10/05/99

It's a good time to be a real-time strategy gamer again. All of a sudden I feel like we are back in 1997 when there were dozens of RTS games hitting the stores. At that point Command & Conquer and Warcraft had established themselves as the leaders in the genre. But there was a whole new batch of RTS games coming out, all with their sights set on the big boys. It was the year that gave us Total Annihilation, Age of Empires and of course Dark Reign. Well, here we are...two years later and it's RTS time again. I'm sure a lot of you have played TA: Kingdoms and I know a lot of you were there on the first day to buy Tiberian Sun (I know I was). And now we have Age of Kings coming out...

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It's very interesting to sit back and see what the competition has been up to the last two to three years. Making Dark Reign 2 is a lot like an RTS game in real life. I try to stay one step ahead of my adversaries as I build my base (form Pandemic Studios), gather my resources (hire the best team possible) and go out and formulate my strategies (make design decisions). Of course, scouting out the adversaries is crucial - I know where we stand with Dark Reign 2, but I never know everything they are doing. Although I don't actually know anyone on any of the other teams, if they are anything like me, they are closely reading everything that the competition is up to and trying to one-up me as well.

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So, what do I think about the latest competition? Well... where do I begin? I feel that as developers, we owe it to game players to consistently push the genre forward, to create new and exciting ways of playing a game. If we sit back and just regurgitate the same thing over and over again I think people are going to get bored after a while. Look at the adventure genre - too many Myst clones just about killed it. Now I sit and look at (and play) the competition. At first glance, I have to say that these games are really polished. But at the end of the day I can't help but feel a little bit empty. Maybe it's just a selfish thing. I want to see some new, cool feature that I can "borrow" for Dark Reign 2. (Believe me... everyone always steal things from other people's games.) But I am left wondering what has happened to the genre. Don't get me wrong. I have played Tiberian Sun like a fool. And I actually enjoy it. But it is more for sentimental reasons than for anything else. The RTS genre hasn't advanced at the pace of other genres - shooters, RPGs, and action games have taken advantage of new hardware and 3D acceleration to build out the gameplay experience, and those RTS games that did offer those advancements, like Myth and Battlezone, didn't sell as well as the games that stayed firmly entrenched in the 2D landscape. The latest round of RTS games seems to indicate that the sales record of the innovators scared many of our competitors into making iterative improvements instead of trying to break new ground.

Next: How will Dark Reign 2 break new ground?