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Relic can be saved while it's not too late now.
AmalurLegend
For god's sake, I give you the last advice for your survive.
To Relic:
To make a W40K Action game with heavy RPG elements to save your company. (It's like the combination of Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light and Diablo 2)
To make a modern warfare RTS game. You can see the develop history of Call of Duty, from WWII to Modern warfare and then Titanfall.
All IP needs a rest, and the best choice is do not make too much sequel. For example, you can make COH2 after COH1, but if you want to release COH3, you had better release other new IP to make sure it has enough time to keep it fresh. And do not make COH4.
Remember, if you want to test a new game mode, you should use a new IP to do it. The Dawn of War series is a bad example and we can see how this example tear the community into many divided player bases.
To produce Age of Mythology 2 is better than to produce Age of Empires 4, the AOE4 is a Death Trap and you can not success with it, because no one would be satisfied by it.
About AOE4, now all you can do is try to cater the majority of AOE2's fans and do not want to cater everyone to ensure you have a not bad sale numbers.
To players:
Cherishing everything you have now, we can do not like games that Relic made, but we still have to buy their games to support them to survive. Because if Relic does fall and then there is no other company can make AAA RTS games. Do not regret it until it arrives.
Open your eyes to figure out what do you really like! Open your mind to figure out what elements you like can be really added in the game.
To learn compromise, the game company can not satisfied everyone, so players have to learn compromise to adapt new games.
Want the RTS genre to survive? Support Relic!
Thanks for reading.
Comments
Dandalus
Well for sure u got some points, but having to buy Relic games for rts to survive even if we don't like them? That's the most hilarious thing I heard for some time, Relic got the deserving economic damage for failing DoW3 badly, it's not the game had no good elements, it had like large scale allowing for multiple front battles rather than blobs, yet the game had much more cons than pros like the victory conditions, if they just copy paste DoW1 win conditions it would be great, they didn't, if they just copy paste Firestorm over Kaurava with new engine it would be INSTANT success, they didn't. I got DoW3 to play CSM now I see I never will so Relic go to hell.
Draconix
To be honest, I don't know anyone other, who could make some good AAA RTS titles these times like Blizzard and of course, Relic. There is Petroglyph, yes but none of their RTS games made so far are Triple A titles in my view.
Overall, I would prefer Relic to stay as long as possible even after Dow3's underserved in my opinion death, so there would be another studio making AAA RTS than Blizzard. Monopoly in gaming industry is actually bad for customers, even if it is a studio with good titles and experience. Some competition on market is not a bad thing, since we have some options to choose.
CANNED_F3TUS
RTS is a dead genre man. The only RTS games that are gonna appeal are those that are already doing ok or have a ultra niche fanbase (which wont make nearly as much money as some of the really successful RTS games back in the day) There is just no money to be made.
Like SC has a huge following. They could easily pull another SC out of their ++heresy redacted++ and it will sell. But Blizzard is off trying to do some moba stuff or whatever and RTS is bottom on their priority list because they killed the genre lol.
The only people that will try to make strategy games are indi devs and more often than not they dont ever get anywhere or copy alot of stuff or try to mooch off of other audiences from other games. Iron harvest is one of those examples. It looks like a CoH clone but with robots and wierd hero units.
TokyoDream
Don't be so negative. If XCOM can come back from the dead, anything is possible.
CANNED_F3TUS
Miracles can happen but not for DoW lol. That boat is sunk and RTS is sinkin too or else we would get more of em.
Amoc
RTS isn't as big a genre as it used to be but it's hardly dead. The problem, of course, is that there really haven't been any new or compelling games in over 10 years. I look back at the RTS genre and the last two games that I thought were even remotely interesting new takes on the genre were World in Conflict (2007) and R.U.S.E. (2010).
With that being the case it's no surprise that CoH and SC are the only franchises doing anything these days. Nobody is offering worthwhile alternatives. There are plenty of games that are fine in their one rights (like Homeworld: DoK) but without anything compelling the genre forward, it's going to stay in the stale place it's occupied for the last 10 years.
0riginal_z0M
Its a big shame though, I feel like back in the day PC games were more appealing as even DOW1 could be played on basic systems, to us lot we have gaming rigs but the new generations are happy with the consoles and thats why its not what it used to be.. also with the current age of tech, I doubt GW even holds half the appeal. I for one upgraded my system in anticipation for this game ( along with needing to for my design work) but many of my pals who played RTS (and other genres mainly mmo), will not invest in PC for one game every blue moon, and ofc, we're not early 20's anymore, mo money less time!
Shame but when a company like Relic pulls a stunt like this (start to finish)... I dont blame them!
Its true you cant be negative but I mean... It is hard to be optimistic, will be interesting to see how AOE4 does but I for one will not be buying it until it proves to be a very good success a few months in.
