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On December 31 2016 00:57 GGTeMpLaR wrote:
To be fair, can you actually even imagine a worthy successor to BW?
Starbow
The things outlined on the Blog have been decanted and purified for years by people like me or Lalush, or Kabel, or Xiphias or Decemberscalm, these things are not impassable obstacles, they can be corrected to create some very cool RTS. Things like SC2BW or as I mentioned Starbow itself, have used these ideas in the past to create very cool interactions.
It is up to the SC2DevTeam to actually implement some of these things
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On December 31 2016 00:23 207aicila wrote:Show nested quote +SC:BW didnt have such a bad interface because they thought it was a good idea but because they just couldnt make it any better back then. (for any reason: time, money, skill, processing power, etc) People keep spouting this here and on reddit and it is factually not true. There are actual printed interviews from the 90s you can find in which the developers clearly point out some of these are conscious, deliberate design decisions.
Of course it was a conscious decision to a certain degree. It didnt just "randomly" happen that you could select 12 units without the devs knowing how this is possible. There is no doubt that they decided on a 12 unit selection limit.
The question is though why they did that. I think the reason is not as simple as 12 is the best number or anything like that. There are many factors at play here like how to make the interface look like. BW had such a low resolution that every pixel was important. Selecting more than 12 units would have required a different kind of interface. It also needs more RAM which back then could have actually played a role. Not a big role perhaps but every little bit counts.
Anybody who says, that blizzard did some hardcore testing on a scientific level and have empirically proven that a 12 unit selection limit is the objectively best solution, is an idiot. The reasons for the 12 unit selection limit are most likely due to designers and developers just thinking "12, yeah, sounds like a good number...".
On December 31 2016 00:17 ZiggyPG wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2016 00:03 RoomOfMush wrote:On December 30 2016 23:16 ZiggyPG wrote:
The ease with which micro and macro can be executed in SC2 would make it difficult for future games (e.g. SC3, bound to happen sometime in the future) to switch back to the previous model used in SC1. Though it would change the gameplay drastically, I find it hard to believe rudimentary solutions such as limiting the number of units in a control group or removing multi selection of buildings would appeal to a modern gamer. And despite the competitive aspects of such solutions one must not forget a professional scene has no right to exist without a casual playerbase. I dont think intentionally dumbing down the interface is a good way to go. SC:BW didnt have such a bad interface because they thought it was a good idea but because they just couldnt make it any better back then. (for any reason: time, money, skill, processing power, etc) But there are many things they could change. The soft-cap on bases mentioned in the article (any many articles before) can easily be improved in various ways, just look at the different SC2 mods that are already out there. The pathfinding can be changed to favor more open formations instead of those tight circles with all units huddling together. A bigger highground advantage and more area-of-effect spells with long durations would make the terrain and movement more important during engagements. There are probably a dozen other ideas that could be tried to improve the game but blizzard isnt willing to do it. Maybe they are scared, maybe they already gave up, maybe its pride or maybe they actually like the game the way it is, but I refuse to believe the game could not have been much better without making the interface intentionally horrible. Changing the pathing of units also sounds like a forced way of fixing things.
My suggestion was not to make the pathing "worse". The pathing can still be good, just a different algorithm that produces different but similarily good results. Instead of having units walk around in water-drop like shapes they could perhaps make units spread out a little bit more by default similar to how units moved in BW. (not the bad pathfinding, just the formation)
Btw: Its nice to have BW vs. SC2 debates back on this forum.
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StarCraft II’s design decisively treads the strategic fork in the road. It emphasizes the player’s plan and how they adjust that plan rather than their execution of that plan. It limits sprawling economic playstyles, producing more passive games with less action.
