Note: This was written several days ago in a draft and is only being put up today.
Aside from focusing on Nintendo, the second company I keep tabs on the most is Blizzard. Having seen and participated with Blizzard since when they were just like fifteen people, it is great fun for me to watch them grow and continue to rake in the money. Blizzard’s success is what game companies used to do and what many companies would still be doing if they weren’t taken over by the ‘Industry’. Interestingly, Blizzard is the only game company who confirms that pioneering new gameplay is not important. Blizzard’s priority has been content (though they express that in different ways). On the Blizzcast podcasts, such as #2, you will even hear them say that the focus isn’t the gameplay but ‘the world’, the ‘continuum’. In other words, Blizzard will bend the gameplay of Starcraft 2 around in order for the ultralisk to become useful (as opposed to removing the ultralisk). Content is king at Blizzard.
As part of my gaming entertainment, I enjoying laughing at the ‘hardcore’. The ‘hardcore’ live in some distant fictional universe where they, alone, move around like angels where ‘casual gamers’ are like stinking mortals of flesh and bone crawling like worms on the face of the Earth. Starcraft 2’s certainly has its share of ‘hardcore’ and, ironically, they all huddle around the Team Liquid forum.
I’ve mentioned one interview in the past by one of its forum owners named ‘Nazgul’ or something. In the interview, he said it was bad how in Starcraft 2, people could select more units than ’12’ and that improvements of the interface meant ‘less skill’ for the game. This struck me as extremely funny so I would joke that in order to create more ‘skill’, it should take more button presses to do actions and unit selection should be limited to only two units maximum.
Reading their forum is an absolute hoot. Imagine tons of ‘hardcore’ gamers all concentrated in one area and they are in ‘rage mode’ all the time. Rage about what? Well, it changes day to day. But they are constantly enraged. Today they say it is about Bnet 2.0. Yesterday, they said it was about lack of diversity for Zerg. Day before that, they said it was because of Terran imbalanced.
As with most people in rage, what they say they are angry about is not the case. Here is the ‘hardcore bubble’ pattern that goes on with many games:
1) Game comes out and is popular.
2) While normal people eventually move on to other games, some people keep playing the game religiously.
3) These people build websites, forums, communities, and dissect the game to death. They give themselves the crowns of experts.
4) The sequel of the game is announced. These ‘experts’ are very excited.
5) Once they get the game in their hands, the following occurs:
A) Once they begin to digest the sequel, they start making suggestions to the company to “fix the game”. The game company ignores them because they want to sell as many copies as they can. The ‘experts’ are shocked that the game company is ignoring THEM. After all, they see themselves as the supreme experts of the game. They literally expect the game company to give a snappy salute and say, “Sir! Yes sir!” and begin redoing the game toward the ‘experts’ wishes.
B) The ‘experts’ begin talk of how the game company has ‘fallen’ and aren’t as good as they used to be. The ‘game company’ doesn’t CARE anymore. They attack the ‘eeevil casual gamers’ who, apparently, are the only ones the game company listens to.
C) Suddenly, everything becomes “wrong” in the game according to the ‘experts’. The art is wrong. The sound is wrong. The gameplay is wrong. The code is wrong. They declare the company doesn’t know what it is doing.
A, B, C then loop over again and again in a constant cycle.
The true cause for the rage is best illustrated in this delightful metaphor. A fish feels good when it is the big fish in the pond. The fish thought he was the ‘big fish’ in the pond because of his intelligence, skill, mastery, and whatever else. The humiliating truth is that the ‘big fish’ is big only because the pond shrank. Once the pond gets larger, the ‘big fish’ suddenly becomes a small fish and just like all the other fish.
In other words, most normal people left Starcraft 1 a while ago to play other games or do other things with their life. It is normal and proper that they do so. The people who remained playing began imagining themselves as ‘so awesome’. They thought they were ‘so awesome’ based of whatever characteristic about themselves they admire. But now that the masses are returning for when Starcraft 2 launches, the so-called ‘Starcraft 1’ experts are discovering that they were big fish only because the pond was small. Now that the pond has grown, their status has shrank.
