Game On: What happened to real-time strategy games?

While the dichotomy between AAA video games and indie titles fills many gaps, the popularity of specific genres nevertheless seems to come and go like fashion trends. For instance, while one-on-one fighting games have remained steadily popular, the long-dormant cooperative beat ’em up genre recently experienced a resurgence with the surprising success of 2020’s Streets of Rage 4 and 2022’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge.

One genre that seems to have largely fallen out of fashion is the real-time strategy game. The genre was exceptionally popular with PC gamers in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, championed by the likes of Command & Conquer, StarCraft and Age of Empires. Today, it’s much more common for strategy and/or role-playing games to be turn-based, rather than real-time.

Ironically, it wasn’t long ago that most gamers turned their noses up at turn-based games, as they were perceived to be sluggish and archaic. After all, real-time titles tend to have a more immersive world with a greater sense of urgency. On the other hand, they can feel a bit sloppy and haphazard compared to the tactical precision offered by turn-based games.

Of course, that supposed sloppiness didn’t stop StarCraft from becoming a popular game for esports tournaments, especially in South Korea, where prize pools were in the millions of U.S. dollars. That scene has cooled off somewhat in recent years, but there are still plenty of diehards.

Most tactical games 25 to 30 years ago were turn-based out of technical necessity. Rendering full-scale battles in real-time, even from a far-away and/or isometric view, was too much for most computers to handle at the time. Once that changed, the gates were thrown wide for the likes of legendary titles like Age of Empires and Rise of Nations, among many others.

I recently returned to Rise of Nations after many years, and while I’m baffled it never received a proper sequel, the 2003 title holds up remarkably well. While the real-time game Northgard focuses mostly on resource management and the aptly named Halo Wars overemphasizes combat, Rise of Nations offers a near-perfect blend of the two.

The game allows players to select a real-world nation – each with their own strengths and weaknesses – and advance their empire all the way from the ancient age to the information age. I can’t help laughing at the satirical historical references, like how converting your government to capitalism boosts oil production and building the Kremlin produces an endless supply of spies.

Ironically, Rise of Nations was created to be a spiritual successor to Age of Empires, which was struggling to maintain relevance at the time. While it’s still not a household name, the series was reinvigorated in 2019 with the release of Age of Empires IV, and at-the-time studio head Shannon Loftis freely admitted that Rise of Nations helped inform aspects of its development. Such feedback loops are not uncommon in the video game industry.

But none of the aforementioned titles can compete with the popularity of Sid Meier’s Civilization, which has been going strong with few missteps since 1991. While I admire the series, I do find that controlling an entire nation’s economic and military actions in a turn-based environment is simultaneously dull and overwhelming – a perplexing combination.

In my defense, I’m an adult with limited free time and the average Civilization session takes around five hours to complete compared to Rise of Nations’ one hour. There’s nothing saying you can’t save and come back later, but upon returning, I typically find my flow is lost and I’ve forgotten my ongoing strategy.

Despite Civilization’s overshadowing success, there are quite a few modern RTS games available today – Gord, The Settlers, Company of Heroes, Falling Frontier and Northgard, to name a few – they simply don’t attract the legions of players that the genre once did.

One issue that’s always held the genre back is its playability on a controller. The tried-and-true mouse and keyboard has and likely always will be the superior input device for RTS titles. But with more and more gamers making the jump to PC gaming – Statista estimates a 1.6% increase in PC gamers from 2022 to 2023 – RTS games could find their way back into the limelight someday soon.