While I’m eager to see what Frost Giant comes up with, but I fear that the theme of the game will not capture my imagination as much as SC2.
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Frost Giant will not have a game out for several years. Which is why I moved on to AOE4. Why waste time on game that is stuck in a stale meta and never gets patched.
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I have no interested in ever changing rules to force new “metas” on players.
AoE4 holds absolutely no interest to me. I’ve tried watching the streams for many of the players I have been watching for years but just can’t get into it. I doubt I’d want to play it.
Which is why I’m concerned about Frost Giant’s game. They will probably want to shake up the formula that made games like SC2 and Warcraft interesting to me. At which point I’m going to be “meh”.
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SC2 had 60m budget fueled by WoW. Beat that as an indie. 
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Most of which goes into artwork. One to three programmers can put out something really decent (like Doom, Starcraft I, …) If there’s anything we’ve learnt from Hollywood it’s that big budgets don’t equal big quality. Don’t despair just yet. They’ll probably cut on cinematics and ‘fluff’.
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Big budget goes into “production values” and that’s A LOT of different things beyond coding.
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I think you both are right.
An indie can make a quality game, especially with the network connects that a team of industry insiders and veterans can muster. An artist with 20 years of experiences is going to have the productivity of less experienced artists even if the quality of their work is similar.
That said, being able to throw money at a problem is an effective tool for getting stuff done. And I think that for SC2 a lot of that large budge went into polish and refinement.
Cinematics, Music, Marketing (those big booths at PAX aren’t cheap), eSports, etc…
Of course you could do all of these things grassroots, which I wouldn’t even mind to be honest. I don’t really care for the mainstream pop culture nonsense that seems to have overtaken games and the competitive space. I can do without much of that stuff.
Most of this isn’t really my concern. What I am trying to express, however, is that Frost Giant will most likely purpose want to distance themselves from Starcraft 2, not only in theme (which I’ll be honest, is not an insignificant drawl for me) but also the game play. There’s a reason why I have no interest in Age of Empires. The game just doesn’t appeal to me despite it being a polished RTS game.
A game I did play a lot of and enjoy back in the day was Myth I & II but I don’t see Frost Giant going that route with their RTS either.
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For the last… many years indie games are much better than AAA titles. Sure they don’t have nearly the same level of art, but gameplay-wise they are infinitely better than e.g. Assassins’ Creed №XX.
Even large budget games that are good are not exactly AAA games - e.g. Dark Souls or Resident Evil remakes are more close to indie games.
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Counterpoint: How many indie games have you played to completion more than once? Probably not many, right? A lot of successful indie games rely on a gimmick, which isnt necessarily bad, but once you play the game and see the gimmick, then it loses a lot of its playability.
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This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this thought, particularly when it comes to From Soft games. How is From Software not considered a AAA studio? Same question for Resident Evil…Capcom is a massive company that pumps out games like no one’s business, how aren’t they AAA?
I define AAA in terms of a budget/team size. That’s the “muscle” of development. Games take A LOT of time to build. That’s why you need so many people. A small studio has no chance of making something which surpasses SC2. It’s like 10 “veteran” developers trying to build a skyscraper. It won’t happen.
I wouldn’t call it polished when it has been released with dated graphics and funny animations and pathing/unit movement during fights. Example of polishing, in sc2 not every unit shoots at the same time to avoid the game looking weird when every unit shoots and attacks at the same time.
I think it displays managerial incompetence. If their cost of capital is too high, then fund StarCraft 2 with debt. They know that they can sell at least a million coins of an expansion. They could be releasing new missions every year and we would buy them. I am not the only adult professional who loves this game. It was foolish to walk away from such valuable IP. If they lack the resources to fund it, call a banker and get some debt to finance it.
Small game studios with inexperienced management could pick and choose games to make, but with blizzard they can easily issue low-cost bonds to finance each game. It is not that difficult to staff up. If anything, it is easier to train new employees when there are tons of staff working on tons of projects.
