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Taking the Fun Out of StarCraft II
StarCraft II lead designer Dustin Browder recently spoke with Gamasutra about how designing a real-time strategy game for competition can sometimes be at odds with designing something purely for the sake of fun.
"'It took me a year and a half to figure this out,' said Browder, an enthusiastic designer who might also be around the top 10 percent in the world in terms of speed-talking. 'I kept trying to shove stuff in that was fun but wasn't a sport,' he said. 'And everybody would tell me "no," and I wouldn't understand why. And I thought they were all jerks. I didn't know, right? I couldn't figure it out.' ... 'It took me a long time to understand why this sport value is so important,' Browder continued. The development team kept itself in check, nixing units that overlapped with the roles of other units and dumping units that were deemed too complicated. Some of the units cut were fun to use, but just didn't fit with the game's objectives as an eSport. 'It makes it so challenging for designers on the project to come up with new and good ideas,' said Browder. 'We could sit here right now, and come up with 10 great ideas for an RTS. But I almost guarantee you that all of those would get shot down for a sport.'"
...the game players are already having fun playing the game as it is, and even if new features may be fun, learning to use them in itself is not so fun at all.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Sounds like an excuse for poor game design. Good games can be fun and competitive at the same time. Look at Marvel vs Capcom. You can button-mash and not know what the hell is going on and still have a blast. You can also distill a perfect strategy and play-style and win tons of money playing the game for sport. At what point did Blizzard decide they had to pick one or the other? Maybe this isn't the same company I knew from my youth.
if you 'do not know what the hell is going on but still having a blast', you cant make an esport out of that game.
next time, read the summary attentively, at last.
Read radical news here
This only makes sense to me if pro players make up a majority of *buyers*. Or if people playing multi in general have the same desires for gameplay, even if they're not competing. But frankly, as a more casual gamer who enjoys "fun", this seems like pandering to a potential minority of hardcore players at the expense of my enjoyment, and that irritates me.
I'm stuck in bronze forever, probably because I don't care about timing and build orders and unit counters, but I have fun playing, and doing all that stuff to climb up the ladder would take the fun out of it for me. And I really don't care about being bronze. What's wrong with playing the game for fun? I wish they'd just let us use all those fun units on unranked games.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Weird how they failed both aspects with starcraft 2.
It's a damn computer game.
Sure, you're always going to have people for whom these games are REEL SRS BZNS! But everyone else looks at these hypercompetitive button-pushers with something faintly resembling pity (with a large dose of impatience and disgust mixed in for good measure).
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Designing a game that would be fun for beginners/casual players and challenging for experts at the same time is extremely difficult. Ten or twenty years ago there were no games like that. Now, with the popularization of things like tutorials and achievements, we are getting closer, but we still aren't there in most genres.
I think the game that does the best job at this (out of those I have seen) is New Super Mario Bros Wii. It has several layers of complexity and can be played at various levels of challenge, from using the bubble or the Super Guide to get you out of the levels to getting all the star coins in the game or finding tricks for infinite lives. I have seen both absolute beginners and old-school hardcore gamers having loads of fun with this game (even when both kinds of players are playing *together*!) and that is truly remarkable, and something to mark in the history of game design.
Now, how could this be applied to Starcraft II? No idea...
... have lost their ability to have confidence in themselves. The games are now designed around what they perceive 'the audience' wants, starcraft 1 was such a hit BECAUSE the design team did not have pressure of korean pro gaming to stifle their creativity.
Starcraft 2 had to be the most conservative and underwhelming sequel of all time. Not only that the single player story felt like an alternate starcraft universe that had very little to do with the first game. It just goes to show that 12 years is too long a time to wait between sequels for a hit game to keep continuity since most of the original developers of Starcraft 1 were long gone by the time SC2 was released.
The internet has become an echo chamber for ignorant fans and developers to heap praise on themselves when the games they are putting out are conservative to mediocre at best simply because there are so many blind fanboys these days.
You certainly took the fun out of Starcraft with the decision to nix the Lurkers.
Shame on you, Blizzard.
This is why I really like Minecraft. Fun stuff can slide in without concerns about it interfering with it being a "sport".
