I wont say starcraft 2 was a failure, FAR from that infact. I loved the game and when i got access to the closed beta i felt like an ecstatic kid again and felt a happiness that even now hasnt really been rivaled. However over the years and the sloooow release of expansions the hype died down and i stopped playing the game because of balance issues revolving around death ball comps. every now and then tho i get a strong craving for the game, but cant invest fully into it.
between SCBW an legacy of the void it took blizzard 17 YEARS to fully complete a sequel. thats not cool and i dont care what blizzards philosophy is. they take TOO LONG to make expansions, TOO LONG to make sequels, and TOO LONG to balance a game. but the biggest smack into the face is that the game STILL IS NOT AS GOOD AS BROOD WAR WAS! 17 years! and the game isnt even close to being as good as BW was in its hay day. why is that? This is the biggest killer for me. i only have one life, so i hope to god i dont have to wait another 12-17 years for a sequel.
what happened to the game and what needs to be changed in the next sequel?
You realize that brood war is a completely different game, and Brood war is far from balanced. It’s just had almost 20 years of time to have people figure out and the balance comes from the maps. It’s like comparing apples and oranges a bit because of how different the games are even though they are both rts games in the same series. A lot of the balance from brood war comes from fighting the interface and the AI.
On you’re Too long between BW and sc2.
First they developed warcraft 3 in between the two, and after that launched in 2004 (Frozen throne) the team moved on to sc2. I’m glad they didn’t launch earlier because the editor is so powerful that they don’t need to rush into sc3. They can still flesh out the story, make changes etc with the sc2 editor. Gives the game a longer life span than just “And that’s legacy of the void. Comeback in 3 years for sc3!” As for too long inbetween games. It was only like 2-3 years for expansions which is good for blizzard. They probably could have taken another year at least for both hots and legacy to flesh out some more stuff if they had chosen to. Each game was launched with the average development time for games. The thing about being too long to balance. The game launched with trash maps and no game knowledge. So it’s hard to balance the game when people have zero idea how to play. So you can’t always rush into changes because maybe something isn’t actually broken the player base needs time to figure it out. Which is a good philosophy to have. Assume your audience is intelligent. It’s not perfect, but there’s a reason why it’s the only RTS really out there now because blizzard overall plays their cards right with the balance.
And It’s still not as good as brood war is all relative. It’s not an actual statement of fact. Brood war is harder for people to get into because of how old mechanics work.
The only thing I would say they did wrong overall was ditching their cut and replace philosphy. When HOTS was first announced, they were going to cut units that didn’t see much use and replace them with other units. But then they back off on that until the carrier was the only unit they cut. And then they were just like “Well it’s weird to only cut 1 unit. So it’s back in” this is what dustin browder said. Then the carrier saw zero changes and zero play for another 3 years. They should have stuck with that. Why keep units in the game that see no role or have a very niche role instead of trying something else?
I don’t think we need and sc3. These yearly patches are great. Personally, I think it’s time for a bigger patch. Still some holes in the game for some new units to fill. Some spellcasters need some touching up and then units like void ray, colossus, swarm host could use some touching up. There’s no reason to do sc3 because what would that editor be able to do that sc2 can’t? Just develop the game that’s currently huge instead of wiping the slate clean? Yes, there will be a sc3 in the future, but sc2 is still growing strong and hasn’t seen its limitations yet. They can do anything. They could literally cut 5 units per race and replace them with something else, the game would feel like a new game without having to spend years developing a new engine, UI etc to ship out.
in what way does it not live up to it’s predecessors legacy? It’s globak. Sc2 was the spear head for esports. The campaign did revolutionary things. The balance approach is something that isn’t really replicated. The units are unique and not just cookie cutter units. Beyond the “The good old days argument” that not everyone might share. What has sc2 done to not live up to the legacy of BW?
is it not obvious to you when you look at current SC2 tournaments vs pas BW tournaments? or better yet, look at content creation for the game vs what we had when BW existed. there is very few people making content for the game, with winter maybe being the top one and he really isnt bringing in new players to the game even tho his guides are pretty good.
matter of fact you dont even need to go as far as BW. SC2 esports popularity has been on the decline since wings. during wings it was at its peak.
Not sure what you mean about sc2 vs brood war tournaments as the sc2 tournaments are bigger and more hype and there are more of them. It’s clear to see when you listen to old BW players talk about BW tournaments. As far as the arcade, yeah it could be better and we could promote content creators more. But we do home people creating stuff even if it’s quiet. And it’s a bit nonsensical to look at all the stuff sc2 does. Pick the one thing that BW did better and be like “Yep, this is why BW is the better game” lol You could do that about any game basically
Unit DPS density needs to be reduced. That is to say the amount of damage each unit does relative to the space it takes up needs to be lower. Blizzard ported the Brood War DPS density over, but with 3d unit pathing, units group so much more that you get much neater concaves.
Community figures like pig have said that SC3 would cost half a billion to produce & only net twice as much over 10 years, which by Blizzard/Activision/Microsoft standards is quite low. League by comparison makes 21 billion every 10 years. SC3 will probably never happen, and if it does it will be probably 10 years down the road. Broodwar was released 6 years after SC-original, WoL was released 12 years after that. HotS was released 2 years later, and LotV 3 years later. It’s now been 9 years since the LotV release. So if you measure endpoint to endpoint, we have broodwar to lotv at 17 years. If that pattern holds, and it likely will, we’re looking at another 8 years before it’s released.
