League of Legends, DOTA2 and of course the much anticipated Sins of a Dark Age are premised on players having high quality network connections.
We have done everything we can within 2 GB of memory and 2 cores
So what about real-time strategy games? Why has their design stagnated? 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.
Strategy game designers regularly quip about first person shooters and MOBA game hardware requirements “Must be tough having to mange and render 4 units all at the same time…”
Demigod has amazing visuals because it can – as a MOBA, it doesn’t have to have as many units in the world
Gas Powered Games made one of the most ambitious RTSs of all time – Supreme Commander. They also made the first stand-alone MOBA – Demigod. The graphics of Demigod go far beyond what’s in Supreme Commander at a fraction of the budget. Why is that? Because Demigod didn’t have to deal with hundreds of independent units running around at once which reduces memory use.
The gorgeous visuals and detail in Ironclad’s Sins of a Dark Age also mean fewer units in the world in order to be compatible with most PCs
The bane of game developers: No matter how much memory you have installed on your computer, 32 bit games can only “see” 2GB. That’s a limitation put on 32-bit processes in Microsoft Windows.
Ironclad’s Sins of a Solar Empire series pushes RTS’s about as far as they can go on the current hardware
I think most gamers would be shocked at how quickly memory gets consumed today. The icon for your favorite game probably uses more visual memory than many DOS games did.
What would a next-generation RTS be like?
Are you an RTS fan? Imagine what a truly ground breaking RTS would be like. Huge scale? Lots and lots of units? Huge armies battling it out on screen with amazing graphical fidelity? Throw in some innovative features to make managing these units really intuitive and compelling? It’s technically possible to do it, you would just have a hard time making money because most of the market wouldn’t be able to play it yet.
As a publisher, I get to see a lot of really innovative game designs cross my desk. There’s no shortage of innovative RTS designs. They just can’t be made profitable yet – their design requirements revolve around a player with DirectX 11, a 64-bit Windows OS and 4 cores (minimum). 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.
After all, can you imagine what would happen if you tried to make some sort of City simulation game today? People would expect to be able to zoom in on individual citizens and have breathtaking visuals but also expect it to take place on some giant map. The designers would have to either have to make the map you play on be really small or cut down the amount of detail or cut down the visual fidelity of the world/buildings (or a combination of all 3). It would be very difficult and expensive to pull off right…
Chris Taylor’s Total Annihilation, arguably still the best RTS ever made
Third Phase RTSs
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.
In both phases, the hardware drove the design of the RTS. Nothing highlighted the difference between Phase 1 and Phase 2 more than real-time Strategic Zoom. Strategic Zoom gave players the ability to zoom out and control their armies in a truly strategic way or zoom in and take control of individual groups. If Ender’s Game was, ironically, an RTS. You can assume that players will expect these kinds of features at a minimum going forward.
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.
Publishers aren’t approving these designs not because there isn’t demand. There is. The problem is you can’t make a game that only a fraction of the player base can currently play.
They’re coming…
According to the Steam Hardware Survey of January 2013 over 40% of users now have 4-core (or more) machines. DirectX10/11 is mainstream and almost 70% of users have 64-bit machines. Not good enough. Not yet. But almost.
Uber Entertainment is working on Planetary Annihilation which might be the start of 3rd phase of RTSs
Keep a close eye on the specs of games. Be looking for when games explicitly require a 64-bit PC and DirectX 10 or later as minimums. Once that has become mainstream, it’ll be a race by studios to position themselves.
The RTS game concept is compelling. It works as a single player experience and can be played as a multiplayer game. Gamers want these games. They’ll pay for these games. But they also have to be measurably superior than what’s already out on the market. To do that, the hardware has to catch up. The good news is that it’s almost ready.
IIRC Anno doesn't tend to have buttloads of units. Well I didn't play a whole lot of it. But it ran on my laptop that was almost 4 years old when I played it.
I am making RTS games, but its so easy to do literally nothing but play CK2 for a month straight that progress basically stalls anytime a really good strategy game comes out. On the other hand I dropped PoE after a single 6 hour day. I got it 8 days ago and I already have 115 hours played. Holy shit. I hadn't looked at that until right now. And all 115 were testing out various starts in Poland with a ruler designer character and I never even hit year 1150.
