7 ms·

StarCraft was never meant to be played the way Koreans played [video]

39 points by bane 3y ago

22c 3y ago
I haven't had the time to watch this video but I may check it out later. I would argue that most games when played at the extreme level are not being played the way they were meant to be played. In a sort of "surivorship bias" way, the games which can be played to an extreme level often end up in that position. Some of the craziest speedruns of games are being played in ways the game designer never intended. How game designers choose to react (or not react) to those unintended strategies/techniques and what effect that has on the longevity of the game is a topic I'd find interesting to discuss.
- Vanit 3y ago
  One of my favourite examples of this was the skiing mechanic in the Tribes series.
  - postmodest 3y ago
    Which made the game arguably better. Because rounds got faster and CTF was more fun.
- empyrrhicist 3y ago
  High school debate is sort of this way. The judges are former debaters, and so the rules/tactics evolve until it wouldn't be recognizable to outsiders, or likely the originators of the format/activity. For example, extreme speed reading is table stakes.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - gowld 3y ago
    It's interesting how this happens. You don't need a judge to suddenly prefer extreme speed. You just need one person to win because being slightly faster earned an extra point from a judge (and the might hate super speedy speakers), and that person gives an extra point to someone slightly faster, and the slippery slope slides.
    - zerbinxx 3y ago
      I always found this interesting because I grew up in a rural area and the debate judges were frequently not familiar with the metagame of debate, or could be aware but were downright hostile to it. Among my friends it became its own metagame: who could get away with the most egregious perversions of the form (including intentionally sneaking in logical fallacies into our arguments) in order to win in an atmosphere where point-keeping was highly contingent on the judge’s preconceived beliefs. While there was no substitute for a very strong positive or negative case, there were little rhetorical levers you can pull: calling the opponent a smooth-talking shuck-and-jiver in a political debate or appealing to your own family history that could win big with the right audience if you could guess correctly on what type of person they were.
      - addled 3y ago
        My favorites were the ones that intentionally defined terms in the most outrageous ways. One time the topic was something about allowing pilots to be armed in the cockpit. After the first couple rounds we realized our jokers were scheduled to face an equal opponent for what promised to be an epic showdown: Pro: Yes pilots should armed, because it is hard to fly a plane with only their feet. Con: Pilots have no business in a cock-pit. Cock fighting is a horrible sport, not to mention being illegal in many states. Sadly the opposing coach pulled their team before the round started.
- bombcar 3y ago
  This is true of more than video games; "board games at the extreme" are not really comparable to how the designers played - and that is often not how it's even played by most people. Monopoly, of course, is an extreme case of this, but there are others. The signs of this are in features/functions in the game that are just ignored; sometimes you can figure out what the designers intended them to be used for - and with modern games being patched (even board games get rule clarifications and changes, and add-ons and expansions almost always changed some rules) you can see it live. Heroes III is a perfect example; watch some online videos of pro players and it's nothing like the compstomps we did back in the day.
  - gowld 3y ago
    Monopoly is different because players ignorantly change the rules. Scrabble is an example of Ayers following the rules while distorting the game.
    - tedunangst 3y ago
      Players at Monopoly tournaments are changing the rules?
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Home players add the free parking rules because otherwise the game is a brutal winner’s snowball that is unfun for the losers, especially kids.
  - whartung 3y ago
    Gamers are gonna game. Rule lawyers too. It’s the nature of complex games with large rule sets. What is nice is if you have an active publisher reacting in a timely fashion. But then, if that’s the case, you as a participant need to keep up. Mind this only happens in competitive tournaments. While at home and in clubs folks tend to favor fun, gameplay, and goodwill over pedantic rule making. It can lead to interesting discussions at high volume however. That said, I’ve seen tournament games lost because someone whipped out an obscure ruling from an official source. In a “Sorry you can’t do that.” “What do you mean?” Kind of way. But it was good to participate in games with an active publisher, doing things like gathering after action reports across local tournaments nationwide, looking for unbalanced components or techniques and, rather than tweaking the game directly, just applying changes to the tournament rules set.
