Hindsight Foresight

[Rohag]

Back in early December 2002 on what must have been a slow news day, GameSpy Daily pointed its readers to a three-year-old “The Future of Strategy Games” article. One of the individuals Fargo of GameSpy interviewed for the piece was Bruce Shelley, acclaimed gaming god best known for the “Age of” series.

So, while turn-based games and real-time games will remain distinct, Shelley suspects that as the RTS genre searches for new twists, it'll begin to focus even more on planning and building -- game elements classically reserved for turn-based games. "We expect to see someone do a great job of making the non-combat parts of RTS more important. The first game that does that very well could be huge success. Casual gamers are more comfortable with that side of RTS and they buy many more games than the hard-core, combat oriented multi-players."

That conversation took place in late 1999, shortly before (?) Brian Reynolds and friends left Firaxis to found Big Huge Games and begin work on Rise of Nations.

Ideas don’t exist in a vacuum and I would expect Shelley’s comments to be his own expression of sentiments at large in the game design community. Has similar thinking at least in part guided RoN’s design and development?

[tniem]

Sure.

I think what we are seeing in the RTS developement community is a search for new ways of doing things. We see this in the two biggest games released last year (WC3 and AoM). WC3 featured a new twist with a type of RP element in the game. It was certainly interesting. AoM included twists with researching gods and having the gods aid in building up your empire. Certainly interesting new ideas.

This seems to be in the same mode. They are just trying to get new ideas and changes to the same old formula. We will see how successful BHG is and the rest of the industry in giving some more life to the RTS equation.

[Alex]

The traditional RTS formula, shaped and sharpened in the "Age of" games, has clearly come to a stall. The traditional TBS formula has also reached that stage, at least from what we can see from titles like Civ3. Both genres have to look for new ideas. I think that if RON becomes a huge success then it will set up a new industry standard for RTSs, and this may even be refined to a point where the TBS games will slowly disappear, unless these games can find new ways of breathing life and freshness to the genre.