Broodwars mechanical emphasis creates, in many cases, its strategical depth-- and the lack of it creates a lack of depth for sc2 as well. The article seems to argue contrarily, but this paragraph the truth slips out. The mechanics of sc2 emphasis a game of unit hard counters, rock paper scissor like combat and death ball turtling,. That doesnt sound very strategically advanced to me. If sc2's design emphasizes turtling and passivity, broodwars mechanical focus creates strategical demands and opportunities of its own. All the builds, harassment, precise timing attacks etc on broodwar are possible and only possible because the game is mechanically demanding. Strategies, unit compositions and build orders would all be drastically different without significant mechanics, and Broodwar ISNT a game of passivity or death balling.
So I really dont see how the game that lends itself to simplistic hard counters, and sitting still, can be construed as the more strategically emphasized game over the one where the game is active and dynamic.
It's true that sc2's design focused on making decision in the abstract in order to win, vs Broodwar necessitating some actual ability in carrying it out, but that doesnt mean those abstract decisions were particularly advanced/impressive in terms of strategical depth. Quite the contrary it was a millstone around sc2's neck.
edit: There is a distinction to be made between something being hard and it being harsh. SC2 is not a hard game, broodwar is a hard game --- classic rts' in general are hard games, actually. SC2 is an easy game, but its a harsh game. More akin to casually strolling through a field of flowers on a nice summer day, though, if you were to trip, the ground itself would rip you to shreds and melt your bones. Harsh, but easy.
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The major difference that needs to be recaptured is an indication of skill in how fast you can click factories. The removal of multiple building selection and adding a unit selection cap would go a long way towards bridging the gap between the genres.
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On December 31 2016 01:59 RoomOfMush wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2016 00:23 207aicila wrote:SC:BW didnt have such a bad interface because they thought it was a good idea but because they just couldnt make it any better back then. (for any reason: time, money, skill, processing power, etc) People keep spouting this here and on reddit and it is factually not true. There are actual printed interviews from the 90s you can find in which the developers clearly point out some of these are conscious, deliberate design decisions. Of course it was a conscious decision to a certain degree. It didnt just "randomly" happen that you could select 12 units without the devs knowing how this is possible. There is no doubt that they decided on a 12 unit selection limit. The question is though why they did that. I think the reason is not as simple as 12 is the best number or anything like that. There are many factors at play here like how to make the interface look like. BW had such a low resolution that every pixel was important. Selecting more than 12 units would have required a different kind of interface. It also needs more RAM which back then could have actually played a role. Not a big role perhaps but every little bit counts. Anybody who says, that blizzard did some hardcore testing on a scientific level and have empirically proven that a 12 unit selection limit is the objectively best solution, is an idiot. The reasons for the 12 unit selection limit are most likely due to designers and developers just thinking "12, yeah, sounds like a good number...".
And by contrast, anyone who says that BW had 12 unit selection cap because the technology was too limited sounds like an Xbox casual who never played a game in his life until 2009 and doesn't know anything about computers. Just saying, if you wanna come in hot and fast and loose with generalizations. 
No, of course they didn't do scientific tests and stuff like that, but they clearly intended to force some micro in high supply situations. As another poster stated previously, StarCraft 64 had a higher selection limit of 18, presumably because micro-ing with an N64 controller is ridiculously hard, despite the N64 being a very weak and limited machine (the weakest of its console generation IIRC, notoriously difficult to program for and I believe the 1st to require some games to be capped at 30 FPS). Warcraft's was 4 units I think? It's been a long time. Age of Empires 1 which came out in 1996 and had a wildly different design philosophy to Blizzard's allowed somewhere in the mid 20s, which was almost half of the population cap, by contrast.
