I wouldn’t be surprised if the SC 2 beta is shorter than expected. The game is already very solid and far more solid than Warcraft 3 was when it was in beta. I remember the Night Elf race being a complete mess.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the beta process of SC 2 because it is fun to look at Blizzard’s development process. Two patches in two days? And look at how hard they are nerfing that mothership! hahaha
The players reactions are very funny. “How dare they nerf the Protoss!? What do they think this is, a beta?” Well, it is exactly that. This is why I refuse to beta test games to this day. Why should I spend my free time to test out other people’s products? Why bother building strategies when the company will likely nerf them? Your time is better spent playing the finished games that are out today.
My favorite are the players who are bragging about how high they are getting in the rankings of Starcraft 2. Yes sir, you certainly are special for beating a few thousand people in an unbalanced game. Do these clowns realize that all their rankings are going to be wiped when the beta test is over? This reminds me of the ‘stress test’ for World of Warcraft where people were racing to level up, to grind, to get special items, only to have Blizzard wipe their character at the end of the stress test.
RTS games are always my favorite types of games, and I’ve been playing them since the very beginning. But the Starcraft 2 reactions from Starcraft die-hards is greatly amusing to me.
It is all about Warcraft 3. I admit that Warcraft 3 had its disappointments (notably how the Orcs no longer seem badass and cool like they did in Warcraft 2. And the Night Elves are pretty lame with their stupid big trees). Warcraft 3 was a radically different game than Starcraft (however, Starcraft was not a radical change from Warcraft 2).
It was not the heroes of Warcraft 3 that radically changed the gameplay. It was the emphasis on battles. In games like Warcraft 2 or Starcraft, the gameplay was very production based. It was more about cranking out units. You could have your army be entirely one or two types of units, and you would be fine. It is a totally different story in Warcraft 3. Production wasn’t emphasized in Warcraft 3 as was the battles. What does this mean?
Let us say you are Orc. Instead of making all of one or two units, you make a few taurens for melee, a few beserkers for range, a witch doctor for heals, and shamans for blood lust. The result is that during the battle, your shamans would be casting blood lust (which improves attack speed), your witch doctors would be placing heal wards (heals during battle), the enemy would be beating on the heavy hitpoint taurens, while your beserkers would be adding damage from behind the protective taurens. The point is that you would win the battle. And in Warcraft 3, winning battles is the key to winning the game.
At first, I couldn’t get into Warcraft 3’s “battle” gameplay. Ironically, every Blizzard game I have bought I immediately disliked and said, “Blizzard has lost it.” Yet, I somehow grow into the game especially with the expansions. I distinctly remember saying when Starcraft came out that “Blizzard has lost it. This game is nowhere as good as Warcraft 2.” Reviews were very harsh on Starcraft 1 at the time. Blizzard even acknowledged this when in Brood War, Artanis says, “Starcraft is not Warcraft in space! It is much more sophisticated!” Starcraft was panned because the game was not cutting edge visuals and was not ‘3d’. Hardcore RTS gamers said that Starcraft catered only to the noobs (today, they would be called the “casuals”. This same complaint was made by RPG players when Diablo appeared, by strategy players when Warcraft appeared, by MMORPG fans when World of Warcraft appeared, and so on).
However, after playing Warcraft 3 with some Blizzard guys and learning from them, I really got the flow of the game. I could never go back to Starcraft and its archaic systems (and Starcraft really shows its age visually. Yech!). The problem was that Warcraft 3 became too sophisticated. There were too many nuances. The game was overshooting its target audience allow a window of opportunity for simpler games to enter. And this is why people played tower defense or DOTA from the start. They are far more simpler games.
Meanwhile, there have been many people who have not left Starcraft. They just turned up their noses at Warcraft 3 and said, “Heroes? Lame!” and kept playing Starcraft for this past decade. The truth is that I don’t think these Starcraft players ever could grasp the new ‘battle’ orientated gameplay that Warcraft 3 had. You cannot play Warcraft 3 in a production orientated way. And it had to be frustrating to have more gold and more units in an army only to get wasted in a battle. “The game sucks!” they said as they went back to Starcraft.
