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Ensemble Studios had spent nearly a decade mastering the real-time strategy genre when it became a victim of its own success. Its 1997 debut, Age of Empires, had been an instant hit and spawned several beloved sequels and expansions that cemented the studio’s glowing reputation. Imitators—some novel, some slavish—quickly appeared in their droves, and by the mid-2000s, parent company Microsoft expected nothing of the studio other than to build on its legacy with another game in the same vein.
The only problem: Ensemble wasn’t much interested. “We had been trying for so long to do anything but an RTS game," says Dave Pottinger, a veteran of the studio who worked there across its lifespan. "If we were going to do another one, something had to change." An idea was floated: stick to the RTS format on which the team had built its reputation, but leave PCs behind to make a game for consoles. Ensemble would have something new to chew on, and Microsoft would be left happy. Or so they hoped.
“Everyone there thought it was a catastrophically terrible idea,” says Pottinger. “We had never designed a console game, much less a console RTS, and they didn't really exist back then.” With Ensemble having already spent a couple of years creating an original IP and prototyping ideas, Microsoft gave the studio an ultimatum: rework the game into a tie-in for the biggest Xbox franchise of the day, or scrap the whole thing. “If they were gonna take a chance on a console RTS, it had to be tied to Halo,” says Pottinger. “That was the only way they thought it would sell.”
And sell it did. When Halo Wars hit shelves in 2009, it sold 1 million copies in under a month. It was the kind of commercial success any developer would be happy with, largely driven, Pottinger admits, by the Halo brand.
Yet were those Microsoft executives to look at Ensemble’s original console RTS today, they may be more approving. In a far cry from its early years, console strategy gaming is the healthiest it’s ever been. Knotty grand-strategy titles such as Crusader Kings III sit alongside the more approachable likes of Minecraft Legends, action-focused games like Aliens: Dark Descent, the more conventional real-time battlefields of Company of Heroes 3, and management simulators like Two Point Campus. Just this year, Ensemble’s PC classic Age of Empires 2 was ported to Xbox platforms with a bespoke gamepad control scheme, and Age of Empires 4 followed suit only last month.
It speaks, in part, to the general homogenization of the medium. “The line between consoles and PC gaming is going away,” says Lewis Ward, gaming research director at market research firm IDC. He notes that seven of the 10 top-grossing games on Steam last year are also available on consoles, and publishers themselves are increasingly blurring platform distinctions. Sony has ported several of its biggest PlayStation exclusives to PC in the past few years, including traditional console mascots like Ratchet & Clank and Sackboy. And the launch of the Steam Deck has allowed players to access the world’s biggest PC storefront through a console-style device.
In the past, hardware disparities have been a major headache for multiplatform developers, as large chunks of a game would have to be tweaked to support the bespoke processes and systems of each console. “Nowadays the CPUs and other hardware are actually surprisingly similar between them all,” says Ben Hymers, technical director on Two Point Campus. “Some platforms are more powerful than others, but the actual core architecture of things is about the same.”
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Porting is therefore more straightforward, and consoles are better equipped to handle whatever’s brought over. “The power of the console and how it’s improved over the years makes developing something like a strategy game easier,” says Dennis Ries, executive producer on Minecraft Legends. With hundreds of interactable AI units appearing onscreen and rolling systems working in the background, strategy games often demand a lot from the hardware. It’s taken modern consoles, with their beefy CPUs and ample memory, for some developers to feel they can bring their games across platforms without sacrificing performance or trimming down the experience.
Yet the strategy genre is more peculiar still. Not only dense with systems, mechanics and menus, some of the most popular strategy games are as kinetic as the biggest first-person shooters. Mouse and keyboard, then, has long been the preferred way of interacting with them, and porting them to consoles has the added difficulty of making their controls compatible with the limited inputs and precision of a gamepad. But controllers haven’t changed substantially in the past few years, so why are developers now more willing to embrace them?
For Ashley Wooley-Khan, a producer at developer HardLight that supported the console port of Company of Heroes 3, there’s been a “maturity in the language of controller use” among both players and developers. “Even if you go back to PS3 or 360 games now, the modern sense of how you would use a controller, it’s just not there,” he says, pointing to the way players now expect by default to use shoulder bumpers to switch menu tabs and press the left analog stick to make their character sprint. “Now, we’ve gotten to the point where players have this shared understanding of what should be done with a controller and how it should function,” he says. That means it’s easier to introduce new players to systems-heavy genres like strategy, as their foundational understanding makes it less effort to pick up knotty controls.
Just as important, suggests designer and artist Greg Foertsch, who has worked on the Civilization and XCOM series and is currently directing a Star Wars strategy game at Bit Reactor, are the changing interests of developers. Strategy developers of the past often saw complexity as a “badge of honor,” he says, and deliberately prioritized complicated design systems that paired well with the many inputs of a keyboard but weren’t created in consideration of controllers.
“Whether your game is on PC or console, for me the platform is a design tool to keep me honest,” Foertsch says. “If you design with the input method in mind, I think you're going to end up with a more accessible game in general, because it's going to focus your thought, it's going to really make you put a lot of effort into how the player interacts with the game.”
It’s a kind of design philosophy clearly demonstrated by the upcoming Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin. While at first glance it looks like a fantasy RTS in the standard vein, it involves minimal base building and virtually no resource systems, minimizing the back-and-forth precision that can be cumbersome to pull off without a mouse.
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“It's about speed of response and quick iteration,” says principal designer Sandro Sammarco. “Go fight the battle, and hopefully you're fighting the opponent more and the controls less.” On Xbox, the default control scheme doesn’t even use a reticle, instead having you shift between units by pointing the analog stick in their direction, and hopping between recruitment menus with slick shortcuts. “We made sure that wherever possible, the game is helping you out when you're pointing at things and locking on to them, and not requiring too many fiddly individual controls.”
Elsewhere, the design challenges that console developers are facing are already starting to feed back on PC. Take the AI worker system that was added to Age of Empires 4’s Xbox port to automate onerous micro-management. “I talk with our creative director, Adam Isgreen, all the time,” says Chris Rubyor, who worked as design codirector on Age of Empires 4 and has contributed to a smattering of RTS games over the past 25 years. “And I go, ‘Dude, how did we not think about this 10 years ago?’” The team plans to bring the system to PC in the future, as well as anything else they think is worth picking up from the console port. “Part of our mantra was we wanted to make sure that whatever we built, the blueprint that we came up with could translate to any Age game going forward.”
But while the console strategy train is picking up steam, not every developer is getting on board. Stormgate, an upcoming free-to-play RTS from ex-Blizzard devs, and something of a spiritual successor to StarCraft II, will be a PC exclusive. It’s putting heavy focus on competitive multiplayer, and developer Frost Giant Studios already has plans for a thriving esports scene. “For our style of game—the fast-paced, real-time strategy game—it’s unlikely the PC will lose its place at the top anytime soon,” says CEO Tim Morten. “If we do support other platforms in the future, we’ll just want to ensure that the gameplay experience remains excellent.”
But Earnest Yuen, executive producer on Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, thinks that hesitancy will rapidly dissipate. He compares strategy’s trend toward console to what first-person shooters experienced over 20 years ago when the likes of Halo and GoldenEye appeared. “There were so many naysayers,” he says, who doubted if the genre could ever work on gamepads as it had with mouse and keyboard. “Nowadays, people don’t even question it.” And with the recent surge of console strategy games, Yuen thinks, maybe someday the same will be said of them. “The genie’s out of the bottle now.”
