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Hey folks, Today I’ll be talking about why StarCraft II feels difficult to play. I’ll be focusing on the design of the game’s mechanics and why they lead the game to feel hard. This is a spiritual follow-up to an earlier post on mechanics; if you missed it, I recommend checking it out first prior to reading this one. How Players Experience Real Time Strategy GamesLet’s start by discussing the thought process most people employ when playing real time strategy games. In general, players: - Play the game as fast as they comfortably can - Execute tasks in priority order Playing faster is better than playing slower. There’s always things that need to be done in a real time strategy game. Completing tasks is valuable in and of itself because it exercises the core mechanics of the game, something that RTS players inherently enjoy – similar to how players who play shooters enjoy the mechanics of shooting. Furthermore, completing tasks increases the player’s odds of winning – whether by controlling their army better, producing more units, or building more production facilities. Players are therefore incentivized to play games as fast as they can, with their physical speed and personal comfort threshold acting as the ceiling. In addition to executing tasks quickly, players also prioritize the set of work in front of them. There’s always more to do than can reasonably be accomplished at once, even for the fastest professionals. Players are incentivized to do important work before unimportant work because it increases their chances of winning. A well-designed title will reinforce this by ensuring the most common, important tasks have strong inherent rewards as well – think of the smooth animation and satisfying plop of dropping a mule on a mineral line. Putting these two things together, players tend to execute tasks quickly and they tend to order these tasks based on what they think is most important. ...
This is a well written blog and i think it's worth to discuss it.
The full article can be read here: illiteracyhasdownsides.com
Author is https://twitter.com/brownbear_47
edit: I also recommend watching his two videos about "StarCraft II for Age of Empires Players" which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdW7bhyBsV6vmvn0BISfxxw/videos
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Very interesting read indeed !
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That's a pretty fair assessment.
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Valuable intel. I totally agree about what' said.
What makes SC2 unfun/difficult for me is that fights happen too quickly. If i'm 0.5 seconds late to the reaction I might lose a game that lasted for 10 minutes.
I had the same feeling in broodwar to a certain extent (like not EMPing arbiters soon enough), but it wasn't ALWAYS the case.
Now with the focus on abilities the game feels more punishing than ever to me.
I wish this guy would review Supreme Commander Forged Alliance now, just to see what he thinks of the set of power mechanics present in this game.
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I agree, simply put the harassment options do too much damage for the amount of work needed to pull it off, or the other way around, the amount of effort needed to stave off game ending harassment damage is too much compared to the effort needed to harass.
But if you think about it this way, isn't this what blizzard wanted all along? Rewarding aggressive play-styles and thus having shorter, more exciting/explosive games?
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Honestly I feel like SC2 gets better and better but the worst parts of it are still leftovers HOTS introduced. Widow mines, oracles, boost vacs all give the harrasser a giant edge over the other player. There's almost no reason NOT to do one of these things as the risk is so low and the reward is insanely high.
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On November 01 2016 01:19 Kingsky wrote:
I agree, simply put the harassment options do too much damage for the amount of work needed to pull it off, or the other way around, the amount of effort needed to stave off game ending harassment damage is too much compared to the effort needed to harass.
But if you think about it this way, isn't this what blizzard wanted all along? Rewarding aggressive play-styles and thus having shorter, more exciting/explosive games?
yes, for the superficial viewing enjoyment (for me it's not great cause whenever I see a situation develop in a game I know it can be reversed instantly for whatever reason and anybody may catch the win in an instant as the game can nearly never build up in complexity and players do mostly short term stuff) and against the fun of playing and the strategic/tactical depth of the game
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this is actually interesting - if it is based on reality - as an insight into why people who think this way dont enjoy sc2. i personally dont experience feelings described there (i for example do not find joy in slowly learning menial tasks) but apparently someone does.
my biggest gripe with these kinds of essays is the generalization. it seems to me that the author fails to realize that he descibed only a certain group of people, not everyone. this is related to the recent talk about blizzard "not listening to community" as it is simply impossible to cater to everyone at once ...
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On November 01 2016 04:41 opisska wrote:
this is actually interesting - if it is based on reality - as an insight into why people who think this way dont enjoy sc2. i personally dont experience feelings described there (i for example do not find joy in slowly learning menial tasks) but apparently someone does.
my biggest gripe with these kinds of essays is the generalization. it seems to me that the author fails to realize that he descibed only a certain group of people, not everyone. this is related to the recent talk about blizzard "not listening to community" as it is simply impossible to cater to everyone at once ...
Well he does talk like a game designer would.
It's like manipulating high level concepts above the usual talk going on about here which is closer to specific unit designs or balance.
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I hate to disappoint you, but not everyone can be a winner. In any game - fast, slow or whatever - you will lose 50% of your games in a fair ladder (think chess etc.). The only way out is to play in a team and blame your team mates for your losses. But Starcraft's main focus is 1v1. It is the 1v1 that is just hard - no matter what game.
