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On October 24 2011 15:02 Azzur wrote:Show nested quote +On October 24 2011 14:56 myopia wrote:On October 24 2011 14:39 Techno wrote:On October 24 2011 14:33 myopia wrote:On October 24 2011 14:22 Techno wrote:Lotta hand waving at a concept that no one has really been able to figure out: Why is BW > SC2? The answer is frankly SC2 would have to be in-fucking-credible to outshine the legend of BW. You don't want to hear this but its the only answer: Give it time. On October 24 2011 14:20 ChineseWife wrote:
agreed. also does anyone cringe when david kim and browder use the term raid, referring to harass in sc2? For some reason that really bothers me and I guess shows me they are somewhat out of touch with the sc2 scene. Nope, not I anyways. They have their own jargon that they use cause they work all day together and discuss the game wayyyy more than you do. It bothers me way more how desperate everyone is to paint Browder/Kim/Blizzard with such negativity all the time. You guys take anything you can find and try to say "this is why SC2 sucks" with it. Its just a lil annoying after a while. Just admit it: your on TL right now 'cause SC2 kicks ass. Thanks, Blizzard! You are misguided. I'm on TL right now because I loved BW and the community is awesome enough to keep me around despite my dislike of SC2. The 'give it time' schtick no longer applies. It's had over a year. No number of new strats will overcome the marauder, roach, colossus, force field, thor, etc.. 'Giving it time' meant something to me when I thought HotS would make SC2 better. I don't like a single thing they revealed at Blizzcon. I don't care if it'll be tweaked before the next expansion is released - the very fact that they considered these ideas good enough to go public with is deeply concerning. Frankly, I think there is no possible way you could be appeased, and even if you were, you would likely hide it. Lets pretend sc2 is actually C&C18 so we can finally stop yearning for our childhoods. SC2 has only been out for a year. That is nothing! Its not the actually dislike of sc2 that I have a grudge against, its people pretending to explain it. Ad Hominem has never been a valid form of debate. It does not negate my post, which was little more than a rehash of the OP and countless other arguments that have been made against SC2 since the beta. This is how we feel. I find it hilarious when Techno posts to "give it time" whilst myopia says that "The 'give it time' schtick no longer applies". Anyways, I do agree with myopia with this one - SC2 has been out for more than a year already and concrete judgements can/should be made about the game. Although I don't agree with many of the "BW supporters who dislike SC2" people here. This is not to say that I like everything in SC2 over BW, but on the whole, I consider SC2 a superior game. As mentioned earlier, I do have concerns about the HoTS direction, but will need to actually play/see the game to make concrete judgements.
Can I ask you a question? How much of BW have you watched and played to conclude that SC2 is the superior game. Just curious.
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OP could be onto something, maybe, but I don't completely get this post.
you go from
"What is a Warhound but a marauder that can be made in a factory? Why does Terran need another meaty unit that can deal high damage to armored units? Why do the Protoss need another muta counter if the Phoenix was originally designed to BE the muta counter?"
to
"Basically, it would be much better if Browder focused less on trying to "shore up" the weaknesses of the races with fancy gimmicky units. Instead, he should design units that are more conventional but ballsier and play to the races' strengths""
how are you proving here that he's just shoring up the weaknesses with gimmicky units by using basically the example of a mech marauder and this new aoe aa tempest. both units do nothing but attack and they have a fairly simple purpose and at it seems like they both have simple weaknesses too. the tempest bad against strong air units in small numbers and bad against ground I suppose. the mech marauder weak against non armored units that it won't deal as much damage to, just like marauders are weak against marines and lings. not only are these like the simplest units from hots, they overlap with existing units from the same race, so they're not good examples of shoring up specific weaknesses of races.
then you argue that it's a design flaw to not know how the units will perform and how they change the gameplay? first of all, you already said it's a flaw to make units with niche roles, doesn't that conflict with this? niche and vague? then you use the example of oracle, when that's a really simple scout around harass eco unit imo. the shredder is much more ambiguous imo, or the swarm host I think is way more ambiguous in it's purpose. is that type of siege going to be effective or even needed when melee gets buffed anyway? is it going to be more used in defense against drops or something like that? or eco harass? I think that's much more questionable than "is oracle going to be the economic harasser and scouting unit that it's designed to be". what else is that unit going to do? maybe be effective in normal attacks by disabling cannons? possibly, but that's only 1 out of 3 spells and even this spell fits this eco harass/scouting purpose. I guess it's debatable. I didn't like the use of oracle as an example.
I don't see how DTs, devourers, lurkers, medics, dark archons, valkyries or corsairs are somehow significantly less gimmicky or niche than battle hellions, warhounds, swarm hosts, vipers, oracles, replicants and tempests... have you really put thought into this? devourers, dark archons, valkyries, DTs... situational gimmicky and niche is what I see. sure, valkyrie isn't gimmicky, but it is niche and situational.
