Relic is famed for RTS games such as Homeworld, Company of Heroes and Warhammer. But the studio has so far shied away from porting any of its titles to console. A bold move considering a number of PC developers now see this a financial necessity.
"Relic sees RTS on console as a very interesting proposition but so far, it hasn't been a good fit for the games we have made," producer Mark Noseworthy told CVG in an interview to be published later this week.
The control scheme is again to blame. "We don't see porting a traditional PC RTS to console as a very good strategy because the controls, by definition, are incompatible with the game design. To do RTS on console right, you have to develop from the ground up and rethink what it means to have real-time-strategy gameplay."
There is some good news for Relic's console fans (the studio also did The Outfit on 360) though in the form of this little bone: "Dawn of War II isn't a traditional RTS and I think it would make a much better candidate for porting to console than any of our previous games but there are no such plans right now."
i think that a warhammer 40k dawn of war game on the next gen consoles would be great. the 360 could solve its own problems. but there is absolutely no need to alter it for ps3. mouse and keyboard support mean that playig online rts on the ps3 would be easy.
the could always simplify it a lil like civ but personally id prefer a straight port.
Let's see if a success with EndWar's voice control changes the perception of console RTSs. I'd love to see a voice controlled console remake of Homeworld.
I tried C&C3 on the 360. It made me glad I still had a PC with a mouse. Wouldnt a firmware update be all that would be needed to add a standard mouse compatibility with left and right buttons and a scroll wheel. I would have thought they would have tried this by now anyway and made an "official" 360 mouse, lol, for twice as much as a decent USB mouse
I don't know what developers of RTS on PC-only are thinking but I bet most gamers are thinking, why can't we just plug our mouse and keyboard in to our consoles? wht, why ,why?
I'm just surprised that no-one has really decided to release a decent RTS on Wii. The first time I got my wii and used the wiimote/nunchuk combo, I immediately thought how well it would translate to an rts - wiimote acts as the mouse pointer and has the two buttons (d-pad could be used similar to hotkeys), analogue stick on nunchuk moves the camera, or with the trigger held down acts to zoom in/out of the action. Hmmm. Quick, someone pass me a copyright form!
If you could plug a mouse and a keyboard into an xbox, it would be a low rent pc without windows. You want to use a mouse, play games on a pc.
You can use a keyboard easy enough, makes setting up your gamer account easier than navigating a keyboard with the controller... they just don't seem to want you to play games with it.
Have to agree with the last sentence though... if I wanted to play games with a keyboard I'd use a PC, but I don't, so I play games on a console with a controller designed specifically for playing games.
Really, RTS fans play them on a PC where they are supposed to be played. I don't think many of them will go out of their way to play the watered down versions on console.
RTS could work on consoles if the hardware manufacturers would simply allow a USB or wireless mouse and keyboard to be used for some games.
I don't know about the 360, but I'm pretty sure this *is* possible on the PS3. I know for a fact certain PS2 games supported keyboard + mouse, typically ports of PC games (Half-life, for example).
The guy in this article pretty much sums up what I've said elsewhere and what I've always thought;
Developers could make RTS games work on console if they started from the ground up. But - rather predictably for traditional PC developers - they haven't got the vision to work out a solution to the problem, so they proclaim it can't be done.
As soon as a dedicated console RTS comes along that shows these lazy-stick-to-what-you-know devs how to make an efficient and popular interface you can be sure they'll be "borrowing" said interface and finally cashing in on the enormous console market they've realised they're missing out on.
Finally, some years later after saying it can't be done, you'll have the same scenario that you have presently with the console FPS; millions of console RTS games that all essentially look and play the same with a few superb titles floating amongst the muck.
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