I am also looking forward to see what Gladius - Relics of war will be like.
Lakaoum
I think Relic is saved. Saved cause dow3 was a good RTS, they have done real mistakes, and it is impossible to come back from a such big gap. Trying to bring race, can on the best possibilty just cover the cost of the developpement.
Relic is saved cause they decide to stop devolepping the game. Keeping humans ressource and money for AOE4 and DoW4 or CoH3. If in two yeras they launch a perfect dow4, everyone, even those that are so sad today will forgive them, saying, hey ok, dow4 is the best thing that should happen to the dow sequel.
Now i love dow3, this is by far my favorite RTS on the dow series. And i would like to play it for many years. It will never happen. Relic is completly honest on that point. The best way to save a community is to speak clearly.
We have Blizzard and Relic for "classical RTS", yes. Grey Box with Grey Goo manage to do a superb RTS game too, but they need to learn from the small mistake they 've done too. RTS is nearly dead, but studio that developp such games should do it with all their passion, the RTS community is the best of all, if you have passion! As on human relationship, passion can burn, sometimes, if you make an offense. Relic has been burnt by their lovers. Not by all, but by a big part.
Ololo111
DoW4 wouldn't be perfect since the launch because of it's heritage. Just like DoW3 hand't been, because it's a game after DoW2 - the attrocity, that shouldn't have ever been commited.
It will all backfire. Just like DoW2 playerbase backfired on DoW3, just like CoH2's one will backfire on CoH3 (because the original one was roughly flushed after the launch).
They hadn't dropped DoW2, so with the time Retribution became an acceptable deal even for me. They hadn't dropped CoH2 despite it really deserved it. They haven't done anything wrong in production of DoW3.. but they just dropped it. And it's the same credibility they've lost with it.
No, I don't think Relic need to be saved. They just need to produce and sell AoE right. There was an article about Rome TW II beating some other A-priced title record at getting -75% 6 months past the release in Steam... and CA are releasing addon to it this month after WH titles success.
At the same time, OP is quite right about AoE, though I won't call it a "deathrap", but a minefield for sure. It's going to have much patchier playerbase than DoW3 could dream to have with all those twists around the serie. I don't want them to fail, but I'm doubtful in Relic capabilities now even with MS doing all the marketing. That's my personal opinion, of course.
Draconix
Makes some sense, since as I know, its very hard to succed own previous titles with new ones. Of course there are some exceptions like Witcher, but on other hand Mass Effect Andromeda didn't succeded Original Trilogy with Shepard. So I wouldn't be suprised if Witcher 4, if ever will be would be unable to succed Trilogy with Gerald.
Fun fact is that Planetary Annihilation is a spiritual successor of Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, yet as far I know, it turned out to be mediocre in comparision with them. While new WH40K RTS would be nice in case if there wouldn't be new DoW, I wouldn't suprised either if it turns out good, but still lackluster in comparision with Dow1. Not to mention that DoW franchise is always AAA RTS game, while new WH40K RTS IP might turn be rather a AA RTS title.
Opinion post with facts about Mass Effect and Planetary Annihilation.
Dandalus
It's a sad truth DoW2 was an atrocity never should have existed.
Amoc
As a sequel to DoW I, I'd agree, but it was a decent game on its own and it was obviously popular with its own fanbase. Trying to cater to both the DoW I and the DoW II fanbases with DoW III was obviously a giant flop, but that's another story.
TokyoDream
DOW2 wasn't the sequel I wanted but in some ways I wish they used more elements of it for DOW3. Wargear, RPG mechanics and a non-linear campaign were good ideas. I assumed Relic was going to do something with them in DOW3. Nope.
Dandalus
DoW1 already had hero wargear in campaign.
Dullahan
XCOM is a good example when you consider that it had to reinvent the genre to make that comeback.
RTS is stuck in a bad place though. Too many people want different things from the genre. StarCraft II is still ticking away, more or less scratching most of the major itches (Great campaign, solid co-op and casual play, very competitive play) but by and large the genre is in dire straits.
Amoc
Great campaign(s) until Legacy of the Void at least :P
In terms of SC2, the big issue there is that nobody has offered anything better since then. The only RTS that I've played since SC2 released that I'd say was even remotely compelling in terms of fresh design was Deserts of Kharak. That was a fantastic game but it was an Indie dev on a tight budget with limited marketing and it was clear from the start that MP was never going to take off. The game never sold enough to generate a viable MP community. Content was also a problem but the real killer was that the game never reached any sort of critical mass appeal.
nachocheese
Deserts of Kharak let down a lot of homeworld fans, previous homeworld games also had a huge mod community with loads of content so not even having a map editor was very stupid. Cant expect people to stick with a game that has barely any maps and bad AI on top of it.
