There's a Difference Between Liking Old Games And Actually Playing Them
The rubber needs to eventually meet the road
Last week I wrote about the limits of nostalgia when it comes to RTS, particularly the commonly cited “heyday of RTS” in the late 90s and 2000s. I thought that the folks over at /r/realtimestrategy might enjoy this take; that turned out not to be the case.
The negativity around real-time strategy games and the general trajectory of the genre, even among the genre’s own fans, is always a surprise to me. We’re talking about the only genre of video games (I’m aware of) with a lengthy criticism section on Wikipedia! I’ll just go ahead and quote the top Reddit comment:
None of the games you name really compare to C&C, WC3, Starcraft or AoE, or even games like Rise of Nations, Total Annihilation, Age of Mythology, etc. Most indie RTS are extremely limited experiences by comparison.
(I get that “Reddit doesn’t read the articles” is like shooting fish in a barrel, but just for the record, my article discusses both StarCraft II and Age of Empires II at length.)
Honestly, I think this is a reasonable take. I think it’s a common take, too - common enough that I figured it was worth responding to in-depth. And I actually thought about it quite a lot when I was writing my article. When I think about the titans of the real-time strategy genre, I think about franchises like Age of Empires or StarCraft, not games like They Are Billions or Northgard. And I thought to myself - does that mean the genre has really stagnated?
I mean, I guess - if you also think the popularity of CS:GO and Rainbow Six: Siege indicates tactical shooters have stagnated, or that the popularity of Dota 2 indicates MOBAs have stagnated. I personally don’t agree with that, though. Actually, I think it’s a little narrow-minded - that somehow, if a franchise is successful enough to last for decades, that must imply that the genre it’s a part of is somehow stale or on the decline.
I actually think about it the other way; that the long-term success of these legendary franchises is in large part thanks to their willingness to adapt, evolve, and improve on their original formula, rather than stubbornly sticking to the gameplay of the 90s. Age of Empires is a great example of this - its most recent iteration is doing pretty well, with significantly more active players than Age of Empires III and Age of Mythology combined. And I think it achieves this by being willing to significantly diverge from the gameplay of the original mainline games.
When you start to do a genuine apples-to-apples comparison of modern and old games, I think the first thing you realize is how much the “heyday” take is susceptible to survivorship bias. It’s great, for example, that Age of Empires II is still going strong. And that’s partly because, as I pointed out, it’s been so thoroughly updated that it’s almost unrecognizable compared to what was released in 1999. But what about all the other games? How many people do you think are still booting up most of the games on that list - compared to the number of people booting up your average modern indie RTS?
This applies to well-known franchises, too. I look back fondly on the first few weeks of the Dawn of War ladder, way back when. Earlier this year, I re-installed it with the hopes of doing a campaign review - but I struggled to get into it, so I gave up.
Or, take Command & Conquer. It’s a legendary franchise. It was also recently remastered. But if you look at concurrent players on Steam, you’ll find that the entire franchise summed together sustains fewer concurrent players than the “extremely limited experiences” of even medium-sized independent real-time strategy games.
And I don’t think that’s something you can just handwave away. Sure, popularity is not synonymous with quality, Steam is not the sum total of the gaming community, yada yada yada. My point is that I think there’s a purist streak within the RTS community that’s so attached to classic titles that it fails to see how this bias isn’t necessarily grounded in player preferences. If modern RTS games “can’t compare” with Command and Conquer or Rise of Nations or Total Annihilation, then there shouldn’t be a large disparity in player counts in favor of the more recent titles. But there is.
And I think this is a point that sometimes goes underrated - looking back fondly on a game is different from actually playing that game. It’s the difference between liking the idea of something, and liking the reality of that same something.
At the risk of annoying a very large number of people, let’s consider StarCraft: Brood War. The game is a masterpiece. But, when it was remastered and released as free-to-play in 2017 - faithfully retaining its original gameplay, in a respectful and well-engineered product - it wasn’t very popular outside of South Korea. It even saw little overlap with the StarCraft II player base, even though the two games are part of the same franchise.
Many RTS players like the idea of Brood War. But when they choose to play an RTS, what they actually play in practice are games like StarCraft II - specifically, the faster-paced and modernized gameplay of Legacy of the Void, which was released well after the “heyday” of the 90s and early 2000s.
None of that says anything bad about StarCraft I - actually, I don’t think it says very much of anything about StarCraft I. Instead, I draw the very vanilla conclusion that while RTS games released in the 90s were amazing, RTS games released in the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s are also amazing. Everyone will have their own personal preferences and favorites. I don’t think it has to be any more complicated that.
Ah, Nostalgia
I like older games, and I take umbrage at folks who automatically interpret that as rose-tinted nostalgia. Banjo-Kazooie is orders of magnitude better than Yooka-Laylee; Morrowind is better than Skyrim; the Legend of Zelda did not benefit from going open world; etc. I’ll be the first person to argue that the trajectory of the video games industry is not a straight upward pointing line.
But I think folks who like older games owe it to ourselves and to the community to be a little more honest about what that actually means. I think Banjo-Kazooie is superior to Yooka-Laylee because I actually sat down and played both of those games back-to-back, and then made a twenty minute video about it. Of course, you don’t need to make a video essay to have a valid opinion - but what you do need is to have an opinion based in reality.
So, if you’re out there truly believing that the best days of RTS are behind it, here’s my suggestion for you - play the games, and send me your notes! I’d love to read them.
Until next time,
brownbear
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