Poll: Is StarCraft really the quintessential RTS?

[Vaemer-Riit]

All I have to say about this topic is this:

Total Annihilation: Release date September 30, 1997

StarCraft: Release date March 31, 1998

Now according to Wikipedia Total Annihilation is older than StarCraft. Despite this it manages to do More than StarCraft does.

There is NO limit on the number of units you can select at one time, the graphics are better, there was more strategy involved. Hell the game even had a more active and more skilled Mod community than SC did.

Everything That was done in StarCraft was done better In Total Annihilation, BEFORE StarCraft was released.

 

[brenflood]

As I understand it, scouting units take much longer to build than an army of 6-12 zerglings. So, the point about being a horrible player for not knowing that your enemy is rushing you is moot.

Ok, so from what I've gathered on this forum, Starcraft is a horrible game. Here's how I've reached this conclusion. Apparently, any decent player has to be capable of at least 60 actions per minute, players who are not on a tournaments level do not have the right to criticize the game, nor are they allowed to play it, and if anyone gets beaten by a zergling rush because they had more important tasks than building defenses within the first five minutes, they are worthless noobs.

I've never seen such elitism for a computer game.

Those conclusions are all drawn from statements made within this thread. So, I think I've found this game's major flaw. It's not the Zergling rush. In fact, it has nothing to do with the programming whatsoever. The fucking players ruin this game.

 

[N-Sef]

People need to get over Starcraft in my honest opinion. Sure it was great in its heyday, but just like Counter-Strike the game has become a fossil that only fans from day one seem to have the 'right' to play or even criticize, citing anyone who doesn't have over 900 hours of play experiance a n00b and not worthy of their time. This kind of attitude is not just apparant amoung these games but pretty much every Blizzard product or MMO, it's trully annoying.

So is Starcraft the quintessential RTS? I really don't think so, maybe when it was released but we have seen better RTS's come out. Sins of the Solar Empire comes to mind.

 

[brenflood]

N-Sef,

I agree with your point almost entirely. However, I feel the need to defend counterstrike just a tad. At least counterstrike has recieved engine upgrades whenever a new suitable engine came out. I believe the first counterstrike was on the first quake engine. I never heard about it until Half-life came out. Now, You can play in on the Half-life 2 engine. I don't think the maps or gameplay have changed much, but at least it has kept up with the times somewhat. Also, it's a fan-made game. It's not made by the PopCap of hardcore gaming, Blizzard.

Regardless, I appreciate your comments here because at least you seem to have some sense.

Sins is a pretty cool game. I think my favorite new strategy game has to be Supreme Commander. I like it because of its dual screen mode. I actually like the gameplay of C&C generals more, but I genuinely feel like a Supreme Commander while using two screens on my Monolith 9000. I don't think either of them are incredibly well balanced, but I can have genuine FUN playing those games, and I thought that's what gaming was about.

 

[TheIceface]

N-Sef,

I agree with your point almost entirely. However, I feel the need to defend counterstrike just a tad. At least counterstrike has recieved engine upgrades whenever a new suitable engine came out. I believe the first counterstrike was on the first quake engine. I never heard about it until Half-life came out. Now, You can play in on the Half-life 2 engine. I don't think the maps or gameplay have changed much, but at least it has kept up with the times somewhat. Also, it's a fan-made game. It's not made by the PopCap of hardcore gaming, Blizzard.

Heh, I agree as well, but perhaps he was referring to CS 1.6 not CS:S. Source has been updated with the times, and still receives updates now and again, but there are still players who cling to 1.6 because since the game updated, that means they will have to as well.

The funny thing is, in the U.S. I play CS:S fairly frequently, but since I've been in China, nobody plays the game. The main reason is because its impossible to find a legitimate copy of any game here, and 1.6 (more commonly 1.5) is easier to hack and play for free. However, in the case of U.S. citizens, most people have the choice to upgrade to the Source version of the game, or stay in their safety zones with the old version.

You know what? After a long day of sitting around playing The Curse of Monkey Island on my ancient Chinese PC, I think I want to go down to the local Chinese internet cafe and play some CS 1.5 for nostalgia's sake. Heck, I may even watch the Chinese players use zergling rush on each other in hacked versions of Starcraft.

 

[Pzychotix]

As I understand it, scouting units take much longer to build than an army of 6-12 zerglings. So, the point about being a horrible player for not knowing that your enemy is rushing you is moot.

