You have no idea how many times I’ve had to catch myself typing “Control” instead of “Craft”.
Maybe it’d be more accurate to say “StarCraft 2 isn’t as awesome as it should have been” but that won’t get folks attention the same way. I’m planning on making a YouTube video of this rant in the style of my other rants (and explanatory video) on Youtube, but that part takes time, so to be sure I don’t get scooped by anyone else I’m going to take the audio I’ve recorded and release it here podcast style. (If someone else ends up saying this, while they may be more popular I can at least claim to have been first.)
You can download my ranting here in either MP3 or, for that indie cred, OGG format. I kept it short, less than 6 minutes, so it won’t take all of your day:
RSS Comments.
August 2nd, 2010 - 5:39 pm
For a rant, it did bring up some good points. Look at what Valve has done in the time Blizzard has had between StarCraft 1 and 2.
August 3rd, 2010 - 6:34 am
I wonder if this choice has anything to do with the game’s popularity in Korea? The Starcraft culture over there has been consistently huge since the game’s release.
I imagine they wanted the game to be similar enough to sell in it’s largest market. I imagine such devoted fans would feel betrayed if it was too different.
“9.5 million sold worldwide, 4.5 million sold in South Korea alone.”
August 3rd, 2010 - 6:51 am
The first draft of the rant actually included a bit about it being Korea’s fault. And WoW. But mostly Korea. But when I started to think about it Korea, having a huge and active user base, was probably more of an excuse than a root cause. The root cause is, like I said, that the “take chances” blizzard is gone and what’s left knew that whatever they pooped out would be gold so why strain themselves.
I also wonder if doing something new even crossed their mind. Like did they even have any new ideas. I thought so, at the end of StarCraft 1. It seemed to me like they were setting up some great ideas for some new races. Was I wrong? Did the people who set up those twists at the end, the ones who had the great ideas, were they no longer at Blizzard? And everyone left, when they said “we’re going to make StarCraft 2″ was the only thing they were capable of thinking of was “Human, Protoss, Zerg, IN 3D!” I don’t know. I wonder who I’d ask about this.
August 3rd, 2010 - 9:45 am
I knew I was smart to get this up sooner rather than later. See, I said that others were going to start saying the same thing. Jerry Holkins aka Tycho said: “Warcraft III was… chockablock with innovations and crazy bullshit – the sort of prayerful long pass that a company with Blizzard’s talent and resources can bring to fruition…. Beyond its narrative strengths, which were manifold, its technological and philosophical bones gave rise to Defense of the Ancients, which I’ve argued constitutes an entirely new genre. It was a game so bold that it contained games within it. Where is that bold heart?
“…[L]et us be clear with one another. We may call Starcraft II ‘old school,’ the electronic equivalent of comfort food, and these things are not untrue in the particulars. But there is a safety in thought and deed here that borders on cowardice.”
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/8/2/blood-and-oil-part-five/
Who wants to bet Thursday that Yatzee echos the same sentiment.
August 3rd, 2010 - 9:45 am
Hmm. I hope you write an ASCIICRAFT game. With 5 races. That will be fun!
August 3rd, 2010 - 7:42 pm
Ogg Vorbis is good not only for indie cred, but also for the legal goodness of not using a patented format. Also, if you have nothing but speech, Speex might be a good choice.
August 4th, 2010 - 10:32 pm
I’d ask James Phinney.
August 5th, 2010 - 7:18 am
@vazor222 James Phinney would be the one to ask if they had ideas for StarCraft 2 like that. I’d be interested to know his take on what the game was going to be. I wonder if we lost that just because he’s no longer working for them, and they didn’t even consider giving him a call. Of course they wouldn’t, they didn’t want changed. They wanted big piles of money.
August 5th, 2010 - 10:42 am
This is why I am looking forward to Torchlight 2 more than Diablo 3 right now.
August 5th, 2010 - 2:10 pm
You’re not the only person disappointed by Starcraft 2, you’re just the only person that wasn’t expecting Starcraft 2. Blizzard has never done anything groundbreaking and new, they have always been groundbreaking in copying something and making it better. The fact that the game plays exactly like the first one is the only thing that makes it not a complete disappointment.
