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.'"

Comments

Re:Excuses

[rekenner]

And if SC2 was 'balanced' like MvC2 was or MvC3 is looking like it will be (given that the metagame is young, I hesitate to say 'is'), then some fractional amount of a single race would be used, as everything else is too bad to be used. So, maybe only the Marine, Reaper, Banshee, and Raven are the only units in the entire game worth using. That's good game design, right? Or maybe only a unit or two from each race are usable and teching to them and microing them is the entire game.
Yeah. No.
RTS balance and fighting game balance are way the fuck different. RTS balance, or at least in SC2, RELIES on having every race be balanced (or so close to balanced as to give them all decent representation, let's not argue if SC2 is balanced yet. See: Young meta) and have multiple good builds and unit compositions and strategies within each race. As compared to MvC2 where how many characters out of the massive roster were tournament usable? Hm. Magneto, Cable, Storm, Sentinel, Psylocke, Strider (if your name is clockw0rk), Doom (mostly see previous parenthetical), CapCom, and Cyclops. And all the rest are thrown out. All the rest aren't used. And how did SC2 avoid that? By what was talked about in this article. SC2 isn't super revolutionary, I'll agree. But as a competitive game? I'd say it's outstanding. As someone who liked Brood War and likes SC2, but also sucks at micro ... I enjoy watching SC games. I watched SC1 tournies and I'm currently watching NASL. Fuck playing the multiplayer myself - I know I'll suck. That's not due to the game, that's due to that I don't care enough to get good. But I love watching the pros play.

Meh

[PFI_Optix]

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.