On April 20 2011 14:45 Persev wrote: What SC2 is missing for me:
Its missing Art. I'm not talking about the awesome cover art by Samwise , jaw dropping game cinematics, or even the 3-d wireframe art. I'm talking about sitting back and just watching games and saying,"whoa that was awesome". To be clear the game play aspects that I thought that made the Brood War experience so memorable was the ability to do "Art".
Let me clarify what I mean by a few brief examples of the Zerg Art. The aspect of Zerg that I miss the most is Mutalisk Micro control. For those that played broodwar this is the pinnacle of controlling your army in Brood War. With your mutalisks you could maneuver them like a scapel and exert tremenous pressure on your opponent and force them to make mistakes. At its highest levels of 300apm+, I can remember the first time I saw July Zerg do this and said wow thats awesome I want to do that...it was cool to watch, even cooler to learn , and really gave me a feeling of accomplishment with every game. I even still have youtube favorite bookmarks of Sc1 moments where awesomeplayers like Jaedong control multiple groups of mutalisk micro ART. If there was one aspect that I would add to the current game play is this level of ART.
This. Pure "Art".
When you stare down an Art masterpiece, you are inspired, fascinated, and captured.
It is not Mona Lisa if all top artists can draw it. It is the uniqueness that creates the Art.
In all big sport, you have Art performed by top athletes:
Jordan's fade-away. Kareem's skyhook.
Messi's speed dribbing.
Nadal's top spin.
Pacquiao's speed Southpaw.
In SC2, it is rare to find uniqueness (e.g. MC's FF). Every match resembles each other and you cannot tell the difference who is playing if the player's names are not shown.
In BW, we have progamers well-known for their uniqueness: Boxer's marine micro, JD's mutas, Bisu's multitasking, Fantasy's vultures, Flash's starsense, etc. A good example is that in recent allstar match, even the progamers play a prank on us to switch their ID and races, we BW fans were able to recognize, only after few minutes of watching, that there's something wrong and not the same player playing. This is what makes BW legend.
I blame this on the intelligent game engine. The movement, pathing, casting and interface are simply too good and outdone what human can do. In BW, you can never have the zergling surround like in SC2 even with 1000 APM. Same goes in any other games that if you have a general best OP weapon, you'll see everyone is using it on every server and that takes out the uniqueness. The current SC2 engine is that OP weapon, it makes machine (artificial) factors outweigh human factors.
So bring back 12 unit control groups, stupid pathing and remove MBS and SC2 will be great?
On April 20 2011 12:46 0neder wrote: My 4th pick would be slower time to supply max, it greatly reduces strategic/tactical options
It's interesting that you say this. It take approximately 15 mins to max in TvP in BW. However, this is playing off 3 bases. I think it takes approximately the same amount of time to max in SC2, if not longer. However, expansions are taken relatively later in sc2.
Also can you elaborate on reducing strategic/tactical options?
BTW, Slayers_Boxer himself said that if SC2 were to succeed, people have to start playing more entertaining games. I mean, yeah, player skill has something to do with it, but there is a skill ceiling that will be reached. After players hit the theoretical skill ceiling, will the games become more entertaining?
Interesting to hear that it takes close to the same amount of time to max out in both games.
I think a main problem in SC2 right now is that a lot of players are afraid to engage in constant, BW-esque aggression throughout the game. Whereas BW players constantly trade armies in continuous engagements, I see too many matches where there is minimal aggression while both players passively max out their balls and engage. It's formulaic. It's boring. It's hurting SC2 as an e-sport.
However, there are quite a few exceptions to the norm emerging in the SC2 scene that do bring hope to this ball-plagued scene. San, July, and more recently Mondragon have shown extremely aggressive, active, yet somewhat scrappy styles that have produced entertaining games and even successful results to a degree. As players become more comfortable leaving their base and engaging in aggression, it should be much harder to accumulate maxed-out balls as armies are constantly traded from all this aggression.
Hopefully, we'll be seeing more Mondragons and fewer Crunchers in the SC2 scene, which should help in producing more entertaining games as well as advancing the metagame in a more desirable direction.
