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On May 03 2010 06:02 Olorin.SVK wrote:
Personally I dont think about the modding as something that should be in the spotlight but I can see how it can bring new great things to a game.
Consider this for a moment.
- Counter-strike was a mod by two college students. Now look at it.
- Garry's mod was, again, a mod.
- Unreal Tournament's engine is outsourced largely to modders and developers. UE3 SDK was made open, for free, to modders. It is easier than ever to make a mod and go commercial with it using this incredibly powerful engine. This is the major selling point of the entire game for Epic.
- Neverwinter Nights owes like 90% of its income thanks to the fact you can do so much with the editor even though it isn't exceptionally powerful, but you can have mini-mmo persistent worlds with it.
- DotA wasn't even a mod, it's a map. Now you have all of these commercial spinoffs, DotA has its own CAL teams, and Icefrog got hired by Valve.
Mods are big business. If Blizzard wants to set up a Premium map system it's in their best interests to make the editor as clean and user-friendly as possible to encourage community growth. As it is, they are hurting it more than ever by ignoring us and leaving the ui in the state it's in.
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wow epic post Ty for the info
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Wow, what a great post! I never got into mapmaking except a little in Age of Empires II (do you have any experience with this game?), let alone modding, but your arguments sound very reasonable. I hope Blizzard takes a look at your points and handles them appropriately.
By the way, when you finish that novel, make sure you let us all know. I'd love to read it.
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I really liked that post, and I have to agree with you. Blizzard is sliding on their product quality.
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On May 03 2010 07:01 FiBsTeR wrote:
Wow, what a great post! I never got into mapmaking except a little in Age of Empires II (do you have any experience with this game?)
I did mapping and made custom AI (yay mass catapults) for the first game but 2's AI scripting was a little too complex for me and late in my modding life so, no. I did play it a fair bit though.
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I find myself pushed to like Starcraft 2,
Push through game after game and win after loss,
Yet under it all it's hard to eschew,
How it fails to be to me what Brood War was
The units have the feel of cartoons,
Siege tanks splay like childrens toys,
Overlords drifting, schoolyard baloons
Nothing here for men, just a wargame for boys
I rail against their game breaking decisions,
How gain I no bonus from my superior vantage?
This beta seems full of glaring omissions,
What have they done with my high ground advantage?
This was to be the crux of my strategic life,
Instead I've been lent no more than grief and strife
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Except for the editor part (the editor doesn't work for me :/) I couln't agree more.
You are complaining about the voices in the game ? You surely don't have listened to french voices. English version is so professional compared to this xD
The zerg voice sounds just like golum from LOTR. You expect « Myprecious minerals » at any moment. Zerg are supposed to be scarrying creature comming from space.
I was horrified by some answers in the dev. « They're enough micro in SC2 » WTF ?? vultures, lurker, reavers, all interesting units to micro has been removed and replaced by some overpowered crap (immo, marauders, . . .).
« No, the actors are final, though we may choose different "takes" they did in the studio or change some of the processing on their audio. »
What ??? What the goal of the beta if nothing is supposed to be changed when it's wrong ?
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holy shit. those mods look ridic
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On May 03 2010 07:12 Sonnet wrote:
I find myself pushed to like Starcraft 2,
Push through game after game and win after loss,
Yet under it all it's hard to eschew,
How it fails to be to me what Brood War was
The units have the feel of cartoons,
Siege tanks splay like childrens toys,
Overlords drifting, schoolyard baloons
Nothing here for men, just a wargame for boys
I rail against their game breaking decisions,
How gain I no bonus from my superior vantage?
This beta seems full of glaring omissions,
What have they done with my high ground advantage?
This was to be the crux of my strategic life,
Instead I've been lent no more than grief and strife
Somebody give this man a beta key.
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United States1719 Posts
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I watched that first video, and that was pretty epic. Amazing
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Great post, read all of it O_o
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Blizzard really, really needs to hire you. I agree with everything in the OP, awesome post.
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On May 03 2010 07:56 EchOne wrote:Show nested quote +On May 03 2010 07:12 Sonnet wrote:
I find myself pushed to like Starcraft 2,
Push through game after game and win after loss,
Yet under it all it's hard to eschew,
How it fails to be to me what Brood War was
The units have the feel of cartoons,
Siege tanks splay like childrens toys,
Overlords drifting, schoolyard baloons
Nothing here for men, just a wargame for boys
I rail against their game breaking decisions,
How gain I no bonus from my superior vantage?
This beta seems full of glaring omissions,
What have they done with my high ground advantage?
This was to be the crux of my strategic life,
Instead I've been lent no more than grief and strife Somebody give this man a beta key.
Already did :D
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It is literally impossible for SC2 sounds / music to sound equal in quality to SC1 sounds / music for you right now. Much of the way our brains determine affinity for sounds is based on how many times we have previously heard them.
SC2 editor sucks, but, like the OP says, the SC1 editor did, too. Since Blizzard left it up to fans to make their own editors it'll probably happen this time, too.
Groups make a lot more sense these days than the chat rooms that get built out of thin air. I could never figure out all the complicated functions of SC1 battle.net that were ripped from IRC circa '96.