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
We knew this was the case during development, but I wish they'd been more honest about it then. Blizzard seem fixated on the Korean esports market. Normally I'd approve of a creative product chasing niche appeal but... esports seems like a really small niche, and I can't see how this is a good long-term business model for the franchise.
I've certainly lost all interest in buying any of the follow-ups. I used to play a lot of Warcraft III multiplayer. Win or lose, it was good fun. But SC2 multi-player is a stressful, joyless experience for a semi-casual gamer like me. Maybe I'm getting too old for this! Back to Company of Heroes again... ( still fantastic fun after all these years )
People played the first Starcraft because it was fun. People played it because it was also a sport.
I play Starcraft 2 from time to time, but not nearly as much as I played the first Starcraft, and mostly because I don't have a lot of fun playing the multiplayer. From the article it looks like they built SC2 to cater directly to the sport play. If it wasn't for the single player, I would think twice before buying future games from Blizzard. Don't want to spend money on something I won't have fun with, but the single player aspect of SC2 was fun, just not sure it was worth the amount I spent. Might wait a while for the price to go down or consider other options when the next expansion comes out.
Once they took out one of the only two play modes I would ever use (LAN play), and threw in the DRM, I was never going to have "fun" with it, since I wasn't going to buy it.
I either need to get SC/BW running under WINE, or get a dedicated VM going for it, so I can repurpose the Win2K box that I use for playing the original.
I play StarCraft II quite a bit, and while by no means am I a professional player, I get a little competitive with it. (High Ranking Diamond player, currently.) I don't think they are absolutely on the wrong path, because a large part of the fun (for me) is having a balanced and relatively simple game to compete in. So while it may seem a bit odd to take out the new and intuitive ideas, for the sake of keeping the game balanced, it may be best. Though perhaps not for the types that don't take pleasure in winning? There is something to be said for the custom games, though. There is a /large/ variety to be had there, that could easily cater to the less-competitive players.
I don't want to play an eSport.. I want to play something _fun_.
I don't understand all the e-hate directed at Blizzard for this in these comments.
In order for the game to be viable for competitive play, the game needs to be extremely balanced. If it wasn't the case, Blizzard would lose the favor of a huge number of competitively minded players plus the whole of Korea :P.
Keep in mind that the title of this slashdot news post is clearly designed to troll you. Multiplayer SC2 is fun because it's so balanced. The skill cap of SC2 is insanely high because of it. If you want to play with "fun" units, there are loads of special unbalanced units in the singleplayer campaign. Furthermore, there's a huge number of custom maps with custom units available on battle.net.
Even if you for some reason don't like SC2 multiplayer, the singleplayer campaign still offers as much content as any similarly priced PC game.
Limited queue sizes, Resources taken when issueing the order as oppose to when it starts.
It's all a bit backwards tbh.
We, Starcraft 2 Players, would love to have many of you join us. However if the game has to be compromised for some of the reasons I have seen in these comments, then continue entertaining yourself otherwise. There are a significant number of people who are able to make a living off being a profession Starcraft 2 player. Their livelihood and the entry of others into that realm of survival are dependent on Starcraft 2's competitive nature as an eSport. Those who are unfamiliar, the eSports scene for Starcraft 2 is huge and just getting bigger. Off the top of my head a few going on: Global Starcraft 2 League ( http://gomtv.net/ ), North American Star League ( http://nasl.tv/ ), Major League Gaming ( http://mlgpro.com/ ), IGN Pro League ( http://www.ign.com/ipl/ ), TSL, various local tournaments happening everywhere, King Of The Hills with open invite to various divisions with cash prizes. Just look at the coverage on YouTube and Justin.tv The linked article this refers to, I feel, is that the game designer realizes the error of his cool additions purely for the sake of fun. A good example of this in action is take a look at the success of Nightmare Chess as a game and if you look into how difficult it has been for many to keep tournaments going. Balance and stability is more important than cool and crazy for long term fun. Blizzard's willingness to keep the stability of Starcraft 2 over chasing hype is admirable in my eyes.
Well, of all religions, I give you that your God at least likes his shrooms. Not the worst of them...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
No matter what the guy in the summary did, the game would have essentially turned out as a competitive one. It is the nature of the genre. Maybe he could have fucked it up enough to not have SC2 be the best competitive game of any type on the face of the planet, but it is not likely.
