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On April 23 2024 05:41 Excalibur_Z wrote:
So in a way, I think that David Kim was sort of put in an impossible situation, having to simultaneously adhere to the director's vision of a very different style of SC game along with the players' expectation of tradition. Through that lens, I think the decisions that came with the expansions make more sense.
Not to mention David Kim took the lead much later into the game life, by that time the game dipped on views and player base against a game genre that, altough based on RTS micro mechanics, had made away with pretty much all of the macro ones.
MOBAs.
There's a reason we have been adding QoL changes like auto attacks on caster and stationary modes on observers to the game, it's artificial difficulty may have been appealing to the small crowd that liked hardcore RTS but was unwelcoming to basically everbody else.
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On April 22 2024 16:04 Menkent wrote:
lol that guy went way too far with the insults. But to be fair, he was insulted first
and he has a point in his arguments. And no one was really engaging with them seriously
I genuinely struggle to see what their points actually are. They're buried in selfmade, poorly explained definitions (like "lore-centric") that make it impossible to engage with them seriously, because we can't even communicate with basic, understood terms. It's like trying to debate philosophy with someone, where one side is well-read and understands conventional terms, and the other has been personally living in plato's cave, writing their own philosophy books with their own esoteric conventional terms.
The fact that the response was to attack my credibility (and apparently go far enough in that effort to look up my profile?) suggests to me that there was no path that would lead to any kind of actual, reasonable discussion.
Besides, I joined TL in 2011 under a different account named after a unit in Dune 2, the first RTS I played, and played some time after I was done shitting diapers. I've also been a designer for a handful of games available on Steam, one of which is an RTS. None of that qualifies me to declare I could have done better than any current/modern RTS designers, but if the lad wants to have an actual credibility competition, I'm curious what they could even bring to the table.
All that said, I would be curious to hear what their actual points were.
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I thought his posts and points were very clear. For example, C&C having a big truck harvesting fields of resources because of the novel Dune. And Warcraft having gold mines and forests. SC2 still had the same system. Deeper insights in gameplay didn't make the devs fine tune the resource systems for better 1vs1 gameplay. How can you say his point were poorly explained when they gave clear examples? And no one asked clarifying questions.
Maybe people here should have engaged with his points rather than insult him. They wrote very coherent posts with a rare level of proper grammar. Instead, you guys did what TL was famous for: baiting moderator action.
David Kim isn't to blame for the failure of SC2. He joined way later as a balance lead. As much as SC2 people whine about balance, poor balance was not anywhere near the problems that plagued SC2.
I would really say that if you weren't at least C+ level in SC BW, you should really be hesitant to voice opinions and mostly just listen to others.
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Yeah i felt his posts were pretty understandable. There are different things you can prioritize when making your game, focusing more on the lore and immersion vs focusing more on what makes good gameplay. Ofc everything is a mix of both, but often times it can indeed be heavily skewed towards one over the other. And sometimes there is just not even much thought put into the resource system, like why exactly are there 1-2 types, etc.
Also, David Kim was like a semipro BW player when he was young (or at least like GM equivalent, some competent level). So he must have understood BW on a decent level and what made it fun.
Also, I know no one is exactly saying they aren't, but I actually love MULEs, Chronoboost, Larvae Inject. I feel they're both very fun abilities and don't feel tedious/unfun (other than maybe Larva Inject, but Zerg players tend to be people who find perfecting macro and mechanics more fun, so it is tailored a bit towards their taste). They feel powerful and meaningful (you can spam MULEs as often as you can early game, but later game you can conserve energy for mass scans or save it for when you take one of your opponent's expos and try to MULE spam it, for Chronoboost you can make cool timings and later game it does become harder to manage/use and you also want to conserve energy for Overcharge or Recall sometimes, and Larva Inject while the least meaningful does make things like mass ling/bling quite powerful and is very swarmy). I feel they were a great addition to the game and not at all a bad way to add some APM/macro mechanics to make up for MBS and stuff. It is a small but still significant way to inject skill expression. Missing a few seconds of muling, chronoboost, or larve inject did have an impact. (Though now larva inject is queue-able, which i think is OK since Zerg had a high APM requirement, though it is weird in that it goes against the original idea by becoming almost automated).
I would have to say that MULE and Chronoboost are one of the most fun things to me when playing Terran or Protoss. Trying to hit larva injects and using hotkeys to do it efficiently was also a bit fun when I used to play Zerg.
Each ability also directly fit each race's focus, and I find that very cool and fun:
Terran is army focused, and MULEs increase your income with limited bases so you can produce more army with less econ.
Protoss is tech focused, so chronoboost helps compliment your powerful key tech timings.
Zerg is economy focused, and larve inject allows you to drone up very quickly and then also be able to mass produce an army reactionary and with less production buildings.
So I don't really understand why even David Kim is criticizing these mechanics as not meaningful and not fun. You did still have to make a decision between MULE and Scans as Terran (and sometimes even call down supply for specific rushes, or if you're having trouble getting more bases then you can call down supply instead of MULEs which mine you out quicker), and what to Chronoboost as Toss and also whether to conserve energy for Recall or Photon Overcharge / Battery Overcharge. Only Larva Inject didn't really have much a decision behind it because you could make mass Queens, but we've seen times where harassing tumors and drones (like 2 rax reaper opening) actually leads to Queens not having enough Transfuse energy to defend, so there is still a meaningful tradeoff. I would agree though that mechanics like this can always be designed in a more ideal way and the abilities themselves could be better in ways.
