Starcraft 2

[luckywaldo7]

By "In spring" I am not sure what you are talking about, here is an example of some icons though:



Pretend that is a little bio ball with some marines, marauders, and one ghost. You can probably guess which icon is the ghost already, now tell me that is hard to find and click on.

[PRO_rANDY]

You click the one with the highest energy to make sure you kill it...oh wait. Also thats a pretty small bioball, only ~15 units? and theres already some overlap going on with this small amount.

[Hoi]

How much hp do they have, are they stimming/stimmed? All things you can't see from those icons.

[scifi]

By "In spring" I am not sure what you are talking about, here is an example of some icons though:



Pretend that is a little bio ball with some marines, marauders, and one ghost. You can probably guess which icon is the ghost already, now tell me that is hard to find and click on.

finding isnt the problem, but seing the enemy aproch would make many baneling attacks useless.

also, it would be easyer to spot a lonely banshee coming from the sides,
it would be easyer to control everything, macro.

the game is suposed to be focusing in a more centered way, you must move the camera all around, with the zoom ability the game would change completly, it would allow the player to see his base and the battlefield, that would make the tiny little units strategys diferent.

you could spot stuff faster, control base in a faster way.

I agree its a positive change, BUT it alters gameplay, just like pathfinding in the first played a important role in the game.

Im not saying DONT ADD ZOOM IT SUCKS, im saying if zoom was added with the current gameplay, it would be a bad choice, since the game depends on the lack of vision of the player over his own base, battlefield.

[luckywaldo7]

You click the one with the highest energy to make sure you kill it...oh wait. Also thats a pretty small bioball, only ~15 units? and theres already some overlap going on with this small amount.

Ok, just for you, equivalent of 100 marines, 50 marauders, and 1 ghost:



Which is probably more then you will ever see together in a starcraft game anyway. And that is zoomed pretty far out; you could probably see the entire map at that zoom.

How much hp do they have, are they stimming/stimmed? All things you can't see from those icons.

Obviously not, I'm proving that it is not hard to find and select important units from zoomed far out when you have good icons, nothing more and nothing less.

@scifi, I quite agree with exactly what you said. Which is why I say Blizzard are lazy developers, not willing to handle potential changes. And yeah its already too late, and I already know that. Doesn't change my feelings though that the game didn't meet its potential.

[luckywaldo7]

Double Post!

Thinking over again scifi maybe I don't quite agree exactly, it would certainly change the way the game needs to be played, but not about how Blizzard themselves designing it I think so much as how it would change for their playerbase.

(btw, here is the zoom video for anyone who missed it earlier: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVoJAMUIhIo)

I suppose in a lot of ways though it is just about taste. Especially when it comes to progressiveness in game design. I've always loved running the cutting edge in stuff, even with the potential of breaking, which is why I need to reinstall my linux partition at least once a year and why I stuck to CA when I first started playing Spring. I would take the change of breaking gameplay to try something new and potentially much better, but I realize that I make up probably a very niche part of a playerbase. So ultimately maybe we can simply agree to disagree on game design.

[scifi]

Double Post!

Thinking over again scifi maybe I don't quite agree exactly, it would certainly change the way the game needs to be played, but not about how Blizzard themselves designing it I think so much as how it would change for their playerbase.

(btw, here is the zoom video for anyone who missed it earlier: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVoJAMUIhIo)

I suppose in a lot of ways though it is just about taste. Especially when it comes to progressiveness in game design. I've always loved running the cutting edge in stuff, even with the potential of breaking, which is why I need to reinstall my linux partition at least once a year and why I stuck to CA when I first started playing Spring. I would take the change of breaking gameplay to try something new and potentially much better, but I realize that I make up probably a very niche part of a playerbase. So ultimately maybe we can simply agree to disagree on game design.

well you got to the point where every game designer must make a choice, stick to what they know that works, or try new things.

Blizzard choose to make a sequal with a few changes.

thats why its an average game and not a EPIC one

but i agree they could have made it better, or hell even try it out with the beta, there were so many people playing it.

hell they even BUFFED zealots like crasy, then nerfed like crasy, we were open minded back then and there were no drama posts
we could have had zoom and things like that, or even a closed alpha testing.

ok maybe a little drama was made XD

but not as the same amount as the current ones, so it was doable, but chaging the game, as it is rigth now i dunno man, they could loose a great competitive playerbase by doing so. People are getting used to it, pros are in the making already, so they would be mad to say the least.