...with friends.
Me and my friends have actually fun, we're ranked gold/silver in 2v2, 3v3; the main issue with SC2 is that is not as varied as WC3 or SC, SC:BW so you end up winning or losing just because of 10 seconds or sometimes bad luck.
On top of that there's people who use genetic algorithms to improve their build... where's the skill here?
Cheers,
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not having unbalanced units, especially early in the game, is not simply an "eSports" thing, it is a multiplayer thing.
If you are building up a decent base, and then suddenly get a drop of unbalanced unit of type X early on, which wipes out your production, and then the opponent repeats this until you are dead, you will not have fun in multiplayer and will stop playing it at all.
Clearly that isn't good for a game that is known for its multiplayer although the campaign is good too.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Sorry, there are no "sports" on computers. (imho). Then again, I don't consider golf, darts, anything where a panel decides the score, or anything involving cars a sport. (Us couch potatoes have all kinds of opinions about sports.)
I don't really play SC2 multiplayer. Every time I do I get stomped into the floor because the other guy's drilled his build order to a fine art. It just rubs me the wrong way that most games of SC2 (in the minor leagues, anyway) are decided almost entirely upon who has the best build order.
For the record, I did beat the campaign and thought it was a blast, and I'll still play against the AI (on easy and medium) from time to time.
I dunno, I just don't have fun losing (at least, for reasons I perceive as arbitrary). Guess I'm one of those jerks.
Sent from my CR-48
competition can sometimes be at odds with designing something purely for the sake of fun.
Not entirely. What's being described here is the difference between perspective-based "fun" and competitive "fun". Perspective based "fun" is something along the lines of one player getting to use something absolutely overpowered to decimate their opponent. This is a pretty key cornerstone of single-player. Some examples (Halo's Tank sequences, CoD Helicopter/Tank sequences, Nuclear Frikkin' Bombs, The Laser Drill on The Dig in SC2) This is bad for multiplayer. Competitive "fun" means that everyone has a more-or-less level playing field, and it is skill/strategy/reactions that win the day. This is great for multiplayer, but can make single-player rather dull.
you should have done craptainsblog.blogger.com
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
The campaign has a lot more unit types and upgrades than the multiplayer mode.
It's obvious the enhancements are there and useful for the game, but Blizzard is holding it back.
That is sports equipment. By your anology, I would as a regular person want my game of baseball/soccer (whatever suits you) with mates to include rigerous dope testing... we would pass with ease. We are far to drunk to piss in a metal trough, let alone a cup.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I've played ~50 matches and the only feeling I get when I win is a sense of relief and "I don't want to do that again". It feels like the time I spent on the match was wasted. After all you get just as many points from rushing an opponent after 2 minutes as you get from carefully constructing a wall of defense and spending time to build an unbeatable late game army. Star Craft 2 is simply not entertaining. The pace of the game is two high for me to play it in a relaxed state. I guess that means I'm not an e-sports person. I love games though and I've played every major PC game... Probably spent several months of game time combined on TF2 and CS... but SC2? Where's the innovation really? It's just chess with more complex rules and much faster pace. I don't get any kick out of it at all. The multiplayer could have been a zillion times more fun by something as simple as making the ranking system more complex than points and ladders. For example, add some simulated large wars, factions and generated story... map regions and whatever. Make a win or a loss count more than getting a few arbitrary points added or removed. SC2 is a game ruined because it was made into an "e-sport" instead.
