Daedalic Entertainment announced their in-development real-time strategy game A Year Of Rain is now officially on hold.
Currently in Early Access on Steam and only becoming available there back in November 2019, it was due to come to Linux a little later but that's likely not happening now. Yesterday, Daedalic announced on Steam they mentioned that the "low player base" had caused some major issues for them with it only hitting a little more "than 5000 players worldwide" this week. Looking at the Steam stats for it, they only managed an all-time peak of 244 players and then it just continued to drop, which for a co-op RTS isn't sustainable for an "independent studio with limited resources". Due to this they "decided to put the active development of A Year Of Rain on hold".
As a big fan of such traditional real-time strategy games and always hoping for a resurgence, it does make me sad to see another failed attempt.
It seems it suffered some big technical issues, with a lot of people mentioning the Pathfinding was pretty awful which is one of the most basic systems an RTS really needs right from the earliest release. Sounds like it was promising in a few ways though but needed a big rework in others. That's what you should expect from an Early Access game though; rough but in-development and that is the point of it. In this case, it seems Daedalic Entertainment expected it to do a lot better.
This has already pushed some users to add negative reviews on Steam, so it doesn't have a very good rating overall.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
For me, the point when RTS as a genre went wrong was when they started "streamlining" the games for online play. Like how they simplified the economy so that people could focus on "micro": a lot fewer different resources, and often obtained by controlling strategic map locations to get resources/units instead of managing your home base, for example. Or how the UI slowly changed to avoid needing to move the screen back to the home base, how unit leveling became a big thing (so that you had to fight early to farm xp, and protect your veterans), how walls started vanishing (because turtling made for slow online games), how games moved deeper into squad-based and unit specialization (to prevent mass-building the same unit to dominate), how more physics simulation for terrain/projectiles made the games require even more micro, etc...
None of those changes were damning on their own, and some of the earlier titles still of this "wave" were quite good (like Battle for the Middle Earth 1 and 2, that were mentioned, or the Star Wars adaptation Empire at War, or Warcraft 3). But eventually, the changes accumulated (in a very, very gradual process) and the games kind of fell apart for me (many people still enjoyed them, though).
I've lately been itching a lot to buy and play Northgard. It looks more like the pace of an RTS of old rather than a cut-throat game like SC2.
I had Rise of Nations as well. I bought it for the hype. If I remember correctly, it never made it out of the shrink wrap. See, I started out with RTS on PC. (I was truly a console kid first.) It was Red Alert that made me a PC gamer instead of console only. From there, it was Age of Empires II and then Empire Earth, C&C: Generals, Battle for Middle Earth, Warcraft 3, a little bit of Starcraft (wasn't a big fan). I eventually focused on shooters and lost interest in RTS. Perhaps it was for the reasons eldaking brings up. I have surprisingly not contemplated it. But it was always comp stomps for me. I had no interest in an RTS campaign. The only one I played was Starcraft II, and that was very worthwhile.
I've lately been itching a lot to buy and play Northgard. It looks more like the pace of an RTS of old rather than a cut-throat game like SC2.
I had a choice of console when i was a kid. Glad I told my dad no and stuck to PC.
I didn't like shooters when i was young since I was scared (lol) but I did like RTS since the fight seemed far away and with AOE games you had a lot of economy going and could do stuff besides fight.
My favorite RTS games were the ones with a good campaign that draws you in , explains the mechanics as you go and then playing skirmish versus bots.
Few of my friends liked RTS.
But is ALWAYS the percentage's fault not something else.
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