ForGG joins oGs - Page 53

On October 02 2011 20:57 Talin wrote:


Sigh.

Brood War has an extremely polished in-game interface (as was the standard for all Blizzard games since pretty much forever). The differences between BW and SC2 interfaces aren't a result of improved quality, but of design decisions. Adding shortcuts and a simplified input system is a game design decision - it has nothing to do with quality of interface. They could have decided that you can only have 1 unit/building selected at a time (WC2 style), and if the game was designed around it, the interface would potentially be just as good.

There's nothing buggy about A* pathfinding, it works exactly as intended. Again, it's mostly a design decision. SC2's group flocking algorithm has more than a fair share of issues in RTS gameplay as well. While the unit groups may find their way around easier in general, the way in which they move (clumped up in a ball) is normally not something that any RTS player will want. The amount of effort player has to do to compensate for the drawbacks of either algorithm is just about the same - only SC2 didn't yet develop to the point where unit splitting/spreading will be absolutely critical and game deciding (but it will).

Finally, I've no idea what your "modern" standards are, so I'll only say that the majority of 2005-onwards AAA titles are in fact NOT pushing the boundaries when it comes to game design and are in many ways inferior to their prequels and predecessors. This is done on purpose, because they're not designed to be good, they're designed to appeal (and be sold) to millions of people which normally requires more than a few compromises that are inherently bad for the game's quality and longevity. Especially a game which is designed to be challenging and competitive.



Skill ceiling is a bad term - it implies that both games are equal until one hits a "skill ceiling" and the other can progress beyond that point. This is in fact not how it works, since as you say no game will ever have players come close to the hypothetical ceiling.

How it works is that a game that requires a higher degree of mechanical skill to control properly will inevitably progress faster and differentiate between players better. Every good, long standing competitive video game in history has been about fast reactions, input precision, attention to detail etc. because this is where the skill separation happens and hard work and training pays off, and this is where the satisfaction comes from.

In order to be a long term success and, a competitive RTS game needs to "push" the two basic human skills - multitasking and manual dexterity - to the absolute limit as a requirement to succeed on ANY skill level, and SC2 game design really just doesn't seem to do that to a sufficient degree. It's often more rewarding to just pick up on the latest timing attack / unit composition flavor in the ever-shifting metagame and abuse the shit out of it.

On October 03 2011 02:14 eleaf wrote:


Please dont mislead ppl here with your biased opinions.

I played BW almost seriously from 2002-2006. During the first few years, BW timing attack is much worse than the current SC2 timing attack. And the balance is even much much worse due to the map. There are thousands of strategies and nobody have figured it out which ones are actually crap. One base play is pretty standard. I remember one player use 1 base fast lurker to 2 base all in to storm the tournament and nobody there even figured it out how to deal with it.

From a Historical view, SC2 is actually pretty damn good. The strategies are evolving very very fast which normally take for years in BW. Micro is also evolving at a unbelievable level which in BW, it takes many years to invent one micro trick (like the muti-drop/mutalisk kiting). So SC2 has indeed better shape as a new game.

Please stop trolling ppl that BW is like a fantastic game. It is a great game in current view. But in many years earlier, it is not that great compared with the same age of SC2.

On October 03 2011 02:40 Ciryandor wrote:

SC2 has the advantage of having the base concepts of heavy, macro-oriented gameplay a norm, thus that emergent gameplay has to emerge not as a completely new concept, but within a well-understood framework of timings, tactical positioning, and economic balance; which was not well understood in the days of BoxeR and YellOw. Furthermore, many of the hard lessons in mapmaking in BW easily carry over to SC2 (emphasis on balancing distance and defensibility, base saturation, openness, and features), giving SC2 a leg up in that respect as well.

What we are seeing in SC2 is the historical equivalent of it being in the iloveoov to Savior period, where an emphasis in macro play has been established, but where most stable and viable builds have not been fully explored. This results in the wild swings in professional-level play, an emphasis on powerful timing attacks, and a feeling out of strategies, partly because of these swings in player style and response to the same information, and partly because of the instability of the game itself because of the balance tweaks and inevitable expansion changes that will come, which however has no parallel in BW.