EPTStarCraft II and Brood War Belong to Different Genres - Pa…
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Dingodile
4133 Posts
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NonY
8748 Posts
LOTV basically is a huge "fuck you" to the entire player base that enjoyed playing WOL/HOTS. Wait you were enjoying yourself during WoL/HotS? It's hard to tell with you man. | ||
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Hildegard
Germany306 Posts
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mYster
10 Posts
On December 30 2016 20:55 Liquid`Ret wrote: Really nice post, been having some of these thoughts myself lately as well. Just the other day I after playing a SC2 game I was thinking of how much I miss just managing my bases/macro everywhere and being occupied with that almost entirely, and finding it very fun to keep busy with. When I played SC:BW I would focus almost entirely on macro and getting my economy near flawless as possible, and then as a result of that I could just awkwardly control my units into a win, and it was very satisfying/fun to me. The actual fighting/micro was a lot less appealing to me than the base management/macro aspects, and even in Sc2, I've felt that way. Just that sc2 offered a lot less in that department than sc;bw did. There's creep spread and injects, but after years it became so boring, BW had so much more to offer in that regard, and even though most tasks completly mundane and largely thanks to outdated interface, it never got boring for some reason. BW also did offer a lot in micro, say with mutalisks or some smaller group of units, but it was a lot different than the type of mass armies control in SC2. Looking back now, I think I've had so much more fun with BW than SC2, and I think I've always felt that way since switching to Sc2, even throughout being a pro and all that, there was always part of me that felt it just wasn't that fun. Maybe it was just nostalgia.. I don't know. That said, when I go back to BW now I find it almost impossible to deal with the unit pathing, lol. Despite having played it for so long before and never having a problem with it then. would be awesome if u would stream BW again Jos, was so awesome back in the days. Loved ur stream and playlist back then, especially ur ZvT and TvZ. | ||
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Meta
United States6225 Posts
On December 31 2016 05:45 Hildegard wrote: Shower thought: Auto-mining or multi-select buildings, more than 12 unit selection etc. could be upgrades in SC3. I would be alright with this. Unlock higher level unit / building selection as tech. Same deal with things like warp gates (should be t3 tech) and other UI functionality that "modernizes" the genre. | ||
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The_Red_Viper
19533 Posts
On December 31 2016 05:38 NonY wrote: The author talked very little about what it means to be a successor. Even when we accept his different sub-genre argument, there remain other indicators that SC2 is a successor. Look at how many players and fans replaced BW with SC2, for instance. He doesn't seem very interested in discussing succession at all and instead focuses entirely on game design in his discussion and arguments, but still chose to make his title, main statement and conclusion about succession. I don't get it. I got enticed into reading something I thought I'd never read before and it's just another game design article that I feel like I've already read five versions of. Wait you were enjoying yourself during WoL/HotS? It's hard to tell with you man. It's weird because the title on his page is different but this one is still in the url. But yeah a little bit on the click bait side of things. You raise a good point though, what does it mean to be a successor. You stated the most obvious criteria: playerbase. In the case of sc2 it's mainly singleplayer though, people were interested to play the campaign. On thos forum we mostly talk about the multiplayer part though, which means we should be interested in the game design a lot. Personally i think a successor should have the same feeling. Obviously this is rather vague though. In other games it's way easier to understand what this means. If you play mario you always have this fast paced gameplay with lots of enemies and your known powerups. While it also adds new things in every edition it still is very close to the games which came before. I think nintendo does a very good job here. In a more complex game like starcraft it's (probably) a lot harder though. What exactly creates this "feeling" here? I think it is fair to say that playing sc2 feels a lot different than playing bw. Whatever you prefer is up to you ofc, but if it wasn't named starcraft and didn't have the same unit skins people probably wouldn't necessarily think it's the same franchise. | ||
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Charoisaur
Germany15958 Posts
