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On December 03 2014 01:31 Squat wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2014 01:21 maartendq wrote:On December 03 2014 00:29 Squat wrote:On December 03 2014 00:13 bartus88 wrote:
I somewhat agree, but it shouldn't be much harder than HotS. It would be off-putting for too many players. Remember diamond still means you're better than >90% of all 1v1 players. Also, as others have pointed out, the achievements give you some more challenge and as long as you can challenge yourself, like you did, it doesn't really matter right? Why not? I meant it's not like you have to play on brutal. Make easy so basic that my cognitively challenged cat could do it, and make brutal so hard you need a Doctor Octopus backpack to beat it, and then the full spectrum in between. Done, everyone wins. Brutal is already completely unplayable for 99% of the people who finished the campaign. People finding Brutal easy is a minority of a minority. So what's the harm in making it harder for that 1%? That argument was a complete non sequitur. If someone is unable to play on brutal, play on an easier setting. I'm not advocating for making the game super hard in single player, I just want the option.
The harm is that every difficulty level has to be thoroughly tested and you have only so much manpower. Adding content for 1% means less content for the rest.
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On December 03 2014 01:48 [F_]aths wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2014 01:31 Squat wrote:On December 03 2014 01:21 maartendq wrote:On December 03 2014 00:29 Squat wrote:On December 03 2014 00:13 bartus88 wrote:
I somewhat agree, but it shouldn't be much harder than HotS. It would be off-putting for too many players. Remember diamond still means you're better than >90% of all 1v1 players. Also, as others have pointed out, the achievements give you some more challenge and as long as you can challenge yourself, like you did, it doesn't really matter right? Why not? I meant it's not like you have to play on brutal. Make easy so basic that my cognitively challenged cat could do it, and make brutal so hard you need a Doctor Octopus backpack to beat it, and then the full spectrum in between. Done, everyone wins. Brutal is already completely unplayable for 99% of the people who finished the campaign. People finding Brutal easy is a minority of a minority. So what's the harm in making it harder for that 1%? That argument was a complete non sequitur. If someone is unable to play on brutal, play on an easier setting. I'm not advocating for making the game super hard in single player, I just want the option. The harm is that every difficulty level has to be thoroughly tested and you have only so much manpower. Adding content for 1% means less content for the rest. It's not that hard to make difficult games.
Anyway i think "brutal" shouldn't be so every diamond+ could do whole campaign on first try before playing it before. Like it was in WoL and HotS.
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On December 03 2014 01:48 [F_]aths wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2014 01:31 Squat wrote:On December 03 2014 01:21 maartendq wrote:On December 03 2014 00:29 Squat wrote:On December 03 2014 00:13 bartus88 wrote:
I somewhat agree, but it shouldn't be much harder than HotS. It would be off-putting for too many players. Remember diamond still means you're better than >90% of all 1v1 players. Also, as others have pointed out, the achievements give you some more challenge and as long as you can challenge yourself, like you did, it doesn't really matter right? Why not? I meant it's not like you have to play on brutal. Make easy so basic that my cognitively challenged cat could do it, and make brutal so hard you need a Doctor Octopus backpack to beat it, and then the full spectrum in between. Done, everyone wins. Brutal is already completely unplayable for 99% of the people who finished the campaign. People finding Brutal easy is a minority of a minority. So what's the harm in making it harder for that 1%? That argument was a complete non sequitur. If someone is unable to play on brutal, play on an easier setting. I'm not advocating for making the game super hard in single player, I just want the option. The harm is that every difficulty level has to be thoroughly tested and you have only so much manpower. Adding content for 1% means less content for the rest.
So why even have brutal in the first place then? By this reasoning, we should only have whatever difficulty the most people can comfortably beat. I'm sorry, but these arguments seem increasingly spurious.
If we're going to have a brutal setting, make it worthy of the name, or don't even bother with it.
