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http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/the-core-gameplay/
The reason why it is getting longer to get to the core fun is because it probably isn’t there. Allow me to use an example.
During the Real Time Strategy game boom, many people were making RTS games. Very few people knew what they were doing. They kept focusing on later units where they said it was fun when all this other stuff is activated.
In order to make a good RTS game, you need to get to the core gameplay, wipe away everything else, and make it interesting. What is the core RTS gameplay? What would a RTS game look like with just the core RTS gameplay?
-Buildings-
-A HQ building (often where the building makers are made).
-A Resource building (where resources are brought in. Sometimes it is the HQ).
-A Unit producing building (where you make offensive units).
-Units-
-A builder unit (who makes buildings)
-A resource unit (who gathers the resource and brings it back)
-One offense unit (it is the first one made).
And that is it. One single unit. And it is the early grunt. Based on just this, the RTS needs to become interesting and be very fun to play. The RTS does not get to bring in super cool later units. Just the simple basics here. This is the core gameplay in which everything else stacks on. If this is not interesting, the game will fail.
When you focus on the the core gameplay, you realize things become very important that you never considered. In the above example, resource gatherers and the very basic structures need to become extremely interesting. In bad RTS games, little attention is given to them (while too much attention is given to the uber units at the end of the tech tree).
This is an interesting blog post. Many games nowadays feel pretty bad because they're built on things that are not fundamental to playing a game. Much of this is just focusing on the how instead of the why, though. People make stuff instead of gameplay, and if gameplay is made, people tend to focus on elaborate systems instead. If both are avoided, the ugly problem of overt simplicity for it's own sake can rear it's head. But really, building a solid foundation and then expanding on it is very good.
A few brilliant examples from Starcraft 2, as examples of very simple, but very interesting things:
Farms: Terran and Zerg farms are very interesting contraptions. The zerg farm, called an Overlord is actually a flying unit instead of a building and can thus be used to scout (it can also later be upgraded into a makeshift dropship. Cheap and massable due to not consuming population cap, but slow), while the Terran farm (Supply Depot) can lower itself to the ground so it can be walked over. This is extremely useful in building walls on chokepoints near your base.
Point-based armour system: The presence of this alone creates an actual difference between the cannon and the machine gun. While the machine gun may deal great damage, armour rapidly kills off it's effectiveness. Far less so for the cannon. A percentage-based armour system needs attack types because it mostly cares about the DPS.
No-nonsense units with different numbers: This is one readily underestimated thing in modern RTS unit design. Consider the Marine and the Zergling. Both deal about equivalent (and quite high) damage with quick weak attacks, making them bad against heavy armour. The Zerglings come in two-packs, and move very fast, but attack only in melee. Meanwhile, the Marine has more HP and shoots at range (it is also marginally better against armoured targets). These kinds of traits readily synergize with the very basic traits of the species' different farms, allowing Zerg great map control (the ability to have a lot of map vision and the ability to project force around the map), while the Marines' range and Terran's natural wall-offs trivially fend off the Zerg. The range also allows Marines who find good places to hole up in to achieve 300-esque feats of endurance and slaughter.
The different character of the races is easily evident with such simple things as these, and they are also very interesting and versatile. Yet they also do one very important thing: All these traits respect the fundamental character of an RTS game: That of troop production and movement, which allow for rough simulations of real-life strategy.
The racial traits of the Protoss are, in contrast, designed to completely circumvent these basic kinds of rules. In an RTS, troop production is usually done in steps such that:
1. The player orders the unit
2. The unit's cost is paid.
3. The unit is produced, forcing the player to wait.
4. The unit is ready and emerges from the production facility, heading for the battlefield.
The Protoss process works differently. They have a mechanic called the Warp Gate which allows them to produce their units directly at any Pylon (the name of the Protoss farm) they have on the map. The Warp-in process works like so:
1. The player orders the unit.
2. The unit's cost is paid.
3. The unit emerges at the chosen Pylon.
4. The Warpgate goes on cooldown, forcing the player to wait.
This sounds like a simple adjustment but serves to undermine a great number of the natural dynamics arising from the game's foundations:
1. Protoss reinforcements are completed much faster. They can get units immediately when getting free population cap whether due to a new farm or units dying. The Terran and Zerg have to wait half a minute for their units to even come out.