Ok, so from what I've gathered on this forum, Starcraft is a horrible game. Here's how I've reached this conclusion. Apparently, any decent player has to be capable of at least 60 actions per minute, players who are not on a tournaments level do not have the right to criticize the game, nor are they allowed to play it, and if anyone gets beaten by a zergling rush because they had more important tasks than building defenses within the first five minutes, they are worthless noobs.

I've never seen such elitism for a computer game.

Those conclusions are all drawn from statements made within this thread. So, I think I've found this game's major flaw. It's not the Zergling rush. In fact, it has nothing to do with the programming whatsoever. The fucking players ruin this game.

Scouting units consist of your basic peon, available before any other unit in the game. There are other units that are solely for scouting, but when we're talking about early scouting, we mean any cheap expendable unit that can get a look at your opponents base.

Think about it: how would the opponent rush you if they didn't scout you out at as well? They would have no idea where your base is, since maps rarely consist of one possible spot for you opponent to be at. The first thing anybody does, including the newbie players, is to scout out your opponent's location. From there, it's a simple act of looking at your opponents buildings to realize what you should be doing.

As for Starcraft having an elitist community:
You've got it completely wrong. No one's saying that he shouldn't be allowed to criticize the game. It's the fact that his criticisms are completely unfounded. It's been explained time and time again that this so-called "unfair" strategy is not unfair. It's a bad strategy that's easy to spot as well as easy to counter. You don't need to play Starcraft at a tournament level to realize this. TheIceFace continues to attack with this point, even though it has been refuted many times, and the SC players in this thread continue to defend SC because it's obviously false.

If anything, the SC players got hugely trolled, but to say that the SC community is horrible for defending themselves? Come on now. Be better than that. Let's not mention the fact that the people here do not represent the SC community as a whole. Small sample size anybody?

TheIceFace: Grow up. Let the point go already, unless you're willing to actually back up your point that this "flaw" should not be a strategy in an RTS.

 

[OmegaTalon]

All I have to say about this topic is this:

Now according to Wikipedia Total Annihilation is older than StarCraft. Despite this it manages to do More than StarCraft does.

There is NO limit on the number of units you can select at one time, the graphics are better, there was more strategy involved. Hell the game even had a more active and more skilled Mod community than SC did.

Everything That was done in StarCraft was done better In Total Annihilation, BEFORE StarCraft was released.

No unit selection limit, Fine.
No attack move, not so good, especially since I have to type in the shoot all command or shift click the buildings one at a time.

Yes, TA graphics are great, but graphics don't make a game.

More strategy eh? any unit abilities barring the basic build, attack, patrol, stop and the D-Gun of the commander, nope, just unit and building choice, and the annoying fact that I had to stack up a ridiculous queue due to the large number of units you need to build,
StarCraft does include your general build queue, it does a much better job of it, well placed hotkeys come to mind, as well as unique abilities for almost every unit, and a much better transport system.

Yeah, I know Supreme Commander fixed the majority of this, but were not talking about that.

The Mod community of TA I can't argue with since the game was easy to Mod, but the online community of StarCraft is still going strong today.

 

[brenflood]

@ Psychotix

My conclusions were almost entirely drawn from Larry Laffer's statements. If you go through all five pages of this thread, you can find Laffer saying those things in other words.

You, on the other hand, seem to have respect for other people's opinions, and I admire that.

As for scouting, you've got me there.

I think TheIceface is arguing so passionately against the Zergling rush because it takes the fun out of the game for him, and for me as well. The fact that there was a patch very long ago that raised the cost of the spawning pool shows that it was, at one time, unbalanced. While it makes sense in a sort of all's fair in war sort of way, it's seems to be an unsportsmanlike thing to do. I mean most decent games I played six ears ago began with everyone agreeing not to rush. However, any game that didn't begin that way had me facing a mini-swarm of zerglings within the first five minutes.

Again, I blame the players for that kind of crap, not the programming of the game.

 

[cave]

No abilities/special attacks and no unit/armor types is one of the GOOD things about TA/Supcom!
That means you don't have to babysit every attack like in Starcraft and tell counter unit X to attack unit Y and retreat with unit A from counter unit B and use special ability Z etc etc and instead focus on the actual strategic part of the game.

