RTS - PC = WTF

With the upcoming release of Halo Wars, an RTS made exclusively for consoles. I have to wonder if RTS's have a solid future on consoles. Sure there have been some that did fairly well. But none as of yet has really taken off and formed a following. Nor has any of them managed to feel as solid to play as their PC counterpart.

As someone who greatly prefers playing games that traditionaly do well with a mouse and keyboard with said controls, if you told me ten years ago that FPS's would be big on consoles and have a strong following I'd tell you that your quite mad. But look where we are now, after Halo the FPS scene has grown significantly on consoles.

Does this mean that there is a chance for the RTS genre to do the same? I think its possible. The RTS genre right now is in a similar place to where the FPS genre was back before it hit big on consoles. First it was port overs, then original console FPS's. All the while developers were trying to figure out a control scheme that wasn't a chore to play with. So what was it that Halo did that allowed FPS's to have a respectable following on consoles?

I personally think the game itself wasn't that great. The controls though did work decently enough. I think it hit at the right time also, where a lot of younger gamers who didn't grow up playing counter strike and such on PC's got to experience an FPS for the first time on their xbox. What I think really made Halo work though was the online community it created. Gamers who didn't play PC games never experienced something like that before.

With the 360 the online community has only gotten stronger, and the quality of FPS's continues to as well. I think a well integrated online community like that is needed for RTS's, but it will take more then that. Its a given that FPS's play better on PC's, but the way a good RTS uses a mouse and keyboard makes it significantly harder to make a solid control scheme on a controller. Besides that hurdle, I've heard some talk about how the fundamentals of RTS's need to change to, for this transition to consoles. Specifically with the way a traditional RTS has you do the same formula of collect resources, build x y and z, etc.

If an RTS is stripped of things like resource collecting, I think something else has to be added to the gameplay then. From what I've heard so far, Halo Wars doesn't seem to be the RTS to help make this great following on consoles. But I guess we'll have to wait and see. There's a lot of Halo fans out there, and hey, you don't always need a stelar game if you have an addictive online community. Just look at Phantasy Star Online.