Blizzard Unveils Custom StarCraft 2 Game Types, Encourages Map Design 83
The first of the Blizzard-made maps is a humorous creation called Aiur Chef, an eight-player free-for-all in which players collect “ingredients” from around the map that are required for recipes, which each grant various rewards, such as points, items, and special powers. You compete against an opponent for a high score, and while you can’t kill each other, you are able to hinder the collection of ingredients through effects like stuns and slowing effects. Each of the three rounds has a “theme ingredient,” and you can see units running around carrying pots and drumsticks and rolling pins. There’s a new UI window showing which ingredients you have left to collect.
Another custom game, titled Left 2 Die, is based on one of the missions in the single-player campaign where players were swarmed by hordes of zombies every night, using daylight hours to rebuild and go on the offensive. Blizzard received enough positive feedback about that particular mission that they decided to go ahead and make a standalone version (tipping their hat to Valve's Left 4 Dead in the process). It's a co-op game, and as you mow down zombies you collect Zerg Biomass to buy upgrades for your army (upgrades that are shared, so you don’t have to worry about competing with your partner). There are new zombie units to contend with, inspired by those in Left 4 Dead, but adapted so they make sense in an RTS.
Next is a game called Starjeweled, which sections off half of the UI into Blizzard’s interpretation of the popular Bejeweled puzzle game. When you match a group of similar symbols, they disappear and grant you resources to spend on units, which then go out and try to attack an enemy base.
Perhaps the most notable of Blizzard's custom games is what they call Blizzard DOTA, based on the hugely popular Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients. In teams of five, players will control Heroes that can buy items, gain experience and level up, while the map constantly spawns waves of monsters from both bases. The heroes will be a collection of notable Blizzard characters from various games.
During the panel about the map tools, the Starcraft 2 team was very focused on introducing map makers to the basics of development. They talked about the necessity of making the first few minutes of a custom game easy to understand for new players, since getting massacred while being utterly confused is not an experience most players will want to repeat. They also encouraged map makers to take a more active role in soliciting and responding to feedback. Blizzard relies heavily on iteration, and they think the community would benefit from doing so as well.
Blizzard was insistent that the custom maps they will be releasing are part of an ongoing process to keep making new maps and custom games for players. One of their big goals for the immediate future is to keep demonstrating what their map editor is capable of and getting assets in the hands of players to facilitate building. To that end, the custom games they’re building will be unlocked, so the community will be able to look at the internals and modify whatever they see fit. (And speaking of security, they're working on better safeguards to keep people from copying others' maps, should the creators wish to keep them private.) Another reason they built the maps was to see in what areas the editing tools were lacking, so they could continue to add and streamline functionality.
Why bnet custom maps fail. (Score:1, Interesting)
the way custom maps are published has always been horrible in bnet 2.0 so far. you find a really good custom you like one of three things happen to it...
1.creativity in bnet is limited as if you try innovative controls bnet 2.0 lags any form of custom interface beyond fun playability.
2. The map maker deletes the map. thus preventing any one from ever playing it again.
3. It gets deleted by blizzard for random offensive content that isnt even offensive... thus preventing any one from ever playing it again.
thus every custom i have played and enjoyed has fallen into one of the two above categories, causing myself to not like any custom games any more on bnet 2.0 as the way blizzard handles it is horrible.
Re:BNet 2.0 a disappointment (Score:5, Interesting)
The big hurdle to custom games right now is they are region locked. Maps from one realm can't be played on any others, which has frustrated devs to the point many of them have given up. The new popularity system also means that 99% of maps never get seen, as the list itself is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Get on the top of the list, you get played a lot because you are on top, so you get played more, etc. Blizz has tried to help by choosing "featured" maps to force to the top of the list for a few weeks, but it's kind of an ugly hack to a broken system. When you make a game, you choose the map, and then slots are automatically filled and the game starts automatically, making announcing any sort of gametype impossible. So for games like Dota, which had dozens of game types, the only way to implement it in sc2 is to make different maps, which splits the player base and keeps the map from hitting the popular list. Oh and my personal pet peeve, when the game fills, it auto starts a 30 second countdown. If people leave during this time, the countdown doesn't stop. Theres no way to stop it and get a player to fill the slot without leaving, and starting over, and if you don't leave fast enough you are stuck hitting load screen. It was a known problem in wc3 and they actually made it 10x worse not better.
Too bad Blizzard is screwing their mod community. (Score:4, Interesting)
Just review the EULA, not only do they stipulate that they own all content uploaded to battle.net. They also pass apple-esk divine judgement of randomness on what qualifies to be publically playable.
Basically they gave their would be mod community the a giant middle finger.
Re:SOTIS (Score:1, Interesting)
Original AC here.
So far blizz hasn't yanked any maps just for the hell of it. The few they have were indeed breaking the rules in one way or another, and once it was sorted out they were allowed to be put back up. Blizz knows that it would be ten kinds of bad to be pulling maps for no reason, so it's very safe to assume that as long as you play by the rules your maps will stay up and be available to whoever is bored enough to click "get more" enough times to find it.
The largest threat to custom maps is the shit interface for finding custom games. You could easily have the best map out there but it's buried under several hundred nothings that nobody will ever wade through. If there's anything to complain about, it's the lack of chat and the lack of a proper way to find/create/name custom games.
Re:SOTIS (Score:3, Interesting)
quite recently they outright banned a game called Nexus Wars. It is a words based game and has a dictionary with 30k words attached to it. Long story short the dictionary spewed 'dike' randomly and the game was banned with no warning (so creator could not remove the word from the pool) for inappropriate language. Their system has ambiguosity written all over it - nobody knows the full list of bad words and judging from the chat filters it's ridiculous if anything like it (chat filters out words: black, white, trans- rape but also grape...). Maybe they fixed the mess already and unbanned it but even if, if it took more than 2hrs to get it straight that's a huge fail on blizz' part.
Re:SOTIS (Score:1, Interesting)
Original AC here again..
"more than 2hrs" wtf man this is a GAME, it isn't a cluster requiring five nines of uptime.
The creator retains full control of what's in the map, banned or not. Nexus Wars was back up the same day. Again, blizz hasn't yanked anything for the hell of yanking it. It's enough of a 'family game' that nobody wants maps with cussing in them, even me. I do find it a bit odd that they ban maps with the same foul language that is in their unit sounds and campaign maps; "Hell, it's about time".
I can't comment about the chat filter because that was the first thing to get turned off.