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On December 31 2016 00:10 2Pacalypse- wrote:As someone who didn't follow SC2 beta at all, can anyone explain to me why that quote in the article from Dustin Browder didn't make everyone skeptical about SC2? At least pro/top players. It's fairly obvious, from that quote alone, that the focus of the SC2 designers was to make the game appealable to the new/casual players. And I think it's pretty obvious that trying to balance the game for the professionals that was designed with that kind of a mindset is pretty futile. Here's the quote in question (bolded the most important part): Show nested quote +Oh dear, we are thinking about how to modify the geysers since forever. We want you to have to manage your economy more. And the geysers would be a perfect start point, since they were quite unspectacular in the past: You sent three workers there, and that’s it. So we decided to change the mechanic, which hasn’t succeeded thus far. It was extremely hard to balance the new system. Had we decided to regulate the gas supply necessarily by hand, to collect the regular amount of resources, we would have severerly disadvantaged the newer players, since they couldn’t afford expensive units like Battle Cruisers and Templar. But just these units have the most appeal to casual players. Therefore, we would have to modify the mechanic in that way, that you still earn enough gas if you leave the geysers to themselves. But then, Micro experts would collect by far more resources and would produce only very mighty units like Carriers and Archons. That would also be unfair. In addition, the constant geyser-checking would become annoying very quickly. We want to reward the players, not annoy them.
The last part of that quote by Browder is the most obvious problem with SC2.
"We want to reward the players, not annoy them."
Do you guys feel rewarded or annoyed when mass adepts shade into your mineral line?
Rewarded or annoyed from massing carriers/swarmhosts?
Rewarded or annoyed from the 5 rang warp prism pickup?
Rewarded or annoyed by that liberator sieged behind your mineral line?
Rewarded or annoyed that two widow mines killed 30 probes?
Rewarded or annoyed that mech is near un-viable, even on the "mech re-work patch?"
Rewarded or annoyed that an invulnerable nydus + 8 queens with transfuse are now in your base?
Rewarded or annoyed that your base dries up incredibly fast compared to HOTS/WOL?
Rewarded or annoyed by proxy 3 rax reaper TvZ/TvT?
Rewarded or annoyed by pylons killing your depots from underneath your ramp for free?
LOTV basically is a huge "fuck you" to the entire player base that enjoyed playing WOL/HOTS. They took everything ever wrong with SC2, and then put it into the final expansion pack, without ever tweaking or reverting the annoying things.
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Had the same thoughts since day 1 of SC2. Well put.
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On December 31 2016 00:57 GGTeMpLaR wrote:
To be fair, can you actually even imagine a worthy successor to BW?
It's a dream we'll never see
I dont think it would be impossible. If the sc2 developpers from the start with all that work and huge budget had asked themselves what is so good and unique in bw instead of trying to make a completely different game. I believe that you could make a game that is very similar to bw, even keeping most of the bugs like mineral glitches and muta stacking, while making it look better and adding just a few.
Its almost like they had this strange oedipus complex from the start. instead of starting with basically bw hd and then tweak it a little bit (like csgo compared to 1.6) they did their own thing.
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On December 31 2016 03:05 207aicila wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2016 01:59 RoomOfMush wrote:On December 31 2016 00:23 207aicila wrote:SC:BW didnt have such a bad interface because they thought it was a good idea but because they just couldnt make it any better back then. (for any reason: time, money, skill, processing power, etc) People keep spouting this here and on reddit and it is factually not true. There are actual printed interviews from the 90s you can find in which the developers clearly point out some of these are conscious, deliberate design decisions. Of course it was a conscious decision to a certain degree. It didnt just "randomly" happen that you could select 12 units without the devs knowing how this is possible. There is no doubt that they decided on a 12 unit selection limit. The question is though why they did that. I think the reason is not as simple as 12 is the best number or anything like that. There are many factors at play here like how to make the interface look like. BW had such a low resolution that every pixel was important. Selecting more than 12 units would have required a different kind of interface. It also needs more RAM which back then could have actually played a role. Not a big role perhaps but every little bit counts. Anybody who says, that blizzard did some hardcore testing on a scientific level and have empirically proven that a 12 unit selection limit is the objectively best solution, is an idiot. The reasons for the 12 unit selection limit are most likely due to designers and developers just thinking "12, yeah, sounds like a good number...". And by contrast, anyone who says that BW had 12 unit selection cap because the technology was too limited sounds like an Xbox casual who never played a game in his life until 2009 and doesn't know anything about computers. Just saying, if you wanna come in hot and fast and loose with generalizations. No, of course they didn't do scientific tests and stuff like that, but they clearly intended to force some micro in high supply situations. As another poster stated previously, StarCraft 64 had a higher selection limit of 18, presumably because micro-ing with an N64 controller is ridiculously hard, despite the N64 being a very weak and limited machine (the weakest of its console generation IIRC, notoriously difficult to program for and I believe the 1st to require some games to be capped at 30 FPS). Warcraft's was 4 units I think? It's been a long time. Age of Empires 1 which came out in 1996 and had a wildly different design philosophy to Blizzard's allowed somewhere in the mid 20s, which was almost half of the population cap, by contrast.