- buffet_overflow 3y ago
  Super Smash Bros and the Nintendo response to things like wave dashing (giving characters a chance to stumble in the latest game, iirc) comes to mind. Basically, they saw a hardcore community form around their family friendly fighting game, and tried to axe it.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    Random tripping was a mechanic added in Brawl. In Ultimate, they dialed it back and now it's only a triggered action (and, at a lower rate than Brawl). If anything, it sounds like they took in some feedback from the community.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    Tripping in Brawl was clearly introduced to punish dash dancing, not wave-dashing. https://www.ssbwiki.com/Dash-dance#/media/File:Dashdance.gif https://www.ssbwiki.com/Dash-dance#/media/File:Dashdance.gif If you did this sequence in Brawl, you'd certainly trip. Dash-dancing kept your momentum, allowing you to instantly move at full dash speed at a moment's notice. But it took great amounts of finger-dexterity to alternate left-right-left-right at this speed and keep the character's momentum at maximum.
beebmam 3y ago
I don't like Brood War as a game, both to play and to watch. I much preferred Starcraft 2 over the original, but unfortunately the esports scene died for it. In any case, RTS games just don't seem like good games for humanity, it's very easy to get repetitive stress injuries from them at high APM play.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Starcraft I esports were really really carried by the commentators; without people like Day9 knowing what was going on, and explaining it to me, I'd never have a chance of following along.
  - oreally 3y ago
    Nah any game with enough variance and complexity will do that.
- Kranar 3y ago
  Starcraft 2 kind of ruined what made Brood War special and turned the RTS genre into a kind of rock paper scissors where the computer does most of the work. It was almost certainly unintentional but in Brood War the game is soooooo mechanically challenging that you have to make very careful decisions about whether you want a big army that's dumb and hard to control but can outnumber your opponent, or a small army that's smart and can be used for very efficient tactics. As a human you simply can not have it all and so you have to constantly make very difficult and creative tradeoffs. You can set up cool tactical positions, have way more opportunities for multipronged attacks, and also you can retreat if you think an engagement won't go favorably. In SC2, the game became a lot more streamlined and automated so you as a player don't really get to express your play style as much as in Brood War. The game kind of has a very blunt set of rules about what counters what and as a player your job is to focus mostly on macro/economy, scouting, and unit production, you build up a kind of death ball army and then send it into a battle that lasts under a minute and whoever wins, wins. Another annoying aspect of SC2 that's a consequence of how automated the game is, is that it is also often very cheesy, where an opponent can rush out an army that's very easy for the computer to control but the defender has to click like crazy to defend it. I'm fairly high level in SC2 (top 4%), and I can literally tell an opponent I'm going to "cannon rush" them, which is a cheesy strategy that has a very specific defense. I can even tell my opponent what that defense is, and they will still lose to it because the defender needs to click like crazy to defend it while I can let the computer basically do almost all of the work for me. The same goes for a bunch of other cheesy strategies where you rush out a small number of units that the computer has an easy time controlling for you, and force your opponent to have to literally engage in very awkward and precise hand gestures in order to defend the attack, and the vast majority of people simply don't know or care to learn to move their hands that way.
nitwit005 3y ago
Essentially ignores the topic in the headline, and discusses history, with a focus on a single prominent player.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Yeah it really seems like the youtube algorithm pushes creators so hard that they are constantly adjusting their video titles to try to get the best traction, often leading to video titles that diverge significantly from the original intent of the video. It's an annoying situation as it means browsing and clicking on videos is a very inconsistent experience!