On December 31 2016 05:38 NonY wrote: The author talked very little about what it means to be a successor. Even when we accept his different sub-genre argument, there remain other indicators that SC2 is a successor. Look at how many players and fans replaced BW with SC2, for instance. He doesn't seem very interested in discussing succession at all and instead focuses entirely on game design in his discussion and arguments, but still chose to make his title, main statement and conclusion about succession. I don't get it. I got enticed into reading something I thought I'd never read before and it's just another game design article that I feel like I've already read five versions of. That were pretty much exactly my thoughts after reading the article. | ||
2Pacalypse-
Croatia9504 Posts
On December 31 2016 05:38 NonY wrote: The author talked very little about what it means to be a successor. Even when we accept his different sub-genre argument, there remain other indicators that SC2 is a successor. Look at how many players and fans replaced BW with SC2, for instance. He doesn't seem very interested in discussing succession at all and instead focuses entirely on game design in his discussion and arguments, but still chose to make his title, main statement and conclusion about succession. I don't get it. I got enticed into reading something I thought I'd never read before and it's just another game design article that I feel like I've already read five versions of. What do you mean he talked very little about what it means to be a successor? The whole premise of the article is that the two games don't belong in the same (sub)genre. That surely is not "very little". The point about many players and fans replacing BW with SC2 is also not really that relevant to the succession discussion. Then you'd also have to include many players who rejected SC2 and stayed with BW, or even those who returned to the BW after playing SC2. At this point, you're not really discussing the games themselves, but the whole ecosystem, which is perhaps something you expected from the title? To me, it was obvious from the title that the discussion will be about the merits of the games themselves, not all the external factors. But anyways, the title of the article was changed to a less click-baity one, so this argument is pretty moot. I also updated the title here on TL to reflect the change. | ||
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207aicila
1237 Posts
On December 31 2016 06:03 The_Red_Viper wrote: What exactly creates this "feeling" here? I think it is fair to say that playing sc2 feels a lot different than playing bw. Whatever you prefer is up to you ofc, but if it wasn't named starcraft and didn't have the same unit skins people probably wouldn't necessarily think it's the same franchise. Completely agreed. There are some key points where SC2 further diverges from BW, that are completely inconsequential to more high minded ideas like game design and game balance, but likely contribute to "feel". Art direction, sound design, music, hell even the single-player story. BW was distinctively darker and not just in a literal sense. The aliens looked and sounded more alien, and the humans more ragtag and dysfunctional rather than heroic. (which is in keeping with the lore of them being mostly convicts and such) As for the feel of the gameplay, someone who hasn't tried both simply would not be able to understand. + Show Spoiler + BW's story, though far from perfect, echoed a similar darkness through its twists and turns, reveals and betrayals and was quite unique both in genre and in gaming as a whole at the time. In other RTS you may play as one race, or one faction of "good" participants from each race, or you may play the conflict once as the good guys and then again as the bad guys, but not simultaneously. In SC1 you played all races and factions consecutively, good and bad, and ultimately through your actions allowing the evil Kerrigan to triumph and crush all opposition in the Koprulu sector. That was pretty damn rad. SC2's story by comparison is just a predictable, overly cheesy and too-Hollywood-for-its-own-good retelling of WarCraft 3: Space Boogaloo. It's as shallow, derivative and mind-numbingly boring as any Michael Bay Transformers film and similar dreck targeted at the lowest common denominator. | ||
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grizzlybear
19 Posts
brownbear here. Thanks for all the comments. I wanted to touch on the title. It originally referenced StarCraft II as a successor to Brood War. I changed this a few days ago because, as several folks have pointed out, it's clickbaity and not really the point of the article. WordPress creates URLs for pieces when they are first saved, not when they are published, hence why it appears there. At no point has the title referenced succession since publication. The references to succession in the article proper were almost stripped out too, but I ended up keeping them after completing an unrelated project on Yooka Laylee. The blog post reminded me of the many discussions that took place around succession when Nuts and Bolts came out many years ago, so I decided to keep it. In retrospect, probably should have been cut, it is a statement that is too easily interpreted in a negative light. To me succession is neutral, ie there was never really a true successor to Age of Empires 2, but I don't mean this in a negative way or to invalidate Age of Mythology or AOE3. The company just stopped making that kind of game. Thanks again for all your comments. Edit: thanks to the moderation team for updating the title of this thread. | ||
