First of all, this rant is going to remain exclusive to Custom Games and the Arcade aspect of StarCraft II. Both are in a completely dire state and Blizzard so far have announced nothing that is going to fix the underlying problems that the game faces.
I purchased Wings of Liberty just days after launch expecting WC3’s massively successful mod scene that spawned many great UMS maps such as World War III, Footman Frenzy, thousands of tower defence games, Wintermaul Wars, a Snipers mod, Battle Tanks, and most notably DotA Allstars, a mod based on Aeon of Strife in Brood War and which spawned numerous standalone successors years later such as Heroes of Newerth, Demigod, League of Legends, SMITE, and Dota 2. It even spawned professional scenes that flourish even today.
What I got instead was bitter disappointment. I remember many of the mods during the Wings of Liberty beta were lackluster, generally inferior clones of successful WC3 mods and not had much of a player base. I was willing to excuse this since it was a beta with few users, Even despite controversies I bought the game anyway.
Where are we now? The first day of 2013. Wings of Liberty came out worldwide on Tuesday 27th July, 2010, around two-and-a-half years ago. Have things really improved at all? Despite a relaunched Arcade in mid-2012? No.
The following paragraphs will discuss the issue on two fronts. The Map Editor and Arcade
1. Map Editor:
The Map Editor in terms of user-friendliness is – simply put – an abomination. Yes, it lets you do amazing stuff like create ultra-powerful units that do things like spit out Banelings, or render 2D sprites as units in the SC2 game, or make a turn based RPG combat system. The real question is… Is there anything that benefits anyone other than the most hardcore of users?
Making something like say... a first person shooter using StarCraft II’s map editor functionality is almost entirely pointless. For starters, many of the “genre changing” mods I played at least during the beta and early WoL suffered from horrific input lag, making the game virtually unplayable and inferior to a real FPS.
Second, if you wanted to make a first person shooter, you’d use an existing engine for it and make an established mod using said engine. For first person shooters there are some of Id Software’s open sourced game engines, the Unreal Engine 3 which just two years ago turned towards a “free for non-commercial use” model, along with CRYEngine 3, and the Source Engine. Based on the sheer volume of games made using the Unreal 3 Engine especially, I’d consider it an industry standard today.
Would you play this mod?
And what about some of the other pointless crap we’ve seen people do using the SC2 engine like say…. create a 2d sprite replica of Chrono Trigger’s overworld? Well…. There’s always RPG Maker. RPG Maker in my experience is a very easy-to-use and surprisingly powerful IDE (and is surprisingly cheap, being at £39.99 - 20% off - on Steam) for making 2D turn based RPGs. Hell… if you are a cheapskate you can just get VX Ace Lite which is a free-to-use but limited version. Why the hell would you use StarCraft II’s engine to recreate Guardia Castle in Chrono Trigger when you could probably produce something with lower system requirements, with a much-easier-to-use IDE, that would run better.
Chrono Trigger in StarCraft II? Why? Just because...
The Data Editor lets you produce some amazing things. The shame is that by designing it this way Blizzard has made it overly complex for the average user. Let’s say for example you want to create a new in-game unit with the same model as the Hydralisk but with a resized model, unique stats, unique weapon effects, unique levellable spells, able to benefit from a custom-made upgrades effect, sounds from a different unit, a hero unit, with an XP bar, and stats that increase as you level?
All I can say is good luck. Rather than many of the aspects of a unit being within the same object like they were in WarCraft III (i.e. the model used, the attack damage, the attack speed, the type of attack, the attack animation, the spell list, the model, the sounds, the buttons used etc. Or with abilities their icon, effect, animation, stat changes etc.), you have to go through a metric crap-tonne of sub-objects that cross-reference each other and which are very ambiguous to configure and make uniquely. This makes what should be a simple action like creating an exact replica of an existing unit in the Data Editor a complicated chore.
Want some sources that truly illustrate just how bad it is? Here you go. Just bear in mind that it's a partially finished tutorial series.
And this is just adding a new unit to the Melee Multiplayer mode of SC2. We haven’t even gone into the sheer complexities of making your own game of a different genre yet which is an entirely different beast altogether
Let’s compare this to a previous example… RPG Maker VX Ace. In their data editor, you will see Items, Equipment, Characters, Classes, Tilesets, Monsters, Squads, Environments, etc and a lot of this stuff will be highly editable and easy to edit. Notice how creating a new playable character isn’t divided into dozens of unnecessarily overcomplicated subcategories and their own objects? Notice how to create a new character you don’t have to go to a specially made Sprites tab or a Sounds tab or an Effects tab and create new objects and assign metadata for each new object just to make a new character. How they include virtually everything you’d need to create a new in-game object in one or two relevant tabs in an easy-to-read, easy-to-digest, easy-to-edit layout?
