Taking the Fun Out of StarCraft II 293
StarCraft II lead designer Dustin Browder recently spoke with Gamasutra about how designing a real-time strategy game for competition can sometimes be at odds with designing something purely for the sake of fun.
"'It took me a year and a half to figure this out,' said Browder, an enthusiastic designer who might also be around the top 10 percent in the world in terms of speed-talking. 'I kept trying to shove stuff in that was fun but wasn't a sport,' he said. 'And everybody would tell me "no," and I wouldn't understand why. And I thought they were all jerks. I didn't know, right? I couldn't figure it out.' ... 'It took me a long time to understand why this sport value is so important,' Browder continued. The development team kept itself in check, nixing units that overlapped with the roles of other units and dumping units that were deemed too complicated. Some of the units cut were fun to use, but just didn't fit with the game's objectives as an eSport. 'It makes it so challenging for designers on the project to come up with new and good ideas,' said Browder. 'We could sit here right now, and come up with 10 great ideas for an RTS. But I almost guarantee you that all of those would get shot down for a sport.'"
Re:what's wrong with letting the game be a game? (Score:2, Informative)
They call those custom games and let people make their own fun games and distribute it over battle.net.
Re:they left my fun out early (Score:5, Informative)
If you hate region locking you made the right move. The region locking of Starcraft 2 takes it to insane levels. eg. If you make a map using the in-built editor you can only upload it to your region!
So those of us in the more obscure regions simply aren't allowed to play the custom maps made by people in other regions.