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On April 13 2010 22:04 Crisium wrote:
So they make cool units, regardless of the balance. This gets Roaches with rapid healing, Reapers that throw D8 Charges, Mothership with Planet Cracker, etc. Then the plan is to let gameplay and time balance it out. Blizzard seemed to think that balance would be adjusting HP, damage, costs, build time, etc. But instead balancing lead to making the "cool" units very uninteresting. Roach is just a cheap Tank, Reapers D8 is now only against buildings and makes the unit harass only, Mothership is just a big, slow, expensive, powerful Arbiter.
The cool is gone, but the units are still there, boring and all.
I think SC1 took a similar approach, but kept the cool in because they weren't so pressed for balance right away (think 1998). That allowed us to have cool things with crazy micro such as Reavers, Vultures (with and without mines), "invincible" M&M balls vs nearly instant-marine-killing Lurkers. People would cry IMBA today and we would lose them.
Does anyone think Colossus Micro is as exciting as Reaver? Can Hellions even compare to Vultures? They have to stop to attack (balance).
Where are the imba spells of SC1, such as Irridate (delay kill almost any Zerg unit, and splash damage), Spawn Broodling (instant kill many units), and anything the Defiler has. Seriously - consider the Defiler on paper. It's way too good. Sacrifice a few 25 mineral units and you can spam countless Plagues that reduce units with a couple hundred HP to 1. Or spam countless Dark Swarms against Terrans who can only send in weak firebats or use splash damage. These Imba spells do not exist in SC2 because out of the fear of balance. I'd rather they did, because they are cool and can be managed by strategy and/or patches instead of outright removal.
Because a unit is balanced it is no longer fun or interesting? So you are saying that for the game to be interesting it has to be unbalanced?
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On April 13 2010 22:14 Fizban140 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2010 22:04 Crisium wrote:
So they make cool units, regardless of the balance. This gets Roaches with rapid healing, Reapers that throw D8 Charges, Mothership with Planet Cracker, etc. Then the plan is to let gameplay and time balance it out. Blizzard seemed to think that balance would be adjusting HP, damage, costs, build time, etc. But instead balancing lead to making the "cool" units very uninteresting. Roach is just a cheap Tank, Reapers D8 is now only against buildings and makes the unit harass only, Mothership is just a big, slow, expensive, powerful Arbiter.
The cool is gone, but the units are still there, boring and all.
I think SC1 took a similar approach, but kept the cool in because they weren't so pressed for balance right away (think 1998). That allowed us to have cool things with crazy micro such as Reavers, Vultures (with and without mines), "invincible" M&M balls vs nearly instant-marine-killing Lurkers. People would cry IMBA today and we would lose them.
Does anyone think Colossus Micro is as exciting as Reaver? Can Hellions even compare to Vultures? They have to stop to attack (balance).
Where are the imba spells of SC1, such as Irridate (delay kill almost any Zerg unit, and splash damage), Spawn Broodling (instant kill many units), and anything the Defiler has. Seriously - consider the Defiler on paper. It's way too good. Sacrifice a few 25 mineral units and you can spam countless Plagues that reduce units with a couple hundred HP to 1. Or spam countless Dark Swarms against Terrans who can only send in weak firebats or use splash damage. These Imba spells do not exist in SC2 because out of the fear of balance. I'd rather they did, because they are cool and can be managed by strategy and/or patches instead of outright removal. Because a unit is balanced it is no longer fun or interesting? So you are saying that for the game to be interesting it has to be unbalanced?
He might be referring to the concept where they make everything so imbalanced that the game is balanced
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On April 13 2010 22:19 SubtleArt wrote:
He might be referring to the concept where they make everything so imbalanced that the game is balanced
You have to destroy certain scientific laws before you can imbalance everything.
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On April 13 2010 22:04 Crisium wrote:The cool is gone, but the units are still there, boring and all.
Yeah I think that too. In my opinion the mothership was much cooler at the beginning but now after it lost nearly all of his abilities it's no longer that special.