This does have different classes of objects that cross reference to an extent but it’s generally very simple compared to SC2’s Data Editor.
The difference? RPG Maker VX Ace isn’t the map editor for an existing game but a fully-blown game engine and IDE, albeit a pretty limited one that only deals with turn based 2D RPGs. It is far easier to use than SC2’s Map Editor. The Map Editor’s complexity is more akin to the Unreal Development Kit. In fact, in some places UDK is probably easier to use than SC2’s Map Editor.
I could take this further and compare the SC2 Editor to something like say… Stencylworks or Game Maker Studio but that will take more time. RPG Maker VX Ace seemed relevant because both the SC2 Map Editor and RMVXA use a game engine designed for one specific game genre. SC2 is a real time strategy game and RMVXA deals exclusively with turn based RPGs.. Yet one is a pretty bad tool to create a mod or indie game.
When this becomes the case, I personally believe Blizzard have epically failed in designing their game.
2. Arcade:
This is not up-and-coming!
The Arcade SUCKS.Upon clicking that tab you are greeted by "Up and coming" games listed on the frontpage of the Arcade. StarJewelled? REALLY, THAT CAME OUT IN 2011? And the Unit Test Map? That has existed since the dawn of time. Oh and look, three other old maps too, Micro Tournament 1.26, Nexus Wars EURO 1vs1 and Blasterbots. The Arcade has virtually nobody playing new content. I wonder why….
This is what happens when you fix things that ain't broke.
Let’s go to the Top Played section and the first thing you will be greeted with upon clicking the Browse Games tab and here you see the same old tripe you saw 2 years ago. Desert Strike 1338 is the “DotA Allstars” of SC2. Except this time it’s a crappy, incredibly overplayed tug of war map with virtually no depth to it.
Squadron TD. I haven’t played much of this but from what I remember either this or Element TD (another top rated and top played TD map) was quite bad compared to some of the really great WC3 TD maps. And yet this is 2nd top rated and 2nd most played. UNBELIEVEABLE!
Marine Arena. Anybody remember Footman Frenzy? This is like an inferior version lacking many features that unsurprisingly makes this version inferior.
Left 2 Die? I tried. I really tried to play this mod on Crapple.net. It’s a very well designed Blizzard-made mod that is like them desperately trying to float a nugget of gold in a sea of shit but the problem is it’s 2 player and can only be played with two players, and thus everybody only wants to play on Night 2 Die difficulty, and if you do one thing wrong, or even so much as blink at your teammate, they will rage quit the game and leave you to get slaughtered. This mod is well designed but simply cannot be fun because of community reasons. It suffers from MineralZ Syndrome.
MineralZ Evolution? MineralZ is ironically the best tower defence game on Crapple.net 2.0. And a previously coined term in my short Left 2 Die write-up “MineralZ Syndrome” is where you enter a game and everybody picks the absolute most masochistically difficult setting, where you have to play perfectly and not have one idiot on your team mess up, else everybody dies. If someone does stupid crap like walls off with a Nexus instead of a Wall? You die. If somebody leaves the game? You die. If somebody doesn’t build Cores of Culture and upgrades them to give the whole team more income? You die. If somebody doesn’t do their specific role properly? You die.
Mafia? Remember those awful Life of a Peasant games in WC3 that were entirely about roleplaying in an open world map, I believe this is one of those types of maps. I played this and didn’t like it one bit.
I can review more of these games but it’s starting to give me a huge headache. All you need to know is that many of these mods are quite old, as in at least over a year old, and they are the only games people will play. Why? Because nobody uses the Open Games tab, nobody has the patience to wait for somebody let alone between 2 and 7 other people to be bothered to double click on their open game, let alone not have one of these people rage quit from the lobby because they are impatient.
Here’s another striking example. There was a recent mod released on the Arcade called Unnerfed. It was basically a Melee mod whereby all nerfs to ingame units from the early beta all the way to the present would be undone and old maps would be brought back, both for the purposes of nostalgia and out of a protest of Blizzard’s “Nerf ALL THE THINGS” approach to haphazardly balancing out their game.
A new mod hyped up on reddit and Teamliquid.... unsurprisingly receiving no actual recognition.