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The article is cool, but for me the contents feel a little bit too similar to how BW elitists tried to reason why sc2 is a dead gaem. And some of the things written is just a bit shallow. You could often hear how perfect injects are what makes or breaks zerg, but in reality zerg is much more about gamesense on when you can and when you can't drone. Also a lot of people complain on how you can just lose in an instant, but once you learn more about the game and become aware of threats, it is usually possible to counter them or count for them to some degree even without borderline godlike reflexes. But you need some time invested into the game to really learn about these things.
Anyways its rare to see good analytics on the game, or just general game design, so it was a nice read. And some of the things can be tought-inducing. Maybe we could use a bit more "solid" type mechanics in the game alongside the "comeback/big play" kind of mechanics that makes things like disruptor wars exciting, even if the first one can become boring for a spectator sport because of the slow snowball effect that kills hype.
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This stuff feels like Japanese soldiers fighting long after the war is over. It's pretty clear the dev team likes everything you dislike about the game. In fact they think that after 2 expansions full of new harassment options, there's still not enough offense and harassment in the game so they're going to give dark templar BLINK. They crashed the plane a long time ago, and now they're just peeing on the cinders.
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i reckon dark templar's the one who shoulda had blink from the beginning, and none of this stalker bs, keeping dragoon
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On November 01 2016 07:58 mishimaBeef wrote:
i reckon dark templar's the one who shoulda had blink from the beginning, and none of this stalker bs, keeping dragoon
eheh, I think the same^^
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I kind of agree, but as long-time player I also have something to add. I believe that the over-flow of abilities and spells has added more focused strategy to the game. This meaning that if you don't go with one specific strategy, you don't have sufficient time or resources to change strategies effectively. Whereas, for example, in brood war, you could try one strategy and if it failed, you could instantly change strategies and turn the tide of the game very quickly. As for the harass aspect, there are so many different ways to harass in SC2. Many more than there were in previous versions of the game. But the addition of easily accessible, over-powered defensive units such as queens and mothership cores make the harassment aspect of the game almost non-existant.
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It feels like there are too many spells and abilities to detract from the main battle, and not enough to prolong the said battles to a degree where it is satisfying to watch and understand. I don't think they should have punished deathballs with lots of AoE but rather with larger unit models, tankier gateway units(especially stalker and sentry) and more mobility spells that is not blink for protoss. A displacement spell on sentries would do much more to help protoss kite than forcefield- which forces both sides to get stuck in a slugfest- and would actually make interesting plays.
In WoL I felt this way what was happening was mainly on your screen and everything else was secondary and was easier to avoid. Watching zergling-bane muta against marine-tank was clean. Broodlord-infestor was clean. Skytoss and terran were very clean. Archon toilet was not a convoluted scheme. Even the deathball was clean(It was stupid, but it was clean). I feel weird watching and thinking about LotV right now. I really can't put my feet into the shoes of the current pros. Now ravager bile and blinding cloud and abduct makes siege tanks and lurkers and colossi wacky, liberator is a fucking weird concept. Disruptor and widow mines are just there to stop two armies from engaging. There is no time for a breather since the bases run out of resources so easily. Everything happens to be everywhere.
Watching pros dance around and endless stream and sources of AoE is pretty annoying, just like how it was, watching the swarm host spam all day every day. I also don't like the mothership core, it acts more like a get out of jail free card, as an old WoL zerg.
Above everything, the races may reach a perfect 50% winrate against each other, but when the game is too convoluted, hard to get into or understand, it's just not fun to watch. It was the case in the end of WoL already and that game already had its faults. I remember some 1-1-1 terrans with great skill having %85 on ladder back in the day when blord infestor were supposed to dominate so it's worth questioning if it even really matters if you balance or change the game around that level or not.
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In the comments of the video, he says he is the player Parfait. If it is him, he finished 2nd in wcg 2007, which for AOE3 was basically the only major tournament of note from year to year. So he definitely knows hows his AOE material.
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On November 01 2016 01:19 Kingsky wrote:
But if you think about it this way, isn't this what blizzard wanted all along? Rewarding aggressive play-styles and thus having shorter, more exciting/explosive games?
No, it isn't what Blizzard wanted at all. And that is what is so shocking about how SC2 has been designed.
They had a game that rewarded aggressive play that had shorter, exciting and explosive games: Wings of Liberty. And lo and behold it was the top E-Sport in the world for a time.
But Blizzard decided they needed to remove game ending early aggressive play. But they found out the hard way that led to boring early games, so to create more action throughout the game, they created more harass tools. But it was a misguided goal from the start that put Blizzard on the carousel of harrassment and defensive tools. And often times, the harrassment tools are so strong they can be game ending anyway. We traded actual early game battles between armies with lots of opportunities for micro, for Widow Mine drops and Oracles.
And so where is SC2 now in terms of a E-Sport?
Proof is always in the pudding.
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EPT