I don't see how you get super excited about the "tons of uses" for corsairs and not get super excited about the tons of uses for vipers... and how is mind control units a good example of bad things that Browder did to Red Alert, when dark archon is a mind control unit that was introduced in BW?
and I didn't like the chess comparison either. you are talking about how he's mudding up the racial differences and making gimmicky units. I wanna point out that given the restrictions of the chess game board, the units are pretty much as gimmicky as they can get, and there's 2 races with the exact same units. btw I've seen people fumble with their knights pretty often, so it's not like they're all that simple. not experienced players of course.
overall I think the units feel good. I think swarm hosts are better for a swarm race than lurkers would, I think viper is exactly what is needed. I think battle hellions and warhounds fit mech even though battle hellions really changed the style of mech with the transformer thing, because I was used to thinking of terrans as sort of the steam punk of scifi, but I think mech is from flavor perspective something that should be further emphasized in terran design and this more modern design sells to the younger generation of players so I won't complain too much. for protoss it's a little more complicated, but the flying high tech ball moving around harassing economy first protoss perfectly, replicants and tempests are a little controversial, but they're not totally off. the flavor was taken into consideration
even though this reply seems quite negative I think you might have a point somewhere in there about embracing racial weaknesses more, but now I'm just saying that whatever you're saying, I don't think it's well said, except for the creatively inside the box thing. I'm gonna steal that and use it myself somewhere someday.
I think the point you could be making about emphasizing racial playstyle differences would also benefit more from analyzing the new units of WoL. I think in WoL there might have been a lot of big mistakes in both playstyle and flavor design decisions, and those 2 things are absolutely completely different issues and should not be mixed the way you did here regarding HotS.
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On October 24 2011 16:47 Dante08 wrote:Show nested quote +On October 24 2011 15:02 Azzur wrote:On October 24 2011 14:56 myopia wrote:On October 24 2011 14:39 Techno wrote:On October 24 2011 14:33 myopia wrote:On October 24 2011 14:22 Techno wrote:Lotta hand waving at a concept that no one has really been able to figure out: Why is BW > SC2? The answer is frankly SC2 would have to be in-fucking-credible to outshine the legend of BW. You don't want to hear this but its the only answer: Give it time. On October 24 2011 14:20 ChineseWife wrote:
agreed. also does anyone cringe when david kim and browder use the term raid, referring to harass in sc2? For some reason that really bothers me and I guess shows me they are somewhat out of touch with the sc2 scene. Nope, not I anyways. They have their own jargon that they use cause they work all day together and discuss the game wayyyy more than you do. It bothers me way more how desperate everyone is to paint Browder/Kim/Blizzard with such negativity all the time. You guys take anything you can find and try to say "this is why SC2 sucks" with it. Its just a lil annoying after a while. Just admit it: your on TL right now 'cause SC2 kicks ass. Thanks, Blizzard! You are misguided. I'm on TL right now because I loved BW and the community is awesome enough to keep me around despite my dislike of SC2. The 'give it time' schtick no longer applies. It's had over a year. No number of new strats will overcome the marauder, roach, colossus, force field, thor, etc.. 'Giving it time' meant something to me when I thought HotS would make SC2 better. I don't like a single thing they revealed at Blizzcon. I don't care if it'll be tweaked before the next expansion is released - the very fact that they considered these ideas good enough to go public with is deeply concerning. Frankly, I think there is no possible way you could be appeased, and even if you were, you would likely hide it. Lets pretend sc2 is actually C&C18 so we can finally stop yearning for our childhoods. SC2 has only been out for a year. That is nothing! Its not the actually dislike of sc2 that I have a grudge against, its people pretending to explain it. Ad Hominem has never been a valid form of debate. It does not negate my post, which was little more than a rehash of the OP and countless other arguments that have been made against SC2 since the beta. This is how we feel. I find it hilarious when Techno posts to "give it time" whilst myopia says that "The 'give it time' schtick no longer applies". Anyways, I do agree with myopia with this one - SC2 has been out for more than a year already and concrete judgements can/should be made about the game. Although I don't agree with many of the "BW supporters who dislike SC2" people here. This is not to say that I like everything in SC2 over BW, but on the whole, I consider SC2 a superior game. As mentioned earlier, I do have concerns about the HoTS direction, but will need to actually play/see the game to make concrete judgements. Can I ask you a question? How much of BW have you watched and played to conclude that SC2 is the superior game. Just curious.
I watched BW near the start of the Boxer dropship-era (pre-1.08) till when FEs became the norm. During this time, I was recording vods using a 56k (!) modem (at around 5k/sec). Before TL even existed, I followed BW from www.broodwar.com (wow, that was a amazing website for it's time). I continued to watch now and then but it was a bit too hard. Thus, I missed the Nada, iloveoov and Savior era.
I returned around 2008 just before Flash because super-dominant. What I found interesting was that strategy advances was still made despite the game was 10 years old at that time. I watched alot of BW (thanks to jon747) until SC2 came out. Still, I was a BW elitist until I started playing and watching SC2. Slowly, I began to see many of the fine points of SC2 and now prefer it. Now, I only watch OSL and MSL finals for BW, but almost all GSL matches.
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Yeah and the biggest difference of all: speed.
in BW zerg ground units are ALL faster than protoss ones, which are ALL faster than terran ones(spellcasters and vults aside), creating an asymettric dynamic.
in SC2 all races have roughly equal speed, creep aside
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On October 24 2011 14:22 Techno wrote:
You don't want to hear this but its the only answer: Give it time.
I swear, the Rapture is coming! Just give it time! If it hasn't happened yet, you haven't waited long enough! Behold my completely unfalsifiable argument!
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Great read, thanks! Agreed, too.