This mod was barely played. I personally wanted to play it but nobody wanted to play it with me and spending ages in chat channels (including General Chat and teamliquid, pretty much the two popular channels on EU) asking if anybody wanted to play it just led to me being called all manner of homophobic slurs under the sun. And here is a review somebody wrote on the game to really hammer the point home. NOBODY IS PLAYING MAPS THAT AREN’T THE MOST POPULAR. THIS CREATES A CATCH 22 FOR MAPMAKERS.
Seriously Blizzard, fix this crap now. I am not buying Heart of the Swarm at this rate.
I've used countless hours on custom games in WC3. They were truly amazing. Why is it so hard for blizzard to just re-do what they did for WC3 with SC2 as far as custom maps goes? But hey i guess them changing the agreement so that they own anything you make kind of made people less likely to create something new and amazing.
The gaming scene was a different place back in BW and even WC3. And by that I mean, there were a lot less "free games" and open source game development software available to the public back then. What that means if someone wanted to kill 20 minutes playing a pretty basic game with not much thought (most but not all of the WC3 mod games), you found some random custom game on WC3. Now, there are like 1 million free games out there, most of which you can play in your web browser.
Basically, the market that the vast majority of custom games occupied (included mobas) has been completely saturated by games and developers that focus on this sort of thing (small games), whereas back in the early 2000s you had to pay for most games still. Getting those custom games for free was a big benefit back then; in today's market it means next to nothing and honestly I can understand why it isn't a focus for Blizzard at this point.
On January 02 2013 02:28 HardlyNever wrote: The gaming scene was a different place back in BW and even WC3. And by that I mean, there were a lot less "free games" and open source game development software available to the public back then. What that means if someone wanted to kill 20 minutes playing a pretty basic game with not much thought (most but not all of the WC3 mod games), you found some random custom game on WC3. Now, there are like 1 million free games out there, most of which you can play in your web browser.
Basically, the market that the vast majority of custom games occupied (included mobas) has been completely saturated by games and developers that focus on this sort of thing (small games), whereas back in the early 2000s you had to pay for most games still. Getting those custom games for free was a big benefit back then; in today's market it means next to nothing and honestly I can understand why it isn't a focus for Blizzard at this point.
Valid point. I still feel like it's a significant devolution to what we had in WC3.
Warcraft 3 had very, very few mods. It had a lot of maps, on the other hand. There is a big difference. The only mods I know of to exist in SC2 were the teamcolor and sound mods. No one made any effort into creating a real conversion, and Blizzard was quick to kill off what few mods did exist.
A mod globally changes the entire game. To do that in sc2 you need to change the mpq files, since Q won't be making a mpqdraft for it. Previously, it was entirely plausible and safe to run not only secmpqs on b.net but even entirely hacked up executables with tons of new code, too. Blizzard didn't care.
Now they "care". And that "care" means big custom content will never exist for their games ever again. With sc2 this would not matter if we had LAN or local hosting. We don't.
I don't mind, because their editor and engine are both abysmal to work with anyways. Sc2's editor was slapped together last-minute and this is pretty telling given the totally haphazard, thoughtless layout, and the fact a vast deal of functions in the editor simply did not do anything, and that it was missing XML stuff to begin with. Don't get me started on the performance. It's slower than any of the user-made java and .net 2.0 programs I've ever used, which is an achievement given all it does is read a few text files. Making basic unit data has never been more painful.
I've worked with shitty editors and games for over 10 years now, starting with Brood War back in 1999 and most recently Sins of a Solar Empire. No matter how disgusting of a game I end up with, nothing is quite as foul to the senses as Starcraft 2.
I was referring to both UMS maps and mods when I refer to the modding scene. I know SC2 has abysmal support for total-conversion mods but this is about simple mapmaking. Like I seriously doubt Icefrog would even bother with Dota Allstars if the WC3 Map Editing tools were this abysmal.
Wc3's tools weren't spectacular, but there's a lot of things in wc3's favor that sc2 just doesn't "get". Everything from the way the internal files are organized (Have you looked at the XML files in sc2? We were modding back in the first week of beta, and were flabbergasted to see that structure remain in release...), to the 3d model format (this very thing also shot NWN2 in the foot when they switched from their text-based format to the Granny2 format, effectively cutting off 3d assets from custom content), down to the very way the games perform.
People laughed at me when I said these things were going to really, really hurt sc2's custom content. Now I don't think anyone is laughing except for Blizzard. The sad part is, I know one of the guys who was on the editor development team, and I've used my contacts to get personal messages and articles to their lead programmers and staff, and if that wasn't enough, half a year ago I was in direct talks with their new editor staff and we agreed on many points of improvement. Half a year ago. For improvements as simple as fixing the way their XML lays out data in the editor. I don't even care about battle.net, if the foundation is rotten the house will fall regardless how shiny it is on the outside.