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Deleted User 26513
2376 Posts
It’s not a successor to Brood War – instead, it’s arguably the best-to-date version of an entirely different type of game, the “strategic” or “modern” competitive real time strategy game. It’s more streamlined, more passive, feels harder, and is more focused on the right decisions – it emphasizes the strategy in real time strategy. Brood War and Age of Empires II are more mechanical, more active, feel easier, and are more focused on optimal execution – they emphasize the real time in real time strategy. Don't let the BW elitists read these lines... Some of them might implode in their rage. Otherwise, good read. BTW the author is talking about sub-genres of RTS, not a "different genre" as the title states. | ||
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NeonFlare
Finland1307 Posts
On December 31 2016 05:27 Dingodile wrote: Do we have any great successors? Look what happened to Diablo, PES, FIFA, GTA, CnC, Settlers, AoE etc... Same with movies. I really think the "prime time" at gaming and movie industries were around 1998-2007. While few in numbers, I think there are still some sequels that are actually good/fun. Like the new HITMAN, despite getting a lot of shit due episodic release and online stuff, it's been hailed as second best title in the series or even sharing the top with Blood Money. I think the biggest problem with devs right now is deciding how faithful do they want to stay to the previous titles and how much new stuff or direction do they take. Often stumbling somewhere inbetween failing to satisfy both new and old players alike. | ||
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Euphorbus
92 Posts
SC2 failed in two respects. It wasn't able to bring in 'casual players'. Those were playing LoL instead. I remember when LoL first came out. People here on TL were talking about trying it out, how cartoony it was. They were making fun of it. It seemed to be a toy of a game, or a satire of Dota. You can still find that thread here, I guess. SC2 also failed to even entertain SC BW players. Almost all those top players from SC BW played SC2, but didn't like it. We secretly knew that about many players, though it was obvious for people like Idra. D+ players were making these arguments after the Testie interview. That's basically when it started. When Testie played an early version of SC2 and when he saw how they used new technology/interface to 'improve' the game. Testie's first honest respond was that, albeit looking amazing, they ruined the game by making it so easy. That was way way before MBS debates. We had 'famous' people try to go and talk to Blizzard about our concerns. We heard leaks about how it was David Kim and Cowgomoo (a WC3 top amateur who was WoW community manager or so, and thus allowed to play internal alpha) vs everyone else. We saw their ignorance about many aspects of the game. I think at the very core is the game engine and the way the units are controlled. It starts there. The people that designed unit behavior, they never thought about the game being an RTS. You want the default unit behavior to be very predictable, but also very easy to improve upon with micro. First off all, SC2 actually has the same delay that WC3 has, that Dota2 has, that LoL has, and that SC BW with lan latency and HoN do not have. People just forgot about that and got used to it. But when lan latency plugin first came out for SC BW, it was a revelation to us all. It is amazing to realize that people today play SC2, WC3, Dota2 and LoL with noticeable latency. No one talks about it anymore. People act like Blizzard fixed it. I remember Blizzard even coming out and saying they fiddled with it, the placed base didn't notice the change, and they decided it wasn't humanly noticeable, or something. Second is the way units group up into a blob in SC2. The way units behave is odd and unpredictable. They try to be smart, yes, they are more efficient that way when not microed. But it just makes it so that you do not try to micro the units. I think Starbow fiddled with it and that some aspects can actually be changed using the map editor. But the way units control in default in SC2, that's just wrong for an RTS. They just have to rewrite the game so units move on a predictable grid and only have so many rotation orientations. Any other fancy 3d engine way, and it impedes unit control Every time I go back to SC BW, I am amazed how much crisp moving around zealots is compared to the floating delayed gliding units that keep clumping and bumping into each other. In SC2, units try to interpret your intentions instead of robotically carry out their instructions. I remember when Blizzard made the Phoenix able to move and shoot, and Blizzard proudly came out and said: "We now finally have a unit that you can micro." We all face-palmed so hard. It wasn't that they weren't trying, in areas where they had room to compromise. They were just both unwilling and clueless. But I guess it was the engine as well, as units in SC2 seem to be able to have pixel-accurate locations, and were able to rotate