Taking the Fun Out of StarCraft II

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.'"

New Super Mario Bros Wii

[cgomezr]

Designing a game that would be fun for beginners/casual players and challenging for experts at the same time is extremely difficult. Ten or twenty years ago there were no games like that. Now, with the popularization of things like tutorials and achievements, we are getting closer, but we still aren't there in most genres.

I think the game that does the best job at this (out of those I have seen) is New Super Mario Bros Wii. It has several layers of complexity and can be played at various levels of challenge, from using the bubble or the Super Guide to get you out of the levels to getting all the star coins in the game or finding tricks for infinite lives. I have seen both absolute beginners and old-school hardcore gamers having loads of fun with this game (even when both kinds of players are playing *together*!) and that is truly remarkable, and something to mark in the history of game design.

Now, how could this be applied to Starcraft II? No idea...

Re:Excuses

[rekenner]

And if SC2 was 'balanced' like MvC2 was or MvC3 is looking like it will be (given that the metagame is young, I hesitate to say 'is'), then some fractional amount of a single race would be used, as everything else is too bad to be used. So, maybe only the Marine, Reaper, Banshee, and Raven are the only units in the entire game worth using. That's good game design, right? Or maybe only a unit or two from each race are usable and teching to them and microing them is the entire game.
Yeah. No.
RTS balance and fighting game balance are way the fuck different. RTS balance, or at least in SC2, RELIES on having every race be balanced (or so close to balanced as to give them all decent representation, let's not argue if SC2 is balanced yet. See: Young meta) and have multiple good builds and unit compositions and strategies within each race. As compared to MvC2 where how many characters out of the massive roster were tournament usable? Hm. Magneto, Cable, Storm, Sentinel, Psylocke, Strider (if your name is clockw0rk), Doom (mostly see previous parenthetical), CapCom, and Cyclops. And all the rest are thrown out. All the rest aren't used. And how did SC2 avoid that? By what was talked about in this article. SC2 isn't super revolutionary, I'll agree. But as a competitive game? I'd say it's outstanding. As someone who liked Brood War and likes SC2, but also sucks at micro ... I enjoy watching SC games. I watched SC1 tournies and I'm currently watching NASL. Fuck playing the multiplayer myself - I know I'll suck. That's not due to the game, that's due to that I don't care enough to get good. But I love watching the pros play.

SC2 is simply not fun

[Co0Ps]

I've played ~50 matches and the only feeling I get when I win is a sense of relief and "I don't want to do that again". It feels like the time I spent on the match was wasted. After all you get just as many points from rushing an opponent after 2 minutes as you get from carefully constructing a wall of defense and spending time to build an unbeatable late game army. Star Craft 2 is simply not entertaining. The pace of the game is two high for me to play it in a relaxed state. I guess that means I'm not an e-sports person. I love games though and I've played every major PC game... Probably spent several months of game time combined on TF2 and CS... but SC2? Where's the innovation really? It's just chess with more complex rules and much faster pace. I don't get any kick out of it at all. The multiplayer could have been a zillion times more fun by something as simple as making the ranking system more complex than points and ladders. For example, add some simulated large wars, factions and generated story... map regions and whatever. Make a win or a loss count more than getting a few arbitrary points added or removed. SC2 is a game ruined because it was made into an "e-sport" instead.

Re:The thing with 'adding fun' to a game is that..

[sweatyboatman]

learning to use them in itself is not so fun at all.

I find in most games, learning the mechanics of the game adds to the enjoyment of the game. It's like reading a good novel.

Which is why I shy away from "sport" games. Once you get past the thin gloss of the production values of a game like Starcraft 2, you're left with a mechanical Quest for Mastery. Instead of a novel, you're reading a technical manual.

Meh

[PFI_Optix]

I despise StarCraft. I really, honestly do. This isn't some trolling to piss people off, this is me venting.

StarCraft is all about speed and memorization. In that way it's more like a side-scrolling fighting game, where the person who can execute the right combos at the right time wins. Wrong build order? You lose. Didn't mass enough units by the five minute mark? You lose. I play StarCraft 2 with some friends from time to time and I do reasonably well at it, but it's nowhere near as fun as other games. It feels more like a job. I have no desire to play it solo.

What really disappointed me from the start is how the game utterly lacks any sort of reward for solid tactical decisions. High ground? That's negated by simple line-of-sight. Every shot is a hit, and every hit scores exactly the same damage. Compare that to Total Annihilation which at least attempted to give some realism in how units move and fire and the effects of terrain. TA's engine was FAR superior to StarCraft.

StarCraft is a clickfest, the closest thing RTS has to an arcade game. And it's tainted the whole genre.

Well you know it isn't for the laidback

[Sycraft-fu]

Simply by the fact that it tracks "actions per minute" and that the stat matters. The game is about speed in a big way. Top players perform multiple actions per second on average. There is no time for sitting back and looking at the strategic overview, you have to be doing something continually. That is not a game that can be played slow pace.

Personally, I'd really love to see a RTS like Homeworld again for online play. Homeworld itself was marred by cheaters but I think it had a good design. Things happened much slower, meaning strategy played a much bigger role and tactics a lesser one. While you could make differences in fights giving tactical commands to your ships, overall the determining factor was the strategy used. Also the fights progressed slowly, so you had time to analyze what has happening and respond.

While that would bore the ADD "eSports" people to tears it was nice for people who wanted a more relaxed game.

As a side note you might want to check out Sins of a Solar Empire if you haven't. It is a much larger scale game, more like what you get in a TBS, but is realtime. It does focus more on the "strategy over tactics" thing.