In life, business, and love, the more relevant someone becomes, the calmer and more confident that person will be. The more irrelevant someone becomes, the more rage prone, less confident, and increasingly panic-stricken that person will be. I believe the so-called ‘hardcore’ Starcraft 1 players are finding themselves becoming more and more irrelevant with each new day the closer Starcraft 2 comes. This is why they find everything and anything wrong with Starcraft 2.
Let me use another example. Remember when Super Smash Brothers Brawl came out? The same phenomenon occurred. The ‘expert’ Melee players were unhappy despite their supreme anticipation. We see this phenomenon occur with almost every sequel to a popular game. Starcraft 2 is a little unique in that it has been twelve years since Starcraft 1. This means the ‘hardcore bubble’ is far larger than normal. It will pop in a most dramatic fashion.
Behind every ‘rage’, there is a quiet hiss which mouths that the ‘community’/ ‘fans’, e.g. the “hardcore, experts”, are the true source to the game’s “greatness”. “HELLO BLIZZARD! KNOW THAT IT IS THE FANS AND COMMUNITY THAT MAKE THE GAME WORK! HELLO! HELLO!” Apparently, Blizzard doesn’t make the game work at all. In their view, the Blizzard developer should wake up, load up Team Liquid on their web browser, study the ‘posts’ with extreme intensity, make certain ‘posts’ as company wide memos (no, not making this up. Team Liquid actually believes this should occur…), and when the SC 2 beta was beginning some people there thought game companies would come and pay Team Liquid to ‘test their games’ (hahahahahahaha).
It should be noted that most of the people at ‘Team Liquid’ are kids who are younger than 30. Many of them did not even hit puberty until well after Starcraft 1 came out. The ‘elder’ ones there seem to have been in the middle of puberty when Starcraft 1 came out. Much of the ‘rage’ seems legitimate to them only because of their youth. Those who are older have seen this pattern and have a far more calm demeanor.
More humorous to me is how they place the picture of the lead designer of Starcraft 2, Dustin Browder, on a dart board. I am not speaking metaphorically. Some of them actually do place his picture on a dartboard! The kiddies there all think they know how to make a better game than Blizzard. They are mad at Browder who revealed the Starcraft 2 creation process was ‘to make an interesting unit first’ and then try to find a role for that unit. The Team Liquid people think this is all wrong. Since Team Liquid who has designed more best selling games than Blizzard, it is right and proper they tell that awful Dustin Browder how it is done.
“You know what a game company should do?” says a reader. “They should throw millions of dollars at these ‘experts’ and have them make a video game.” This has occurred before. The game, made by ‘expert players’, was ‘Master of Orion 3’ which completely destroyed the fine Master of Orion series. This is why I say if you think you know how to make a game, try making one and putting it out there. The marketplace will humble you real quickly.
Another funny aspect of Team Liquid is the ‘time capsule’ the people appear to be in. For example, they still refer to custom games as ‘UMS’. ‘UMS’ stood for ‘Use Map Settings’ which was done for Starcraft 1 but that term hasn’t been used in any RTS games since (not in Warcraft 3 or Starcraft 2.) Another one that pops up is the use of the word ‘mod’ meaning adding data files to the main directory of the game. This was done in earlier RTS games but has been made obsolete in later RTS games, such as Warcraft 3, since the files are embedded within the map. To those who think “a few mb isn’t enough, I need gbs and tbs”, know that a bad game maker relies on tons of data space. Aside from a few icons, a map like DOTA had no custom assets except the bloated title screen that took up 90% of the map data size. These people need to get up to date on their terms. It is ridiculous to use terms like ‘UMS’ when ‘Use Map Settings’ doesn’t even exist and hasn’t in RTS games for almost a decade.
So grab some popcorn and enjoy the show. The meltdown will intensify the closer and closer the game launches.