Dustin Browder Interview April 2011 - Page 14

On April 29 2011 02:32 BLinD-RawR wrote:
At this point it's real pointless to say anything other than this:

It's upto the community to decide whether or not SC2 will succeed BW or not,and as a game that is being discovered and changed constantly(forcing it to be rediscovered) no one can really predict anything about the game.Whatever happens you can always fall back to BW since it's not really going anywhere.

But seriously does it really not stand a chance I mean it does have 2 more expansions left.Anything can happen.

On April 29 2011 02:39 Legatus Lanius wrote:


i guess people are dismissing it considering all the time and help available to dustin and co and they still made a rather casual game, so what incentive do they have to make it more challenging? they've seen that there is an inverse relationship between difficulty and sales.

yeah, we can still play brood war, but what if the success of sc2 hurts broodwar bad enough that the sponsors decide to pull out? do you really want to stop seeing flash weaving his art? or even worse, playing a game like sc2 where he cant even show it off? for what, a game that cant even hold a candle to the original?

On April 29 2011 02:13 infinity2k9 wrote:
Also Ribbon why are you even trying to compare to a game from 2001, how many fucking times does it need to be said that BW experience DIRECTLY helps SC2 players.

people are going into the game with immediate knowledge of RTS fundamentals and great mechanics. This is the most irritating fallacy that people on this forum constantly repeat. Stop comparing it to back then, it's completely stupid. You admit people didn't even understand the concept of a 'macro' game back then, then you compare it to SC2 today, it's retarded. Then you got xbankx spawing a whole page of shit about build orders when the only point was that BW back then didn't even have this concept properly.

The 'give it time' shit is seriously the most annoying thing on here.

On April 29 2011 03:44 Ribbon wrote:


No it really doesn't. They're different games, you know. Warcraft 3 players were able to transfer to SC2 with a decent bit of success, and Warcraft 3 has only a passing resemblance at best to economy-based RTSes like SC/SC2.



Calm down, bro.

Next to nothing from BW transfers directly to SC2 in any meaningful way. If it did, then SC2 would be almost exactly like BW, and you wouldn't be complaining. All the micro is different. The macro is different. It's WILDLY different, in fact. The economy management is entirely different, and thus nothing from BW follows naturally.

I mean, for god's sake, MC is the best Protoss in the world and I caught him putting his zealots in the back and clumping his Templar, so don't tell me people are playing SC2 at the highest levels.

What, and give me a specific example did BW players not know in 2001 that they can apply directly to SC2?

On April 29 2011 02:57 Jurassic wrote:


In my opinion, a player like Flash could make SC2 as entertaining as BW. We can already see that as pro players get better at SC2, they provide better games too. This combined with the improving maps and balance patches, SC2 has a great chance to become a worthy successor (in time).

On April 29 2011 03:44 Ribbon wrote:


No it really doesn't. They're different games, you know. Warcraft 3 players were able to transfer to SC2 with a decent bit of success, and Warcraft 3 has only a passing resemblance at best to economy-based RTSes like SC/SC2.



Calm down, bro.

Next to nothing from BW transfers directly to SC2 in any meaningful way. If it did, then SC2 would be almost exactly like BW, and you wouldn't be complaining. All the micro is different. The macro is different. It's WILDLY different, in fact. The economy management is entirely different, and thus nothing from BW follows naturally.

I mean, for god's sake, MC is the best Protoss in the world and I caught him putting his zealots in the back and clumping his Templar, so don't tell me people are playing SC2 at the highest levels.

What, and give me a specific example did BW players not know in 2001 that they can apply directly to SC2?

On April 29 2011 13:23 Legatus Lanius wrote:

"Next to nothing from BW transfers directly to SC2 in any meaningful way. If it did, then SC2 would be almost exactly like BW" yeah, its just total coincidence that all the ex-bw players that switched over havent embarassed themselves at sc2 yet (excluding the embarassment of actually playing sc2 of course.) going by your logic, MC beginning his career in sc2 would have been of equal competitiveness to a 15 year old boy who has never played an rts before

On April 25 2011 21:33 maybenexttime wrote:
Well, personally I think he did not understand what made BW great in the least. He/they removed all the fun/exciting units from BW (Vultures, Wraiths, Lurkers and so on) and replaced them (mostly) with boring a-move units (Marauders, Vikings, Hellions, Immortals, Colossi, etc.). They also screwed up some of the old units (Hydra comes to mind).