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On December 03 2014 01:56 Tuczniak wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2014 01:48 [F_]aths wrote:On December 03 2014 01:31 Squat wrote:On December 03 2014 01:21 maartendq wrote:On December 03 2014 00:29 Squat wrote:On December 03 2014 00:13 bartus88 wrote:
I somewhat agree, but it shouldn't be much harder than HotS. It would be off-putting for too many players. Remember diamond still means you're better than >90% of all 1v1 players. Also, as others have pointed out, the achievements give you some more challenge and as long as you can challenge yourself, like you did, it doesn't really matter right? Why not? I meant it's not like you have to play on brutal. Make easy so basic that my cognitively challenged cat could do it, and make brutal so hard you need a Doctor Octopus backpack to beat it, and then the full spectrum in between. Done, everyone wins. Brutal is already completely unplayable for 99% of the people who finished the campaign. People finding Brutal easy is a minority of a minority. So what's the harm in making it harder for that 1%? That argument was a complete non sequitur. If someone is unable to play on brutal, play on an easier setting. I'm not advocating for making the game super hard in single player, I just want the option. The harm is that every difficulty level has to be thoroughly tested and you have only so much manpower. Adding content for 1% means less content for the rest. It's not that hard to make difficult games. Anyway i think "brutal" shouldn't be so every diamond+ could do whole campaign on first try before playing it before. Like it was in WoL and HotS.
It is hard to make difficult, yet fair games. Instead of bragging around how easy you think the campaign is (i finished both campaigns on brutal as well) why don't you enjoy playing with additional restrictions?
I see no valid criticism in this thread that the campaign is in fact too easy for a strategy game campaign. I see some players who have hundreds of hours multiplayer experience bragging about how easy they find the campaign missions.
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On December 03 2014 01:59 Squat wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2014 01:48 [F_]aths wrote:On December 03 2014 01:31 Squat wrote:On December 03 2014 01:21 maartendq wrote:On December 03 2014 00:29 Squat wrote:On December 03 2014 00:13 bartus88 wrote:
I somewhat agree, but it shouldn't be much harder than HotS. It would be off-putting for too many players. Remember diamond still means you're better than >90% of all 1v1 players. Also, as others have pointed out, the achievements give you some more challenge and as long as you can challenge yourself, like you did, it doesn't really matter right? Why not? I meant it's not like you have to play on brutal. Make easy so basic that my cognitively challenged cat could do it, and make brutal so hard you need a Doctor Octopus backpack to beat it, and then the full spectrum in between. Done, everyone wins. Brutal is already completely unplayable for 99% of the people who finished the campaign. People finding Brutal easy is a minority of a minority. So what's the harm in making it harder for that 1%? That argument was a complete non sequitur. If someone is unable to play on brutal, play on an easier setting. I'm not advocating for making the game super hard in single player, I just want the option. The harm is that every difficulty level has to be thoroughly tested and you have only so much manpower. Adding content for 1% means less content for the rest. So why even have brutal in the first place then? By this reasoning, we should only have whatever difficulty the most people can comfortably beat. I'm sorry, but these arguments seem increasingly spurious. If we're going to have a brutal setting, make it worthy of the name, or don't even bother with it.
If we only had the first three difficulties and no 'brutal' setting, a larger percentage of players would have no real challenge. If brutal would be much, much harder than hard, we in fact still would have only three usable difficulty settings for most players. If we would have five instead of four settings, it would require more work in mission design which would mean less content somewhere else.
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How about playing with your off-hand?
I know I would get destroyed.
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On December 03 2014 02:16 Salteador Neo wrote:
How about playing with your off-hand?
I know I would get destroyed.
Might consider that. Sounds difficult.
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I used to play The broodwar campaign with only 1 worker per mineral when I was younger. No wonder it was so difficult.
My suggestion would be to have some sort of drinking game.
Use kerrigan - Take a sip
Supply blocked - take a sip
Finish a mission - Finish your drink
fail to complete a mission - 1 shot
JOKER Bonus: sc2 crashes - 3 shots
Or whatever rules you fancy.
