Dustin Browder Interview April 2011 - Page 4

On April 26 2011 01:21 frodoguy wrote:
maybe blizz decided that they will start off with something easy to understand to cater for those who do not know sc at all (wings of liberty) and then gradually make it more complex like BW in the future (heart of the swarm and legacy of the void) so those newbies who make up like 90% of the sc2 community will be abled to understand the more complex things (just my theory though).

^ Pressing individual factories and spamming buttons doesn't really concern the viewers in terms of entertainment.

On April 26 2011 03:53 Greem wrote:


After Reading FrozenSolid post i came to same conclusion, wings of liberty could be just a start to forge the community , after the comunity is there, they could really focus on making the game more complex .

On April 26 2011 01:14 KevinIX wrote:


Warcraft 3 had 4 races. That means 16 matchups, almost double what SC has. You balance one matchup and the others get messed up. Even then, WC3 was pretty damn close to balance. There wouldn't have been a pro scene if it weren't.

On April 26 2011 03:29 nepeta wrote:
They sold out to casuals, because their business is to sell games, and there are more casuals than pros, get over it. Browder isn't paying a cent more than lip-service to e-sports, because e-sports is worth very little compared to copy sales. It is by no means useless; big tournaments generate publicity, and increase the length of attraction in a sizeable part of the buyers, but underneath the black line named "$ profit" the e-sports gains are, in my very humble opinion, peanuts.

If you were to pay €25 + €5/month, blizz would have an incentive to aim for longevity, but the entire model of personal computer development and game sales is against it, so it's not going to happen any time soon. SC2 is not like WoW, its main attraction is pvp, which means adding content is a very limited tool to ensure customer loyalty. They need a radically different setup of income from e-sports, i.e. a HUGE increase of revenue from e-sports, to bring it on the same level as that from copy sales, period.

Yeah, we at TL.net like to see gosu micro, epic low econ battles, cunning plans and meta metagames, but all the scrubs out there just want to see pretty things shoot and explode when they click and don't give a damn about units which require more than 2 clicks to operate. SC2 could have been a lot worse, from an e-sports view, try envisioning a pvp environment run like the sp campaign. Scary, isn't it?

Browder/Blizz/Activision are balancing like crazy, but first and foremost they do so financially, all other objectives are secondary.


Lord almighty forgive my entering this discussion, but I suppose I'm crazy enough to argue in it, and my point is its pointlessness :p

On April 26 2011 00:56 FrozenSolid wrote:
You have to remember that SC2 was also designed so that it is easy to watch and to understand.

A newer player may not understand exactly how hard it is to move a squad of dragoons fluidly, and if spectators aren't aware of what's going on they are missing out on what's happening.
While fluid unit movement lessens the need for good micro when moving an army, it makes for a less complicated viewing experience, which many argue, will translate to a bigger audience for the progaming scene.

Broodwar features lots of engine-based limitations that do make the game much harder to play and giving it a much higher mechanical skill ceiling, but it's important to note that implementing those limitations was most likely not a premeditated choice. If mechanical difficulty was the only consideration when designing a game, units would probably all have to be controlled individually without any kind of group selecting method, hotkeys, camera controls or mini-map. We can all agree that a game like that would quickly turn out to be boring, so a game designer has to make a hard choice between what he can or cannot implement into his game based on the expectations of his target audience.

Another necessity for a game to become a known e-sport is to achieve massive popularity. This is likely why Broodwar never took off in the west. The game is absolutely amazing and remains one of the best games ever made even after SC2's release, but it was never popular outside Korea when compared to games like Halo, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Guitar Hero and other triple A titles. These games had so many more people playing them than Broodwar because they were much easier to play, but also had the depth necessary to produce a professional scene (with the exception of maybe guitar hero, which ended up being rote-learning based). Nobody in their right mind would argue that any of those games is more complicated than Broodwar, but sheer complexity isn't what has made Counter-Strike massively popular around the world. Counter-Strike didn't feature advanced movement modes so it was actually less complicated than many games in its own genre, and a new player could take out a pro instantly with a lucky spray & pray headshot. Professionals would still overtake newer players over the course of many rounds, so the random aspect wasn't detrimental to the professional scene. Top players could still establish themselves and make a living playing the game.

Therein lies another reason why SC2 was made easier to pick up and play than Broodwar. For a professional scene to develop, it needs sponsors that are interested in marketing their products specifically to that game's community. If the community in itself is larger, then sponsors will be more inclined to finance teams, tournaments, or even leagues. The sad truth in the e-sports world is that the game with the most money will be the most successful, and the game with the biggest fan base will get the money. As long as a certain criteria for difficulty and skill is upheld, it becomes irrelevant how high the game's skill ceiling is in terms of having that game become a successful e-sport. What matters is having long term consistency in results between two players of different skill level. Much of Broodwar's popularity in Korea can be attributed to the PC bang culture and holding tournaments to see who was the top player in the area. Korean e-sports evolved around Starcraft because the game was popular, not because the game was hard to play or because it was a better game than the competition (which it was by a huge margin). Those certainly contributed to its popularity, but they weren't the selling points of sponsorship deals for the players.

Blizzard has clearly designed SC2 not only as a modern RTS with a powerful engine for their modding community (which created DotA on the War3 engine), but also as a game with massive potential to become popular in the west. Even in the event that the standard game itself wouldn't take off, the SC2 engine is powerful enough that the modding community could create a custom map that could become an e-sport of its own. Blizzard also promotes the game within their own huge gaming community (which remains largely WoW based) and restricts third parties from holding tournaments so they can be fully aware of SC2's popularity (which may or may not be a good thing). They are very serious about having SC2 or a community mod based on it succeed as an e-sport, and everything about the game from design to marketing seems to be fixated on that. That means having to make sacrifices and compromises in order to cater to all players. While SC2 has a lower skill ceiling than its predecessor, it can be expected that the game will evolve beyond how we understand it now if it becomes huge. Players will always find ways to innovate and gain even the smallest advantage over their opponents when there's enough money on the line.

On April 25 2011 21:35 Kipsate wrote:


This is factually wrong, it didn't have hundreds of patches O.o.

On April 25 2011 21:35 Kipsate wrote:


This is factually wrong, it didn't have hundreds of patches O.o.

On April 26 2011 05:32 EsX_Raptor wrote:
If SC2 is "much easier" than BW, then howcome...

+ Show Spoiler +

... got their asses handed to them 3-0? Please somebody explain that to me.

On April 25 2011 23:12 maybenexttime wrote:


Some people settle for sc2 being just good, while others want it to be just as good if not better than BW. What's wrong with the latter?

On April 26 2011 05:47 Loli wrote:


Well honestly, they weren't doing so hot towards the end of their BW careers either.

On April 26 2011 06:02 EsX_Raptor wrote:

I'm pretty sure BoxeR and NaDa are much better Broodwar players than any player in the TSL...

On April 25 2011 21:35 Legatus Lanius wrote:
whoa lets not go nuts, nothing is as good as a brood war tvz

On April 26 2011 05:32 EsX_Raptor wrote:
If SC2 is "much easier" than BW, then howcome...

+ Show Spoiler +

... got their asses handed to them 3-0? Please somebody explain that to me.

On April 26 2011 06:05 TheYango wrote:

You mean other than the other ex-BW players that were doing at least as well as/better than them at the ends of their BW careers too?