Even with Diablo there should be releasing more expansions. It is bad management to do otherwise. They could easily lever up and increase their ROE, jack up their value (and their share price, pre-acquisition), but even under a mega-corp umbrella it makes sense to produce what the market will buy. StarCraft sales are a sure thing. Only bad management explains Blizzard’s refusal to increase their own value and make customers happy.
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Two big problems here:
- Interest in strategy games has tanked by ~90% in the last 10 years.
- SC2 is a multitasking game. Multitasking is known to cause stress levels similar to eating disorders according to studies. This probably extrapolates well to SC2 and how stressful it is and how rage prone players are when they play it.
- Combining the two, I don’t think they see much potential in the RTS industry. Furthermore, I’d bet that had they known how unpopular it was, from the start, I don’t think they would’ve made SC2.
Even if the game devs don’t do a market analysis, the bank sure will before giving you the loan. They aren’t going to dump money down a hole unless there’s a very high probability it has a positive return.
By the way, YouTube now classifies SC2 content as “moba” which means RTS as a category is dead and SC2 is a small fish in the MOBA pond. You’d have to compete with League and Dota. League has 300x as many players. Is the bank gonna like to hear this when they do their due diligence? Good luck finding someone to actually loan the money to you. It’s crazy hard to find investors even for an already established business. But add in the studies showing interest in strategy has tanked, and so forth, and it’s like yeah good luck.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that all the new RTS startups have crashed? Do you remember that RTS game called GreyGoo that came out in 2015? No? Exactly. This is where google trends are at for it: https://i.imgur.com/q8kcQ3c.png
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I think sc2 isn’t popular, not because players don’t like strategy. Rather I think that it was the detrimental focus on designing the game for the handful of professional players and some streamers all who could play the game 16 hours a day to achieve the level of play where they could take advantage of that design to its fullest. Meanwhile average joe who just wants to log in for a few games on a Thursday night after dinner and before the wife calls him to bed literally can’t play the game without it being a physical nightmare on his body to win a game. Eventually the average player seeks other games to spend that evening with.
You can’t design a game that can only be played fairly by players who spend their entire day playing it and expect it to be successful.
Blizzards sole focus on Esports killed StarCraft over the long run.
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You’re right but that’s the simplified explanation of what’s going on. The 200 iq explanation is that it’s caused by apm spam. Just here me out. The balance team was doing design changes that honed in on features that made the game balanced. What is the primary feature that they honed in on? Well the game length kept going up. In HotS, it peaked at 2 hours for some ZvZs. So what they were doing, more or less, was increasing the game length. What does game length do? Longer games focus on more bases and larger armies. More bases requires more APM to macro. Larger armies require more APM to micro. So they were honing-in on making the game require more APM. Since APM is a player trait, the player decides who wins and not game balance. This is why the balance team honed in on APM: it balanced the game.
How does this affect the average player? Well the sheer speed required to play SC2 is so high that you can only achieve it through pre-memorization. How do you prememorize? By grinding thousands of hours of practice until you hone your split second instincts to do the right thing in every scenario. It’s obvious why casual players won’t like that. You can’t compete without copious amounts of grinding. SC2 pro play is a game of who is the biggest loser. There was an american TV show called “The Biggest Loser” where contestants competed to lose weight. It was a drama show. Anyway that’s what SC2 is, The Biggest Loser, because it’s a competition for who has no life & is willing to mindlessly grind more games than the other guy. The Biggest Loser gets to win a premier tournament. Congrats.
Yeah every girl is different, I find. I had to put my gaming PC by a couch because these chicks would try to cuddle. They’d be like hey what you up to, right, and then they’d sit on your lap and it’s like girl you’re gonna tank my mmr. So I put a couch and I am sitting there playing SC2 while she cuddles against me and browses her phone. Occasionally we’d laugh if something funny happened, and I’d try to make a show out of it, you know what I mean. Try to make some jokes with my opponent or laugh when the opponent rages about balance or hop onto a twitch streamer’s stream, after beating them, and get their reaction.
