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United States4883 Posts
Hey guys. I've been sitting on these thoughts for years, and now that I'm starting to get back into Brood War and becoming more involved in the StarCraft community again, I decided to write down a bunch of my frustrations with SC2 and why I think it failed to live up to its potential.
This is not a whine post. This is not a "I hope they fix it" post. Just a long rant about the things that have bothered me for so long and why I think they came about. I don't care if you agree or disagree with me, but I thought this might be a good article to spark some design discussion.
I originally posted this on my site, but rather than just giving you a link, I decided to reformat the article to fit TL. This is actually only the first part so far...I still have several other ideas, but I thought it might be a good idea to cap it at 4k words for the first section.
The Failures of SC2
Decided to do a bit of a short article about my thoughts on StarCraft 2…and then it grew into this thing. I want to be very clear that StarCraft is quite honestly one of the best things that has ever happened to me; it completely changed my view of the world, and I’ve never been the same since I first discovered it. Nonetheless, I think it failed to live up to its potential, and it’s important to look back on the history of the game, how it evolved, how it came to be, and really think critically about how it was handled. It’s important to do this sort of analysis, not just because I just want to disagree with David Kim, but because I truly believe the developers didn’t think through their design decisions properly, and thus the finished product was botched beyond belief.
I’ve been through a lot of ups and downs with StarCraft 2, and since I’ve taken the long way around to playing Brood War, I feel I’m qualified to explain the design failures of StarCraft 2 accurately with a sober and impartial approach free from “arguments of nostalgia”. StarCraft has been a huge part of my life, and I feel it’s necessary to put down on paper all of the things that have been bothering me about its design and development from day one—and hopefully in the process, I can explain why some of these things came to be in the first place.
Note: I have not played Legacy of the Void since the first few weeks of release. I know a lot of people believe that the final expansion has made a lot of progress and created a much better game, but through my own observations, watching tournaments, and seeing others play, there are still plenty of core issues that still persist and taint the potential of this beautiful game. I want to avoid making too many Brood War vs StarCraft 2 arguments, but I think it would be willfully ignorant to gloss over the things that BW did correctly just to avoid a comparison argument.
Defender’s Advantage is Dead
If you play Brood War for only a moment, you will immediately notice the insane power of defender’s advantage. With the right units, you can hold a base forever against your opponent. For instance, literally no number of marine/medic will ever break three lurkers on top of a ramp, and Protoss can camp out on one base with Templar, Dark Archons, and Arbiters safely for pretty much eternity.
This sort of defense doesn’t exist in StarCraft 2. It’s not necessarily bad that the sequel got rid of high ground advantages that relied on RNG, but the effects on the gameplay were numerous and adverse.
Perhaps the largest difference is the emergence of the “deathball syndrome”. I don’t necessarily mean the emergence of large armies, but rather the phenomenon where players will always expand outward from their main while using a rather mobile army bouncing between bases to defend. From this issue arises a whole slew of other problems, from hard counters to uninteresting economic models to unit design issues.
Here’s an example: in Brood War, one of the key concepts, particularly for Zerg and Protoss players, is to expand to other corners of the map and create two “main bases” to work outwards from. This means that you can defend one base from your opponent’s attacks while slowly building up a force at the other base. When the big doom push comes knocking at your natural expansion, you can stall out with defilers or templar while continuing to amass forces at the other corner of the map.
If you attempt this sort of strategy in StarCraft 2, one or both of your bases will likely be overrun very quickly unless your opponent doesn’t scout it. This was attempted many times in the game’s infancy, and there’s a reason why the tactic quickly died out.
A Thought Experiment
Think abstractly for a moment. Two kings are at war with one another. King Raynor has only one castle, but King Artanis has two castles placed a reasonable distance apart. If Raynor wants to take over Artanis’s empire, he will want to invade both castles. He can either split his forces and risk being unable to break either or he can overrun them one at a time; naturally, Raynor will decide to dedicate all of his forces toward one target to avoid splitting his damage too much.
Assuming unlimited resources, the king with two castles will always win. Artanis can stall out Raynor’s siege for a very long time while gathering his forces at his other castle, eventually gathering a critical mass that will allow him surround and crush the invasion or attack Raynor’s base directly; Raynor will have to either sacrifice his castle (which he can’t) or retreat with his forces intact. Either way, Artanis with his two castles comes out ahead in the war.
If you remove the defender’s advantage—say, the two kings own camps on large fields—there are few incentives to creating large camps far away from each other (though you do have the perk of being able to relocate easily). Instead, the kings will tend to clump up their resources and rely more on mobile troops who can switch very quickly between attack and defense to guard their land. History will show that this is often the case in less advanced regions, with examples such as the Mongols during Atila’s reign or the Iroquois Indians in the plains region of North America; the group that was proficient on horseback and owned many horses was always on the winning side.
The second example is much closer to the accidental design of StarCraft 2. It’s not necessarily bad, but it does create a situation where bases must be tightly clustered and multi-purposed units with a lot of mobility reign supreme. If you need a more concrete example, look at the one exception in Brood War: ZvZ. In that matchup, Sunken and Spore Colonies simply don’t attack quickly enough to deal with swarms of mutalisks or zerglings, therefore negating a lot of the defender’s advantage. As such, players constantly had to match their opponent’s army in order to defend against potentially fatal attacks.
You could argue that ZvZ was borderline chaos. StarCraft 2 took this a step further into to the extreme when things like instant reinforcement (Protoss Warp-ins, speedlings on creep) and hyper utility units (like the Queen or the Mothership Core) were added to the game and even further weakened the defender’s advantage. The road since then has never yielded us a comfortable design that felt manageable. Without the proper checks and a stable set of rules, this sort of mobile warfare devolves from a brilliant allocation of troops similar to Risk into absolute chaos.
The Deathball: An Unintended Side Effect
The thought experiment above is actually great for understanding different systems of warfare and even understanding some of the asymmetric balance that occurs between the races in StarCraft, but as you can see, it comes with some serious considerations. If bases aren’t spread out, what’s the point of spreading your army out?
Deathballs were something that emerged almost immediately in Starcraft 2‘s storied past, beginning with the horrific 1 food roach swarms during the beta. Many reasons were stated in the past as to why this particular phenomenon seemed to crop up: it was the fault of “unlimited” unit selection, damage density, hyper-mobile units, weak AoE, boring unit design, economic mining behavior, etc. There’s no doubt that these things may have exacerbated the problem, but at its core, it all began with a lack of defender’s advantage.
If you have a weak defender’s advantage and have to rely primarily on numbers, then positioning becomes much more important. In the late game, a large army can only be defended by an equally large army. It’s difficult to spare even a single unit to defend outlying bases, much less split your army in two. Thus, it makes more sense to move your army in a large ball between bases, using small groups and vision to deter possible counterattacks.
Blizzard’s Attempt to Fix the Problem
Legacy of the Void has attempted to artificially solve this problem by starving players out (“expand or die”) and forcing them to take blind chances with their positioning; they must split up their army and do harassment on several different fronts to protect their own economy while slowing down their opponent’s. You will always lose something, so it becomes a battle to see who can lose less—it’s skillful, but not necessarily fulfilling. For multiple reasons, I don’t believe this is fun (though I know others believe differently). More objectively, however, it creates a world in which a “perfect game” is impossible, a sentiment that many Korean players and coaches have shared with David Kim and the design team over and over—it’s not just very hard to play well, it’s literally impossible.
One of the beauties of Brood War is that it can actually nearly be mastered. Basic macro and positioning is difficult to do, but very much achievable with many intermediate steps along the way. Most of the difficulty is in the PvE aspect, so you feel great if you played a game with high APM, great macro, and a well-executed strategy. From there, it’s a battle with your opponent to see who can out-multitask the other. That’s where the endless challenge of Brood War lies, and it’s an endless pursuit as long as players play the game competitively.
On the other hand, Legacy of the Void has an extremely low barrier of entry but forces you to make blind decisions regarding your tech, scouting, and army positioning. While this can be entertaining from a spectator’s perspective (for those “big moments”), it’s nigh impossible to practice properly because of the game’s ever-changing nature depending on the opponent, their build, and their playstyle; you cannot become proficient without either having innate godlike twitch mechanics or an uncanny ability to read your opponent and guess their next move.
To reiterate, this is a band-aid fix for a problem that runs much deeper than the surface. It’s not necessarily accurate to give the game an inherent property that actually means something, but for a game that is based on economics, Starcraft 2 fails on the premise of making economics meaningful. Unit interaction and throwing a wrench in your opponent’s plans take up a far more meaningful role than building bases and managing resources.
There are some potential fixes that could have helped to fix deathballs (such as better defender’s advantage, stronger space control, or some sort of innate base defense that can defend against small numbers of units), but a starvation economy and an increased focus on harassment has done nothing but destabilize the game.
Damage Numbers Are Out of Control
One of the key features of StarCraft 2 has always been its quick pace and smooth graphics. Compared to Brood War (or really any other RTS that came out around the same time), it runs on a beautiful, efficient engine. Everyone who’s seen a dragoon take 20 minutes to find the entrance to a ramp knows exactly the frustration that older generation RTS’s posed in terms of unit movement and animation. StarCraft 2, on the other hand, was revolutionary.