On January 02 2013 01:44 AnachronisticAnarchy wrote: There's an open games tab? Holy shit I didn't even know that existed. Kinda the problem I guess, though. Probably nobody uses it as you said.
I second this, I used to be ok with just playing some monobattles/starstrikers but right now, there's just 1 monobattle map left for me if I dont want to wait forever, probably partly because I knew nothing of this open games tab.
I once managed to get a few games of photon cycles and that very rare wordnexus wars once. Then again, I only get to play just outside hightraffic hours, so that probably doesn't help.
I completely agree with the 2nd rant. Not so sure about the 1st one...
While half of it is about how the SC2 editor is hard to use (which I can't really say, haven't had the time or disposition to play with it, while I happily played around the editor files in WC3, which were easy enough to change for some easy stuff like custom stats, animations and the like for a 14 yo boy), it's really unfair to compare WC3 maps with SC2. First, you start right off the bat saying how most of the stuff done with the maps can be done with other, better editors. True, but if WC3 were released today, you'd probably would say the same thing. The launch of indie games and relative selling platforms into popularity means that most of the stuff done in custom maps can be done even better as a stand-alone game. That, of course, wasn't the case when BW and WC3 were released.
But yeah, nothing new, the Arcade system needs a serious revamping, right now it feels as a circle-jerk for the popular maps toget even more popular, while the real new ones that constantly get released get zero exposure, which is pretty sad. The SC2BW map that finally the people are starting to notice, I played it quite a few months back, great game, but I'd just play it with friends, since it wasn't that popular, and chat channels don't really help.
I think what you are getting at, essentially, is that the limitations of the War 3 and Brood War custom systems (basically an open games tab and that's all) ended up actually benefiting the scene as a whole despite feeling extremely limited at the time. Since everyone was forced to use the list no matter what, if a map creator made a new map and hosted it, they knew people would actually see the map and join it. Sure, 90% of the maps on the list were Dota and it seemed broken at the time, but even players that never wanted to play the same Map twice could constantly try new games and have people in them.
On the editor I think what we're seeing is that it's better to have a simple editor that is more productive than a powerful general one. There are vastly better tools if you want to make a first person shooter. But the War 3 editor was a monster in churning out Tower Defense, DotA, anything involving little dudes gaining various powers and kill other little dudes.
You are wrong about Mafia though, it's not an RPG, isn't that a version of that party game called Werewolf where you kill one player every turn and try to kill just the Werewolves or Mafia people? I've played that in other formats and it's great.
On January 02 2013 04:52 JackDT wrote: I think what you are getting at, essentially, is that the limitations of the War 3 and Brood War custom systems (basically an open games tab and that's all) ended up actually benefiting the scene as a whole despite feeling extremely limited at the time.
This is half true. It's a subject I've talked to quite a few veteran developers about. Is there such a thing as too much power? No. It really all comes down to how that power is presented.
In our community, back in wc3, we faced the odd conundrum that while wc3's editor/engine were capable of much more than Brood War, wc3 had virtually no large projects (with a "large project" being a campaign, and a very large project being a complete total conversion with voice acting and the works). Brood War has a lot of custom campaigns. Why not wc3? After all, Brood War was very limited, very heavily hardcoded. So was wc3, of course. Blizzard engines are, by nature of the intern beast, terrible. Even so, wc3 was better than bw, right? The editor is way better, right?
Not necessarily so.
The presentation of information matters just as much, if not more, than the information itself. As someone from SME put it a half-decade back, "Wc3 hands you everything in a way that makes it entirely uninteresting to map for". While I did work with wc3 myself, I never really felt that vibe until I hit sc2. Sc2's editor is "powerful" if you compare it to wc3 (but not to BW, not with the things you can do with the existing ASM infrastructure given the right skills), but the information is all over the place. Go to the Unit Tab, find unit description and unit name. Yeah. They're on entirely opposing ends of the list and the unit description is actually called "editor - description". It's like using a very, very poorly translated chinese trainer. Doesn't seem like much? Try making a total conversion. Make your own unit dialogue, assets, everything. Then get back to me.
Energy in making a big project goes into two things. The first is problem solving, the second is pipeline. Design and asset creation are all only a tiny part of a huge machine. If you're fighting your tools every step of the way like you do with sc2, you won't make it to the point of getting screwed by battle.net. Me, I produce only private projects - I was never going to put something on that disgusting excuse of a service anyways. But both battle.net and the editor have the same haphazard process behind them.