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On October 24 2011 17:08 Azzur wrote:Show nested quote +On October 24 2011 16:47 Dante08 wrote:On October 24 2011 15:02 Azzur wrote:On October 24 2011 14:56 myopia wrote:On October 24 2011 14:39 Techno wrote:On October 24 2011 14:33 myopia wrote:On October 24 2011 14:22 Techno wrote:Lotta hand waving at a concept that no one has really been able to figure out: Why is BW > SC2? The answer is frankly SC2 would have to be in-fucking-credible to outshine the legend of BW. You don't want to hear this but its the only answer: Give it time. On October 24 2011 14:20 ChineseWife wrote:
agreed. also does anyone cringe when david kim and browder use the term raid, referring to harass in sc2? For some reason that really bothers me and I guess shows me they are somewhat out of touch with the sc2 scene. Nope, not I anyways. They have their own jargon that they use cause they work all day together and discuss the game wayyyy more than you do. It bothers me way more how desperate everyone is to paint Browder/Kim/Blizzard with such negativity all the time. You guys take anything you can find and try to say "this is why SC2 sucks" with it. Its just a lil annoying after a while. Just admit it: your on TL right now 'cause SC2 kicks ass. Thanks, Blizzard! You are misguided. I'm on TL right now because I loved BW and the community is awesome enough to keep me around despite my dislike of SC2. The 'give it time' schtick no longer applies. It's had over a year. No number of new strats will overcome the marauder, roach, colossus, force field, thor, etc.. 'Giving it time' meant something to me when I thought HotS would make SC2 better. I don't like a single thing they revealed at Blizzcon. I don't care if it'll be tweaked before the next expansion is released - the very fact that they considered these ideas good enough to go public with is deeply concerning. Frankly, I think there is no possible way you could be appeased, and even if you were, you would likely hide it. Lets pretend sc2 is actually C&C18 so we can finally stop yearning for our childhoods. SC2 has only been out for a year. That is nothing! Its not the actually dislike of sc2 that I have a grudge against, its people pretending to explain it. Ad Hominem has never been a valid form of debate. It does not negate my post, which was little more than a rehash of the OP and countless other arguments that have been made against SC2 since the beta. This is how we feel. I find it hilarious when Techno posts to "give it time" whilst myopia says that "The 'give it time' schtick no longer applies". Anyways, I do agree with myopia with this one - SC2 has been out for more than a year already and concrete judgements can/should be made about the game. Although I don't agree with many of the "BW supporters who dislike SC2" people here. This is not to say that I like everything in SC2 over BW, but on the whole, I consider SC2 a superior game. As mentioned earlier, I do have concerns about the HoTS direction, but will need to actually play/see the game to make concrete judgements. Can I ask you a question? How much of BW have you watched and played to conclude that SC2 is the superior game. Just curious. I watched BW near the start of the Boxer dropship-era (pre-1.08) till when FEs became the norm. During this time, I was recording vods using a 56k (!) modem (at around 5k/sec). Before TL even existed, I followed BW from www.broodwar.com (wow, that was a amazing website for it's time). I continued to watch now and then but it was a bit too hard. Thus, I missed the Nada, iloveoov and Savior era. I returned around 2008 just before Flash because super-dominant. What I found interesting was that strategy advances was still made despite the game was 10 years old at that time. I watched alot of BW (thanks to jon747) until SC2 came out. Still, I was a BW elitist until I started playing and watching SC2. Slowly, I began to see many of the fine points of SC2 and now prefer it. Now, I only watch OSL and MSL finals for BW, but almost all GSL matches.
You're the first person on the forums I've seen who prefers sc2 over bw after watching both games xD. Nothing wrong of course, everybody is entitled to their own opinions. I watch plenty of SC2 as well and I find TvZ to be the most entertaining matchup (mirrors excluded). The other matchups involving Protoss are just boring to me IMO mainly because of the colossus, which I hope blizzard can fix someday.
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On October 24 2011 16:56 grappasc wrote:+ Show Spoiler +OP could be onto something, maybe, but I don't completely get this post.
you go from
"What is a Warhound but a marauder that can be made in a factory? Why does Terran need another meaty unit that can deal high damage to armored units? Why do the Protoss need another muta counter if the Phoenix was originally designed to BE the muta counter?"
to
"Basically, it would be much better if Browder focused less on trying to "shore up" the weaknesses of the races with fancy gimmicky units. Instead, he should design units that are more conventional but ballsier and play to the races' strengths""
how are you proving here that he's just shoring up the weaknesses with gimmicky units by using basically the example of a mech marauder and this new aoe aa tempest. both units do nothing but attack and they have a fairly simple purpose and at it seems like they both have simple weaknesses too. the tempest bad against strong air units in small numbers and bad against ground I suppose. the mech marauder weak against non armored units that it won't deal as much damage to, just like marauders are weak against marines and lings. not only are these like the simplest units from hots, they overlap with existing units from the same race, so they're not good examples of shoring up specific weaknesses of races.
then you argue that it's a design flaw to not know how the units will perform and how they change the gameplay? first of all, you already said it's a flaw to make units with niche roles, doesn't that conflict with this? niche and vague? then you use the example of oracle, when that's a really simple scout around harass eco unit imo. the shredder is much more ambiguous imo, or the swarm host I think is way more ambiguous in it's purpose. is that type of siege going to be effective or even needed when melee gets buffed anyway? is it going to be more used in defense against drops or something like that? or eco harass? I think that's much more questionable than "is oracle going to be the economic harasser and scouting unit that it's designed to be". what else is that unit going to do? maybe be effective in normal attacks by disabling cannons? possibly, but that's only 1 out of 3 spells and even this spell fits this eco harass/scouting purpose. I guess it's debatable. I didn't like the use of oracle as an example.