For the first time, units would glide over the terrain with precision and accuracy. Micro tricks like marine splitting, blink stalker micro, and ling/baneling wars were the apex of the game’s achievements; nothing in the world takes your breath away like watching a pro player split marines like a god. Anyone who argues for the wonky glitches and awkward unit interaction from older generation RTS’s is living in a fantasy world. Either way, we still have to face the fact that the smoothness of the engine did cause some unintentional problems.
The first inherent problem is the tendency for units to clump up. If you select a large group of units and click at a designated location, the engine will give each and every unit a command to walk to that exact spot on the map, hindered only by unit collision. Not a big deal, but it does create some issues in that groups will always travel in clusters. Add in “unlimited” unit selection, and you’ve got yourself a good old-fashioned “deathball”. One of the beauties of older generation games was that units moved in waves or small, kind of square-like groups that was messy and required micro management to keep it in line.
A ball, however, is the perfect shape for damage. With ranged units, it applies equal DPS on all sides and naturally protects itself from surrounds by eliminating the gaps in between ranks and reducing surface area. Most importantly, it greatly increases the damage density.
Damage Density is Dangerous
Damage density is the damage per second per square inch (or foot or meter or what have you). In other words, clumped up units do more damage per second.
So what makes this different from any other game? Critical mass. If you continue adding to the ball, eventually you reach a point where the diameter of the ball exceeds the range of the unit. When all of the units cannot fire at once, the ball has reached critical mass and cannot generate a higher DPS except through a concave. What happens when you can select up to 100 units at a time in StarCraft 2‘s ultra smooth engine? The critical mass almost ceases to exist in a realistic game.
Some have speculated that increasing unit collision size or refining some of the movement behavior through unintuitive engine rules might fix this problem, but it’s unlikely that these changes would ever create a more stable or glossier interface that we have currently; we do not want to go back to a clunkier system.
Assuming that the engine mechanics are here to stay, we can only influence the behavior of deathballs (which is difficult for reasons stated above) or find a way to prevent the critical mass from sublimating everything in their path.
Quality of Life Improvements Are Too Good
The second major problem arising from StarCraft 2‘s engine is the ease of utility and the smoothness of the way the units move and behave. Again, these are great improvements in quality, but they can cause some serious issues if left unchecked.
Things like smart targeting, lack of overkill, and smart casting all play a part in making the user’s experience easy and consistent. In addition, the animations in the game are clean and functional without creating visual clutter. It’s honestly a marvel in game development how few bugs and glitches StarCraft 2 has. However, these quality of life improvements also make it really easy to focus damage and gun things down very efficiently.
Smooth unit movement also makes it incredibly easy to close distances with melee units or move armies up and down ramps like a flowing river. It makes everything more mobile, more slippery, and above all, more dangerous. Added to the quick speed of the game, there’s hardly time to react to unit movements and you will almost inevitably take some damage if you’re not paying close attention. It’s not uncommon to look away at your base and look back to find your army melting to colossi beams and Psionic Storms.
To put it simply: the fluid unit movement and attack animations in StarCraft 2 are simply too good for the current damage numbers. Damage numbers have grown out of control. Again, we definitely don’t want to relive the past, but we must adapt to the new technology better than we have so far.
Reducing the Overall Damage Output
The most elegant solution is a damage nerf across the board. Oracles should not be able to clear an unattended entire mineral line in seconds. A group of marine/marauder/medivac shouldn’t be able to level a base in the blink of an eye. A group of 12+ roaches shouldn’t be able to one-shot basically any unit in the game.
The game of StarCraft 2 is actually played a notch faster than originally intended, but as the standard game speed increased, the damage numbers stayed the same. As a result, the hectic race of trying to drop in two places while maneuvering your army in an intelligent way on top of macroing perfectly has always been a delicate balance. Many games have been won and lost by a single mistake, a single moment of inattention, and it’s largely because things just die too fast. For the most part, we got used to it, but the insane pace set by Legacy of the Void sped up the game even more and created a frantic atmosphere of drops, small skirmishes, non-committal expansions, and crazy strategies. It’s become a game of making less mistakes than your opponent rather than executing thoughtful strategies perfectly.
If you ask me, the base attack of most units in the game could be toned down by 20-50%. It would feel weird at first, but giving players more time to react, micro, and play around attacks might create an illusion that the game is not so chaotic as it seems sometimes. Large spell threats like Psionic Storm, Ravager bombs, or Widow Mines could remain the same to retain those big moments where attention is absolutely necessary, but preventing critical masses from mowing down everything in sight instantly could create much more interesting game dynamics than we see currently.
Macro Mechanics Were a Bad Idea
I don’t think there should be any argument here, to be honest. Macro mechanics were designed as a way to keep players doing things and paying attention to their bases, a problem the developers appropriately identified when they simplified/smoothed out a lot of the UI. Increasing the ease of play by allowing workers to be rallied automatically, shift-clicking buildings, and increased maximum unit selection were all good things (it would be ignorant to say otherwise), but they had one major drawback: they made the game a little too easy to play. Working with the smaller maps and confined spaces to build at the time, the developers calculated that something needed to be worked out so that players had to look at their bases occasionally. The result was macro mechanics.
At the outset, it didn’t seem as if they posed any large overarching problems. Hilariously small maps like Steppes of War and Slag Pits were dominated by proxy cheeses which Terran and Protoss benefited from most, but macro mechanics allowed non-stop action during these elongated one base vs one base fights. On large maps, there seemed to be no adverse side effects other than 4-gate rushes and speedling openings. It was apparent that one-base tech was coming out a little too quickly, but that could always be solved with research time adjustments (like the ones for the bunker, warp gate timing twice, banshees, reapers, etc.); large scale macro games, however, showed no real signs that the macro mechanics caused issues. It was difficult at this time for the creators to actually gauge whether macro mechanics or some of the more common things like unit design, timing, and maps were the issues with imbalance.
In hindsight, it’s strange that they overlooked a core aspect of the game for more variable objects. While numbers or functionality of a unit can be changed to affect one circumstance, macro mechanics affected all parts of play in every circumstance. If something so core to the game isn’t accurately vetted and tested, there’s no telling what the long-term effects of it will be, and in this case, all it did was artificially speed up the game.
The Inject Larva Arms Race
When we finally reached open mapmaking that gave fair opportunity to all races and Zerg could freely take third bases, Inject Larva started an arms race. This is when we began to truly see the “three base cap” and big deathballs emerge, and it was all because Zerg could instantly remax their army off of four injected hatcheries. I personally believe the first time that macro mechanics became truly problematic was Stephano’s roach max build. This wasn’t some chimerical idea that had never been thought of before, but it did change the way that many players looked at production and defense. After that, Terran players began to build extra CCs earlier, Protoss players began taking bases earlier, Zergs got even more aggressive with their expansions—the greed got out of control because whatever drawbacks the player took from expanding early were more than made up for within a minute or two due to the macro mechanics. The economic boost gained through Chronoboost, MULEs, and Inject Larva sped up the early/mid game to an alarming speed and ushered in an artificial late game with monstrous armies.
Within a few months, the game had evolved from a mosh pit of one and two base aggressive plays and awkward macro play to a calculated game of risk that balanced greed and safety on a knife’s edge while abusing macro mechanics. Pretty soon, everyone was able to get to three bases rapidly without any danger, and we began an era of 2-base all-in or max. A few odd turtle strategies like mech or swarm host play emerged, but generally the game revolved around one thing: getting a third base and maxing out.
Legacy of the Void and Macro Mechanics
These problems persisted late into the second expansion and into Legacy of the Void. As the game grew into larger maps and freer bases, the developers began to realize they had made a huge error. The attempt was made to artificially slow down the rate of expansion and maxing out with their economic changes as well as the introduction of several more units who could break fortifications or harass mineral lines with ease. Following an outcry that the game was too difficult, the developers decided now was a good time to address macro mechanics and maybe even remove them altogether.
Removing MULEs, Chronoboost, and Inject Larva was probably the best thing they could have done with the game, but a surprising amount of backlash from the community pressured developers into bringing them back. Faux arguments that macro mechanics showed skill, allowed more choices, or were an integral part of StarCraft 2 were all fallacies backed by nostalgia; all of them failed to recognize that the insane arms race generated by macro mechanics are the reason why the game needed an economic adjustment to begin with. Removing them provides far more meaningful decisions in regards to your army positioning, how you harass, and your opening build.
Think for a moment of an early game where variations of 4-gate timings aren’t two minutes apart. Think about how much more predictable that particular pressure will be. All builds would take a little longer to get off the ground, harass units like oracles or cyclones would come out later (and at a much more reliable time), and scouting in the early game would actually be somewhat difficult. Mind games and proper control become paramount, but no longer does each player need to take risks to account for an impossibly early rush that might kill them instantly. Bases are taken somewhat more organically as players take a bit longer to mine out. There’s more early game interaction between units and less positional guesswork involved.
