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BW wasn't a "perfect" game either. Just because something is statistically balanced doesn't mean much. Rock, Paper, Scissors is perfectly balanced but there's not enough depth and room for skill for it to be interesting.
The people that did the graphics, the programming, the art design; they deserve tons of credit. Compared to them I don't think the Blizzard game designers really deserve much credit and this ultimately comes down to Dustin.
They had the chance to improve and perfect a fantastic game and right from the start they made bad decisions like the removal of the reaver... why remove one of the most exciting units?
Then they made roaches, marauders, banshees, thors. All units that go against what made Starcraft so exciting; lots of fragile units and real finesse. It's the streams of cheap units running across the map in TvZ that makes it so exciting. One mistake and the whole army will die.
Having said that they made some great decisions too. Such as banelings, warp-in, blink stalkers. And they've made some good patching decisions too, such as Thor AOE.
In the end they'll get it right but not as quickly as I think you would expect from a budget of this magnitude. If the original BW designers had made SC2 I feel like it would be have been a much more polished game.
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I just hope they bring back Bill Roper to HotS. His magic was what made BW the best game ever made to play and spectate.
For me Protoss is near unwatchable at the moment; Collossus, Immortal, Voidray, auto-shooting Pheonix are so badly designed from a spectator point of view that I do not understand how they were left in the game in alpha. They lack the micro-bility that made me sit in awe watching a pro handle reaver-shuttle-zealot-carpet storms-dragoon micro.
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Yeah the biggest downside of this game i think is the REAL micro that is not here anymore , i mean i was inlove of the game just because of the micro battles , here we have no insane marine vs lurkers / reavers vs everything , the true muta micro(remember jaedong control 2 groups of mutas or july insane micro) the multipe irradiate , the templar drops from shuttles and storms , the wraith micro , vulture micro , corsair micro vs scourges , zelot bombs and the list can go on and on ... well the game had a lot of time and they apeard but in sc2 i don't really see them they are so few it's ....marine vs banelings and .... that's all i think that requires good micro ( banshee micro is crap , vikings vs other fleet is ... , void ray micro .... phonix micro ... most of them are just move back and shoot a 5 year old can do a good job with those if told what to do exactly ).
2'nd the big battles i mean what's cooler ? a deathball vs a deathball and ppl push buttons and attack or half a map vs half a map that engages on all sides and ofc attack move  but i think it's cooler to see smaller mini balls engageing then 1 big decisive battle . The moment you took an expansion and you could place 2-3 lurkers + 1 defiler and defend it for a decent amout of time , place 4-5 cannons , 1 reaver , 2 templars and the enemy z would sacrifice a lot for it, when you placed mines a wall with 2 supply depots and 4 tanks and the protoss could lose a lot of army in exchange for that expo , now a guy is at your expo you invest those money in defense he has a very cost effective way to take it out unless you bring your ball and engage him. BW will always shine in my heart as the most exciteing and wonderfull pc game i have ever played until 00:48 march 14 2011 server time it seems :D never know what the future brings :D
PF doesn't count in "smart defense placement"
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Well, the reaper change was definately needed unless you wanted every ZvT to go like the Morrow v Idra @ gamescon finals. How boring.
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Having just watched some much older games of BW for another project, I thought I'd throw in my two cents.
Four years after release, pros were still sometimes using (almost pure) hydra against m&m. This shocked me - even as a very casual Protoss player I've learned this doesn't work well. But micro standards were lower, m&m composition (and production) wasn't as refined, and so you could sort of get away with it - how bad it was wasn't yet apparent. Besides, island maps were still common, and lurkers can't shoot down dropships.
Back to today: SC:BW taught the world to macro and micro, so SC2 is starting out with a huge lead in the "basics of the strategy game" department. But what can't be carried over entirely is that development stage. You could make a serious argument that game balance wasn't finished until 2007 with Protoss forge FE (or 2008 with the Flash anti-carrier build, or...), and that "balance" is still easy to disrupt with new maps (Battle Royale? Central Plains?), new builds and tweaks are still coming out - it's entirely possible (if very unlikely) that some B-team practice partner wakes up tomorrow and tries something dumb that "breaks the game" for at least a couple weeks. It's hard to see how... but still.
Even if it only takes 3 or 4 years to work things out instead of 8 or 9, things need to be left alone at some point.
Counterpoint: the problem is that with increased base skill of players, potential imbalances that haven't had a solution found yet have the potential to wreck tournaments. Take 5 rax reaper - you let that build sit around for a while, somebody finds a counter eventually (probably); but when you compare it to early BW nobody was even building 5 raxes. On the other hand, nerfs/buffs are equally dangerous - I know BW better, so I'll put it like this: if, in today's metagame, Blizzard dropped in a patch that gave storm 180 damage (instead of 112), I'd lay about 95% odds a Protoss wins a title in this next season.
The tl;dr version: honestly if Blizzard wanted a balanced enough game for serious tourney play on release, beta should have lasted a couple years. SC2 in it's natural (developing) state can't compete with BW for balance, and if it gets over-"balanced" now it will break later. But that's okay - SC3!
