RTS WTF? Battle Realms still getting updates in 2022

[Not.AI]

It's one of the best games ever made. Also one of the most innovative.

Too bad the company that made it couldn't follow it up with anything, not sure what happened.

 

[Deadyawn]

None of their early games were real hits, the industry shifting focus to consoles and the decline of the rts genre meant they got relegated to tie-in games.

A fate worse than death.

 

[Great Deceiver]

It worked perfectly fine in LAN at the very least, like basically all the RTS games back in the day.

I'm pretty sure by that point Battle.net was the "established" standard for online play. We are talking about years after Starcraft had been a thing i don't think LAN was gonna cut it anymore.

Hence "at the very least". I've got no clue whether the online play was any good, since we never tried it. Probably would have used some client like GameSpy or whatever and that would have been decent and the standard.

Online at the time was handled by Gamespy indeed. This was the reason why many good games of the day could never compete, because the online services sucked compared to Bnet. Bnet was so ahead of the curve back then. If I remember correctly, you had to use a third party program to see servers and I can't remember if there was any matchmaking. Bnet was simply press a button and go, plus tracked stats, special icons, unique chat rooms, etc.

Another example was Armies of Exigo, a brilliant game that came out in 2004, and which was killed off by a combination of shit EA marketing (sent off to die against EA's own vastly inferior BFME, but which had a powerful franchise behind it and all the marketing dollars), a very complete demo with multiplayer functionality that perhaps disincentivized people buying the full game, and Gamespy.

 

[Lucumo]

Hence "at the very least". I've got no clue whether the online play was any good, since we never tried it. Probably would have used some client like GameSpy or whatever and that would have been decent and the standard.

Online at the time was handled by Gamespy indeed. This was the reason why many good games of the day could never compete, because the online services sucked compared to Bnet. Bnet was so ahead of the curve back then. If I remember correctly, you had to use a third party program to see servers and I can't remember if there was any matchmaking. Bnet was simply press a button and go, plus tracked stats, special icons, unique chat rooms, etc.

Another example was Armies of Exigo, a brilliant game that came out in 2004, and which was killed off by a combination of shit EA marketing (sent off to die against EA's own vastly inferior BFME, but which had a powerful franchise behind it and all the marketing dollars), a very complete demo with multiplayer functionality that perhaps disincentivized people buying the full game, and Gamespy.

Well, yeah, GameSpy and the like were the third-party programs then. Without it, no online play/server list, unless it had direct connection or whatever. Battle.net didn't have any matchmaking until Warcraft III was released though...right? So that was still after Battle Realms. (I heavily dislike matchmaking and prefer the lobbies.)

Played both games, but I don't think near release (most likely in 2005 when RTS releases weren't good). BFME was highly forgettable and I didn't like Armies of Exigo because the plane swap thing felt too gimmicky for me. However, I guess one can give them credit for trying something new. The RTS games I spent time with in 2004 were the SpellForce expansions, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War and Warlords Battlecry III. 2005 was basically only Dawn of War: Winter Assault (and Warcraft III custom games). I feel like it's the year a lot of players shifted mostly or even completely away from the genre due to a lack of quality releases while at the same time FPS games started booming and online-only play got really big via MMOs and browser games. And that trend continued for the next years.