That’s the sort of StarCraft that feels strategic.
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i agree with some of these complaints. However, i think if the perfect RTS game were released in 2010 it'd be like releasing the perfect dot-eating-maze game in 1986 or the perfect gallery shooter in 1982. Too late: advances in consumer technology has given consumers too many choices and effectively watered down the hard core demand for the product.
there are just too many ways to be part of big armies fighting each other today. in 1999 it had to be on a monolithic desktop PC planted firmly in your house. the big army fight is the ultimate payoff and was not possible in the 1980s. When it became possible in the 1990s the genre skyrocketed in popularity.
Games like the 1982 Intellivision Utopia is an RTS game with combat limited by the tech of the day. Its a nice niche title with a community around it that lasted decades. However, people want both action and strategy.
The peak era for RTS has come and gone and there is nothing any single company or group of companies can do about it. It didn't matter what Blizzard did.. it was already over.... and still is.
no company can justify pouring huge resources into an RTS game so we get stuff like Halo Wars 2, Dawn of War 3, and Homeworld: Shipbreakers.
the SC2:LotV team is filled with ex-C&Cers and the pace of the game more resembles a C&C game than Brood War or even SC2:WoL. i like the fast pace... i like C&C games as well. There is a very big difference between SC2:LotV and SC1:Brood War. Consumers now have greater choice within the genre as a result of the direction Blizzard took SC2:LotV. I'm happy with it.
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"Macro was a mistake"
- Hayao Miyazaki
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I agree that removing the macro mechanics was the best thing they ever did for SC2, and now I don't play it and am back to BW too, nice blog well said. 5/5
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i tried playing broodwar again and it's just so infuriating.. drones don't auto mine, they rally to the minerals and just sit there!! oh the joys of 'macro mechanics'.. ie.. babysitting every single unit that pops from every single hatchery...
totally agree on the 'defenders advantage' stuff tho
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Great read, 5/5.
A lot of what you said were the exact feelings I had during WoL Closed Beta, especially the part about the lack of defender's advantage and Blizzard's approach to balance. I got so frustrated with the constant tweaks, their inability to understand RTS concepts, and their refusal to address core problems that their design/engine was producing. I promptly quit the game 2 months after they released WoL with no regrets.
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Perhaps they could try adding an 'easy' mode option to BW remastered that has automining, larger control groups and multiple building selection and see how that works. There's probably all sorts of reasons why it wouldn't work well but it would be interesting to see what it's like.
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On June 04 2017 17:49 tomatriedes wrote: Perhaps they could try adding an 'easy' mode option to BW remastered that has automining, larger control groups and multiple building selection and see how that works. There's probably all sorts of reasons why it wouldn't work well but it would be interesting to see what it's like.
I am all for it. Now logically we assume that that is what makes BW, BW, however I always prefer an experiment over theory, however compelling that theory might be.
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United States4883 Posts
On June 04 2017 15:59 CUTtheCBC wrote: i tried playing broodwar again and it's just so infuriating.. drones don't auto mine, they rally to the minerals and just sit there!! oh the joys of 'macro mechanics'.. ie.. babysitting every single unit that pops from every single hatchery...
totally agree on the 'defenders advantage' stuff tho
This is actually something I talked with people about a little after I wrote this article. It's an interesting idea to consider sending workers to mine or building buildings one by one a "macro mechanic", because it totally is. Whether it was unintentional or not isn't very clear.
However, if we imagine for a second that forcing players to send workers to mine was an intentional design decision to force players to look at their base and artificially make the game, there's still a huge difference between that and injecting or chronoboosting in SC2, the main difference being that it is much more incremental and has a much smaller effect on unit production. As I mentioned in the article above, the big effect of macro mechanics introduced in SC2 was an arms race of economy and greed which accelerated early/mid game to extreme speeds.
I think if you have intentional design decisions created to separate good players from bad ones, you should look toward creating a system which has multiple steps toward "mastery" of a certain aspect. If "mastery" in Brood War is sending every single drone to mining immediately after hatching, then the effect of having a 1-2 second delay in your reaction time is noticeable but not adverse. It allows the better player to eke out an extra 100 minerals every 2 minutes or something.
Adding in more steps toward mastery provides a larger array of skill available and makes necessary decision trees and reaction times far less sharp. The game has a softer edge which makes it more accessible to a larger group of people and a larger differentiation of skill between those players.
On June 04 2017 16:26 imBLIND wrote: Great read, 5/5.
A lot of what you said were the exact feelings I had during WoL Closed Beta, especially the part about the lack of defender's advantage and Blizzard's approach to balance. I got so frustrated with the constant tweaks, their inability to understand RTS concepts, and their refusal to address core problems that their design/engine was producing. I promptly quit the game 2 months after they released WoL with no regrets.
That's ironic because I actually think WoL was the best form of SC2 ever. It obviously still had some issues, but at least scouting wasn't free and players had to think fairly critically about how greedy they could be. The game was dead in the water by the time Broodlord/Infestor rolled around, and HotS did very little to address the problems that were already in the game.
The game had real potential, but Blizz diverged down an entirely different road.
On June 04 2017 17:49 tomatriedes wrote: Perhaps they could try adding an 'easy' mode option to BW remastered that has automining, larger control groups and multiple building selection and see how that works. There's probably all sorts of reasons why it wouldn't work well but it would be interesting to see what it's like.
I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense in Brood War proper. It just doesn't fit within the engine, so it would be better to just make a Brood War mod in SC2. I don't know. I'm not really a Brood War elitist or anything, but the idea of adding automining, larger control groups, or MBS is just very un-Brood War-like to me.
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On June 04 2017 20:35 EsportsJohn wrote:Show nested quote +On June 04 2017 17:49 tomatriedes wrote: Perhaps they could try adding an 'easy' mode option to BW remastered that has automining, larger control groups and multiple building selection and see how that works. There's probably all sorts of reasons why it wouldn't work well but it would be interesting to see what it's like. I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense in Brood War proper. It just doesn't fit within the engine, so it would be better to just make a Brood War mod in SC2. I don't know. I'm not really a Brood War elitist or anything, but the idea of adding automining, larger control groups, or MBS is just very un-Brood War-like to me. SC2BW, and Starbow are close to BW remastered in a modern engine. These mods do encounter a ton of issues with Damage Density and Pathing. However, already the unit design who were never meant for this engine, already encourages splitting your forces up more than the normal sc2 units.
Ideally I would love for sc2 to have a wc3 like pathing. It is smart but units block each other. They dont push and squeeze themselves through the tiniest holes smoothly,
On the point of damage density and how the developers of BW managed to "tone" down the dps of units even more. In Brood War, if a ranged unit, and maybe melee as well, killed a unit or lost its target, it would spend more time than it's regular weapon cool-down (attack speed) to shoot on a new target compared to firing on an existing one.
You can see this element of the game being discussed in these threads: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/482111-extra-time-for-switching-targets http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/96786-how-to-make-sunkens-have-infinite-range
However I think it is nice that we are able to have a discussion about why sc2 is not as good as BW, without simply limiting ourselves to the argument of "MBS/unlimited select = bad". That is the UI of the game and I refuse to believe that it isnt possible to build a good RTS around these features.
On June 04 2017 10:04 EsportsJohn wrote: Removing MULEs, Chronoboost, and Inject Larva was probably the best thing they could have done with the game, but a surprising amount of backlash from the community pressured developers into bringing them back. yes! I remember the LotV beta and how much better the pacing of the game became without these skipping early game mechanics! It just became soo much better!
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I agree, it is all about the engine.
We discussed things like MBS to death, but we could not conceive of how the engine that Blizzard made is completely inappropriate for RTS gaming.
It is indeed a marvel of an engine. So smooth, elegant, well-thought out. I'd love to look at the source code, if I had the time to do so. Those that made it should be proud. However, it was completely ill-conceived. Every step of the way, at every decision point, they 'merely' selected the most mathematical of algorithm-technical ideal solution to the problem. They never ever considered the gameplay implications of how they wrote their engine. And with gameplay, I mean true gameplay. So not the gameplay by which we played the single player back in 1998. That is the gameplay the developers had in mind, if they had any. No. I mean the gameplay of the Starcraft we have been playing the last decade.
The engine combined with the instant gratification sickness that somehow emerged in gaming, where players seem entitled and demand to be able to 'play like top players' is predominant. The gameplay were most players get frustrated, have 'ladder anxiety', people are only able to have fun if they beat someone that they feel is worthy of beating. A game where a developer has to go out of their way to conceive of some way to prevent the player from realizing their own mediocrity.
And I guess third is Blizzard's arrogance and unwillingness to give up control. The community knows better what is good for the game than Blizzard. Blizzard let the original ladder die because they tried to enforce the player base to play on 'fast'. As long as Blizzard decides on the map pool of the ladder and/or the major tournaments, proper balance is impossible.
Of course, there were too many C&C people on the SC2 team for SC2 to have more of the soul of SC BW than it has right now of the soul of C&C. But that was intentional, I guess. It seems that Blizzard refused to recognize the success and special nature of SC BW, and the reason for that special reason, until Flash, JD, Bisu, etc went back to SC BW, and they started thinking about remastered.
