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I occasionally watched professional Korean Starcraft games for a few years. The graphics of Broodwar are so much better for the audience’s sake (and I assume a
by jacobolus 10y ago
I occasionally watched professional Korean Starcraft games for a few years.
The graphics of Broodwar are so much better for the audience’s sake (and I assume also for the players’) than Starcraft 2 or similar 3D games.
Having pixel sprites and a fixed isometric view is a huge advantage in character legibility/contrast.
3D everything demos well and looks more “realistic” (i.e. more like a high-budget space film), but it’s horrible when you’re trying to see past the clutter to figure out what’s going on.
All the rotating cameras and fancy animated backgrounds and tricky lighting and so on are pure gimmicks which distract from the gameplay.
- gribbly 10y agoExactly, for top down rts games, 3d offers nothing but increased hardware demands. It's not as if you have anything to gain by zooming in on a unit or rotate around it, pre-rendered graphics will look better and have less hardware demands.
- debaserab2 10y agoThe main problem with 2d sprites is animation. 2d sprites will never compare to 3d animation in terms of what an object can visually communicate to a player about what is happening in a game. In full 3d, animation can tell a player a lot about what is happening on the battle field, such as where the bounding boxes actually are near a unit, what the actual angle is they are using to target a unit, or how a unit is physically affected by different buffs/debuffs. Although I find well made 2d games to be remarkable for their own reasons, I don't there is a legitimate argument as to which provides the superior gameplay.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoFor me 2D graphics do look better (especially SC1 vs. SC2) because of the art style. When you go from hand-drawn sprites to 3D models, you always lose quality, because there's more computation to be done than any hardware could reasonably perform in real-time. Some games try to hide it by altering their art style, e.g. by making more cartoony-looking units. Warcraft 3 did that, and SC2 seems to have inherited it. Which for me was huge negative - the general atmosphere of SC1 was dark and serious; SC2 feels lightweight and more like a comedy at times.
- spicytunacone 10y ago>I don't there is a legitimate argument as to which provides the superior gameplay. I think you're conflating graphics and gameplay too much here; different games need to communicate different things. If anything, well made 2D games, because of their economy of expression, possess superior legibility once you learn to read the sprites.
- debaserab2 10y agoLegibility? Yes, more recognizable. Definitely cannot communicate as many different things about what is going on in the game though.
- fuckthis 10y ago>what an object can visually communicate to a player about what is happening in a game. And yet somehow with superior visual fidelity, Andromeda looks worse than Mass Effect 1. 'Better' animation technology not always the answer.
- NTripleOne 10y agoDeveloper incompetency has nothing to do with 2d vs 3d animation.
- Tossrock 10y agoSo, you think this http://i.imgur.com/MAy4Pgl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/MAy4Pgl.jpg is more legible than this http://i.imgur.com/xrBPKda.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xrBPKda.jpg ? I disagree! And Starcraft 2 has a fixed isometric viewpoint. While it is technically possible to move the camera, no one ever does that in a real game.
- wruza 10y agoYou are comparing ultralisk-backed battle in psy storm with a pair of protoss not even started to evaporate few zerglings.
- TulliusCicero 10y agoThat's a really unfair comparison, there's way more going on in a tight space in the BW pic. Especially since if anything dense clustering of units is way more common in SC2 because the pathing is more efficient.
- theandrewbailey 10y agoBrood war has more contrast than SC2. SC2 relies more on color to distinguish things, but BW uses brightness, which human vision is more sensitive to. I much prefer the BW shot.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoSC1 has less eyecandy and less random moving things; I find it much easier to focus on SC1 game than on SC2 one. I might be biased though; I spent much more time in SC1 than in SC2.
- spicytunacone 10y agoSibling comments already made good points, but the BW screenshot isn't actually in-game view, either. The mini-map adds to the noise and the shot is smaller. I don't know if the SC2 one is in-game with the HUD removed as well.
- fuckthis 10y agoA few air units and zerglings to the biggest ground units in the game... Even the anti Broodwar fanboys can't get their hatred of it right.