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I think the art style is so, so much more important than people give credit.

GGG voice: "The mission objective is incredibly unique: You visit 3 points of interest and face increasingly harder waves of enemies...."

>Go into an RTS game
>I ask the Receptionist if its a Westwood RTS or a Blizzard RTS
>She doesn't understand, I pulled out an illustrated diagram explaining the differences between a Westwood and a Blizzard RTS
>She laughs "It's a modern RTS, sir"
>Buy the game
>It's a Relic RTS

A lot of older RTS games are more creative then newer ones. Warcraft 3 had a lot more interesting characters, stories and environments than Stormgate for example.

It's not that new games are just doing what has been done by classic titles. They do it WORSE

One minor thing, the RTS camera perspective rewards exaggerated proportions, simple lines, and other similar designs for units.

Excessive detail or minute features on units create a cluttered, indistinct, and illegible battlefield and make it hard to convey unit personality.

Part of the reason RTS age well visually is because visual design accomodating low polygon counts and lower resolution textures naturally suit the camera perspective of RTS.

They weren’t just strategy games. They were creative worlds that were exciting to explore. If you were a history fan there was Stronghold, AoE, or Cossack. If you were a speculative fiction fan there was Command and Conquer, Ground Control, or Homeworld. Fantasy fan? World of Warcraft, Might and Magic.
Maybe it’s nostalgia but the stories felt compelling and I wanted to know more.

I think a big part of the problem is the general creative sterility that's afflicting all media these days.

A lot of classic RTS titles drew inspiration directly from all the creative storytelling in film and television that was going on at the time. Starcraft largely started out as Blizzard's development team wanting to take all the cool sci fi movies and TV shows they had grown up with like Aliens, Star Wars, Starship Troopers and so on, and make a video game about them. They spent hours and hours watching Aliens and Starship Troopers and thought "holy hell I want to play as those things in a video game!", then plugged that into a spare Warcraft engine and bingo - the Zerg.

That kind of cross-pollination from other media was a big influence on a lot of the most beloved RTS titles. KKND was basically made as a love letter to B-grade post-apocalypse movies from the 1970s and 1980s. Red Alert and Red Alert 2 both draw a lot from James Bond films. Homeworld is an homage to Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars (and 1970s space opera artwork). Even Company of Heroes started out as Saving Private Ryan/Band of Brothers translated into a video game.

These days media in general has become increasingly creatively sterile, largely driven by the executives in charge of funding new content being excessively risk-averse. That means a very monotonous landscape of remakes and cinematic franchise universes and sequels, and that monotomy of content bleeds over into the video game space as developers don't have the same colourful pool of other storytelling to draw inspiration from.

Though come to think of it a great war between Disney Princesses could make for a pretty awesome RTS game if it was done right..

If anything Tempest Rising proved that there is still an audience for classic RTS. It was very well received. Smaller studio though so it was never likely to go mainstream... but I think it did pretty good sales numbers.

The most recent AAA classic style RTS was AoE4, and that is still going strong like 6 years after release. Most games from other genres including AAA are dead after a couple of years.

RTS community has this weird narrative because the genre as a whole is not as popular as it used to be... but tell me where are the big studio AAA releases that failed with classic RTS? Or did they mostly only fail when they tried to change it too much?

Said it forever and ever. FACTION DESIGN matters. How many "oh these are the humans with tech, this is the bio-aliens and this is the ancient race" do we see? FACTION DESIGN makes an RTS stand out, makes you want to compete in that world.  Why do you think Warhammer makes an RTS and it goes gangbusters instantly? Why did Starcraft? C&C? Red Alert? The factions had so much personality and story.

4:00 there's a reason boomer shooters came back, some of the players actually don't want their shooter to be RPG with NPCs in the Open World, they just want a good shooter 😄

I have a similar issue with modern non-strategy games. Developers are being forced by the fallacy of "general audiences" to infest almost every new game with the aspects of "open world, MMO, PvP, looter-shooter base builder, roguelike, with pets". While not all have every aspect, that is where they start [as unholy crossbreeds of Minecraft, WoW, and Fortnite], instead of starting with a story or unique gameplay mechanic [or focusing on what made the series popular, as even former industry leaders like Final Fantasy are cloning other unrelated games now becoming Skyrim or God of War with Chocobos].

2 things I noticed RTS games have yet to commit to:

- Anyone remember the Bonus Campaign from The Frozen Throne? The one where it plays more like an RPG in the Warcraft 3 engine? Where's an RTS that starts you off like that and slowly rope you in with more traditional things an RTS does, i.e., missions with pre-deployed units alongside ur hero, a main hub where you just solo stuff with your hero, or even that bit in Act 2 where you build your own mini army to throw at the Humans

- Idk if it's cringe or some other belief but, there's a damn good reason the FMV quality ahh cutscenes ala the first 2 Command & Conquer and Red Alert games remain classic examples of unironically damn good storytelling & presentation. How do you top a mission briefing where your supposed handler gets shot right in front of you as Kane takes his place? Or the end campaign bonus of letting you, the player, choose which monument to Ion Blast?

