Starcraft 2: The Wrath of Disappointment
by Phanixis
So 12 years after the release of the original Starcraft, Blizzard has released Starcraft 2. This game is such a disappointment that I feel the need to specify precisely why is was disappointing and how it could have been done better. Now when I say the game is disappointing I mean precisely that; I am not implying the game is bad. Its a solid RTS with a well executed campaign and solid, enjoyable multiplayer gameplay.
So what precisely is the nature of my problem with this game? Well, its essentially just a copy of the original Starcraft. Rather than being a successor to Starcraft, its little more than a glorified expansion pack. An expansion pack that took 10 years to develop. By one of the largest and most talented game developers out there. How does that even happen?
Well, I guess no one is perfect. Blizzard was probably playing it safe, not taking risk (or even something remotely close to something that might appear to be a risk), and dropped the ball in the process. So mistakes happen. So naturally, I expected all the game to get slammed by review sites for being little more than a glorified expansion pack. And yet, I have to go out of my way to find a review site on the web that will give this game anything less a 9 out of 10. Doesn't anyone have high standards? How can you give 9/10 and 10/10 to a re-skinned game with decade old gameplay?
Well I have standards, and I am going to hold Blizzard to them. So its time to explain what precisely is wrong with this game.
My core criticism is that Starcraft 2 is just Starcraft. And beyond that, their has been over a decade of progress in RTS made by developers such as Relic, Cavedog, Westwood, etc. that has been outright ignored in the development of Starcraft 2.
A lot of people will respond to this criticism to something of the effect of ?So what? Starcraft was a good game, so obviously its duplicate is a good game.? I have even read post in forums that were so arrogant as to claim that Starcraft was so perfect that only reason for the past 10 years are RTS innovation is that other companies simply couldn't compete with the ?perfection? of Starcraft and had to change the way the genre played to compete. There are two problems with this line of thought:
Problem 1: I can just play the original Starcraft. Ok, this is arguably the weaker of the two arguments, but its still important. What is the point in paying $60 retail for a game you essentially already own, or investing 10 years to create what already exist? Even worse, the original Starcraft came before consumers got saddled with the DRM bullshit that currently infests the market like a horde of demonically possessed plague rats that work a second job as Lovecraftian horrors, and treated the owners like adults, enabling them to create LAN and direct connect games as well as install multiplayer spawns so they could play against friends who weren't willing to commit to owning the game. Starcraft 2 treats everybody like they're bloody 12 year olds, and requires any multiplayer game to go through Battlenet to make sure they aren't using pirated copies.
Problem 2: Starcraft is not, and never was, a perfect game. A good game it was, but never even close to perfect, and certainly not the kind of game that can outright ignore 12 years of RTS innovation like Blizzard choose to do. However, before I can get into what its weaknesses really are, I need to detail its strengths.
Starcraft was an excellent game in many respects, but there are four main things that made it really stand out: the three unique races, the excellent game balance, the tight unit designs and the original battlenet.
The Three Races: The races are probably the game's biggest selling point and, unlike the rest of the game, really have withstood the test of time. At the time of the game's release, most factions in RTS's were virtually identical save for aesthetics and a few unique traits. This includes the first two Warcrafts, where the only differences were the spells available to each race, and Total Annihilation. The Command and Conquer series, which included Red Alert did grant each faction some unique units, but both factions also used a lot of the same basic units and structures. So having three different races that played entirely differently, from unique ways of building structures, to radically different combat units, was revolutionary. The choice of race radically altered the strategy and really set Starcraft apart from every other game in the genre. Virtually every RTS since has followed suite, yet not a single game has executed the distinction between races as well as Starcraft and Starcraft 2.
Unit Balance: The game wouldn't have been very fun if a single race or unit dominated the game. Each unit as distinct strengths and weaknesses, all are useful, and none or overpowered (with the possible exception of the mutalisk pre Brood War). This ensured each was valuable and enabled interesting tactics.
Tight Unit Design: This goes in hand in hand with game balance. Tight unit design is essentially the absence of unnecessary and pointless units. Every unit serves and purpose, and there are virtually no redundancies (save maybe the scout and corsair post Brood War, but the corsair was needed to fix the aforementioned mutalisk and provide early game anti-air). Again, this ensures no unit is a waste and keeps tactics simple yet interesting.
Battlenet: This was a major boon back in the days when people were playing over the modem. It has been a long time since I first used Battlenet for the original Starcraft, but it was vastly easier to play multiplayer games over the Internet using this service than the methods that existed at the time, such as directly connecting with a friend via modem, or the poor means the existed for playing games over the Internet if the game even supported the option. Of course in this day and age, it is fairly easy to get virtually any game to work over the Internet, save perhaps Generals: Zero Hour, so the benefit this once represented no longer exist. The current Battlenet is sadly more of a DRM enforcement mechanism rather than a service that exists for the convenience of the customer.
The combination of these strengths led to a very powerful and interesting multiplayer game, and the tight unit design and balance even enabled it to be played competitively in Korea. So this begs the question, what do I find wrong with it? There is the 12 years of innovation the game outright ignored, but that is really specific to the sequel. Lets start with the problems inherent to the game itself, and not problems associated with its potential to be a much better game, which I will discuss later. Because Starcraft and Starcraft 2 are essentially the same game, these problems apply both the the original and the sequel.
Starcraft's biggest problem can be identified as soon as you begin a multiplayer match. What is the first thing you see? Your Nexus/HQ/Hatchery and your workers. These buildings and units form the core gameplay element of Starcraft. Managing and building more workers and HQs are far more likely to win you the game than winning combat engagements, provided you also can efficiently and immediately spend the resources to buy more workers, HQs and combat units. At its heart, Starcraft is an economic game first and a tactical strategy game second. This in and of itself isn't a bad thing, except that those strengths I just listed previously, the beautifully diversified racial units and tight balance, really only come into play on the tactical side of the game.
Meanwhile, very little interesting happens on the economic side of the game. The workers are basically identical save for their unit building modes, and otherwise are identical in how they go about harvesting resources. Heck, these workers collect resources and a manner identical to that of the peasants from the original Warcraft, only the difference between collecting gas and crystals is even less interesting than Wood and Gold! So the central resource collecting mechanic that forms the core of this game is 20 years old! Time to innovate, Blizzard.
Spending resources is also essentially the same. One to several of a given production building is constructed, a single unit is queued in each building whenever it is finished, and they are sent off to war. Building speeds for each race's combat units are different, but that is to compliment the relative unit strengths of the various races' tactical playstyles, rather than providing something interesting about the economy itself. Some variation is found in the fact that Terrain structures can fly and the Zerg produce everything at the hatchery, and this can lead to some rather interesting strategies, but it still doesn't come close to the variation found at the tactical level of this game.
To top it off, the economic design is terrible. While the tactical design is tight with each unit serving a clear purpose, the economy will have you spamming enormous numbers of identical units and structures to keep everything going. As the game progresses, simultaneous management of several HQs will be required, each with its own legion of workers. Beyond that, each race must build a support structures to increase their unit cap, another carry over from Warcraft that probably should have never been carried into Warcraft 2 let alone the Starcrafts. These buildings must be built in irresponsibly large numbers and serve little purpose other than to waste the player's time and have an annoying habit of bringing production to an immediate halt if the player does not keep after them. Finally, production structures must be built in massive blocks in order to purchase units at a reasonable rate and to streamline the micro required to build the units. In larger games it all becomes a bloated mess and serves no purpose beyond collecting and spending resources, and tends to distract from the rest of the game.
To even further these problems, neither Starcraft has a workable queuing system. Queues are something virtually every RTS company has manage to work into their games properly, except apparently Blizzard. Its simple enough, if you want a structure to build multiple units in a row, place the units in a queue, and after the first is finished the structure will begin to build the next unit in the queue.
The problem when queuing units in Starcraft is that you are immediately charged the resource cost for said unit, when you should not be charged for a queued unit until construction of said unit has actually begun. This means that to queue, for example, 4 additional zealots will cost 400 minerals immediately. These resources could have been put to immediate use either purchasing a combat unit using another structure, or purchasing a new production structure if no said structures exist. This approach enables faster production of units, and this in turn wins games. In effect, using the queue puts a player at a huge economic disadvantage, typically severe enough to cost him the game, thus rendering the queues in Starcraft all but worthless.
Without working queues, the player is required to repeatedly select a structure every single time it completes a unit to give it new orders if that player wants to ensure the structure is continually producing units. And because of the demands Starcraft places on the player, he will always want to do this for every production structure he has. This becomes a persistent hassle and mindless chore that constantly distracts the player from the rest of the game, and it is entirely unnecessary. If the player wants a structure to repeatedly build zealots and marines, he should be able to set it to build indefinitely and move on to other task, without being penalized for doing so by being charged for units that won't even undergo construction until well into the future.
And thus the key problem is revealed. Starcraft is a game the doesn't focus on its own strengths. You have a game with all manner of intricate units, and you will be spending an enormous amount of time dealing with the all to similar drones and filling unit queues rather than what I would assume everyone would want to do: conducting battle with futuristic marines, alien monsters and starships! The game is constantly trying to pull the player away from the battles involving all the unique, well designed units that play off the various race's strengths and weaknesses so he can fill out requisition orders! This is an enormous design flaw, and hardly an attribute of what I would consider to be a perfect game.
Add to these problems is the general flow of the game. Perhaps it was acceptable at the time, but looking back is there really any reason the first 5 to 6 minutes of the game was building virtually nothing but workers before you collected enough resources to start building troops so you could start actually playing the game in earnest? Obviously you can scout with the workers and do something clever like an SCV rush, but this strikes me as players making the best of a bad situation, certainly not the gameplay associated with a perfect game, and certainly not something that should have survived the 10 years of game development the sequel underwent.