I think the biggest problem with this is that ultra-aggression isn't very forgiving. Without any meaningful defender's advantage, if you are ultra aggressive and then lose your army, it's much harder to make a comeback with less units than your opponent.
On April 20 2011 21:10 karpo wrote: So bring back 12 unit control groups, stupid pathing and remove MBS and SC2 will be great?
I think it's more a case of those restrictions happening to reward different things than SC2 rewards. Deathball-style play was just impossible in SCBW. Given how easy it is now, SC2 needs to find its own way of making it undesirable.
Really, for the last time. It really feels like none of you are here to help improve the game at all. You can use the old game to improve the new, but you can also use other games, not just strategy games, and other concepts from maybe even real life to improve it. It's so obvious tough. We all love BW. It's not hard to find things that are "better" in that game. But the view has quickly narrowed down on finding flaws instead of ways to improve.
It's not a solution to say it should "be like BW" because we can't copy straight off. That would be a remake. We can't make mutas handle the same. You have try to find a solution, instead of being the 56th person to point that they are not the same in SC2 and link a video to an awesome SCBW game.
On April 20 2011 21:19 osten wrote: Really, for the last time. It really feels like none of you are here to help improve the game at all. You can use the old game to improve the new, but you can also use other games, not just strategy games, and other concepts from maybe even real life to improve it. It's so obvious tough. We all love BW. It's not hard to find things that are "better" in that game. But the view has quickly narrowed down on finding flaws instead of ways to improve.
It's not a solution to say it should "be like BW" because we can't copy straight off. That would be a remake. We can't make mutas handle the same. You have try to find a solution, instead of being the 56th person to point that they are not the same in SC2 and link a video to an awesome SCBW game.
On April 20 2011 21:19 osten wrote: Really, for the last time. It really feels like none of you are here to help improve the game at all. You can use the old game to improve the new, but you can also use other games, not just strategy games, and other concepts from maybe even real life to improve it. It's so obvious tough. We all love BW. It's not hard to find things that are "better" in that game. But the view has quickly narrowed down on finding flaws instead of ways to improve.
It's not a solution to say it should "be like BW" because we can't copy straight off. That would be a remake. We can't make mutas handle the same. You have try to find a solution, instead of being the 56th person to point that they are not the same in SC2 and link a video to an awesome SCBW game.
What other games can you use? What can really translate from a non-RTS game when talking about what can make SC2 a great spectator game? I've said this a dozen times - the reason that you always compare to BW is because BW was the one game that really made it work.
And finding flaws is the first step in finding ways to improve. You can't say, "Lets improve SC2, but lets not find any flaws!" That's just stupid. If you don't find flaws you don't know what to improve.
your opponent can't immediately attack into your remaining army without severe repercussion. This also introduced a way to delay your opponent by slowly giving up ground rather than doing what most SC2 player have to do, which is run back to their nat and turtle until they have a unit advantage.
This is something I feel lacking in starcraft 2, even if you end up in an engagement with higher tier units, they'll just get pummeled into nothing by sheer number advantage. And if you lose one engagement thats it, it feels like we need more powerfull siege units added to all races.
notice how dragoon ai completely destroys the game. or how its not hindering at all. in fact its the opposite and it makes dragoons super good to use. its one or the other i just dont know
Also notice how long the battle is. The constant reinforcements streaming in from both sides allow for an extremely long battle. Basically, the entire fight lasts from the point where the video starts to the end of the video. That's nearly 8 minutes of non-stop fighting.