The original red alert had unlimited unit selection already in 1996.
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On December 31 2016 00:10 2Pacalypse- wrote:As someone who didn't follow SC2 beta at all, can anyone explain to me why that quote in the article from Dustin Browder didn't make everyone skeptical about SC2? At least pro/top players. It's fairly obvious, from that quote alone, that the focus of the SC2 designers was to make the game appealable to the new/casual players. And I think it's pretty obvious that trying to balance the game for the professionals that was designed with that kind of a mindset is pretty futile. Here's the quote in question (bolded the most important part): Show nested quote +Oh dear, we are thinking about how to modify the geysers since forever. We want you to have to manage your economy more. And the geysers would be a perfect start point, since they were quite unspectacular in the past: You sent three workers there, and that’s it. So we decided to change the mechanic, which hasn’t succeeded thus far. It was extremely hard to balance the new system. Had we decided to regulate the gas supply necessarily by hand, to collect the regular amount of resources, we would have severerly disadvantaged the newer players, since they couldn’t afford expensive units like Battle Cruisers and Templar. But just these units have the most appeal to casual players. Therefore, we would have to modify the mechanic in that way, that you still earn enough gas if you leave the geysers to themselves. But then, Micro experts would collect by far more resources and would produce only very mighty units like Carriers and Archons. That would also be unfair. In addition, the constant geyser-checking would become annoying very quickly. We want to reward the players, not annoy them.
Well at the time, the community was pretty split. There were a lot of posts about how terrible bnet .2 was (there was a picture comparing the new b.net to a rock and lost). I remember reading an interview between one of the sc2 hire-ups at Blizzard and he actually asked "Do you really want chat channels?" I mean, come on, a lot of it is common sense but WoL was pretty lacking when it came out. We only remember it as a good period because sc2 got even worse. At the time of sc2 beta, a lot of people had hopes that Blizzard would fix things. The defense for sc2 was that BW took 10+ years to mature, and sc2 only has been out for a year so give it time. I remember when I went to watch GSL Open 2 Grand Finals between Nestea and MKP (Foxer), the entire hall cheered just because it wasn't close spawn, meaning they would actually get a game instead of a cheese. That's how you already know it wasn't going to be a good design game. People just had hopes that Blizzard would fix things, that was what was driving it.
Unfortunately, time came and passed and the problems got worse. At least we got all those features for bnet we always wanted, 4+ years later lol.