1b. This means that an even army trade favours the Protoss because he has units out first. If you win narrowly you may not even have the advantage, let alone a large one.
2. The Protoss player can build his unit-producing structures later because the first unit comes out immediately. As we all know, time is man- I mean money.
3. The natural concepts of reinforcement times and resulting defender's advantage (based on which basic tenets of strategy work) cease to apply to a great extent. Regardless of how far the Protoss opponent's base is, his troops are at your door immediately and you cannot intercept his reinforcements by way of ambush. You, conversely, are bound by these basic rules of strategy.
4. The system is ridiculously efficient. Normally these kinds of abilities require taking insane risks like placing your production structures near the enemy base (called proxying them). Protoss needs a single Pylon. This is an insanely cheap cost (100 minerals for Pylon, 150 for a single production facility, 50 for a Worker/Marine or a pair of Zerglings), and has none of the other traditional disadvantages like having no production in your home base.
The mechanic is interesting, and feels cool, yes, but a simple examination exposes all kinds of problems. These can somewhat be masked away by balance tweaks like making Protoss units weak (which was done but leads to another host of problems) but the core issues are still there and will inevitably rear their ugly head somewhere.
The reason I chose this example is to highlight two things:
First, how a certain sense of rules to be respected is necessary for things to make sense and the players to have expectations. In this case, the Warp Gate tramples on established rules of how the game works at a very fundamental level.
The second one is to highlight how antagonistic multiplayer raises the bar for the cool stuff to be included. Imagine Kirby Wii as a competitive more than co-operational game, like a race to the finish for example. Kirby himself may be broken, but him being super cool does not limit the other characters' ability to be cool to a great degree at all. It's still a big bummer but not a complete catastrophe.
In a game where the players are direct enemies, however, it is a catastrophe because what you can do very drastically affects what your opponent is allowed to do. It is not enough for the unit to be cool and fun to use - it also has to be fun or interesting to face. Numbers tweaks are possible but in the end the fundamental nature of the inclusion should be "right". This is something I feel Blizzard is nowadays very much slipping on*.
*If they were ever good at it in the first place - as far as I know, the Frozen Throne expansion was directed by a WarCraft 3 pro or a similar outsider who basically went "goddamnit let me fix your game" and included things with a very distinct gameplay job to fulfill instead of just making cool stuff up and including it (Blizz's admitted MO with Heart of the Swarm). The game is still broken, balance-wise, to the point where a famous Undead pro just picked Orc against Orc. Starcraft: Brood War's famed balance is in large part a result of saner unit designs combined with professional Korean mapmakers and the near-inhuman effort and work ethic of the progamers from said country. An argument could be made that Blizzard was only ever really good in the art direction and general content department, where they have been very clearly slipping as of late (Exhibits #1, #2, #3)
 
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So basically you're argueing that stuff like Warpgates (one pylon for getting my entire reinforcement in your face? Yes please!), no high ground advantage (lol, go ahead, defend your fort with arches who are on the same height as my infantry!) and similar things - while totally cool in some cases - go against basic design principles and are therefore bad?
If yes, I totally agree. =P
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Not the high ground advantage specifically - While it may not be ideal it does work to an extent. I would probably prefer a percentage-based approach but the current one isn't horrid at all. What I'm saying is more that Blizzard has a singleplayer mentality on unit design: Make stuff cool. This is fine in single player where cool stuff is okay and the main goal. But in directly adversarial multiplayer you just need to pay attention to things like how oppressive designs are.
They also undervalue the ability to blow things up a lot. The main features of a harass unit are to blow stuff up and bail out. Easy enough. This also enables them to be used in other contexts like Mutas and Banshees picking up stray Siege Tanks or harassing reinforcements. The Oracle's ability is boring, feels gimmicky and is super narrow. It's a unit very much put into one box and never being able to come out of it. Or the Recall? Get out of jail free card as a harassment solution? You kidding me or something?
