Blizzard kinda killed the RTS genre with Starcraft 1. It's basically the perfect RTS so everything that came after it seems inferior. Even Starcraft 2.
There are still niches for specialized audiences, like historical battles with a more strategic bent, but for mass market RTS nothing has been able to beat a 23 year old game.
I love BW but it's still far from perfect. Even if things like single build select and max 12 unit select were okay at the time and worked decently within the game's design, they're still incredibly clunky choices. Honestly, even playing it in its heydey, I already disliked the 12 unit select.
> It's basically the perfect RTS so everything that came after it seems inferior. Even Starcraft 2.
SC2 had a bunch of design choices that seemed to reflect a shallow understanding of what made BW actually super good. Like, how incredibly tightly units clumped together should've been picked out as an obvious flaw immediately, but instead they never fixed the underlying issue and just patched up some of the negative impacts via econ changes.
> Like, how incredibly tightly units clumped together should've been picked out as an obvious flaw immediately
Pretty much everyone who used air-units in SC1 abused the "tight" formations of Muta-stacks (or other SC:BW air units). In most fights: tight formations are incredibly superior to loose formations. (Obviously Corsairs / Valkyries changed that, but typical hit-and-run tactics are better when stacked)
Automatically having tight stacks in SC2 meant the skill-curve of tight formations was brought down: so that beginners can benefit from the strategy with less practice. Advanced players can still use their superior APM to loosen the formations (if they go up against anti-death ball units, like Siege Tanks or Banelings).
There are plenty. The problem is that it's created a game dynamic where battles turn in an instant. You either dodge the splash and your army melts theirs or you eat the splash and your army evaporates in a flash. The game feels really swingy and punishing when whoever gets the right angle auto-wins.
In contrast to Brood War, where battles tend to unfold as an aggregate of smaller engagements happening simultaneously all around the map, Starcraft 2 hinges a lot on positional play with two giant armies dancing around and probing each other trying to engage at an advantageous position. And then once they get drawn into an engagement it's just BOOM! ZAP! POW! and it's over. If you blink you could miss it.
In Starcraft: Broodwar... Muta-harass isn't about winning, its about forcing your opponent to make more clicks than you.
In the ZvT metagame, Zerg can deploy Mutalisks many minutes before the Terrain have access to Valkyries (AoE anti-air). Terrain's only response at that stage in the game is Marines.
Marines (who shoot one-vs-one) need to group up tightly to have a chance vs Mutalisks. However, a Marine only has 40 HP, and can be KO'd by a group of 11 Mutalisks taking one shot simultaneously.
This forces the enemy Terrain player to group up their Marines before approaching Mutalisks: the Mutalisks are flying however, so they just run away when they see the opponent grouping up. By forcing the opponent to group up, respond, and deploy, you win the "APM / Clicks" war. You're just trying to force the opponent to "waste their clicks" and eat up their mental capacity.
If the opponent fails to respond, you just run into their economy and destroy their workers. If you break the opponent's economy, you pretty much instantly win. Because you have flying units, you always have access to the opponent's backline / economy. (IE: most Terrain players "wall off" their economy so that ground units must destroy a 500HP defensive structure before reaching the backline. But you can get around those walls by using flying units, like Mutalisks)
Otherwise, you take advantage of map features: high-ground makes your creatures invisible (even air creatures are invisible on the high ground in Starcraft: Brood War). So you swing in from the cliffs / retreat into the cliffs repeatedly.
A missile turret has 200 HP, and is a bit harder to deal with. However, a Muta-stack with of 11 can KO the missile turret before it even takes a 2nd shot. It takes much practice: you need to learn the timing of the Mutalisk, carefully watch their animation and positioning (they only take a "instant shot" if they're flying in the same direction that the shot will take place), and Mutalisks can instantly turn-around (you need to move-click 180-degrees offset from the direction of their current movement).
With accurate timing, you can move-click, attack the missile turret, move-click away (causing an instant turnaround, leaving the missile turret range, preventing the 2nd shot), then move-click attack the missile turret a 2nd time and KO the defensive structure. This is the "muscle memory" practice that made Starcraft: Brood War famous. Only those who dedicate many hours of practice to memorizing this strict timing will even reach the barebone basics of the game.