Let us not forget what happens immediately after this point, the rushing stage of the game. Anybody who is anybody will attempt to rush in this game; there is very little reason not to do it. Build a mass of your first combat unit, and if you managed your economy better, or pull and clever tactical stunt in the first engagement, you can win the game immediately, and your opponent can do likewise. If you're really advanced or just feeling clever, it is possible to carry out a rush with all of two kinds of units! It is of course a perfectly valid and effective tactic, and can easily win a majority of Starcraft games. So what is the problem? What about all those other units, the artillery units and spellcasters and aircraft and all the nifty things the game gives us to play with? You never get to field those in a surprisingly large number of games because they end in a rush. Once again, players are denied the huge variety of intricate units the game provides that Blizzard spent a laboriously long time designing, because of the way the game plays.
Of course, even if you do manage to get past the rush stage of the game, if is often better to eschew an elaborate combination of units for tactical flexibility in favor of choosing a small handful of powerful units while focusing on your economy(because again, it is what wins the game). Thus while tactically powerful, it is often advantageous to ignore the spellcaster units in favor of simply drowning the opponent in something that has been proven to be universally effective, such as mutalisks in the original or void rays in the new one. The apparent nerf to spellcasting units in Starcraft 2 has not helped this situation either(where are my arbiters?).
Part of the reason for this approach is the terrible AI. Units require constant supervision. Simply moving a unit unsupervised might get it killed because it will not fight back even if it could win, unless of course you use attack to move, which carries its own problems. In fights, when and idle group of unsupervised units gets attacked it is very common for part of the force to break off and fight or even chase the enemy while the rest stand around doing nothing, and often you cannot leave them standing around for a second because they cannot fend for themselves. Which wouldn't be so much of a problem if the economy did not require so much attention.
Which brings me to the flaw that brings all the other flaws together: the micromanagement. To put it charitably, Starcraft is and has always been an absolute micromanagement nightmare, a nightmare that only gets worse as the game progresses. The emphasis on economy, the lack of working queues, the bloated economic design, and terrible unit AI all conspire together to make a game where it is incredibly difficult to merely manage what you have, let alone conduct a war. It's like the game is constantly trying to distract you from actually organizing an army and executing a clear plan of attack on the enemy. In effect, Starcraft seems to do everything in its power to stop you from using strategy, despite being a strategy game! Fortunately, it also distracts your opponent, and you can more often than not simply drown him in units through superior economic micromanagement.
To add to this problem, the game is almost always played at one of its faster, if not fastest speeds, to skip through the initial do nothing worker phase at the beginning of the game. To overcome this problem, the player will need to memorize hot keys, build like buildings in blocks and bind them to number keys, and develop the reflexes of Jackie Chan on speed, which seems a bit much for what is supposed to be a strategy game. All in all it makes the game increasingly hard to play as the scale of battle is increased, which is ironic because the larger scales of battle are one of the supposing selling points of the series and a justification for the lack of innovation in the sequel, despite the fact that it is done so poorly in Starcraft and so much better by Total Annihilation and its Supreme Commander offshoots.
Now as far as the original Starcraft was concerned, these flaws were understandable. The RTS genre was new, Starcraft itself was experimental, and it managed to cover a lot of ground in other areas, namely the aforementioned strengths. But for Starcraft 2 to retain all these flaws, after 10 years of development and with virtually no other form of innovation in sight is inexcusable. This is particularly true for the simpler flaws, such as the terrible queuing system and the 5 minutes of down time at the beginning of the game. These flaws would be incredibly simple to fix, and yet after 10 years of development, Blizzard failed to do so.
The Past 10 Years and More
If you have bared with me this long, I have hopefully convinced you Starcraft and Starcraft 2 are poorly designed in many respects, and that much improvement is warranted. Or perhaps that my writing requires improvement! Either way, it's time to move on to those 10 years of innovation Blizzard outright ignored by discussing some of the remarkable RTS that have been release and the improvements that could have adapted to Starcraft 2 had Blizzard been interested in taking any risk of any kind.
Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander Series:
Let's start with Total Annihilation. This game is old, older than the original Starcraft, but released sufficiently close to the release of Starcraft that Blizzard probably would have been unable to adopt any of its design features for the original Starcraft. The designers of Starcraft 2, of course, had no excuse for not integrating ideas from this game into their own.
This game was every bit as ground breaking as Starcraft, and it is unfortunate it never got to share in the same level of fame. It lacked the unique races, play balance and tight unit design of Starcraft of course, as well as Battlenet, but more than made up for it.
This game featured enormous 3d maps of massive landscapes with continuous changes in elevation that included oceans, mountains, forest and the like. The game incorporated a physics engine, and all units and weapon projectiles had a clear size and shape. Projectiles actually had to travel from the firer and hit their targets, and could miss or strike intervening obstacles. Shooting down aircraft was more a matter of striking the target than having an arbitrarily designated anti-aircraft weapon. Artillery shells would down aircraft with a lucky hit, but guided missiles were much more effective because they could change direction in flight to intercept aircraft. The aircraft themselves moved dynamically like actual aircraft, dodging attacks in three dimensions, making banked curves and performing aerial acrobatics. Land and sea units were similarly dynamic: virtually everything is capable of firing on the move, which in addition to being really cool meant that a if a unit ordered to move came under attack, it would actually fight back as it traveled to its destination without the player's input.
Equally impressive was the AI, the intricate economy, and the ability to manage both the economy and military forces with ease. If you wanted a game where the economy was the core of gameplay, this could be it, with the huge range of production structures, resource collection structures, resource storing units and production units, all of which could be built on land, sea or even under the sea. Despite the increased complexities of the economy, that game design managed to minimize economic micromanagement, freeing the player to conduct warfare. Among the features that assisted in minimizing the micromanagement was the delegation of resource collection to fixed structures placed on the resources in question rather than the use of hordes of workers, which vastly streamlined resource collection.
But of course the economy alone was not the emphasis. True line of sight, along with radar and sonar of fixed range and corresponding jammers obtained both from fixed structures and mobile units, including a awax style radar aircraft led to a rather intricate intelligence war.
But perhaps most interesting was the sophisticated AI, queuing system and unit management options that made a large scale war quite manageable. If you want to talk about make conducting war on a massive scale fluidly and effectively, Total Annihilation's design makes Blizzard look like bunch of amateurs! Complex patrol paths, alternate unit behaviors, the ability to set complex unit orders from production, efficient queuing and a myriad of other options makes management of enormous battles fluid and intuitive while minimizing micromanagement. If Blizzard's goal was truly to make amazing large scale battles for their sequel, they should have borrowed a lot of ideas from Total Annihilation, or its Supreme Commander spiritual successors.
Command & Conquer Series:
A series almost as old as the original Warcraft, it has a couple of interesting ideas. The original Red Alert managed a functioning queue back in the days of Warcraft II, a feat Blizzard still has yet to replicate properly. It also had some fluidity and physics to its gameplay, with tanks able to aim turrets and fire on the move, and some degree of projectile tracking, though nothing on the level of Total Annihilation.
What I particularly like about this series is its approach to economic management. Rather than having to constantly go back to your base, there was a menu along the side of the screen that enabled to player to purchase units from any of his available production structures without ever having to select a production structure or even take his eyes off combat, a feat that in most RTS would at least require a numerous numerical key bindings. Even better, the player can actively monitor the progress of any units under production from this GUI. Toggling said menu also enabled the construction of buildings, although the player still needed to transition the screen to choose a production site.
Also, the existence of neutral capturable and garrisonable buildings added some unique strategy and tactics to this game series.
Relic Games: Dawn of War Series and Company of Heroes:
Now we are getting to some modern games. Relic realized that players wanted to play a game of strategy without having to deal with the mindlessness of economic micromanagement and shepherding of poorly pathing units and adopted a number of innovations to deal with these problems.
All the aforementioned games replace the traditional resources collection found in Starcraft and Command & Conquer with a control point mechanic. Instead of using hordes of workers to harvest resources, infantry must spend a fixed amount of time capturing control points, and once captured, a control point provides a continuous influx of resources.
Strategically, both mechanics work the same. They are both based on territory control. You need to control the territory that contains the most resources with your forces. Control enables you to harvest resources while denying the enemy the same. In Starcraft, this manifested itself in your ability to attack enemy workers while protecting your own. In Relic games, it manifests itself as your ability to take enemy control points while protecting your own. The key difference is that the control points do not require the management of workers and related structures, and the players duty is reduced from micromanagement to simple protection of the point, enabling him to focus on the other aspects of the game.
The other big improvement was a squad system. Essentially, like units are grouped in a squad that acts in many respects like a single unit, and in particular it will always stick together. This streamlines management as a group of 20 soldiers organize into squads of 5 can essentially be treated a 4 individual units. It also helps with AI and pathing issues, as individual stragglers won't be separated from the squad during pathing or combat, which typically resulted in either the unit's death, or it getting hopelessly lost somewhere on the map. The loss of flexibility due to the inability to separate soldiers from a squad is typically inconsequential because you rarely use an individual soldier to do anything in an RTS, unless its special unit that won't be squadded in the first place. Also, variable squad sizes and the ability to attach specialized units and upgrades usually provides any flexibility that might be needed.
Finally, the cover system introduced in Company of Heroes vastly enhanced the tactics available to the game. With the cover system, terrain genuinely matters, enabling players to obtain considerable advantages by choosing when, where and how to attack. And because cover is directional, advantages can be gained by coming up behind an engaged unit and attacking them where they are more exposed. A secondary benefit is that units can no longer arbitrarily shoot through solid obstacles at any unit in range. Overall this system vastly enhances the way the game plays. And kudos to Relic for providing a friendly AI that does a good job of using this system in your absence.
World in Conflict:
World in Conflict is another rather innovative title that eliminates base building entirely, enabling the player to focus entirely on the tactical aspects of the game. Much like the Relic games, the economy is based on territory control, but rather than building units at a base, they are simply ordered to enter a friendly region of the map using requisition linked partially to the control points on the map. In addition to not harassing the player with unnecessary micromanagement, it enabled some very deadly support attacks, including a ?to scale? tactical nuke. With bases, such a nuke would be broken because the first player to obtain such a weapon would simply level the other player's base and end the game. But with World of Conflict's design, it can only be used to destroy units, and there is obviously a huge risk of friendly fire.
