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In old games there were many techniques that were based on abusing the game mechanics, often Animation Canceling stuff.
Some things I remember right now:
-> Moving Shot in Broodwar, based on cancelling the animation part in which the unit does not start moving on its own.
-> Animation canceling in Warcraft 3, following the same principle. Huge and important part of WC3 mod DOTA that has an own eSports scene for some time already.
-> Quake/Doom movement. In one of the first games, jumps made people becoming faster because of a bug in the game engine. The developers were clever enough to keep it in the sequels however because it became an important part of those games.
-> "Russian Duck" in CS 1.6. Hitting the crouch key twice results in some kind of strange little jump that allowed to move faster than sneaking without doing footstep sounds as loud as when running. Also, it can be used to move out of cover, lowering the chance of recieving a headshot right away.
-> Mutalisk stacking in BW of course
Modern games tend to eliminate controlling difficulties and removing all bugs, also making animations smoother.
-> Many modern games feel like beeing "controlled through a thick layer of syrup", both shooter and RTS games. Player models as well as Units often have acceleration/deceleration in movement or delays before and after shooting or they need time to turn around, so they don't respond to commands instantly like they did in most old games. No possibilities of abusing stuff like frame-based animations that could be cancelled with proper timings. Especially in shooter games, it can be really annoying if the crosshair doesn't respond directly 1:1 to mouse movements.
-> Russian duck removed in CS:S
-> No real animation canceling in SC2 anymore
-> Infinitely huge unit selection groups in SC 2, also groups for buildings
-> 3D engines rarely contain any usuable bugs anymore unlike there were in the old 2D engines
Now I wouldn't say that this necessarily is in issue in case of SC2. General control feels kinda direct, most units do not have annoying acceleration or turning times, most likely because blizzard knows about these things and wanted to please the experienced community that played Broodwar and WC3 already.
However, in general all these losses in direct unit control feel really annoying. They eleminate much of the so important parts of aiming (shooters) or micro (RTS) and replace them with planning in advance.
In SC2 it feels more like the frustratingly low influence of micro is mainly caused by other decisions apart from the missing moving shot. Units tend to be specialized, clever and small.
The specialization becomes a problem because it often does not matter how hard a player microes, the result won't change alot - A hellion will always die to a roach. There is no spider mine that would save it if it is used well and the opponent does not respond. The Terran cannot take the fight and the Zerg does not have to respond.
Units are smaller in terms of collision boxes and smarter, so they don't block each other anymore, so positioning becomes less of a micro issue. They position themselves smartly, they have smartcast, and they often get the most important targets by themselves, mostly because they always try to do as much damage as possible, so they get the targets which they are supposed to counter.
Another aspect depends more on the units and skills in the game. There are way less skill that require good micro because they have to be spammed by players (in case of forcefields this is really not a micro heavy skill - players might spam them, but not like spider mines all the time constantly everywhere). Also there are virtually no skills or things that have or can be used in response to something. For example, a spider mine that is planted right in one's army has to be focussed. Or, in Warcraft 3, dispel of courses or buffs and healing skills are important to be used manually and in a responsive manner.
There are less positioning heavy skills and units, like lurkers and dark swarm. Siegetanks are left, but without spider mines and high ground advantage, only half of their positioning aspect remains.
So even if modern, necessary adaptions of the UI like MBS and infinite unit selection would not exist, SC2 is still very flat on micro because of unnecessary design decisions.
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I agree 100%. The most important thing to me in a game is that I should feel in control of it. A huge part of me feeling in control of a game is that it should respond when I tell it to do something. Games where an animation, once started, insists on finishing before the character will respond to your commands feel, as you said above, like being controlled through a layer of syrup. My girlfriend, who is not a gamer at all but enjoys the odd game of BW vs a computer, tried SC2 the other night; she didn't like it at all, claiming that it felt slow, laggy, and unresponsive.
