Console RTS "still not close to PC"

By Robert Purchese Published 20 March, 2008

Desktop dictating development, says EA.

Electronic Arts' Chris Corry believes there is still a long way to go before console RTS games can be as fluent as their PC counterparts.

"Console RTS design has come a long way, but I don't know if you will be able to lead design of a true RTS, which is so inherently reliant on the mouse and keyboard combination, on the console," the Red Alert 3 producer told Eurogamer.

"It's one of the reasons we don't do cross platform play - the way RTS' are meant to be played, the PC guys would be so much faster."

Numerous console ports of the Command & Conquer series have appeared on console, beginning with the original C&C on PSone and Saturn back in the 1996.

An increased console interest in the genre means more time and effort is being spent on it now, and Corry believes C&C3 expansion Kane's Wrath will raise the bar in what we expect.

"C&C3, by all accounts, did a great job of easing the management experience with a controller," he added.

"What our team has done with the new radial interface in C&C3 Kane's Wrath is leaps and bounds beyond that. It's still not close to a PC, but it shows we can keep improving and that's something our team is dedicated to continue to strive towards."

These "leaps and bounds" should be noticeable in Red Alert 3 when it's released on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 sometime next year.

One of the areas Corry and his team will be brushing up on is multiplayer; not only will there be the jump-in co-operative campaign, but multiplayer will lie at the heart of the game engine.

"Multiplayer is something we're going to be focusing heavily on - we can't share a lot of details now on features, but we can tell you the SAGE engine's evolution and improvements aren't just about graphics or physics," continued Corry.

"We're making major improvements to the multiplayer technology resting in the heart of the game engine. This should lead to greater stability and connection reliability, not to mention fewer configuration challenges and problems from disconnecting cheaters."

Other fresh features will including base-building at sea, which will be handy for avoiding land-restricted tank rushes. There will be amphibious units, too, which will automatically adapt to the terrain they're on like clever little sausages, although they will be weaker than specialised land or sea units.

Pop over to our Red Alert 3 gamepage for plenty more where that came from.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (33) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Inquisitor #1 4 years ago

    Universe at war on consoles is apparently really, really good. From what I've heard it sounds like they've got a really good control scheme.

  • Zander #2 4 years ago

    Just add keyboard & mouse support! I'd love to play an RTS on my tv, but not with a pad. I bet it will hold back halo wars as well.

  • jack_klugman #3 4 years ago

    When is someone going to realise the Wii is ideal for making a good ol' point-and-click RTS?

  • TelexStar #4 4 years ago

    @ jack_klugman,

    There's no way in hell the Wiimote is precise enough for this.

  • r3n #5 4 years ago

    I think MS in particular don't fancy allowing mouse & keyboard to the 360 because people will just look at it as a dumbed down PC... which is in effect what consoles are. Not that that's a bad thing.

  • miiiguel #6 4 years ago

    "!I think MS in particular don't fancy allowing mouse & keyboard to the 360 because people will just look at it as a dumbed down PC... which is in effect what consoles are."
    I don't agree with that. Things are what they are. It's almost like saying bikes are dumbed down cars...

  • magicpanda #7 4 years ago

    I'm a long time RTS player on the PC I see no reason why they cant do more on the Wii. The remote is definitely precise enough.

  • jack_klugman #8 4 years ago

    There's no way in hell the Wiimote is precise enough for this.

    @TelexStar: Absolute nonsense.

  • Vaxadrin #9 4 years ago

    "It's one of the reasons we don't do cross platform play - the way RTS' are meant to be played, the PC guys would be so much faster."

    I'm sure this statement has nothing to do with the fact that your competition's RTS has cross-platform play and is releasing next week...right?

  • crozon #10 4 years ago

    "It's one of the reasons we don't do cross platform play - the way RTS' are meant to be played, the PC guys would be so much faster."

    "I'm sure this statement has nothing to do with the fact that your competition's RTS has cross-platform play and is releasing next week...right? "

    What Universe at War, that crap game no one seems to be buying or playing

  • TelexStar #11 4 years ago

    Absolute nonsense.