Unfortunately, the game makes a major design mistake by having players specialize either as an armor, infantry, air or support commander and playing along side other players to create a complete army. While this is an interesting idea, World in Conflict's design had already freed the player from enough micromanagement that he should be able to managed a complete force, not just a subset. With this extra specialization, multiplayer games almost feel more like playing League of Legends than a genuine RTS. Nevertheless, the underlying ideas behind the game are solid and deserve further exploration.
Other RTS:
I could probably go on indefinitely about the variety of RTS out their and the many innovations they made, but this discussion would probable never end if I did so. Needless to say, there are games such as Dungeon Keeper, Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Age of Empires, Rise of Legends and R.U.S.E. that are chalk full of good or at least interesting ideas. Now obviously Blizzard can't adopt every idea from every RTS out there, but there are a lot of good ideas and mechanics from the past 10 years and even prior to the past 10 years, and Blizzard should have at least experimented around with some of them.
Improvements that Could Have Been:
Not being a game designer myself, I lack many original ideas that could be used to improve upon the original Starcraft. Fortunately, I do not require such ideas to suggest improvements to Starcraft, as I am not so arrogant as to outright dismiss that past 12 years of RTS innovation, and need only to adapt these ideas to Starcraft. Here I will provide a range of suggestions that could have been incorporated into Starcraft 2 to improve it over its predecessor, or at the very least, add enough uniqueness that the game would have actually earned the 2 at the end of its title. First I will discuss changes that would have fundamentally altered that way the game played, followed by those that would have largely kept gameplay intact but dealt with all the gremlins I previously mentioned.
Improvements that would have Fundamentally altered Starcraft
Replace Resource Gathering with a Control Point System:
I listed this first because I think it would be a biggest improvement to Starcraft. To keep it more in line with the feel of Starcraft, a worker would need to build an expensive structure on said point instead of infantry capturing said point as per the Relic style of gameplay. However, once said structure is complete, it automatically begins harvesting resources at the maximum rate with no need to build workers or refineries. This still maintains the risk of losing the resources invested in your expansion if the enemy discovers and destroys it early on, but once your worker places the structure it no longer requires your attention other than the obvious need to protect it, leaving the player free to manage other things.
This would vastly streamline economic expansion, enabling the player to quickly grab a resource expansion whenever he had the resources available and worker on site to expand, and allowing him to immediately move on to other concerns. As an added bonus, the starting base would already be producing resources at the maximum rate, enabling the player to immediately move on to scouting, military production and expansion with virtually none of the early game downtime. Expansion would become fast and fluid, and would facilitate participation in large scale battles without the constant headaches of managing resource expansions that add nothing to the game.
Add a Squad System:
Starcraft could benefit considerably from a squad system. Now there appears to be a stigma out there that squad systems only apply to small scale battles, which makes little sense as having several units grouped together as one would vastly reduce to complexity of large scale battles. This may be because the Relic games are on a smaller scale. Ultimately it is just a system that enables easier management of troops regardless of the scale of the game, despite whatever connotations the word squad implies.
When determining the suitability of a squad system, the major question is how often are units going to be found in and ordered as large groups versus how often they need to be ordered around as individuals. If they are constantly ordered around as groups and rarely as individuals, they might as well be automatically grouped together, and hence are perfect candidates for being placed in a squad. In the case of Starcraft, it is not uncommon to find battlecruisers being ordered around as a single large group, so I think a strong case can be made for a squad system in this game. And while capital starships probably aren't grouped often enough to justify squading, there are a myriad of units that wouldn't be caught dead alone (and which promptly die if caught alone), and would probably work better if squaded. Units such as marines, marauders, zerglings, hydralisk, mutalisk, zealots, stalkers, valkyries, phoenixes and the like would all make fantastic squads, as they are never alone.
And just because there is a squad system does not mean every last unit must be built in a squad. Units such the ghost that have no business being in a squad would still be built individual. Other units that don't belong in a squad would serve as great attachable units. Attachable units were found in the original Dawn of War. They were built as individuals, and could freely be attached or detached from a squad, making them either part of that unit and a separate unit respectively. Attaching a unit would make its unique abilities available to the squad, a perfect mechanic for support and spellcaster units. For instance, attach a high templar to a zealot squad, and that squad can now use psionic storm, no need to number key bind the templar or pick him out of a horde of zealots, just select the single squad and then fire psionic storm from either the hot key or the GUI. Furthermore, the squad AI would work to keep the zealots between the enemy and the templar, keeping the templar out of harms way without the player's constant supervision. Very simple and very natural. And there are plenty of other obvious choices for attachable units such as sentinels and medivacs.
Of course just managing a blob of troops is vastly simplified. Ever dragged a box over a troop horde? You could easily select enough troop icons to fill multiple windows in the GUI on the bottom of the screen. If marines were grouped into squads of 10, 20 marines that would normally show as 20 separate icons now show up as 2 separate icons, which is pretty convenient if you need to pick a lone ghost out of the group.
Little flexibility would be lost with such a system. There are already several means of obtaining variable squad sizes, so Starcraft could easily provide a means to vary the size of marine squads between 5 to 20, as an example. Need to break 5 marines off from the main group, no problem, just select a small squad and send them on there way. You wouldn't be able to use fewer than 5 independently(unless the squad has been injured), but you essentially never use less than 5 marines in Starcraft anyway.
Make Gameplay More Fluid:
It's the future, units ought be able to fire on the move! Granted, there are a small handful that do, but most units have to stand in place like statues to attack. Let virtually every unit fire on the move, and even melee on the move, with the possible exception of things like siege tanks and seige mode, and the game would become much more dynamic a fluid. Aircraft in particular should avoid coming to a complete stop, to make them feel more like aircraft and less like flying tanks.
Use a Projectile Physics for Weapon Fire:
Units shouldn't be able to hit units that have traveled out of range or shoot other units through solid objects. Adding a projectile physics would resolve these problems and provide other opportunities. Fast projectiles would have a genuine advantage over slow projectiles (with many Protoss projectiles traveling instantaneously), and certain units such as siege tanks could fire in a parabolic arch to clear intervening terrain. To make things really interesting, units could miss fast moving units such as aircraft on the basis of projectile physics, and guided weapons could be added to remedy such problems.
Use True Line of Sight for Fog of War:
Units can't see through solid objects. Simple enough. Advantageous for aerial scouts, but also makes it easier to see aircraft.
Terrain Elevation Should be Continuously Variable:
There is more to 3D than pretty graphics. Replace the three level terrain system in Starcraft with one that supports continuous changes in elevation. Also, terrain should effect more than fog of war. For instance, the high ground can improve the range of some weapons (a natural compliment to projectile physics), while land units are slowed when going uphill.
Add a Cover System:
The cover system from Company of Heroes is simply awesome, and would radically improve how Starcraft is played. Currently, most fights come down to unit composition and numbers, and in many cases just numbers. A cover system would make terrain a significant part of that equation, and greatly increase the dynamism of combat. With cover, terrain would become more than just a source of chokepoints (often absent in Company of Heroes maps by the way, because the terrain already works into the tactics of the game so well).
Changes that Would not Fundamentally Alter Starcraft
Some would find a Starcraft with control points, cover, and combat conducted on the move deplorable, despite how awesome it would obviously be. For them, I purpose changes that would essentially retain the play style of Starcraft, while eliminating those aspects I feel purely detract from the game. As an added benefit, many of these changes would have represented very little work on Blizzard's part when compared against the above changes.
Fix the Queuing System:
I already elaborated on this at length, but placing units in a production queue should not drain resources until production actually begins. Furthermore, queues should be of unlimited size instead of limited to 5 units max. Finally, if an idle production structure is given an order to build an unit when there are insufficient resources available, it should still place said unit in the queue, and production should begin as soon as resources are available.
In addition, add an overwatch. This is another innovation from the fine folks at Relic. It can be thought of as queuing an infinite number of units. In effect, when a unit is set to overwatch in the build menu, the associated production structure will attempt to build that unit upon becoming idle if sufficient resources are available. This keeps structures constantly producing units without player oversight, which is a godsend in a game like Starcraft where structures need to produce nonstop. Absolutely essential for producing workers at an HQ, provided certain other suggestions weren't implemented.
Improve the Friendly AI:
Units should be able to take care of themselves for at least a few seconds while my attention is elsewhere. At least make it so that pathing units won't get shot without fighting back by an enemy I didn't see when I order them to move, and make it so that they will not chase an enemy to their doom simply after being shot at once. Variable AI settings, such as pursue/hold ground and fire at will/return fire would also be welcome. Beyond that, see Company of Heroes for good friendly AI.
Use Automated Resource Gathering Structures:
This is a compromise between Starcraft resource gathering and the aforementioned control point economy inspired by the automated refineries you can obtain in the Terran campaign. Basically, the automated refineries collect vespene gas without requiring SCVs to carry the gas to the HQ. I took this over the likely more powerful alternate option out of curiosity, and I must say these things were great! Build a refinery and your done. You never having to bother with ensuring it gets allocated SCVs or worrying about accidentally ordering its SCVs elsewhere. Its to bad these aren't standard.
For automated resource gathering, automated refineries become standard for each race. In addition, races now build a automated mine on each mineral stockpile to gather minerals, so workers are no longer required to gather resources, only to build. Once a mineral stockpile is depleted, the player is refunded the cost of the mine to simulate the effect of moving workers to a different mineral stockpile. It's more micro intensive than a single structure built on a control point, but at least it is no longer necessary to manage something on the order of 20+ workers per resource stockpile.