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On December 31 2016 03:07 avilo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2016 00:10 2Pacalypse- wrote:As someone who didn't follow SC2 beta at all, can anyone explain to me why that quote in the article from Dustin Browder didn't make everyone skeptical about SC2? At least pro/top players. It's fairly obvious, from that quote alone, that the focus of the SC2 designers was to make the game appealable to the new/casual players. And I think it's pretty obvious that trying to balance the game for the professionals that was designed with that kind of a mindset is pretty futile. Here's the quote in question (bolded the most important part): Oh dear, we are thinking about how to modify the geysers since forever. We want you to have to manage your economy more. And the geysers would be a perfect start point, since they were quite unspectacular in the past: You sent three workers there, and that’s it. So we decided to change the mechanic, which hasn’t succeeded thus far. It was extremely hard to balance the new system. Had we decided to regulate the gas supply necessarily by hand, to collect the regular amount of resources, we would have severerly disadvantaged the newer players, since they couldn’t afford expensive units like Battle Cruisers and Templar. But just these units have the most appeal to casual players. Therefore, we would have to modify the mechanic in that way, that you still earn enough gas if you leave the geysers to themselves. But then, Micro experts would collect by far more resources and would produce only very mighty units like Carriers and Archons. That would also be unfair. In addition, the constant geyser-checking would become annoying very quickly. We want to reward the players, not annoy them. The last part of that quote by Browder is the most obvious problem with SC2. "We want to reward the players, not annoy them." Do you guys feel rewarded or annoyed when mass adepts shade into your mineral line? Rewarded or annoyed from massing carriers/swarmhosts? Rewarded or annoyed from the 5 rang warp prism pickup? Rewarded or annoyed by that liberator sieged behind your mineral line? Rewarded or annoyed that two widow mines killed 30 probes? Rewarded or annoyed that mech is near un-viable, even on the "mech re-work patch?" Rewarded or annoyed that an invulnerable nydus + 8 queens with transfuse are now in your base? Rewarded or annoyed that your base dries up incredibly fast compared to HOTS/WOL? Rewarded or annoyed by proxy 3 rax reaper TvZ/TvT? Rewarded or annoyed by pylons killing your depots from underneath your ramp for free? LOTV basically is a huge "fuck you" to the entire player base that enjoyed playing WOL/HOTS. They took everything ever wrong with SC2, and then put it into the final expansion pack, without ever tweaking or reverting the annoying things.
i was going to pretty much say what you said here, but the CRUCIAL differance is that dustin browder is NO LONGER working on the balance and i think you too could feel the turn in changes from when david kim took full power
i think when he ninja nerfed PDD so it couldnt block brood shots, then nerfed ghosts the next patch due to the game nestea threw (look at the last engagement, its obvious he threw, no anti air, all corruptors into broods and no detection vs mass ghost? he threw deliberately to make Dkim nerf and it worked!
www.youtube.com
Broodwars ENTIRE appeal comes from the ability to have STRATEGY, you could go factory, barracks, starport tech make just about any composition so long as you covered air and ground, if you had the micro as proven by Boxer!
Wol/hots had this, where you had options you could rush/allin with builds that included units from any and all tiers, but in LOTV terran and protoss basically have their backs to the wall in terms of options, and nothing... NOTHING kills the game as hard as losing when you did the only thing you still can
take parasitic bomb, that now makes it so terran cant turtle whatsoever but zerg still can, so in the situation where zerg literally digs in turtling for vipers, you can do nothing as a mech terran, you simply have to take it once the vipers pop
or the random liberator nerf so it can no longer trade with corruptors, or the ghost nerf which means you no longer have a proper counter to the infestor, only soft counters
everytime i play the game i am reminded of all the greatness and potencial the game once had, and how limited and trapped i am playing against the clock be it ultra, templar, broods or vipers, even with the new mech buffs, it is extremely scary being forced to depend on single units like the raven or the siege tank, knowing that david kim can nerf these units at anytime (recent siege tank fire rate nerf from 2.0 to 2.14)
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On December 31 2016 03:07 avilo wrote:
LOTV basically is a huge "fuck you" to the entire player base that enjoyed playing WOL/HOTS. They took everything ever wrong with SC2, and then put it into the final expansion pack, without ever tweaking or reverting the annoying things.
here you go speaking for everyone again. everyone in the clan i'm in loves WoL. half of them love LotV and play it every week. the other half thinks it has too many units and is too complex and they keep on playing WoL.
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This is just my opinion but if sc2 had limited unit control cap i'd prolly quit the game. Atleast for me it brings out an annoying "fight against the game" kind of feeling. Sc2 in hots was the best for me personally but i don't mind current Lotv. This post doesn't have much of a flowing idea except that i like sc2 more than the original i guess.