In the end these are corporate decisions that weight probabilities of a certain amount of profit, for each possible scenario. Decisions made in the most fancy meeting room in some corporate tower. The core gameplay of SC2 was decided by minds who are completely oblivious to that what is obvious to a D+ SC BW player. In the end we have to conclude that Blizzard never understood their own product.
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On June 05 2017 02:14 Ernaine wrote: In the end we have to conclude that Blizzard never understood their own product.
Ouch! lol. Totally agreed though. Reminds of two times. First is when NoNy was like yo Blizzard fix the fuckin carriers. Blizzard ignored everyone for months about this "carriers are fine" they said. NoNy spelled it out letter by letter in a really cool video. They then FINALLY changed it, but wtf, it was 100% a community effort. Lazy Blizzard took ages and the damage was already done..
Second time was community maps. hotbid did an interview with Browder and explained how the community cannot balance or grant feedback to ladder maps, because there was no system to do so. Such a simple concept. Browder was "appalled" and had no response. He noted that it was "an interesting problem". Ended up never getting fixed properly, at least in WoL.
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unfortunately Starcraft 2 was Blizzard's ESPORTS guinea pig, and the game paid dearly for it.
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On June 04 2017 20:35 EsportsJohn wrote:
I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense in Brood War proper. It just doesn't fit within the engine, so it would be better to just make a Brood War mod in SC2. I don't know. I'm not really a Brood War elitist or anything, but the idea of adding automining, larger control groups, or MBS is just very un-Brood War-like to me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not saying this should be the main game in remastered, just a non-ladder (or separate ladder) option that people could mess around with. i'd just be very curious to see how these things would work with the BW engine and whether it could be fun at all or not. It would also be very interesting to see what sort of effect it would have on balance. There's nothing wrong with giving people options as long as they're not forced on anyone in my opinion.
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I feel "failures" is a bit too grim of a term for my taste, but you have really solid criticism. I disagree with your thoughts on macro mechanics, I think having them is very important as a skill for players with the addition of automine, however zerg's macro decision is a bit too cruel.
One thing I wish you had brought up in your damage section, I really dislike the addition of weapon types, armor types, in Starcraft 2. I wish units were just better vs other units naturally without needing weird damage modifiers. I know brood war had something similar with the size variable, but mostly that was damage reduction and not +bonus damage, which exacerbates the problems highlighted.
The lack of defender's advantage and the clumping up damage density are what irritates me the most.
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Do new players really hate sending workers to mine that much? Personally I find it gives a great reason to learn F-Keys. F1 main, send worker to mine. F2 nat, send worker to mine.
Even in SC2, the most user-friendly StarCraft the earth will ever see, I made great uses of F-Keys as a competitive player -- so they are essential in both SC2 and BW.
And once a player gets the F-Key mechanics down, it's trivial to get workers to mine.
Workers mining isn't really an important piece to "gate" lower level players, and prevent them from winning. Any player can consistently send workers to mine.
The real key that makes BW to great, is that better players prioritize their focus on the most important aspects in real-time! At certain points it really is important to neglect sending workers to mine, in favor of focusing elsewhere. This kind of prioritization and decision making makes BW satisfying to both play and watch, and this specific opportunity for differentiation did not exist in SC2.
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On June 06 2017 06:42 CecilSunkure wrote: Do new players really hate sending workers to mine that much? Personally I find it gives a great reason to learn F-Keys. F1 main, send worker to mine. F2 nat, send worker to mine.
Even in SC2, the most user-friendly StarCraft the earth will ever see, I made great uses of F-Keys as a competitive player -- so they are essential in both SC2 and BW.
And once a player gets the F-Key mechanics down, it's trivial to get workers to mine.
Workers mining isn't really an important piece to "gate" lower level players, and prevent them from winning. Any player can consistently send workers to mine.
The real key that makes BW to great, is that better players prioritize their focus on the most important aspects in real-time! At certain points it really is important to neglect sending workers to mine, in favor of focusing elsewhere. This kind of prioritization and decision making makes BW satisfying to both play and watch, and this specific opportunity for differentiation did not exist in SC2.
It's not the act itself, its how many times you have to do it and how it distracts you from engaging in other stuff outside your base. It becomes tedious. Hence Warcraft 3 and other RTS have automine and people are OK with it.
It's satisfying in Brood War, but I think people would rather other macro activities to do instead of moving workers when they're probably very used to rallying to whatever resource they need.
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United States4883 Posts
On June 05 2017 09:59 tomatriedes wrote:Show nested quote +On June 04 2017 20:35 EsportsJohn wrote:
I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense in Brood War proper. It just doesn't fit within the engine, so it would be better to just make a Brood War mod in SC2. I don't know. I'm not really a Brood War elitist or anything, but the idea of adding automining, larger control groups, or MBS is just very un-Brood War-like to me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not saying this should be the main game in remastered, just a non-ladder (or separate ladder) option that people could mess around with. i'd just be very curious to see how these things would work with the BW engine and whether it could be fun at all or not. It would also be very interesting to see what sort of effect it would have on balance. There's nothing wrong with giving people options as long as they're not forced on anyone in my opinion.
My point is that sending workers to mine and things like that IS Brood War. It's strange to think of playing the game without those mechanics because that's what makes the game so uniquely interesting and enjoyable. It's like if you replaced basketballs with footballs. The result would be so different it wouldn't even resemble the original game.
On June 06 2017 06:01 lestye wrote: I feel "failures" is a bit too grim of a term for my taste, but you have really solid criticism. I disagree with your thoughts on macro mechanics, I think having them is very important as a skill for players with the addition of automine, however zerg's macro decision is a bit too cruel.
One thing I wish you had brought up in your damage section, I really dislike the addition of weapon types, armor types, in Starcraft 2. I wish units were just better vs other units naturally without needing weird damage modifiers. I know brood war had something similar with the size variable, but mostly that was damage reduction and not +bonus damage, which exacerbates the problems highlighted.
The lack of defender's advantage and the clumping up damage density are what irritates me the most.
Well, I think the underlying idea is that it is a "failure" of SC2 to live up to its potential. The game itself was a success, just not as good as it possibly could have been, imo.
As far as macro mechanics, I'm not saying that they are inherently "bad". Like I mentioned in an earlier comment, you could consider BW's mechanics of sending workers to mine a "macro mechanic". The biggest issue is that macro mechanics in SC2 were way too strong and unintuitive, which is why they peeled them back in later iterations. It was their introduction in the first place that caused a lot of problems, but we weren't able to pinpoint it until the maps caught up to the actual design.
Every RTS has weapon types that interact differently with each other. Concussive damage (vultures) do extra damage to light units (zerglings, marines, zealots, workers), so it's not like this was a new concept designed in SC2. I do agree that SC2 had too many of these modifiers though, especially when you consider some of the wonkier design decisions such as widow mines that did extra damage to shields and tempests which did extra damage to massive units for some reason.
Certain things like damage, range, and AoE should have been enough to differentiate the units from each other. BUT, as I'm already writing about as well, another huge issue was overlapping unit design (particularly the "tanky trio") that prevented the game from easily balancing itself out through more intuitive design.
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Do they really do extra damage? I thought vultures just did 20 damage, except to non-bio non-light units they get reduction to 4? Well and shields take full 20 as well.
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It's not really "extra" damage. The wiki says "This damage type deals 100% to small units, 50% damage to medium units, and 25% damage to large units. "
Maybe I'm playing semantics, but isnt that really saying that vultures do reduced damage to medium/large units and not bonus damage to small units?
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You could've written the Vulture grenades as 5 dmg + 15 to light, +5 vs medium. It was just easier back then to define damage as "Normal", "Explosive", and "Concussive" rather than individually coding each attack to have a special attribute versus specific armor/units.
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A ball, however, is the perfect shape for damage. With ranged units, it applies equal DPS on all sides and naturally protects itself from surrounds by eliminating the gaps in between ranks and reducing surface area. Most importantly, it greatly increases the damage density.
The level of salt makes this blog hard to read. This is the point at which I stopped. You're better than this.
When you and I would play, you would die to straight up pushes from me. How can you even talk about grand strategy when your games would be decided within the first 10 minutes?
And that gets even more interesting because I myself am an ATROCIOUS sc2 player. My games are decided by my ability to keep up with macro cycles.
To show my perspective; I think SC2 has never been better. I love the chaos. Defenders advantage still exists, it's just not perfect. Turtles are lame. Mech is lame. Broodlord infestor was lame. Mass swarmhosts were lame. Broodwar TvP is lame. Now the game is about attacking everywhere at once and crisis management. It's exciting, difficult, and fun.
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United States4883 Posts
On June 06 2017 09:22 lestye wrote: It's not really "extra" damage. The wiki says "This damage type deals 100% to small units, 50% damage to medium units, and 25% damage to large units. "
Maybe I'm playing semantics, but isnt that really saying that vultures do reduced damage to medium/large units and not bonus damage to small units?
