EPT
Part III: Thoughts on Gameplay
Sorry for the rather delayed posting of this particular piece. I’ve been held up by college admissions + illness + midterms + new car + some other random crap, but I should still have finished it earlier. Ah well; with no further ado, the third installment:
I’m not going to go on about each unit in detail [I did write pages of notes on them during the planeflight home, and then realized how pointless it was] because specific units change every week. I’m just going to give rather general impressions about various aspects of gameplay from my limited knowledge.
Note: This may seem overly critical: I want to reiterate that it's an enjoyable game headed in a StarCraft-ish direction; trust in Blizzard. I'm just noting differences that I felt as a StarCraft player, both good and ill.
Graphical Feel/UI
Much like Pusan, my initial reaction was “whoa, this game looks different”. The feeling stayed with me throughout the day – not bad, just not the same as SC1. The game lobby didn’t have a countdown, and didn’t have much space to display screennames [we were TL_LastRo… and (T1)TL_sem…] – two insignificant cosmetics that will most likely be fixed anyway.
As for in-game, a few key changes: above the center, you can see what your hotkeys are + what you have on each key. It’s one of those ‘modern RTS’ things that I’ve never really found a use for, but it might help people get into SC2, which is good. I’ve played SC1 for long enough that I always use the same keys in every matchup; I didn’t stray far from the usual when playing SC2 but I can see why they made the hotkey display.
Hovering mouse shows not only cost in minerals/gas/supply, but time-to-build as well. It’ll make build timings easier when the game finally does come out. While I didn’t attempt to innovate much due to time constraints, I can see how fine-tuning build orders will be easier – now amateurs, as well as pros, will have exact 1/4 supply builds.
Micro
As for unit control, I’ll start with some traditional things – TvP battle micro. So playing around with jackals and stalkers: Jackals control differently from vultures; stalkers are not quite like dragoons. The first is a rather big difference: no mines, lower damage, less per-unit worth [one jackal is less ‘good’ than one vulture in any given scenario, IMO] Then my experience with dragoon micro served me ill – hold position seems to operate differently with stalkers and immortals. Not that it ever truly mattered. Part of it was a question of comparative ranges. No longer do stalkers outrange marines; this changes the TvP earlygame considerably.
So analogous units don’t really handle the same – that would be cool if it introduced a ‘different’ aspect, but I feel that, at least in this particular example, it just dumbs down the game. With both range upgrades no longer there, it removes a “level”, if you will, of control. Take bunker vs dragoon. Originally, dragoon > marines; bunker > dragoon; range > bunker; rangerines > rangegoons. Several back-and-forth volleys of upgrades and buildings and units.
Now it’s just marines > stalkers. Whatcha gonna do about it ? Things like that strike me as iffy. Something else of note: the Battlecruiser. Your giant space cow is now rather useful alone, because of his plasma torpedoes. The upgrade gives you something that is reminiscent of psi storm, in that it decimates craploads of ground units [though not air]. OK, good, but.. but what? My gripe is that putting it on a 500 HP armored beast removes strategic elements – it’s too straightforward, too ‘unstoppable’. You, upon seeing this, are supposed to just bend over and grab your ankles. That’s not to say it’s imbalanced, it’s unstoppable. There’s a difference.
Let me elaborate more. So in SC1 you’ve got your HTs accompanying your zealot/goon/archon army, and bam! Cracklings swoop down and snipe a couple HTs before you can react, severely limiting your spell damage. For a few larvae and a couple hundred minerals, he’s saved himself five, even ten times as much. Can’t do that with a Mothership or a Battlecruiser – they’re too beefy; any sacrifice wouldn’t really be worth it. So, my first main point: superunits should not come with superspells.
Continuing my micro thoughts, then. Tata to the reaver, bye-bye medic, hasta la vista DA, adieu monsieur l’arbiter, goodnight scourge – bam! There goes all the Kim SungJe/Lee YoonYeol/Kang DoKyung name shouting. Cost-effective unit variance seems, to me, to be limited in the sequel. You’ve got forty-kill HTs and eighty-kill reavers in SCBW – nothing seems to have that potential in SC2. Many units seem too straightforward and easy-to-use, and not enough seem like they have hidden pizazz.
I am not saying ‘add an ability to every unit!’ but rather ‘make for flashier abilities’. Let’s bring up something else, the stalker’s blink. OK, so he can blink. Everyone knows he can blink. Soon enough, everyone can use blink. Blink allows anyone to do Reach vs TheRock on RoV with minimum effort since his surrounds are rendered pointless. What’s the fun in watching, then? Dragoon vs melee micro is so beautiful because there’s a vast difference between a progamer’s dragoon and an amateur’s dragoon.
So the point isn’t to add abilities; adding abilities may actually diminish the interest of watching. On the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got the severely nerfed psionic storm. It now covers a piddly area [you need like four or five storms to saturate a 7/8 mineral+gas expo] and does less damage than the original. They say it’s been de-powered because the original was ‘too strong’. Damn right, it was too strong; look at SKY finals between Reach and BoxeR if you don’t believe me.