- yaomtc 3y ago
  It's also Part 1 of 3, and as the second two parts are not done yet, the story that was meant to be told is incomplete.
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
Somewhat unrelated, but I never understood why the Command and Conquer series wasn't as popular as Starcraft. At least Red Alert 2, I always thought was a vastly superior RTS.
- dudul 3y ago
  I also loved red alert 2, and played it much more than starcraft. However, one possible reason is that starcraft had 3 factions. 3 very different factions. Yes, Allies and USSR had special units in RA2, but the differences were much more pronounced in SC. It made for very different possible gameplays and strategies. Also, maybe building on top of the warcraft brand helped. WC2 was pretty amazing back then.
  - fakedang 3y ago
    That begets the question why Generals did not become such a hit multi-player game. AFAIK, the three factions in Generals (USA, China and terrorists) are quite different themselves in terms of play style. RA3 obviously tried to follow that pattern, and failed miserably.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  The economy seems far less substantial in C&C compared to StarCraft, at least from my memory. StarCraft has mining, gas, and unit caps. C&C has tiberium/money.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    For those unaware, Tiberium is the unit from Command and Conquer, while Money is the unit from Red Alert. --------- I've become strong-casual (1000 Elo) in Age of Empires 2 by the way. Juggling Wood, Food, Gold and Stone has far more strategic depth than just Starcraft's Minerals + Gas. Age of Empires 2 has less micro: in particular, there's no such thing as "spells" like Psi Storm. Furthermore, all units move much, much slower. Yes, Hera and Viper (trading for #1 and #2 spots in the world) both still clicks at 400 APM when fights start, but this is far away from Starcraft's insane 800 APM professionals (short-term burst of course, I think everyone has a long-term average of 300 APM). AoE2 has a high-skill ceiling for APM still, but strategic implications are far more important compared to Starcraft due to the slower speeds in AoE2. Cavalry in Age of Empires is the fastest unit, but Cavalry feel slower than Protoss Brood-War Carriers IMO. And then infantry crawl, and siege units and elephants (ie: Battering Rams) are extremely slow. With such slow movement, its far more important to decide that "moving out is a good idea", there's not as much APM dedicated to crazy things like Muta-micro, Vulture-micro (vulture / mine / siege tank pushes). It also means that there's more time to think about the implications of your attacks (while IMO, most Starcraft matches feel like they're won or lost by a well placed Psi Storm or other such micro-trick, like a good Lurker-dodge, a well placed Baneling, Scourge or whatnot). AoE2 still has Monk micro, Siege attack-grounds, and arrow dodging as far as micro-tricks go. So its not a dearth of micro, but its very much refreshing compared to the Psi Storm / Siege Tank / Mine pushes of insane APM that a typical Starcraft BW match has. ---------- AoE2 still has two very "swinging" situations. Monk conversions swing the game extremely, and Onagers basically shoot a Psi-storm like area-of-effect high-damage siege shot every 5 seconds or so. In both cases, a game can be won or lost in a matter of seconds (much like how one good Psi-storm can turn the tide of the entire match). But both Monks and Onagers are the slowest units in the game, and both are weak vs the cheapest Scout Cavalry (Onagers have minimum HP, while Monks take longer to convert scouts while Scouts deal extra damage vs Monks). So... if you scout out the opponent and keep track of these incredibly powerful units, then everything's pretty much predictable and less "surprising" than Starcraft. And that's a good thing IMO.
karmakaze 3y ago
I haven't watched it yet but I've watched some machine vs machine SC2 matches if you want to see a game played as it was never meant. So many micro abuses besides having virtually unlimited APM. Moving SCVs through a bunker speeds movement and normally workers slow down just before getting to resources which can be overridden with more attention. Shouldn't mass reapers kill zerg in early game?
aendruk 3y ago
The video contains no discussion of how the game is actually played. It consumes ten minutes to dramatically tell you that government-managed e-sports exists.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  Thanks for saving me 10 minutes.
habitue 3y ago
Great editing, seems like a promising intro but... yeah there's not much substance yet. It's a three part series and only part one is released. I've subscribed to see if the rest pays off
tetrisgm 3y ago