I don't see how DTs, devourers, lurkers, medics, dark archons, valkyries or corsairs are somehow significantly less gimmicky or niche than battle hellions, warhounds, swarm hosts, vipers, oracles, replicants and tempests... have you really put thought into this? devourers, dark archons, valkyries, DTs... situational gimmicky and niche is what I see. sure, valkyrie isn't gimmicky, but it is niche and situational.
I don't see how you get super excited about the "tons of uses" for corsairs and not get super excited about the tons of uses for vipers... and how is mind control units a good example of bad things that Browder did to Red Alert, when dark archon is a mind control unit that was introduced in BW?
and I didn't like the chess comparison either. you are talking about how he's mudding up the racial differences and making gimmicky units. I wanna point out that given the restrictions of the chess game board, the units are pretty much as gimmicky as they can get, and there's 2 races with the exact same units. btw I've seen people fumble with their knights pretty often, so it's not like they're all that simple. not experienced players of course.
overall I think the units feel good. I think swarm hosts are better for a swarm race than lurkers would, I think viper is exactly what is needed. I think battle hellions and warhounds fit mech even though battle hellions really changed the style of mech with the transformer thing, because I was used to thinking of terrans as sort of the steam punk of scifi, but I think mech is from flavor perspective something that should be further emphasized in terran design and this more modern design sells to the younger generation of players so I won't complain too much. for protoss it's a little more complicated, but the flying high tech ball moving around harassing economy first protoss perfectly, replicants and tempests are a little controversial, but they're not totally off. the flavor was taken into consideration
even though this reply seems quite negative I think you might have a point somewhere in there about embracing racial weaknesses more, but now I'm just saying that whatever you're saying, I don't think it's well said, except for the creatively inside the box thing. I'm gonna steal that and use it myself somewhere someday.
I think the point you could be making about emphasizing racial playstyle differences would also benefit more from analyzing the new units of WoL. I think in WoL there might have been a lot of big mistakes in both playstyle and flavor design decisions, and those 2 things are absolutely completely different issues and should not be mixed the way you did here regarding HotS.
I don't see how you can complain about the incoherence of my post when you ramble on like this without a central argument. I will try to address the points that I think you're making.
1) Why is the tempest a more gimmicky unit than the corsair?
Let's take a look a the roles of the tempest and the roles of the corsair. In Brood War, corsairs provided the Protoss with a cheap, fast air unit that can counter mutas in groups of 6 or more. They are also far better at countering scourge than carriers, arbiters, and scouts, making the sair/reaver build viable. Their disruption web spell is easy to understand; even a complete newbie to the game can see the potential applications for this spell, even if the execution may be a bit more difficult to master.
In contrast, the tempest is a unit that's supposed to counter mass light air units. Which is... exactly the same thing the Phoenix is supposed to do. Its a redundant and unnecessary overlap in roles. Is this the failure of the phoenix as a unit, or the failure of the tempest? I can argue that the corsair is better than both the phoenix AND the tempest because of the inherent simplicity of the unit. It's powerful because unlike phoenixes you can simply attack-move with a group of corsairs to counter the units it's designed to counter, yet unlike the tempest it fulfills a unique role in the Protoss army that isn't already filled by another unit.
2) Why are warhound/marauder flawed in design when they're not "gimmicky" and are functionally simplistic?
Again, because these units overlap with so many other units. Maybe you should read my reply to jeeeeeohn, where I compare the Marauder to the Marine:
"Basically, while both units are functionally simplistic, the role the marine fulfills is simple while the role the marauder fulfills isn't.
The marine is a weak, high-dps unit meant to be used en masse as the main army. They build fast, kill fast, die fast. If you watch over them they'll work wonders, but if you leave them unattended they can easily get rolled by speedling/banes or psi-storm or colossi lasers.
The marauder, on the other hand, fulfills too many roles very well. They don't fulfill any specific niche, they're just a good unit to have a bunch of all the time. They can sometimes replace the tank, sometimes replace the marine. If you leave them alone for a few seconds they won't die to banelings or psi storm. They simply allow Terran to be as offensive and defensive as they want with less effort. That's why the marauder isn't considered a "simplistic" unit, because their role isn't simple at all."
Warhounds and Marauders basically provide Terrans with an "attack move death ball" solution to a wide variety of problems, putting them on par in terms of mobility and play style with Protoss and Zerg. What use is having three diverse races if all of them are capable of creating the same ball-shaped, attack-move army? This philosophy of game design is completely against what Starcraft stands for.
3) Well, what about the Viper? Isn't that a good unit?
Yes, but for most people it's because the Viper's spell is functionally similar to the Brood War defiler's dark swarm ability. Browder doesn't get full credit for how brilliant this unit is.
4) Aren't Chess units all extremely gimmicky? Your chess analogy is invalid.