Eliminate Supply:
Starcraft has three resources, minerals, vespene gas and supply. Supply is provided by supply depots, pylons or overloads, all of which can be obtained by spending minerals. It essentially works the same as the other two resources, you can't purchase units if you don't have enough, although unlike the other units it gets refunded when friendly units die. The cap of 200 also serves as the games unit cap. It essentially is an indirect way of purchasing units with minerals, and does little more than waste the players time building enormous numbers of pylons, supply depots or overlords. Its a thankless chore that should be removed from the game.
All players should simply start with 200 supply at the beginning of the game to serve as the games unit cap, while pylons, depots, and overlords no longer provide supply. Depots can be replaced with a retractable wall as that is the only purpose it serves now, and mineral cost of all three structures can be adjusted accordingly. A completely unnecessary mechanic has now been removed from the game.
Eliminate or At Least Minimize Research:
Yet another unnecessary aspect of the game to sideline the players attention. Research comes in two varieties, attack/defense improvements and unlocking unit abilities. The attack and defense buffs are utterly pointless, as one sides defense buff will simply negate the others attack buff, provided they are both keeping on top of the research. It is yet another vestigial economic gameplay mechanic. The attack and defense boost research should be removed from the game, along with buildings such as the forge and engineering bay associated with them (turret dependence obviously needs to be moved to a different building).
My feelings are a bit more mixed regarding the other research. Some research, such a the speed boost to void rays, make a genuine gameplay difference not offset by the opponent, while the unit in question still remains potent even without it. However, spellcaster units should have immediate access to all their powers, as these powers are the only function the unit serves. Overall, I think Starcraft could do even without even this class of research, starting units and full power and cutting this mechanic from the game as well. Research just doesn't add enough to this particular game.
Consolidate Production Structures:
After 10 years of development, Blizzard still found that having four stargates adjacent to each other building four copies of the same unit was good design. I don't know why. Here is an idea, make production structures upgradeable, so they can simultaneously produce multiple units, much like barracks with the bio-reactor add-on. For each upgrade, the structure gets more health, gets and additional queue and can produce and addition unit simultaneous. Taking sufficient damage downgrades to structure. Works exactly like before, but without the unwanted industrial sprawl.
Now you may have noticed that the last three suggestions have all been about eliminating elements of the game that aren't adding anything to the game. The is similar to one of the strengths I listed about Starcraft in the beginning, which I referred to as a tight design, which incorporated the absence of unnecessary units. Problem is this essentially referred to the combat units of the game, while the economy has plenty of bloat. I am merely carrying the same design philosophy Blizzard applied to Starcraft's combat units to its economy.
And as I mentioned early, its the economy that will win you the game. Managing your supply and building four copies of a production structure to quickly spend your resources will usually beat understanding the racial strengths and weaknesses and employing proper tactics, although you should be doing both. Again, the game doesn't play to its strengths, managing the bloated economy comes first, the tactics and interplay between races second. Now back to suggested improvements.
Add an Army and Structure Management GUI:
Add a GUI on the side of one of the screen that enables to player to sort through all of his structures and troops and provide production orders as well as other orders without the need to locate them on the map or through key bindings.
Eliminate the Pointless Downtime at the Beginning of the Game:
I view the 5 minutes or so at the beginning of each Starcraft game building enough workers and supply to get the rest of the economy going a waste of the players time. Skip this tedious phase of the game by providing enough workers and supply structures (if they haven't been eliminated per earlier suggestion), that players can immediately start building troops and expanding. Because this is a simple modification of game starting conditions, you could even retain an ?old-school? setting for those players who insist on sitting through 5 minutes of tedium on the 0.1% chance someone might manage an SCV rush.
Allow Game Speeds to Be Varied During Gameplay:
Often it is preferable to have fast game speeds early game and slow speeds later game. The ability to change the game speed during the game, also found in Total Annihilation, would allow players to have their cake and eat it too. Like the previous suggestion, fixed/variable game speed could exist as an option that could be toggled at the beginning of the match, as I assume variable game speeds would be frowned upon for ?tournament? style games.
Original Ideas and True Innovation:
Not being a game designer and not spending 10 years on Starcraft 2, virtually all the above ideas are taken from other RTS or are simply the removable of problematic gameplay elements. Had they put their minds to it over the course of the 10 years they had, Blizzard could have created their own new revolution ideas or simple, clever gameplay modifications in addition to any of the above suggestions. These changes could potentially have been improvements far superior to any of the suggestions I had listed, Blizzard being a group a game design professionals and all. Sadly, they didn't bother devising such improvements, so we can only speculate regarding how awesome they could have been.
Points of Praise:
I do need to give credit where credit is due, there are a few things Starcraft 2 did do well.
First, they did a fantastic job with the campaign. Obviously, the game mechanics are the same as Starcraft and the story is rubbish, but the campaign missions themselves are interesting, varied and fast paced. The between mission hub an the RPG elements are a nice touch (which by the way, are an indirect removal of some of the research from within the game itself). The story is cliched but the game entertains and you will not be bogged down with mission after mission that amounts to just ?kill the enemy base.? Probably all the creativity that went into this game went into the campaign. Despite all the flaws I mentioned above, you do not get shortchanged on the campaign despite it being Terran only (with some Protoss thrown in for good measure).
Also, kudos on the matchmaking. I joined games against random strangers and did not lose immediately and horribly, which is a sign of good matchmaking. Actually, I think I won most of my matches against strangers. Not bad.
Also, the game obviously looks really nice, sounds nice, and is bug free. But I would have been incredibly surprised if anything release by Blizzard didn't at least live up to at least these standards.
Game Reviews:
One of the reasons why I have wrote this enormous rant is that virtually every game review out there could not heap enough praise on this game and rarely took a look at even the most basic of flaws. I can kind of understand Blizzard's position in taking no risk with the game design as it was guaranteed to be a blockbuster based just on the predecessor's success and the companies reputation alone and that they didn't want to do anything too drastic that might upset the fan base. But why didn't any of the reviewers call them out on this, on the lack of risk taking, innovation, and obvious flaws like the excessive micromanagement and lack of even a functional queue?
Here is a sample of the reviews that game received:
PC Gamer: 93/100 Editor's Choice
Gamespot: 9.5/10 Editor's Choice
Game Life: 9/10
IGN: 9/10 Editor's Choice
Joystiq: 5/5
Metacritic listed a composite score of 93/100 for this game. It is described as a ?Masterpiece?, ?Lives Up to 10 Years of Hype? and ?Olympic?. All this praise for what is essentially a graphically re-skinned version of a 12 year old game.
I mean, its definitely not a bad game. Its worth your time, solidly above average, bug free, has solid multimedia, a good campaign, and a tight well balanced game design. But its also dated, a micromanagement nightmare, and devoid of innovation, risk taking and ambition. Its a competently designed game by a reputable game developer. I'd give a 7, which is pretty good score. I wouldn't give it a 9 or 10, those scores are reserved for perfection mixed with innovation, which this game is not.
Some Final Thoughts on Micromanagement:
If it wasn't already apparent, I have sampled some of the criticism or lack thereof of Starcraft 2. And there has been the odd voice on the Internet that has pointed out that Starcraft 2 is micromanagement hell. The response is to the effect of: So what? Its Starcraft? Micromanagement is a skill.
The problem with excessive micromanagement is not the that it doesn't require skill, but that it adds nothing to the game. Lets say I added a new mechanic to the game. Every minute during gameplay, you would be locked out of the Starcraft UI until you type ?There is no such thing as too much micromanagement noob!? into the game without any typos, and all the while the game would continue to progress. This would take skill, namely touch typing, a rather useful skill that can also be used to write endless rants about games that disappoint you, but would add nothing to the game. It adds no extra strategy, no extra decision making, and certain no extra enjoyment, and definitely tonnes of extra frustration. Just adding a random element that takes skill does not necessarily enhance the game.
If that example seems over the top, consider the absence of queuing in this game. Because queues don't work correctly in this game, you must repeatedly reselect a production structure each and every time it finishes production. So lets say you want to continuously build marines, and you have set up production efficiently with a numerical key binding, let us just say it is ?1?. The marine build time is 25 seconds. That means as long as you are building marines, every 25 seconds you need to press ?1M?. Its not as bad as the above example, but its wouldn't be necessary at all with a proper queuing system, and obviously the more production structures you have the more of this you are constantly going to need to do. You will need another two key presses per HQ every 17 seconds to build SCVs. Another pair of keystrokes to build siege tanks at a factory, and another to build valkyrie's at a spaceport, etc., none of which is necessary. And for what purpose? What value does having to constantly issue the exact same production orders have over simply instructing your production structures you want something built repeatedly? Your not making any additional decisions, your just doing constant, repetitive busy work to reaffirm a past decision you have already made, mainly that a given structure will produce X nonstop until you have decided otherwise.
And keep in mind this is just one task. You'll be setting up resource expansions, pathing units that are dumb as wood, trying to sort your troops all while being constantly attack and attempting to attack yourself. And your supposed to come with an actual strategy while juggling all this? This is the underlying design principle of the game that ?Lives Up to 10 Years of Hype?. Its time to let go of our nostalgia and realize this level of micromanagement should have been removed from RTS a long time ago. Technically it was, but Blizzard didn't feel like learning from anybody, so we are again stuck with it in Starcraft 2.
Final Thoughts:
So there you have it, my thoughts on Starcraft 2. Not a bad game, but dated and a major disappointment. It was admittedly the safe bet and sound business decision on Blizzard's part, but I was hoping something else might push the series forward. Ambition. Didn't anyone at Blizzard have ambition, and want to make the new Starcraft as revolution as the old? At the very least, didn't they want to see their flagship RTS title into the next decade? Instead we have a decade old game inhabiting current generation graphics.
