Why, despite everyone’s best efforts, the RTS fails on a console

When you saw the title of this entry, your immediate reaction was likely, ‘control scheme’. Sure, that’s the foundation of why real-time strategy games don’t work on home consoles, but it’s more the way that it affects their design that hampers the genre.

Going back to the Cossacks games on PC and the Total War franchise, strategy has been about scale. On a console, no matter how advanced the memory capabilities become, controlling a large-sized battle with a pad is just not feasible, no matter how furiously developers pander to the controller.

What you get when developers dumb down the RTS, to retrofit it into the traditional console control scheme, is a Halo Wars – small-scale battles that rarely excite, thanks to a mean unit cap.

Aside from a few stalwarts, the genre is dying. Witness the PC’s C&C: Tiberium Twilight, a game dubbed the end of the series, which has been running for over a decade and used to garner huge sales in its heyday.

What bothers me is that in the intervening period, developers still haven’t managed to capture the essence of the genre’s PC-based rhythm on a console. Even the most talented  RTS developers have slipped up – Civ Rev is too simplistic, Stormrise is dreadful.

Still, since the genre is pretty much dead, I don’t suppose it even matters.