EPTDustin Browder Interview April 2011 - Page 3
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ShadeR
Australia7535 Posts
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andrewlt
United States7702 Posts
On April 25 2011 23:15 Rampager wrote: Oh absolutely nothing is wrong with this, I got nothing against growth  I just think some of the undue criticism that sc2 should've been "sc:bw HD" are dubious claims, I don't think there's any way Blizzard could justify horrible dragoon pathfinding for a game released in 2010  Hopefully with more time, and maybe an expansion or two, sc2 will become better, or atleast match BW. Until then, I need to find Sea and console him.Ugh, I hate it whenever dragoon pathfinding is brought up as an example of BW's micro. Why does that justify removing muta stacking, wraith stacking, moving shot and all the micro tricks in BW? Do you seriously mean they couldn't improve dragoon AI without removing all the other stuff? Overcoming dragoon AI is not even noticeable in most games. Too many SC2 units have crappy acceleration to reduce the effects of micro. Vikings have insane range but are really clunky to control compared to wraiths. | ||
Kipsate
Netherlands45349 Posts
On April 26 2011 01:07 Roe wrote: idk about you, but I just dont find someone pressing each individual factory and spamming buttons very entertaining. While it is true that there is no way you can justify the lack of MBS save for the sake of a competitive E-sport game(it makes no sense for the casuals), it does attribute to the fact. When is anyone amazed by someones macro really in SC2? If you follow BW (I think you do judging from you posting here. Then check out the recent game with Flash vs Best, the livechat and LR thread was bursting with HOLY MACRO BATMAN THAT IS ALOT OF UNITS, due to the sheer mechanically taxing UI you get amazing moments. Chill once described it that it attributes because as a casual player, you just can not do that, only the pros are able to macro with such at such a high level. It cuts the good from the pro players, you really have the feeling that you are watching the best of the best, it attributes to the spectatorship but only if you know that it is incredibly hard to do so(watch any FPvod and you know what I am talking about). And personally, I think it is amazing when you switch to FPV for about 5s and watch a guy instantly macro his production facalities in less then a second. There is no way to justify MBS except for the sake of making the game harder(and thus more competitive and better for E-sports), and as such I do not expect Blizzard to change this, ever. However it does make BW better for spectatorship values based upon sheer macro. It is but one of the many factors which makes BW better in terms of spectatorship and as an E-sport. In the end SC2 is a game marketted for casuals(the larger majority of the consumers), where as Brood War had no such idea behind it and as a result SC2 suffers in the E-sport department as such. | ||
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PH
United States6173 Posts
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eviltomahawk
United States11133 Posts
On April 26 2011 01:53 andrewlt wrote: Ugh, I hate it whenever dragoon pathfinding is brought up as an example of BW's micro. Why does that justify removing muta stacking, wraith stacking, moving shot and all the micro tricks in BW? Do you seriously mean they couldn't improve dragoon AI without removing all the other stuff? Overcoming dragoon AI is not even noticeable in most games. Too many SC2 units have crappy acceleration to reduce the effects of micro. Vikings have insane range but are really clunky to control compared to wraiths. While it's somewhat disappointing that SC2 lacks many of the micro tricks that made BW quite awesome, I think that they may have had some good reasons for their decisions. Stacking air units just doesn't work with unlimited unit selection. Unless there are built-in tweaks to the pathing, being able to control more than 12 flyers in one stack has the potential to be extremely overpowered. Even if tweaks are possible, I think stacking is an artifact of an old engine that wouldn't transfer very well into the new engine. I imagine that engine differences may also be a reason why other micro tricks, like patrol micro, did not transfer over to SC2. Those tricks were exploits of an aged engine, and I imagine that a modern Blizzard would've patched them out if BW was still getting balance updates. However, I do agree that quite a few units just feel clunky, especially without an obvious moving shot. Nevertheless, there is a fine line between a micro trick giving a player a slight edge or being completely imbalanced at all levels. While I don't think it'll be difficult for Blizzard to tweak units to have a moving shot, it's going to be much harder for them to purposely add hidden, more intricate micro tricks into the engine in hopes of people discovering and exploiting them. Moving shot, stacking, and patrol micro were accidental discoveries of unintended engine intricacies. While it's easy to point at the stuff that's already been discovered in BW, it's difficult to purposely and artificially create hidden micro tricks that can be discovered by future players. | ||
