The folks over at
gamereactor.eu have recently
released a blog, titled
The Golden Age of Strategy is Now, which challenges the assumption that the strategy genre is dead and that to make such a proclamation is indeed premature, considering the performance of the genre last year.
It starts off with a retrospective look at the 90s, which represented the rise and peak of the Real-Time Strategy (RTS) genre, with a large number of legendary games and franchises being named that it almost resembles a Hall Of Fame roll call. It then goes on to talk about how the noughts saw the rapid expansion and the proliferation of consoles, specifically the
Playstation 2, which led to the genre facing an awkward pause and period of stagnation. This could be seen by the rise of non-traditional RTS franchises such as
Dawn Of War,
Company of Heroes and
Supreme Commander, whereas
Command & Conquer only came back fully in the second half of the noughts, with the release of
Starcraft 2's Wings of Liberty in 2010 capping off RTS's (temporary?) revival.
The studio was never focused entirely on strategy, even if that was their strength, and perhaps that ambition to do everything was their undoing. Their last two games released as Westwood were a shooter, Command & Conquer: Renegade, and a sci-fi MMORPG called Earth & Beyond. Both released in 2002, and both were costly failures for EA. Part of Westwood was tucked into EA Los Angeles, and the Command & Conquer franchise survived even if its current status following the cancelled free-to-play reboot is unknown. Many former Westwood employees went on to form Petroglyph, who have been keeping it traditional in recent years with the likes of Grey Goo and 8-Bit Armies.
Source: gamereactor.eu
There is also an extended paragraph devoted to the role played by
Westwood Studios in popularising the RTS genre and of how the attempt by Westwood in the noughts to venture away from its core strength of RTS games could have spelled, or in fact, accelerated its demise. This is because only a few years later it would be closed and absorbed to
EA Los Angeles with a number of former staff choosing to form
Petroglyph Games instead.
The article ends off with stating how 2016 had been a succesful year for the strategy genre, specifically those of the Grand Strategy and 4X sub-genre, with the release of games such as
Stellaris,
XCom 2 and
Civilization VI. Whether this would spell a similar revival (again) in the RTS genre or lead to the strategy scene to be dominated by grand-style games remain to be seen and we can only speculate about the future.
To read the full article, do check it out
at the link here. Do also tell us your take on the future of the strategy genre and if you agree with the view above!