Ultimately, though, my problem is that Starcraft 2 wasn't a revolution game. Not every game can be revolution, even those backed by a talented developer with loads of time and resources. My problem is that, as best as I can tell, Blizzard didn't even try to improve upon the original Starcraft.
by Phanixis
So 12 years after the release of the original Starcraft, Blizzard has released Starcraft 2. This game is such a disappointment that I feel the need to specify precisely why is was disappointing and how it could have been done better. Now when I say the game is disappointing I mean precisely that; I am not implying the game is bad. Its a solid RTS with a well executed campaign and solid, enjoyable multiplayer gameplay.
So what precisely is the nature of my problem with this game? Well, its essentially just a copy of the original Starcraft. Rather than being a successor to Starcraft, its little more than a glorified expansion pack. An expansion pack that took 10 years to develop. By one of the largest and most talented game developers out there. How does that even happen?
Well, I guess no one is perfect. Blizzard was probably playing it safe, not taking risk (or even something remotely close to something that might appear to be a risk), and dropped the ball in the process. So mistakes happen. So naturally, I expected all the game to get slammed by review sites for being little more than a glorified expansion pack. And yet, I have to go out of my way to find a review site on the web that will give this game anything less a 9 out of 10. Doesn't anyone have high standards? How can you give 9/10 and 10/10 to a re-skinned game with decade old gameplay?
Well I have standards, and I am going to hold Blizzard to them. So its time to explain what precisely is wrong with this game.
My core criticism is that Starcraft 2 is just Starcraft. And beyond that, their has been over a decade of progress in RTS made by developers such as Relic, Cavedog, Westwood, etc. that has been outright ignored in the development of Starcraft 2.
A lot of people will respond to this criticism to something of the effect of ?So what? Starcraft was a good game, so obviously its duplicate is a good game.? I have even read post in forums that were so arrogant as to claim that Starcraft was so perfect that only reason for the past 10 years are RTS innovation is that other companies simply couldn't compete with the ?perfection? of Starcraft and had to change the way the genre played to compete. There are two problems with this line of thought:
Problem 1: I can just play the original Starcraft. Ok, this is arguably the weaker of the two arguments, but its still important. What is the point in paying $60 retail for a game you essentially already own, or investing 10 years to create what already exist? Even worse, the original Starcraft came before consumers got saddled with the DRM bullshit that currently infests the market like a horde of demonically possessed plague rats that work a second job as Lovecraftian horrors, and treated the owners like adults, enabling them to create LAN and direct connect games as well as install multiplayer spawns so they could play against friends who weren't willing to commit to owning the game. Starcraft 2 treats everybody like they're bloody 12 year olds, and requires any multiplayer game to go through Battlenet to make sure they aren't using pirated copies.
Problem 2: Starcraft is not, and never was, a perfect game. A good game it was, but never even close to perfect, and certainly not the kind of game that can outright ignore 12 years of RTS innovation like Blizzard choose to do. However, before I can get into what its weaknesses really are, I need to detail its strengths.
Starcraft was an excellent game in many respects, but there are four main things that made it really stand out: the three unique races, the excellent game balance, the tight unit designs and the original battlenet.
The Three Races: The races are probably the game's biggest selling point and, unlike the rest of the game, really have withstood the test of time. At the time of the game's release, most factions in RTS's were virtually identical save for aesthetics and a few unique traits. This includes the first two Warcrafts, where the only differences were the spells available to each race, and Total Annihilation. The Command and Conquer series, which included Red Alert did grant each faction some unique units, but both factions also used a lot of the same basic units and structures. So having three different races that played entirely differently, from unique ways of building structures, to radically different combat units, was revolutionary. The choice of race radically altered the strategy and really set Starcraft apart from every other game in the genre. Virtually every RTS since has followed suite, yet not a single game has executed the distinction between races as well as Starcraft and Starcraft 2.
Unit Balance: The game wouldn't have been very fun if a single race or unit dominated the game. Each unit as distinct strengths and weaknesses, all are useful, and none or overpowered (with the possible exception of the mutalisk pre Brood War). This ensured each was valuable and enabled interesting tactics.
Tight Unit Design: This goes in hand in hand with game balance. Tight unit design is essentially the absence of unnecessary and pointless units. Every unit serves and purpose, and there are virtually no redundancies (save maybe the scout and corsair post Brood War, but the corsair was needed to fix the aforementioned mutalisk and provide early game anti-air). Again, this ensures no unit is a waste and keeps tactics simple yet interesting.
Battlenet: This was a major boon back in the days when people were playing over the modem. It has been a long time since I first used Battlenet for the original Starcraft, but it was vastly easier to play multiplayer games over the Internet using this service than the methods that existed at the time, such as directly connecting with a friend via modem, or the poor means the existed for playing games over the Internet if the game even supported the option. Of course in this day and age, it is fairly easy to get virtually any game to work over the Internet, save perhaps Generals: Zero Hour, so the benefit this once represented no longer exist. The current Battlenet is sadly more of a DRM enforcement mechanism rather than a service that exists for the convenience of the customer.
The combination of these strengths led to a very powerful and interesting multiplayer game, and the tight unit design and balance even enabled it to be played competitively in Korea. So this begs the question, what do I find wrong with it? There is the 12 years of innovation the game outright ignored, but that is really specific to the sequel. Lets start with the problems inherent to the game itself, and not problems associated with its potential to be a much better game, which I will discuss later. Because Starcraft and Starcraft 2 are essentially the same game, these problems apply both the the original and the sequel.
Starcraft's biggest problem can be identified as soon as you begin a multiplayer match. What is the first thing you see? Your Nexus/HQ/Hatchery and your workers. These buildings and units form the core gameplay element of Starcraft. Managing and building more workers and HQs are far more likely to win you the game than winning combat engagements, provided you also can efficiently and immediately spend the resources to buy more workers, HQs and combat units. At its heart, Starcraft is an economic game first and a tactical strategy game second. This in and of itself isn't a bad thing, except that those strengths I just listed previously, the beautifully diversified racial units and tight balance, really only come into play on the tactical side of the game.
Meanwhile, very little interesting happens on the economic side of the game. The workers are basically identical save for their unit building modes, and otherwise are identical in how they go about harvesting resources. Heck, these workers collect resources and a manner identical to that of the peasants from the original Warcraft, only the difference between collecting gas and crystals is even less interesting than Wood and Gold! So the central resource collecting mechanic that forms the core of this game is 20 years old! Time to innovate, Blizzard.
Spending resources is also essentially the same. One to several of a given production building is constructed, a single unit is queued in each building whenever it is finished, and they are sent off to war. Building speeds for each race's combat units are different, but that is to compliment the relative unit strengths of the various races' tactical playstyles, rather than providing something interesting about the economy itself. Some variation is found in the fact that Terrain structures can fly and the Zerg produce everything at the hatchery, and this can lead to some rather interesting strategies, but it still doesn't come close to the variation found at the tactical level of this game.
To top it off, the economic design is terrible. While the tactical design is tight with each unit serving a clear purpose, the economy will have you spamming enormous numbers of identical units and structures to keep everything going. As the game progresses, simultaneous management of several HQs will be required, each with its own legion of workers. Beyond that, each race must build a support structures to increase their unit cap, another carry over from Warcraft that probably should have never been carried into Warcraft 2 let alone the Starcrafts. These buildings must be built in irresponsibly large numbers and serve little purpose other than to waste the player's time and have an annoying habit of bringing production to an immediate halt if the player does not keep after them. Finally, production structures must be built in massive blocks in order to purchase units at a reasonable rate and to streamline the micro required to build the units. In larger games it all becomes a bloated mess and serves no purpose beyond collecting and spending resources, and tends to distract from the rest of the game.
To even further these problems, neither Starcraft has a workable queuing system. Queues are something virtually every RTS company has manage to work into their games properly, except apparently Blizzard. Its simple enough, if you want a structure to build multiple units in a row, place the units in a queue, and after the first is finished the structure will begin to build the next unit in the queue.
The problem when queuing units in Starcraft is that you are immediately charged the resource cost for said unit, when you should not be charged for a queued unit until construction of said unit has actually begun. This means that to queue, for example, 4 additional zealots will cost 400 minerals immediately. These resources could have been put to immediate use either purchasing a combat unit using another structure, or purchasing a new production structure if no said structures exist. This approach enables faster production of units, and this in turn wins games. In effect, using the queue puts a player at a huge economic disadvantage, typically severe enough to cost him the game, thus rendering the queues in Starcraft all but worthless.
Without working queues, the player is required to repeatedly select a structure every single time it completes a unit to give it new orders if that player wants to ensure the structure is continually producing units. And because of the demands Starcraft places on the player, he will always want to do this for every production structure he has. This becomes a persistent hassle and mindless chore that constantly distracts the player from the rest of the game, and it is entirely unnecessary. If the player wants a structure to repeatedly build zealots and marines, he should be able to set it to build indefinitely and move on to other task, without being penalized for doing so by being charged for units that won't even undergo construction until well into the future.
And thus the key problem is revealed. Starcraft is a game the doesn't focus on its own strengths. You have a game with all manner of intricate units, and you will be spending an enormous amount of time dealing with the all to similar drones and filling unit queues rather than what I would assume everyone would want to do: conducting battle with futuristic marines, alien monsters and starships! The game is constantly trying to pull the player away from the battles involving all the unique, well designed units that play off the various race's strengths and weaknesses so he can fill out requisition orders! This is an enormous design flaw, and hardly an attribute of what I would consider to be a perfect game.
Add to these problems is the general flow of the game. Perhaps it was acceptable at the time, but looking back is there really any reason the first 5 to 6 minutes of the game was building virtually nothing but workers before you collected enough resources to start building troops so you could start actually playing the game in earnest? Obviously you can scout with the workers and do something clever like an SCV rush, but this strikes me as players making the best of a bad situation, certainly not the gameplay associated with a perfect game, and certainly not something that should have survived the 10 years of game development the sequel underwent.