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valaki
Hungary2476 Posts
On April 26 2011 02:14 eviltomahawk wrote: ...being able to control more than 12 flyers in one stack has the potential to be extremely overpowered It's true however, they would be extremely fragile against aoe like infestor, archon / strom, hsm | ||
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DuneBug
United States668 Posts
On April 26 2011 01:35 ShadeR wrote: I feel that entertainment value comes from professionals who are able to overcome hard counters with micro. Isn't it sick to watch marines which are hard counter'd by lurkers dance around and pick them off? And oh let's not even get into the loss of the reaver =[. This. Except marine/lurker has the same dynamic as marine/baneling right now. Is that why TvZ is the most interesting MU ? Banshee/marine is pretty good though. Thor/muta, not bad. But not as good as scourge science vessel. XvP is bad because of the colossus, there's just not really a good way to counter colossi with micro. Maybe some of that is forcefield's fault. But I think most people like FF. Especially sentry/gateway vs burrowed roaches is pretty cool. And templar need a buff. 80 dmg psi storm is kind of a joke without khaydarin. | ||
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andrewlt
United States7702 Posts
On April 26 2011 02:14 eviltomahawk wrote: While it's somewhat disappointing that SC2 lacks many of the micro tricks that made BW quite awesome, I think that they may have had some good reasons for their decisions. Stacking air units just doesn't work with unlimited unit selection. Unless there are built-in tweaks to the pathing, being able to control more than 12 flyers in one stack has the potential to be extremely overpowered. Even if tweaks are possible, I think stacking is an artifact of an old engine that wouldn't transfer very well into the new engine. I imagine that engine differences may also be a reason why other micro tricks, like patrol micro, did not transfer over to SC2. Those tricks were exploits of an aged engine, and I imagine that a modern Blizzard would've patched them out if BW was still getting balance updates. However, I do agree that quite a few units just feel clunky, especially without an obvious moving shot. Nevertheless, there is a fine line between a micro trick giving a player a slight edge or being completely imbalanced at all levels. While I don't think it'll be difficult for Blizzard to tweak units to have a moving shot, it's going to be much harder for them to purposely add hidden, more intricate micro tricks into the engine in hopes of people discovering and exploiting them. Moving shot, stacking, and patrol micro were accidental discoveries of unintended engine intricacies. While it's easy to point at the stuff that's already been discovered in BW, it's difficult to purposely and artificially create hidden micro tricks that can be discovered by future players. Moving shot doesn't necessarily have to be done the same way it's done in BW. I don't even know exactly how it's done in BW, just that it's really exciting to watch and adds tactics to the game. Not only did Blizzard remove moving shot, they made it so that certain units like hellions have to come to a dead stop while shooting and then accelerate slowly after stopping. To compensate, they gave units like vikings ridiculous range. It just feels to me like a deliberate attempt to reduce micro to 1a as much as possible. The only micro that exists in SC2 is splitting units. | ||
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space_yes
United States548 Posts
On April 26 2011 02:37 andrewlt wrote: Moving shot doesn't necessarily have to be done the same way it's done in BW. I don't even know exactly how it's done in BW, just that it's really exciting to watch and adds tactics to the game. Not only did Blizzard remove moving shot, they made it so that certain units like hellions have to come to a dead stop while shooting and then accelerate slowly after stopping. To compensate, they gave units like vikings ridiculous range. It just feels to me like a deliberate attempt to reduce micro to 1a as much as possible. The only micro that exists in SC2 is splitting units. Yeah controlling units in SC2 is like trying to micro an Oldsmobile. Part of this is the acceleration, another part is the minimum latency of bnet 2.0. | ||
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maybenexttime
Poland5362 Posts