Pressing a bunch of buttons really fast sounds more like an arcade game to me, maybe why the koreans like it so much.
They're good a memorizing stuff like the the paper-rock-scissor unit system and unit/buildings statistics too, but that's not strategy!

If you think about strategy and military commanders in real life, they don't tell every single man what to do and who to attack, they deal with the larger plan and simply say "attack there", just like in TA/Supcom, and the soldiers figure the rest out themselves.

 

[Iron Mal]

Please ignore this post, purely accidental

 

[GloatingSwine]

No abilities/special attacks and no unit/armor types is one of the GOOD things about TA/Supcom!
That means you don't have to babysit every attack like in Starcraft and tell counter unit X to attack unit Y and retreat with unit A from counter unit B and use special ability Z etc etc and instead focus on the actual strategic part of the game.

It also means that there's very little incentive to build a varied force, and that low tier units are pretty much irrelevant by endgame because they are simply squashed by high tier stuff. SupCom still has that failing, the game is a race to get to end tier and once you get there tier 0/1 is useless. Compare Dawn of War where generally even the Tier 0 unit has a capping/harassment role in the endgame, even up to a Surprise Bloodthirster from a Cultist squad.

TA is fun, but it's not as objectively good a game as Starcraft.

 

[pieeater911]

Starcraft is defiantly one of the best RTSs ever made, and there are a few reasons why.
1. Three distinct playable races all with distinct playing strategies. There is something for everybody if you're an RTS player.
2. The game is just so well balanced. Everything has strengths and weaknesses. Even the toughest of units can be brought down easily if you have the right strategy.
3. The game is FUN. There are only one or two other RTSs out there that I can think of that made me feel as if I was actually having fun, and not just looking at in-game spreadsheets for an hour. These RTSs are Warcraft 2, and Medieval: Total War 2.
Besides, the game has a lot of merit just from what Blizzard was able to do with it a decade ago.
I cannot wait for Starcraft 2.

 

[TheIceface]

Alright, I'm kind of looking forward to SC2... but if I see a zergling rush on my first day online, I'm burning the disk AOL 6.0 style; in the microwave.

 

[OmegaTalon]

No abilities/special attacks and no unit/armor types is one of the GOOD things about TA/Supcom!
That means you don't have to babysit every attack like in Starcraft and tell counter unit X to attack unit Y and retreat with unit A from counter unit B and use special ability Z etc etc and instead focus on the actual strategic part of the game.

Pressing a bunch of buttons really fast sounds more like an arcade game to me, maybe why the koreans like it so much.
They're good a memorizing stuff like the the paper-rock-scissor unit system and unit/buildings statistics too, but that's not strategy!

If you think about strategy and military commanders in real life, they don't tell every single man what to do and who to attack, they deal with the larger plan and simply say "attack there", just like in TA/Supcom, and the soldiers figure the rest out themselves.

Point 1: ok lets see here, if I don't have to baby-sit the attack, that means doing nothing except attacking head on, no flanking, harassment, distractions, ambushing, surrounding, using terrain to your advantage, and those are all happen to be strategic parts of a game

Point 2: micromanagement is annoying for some, I can agree with that, but there is no rock-paper-scissor system on StarCraft, every unit has a variety of purposes and there is no unit designed specifically for countering another, possibly barring the firebat for zergling's on choke points, which wont work well without a medic helping anyway.
To add to that, all units are useful from start to finish, almost nothing turns obsolete halfway through the game.

Point 3: ok, so first you compare Real Life to TA and SupCom, notably one of which works with real people whilst the other is with remote control vehicles.
Second, I doubt a commander would say "Attack there" and let the rest work itself out risks and chances of loss of life have to be taken into account.

stuff like > the the < paper-rock-scissor unit system

Use a spell checker it helps, a lot.

 

[mathias53]

TA Total Anialation, does anyone remember that wonderfull game. Not the best graphics but surely some fo the best gameplay ever.

TA is the best RTS, I still play it. It was so simple, didnt have any gimmicks and didnt have blinding graphics that cloud the game (see Supreme Commander). I have supreme commander and yes it is the unofficial sequal to TA

I have StarCraft, TA, and Supreme Commander and ill tell you right now which is the best- TA

1. My computer isnt blowing a coronary trying to render unthinkle amounts of units (SupCom)
2. I dont bother with upgrading units because that takes time and recourses that should be forced to war.
3. Both sides are pretty much the same except with different names and paint jobs

I think the best RTS/TBS is the one that perfectly balances between going to war and having peace. There needs to be a conciquence for going to war. Most games we play are only war, and if you arent fighting with someone then you are playing it wrong.