Remove smart casting. I think it ruins one of the best aspects of the game. Back in BW I used to be up in arms everytime they threw storms and how good the HT control was. Now every joe does it, and its not exciting at all
sorry but all of those games that you showed were just so boring to watch... I found myself wanting to stop watching so fast but I saw them all the way through just to try and see your points. Seriously the huge skill gap made by the Koreans was only made because of how terrible the mechanics in BW were, and the fact that the Korean's turned it into a huge professional sport thus allowing them to spend 8 hours a day training their minds and fingers. The fact of the matter was that if you weren't Korean, you didn't have the chance or the talent to be good enough, and even if you were Korean, only 20 so people could compete at the highest level, and even still only 2-5 people would win every single tournament. Now the mechanics in sc2 are much better and the game is easier to play. The skill cap is lower because people can actually play the game now rather than playing the games flaws. More people are able to play the game successfully without having to spend a minimum of 8 hours a day training. An important issue however is that there is still so much more to be done with sc2. Every BW fan thinks that sc2 is capped out already, but the fact of the matter is that right now everyone is focusing on style and strategy to try and earn prize money, rather than focusing on intense micro/macro and going for huge skill filled games because honestly, being able to move your fingers and use your brain at optimum capacity while the game is moving so fast will take soooo much intense training, they will not be able to support themselves because they'll spend too much time getting raped. You can complain that sc2 is missing too much and that BW is better for such and such reason, but it's just like a lot of people are saying, they are 2 different games. You find BW to be more entertaining for such and such reason while I find it boring for the same reasons. Entertainment is opinionated. The only fact in the matter is that sc2 has so much more skill to be learned, and your arguments are only temporarily valid.
I'd like to say, that even though I do dislike the anti-micro abilities, I do understand that they're necessary for the game in some respect. SC2 has a huge emphasis on mobility, with cliff-walking units, warp-in, creep speed bonus and the speed of Zerg core units, free dropships, and so forth. Even if you look at numbers alone, most units have gotten relative movement speed boosts - Speedlings are now faster than they were in BW, and Stim increases movement speed by a larger percentage.
This is probably one of the reasons the defender's advantage appears to have been reduced - reinforcing is a lot faster for Zerg and Protoss. You can have Warpgate pushes on one hand, and those Roach/Ling timing attacks, where you attack across the map with your Roaches and reinforce with speedlings. This is also another reason why TvT is the best mirror matchup - Terran units actually need to walk across the map in order to reinforce a push.
Now, I'm not saying this validates Fungal, FF or Concussive Shell being in the game, but it does make some sense to have anti-mobility spells in such a mobility-focused game.
On April 21 2011 00:46 Sqq wrote: Remove smart casting. I think it ruins one of the best aspects of the game. Back in BW I used to be up in arms everytime they threw storms and how good the HT control was. Now every joe does it, and its not exciting at all
To offer a bit of a different perspective, the lack of smart casting would be a lot more visible in SC2, because of how the engine works. The reason you'd don't often see players microing individual units around in battles is partly because the clumped formations just don't give any room to move them around; furthermore, it makes it quite difficult to actually select an individual unit from a ball - especially if you also have air units floating over your army, or Colossi standing on it. Try to make a 200/200 Protoss ball in a unit tester, move it around a bit, and then try to manually select a HT and cast storm really fast. It's pretty difficult, and doing the same thing with BW's engine was a lot easier.
It may shock you (despite being repeatedly said in this thread), but people make these comparisons and threads because they're trying to get SC2 to learn from BWbecause they want SC2 to truly succeed as an e-sport.
Terribly shocking, I know.
That itself is quite puzzling. Why? Because SC2 clearly deserves it? Highly debatable ( lets just leave that poiint there and not argue it). I believe people want it to succeed because it has SC in the title... If you like the dynamics in BW so much leave SC2 to die and just play BW.
How do you not get this? It's quite obvious. SC2 is the biggest chance that e-sports has ever had to truly grow into something in the west. People are cheering for it and want it to succeed because they want e-sports to grow. This was incredibly obvious right from the beta.
I believe you want it to succed, but if Blizz were to follow your advice, it would fail.
E-sports does not need another Brood War. It doesn't even need a game that's similar to Brood War. It already has Brood War, and any attempt to replace it is doomed to failure.
Damn some people are dense. The ideas presented in the OP don't go hand-in-hand with the game being Brood War. The ideas are general ideas that have made the only truly successful e-sport, EVER. Game flow, map control, positioning, unit interaction, these are general concepts that are achieved in a specific way in BW. You don't have to achieve them in the same way as BW, but they should be done in some way because they aren't in SC2, or at least aren't done enough.