Whenever I'm discussing new features in between coding some asshole is like, that sounds vaguely like such and such game, and then at least a week is lost. A week on Achron, a week on Kohan, 2 weeks on Stronghold, a week so far on CK2 but eventually a month unless I really control myself. I only wasted a day on Towns though. Ooh a week on Hinterland. The list goes on. I had to drop a week replaying Majesty as well. And 2 weeks on Dredmor.
And by week I mean 8-16 hours a day for a whole week.
I do open source because adding business is too much work. I was supposed to drop a minimal concept game 2 months ago. Now its not going out until summer. God damn independent game developers. They need to stop making so many good games.
Dammit almost forgot the month I wasted on KoDP. It was spread out but still. God I love that game. I eventually quit though because after my first game I never again got my triceratops war mounts. I cried for a real life hour when they finally died in battle.
Frogboy isn't Ironclad. But his logic is sound.
I am quite happy with Sins of a Solar Empire.... which is a very good RTS with some E4X elements into it.
The thing with Anno 2070 is
I wrote this over at BluesNews but it's worth repeating here:
In terms of cores. RTS's are very parallel processing intensive (unit AI, physics on a large scale). A game like FarCry 3 only has to manage a few units in memory.
Pretty much every next generation design I've seen for an RTS involves increased scale, better graphics, etc. We're out of memory / CPU to do that.
I remember in Sins of a Solar Empire people wanted the ships to have turrets (become Homeworld had them). Gamers often ignore the difference between having 1 ship with physics and 1000 units with them.
Even SupCom had to cut a lot of corners to do what it did. Its maps, unlike TA, were largely 2D with effort made to give the illusion of 3D because it would have totally bogged down having that kind of scale and dealing with trajectories, etc. on a single core.
The cool designs coming up (which you will see over the next couple of years) will involve thousands of units fighting high fidelity battles where the player is managing armies because the units themselves will be able to have sufficient smart AI (CPU is always the AI coder's bane) to have them operate as combined arms groups.
What game designers have been doing in recent years is working within the limits to create squad based RTSs (CoH) and of course we saw the birth of MOBA games which allow for a very limited number of high fidelity units (but still with very limited physics).
In short, we need more than 2G so that we can be visually competitive with other game genres that only have to make a handful of units pretty and we need more cores so that we can do more parallel processing (physics, massive pathfinding, massive collission detection, unit AI, etc.).
Hope that helps.
I can't speak for Ironclad so this is just my opinion: There won't be a Sins 2 until it can be done in 64-bit. Even with Sins now, we struggle to add any more units and fit into 2GB. And players would expect more sophisticated physics in play I suspect (measures and counter-measures on weapons for instance) and that would mean more cores to be available (I suspect you could probably do a Sins 2 with dual core but I wouldn't want to be the one coding that <g>).
As for Stardock, no we don't internally have it in our technical wheelhouse to make an real-time engine. They'll require next-gen engines that we'd have to license and as a practical matter, there aren't any currently available that can do it.
The ONLY engine I'm aware of that is close to existing that could do next-gen is what Uber is building. And even there, I'd imagine they'd have to support 32-bit which means they'll have to severely limit those players (either smaller maps or fewer units). But Uber's engine, I suspect, is massively multithreaded so it can put together a proper job system for parallel rendering/physics/path finding/etc. That puts it beyond anything that I know of.
Put another way, the Forge engine (SupCom's engine) would be like an F-15. The Iron engine (Sins of a Solar Empire) would be that class of an engine as well. Still really good. Uber's engine is more like the F-22. A true next-gen (please understand, I'm not privy to what they're working on, I'm just looking at their concept video at seeing what they plan to do and what I think it would take to deliver on that).
The F-22 is a POS, so I wouldn't compare it to that.
I'm still wondering what percentage of your customers for TBS games are still using XP- and when do you pull the plug? I can understand why you didn't on LH, but if you're getting down to 10%, it's time on your next game.
BOO. Why do you say that. You prefer the F-35?
Should have went with the YF-23, was cheaper than the Raptor and not to mention, are they still grounded...?
Oh, what do you think of what Fraser said in a interview that was released days ago...
They are better than drones
I was gonna ask the same thing. Whats up with all the hate?