So now we have Starcraft 2 Beta and very different reactions from Warcraft 3 players and Starcraft players. The Warcraft 3 players are having a ball. They find Starcraft 2 to be MUCH SIMPLER and (dare I say it) a more casual game than Warcraft 3. With no heroes and less spell casters, the game becomes very simple. It is a joke among Warcraft 3 players that the creeps have been replaced with dumb rocks (the destroyable rocks). Since Starcraft 2 has a similar ‘battle’ orientated gameplay, Warcraft 3 players are fitting into the game very well.
For Starcraft players, it is another story. They like the game, but…. “I like this, but…” The way how they have articulated their complaints is in a type of “hard counters” versus “soft counters”. What do they mean by this? A “hard counter” is a unit that counters another units very intensely, like the hippo-glyph does to air units. A “soft counter” is a unit that counters another unit less intensely with tons of room for micromanagement. For example, lurkers can kill marines but a skilled player can move the marines around to eventually kill the lurkers. Another complaint from Starcraft players is that the game’s battles “are too fast”. This could be translated to “I keep losing in the battles”. There has also been surprise when they find that adding a couple of units, say the ultralisk, completely changes their army (e.g. the ultralisk can mow down smaller units like zerglings in SC 2).
It is amusing to me, a Warcraft 3 player, seeing these Starcraft elitists get their clocks being cleaned by Warcraft 3 players (since Warcraft 3 wasn’t a real ‘RTS’ game to these fools). I’ve played Warcraft 3 more than Warcraft 2 and Starcraft playtime combined. A great game. However, I do think its singe player was meh. And I do think the Night Elves and their big trees were high on the lame meter. The worse was that Orcs were no longer the badass guys they were in Warcraft 2. I want Warcraft 4 to be Orcs versus Humans again.
Above: Remember when the Orcs were badass?
Anyway, what I most look forward to is what people can do with the Starcraft 2 editor. It hasn’t been noticed by anyone, but there is a large underground modding world (mostly by people in Eastern Europe, Russia, and so on) concerning Warcraft 3. “Game journalists” just talk about tower defense (which is old) or DOTA (which actually began with Starcraft and stole from many War 3 modders), but there is a huge amount of energy on these ‘little map makers’. They are literally spending years (!) of their lives on a single map! No joke! And they are all stuck with a 8 mb limit in their maps (used to be 4 mb). They have had to become very creative when it came to importing art assets as well as map size.
There are going to be two type of Starcraft 2 editors: those who did well with Warcraft 3 modding and those who didn’t. And those who didn’t, including our elitist Starcraft players who wrote off Warcraft 3, are going to be completely rolled by the War 3 modders.
Above: This level of detail is rapidly considered the ‘norm’ for terrain in Warcraft 3 maps.
Above: What happens to young ones with intense excitement for Diablo 3? Why, they just make the game in Warcraft 3! Incredible detail.
Above: Some maps rewrite the stat system and create whole new systems. I’m still not sure how they did it. Although, this map is on the verge of breaking the game.
With Starcraft 2, these War 3 modders are going to be erupting like a farg out of hell at top speed. Starcraft 2 is going to be much easier to mod than Warcraft 3. No JASS, for one (do not mention the evil 1.24 patch to any War 3 modder). And this is the first time, that I can recall, that the game company is setting up a system where people can actually SELL their work. Now, Blizzard is doing this only for the purpose to keep popular stuff from leaving their platform (like tower defense did). But there is immense potential here and I think many people, especially the Starcraft 1 people who think their skills in Staredit will translate to the Galaxy Editor, are going to be shocked.
But I will not be shocked. In the Era of Disinterest, gamers are going to be making their own games. Industry men who think their games are secure because they have tons of money in ‘production values’ should be concerned of the revolution bubbling up from the low end.
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