If you've played SC competitively, it's pretty obvious the game wasn't initially designed for esports. Initially. The Zerg build tree is dependent on you mastering things like: "start building, reducing your population count, build a new builder, cancel building, exceeding population cap by one". The way splash damage (using aoe attacks) is used to detect invisible units is another. It's a game with wonderful complexity and lots of possible permutations. Most Blizzard games are built with this complexity from the start, and blatant exploits are patched. Their approach is to enable creativity and tweak things.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I feel the games designed for esports have kinda been "meh" whereas the ones designed before esports were really a thing (and then balanced accordingly) were much better. Much more "emergent gameplay".
  - tetrisgm 3y ago
    It depends. There aren't many multi-player games that weren't designed to be exports that get any traction these days. The first few (Quake, Starcraft, CS1.6) were definitely more organically designed, but it's also more a product of the time and the budgets.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      And the longevity, I feel (though we're staring down the barrel of TF2 still being played) - you just didn't have as many AAA games back then, and the ones that you did get you played hard; especially if nothing else really "caught your eye". It felt like everyone who played games played all the big ones even if they weren't huge fans of a particular one; so everyone understood somewhat what was happening in a Starcraft match.
proc0 3y ago
In my opinion SC is a gigantic missed opportunity by Blizzard. SC2 should have just been a Brood War remake, while at the same time advancing the single player campaign story. Balancing an RTS must be the hardest thing in game design, and they had achieved it only to start over with SC2 (after 10 years of sitting on it). Blizzard seems to always under-appreciate what they have made, at least since after the Activision merge.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  No modern gamer would have accepted the crappy movement of Dragoons and/or Goliaths. What's ironic is that by "fixing" all units to move gracefully, it seemingly made Starcraft2 more of a deathball-oriented game. In many ways, Starcraft is fun because many powerhouse units move so wonky and unreliably... negating "deathball" as a strategy. But no newbie would want to practice a game with such weird movement mechanics. We need to evolve past expert-knowledge just to move-and-shoot, and yet still achieve a high level of strategic thought. --------- I do think AoE2 is moving along that path however (!!). The new DLC (lol, yeah, DLC for a game released nearly 25 years ago) is pretty fun.
  - proc0 3y ago
    They could have fixed those issues without reinventing the wheel. Additionally you can make the game more accessible by adding all kinds of game modes for people to learn from, without touching the high level functionality the pros depend on. I don't think it's hard to innovate in this area. Unfortunately most game companies don't see profit in a "proper" game, and instead chase after "games as a service" that optimize for in-game purchases, and having a product life that is meant to die once the cow has been milked. I think that is a missed opportunity (in hindsight though). Had Blizzard taken SC in a more chess-like direction, it could have easily spread as much as chess did. It's not that SC2 is bad, it's just a completely different game that is only building on top of the art and backstory of the previous one, when it could have been a greater success had they also built on top of the game design that was already tried and tested. I don't play AoE, but it seems that franchise is doing this to some extent, at least it doesn't seem to be reinventing their own wheel.
senttoschool 3y ago
The video doesn't actually explain the title. As a SC1 and SC2 player, I think the most reasonable analysis to the title is that Blizzard never intended Starcraft 1 to be played with 400+ APM like the Korean Pros were doing. The speed is just insane. I doubt any SC1 developer even surpassed 200 APM when developing the game.
majikaja 3y ago
It's difficult to imagine competitive games becoming that popular nowadays - seems like people today want instant gratification / don't have the time. And I guess lots of people are more aware now than before that their aptitude for competitive games is not special or even above average and don't want to try anymore.
ydnaclementine 3y ago
Looks like the video missed the mark, but that train of thought reminds me of casual aoe2 players who think building behind walls for 45 minutes + no rush is the only way to play. Nothing wrong with that way, but maybe not the best if you're playing to win