I also liked the Thor in its original form, when it had this devastating "shoot the shit out of this area" ability and it was even bigger and looked mightier.
And finally they completely removed the Lurker WTF?
I understand that these things were perhaps imba but removing cool abilities and units in order to balance is not the right way. I guess if they wanted they would have found another possibilty.
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On April 13 2010 19:23 Lollersauce wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2010 19:09 Adama wrote:
How is people complaining about sc2 development process?
They are a group of world class game engineers, programers, artist and thinking tanks. They are a lot of them, they are well payed for what they do, and probably they like what they do. Also, they have been working on this project for years.
How can you dare to question such a basic and fundamental aspect of their work as their methods? Have you produced many videogames? Are you Miyamoto, Kojima, Newell? WTF do you know.
FFS GUYS, think ahead. You need a really strong argument to say "They are doing it wrong", not some forum thesis. The most funy thing, you do it based on 6 lines of Dustin words. facepalm. Welcome to the real world, where talent is a rare commodity and not everyone with experience or getting paid well is actually that talented. Dustin does seems pretty clueless.
Way to dismiss a valid post with some quick whit. Yes, there are a lot of idiots in the real world and no one can argue that. However Blizzard is not some run of the mill company that anyone to get into. In the industry they are a very sought after place to work for which gives them pretty much the free will to choose the best of the best. True that not everyone that gets past this selection is going to be brilliant but I think there track record shows that they have a clue to what is going on.
I am sure some of you have realized that SC1 got to where it was at by enduring a long process of development, patching, community feedback and dumb luck. I have no issues with early phases of the design having as few restrictions as possible. Down the road this stuff can get honed down and adjusted. I personally think that SC2 is slowly taking shape and will do the series justice. Sadly the community is split and thats going to be the nature of things. I personally think some of the haters are holding onto the tits of Starcraft1 and must realize that nothing will make them happy.
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Before I say anything, I think the Starcraft 2 developers have done an awesome job and that their new game engine is a pristine example of modern graphical techniques. They are professionals and they are definitely good at what they do.
That being said, I don't quite agree with making the choice to conceptually design the units independently of one another. As I've pointed out before, you begin with an incoherent mass of units per race before balancing begins, and then as you go you are forced to take measures to alter certain units in the face of other units. What I'm saying is that design becomes too unit-centric rather than army-centric. Eventually, certain units will be forced to perform similar roles within each race in similar ways, and despite Blizzard's best efforts to try and make each unit as unique as possible, they tend to become rather homogenous in function and use.
Why is this the case? Well this occurs when there is no design template or some over-arching rule for each race from a design standpoint. Units simply end up in certain roles, and more often than not these roles become rather similar. Also, the introduction of many new mechanics that speed up unit production drastically often create situations where armies cannot hold off other armies simply because there are too many strong opposing units. You create the need for a unit that can soak damage around early-mid game. So you do that. Then what happens? Similarity of roles. Similarity of function. They try to distinguish each by numbers, but none of them have a mechanical requirement to them.
That's the real question here. Should units distinguish themselves solely through how they function on paper or when they are actively controlled. Previous units that required special control (Reaver, Lurker, Mutalisk, Tank, Vulture) produced PHENOMENALLY different results when controlled and most even REQUIRED extra control to be even REMOTELY effective. Races were completely imbalanced on paper, considering how little damage Terran and Zerg units did versus how much punishment Protoss units could deal out and how survivable they were. Yet they were balanced through resource cost, build time, and through the level of commitment a certain strategy would require before it paid off, and that's BEFORE the CONTROL requirement.
tl;dr: Devs have done awesome so far, but should balance/design units using micro as the deciding factor, not the decision to build the unit.
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was kinda underwhelmed by the Interview... Seems like Dustin doesn't really have the full scoop on how SC2 is being plyed competetively atm... :S
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On April 13 2010 22:04 Crisium wrote:
So they make cool units, regardless of the balance. This gets Roaches with rapid healing, Reapers that throw D8 Charges, Mothership with Planet Cracker, etc. Then the plan is to let gameplay and time balance it out. Blizzard seemed to think that balance would be adjusting HP, damage, costs, build time, etc. But instead balancing lead to making the "cool" units very uninteresting. Roach is just a cheap Tank, Reapers D8 is now only against buildings and makes the unit harass only, Mothership is just a big, slow, expensive, powerful Arbiter.