Batz… keep being batz. The forums would be the same with you at this point I guess.
One time this chick decides she is going to find a way to distract me, whatever it takes. So she’s trying on all these bikinis and coming out and is like so what do you think about this one. I’d glance up and I’d give the usual jaw dropping dadgummit reaction. After the 5th bikini I was like holdup there is something going on here. Yeah she was texting her friend group and they were betting on how many bikinis it would take before I gave up playing starcraft.
So anyway we ended up going through her entire collection and I was sitting there like I was a bikini critique. “Oh this one really highlights your curviness” and “I am not sure that’s the best color for you skin tone.” That sort of thing.
Apparently some women collect bikinis like they collect shoes, because this girl had a massive collection. It was really cute because she’d run away and then excitedly pop back out with a new one. She was just loving the attention, right.
The bikinis just kept coming so after awhile I was like holey toledo I need a drink. So I am sitting there sipping a sangria and playing the game of being as mind blown as possible every time she comes back out. She’d run back in and I’d hop onto chatgpt and be like “A chick is showing me her bikini collection. What are some ways I can compliment her?”. That’s how many bikinis she had bro. I had to go to chatgpt because I ran out of ways to compliment her.
I thought about incorporating something like this into a starcraft 2 stream. Imagine playing SC2 in a hottub with two babes on either side. Are you seeing it. Now imagine just how many viewers you’d be able to bring to SC2. You’d be able to single handedly quadruple the average viewership of the entire SC2 category. I thought about it but decided I didn’t want to get that personal on stream. I also worried that maybe the chicks wouldn’t behave properly. Sure it would make for good content until you got banned because they got a little too excited, you know what I mean. There’s always the chance they get silly and splash the laptop too. So yeah that could get expensive really fast. The more I think about it the worse the idea is.
Now that I am thinking about the intersection between bikinis and starcraft, this reminded me of livibee. She did that hottub stream where she drank a bunch of vodka. It was her birthday or something. At the end of it you could tell she was pretty hammered, right. You can just tell be the facial expressions. Anyway I hopped on to see what all the fuss is about and I was just thinking about how this must’ve been a logistics nightmare. Setting up a pool inside of your apartment, setting up the green screen, setting up the PCs, trying to remember not to touch the PC with your wet hands as you slam the vodka. I was amazed her PC survived dude. All it would take is one moment of reaching your hand to the keyboard and it’s -2000 usd.
I have a buddy who is an engineer. His house has a tiny backyard. He bought a giant hottub, and it’s way too big for his yard, but that’s beside the point. He does all this research and discovers some BS about how the dyes in swimsuits interact with the bromine or something. I don’t really remember because the next thing he said is that swimsuits aren’t allowed in his hottub, so I kinda forgot what he was saying prior to that moment. Well this guy buys a new cellphone and he’s excited because it’s got all these features he’s showing off. One of them is that the camera rotates on its own. We were just talking about his hottub and I am seeing this rotating camera thing and I am like man is that thing ip68. He’s like nah I decided waterproof isn’t that big of a deal. I liked the other features more. Well guess what happened. He drops it in his hottub. Go figure. I saw that one coming a mile away.
The point I am getting at here is that it would probably be a bad idea to stream starcraft from a hottub, ok. That’s the moral of the story.
So this buddy of mine is a libertarian kind of guy. The “live and let live” and “get out of the way, uncle sam” kind of guy. He has a yuuuge gun collection. His brother is a crossdresser who loves TOOL, the band. I love TOOL too so naturally the conversation gravitates that way. So I am sitting in a hottub talking about TOOL with a crossdressing man who shaved half his head and left the other half long. I still remember how silly his hair looked once it was wet. You could really see how thin it was, you know what I mean. That is a life experience I will never forget.
He’s like so I installed a speaker system and it has bluetooth. I am like of course he did. So in true libertarian fashion I am sitting there listening to The Pot by TOOL in a hottub with a crossdresser at 70 db and feeling the bass vibrate the water:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=civuoU_NE38
Starcraft was abandoned long ago. Who is even on the balance council these days ?
