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I'm not sure if this is a rant or a legitimate discussion topic.
I really feel like Starcraft 2 is an amazing game, or has the potential to still become an amazing game. I bought the game when it was released and I loved it! For me, WoL was definitely the peak of Starcraft 2.
I still to this day believe that without getting into detail, with a little bit of tweaking, Starcraft 2 has the potential to become a much more enjoyable game, maybe even equally as enjoyable as Brood War was.
But here begs the question, with all the contact that Blizzard had with Professional players, casters and many other talented people, why do I feel like the game is still not in its final stage!
Did Blizzard not listen to the feedback? Was the feedback wrong? This question has been bothering me for the last 13 years!
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Zurich15365 Posts
SC2 has been on live support with Blizzard for years. They basically keep the lights on and that's about it. Maintenance in the sense of balancing, design and running of the pro scene, map pool, etc have all been outsourced.
With regards to SC2's history: Personally I feel like people reminiscing about the WoL days just view the past through rose colored glasses. WoL was an awful game compared to LotV. LotV is when SC2 finally came together, became a game on its own, and a great one at that.
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Blizzard isn't the same company it used to be. Their approach to supporting legacy games and esports has changed dramatically since Mike Morheim and a bunch of the others left.
But even that aside, the simple truth is that Starcraft 2 was at the peak of its popularity in Wings of Liberty, where it was at its weakest as a game. It failed to capture the Korean audience, and worldwide it was quickly supplanted by MoBA games as the peak of esports.
Blizzard continued to try and revive it and get it back to the top with expansions, new units and even redesigns to the core economy, all of which improved the game dramaticaly but it was too little too late. They missed their window by not getting the game right the first time, and all the while the Free to Play model was radically changing the landscape of PC Gaming, especially competitive PC Gaming.
So now we have a new company that no longer embraces esports the way Blizzard of old once did, and we have a changed landscape for esports as a whole. There just isn't a lot of incentive to keep pushing old titles with outdated business models when instead they can be focusing on something new.
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WoL feels like the "peak" because it was new and there was the kind of hype from the community you can't really get from an older game - even the giants LoL and DotA2 don't have that. But gameplay-wise, WoL was for sure the weakest addon...which is a good thing. Imagine the first iteration actually being the best and it got worse after that.
As for the "it could be much more enjoyable"-part: Yes, it could. But it is really hard to answer your question "what happened" when we don't know what exactly is bothering you. Maybe you have some valid and cool ideas. Or maybe you want 16 more races in the game and it should be more like AoE...what I mean is it is hard to say if your tweaks are something Blizzard actually missed or if it is stuff only you would enjoy but everyone else would think of as terrible.
Lastly, SC2 came out at a weird time. The Esports-thing kinda crashed hard after the world economic crisis. It was a bubble, heavily relying on sponsorship money, while giving out prizepools that couldn't support players at all.
To give you an example: In WC3, one of the biggest tournaments I can remember was the ESWC 2007. A tournament with ~40 players attending. You had to reach Top 3(!) to get any prizemoney...and it was just 3000$. And no, there was no paid travel at all I believe.
When sponsors retracted, the scene collapsed. After that, SC2 got released, but it was still in the middle-spot between "Esports crashed and burned" and "Developers started pumping money into their games".
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i played sc2 in all expansions as master 1 terran and i never liked the new units in the expansions. they were wonky and therefore required several changes. many units also overlapped, such as the tank and the liberator, or the swarm host and the brood lord.
i get that a new expansion is expected to release new units, but i feel blizzard couldnt find new units that didnt occupy an already existing slot. i dont think they planned expansion units when they release wings of liberty.
another thing i disliked as time went by was that patches nerfed early game agression. they buffed queens to an insane level, added the mothership core and in legacy of the void they kinda removed the early game completely with the increased worker start.
i feel that sc2 patches/expansions decreased the uniqueness between units and races, as an easy way to balance the game. but, that also makes the game more boring and generic.
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I don't know who designed disruptor with prism and thought it was a good idea. It basically made me quit the game as it is very anti older player with slower reaction time.
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Okay first off, WoL was not peak SC2 player level, it was just peak viewership. Gameplay and maps were trash in the beginning.
Second, I do agree that the game could stand a few more tweaks here and there, I wish the balance council was a bit more active in their changes and talks to the community, Protoss could probably use a minor buff here or there.