The cool is gone, but the units are still there, boring and all.
I think SC1 took a similar approach, but kept the cool in because they weren't so pressed for balance right away (think 1998). That allowed us to have cool things with crazy micro such as Reavers, Vultures (with and without mines), "invincible" M&M balls vs nearly instant-marine-killing Lurkers. People would cry IMBA today and we would lose them.
Does anyone think Colossus Micro is as exciting as Reaver? Can Hellions even compare to Vultures? They have to stop to attack (balance).
Where are the imba spells of SC1, such as Irridate (delay kill almost any Zerg unit, and splash damage), Spawn Broodling (instant kill many units), and anything the Defiler has. Seriously - consider the Defiler on paper. It's way too good. Sacrifice a few 25 mineral units and you can spam countless Plagues that reduce units with a couple hundred HP to 1. Or spam countless Dark Swarms against Terrans who can only send in weak firebats or use splash damage. These Imba spells do not exist in SC2 because out of the fear of balance. I'd rather they did, because they are cool and can be managed by strategy and/or patches instead of outright removal.
Probably the best post regarding unit balance I've seen in this thread so far.
I think Blizzard is being way too careful in allowing "imba" skills or units in this game and that's going to end up hurting SC2 in the long run. If they had to nerf Storm AoE because players couldn't bother to learn any micro skills of running out of storm, then we're likely to see less phenomenal micro than we did in SC1, like reaver micro, vulture micro, Bisu's mine-destroying micro (just watched that vod and it's freakign amazing), and every other amazing thing we saw in BW.
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On April 13 2010 15:03 Wintermute wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2010 14:55 LunarC wrote:On April 13 2010 14:07 Wintermute wrote:On April 13 2010 13:54 LunarC wrote:On April 13 2010 13:31 Wintermute wrote:On April 13 2010 13:21 iG.ClouD wrote:On April 13 2010 13:15 Wintermute wrote:On April 13 2010 12:54 eXigent. wrote:
As to attacking the Gateways... you're just dead wrong there. Why kill two buildings with 1000 health apiece when you can kill one pylon with 400 health?
Huh? That just goes to show you are equally as unaware as dustin lol. In sc1 any decent player would ignore the pylon simply because if the probe is alive, he can just make 2 or even 3 pylons next to the one you are killing, and they will certainly morph before you have a chance at doing ANY DAMAGE at all. I'm not going to argue with you about what a decent SC1 player would or wouldn't do. A decent SC2 player would kill the pylon if possible. SC2 pylons don't have as many HP as SC1 pylons, and if he makes 2-3 more pylons, it's still easier to kill all of them than even one gateway. Whether or not he still has a probe nearby is irrelevant. Killing the gateway ensures it won't be producing anything anymore, while going for pylons won't stop zealot production by any mean. Which one is better? Killing the pylons will stop production. and then you can kill the gateways unopposed. Only if the probe that can warp in additional pylons is also dead. If not, then you need to target the Gateways. Did I miss some development where pylons are free and warp in instantly? When somebody is committed to proxy gateways, they will continue to produce/cancel pylons as needed. They have a steady stream of minerals and pylons are relatively cheap. They also warp in much faster than Gateways, whereas a couple workers can deal significant damage to a Gateway with sustained attack. Then once your own basic units are out, you can finish off the Gateways relatively quickly. If you are busy going from pylon to pylon and try to take them down instead, the Gateways will warp in at full health, by which point they will start to produce Zealots. It's still not clear to me how the gateways are going to warp in any units when they don't have power. Every time a pylon goes down, that's -100 minerals and a lack of power. Of course I would attack a gateway that already exists vs attacking a pylon thats still warping in, but given a choice of a full health pylon and a full health gateway, I'd kill the pylon, because even if he has 2-3 of them. they're still easier to kill than gateways, and once they're dead, the gateways are effectively dead until he builds more pylons.