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Northern Ireland23624 Posts
On April 23 2024 08:38 Menkent wrote:
I thought his posts and points were very clear. For example, C&C having a big truck harvesting fields of resources because of the novel Dune. And Warcraft having gold mines and forests. SC2 still had the same system. Deeper insights in gameplay didn't make the devs fine tune the resource systems for better 1vs1 gameplay. How can you say his point were poorly explained when they gave clear examples? And no one asked clarifying questions.
Maybe people here should have engaged with his points rather than insult him. They wrote very coherent posts with a rare level of proper grammar. Instead, you guys did what TL was famous for: baiting moderator action.
David Kim isn't to blame for the failure of SC2. He joined way later as a balance lead. As much as SC2 people whine about balance, poor balance was not anywhere near the problems that plagued SC2.
I would really say that if you weren't at least C+ level in SC BW, you should really be hesitant to voice opinions and mostly just listen to others.
Decent grammar in service of meandering treatises isn’t all that impressive. And on TL proper grammar ain’t all that rare.
Interesting observations and analysis interspersed throughout aye, but I had little idea what the real overarching point they were trying to make was. I would have liked to have delved a bit into that via civil queries as I was intrigued, but alas that’ll have to wait until they’re off the naughty step.
As to the bolded, no that’s an utterly preposterous bar to any topic other than ‘how do I get somewhat competent at 1v1 Brood War?’
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On April 23 2024 08:38 Menkent wrote:
I thought his posts and points were very clear. For example, C&C having a big truck harvesting fields of resources because of the novel Dune. And Warcraft having gold mines and forests. SC2 still had the same system. Deeper insights in gameplay didn't make the devs fine tune the resource systems for better 1vs1 gameplay. How can you say his point were poorly explained when they gave clear examples? And no one asked clarifying questions.
Maybe people here should have engaged with his points rather than insult him. They wrote very coherent posts with a rare level of proper grammar. Instead, you guys did what TL was famous for: baiting moderator action.
David Kim isn't to blame for the failure of SC2. He joined way later as a balance lead. As much as SC2 people whine about balance, poor balance was not anywhere near the problems that plagued SC2.
I would really say that if you weren't at least C+ level in SC BW, you should really be hesitant to voice opinions and mostly just listen to others.
Hey, thanks! I'm always willing to be wrong. Maybe I joined too late in the conversation to understand their points. By the time I joined they were already babbling wrong and/or incoherent stuff. Lemme go back a bit and come back with examples.
I'm back! Turns out, it was their second post in this thread I objected to, so I wasn't missing a lot. Here:
On April 20 2024 16:38 Crimthand wrote:
C&C was in 1996 bro. SC2 was released in an era where games had bigger budgets than movies, C&C was literally the first RTS game with it's own story, as Dune 2 was Dune the novel's story.
To highlight my concerns and why they quickly felt like someone with whom I'd engage where they're at, and not more than that:
"C&C was in 1996 bro." is shit grammar, and also wholly irrelevant to the point he was responding to. In his first post he claimed SC2's story is horribly (I strongly agree), and later stated that C&C's story was goofy and paper-thin. He indicated that it was fine for C&C but not fine for SC2, and the person he's responding to in this second post contested this apparent contradiction, and rather than elucidate his point he made some fucking garbage up.
"C&C was literally the first RTS game with its own story" - This is wrong, and don't rely on me to refute it, let's just let Crimthand self-own with his previous post, where he said:
With WC, WC2 and SC, Blizzard actually did a better job at trying to create a story and do world-building. But what SC2 did to the story is absurd.
Warcraft 1 was '94. C&C was in 1996 bro. Also, if you have any concerns about Warcraft 1 not being an 'actual story' or something, here, more Crimthand :
Playing a campaign is literally playing through a story. It is the entire concept.
Moving on! "...Dune 2 was Dune the novel's story" - also wrong. I posted about it already, but Dune 2 doesn't feature any characters from the novels, features a house as a playable race that isn't present in the novels (Ordos) and at best follows themes of Dune generally. It does not follow the stories in the novels.
Further, they ended this second post with an unwarranted "Also, can you please proofread your posts and try to use proper grammar and punctuation? Thanks!", which is what gives me no hesitation in bringing the same level of "Shit your diapers bro" energy to my response.
I could continue, but this is more energy than I want to spend on a random human on the internet. I hope this clarifies why I don't see any actual central thesis of theirs to be responded to and why I engaged them with the energy they were bringing, and not... well, the energy you and I have here. They had opportunity to respond to critiques of their position, and instead chose to attack the people and not contest the ideas. Ultimately, I don't see the rare level of proper grammar, nor the coherent posts, though I accept that as, on some level, my failing. I certainly wasn't attempting to bait any mod action, I was just meeting them where they're at. They didn't rise above it yet, and if they do I'll rise alongside.
ANYWAYS.
RTS imo are in an interesting spot where the "Chasing Brood War" school of design feels like a really hard sell. I feel like a lot of us would wholeheartedly agree that BW is (among) the best competitive game available, while simultaneously being able to see that its fun isn't 'accessible'. The problem I feel will always be a problem is you can't make Brood War's fun accessible. The game is about controlling all these moving parts and the level of tension that rises from exactly that difficulty - you remove that difficulty, and you remove that fun.