Draconix
Perhaps indeed, lackluster compared to previous HomeWorld games, but I'm still looking forward to give it a own personal shot, just like I was in Dow3's case.
Amoc
It was obvious that the game was pretty light on content (especially at a AAA price) and it was going to tire people out quickly without swift updates, but ultimately it didn't matter. The game's sales were awful and with a short campaign it was going to live and die by its multiplayer. Too few people bought it for a multiplayer community to ever form, however, so the MP was in death-spiral territory right out of the gate.
It was a weird and unusual game failure (IMO).
Dullahan
Just another body in the graveyard as far as recent RTS releases are concerned.
Amoc
The one thing folks should consider is that RTS is hardly unique in how stale it's become. Whether you're looking at shooters, MMO's, RTS, TBS, TCG or RPG's, they're all littered with the corpses of failed and lacklustre games. There are more misses than hits across the board.
The RTS market is certainly smaller than it used to be, but the fact that studios continue to make RTS games tells us everything we need to know about whether the market still exists. The fact that new games consistently disappoint doesn't prove that the market's not there. It just proves that nobody is really making interesting new games.
Dullahan
The studios that continue to make RTS games are only doing it because they themselves are fans of the genre. Relic and Petroglyph are the largest and they only continue to do it because it is all they have ever done. Compare that to the late 90's and early 2000s when we had large publishers and studios pumping them out on the regular. EA was pumping out RTS games every year or two with C&C and BFME 2. Blizzard was practically founded on the back of StarCraft and Warcraft, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Empire Earth etc were all very popular (AoE has seen a resurgence though admittedly), Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander, Rise of Nations, World in Conflict, Homeworld etc etc. Where are any of these franchises now? Except for AoE and arguably StarCraft 2 (The game is alive, but does anyone think we will see SC3 anytime soon?) these franchises are all pretty much dead.
Simply look at this list and tell me that RTS games didn't fall off a cliff in the 2010's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_real-time_strategy_video_games
There were 218 RTS games between 2000-2010 and there were 30 between 2010 and present day.
The genre has been dying for over a decade now. MOBA's took the market by force and killed the RTS genre and then people complain when long standing RTS franchises try to blend elements from those far more successful titles back in.
Amoc
Even SC in its heyday didn't boast the sort of numbers we see for LoL. While MOBA's are no doubt partially responsible for RTS' smaller market share today, there's undeniably still a market for RTS.
The release numbers for DoW III prove that. It sold a quarter million copies right off the start. It pretty much died at the gate, however, because it grossly disappointed.
As a counter-example, just look at They Are Billions. That's a low-budget Indie game that doesn't even have a campaign yet, but it's already surpassed DoW III in terms of player retention. It's a great game and offers a unique experience. It's not trying to be SC, or CoH, or latch on to the MOBA market. It targeted a niche and built a game for THOSE people. It's already sold over half a million copies (in early-access) and has a nearly 90% positive steam user review rating. If RTS was "dead" then an obscure Indie title like TAB would never have gone anywhere. The fact that folks invested in an unknown developer and a brand-new RTS IP proves that the market is there. Folks are starving for compelling new RTS experiences.
The unholy abomination we got with DoW III doesn't prove that RTS is dead. It's another bad RTS that failed.
Dullahan
They Are Billions is more of a tower defense game than an RTS. The roots of the genre are in adversarial combat between relatively equal opponents (Original RTS games were mostly symmetrical factions for example) competing over the same resources. A reduction of the formula into a wave based survival mode is more popular because it discards many of the gameplay mechanics present in other games and keeps things simple and manageable.
It's like when people try to call Total War an RTS because you can sort of control units in combat. It has nothing in common with the historic roots of the genre.
Dullahan
They are Billions is popular precisely because it discards everything that makes RTS an RTS, including having a pause feature. It has more in common with tower defense games than it does the classic RTS formula. The key words in their store page are: "This game is all about strategy, not player performance or the player’s skill to memorize and quickly execute dozens of key commands. Pause the game and take all the time you need!" Can it really be an RTS game if it's trying to appeal to the audience that only likes the idea of the "real time" part of RTS? To me, it's just another strategy game. (Which has been a very popular genre in the last decade. Only RTS has suffered.)
RTS has its roots in adversarial combat between relatively equal forces competing over the same resources to try and kill each other. The original games were even symmetrical factions, or symmetrical factions with minor differences. Classic RTS games like StarCraft, C&C and Age of Empires are all about adversarial multiplayer and that is indeed a niche that hasn't seen much success in a very long time.
Amoc
Depending on how broad or narrow you want to make the definition of the genre, the argument goes in wildly different directions. You've chosen a really narrow definition and that changes the debate into something altogether different.