Dude, this is like totally going over your head. First off, cloud was one of the top 10 european protoss players in SC1(got beat out by nony to become a progamer in korea), and is extremely familiar with how proxy gateways work, and how to stop them.
Now, just take a moment and think really hard while I explain this 1 more time. You keep saying you can kill 3 pylons before he can make any units, but you are just sooo wrong it hurts. Once again what cloud said is that if the probe is STILL ALIVE you need to kill the gateways. You say you can kill 3 pylons, but it doesnt stop there man. If the probe doesnt die, he is just gonna continually spam pylons while his zealots are building. As soon as his first 1-2 zealots are out, you now have to deal with his army AND his production buildings that are making MORE army.
It's like you think he is only gonna make a set number of pylons, and you can easily kill them off and be ahead, when in reality, he is just gonna spam pylons to the point where you WONT be able to kill them all before he gets out a unit. Once his unit's start coming out, you are basically fucked, because now you gotta target the zealots, allowing him MORE time to continually produce them.
Seriously, think hard about it. Are you going to stop a probe that is making 10+ pylons as you are killing the 1-2 that you ONLY have time to kill before his zealots pop out. (your in a race against time)
In sc1 when you see the proxy , you typically send your workers to kill the gateway, hoping it dies before any zealots come out. The point is, if the gateway dies, his ENTIRE PROXY PLAN is out the window. If 1-2 pylons die, then he's just gonna keep spamming them until his units pop out. There is virtually no way to stop a good player from proxying unless you kill his probe or his gateway. No matter how much you argue against this you will be wrong. This has been debated and proven over the course of 10years of Starcraft, and it's the EXACT same in sc2.
I mean, 5 people including a TOP starcraft player and almost potential progamer are all telling you the same thing, yet apparently in your mind we are all wrong, and you're the only person that could possibly know the right way to do it.
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On April 14 2010 03:00 Ryuu314 wrote:
like reaver micro, vulture micro, Bisu's mine-destroying micro (just watched that vod and it's freakign amazing), and every other amazing thing we saw in BW.
Majority of the amazing things in BW was because of the bad UI and unit pathing anyway.
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So we're probably going to do some changes to the build time on the upgrade for Warp Gates, just to push that a little bit later in the tech tree so that a lot of the early Warp Gate shenanigans that we're seeing in the beta get pushed back a little bit.
Why would you nerf warp gates to stop 2 gate proxy??? A strat that usually ends the game before the first assimilator gets built?
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On April 13 2010 21:01 Fizban140 wrote:
They have good testers, look at CGM and KHB.
Incidentally, neither of them play zerg!
On April 14 2010 03:38 fatduck wrote:Show nested quote +So we're probably going to do some changes to the build time on the upgrade for Warp Gates, just to push that a little bit later in the tech tree so that a lot of the early Warp Gate shenanigans that we're seeing in the beta get pushed back a little bit. Why would you nerf warp gates to stop 2 gate proxy??? A strat that usually ends the game before the first assimilator gets built?
I would assume he just got a bit tongue tied.
On April 14 2010 03:14 lolaloc wrote:Show nested quote +On April 14 2010 03:00 Ryuu314 wrote:
like reaver micro, vulture micro, Bisu's mine-destroying micro (just watched that vod and it's freakign amazing), and every other amazing thing we saw in BW. Majority of the amazing things in BW was because of the bad UI and unit pathing anyway.
And thus, SC2 must have bad Ui and bad pathing.
(That was a joke)
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Thanks OP. Halfway through, but best quote so far:
Browder: "In terms of how happy I am right now, we're in beta. It's certainly the biggest game I've ever had the honor of getting a chance to work on. I'm not happy at all. We're all just scared s**tless."
I'll give him extra credit for knowing the scale of his decisions.
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The interview comes off as if it was done before patch 7, then just recently posted
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Btw if some of you clueless people who think you can make a good game by making 'cool units without any regards to balance'..... download Battleforge. It's free and it sucks (yet another bad EA game).