I don't think you understand what the word "gimmick" means. Or game design principles very well. If you're interested in game design philosophies and balance, here are some helpful resources:
www.gamasutra.com (Features section, although you have to browse around a bit)
www.sirlin.net (the earlier articles)
http://www.designersnotebook.com/Design_Resources/No_Twinkie_Database/no_twinkie_database.htm
Basically my point is that certain game design principle work better for some games than others. Dustin Browder's approach to designing Starcraft 2 is far better reserved for games like the Command & Conquer series, not the Starcraft series.
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Great blog! I think that some of your points could be extended to films and tv-shows being made atm.
This whole concept of more is better is just getting ridiculous. Less surface more substance plz
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Although I liked the OP's passion I do not necessarily agree with his opinion. I am somewhat excited for the new units even though I think they are gimmicky. I feel that at this point the foundations of each race is already set with the units we got in WoL. Now in order to give us more units in an expansion, they are just putting in filler.
Basically what I am saying is that there is no need for any type of units other than gimmicky ones as the game stands.
Lastly, I have no problem with roaches or marauders like others in this thread. I feel they fit both of their races nicely and are fun to play with. I will add that I never played BW so I am coming into SC2 without any biases.
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no, I have no experience in game design professionally, I do not follow game design forums and I don't know the lingo. however, I have common sense. the word "gimmicky", the word "gimmick" has something to do with tricks. so if I were to for example replace the corruptor with viper in the purpose of countering collossus, it would be gimmicky replacement. because the pulling effect is a cute effect that requires you to use an ability, when we already had corruptors as normal shooting air units doing the job.
... but if warhound overlaps with marauder, that alone doesn't make warhound gimmicky, it makes it overlapping. there is nothing clever about warhound. there is no new tricky mechanic. that's why I don't understand why you use the word "gimmicky" in this context. there is no gimmick.
I didn't ask you why marauders were gimmicky.
the same applies to the tempest pretty much, but I don't like how it overlaps with both phoenix and storm. it looks to me like they're desperate to replace carrier and mothership more than they were looking for AA solutions.
if you're so good with the lingo you should be able to give a short and simple definition for "gimmicky" instead of linking me to different sites saying telling me to find out myself. I do admit that I could go wrong with calling the chess units as gimmicky as they can get, because there could be design one could imagine that would just outright blow me away and it would be my mistake to think there isn't anything to explore there, BUT there's still only 2 races with exactly the same units so even if I was wrong about the gimmicky part, it's a bad analogy.
edit: also, there's nothing final about the build they showed for hots, so basically all the overlapping stuff is sort of irrelevant in the first place. they hype the product, we can't say for sure what they want to do with the units. what this does do however is show blizzard whether we like their new stuff or not and that would encourage or discourage them to proceed with the units they introduced
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There's no question the sound design is horrible, it's almost like they had 15 different designers make the sounds? I dont know... but certain things sound amazing as the OP said, I also love the sound of the protoss buildings being canceled, most of the other stuff is shit. Terrans are also too mobile because of the tank nerf and bio being incredibly strong
The game is just different, Browder ruined Starcraft, and turned it into a hard counter based RTS
Starcraft2 is just another decent/good game, but in the end it falls short to being great like BW.
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On October 24 2011 17:34 Dante08 wrote:Show nested quote +On October 24 2011 17:08 Azzur wrote:On October 24 2011 16:47 Dante08 wrote:On October 24 2011 15:02 Azzur wrote:On October 24 2011 14:56 myopia wrote:On October 24 2011 14:39 Techno wrote:On October 24 2011 14:33 myopia wrote:On October 24 2011 14:22 Techno wrote:Lotta hand waving at a concept that no one has really been able to figure out: Why is BW > SC2? The answer is frankly SC2 would have to be in-fucking-credible to outshine the legend of BW. You don't want to hear this but its the only answer: Give it time. On October 24 2011 14:20 ChineseWife wrote:
agreed. also does anyone cringe when david kim and browder use the term raid, referring to harass in sc2? For some reason that really bothers me and I guess shows me they are somewhat out of touch with the sc2 scene. Nope, not I anyways. They have their own jargon that they use cause they work all day together and discuss the game wayyyy more than you do. It bothers me way more how desperate everyone is to paint Browder/Kim/Blizzard with such negativity all the time. You guys take anything you can find and try to say "this is why SC2 sucks" with it. Its just a lil annoying after a while. Just admit it: your on TL right now 'cause SC2 kicks ass. Thanks, Blizzard! You are misguided. I'm on TL right now because I loved BW and the community is awesome enough to keep me around despite my dislike of SC2. The 'give it time' schtick no longer applies. It's had over a year. No number of new strats will overcome the marauder, roach, colossus, force field, thor, etc.. 