The ideas are what made the game a great e-sport, not what made the game great, or what made it uniquely Brood War. The only reason that BW is brought up at all is because it's the example of a game that had the right mechanics, designs, etc. to make the game truly succeed as a watchable video game. It's not like people are looking at SC2 and saying, "How can we make it like BW?" People are looking at SC2 and saying, "There's something missing from the spectator experience of SC2. Lets identify what it is and figure out what would make it better. The best example of what would make it better is BW, because it's not only an RTS as well, but it's also the prequel to this game, and most importantly, it's the most successful e-sport ever."
Are we understanding the point yet?
This argument doesn't make any sense. If you put in SC2 at the time of BW (disregarding engine/graphics advances), you'd all be clamoring how MBS/infinite unit control/etc is 'the standard.'
BW popularity does not implicitly validate the game engine. At least say something like 'the game is mechanically more difficult' (true) which 'relates to higher learning curve and more direct and measurablestratification of players (true).' Don't validate BW because it's popular. It's like saying that Pokemon somehow is the paragon of RPGs because it's more popular than FF.
Seriously, the problem every single one of these threads have are people who refuse to argue game design ... with game design. 'Oh, BW is popular! BW is so deep! BW is so this and that,' but that is more complicated than JUST game design. It has to do with the players, their incentive to improve; mapmakers and how maps changed the game; Blizzard's patches and how they changed how people approached the game; in short, much, much, much more than just game design.
Saying 'faster pace of battles encourages more action, shorter games, and more all-ins which MIGHT reduce the amount of macro games BUT MIGHT ALSO be mitigated if players currently play more defensively against all-ins or map sizes are increased' is legitimate. Spouting a bunch of nonsense theorycrafting like 'positional advantage' and 'gameflow' is just the hallmark of entertainment preferences. Nothing more.
On April 20 2011 21:19 osten wrote: Really, for the last time. It really feels like none of you are here to help improve the game at all. You can use the old game to improve the new, but you can also use other games, not just strategy games, and other concepts from maybe even real life to improve it. It's so obvious tough. We all love BW. It's not hard to find things that are "better" in that game. But the view has quickly narrowed down on finding flaws instead of ways to improve.
It's not a solution to say it should "be like BW" because we can't copy straight off. That would be a remake. We can't make mutas handle the same. You have try to find a solution, instead of being the 56th person to point that they are not the same in SC2 and link a video to an awesome SCBW game.
What other games can you use? What can really translate from a non-RTS game when talking about what can make SC2 a great spectator game? I've said this a dozen times - the reason that you always compare to BW is because BW was the one game that really made it work.
And finding flaws is the first step in finding ways to improve. You can't say, "Lets improve SC2, but lets not find any flaws!" That's just stupid. If you don't find flaws you don't know what to improve.
Okay we can use the rule of elevators to make units able to walk under and over each other on a multi-level battleground. We could make a unit that can be a moving main base. We can make a neutral garrisonable bunker. I don't know why you hate everything that was not in BW and no, it is not the only successful game ever made just because it got to be a real sport in Korea. It's not only about what happened, it's about what could have happened, if for instance C&C would have been played just as much. Stop being so narrow minded and why don't you come with some innovation instead of saying we should only find flaws and post scbw videos.
So I reiterate, let's not improve on perfect (BW) let's make a new game better. I give up now if that's too hard to understand.
I am an old school player, grown up with BW and I must say I really enjoyed this game but...
I watched recent VODs of BW and SC2BW project, and compared them to SC2 games and I must say... well, BW games just seem to be very BORING for me to watch.
Sure it's "art", because how difficult it was to control your troops (btw I think that if you take BW units with SC2 mechanics like in SW2BW you will just not have the same game, and the metgame would break completely), but honestly it should not be how SC2 must be.
When SC2 came out, I really loved it outright because it removed so much flaws I was bored with when playing BW, and I'm not speaking about game mechanics being more easy. I speak about the feeling : in SC2 you get the REAL feeling of what races SHOULD be : Zerg feel very swarmy (see the mass speedling agressions, they are beautiful to watch), Protoss is so cool being high tech and using warp ins, its like ok, I play Zerg and I really hate 4 gate and I definitely think the game currently need a tweak with this warp in mechanics and the dethball problem, but god! its so cool ! This is the way protoss should have been since the beginning!