 

[mathias53]

If you have ever read the book Ender's Game then you should now the single most flawed part of strategy games is micromanagment. If you have read the book then you know how Ender was such an amazing leader. He trusted his commanders to beat the enemy in there own way. He could tell Crazy Tom to take the lower star while he helped Hot Soup.

This eventually led to the downfall of the Buggers. The Bugger queen could only control a few ships at a time. Basically it was ten semi-good commanders (humans) versus one really good commander (Buggers). The Bugger queen micromanged while Ender didnt and look who one (and yes i know about the Dr Device, shut up)

 

[karpiel]

yeah, I've got to say that TA really beat blizzard to the punch when it came to a lot of their gameplay ideas. In my opinion, Warcraft 2 is their finest and most original effort in the RTS genre.

 

[Ultrajoe]

i've played alot of RTS's, but for me, the true ultra experience is DoW

Fast

Brutal

Chaotic

And pulling a Turtle is now a technique that takes mastery, not 5 minutes tutorial. (Unless you have that mastery you can be broken open like an egg in 60 seconds)

And no moral qualms, a sheer test of wills and strategy.

I've played them all people, so i'm not just speaking from ignorance, DoW won me over with 30 minute games and squad systems.

And NO. BLOODY. PEASANT. RUSH... i love it.

 

[Xocrates]

Starcraft is the quintessential RTS not because it is particularly original, not because it might have brought a lot of innovations, but simply because it set the standard through which RTS are now measured.

Many games mentioned here could (arguably, of course) be considered better than startcraft, but were they better in all aspects?

One can be more original, but maybe SC plays better. One could have more variety, but SC might be better balanced. And so on...

SC is the standard because it's good all around. The same is true with pretty much every Blizzard game: Diablo set the standard to Hack and Slash, WoW set the standard to MMORPG. Maybe many games out there are better on many aspects, but they are never better in all of them. That's what the standard means.


It's not different from, say, Half-life. I've only played Half life for the first time this year, and had I not known any better and I would say the game to be an average shooter. Yet I realize this is not true because I'm well aware that HL set the standard. Everything that came afterwards was just variations of what HL did.

On a non-gaming example: Saving Private Ryan. I remember being awed with it first time around, last time I watched it it felt rather meh. That's because it set the standard for war movies since then, and therefore everything that came afterwards was trying to copy or improve the formula.

Same with SC and with pretty much everything that set the stadard.

 

[Xhumed]

Starcraft is the quintessential RTS not because it is particularly original, not because it might have brought a lot of innovations, but simply because it set the standard through which RTS are now measured.

Many games mentioned here could (arguably, of course) be considered better than startcraft, but were they better in all aspects?

One can be more original, but maybe SC plays better. One could have more variety, but SC might be better balanced. And so on...

SC is the standard because it's good all around. The same is true with pretty much every Blizzard game: Diablo set the standard to Hack and Slash, WoW set the standard to MMORPG. Maybe many games out there are better on many aspects, but they are never better in all of them. That's what the standard means.


It's not different from, say, Half-life. I've only played Half life for the first time this year, and had I not known any better and I would say the game to be an average shooter. Yet I realize this is not true because I'm well aware that HL set the standard. Everything that came afterwards was just variations of what HL did.

On a non-gaming example: Saving Private Ryan. I remember being awed with it first time around, last time I watched it it felt rather meh. That's because it set the standard for war movies since then, and therefore everything that came afterwards was trying to copy or improve the formula.

Same with SC and with pretty much everything that set the stadard.

That might possibly have been true for a while after it came out, but the same was true of many RTS's prior to that (Dune 2, then C&C, Warcraft, and so on and so forth.) More than that, it's been surpassed over and over again by better games. Game development is an evolutionary process.Saying SC is the quintessential RTS is like saying Homo erectus is the quintessential hominid. Saying it's quintessential because it's still played today is a spurious argument. I still play Red Alert 2 today, but i wouldn't dream of calling it quintessential, even though it has 3 balanced sides (im counting Yuri's revenge), with different units and strategies, and its still great fun.