39 points by bane 3y ago

22c 3y ago

I haven't had the time to watch this video but I may check it out later. I would argue that most games when played at the extreme level are not being played the way they were meant to be played. In a sort of "surivorship bias" way, the games which can be played to an extreme level often end up in that position. Some of the craziest speedruns of games are being played in ways the game designer never intended. How game designers choose to react (or not react) to those unintended strategies/techniques and what effect that has on the longevity of the game is a topic I'd find interesting to discuss.

Vanit 3y ago
One of my favourite examples of this was the skiing mechanic in the Tribes series.
- postmodest 3y ago
  Which made the game arguably better. Because rounds got faster and CTF was more fun.
empyrrhicist 3y ago
High school debate is sort of this way. The judges are former debaters, and so the rules/tactics evolve until it wouldn't be recognizable to outsiders, or likely the originators of the format/activity. For example, extreme speed reading is table stakes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gowld 3y ago
  It's interesting how this happens. You don't need a judge to suddenly prefer extreme speed. You just need one person to win because being slightly faster earned an extra point from a judge (and the might hate super speedy speakers), and that person gives an extra point to someone slightly faster, and the slippery slope slides.
  - zerbinxx 3y ago
    I always found this interesting because I grew up in a rural area and the debate judges were frequently not familiar with the metagame of debate, or could be aware but were downright hostile to it. Among my friends it became its own metagame: who could get away with the most egregious perversions of the form (including intentionally sneaking in logical fallacies into our arguments) in order to win in an atmosphere where point-keeping was highly contingent on the judge’s preconceived beliefs. While there was no substitute for a very strong positive or negative case, there were little rhetorical levers you can pull: calling the opponent a smooth-talking shuck-and-jiver in a political debate or appealing to your own family history that could win big with the right audience if you could guess correctly on what type of person they were.
    - addled 3y ago
      My favorites were the ones that intentionally defined terms in the most outrageous ways. One time the topic was something about allowing pilots to be armed in the cockpit. After the first couple rounds we realized our jokers were scheduled to face an equal opponent for what promised to be an epic showdown: Pro: Yes pilots should armed, because it is hard to fly a plane with only their feet. Con: Pilots have no business in a cock-pit. Cock fighting is a horrible sport, not to mention being illegal in many states. Sadly the opposing coach pulled their team before the round started.
bombcar 3y ago
This is true of more than video games; "board games at the extreme" are not really comparable to how the designers played - and that is often not how it's even played by most people. Monopoly, of course, is an extreme case of this, but there are others. The signs of this are in features/functions in the game that are just ignored; sometimes you can figure out what the designers intended them to be used for - and with modern games being patched (even board games get rule clarifications and changes, and add-ons and expansions almost always changed some rules) you can see it live. Heroes III is a perfect example; watch some online videos of pro players and it's nothing like the compstomps we did back in the day.
- gowld 3y ago
  Monopoly is different because players ignorantly change the rules. Scrabble is an example of Ayers following the rules while distorting the game.
  - tedunangst 3y ago
    Players at Monopoly tournaments are changing the rules?
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Home players add the free parking rules because otherwise the game is a brutal winner’s snowball that is unfun for the losers, especially kids.
- whartung 3y ago
  Gamers are gonna game. Rule lawyers too. It’s the nature of complex games with large rule sets. What is nice is if you have an active publisher reacting in a timely fashion. But then, if that’s the case, you as a participant need to keep up. Mind this only happens in competitive tournaments. While at home and in clubs folks tend to favor fun, gameplay, and goodwill over pedantic rule making. It can lead to interesting discussions at high volume however. That said, I’ve seen tournament games lost because someone whipped out an obscure ruling from an official source. In a “Sorry you can’t do that.” “What do you mean?” Kind of way. But it was good to participate in games with an active publisher, doing things like gathering after action reports across local tournaments nationwide, looking for unbalanced components or techniques and, rather than tweaking the game directly, just applying changes to the tournament rules set.
buffet_overflow 3y ago
Super Smash Bros and the Nintendo response to things like wave dashing (giving characters a chance to stumble in the latest game, iirc) comes to mind. Basically, they saw a hardcore community form around their family friendly fighting game, and tried to axe it.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  Random tripping was a mechanic added in Brawl. In Ultimate, they dialed it back and now it's only a triggered action (and, at a lower rate than Brawl). If anything, it sounds like they took in some feedback from the community.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  Tripping in Brawl was clearly introduced to punish dash dancing, not wave-dashing. https://www.ssbwiki.com/Dash-dance#/media/File:Dashdance.gif https://www.ssbwiki.com/Dash-dance#/media/File:Dashdance.gif If you did this sequence in Brawl, you'd certainly trip. Dash-dancing kept your momentum, allowing you to instantly move at full dash speed at a moment's notice. But it took great amounts of finger-dexterity to alternate left-right-left-right at this speed and keep the character's momentum at maximum.