Ignoring performance problems, the layout and way the editor gives you information is entirely thoughtless and detracts from not only the experience of making custom content, but simply learning it. That barrier serves to prevent most people from ever attempting to make a major project, much less see it to the end (which is tough no matter how good your tools are). This is ignoring the fact Blizzard still hasn't given us the 3ds max plugin they've been using since they first made the game and we've had bumpy, limited success on our end.
In the end, Blizzard has zero obligations to "fixing" either battle.net or the editor. They have your money, which is, as a business after all, what they want, and HoTS will be a massive commercial success just like WoL was even if they don't ship an "editor" at all.
Most major developers of custom content are accustomed to building their own programs, their own solutions. But a lot of the "casual" developers, so to speak, don't feel inclined to do so with sc2 because it already has an "editor". This is where your statement really plays properly into destroying potential growth, because even though sc2 has an editor it doesn't do the job very well and stifles creativity. Potential tool programmers don't see the need to compete regardless. Back in Diablo 2, Brood War, and even Warcraft 3, 99% of your tools are user-made because of necessity. "Hardcore" developers, those who are going to build their own tools anyways, look for greener pastures or just make their own engine because working with a game as hardcoded, inefficient, and convoluted as Starcraft 2 actually pans out to be more work than it is worth.
Then you've got stuff like patch 1.5 which decides to just delete every unrelated files in its directories with zero notice or warning. You know, the files you must have there to test and work with your content. Stuff like my campaign and its various backups. Yeah. I was willing to work with the editor and make my campaign until it kind of deleted it all.
As games get newer they get more and more hostile to custom content. There are a few exceptions but, generally speaking, if you want to make something more advanced and involved than dota you're better off using an actual engine and related toolset like Unity, UDK, rather than bending over backwards for sc2 and bent 0.2. Most wc3 mappers were casual and when met with this realization just entirely quit custom content, stick with wc3, or learn to live with it. Almost none of the bw content producers I know remain in the Blizzard community at all or stuck with BW anyways.
Modding and mapping should never be considered a hobby, but nor should they be considered an obligation. Don't do something if you don't enjoy it. If you enjoy sc2, great. If you don't, and you likely won't, there's no reason to force yourself to do it - and certainly no reason to believe it will ever get better. I used to know a few guys who were sworn diehard blizzard fanboys. They'd tell me, "The editor is great! You can do anything with it! You just need to give it a chance." Then they actually tried to make a project as opposed to just doing random experiments. None of them have anything to do with sc2 anymore.
On January 02 2013 05:53 IskatuMesk wrote: In the end, Blizzard has zero obligations to "fixing" either battle.net or the editor. They have your money, which is, as a business after all, what they want, and HoTS will be a massive commercial success just like WoL was even if they don't ship an "editor" at all.
That's why I'm avoiding HotS. Blizzard don't deserve my money if they're unwilling to make some serious improvement on these features.
I'm probably not going to get HotS either. But I have found a good custom map: Random TD. It's actually got a bit of a following even though it's hasn't been on the front page in a long time.
When WC3 came out there was no Steam. There was no app store. There were no consoles with thriving download-only game markets. Average household bandwidths were much lower and downloading a big game title was a pretty large investment. Even the cost of storing a downloaded game: hard drive space has gone down from $2.50 per GB in 2003 to about ten cents per GB today.
Why the hell would I want to play a Tower Defense game written in the SC2 engine when I can download about six thousand different native TD games for my phone, iPad or desktop? Because it lets me use all those other amazing battle.net features that are totally missing from Steam?
And really, why does this matter? Game developers should write games in the engine that makes the most sense to them, and put them out on the distribution platform that gives them the best shot at success. Even if battle.net 2.0 was freakishly amazingly good, it would still be a platform that forced developers to build games on top of an RTS engine, and distribute their games to the limited audience of Starcraft 2 players. Game developers just have far better options these days.
In a world with tanks, you're not going to get far building a better cavalry.
Custom maps on the other hand, there's a lot of untapped potential for, and generally speaking all the things you could to to make custom maps better would help custom games anyway.
I agree with the 2nd rant, but if you think eu is bad, you should come onto the SEA server sometimes. Seriously, all you see on the open games tab is marine arena, day9's monobattles and nexus wars. Probably more of a community problem than anything else.
btw, unnerfed is the best custom map i've played ever. 60 warpgate? 1 supply 2 armour roaches? planet cracker mothership? It's basically a reminder of sc2 WOL's history
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/xPQ8w.jpg)
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