Starcraft 1 was genius, Warcraft 1, 2, and 3 were brilliant, then after much waiting SC2 took a major step back in my opinion. No heros, no real units with auras or other augmentation, no creeps... in my opinion SC2 is one of the more boring rts's out there... e-sport or not. I played the original WC1 when no one ever even heard of blizzard, played WC2 till my eyes bled, then SC1 came out and it was awesome.... only to be trumped by WC3 TFT. They progressed making it more and more complicated. More complicated objectives, more complicated ideas, strategies etc. Then SC2 a graphical wonder-lust but horribly dated game play. Mass units, throw them at the enemy. I dunno, i am really disappointed, I was first on line the day it was out but once done with the single player campaign it was lame. Multiplayer is just so boring. The lack of heros really just sucks. It's like stepping back in time. All in all, i dont understand the article. You make RTS's more fun by adding new techniques in which you must master (ie: creeping for exp was brand new in WC3 among many many others). SC2 in my opinion just fell flat... especially considering how much damn time it took them. I mean seriously the excuse in the article for making a bad game really is pathtetic. They had forever and took another year of two to get it done.... then it comes out and you say "well its not fun because we wanted to make it competitive". What a bunch of crap, i call bs. Truth is more likely... well, we made so much on WOW that we didn't feel SC2 mattered... so we waited till the last minute and then released a crap game. Sorry but at least it's well balanced.
Doesn't almost every game start with "gl hf"?
See. Everyone is having fun already (until they get 4-gated).
I think that what is being said is that the variety of units has had to be dulled down in competitive games. I have heard people say that this makes it easier to watch but there is still a lot of complexity in the game with three races and all their differences.
If you want to try out all sorts of units, there are a ton of custom games where you can use every unit available.
For me, the game is the best in many years and has been keeping me going for 8 months now - there are all sorts of different things to do from ladder, custom games and private matches between friends.
Brilliant game, brilliant design and a great deal of fun for me..
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The built the game for speed and competition only.
Multiplayer isn't fun. It's just a competition for execution of build orders, and speed in switching from one pre-determined build to another.
I liked SC1 a lot..... but after I finished the campaign in SC2, I tried a couple of games.... and never went back to it.
learning to use them in itself is not so fun at all.
I find in most games, learning the mechanics of the game adds to the enjoyment of the game. It's like reading a good novel.
Which is why I shy away from "sport" games. Once you get past the thin gloss of the production values of a game like Starcraft 2, you're left with a mechanical Quest for Mastery. Instead of a novel, you're reading a technical manual.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I despise StarCraft. I really, honestly do. This isn't some trolling to piss people off, this is me venting.
StarCraft is all about speed and memorization. In that way it's more like a side-scrolling fighting game, where the person who can execute the right combos at the right time wins. Wrong build order? You lose. Didn't mass enough units by the five minute mark? You lose. I play StarCraft 2 with some friends from time to time and I do reasonably well at it, but it's nowhere near as fun as other games. It feels more like a job. I have no desire to play it solo.
What really disappointed me from the start is how the game utterly lacks any sort of reward for solid tactical decisions. High ground? That's negated by simple line-of-sight. Every shot is a hit, and every hit scores exactly the same damage. Compare that to Total Annihilation which at least attempted to give some realism in how units move and fire and the effects of terrain. TA's engine was FAR superior to StarCraft.
StarCraft is a clickfest, the closest thing RTS has to an arcade game. And it's tainted the whole genre.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
it was this esport thing that ruined the game for the rest of us.
i think it also reflects the degree to which starcraft has been sid meier-ed, that is to say ossified by its own past success and petrified of messing it up. I don't really think anyone knows what makes a good game. it's an art and a lottery all at once, and one that you can't learn from e.g. majoring in game development at college.
It's the same reason that movie sequels are usually terrible.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
non tournament approved fun back into starcraft... Please.
The game is so..routine.
Have your plan, implement your plan, if you chose the wrong plan, well to bad there is not time to adjust to new information.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And this is why I haven't found Starcraft 2 multiplayer all that fun, and thus why I will no be purchasing it myself. I mean come on, this is pretty much Blizzard saying that they don't care at all about the casual player, which is exactly what my friends and I are. When we dicked around with SC:BW at lan parties and such we weren't trying to train for some big competition. We were having fun playing BGH or Fastest and seeing whoever could get 2 dozen carriers first.
I found the single player fairly interesting and firefly-esque. Multiplayer wasn't very fun for me since I was terrible and hate entertaining put-downs from ten year olds about exactly how terrible I am. I think I stopped playing after two weeks and have not returned to it for months.
Once you get past the thin gloss of the production values of a game like Starcraft 2, you're left with a mechanical Quest for Mastery. Instead of a novel, you're reading a technical manual.