'Giving it time' meant something to me when I thought HotS would make SC2 better. I don't like a single thing they revealed at Blizzcon. I don't care if it'll be tweaked before the next expansion is released - the very fact that they considered these ideas good enough to go public with is deeply concerning. Frankly, I think there is no possible way you could be appeased, and even if you were, you would likely hide it. Lets pretend sc2 is actually C&C18 so we can finally stop yearning for our childhoods. SC2 has only been out for a year. That is nothing! Its not the actually dislike of sc2 that I have a grudge against, its people pretending to explain it. Ad Hominem has never been a valid form of debate. It does not negate my post, which was little more than a rehash of the OP and countless other arguments that have been made against SC2 since the beta. This is how we feel. I find it hilarious when Techno posts to "give it time" whilst myopia says that "The 'give it time' schtick no longer applies". Anyways, I do agree with myopia with this one - SC2 has been out for more than a year already and concrete judgements can/should be made about the game. Although I don't agree with many of the "BW supporters who dislike SC2" people here. This is not to say that I like everything in SC2 over BW, but on the whole, I consider SC2 a superior game. As mentioned earlier, I do have concerns about the HoTS direction, but will need to actually play/see the game to make concrete judgements. Can I ask you a question? How much of BW have you watched and played to conclude that SC2 is the superior game. Just curious. I watched BW near the start of the Boxer dropship-era (pre-1.08) till when FEs became the norm. During this time, I was recording vods using a 56k (!) modem (at around 5k/sec). Before TL even existed, I followed BW from www.broodwar.com (wow, that was a amazing website for it's time). I continued to watch now and then but it was a bit too hard. Thus, I missed the Nada, iloveoov and Savior era. I returned around 2008 just before Flash because super-dominant. What I found interesting was that strategy advances was still made despite the game was 10 years old at that time. I watched alot of BW (thanks to jon747) until SC2 came out. Still, I was a BW elitist until I started playing and watching SC2. Slowly, I began to see many of the fine points of SC2 and now prefer it. Now, I only watch OSL and MSL finals for BW, but almost all GSL matches. You're the first person on the forums I've seen who prefers sc2 over bw after watching both games xD. Nothing wrong of course, everybody is entitled to their own opinions. I watch plenty of SC2 as well and I find TvZ to be the most entertaining matchup (mirrors excluded). The other matchups involving Protoss are just boring to me IMO mainly because of the colossus, which I hope blizzard can fix someday.
He's the second person for me, and the first person to say that he's extensively watched BW. I think it's just surprising for a lot of BW elitists to see people like that because even though we might watch SC2, we don't engage actively with a lot of people who play it.
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My opinion echos the OP's opinion. The way I put it though is, BW units were weak with 1 extremely strong point. So, in order to have a viable army, you needed a real "unit composition" which is essentially lost in SC2. A terran army in SC2 composes of medivac, marines, and tanks. Marine's only weakness is it's health. It has amazing movement, and CRAZY CRAZY dps. So the medivac coveres for the health, while tank covers for the large baneling counts/infestors which is the only thing that can overcome the medivac's healing. On the other hand, BW TvZ army needed marine, medic, tanks, vessel, and most likely a dropship. In rare cases even firebats were sprinkled in for dark swarm, or a bit of a tankier unit.
Same for zerg. In sc2, all i see, all game long is ling/baneling/mutas for 90% of the game. On RARE occasions i'll see a couple other units. In BW you saw lings, in to mutas, in to lurker/lings, in to defiler/luker/ling, in to defiler/lurker/ultras. There were things like "transitioning".
In BW, because there were these extreme weaknesses to your own units, as well as certain opponent units having such strong strong points, the existance of one or two units changed the pace completely. There was this "pushing and pulling" that went on. Zerg would be the one pushing early game TvZ, but when marines and medics show up, terrans had a window of pushing oppurtunity, but when mutas show up with their micro, terran has to back up, and zerg has map control. Once a vessel shows up, cause of irradiate mutas become useless, giving terran safety to add tanks. Zerg's only way to slow this down was to use lurkers to make terran seige/unseige. It was a race against the clock for the zerg to get out defilers, and for terrans to do dmg before defilers came out. Once the defilers came out, it was a completely different game where terran had to back up and tried to use drops and such to be where the defilers coudln't be, etc etc etc. I look at SC2 now, and i feel like it's a monotone game. Yes it does have it's own "elegance" but i can compare it to.. it's a beautiful music played only with one instrument, while broodwar was more of an orchestra, where you change in to differnet harmonies with multiple instruments.
Broodwar was amazing because every race was SO OP and SO BROKEN at the same time. Just look at irradiate, dark swarm, storm, emp, recall, plague. ANY one of those skills are completely OP. At the same time, imgaine a broodwar army only composing of marines, dragoons, hydras. They are completely trash. But imagine a SC2 army of only rines, we actually see this army comp time to time. Or blink stalkers? or pure roches? They are "counterable" but they aren't complete trash. Make the strong points of each race stronger, and the weak points weaker, I couldn't agree with the OP more on this.
I wrote this whole thing using a TvZ as an example cause i'm a toss player, and i don't think i coudl've been objective using toss as an example, but i feel that the PvX match up isn't too different.
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While I don't disagree with your overall point, the Phoenix isn't designed to be an answer to mass air units. It used to be designed that way (http://us.starcraft2.com/features/protoss/phoenix.xml) but the design is clearly gone since there's nothing in the Phoenix arsenal that could ever handle more than 6 - 8 of anything. The Tempest is a bad design because it's another expensive, overly niche unit that only answers a situation that Protoss already had an answer to from Templar tech. It doesn't really provide a solution for the inability to transition in to Stargate tech except when you already have a huge lead or when your opponent just doesn't scout well.