Yeah, good point. My fact checking has been garbage recently. In any case, I don't think there's much of a difference between "reduced dmg vs" or "extra dmg vs" except I guess if the extra damage were exacerbating damage numbers. Technically, the damage in SC2 is somewhat even compared to Brood War DPS, but minor stuff like re-targeting, horrible unit movement, and buggy pathing caused Brood War damage to drop substantially, especially in larger numbers.
It just seems as if they developers didn't really take into account the smoother engine and mechanics when they designed the damage numbers, and then ignored it when things started dying almost instantly to everything.
EDIT: EXCEPT for the siege tank. They had no problem nerfing that thing into the ground immediately and never touching it again.
On June 06 2017 10:40 Thaniri wrote:Show nested quote + A ball, however, is the perfect shape for damage. With ranged units, it applies equal DPS on all sides and naturally protects itself from surrounds by eliminating the gaps in between ranks and reducing surface area. Most importantly, it greatly increases the damage density.
The level of salt makes this blog hard to read. This is the point at which I stopped. You're better than this. When you and I would play, you would die to straight up pushes from me. How can you even talk about grand strategy when your games would be decided within the first 10 minutes? And that gets even more interesting because I myself am an ATROCIOUS sc2 player. My games are decided by my ability to keep up with macro cycles. To show my perspective; I think SC2 has never been better. I love the chaos. Defenders advantage still exists, it's just not perfect. Turtles are lame. Mech is lame. Broodlord infestor was lame. Mass swarmhosts were lame. Broodwar TvP is lame. Now the game is about attacking everywhere at once and crisis management. It's exciting, difficult, and fun.
Nice ad hominem attack...?
I couldn't care less if I played well or not. It doesn't change the fact that SC2 failed to realize its fullest potential due to a bunch of questionable design decisions from Blizzard.
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I just have a hard time accepting these grievances from people who have not fully explored and understood the game.
I would not have replied if you weren't a community figure. A gold league reddit whine wouldn't have gotten a read from me.
I apologize for the harshness.
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On June 06 2017 13:13 Thaniri wrote: I just have a hard time accepting these grievances from people who have not fully explored and understood the game.
I would not have replied if you weren't a community figure. A gold league reddit whine wouldn't have gotten a read from me.
I apologize for the harshness.
wtf, why do i keep seeing this argument, who cares who he is??? stop attacking him and read the post itself.. this is literally saying "tldr...."
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On June 06 2017 10:40 Thaniri wrote:Show nested quote + A ball, however, is the perfect shape for damage. With ranged units, it applies equal DPS on all sides and naturally protects itself from surrounds by eliminating the gaps in between ranks and reducing surface area. Most importantly, it greatly increases the damage density.
The level of salt makes this blog hard to read. This is the point at which I stopped. You're better than this. When you and I would play, you would die to straight up pushes from me. How can you even talk about grand strategy when your games would be decided within the first 10 minutes? And that gets even more interesting because I myself am an ATROCIOUS sc2 player. My games are decided by my ability to keep up with macro cycles. To show my perspective; I think SC2 has never been better. I love the chaos. Defenders advantage still exists, it's just not perfect. Turtles are lame. Mech is lame. Broodlord infestor was lame. Mass swarmhosts were lame. Broodwar TvP is lame. Now the game is about attacking everywhere at once and crisis management. It's exciting, difficult, and fun.
Probably shouldn't be derailing... but what's the problem with BW TvP? Its one of my favourite MUs to play and watch, and is most certainly different from mass swarmhosts/Broodfestor etc.
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Don't like that the terran's mission critical is 'Hold until 200 supply then push'. Just repair the bunker while dragoons harass it. Hold off DTs if they come. Set up a simcity around 3 bases until X supply. Poke with vultures. Try to take another base. Hold off recalls. Push.
On June 06 2017 15:12 Endymion wrote:Show nested quote +On June 06 2017 13:13 Thaniri wrote: I just have a hard time accepting these grievances from people who have not fully explored and understood the game.
I would not have replied if you weren't a community figure. A gold league reddit whine wouldn't have gotten a read from me.
I apologize for the harshness.
wtf, why do i keep seeing this argument, who cares who he is??? stop attacking him and read the post itself.. this is literally saying "tldr...."
I stopped reading when he said that a ball is the perfect shape for damage. I expect better of him. He was on the TLStrat team. This is such a basic fundamental concept that he got wrong that I can't be arsed to care any further. If he was some random guy I wouldn't give a shit, but he's not and should be called out on this line if nothing else.
edit: All my ranting has been unjustified and immature.
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The ball is not the perfect shape for damage, but it is definitely the easiest shape to maintain for optimal damage, control, and survivability. "Easiest" and "best" are completely different from one another, but in this case, I believe ease of use is a major factor in determining what shape is "best."
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Really dislike it when people refer to things they dislike in sc2 as "design failures". Just say "things I personally don't like about the game". Many other people like sc2 exactly because of the reasons you stated in the OP.
It would be like me referring to 12 unit selection cap and no auto-mining as design failures.
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On June 07 2017 07:14 Charoisaur wrote: Really dislike it when people refer to things they dislike in sc2 as "design failures". Just say "things I personally don't like about the game". Many other people like sc2 exactly because of the reasons you stated in the OP. It would be like me referring to 12 unit selection cap and no auto-mining as design failures. this mislabeling leads to further imprecise thinking. we've got 3 really different RTS games to choose from... WC3, SC2:LotV, and Brood War. And soon, Brood War will be much easier to set up and install on modern OSs.
If people want to moan, whine, bitch and complain about Blizzard's support of the RTS genre maybe they should check out the "awesome RTS games" Eugen Systems or Gearbox or Relic are pumping out these days. maybe we can get a big Halo Wars 2 clan going?
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Yeah, that's why I felt the criticism was way too strong. Not being dismissive of the critique, but making a giant list of "failures" its kinda ignoring the successes of the game, and makes it seem like its a giant disaster like CnC4 or something.
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United States4883 Posts
On June 07 2017 09:02 lestye wrote: Yeah, that's why I felt the criticism was way too strong. Not being dismissive of the critique, but making a giant list of "failures" its kinda ignoring the successes of the game, and makes it seem like its a giant disaster like CnC4 or something.
Tbf, I did mention a lot of things that are amazing in SC2 such as the pathing engine and quality of life improvements. There are a lot of good components to the game, and it obviously did very well. This is just a personal list of grievances, of things that could have been handled a bit better with some better foresight.
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I don't think blizzard cares whether sc2 is considered a success or failure now. To them it was a massive success, they made money from the millions of people who bought the game plus expansions, they tried to please the masses of people but it seems like in the end lots of people were left unsatisfied, but to them they made plenty of money and are moving back to broodwar to milk some more cash out of us, which I am completely fine with since I love broodwar :D
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United States335 Posts
Having both macro mechanics and auto-mining has always seemed like an inconsistent design choice to me.
The point of auto-mining is to save you the trouble of a repetitive, brainless task that could just as easily be automated. By that logic though, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to set macro mechanics to auto-cast. It would be so simple to implement. Queens could auto-cast spawn larva on any hatcheries in their sight range when idle, and orbital commands could be set to cast call down MULE on the nearest mineral patch that the player has vision of. If you want to bank mana for scans or whatever, you could right-click the icon to toggle auto-cast on and off, just like in Warcraft III. And of course chrono boost already auto-casts now.
On the other hand, if auto-cast would would make the game too easy, or defeat the purpose of having macro mechanics in the first place, then I don't understand how having macro mechanics is any better than disabling auto-mining.
From the perspective of marketing and player satisfaction though, I suppose it makes a lot of sense. Auto-mining has become an expectation for modern RTS games, and macro mechanics are an alternative that most gamers are willing to accept. Plus you could make the case that psychologically, forgetting to send workers to mine feels like a mistake, whereas remembering to use a macro mechanic feels like a reward.
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Having both macro mechanics and auto-mining has always seemed like an inconsistent design choice to me.
I dont think so. Your third paragraph is probably best describes the reasoning. The idea is to replace that macro upkeep with something that feels more substantial than a worker rally, which many feel is redundant and silly.
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There's actually something very interesting about rallying a worker manually. It forces the player to learn a mechanical skill, a simple one that extremely easy to measure progress in.
All of BW revolves around what mechanical skills each player has, and once achieved they unlock certain strategies.
To me it feels like players that find rallying workers lame or silly severely lack discipline. Sure, in concept rallying workers manually is completely mundane. However in practice the mechanical skills needed are immensely valuable. Once able to rally workers effectively, a mastery of either control groups or F-Keys is needed. Either of these mechanical avenues are needed to unlock other types of important gameplay maneuvers.
It's a lot like the concept of training wheels. When learning to ride a bike, first we must cope with training wheels. Training wheels are completely redundant, mundane, and get the in the way. But after a certain point they must be removed, and balancing the bike congeals into the muscle memory.
In this way rallying workers is akin to training wheels. After a certain point rallying workers becomes trivial and easy, as the action is absorbed into muscle memory, ready to be re-used for other important tasks.