maybe 1 degree at a time. This explains why air units slowly drift away while they bump into each other. People talk about fighting the game in SC BW, but in SC2 you had the same thing for different reasons. Like units drifting away into enemy range. Or the tank stopping to shoot, moving it's turret, but then just not firing, and you canceled it's complete attack by ordering it to move again. Yes, you could also waste attack animations in SC BW. But the whole way that units respond in an RTS game, that concept never entered the minds of the guys who coded the engine and the unit control algorithms. I am sure the people who created it were really talented. I am sure they have very nifty code. In fact, I know they have. But it is completely ill-conceived for use in an RTS game. We had this Lalush posts years ago. But I don't know why that was such a revelation. Maybe because it had videos explaining everything. We had D level players making the exact same arguments without ever having players SC2 yet. Same exact thing about worker saturation/inefficiency. That was not a hard concept to predict. People were actually ridiculed by making a point about the strategic implications of having 100% efficient mining with just two workers. It's just a detail, but these things stack up, at every point of SC2. Blizzard came up with these fundamentally broken ideas and gimmicky units and abilities. Warp gates, for example. The time it takes you to rally in your newly produced units after a 200 vs 200 fight is very important. If you can instantly warp in units, that is just super-powerful. And that means all your units get weaker, because in the end you need to balance the game. Same with zerg unit speed boost on creep. Nice cool idea, especially lore-wise. But in the end it just means zerg can't really fight cost-efficiently off creep. And WoL had a unit like the Thor. I guess the idea was to have a really badass unit, for the sake of badassery. I think originally there were to be superunits like the mothership and the thor. I remember before beta, every day they was an update on how they changed the thor that week, trying to make the Thor work. I am sure the Thor was Dustin's idea and no one dared to stand up to him and kick it out of the game. I also agree very much with the idea that SC BW is much easier to play for beginners. In SC2, everything has abilities and spells. When I first started playing Starcraft it was very simple. As simple as Warcraft. The idea that Starcraft was hard to play only came like five years later when we realized there were Koreans playing with 300 APM. I guess that goes to the core of SC2 and how it tries to protect your ego. This is so evident in the way the ladder works. It was deliberately designed to give every customer the illusion they were skilled already and improving even more. At Blizzard I think they hired some mathematics PhD guy to come up with the matchmaking algorithm, and hiding your actual MMR was super-essential. I guess this goes big time into catering the player that would usually play 5vs5 moba, where you can just blame losing on having bad team-members. I don't know why the game was designed trying to appeal to people who weren't willing to play a 1 vs 1 game where unless you were supertalented and playing 12 hours a day, you would be a complete walkover for any professional player. Really, what is so bad about that? Isn't it amazing that in chess, you have the best player in the world ranked at 2600 and club players are 1200. And a 200 point difference means player A would beat player B 76% of the time. Is it really that bad for a player to realize that there are that many tiers between them and the best player in the world? I don't get it what it is about video games. Take normal sports and people play it for years, without being anywhere close to the best players in the world. In fact, they play for a decade without even improving. But they are having fun. But gamers somehow need to be given the illusion that they are amazing and empowered and doing awesome stuff, no matter their skill level. We used to make the analogy with traction control in F1. F1 had traction control before SC2 beta came out, but the debate in F1 was increasing, as it impeded testing driver skill. They removed traction control from F1 years ago. The debate was about which skills you really want to test in SC2. There should be less testing of mundane clicking, people argued. I don't know why people would say that, and I still do not know. Yes, I understand the argument about bugged pathing in SC BW. That ought to be improved on. But what was so bad about being able to outclick your enemy in SC BW? No one complained about the difficulty of aiming in FPS. No one would introduce autoaim there, 'to make the game more strategic'. People would claim there would be more strategy if the player was given more time to think when he wasn't clicking. People just didn't like clicking, but thought they did like RTS. People argued RTS was real time strategy, and thus should be about strategy. But of course the 'strategy' mean the game had base management, technology tree and resources and contrasted RTS with RTT. And the real-time was there of course to contrast it with turn-based. So