The RTS genre "hasn’t changed much" says former Age of Empires developer, "you’re still playing the same game we’re playing 20 years ago"

RTS 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’ll be interesting to see if he does make something that keeps the genre fresh. Everyone at Last Keep Games plays something together once a week, and recently that’s been Microsoft‘s Age of Mythology remake.

“It was a big nostalgia trip to go back… it was heartwarming to go back and see those [missions] again and see how universal and popular that strategy gameplay is,” he says in an interview with VideoGamer. “I think it reinforced our decisions to innovate with Project Citadel.”

He goes on to say: “It hasn’t changed much. You know, you’re still playing the same game we’re playing 20 years ago and looking at some of these new games—Stormgate and others like that—and they’re still really largely based on that formula. It works, it’s an old, golden set of rules, because they were good back then and they’re still good now, and it’s nice to see that stuff still works but at the same time I want to do something new, we want to do something new.”

It’s not always easy to innovate, though. “There were some times on the Age franchise where we flew a little too close to the sun,” he explains. “We had to pull back and take some very innovative things out of the game. I’m talking particularly about formation-based combat in Age of Empires 3. Hell, we demoed that at E3, and took that out of the game because we were afraid it was going to alienate too many of the existing Age fans.”

My favorite RTS of all-time is The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2, and I’d still play it to this day if my laptop had a disc drive. It feels like a timeless game, but maybe that is because the formula of the genre hasn’t changed that much.

While you’re here, check out our list of the best strategy games you can play right now.

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