All right, that headline is a bit of hyperbole, but it does reflect how I’m feeling right now.
A bit over a year ago, I listed off three promising multiplayer RTS intended as spiritual successors to StarCraft II. I always suspected that not all of them would go on to become successful, but in what feels like a shockingly small amount of time, two have all but self-destructed, leaving only one candidate to be the new champion of the RTS genre.
Stormgate pretty much crashed and burned out of the gate with a woefully unpolished and uninspired early access build. It’s still pressing forward, and the devs have already made good changes based on player feedback, such as revamping the model for campaign heroine Amara. And I’d be happy to see a redemption arc for Stormgate, but with lacklustre reviews (including a brutal “1-2/10” courtesy of Day9, whose own mother works on the game) and dismal player numbers, I’m not optimistic.
I don’t think the developers at Frost Giant Studios have really owned up to their mistakes with Stormgate, either. They’ve accepted feedback with respectable grace, but the overall tone of their communication has remained that all the game’s numerous flaws are expected early access hiccups and everything is going as planned, which brings to mind a certain cartoon dog.
In my opinion, hubris has been the death of Stormgate. There is a sense that the people behind it believed their ex-Blizzard pedigree was a substitute for a genuine vision. Until the studio gets brutally honest with itself about the state of Stormgate‘s launch, I’m not going to have much hope for the game’s future.
Meanwhile, Immortal: Gates of Pyre rocked my world with an alpha that was incredibly fun despite its minuscule content, only to follow this up a few weeks later with the absolutely gut-wrenching news that it’s decided to become an NFT game.
Damn. It.
It was such a small team with such ambitious goals that I always thought there was a good chance the game was never going to see the light of day, but man… not like this.
Even putting aside all the valid ethical concerns around blockchain tech, the fact is pretty much every game that’s tried to go the NFT route has proven to be a failure. It’s a dumb fad that’s already well on its way out. I can’t have any faith in Sunspear Games‘ judgment after this. Even if it did drop the NFTs, I’d think twice about supporting the game now, even though I truly loved everything about it. I can’t see it having any kind of future when it’s already made such a massive blunder.
So that brings us to ZeroSpace.
For me it’s always felt like the middle of the road option. Not as creative as IGoP, but still offering a lot more reasons for excitement than Stormgate. I will say it’s the only one that’s been planning to be buy-to-play from the start, which I do think is the smarter choice for an RTS.
I still have concerns, though. With four main factions, seven mercenary factions, and a talent tree inspired in-match upgrade system, it looks to have a level complexity that feels overwhelming even to me as an RTS vet, and I worry it’s going to be totally inaccessible to more casual players.
And as with IGoP, I’m also not sure a team this small can adequately deliver on its huge ambitions for the game. And using AI in the creation of their key art isn’t a great look, though the devs have pledged not to use generative art for anything else in the game.
ZeroSpace was originally intended for a launch in May of 2025, but the latest developer update casts doubt on that. I’m actually a bit relieved as I never thought that was a realistic timeline. The studio is weighing a delayed launch or going the early access route. I hope for the former; I don’t want to see another game kill its own hype with a premature launch. There will also be a free demo event this November, which will hopefully go better than Stormgate‘s Next Fest demo did.
There’s also a lot of reasons to be excited for ZeroSpace. The galactic war mode in particular looks like an absolute blast, and I appreciate that the devs plan it to be playable either solo or co-op. This should keep the mode playable at virtually any player count, which is a welcome concession to realism from an indie game.
It remains a game I’m cautiously optimistic about. I just want to point out that its quality and success are far from sure things, and that’s worrisome because for RTS fans, there is a lot riding on this game.
Yes, there are other RTS games out there. The Age of Empires franchise in particular is doing quite well these days off the back of several well-received remasters. These are good games, and I enjoy them, but at the end of the day these are still mostly remasters of games from 20 years ago. Even the one new entry, AoE4, feels more like a love letter to the past than something truly innovative, and while I enjoyed it at launch, its trajectory post-launch has mostly disappointed me. I still haven’t even bought its expansion.
It’s worth noting that StarCraft 2 is still chugging along as well. Despite maintenance mode, it retains a strong population, and its esports scene is surviving, if perhaps no longer thriving. I don’t think the death of SC2 is anywhere close, but its star will slowly continue to wane.
And there’s other options as well. Total War is still a thing. Battle Aces looks good for what it is, but I think its laser focus on PvP will leave it with a very small niche, and I’m definitely not part of that niche. Godsworn is great, and I’m looking forward to it leaving early access, but it’s a small game with small ambitions. It’s the sort of thing where you play through the campaign once, maybe tool around with custom games for a bit, and then move on.
Which is fine. I think that was always the developers’ goal, and not every game needs to be a blockbuster.
But I do want a blockbuster. I want a game I can sink hundreds of hours into as I did for SC2, and I want new ideas that move the genre forward. If nothing else, Gates of Pyre showed us there’s still a lot of space to evolve the RTS formula.
The RTS genre is surviving with its niche audience, but these days it consists almost entirely of tiny indie titles and franchises from two decades ago. It’s been a long time since we saw genuine ambition and innovation in this field. Maybe RTS will never again be as big as it was in the ’90s, but I want to believe it’s capable of more than this.
ZeroSpace isn’t the last hope for the survival of the RTS genre. But it may be the last chance we have to see real forward progress for RTS as a medium, at least for the foreseeable future.
No pressure, guys.
The world of online gaming is changing. As the gray area between single-player and MMO becomes ever wider, Massively OP’s Tyler Edwards delves into this new and expanding frontier biweekly in Not So Massively, our column on battle royales, OARPGs, looter-shooters, and other multiplayer online titles that aren’t quite MMORPGs.