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On March 06 2011 12:40 randplaty wrote:
BW was a much less ambitious project. BW had "core" units that did decently well against all units. Terran had goliaths and marines. Zerg had hydras and Toss had goons.
SC2 introduced bonuses for "armored" or "light." In a sense Blizzard introduced more imbalance in the specific units in order to create a more dynamic game. There are a lot more hard counters. Every unit has a hard counter. This is VERY different from BW. Hydras are owned by collossus. Stalkers are owned by marauders. This just did not happen to hydras and goonz in BW.
Blizzard refuses to nerf or buff any of the core units in SC2... so these huge imbalances exist. The marine, hydra, and stalker will not receive any changes because they're afraid that small changes to these units will completely change the game... which might be true. The problem is that there are huge imbalances within these core units which are causing the imbalances in the game. Because Blizzard is too scared to balance the core units, they are using peripheral changes to peripheral units and upgrades in order to balance the game. This may or may not work. We will see.
Examples:
Blizzard refuses to change the Stalker when it's clearly the problem with the PvT matchup.... so they have to do drastic changes to Khaydarian Amulet and Stim.
Blizzard refuses to change the marine when it's clearly the problem with TvZ... and therefore they have to do bunker changes and infestor changes.
Basically this, I see this too.
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I think that the game is fairly balanced to some point. I still think that zerg needs some more tweaking and I agree the blizz should go about doing this by tweaking stats and making things more powerful for the counter, rather than nerfing things into oblivion (ex. 4 roach range instead of what changed 5 rax reaper). I also dont like how alot of the units now are simply move and shoot types of units (collosus, roach, etc) and all the units that are "interesting" seem to be getting nerfed into oblivion as well by removing things.
However there are 2 expansions to go so I have faith that things will be balanced out with the new units they will be adding during them. Blizz still has roughly a year as I recall to balance out WoL before they have to deal with HoTS balance so I think thats ample time.
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you people saying SC1 was balanced from the get go obviously never played the game.
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I remember seeing a post during or shortly after beta of SCII about the removal of "mobile static defense" and it made a lot of good quality sense.
Personally, as someone who has tried again and again to get "into" SC II, I see this.
SC II is not Brood War at all, it is an entirely different game. Because of the inclusion of these various bonus damage types, the seemingly much faster intake of minerals, and a slew of other things it's got to be balanced like a different game. I still think the way BW was balanced was not always perfect and to this day, all BW players would like to see even a few blips come in (Scouts anyone?)
But, all that comes down to something I noticed and that was very eerie. The units in SC II seemed designed from a gameplay first, story second standpoint. In Brood War, I can conceive and imagine all the ideas going on very well. They make sense. I can understand why a future human army would be equipped the way it was, the way they could invent something like a vulture, and so on. Protoss units fit exactly as I would imagine, down to the alien cloaking fields, shields, and the unique units that seemed totally foreign and high tech. The Zerg as well are shown to be very flavorful and stylized. It almost felt like to me, the creators just took a DnD or tabletop game story they had and came up with the idea to make a game out of it one day. I play DnD, I talk about making games out of campaigns all the times with my friends.
In SCII, why did the zerg abandon evolution and drop the lurker?Aside from gameplay balances, because that could have been patched, which they seem more than happy to shove out every week. Why did the terran go from a hover bike with hidden mines to a dune buggy? The fact is, they were the top dogs pretty much at the end of BW. They should have only upgraded. Instead, I get a "rural and rugged" theme coming now. I don't understand why the Protoss would ever design anything like the phoenix. An AtA unit that lifts stuff, why wouldn't is just shoot the ground too? Why...a fast, mobile unit that does small damage but fast attack speed to both g and a? Sounds like...a scout! The whole zerg race now feels clunky to me and looks more so, I just can't understand why scourge would be abandoned, infestors...like, at all. Why the queen needed legs? Why the defiler, of all units, was removed. It feels like the races were homogenized a little, spreading the uniqueness that made BW so special a little thin
I like some of the game, a lot actually. Some cool ideas. More lame ones, and it showed in the early stages. No LAN, Map pools looked like garbage and Xel Nagas and Rocks in every map, the whole submission system, facebook jank, etc.
It just feels...forced. It feels like unit roles and what the development team thinks we should be doing is playing a much more integral part of this than just the desire and passion to create a GREAT game and letting the natural beauty of the game attract and develop it's base.
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The problem is very simple: In Blizzard's attempt to 'one-up' SC1, they introduced non-cast unit capabilities which are generally far more dramatic than in SC1. Units like collosus, the banaling, hellion, thor, planetary fortress, cloak banchees, etc. These units project ridiculous damage and the gameplay mechanics associated with defense and offense with these types of units are much less important than the very fact that you 'have' the units.
These units might be super cool looking and watch compared to SC1 units, but it makes for gameplay that does not complement skill nearly as much as unit compositions which require more mechanical prowess.