But that’s in the hands of a progamer in his prime, and it’s not like even he, the Mudang Protoss himself, was able to crush anyone as soon as he had storm tech. His zealot/archon/templar approach to PvZ is flashy and manly, but there are better ways of going about it. An ability with an incredibly high potential should not be scrapped simply because it, operating at top capacity, can win games. That’s the point of including abilities like that: a skilled user will be able to use said abilities to win, whereas a low skill player won't be able to get as much mileage from them.
OK, so we leave sad!Reach and go on to army control. In battle, with hundreds of supply engaged, you’re about as busy as you were in SC1. That’s good. But moving from battle to battle is rather dull. 1a. My entire army marches. Unlimited unit selection doesn’t help you too much in-battle [as most people probably guessed] but it basically means apm peaks and dips will be extremely exaggerated. I don’t like that.
This micro section seems like mostly criticism with very few bright spots. That’s something of a misrepresentation – I do think the micro aspect of the game is fun overall, and those sticking points I have are intended as constructive criticism to make it even better. I’d like to say that I do think they’re headed in the right direction with micro, they just haven’t gotten there yet. They’re toying with new abilities for the infester, new units like the nullifier; they’ve tampered with an increased-power psi-storm and such.
Macro
This is my main ‘needs fixing’ area, from what I saw. In my previous posts on the matter, I talked about how Dustin knows MBS needs to go, or at least needs some sort of alternative macro-intensive game addition. Aside from that, I’ve only one other thing about macro mechanics – the ‘other parts’.
So mid-late game here’s a scenario of me as a Terran player. 1a. OK, my army moved. 2tj. I just made 6 more tanks and 18 more jackals. 0s. Four more scvs. 3bs+shift+bs+shift+bs+shift+bs+shift+bs. Good to go for another six depots. A comparable SC1 version:
1a2a3aF2ttvvvvvv00s99s88s77sF3bsbs1a2a3aF2ttvvvvvv00s99s88s77sF3bsbs1a2a3aF2ttvvvvvv00s99s8
8s77sF3bsbs; there are clicks after virtually each command too. It’s a gigantic difference, and not only in MBS. Queuing buildings is huge. I can queue an infinite amount of buildings, since I only have to pay for them once I start construction. So come midgame, I can just queue-queue-queue-queue and then forget entirely about depots.
Then you have your automine so workers are fire-and-forget, you have your mass building rally so GoRush can’t show off on bnet anymore – none of this helps with strategy, but the mechanical aspect is gone in more ways than one. Sure, you say, mechanics are easy, but iloveoov was a macro beast because of his game sense, not just mechanics.
And yes, I believe that economic decisions can be, and are, as multivariate and complex in SC2 as they are in SC1. But I also believe that part of the entertainment of SC1 is watching 300+ apm players [or being a 300+ apm player] and having the ability to pound out all those keys. I don’t think more apm should always result in a win, but I also don’t think that I should be able to macro perfectly with 50 apm.
It's not just a question of apm, either, but also that of multitask. You don't need to watch your nexi anymore, you don't need to f2 back to your production buildings, so you can continually look at your army and nothing else. Sometimes once it reached mid/lategame I was just moving around with a group of units, sniping off random enemies, and occasionally doing my 3tj0s [five keystrokes! perfect macro!] and then I'd suddenly realize oh! 200/200! attack move! and I never once moved the screen away from my harass group. So I do think macro is in serious need of some serious fixing.
Pacing
The pacing of SC2 feels similar to SC1. Slower, to be sure, but it’s because we were playing on ‘faster’ and not ‘fastest’; there was no ‘fastest’ option. Build timings will need to be reworked, but that’s not a big issue. I did find that the slightly slower pacing threw off some of my micro b/c I’d issue commands before things actually happened, but that’s not too important either. Some things, like reduced mineral count, make FE timings really iffy – you have to stop probes to 14nex [or even 15nex]; I’m not really sure why the minerals were reduced from 8x to 6x.
I must say that I was pleased with timing, though. Early game rushes were possible, but so were ‘safe’ expansion builds. Salvage and increased marine range makes bunker rush slightly more powerful, but minor issues like that aren’t really ‘pacing’ and can be fixed simply by changing a couple lines of code. The game moves along like a game of StarCraft insofar as how quickly units are produced and how quickly they die.
Conclusion
StarCraft II as a standalone game is, even in its current build, amazingly fun. There are bugs, there are imbalances, there are a good number of things I’d change, sure, but the feeling of the game is definitely StarCraft and not WarCraft III. The reason this post may seem critical is because I see so much potential in the project and want it to be as close to perfect as possible. I think the dev team is aware of many of the issues I brought up, and is addressing them accordingly. It was an honor to be invited to play the game, and I look forward to whenever the beta comes out.
For what it's worth, on my part, they have at least +1 StarCraft II sale.
Love and Luck,
LR
P.S. sorry about the textwalls and no-picture style :x semioldguy will have them up soon, when his internet decides to work.