Similarily, you don't need Forcefields to zone people out - the threat of blowing them up with a Siege Tank shot, a manned Bunker or a pre-emptive "I dare you" Storm is much more exciting, still effective and far less binary. It has tension. Plus it just feels honest, unlike say FFs on a ramp which can just say "no you won't come here" and allow a badly positioned force to walk away without a scratch.
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Entomb is plain RETARDED indeed, just as retarded as the idea they had with the Dark Pylon back then.
Recall isn't bad design, it is an awesome design, just look at the BW arbiter. I don't know how the recall works in SC2 thought.
FFs and FG are bad designs too, no doubt about that. But at least they aren't as retarded as entomb.
Seriously, entomb is ridiculous.
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So you say Blizzard needs to design a good game. That won't happen because Blizzard is a For Profit company. Look Blizzard made the marvel that is Brood War and it lasted very long. Blizzard can't let that happen again else they would go bankrupt (not including WoW).
Its the same story with CoD. Every new game fixes an old problem but creates a new one so you'll buy the next game in the series (noob tubes/quick scoping in MW2 fixed with terrible tubes/snipers in BO; Hard to shoot guns in BO -> Type 95, ACR, Striker in MW3; bad maps/easy kill streaks in MW3 -> It will get fixed, but a new problem will arise).
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The problem with recall in HOTS is that it is available so early on while in BW you had to climb a whole tech tree to get it, and even then there were counters to it like EMP. I could be wrong but I doubt anyone is going to start EMPing mothership cores anytime soon.
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I don't get it. A lot of your points about how "warpgate messes with the natural order of things as decreed by me" are completely arbitrary. Terran is (supposedly) better at holding positions, they have mules as to require less army supply, so their army can potentially be stronger. They can stim units to have them move to the battlefield more quickly. Zerg units are so quick and build so fast that warpgate is only slightly faster as a way of production as well. What you call "masking problems" is actually called "assymetric game design", since after all everything you add to the game makes it harder to balance.
I agree with the need for good core gameplay design, but for something like warpgate the only thing you can really say about it is whether it "works" or it doesn't, all the potentially bad things are only relevant then. I'm pretty sure warpgate could be tweaked to satisfy all its anti-fans and then all of a sudden its problems become "masked" (i.e. they aren't problems anymore).
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So recall now is on the nexus? wtf?
tch... dodging emps, bossing through walls of turrets, microing your recaller is where the fun is at, and now they remove it all and add the spell to a building, just fucking amazing how they screw up simple things with ease.
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So I see a link to a blog post written by someone in the grip of heavy nostalgia. (He tries to tell me that running around with an 8 bit Link, one sword, killing one monster over and over again would be fun. He's wrong, it sounds awful and Skyward Sword is probably my all time favorite Zelda game) Then we get tired and unoriginal bitching about WGs, plus a little blizzard bashing because those aren't dead and rotted horses at all are they?
Then you mention The Frozen Throne which was designed by... the same guy who made WoW and is now the executive vice president of game design at Blizzard. His name is Rob Pardo, the "Pro" from WC 3 you mentioned and gave 100% of the credit to is not listed anywhere that I can find easily. Also "balancing" that many distinct races is a task you shouldn't underestimate and couldn't manage on your own without stripping the races down to almost carbon copies of each other. (I don't know too much about who designed TFT so I will happily admit I'm wrong on this one if you can tell me who you're talking about.)
Both Dustin Browder and David Kim have explained what gameplay roles they feel the new units fill, to say their MO is making cool shit up and throwing it in really is over the top.
See them explain it here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=344574
Finally a bunch of comments complaining about units in a game that isn't even out yet. This is a fine example of the worst kind of negativity and pointless whining the internet has to offer.
5 stars.