Took chances? Making something that might not succeed? They were coming off two successful RTSs during a time when RTSs were reigning supreme on the PC.
I really don’t understand or agree with this idea that every sequel needs to recreate the game. You want a whole new game. Fine, so play a whole new game. Why drag along the fans through gameplay they might not enjoy? When Coca-Cola decides they want to make a lemon-lime drink, they give it a new name, a new color, a new slogan, and you get Sprite. They don’t start selling “Coke 2,” make it lemon-lime flavor, and expect people to happily go along with it. Coke already learned that lesson, and thankfully so has Blizzard. You expect there to be great changes in 12 years? Some people have been waiting 12 years for Starcraft to make a comeback.
If you ask me, they changed too much. The gameplay is excellent, even better than the original. Things like multiple building selection, automining, the increased size of control groups, macro abilities, and new terrain features have already drastically altered the flow of the game for anyone who actually got serious about it. I think gameplay has improved, personally. What I’m deeply disappointed with is the story. The writing is horrible, the characters got neutered, it’s just a depressing mistreatment of great fiction.
To be bluntly honest, you need to stop thinking about what would be “cool” in an RTS and think about what would actually make a well-balanced and long-lasting game. I don’t think your suggestions would, they sound hasty and superficial. Nothing personal, I don’t even know you, but if you’ve got a great idea for an RTS, go make it. Send me a link when it’s playable. Until then, I’ll be playing SC2 and being thankful Blizzard didn’t fix what wasn’t broken.
August 5th, 2010 - 5:42 pm
@TheBaron87, I like your comment. Verbose, but it’s well thought out and intelligent without being condescending. Thank you very much for taking the time to respond.
But you missed the point. This isn’t about sequels in general. (I could go off on that at a future time.) This is about this sequel. StarCraft 1 set up some things that StarCraft 2 didn’t deliver on, and that’s what ticked me off. It failed to deliver on the expectation. Of course for those who have spent the intervening time only playing the multilayer aspect then this game this is exactly the game they wanted, it surpassed those expectations in the beta. But I never played online multiplayer, I was never willing to invest the time to get good enough at it to be anything more than a pinata for the other players. So all I had was the promises of the story campaign to base my expectations on.
Re: StarCraft 1 taking chances, absolutely it was. If they had inadvertently let slip some massive balance breaking issue that made multiplayer no fun to play, then the game would have had a shorter life, maybe much shorter. Mistakes like that happen when releasing a game, but they could have hedged their bets if they had gone with the original idea of making “Warcraft in space”. They didn’t do that. They started from ground zero, tried something unheard of, and they hit it out of the park.
August 5th, 2010 - 11:52 pm
I’m glad to hear you aren’t trying to advocate reinventing the wheel with numbered sequels, and I agree, the campaign was disappointing. I’m not sure I could understand the game from the viewpoint of someone who only plays singleplayer, as I’m a Platinum level player myself and spent a long time playing melee in the original. However, I’m also a huge fan of the first game’s story. It is my favorite game of all time, and I’ve been playing games since the NES on consoles and PC. I even have the instruction manual for Starcraft 1 on a bookshelf next to my desk. The campaign is just half of the equation for me, so it doesn’t completely make or break the investment. As a fan of science-fiction and an appreciator of good narrative and characters, it still breaks my heart.
Disappointment with the ending aside, I’m expecting more about the Xel’Naga and the hybrids. In case you missed it, Samir Duran was the character that set up those twists at the end of Brood War, and in SC2 there’s a character named Dr. Narud, a researcher who asks you to protect data on the locations of the remaining artifact pieces from Kerrigan in the “The Moebius Factor” mission. Duran is clearly still pulling strings in the background. Also, remember that Starcraft 2 has been split up into three parts. They probably won’t really dive back into the part of the plot you’re interested in until the third campaign. It’s been twelve years, a lot of the people playing now didn’t play the first game, so Blizzard can’t just pick up where they left off like only a year’s gone by. The expansions probably won’t have this “starting over” feeling. It seems like you’re just really on about that one sideplot with Duran, and I’m sure that will get addressed, but SC2 isn’t “done” yet. Wings of Liberty is chapter one.