I happen to like all of the above. TBS, RTS, and MOBA's. I can get into some FPS, or 3rd person shooters too. It just depends on my mood at the time. Different people have different tastes. No point on dissing others over what kind of game the like or don't like.
I totally agree with Frogboy on the OP about the hardware issue, but i will add that until we go full blown 64 bit then games in general not just RTS are gonna stagnate.
I will also like to point out that next gen graphics take up a huge chunk of resources, but are only a small part of the overall big picture. CPU usage also plays a big role too. AI, Pathfinding, Weapon calculations, Buffs Debuffs etc. etc. Nobody stops to think about what is under the hood, or what goes on in a game that we do not see. People think it is so easy to make a game. I can safely say it is not an easy task at all. You also have to consider the game play itself. You can have the prettiest. Most awesome graphics in the world in any game. However if no effort is put forth in innovation, and the game play itself. Then you will fail. It doesn't matter what kind of game it is. No amount of eye candy will ever save a game that sucks.
Strategy has nothing to do with scale or graphics. The old developers understood that... The reason RTS is dead is because the games simply lack strategy
That's why better RTS games came out 10 years ago than today (SC2 is basically a game from 15 years ago in design). resource management works well, and it doesn't get better with stronger PCs
Better PCs will probably hinder progress when the reality is that they'll be used for graphics or millions of units while exploding budgets, rather than something useful like AI
I have a feeling that CoH 2, while not a next phase RTS so to speak, will bring a ton of attention to RTS. After all, CoH 1 is considered one of the best RTS's ever.
Seriously I believe 2013 is the year of the RTS. God there are so many good RTS games coming out. CRAZY GOOD!
frog, as a minor aside, in my personal network of systems, I have FOUR(classed as primary gaming) quad core or quadcore/hyperthreading(speeds are 2ghz,4ghz,4ghz,3.4ghz) with 8gb or more ram and 64 bit OS(vista,w7,w7,w7), the 3 dual cores are mostly for mundane stuff like websurf/download/email/ fileserving/evaluation(and classed as seconadary game capable) and field use, and the remaining comps are singlecore for legacy support/testing of old programs(legacy(pre2k) gaming only).
harpo
Basically, they are looking to make the game as scalable as possible. And pretty much every other engine out there right now is too rigid to be able to do that properly, at least for what they are looking at doing. Hopefully success with Uber's new engine will spark innovations in RTS games, and game engines in general.
Thank you for your insights into the industry frogboy.
KAG was awesome-kings of war not so much. a modernized and expanded KAG would be awesome but it seems that timegate is not doing too well these days so kohan 3is not very likely.
It seems very ironic that we've had better hardware and software for years, yet very little changed until the new consoles were coming.
PC gaming should have a new motto: no matter how things advance, nothing happens as everyones too afraid of ostracizing anyone.
I'm going back to console gaming next gen at least until PC gaming gets back to being the gold standard. Properly optimized 64 bit games with DX11/equivalent won't just be just a pipe dream with the new machines...it'll be the default.
PC gaming? We'll probably see a few start showing up...because of the consoles, not because anyone was actually going to put the resources into it otherwise.
most would buy newer hardware to play dx11 quad+ core super graphic, huge map, enourmous multiplayer STARDOCK game.
So, the Playstation 4 can make RTS games?
Well it could probably play them decently now. But the entire game would have to be designed for the console in question. Strategy game ports from PC to console usually do not do well because of the totally different control schemes.
The PS3 supports KB+M as I recall, and all the C&C games between 2 and 4 (3, Kanes Wrath, RA3 iirc) were on the X360. Never tried them of course.
As a strategy gamer I've come to accept that I play games in a NICHE market. I lOVE turn based strategy games with RPG elements (Like AoW and FE). I'm very excited for Legendary Heroes and i'm hoping you are considering a new galactic civilizations.
SoSE is one of my favorite RTS games. I'm looking forward to a sequel if we ever get one. And i've been waiting a long time for a new homeworld game.
Going to bring this thread back to life here. I am a huge RTS fan, been playing for years since SC:BW.
I'm here to let you all know of a new RTS coming out within the year. You can get into alpha now. But it is called Novus AEterno. They have a Kickstarter for 8 more days... they also have a website at novusaeterno.com, please check it out, for the love all RTS games... please check this out!
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