Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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!
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.
I'm pretty sure that this "everyone" you mean is confined to the same group of jerks who look down on people who "read" and, omg, those losers who actually post on uber-geek-loser sites like slashdot.
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.
There are plenty of games that are fun. It's not surprising, that there's a niche for games that are a sport.
Football, volleyball, tennis, etc. - all are both games and a sport. What's wrong with some computer games also being an eSport?
Oh, that's silly. I find eating a really good Chicago hot dog "a blast" and they've made a sport out of competitive hot dog eating.
I've had a blast playing Chicago-style 16-inch softball where the pitcher has a beer in one hand and the ball in the other and that's a goddamn sport. I've had a blast bowling, riding my bike, doing martial arts, riding a horse, skiing, snowboarding, dancing, playing darts, and I'm just getting started with this list. I'm at the approximate level of "button masher" in all of these activities except martial arts and they have all been made into "sport".
What we are getting in this article is part of the campaign of excuses for why StarCraft2 is not as good as StarCraft.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
You're totally forgetting about arcade and console gaming before all this new-fangled computer stuff (though, I suppose, that is what Evo is at its roots).
In terms of "modern" computer gaming, there was a professional league in the states competing using Quake in 1997 (see: Cyberathlete Professional League).
Starcraft had not even been published at that point.
Sure, Starcraft (and South Korea) deserve huge props for what they've contributed to the gaming scene but I'm not sure I would feel correct in saying that any one nation or league or game "set the concept of professional gaming and esports". Too many outside factors and each area contributing to the buildup in their own way...
There have always been competitive tournaments, frequently with cash or other prizes, for pretty much any game of any popularity. They do not even have to be electronic. You can play Monopoly professionally (but you won't make much money).
So StarCraft was a dominant game when the World Cyber Games started. That doesn't mean it originated the idea of "esports" (a term I LOATHE by the way). I was playing in for-money Quake tournaments two years before StarCraft came out.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
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 should have a space. Ever seen "pro-golfing" or "pro-basketball"? Pro- means "for", pro without the hyphen is a shortening of "professional".
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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
and some of us played galaga for money in arcades in the 80s. and our parents played pinball for money in the 50s. your point is what?
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
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.
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.