Animation cancelling is a hugely important feature in my opinion - not just in RTS but in any game. If a character is in the middle of an attack animation and I tell it to move away, it should damn well stop what it's doing and move. If my timing is wrong and I give it an order before it's actually dealt the damage, then that's my fault and getting the timing right is something that I can practice.
At risk of soapboxing a little, I'd suggest that this issue can be generalized to the trend these days of games being based on appearance over gameplay: the designers and marketers figure that it's important for the visuals to be smooth and uninterrupted, and for all the animations to appear the way they were lovingly crafted by the art department. Unfortunately for them, when I'm controlling units at 200 APM in the middle of an intense battle, I'm not really interested in watching overly long attack animations...
Examples of the right and wrong way (IMO) of doing it: Carrier, and Valkyrie (both in BW). The Carrier is great. I love microing carriers. You can always move them around, even while they're attacking; they never sit stuck in one place. On the other hand, we're all familiar with the control issues with Valkyries, to the point that they are mostly unused.
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TC, you took my thoughts of the past 5 years and put it into a coherent post.
This problem isn't just limited to Starcraft-- it's *everywhere*.
The first obvious happening was with Halo 2 to Halo 3. What? No BXR? No BXB? No double shot? mind you, these were definitely glitches, but they *could* have been left in. Instead they were replaced with a lag "fair" double whack solution. Both players run into each other, melee, melee again, and die together in pile of lameness.
Then comes the transition from SSBM to SSBB. God. I don't even know where to start. No l-cancel? No wave dashing? Lame edgeguarding? No edgehogging?
Both of these sequels were simplified so much from their previous incarnations that it just made them uncompetitive, and ultimately, much less fun for me to play.
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Yeah, they should really start putting "glitches" into modern games.
The trick is making them hard enough to perform in a critical situation that the game doesn't just consist of exploiting them.
Plus, having experienced players show you (and you showing off to friends) how to do cool stuff like patrol micro and BXR is one of the most fun parts of getting pro at a new game.
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On May 09 2010 13:42 teekesselchen wrote:
-> Many modern games feel like beeing "controlled through a thick layer of syrup"
That's a nice way to put it, it's really my main gripe with modern games. But SC2 specifically, I don't like how all the units in a big army clump so tidily. The way they clunked about and bumped into each other in BW made it really important to control your army well. You could easily tell the difference between a newbie a-move and a skilled player's co-ordinated attack. They can't change this though, the new interface/engine simply removes the possibility of this kind of micro.
I really miss the worker as an attack unit dynamic in BW. Where you could fend off early rushes by abusing the way the unit AI doesn't prioritise workers and how the stack-glitching worked. But I don't think introducing glitches into SC2 would work, partly because of the new engine and partly because it just doesn't fit with the way they're designing the game.
I think it would be nice to give everything animation cancelling, then either tone it down or remove it if it simply doesn't work. But I doubt blizzard will do that because the current state of micro in the game is "good enough".
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It's not about making glitches... Just having a good and responsive control mechanics. This doesnt have to include animation cancelling, it can be whatever cool method you come up with to make things behave satisfyingly.
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On May 09 2010 22:17 JohannesH wrote:
It's not about making glitches... Just having a good and responsive control mechanics. This doesnt have to include animation cancelling, it can be whatever cool method you come up with to make things behave satisfyingly.
No it's not necessary but there were lots of cool glitches that gave players new ways of controlling their units in a more detailled and effective way in the past. Developers removed them and gave nothing back in return.
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Uhhhh, crouch running is banned in most tournaments and leagues, and only really started coming onto the 1.6 scene in 06/07. SC2 beta has been out for just a few months now, I'm sure players will eventually find flaws in the engine. Also in Quake, bunny hopping doesn't make you move faster. The actual increase in speed comes from air strafing. Plain old bunny hopping just gives the illusion of faster movement.