A fundamental difference between SC2 and BW to me is that SC2 tried to make said fun accessible, but failed to keep the same tension. In a game of BW, a better player than me could kick the shit out of me with an army half the size, simply because they could control the engagement -that much better-. There's a tension in knowing you have an advantage and knowing the sheer difficulty in actually executing a plan that exploits that advantage. Maybenexttime said it best - the more ahead you get economically, the harder it is to manage.
I don't know how you get past this hurdle, because people don't like things being hard. It's why I harp so much on campaign being important for any RTS, because I think a good RTS -needs- to be hard*, and campaigns or co-op function as an entry point where you can start experiencing that fun before having to go on to a competitive 1v1 game and getting your ass kicked.
*That said, I'm 100% all for PvE / noncompetitive RTS experiences.
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Northern Ireland23624 Posts
I think one oft-neglected aspect of Brood War is quite how explored it is as a game. There’s a relative handful of RTS games with even close to as many collective personhours put in to working out its many intricacies, I mean it’s incalculable but I think it’s a safe bet that it’s #1, by a distance. SC2, WC3, AoE2 are likely the only other games in the genre even in the same ballpark.
Not that there aren’t things it can teach us, far from it but I think we can slip into a kind of reverse engineering process when looking at what makes a good RTS game, and what is possible.
RTS needs the hive mind to really explore and iterate, create emergent and interesting gameplay, and in games that have those collective hours put in even incredibly talented development teams can’t predict where their babies go. It’s what makes it such an interesting genre but also so difficult to develop.
In most other genres I can think of, development teams are the innovators, in RTS it’s a collaborative effort with the playerbase.
Aside from it being something of a lightning in a bottle/perfect storm game (not taking anything away from its quality), nearly every nook and cranny of it is pretty explored. But I think it’s a mistake to have the takeaway that it’s some kind of foundational text in fundamental RTS principles.
A little chicken and egg perhaps, but is its persistent success evidence of some blueprint for RTS do’s-and-don’ts, or do we consider those more universal principles of design merely because it was so successful, and very thoroughly explored?
And of course the flipside to that is how many games had interesting mechanics and hidden depths never fully revealed because they didn’t catch fire.
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On April 23 2024 08:38 Menkent wrote:
I thought his posts and points were very clear. For example, C&C having a big truck harvesting fields of resources because of the novel Dune. And Warcraft having gold mines and forests. SC2 still had the same system. Deeper insights in gameplay didn't make the devs fine tune the resource systems for better 1vs1 gameplay. How can you say his point were poorly explained when they gave clear examples? And no one asked clarifying questions.
Maybe people here should have engaged with his points rather than insult him. They wrote very coherent posts with a rare level of proper grammar. Instead, you guys did what TL was famous for: baiting moderator action.
David Kim isn't to blame for the failure of SC2. He joined way later as a balance lead. As much as SC2 people whine about balance, poor balance was not anywhere near the problems that plagued SC2.
I would really say that if you weren't at least C+ level in SC BW, you should really be hesitant to voice opinions and mostly just listen to others.
Resource nodes (location and destructible), how they are gathered, how workers are designed (including how durable, speed and pathing) are core gameplay mechanics.
It's never just been only about the lore, I don't understand where this perception is from and tbh I don't see why it matters.
No one is manufacturing live ammunition or extracting oil right in battlefield by army units, as it would have been implied by company of heroes.
SC2 could very well do whatever zerospace is doing, and rename them to mineral and gas and still would still be lore accurate.
It's not like SCV, probes or drones are essential to the lore and won't be the first unit to be replaced/not present in the multiplayer.
In what way are they not already fine tuned for 1v1 when resources create a fundermentally different early game for SC and AoE and CoH for example.
Or that maps are not designed around it?
Is the issue the naming of the resources or something?
What kind of resource system would be the better system for 1v1?
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United States12224 Posts
On April 23 2024 12:05 Fleetfeet wrote:
RTS imo are in an interesting spot where the "Chasing Brood War" school of design feels like a really hard sell. I feel like a lot of us would wholeheartedly agree that BW is (among) the best competitive game available, while simultaneously being able to see that its fun isn't 'accessible'. The problem I feel will always be a problem is you can't make Brood War's fun accessible. The game is about controlling all these moving parts and the level of tension that rises from exactly that difficulty - you remove that difficulty, and you remove that fun.
A fundamental difference between SC2 and BW to me is that SC2 tried to make said fun accessible, but failed to keep the same tension. In a game of BW, a better player than me could kick the shit out of me with an army half the size, simply because they could control the engagement -that much better-. There's a tension in knowing you have an advantage and knowing the sheer difficulty in actually executing a plan that exploits that advantage. Maybenexttime said it best - the more ahead you get economically, the harder it is to manage.
I don't know how you get past this hurdle, because people don't like things being hard. It's why I harp so much on campaign being important for any RTS, because I think a good RTS -needs- to be hard*, and campaigns or co-op function as an entry point where you can start experiencing that fun before having to go on to a competitive 1v1 game and getting your ass kicked.
*That said, I'm 100% all for PvE / noncompetitive RTS experiences.
BW is a curious beast because it has so many layers of complexity. However, fundamentally, it is an accessible game, as proven by its universal popularity and the fact that it resonated with a substantial casual playerbase. Around here on TL we like to float the concept of "real" BW referring to high-level BW: a carefully curated set of maps that follow general design rules where players frequently use various quirks and exploits in the game engine honed from years of experimentation at a blinding pace. But that is the bleeding edge.