An obvious symptom of this change is that tweaks to unit mechanics/stats will be more dramatic.
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On March 14 2011 03:13 Hypatio wrote:
The problem is very simple: In Blizzard's attempt to 'one-up' SC1, they introduced non-cast unit capabilities which are generally far more dramatic than in SC1. Units like collosus, the banaling, hellion, thor, planetary fortress, cloak banchees, etc. These units project ridiculous damage and the gameplay mechanics associated with defense and offense with these types of units are much less important than the very fact that you 'have' the units.
These units might be super cool looking and watch compared to SC1 units, but it makes for gameplay that does not complement skill nearly as much as unit compositions which require more mechanical prowess.
An obvious symptom of this change is that tweaks to unit mechanics/stats will be more dramatic.
While I agree, this is just one of the problems.
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On March 06 2011 12:40 randplaty wrote:
BW was a much less ambitious project. BW had "core" units that did decently well against all units. Terran had goliaths and marines. Zerg had hydras and Toss had goons.
SC2 introduced bonuses for "armored" or "light." In a sense Blizzard introduced more imbalance in the specific units in order to create a more dynamic game. There are a lot more hard counters. Every unit has a hard counter. This is VERY different from BW. Hydras are owned by collossus. Stalkers are owned by marauders. This just did not happen to hydras and goonz in BW.
Blizzard refuses to nerf or buff any of the core units in SC2... so these huge imbalances exist. The marine, hydra, and stalker will not receive any changes because they're afraid that small changes to these units will completely change the game... which might be true. The problem is that there are huge imbalances within these core units which are causing the imbalances in the game. Because Blizzard is too scared to balance the core units, they are using peripheral changes to peripheral units and upgrades in order to balance the game. This may or may not work. We will see.
Examples:
Blizzard refuses to change the Stalker when it's clearly the problem with the PvT matchup.... so they have to do drastic changes to Khaydarian Amulet and Stim.
Blizzard refuses to change the marine when it's clearly the problem with TvZ... and therefore they have to do bunker changes and infestor changes.
Great post, sums most of my thoughts. Thank you.
Knowing that SC2 core units/mechanics need significal changes, and that Blizzard won't take the risk to do what is needed, I'm really not confident about the future of SC2, at least for a year or two.
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People are complaining too much about how bad the state of the game is with all the drastic patch changes and how "limiting" these changes are making gameplay. But has no one else thought that these changes ARE making the game better? Look at the pro matches and see how much more leaner builds are now compared to a few months ago, how much more varied similar strats can be implemented, etc. Deathball vs deathball pushes are becoming less common in favor of multiple smaller battles across the map (unless it's pvp  ). Of course this has a lot to do with amount of time passed in order to understand the nuances of the game, but too many people are crying about how each patch takes the game a step back when the game is actually evolving forward. Until gameplay actually takes a step backwards I don't think qq-ing about patch changes is a productive way to use up my time.
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Generic SC2 rant thread part infinity?
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BTW, while SC2 did individualize the damage system more than BW, it's not true to say that damage type ("bonuses") are a new idea. Brood War units all got a size classification (small, medium, large) that had nothing to do with actual size and each attack was classified (regular, explosive, concussive) with percentage penalties on attacks vs. these certain unit sizes.
It could be an interesting argument whether the semantic change (from penalties to bonuses) actually a) influenced development of SC2 or b) plays a big role in actual strategy (as opposed to whine). It would also be interesting to see whether the "bonus" system results in dps being a higher % of total unit HP then BW's penalties, but unless it's a significant difference (say 5%+ across the board) then it's going to depend so much on builds it's not actually a useful measure.
And in theory I'm all in favor of individualizing penalties/bonuses. While it simplified theory-crafting in BW, it's kind of silly (when you think about it) that a firebat and vulture have the same "kind of attack" damage penalties - never mind things like the sunken's explosive (!) attack.
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I agree with the OP. Though I never got into BW competitively, I've read some stuff on it and really like how Blizzard got even the most overpowered abilities to fit by making the other races have their own answers. The current trend they've adopted of seeing a problem and then removing it is leading StarCraft 2 to become one dimensional.
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zealot bombs still work Lol.
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Please, oh please just give us the ability to collectively watch replays. Why was this EVER omitted?
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+ Show Spoiler +On March 14 2011 02:52 woofwoof wrote:
you people saying SC1 was balanced from the get go obviously never played the game. Everyone who says SC1 was unbalanced just sucks at the game.
Anyways back on topic.
I think the problem here is that blizzard is focusing to make the game too "balanced" for its own good. I don't think this is bad IMO. But what annoys me is that they remove certain tech even the game is already out of beta.
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I think blizzard is probably aware of how their changes effect the game. Though eliminating upgrades and such may eliminate some strategies blizzard knows what theyre doing, and i think that blizzard wants esports to grow as much as we do since that means more people buying their games, so i doubt they would implement changes that would make sc2 less viable as an esport.
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EPT
