Creative Assembly’s console RTS Stormrise will eventually make it to the PC.

I saw the game at E3 and wasn’t really impressed. The controls looked fine, but the demo was so staged – an assault on a seemingly immobile defensive army – that I got a poor feel for how it worked in real time. The demo was perfectly fine for a tactical training exercise; showing off unit powers, emphasizing flanking and crossfire, matching unit strengths and weaknesses, etc. In other words, something we haven’t seen much of on consoles.

Without seeing how the AI would move in response to a player action, however, I didn’t get any sense of how time pressure fits into all the tactics and planning. And how a game deals with time pressure is what separates a good RTS from a bad RTS. Showing me scouting and psychic mind control and cross fire is nice. It doesn’t give me any sense for how everything fits together into a war plan when someone is moving in the opposite direction.

The port to the PC is interesting, because it will be, I think, the first RTS designed for console controls that will have to be adapted to a keyboard/mouse environment. Will it be as messy as the usual platform transfer? Or easier because the control norms are already firmly in place?