Hi guys,
Just wondering what you all thought about this topic (if you care at all!) I know the general consensus is that RTS/strategy/simulation games do not work on consoles at all, due to the fact that the control input of dual analogue works nowhere near as well as using a keyboard & mouse.
But as someone who grew up with the PS1, I became accustomed to playing these types of games on consoles. Command & Conquer plus Warzone 2100 satisfied my RTS fix; Theme Hospital and SimCity 2000 gave me a chance to try simulation games which were totally different to everything else PS1 offered at the time. N64 even offered the best console RTS experience - possibly of all time - in Starcraft 64.
As time and home consoles have gone on, however, these pickings seem fewer and further apart. There have been some stand out games - particularly the 360 in the first few years of its life secured great console ports of things like Command & Conquer 3; Tropico 3 & Supreme Commander 2. Again, yes, these games play better on PC, but having them on consoles is a nice bonus and personally was a big draw towards the 360 for me (not enough, in the end, but it's certainly a factor which swayed me towards it). Similarly, Wii has had the odd game break through - SimCity Creator, although not fantastic, allowed the SimCity experience with motion controls - while stuff like Anno finding its way onto the console again was just a pleasant bonus. When I search for similar stuff on PS3, the pickings are much slimmer, but there's still the odd game like Red Alert 3 - which is a pretty decent game, even with console controls.
Which brings me to the point of this post, really. Do you guys see a future in these genres on consoles, or is there simply not a big enough market to justify the development costs as they inevitably rise again, leading to even fewer to pick from in the eighth gen? Studios like Lionhead - who begun life as a team of ex-Bullfrog workers, created fantastic strategy games in Black & White and The Movies, yet being put on console developed by Microsoft meant that these ideas had to be dashed in favour of a more console-friendly offering in the action-adventure series Fable. SimCity, coming from Maxis, is a PC-only title at the moment that seems unlikely to make its way onto consoles. SEGA's popular Total War series has never managed to find its way away from PC.
The Wii-U's gamepad provides some interesting opportunites for control options for these types of games, and even the rumoured PS4 controller with a touch screen in the middle could provide a slightly better input for screen scrolling/gathering up troops etc. But has the market simply moved on, and these games are a relic of a bygone era when console development happened despite the obvious limitations compared to keyboard & mouse? Or could the next gen provide a better opportunity for these titles to reappear? Let me know what you think :)