Anyway, I still don’t see SC1 as a game that took chances aside from the variety of the races. Total Annihilation was a far more innovative game from the time, SC1 was still rooted deep in RTS tradition, Blizzard just found a way to make three great races and get them to work together. Other than that it was the same as handfuls of RTSs before it.
August 7th, 2010 - 11:03 pm
Stacraft 2 SUCKS!!!!!!!
August 18th, 2010 - 8:51 pm
I just finish playing a 4 player free for all with 3 very hard A.I, and I cant get over how fast my bases would disappear. First starcraft I would have at least some time to get units over to it to try and save it, not so on SC2. The game is simply maddening. I make 2-4 different units beside the workers, and that’s all you really have time for, before your done in by harassing reapers, or a mob of zealots. Terran are by far the best. I took out more buildings with half a dozen reapers than 4 dozen marines. playing vs A.I is just a human player simulation to get you ready to play online. Same with the challenges, pointless.
August 18th, 2010 - 9:00 pm
Here is how you play SC2 amass workers, harass, harass, harass, attack with everything you have. longest game was an hour, and it was a game of cat and mouse hunting bases and destroying everything you can find. This game is more work than fun.
August 23rd, 2010 - 5:19 pm
I “sampled” SC2; I’m so glad I did not buy it — my expectation was that Blizzard would create a monstrosity that in no way held up the original SC standard of quality, and I was precisely, exactly correct.
It’s the W3 engine with a few tweaks — there is absolutely no innovation; in terms of features, it’s like a stripped down W3 (which was a bad enough engine to begin with)… I see better games than this released on Armor Games all the time, with more care & attention to detail, more creativity, and certainly more originality.
The game play feels like a horrid travesty of what a moneyed exec thinks PvP is like after a two hour presentation done by a cocaine-addled twelve year old… gone is the feel of a genuine strategy game, instead it’s more like an action game where you control a ton of characters but can’t actually tell any of them exactly what you want them to do.
It’s like they WANTED to make fine micro an impossibility; they took about the ability to slow the game down in intense combat, they did the BARE MINIMUM they could get away with in terms of macro ability (why is everyone praising features that are 10+ years old in the non-Blizzard world??), and generally destroyed the fine grained, nuanced feel that made the original so compelling.
The AI sucks; I saw so many cases of units running around in circles until they died, mis-pathing (the pathing behavior was actually very impressive in the original SC, though it certainly wasn’t perfect), getting trapped or stuck, etc….
I’m horrified that they removed LAN play — even though I never ONCE played on a LAN, I know exactly how important that was to the gaming community….
tl;dr: SC2 is an amateurish “garage game” with really good FMV. No more, no less.
August 23rd, 2010 - 5:22 pm
Addendum: by “really good” FMV, I mean “better than it was in SC” — the actual animation quality was really quite miserable, especially Raynor’s “elbow jaggies” where the muscle texture wraps really badly and makes it look like he’s got rocks under his skin….
August 31st, 2010 - 2:53 am
Well, if you aint a competitive player and are looking for a game that just amuses you and present non-balanced innovation thingies, this game is not for you.
It’s not that Starcraft sucks, you just don’t get it because you are looking for something else then an E-sports game that is focused around being ultimately balanced and is ment to REPLACE Starcraft 1 in the E-sports scene.
Replacing it wouldn’t work if they changed too much, and as there has never been a game that was better then SC1 in being a competitive RTS, what needs to be changed then?
@WHAT! August 18th, 2010 – 8:51 pm & Is this stratigy or psycology August 18th, 2010 – 9:00 pm
You are just sucky players who haven’t found out how to play the game yet.
No offence, takes hundreds of games for everyone.
@ S August 23rd, 2010 – 5:19 pm
amateurish “garage game” ? Lol it’s a masterpiece in the eyes of one that appreciates real RTS.
August 31st, 2010 - 9:10 am
I do have to say, I much prefer the comments here then the comments this got on YouTube. Because even if someone disagrees with you here they’re respectful of you as a person. Just wanted to say thanks for that.
Oh, by the way, I’ve made the YouTube video i was going to. Link in the paragraph above. See if you can find it.