The graphic designers literally make the units, with completely no regard to current/future balance. They draw/create new units, they puts random stats on them with no regard to balance. There is literally 5 useable units per civilization and only 2 that are good... out of like 50... because there is absolutely no regard to balance at all when they create units! So many overlap and so many are completely worthless. And every expansion they come out with 20-30 units per civ... which the graphic designers created without any regard to balance... most of which are completely useless and leaving you thinking wtf!
But hey... it sells copies.
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You guys don't seem to understand Blizzard's design philosophy. They don't just "create cool units and stick them in there." They create cool units, put them in the game, and then iterate, iterate, iterate.
As I've seen it explained, they design a unit with Dustin's stated philosophy (of what seems cool and fun, balance notwithstanding), put it in the game, see how it plays with other units and the race as a whole, then alter or remove the unit based on this info; if they decide to keep the new unit, then they'll go on to add/alter/remove a bunch of other units based on their information as to how this alters the rest of the races and overall flow of the game. Then, every time they make changes to any unit, they'll test to see how this change plays out with the rest of the units, add units back in, take them out, or change other units based on the information they receive. They then repeat this process ad infinitum, continuously adding, altering, and changing units, with the goal of eventually keeping only the units that are interesting, feel right, and synergize with other units well.
So while the units themselves are designed more with "this would be a cool, fun concept for a unit" than with "hey, Terran has a hole in their ground army," they still very much test for these kinds of things. They'll play the game, and if they think Terran has a whole in their ground army, they'll take one of the units they cut and put it back in, or change some of the other units around to fill the need, or cut a Protoss unit that's causing the problem, or whatever; then, they'll test these changes, see how they play, and alter things again based on problems that this causes.
It's an extremely laborious and time-consuming process...but it's how Blizzard makes games. And it's NOT just randomly throwing crap into a game.
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On April 13 2010 19:00 Eury wrote:
Btw how do you think original Starcraft was created? "Fun" is the game design philosophy Blizzard have always designed around. E-sports barely existed as a concept when Starcraft was created, a lot less dedication was paid to the competitive crowd in the creation of Starcraft than in Starcraft 2.
The problem with SC2 is that instead of looking at SC1, finding the units that were lacking, and replacing them or tweaking them, they thought up a bunch of new "cool" units, then looked for ways to displace existing units to fit them in.
Replacing drop ships with medivacs and warp prisms is a great idea. Drop ships are not cool, but being able to drop units is cool. Turning the queen into an egg laying base defense? Genius. That's what a queen IS, not some useless flying beasty.
Getting rid of the AoE anti air units is fine. Air power was useless in SC1 except muta harass and maybe late game carriers. Banshees, vikings and void rays are all more interesting than what they replaced. Corruptors and Phoenix are sort of lame, but they fulfill their purpose.
What's not okay is the Roach. The roach isn't okay, because to fit it in, you had to turn the hydralisk into a T2 glass cannon. It's not okay, because in order to fit in the roach, you made it move while burrowed, and took out the lurker. It's not okay, because the very existence of a low tier tough as nails tanky unit doesn't fit the personality of zerg, and it forces you to provide hard counters like marauders and immortals. The more "balanced" the roach becomes, the more it looks like a short range, slightly more expensive zealot. Zerg needed zealots, apparently.
Thors, hellions, marauders, immortals are all just bad units. Not bad because they don't have a use in the game but bad because they have done nothing to make the game more interesting, fun, or balanced (in fact quite the opposite, IMO). Bad because they came up with a concept first, then tried to shoehorn it in, rather than allowing form to follow function.