If we're talking about games that built on the original formula of Dune, C&C and Warcraft, then sure. RTS has expanded substantially since then, and I don't think it should be surprising or even interesting that game design has evolved from 20+ year old formulas. There's always going to be limited market space for such and old and refined genre niche, so unless someone can come up with something substantially better than Starcraft, it's not going to go anywhere.
The reason why nobody can really touch LoL or WoW these days is similar. We're dealing with mature markets with large player bases firmly established at the top. They do what they do better than anyone else and they have more resources and a bigger fan base to deliver relevant content and updates. Why would people choose the underdog, particularly when nothing new or interesting is being offered?
Gorb
I wish there was more nuance to these discussions that "this game is bad because the market decided so". Good games can fail. Bad games can succeed. Well, more likely, games that aren't either excellent or terrible. It's not as straightforward as "well this game is doing well ergo it must be good". Or the reverse.
To keep reinforcing claims about how DoW III was bad on those grounds is as poor logic as you claim others display, @Amoc.
Singular counterexamples don't change that. The "market" doesn't exist by dint of singular examples. It works on trends, and RTS is trending downwards. Undeniably. DoW III's failures are not down to it not necessarily being a poor RTS game. A lot of the criticism was because it used the DoW name. You even used this argument yourself. If it didn't have the DoW name, heck, it if leveraged a different or new IP, it might've been a different story. You say that 250,000 was a good amount of pre-orders, there were multiple active threads on Steam by different posters reinforcing the image that the pre-orders were doing badly. People were - before the game was released - being very vocal (repeatedly) about how this game was going to fail because the pre-orders were so low. So either someone is wrong in this equation, or maybe the people on Steam were running some deliberate misinformation to put people off. Who knows.
The place where we're at now is because of the specific intersection of the chosen IP, the chosen genre, and how its fans perceive their preferred games. If this could be debated without falling into the "why are you blaming the fans" trap (nobody in good faith blames all fans for anything, but as with anything that has nuance factors must be acknowledged), it'd be a good start.
For example, "disaffected fans can't have a noticeable dent on Steam reviews" was something that you've argued before. The non-constructive detractors, the unreasonable "haters", you claimed this specific demographic was so minor that they in no way could affect the Steam metrics in any real way. And yet, when SEGA announced a lack of support, the reviews were tanked further than they'd ever gone before. So certainly, a certain population on Steam is capable of radically influencing a game's score on Steam. The only counterargument here would be the supposition that people upset by SEGA's decision outnumber the aforementioned demographic of unreasonable malcontents. But there is absolutely zero evidence to that counterargument, and indeed if made, would only be based on wishful thinking. Naturally, it hasn't been made yet. My point here was simply to illustrate that contrary to past debate, Steam reviews can radically change by the actions of a small group of users. The extent of this effect is of course debatable, but the existence of such is undeniable.
If folks were starving for such experiences, they wouldn't be so critical of the experiences they receive. Somebody who's starving is not picky about the food they eat - take that from me
And don't get me started on genres. Everyone has a different interpretation of them; to rely on that particular semantic argument is rather odd, considering your historic disdain of any semantic arguments. Enough examples of RTS games have been provided for them to be debated specifically, instead of retreating back in how narrow or broad someone is defining RTS to be.
Opinion post.
Dullahan
It's hardly a narrow definition, requiring an RTS game to take place fully in real-time and have adversarial multiplayer (vs AI or humans) that requires you to compete over resources is the lifeblood of the genre. There isn't a single classic game in the genre that doesn't feature those mechanics in its core. C&C4 and Achron both fit into that and those are some of the most "unique" games in the genre.
Except games still get made and are highly successful in both genres. The mobile market is flooded with half baked MOBA's, and there's plenty of successful MMO's that aren't WoW. These games all find an audience beyond a few hundred people unlike just about every RTS game released in the last 8 years. No one is quite as successful, but atleast those games find an audience and you can actually ++heresy redacted++ play them. Something like Battlerite, some random free2play MOBA I pulled up on steam, has 10K people playing it right now. No that's not LoL numbers but that's still a sizeable playerbase. I have an easier time loading up a decade old game like BFME2 or C&C3 and finding a match than I do with anything released in the last 8 years save for CoH2.
Every time I buy an RTS these days I regret it because there's no multiplayer base that survives for more than a few weeks/months and then they're essentially dead weight in my steam library. It's just as bad as indie multiplayer games that never find more than 5 people online at any one time.
BTW that list of 30 games I mentioned earlier includes remakes (StarCraft remastered, age of empires 2 HD for example) so really the list of RTS games released in recent years is less than many single years in the decade prior. If that's not a sign of a dead genre, I don't know what is. Worse, it's a genre defined by multiplayer so you can't even play what few games do exist by yourself and expect to have much fun.