the semantics of that was completely silly. I always was under the impression people secretly believed they would be more competitive if the game was easier to play mechanically. Or that people came from WC3 or C&C and they wanted whatever was in WC3/C&C already to also be in SC2, just following the natural development of interface improvements. I think it was said in this thread already, but here is the link to the original gamespot review of Star Craft: http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/starcraft-review/1900-2533189/ You should read what they wrote about the interface and the limitations back in 1998. And then go and think about why, after SC BW first being abandoned in favour of WC3, only to have it resurge again, then the same with SC2, only to resurge again. Remember, it is almost 2017! And Starcraft already had a 'wrong' interface in 1998. Maybe there is just something fundamentally wrong with the whole 'outdated interface'-argument? I believe very strongly that no one on the SC2 dev team understands why people now go back to SC BW, after SC2. People say 'nostalgia'. With WC3 people said 'people just like SF over fantasy'. I even remember a silly video about MBS before MBS about WC2, saying SC BW would be 'better' if it had the same interface as WC2. I think there is just a lot of misunderstanding among developers about the actual appeal of SC BW. And yes, it is a niche and it will never make you a multimillionaire. Let's hope Blizzard doesn't continue with their HD remake. It can only be a disaster. At best, it is only a reskin. But what does that really achieve? I remember times were we would dread Blizzard patching because then our 2.2 MHZ cores would be running on 100% again, running SC BW, as a new patch would disable CPU throttling. And I even remember kespa reverting once, because their new patch gave bnet lag even on lan. Yes, the same lag you now have and accept in SC2/dota2/LoL. I guess Blizzard forgot SC BW lan actually had low latency, since they abandoned low latency for WC3. A HD remake would only give more and more of these problems, and split the playerbase once again. I don't know why people want anything to do with Blizzard after what they did with their lawsuits, suing kespa, forcing OGN and MBC to stop broadcasting games, forcing proleague to switch to SC2, etc etc. | ||
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KeksX
Germany3634 Posts
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 Completely unfair point imho. There is a worthy discussion in both the article as well as in this thread. I'm surprised it's this constructive to be honest. | ||
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Meta
United States6225 Posts
On December 31 2016 06:33 grizzlybear wrote: Hey folks, brownbear here. Thanks for all the comments. I wanted to touch on the title. It originally referenced StarCraft II as a successor to Brood War. I changed this a few days ago because, as several folks have pointed out, it's clickbaity and not really the point of the article. WordPress creates URLs for pieces when they are first saved, not when they are published, hence why it appears there. At no point has the title referenced succession since publication. The references to succession in the article proper were almost stripped out too, but I ended up keeping them after completing an unrelated project on Yooka Laylee. The blog post reminded me of the many discussions that took place around succession when Nuts and Bolts came out many years ago, so I decided to keep it. In retrospect, probably should have been cut, it is a statement that is too easily interpreted in a negative light. To me succession is neutral, ie there was never really a true successor to Age of Empires 2, but I don't mean this in a negative way or to invalidate Age of Mythology or AOE3. The company just stopped making that kind of game. Thanks again for all your comments. Edit: thanks to the moderation team for updating the title of this thread. For a good example in another genre, check the succession / evolution of ARPGs after Diablo 2. It was a wildly popular game in the ARPG genre, and after Diablo 3 was released, it became clear that the differences were unpopular among many fans of Diablo 2. Many former Diablo 2 players gave up on Diablo 3 and now play Path of Exile, which, using a similar argument, you could categorize as being in a more similar genre to Diablo 2 than Diablo 3. It's important to consider what the player is actually doing most of the time when he is playing these games. In SC:BW, a large fraction of his actions and attention are spent clicking production buildings, ordering workers to mine, setting/updating rally points, and partitioning units into control groups. These actions represent an extremely small fraction of what the player is doing in SC2. The player is doing very different things in these games, so it's reasonable to me to consider them to be different genres. I would love a modern RTS where you have to spend most of your time clicking production builds and managing your economy, where actual battles and army movement are a small fraction of the totality of the gameplay. I gather that this is the crux of the argument. | ||
