Manifesto of Game Design: Individual Freedom

The properties that are desirable belong to the dynamics, not the units themselves. It's very hard to design good open-ended dynamics because they are emergent -- you can't see directly from the pieces you have what they're going to be capable of, unless they follow very basic rules which makes a trivial game.

I believe you're looking at BW through rose-tinted glasses. It has some cool unexpected dynamics, and it is better than SC2 in that regard, but it's unfair to say BW was that much better at letting units perform different roles on the fly. The thing that gave BW more magic was that any given engagement seemed to have lots of opportunities to gain an edge. It actually didn't have that many but it feels like it because of the unit control and pathing limits. So you had to do APM triage on the fly. That's like playing checkers and spinning plates at the same time. SC2 doesn't have this as much, for a lot of reasons, mostly because of unit control and pathing.

The units in SC2 also have bad design features and I wish they were better. But it's easy to overplay the design-based success of BW. Everything you mentioned from BW that isn't basic micro is just a quirk of the engine. The performance of things in SC2 is much more uniform and that comes out in how similar things feel.

The best way to fix this from a unit design standpoint would be to try and create units that perform much better when you babysit them. But that will only go so far.

To get back to the main idea of your post, individual freedom, I think you're actually naming a deeper design phenomenon with the language of dynamics (similar to what I said above). Not that this is bad -- the job of design is to connect mechanics and dynamics through explicit choices and general guidance. You make the game pieces, you don't directly make the gameplay.

What you really mean by individual freedom is that any given focal point for player choice has lots of complex ramifications. Some of them might be powerful and most should probably be irrelevant 99% of the time. But the benefit of saturating a game with these options is that you have an overflow of things that might matter. Most of the time things are straightforward, otherwise you boggle players with incomprehensible dynamics. But there is always an opportunity to turn a game situation on its ear by taking advantage of an unusually relevant dynamic. That's the kind of thing that makes you say "oh shit, good call, genius play". But if you overburden players with a huge list of complicated things the pieces do, they can't even get to the dynamics because they are just trying to remember their list of options, let alone form an idea of what will happen after choosing one.

Thus the ideal is a distribution of dynamics that weights towards some basic principles but always leave room for unlikely situations, all of which arises out of pieces and rules that are as simple as possible.

In the case of BW and SC2, we get a lot of mileage out of the fact that units have a certain damage, fire rate, hp, armor, range, and they can be anywhere in a 2D plane throughout time, and you can manipulate the last two. That's a lot of variability! Obviously the sheer multitude of possibility doesn't mean anything can happen -- speedlings surrounding a hellion squad will have the same result no matter where it happens on the map. But depending on the other things in the game, like terrain features, small adjustment can make a big difference. And that's not even considering all the splashy unit abilities that provide additional tactical and strategic depth.

That's why I point to the not-as-sexy "pathing" for BW's dynamics. This is where you are manipulating the units, throughout XY and T. Homogeneous SC2 engine makes homogeneous SC2 dynamics.

And lots of other complicating factors, like unit design. I didn't even get into interchangeability, which relates to what you were saying. But the "hardcounter"-iness of SC2 units makes them less interchangeable than BW units, so they can't perform as many roles.



Nice post, I like the lens of "freedom" for evaluating design. Looking forward to more.

What you're referring to as "freedom" and "depth" is commonly referred to as "strategy vs execution".

In BW, micro was arguably alot more important, this made the "excecution" of your play alot more important. Micro was needed for pretty much every single unit at a high level of play. It made every unit seem to have alot more "depth" because a hard counter suddenly becomes a soft counter in the hands of a good player.

Here in SC2, its pretty much all about building the counters and the strategy. ie you build roaches/lings and ill just build collosus and you'll just build corruptors. You get broodlords and ill just get vikings and you'll just get vikings. etc.
Of course the micro is still here, it just plays a smaller role compared to strategy.
This limits depth because, hard counters will always be hard counters no matter how hard you micro. Units will only be viable in certain situations unlike in BW.
Of course there are examples of BW like units here in SC2 such as Terran bio(thank god they decided to take out the warhound). Maybe phoenix play or blink stalker micro. But thats pretty much it. I cant think of anything else.

Just a TLDR version of your main points.

This is a great topic and part of why I think it is great is because I disagree with some of the points. Still, it is well written and makes a good case.

I don't know how relevant this will be to the topic, but it is the first thing I came to think about when I read it:

When diablo 3 was released, the design team promised millions of possible rune and skill paths. This was mostly due to the fact that diablo 2 was loved because of its replayability. They wanted a game with so many options that nobody would ever get tired of it.

Problem is that with D3, as with all new games, both designers and players expect balance. In other words we want each of those abilities and also each of their combinations to be equally strong compared to others. This in stark contrast to how the expectations were for D2 back in the days.

The result? D3 was released with millions of combinations of skills, most of them doing the same or very similar things. Sure, the game was fairly balanced, but the depth of gameplay mechanics was just not there. A few months in, there remained one or two builds that were viable in inferno for each class. At least that was how it looked to me.

The issue with making each unit viable on its own, without the synergy of a larger group, or at least not a pre-defined group is that some units will then simply be better than others. It is also very hard to say which unit will be better before players get to play them. Especially why they would be better. The result of that is that you must make each units individual "gimmick" less extreme to avoid imbalances. Then you suddenly lose a lot of flavour as well. Even brood war had way less pressure on it to be balanced than sc2 had from release.

I think that our crusade for perfect balance will always stand in the way of ultimately interesting units on an individual level. It is just too complex of an analysis to make, at least in my oppinion.

That isn't legit information. We have had ''most hated unit pools'' before, few people dislike the marine. The marine is great.

Collosi won the ''most hated unit award''.

Agree with alot of other things you say but i think your a bit too hard on the BW/SC2 analogy. And the swarm host doesn't have to be that one-dimensional, i think it has potential for a little ''freedom''.

you mean like blizzard keeps on saying that
they dont care about widow mines being used for aggression instead of map control?
that they are OK with the core being used offensively?

Stop thinking so one-dimensional and think back to the early days of SC2 and how everything started. There was no meant to be and blizzard hardly ever said something like that. Things just settled in a certain way and now people "always knew it from the start, because it was designed in X,Y way". That the community was wrong a thousand times with those claims and that they are only right with the current ones, is just a matter of claiming everything from the start, so somethings got to be right.