beebmam 3y ago

I don't like Brood War as a game, both to play and to watch. I much preferred Starcraft 2 over the original, but unfortunately the esports scene died for it. In any case, RTS games just don't seem like good games for humanity, it's very easy to get repetitive stress injuries from them at high APM play.

bombcar 3y ago
Starcraft I esports were really really carried by the commentators; without people like Day9 knowing what was going on, and explaining it to me, I'd never have a chance of following along.
- oreally 3y ago
  Nah any game with enough variance and complexity will do that.
Kranar 3y ago
Starcraft 2 kind of ruined what made Brood War special and turned the RTS genre into a kind of rock paper scissors where the computer does most of the work. It was almost certainly unintentional but in Brood War the game is soooooo mechanically challenging that you have to make very careful decisions about whether you want a big army that's dumb and hard to control but can outnumber your opponent, or a small army that's smart and can be used for very efficient tactics. As a human you simply can not have it all and so you have to constantly make very difficult and creative tradeoffs. You can set up cool tactical positions, have way more opportunities for multipronged attacks, and also you can retreat if you think an engagement won't go favorably. In SC2, the game became a lot more streamlined and automated so you as a player don't really get to express your play style as much as in Brood War. The game kind of has a very blunt set of rules about what counters what and as a player your job is to focus mostly on macro/economy, scouting, and unit production, you build up a kind of death ball army and then send it into a battle that lasts under a minute and whoever wins, wins. Another annoying aspect of SC2 that's a consequence of how automated the game is, is that it is also often very cheesy, where an opponent can rush out an army that's very easy for the computer to control but the defender has to click like crazy to defend it. I'm fairly high level in SC2 (top 4%), and I can literally tell an opponent I'm going to "cannon rush" them, which is a cheesy strategy that has a very specific defense. I can even tell my opponent what that defense is, and they will still lose to it because the defender needs to click like crazy to defend it while I can let the computer basically do almost all of the work for me. The same goes for a bunch of other cheesy strategies where you rush out a small number of units that the computer has an easy time controlling for you, and force your opponent to have to literally engage in very awkward and precise hand gestures in order to defend the attack, and the vast majority of people simply don't know or care to learn to move their hands that way.

nitwit005 3y ago

Essentially ignores the topic in the headline, and discusses history, with a focus on a single prominent player.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Yeah it really seems like the youtube algorithm pushes creators so hard that they are constantly adjusting their video titles to try to get the best traction, often leading to video titles that diverge significantly from the original intent of the video. It's an annoying situation as it means browsing and clicking on videos is a very inconsistent experience!
yaomtc 3y ago
It's also Part 1 of 3, and as the second two parts are not done yet, the story that was meant to be told is incomplete.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

Somewhat unrelated, but I never understood why the Command and Conquer series wasn't as popular as Starcraft. At least Red Alert 2, I always thought was a vastly superior RTS.