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Foxxan
Sweden3427 Posts
If we look at SC2, those things are gone -yes, But what instead is there to do for the player? Not much actually if you think about it. Your units die so fast when you engage, the micro isnt really much either- perhaps tvz in hots was closest to the "much micro to do through the game" but that aside, its not much to do. Spreadning creep imo is super boring - Clicking buildings in broodwar is more fun here. I want a modern RTS without these things broodwar provide BUT ADD other things which occupie the player/s throughout the game. Iam talking relevant stuff. For example, instead of managing your 1base in broodwar(you build most buildings in your main) if you could manage buildings on the map instead and more "tactic" buildings. The right defence here and there , i want to have vision here. I want to control this area of the map right here. and os on | ||
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The_Red_Viper
19533 Posts
On December 31 2016 07:35 Foxxan wrote: I dont buy the argument that the clicking on buildings, sending workers to mine etc are a core part of what an rts should look like, be like. If we look at SC2, those things are gone -yes, But what instead is there to do for the player? Not much actually if you think about it. Your units die so fast when you engage, the micro isnt really much either- perhaps tvz in hots was closest to the "much micro to do through the game" but that aside, its not much to do. Spreadning creep imo is super boring - Clicking buildings in broodwar is more fun here. I want a modern RTS without these things broodwar provide BUT ADD other things which occupie the player/s throughout the game. Iam talking relevant stuff. For example, instead of managing your 1base in broodwar(you build most buildings in your main) if you could manage buildings on the map instead and more "tactic" buildings. The right defence here and there , i want to have vision here. I want to control this area of the map right here. and os on I actually do not understand how you decide what "should be a core part" tbh. Basically macro should need the least amount of clicks possible? Does it come down to that? Ofc there is no right and wrong per se, but personally i think having more options to be a better macro player is also an important aspect of rts. Streamlining it means there are less options though. | ||
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Euphorbus
92 Posts
I had this argument many times. People wanted to have some meaningful clicking. You could just have it that in your dead time, you would solve sudoku or other puzzles at your buildings to improve production. That sort of was my absurd argument, but it points out that for some people, emergence still plays a role. It is about space marines fighting aliens, in some parallel or future universe. And things you do have to make sense in that context. Like spreading creep in SC2 makes sense both in respect of testing multitasking, and lore-wise (though it has it's problems, as mentioned earlier). But to me, everything can be abstracted away, exactly like it is in chess today. Some people say the rook is a chariot. Others say it is a cannon. No one knows, and it doesn't matter. It is an abstract unit. The same can be true for a future RTS. And if you want 'building management' to be more than clicking, but something that does test multitasking, you can come up with stuff. It is going to be arbitrary, but really in an abstract game, everything is arbitrary. The mineral mining in SC is actually a major reason for its success, as has been discussed to death years ago on this forum. But what was it really? They flipped around gold and wood in WC2 to minerals and gas in SC. Now, the stuff from the stationary building was the tech resource. Add unit ai being bugged, and suddenly you get a nuanced resource collection system that leads to rich strategy. | ||
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KeksX
Germany3634 Posts
On December 31 2016 07:35 Foxxan wrote: I dont buy the argument that the clicking on buildings, sending workers to mine etc are a core part of what an rts should look like, be like. This is a years-old argument to be fair. Even if you don't think it's not a core part of all RTS, it is/was at least a core part of StarCraft. I want a modern RTS without these things broodwar provide BUT ADD other things which occupie the player/s throughout the game. Iam talking relevant stuff. For example, instead of managing your 1base in broodwar(you build most buildings in your main) if you could manage buildings on the map instead and more "tactic" buildings. The right defence here and there , i want to have vision here. I want to control this area of the map right here. and os on This is already the case in Brood War, with bases and units spread out across pretty much the whole map. The elegance in BW's design is that they don't need specific units or buildings for that. The existing ones are enough. | ||
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Euphorbus
92 Posts
I always imagined SC2 maps being way smaller, I guess that plays a role as well. | ||
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