Press Play to Start:  RTS Games show the enduring power of challenging gameplay

Wait, it’s already April?

How come it feels like time suddenly sped up somewhere during March? It felt like just yesterday we were all going on spring break, and now I’m almost a month away from graduating and leaving USC. 

That can’t be right, there’s no way. I refuse to face the facts. I will keep acting as if the semester just started and therefore have all the time in the world to enjoy my last semester as an undergraduate. Presidents’ Day? Spring break? I can’t wait.

In light of this (recent) extension of my semester, I’ve decided to pick up a couple of time-consuming hobbies. After all, thanks to my limited and constrained schedule over the past years, I’ve barely even had time to get home and cook myself dinner every night. But now, with this expanded semester, I finally have the time to stop and smell the roses, but only the ones I plant. Yes, I started gardening for the first time, believe it or not. I also decided to finally learn how to play chess, and I plan on becoming reasonably good at tennis as soon as I can find someone willing to play with me.

Still, the hardest and most time-consuming hobby I started isn’t any of those. While the things I mentioned are all useful or impressive skills, I of course decided to spend most of my hours obsessing over something with little to no practical value: RTS games.

For those of you who don’t know, RTS — which stands for Real-Time Strategy games — is a genre that requires quick thinking and management prowess. In most of these games, the main gameplay loop revolves around developing your “base,” growing your army and destroying your enemy’s base with it while keeping an eye on your resources (things like food, raw materials, etc). As the name suggests, a lot of the game revolves around the strategies you develop to accomplish the aforementioned goals while also ensuring you survive. Add the fact that there are different levels of buildings, army units with specific advantages and disadvantages and maps with different locations of resources (if not completely random distributions), and you start to get a better picture of these games.

Sound complicated? That’s because it is. And that’s kind of the point.

Compared to other games and genres I cover in this column, RTS games seem to effectively oppose everything I preach. Instead of having a low -skill barrier to attract the most players possible, these games take the opposite road, making themselves extremely difficult to get into. Worse, since the game requires quick thinking and a lot of unit management, they naturally lend themselves to a mouse and keyboard environment, which automatically alienates many casual gamers who don’t have the time or inclination to invest in a gaming computer. And while this wasn’t an intended difficulty on the developers’ part, the now niche status of these games in the west means that whenever you decide to try your luck at an online match, odds are that you’ll be going against someone who has been playing the game for years and is infinitely better than you at virtually everything. 

Unless you have some sort of David versus Goliath complex or enjoy pain, it’s hard to imagine how you can have fun playing games like this. Most people don’t like having to dedicate all their attention to the most minute details and getting curb-stomped online repeatedly when they fail to click the screen as fast as their opponent (I’m not kidding, that is a real competitive edge). And while they were all the rage many years ago, with arguably the most famous series in this genre, “StarCraft,” effectively jump-starting esports in general, they have failed to retain their audience in the west for the reasons I listed and many more. After all, with and gaming becoming increasingly popular and easy to get into, why on earth would someone choose to play a game that is extremely hard?

That is the sort of thinking I, too, carried for most of my life. While I got the opportunity to play some “Age of Empires” and “StarCraft” at my cousins’ house when I was little, none of those experiences were particularly more fun than, say, “The Simpsons: Hit & Run” or any number of other games. And as I grew older, whenever I tried to give them a chance, I would immediately run into all the issues I detailed and quit after five matches or less. 

But with the rising popularity of FromSoftware games, which are also hard albeit in a different way, my tolerance for frustration began to grow larger. And after completing my three runs of “Elden Ring” late last year, I felt like I was finally ready to tackle this insurmountable challenge once again.

And let me tell you, I’m so glad I did.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still losing 99% of the time. But since I decided to buckle down and learn the ins and outs of these games, I found myself having more fun as time went on. 

But the best part about them comes only after you decided to take the plunge. While the skill barrier is incredibly high, overcoming that hurdle opens up a brand new world, where the skill ceiling is virtually non-existent. And all the things that used to make you not enjoy the game — the constant gamification of every single skill set, the quick decisions, the innumerable strategies required for different matchups — become things to get excited about. Seriously, while I joked about actions per second being a real competitive mechanic earlier, isn’t it also kind of interesting to play a game in which every single element of it can be honed and developed to perfection, including how fast and where you click?

The result ends up being a sort of esports Wild West, where the laws and constraints that are in place in other games to ensure an even playing field are non-existent, and you’ll go as far as your skills can take you. Of course, this means you’ll spend countless hours hunched over your computer trying to maximize things like finding and acquiring sheep faster. But unlike other games, where those hours are usually dedicated to acquiring some item that will only marginally increase your attack power, the skills you acquire after these long sessions are yours to keep forever and will make every single game you play more enjoyable. 

None of this is to say that these games are for everyone. I still believe in all of the things that I preach in the other columns. After all, gaming should be for everyone, from the most incredible pro gamer to the run-of-the-mill customer who plays an average of three hours a week. But RTS games, regardless of their difficulty, prove there is value in taking the alternative path for those who want the challenge. If this inspired you to try them out, let me know and I’ll play a couple of matches with you. You’ll get demolished, but at the very least, you’ll know whose face you want to punch. 

Guilherme Guerreiro is a senior writing about esports. His column “Press Play to Start” runs every other Wednesday.