Some (many) people like that; its why Arenas are popular in WoW (although it takes many many months to learn all the different classes), and why people enjoy FPSes-- its not like "point gun at head, pull trigger" takes very long to figure out, and learning the intricacies of any given FPS wont generally take more than a few hours, but people still play them.
If you look at all the games through history, how many multiplayer games can you name that people have played for more than 10 years that weren't competitive and balanced? I can think of 0.
I feel like this guy's idea of a "fun" unit is one that looks cool but is strictly worse than alternatives, and losing is NOT FUN. If his "fun" unit dominated the others, everyone would build the "fun" unit and the game would NOT BE FUN.
Magic the gathering has plenty of suboptimal cards, and I do enjoy trying to "break" them. However, I only usually try to break it once or twice. Then, it effectively goes in the waste bin.
Adding a lot of cruft units to Starcraft 2 for the sake of "fun" is just going to make the game more difficult to hotkey and more intimidating to new players.
Plenty of us enjoy games that take skill to play and time to master. You don't waste that sort of time on a game that isn't balanced.
This would be true, except for the 10,000 game types available...
Every patch Blizzard turns WoW more and more into nothing but a competitive eSport. I look at the raids in the latest expansion and all I can see is the progression tower from Mortal Kombat.
I'm not arguing your point...but I do feel the need to say that, at least IMO, Civ 5 is hands down the best of the series so far.
No. But from my own experience there are a lot of gamers who want to see competitive VODs in tourneys. Viewers of progames on the other side are turning into loyal buyers of other games and not only the SC franchise. I was never very good at SC1 and neither am I for SC2, but I certainly enjoy watching good games between two progamers. For that the games needs to be balanced and game design needs to take that into account. On a side note I still enjoy BW games more, but the old graphics don't attract new viewers who want to be able to zoom in to the bullet marks on the armor of a marine. The game designers did a pretty good job at making sure the new flashy effects won't affect the ability to see the action and react fast during a match.
Personally I love Starcraft II because they've taken network play to a new level of refinement while feeling free to build a slightly different game for the campaign. They gave up on trying to synchronize the units in the campaign and the ladder play. Getting 3 balanced races for head to head play is hard. The fact they can do it to a point where an eSport can develop is absolutely amazing (for all the reasons they mention in the article). Then they don't confine themselves to that design space when they build the campaign. Obvious and yet brilliant.
All this allows for the most enjoyable campaign I've player of any of the past Blizzard RTSs. I've played all the Blizzard RTSs and this one is the first campaign I've actually enjoyed. It's also the best ladder play as well. I'd have to expose myself to potentially fatal radiation in order to grow enough thumbs to show how much I like this game.
Wonder how much this design philosophy has setback the development of D3. I kinda suspected something along those lines when I first saw the first screenshots of PVP arenas. I don't wanna play that! I want to have a good ol' dungeon exploring romp with my mates. Not something balanced to appeal to the PVP e-sport crowd. PVP like religion poisons everything.
I think the hard-core fanboys are the wost. Nothing but a bunch of whiners living in their parents basement. The lucky ones are working in a call center and sharing an apartment.
I could care less if Starcraft 2 or Metroid the other M wrecked their stupid little continuity. I just care if the game is fun for a maybe the first hundred hours or so.
Amen.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
This is really bothering me. The creative team thinks these units are "fun". This does not mean that players would find the units to be fun. Real fun. Not weird, or off-the-wall, or neater versions of what is already there. These "fun" units splash around game systems, captivating some players with their history and neat features even though in game they are useless. Eventually these players become frustrated that their units do not work so well and they greatly detract from the meta-game. Visit http://www.belloflostsouls.com/ for a list of blog posts where you'll find what we in the Warhammer 40K community have dubbed fluff-bunnies. Fluff-bunnies are players that use "fun" units exclusively. These people then come online to complain that they are not working as expected and that we need to mod the rules to make the game work for these units. These are the worst of the worst and few players enjoy them.
The problem is that there is a spectrum of players between those that have figured out the best strategies and those that want to use a strategy that sounds like it should work. These people in the middle are a large swath of players that want their cool units to be as useful as they are cool. They insist on using them no matter how often they lose.
"Fun" units encourage a style of play that detracts from the competitive nature of the game. If you don't think an RTS or specifically Starcraft 2 should be competitive, then I don't know what you get out of an RTS.
