Today brings news that World in Conflict for XBox 360 will use some voice controls. This makes 2 RTS’s this year trying out voice commands for the first time (the other being Tom Clancy’s EndWar). I already own World in Conflict for PC, but the news about voice controls probably makes WiC for XBox a must buy.

RTSs are a genre that had grown stale over the years. The trend seemed to be towards complex micromanagement and clickfests. However, to the extent people play video games to play out their fantasies and to immerse themselves in the gameplay, micromanagement clickfests were exactly the wrong direction for the genre. The RTS player wants to command armies and nations; we are Patton and Caesar wannabes. And Patton didn’t have to tell each individual soldier in his army when to fire his gun or take cover; they took some individual initiative. The role of a general or officer isn’t to tell soldiers when to fire; it’s to determine where the various soldiers go, figure out which units they want in their army, and let the individual soldiers do their thing. So, if I want to play a game and immerse myself in the general role, I don’t want to have to tab through each unit telling it to take cover or rally or some such. That’s neither fun nor immersive.

Voice command, on the other hand…that’s immersive. Yes, the professional strategy gamers will whine, and the rest of us who buy games to enjoy them should ignore their whining like always. I’ve heard from people who are looking for a good cane to pace their living rooms with while ordering European tanks to charge Russian infantry. That’s much more fun than clickfests, and it doesn’t have to mean that the depth is gone.

RTS adds real-time decision making, but the addition of realtime isn’t supposed to be used to require faster clicking. The way real-time should work is to require better reaction times–you don’t have as much time to think about where you want infantry unit 1. But the advantage shouldn’t go to the player that most quickly queues up 20 Zerg units through finger and mouse exercises.

So, I look forward to this wonderful new trend in the RTS genre of making games with less complexity, more immersion, and less depending on twitch abilities. Or, in the alternative, slower RTS games with lots more complexity (like Sins of a Solar Empire).