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On December 31 2016 03:22 Elroi wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2016 03:05 207aicila wrote:On December 31 2016 01:59 RoomOfMush wrote:On December 31 2016 00:23 207aicila wrote:SC:BW didnt have such a bad interface because they thought it was a good idea but because they just couldnt make it any better back then. (for any reason: time, money, skill, processing power, etc) People keep spouting this here and on reddit and it is factually not true. There are actual printed interviews from the 90s you can find in which the developers clearly point out some of these are conscious, deliberate design decisions. Of course it was a conscious decision to a certain degree. It didnt just "randomly" happen that you could select 12 units without the devs knowing how this is possible. There is no doubt that they decided on a 12 unit selection limit. The question is though why they did that. I think the reason is not as simple as 12 is the best number or anything like that. There are many factors at play here like how to make the interface look like. BW had such a low resolution that every pixel was important. Selecting more than 12 units would have required a different kind of interface. It also needs more RAM which back then could have actually played a role. Not a big role perhaps but every little bit counts. Anybody who says, that blizzard did some hardcore testing on a scientific level and have empirically proven that a 12 unit selection limit is the objectively best solution, is an idiot. The reasons for the 12 unit selection limit are most likely due to designers and developers just thinking "12, yeah, sounds like a good number...". And by contrast, anyone who says that BW had 12 unit selection cap because the technology was too limited sounds like an Xbox casual who never played a game in his life until 2009 and doesn't know anything about computers. Just saying, if you wanna come in hot and fast and loose with generalizations. No, of course they didn't do scientific tests and stuff like that, but they clearly intended to force some micro in high supply situations. As another poster stated previously, StarCraft 64 had a higher selection limit of 18, presumably because micro-ing with an N64 controller is ridiculously hard, despite the N64 being a very weak and limited machine (the weakest of its console generation IIRC, notoriously difficult to program for and I believe the 1st to require some games to be capped at 30 FPS). Warcraft's was 4 units I think? It's been a long time. Age of Empires 1 which came out in 1996 and had a wildly different design philosophy to Blizzard's allowed somewhere in the mid 20s, which was almost half of the population cap, by contrast. The original red alert had unlimited unit selection already in 1996.
Not only are you right now that I think about it, but also that's probably the best example for this discussion. Case closed lol.
On December 31 2016 03:46 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2016 03:07 avilo wrote:
LOTV basically is a huge "fuck you" to the entire player base that enjoyed playing WOL/HOTS. They took everything ever wrong with SC2, and then put it into the final expansion pack, without ever tweaking or reverting the annoying things. here you go speaking for everyone again. everyone in the clan i'm in loves WoL. half of them love LotV and play it every week. the other half thinks it has too many units and is too complex and they keep on playing WoL.
There's still non-hackers playing WoL? I am genuinely shocked.
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On December 31 2016 03:05 207aicila wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2016 01:59 RoomOfMush wrote:On December 31 2016 00:23 207aicila wrote:SC:BW didnt have such a bad interface because they thought it was a good idea but because they just couldnt make it any better back then. (for any reason: time, money, skill, processing power, etc) People keep spouting this here and on reddit and it is factually not true. There are actual printed interviews from the 90s you can find in which the developers clearly point out some of these are conscious, deliberate design decisions. Of course it was a conscious decision to a certain degree. It didnt just "randomly" happen that you could select 12 units without the devs knowing how this is possible. There is no doubt that they decided on a 12 unit selection limit. The question is though why they did that. I think the reason is not as simple as 12 is the best number or anything like that. There are many factors at play here like how to make the interface look like. BW had such a low resolution that every pixel was important. Selecting more than 12 units would have required a different kind of interface. It also needs more RAM which back then could have actually played a role. Not a big role perhaps but every little bit counts. Anybody who says, that blizzard did some hardcore testing on a scientific level and have empirically proven that a 12 unit selection limit is the objectively best solution, is an idiot. The reasons for the 12 unit selection limit are most likely due to designers and developers just thinking "12, yeah, sounds like a good number...". Just saying, if you wanna come in hot and fast and loose with generalizations.