Then there's the lack of highground advantage, defender's advantage and positional play. The lack of micro is also pretty apparent, and so is the hardcounter gameplay, very un-StarCraft-like. Not to mention the ball vs. ball gameplay and horrible maps/their ladder mappool policy, as well as the fact that they deliberately refuse to fix those aspects of gameplay that can be fixed (like micro, look up Project Micro on TL) and patch interesting micro tricks because they're conflicting with their design policy...

Instead of trying to understand something as deep as BW on their own, they should've consulted some of the more knowledgable players, who have shown that their understanding of what's made BW so great and what's sc2 lacking is superior to that of blizzard designers (I'm talking about the articles on positional gameplay, spells, etc. we've had on TL).

All in all, the game is OK (TvZ and TvT are actually on par with BW MUs), but it could've been so much better. I think Browder failed because he tried to appease two drastically different groups - competitive and casual players - by trying to make sc2 play the same way for both of them. He should've taken a different approach - instead of getting rid of any non-obvious features (like Muta stacking, patrol micro, mineral jumping, Void Ray micro, positional play, etc.), he should've embraced them. Casual players would be unaware of them (unless blizzard made some tutorials) and they'd keep playing the game "the simple way," while competitive players would be able to go deeper and explore other aspects of the game.

On April 29 2011 14:04 Ribbon wrote:
I suppose you guys are right. It's not like players have improved massively in the last year, or that old builds have fallen by the wayside due to metagame shifts and people learning to deal with them better. The average length of a game hasn't even significantly increased since GSLs of old!

And if BW didn't directly transfer to SC2, we'd be seeing Warcraft 3 players like Moon and Lyn being able to compete in major tournaments, and that'd be absurd!



Exactly! A 15-year-old with no progaming experience competing in the GSL?! That'd be Creator! I mean, absurd! I don't know why I said Creator. That's the kind of name a 14-year-old with no progaming experience before SC2 playing in a GSL would have, and that's a stupid concept to which I'll give no further thought.

And we know, of course, that players are playing optimally. Why, if I did a long recap of a highly-rated game between two top players in the TSL a few pages back, I probably couldn't even find enough horrific micro mistakes to make a lame running gag out of! There's no way the skill ceiling hasn't been reached!

I suppose I'll just have to accept that SC2 is totally mapped out thanks to Brood War. I bet Bisu figured out the optimal number of chrono boosts to spend on his warp gate research to safely 3-gate expand while teching in like 2008 or something. Even the literally hundreds of wildly different maps used in pro tournaments so far haven't produced any notable change in gameplay.

I guess there's just no hope

On April 29 2011 14:12 dalenous wrote:
What made BW so great is the people themselves. It was released as another RTS game. But what made it so great was the Koreans and how they viewed and used it. If it wasnt for the poor economy of South Korea during the late 90's and early 2000's then they wouldnt have used Starcraft as a way to entertain the masses. Let bygones be bygones and look toward the future. Sure broodwar was a great game but really what made the units so great is their imperfections, horrible Dragoon Ai comes to mine, glitchy scarabs, heck even the muta micro wasnt supposed to exist.

On April 29 2011 02:20 Legatus Lanius wrote:
comparing the 6th osl to the 6th gsl is criminally stupid. both games, as RTS's, are virtually the same at the base. sure, one has less macro/less micro/less demanding units, but its still the same idea. in the 6th gsl, you have ex-high level brood war players who already have strong mechanical skills and dexterity that just needs to be applied to new hotkeys/new buildings/new units etc etc. circa bw 2001, nobody had any idea what they were doing, even noobs like iron and mvp would embarass boxer and garimto back then