Let us not forget what happens immediately after this point, the rushing stage of the game. Anybody who is anybody will attempt to rush in this game; there is very little reason not to do it. Build a mass of your first combat unit, and if you managed your economy better, or pull and clever tactical stunt in the first engagement, you can win the game immediately, and your opponent can do likewise. If you're really advanced or just feeling clever, it is possible to carry out a rush with all of two kinds of units! It is of course a perfectly valid and effective tactic, and can easily win a majority of Starcraft games. So what is the problem? What about all those other units, the artillery units and spellcasters and aircraft and all the nifty things the game gives us to play with? You never get to field those in a surprisingly large number of games because they end in a rush. Once again, players are denied the huge variety of intricate units the game provides that Blizzard spent a laboriously long time designing, because of the way the game plays.
Of course, even if you do manage to get past the rush stage of the game, if is often better to eschew an elaborate combination of units for tactical flexibility in favor of choosing a small handful of powerful units while focusing on your economy(because again, it is what wins the game). Thus while tactically powerful, it is often advantageous to ignore the spellcaster units in favor of simply drowning the opponent in something that has been proven to be universally effective, such as mutalisks in the original or void rays in the new one. The apparent nerf to spellcasting units in Starcraft 2 has not helped this situation either(where are my arbiters?).
Part of the reason for this approach is the terrible AI. Units require constant supervision. Simply moving a unit unsupervised might get it killed because it will not fight back even if it could win, unless of course you use attack to move, which carries its own problems. In fights, when and idle group of unsupervised units gets attacked it is very common for part of the force to break off and fight or even chase the enemy while the rest stand around doing nothing, and often you cannot leave them standing around for a second because they cannot fend for themselves. Which wouldn't be so much of a problem if the economy did not require so much attention.
Which brings me to the flaw that brings all the other flaws together: the micromanagement. To put it charitably, Starcraft is and has always been an absolute micromanagement nightmare, a nightmare that only gets worse as the game progresses. The emphasis on economy, the lack of working queues, the bloated economic design, and terrible unit AI all conspire together to make a game where it is incredibly difficult to merely manage what you have, let alone conduct a war. It's like the game is constantly trying to distract you from actually organizing an army and executing a clear plan of attack on the enemy. In effect, Starcraft seems to do everything in its power to stop you from using strategy, despite being a strategy game! Fortunately, it also distracts your opponent, and you can more often than not simply drown him in units through superior economic micromanagement.
To add to this problem, the game is almost always played at one of its faster, if not fastest speeds, to skip through the initial do nothing worker phase at the beginning of the game. To overcome this problem, the player will need to memorize hot keys, build like buildings in blocks and bind them to number keys, and develop the reflexes of Jackie Chan on speed, which seems a bit much for what is supposed to be a strategy game. All in all it makes the game increasingly hard to play as the scale of battle is increased, which is ironic because the larger scales of battle are one of the supposing selling points of the series and a justification for the lack of innovation in the sequel, despite the fact that it is done so poorly in Starcraft and so much better by Total Annihilation and its Supreme Commander offshoots.
Now as far as the original Starcraft was concerned, these flaws were understandable. The RTS genre was new, Starcraft itself was experimental, and it managed to cover a lot of ground in other areas, namely the aforementioned strengths. But for Starcraft 2 to retain all these flaws, after 10 years of development and with virtually no other form of innovation in sight is inexcusable. This is particularly true for the simpler flaws, such as the terrible queuing system and the 5 minutes of down time at the beginning of the game. These flaws would be incredibly simple to fix, and yet after 10 years of development, Blizzard failed to do so.
The Past 10 Years and More
If you have bared with me this long, I have hopefully convinced you Starcraft and Starcraft 2 are poorly designed in many respects, and that much improvement is warranted. Or perhaps that my writing requires improvement! Either way, it's time to move on to those 10 years of innovation Blizzard outright ignored by discussing some of the remarkable RTS that have been release and the improvements that could have adapted to Starcraft 2 had Blizzard been interested in taking any risk of any kind.
Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander Series:
Let's start with Total Annihilation. This game is old, older than the original Starcraft, but released sufficiently close to the release of Starcraft that Blizzard probably would have been unable to adopt any of its design features for the original Starcraft. The designers of Starcraft 2, of course, had no excuse for not integrating ideas from this game into their own.
This game was every bit as ground breaking as Starcraft, and it is unfortunate it never got to share in the same level of fame. It lacked the unique races, play balance and tight unit design of Starcraft of course, as well as Battlenet, but more than made up for it.
This game featured enormous 3d maps of massive landscapes with continuous changes in elevation that included oceans, mountains, forest and the like. The game incorporated a physics engine, and all units and weapon projectiles had a clear size and shape. Projectiles actually had to travel from the firer and hit their targets, and could miss or strike intervening obstacles. Shooting down aircraft was more a matter of striking the target than having an arbitrarily designated anti-aircraft weapon. Artillery shells would down aircraft with a lucky hit, but guided missiles were much more effective because they could change direction in flight to intercept aircraft. The aircraft themselves moved dynamically like actual aircraft, dodging attacks in three dimensions, making banked curves and performing aerial acrobatics. Land and sea units were similarly dynamic: virtually everything is capable of firing on the move, which in addition to being really cool meant that a if a unit ordered to move came under attack, it would actually fight back as it traveled to its destination without the player's input.
Equally impressive was the AI, the intricate economy, and the ability to manage both the economy and military forces with ease. If you wanted a game where the economy was the core of gameplay, this could be it, with the huge range of production structures, resource collection structures, resource storing units and production units, all of which could be built on land, sea or even under the sea. Despite the increased complexities of the economy, that game design managed to minimize economic micromanagement, freeing the player to conduct warfare. Among the features that assisted in minimizing the micromanagement was the delegation of resource collection to fixed structures placed on the resources in question rather than the use of hordes of workers, which vastly streamlined resource collection.
But of course the economy alone was not the emphasis. True line of sight, along with radar and sonar of fixed range and corresponding jammers obtained both from fixed structures and mobile units, including a awax style radar aircraft led to a rather intricate intelligence war.
But perhaps most interesting was the sophisticated AI, queuing system and unit management options that made a large scale war quite manageable. If you want to talk about make conducting war on a massive scale fluidly and effectively, Total Annihilation's design makes Blizzard look like bunch of amateurs! Complex patrol paths, alternate unit behaviors, the ability to set complex unit orders from production, efficient queuing and a myriad of other options makes management of enormous battles fluid and intuitive while minimizing micromanagement. If Blizzard's goal was truly to make amazing large scale battles for their sequel, they should have borrowed a lot of ideas from Total Annihilation, or its Supreme Commander spiritual successors.
Command & Conquer Series:
A series almost as old as the original Warcraft, it has a couple of interesting ideas. The original Red Alert managed a functioning queue back in the days of Warcraft II, a feat Blizzard still has yet to replicate properly. It also had some fluidity and physics to its gameplay, with tanks able to aim turrets and fire on the move, and some degree of projectile tracking, though nothing on the level of Total Annihilation.
What I particularly like about this series is its approach to economic management. Rather than having to constantly go back to your base, there was a menu along the side of the screen that enabled to player to purchase units from any of his available production structures without ever having to select a production structure or even take his eyes off combat, a feat that in most RTS would at least require a numerous numerical key bindings. Even better, the player can actively monitor the progress of any units under production from this GUI. Toggling said menu also enabled the construction of buildings, although the player still needed to transition the screen to choose a production site.
Also, the existence of neutral capturable and garrisonable buildings added some unique strategy and tactics to this game series.
Relic Games: Dawn of War Series and Company of Heroes:
Now we are getting to some modern games. Relic realized that players wanted to play a game of strategy without having to deal with the mindlessness of economic micromanagement and shepherding of poorly pathing units and adopted a number of innovations to deal with these problems.
All the aforementioned games replace the traditional resources collection found in Starcraft and Command & Conquer with a control point mechanic. Instead of using hordes of workers to harvest resources, infantry must spend a fixed amount of time capturing control points, and once captured, a control point provides a continuous influx of resources.
Strategically, both mechanics work the same. They are both based on territory control. You need to control the territory that contains the most resources with your forces. Control enables you to harvest resources while denying the enemy the same. In Starcraft, this manifested itself in your ability to attack enemy workers while protecting your own. In Relic games, it manifests itself as your ability to take enemy control points while protecting your own. The key difference is that the control points do not require the management of workers and related structures, and the players duty is reduced from micromanagement to simple protection of the point, enabling him to focus on the other aspects of the game.
The other big improvement was a squad system. Essentially, like units are grouped in a squad that acts in many respects like a single unit, and in particular it will always stick together. This streamlines management as a group of 20 soldiers organize into squads of 5 can essentially be treated a 4 individual units. It also helps with AI and pathing issues, as individual stragglers won't be separated from the squad during pathing or combat, which typically resulted in either the unit's death, or it getting hopelessly lost somewhere on the map. The loss of flexibility due to the inability to separate soldiers from a squad is typically inconsequential because you rarely use an individual soldier to do anything in an RTS, unless its special unit that won't be squadded in the first place. Also, variable squad sizes and the ability to attach specialized units and upgrades usually provides any flexibility that might be needed.
Finally, the cover system introduced in Company of Heroes vastly enhanced the tactics available to the game. With the cover system, terrain genuinely matters, enabling players to obtain considerable advantages by choosing when, where and how to attack. And because cover is directional, advantages can be gained by coming up behind an engaged unit and attacking them where they are more exposed. A secondary benefit is that units can no longer arbitrarily shoot through solid obstacles at any unit in range. Overall this system vastly enhances the way the game plays. And kudos to Relic for providing a friendly AI that does a good job of using this system in your absence.
World in Conflict:
World in Conflict is another rather innovative title that eliminates base building entirely, enabling the player to focus entirely on the tactical aspects of the game. Much like the Relic games, the economy is based on territory control, but rather than building units at a base, they are simply ordered to enter a friendly region of the map using requisition linked partially to the control points on the map. In addition to not harassing the player with unnecessary micromanagement, it enabled some very deadly support attacks, including a ?to scale? tactical nuke. With bases, such a nuke would be broken because the first player to obtain such a weapon would simply level the other player's base and end the game. But with World of Conflict's design, it can only be used to destroy units, and there is obviously a huge risk of friendly fire.
