And to contribute something more interesting: The appealing thing about this rather ‘neutral’ model style is probably similar to LEGO environments. The less people crap their artistic and stylistic vision all over the place, the more you are free to develop your own.

There’s something essentially gamey about being an eye in the sky over some intricately constructed terrain…

I’m not even sure a “God’s eye” or “Isometric” perspective is necessary. In fact, let’s abuse two overused and inapt metaphors: Sandbox and antfarming.

Sandbox: developer types like to use “Sandbox” (hell, it’s been used in this thread) to evoke the idea of a game where a player decides what to do and what the rules are. What they mean, though, is a game type that has multiple types and magnitudes of sub-games for the user to play. So, in practice, if a “regular” videogame were like a miniature golf course or a hedge maze, a “sandbox” game would be like an amusement park — lots of little rides, most of them suitable for small children who don’t mind waiting in line to repeat the same inane spinning teacup bit fifteen times until they get it right.
Oh yeah, one other thing: not even the Sims gets called “Dollhouse”. Basically, the two ideas are the same, only the actors are gendered differently.

“Antfarming” is a great term to use for the classic developer’s mistake of falling in love with a complex design that doesn’t really do anything for the player other than make a dull game confusing as well.

But what about the real deal? Has anyone actually looked at what happens in a sandbox?
Sandboxes are where cats shit and children play, in that order. Kids play with toys, plural. After about the age of two, the fun isn’t in making that yellow truck move around the sandbox; it’s in making that truck deliver a load of catshit from Witch Mountain all the way down to the semi-fertile farms of Booger Gulch. If there’s more than one kid, the toys and the choice of game will be a manner of negotiating and reinforcing the social order: now’s when we set your Luke Skywalker action figure on fire and bury him behind the ashy remains of his Tatooine lollipop-stick factory, while my SpongeBob doll dances on his grave shouting obscenities.

Sandbox play does not involve kids taking single toys as their avatars and exploring the sandbox with them. It’s kids staring down at toys and establishing relationships between them, the environment and each other. That’s what makes train sets cool, model villages, RTSs and Combat Mission.

Ant Farms? Well, I just brought them up because they’re best viewed from a horizontal-perspective. Part of the surprise of ant farms comes from the fact that, while we often see across a flat surface, the behavior seems much more complex when an anthill can be seen from the side.

So top-down or isometric isn’t necessary; it’s just how we best see the relationships between the terrain and the agents.

Miniature models and their virtual counterparts probably share another common bond. Some video game artists seem particularly fond of assembling them, usually in the proximity of a 3D scanner.

SS3 + Combat Mission = a serious drop in worldwide productivity.

Sorry for the long quote, just wanted to make clear to what I am referring – I’ve thought this for a while now, how exactly that trend seems to get less and less, and is only really left in RTS games. I for one miss top-down/isometric games in other genres a lot, and it’s a particular shame that now that 3D is finally far enough to be pretty much as detailed as 2D was (as demonstrated by Titan Quest, for example), while having lots of other advantages, the perspective, formerly especially used in RPG games, is almost dead.

Sometimes after playing an FPS or Third-person game, I long more for a change of perspective than a change of game or genre.

Another thing to like about Sudden Strike was that these games actually had a Russian side from the start. Nowadays, it seems to be pretty impossible to get a WW2 RTS that involves more than Germany and the USA (and maybe the British)…

Also inexpressibly boring. Loathe those games and I’m a big RTS fan.