Most players don't play that way, and don't care to learn. And yet, the game still works very well for them, and remains fun. They sit behind countless walls of Photon Cannons and build Carriers while floating thousands of minerals, if they even bothered to expand at all. They have entire attack squadrons consisting of no more than 12 Zerglings. They think Vultures are only good for Spider Mines. Some just play comp stomps or clunky, poorly-balanced UMS maps. They're perfectly happy in this world.
SC2 decided to put competition at the forefront by making ladder the default way to play multiplayer. There are tutorials about macroing, control groups, hotkeys, all to prepare you for the deep end. It also stripped down the Battle.net experience to dissuade players from building casual communities that thrived in BW. Hardcore was now the de facto Starcraft experience, and while the matchmaker tried its best to make matches fair, where even the weakest players could feel like they had a shot, the creeping dread was ever-present because everyone felt like they needed to constantly try their hardest to maintain their rank. For the casual crowds of old hoping for BW familiarity, that's a big detractor for retention. As a result, SC2's community skewed increasingly hardcore. Eventually, after years, Blizzard realized that they were alienating an entire population and introduced Co-op, which unsurprisingly was very successful because it gave those players a home again.
So when you talk about "accessibility", it's very important to get the framing right. BW and SC2 are both highly accessible. BW especially has an infinite skill ceiling with a very low skill floor (SC2, despite its QoL leaps, I'd argue has a higher skill floor by design). The better you get, and the more you learn, the more pathways for improvement appear. That's why we love BW, and that's why it has so much staying power.
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On April 23 2024 14:03 Excalibur_Z wrote:
....
So when you talk about "accessibility", it's very important to get the framing right. BW and SC2 are both highly accessible. BW especially has an infinite skill ceiling with a very low skill floor (SC2, despite its QoL leaps, I'd argue has a higher skill floor by design). The better you get, and the more you learn, the more pathways for improvement appear. That's why we love BW, and that's why it has so much staying power.
thats a good explanation i think, but i have to disagree when it comes to staying power when it comes to BW. With the release of WC3 at the latest, it wasnt the most played RTS anymore, to this day WC3 is more popular, so is SC2.
You yourself wrote that nice recalling that BW wasnt popular enough to get shown on the TV back in the day.
and while BW is accesible in the sense that you can just start it and build a few units and send them across the map, most modern (that is current) players would shut it off pretty quickly since everything is a hassle to do, same is true for SC2 in a way, although stuff like multiple building selection makes it more accesible in my view, but thats very debatable id say
The amount of players that still call this their favourite game is very high for a game that age, but still nowhere near where any dev would consider it as a template. there are still plenty of old games that have loyal, loving fanbases way after all those years, many of them with very contradicting designs choices.
and for the average gamer, BW (SC2 as well i would guess) doesnt stand out here, not because they "dont get it" or "are just not good enough at the game" or whatever some here a telling themself.
Its because its less fun to play a game where you fight both your oppenent and the game itself for no reason. ppl love hard games (look at the success of the soullike games) and competetive play as well, but none of those games have to much "unnecessary" mechanical difficulty added, because those are just not popular with a wider audiance (and never where for many im sure)
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On April 23 2024 14:03 Excalibur_Z wrote:Show nested quote +On April 23 2024 12:05 Fleetfeet wrote:
RTS imo are in an interesting spot where the "Chasing Brood War" school of design feels like a really hard sell. I feel like a lot of us would wholeheartedly agree that BW is (among) the best competitive game available, while simultaneously being able to see that its fun isn't 'accessible'. The problem I feel will always be a problem is you can't make Brood War's fun accessible. The game is about controlling all these moving parts and the level of tension that rises from exactly that difficulty - you remove that difficulty, and you remove that fun.
A fundamental difference between SC2 and BW to me is that SC2 tried to make said fun accessible, but failed to keep the same tension. In a game of BW, a better player than me could kick the shit out of me with an army half the size, simply because they could control the engagement -that much better-. There's a tension in knowing you have an advantage and knowing the sheer difficulty in actually executing a plan that exploits that advantage. Maybenexttime said it best - the more ahead you get economically, the harder it is to manage.
I don't know how you get past this hurdle, because people don't like things being hard. It's why I harp so much on campaign being important for any RTS, because I think a good RTS -needs- to be hard*, and campaigns or co-op function as an entry point where you can start experiencing that fun before having to go on to a competitive 1v1 game and getting your ass kicked.
*That said, I'm 100% all for PvE / noncompetitive RTS experiences. BW is a curious beast because it has so many layers of complexity. However, fundamentally, it is an accessible game, as proven by its universal popularity and the fact that it resonated with a substantial casual playerbase. Around here on TL we like to float the concept of "real" BW referring to high-level BW: a carefully curated set of maps that follow general design rules where players frequently use various quirks and exploits in the game engine honed from years of experimentation at a blinding pace. But that is the bleeding edge. Most players don't play that way, and don't care to learn. And yet, the game still works very well for them, and remains fun. They sit behind countless walls of Photon Cannons and build Carriers while floating thousands of minerals, if they even bothered to expand at all. They have entire attack squadrons consisting of no more than 12 Zerglings. They think Vultures are only good for Spider Mines. Some just play comp stomps or clunky, poorly-balanced UMS maps. They're perfectly happy in this world. SC2 decided to put competition at the forefront by making ladder the default way to play multiplayer. There are tutorials about macroing, control groups, hotkeys, all to prepare you for the deep end. It also stripped down the Battle.net experience to dissuade players from building casual communities that thrived in BW. Hardcore was now the de facto Starcraft experience, and while the matchmaker tried its best to make matches fair, where even the weakest players could feel like they had a shot, the creeping dread was ever-present because everyone felt like they needed to constantly try their hardest to maintain their rank. For the casual crowds of old hoping for BW familiarity, that's a big detractor for retention. As a result, SC2's community skewed increasingly hardcore. Eventually, after years, Blizzard realized that they were alienating an entire population and introduced Co-op, which unsurprisingly was very successful because it gave those players a home again. So when you talk about "accessibility", it's very important to get the framing right. BW and SC2 are both highly accessible. BW especially has an infinite skill ceiling with a very low skill floor (SC2, despite its QoL leaps, I'd argue has a higher skill floor by design). The better you get, and the more you learn, the more pathways for improvement appear. That's why we love BW, and that's why it has so much staying power.
