Real-time strategy games have been around for a long time, but industry veteran Dave Pottinger, whose resume includes games like Age of Empires, Age of Mythology and Halo Wars, believes the genre is stagnating.
Pottinger is working on a new game, Project Citadel, with Last Keep Games, and with the pedigree he has, it will be interesting to see if he does something that keeps the genre fresh. Everyone at Last Keep Games plays something together once a week, and recently that was Microsoft's Age of Mythology remake.
“It was a great nostalgia trip to come back… it was touching to come back and see those [missions] again and see how universal and popular that strategy game is,” he says in an interview with Gamer. “I think it reinforced our decisions to innovate with the Citadel Project.”
He goes on to say, “Not much has changed. You know, you're still playing the same game we were playing 20 years ago and you look at some of these new games, Stormgate and others like it, and they're still relying heavily on that formula. It works, “It's a set of old, golden rules, because they were good then and they're still good now, and it's nice to see that they still work, but at the same time we want to do something new, we want to do something new.”
However, it is not always easy to innovate. “There were times in the Age franchise where we flew too close to the sun,” he explains. “We had to go back and take some very innovative things out of the game. I'm particularly referring to the formation-based combat in Age of Empires 3. Hell, we demoed it at E3 and removed it from the game because we were afraid it would alienate a lot of fans. of Age”.
My favorite real-time strategy game of all time is The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth 2, and I would still play it to this day if my laptop had a disk drive. It seems like a timeless game, but maybe that's because the genre formula hasn't changed much.
While you're here, check out our list of best strategy games you can play right now.