[Hobo Joe]

You can't micro units in starcraft when you're trying to click on individual pixles on the screen. Starcraft would be all but unplayable with a farther out zoom. You probably couldn't even differentiate the units. New players would use it because it would allow them to "see" their base and the battle at the same time, but it would be a terrible habit for them and it would create poor play in the long run.

So? It's another tool, good players can use it to play better, or if they don't like it, they can ignore it. Using bad habits as a reason to not have a very useful feature is.... dumb. And as for differentiating units, as Waldo said - Icons.

Starcraft II is only a newbies game in of that it ranks you based on your skill and only asks you to play players of your own level. In every other way it's a game that encourages you to practice and master it. It is the definition of a hardcore game. If you don't want to take SC2 as a hardcore game, then it doesn't want you to play. SC2 needs to make no apologies for being hard to learn or making decisions that favor high end players over low end players. There's only one thing that matters in starcraft 2. Skill. Period.

So.... asking for a useful feature that in no way changes the skill ceiling and is used only to be able to manage and oversee more at once is suddenly... Trying to make the game easier or less hardcore or less focused on skill? What? This paragraph makes no sense at all.

The thing I don't like in SC2 is the fact they have no formation control structure. Painting or clickdragging lines in spring was so easy and effective. I don't see why blizzard just didn't impliment something like that. It makes micromanagement better because you have more intimate control over your units. With good players, everything in starcraft moves as blobs and limbolines, that's my one big disappointment with starcraft2, and probably the reason why I never got serious about playing it after being spoiled from playing spring RTSes. Still. It's an amazing game to watch, and extremely brilliantly designed. From a competitive standpoint it gives you so much more than other RTS games even try to. It's awesome. It has a few flaws, but nothing compares in raw design.

Agreed. Line formations are the biggest thing that make me have such a difficult time transitioning to any other RTS. Clump moving is so bad.

I wouldn't say it was a bad game, generally I'm just not a fan of the style. Randy pretty much summed it up on the last map. Little unit variety (less choices), very limited map design style (less choices, more linear and predictable gameplay, etc). It's balanced and fast paced, but also very linear and very constricted. Watching the speed and skill of high level players is very impressive, however it gets boring after watching 2 or 3 games. Linear gameplay compounded by the fact that unit micro is a joke (no acceleration or turn times), base management is almost non-existent (click spam cause of bad queues and no econ management required due to the simplest eco possible) , as well as linear expansion (very defined base/resource points on the maps, compared to something like *A games where it's very open ended) , not to mention the archaic and pointless town hall/farm system that's still being used 15 years after the technical reasons it was created are obsolete, and so forth.

Balanced and fast paced yes, but falling short in so many areas. "Extremely brilliantly designed" is excessive, to say the least. And yes, other stuff does compare in raw design, 'raw design' is SC's biggest weak spot. It does great with balance, but TBQH falls short in nearly every other way. Most games don't have its balance simply due to a smaller playerbase and thus less brute-force power to expose balance flaws, or the vast resources of a company like Blizzard.

[scifi]

i think starcraft is balanced, but is it fun hmmmm, it is i supose but not as fun as the first

the second is more balanced it has pathfinding e.t.c.. but sure it isnt as fun as the first.

The changes id do in the next patch would be:
limit home bases to 1 vespene gass only
alter the center of maps to have more higher, lower ground, more interesting area of play.

Internacional server
Allow lan
Improve Bnet, better chat e.t.c........

Justification for 1 vespene geyser, people couldnt rush tier 2 units and they would depend on a more interesting t1 fase.

ofc the pros can use t1 all game, ive done it to in some games i had, but in a general way it would work more and make the game more fun and expantion oriented.

[SwiftSpear]

Balanced and fast paced yes, but falling short in so many areas. "Extremely brilliantly designed" is excessive, to say the least. And yes, other stuff does compare in raw design, 'raw design' is SC's biggest weak spot. It does great with balance, but TBQH falls short in nearly every other way. Most games don't have its balance simply due to a smaller playerbase and thus less brute-force power to expose balance flaws, or the vast resources of a company like Blizzard.