Fair!
Part of it will be a given person's experience. Brood War FEELS a lot less accessible to me because I didn't grow up as a gamer playing it. I've played adjacent things - Warcraft 1/2, Red Alert, Dune 2 etc, but SC2 was the first time I experienced a 'tryhard' competitive multiplayer game, beyond just lan with friends or brothers, backed by the idea that people can actually be good at games. I certainly played SC1/BW, but wasn't blessed with an internet connection when I played it, so the entirety of UMS / online play was lost to me.
Approaching BW now, it doesn't feel nearly as accessible as SC2, nevermind Fortnite or Autochess or Valorant or some other modern competitive game - Aside from my own personal mental blocks, Brood War is -hard- just to do basic shit. Having bad aim in an FPS and watching yourself fail is frustrating - failing in BW is watching the wheels fall off your car in slow motion, and being powerless to do anything about it. By the time you know shit is going wrong, it's already too late for that, and you've gotta focus on holding the rest of your car-metaphor together.
For those who have been playing it on and off for the better part of the last 20 years, Brood War is gonna feel like a comfy leather glove, and of course that feels plenty accessible. For me, who has played probably around 100 hours of brood war since its release, and having watched probably 1,000, it feels like wearing mason jars on my hands and trying to play piano.
I think you're right - it's important to get the framing right, and I can't speak to how isolated my experience is. I would expect that here on TL more people are in the 'comfy leather glove' camp, but it's hard to say how accessible Brood War is to your average modern gamer.
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@Fleetfeet
lol you just cherry picked a few sentences about what he said as being 'poor grammar'. That's not how language works.
Also, they are right about Dune 2 and C&C stories. You can't compare that to storytelling in 2010. And yeah there were a few games whose names are basically lost that could be considered to be RTS games way early on. But those are nitpicks that don't even counter the core point. You can't say that SC2 having a shit story is ok and still appeals hugely to single player people because there was a niche game called 'Herzog Zwei'. Or that the Dune 2 game added a faction that doesn't exist in the novels. It IS the same story. You have a planet called Arrakis with spice. And you have to conquer it. That's the story. And it is pulled 1 for 1 from the book. Those don't counter the argument that SC2 had a bad story. That doesn't make any sense.
Why not deal with the good arguments? Where is the evidence that Westwood changed their resource gathering system for gameplay reasons? Where is the evidence that Blizzard switched around minerals and gas for gameplay reasons? I have never seen it. You all just assume that happened. But how can that be true when we have the maps from that time showing how the devs viewed resources. Their only idea was 'just put some one the map so the player can build stuff'. That's it! I remember how I played WC2 and I wasn't able to beat once campaign mission for a while. Yeah, I was a kid. But I couldn't immediately phantom the basic principles of RTS as we know them now. But you guys argue that the devs changed their resource system based on how competitive play YEARS LATER would turn out to be? We know for a fact basically everyone played RTS that way back then. And that must definitely have included the devs. The idea that the devs were playing 1vs1 all the time and adjusting the resource system for that is silly. And we also know other devs didn't design their games that way because they all came up with inferior systems. Did they do that on purpose? No. They just picked their own lore-based resource system.
If you throw mud at someone who makes posts with high quality. If you respond without grammar and only respond to a misinterpretation of the least relevant points, then it is on you that the other side gets annoyed. But this is classic TL. We prefer to talk about how the mods banned someone instead of talking about actual arguments. I see some people claim here he said these were all facts and now their opinion. Where does that say that? Just because you are unable or unwilling to engage with the other side's arguments, that doesn't mean the other side claimed they were facts.
Additionally, if in 20 years people have not been able to successfully counter these arguments, why would someone expect something different to happen today? If you debated creationists for 30 years, and you have one more debate, you don't suddenly expect to be countered with arguments so you have to change your opinion in a way you would when you would be debating stellar evolution in irregular galaxies because the James Webb space telescope generated new data. So no, the creationist side doesn't get to yell 'But the evolution scientist is saying everything as if they are facts, I can't handle that boo boo'.
The whole dynamics that SC BW had of putting 3 workers on mineral patches, and then transferring them to your new base, is one of the reasons SC BW was strategically rich. It wasn't designed that way. In fact, it only became relevant years later. Imagine if SC BW had no workers at all, and you just had to build a building on a mineral quarry and a gas geyser, and that would both just collect x amounts of resources over time, the game would have played vastly different. And SC 2 probably would never have been made.