Also, things I miss from the genre:

- Remember when RTS games used to treat you, the player, as well... a character? Minor as the player's role is, there's things you can do here-

- Or how about the SC 2 prototype Terran Campaign where you could "buy your tech tree" for missions too, there's so much untapped potential for micro and macro strategy yet to fully see it done well

Maybe some of these already exist. Do let me know, cause it is surprising if something new has done these

I think a big contributor to why a lot of AAA RTS games fail is lack of style.
Take Red Alert 2 for example, the game immediately smacks you with an amazing intro cinematic, followed by a wacky single player campaign with interesting units, great presentation and a fantastic memorable soundtrack. On top of this, it's very easy to pick up and play as the AI tends to go very easy on you even on the harder missions.

I think you need to be able to explain the game to your 4th grade class mates and have them swear because the concept was that cool, and that's not something Grey Goo, 9bit armies or now Stormgate managed to accomplish.
They're all solid and competent, but extremely boring compared to Doctor Thrax ribbing you about building a barracks to fight toxin trackors, or Yuri ribbing you about building a silo and sending 19 kirovs to vaporize you.

As for multiplayer. The singleplayer is the onramp for the multiplayer. You want people interested or you attacht no one, but sweats and people who play skirmish games all day.

There was this poll that showed that like 90% of players (i think of sc2) only played the campaign, then left.
Back in the day when game sales were the central metric, companies didn‘t care as much how long you stayed.
Now that every game needs to have constant revenue AND an esports-scene, those 90% are being alienated from the get-go.

There is a reason kerrigan appeared in the office:
People cared about the story being told… but game devs can‘t pitch a game just for the story because it doesn‘t bring long term profits

The reason why old RTS worked so well is primarily because they weren't made as Esports or as some DLCfests. They were made with a personality, and that personality was shown in everything like the graphics style, the UI design, the campaign design, the soundtrack, all of the extra content and game modes, you name it. The only old RTS that really blew into an Esport was Starcraft, but that's because it was so well designed that the players made it into an Esport, not because it was built with that intention. Blizzard probably didn't even expect that it will become what it became.

I think also at some point Devs lost track of what people liked in these games, the single thing I always enjoyed the most wasn't the deep micromanagement or clicking around like crazy to develop a fast economy because there is no time to waste, I wanted to see the fights, the moment my army clashes with their army and I want it to look cool. I remember playing Age of Mythology for the first time and being blown away by a cyclops throwing soldiers around, it wasn't just a unit with better stats, it actually had a visual impact, or when I first played Warhammer Dawn of War and saw the Space Marines switch to knifes and close quarter weapons to fight the orcs that got too close. That's the kind of details that make the game memorable in my opinion, everything else is important of course, but in the end you are making an iteration of something that has already been done a thousand times. I personally loved games like age of empires, but also hoped next iterations would bring things like soldiers on walls, towers with actual archers inside, maned catapults and ships and better fight animations.

I like to go back to Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge because of who I played it with.
When I was little, my best friend at the time showed me the game and I got hooked on it.
20+ years later I showed the game to my little brother (There is a 17ish year gap between us) and he loved it too.
We played the campaign together taking turns, during play time he would tell me things he wouldn't tell our parents and it was great.
It really brought us together, but there were also gameplay moments that stood out.

In the mission Last Chance of the original RA2 game. Our entire base got decimated.
I had no units left, except for a single GI.
We spend a bit of time exploring the map, trying to find where we could shoot at the Psychic amplifier from without being detected until we finally did.
As the amplifier was close to destruction, the AI finally decided to send tanks our way, so it was a tense situation for us.
My brother suddenly shouts: "We are calling you Joe!, we believe in you!"
In the end Joe was able to destroy the amplifier and we passed the mission.

2026 and he plays the game with his friends.

I think this is the kind of magic that has been lost in modern RTS titles.

Honestly I strongly disagree. What you primarily point towards isnt technology but scope expansion to include greater depth. But this by itself isnt a core reason or even necessarily a big point to the decline of RTS. The reformed Doom a decade ago proved FPS need not be realistic cover shooters or such and such by pulling back depth to more specialize rather than expand. RTS has already had this at several points like how Supreme Commander specializes in massive macro moves, or League of Legends with its emphasis on pure micro and individual unit depth. In large part the decline of classical RTS is as much trying to find the right balance and specialize where you need to do so. Starcraft is far from a perfect RTS, and honestly there are a lot of small elements in the game I absolutely hate. Tempest Rising personally suffered in art style to not make units visibly identifiable as what they do for example. RTS is just complicated from both a developer and consumer perspective.