    @jack_klugman: Just so we're clear, I'm not flaming the Wii here. It's just not possible to replicate the precision of a mouse into the Wiimote. There's no nonsense about it. For starters, the Wiimote pointer's detection zone is huge and would cause massive headaches when trying to pick out individual units. It's also pretty shakey no matter how steady your hand is. Imagine trying to play an RTS with a lightgun.

    I hope someone will try an RTS on the Wii and prove me wrong but I think they'd be huge compromises in the GUI to get it to work.

  • shadaik #12 4 years ago

    It's weird, really. They got the Wii, they could do RTS on that (even if it may turn out shacky - so far they have not even TRIED), but not even Nintendo does so (BWii does not count imho). And somehow, it seems that on Nintendo systems everyone is just doing the same Nintendo does, so we will not see Wii RTS sooner than Pikmin 3, if at all.

  • jack_klugman #13 4 years ago

    TelexStar:

    You'd just need to pick a sensible scale. Selecting units and issuing orders using the Wii Remote should be no more difficult than targetting an aim reticule in an FPS, which I believe we've already seen can be done with great finesse.

    I agree, you won't be able to have an experience which is as pixel-precise as the PC mouse can give you, but if you work with a sensible scale and introduce additional mechanics to facilitate ease of unit selection and environment navigation I'd imagine you could easily provide an experience that at least feels, if not directly as responsive as playing on a PC, then a heck of a lot closer to that experience than you'll get with analogue sticks.

    My argument is it feels like a no brainer.

    The Wii gives you a very tactile and intuitive pointing mechanism. Most RTS games are all about the pointing.

    Make it happen!

  • coach_mcguirk #14 4 years ago

    "Apples still not close to Oranges"

  • ParanoidZombie #15 4 years ago

    Blahblahblah, I cleared BFME2 and C&C3 on x360, had a lot of fun, controls were just fine, maybe it's not as good as a mouse/keyboard config but who gives a fuck as long as IT WORKS.

  • thisisatempaccount #16 4 years ago

    Attention-grabbing soundbite for headline + shameless product plug = eurogamer story

  • Nikanoru #17 4 years ago

    For starters, the Wiimote pointer's detection zone is huge and would cause massive headaches when trying to pick out individual units. It's also pretty shakey no matter how steady your hand is.


    Then you played on a sucky setup. Light interference, distance from the screen, sensitivity settings, etc. The right setup paired with an app that's decently programmed makes for pixel perfect precision, if you can muster it (i.e. don't play drunk ;).

  • tapper #18 4 years ago

    Seriously, the pointer on the Wii is amazingly accurate. If yours is not, I'm guessing it's set up wrong (or there's light interference).

  • Nithron #19 4 years ago

    Here's another suggestion:
    Use the stylus on DS. Why the hell nobody's ported Command and Conquer to the DS is totally beyond me. It could easily handle those shitty low res graphics, and the stylus is perfect for this kind of gameplay.

  • T4RG4 #20 4 years ago

    My hand/arm would get tired quickly playing an RTS on the Wii ;)

  • tapper #21 4 years ago

    You don't have to hold your arm straight out, you know.

  • toy_brain #22 4 years ago

    Unfortunately for the DS, it seems as though Western dev's just aren't interested in making a decent RTS game for it, meaning we have to rely on Japanese developers learning the genre from scratch, and probably adding their own twists that may or may not fly with longtime RTS fans.

    If it finds an audience with DS owners it could take off bigstyle, but so far current offerings are somewhere between 'meh' and utter shite.

  • Vaxadrin #23 4 years ago

    I played FF12 Revenant Wings on the DS. It was labeled an RTS by the gaming media. It was certainly real-time, but there was no strategy whatsoever.

  • Jigglybean #24 4 years ago

    LOL @ Flurrytrucker... So damn true! The console can try and be an FPS and RTS machine but it aint gonna happen

  • FooAtari #25 4 years ago

    @Jigglybean & FluffyTucker

    +1

    Sure a pad might work in some botched way but an RTS doesn't adapt to a pad as well as an FPS does. It slow and cumbersome.