Unfortunately, the game makes a major design mistake by having players specialize either as an armor, infantry, air or support commander and playing along side other players to create a complete army. While this is an interesting idea, World in Conflict's design had already freed the player from enough micromanagement that he should be able to managed a complete force, not just a subset. With this extra specialization, multiplayer games almost feel more like playing League of Legends than a genuine RTS. Nevertheless, the underlying ideas behind the game are solid and deserve further exploration.
Other RTS:
I could probably go on indefinitely about the variety of RTS out their and the many innovations they made, but this discussion would probable never end if I did so. Needless to say, there are games such as Dungeon Keeper, Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Age of Empires, Rise of Legends and R.U.S.E. that are chalk full of good or at least interesting ideas. Now obviously Blizzard can't adopt every idea from every RTS out there, but there are a lot of good ideas and mechanics from the past 10 years and even prior to the past 10 years, and Blizzard should have at least experimented around with some of them.
Improvements that Could Have Been:
Not being a game designer myself, I lack many original ideas that could be used to improve upon the original Starcraft. Fortunately, I do not require such ideas to suggest improvements to Starcraft, as I am not so arrogant as to outright dismiss that past 12 years of RTS innovation, and need only to adapt these ideas to Starcraft. Here I will provide a range of suggestions that could have been incorporated into Starcraft 2 to improve it over its predecessor, or at the very least, add enough uniqueness that the game would have actually earned the 2 at the end of its title. First I will discuss changes that would have fundamentally altered that way the game played, followed by those that would have largely kept gameplay intact but dealt with all the gremlins I previously mentioned.
Improvements that would have Fundamentally altered Starcraft
Replace Resource Gathering with a Control Point System:
I listed this first because I think it would be a biggest improvement to Starcraft. To keep it more in line with the feel of Starcraft, a worker would need to build an expensive structure on said point instead of infantry capturing said point as per the Relic style of gameplay. However, once said structure is complete, it automatically begins harvesting resources at the maximum rate with no need to build workers or refineries. This still maintains the risk of losing the resources invested in your expansion if the enemy discovers and destroys it early on, but once your worker places the structure it no longer requires your attention other than the obvious need to protect it, leaving the player free to manage other things.
This would vastly streamline economic expansion, enabling the player to quickly grab a resource expansion whenever he had the resources available and worker on site to expand, and allowing him to immediately move on to other concerns. As an added bonus, the starting base would already be producing resources at the maximum rate, enabling the player to immediately move on to scouting, military production and expansion with virtually none of the early game downtime. Expansion would become fast and fluid, and would facilitate participation in large scale battles without the constant headaches of managing resource expansions that add nothing to the game.
Add a Squad System:
Starcraft could benefit considerably from a squad system. Now there appears to be a stigma out there that squad systems only apply to small scale battles, which makes little sense as having several units grouped together as one would vastly reduce to complexity of large scale battles. This may be because the Relic games are on a smaller scale. Ultimately it is just a system that enables easier management of troops regardless of the scale of the game, despite whatever connotations the word squad implies.
When determining the suitability of a squad system, the major question is how often are units going to be found in and ordered as large groups versus how often they need to be ordered around as individuals. If they are constantly ordered around as groups and rarely as individuals, they might as well be automatically grouped together, and hence are perfect candidates for being placed in a squad. In the case of Starcraft, it is not uncommon to find battlecruisers being ordered around as a single large group, so I think a strong case can be made for a squad system in this game. And while capital starships probably aren't grouped often enough to justify squading, there are a myriad of units that wouldn't be caught dead alone (and which promptly die if caught alone), and would probably work better if squaded. Units such as marines, marauders, zerglings, hydralisk, mutalisk, zealots, stalkers, valkyries, phoenixes and the like would all make fantastic squads, as they are never alone.
And just because there is a squad system does not mean every last unit must be built in a squad. Units such the ghost that have no business being in a squad would still be built individual. Other units that don't belong in a squad would serve as great attachable units. Attachable units were found in the original Dawn of War. They were built as individuals, and could freely be attached or detached from a squad, making them either part of that unit and a separate unit respectively. Attaching a unit would make its unique abilities available to the squad, a perfect mechanic for support and spellcaster units. For instance, attach a high templar to a zealot squad, and that squad can now use psionic storm, no need to number key bind the templar or pick him out of a horde of zealots, just select the single squad and then fire psionic storm from either the hot key or the GUI. Furthermore, the squad AI would work to keep the zealots between the enemy and the templar, keeping the templar out of harms way without the player's constant supervision. Very simple and very natural. And there are plenty of other obvious choices for attachable units such as sentinels and medivacs.
Of course just managing a blob of troops is vastly simplified. Ever dragged a box over a troop horde? You could easily select enough troop icons to fill multiple windows in the GUI on the bottom of the screen. If marines were grouped into squads of 10, 20 marines that would normally show as 20 separate icons now show up as 2 separate icons, which is pretty convenient if you need to pick a lone ghost out of the group.
Little flexibility would be lost with such a system. There are already several means of obtaining variable squad sizes, so Starcraft could easily provide a means to vary the size of marine squads between 5 to 20, as an example. Need to break 5 marines off from the main group, no problem, just select a small squad and send them on there way. You wouldn't be able to use fewer than 5 independently(unless the squad has been injured), but you essentially never use less than 5 marines in Starcraft anyway.
Make Gameplay More Fluid:
It's the future, units ought be able to fire on the move! Granted, there are a small handful that do, but most units have to stand in place like statues to attack. Let virtually every unit fire on the move, and even melee on the move, with the possible exception of things like siege tanks and seige mode, and the game would become much more dynamic a fluid. Aircraft in particular should avoid coming to a complete stop, to make them feel more like aircraft and less like flying tanks.
Use a Projectile Physics for Weapon Fire:
Units shouldn't be able to hit units that have traveled out of range or shoot other units through solid objects. Adding a projectile physics would resolve these problems and provide other opportunities. Fast projectiles would have a genuine advantage over slow projectiles (with many Protoss projectiles traveling instantaneously), and certain units such as siege tanks could fire in a parabolic arch to clear intervening terrain. To make things really interesting, units could miss fast moving units such as aircraft on the basis of projectile physics, and guided weapons could be added to remedy such problems.
Use True Line of Sight for Fog of War:
Units can't see through solid objects. Simple enough. Advantageous for aerial scouts, but also makes it easier to see aircraft.
Terrain Elevation Should be Continuously Variable:
There is more to 3D than pretty graphics. Replace the three level terrain system in Starcraft with one that supports continuous changes in elevation. Also, terrain should effect more than fog of war. For instance, the high ground can improve the range of some weapons (a natural compliment to projectile physics), while land units are slowed when going uphill.
Add a Cover System:
The cover system from Company of Heroes is simply awesome, and would radically improve how Starcraft is played. Currently, most fights come down to unit composition and numbers, and in many cases just numbers. A cover system would make terrain a significant part of that equation, and greatly increase the dynamism of combat. With cover, terrain would become more than just a source of chokepoints (often absent in Company of Heroes maps by the way, because the terrain already works into the tactics of the game so well).
Changes that Would not Fundamentally Alter Starcraft
Some would find a Starcraft with control points, cover, and combat conducted on the move deplorable, despite how awesome it would obviously be. For them, I purpose changes that would essentially retain the play style of Starcraft, while eliminating those aspects I feel purely detract from the game. As an added benefit, many of these changes would have represented very little work on Blizzard's part when compared against the above changes.
Fix the Queuing System:
I already elaborated on this at length, but placing units in a production queue should not drain resources until production actually begins. Furthermore, queues should be of unlimited size instead of limited to 5 units max. Finally, if an idle production structure is given an order to build an unit when there are insufficient resources available, it should still place said unit in the queue, and production should begin as soon as resources are available.
In addition, add an overwatch. This is another innovation from the fine folks at Relic. It can be thought of as queuing an infinite number of units. In effect, when a unit is set to overwatch in the build menu, the associated production structure will attempt to build that unit upon becoming idle if sufficient resources are available. This keeps structures constantly producing units without player oversight, which is a godsend in a game like Starcraft where structures need to produce nonstop. Absolutely essential for producing workers at an HQ, provided certain other suggestions weren't implemented.
Improve the Friendly AI:
Units should be able to take care of themselves for at least a few seconds while my attention is elsewhere. At least make it so that pathing units won't get shot without fighting back by an enemy I didn't see when I order them to move, and make it so that they will not chase an enemy to their doom simply after being shot at once. Variable AI settings, such as pursue/hold ground and fire at will/return fire would also be welcome. Beyond that, see Company of Heroes for good friendly AI.
Use Automated Resource Gathering Structures:
This is a compromise between Starcraft resource gathering and the aforementioned control point economy inspired by the automated refineries you can obtain in the Terran campaign. Basically, the automated refineries collect vespene gas without requiring SCVs to carry the gas to the HQ. I took this over the likely more powerful alternate option out of curiosity, and I must say these things were great! Build a refinery and your done. You never having to bother with ensuring it gets allocated SCVs or worrying about accidentally ordering its SCVs elsewhere. Its to bad these aren't standard.
For automated resource gathering, automated refineries become standard for each race. In addition, races now build a automated mine on each mineral stockpile to gather minerals, so workers are no longer required to gather resources, only to build. Once a mineral stockpile is depleted, the player is refunded the cost of the mine to simulate the effect of moving workers to a different mineral stockpile. It's more micro intensive than a single structure built on a control point, but at least it is no longer necessary to manage something on the order of 20+ workers per resource stockpile.