I also don't get how even in 2024, people who hate SC BW still feel the need to falsely claim that WC3 is more popular than SC BW. It is just amazing.
@Excalibur_Z
All those points you made about 1vs ladder SC2 are completely true for chess. I used to think that maybe in 2010 and onward, gamers didn't want to play 1vs games on a ladder and lose 50% of their games. But it turns out people do in chess? Why? It is the only thing I was wrong about, looking back at the debates during SC2 beta.
I agree that Blizzard should have pushed other game modes more. But putting in a good coop mode doesn't interfere with designing a good 1vs1 game. Chess.com also has all kinds of tutorials that show you how much there is to learn for you to improve. I have never seen what they actually added, but in chess everyone agrees these are good things that help new players.
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On April 23 2024 13:41 KingzTig wrote:
Resource nodes (location and destructible), how they are gathered, how workers are designed (including how durable, speed and pathing) are core gameplay mechanics.
It's never just been only about the lore, I don't understand where this perception is from and tbh I don't see why it matters.
It matters because as you say, they are core gameplay mechanics. The resource system basically decides how your RTS plays. It is probably the most important thing to decide upon when making an RTS.
No one is manufacturing live ammunition or extracting oil right in battlefield by army units, as it would have been implied by company of heroes.
Lore-based doesn't mean hyper-realism.
SC2 could very well do whatever zerospace is doing, and rename them to mineral and gas and still would still be lore accurate.
SC2 does the same thing as Warcraft 1 does. Are you telling me the Warcraft 1 resource system was deliberately designed for 1vs1 play?
It's not like SCV, probes or drones are essential to the lore and won't be the first unit to be replaced/not present in the multiplayer.
Are you just pretending you don't get it on purpose? What do you think would be something that is not 'lore based'?
In what way are they not already fine tuned for 1v1 when resources create a fundermentally different early game for SC and AoE and CoH for example.
Or that maps are not designed around it?
Is the issue the naming of the resources or something?
Yes, because SC BW resource system was not designed for competitive play, map makers changed the maps.
How does AoE having a different resource system prove AoE was fine tuned for 1vs1 play?
What kind of resource system would be the better system for 1v1?
Look, we could have had a debate on that. But it would be better if RTS game devs who have 15+ years of experience designing actual RTS games would be the ones talking about this. But they don't. And if you look at Zero Space, it looks like they don't think about it either. But it is clear that having to continuously manage your economy and it's growth is good. Compared to a system where you just have 10 income per second at the start. And then at some point you can invest 1000 to go to 20 income per second. And that that is about it. In SC BW, having to invest in both workers and town halls already makes it multi-pronged. You can do a small investment to get more short term income. Or a larger investment to get more long term income. One thing you could change about SC BW would be to make a special building that is used to build workers. And that your second and third town hall are only used to gather resources to, not to build more workers. This decouples both strategies, diversifying it more. Not saying you have to do this, but this is just an example of how this works.
But since SC BW is completely lore-based, they just had the Warcraft town hall and no one thought about the emergent gameplay that became apparent years later. No one on the Starcaft team would ever have proposed making a special building for building more workers to make strategies more diverse. But they could have during SC2. And that's exactly the point.
A lot of people criticize the former Blizzard devs now making new RTS games of making copies of Starcraft. If you go back completely to the drawing board, and you rethink RTS fundamentally, and you come up with a completely new resource gathering system, you avoid a whole bunch of this criticism. For example, you could design a game where worker harass is permanent. Where it is just a thing, always. Meaning, you don't need to build buildings, then units, then move them to the enemy base. You can have permanent micro around worker harass. It could mean units don't die and end. You could give both sides units that are immortal that can just disrupt resource gathering for the other team. And you start with them, but you can invest to make them stronger or different. And you end up having to counter both the strategies and the micro involved the entire game.
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On April 23 2024 14:03 Excalibur_Z wrote:Show nested quote +On April 23 2024 12:05 Fleetfeet wrote:
RTS imo are in an interesting spot where the "Chasing Brood War" school of design feels like a really hard sell. I feel like a lot of us would wholeheartedly agree that BW is (among) the best competitive game available, while simultaneously being able to see that its fun isn't 'accessible'. The problem I feel will always be a problem is you can't make Brood War's fun accessible. The game is about controlling all these moving parts and the level of tension that rises from exactly that difficulty - you remove that difficulty, and you remove that fun.
A fundamental difference between SC2 and BW to me is that SC2 tried to make said fun accessible, but failed to keep the same tension. In a game of BW, a better player than me could kick the shit out of me with an army half the size, simply because they could control the engagement -that much better-. There's a tension in knowing you have an advantage and knowing the sheer difficulty in actually executing a plan that exploits that advantage. Maybenexttime said it best - the more ahead you get economically, the harder it is to manage.
I don't know how you get past this hurdle, because people don't like things being hard. It's why I harp so much on campaign being important for any RTS, because I think a good RTS -needs- to be hard*, and campaigns or co-op function as an entry point where you can start experiencing that fun before having to go on to a competitive 1v1 game and getting your ass kicked.