On April 26 2011 02:14 eviltomahawk wrote: While it's somewhat disappointing that SC2 lacks many of the micro tricks that made BW quite awesome, I think that they may have had some good reasons for their decisions. Stacking air units just doesn't work with unlimited unit selection. Unless there are built-in tweaks to the pathing, being able to control more than 12 flyers in one stack has the potential to be extremely overpowered. Even if tweaks are possible, I think stacking is an artifact of an old engine that wouldn't transfer very well into the new engine. I think they could easily make the ability to stack inversely proportional to how many Mutas the player has selected. After exceeding a certain number of Mutas (determined through balance experiments). They could even come up with some lore explanation for stacking so that the casuals don't whine it's unrealistic (it's a sci-fi game ffs). But that's besides the point. The key aspect that separates BW Muta micro and sc2 Muta micro is the fact that in BW one can overcome the tendency of air units to come to a halt before they attack with micro/technique. That's not possible in SC2 - Mutas decelerate and stop before they attack and have to slowly accelerate afterwards. I imagine that engine differences may also be a reason why other micro tricks, like patrol micro, did not transfer over to SC2. Those tricks were exploits of an aged engine, and I imagine that a modern Blizzard would've patched them out if BW was still getting balance updates. They wouldn't have patched them - they did - take Void Ray micro for example. This is a HUGE mistake on their part. It's akin to Quake designers getting rid of rocket jumping. ;o They should've embraced those - de facto - unintended gameplay features. However, I do agree that quite a few units just feel clunky, especially without an obvious moving shot. Nevertheless, there is a fine line between a micro trick giving a player a slight edge or being completely imbalanced at all levels. While I don't think it'll be difficult for Blizzard to tweak units to have a moving shot, it's going to be much harder for them to purposely add hidden, more intricate micro tricks into the engine in hopes of people discovering and exploiting them. Moving shot, stacking, and patrol micro were accidental discoveries of unintended engine intricacies. While it's easy to point at the stuff that's already been discovered in BW, it's difficult to purposely and artificially create hidden micro tricks that can be discovered by future players. Those techniques do not have to be hidden in any way whatsoever. Would the fact that Muta stacking and moving-shot wouldn't be be "hidden" make it any easier to master? The first step to improving sc2 micro would be not removing the already existing micro tricks such as Void Ray micro that used to be possible. The next step would be bringing back at least some of the micro techniques from BW - without hiding them. For all I care, they could even make their own tutorials explaining how to use them. They need not change the engine. It's all possible to fix even in the map editor: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=125146 | ||
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Sephy90
United States1785 Posts
On April 26 2011 02:37 andrewlt wrote: Moving shot doesn't necessarily have to be done the same way it's done in BW. I don't even know exactly how it's done in BW, just that it's really exciting to watch and adds tactics to the game. Not only did Blizzard remove moving shot, they made it so that certain units like hellions have to come to a dead stop while shooting and then accelerate slowly after stopping. To compensate, they gave units like vikings ridiculous range. It just feels to me like a deliberate attempt to reduce micro to 1a as much as possible. The only micro that exists in SC2 is splitting units. The moving shot in BW is when you right click your unit (by chasing whatever you're attacking) and using "Attack" then immediately right clicking again to chase your enemy. The timing to do this is pretty strict because you have to input the commands very fast. By doing this it seems as if your unit is shooting without stopping at all. Units like mutalisks and wraiths could do this. The moving shot in SC2 is just right click spamming while the engine automatically attacks for you. Although the timing isn't too hard to learn in BW it still requires effort and good unit control (micro of course). | ||
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sCCrooked
Korea (South)1306 Posts
On April 25 2011 23:08 Rampager wrote: I love both games equally, obviously brood war requires far superior mechanics but both are easy to learn hard to master games. Can't everyone just <3 If you're an A on iCCup, you have "learned" BW. If you're Jaedong/FlaSh/Bisu/St0rk/ManyotherAandSrankprogamersinKorea, then you have "mastered" it. If you're a Bronze on SC2, you have "learned" SC2. If you're an old B-team-skill-wielding retired BW player, then you have "mastered" it. I don't see the equality here. | ||
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arb