Similarly, I think the Marine is actually more of a bad design right now than the Marauder. The Marauder's DPS against non-armored is pretty decent, but the cost and build speed are also a lot higher than a Marine. In terms of what you can realistically build, the Marauder becomes an answer in the TvP matchup, TvT vs. Mech and TvZ vs. Roach builds. You don't really want to always build the Marauder, which is ok in my opinion. Granted, I think the unit still needs to be removed altogether because bio doesn't need and shouldn't have an anti-armored unit like that. The Marine, however, is incredibly cost-efficient, pretty tough for its cost, highly upgradable, and almost as strong as its own support units. Honestly, the only reason you can't just build marines & medivacs to win is their weakness to AoE.
Wait & See is a bad philosophy. We need to actually be vocal and discuss this stuff so Blizzard can make the changes we want. If we wait 'till beta to say anything then it turns in to why the Marauder/Roach/Stalker units ended up staying in the game.
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On October 24 2011 00:53 caradoc wrote:
Maybe I was naive to hope that they would remove the collosus, the roach, the goddamned marauder. Replacing them with thoughtful, race appropriate, awesome alternatives that deeply interacted with other tactical resources the races had. But I did hope, and I am so disappointed.
Was the perfection of deep unit interaction and synergy that was Brood War simply a blip in history?
I suppose we do tend to think of the fully formed old and compare it with the absent metagame of the yet to be released new and lament at its emptiness. But there was obvious synergy in BW even before release. I see no synergy or racial cohesion or even a perfunctory attempt at any type of grand overarching racial design in these new units. (aside from maybe something like 'zerg are swarmy, lets give them more swarmy stuff', 'terran are mechy, lets give them more mechy stuff', protoss are strange and annoying, lets give them more strange and annoying stuff)
Took the words out of my mouth / said it better than I even could. The new units seem incredibly superficial and this shows when watching the presentation. Browder when unveiling the Tempest said it was to counter mass-muta. Why add a new capital ship unit to counter that? I mean if it is such an issue there has to be a more simple fix. And why even a straight unit counter that just seems like the wrong way to approach it entirely. IMO each unit should be able to fulfill different roles depending on the strategy and match-up. The thing is the Tempest may well do that but the fact that the design team don't even know how it will work out is kind of concerning its almost like they are thinking lets just add a bunch of ideas and see what sticks in the beta.
I wasn't able to watch Blizzcon this weekend. So I was really looking forward to seeing the unit unveiling I even watched the GSL finals (which were great and really touching, the foreign fans have come so far!) first to build up the anticipation. After the earlier comments by Browder and co I was expecting them to rework the collosus, roach, marauder, remove mothership and even broodlords, and bring back effective Protoss harassment, and Zerg siege. In other words I was expecting the Reaver, Lurker and maybe Spider Mines equivalents, plus some new spells/abilities and a lot of the boring/useless stuff to go. Plus hopefully bolster the micro options for each race.
Needless to say I'm a bit underwhelmed by the changes they seem to have added pseudo BW units minus the interesting interactions they had in BW. For example how can Terran micro Shredders the way they could micro Vulture. The Swarm Host doesn't seem to offer any of the interesting strategy that the Lurker did. And the Oracle is no where near as effective at harassment as Reaver drops since it doesn't even have an attack it just blocks minerals for a few seconds.
Instead, he should design units that are more conventional but ballsier and play to the races' strengths. Make the weaknesses of each race even MORE vulnerable, but make the strengths unmatchable.
For whatever it is worth I love that line and I think it is incredible true. Each race should be "imba" in its own way. What I mean is and the OP said it well why can't the Siege Tank be super strong making Terran siege lines extremely hard to break but at the same time extremely slow and vulnerable when unseiged. The point is forget about making each race complete with a swiss army knife of units for every situation but balance the game with buffs, make each race both incredibly strong and incredibly fragile. Strive for complex simplicity rather than just complexity. Look at the board game Go it has only one unit (black or white stone depending on the player) however the interactions between stones are incredibly complex. So much so no-one is yet to make an effective Go AI. The point is its not unit complexity or diversity that matters but unit interaction complexity, i.e. unit should have complex relationships with other units rather than just simple counters.
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On October 24 2011 21:14 Mirror0423 wrote:
My opinion echos the OP's opinion. The way I put it though is, BW units were weak with 1 extremely strong point. So, in order to have a viable army, you needed a real "unit composition" which is essentially lost in SC2. A terran army in SC2 composes of medivac, marines, and tanks. Marine's only weakness is it's health. It has amazing movement, and CRAZY CRAZY dps. So the medivac coveres for the health, while tank covers for the large baneling counts/infestors which is the only thing that can overcome the medivac's healing. On the other hand, BW TvZ army needed marine, medic, tanks, vessel, and most likely a dropship. In rare cases even firebats were sprinkled in for dark swarm, or a bit of a tankier unit.
Same for zerg. In sc2, all i see, all game long is ling/baneling/mutas for 90% of the game. On RARE occasions i'll see a couple other units. In BW you saw lings, in to mutas, in to lurker/lings, in to defiler/luker/ling, in to defiler/lurker/ultras. There were things like "transitioning".