dudul 3y ago
I also loved red alert 2, and played it much more than starcraft. However, one possible reason is that starcraft had 3 factions. 3 very different factions. Yes, Allies and USSR had special units in RA2, but the differences were much more pronounced in SC. It made for very different possible gameplays and strategies. Also, maybe building on top of the warcraft brand helped. WC2 was pretty amazing back then.
- fakedang 3y ago
  That begets the question why Generals did not become such a hit multi-player game. AFAIK, the three factions in Generals (USA, China and terrorists) are quite different themselves in terms of play style. RA3 obviously tried to follow that pattern, and failed miserably.
boomboomsubban 3y ago
The economy seems far less substantial in C&C compared to StarCraft, at least from my memory. StarCraft has mining, gas, and unit caps. C&C has tiberium/money.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  For those unaware, Tiberium is the unit from Command and Conquer, while Money is the unit from Red Alert. --------- I've become strong-casual (1000 Elo) in Age of Empires 2 by the way. Juggling Wood, Food, Gold and Stone has far more strategic depth than just Starcraft's Minerals + Gas. Age of Empires 2 has less micro: in particular, there's no such thing as "spells" like Psi Storm. Furthermore, all units move much, much slower. Yes, Hera and Viper (trading for #1 and #2 spots in the world) both still clicks at 400 APM when fights start, but this is far away from Starcraft's insane 800 APM professionals (short-term burst of course, I think everyone has a long-term average of 300 APM). AoE2 has a high-skill ceiling for APM still, but strategic implications are far more important compared to Starcraft due to the slower speeds in AoE2. Cavalry in Age of Empires is the fastest unit, but Cavalry feel slower than Protoss Brood-War Carriers IMO. And then infantry crawl, and siege units and elephants (ie: Battering Rams) are extremely slow. With such slow movement, its far more important to decide that "moving out is a good idea", there's not as much APM dedicated to crazy things like Muta-micro, Vulture-micro (vulture / mine / siege tank pushes). It also means that there's more time to think about the implications of your attacks (while IMO, most Starcraft matches feel like they're won or lost by a well placed Psi Storm or other such micro-trick, like a good Lurker-dodge, a well placed Baneling, Scourge or whatnot). AoE2 still has Monk micro, Siege attack-grounds, and arrow dodging as far as micro-tricks go. So its not a dearth of micro, but its very much refreshing compared to the Psi Storm / Siege Tank / Mine pushes of insane APM that a typical Starcraft BW match has. ---------- AoE2 still has two very "swinging" situations. Monk conversions swing the game extremely, and Onagers basically shoot a Psi-storm like area-of-effect high-damage siege shot every 5 seconds or so. In both cases, a game can be won or lost in a matter of seconds (much like how one good Psi-storm can turn the tide of the entire match). But both Monks and Onagers are the slowest units in the game, and both are weak vs the cheapest Scout Cavalry (Onagers have minimum HP, while Monks take longer to convert scouts while Scouts deal extra damage vs Monks). So... if you scout out the opponent and keep track of these incredibly powerful units, then everything's pretty much predictable and less "surprising" than Starcraft. And that's a good thing IMO.

karmakaze 3y ago

I haven't watched it yet but I've watched some machine vs machine SC2 matches if you want to see a game played as it was never meant. So many micro abuses besides having virtually unlimited APM. Moving SCVs through a bunker speeds movement and normally workers slow down just before getting to resources which can be overridden with more attention. Shouldn't mass reapers kill zerg in early game?

aendruk 3y ago

The video contains no discussion of how the game is actually played. It consumes ten minutes to dramatically tell you that government-managed e-sports exists.

barbazoo 3y ago
Thanks for saving me 10 minutes.

