Taylor: RTS innovators going backwards

By Robert Purchese Published 12 January, 2010

Supreme Commander urges restraint.

Innovation is a double-edged sword in the real-time strategy genre, according to Gas Powered Games boss Chris Taylor, because by trying to stand out too much you may not been seen at all.

The problem for the RTS genre, Taylor explained in an interview published today, has been trying to rethink the core base-building mechanic that made games like Total Annihilation fun in the first place.

"There's been some desperate moves in the industry to find a new place for RTS," Taylor told Eurogamer. "All these kinds of variations, but it's like saying let's add a fifth wheel to a car, or let's take a wheel off. But maybe we can actually make the car more comfortable, maybe we can make the drive less noisy or more fuel-efficient.

"There's other places to go than just pure breaking something off or sticking something on to innovate. I actually wrote an internal essay about this - when games run out of places to go and apply a gimmick instead, it's a turn-off, and not having had the resources or the dare to do it, they would have sold more copies.

"For years we've been beating the drum 'innovation, innovation, innovation'," he added, "but innovation for innovation's sake actually takes you backwards."

Ideas that enhance core RTS mechanics are what Taylor likes. In Supreme Commander 2, he's adding features like strategic zoom and Experimental units "that really make the game more lively but not at the expense of the core RTS experience", as you can read in last week's preview.

Alas, the follies of the genre have left Taylor as one of the last big-name RTS developers in the business, although there is another - and that company is Blizzard.

"We're doing a good job of revitalising RTS but keeping it moving forward in a way that doesn't forget itself, if you love Dune 2 and Command & Conquer and Total Annihilation and StarCraft," he said. "I mean, certainly Blizzard is staying on that track, they're not throwing away the old formula."

But he added: "It's no secret that they have a double-edged sword there, because you need innovation, but if the Koreans up and stop playing the game... What they should do is they should take Warcraft IV and innovate on that, because they don't have the same risk and they do need a free hand."

Supreme Commander 2, announced a couple of months ago, will be out in the spring on PC and Xbox 360.

Head over to our full interview with Chris Taylor to find out more.

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.

You may also like...

Comments (11) Latest comment 2 years ago

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

  • SAMagic #1 2 years ago

    Which games is he referring to exactly? I can't think of any major stinkers.

    Over the last few years, I found Company of Heroes was very innovative, Dawn of War 2 was aimed at being an RTS-RPG crossover and Creative Assembly are continuing their two-step approach for the Total War games (Big changes in one title followed by refinements in their next). On the X360 we had C&C 3 and Halo Wars, which weren't amazing RTS games but weren't exactly god-awful.

  • ignatiusjreilly #2 2 years ago

    Was going to say the same thing - Company of Heroes and Dawn of War II were both innovative, and they were both by Relic, who is now perhaps the premier RTS developer.

    No one wants just gimmicks (*cough*RUSE*cough*), but just because Blizzard are making the same game they did 10 years ago doesn't mean everyone should take that approach.

  • abigsmurf #3 2 years ago

    Can't help but feel this is a dig at C&C4.

    Removing the harvesting (you fight over random tiberium drops), no base building, control point capture mechanics, unit count limits... They've basically removed all the gameplay mechanics that make the command and conquer series recognisable.

    C&C3 was great. Rather than build on that they've decided they want to make Dawn of War 3 instead.

  • Rubarack #4 2 years ago

    And again, the innovations in Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2 are exactly the type of things he's talking about and why Company of Heroes in particular is so outstanding.

  • Gastrian #5 2 years ago

    Well after Supreme Commander I'm inclined to disagree with this guy. Supreme Commander was a step back for RTS games. It took the basic RTS formula and instead of improving it just increased it to the point where it got silly. There was a huge amount of micro management which is bad enough when you are dealing with a normal game but when you ramp up the unit numbers it just becomes a horrible, unweildy mess.

    Its the innovations of other companies which have reinvigorated and the standards for the RTS scene. You've no got your micromanagment heavy squad based RTS games like Dawn of War 2 and then you have your large scale warfare games like the Total War saga.

    If anything the current batch of games released over the past few years show that many of the mechanics in RTS games are archaic and redundant. Base building and resource gathering is no longer essential to a games "strategyic" nature. I've had such a blast on DoW2 multiplayer as I could focus all my strategic thinking on squad choice, placement and what objectives to capture not what building do I build first and how many people do I sety off to gather resources..

  • Zaiz #6 2 years ago

    Yup. There is no shortage of irony in the Supreme Commander creator(and a bunch of other mediocre titles) declaring that innovation is bad. Or more honestly put, please stop playing innovative, polished titles that have way more of a following than my games will ever have. Ever.

  • ChaK #7 2 years ago

    steam locked, no custom map, less units, now THAT is innovations

  • craziii #8 2 years ago

    experimental units ruined the supreme commander series in my opinion. the 2nd part was that pretty much all 3 factions of the old game was the same.

    this is just a serious observation from an ex-fan.

  • kcasier #9 2 years ago

    The problem is that the RTS moniker has come to comprise of two different game types; the Strategy game and the Tactical game, the "innovation" he complains about is actually the shift (in the market) from the strategy side of things to the tactical side of things. (the difference general in between strategy and tactics being scope, strategy is about winning wars, over a long period time using armies, tactics is about winning battles, over a short period of time using squads).
    If you bear that in mind his comments make some kind of sense, since most innovation (like found in CoH and DoW2) is purely tactical in nature, and would make little to no sense in a strategic oriented game.

  • Zaiz #10 2 years ago

    But honestly, tactics is more interesting. Strategic is fine and dandy, but you lack hard control, and it really doesn't matter too much. Furthermore, you units are absurdly expendable, which made me wonder why they appeared to have veterancy in the first game anyways. Meh, the man's a loon as it is, his most recent games have been pretty terrible, and SupCom2 will be relatively samey in play by the look of it. Giant hordes of expendable units, experimental units stomping in and killing everything, and little tactics but more mid-level strategy.

    Meh, I'll wait till Starcraft 2 if I want my classic RTS, and buy Chaos Rising, because Relic made it.

  • brod #11 2 years ago

    @Gastrian
    "Base building and resource gathering is no longer essential to a games "strategyic" nature."

    It does add to the depth and strategic choices of a game, though.

    "I've had such a blast on DoW2 multiplayer as I could focus all my strategic thinking on squad choice, placement and what objectives to capture not what building do I build first and how many people do I sety off to gather resources.."

    What you're saying is you prefer only having to think about your units, instead of your units + your base + expansions. There's dumbing down and then there's pointless dumbing down, and IMO the removal of base building from RTS games falls into the latter category.

    @kcasier
    "The problem is that the RTS moniker has come to comprise of two different game types; the Strategy game and the Tactical game, the "innovation" he complains about is actually the shift (in the market) from the strategy side of things to the tactical side of things."

    Agreed - a lot of the new 'RTS' games should really be labelled as RTT (real time tactics) instead.

    http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_time_t...
    Edited by 1 at 18/01/10 @ 01:44