The Philosophy of Design: Part 2 - Unit Design - Page 15

On January 12 2012 22:20 Grumbels wrote:
I keep thinking more and more the biggest problem with so many of these issues is Blizzard wanting to have the game playable for bronze/silver level players. There is, as mentioned, an industry trend towards more automation so that the game actually becomes pure strategy, no execution involved, so even if you can barely play the game, you can still have some semblance of the experience the game is meant to provide. In Starcraft's case it is about alien races on harsh worlds going to battle - I think the fear is a new player is going to start, say, Brood War multiplayer and simply become overwhelmed by the high execution requirements and become frustrated at his inability to produce said armies.

That's one incarnation of an automation argument: the fear of alienating casual players. I have two examples to sort of illustrate some of the ideas in here.

I used to play Warcraft 3 a lot and I was able to convince one of my brothers to also play the game. He actually likes strategy games a lot and often plays Risk and Rome: Total War and such. He did not play on as high a level as I did, playing mostly team games, where he likes getting ultimate unit compositions. I don't think I could have gotten him to play Brood War the same way though. Maybe some big money maps, if that, because Brood War is so much harder than Warcraft 3. My youngest brother tried Warcraft 3 melee gameplay like a couple of times, but he was terrible at it and just stuck to playing DotA. For him even WC3 was too mechanically demanding compared to just the one hero.

My second example is that I'm currently playing through the Warcraft 2 campaigns and if you think Brood War was mechanically demanding, try that game. No control groups, awkward hotkeys, no queuing, you can only select 9 units maximum. If you play it at the highest speed and actually bother with expanding, you'll be so busy creating units you will hardly have time to even do scouting or set up attacks. You pretty much need to sacrifice efficient macro, just build way too many barracks, and focus on purely army movement in such cases.
I will say that playing this is a little bit tiring, but I actually hardly have any problems with it, even if it's more demanding than Starcraft 2. I think the reason is because I only play the campaigns and I'm not punished for lack of speed: it just makes the missions harder, but I can also always play on slower game speeds if I want to or use cheat codes.

Personally, I think that you have to know your audience, and some people are simply not good at multitasking and/or strategic thought. To dilute something too much for the casuals will eventually alienate actual RTS players, who are the people you want to attract. At the same time, not everyone has the ability to acquire mechanical skill and it's a good thing to have a playable game for both casuals and hardcore players. Maybe at TL the focus is purely on the hardcore aspect of it, but you will eventually lose an audience of potential RTS gamers that are just too overwhelmed by the game's difficulty.

I honestly think it's a big missed opportunity that Blizzard didn't create more of a casual multiplayer experience. As I said earlier, I don't think requiring mechanical skill is too overwhelming (maybe) if you are simply not punished for the lack of it. Ladder play does exist, and it's pretty nice, but it's still a game mode focused on competitive play, where you will be punished. It's not about fun. I think some people approach RTS games with a certain idea in their head about how they like to play the game and they are mostly concerned about recreating that idea, not about "playing to win".

So just an example of what an implementation of this might look like: instead of the silly practice ladder, just divide the ladder into two modes: casual, competitive. Casual is focused on having a slightly slower game speed, lots of available scouting information such as plentiful xel`naga towers, safety against rushes, lots of resources. I think if Blizzard wants to, they could also add autocast options for mules, inject larva, building workers. Add a notification to the warpgate icon for protoss that shows when all your warpgates are off cooldown etc. So keep the game mostly the same (I think having actually different units can be confusing), but change the maps and add some beneficial UI features. All these features would disappear from the competitive ladder, though.

I hope what this accomplishes is to separate competitive play and 'fun' play in a meaningful way that does not prevent crossover. The units are the same, the mechanics are also mostly the same, it's just that minerals are sparser, attacks are easier and there's overwhelmingly more mechanical stuff to do. I think that if the game was set up this way you could attract a casual audience that you could sort of 'nurture' and have transition off into watching or playing competitive e-sports - or just stick to casual modes, of course. In my first example, I think my brother that plays DotA would still not go for Starcraft 2 in this incarnation, but my other brother certainly would, so that'll be nice I think.
Obviously you can accomplish all of this in the map editor, but it's not as accessible and frankly, the results won't have the quality of when an industry-leading game development company would do the same thing.