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Gameplay>Graphics
In the old days, people who made games cared too little about the money and did everything with an intense passion, nowadays a great bunch of random programmers think they can be game-developers, and even provided they have the good initiative and skill-set for making a great game, (that actually takes time and testing to perfect) it's all choked to death abruptly by lame contracts and deadlines, mostly with greedy developers that are in a fierce competition with each other, thus the quality/quantity ratio grows ever smaller.
What was once a niche community of incredibly passionate people has become a large industry full of eager people to make some money.
Also, as the consumer numbers increased dramatically, more and more retarded people come out of the woodwork, who need easier and dumber games (since they're not really "dedicated/hardcore" gamers), with an extraordinary visual aspect to compensate.
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On May 11 2010 10:45 minus_human wrote:
Gameplay>Graphics
In the old days, people who made games cared too little about the money and did everything with an intense passion, nowadays a great bunch of random programmers think they can be game-developers, and even provided they have the good initiative and skill-set for making a great game, (that actually takes time and testing to perfect) is choked to death abruptly by lame contracts and deadlines, mostly with greedy developers that are in a fierce competition with each other, thus the quality/quantity ratio grows ever smaller.
What was once a niche community of incredibly passionate people has become a large industry full of eager people to make some money.
Also, as the consumer numbers increased dramatically, more and more retarded people come out of the woodwork, who need easier and dumber games (since they're not really "dedicated/hardcore" gamers), with an extraordinary visual aspect to compensate.
^Agree with 100% as well as the blog in general.
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On May 11 2010 10:41 Uncle Leo wrote:
Uhhhh, crouch running is banned in most tournaments and leagues, and only really started coming onto the 1.6 scene in 06/07. SC2 beta has been out for just a few months now, I'm sure players will eventually find flaws in the engine. Also in Quake, bunny hopping doesn't make you move faster. The actual increase in speed comes from air strafing. Plain old bunny hopping just gives the illusion of faster movement.
Ok, it came relatively late. However, I do not know any tournaments that still forbid it. There was one or two but it came up totally confusing with like semi random defflosses and from then on I never heard about it beeing banned anywhere. ESL and so on never even attempted to do that.
Good, it's air strafing, like it was in CS way earlier ^^
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I agree. This is basically the same topic as the GunZ thread:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=124399
Excerpt from what I wrote there:
It's about creating an engine that works on some basic rules, but does not foresee any possible situation. The more modern and complex games become, the more the programmers tend to cover any eventualities and thus have to write out how everything works out in the game. This reduces the possibility of players to find new stuff that they can abuse. Sure, sometimes those things are too easy to abuse, breaking the game. Then they have to be patched (like the reaver shooting right after being dropped in the initial BW). Others are too hard to abuse, or very hard, like goliath+dropship killing sunkens or tanks + dropship killing dragoons (<3 nazgul!). Some are just perfect.
Man I want some company to realize all this and make a good game again.
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On May 12 2010 02:05 Asta wrote:I agree. This is basically the same topic as the GunZ thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=124399Excerpt from what I wrote there: Show nested quote +It's about creating an engine that works on some basic rules, but does not foresee any possible situation. The more modern and complex games become, the more the programmers tend to cover any eventualities and thus have to write out how everything works out in the game. This reduces the possibility of players to find new stuff that they can abuse. Sure, sometimes those things are too easy to abuse, breaking the game. Then they have to be patched (like the reaver shooting right after being dropped in the initial BW). Others are too hard to abuse, or very hard, like goliath+dropship killing sunkens or tanks + dropship killing dragoons (<3 nazgul!). Some are just perfect.
Man I want some company to realize all this and make a good game again.
I like that. It's very true, when SC or BW were released, the designers most likely had no clue what players will do with all this stuff apart from some very basic rules. Now every unit gets clearly defined. A reaper has one or two purposes but cannot be used in a great variability and thats it.
Ok, now this wasn't about the units but about the general gaming technique but Blizzard extended it upon unit design. It sucks.
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EPT