If you are wanting new rts content, you’re probably going to have to go to the indie developer scene, because a billion dollar market is still plenty for them to pursue. Three big notables are Age of Empires, Stormgate, and Battle Aces. I know of at least two that are in the pipeline that haven’t even been announced yet. Pig’s estimate of “half a billion dollars” to make an RTS game is also a grotesque over estimate. An indie studio could produce an RTS game for a million bucks, but half a billion is believable for a big company like blizzard that would throw ludicrous amounts of money to make hyper realistic cinematic cut scenes.
Before you discount the possibility of a hit RTS coming from the indie scene, it’s worth noting that Subnautica, Valheim, Minecraft & Helldivers were indie games. Subnautica alone made ~300 million. So, yeah, a hit RTS could totally come from the indie scene.
IMO, SC2 is the best RTS of all times, but it has some design choices, which make it far less popular than it could be. One such core choice is a very high damage/HP ratio. In WC3/DotA/MOBAs, nothing can be one-shot. In SC2, there are many situations where you can lose 20-30 supply to ONE shot of splash damage. This is not fun to play. I doubt many people like this kind of mechanics. It’s VERY punishing, if your micro isn’t great. Another problem in SC2 is that macro takes a lot practice. In WC3, there was practically no macro at all. In SC2, not only you often play on 3+ bases, there are also those little things which keep you busy, MULEs, injects, tumors, etc. There are some some stupid art direction decisions in SC2. For ex. they replaced the excellent Dragoons with those ugly Stalkers and also the iconic Reavers, with the ugly Disruptors. Many new units in SC2 are poorly designed. Another problem with SC2, is that it’s too fast, and requires to much APM for most people. These days, many pro games are played at 500+ APM. This is WAY to much. Popular games, like LoL/DotA, don’t require so much fast clicking.
The damage to health ratio has always been high in StarCraft. That is part of the design of both games, and I don’t think that is really the problem. Some unit interactions that StarCraft depends on outright wouldn’t work if you just nerfed damage and buffed health across the board.
It should be noted that the games that you are comparing StarCraft to are much more symmetric than StarCraft.
WarCraft in particular (like most strategy games) tends to have units that fulfill the exact same constant roles across the factions (basic melee unit, archer, stronger melee unit at later tech, some supporting casters, a catapult-type siege unit, air-to-ground & air-to-air if available). WarCraft III added more specialized units and tweaked the stats for these units further than previous games in the series (so they don’t always come across as reskins), but it still has that baseline to work with for all 4 of the factions.
StarCraft is very different from that. There are a few common traits that you can pick out (for instance, at least one unit serves as a mineral dump and there are at least a few anti-air units), but even the units that share some of these traits tend to be radically different from each-other. This works because the factions have some viable composition that are capable of handling each-other, but this isn’t a case where you can just scale up the health and scale down the damage across the board and expect things to work.
This is not true.
WarCraft III has a number of spells (and critical strikes from Blademasters) that can one-shot summons and some 1-2 supply units. There are also spells like Doom and Transmute that guarantee death and Charm/Possess effects are at least as devastating as killing a unit. Champions/Heroes in MOBAs also often scale up enough to one-shot mobs with spells or kill them extremely quick with auto-attacks as they level.
Furthermore, MOBAs mainly got started on WarCraft III. They were popularized through custom maps, and the separate services that kicked off kept most of that model.
There are ways to mitigate that while still having very powerful splash.
One method is to split the splash damage into different damage radii, such as the 100%/50%/25% model used by most splash units in Brood War, including Tanks and Archons that retained that model when they crossed over. This provides some benefits to splitting for many units even when they are still close enough together to take some of the damage, and it usually means that a single hit won’t be quite as devastating. That said, the splash damage unit still needs to be effective, so there might need to be some other change to compensate when changing a flat damage unit to a radial damage unit in this way–Such as increasing the base damage in that center radius, decreasing the cooldown, or increasing the chance to hit the main target.
These have always been very different games.
WarCraft has always had relatively limited macro and smaller army sizes, such that unit retention and micro was generally more important than macro.
StarCraft has always been more macro-oriented, with more bases, higher worker counts, and larger armies. That is just going to take more work to keep track of.
That said, I don’t like the macro abilities. They each have some side-effect that has been somewhat harmful to the game.
From a gameplay standpoint, I don’t think you actually want Reavers if you are currently complaining about Disruptors. I like the Reaver, but it is generally much more powerful than the Disruptor as a splash damage unit.
That’s the pro level. If you aren’t at that level your APM requirements won’t be quite so high; although they are obviously still higher than a game where you only control less bases and fewer units.
The reality is that most people play games for fun. In SC2, many 1v1 mechanics are designed to make the game harder and more punishing, not more fun to play. It’s not fun to do splits vs. Disruptors. It’s not fun to micro PROJECTILES. It’s not fun to get your Muta ball wiped by Widow Mines. It’s not fun to run from Banelings. It’s not fun to constantly inject and place those tumors over and over and over. It’s not totally terrible, because each of those problems has a solution, but those solutions are not fun to play.
The thing I hate the most in SC2 is that often I’m supposed to out-micro splash damage in some way. IMO, there should be a cap on max splash damage per splash attack. In WC3, they added a cap on Dread Lord’s Carrion Swarm, because prior to that cap level 3 CS was devastating in some cases. I would cap max total damage per WM shot, max total damage of a Disruptor shot and of a Baneling. Currently in the game there are situations where splash damage can rise to ridiculous values. For ex. you fly with a Muta ball over some Widow Mines, and BOOM, you can lose dozens Mutas instantly.
One-shot mechanics in WC3 were very rare in practice. For ex. Doom and Charm are Ultimates, with long cooldowns and you could eliminate only ONE unit. Possession was imba, but they fixed it, and it required like 250 mana. Blade Master’s crit was random and it one-shotted very few units. In SC2 there are many games with tons of splash damage which can one-shot/two-shot.