A recent article at RockPaperShotgun touches on the recent flurry of MMORTS activity, with the loudly pronounced arrival of SAGA and its innovative take on micropayments, the Beyond Protocol BETA which is generating a lot of fan noise and the reincarnation of Dreamlords with The ReAwakening, again, just released.

Like most recent discussions about the genre by those who populate either the MMORPG or RTS scenes, many act like this is an unexpected turn of events and something new to behold. To point out the genre is 10 years old is too, typically, kill the thread as folk reread their comments and wish for an edit button.

One key point here, what many old MMORTS players need to comment on, is the advent of decent networking hardware, and software also. All recent games, to my knowledge, have heavily relied upon .net technology and without this, and better code, would have suffered from the lag which plagued this genre for years. Dont get me wrong, lag will still occur, just at a much higher ceiling and outside of the majorities experience we are hoping. Hardware can be added too more smoothly now and cpu power and ram have increased massively.

Graphics are much better nowadays but not important really - shiny textures soon annoy when selecting units in a hurry and many veterans wouldnt log on prior to a battle without setting everything low anyway. Having recently put my points on this to RockPaperShotgun and a few associated sites ( after the tentonhammer crew slated SAGA) I will await more comments and see if I can contribute some other points once the basics are over with.

I would love for those reading this to venture forth and comment - increased debate and coverage gaurentee's our genre's success - remember every game you have entered and been alone in - we can stop this!!

i disagree with you on network tech. rts isn't limited by lag and ping. fps games are what require mad networks, they need sub- 200ms pings. why look at me, i play rts at 2 full seconds. and rts is the easiest to play out of all the genre's. if your refering to the high amounts of units and fps lag, please be more obvious next time

Just a quickie reply but I have never counted you amongst the large players unit wise - mostly down to you ongoing awful connection over the time I have known you. Its all you moan about. Our genre is stressful for pcs with both CPU and GPU load but network issues can smooth out this - more so now than ever.