The kids who grew up playing StarCraft on Nintendo 64 must have thumbs of steel. With the exception of a handful of games designed specifically for consoles like Herzog Zwei and Halo Wars, the RTS has not been a genre that’s played well with controllers. It remains the heartland of the mouse and keyboard.
And yet, Total War developer Creative Assembly is committed to releasing Total War: Warhammer 40,000 on consoles. The studio’s battle product owner Dave Petry told TechRadar at Gamescom he thinks it’s a “myth” that controller support doesn’t work for the RTS genre and that they’ve “landed something that really does work.”
“Because yes, obviously, controllers are your primary method for using consoles, but it’s just an input method. It’s an accessibility tool, right? It’s how you want to play or how you would like to play, and so we’ve always wanted to be able to bring that experience to people who want to use a gamepad.”
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Creative Assembly co-developed Halo Wars 2, which Petry cited as a specific example of a “really strong implementation of controller and RTS,” though it benefits from its simplicity. When the more fiddly Age of Empires 2 came out on Xbox it had to have automated villagers who would gather resources and construct farms based on your preset preference, because that kind of micromanagement is a bit of a faff with twin sticks.
Of course, the Total War games leave building and tech trees for the turn-based side of the campaign, and it’s only battles that happen in real-time. While the finer points of cycle-charging or drawing missile fire by marching your lord back and forth might not feel as nice with a controller, I’m sure it would be possible.
“I think we are learning that we can do this right, and yeah, it’s definitely something that we’re all keen to keep evolving as we ship and work on it,” Petry said. “I think we’ve landed in a really solid spot. I think we’re quite proud of where we are when it comes to the technical side of things as well.”