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I was with you until it turned into a bunch of bullshit Protoss balance whine D:
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On June 20 2012 01:26 TheFrankOne wrote:So I see a link to a blog post written by someone in the grip of heavy nostalgia. (He tries to tell me that running around with an 8 bit Link, one sword, killing one monster over and over again would be fun. He's wrong, it sounds awful and Skyward Sword is probably my all time favorite Zelda game) Then we get tired and unoriginal bitching about WGs, plus a little blizzard bashing because those aren't dead and rotted horses at all are they? Then you mention The Frozen Throne which was designed by... the same guy who made WoW and is now the executive vice president of game design at Blizzard. His name is Rob Pardo, the "Pro" from WC 3 you mentioned and gave 100% of the credit to is not listed anywhere that I can find easily. Also "balancing" that many distinct races is a task you shouldn't underestimate and couldn't manage on your own without stripping the races down to almost carbon copies of each other. (I don't know too much about who designed TFT so I will happily admit I'm wrong on this one if you can tell me who you're talking about.) Both Dustin Browder and David Kim have explained what gameplay roles they feel the new units fill, to say their MO is making cool shit up and throwing it in really is over the top. See them explain it here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=344574Finally a bunch of comments complaining about units in a game that isn't even out yet. This is a fine example of the worst kind of negativity and pointless whining the internet has to offer. 5 stars.
If I could upvote this comment I would.
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On June 20 2012 01:12 Grumbels wrote:
I don't get it. A lot of your points about how "warpgate messes with the natural order of things as decreed by me" are completely arbitrary. Terran is (supposedly) better at holding positions, they have mules as to require less army supply, so their army can potentially be stronger. They can stim units to have them move to the battlefield more quickly. Zerg units are so quick and build so fast that warpgate is only slightly faster as a way of production as well. What you call "masking problems" is actually called "assymetric game design", since after all everything you add to the game makes it harder to balance.
I agree with the need for good core gameplay design, but for something like warpgate the only thing you can really say about it is whether it "works" or it doesn't, all the potentially bad things are only relevant then. I'm pretty sure warpgate could be tweaked to satisfy all its anti-fans and then all of a sudden its problems become "masked" (i.e. they aren't problems anymore).
Even if ling production is fast and they travel on creep all the way to the battlefield, they still obey the basic rules: 25 seconds to make, then travel time to battlefield during which time all the rules still hold. You have a defender's advantage, if you won a trade you have an advantage for a short period of time and can start pushing it, the reinforcements can be denied and the list goes on. Warp gates ignore a large portion of these basic building blocks of the genre. I don't doubt for a second they're balanceable - they are. I am saying the basic design isn't good, in large part because of that ability to just ignore certain basic tenets of this kind of game. It defeats a lot of basic assumptions about what you can do - makes the game less logical, in a sense. Asymmetry is a very good and desirable thing, but it doesn't excuse bad design choices.
On June 20 2012 07:16 KSKaleido wrote:
I was with you until it turned into a bunch of bullshit Protoss balance whine D:
Not balance whine, criticism on the design. Protoss is pretty decently balanced at the moment, but the designs of things like Warp Gate and Forcefield and the current version of the upcoming Oracle are atrocious and gimmicky. Something can very well be balanced and badly designed, or imbalanced and well designed. Furthermore, Protoss is merely the most glaring problem collection. High-end Terran units are pretty puzzling as well and Fungal could use a tweak. To say nothing of the macro mechanics which were added to because people whined SC2 would be babbyzone because you don't have to have a degree in APMology to do what you want.
An easy, extreme example of the first would be a faction that can only win by very early proxy. It has about a 50% win rate. If it doesn't win, that faction loses. The game is balanced but the design is horrible and unenjoyable. Likewise, there are matchups in for example fighting games that feel relatively fair and sane to play, but the numbers add up to one side having an advantage (for example, a bit more damage and HP while most other tools are roughly the same).
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On June 20 2012 01:26 TheFrankOne wrote:
So I see a link to a blog post written by someone in the grip of heavy nostalgia. (He tries to tell me that running around with an 8 bit Link, one sword, killing one monster over and over again would be fun. He's wrong, it sounds awful and Skyward Sword is probably my all time favorite Zelda game) Then we get tired and unoriginal bitching about WGs, plus a little blizzard bashing because those aren't dead and rotted horses at all are they?