Now when I look back at BW games and see gateways and see zeals and goons spawned one by one like marines from barracks, I cant help myself thinking "uuuh well, they cant even become warpgates lol so dumb". I knows its stupid. I too favor the game mechanics/ unit interactions to be far far far more important than just cool explosions/great graphics, otherwise I would play any modern random RTS games out there and be happy. I dont think cool stuff > balanced game. What I want now, in 2011, it having BOTH.
I want stalkers to warp in, to blink, zerg to spawn shitloads of lings, queens being queens, AND the game to be balanced and fun to play somehow. I am not happy with the current deathball and I think colossus is now damaging the game greatly, but I strongly believe Blizzard will eventually work their way around it and fix everything, but NOT by puting back BW concept.
I DONT WANT Zerg to have siege units like the Lurker ! I dont care it offers space control, slow down pushes, etc., it's not the way it should work in SC2. When I watch BW now I just see one race fighting the same exact race with different graphics: Z, T and P can control space, Z, T, P have heavy damage dealers that take time to set up, and I dont care if the lurker needs to burrow or the tank siege or the reaver being dropped at the right place, its basically the same overall thing with a slightly different mechanism, but for me its not enough to define a race. Zerg is basically a terran with a siege unit which has less range and that burrows?
Ok of course I'm exagerating a lot here, but honestly I believe its a good thing that Zerg has no siege unit at all (now the infestor is a little bit of this, but that's it), Zerg is not made for performing sieges and controling space, they are made to SWARM THE FUCK OUT OF THE SCARED TERRAN who relies on big guns and statics defenses not to be overrun by a sea of claws. In the last BW games I saw, the terran player had more units than a zerg and was pushing their ass with swarms of marines while the zerg (jaedong) was desperately trying to contain the M&M with a couple lurkers and a handful of scared zerglings in hope to get a defiler in time not to be overrun.
Yes, this might be extremely well balanced and everything, but it just feels lame. And YES I used to play BW a lot and enjoy it and I have a lot of respect for great BW players and everything, I just think that SC2 is trying to do exactly the right thing. Maybe it will not manage to achieve his goals, but hell I hope it will! Currently I enjoy watching the game between my bronze-gold mates (I play in high diamond) because I know that at their level they will feel a great tension and that the game will LOOK epic and brutal and they will feel good about that. Playing BW when not at very high-super-class-level is just dumb and uninteresting.
Blizzard just need to find a way to prevent the deathball syndrom to occur and everything will be fine with SC2. ZvT and TvT are great matchups to watch, maybe PvP and ZvP need a fix. But all in all, I prefer to see games when decision making seals the deal instead of pure mechanical skill. I always hated that concept with BW. I speak for myself in this post, no offense to anyone, but I now a bunch of guys who think the same way...
On April 20 2011 21:10 karpo wrote: So bring back 12 unit control groups, stupid pathing and remove MBS and SC2 will be great?
I think it's more a case of those restrictions happening to reward different things than SC2 rewards. Deathball-style play was just impossible in SCBW. Given how easy it is now, SC2 needs to find its own way of making it undesirable.
I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but in PvT if you got outmacroed hard by the Terran, he could just waltz in with his mech force and rape the shit out of you. Except this only happened when one player was clearly above the other in terms of skill.
The way to make deathball style undesirable is to bring back units with huge aoe that destroy tightly packed armies (lurkers, BW tanks, BW storm). Of course the collosus is one such unit in SC2, but its seems like its too strong if it has enough support (stalkers to tank and kill air/sentries to ff) not to mention that it has no setup time (as mahini pointed out in the op) so you can micro it back if it is getting focused and then micro it forward when the focus is off it. Like I've said before, hopefully Blizzard has some good ideas on how to make the game more exciting with Heart of the Swarm, I think if enough people demand more interesting play, Browder will surely deliver.
EPT