All I'm saying is players that don't like the simple and boring concept of rallying workers, at least to me, seem to lack discipline and in the end miss out on a lot of fun.
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United States335 Posts
On June 08 2017 23:41 lestye wrote:Show nested quote +Having both macro mechanics and auto-mining has always seemed like an inconsistent design choice to me.
I dont think so. Your third paragraph is probably best describes the reasoning. The idea is to replace that macro upkeep with something that feels more substantial than a worker rally, which many feel is redundant and silly. Perhaps inconsistent is the wrong word. What I meant to get across is that macro mechanics and auto-mining are accomplish opposite goals: auto-mining removes a repetitive macro task, while macro mechanics add one back in.
Of course if most players happen to find one repetitive macro task more palatable than the other, and you think that the game really needs at least one of them to maintain the skill curve, then it is totally sensible to go with the one that most players prefer. To me though, it feels a little arbitrary that my drones can auto-mine, but my queens can't auto-cast inject larva.
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On June 09 2017 02:26 conTAgi0n wrote:Show nested quote +On June 08 2017 23:41 lestye wrote:Having both macro mechanics and auto-mining has always seemed like an inconsistent design choice to me.
I dont think so. Your third paragraph is probably best describes the reasoning. The idea is to replace that macro upkeep with something that feels more substantial than a worker rally, which many feel is redundant and silly. Perhaps inconsistent is the wrong word. What I meant to get across is that macro mechanics and auto-mining are accomplish opposite goals: auto-mining removes a repetitive macro task, while macro mechanics add one back in. Of course if most players happen to find one repetitive macro task more palatable than the other, and you think that the game really needs at least one of them to maintain the skill curve, then it is totally sensible to go with the one that most players prefer. To me though, it feels a little arbitrary that my drones can auto-mine, but my queens can't auto-cast inject larva. I think what the repetitive task is and how substantial it is is an important thing. Because of other RTS games, people probably feel that rally/automine should be in the game and they're taking away by making them do a task other games would normally just rally/automate. While inject/MULE/ is probably more impactful and it doesnt feel like something you might automate, whereas workers are, if that makes sense.
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United States335 Posts
On June 09 2017 04:12 lestye wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2017 02:26 conTAgi0n wrote:On June 08 2017 23:41 lestye wrote:Having both macro mechanics and auto-mining has always seemed like an inconsistent design choice to me.
I dont think so. Your third paragraph is probably best describes the reasoning. The idea is to replace that macro upkeep with something that feels more substantial than a worker rally, which many feel is redundant and silly. Perhaps inconsistent is the wrong word. What I meant to get across is that macro mechanics and auto-mining are accomplish opposite goals: auto-mining removes a repetitive macro task, while macro mechanics add one back in. Of course if most players happen to find one repetitive macro task more palatable than the other, and you think that the game really needs at least one of them to maintain the skill curve, then it is totally sensible to go with the one that most players prefer. To me though, it feels a little arbitrary that my drones can auto-mine, but my queens can't auto-cast inject larva. I think what the repetitive task is and how substantial it is is an important thing. Because of other RTS games, people probably feel that rally/automine should be in the game and they're taking away by making them do a task other games would normally just rally/automate. While inject/MULE/ is probably more impactful and it doesnt feel like something you might automate, whereas workers are, if that makes sense. I think we are saying pretty much the same thing at this point. As you say, players feel as though worker mining should be automated, because they are used to not having to do it in other games. Meanwhile macro mechanics don't feel like something that should be automated, even though it is a repetitive macro task that could be automated just as easily as worker mining. It is still a case of removing one repetitive task only to replace it with another, but for purely subjective reasons, most players prefer the swap.
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I'll bite.
On June 04 2017 10:04 EsportsJohn wrote: Decided to do a bit of a short article about my thoughts on StarCraft 2…and then it grew into this thing. I want to be very clear that StarCraft is quite honestly one of the best things that has ever happened to me; it completely changed my view of the world, and I’ve never been the same since I first discovered it. Nonetheless, I think it failed to live up to its potential, and it’s important to look back on the history of the game, how it evolved, how it came to be, and really think critically about how it was handled. It’s important to do this sort of analysis, not just because I just want to disagree with David Kim, but because I truly believe the developers didn’t think through their design decisions properly, and thus the finished product was botched beyond belief.
This is actually a general problem in the media industry as a whole. You start off with a product, and then "test" it against focus groups. The idea is to expand the demographic so that the finished product will make more money. Movies generally have this problem where the original script gets butchered by the studio, and that's why there are random things in movies that seem really out-of-place. For example, a studio makes a movie based on a children's cartoon show. Let's call it "Dora The Explorer: The Movie" and it's about Dora trying to find her way back to her family using a magic map. Then the studio says: "We need to slip a bunch of sexual innuendo into the movie so it makes teens laugh." and then you have a scene where a pirate is like "I'm gonna get my hands on that booty!" and another pirate beside him is like, "I'm having flashbacks to my time in prison!!!" Get it? You get anally raped in prison. Haha. Great joke.
In this case, the focus group is the "SC2 community", which is not a hivemind. There are two primary strains of armchair-game-designers: The first is adamant about making the game as complicated as humanly possible. The means units that are harder to control, a lower margin for error, and so forth. This is to 'raise the skill ceiling'. Whether or not the changes they propose actually raise the skill ceiling is debatable, but that's not the point. The second group wants to make the game friendly to noobs in order to "get new people into the game", with their endgame being that they want SC2 to be a giant world-wide phenomenon because it's easy enough for a six-year-old to pick up and play.
The problem is that Blizzard takes all this input, and what comes out the other side of the Blizzard machine are changes that, ultimately, don't please either party. I think Blizzard needs some direction when it comes to where they want the game to go. But their hands are really tied because if Blizzard dumbs the game down too much, progamers will hate it and stop playing, and if Blizzard makes the game too complicated, casuals will hate it and stop playing. As a result, you get this sort-of-middle-ground mess.
The point is, I don't know really how much control over the changes the development team actually had. It's easy to blame them, but ultimately, they're just doing their job. They can only work with the allotted budget given to their division, which in business terms, is not a lot of money.
I’ve been through a lot of ups and downs with StarCraft 2, and since I’ve taken the long way around to playing Brood War, I feel I’m qualified to explain the design failures of StarCraft 2 accurately with a sober and impartial approach free from “arguments of nostalgia”.
If one calls a game "Something 2", it will be inevitably compared to "Something 1". There's no way around that. Even if you played SC2 first, then played Brood War after that, the similarities in both games and title compel comparisons between the two. So sure, you're not 'arguing from nostalgia', but when you start comparing 1 and 2
I want to avoid making too many Brood War vs StarCraft 2 arguments, but I think it would be willfully ignorant to gloss over the things that BW did correctly just to avoid a comparison argument.
then it doesn't matter when you played which game. The comparison has been made regardless, so either you go there or you don't. When StarCraft first came out, it was compared to a lot of other games, such as WarCraft II, Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, etc. However, back in the 90s, gaming culture was quite a bit different than it is today. Most games were designed for "nerds", and for each nerd-niche, there was a little company willing to publish games. PC gaming is a lot more mainstream now, and so the way games are made has changed with the culture. SC2 always had the problem of copying its core concepts from a very retro StarCraft: Brood War. It would be almost impossible to compare SC2 with a modern RTS like Act of Aggression or Ashes of The Singularity or Something of The Something 2: Something that starts with an 'R'.
Basically, once you open Pandora's Box (teehee) it can't be closed.
Defender’s Advantage is Dead
If you play Brood War for only a moment, you will immediately notice the insane power of defender’s advantage. With the right units, you can hold a base forever against your opponent. For instance, literally no number of marine/medic will ever break three lurkers on top of a ramp, and Protoss can camp out on one base with Templar, Dark Archons, and Arbiters safely for pretty much eternity.
This is only half-true. Maybe you were using hyperbole, but you said "literally no number of marine/medic" and I wasn't sure, because it's not cost-effective to break the ramp with marine/medic, but that doesn't mean it literally can't be done. Besides that, there are many situations where the attacker has an advantage, like if a Zerg is sending guardians to hit SCVs from over a cliff, and the units at the bottom of the cliff can't reach them because they're over water.
This sort of defense doesn’t exist in StarCraft 2. It’s not necessarily bad that the sequel got rid of high ground advantages that relied on RNG, but the effects on the gameplay were numerous and adverse.
Perhaps the largest difference is the emergence of the “deathball syndrome”. I don’t necessarily mean the emergence of large armies, but rather the phenomenon where players will always expand outward from their main while using a rather mobile army bouncing between bases to defend. From this issue arises a whole slew of other problems, from hard counters to uninteresting economic models to unit design issues.
Here’s an example: in Brood War, one of the key concepts, particularly for Zerg and Protoss players, is to expand to other corners of the map and create two “main bases” to work outwards from. This means that you can defend one base from your opponent’s attacks while slowly building up a force at the other base. When the big doom push comes knocking at your natural expansion, you can stall out with defilers or templar while continuing to amass forces at the other corner of the map.