Eliminate Supply:
Starcraft has three resources, minerals, vespene gas and supply. Supply is provided by supply depots, pylons or overloads, all of which can be obtained by spending minerals. It essentially works the same as the other two resources, you can't purchase units if you don't have enough, although unlike the other units it gets refunded when friendly units die. The cap of 200 also serves as the games unit cap. It essentially is an indirect way of purchasing units with minerals, and does little more than waste the players time building enormous numbers of pylons, supply depots or overlords. Its a thankless chore that should be removed from the game.
All players should simply start with 200 supply at the beginning of the game to serve as the games unit cap, while pylons, depots, and overlords no longer provide supply. Depots can be replaced with a retractable wall as that is the only purpose it serves now, and mineral cost of all three structures can be adjusted accordingly. A completely unnecessary mechanic has now been removed from the game.
Eliminate or At Least Minimize Research:
Yet another unnecessary aspect of the game to sideline the players attention. Research comes in two varieties, attack/defense improvements and unlocking unit abilities. The attack and defense buffs are utterly pointless, as one sides defense buff will simply negate the others attack buff, provided they are both keeping on top of the research. It is yet another vestigial economic gameplay mechanic. The attack and defense boost research should be removed from the game, along with buildings such as the forge and engineering bay associated with them (turret dependence obviously needs to be moved to a different building).
My feelings are a bit more mixed regarding the other research. Some research, such a the speed boost to void rays, make a genuine gameplay difference not offset by the opponent, while the unit in question still remains potent even without it. However, spellcaster units should have immediate access to all their powers, as these powers are the only function the unit serves. Overall, I think Starcraft could do even without even this class of research, starting units and full power and cutting this mechanic from the game as well. Research just doesn't add enough to this particular game.
Consolidate Production Structures:
After 10 years of development, Blizzard still found that having four stargates adjacent to each other building four copies of the same unit was good design. I don't know why. Here is an idea, make production structures upgradeable, so they can simultaneously produce multiple units, much like barracks with the bio-reactor add-on. For each upgrade, the structure gets more health, gets and additional queue and can produce and addition unit simultaneous. Taking sufficient damage downgrades to structure. Works exactly like before, but without the unwanted industrial sprawl.
Now you may have noticed that the last three suggestions have all been about eliminating elements of the game that aren't adding anything to the game. The is similar to one of the strengths I listed about Starcraft in the beginning, which I referred to as a tight design, which incorporated the absence of unnecessary units. Problem is this essentially referred to the combat units of the game, while the economy has plenty of bloat. I am merely carrying the same design philosophy Blizzard applied to Starcraft's combat units to its economy.
And as I mentioned early, its the economy that will win you the game. Managing your supply and building four copies of a production structure to quickly spend your resources will usually beat understanding the racial strengths and weaknesses and employing proper tactics, although you should be doing both. Again, the game doesn't play to its strengths, managing the bloated economy comes first, the tactics and interplay between races second. Now back to suggested improvements.
Add an Army and Structure Management GUI:
Add a GUI on the side of one of the screen that enables to player to sort through all of his structures and troops and provide production orders as well as other orders without the need to locate them on the map or through key bindings.
Eliminate the Pointless Downtime at the Beginning of the Game:
I view the 5 minutes or so at the beginning of each Starcraft game building enough workers and supply to get the rest of the economy going a waste of the players time. Skip this tedious phase of the game by providing enough workers and supply structures (if they haven't been eliminated per earlier suggestion), that players can immediately start building troops and expanding. Because this is a simple modification of game starting conditions, you could even retain an ?old-school? setting for those players who insist on sitting through 5 minutes of tedium on the 0.1% chance someone might manage an SCV rush.
Allow Game Speeds to Be Varied During Gameplay:
Often it is preferable to have fast game speeds early game and slow speeds later game. The ability to change the game speed during the game, also found in Total Annihilation, would allow players to have their cake and eat it too. Like the previous suggestion, fixed/variable game speed could exist as an option that could be toggled at the beginning of the match, as I assume variable game speeds would be frowned upon for ?tournament? style games.
Original Ideas and True Innovation:
Not being a game designer and not spending 10 years on Starcraft 2, virtually all the above ideas are taken from other RTS or are simply the removable of problematic gameplay elements. Had they put their minds to it over the course of the 10 years they had, Blizzard could have created their own new revolution ideas or simple, clever gameplay modifications in addition to any of the above suggestions. These changes could potentially have been improvements far superior to any of the suggestions I had listed, Blizzard being a group a game design professionals and all. Sadly, they didn't bother devising such improvements, so we can only speculate regarding how awesome they could have been.
Points of Praise:
I do need to give credit where credit is due, there are a few things Starcraft 2 did do well.
First, they did a fantastic job with the campaign. Obviously, the game mechanics are the same as Starcraft and the story is rubbish, but the campaign missions themselves are interesting, varied and fast paced. The between mission hub an the RPG elements are a nice touch (which by the way, are an indirect removal of some of the research from within the game itself). The story is cliched but the game entertains and you will not be bogged down with mission after mission that amounts to just ?kill the enemy base.? Probably all the creativity that went into this game went into the campaign. Despite all the flaws I mentioned above, you do not get shortchanged on the campaign despite it being Terran only (with some Protoss thrown in for good measure).
Also, kudos on the matchmaking. I joined games against random strangers and did not lose immediately and horribly, which is a sign of good matchmaking. Actually, I think I won most of my matches against strangers. Not bad.
Also, the game obviously looks really nice, sounds nice, and is bug free. But I would have been incredibly surprised if anything release by Blizzard didn't at least live up to at least these standards.
Game Reviews:
One of the reasons why I have wrote this enormous rant is that virtually every game review out there could not heap enough praise on this game and rarely took a look at even the most basic of flaws. I can kind of understand Blizzard's position in taking no risk with the game design as it was guaranteed to be a blockbuster based just on the predecessor's success and the companies reputation alone and that they didn't want to do anything too drastic that might upset the fan base. But why didn't any of the reviewers call them out on this, on the lack of risk taking, innovation, and obvious flaws like the excessive micromanagement and lack of even a functional queue?
Here is a sample of the reviews that game received:
PC Gamer: 93/100 Editor's Choice
Gamespot: 9.5/10 Editor's Choice
Game Life: 9/10
IGN: 9/10 Editor's Choice
Joystiq: 5/5
Metacritic listed a composite score of 93/100 for this game. It is described as a ?Masterpiece?, ?Lives Up to 10 Years of Hype? and ?Olympic?. All this praise for what is essentially a graphically re-skinned version of a 12 year old game.
I mean, its definitely not a bad game. Its worth your time, solidly above average, bug free, has solid multimedia, a good campaign, and a tight well balanced game design. But its also dated, a micromanagement nightmare, and devoid of innovation, risk taking and ambition. Its a competently designed game by a reputable game developer. I'd give a 7, which is pretty good score. I wouldn't give it a 9 or 10, those scores are reserved for perfection mixed with innovation, which this game is not.
Some Final Thoughts on Micromanagement:
If it wasn't already apparent, I have sampled some of the criticism or lack thereof of Starcraft 2. And there has been the odd voice on the Internet that has pointed out that Starcraft 2 is micromanagement hell. The response is to the effect of: So what? Its Starcraft? Micromanagement is a skill.
The problem with excessive micromanagement is not the that it doesn't require skill, but that it adds nothing to the game. Lets say I added a new mechanic to the game. Every minute during gameplay, you would be locked out of the Starcraft UI until you type ?There is no such thing as too much micromanagement noob!? into the game without any typos, and all the while the game would continue to progress. This would take skill, namely touch typing, a rather useful skill that can also be used to write endless rants about games that disappoint you, but would add nothing to the game. It adds no extra strategy, no extra decision making, and certain no extra enjoyment, and definitely tonnes of extra frustration. Just adding a random element that takes skill does not necessarily enhance the game.
If that example seems over the top, consider the absence of queuing in this game. Because queues don't work correctly in this game, you must repeatedly reselect a production structure each and every time it finishes production. So lets say you want to continuously build marines, and you have set up production efficiently with a numerical key binding, let us just say it is ?1?. The marine build time is 25 seconds. That means as long as you are building marines, every 25 seconds you need to press ?1M?. Its not as bad as the above example, but its wouldn't be necessary at all with a proper queuing system, and obviously the more production structures you have the more of this you are constantly going to need to do. You will need another two key presses per HQ every 17 seconds to build SCVs. Another pair of keystrokes to build siege tanks at a factory, and another to build valkyrie's at a spaceport, etc., none of which is necessary. And for what purpose? What value does having to constantly issue the exact same production orders have over simply instructing your production structures you want something built repeatedly? Your not making any additional decisions, your just doing constant, repetitive busy work to reaffirm a past decision you have already made, mainly that a given structure will produce X nonstop until you have decided otherwise.
And keep in mind this is just one task. You'll be setting up resource expansions, pathing units that are dumb as wood, trying to sort your troops all while being constantly attack and attempting to attack yourself. And your supposed to come with an actual strategy while juggling all this? This is the underlying design principle of the game that ?Lives Up to 10 Years of Hype?. Its time to let go of our nostalgia and realize this level of micromanagement should have been removed from RTS a long time ago. Technically it was, but Blizzard didn't feel like learning from anybody, so we are again stuck with it in Starcraft 2.
Final Thoughts:
So there you have it, my thoughts on Starcraft 2. Not a bad game, but dated and a major disappointment. It was admittedly the safe bet and sound business decision on Blizzard's part, but I was hoping something else might push the series forward. Ambition. Didn't anyone at Blizzard have ambition, and want to make the new Starcraft as revolution as the old? At the very least, didn't they want to see their flagship RTS title into the next decade? Instead we have a decade old game inhabiting current generation graphics.
Ultimately, though, my problem is that Starcraft 2 wasn't a revolution game. Not every game can be revolution, even those backed by a talented developer with loads of time and resources. My problem is that, as best as I can tell, Blizzard didn't even try to improve upon the original Starcraft.