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Compared to old school RTS campaigns like Command & Conquer and Age of Empires I would say HotS is on the easy side for sure. Probably lacking a bit too much challenge wise. WoL has more challenging levels, especially on brutal, but certainly not hard overall. I remember finding Starcraft and Broodwar campaigns even easier, mostly because there was no difficulty adjuster.
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On December 03 2014 01:34 mantequilla wrote:Well, "harder" shouldn't be equal to "AI just throws you 5x more units over the same duration". Making campaigns challenging requires a lot of work. It requires reworking all mission maps. And a mission will be still winnable in an hour (you don't want to play same mission for 4 days right?). From a developer perspective this is too much a high investment low return situation  To put my reply in perspective, I am one of the guys who spent two years the Brood War campaigns in Starcraft 2, so I do have some experience in mapmaking, even though it all happened on my free time.
You make maps challenging because that makes for a better game, even if a large fraction of players won't use it. I'm not a professionnal developper, but when making the Brood War campaigns remake, we took that extra step to make sure the maps would be challenging for, say, diamond players. Then we added lower difficulty levels so more people could play them.
Did that require more work? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes. Players really felt they had done something when completing a campaign. Spending three hours to try and beat the final mission usually ends it "that was fun" when they finally do it.
I don't want to sound like I'm teaching Blizzard employees their job, they are professionnal and I'm not. WoL and HotS campaigns are vastly larger than anything I'm ever going to do. But there were difficulty issues with the HotS campaign.
Kerrigan's ability were definitely overpowered. Spawn banelings should never have made it past beta testing, not only did it make your units irrelevant, but it also made enemy units irrelevant. Enemy waves fell in three categories: those I could break in one spawn banelings, in two spawn banelings, and air. You could increase the size of attack waves, I'm not sure I would particularly notice. Predictably, the difficulty mostly came from the timer, not the obstacles you had to overcomme.
An other point is that the AI barely used any abilities. I recall Templar using psionic storm, but the Terran never used cloak or scan. That's an other way to make missions challenging, but it didn't happen, even though it takes a trigger of three lines to make banshees cloak (it is literally three, I did it).
A note about Casual difficulty: I once tried the level where you rescue Raynor in Casual. I a-moved to the other side of the map, went away to cook dinner, and when I returned, Kerrigan was alive and well where I told her to go. I did it again for the second half of the level, and won the achievement "Never have Kerrigan go below 50% hp". I suspect it would be difficult to lose that level in Casual even if you tried.
Now, obviously, this is Casual and maybe that level is an exception. But who exactly is Casual difficulty (or lack thereof) designed for? This level is near the end of the campaign but you can, literally, win it without playing. I find this telling because I don't think this would happen if the difficulties were designed as a way to challenge players. I feel the campaign was design to be "cool" and accessible to lots of players, rather than balanced - even though the two are not mutually exclusive, thanks to difficulty levels.
TL;DR: I agree that the HotS campaign were too easy, and a lot of it came from overpowered abilities. But more to the point, I feel Blizzard didn't really try to make them challenging.
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On December 03 2014 02:02 [F_]aths wrote:I see no valid criticism in this thread that the campaign is in fact too easy for a strategy game campaign. I see some players who have hundreds of hours multiplayer experience bragging about how easy they find the campaign missions.
I haven't played SC2 since 2011 when I beat the campaign on Hard and had like 100 games to my multiplayer name. Maybe less.
Two weeks ago I loaded up WOL single player on brutal. I've beaten almost every mission on my first try. The ones I didn't beat on the first try? Their execution comes down to getting lucky, either by doing the missions in the optimal order (to have the right units) or those stupid Marauder patrols being in the right place, or finding a gimmick solution (DT walls in the last Protoss mission).
The point here being that if the missions didn't come down to luck or knowing some gimmick solutions, I, having not played the game since 2011, and not playing it much at all when I did play it, would have beaten the entire thing on my first try.