I don't see how this is a 'problem' over being a personal preference. Say you play on a two-player map in Brood War. Pretty much the same thing as what you just described is going to take place. Also, it is not necessary for a player to take the faraway base. If a player expands to the faraway main, it is a calculated level of risk they are taking, because of the economic benefit it may yield if they can defend it successfully. The distance of the faraway base makes it more difficult to defend than a closer base. While taking a far base may not be viable in SC2 (I don't really know the answer to this for sure), it is definitely not a necessity in SC1.
If you go, "You're proving my point by showing how SC1 is more diverse in its gameplay by giving players more choices on what they can do strategically." then you're welcome.
A Thought Experiment
I didn't give you permission to experiment on my thoughts.
Think abstractly for a moment.
This is how I think most of the time.
Two kings are at war with one another. King Raynor has only one castle, but King Artanis has two castles placed a reasonable distance apart. If Raynor wants to take over Artanis’s empire, he will want to invade both castles. He can either split his forces and risk being unable to break either or he can overrun them one at a time; naturally, Raynor will decide to dedicate all of his forces toward one target to avoid splitting his damage too much.
Assuming unlimited resources, the king with two castles will always win. Artanis can stall out Raynor’s siege for a very long time while gathering his forces at his other castle, eventually gathering a critical mass that will allow him surround and crush the invasion or attack Raynor’s base directly; Raynor will have to either sacrifice his castle (which he can’t) or retreat with his forces intact. Either way, Artanis with his two castles comes out ahead in the war.
Unless both have nuclear missiles. Then it's mutually-assured destruction.
If you remove the defender’s advantage—say, the two kings own camps on large fields—there are few incentives to creating large camps far away from each other (though you do have the perk of being able to relocate easily). Instead, the kings will tend to clump up their resources and rely more on mobile troops who can switch very quickly between attack and defense to guard their land. History will show that this is often the case in less advanced regions, with examples such as the Mongols during Atila’s reign or the Iroquois Indians in the plains region of North America; the group that was proficient on horseback and owned many horses was always on the winning side. The second example is much closer to the accidental design of StarCraft 2. It’s not necessarily bad, but it does create a situation where bases must be tightly clustered and multi-purposed units with a lot of mobility reign supreme. If you need a more concrete example, look at the one exception in Brood War: ZvZ. In that matchup, Sunken and Spore Colonies simply don’t attack quickly enough to deal with swarms of mutalisks or zerglings, therefore negating a lot of the defender’s advantage. As such, players constantly had to match their opponent’s army in order to defend against potentially fatal attacks.
This is true all the mirror matches in SC1, and also TvZ. The main difficulty for Zerg in TvZ is defending all of the places that Terran can hit them from.
You could argue that ZvZ was borderline chaos. StarCraft 2 took this a step further into to the extreme when things like instant reinforcement (Protoss Warp-ins, speedlings on creep) and hyper utility units (like the Queen or the Mothership Core) were added to the game and even further weakened the defender’s advantage. The road since then has never yielded us a comfortable design that felt manageable. Without the proper checks and a stable set of rules, this sort of mobile warfare devolves from a brilliant allocation of troops similar to Risk into absolute chaos.
The Deathball: An Unintended Side Effect
The thought experiment above is actually great for understanding different systems of warfare and even understanding some of the asymmetric balance that occurs between the races in StarCraft, but as you can see, it comes with some serious considerations. If bases aren’t spread out, what’s the point of spreading your army out?
The only reason to 'spread your army out' is because you have a numerical superiority that makes such a thing possible. There are some obvious historical examples of this, but let's stick to video games. If you play a game with a supply cap, then it's not possible to have a huge advantage in numbers unless you cripple your opponent early in the game. It stands to reason, then, that if you cannot outnumber your opponent, you will gain a different kind of advantage. I'm not even sure why SC2 has a supply cap, though. It just feels like they were trying to create a retro game with modern game stuff in it, and it didn't work out. Now the object is to just mass the most powerful or composition-correct series of units until you reach 200, and then you have no choice but to attack. This archetype occurs in SC1 frequently, and is not unique to SC2.
Deathballs were something that emerged almost immediately in Starcraft 2‘s storied past, beginning with the horrific 1 food roach swarms during the beta. Many reasons were stated in the past as to why this particular phenomenon seemed to crop up: it was the fault of “unlimited” unit selection, damage density, hyper-mobile units, weak AoE, boring unit design, economic mining behavior, etc. There’s no doubt that these things may have exacerbated the problem, but at its core, it all began with a lack of defender’s advantage.
I just think SC2 units kill each other way too fast. The units themselves seem like they have a lot of cool ideas behind them, but I just see huge armies get toasted in like three seconds because the units are so densely packed together and run into some amazingly destructive firepower.
If you have a weak defender’s advantage and have to rely primarily on numbers, then positioning becomes much more important. In the late game, a large army can only be defended by an equally large army. It’s difficult to spare even a single unit to defend outlying bases, much less split your army in two. Thus, it makes more sense to move your army in a large ball between bases, using small groups and vision to deter possible counterattacks.
Blizzard’s Attempt to Fix the Problem
Legacy of the Void has attempted to artificially solve this problem by starving players out (“expand or die”)
yeah, I hated this concept, which is why I didn't purchase LotV.
and forcing them to take blind chances with their positioning; they must split up their army and do harassment on several different fronts to protect their own economy while slowing down their opponent’s. You will always lose something, so it becomes a battle to see who can lose less—it’s skillful, but not necessarily fulfilling. For multiple reasons, I don’t believe this is fun (though I know others believe differently). More objectively, however, it creates a world in which a “perfect game” is impossible, a sentiment that many Korean players and coaches have shared with David Kim and the design team over and over—it’s not just very hard to play well, it’s literally impossible.
One of the beauties of Brood War is that it can actually nearly be mastered. Basic macro and positioning is difficult to do, but very much achievable with many intermediate steps along the way. Most of the difficulty is in the PvE aspect, so you feel great if you played a game with high APM, great macro, and a well-executed strategy. From there, it’s a battle with your opponent to see who can out-multitask the other. That’s where the endless challenge of Brood War lies, and it’s an endless pursuit as long as players play the game competitively.
I don't think this is necessarily a design flaw in SC2 itself, but more of a lack of familiarity. Every time the game is patched, it fundamentally alters the actual in-game stuff. The frequency by which Blizzard makes such changes is very detrimental to a progamer, because it takes a long time, a lot of practice, and a lot of games to start to figure out how to exploit the small things in a manner that is useful to a progamer. This is how meta-shifts like the "bisu build" and "crazy zerg" came about, and for those play styles to be countered by new play styles. At a fundamental level, the game itself did not change. The units in 2006 were the same units that existed in 2005. Unfortunately for SC2 players, the units that exist today are changed periodically. Therefore, the players are not the ones solving problems, but the company is solving problems for the players by changing the problems.
I hear a lot of people go, "Match-ups in SC2 are the same stuff every game and it gets boring." which is an understandable complaint, but most SC1 games are similar as well. If you watch any Brood War game, you have a pretty good idea of what sorts of things are going to be built, with minor variations. The reason stuff becomes "standard" is because it works. Good players will always try to figure out how to use what's available to them in the best way they know how. That, of course, would change over time if it were not changed for them.
On the other hand, Legacy of the Void has an extremely low barrier of entry but forces you to make blind decisions regarding your tech, scouting, and army positioning. While this can be entertaining from a spectator’s perspective (for those “big moments”), it’s nigh impossible to practice properly because of the game’s ever-changing nature depending on the opponent, their build, and their playstyle; you cannot become proficient without either having innate godlike twitch mechanics or an uncanny ability to read your opponent and guess their next move.
I don't know how hard it is to scout in SC2, but something about this seems amiss.
To reiterate, this is a band-aid fix for a problem that runs much deeper than the surface. It’s not necessarily accurate to give the game an inherent property that actually means something, but for a game that is based on economics, Starcraft 2 fails on the premise of making economics meaningful. Unit interaction and throwing a wrench in your opponent’s plans take up a far more meaningful role than building bases and managing resources.
There are some potential fixes that could have helped to fix deathballs (such as better defender’s advantage, stronger space control, or some sort of innate base defense that can defend against small numbers of units), but a starvation economy and an increased focus on harassment has done nothing but destabilize the game.
LotV is just a metaphor for the Congolese Civil Wars.
Damage Numbers Are Out of Control
One of the key features of StarCraft 2 has always been its quick pace and smooth graphics. Compared to Brood War (or really any other RTS that came out around the same time), it runs on a beautiful, efficient engine. Everyone who’s seen a dragoon take 20 minutes to find the entrance to a ramp knows exactly the frustration that older generation RTS’s posed in terms of unit movement and animation. StarCraft 2, on the other hand, was revolutionary.
For the first time, units would glide over the terrain with precision and accuracy. Micro tricks like marine splitting, blink stalker micro, and ling/baneling wars were the apex of the game’s achievements; nothing in the world takes your breath away like watching a pro player split marines like a god. Anyone who argues for the wonky glitches and awkward unit interaction from older generation RTS’s is living in a fantasy world. Either way, we still have to face the fact that the smoothness of the engine did cause some unintentional problems.