From what I've seen starcraft is less linear than any of the TA based spring mods I'm aware of. Sure, there's alot more variety of unit roles in spring games, but most of the are crappy and useless, they completely don't fit into the game. For any action your opponent makes there are at least 2 viable responses, for most there are many more than that. That's very impressive design.

[flop]

lol im suprised andy put so much time into debating this with you guys

haters gonna hate

[SwiftSpear]

I feel the anti starcraft series bias is much greater of the anti-fans than the bias of starcraft fans here.

Quite the opposite, its like you guys are unable to except that there are possibly any flaws in the game.

The "flaws" you have pointed out so far are not flaws. They're either irrelevant or outside of the scope of the project. Starcraft 2 is designed to be a challenging, interesting, and balanced high skill game, in which an average match is somewhere between 10-40 minutes. And it does that heads and shoulders better than any other modern RTS to date, and in so doing that captures the majority market of current RTS fans.

The game does have flaws, definitely, but more so in little brokennesses than in wide arching gaps in design. From a game design prespective SC2 is pure game design porn. There is so much obvious thought and deliberation in every uniqueness in every unit, and things fit together like a diabolical jigsaw puzzle at the game play level. It's awesome. There are little things, like I feel some races and some matchups are poorly paced compared to others, and go through periods requiring inconsistent amounts of APM. Starcraft 2 has virtually none of this "one unit is too good" stuff you see in every other RTS ever, there are ALWAYS tonnes of options for how you will respond to any given opponent move, and tonnes of options for how you can force the opponent when you want to have "possession of the ball" per say. Seriously, if you have a brain and you really look into the game design elements in place this game literally expands your mind. it is SOO complete and reasoned out. TA was full of arbitrary crap that made things more "cool", in starcraft the cool comes from death animations and explosions, the gameplay design is deliberate and obsessive to an absurd degree. It makes the game amazing. It is the absolute definition of "gameplay first, everything else second" design.

[Johannes]

Nah, SC2 designers themselves said they didn't come up with unit designes with thorougly thought out roles at first, but just thought up stuff that seemed cool, and made the balancing just iteratively from there on.


And yeah who gives a fuck if theres zoom or not

[Gota]

No game is perfect.
Starcraft has the blizzard name behind it and people understand what it means...
Its polished it will enjoy super long support on all levels...
Its competitive and addictive....
Why wont people like it...
Comparing it to spring is silly since spring games are very unpolished and basic with many many missing or very basic features.
SC2 is very good for competetive gamers...
Spring is good for people who want to get into the game industry while also being busy with work or school and for lifeless unemployed nerds or the random geeky teenager.

[pintle]

This thread is making SC2 into radiohead/apple products: I am predisposed to dislike it, no matter the merits, because of the legion of drooling fanbois and their waves of self deluding bullshit.

The absolute definition of "gameplay first, everything else second". Just wow: this thread keeps providing me with lolz :D

[Gota]

Im not sure I understand...Are you saying it IS gameplay first everything else second or that thats the wrong way of looking at it?

[pintle]

Im saying they deliberately split the release into 3 packages for maximum commercial gain. Let alone the exorbitant price of the software. There are plenty of other factors, but it is definitely not the definition of a game for gaming's sake. It is very clearly a hugely commercial endeavour. Just look at the Lan crap.

[Gota]

Im saying they deliberately split the release into 3 packages for maximum commercial gain. Let alone the exorbitant price of the software. There are plenty of other factors, but it is definitely not the definition of a game for gaming's sake. It is very clearly a hugely commercial endeavour. Just look at the Lan crap.

Well of course its not an open source project developed for nothing...
Commercial games are....commercial games.
I dont think they ever claimed to be non profit.

[pintle]

I was trying to outline how I perceived Swift's statements to be ever so slightly naive/coloured by his enthusiasm for the game, as opposed to suggesting that the game is not cool cos its not free.

[SwiftSpear]

Im saying they deliberately split the release into 3 packages for maximum commercial gain. Let alone the exorbitant price of the software. There are plenty of other factors, but it is definitely not the definition of a game for gaming's sake. It is very clearly a hugely commercial endeavour. Just look at the Lan crap.

How does that effect the multiplayer in any way that isn't positive? We've got a full scale multiplayer release that is as big as broodwar was, the next 2 games can only add more cool stuff to it. The single player additionally, was great. There's nothing to complain about in the split into 3 games yet. Right now we have 1 game, and it was worth what it was priced at.