Greg Foertsch, creative director on the upcoming Star Wars Zero Company, gave his take on the resurgence of crustier PC gaming genres like RTS and turn-based tactics over the last decade in a recent interview with PCG associate editor Ted Litchfield. He also explained why he thinks there was such a long fallow period for complex, simmy games in the aughts and early 2010s.
If you love grand strategy, 4X, turn-based tactics, RTS, CRPGs, and so on, there were several decades where you needed a PC to get the full lay of the land, and even then it was slim pickings for a while. You could certainly find these genres finding success on consoles here and there with games like Fire Emblem, Halo Wars, and Dragon Age: Origins, but countless classics were gated by InstallShield wizards and newbie-hostile forum lords who refused to explain what “THAC0” was.
That’s less true these days—Age of Empires plays great on a controller, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a cross-platform mega hit, and in defiance of all common sense, Company of Heroes is on Nintendo Switch.
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“Early on in the 2000s, we got enamored with consoles,” Foertsch explained. “And I think certain games didn’t make the leap right—the technology reasons, whatever it was, they couldn’t make that conversion. A lot of tactics games you look at, they had an isometric sprite based thing. And the way they delivered the content, it never embraced the camera as a tool.”
He added that the more games there are solving these problems, the easier it gets to see what works and what doesn’t and, in turn, innovate further. “It’s great to see other people’s solutions to problems that we faced, and how did they get around that? What did they do? What choices did they make? Because these games are deceptively hard—they look easy—but they are deceptively hard to make.”
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