And you don't think that's too easy.
OK.
p.s.: on a slight side note, I've been really disappointed with just how few macro missions there are in WOL (and yeah, I know, HOTS is even worse). Every single mission doesn't have to be KKND, but how about 1/5? 1/10? 1/20?
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Remember when devs used to make challenging games that was not achievement hunting? I liked those days man. Only game that gave me those feels in recent years was probably Dark Souls.
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On December 03 2014 02:41 KrOmander wrote:
Remember when devs used to make challenging games that was not achievement hunting? I liked those days man. Only game that gave me those feels in recent years was probably Dark Souls.
There are still plenty of games like that out there, if you know where to look.
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On December 03 2014 02:44 Nafa wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2014 02:41 KrOmander wrote:
Remember when devs used to make challenging games that was not achievement hunting? I liked those days man. Only game that gave me those feels in recent years was probably Dark Souls.
There are still plenty of games like that out there, if you know where to look.
Really? Where do I have to look for these games then? They seem to be doing a great job of avoiding my attention..
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On December 03 2014 02:35 Telenil wrote:
But there were difficulty issues with the HotS campaign.
Kerrigan's ability were definitely overpowered. Spawn banelings should never have made it past beta testing, not only did it make your units irrelevant, but it also made enemy units irrelevant. As I understood Blizzard, Kerrigan was intended to be OP.
Maybe not everyone enjoys being able to almost solo the front line, I also felt that some unit types were superfluous. But HotS is seemingly about Kerrigan as hero character with really strong combat abilities.
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Really? Where do I have to look for these games then? They seem to be doing a great job of avoiding my attention..
Steam would be a great start, there are plenty of games there.
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On December 03 2014 02:41 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2014 02:02 [F_]aths wrote:I see no valid criticism in this thread that the campaign is in fact too easy for a strategy game campaign. I see some players who have hundreds of hours multiplayer experience bragging about how easy they find the campaign missions. I haven't played SC2 since 2011 when I beat the campaign on Hard and had like 100 games to my multiplayer name. Maybe less. Two weeks ago I loaded up WOL single player on brutal. I've beaten almost every mission on my first try. The ones I didn't beat on the first try? Their execution comes down to getting lucky, either by doing the missions in the optimal order (to have the right units) or those stupid Marauder patrols being in the right place, or finding a gimmick solution (DT walls in the last Protoss mission). The point here being that if the missions didn't come down to luck or knowing some gimmick solutions, I, having not played the game since 2011, and not playing it much at all when I did play it, would have beaten the entire thing on my first try. And you don't think that's too easy. OK. p.s.: on a slight side note, I've been really disappointed with just how few macro missions there are in WOL (and yeah, I know, HOTS is even worse). Every single mission doesn't have to be KKND, but how about 1/5? 1/10? 1/20?
(If you want to macro, you can use the multiplayer mode or play a custom vs AI.)
I guess that most RTS single player fans don't even know what macro management is. Did you play Command&Conquer? I did play the campaign and was proud when I had a mammoth tank. (I talk about the 1995 original C&C.)
Of course I consider both campaigns, especially HotS, easy. But I have years of prior RTS experience in multiplayer as well (when I quickly learned, that a lot of early units is better than to save up for a mammoth.)
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On December 03 2014 03:03 Nafa wrote:Show nested quote +
Really? Where do I have to look for these games then? They seem to be doing a great job of avoiding my attention..
Steam would be a great start, there are plenty of games there.
Yes I have a steam account thanks.
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Bisutopia19322 Posts
They did a great job of making the user feel really powerful while controlling the swarm. Unfortunately, it ultimately makes the accomplishment of winning in brutal underwhelming.
I remember playing through the WoL campaign and selecting brutal on my first play through. The stupid mission where resources are rare and lava keeps rising was pretty difficult the first time through. Now I've improved enough where I skate through all brutal levels excluding the final mission. That actually requires you to pay attention if your builds aren't gimmicky.
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EPT