One thing I can't stand is unit limits or at least low ones I run into constantly. It sucks to continuously be forced to execute your own people to make room for others.
And while space ships, mechs and walking robotic creatures look cool war elephants and old geezers spouting "wooohloooohooo woooloooo" make me smile.
However Starcraft, for various reasons, has become something that has been latched on to by the hardcore types. Online players are just extremely competitive, it attracts people who want to win no matter what, not play for fun.
As such, they decided to design to that for SC2. Has been a success too. It was what certain people wanted.
Now if you don't, then I say good on you. Games should be fun, not work. The answer is just to not buy games designed like that. I don't own SC2, and I probably won't until it is in the bargain bin and then just to play the campaign. They designed a game that isn't what I want, so I'll just play others, there are plenty.
Blizzard is really getting in to this whole "eSport" thing (see arenas in WoW). That's fine, there are people in to that. I am not one of them, sounds like you aren't either. That means that you and I are not likely to be purchasing so many Blizzard titles. No problem, there are tons of others out there to keep us happy.
There's room in the market for hardcore games, and room in the market for fun games.
Personally, I thoroughly enjoy the "Quest for Mastery" and it's what puts "sport" games so far above others to me. Furthermore, I think the game is actually really fun to play. Compare this to boring games like World of Warcraft where the game is pure monotony and the only thing you're improving is your character's gear.
Simply by the fact that it tracks "actions per minute" and that the stat matters. The game is about speed in a big way. Top players perform multiple actions per second on average. There is no time for sitting back and looking at the strategic overview, you have to be doing something continually. That is not a game that can be played slow pace.
Personally, I'd really love to see a RTS like Homeworld again for online play. Homeworld itself was marred by cheaters but I think it had a good design. Things happened much slower, meaning strategy played a much bigger role and tactics a lesser one. While you could make differences in fights giving tactical commands to your ships, overall the determining factor was the strategy used. Also the fights progressed slowly, so you had time to analyze what has happening and respond.
While that would bore the ADD "eSports" people to tears it was nice for people who wanted a more relaxed game.
As a side note you might want to check out Sins of a Solar Empire if you haven't. It is a much larger scale game, more like what you get in a TBS, but is realtime. It does focus more on the "strategy over tactics" thing.
...is why Blizzard has lost the plot (not just with Starcraft but also WoW and their other series). And why most of their original designers (the ones whose ideas made them rich) have left to form new companies.
Yeah, why make something fun or innovative when you can make it slightly more profitable instead?
SC (and SC2) are games to me. I play them. I like playing them. I like the creative part of trying different things, of solving a problem a different way, of blah blah blah. If I were to focus on 500 Clicks A Minute, and stealing builds and strategies from the uber-1337 players who would just destroy me with a single SCV, it would be Another Job. It would no longer be Fun. I would have Investment, and Expectations, and More Bad Stress. I would have rivalries, and would spend energy thinking about those rivalries, and it would feel like another profession. I just want a huge-ass carrier fleet. Or BC fleet. Or whatever comes to mind. I get PLENTY of challenge trying to beat, say, a low campaign level on the hardest difficulty. It's just complex enough to achieve without making me want to go sit at my desk and do Real Work to relieve the stress of a pastime.
I teach for Realz. Relationships with the students? Worried right now, and I'm off today. Everything about doing That is REAL to me, and important enough to take on an archangel if needs be. Don't screw with me about teaching or my students. (That doesn't mean we don't have fun, and don't laugh a lot, but it's the Real Deal as far as Important to me.)
Let SC2 be as important to you as it should be. If you're trying to make it your livelihood, then by all means, you should study video and styles. I know every professional competitor in every field should be doing their homework about their medium of competition and the other competitors.
If that's not you, just enjoy playing. It's a game. Don't make it another freaking job. Life's too short.
most people arena just for purple epix
Personally, I thoroughly enjoy the "Quest for Mastery" and it's what puts "sport" games so far above others to me. Furthermore, I think the game is actually really fun to play. Compare this to boring games like World of Warcraft where the game is pure monotony and the only thing you're improving is your character's gear.
SCII is pure monotony.