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On April 14 2010 09:00 Wintermute wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2010 19:00 Eury wrote:
Btw how do you think original Starcraft was created? "Fun" is the game design philosophy Blizzard have always designed around. E-sports barely existed as a concept when Starcraft was created, a lot less dedication was paid to the competitive crowd in the creation of Starcraft than in Starcraft 2. The problem with SC2 is that instead of looking at SC1, finding the units that were lacking, and replacing them or tweaking them, they thought up a bunch of new "cool" units, then looked for ways to displace existing units to fit them in. Replacing drop ships with medivacs and warp prisms is a great idea. Drop ships are not cool, but being able to drop units is cool. Turning the queen into an egg laying base defense? Genius. That's what a queen IS, not some useless flying beasty. Getting rid of the AoE anti air units is fine. Air power was useless in SC1 except muta harass and maybe late game carriers. Banshees, vikings and void rays are all more interesting than what they replaced. Corruptors and Phoenix are sort of lame, but they fulfill their purpose. What's not okay is the Roach. The roach isn't okay, because to fit it in, you had to turn the hydralisk into a T2 glass cannon. It's not okay, because in order to fit in the roach, you made it move while burrowed, and took out the lurker. It's not okay, because the very existence of a low tier tough as nails tanky unit doesn't fit the personality of zerg, and it forces you to provide hard counters like marauders and immortals. The more "balanced" the roach becomes, the more it looks like a short range, slightly more expensive zealot. Zerg needed zealots, apparently. Thors, hellions, marauders, immortals are all just bad units. Not bad because they don't have a use in the game but bad because they have done nothing to make the game more interesting, fun, or balanced (in fact quite the opposite, IMO). Bad because they came up with a concept first, then tried to shoehorn it in, rather than allowing form to follow function.
Meh I pretty much disagree with about everything you said. And never ever say again Thor is a bad unit, you make Arnold cry 
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On April 14 2010 09:07 iG.ClouD wrote:Show nested quote +On April 14 2010 09:00 Wintermute wrote:On April 13 2010 19:00 Eury wrote:
Btw how do you think original Starcraft was created? "Fun" is the game design philosophy Blizzard have always designed around. E-sports barely existed as a concept when Starcraft was created, a lot less dedication was paid to the competitive crowd in the creation of Starcraft than in Starcraft 2. The problem with SC2 is that instead of looking at SC1, finding the units that were lacking, and replacing them or tweaking them, they thought up a bunch of new "cool" units, then looked for ways to displace existing units to fit them in. Replacing drop ships with medivacs and warp prisms is a great idea. Drop ships are not cool, but being able to drop units is cool. Turning the queen into an egg laying base defense? Genius. That's what a queen IS, not some useless flying beasty. Getting rid of the AoE anti air units is fine. Air power was useless in SC1 except muta harass and maybe late game carriers. Banshees, vikings and void rays are all more interesting than what they replaced. Corruptors and Phoenix are sort of lame, but they fulfill their purpose. What's not okay is the Roach. The roach isn't okay, because to fit it in, you had to turn the hydralisk into a T2 glass cannon. It's not okay, because in order to fit in the roach, you made it move while burrowed, and took out the lurker. It's not okay, because the very existence of a low tier tough as nails tanky unit doesn't fit the personality of zerg, and it forces you to provide hard counters like marauders and immortals. The more "balanced" the roach becomes, the more it looks like a short range, slightly more expensive zealot. Zerg needed zealots, apparently. Thors, hellions, marauders, immortals are all just bad units. Not bad because they don't have a use in the game but bad because they have done nothing to make the game more interesting, fun, or balanced (in fact quite the opposite, IMO). Bad because they came up with a concept first, then tried to shoehorn it in, rather than allowing form to follow function. Meh I pretty much disagree with about everything you said. And never ever say again Thor is a bad unit, you make Arnold cry
The Thor is a bad unit because it's bulky and inelegant.
It's a very useful unit to make, especially vs light air, it's just not a unit that needed to exist in place of the Goliath. I liked Voltron, Robotech,etc too, but having giant robots to have giant robots isn't actually that cool. Vikings are cool because they actually represent a new dynamic with different choices to make. Thor represents the dynamic of "DURP! GIANT ROBOT LOL!"
P.S.- on what basis do you disagree? Do you prefer to put together a puzzle where the pieces don't match, so that you can work harder to force the damned things to snap together?
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And here I thought they were going too reproductive and tentacles with zerg.
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EPT