*That said, I'm 100% all for PvE / noncompetitive RTS experiences. BW is a curious beast because it has so many layers of complexity. However, fundamentally, it is an accessible game, as proven by its universal popularity and the fact that it resonated with a substantial casual playerbase. Around here on TL we like to float the concept of "real" BW referring to high-level BW: a carefully curated set of maps that follow general design rules where players frequently use various quirks and exploits in the game engine honed from years of experimentation at a blinding pace. But that is the bleeding edge. Most players don't play that way, and don't care to learn. And yet, the game still works very well for them, and remains fun. They sit behind countless walls of Photon Cannons and build Carriers while floating thousands of minerals, if they even bothered to expand at all. They have entire attack squadrons consisting of no more than 12 Zerglings. They think Vultures are only good for Spider Mines. Some just play comp stomps or clunky, poorly-balanced UMS maps. They're perfectly happy in this world. SC2 decided to put competition at the forefront by making ladder the default way to play multiplayer. There are tutorials about macroing, control groups, hotkeys, all to prepare you for the deep end. It also stripped down the Battle.net experience to dissuade players from building casual communities that thrived in BW. Hardcore was now the de facto Starcraft experience, and while the matchmaker tried its best to make matches fair, where even the weakest players could feel like they had a shot, the creeping dread was ever-present because everyone felt like they needed to constantly try their hardest to maintain their rank. For the casual crowds of old hoping for BW familiarity, that's a big detractor for retention. As a result, SC2's community skewed increasingly hardcore. Eventually, after years, Blizzard realized that they were alienating an entire population and introduced Co-op, which unsurprisingly was very successful because it gave those players a home again. So when you talk about "accessibility", it's very important to get the framing right. BW and SC2 are both highly accessible. BW especially has an infinite skill ceiling with a very low skill floor (SC2, despite its QoL leaps, I'd argue has a higher skill floor by design). The better you get, and the more you learn, the more pathways for improvement appear. That's why we love BW, and that's why it has so much staying power.
Personally I have to disagree with most of everything here, but also in some way I am in total agreement with you. I say that with no disrespect, and from a pretty hardcore gamer perspective.
All you need to do is look beyond RTS scene.
SC2 was just the earliest batch of the modern gaming era, which every game are fighting for player's time and attention. Many video game devs have brought up this point, the sense of progression matters just as much if not more than having fun.
Decades ago, your range of competition would most likely be local pub hero or your friends. With the internet maturing, your competition is worldwide. Which game right now has a big casual scene alongside with a competitive esports scene?
That's why we have toxic meta build players in Helldivers 2 (which is a 100% PvE mode, and you don't lose anything at all even if you failed the mission).
You have "best build" on a simple casual card game like marvel snap.
Diablo genre becoming even more of a minmax grind, when most of playerbase at casual used to just enjoy the game at their pacing back in D2 .
Fighter genre is the biggest victim of it all, most of their games have player count down 90% within around a month after launch. The difference? Remember it used to be played mostly in arcade?
Fortnite is now played like a psychotic game where players spam their build wall buttons, and drove players off.
EPIC basically repositioned the whole game with collaborate for MTX and get out of the broken meta/core gameplay loop.
Games just aren't building their social side through lobby or launcher, it's all discord/social media/twitch.
Not League of legends, not Dota, not overwatch, not CS.
looking at BW and thinking to use it as a template for modern game era is imo, not seeing how much gaming has changed overall, at every genre.
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I never played Fortnite, but from watching, the whole building thing inside Fortnite is really complex, hard to learn, emergent and not intentional, and it interferes with the traditional shooting skillset of traditional FPS. I am sure there's quite a few people that would have liked Fortnite more with less building.
You can say it is just 'stupid build wall' spamming. But even with me never having played it, I can say that's false. And people loved the gameplay it gave.
You could really compare building in Fortnite to macro in SC BW. In that one could say that it is lame, hard to learn, takes tons of clicks, and gets in the way of the actual game: shooting.
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On April 23 2024 17:34 Menkent wrote:Show nested quote +On April 23 2024 13:41 KingzTig wrote:
Resource nodes (location and destructible), how they are gathered, how workers are designed (including how durable, speed and pathing) are core gameplay mechanics.
It's never just been only about the lore, I don't understand where this perception is from and tbh I don't see why it matters.
It matters because as you say, they are core gameplay mechanics. The resource system basically decides how your RTS plays. It is probably the most important thing to decide upon when making an RTS. Show nested quote +
No one is manufacturing live ammunition or extracting oil right in battlefield by army units, as it would have been implied by company of heroes.
Lore-based doesn't mean hyper-realism. Show nested quote +
SC2 could very well do whatever zerospace is doing, and rename them to mineral and gas and still would still be lore accurate.
SC2 does the same thing as Warcraft 1 does. Are you telling me the Warcraft 1 resource system was deliberately designed for 1vs1 play? Show nested quote +
It's not like SCV, probes or drones are essential to the lore and won't be the first unit to be replaced/not present in the multiplayer.
Are you just pretending you don't get it on purpose? What do you think would be something that is not 'lore based'? Show nested quote +
In what way are they not already fine tuned for 1v1 when resources create a fundermentally different early game for SC and AoE and CoH for example.
Or that maps are not designed around it?
Is the issue the naming of the resources or something?