Self interested parties thats who , people with no concept of how to design a game let alone balance it.
Starcraft was never a fair match like chess. Don’t expect the game skills to be linear. The truth is that skill level is assymetrical .
Zerg and toss can F 2 a move to masters , it speaks volumes
They were doomed from the start. Computer science graduates working on the problem full time for 10 years weren’t able to solve the issue. Basically it’s hard to balance protoss for the player base without handicapping it at the pro level. The balance team decided the player base was the priority, and got the game to 33/33/33 split representation in GM. On their way out, however, as the team disbanded, they decided to throw out one more patch that buffed the void ray, and protoss has dominated PvZ since then. The balance counsel extended this dominance into PvT, and now Terran is 24% of Grandmaster, which is where Zerg has been for years.
I understand why the protoss members of the balance counsel are so protoss biased, but it’s an absolute mystery why people like PiG, for example, have such an extreme bias against Terran in TvP. I suspect it’s garden variety corruption. He’s probably besties with Astrea or someone like that an this Protoss whiner, whoever he is, feeds delusional ideas into his ear 24/7. Even the most prolific random player ever, Uthermal, has made statements saying it’s very easy to lose, as terran, against a protoss who plays so bad it’s as if they don’t have hands.
The data is absolutely crystal clear. The community consensus is that protoss is op. Anyone who has ever played high level starcraft knows how difficult XvP is contrasted against PvX. We can look at pro play and find very obvious skill issues with top protoss professionals.
To demonstrate just how severe this bias is, consider this example. PiG is casting with Rotti and Rotti explains how useful F2 is because he can manage his army without looking at it. Rotti outright admits he likes F2 because he doesn’t like looking at his army. Suddenly it makes perfect sense why toss professionals F2 their army in weird ways and which leads to random unit deaths. They will F2 a prism over a spore for example or f2 a colossus into the middle of the map where it is intercepted. They argue F2 use is BENEFICIAL and that those who criticize F2 don’t understand how beneficial it is. But in so arguing why it is beneficial, they admit they just don’t want to look at their army. It’s painfully obvious why toss can’t win premier tournaments. If you are serious about winning premiers, you need to watch your army like a hawk and you should unbind F2 in the hotkey menu and never use it again. You NEVER look away from your army when it is in proximity to the enemy unless it is moving AWAY from the enemy, for starters.
They cry about dark getting a 6 second supply block on 36 supply, which is basically irrelevant, but gloss over how the toss loses 10k resources from bad army management due to f2 abuse. They don’t multiprong. They don’t use dropship mechanics. They ball their army and attack down a single lane on the map. Obviously such a basic maneuver gets destroyed by serral, costing the toss tens of thousands of resources, but, trust us, guys, the real issue is that Dark has a 6 second supply block which might cost him 50 minerals. Mismanaging your army with F2 is beneficial even though it costs 10k resources; a small supply block is the end of the universe and it’s utter proof why maxpax is better than dark – got it. Just so we’re clear on the “logic” here.
Their inability to be realistic with protoss is just bias incarnate. I don’t know if PiG is on the counsel, but let’s hope not because there will never be a resolution to these balance issues as long as this amount of bias is allowed on the balance counsel. If you can’t be reasonable and objective, you shouldn’t be on that council. What is the source of the counsels bias? Is PiG the source? Is he even on the council? Nobody knows. All we know is that community members have a preference for protoss and that protoss is simultaneously favored by the balance counsel. If there is zero overlap, I would be surprised.
https://i.imgur.com/Lnt3Okl.png
Holey toledo dude. Terrans allin at the 6 minute mark or GG. That’s TvP right now:
https://sc2pulse.nephest.com/sc2/?season=62&queue=LOTV_1V1&team-type=ARRANGED&us=true&eu=true&kr=true&cn=true&gra=true&page=0&type=ladder&ratingAnchor=99999&idAnchor=0&count=1#stats-match-up