Nearly every match is decided in the first 2 minutes, and the deciding factor is nothing more than "who clicked faster" or "who won the rock paper scissors match"?
Every patch since release has sought to tighten players down into fewer and fewer possible build orders at the beginning of the game.
A few months ago they made it so Terrans HAD to have a Supply Depot up in order to build a Barracks. Prior to that, you could build both simultaneously, or, if you're an idiot, build a Barracks before a Supply Depot. This was an extreme nerf to Terrans (some of which may have been needed), but more troublesome than any balance concerns is the fact that for the first 90 seconds of every match, every Terran player will be doing the exact same thing.
This is compounded by the fact that the game is balanced only for 1v1 matches. 2v2 matches are a rush fest. You HAVE to defend one spot together. If you guess wrong, you're dead. If you split up, their combined force will overwhelm you and you're dead. If you case right, you'll win the battle (having the benefit of base defenses, repairs, walls, cliffs, production during their travel time and during the battle), and the immediately push to win the match. Given a 2/3 chance to lose, the only viable option is to mass and attack early. This is even more of a joke in 3v3 or 4v4 maps, because the time it takes for any support from teammates to arrive is much longer since the map is larger, and the initial battle isn't 2v1, it's 3v1 or 4v1.
Another shitty thing about SCII is the fact that, even while they go to great lengths to make the maps symmetrical and boring, the fact that all buildings are all oriented the same way ruins map balance. If you spawn at the wrong corner of a map, it'll take you an extra structure to wall off your ramp as Terran, while your opponent can simply use his barracks + tech lab to do it. You may be able to fit a 3x2 building on top of your cliff, but he may not be able to, since that cliff is rotated 90 degrees for him.
Beyond that, there is a mile long list of things Blizzard simply ignored with regards to RTS development since SC came out (and from before!).
Chief among them being formations, scatter, guard, move speed lock, patrols (SCII can't have looping patrol paths unless you make the path clockwise, then trace it back counter clockwise, good luck if you need a lot of waypoints - there's a cap), a decent interface to find games, LAN play, custom start conditions for all maps, and oh yeah, fun. The original Command & Conquer had nearly all of these fucking things (except formations and move speed lock, which were added in later games in the series).
Blizzard developed SCII in a vacuum, and developed it in a way that would result in cash moneys. The balance and game design are geared to "esports" asshats, and the interface and "social" pieces of BNet 2.0 are all designed to have everything monetizable. This is what they learned from selling shiny shit, name changes, character transfers, etc. in WoW. People are morans and will pay, pay, pay for anything you put in front of them if it's an established IP.
Are you insane? The AI is so piss poor that I beat it on the highest setting in under a week. I've never beaten Monarch on any of the others. It's completely broken.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Dustin Browder only accepted the position as lead designer so he could inject his mug into the game as the Goliath unit. True story.
Are you insane?.
Entirely possible. The older I get the more certain I become that this is the case and that I just couldn't tell the difference before.
:)
I rarely play it single player. I have 2 friends that are willing to play multiplayer games which is who I usually play with. Ofc, the games take forever. I had noticed before that the computer was easy to beat...I just thought I was good
I like the new battle system. In the old ones is was just a race to the biggest steamroller. Now, you have to think about how you move things around.
Many people who suck and should not play it are trying to shift the fault on the game, which is total bollocks.
To me, challenge and effort (rel, blood-stained effort) some of the few things in life that provide a source of satisfaction. You could call it your mythical "Fun". I don't even know what it is and how can something ruin it, your "Fun" must be a really frail quality.
When I program, I do not feel "Fun", I feel satisfaction of doing it as it is, likewise, I am not afraid to lose, therefore Starcraft 2 is actually VERY satisfying, as it makes me learn many things to advance (and feel true, manly satisfaction of becoming stronger).
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
I bet you're a hoot at parties.
Level of physical skill required to play a "sport" is much higher than for a "game".
Stephen Hawking could beat you at chess, but not at tennis . . .
Ask Me About... The 80's!
I'm the exact opposite. I get the most fun at trying to become the best. I usually only stick to the competitive 1v1. All the fun is in outsmarting and outplaying and winning. I could care less about the story or wasting time