Go back and read my post again. I never said anything about the 12 unit selection limit or said it was due to technical limitations. I was talking about the interface in general and was strategically vague.
On December 31 2016 03:22 Elroi wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2016 03:05 207aicila wrote:On December 31 2016 01:59 RoomOfMush wrote:On December 31 2016 00:23 207aicila wrote:SC:BW didnt have such a bad interface because they thought it was a good idea but because they just couldnt make it any better back then. (for any reason: time, money, skill, processing power, etc) People keep spouting this here and on reddit and it is factually not true. There are actual printed interviews from the 90s you can find in which the developers clearly point out some of these are conscious, deliberate design decisions. Of course it was a conscious decision to a certain degree. It didnt just "randomly" happen that you could select 12 units without the devs knowing how this is possible. There is no doubt that they decided on a 12 unit selection limit. The question is though why they did that. I think the reason is not as simple as 12 is the best number or anything like that. There are many factors at play here like how to make the interface look like. BW had such a low resolution that every pixel was important. Selecting more than 12 units would have required a different kind of interface. It also needs more RAM which back then could have actually played a role. Not a big role perhaps but every little bit counts. Anybody who says, that blizzard did some hardcore testing on a scientific level and have empirically proven that a 12 unit selection limit is the objectively best solution, is an idiot. The reasons for the 12 unit selection limit are most likely due to designers and developers just thinking "12, yeah, sounds like a good number...". And by contrast, anyone who says that BW had 12 unit selection cap because the technology was too limited sounds like an Xbox casual who never played a game in his life until 2009 and doesn't know anything about computers. Just saying, if you wanna come in hot and fast and loose with generalizations. No, of course they didn't do scientific tests and stuff like that, but they clearly intended to force some micro in high supply situations. As another poster stated previously, StarCraft 64 had a higher selection limit of 18, presumably because micro-ing with an N64 controller is ridiculously hard, despite the N64 being a very weak and limited machine (the weakest of its console generation IIRC, notoriously difficult to program for and I believe the 1st to require some games to be capped at 30 FPS). Warcraft's was 4 units I think? It's been a long time. Age of Empires 1 which came out in 1996 and had a wildly different design philosophy to Blizzard's allowed somewhere in the mid 20s, which was almost half of the population cap, by contrast. The original red alert had unlimited unit selection already in 1996.
I might remember this incorrectly but I think it had a limit but the limit was ridiculously high. Something like 256 or 512 units. But it has been some time since I last played a C&C game.
I am feeling like this thread is about to derail into a balance whine thread soon. I think we shouldnt start blaming the game for units/skills we dont like and instead stick to the original topic.