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Northern Ireland26778 Posts
BW is a lightning in a bottle game. It’s very bloody good, but right time, right place esp. when it comes to Korea and being the first mainline eSport. And almost all of the unintended quirks and bugs with unit behaviour actually enhanced its playability. The UI constraints it had were not atypical for the time, indeed mostly better than contemporaries so they weren’t a barrier of entry for most at the time.
It became fully explored, as no RTS ever has, with new depths being plumbed and every new seemingly unstoppable style being defeated by either the playerbase, or by judicious mapmakers.
Dominance begets further dominance in this space. I’m sure plenty of other RTS games could have been very compelling competitive games, and we’d have more points of comparison in this particular genre, but few got even a fraction of the development of understanding by the collective playerbase as BW was THE game that people played for their 1v1 competitive fix especially.
Add to that the misty eyes of nostalgia, or if not that the exuberance of youth. SC2 isn’t competing against SC1 as a game. It’s competing against SC1 + the time we had with that game as kids or young adults without a care in the world. Which is bloody hard
Finally, more enjoyable for who? Everyone and their dog has a different opinion on what good looks like. Not to be disparaging to anyone’s particular opinions. Some want it faster, some slower, some want restrictive UI like BW, some want it even more QoL improvements, etc etc
Where SC2 did fuck up 100% IMO. I’ll leave balance/design considerations out
1. Social features on launch.
WC3 I could log and hang with my buddies, explore various channels, have my clan, and we used to just chill out chatting as much as play. SC2 at launch was a pain, Bnet 2.0 required too many clicks and not enough shortcuts, with no unique names so if you were actually in any kind of demanding game communication was kinda off the table.
I think people forget/nowadays people just chill in Discords etc anyway but the actual social experience of early day WoL was atrocious.
[/b]2. Rolling out the ‘final’ form a bit too late. [/b]
Balance wise, a different thing as that evolved and you need to unleash tons of players to figure out and optimise the game. But Co-Op, QoL UI improvements, all of that improved the product and probably could have been fast-tracked.
3. The release model itself
Linking in with point 2, Blizzard hit the ground running with WoL and were explicitly locked in to a two game expansion model from the very start. However, quite quickly in SC2’s life saw the explosion of F2P games to prominence, indeed, competing directly for the same audience. League/DoTA2 later CS:GO may not be RTS games but they’re all mining the same
competitive niche as SC2 was doing very well in.
The model doesn’t translate as neatly monetising SC2 is harder, but some of its lessons could have been learned and at least part applied, in various forms but they stuck course.
One of the benefits of the F2P model is you can fix problems as they come, or add improvements. With SC2 you couldn’t do that wholesale because you’re bound to deliver much of that in an expansion.
I think SC2 is a great, yet still deeply flawed game. As a 1v1 competitive RTS which was ultimately its design focus, it’s probably second only to its predecessor in overall success, which isn’t bad to be fair.
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On August 17 2023 21:17 Balnazza wrote:
WoL feels like the "peak" because it was new and there was the kind of hype from the community you can't really get from an older game - even the giants LoL and DotA2 don't have that. But gameplay-wise, WoL was for sure the weakest addon...which is a good thing. Imagine the first iteration actually being the best and it got worse after that.
As for the "it could be much more enjoyable"-part: Yes, it could. But it is really hard to answer your question "what happened" when we don't know what exactly is bothering you. Maybe you have some valid and cool ideas. Or maybe you want 16 more races in the game and it should be more like AoE...what I mean is it is hard to say if your tweaks are something Blizzard actually missed or if it is stuff only you would enjoy but everyone else would think of as terrible.
Lastly, SC2 came out at a weird time. The Esports-thing kinda crashed hard after the world economic crisis. It was a bubble, heavily relying on sponsorship money, while giving out prizepools that couldn't support players at all.
To give you an example: In WC3, one of the biggest tournaments I can remember was the ESWC 2007. A tournament with ~40 players attending. You had to reach Top 3(!) to get any prizemoney...and it was just 3000$. And no, there was no paid travel at all I believe.
When sponsors retracted, the scene collapsed. After that, SC2 got released, but it was still in the middle-spot between "Esports crashed and burned" and "Developers started pumping money into their games".
Was it really? There were an enormous amount of SC2 tournaments in the early stages of WoL: NASL, GSTL, MLGs... they might not have lasted that long, and were certainly not sustainable, but I feel SC2 benefitted from an international E-sports boom, which other games took over.