habitue 3y ago

Great editing, seems like a promising intro but... yeah there's not much substance yet. It's a three part series and only part one is released. I've subscribed to see if the rest pays off

tetrisgm 3y ago

If you've played SC competitively, it's pretty obvious the game wasn't initially designed for esports. Initially. The Zerg build tree is dependent on you mastering things like: "start building, reducing your population count, build a new builder, cancel building, exceeding population cap by one". The way splash damage (using aoe attacks) is used to detect invisible units is another. It's a game with wonderful complexity and lots of possible permutations. Most Blizzard games are built with this complexity from the start, and blatant exploits are patched. Their approach is to enable creativity and tweak things.

bombcar 3y ago
I feel the games designed for esports have kinda been "meh" whereas the ones designed before esports were really a thing (and then balanced accordingly) were much better. Much more "emergent gameplay".
- tetrisgm 3y ago
  It depends. There aren't many multi-player games that weren't designed to be exports that get any traction these days. The first few (Quake, Starcraft, CS1.6) were definitely more organically designed, but it's also more a product of the time and the budgets.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    And the longevity, I feel (though we're staring down the barrel of TF2 still being played) - you just didn't have as many AAA games back then, and the ones that you did get you played hard; especially if nothing else really "caught your eye". It felt like everyone who played games played all the big ones even if they weren't huge fans of a particular one; so everyone understood somewhat what was happening in a Starcraft match.

proc0 3y ago

In my opinion SC is a gigantic missed opportunity by Blizzard. SC2 should have just been a Brood War remake, while at the same time advancing the single player campaign story. Balancing an RTS must be the hardest thing in game design, and they had achieved it only to start over with SC2 (after 10 years of sitting on it). Blizzard seems to always under-appreciate what they have made, at least since after the Activision merge.

dragontamer 3y ago
No modern gamer would have accepted the crappy movement of Dragoons and/or Goliaths. What's ironic is that by "fixing" all units to move gracefully, it seemingly made Starcraft2 more of a deathball-oriented game. In many ways, Starcraft is fun because many powerhouse units move so wonky and unreliably... negating "deathball" as a strategy. But no newbie would want to practice a game with such weird movement mechanics. We need to evolve past expert-knowledge just to move-and-shoot, and yet still achieve a high level of strategic thought. --------- I do think AoE2 is moving along that path however (!!). The new DLC (lol, yeah, DLC for a game released nearly 25 years ago) is pretty fun.
- proc0 3y ago
  They could have fixed those issues without reinventing the wheel. Additionally you can make the game more accessible by adding all kinds of game modes for people to learn from, without touching the high level functionality the pros depend on. I don't think it's hard to innovate in this area. Unfortunately most game companies don't see profit in a "proper" game, and instead chase after "games as a service" that optimize for in-game purchases, and having a product life that is meant to die once the cow has been milked. I think that is a missed opportunity (in hindsight though). Had Blizzard taken SC in a more chess-like direction, it could have easily spread as much as chess did. It's not that SC2 is bad, it's just a completely different game that is only building on top of the art and backstory of the previous one, when it could have been a greater success had they also built on top of the game design that was already tried and tested. I don't play AoE, but it seems that franchise is doing this to some extent, at least it doesn't seem to be reinventing their own wheel.

senttoschool 3y ago

The video doesn't actually explain the title. As a SC1 and SC2 player, I think the most reasonable analysis to the title is that Blizzard never intended Starcraft 1 to be played with 400+ APM like the Korean Pros were doing. The speed is just insane. I doubt any SC1 developer even surpassed 200 APM when developing the game.

majikaja 3y ago

It's difficult to imagine competitive games becoming that popular nowadays - seems like people today want instant gratification / don't have the time. And I guess lots of people are more aware now than before that their aptitude for competitive games is not special or even above average and don't want to try anymore.

ydnaclementine 3y ago

Looks like the video missed the mark, but that train of thought reminds me of casual aoe2 players who think building behind walls for 45 minutes + no rush is the only way to play. Nothing wrong with that way, but maybe not the best if you're playing to win