Yes, because SC BW resource system was not designed for competitive play, map makers changed the maps. How does AoE having a different resource system prove AoE was fine tuned for 1vs1 play? Look, we could have had a debate on that. But it would be better if RTS game devs who have 15+ years of experience designing actual RTS games would be the ones talking about this. But they don't. And if you look at Zero Space, it looks like they don't think about it either. But it is clear that having to continuously manage your economy and it's growth is good. Compared to a system where you just have 10 income per second at the start. And then at some point you can invest 1000 to go to 20 income per second. And that that is about it. In SC BW, having to invest in both workers and town halls already makes it multi-pronged. You can do a small investment to get more short term income. Or a larger investment to get more long term income. One thing you could change about SC BW would be to make a special building that is used to build workers. And that your second and third town hall are only used to gather resources to, not to build more workers. This decouples both strategies, diversifying it more. Not saying you have to do this, but this is just an example of how this works. But since SC BW is completely lore-based, they just had the Warcraft town hall and no one thought about the emergent gameplay that became apparent years later. No one on the Starcaft team would ever have proposed making a special building for building more workers to make strategies more diverse. But they could have during SC2. And that's exactly the point.
Honestly to me, what you are saying makes no sense
What in the BW lore stops them from doing exactly what your idea is?
Where in the BW lore implies all resources should be next to your command centre and not all around the maps like AOE?
What in the lore in AOE make it so that it is possible for AOE to have resource specific gathering hub, and not BW?
And where in zerospace is their resources system lore specific and limited by it to the point they cant have whatever system you spoke of?
This is such a random argument, when we do have multiple RTS with vastly different resource system, some even without a story mode.
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On April 23 2024 17:54 KingzTig wrote:
What in the BW lore stops them from doing exactly what your idea is?
Nothing. And this has nothing to do with the argument.
Where in the BW lore implies all resources should be next to your command centre and not all around the maps like AOE?
No where. And this has nothing to do with the argument.
What in the lore in AOE make it so that it is possible for AOE to have resource specific gathering hub, and not BW?
No where. And this has nothing to do with the argument.
And where in zerospace is their resources system lore specific and limited by it to the point they cant have whatever system you spoke of?
Nothing.
This is such a random argument, when we do have multiple RTS with vastly different resource system, some even without a story mode.
Because you are trying on purpose to not get it.
How do YOU think game devs decided on their resource system? Look, it is way way more simple than you think it is. Devs just copy a resource system from a previous game. Or they make one up that makes sense in their game world.
How that makes the game play are secondary considerations. And I am arguing that in 2024, they should be the primary ones.
No way in hell that the Dune 2 team considered having workers that chop down trees or gather gold. They had these spice mining trucks being picked up by 'carryalls'. It is in the novel. They just put that straight into the game and it worked fine for their purposes. Their game was really successful and spun off an entire genre of games.
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On April 23 2024 17:41 Menkent wrote:
I never played Fortnite, but from watching, the whole building thing inside Fortnite is really complex, hard to learn, emergent and not intentional, and it interferes with the traditional shooting skillset of traditional FPS. I am sure there's quite a few people that would have liked Fortnite more with less building.
You can say it is just 'stupid build wall' spamming. But even with me never having played it, I can say that's false. And people loved the gameplay it gave.
You could really compare building in Fortnite to macro in SC BW. In that one could say that it is lame, hard to learn, takes tons of clicks, and gets in the way of the actual game: shooting.
not anymore
I played fortnite since release, so I can comfortably tell you, the no build mode pretty much saved the game at its worst and became a perma mode because of it
https://blog.gamesight.io/what-fortnites-recent-zero-build-mode-has-done-to-its-twitch-viewership/
in fact it is still doing incredibly well against build mode, and that article also highlights a lot of what I have said in the modern gaming era.
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See! So I was right about Fortnite and building. Many people do dislike it. But it was the thing that made it initially very popular, because it was new.
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On April 23 2024 18:10 Menkent wrote:Show nested quote +On April 23 2024 17:54 KingzTig wrote:
What in the BW lore stops them from doing exactly what your idea is?
Nothing. And this has nothing to do with the argument. Show nested quote +
Where in the BW lore implies all resources should be next to your command centre and not all around the maps like AOE?
No where. And this has nothing to do with the argument. Show nested quote +
What in the lore in AOE make it so that it is possible for AOE to have resource specific gathering hub, and not BW?
No where. And this has nothing to do with the argument. Show nested quote +
And where in zerospace is their resources system lore specific and limited by it to the point they cant have whatever system you spoke of?
Nothing. Show nested quote +
This is such a random argument, when we do have multiple RTS with vastly different resource system, some even without a story mode.
Because you are trying on purpose to not get it. How do YOU think game devs decided on their resource system? Look, it is way way more simple than you think it is. Devs just copy a resource system from a previous game. Or they make one up that makes sense in their game world. How that makes the game play are secondary considerations. And I am arguing that in 2024, they should be the primary ones. No way in hell that the Dune 2 team considered having workers that chop down trees or gather gold. They had these spice mining trucks being picked up by 'carryalls'. It is in the novel. They just put that straight into the game and it worked fine for their purposes. Their game was really successful and spun off an entire genre of games.
Nope because now we are getting somewhere.
It's not about lore based because nothing in the lore stops them from doing whatever you mentioned.
You are talking about resources system did not innovate what a resource system that was crafted from lore.
Which I still disagree since nothing in WC1 or (WC2, 3) lore stopped them from using a resource gathering hub system, and which they clearly could have copied from AOE when that was put into the table.
Contrast to what you think, rts games do have resources system considered for gameplay.
you don't even need to gather resource to generate top bar ability for Zerospace. Nor do you need to kill units to gain so (by capturing points, similar to COH). Similar system exist for gate of pyre.
And it is a pretty crazy thing to say, considering greygoo has some of the most innovative faction design ever and that includes how it gathered resources
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EPT