The maps are pretty standard, but they should be for figuring out balance in beta. If the maps were all Demon's Forest, DMZ, and Plasma, no one would have any idea about balance. I guess if they threw Diablo units in so giant neutral demons could use DBZ moves on Command Centers, it would be a lot more "innovative", but most of us would not like that.
Reaver > Colossus but the Colossus still takes micro since it is fragile and best used in conjunction with Sentry/FF.
None of the unit voices really sound that bad to me, although some of the writing sucks, like the SCV guy freaking out. I like the Thor, prolly partially because there isn't any nostalgic counterpart to compare it too. Nothing stuck out about the zerg to me, which is probably a step down from SC1 but it didn't sound amateur to me.
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On May 03 2010 09:37 Pyrrhuloxia wrote:
SC2 editor sucks, but, like the OP says, the SC1 editor did, too. Since Blizzard left it up to fans to make their own editors it'll probably happen this time, too.
.
The same was said about wc3 but it never happened. I mean, I'll try to convince some of the programmers to make stuff for sc2, but most of them are retired now or working.
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Fantastic post, read the whole thing. I've never had the patience to learn to be good at modding games; I tried editing ROMs of the old Fire Emblems, but hex made me want to kill myself, and all the forums I was looking on for help were dead. It's interesting to hear about the game from a perspective so different than the one we usually see on this forum.
I agree with you 100% about the unit sounds. I've started playing with the sound either on lowest or off, since I play zerg and can't deal with hearing "We require more MineralSSSSSSS" 10000000 times in a game
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Great post. I've seen your posts before always interesting. I hope it gets spotlighted. I played beta for like 4 days. I'm actually about to play sc1 and then read (on some programming  ). I surely hope they do something to create something more "dynamic" both in game and for the editors. Thanks.
5/5
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Thank you for this blog, IskatuMesk. It was very informative and I certainly hope Blizzard will listen to your feedback regarding the editor.
That said, however, I do not think the Vulture and Reaver would work in SC2. The thing that made these two units compelling and balanced was the flawed AI pathing. It was the bad pathing that allowed units to potentially drag the mines and use them against the Terran player. Likewise, it was the bad pathing that forced Protoss players to manually target with the Reaver and that made each shot a gamble in which the Protoss could do either lots of damage or no damage at all.
With the improved AI pathing, these two units would just be boring and overpowered. Reavers would surely hit with every scarab, not making them any better then a direct fire unit, and deal massive splash damage. Do not even get me started on Vultures, who were just barely balanced in the original SC as it was. They were incredibly cheap, took a lot of shots to take down, could fire while moving and could plant mines that could kill units much more expensive from themselves. If each mine would successfully be able to explode upon first contact upon it's intended target, then there would be preety much no stopping them.
I don't think the Colossus and Hellion are bad replacements, but I think it would be hard to deny that both require work. While the Colossus has the personality and charm the Reaver had (sorry, the obvious "War of the Worlds" reference does not change that, just like the obvious "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" reference doesn't in the Reaver's case) , I feel like it doesn't make the most use of it's ability to scale up and down cliffs. I feel like the unit would feel a lot more compelling if it had an attack method that would warrant it to use that movement ability more.
Also, while I think Hellions have a lot of potential (A Firebat on steroids and wheels? Who wouldn't want that?), too much of their damage currently consists of bonus against light. This means that any sort of Armored unit quickly renders them obsolete. If they did at least decent base damage, I think they would have made a decent mineral sink for Mech-based play.
As for the voices, they are a mixed bag for me. While I love most of the Terran and some of the Protoss voices, I agree that Zerg could be a lot better. Also, I was seriously dissapointed at the Archon's voice....it doesn't sound even remotely as menacing as it's original counterpart.
Overall, thank you for sharing your thoughts. Sadly, it was preety much inevitable that some would not like it. While I like the game, I realise that it still has a lot of issues. I hope Blizzard takes your feedback to heart and I hope that the game will turn better as well as more to your liking in the future.
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United States47024 Posts
Very well thought out post. The only thing i really have to comment on is this:
Even just the Terrain editor is weird and haphazard. It seems as though Blizzard ignored previous editors like Earth 2150, Neverwinter Nights 2, even Titan Quest. Starcraft 2's editor boasts -100 to +100 height levels but only three cliff levels, the map size is still restricted to 256x256 - a problem when Sc2's units and buildings are bigger than sc1 and utterly crippling for major mods or campaigns - and the actual tools leave a great deal to be desired.
I expect (or rather, I hope to GOD) that this is a limitation that will only be present in the beta, mostly because Blizzard expects people to be using the current version of the editor pretty much exclusively to design melee maps. That said, it is indeed distressing if they themselves are using this editor to design content in the game, because it is a nightmare to work with.
On May 03 2010 04:55 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
Because Blizzard didn't cater to a niche group of players, it's a bad game?
LIke, sorry it didn't meet your standards, but you have to realize that your niche is not one that's of particular concern to Blizzard. I'm not really sure what you're trying to get at with this post.
The issue is that the WHOLE POINT of having an editor this powerful is to cater to people to like IskatuMesk. It's not like your average player is going to so much as look at the map editor. If the people who actually will use the editor think this poorly of it, there's pretty much no point in including the editor to begin with.
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