It was just that RTS games are too hard and 1v1 focused. The titles which took over were mostly team games. You need a massive player base first, then form an E-sports scene. SC2 was almost the other way around, it was designed for E-sports.
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Pre-2012 WoL was definitely the most fun as a fan, but that was because the game was still new and people were still figuring stuff out. Even then, people could see the issues, but people were trying so hard to promote the game and everybody was doing their best to convince themselves that it was the new BW so negative feedback was pretty heavily restricted.
Blizzard just tried to do too much. Brand new macro mechanics, a new economic system, and an entire overhaul/redesign of units - not exactly the easiest things to juggle.
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its a high quality game that had an amazing run compared to 99% of games in history, and its still fun and relatively well balanced despite some remaining flaws that exist in competitive play
not sure why we need to be dramatic about it like we fucked up the cure for cancer or something lol
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I mean sc2 wol was for sure the peak of sc2, it wasn't nearly as good as bw but it had many things that where better than bw. I watch so many sc2 tournaments and it was so much fun to watch mlg etc.
End of wol meta broodlord infestor was terrible, then hots came and I fell asleep watching speed medivacs every game, it felt so cheap and bland + swarmhosts meta, and that's when sc2 lost most of it's fanbase, for good reason
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Yeah I also think SC2 is a great game. As a complete package it lacked features, but whether you loved the 1v1 gameplay is pretty subjective. I think Dustin Browder and his team did an exceptional job.
It's just another means to an end. Each game informs the next one. Presumably this means Stormgate will be the next evolutionary stage and will learn from the mistakes of Star2 while harvesting the good stuff.
I also do not think you can tweak a few things and have a eureka moment with SC2. I feel that the problems are really baked into the core design, like unit pathing and clumping, as well as the design of certain units being arguably unhealthy xD.
That said, SC2 is its own thing and serves its playerbase super well. We're going on 13 years. I've been with it the whole time.
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On August 18 2023 04:07 sertas wrote:
I mean sc2 wol was for sure the peak of sc2, it wasn't nearly as good as bw but it had many things that where better than bw. I watch so many sc2 tournaments and it was so much fun to watch mlg etc.
End of wol meta broodlord infestor was terrible, then hots came and I fell asleep watching speed medivacs every game, it felt so cheap and bland + swarmhosts meta, and that's when sc2 lost most of it's fanbase, for good reason
Letting Infestor/Broodlord dominate the game for such a long time when the game was at the height of its popularity was such a massive mistake. They could have pushed out their nerfs to the Infestor much earlier but they didn't, they just left the game as it was until HoTS came out and for almost a year we were subjected to tournament after tournament of the same stale gameplay.
There was a brief period where HoTS injected new excitement in the game but that didn't last long before The Mothership Core and Swarm Host each in their own nefarious ways dominated the meta. Both units were so bad for the game that neither of them exist anymore, or exist as they did back then.
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Northern Ireland26778 Posts
On August 18 2023 01:49 jhjghjhguztrg wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2023 01:28 WombaT wrote:
BW is a lightning in a bottle game. It’s very bloody good, but right time, right place esp. when it comes to Korea and being the first mainline eSport. And almost all of the unintended quirks and bugs with unit behaviour actually enhanced its playability. The UI constraints it had were not atypical for the time, indeed mostly better than contemporaries so they weren’t a barrier of entry for most at the time.
It became fully explored, as no RTS ever has, with new depths being plumbed and every new seemingly unstoppable style being defeated by either the playerbase, or by judicious mapmakers.
Dominance begets further dominance in this space. I’m sure plenty of other RTS games could have been very compelling competitive games, and we’d have more points of comparison in this particular genre, but few got even a fraction of the development of understanding by the collective playerbase as BW was THE game that people played for their 1v1 competitive fix especially.
Add to that the misty eyes of nostalgia, or if not that the exuberance of youth. SC2 isn’t competing against SC1 as a game. It’s competing against SC1 + the time we had with that game as kids or young adults without a care in the world. Which is bloody hard
Finally, more enjoyable for who? Everyone and their dog has a different opinion on what good looks like. Not to be disparaging to anyone’s particular opinions. Some want it faster, some slower, some want restrictive UI like BW, some want it even more QoL improvements, etc etc
Where SC2 did fuck up 100% IMO. I’ll leave balance/design considerations out
1. Social features on launch.
WC3 I could log and hang with my buddies, explore various channels, have my clan, and we used to just chill out chatting as much as play. SC2 at launch was a pain, Bnet 2.0 required too many clicks and not enough shortcuts, with no unique names so if you were actually in any kind of demanding game communication was kinda off the table.