The first inherent problem is the tendency for units to clump up. If you select a large group of units and click at a designated location, the engine will give each and every unit a command to walk to that exact spot on the map, hindered only by unit collision. Not a big deal, but it does create some issues in that groups will always travel in clusters. Add in “unlimited” unit selection, and you’ve got yourself a good old-fashioned “deathball”. One of the beauties of older generation games was that units moved in waves or small, kind of square-like groups that was messy and required micro management to keep it in line.
A ball, however, is the perfect shape for damage. With ranged units, it applies equal DPS on all sides and naturally protects itself from surrounds by eliminating the gaps in between ranks and reducing surface area. Most importantly, it greatly increases the damage density.
I agree with this, mostly. Units should not pack themselves together like sardines. A ball is the perfect shape for taking ranged AoE damage, I'd say. If the ball is made of ranged units against melee units, then the ball is going to be more efficient theoretically. For dealing damage, ranged units are best when situated in an arc, so all of them can fire onto an incoming enemy from all sides. This is especially important for melee units, so that they can all hit at the same time. If melee units attack in a ball, only the units at the front can attack.
That's all I've got for now because I'm tired. Also, macro was a mistake.
Edit: btw, this is not an "argument" or "debate" reply. I'm just saying my thoughts.
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United States4883 Posts
On June 08 2017 19:26 conTAgi0n wrote: Auto-mining has become an expectation for modern RTS games, and macro mechanics are an alternative that most gamers are willing to accept. Plus you could make the case that psychologically, forgetting to send workers to mine feels like a mistake, whereas remembering to use a macro mechanic feels like a reward.
This is the ironic part. Aside from the very early stages of the game, forgetting to send your workers to mining right away (we'll say you're particularly horrible and delay 20s on every worker), it's nowhere near as punishing as forgetting to inject or drop a MULE (though Blizz has made a few changes in LotV to address that).
And I guess that's the whole appeal of SC2. In a lot of ways, you get instant gratification by remembering to do your macro mechanics occasionally or by barely microing one insanely cost-effective unit into a mineral line and killing the entire thing. But the balance sits on a razor's edge because when your opponent does stuff marginally well, they can just outright kill you. There's not a whole lot of in between (see: Rogue making 20 mutas against soO earlier today and the insta-gg).
On June 09 2017 08:08 ninazerg wrote: btw, this is not an "argument" or "debate" reply. I'm just saying my thoughts.
I appreciate it! There's a lot of interesting stuff in this reply, most of which I agree with.
This is only half-true. Maybe you were using hyperbole, but you said "literally no number of marine/medic" and I wasn't sure, because it's not cost-effective to break the ramp with marine/medic, but that doesn't mean it literally can't be done. Besides that, there are many situations where the attacker has an advantage, like if a Zerg is sending guardians to hit SCVs from over a cliff, and the units at the bottom of the cliff can't reach them because they're over water.
This is true all the mirror matches in SC1, and also TvZ. The main difficulty for Zerg in TvZ is defending all of the places that Terran can hit them from.
Maybe a bit hyperbolic. This entire article is really a rant, so there's definitely areas where I may have just overstated facts or made up random and quite possibly incorrect concepts (like "a ball is the perfect shape for damage").
However, in the case of how defender's advantage works in SC1, I fundamentally disagree here. In the case of guardians or drop play having an advantage on aggression, this is mostly just a side effect of high ground advantages and unit design (range). If you consider the same example, but both sides are reinforcing and trading continually—we'll say Terran continues to build wraiths while Zerg reinforces with scourge/overlords—the advantage will eventually go in favor of Terran assuming fairly even trades because of the reinforcement distance. Of course, the game is a lot more complicated than this and 3 wraiths could kill all of the scourge, the guardians, and win the game with good enough micro.
In the case of mirror matchups, I again fundamentally disagree here. While PvP is arguably consistently unstable, defenders can take advantage of building placement to soak up damage, and reavers (arguably the most important unit in early game PvP) reinforce MUCH faster for the defending player. In the later portions of the game, it plays out a bit more like SC2, I will admit to that haha. TvT, you insane. The big point I'm trying to make here is that defensive units like reavers, tanks, lurkers, defilers, etc. do an insane job of warding away much larger armies and/or forcing cost-ineffective trades. In addition to the fact that reinforcement takes real time to move across the map (shoutout to Nydus Canal though), it's much harder for the aggressor to match the defender over a long period of time unless they start with a substantial advantage.
The only reason to 'spread your army out' is because you have a numerical superiority that makes such a thing possible. There are some obvious historical examples of this, but let's stick to video games. If you play a game with a supply cap, then it's not possible to have a huge advantage in numbers unless you cripple your opponent early in the game. It stands to reason, then, that if you cannot outnumber your opponent, you will gain a different kind of advantage. I'm not even sure why SC2 has a supply cap, though. It just feels like they were trying to create a retro game with modern game stuff in it, and it didn't work out. Now the object is to just mass the most powerful or composition-correct series of units until you reach 200, and then you have no choice but to attack. This archetype occurs in SC1 frequently, and is not unique to SC2.
I thought about this some too after posting this blog. It was argued at some point that SC2 should raise the cap to 300 to solve the "three base cap" problem, but now that I'm arguing about it from the point of view of critical mass and army size, it kind of makes sense. If you up the supply enough to actually hit the critical mass for SC2 armies, maybe it becomes a better strategy to split your forces up into two huge armies. And how is that different from splitting up small groups?
It's an interesting avenue of thought to go down, but I don't think it matters anymore since LotV already kind of forces you to split up units anyway.
I don't know how hard it is to scout in SC2, but something about this seems amiss.
On the whole, scouting in SC2 is MUCH easier in the mid to late game, but the economy changes in LotV forced a lot more blind tech decisions in the early game, especially for Zerg players who relied on overlord scouting. Other than that, there's a lot of ultra crisis units like oracles, hellions, adepts, and lings that can decimate a mineral line if you don't have things in the proper position or know their trajectory coming into your base. This is true to some degree with units in BW as well, but I feel like it's generally easier to predict and deflect.
I agree with this, mostly. Units should not pack themselves together like sardines. A ball is the perfect shape for taking ranged AoE damage, I'd say. If the ball is made of ranged units against melee units, then the ball is going to be more efficient theoretically. For dealing damage, ranged units are best when situated in an arc, so all of them can fire onto an incoming enemy from all sides. This is especially important for melee units, so that they can all hit at the same time. If melee units attack in a ball, only the units at the front can attack.
Fair.
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On June 09 2017 08:55 EsportsJohn wrote: However, in the case of how defender's advantage works in SC1, I fundamentally disagree here. In the case of guardians or drop play having an advantage on aggression, this is mostly just a side effect of high ground advantages and unit design (range). If you consider the same example, but both sides are reinforcing and trading continually—we'll say Terran continues to build wraiths while Zerg reinforces with scourge/overlords—the advantage will eventually go in favor of Terran assuming fairly even trades because of the reinforcement distance. Of course, the game is a lot more complicated than this and 3 wraiths could kill all of the scourge, the guardians, and win the game with good enough micro.
In the case of mirror matchups, I again fundamentally disagree here. While PvP is arguably consistently unstable, defenders can take advantage of building placement to soak up damage, and reavers (arguably the most important unit in early game PvP) reinforce MUCH faster for the defending player. In the later portions of the game, it plays out a bit more like SC2, I will admit to that haha. TvT, you insane. The big point I'm trying to make here is that defensive units like reavers, tanks, lurkers, defilers, etc. do an insane job of warding away much larger armies and/or forcing cost-ineffective trades. In addition to the fact that reinforcement takes real time to move across the map (shoutout to Nydus Canal though), it's much harder for the aggressor to match the defender over a long period of time unless they start with a substantial advantage.
I'm talking strictly about mobility. For example, in TvT, if one player goes mostly static defense against a player that has a bunch of dropships, neither one is playing the match-up incorrectly. The static defense player will have a much more difficult time defending all of his/her area by simply shifting units around as opposed to the dropship player, who will be able to drop on weak spots in their opponent's defense. Additionally, the dropship player will be able to defend by picking a bunch of units up and putting them where they need to be in key spots on the map to defend.
In PvP, there's a "zealot stage" of the game, "dragoon/reaver stage" of the game, and then there's a late stage of the game. The person who reaches the next 'stage' of the game first generally has a mobility advantage. A zealot/archon/templar army is much easier to control than a dragoon/reaver army. Having reaver first gives the player the ability to keep their opponent in-base because the opponent doesn't know when or where their opponent will hit until/unless they have observers.
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On June 04 2017 17:49 tomatriedes wrote: Perhaps they could try adding an 'easy' mode option to BW remastered that has automining, larger control groups and multiple building selection and see how that works. There's probably all sorts of reasons why it wouldn't work well but it would be interesting to see what it's like. Multiple Building Selection next to deathballs are the cancer of SC2, due to that in SC2 there are very few comebacks, the MBS makes the snowball effect bigger.
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Just want to say this is a very nice, well written, blog post. I missed this when it was published.
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