In BW, because there were these extreme weaknesses to your own units, as well as certain opponent units having such strong strong points, the existance of one or two units changed the pace completely. There was this "pushing and pulling" that went on. Zerg would be the one pushing early game TvZ, but when marines and medics show up, terrans had a window of pushing oppurtunity, but when mutas show up with their micro, terran has to back up, and zerg has map control. Once a vessel shows up, cause of irradiate mutas become useless, giving terran safety to add tanks. Zerg's only way to slow this down was to use lurkers to make terran seige/unseige. It was a race against the clock for the zerg to get out defilers, and for terrans to do dmg before defilers came out. Once the defilers came out, it was a completely different game where terran had to back up and tried to use drops and such to be where the defilers coudln't be, etc etc etc. I look at SC2 now, and i feel like it's a monotone game. Yes it does have it's own "elegance" but i can compare it to.. it's a beautiful music played only with one instrument, while broodwar was more of an orchestra, where you change in to differnet harmonies with multiple instruments.
Broodwar was amazing because every race was SO OP and SO BROKEN at the same time. Just look at irradiate, dark swarm, storm, emp, recall, plague. ANY one of those skills are completely OP. At the same time, imgaine a broodwar army only composing of marines, dragoons, hydras. They are completely trash. But imagine a SC2 army of only rines, we actually see this army comp time to time. Or blink stalkers? or pure roches? They are "counterable" but they aren't complete trash. Make the strong points of each race stronger, and the weak points weaker, I couldn't agree with the OP more on this.
I wrote this whole thing using a TvZ as an example cause i'm a toss player, and i don't think i coudl've been objective using toss as an example, but i feel that the PvX match up isn't too different.
I couldn't agree more sir, make what's strong stronger, what's weak weaker.
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On October 24 2011 05:16 Myrkskog wrote:
Nice job drawing the parallel between Dustin Browder's previous work and his design philosophy for StarCraft 2. I totally agree with you that he is taking it in the wrong direction. Unfortunately, the return to simplicity that you are hoping for can't be the solution. The mechanics of SC2 dictate that there needs to be some form of APM eater in place of Brood Wars challenging macro to keep it exciting. Dustin Browder decided that his specialty, gimmicky units, would fill that void. It would have taken some deep brainstorming to come up with another solution, and who knows what that alternative would have looked like.
For better or worse, we're stuck with the easiest, and unfortunately for me, least appealing solution of giving as many units and buildings as many abilities as possible to eat up as much of people's APM as possible. Without a fundamental redesign this will be ridiculously hard to change, and we are on the path to seeing a lot more gimmicks in the future with the Protoss expansion as well. Simply put, Browder's design philosophy requires that you need a million things you need to do with your units(and HoTS pretty much doubles it) because you have nothing left to do at home. Nobody's talking about removing MBS or auto-mining anymore, and I don't think that I would want to revert it myself, but these were the fundamentals that made the simplicity of Brood War's fighting units work.
The problem with StarCraft 2, despite the fact that we're seeing all these "creative units"("ridiculous units" is more appropriate), is that Dustin Browder and his team are not creative at all. In fact, they are incredibly stale and stagnant in their thinking. Brood War's success lay in the fact that the game was played nothing like the designers intended. To hope to achieve the same in StarCraft 2 would be ridiculous and suicidal. Brood War was a great accident, like potato chips, but you can't look to it for solving SC2's problems. StarCraft 2 was going to need some genuinely creative thinking to make it great(on purpose), and the minute that the game was first revealed and we saw that both Terran and Zerg had a Dragoon we knew we were fucked.
Yes, great post. The lack of MBS/auto-mining/smartcasting/unlimited unit select was a HUGE part of why BW worked, and why it worked for so long. Like you i wouldn't agree with putting them in SC2, but what's the solution to create the extra difficulty and APM sinks without them? I've thought about it quite a bit but i can't think of much.
However it's no excuse for Blizzard to not fix how dire the combat is in SC2 in general, things like clumping/blobs and the speed at which battles happen and are instantly over.
Also i'm surprised at the guy above who watched BW regularly and thinks SC2 is better, either to play or to watch. I can't comprehend someone watching the last OSL finals for example and coming to that conclusion. I watch SC2 progames now and there just is a total lack of.. pretty much anything to comment on a lot of them. Someone makes a decision, sometimes just a single one that decides the game. 15 minute games decided by about 5 seconds of attacking and smartcasting. I don't get impressed by the micro (or even macro somehow the casters try to frame as amazing) despite the total over-hype of everything because simply it isn't particularly impressive. It's actually quite annoying and fake how you have casters who previously played BW at a high level try to make out that something incredible is happening. And now with these HotS units i don't see any potential in them either.
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All I know is there's gonna be a shitload of units when the third expansion comes out, good luck with balance
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While I may not agree with the idea of making the strong stronger, and the weak weaker. I agree with the fundamental mindset that each race should be unique/OP in its own sense.
Currently there are many units that have overlapping roles. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that you can easily mass up a single type of unit and almost never go wrong. Also the Marauder/roach/stalker relationship is just fundamentally flawed. Giving the dragoon to all 3 races is just.. wrong. The hydra/firebat/dragoon relationship is very much different. They are not designed to be analogous or the "equivalent" unit of one another, but rather, unique to the lore of the race and it is then up to the players to figure out how it fits.
5/5 blog. Good work - I believe this is feature worthy, but it might paint a horrible picture on the stance that TL is taking regarding balance. Nobody wants to bring up a balance discussion since it's eventually going to turn into a senseless flamewar that is going nowhere and since we obviously can't do anything about the game balance.
and even if we did.. I doubt we would be able to come up with better solutions. Maybe bw was just an accidental success after all.
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EPT