I think people forget/nowadays people just chill in Discords etc anyway but the actual social experience of early day WoL was atrocious.
2. Rolling out the ‘final’ form a bit too late.
Balance wise, a different thing as that evolved and you need to unleash tons of players to figure out and optimise the game. But Co-Op, QoL UI improvements, all of that improved the product and probably could have been fast-tracked.
3. The release model itself
Linking in with point 2, Blizzard hit the ground running with WoL and were explicitly locked in to a two game expansion model from the very start. However, quite quickly in SC2’s life saw the explosion of F2P games to prominence, indeed, competing directly for the same audience. League/DoTA2 later CS:GO may not be RTS games but they’re all mining the same
competitive niche as SC2 was doing very well in.
The model doesn’t translate as neatly monetising SC2 is harder, but some of its lessons could have been learned and at least part applied, in various forms but they stuck course.
One of the benefits of the F2P model is you can fix problems as they come, or add improvements. With SC2 you couldn’t do that wholesale because you’re bound to deliver much of that in an expansion.
I think SC2 is a great, yet still deeply flawed game. As a 1v1 competitive RTS which was ultimately its design focus, it’s probably second only to its predecessor in overall success, which isn’t bad to be fair. "Locked into two expansions". How many expansion did every other Blizzard RTS have? "yet still deeply flawed game". That always suggests that other games are perfect. Are they? And yet for some reason, Brood War never took off in any other country than korea. How? Its the perfect game, isnt it? [/b][/b]
BW and TFT were one apiece. They didn’t launch the vanilla games with a public roadmap to two expansions, they launched with campaigns for all the factions, SC2 launched with 1/3 and from day one announced the intention to feed another 1/3 with expansions.
SC1/BW are some of the biggest selling PC games of all time, they did plenty fine outside of Korea. They just didn’t have a big eSports scene outside of there for decades because literally no game had that for well over a decade.
The snarkiness as to BW being a ‘perfect game’ is ridiculous in the extreme given I say that it’s flawed in the first fucking paragraph.
Christ on a bike man, chill the bap as we say over here
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On August 17 2023 18:31 zatic wrote:. LotV is when SC2 finally came together, became a game on its own, and a great one at that.
its like half C&C and half SC1. its awesome.
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Here's the thing for me: I just moved to Seoul and while I'm here I'd like to watch some dang eSports live. But Starcraft is the only one I love! Anything FPS based is just too quick to follow, even something like R6 Siege which has a ton of strategic elements. MOBAs just have too much going on and are so tough to follow if you don't actually play the game. I just flat-out love watching Starcraft, always have since the launch of SC2 (BW was just a bit too hard to follow for me before remastered -- I have to say the UI for viewers is pretty elite for Starcraft now) and still find it hard to figure out how it didn't take off -- the warp-speed chess of the whole thing really does translate for me.
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Northern Ireland26778 Posts
On August 20 2023 02:46 ScrappyRabbit wrote:
Here's the thing for me: I just moved to Seoul and while I'm here I'd like to watch some dang eSports live. But Starcraft is the only one I love! Anything FPS based is just too quick to follow, even something like R6 Siege which has a ton of strategic elements. MOBAs just have too much going on and are so tough to follow if you don't actually play the game. I just flat-out love watching Starcraft, always have since the launch of SC2 (BW was just a bit too hard to follow for me before remastered -- I have to say the UI for viewers is pretty elite for Starcraft now) and still find it hard to figure out how it didn't take off -- the warp-speed chess of the whole thing really does translate for me.
Agreed, SC is relatively easy to follow, it’s 1v1, observers do a great job of showing the important stuff and casters generally explain things quite well. Other games the broadcast is trying to paint a picture of 10 or 12 players having duels of varying importance in multiple locations and it’s hard to capture all that action.
I guess few eSports get many viewers of people who’ve no familiarity with the game in question, and other games just have a bigger player pool.
Perhaps I’m biased but I do think SC is a more visceral spectacle that translates better to watching than many other titles.
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EPT