Noobville17919 Posts
On April 25 2011 21:57 ShadeR wrote: Guys Im ahaving a laugh at how he said HUNDREDS of patches lol... wasnt there only 2 actual balance patches? and after that the game was balanced | ||
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emucxg
Finland4559 Posts
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maybenexttime
Poland5362 Posts
On April 26 2011 03:03 arb wrote: wasnt there only 2 actual balance patches? and after that the game was balanced Roughly 3-4 balance patches for SC and BW combined, I believe. | ||
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doothegee
Korea (South)3011 Posts
No real point here, just my two cents of rambling. I would like to see Blizzard give some more credit to the actual players and people behind the scene that made BW into the great pioneer of e-sports that it is. | ||
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Kralic
Canada2628 Posts
On April 26 2011 02:58 sCCrooked wrote: If you're an A on iCCup, you have "learned" BW. If you're Jaedong/FlaSh/Bisu/St0rk/ManyotherAandSrankprogamersinKorea, then you have "mastered" it. If you're a Bronze on SC2, you have "learned" SC2. If you're an old B-team-skill-wielding retired BW player, then you have "mastered" it. I don't see the equality here. I don't see the logic of your post. Basically you are saying if you played your placement matches you are the equivlant of "A" in SC2. I don't see the equality either. Edit: Further onto it. I am sure a "old B-team-skill-wielding retired BW player" can also obtain A or higher on ICCup still. The fact is that if one of the "mastered" BW players went to SC2, then the current "mastered" players wouldn't be the "mastered" player anymore. Calling BW and SC2 mastered is a bold statement anyway. | ||
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nepeta
1872 Posts
If you were to pay €25 + €5/month, blizz would have an incentive to aim for longevity, but the entire model of personal computer development and game sales is against it, so it's not going to happen any time soon. SC2 is not like WoW, its main attraction is pvp, which means adding content is a very limited tool to ensure customer loyalty. They need a radically different setup of income from e-sports, i.e. a HUGE increase of revenue from e-sports, to bring it on the same level as that from copy sales, period. Yeah, we at TL.net like to see gosu micro, epic low econ battles, cunning plans and meta metagames, but all the scrubs out there just want to see pretty things shoot and explode when they click and don't give a damn about units which require more than 2 clicks to operate. SC2 could have been a lot worse, from an e-sports view, try envisioning a pvp environment run like the sp campaign. Scary, isn't it? Browder/Blizz/Activision are balancing like crazy, but first and foremost they do so financially, all other objectives are secondary. Lord almighty forgive my entering this discussion, but I suppose I'm crazy enough to argue in it, and my point is its pointlessness :p | ||
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kainzero
United States5211 Posts
But anyway... I can't watch SC2 at all. There's no impressive micro and there's no real multitasking. The AI is so smart that microing might make you worse. On top of that, the loser of the big battle is an instant gg because there's no hope of coming back. One thing that makes BW impressive to watch is because when I play it, I can't perform at the level the pros do. In fact, to perform at that level, I need to put in years of practice. I don't understand how people can find SC2 more interesting to watch. You might say "Oh, I don't like watching people build units perfectly" or "Dragoon AI sucks" but those aren't problems we're dealing with as spectators. We're only watching. We don't watch people macro from their factories in 2 seconds, we only see tanks roll down the screen and wonder how they have so many units. We don't complain how hard it is to perfect blanket storm, we only know it's a rare sight when it happens and it gives us reason to cheer. Reading the interview, it makes me wonder if Browder actually called for more depth. It says the development team kept him check by cutting units that were "too complicated." | ||
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Ideas
United States8037 Posts
