Disappointed in modern RTS games

[Elandyll]

Hi there.

This is more of a reflexion, perhaps a rant, on the state of modern RTS games (at least the few I have tried this past few years).

I am fairly old school in RTS games. I have played extensively the old Dune 2, Warcraft, Warcraft II, Warcraft III, Command & Conquer, C&C 2, Homeworld, Homeworld 2.

As you can tell, I am more inclined toward Fantasy / scifi settings too.

Now these past few years I have tried a few new games, in particular Sins of a Solar Empire and Command and Conquer 4 very recently, and came out disappointed.
In one case (Sins), I found the game not only relatively poorly designed in its interface (it gets very -very- complicated very quickly) but also extremely lacking in tutorials.
Call me lazy, I like to only spend a minimum of time with the manual to start playing. Well, until now, I was used to games guiding you through simple scenarios to start with, and then letting go progressively and giving you more and more options.
Sins had a few "tutorial maps", explaining a few core concepts of the game, and that was about it. Of course, the lack of -any- campaign finished to disgust me (I knew it had no "official" campaign per say, but all the "raving" articles were basically saying that the game could be thoroughly enjoyed in a sandbox mode.
This is (at least to me) a lie.
Fast forward 2 -3 years, I decide to try C&C4 (in between I did good with a few other games and Civ5 -not RTS though-, but there too was somewhat disappointed, probably due to unrealistic expectations from the "Rolls" of turned based strat games), and yeesh, perhaps there too my expectations were too high?

The "tutorial" (which to their credit they fully integrate in the story) is a mere 3 missions which do not touch on several key concept (including the importance of the actual tiberium). The gameplay itself feels completely dumbed down to me. No more establishing bases and progressing, no more need of ressource harvesting, no more real strategy of research ...
Everything is about gaining xp, unlocking units, and rock- paper- scissors with the enemy units.
Small is owned by medium, medium is owned by big, big is owned by small (simplified, but barely).
Your base comes back within 2 minutes if destroyed, you can rebuild your entire force (limited in number by "command points" or whatever) from thin air within 2 minutes after that.
You have to chose either defense or offense (support seems only for coop), no more mixing of both or adapting on the fly to respond to unforeseen events.


It all looks terribly dumbed down to me, and all of this (both Sins and C&C4) seems to be done to cater to one thing: Multiplayer.
Well, I am tired of single player taking a back seat to MP frankly.

We are to the point where entire games are released as Sand Box without a true SP campaign simply because it's the easy thing to do and it will sell anyway.
To their credit, EA has done a good job of creating FMV sequences and a true story for a SP campaign, but it's like a very good paint job. It still cannot hide the structural problem that -everything- down to the core gameplay was thought out with Multiplayer in mind: make it quick, no development, base everything on xp, make no situation too complex and players do not need to think - they just want to "do".

I think back to times where the two types of play were either thought as separate experiences, or when SP had the primary role, and MP was a nice bonus.

I still hope to this day to see Homeworld 3 sometime in the future, but I now shiver at the thought of what it may become...