Then you mention The Frozen Throne which was designed by... the same guy who made WoW and is now the executive vice president of game design at Blizzard. His name is Rob Pardo, the "Pro" from WC 3 you mentioned and gave 100% of the credit to is not listed anywhere that I can find easily. Also "balancing" that many distinct races is a task you shouldn't underestimate and couldn't manage on your own without stripping the races down to almost carbon copies of each other. (I don't know too much about who designed TFT so I will happily admit I'm wrong on this one if you can tell me who you're talking about.)
Finally a bunch of comments complaining about units in a game that isn't even out yet. This is a fine example of the worst kind of negativity and pointless whining the internet has to offer.
He's not a man in the grip of nostalgia, just a fan of good games as am I, and we both recognize that not very many are coming out. But your tastes probably differ overall by quite a lot, given the Skyward Sword comment. The main reason I posted that link is to highlight that games need a good, solid foundation to work, something that is increasingly forgotten nowadays in favour of systems after systems after systems and the senseless pushing of things like cinematicism and social media integration. But that is a whole different topic, so take it to PM or something.
The Warp Gates are a very low-level example with far-reaching consequences, why would I not use it as an example? The point of criticism is not to be original, simply to point out problems, causes and perhaps also possible solutions. That it's been done before just speaks of other people thinking the same.
The TFT stuff is just based on memory which is why I didn't word it terribly strongly. I don't think it's impossible at all to balance TFT decently - at least to the point pros don't feel like counterpicking Orc with Orc - The designs don't seem horrible and there's enough knobs to turn, but the foruth race is indeed problematic.
Also, why would criticizing the unit designs be a bad thing? Credit where it's due, there's good ones in there like the Battle Hellion and Swarm Host, but I'm going to call something a turd if it seems like a turd, like with the Oracle and Tempest or the already-pulled Shredder and Replicant. Also not sold on the Widow Mines, they seem to be going too explicitly for things that don't work in a deathball period instead of just making designs that work well in small groups like Marines or Phoenixes or Hellions.
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On June 20 2012 14:04 Coffee Zombie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2012 01:12 Grumbels wrote:
I don't get it. A lot of your points about how "warpgate messes with the natural order of things as decreed by me" are completely arbitrary. Terran is (supposedly) better at holding positions, they have mules as to require less army supply, so their army can potentially be stronger. They can stim units to have them move to the battlefield more quickly. Zerg units are so quick and build so fast that warpgate is only slightly faster as a way of production as well. What you call "masking problems" is actually called "assymetric game design", since after all everything you add to the game makes it harder to balance.
I agree with the need for good core gameplay design, but for something like warpgate the only thing you can really say about it is whether it "works" or it doesn't, all the potentially bad things are only relevant then. I'm pretty sure warpgate could be tweaked to satisfy all its anti-fans and then all of a sudden its problems become "masked" (i.e. they aren't problems anymore). Even if ling production is fast and they travel on creep all the way to the battlefield, they still obey the basic rules: 25 seconds to make, then travel time to battlefield during which time all the rules still hold. You have a defender's advantage, if you won a trade you have an advantage for a short period of time and can start pushing it, the reinforcements can be denied and the list goes on. Warp gates ignore a large portion of these basic building blocks of the genre. I don't doubt for a second they're balanceable - they are. I am saying the basic design isn't good, in large part because of that ability to just ignore certain basic tenets of this kind of game. It defeats a lot of basic assumptions about what you can do - makes the game less logical, in a sense. Asymmetry is a very good and desirable thing, but it doesn't excuse bad design choices.
Sorry, but what qualifies you to call something bad design? All of those things you mentioned are arbitrary, apparently 25 seconds plus a little travel time count as obeying the rules, but 5 seconds warptime plus less travel time falls short of your standards. Defender's advantage doesn't go away even with warpgate and there are many ways in the game to reduce defender's advantage. I'm not a fan of warpgate, but I'm not going to claim that "it's bad for X reason", since frankly it's not something I can say for certain.
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EPT
