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

what's wrong with letting the game be a game?

[Punto]

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.

Re:what's wrong with letting the game be a game?

[19thNervousBreakdown]

1. At the higher levels it's all build order and strat and multitasking at an insane level. It's fun, but when you get to the higher levels the experimentation in the game is pretty much gone. If you experiment at all with a new strat you are dead.

Emphasis mine.

This is every high-level competition I can think of. Ever played Bridge, Poker, or Euchre? You almost know what the other player has. They know you know, so they pretend to have something else. You know they know you know, so you figure out what they would have that would make them want to pretend to have what they're pretending to have, ad infinitum.

The thing that really drives the concept home is when you play against an amateur. I remember getting my ass handed to me in Street Fighter II by someone who couldn't even throw a fireball, because I was so used to being able to predict exactly what they were going to do, I'd start the counter before I even thought about it, and planning counters to their counter to my counter ... and then I was dead, to a high roundhouse kick that any pro player would know was absolute suicide. Ever play poker against someone who has absolutely no idea how to play? They're the perfect bluffs, because they don't even know they're bluffing, and people get pissed. Which is funny to me, because you'd think that it's the first time they've ever come up against the wildness of an amateur's play. That scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin happens all the time.

Don't get me wrong, I hate Starcraft and think it's an unfun, terrible game, but you won't find an escape from this particular issue as long as people have a theory of mind.

The truth is game developers...

[blahplusplus]

... 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.

Re:The truth is game developers...

[Alioth]

I don't really agree with this (except in so much that SC2 is a fairly conservative follow-up). I happen to find SC2 multiplayer awesome, I enjoy the competition even though I'm dreadful at it (struggling not to be demoted back to bronze). I think the game itself is well designed and is a lot of *fun* (otherwise I wouldn't play it).

I also enjoy seeing the pro-gaming aspect of it, some of the TSL games last weekend were awesome.

I think Blizzard have designed a good game here, not only do people like me who just play casually find it a lot of fun, but also the pro-gamers like it too. It's an achievement that the game is easy enough to pick up for a casual but deep enough for the pro.

they left my fun out early

[dltaylor]

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.

Re:they left my fun out early

[SpazmodeusG]

If you hate region locking you made the right move. The region locking of Starcraft 2 takes it to insane levels. eg. If you make a map using the in-built editor you can only upload it to your region!

So those of us in the more obscure regions simply aren't allowed to play the custom maps made by people in other regions.

Re:Sport...pfft.

[Sky Cry]

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?

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.