it's a combination of amazing unit designs AND intense mechanical requirements, and often times they overlap with each other. the muta itself is a pretty boring unit (just look at sc2 muta) but when you combine it with unit stacking, it becomes one of the most interesting parts of brood war. it's fun (at least to me, and I think to a lot of BW fans) to control a maxed out army properly with limited unit selection, and amazing to watch. it's incredibly satisfying to have good macro and and to be able to out-produce your opponent. a lot of the mechanical stuff just wont ever be as fun in SC2 as BW (mostly army control and basic macro), but there is still potential in the expansions to make the macro mechanics more interesting and more fun (sc2 zerg probably has the most interesting/fun macro mechanics, although i feel it's still a bit shallow for what it tries to do), although I really wonder if blizzard will be able to improve the game in ways that they need to (at least, that they need to do in order to get me to play it). I feel like many things are just fundamentally wrong with the design though and will never change, and thus the game will never be fun for me: - lack of a real high ground advantage drastically decreases defender's advantage. combined with short rush distances on most blizzard maps makes "real" FEs much harder to do (by "real" FE I will arbitrarily say means expanding before gas, aka 1 RAX FE, forge FE, etc) - hard counter system is far more shallow than counters in BW. In BW the "hard" counters were just splash damage units vs light units that clump together (archons vs mutas, firebats vs zerglings). the beauty of this was that it just put extra pressure on the countered player to micro better than his opponent (IE make sure mutas are never in range of archon, splitting marines vs lurkers, etc). the hard counter system in SC2 generally just makes 1 unit do a whole lot more damage to the other unit, and there's no way of micro-ing around that (at least with interesting micro). - this doesnt fit too well with the other bullet points, but I just want to say that focus-firing is not a fun or interesting micro, and simply trying to get the biggest surface area when you attack the other guy's army is not a very fun method of army control. Im not saying that these didnt exist in some form or another in BW but they were definitely the least interesting things that happened in BW. - smart-casting forces all spells to be far less powerful and less interesting. im just going to go ahead and say that just about all spells in SC2 are pretty lame, even the ones kept from BW are less interesting because of changes. storm in BW could kill almost anything with 1 cast, but since it took so long to complete (actually it's pretty short, but like 3x longer than sc2 storm) the other player has a chance to move his units out of it and not instantly die. SC2 storm does less damage in a smaller area over a shorter time, meaning that it's not as important to dodge (although admittedly still important to try to dodge) but much harder to dodge because it's over so quick. Then you have spells like fungal growth and EMP where besides trying to spread out units in case the spell is casted (which you already would do vs storm) you just have to sort of sit there and take it. there are a lot of things that blizzard can do to make the game better, although i really doubt they will: most army compositions function in the exact same way (IE big ball of ranged units) - as many have discussed, outside of siege tanks (and forcefields sorta) there are no area-controlling units (IE no more lurkers, dark swarm, reavers, or spidermines). outside of ZvT(or rather, terrans going mech), all army compositions are extremely similar (in that they are a big ball of ranged units and some lings or zeals thrown in). hopefully the next expansion will introduce units/spells that fall into this category, as these units not only make armies look and function differently, but allow for many more play-styles as well. oh crap I gotta go for now. i'll post more later I think lol. I also wanted to talk about: -all 3 races are more mobile in SC2, making harass less viable (as well as making it much riskier to ever split up your army at all) - why games never go through different stages as well as BW games do (IE in BW ZvT, you have terran pushing out before mutas, then mutas harassing base, then terran pushing out again while zerg turtles with swarm, then ultras come out and zerg has map control, but then terran switches to mech, etc). probably a combination of yet-to-be-developed meta game, but also lack of late-game options (IE zerg hive tech is much more limited than BW, protoss just have a fucking mothership, etc) - baneling vs marine micro is way lamer than marine vs lurker micro (and also that the lurker is a far superior unit than the baneling in terms of functions, entertainment, and offering play-styles) - blizzard should consider something like "micro mechanics" (akin to the macro mechanics) to allow users more room to differentiate themselves with micro. this would not only differentiate the races more, but make the game more fun too (both to watch and to play). - how zerg has been so messed up because blizzard never gave them another unit in the beta (basically instead of adding in another unit to make zerg stronger, they just made all the existing units stronger yet they still have holes in their army (particularly in the late game)). | ||
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