  • Widge #26 4 years ago

    Are EA going to even bother exploring Keys/Mouse for the PS3 Red Alert?

  • smoothn00dle #27 4 years ago

    RTS need to go console because RTS is dying on PC platform. Looking at C&C3 US sales, it only sold 384k copies. Not even half a million. The problem with RTS is after Starcraft, no single RTS can top it, not even Blizzard's own Warcraft3. RTS genre becomes stalled. To make it worst, PC platform is dying and consoles are rising. This year 2008, console games graphic will surpass PC games first time since 1989s. The last time consoles won was during the SNES era.

  • riz23 #28 4 years ago

    "This year 2008, console games graphic will surpass PC games first time since 1989s. The last time consoles won was during the SNES era."
    I'm not much of PC Gamer these days but you obviously haven't played Crysis on decent DX10 PC. Consoles still have a way to go and they won't catch up this year, if ever.

    As for the console RTS debate, you can't take the PC 'Mouse & Keyboard' template and shoehorn that onto a console. It's never going to be as efficent. That does not mean you can't have a slick, fast and playable RTS on console, just that we haven't seen a great one yet. Tom Clancy's Endwar looks to be taking a smart sidestep control-wise to try hit a new benchmark. It's impressing me so far and I look forward to the finished game.

  • Jigglybean #29 4 years ago

    This year 2008, console games graphic will surpass PC games first time since 1989s.

    What have you been smoking Smoothnoodle? Universe at War on the 360 has a neat new way of controlling units for an RTS title and the PC market is not dying. There are more PCs installed around the globe than consoles for sure. Publishers and developers keep saying that the PC market is dying because they are just too lazy to develop games on the PC format and deal with some of the headaches when it comes to tech support.

    People who spend hundreds of pounds on their PCs deserve high end gaming and not this dumbed down 'accessible' crap being released right now

  • Nikanoru #30 4 years ago

    This year 2008, console games graphic will surpass PC games first time since 1989s. The last time consoles won was during the SNES era.

    Umm, no? At launch, console graphics surpass PC graphics every generation, if not through sheer horsepower, then through the ability to focus optimization for a single hardware configuration. PC graphics just always catch up, sometimes sooner, sometimes later.

    The original N64 Turok, which came out at around the same time as the first Quake, had codes for stuff like godmode, or big head mode or other silly crap. There was this one code for "Quack mode". It made all the textures blocky and unfiltered, and made all the character animations stutter as if they were running at 5fps. Obviously this made fun of Quake, which looked primitive on the PC in comparison.

    Just to show how quickly PC hardware catches up though, barely a year later Turok was ported to the PC, albeit with a worse framerate depending on the hardware, no anti-aliasing, and some odd visual glitches.


    People who spend hundreds of pounds on their PCs deserve to be ridiculed.

    Fixed that for you. ;D

  • Jigglybean #31 4 years ago

    @ Nikanoru
    Talking out of your rear end. A console has better graphics than a PC, which is always playing catch up? Are you insane? The reason why Turok was such a bad port was down to the developers being lazy. PC's are far superior in every way to consoles, whilst the PC pushes boundaries on gaming, when given the chance to do so.

  • Xerx3s #32 4 years ago

    Add mouse as standard peripheral. Job done.

  • Nikanoru #33 4 years ago

    @Jigglybean: NO U are talking out of your ass. Don't just say "lol no" without really getting what the hell I'm saying, namely that the Turok PC port was an example of PC's getting better real fast (that is, if you bother to upgrade every damn year). And don't avoid my main argument about the Quake reference in the N64 Turok, which was a response to smoothn00dle's assertion that consoles haven't had better graphics than the PC since the SNES.

    If you're still not happy, how about this one: look at God of war 2, to name an example. that's running on the very same console hardware from 8 bloody years ago. Do you seriously think PC hardware from that time could have handled anything even remotely like that, even if heavily optimized?


    People who spend hundreds of pounds on their PC's are silly.