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On December 31 2016 03:48 207aicila wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2016 03:22 Elroi wrote:On December 31 2016 03:05 207aicila wrote:On December 31 2016 01:59 RoomOfMush wrote:On December 31 2016 00:23 207aicila wrote:SC:BW didnt have such a bad interface because they thought it was a good idea but because they just couldnt make it any better back then. (for any reason: time, money, skill, processing power, etc) People keep spouting this here and on reddit and it is factually not true. There are actual printed interviews from the 90s you can find in which the developers clearly point out some of these are conscious, deliberate design decisions. Of course it was a conscious decision to a certain degree. It didnt just "randomly" happen that you could select 12 units without the devs knowing how this is possible. There is no doubt that they decided on a 12 unit selection limit. The question is though why they did that. I think the reason is not as simple as 12 is the best number or anything like that. There are many factors at play here like how to make the interface look like. BW had such a low resolution that every pixel was important. Selecting more than 12 units would have required a different kind of interface. It also needs more RAM which back then could have actually played a role. Not a big role perhaps but every little bit counts. Anybody who says, that blizzard did some hardcore testing on a scientific level and have empirically proven that a 12 unit selection limit is the objectively best solution, is an idiot. The reasons for the 12 unit selection limit are most likely due to designers and developers just thinking "12, yeah, sounds like a good number...". And by contrast, anyone who says that BW had 12 unit selection cap because the technology was too limited sounds like an Xbox casual who never played a game in his life until 2009 and doesn't know anything about computers. Just saying, if you wanna come in hot and fast and loose with generalizations. No, of course they didn't do scientific tests and stuff like that, but they clearly intended to force some micro in high supply situations. As another poster stated previously, StarCraft 64 had a higher selection limit of 18, presumably because micro-ing with an N64 controller is ridiculously hard, despite the N64 being a very weak and limited machine (the weakest of its console generation IIRC, notoriously difficult to program for and I believe the 1st to require some games to be capped at 30 FPS). Warcraft's was 4 units I think? It's been a long time. Age of Empires 1 which came out in 1996 and had a wildly different design philosophy to Blizzard's allowed somewhere in the mid 20s, which was almost half of the population cap, by contrast. The original red alert had unlimited unit selection already in 1996. Not only are you right now that I think about it, but also that's probably the best example for this discussion. Case closed lol. Show nested quote +On December 31 2016 03:46 JimmyJRaynor wrote:On December 31 2016 03:07 avilo wrote:
LOTV basically is a huge "fuck you" to the entire player base that enjoyed playing WOL/HOTS. They took everything ever wrong with SC2, and then put it into the final expansion pack, without ever tweaking or reverting the annoying things. here you go speaking for everyone again. everyone in the clan i'm in loves WoL. half of them love LotV and play it every week. the other half thinks it has too many units and is too complex and they keep on playing WoL. There's still non-hackers playing WoL? I am genuinely shocked.
when my clan mates who only want to play WoL want a 2v2 i play with them as their team mate. it takes us 1 to 3 minutes to find a game and i don't think our opponents are hacking. i don't play WoL 1v1s but some of my clan mates do and they find games quickly.
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The cap limited unit selection is by design of course, In AoE II it was something like 24 units, in some community patch they tried the unlimited selection and that just broke the game (imagine that you can choose 80 Paladins at once), so the community decided in something like 36 cap , even in HD you can play with MBS but in competitive games and ladder you never see that in the original, these things help to put some mind in the game, not just one mindless click and you are just good to go.
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What i think is very interesting is the claim that easy to understand tasks like selectign new workers and send them to mining are exactly the tasks which make the game fun and rewarding. I think this is 100% true, one of the best feelings in sc2 is creep spreading, exactly because it is close to the "tedious" tasks of bw.
Ofc you also wanna interact with the opponent and play certain strategies, but the actual fun part is mastering certain mechanics because it's easy to notice that you got better.
At the same time it's extremely frustrating to lose a game because you didn't scout the dt shrine (which is more of a "hard task")
Imo real time games (always) create fun through mechanics. No matter if it is guitar hero, super mario or starcraft. If you create a real tiem game where the focus is more on the strategy side (strategy inlcudes decision making, scouting, building the right unit composition, etc) the gameplay becomes easily frustrating because unlike a round based game you cannot make decisions which are based on all the available information (or rather the information available is exremely limited)
Ofc opinions might differ here, but to me this train of thought makes sense.
I am not quite sure if i would say that sc2 therefore is in a different sub genre, but sure we can define it that way. It's probably more about the time the games released though. The next big rts game will probably have almost no mechanics requirements, at least on the macro side of things. The more unique tasks you have to do (multitask) the less likely it imo is that a game has success these days. Even though that would speak against the premise of lots of easy tasks creating fun i guess, dunno^^
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yet another article which creates a thread to bash blizzard devs for even breating air... nothing constructive
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On December 31 2016 05:15 PharaphobiaSC wrote:
yet another article which creates a thread to bash blizzard devs for even breating air... nothing constructive
Your post on the other hand is a gleaming bastion of usefulness and help.
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EPT