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Eventually, Terrain can go Valkyries and with a large enough group, can AoE kill the entire Mutalisk stack. However, that's later in the game. By that point, the Zerg player has moved onto their main strategy (probably mass ground-forces, like Hydralisks). Valkyries are useless against that, and its well known that Mutalisks are otherwise an inefficient unit in combat. So its unlikely for the Zerg player to heavily invest into Mutalisks.
Whether intentional or not, I think 12 unit select was one of the design choices that enabled the pros and experts to really separate themselves from the average folks.
For a "perfect" game, Dragoon / Goliath pathing is sure awful.
Starcraft 2 units really do "what you want" most of the time: automatically balling up into groups or "dancing" together. From one perspective, elite Starcraft1 players who memorized "The Magic Box" and other engine-level pathfinding behaviors saw this as an abomination: other players can gain the same skills now without practice.
On the other hand... lets be frank. Dragoon / Goliath pathfinding was bullshit from Starcraft1. The extraordinary measures you'd have to take to become a competitive player who uses those (ie: Magic box memorization. Dragoon Dance practice. Etc. etc.) was fundamentally unfun.
This is coming from me: someone who did put in the effort to properly dragoon dance / Muta stack / etc. etc. We all do things to seek a competitive edge against our opponents.
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The work / reward ratio needs to be there in some extent. But it can't be so large to turn beginners away. I'm not sure if anyone's found the proper balance yet, but Starcraft2 definitely was better from that perspective.
EDIT: I'm also a big fan of fighting games. Hyper-fighters, like Blazblue or Guilty Gear, have a nice auto-balance called combo proration. Combos are clearly the best way to play, but each combo makes the rest of the combo exponentially do less damage (!!!). This means that a 50 hit combo in BlazBlue will probably only do 10% more than a 20 hit combo, despite the huge difficulty curve in executing. The bulk of the damage is from the attacks before proration kicks in. This allows for the expert-community to practice for those 50-hit combos, while not necessarily granting huge 250% bonuses over beginners. A casual player may only decide to learn the 20-hit combo and still be 90% of the way to playing like an expert (compared to experts who have to work far, far harder to get the last 10% of damage).
I've always held that their patch/balance style is what ultimately killed SC2's scene compared to SC1. Just look at how many balance patches were required from SC2 vs. what they applied in SC1.
While neither game is perfect IMO, letting the game mature without micromanaging it was a very important aspect of SCBW's success. Instead of mucking with units on a monthly basis they let things simmer and ultimately let balance be achieved through proper map design used in the competitive scene.
In my personal opinion one of the biggest faults with SC2 was their unit design philosophy. The idea that every unit was viable or had some special unlock created a balance nightmare. Its been years since I played either game competitively (played iCCup in BW / Collegiate StarLeague for SC2:WoL) but I remember always feeling like the game had too much "gotcha" in it that SCBW never had. Didn't scout proxy reapers? gg. Didn't scout fast void? gg. Didn't scout x? gg. It was too much rock-paper-scissors where missing one piece of intel was death while SCBW wasn't entirely the same. Taking the Terran/Protoss matchup for example you'd typically expect the early game to be vulture+tank vs. zealot+goon where if the terran player just a-moved into the protoss it was guaranteed loss, but microing the vulture and tanks gave you the chance and arguably the upperhand where the skill of the either player determined the outcome. SC2 didn't have that to the same extent.
That sounds more like a symptom as opposed to the underlying problem. A large number of patches isn't necessarily a bad thing, but an unstable meta is definitely bad.
So SC2 starts off with SCV-auto split, no more manual splitting at the start of the game (all players now can play the first 5-seconds of every game like a pro: no practice needed anymore) But then muscle-memory people wanted an edge, so they added MULEs / Spawn Larva / Chronoboost, giving players a muscle-memory / simple timer countdown to play with. Etc. etc.
Just back-and-forth changes like that was the real problem. The general balance patches had no idea for the final metagame they were actually going for. Did Blizzard want a game that rewarded manual effort (Juggle MULEs?)? Or did they want a game where manual-effort was minimized (Auto-Worker Split?)
In the end: Blizzard wanted both, even if the two designs contradicted each other. You really can't please both groups of players, but by switching back and forth between the two designs, they only really pissed off both camps over the long term.
I'm not sure I agree, the balance for pro level has almost no bearing on lower leagues who suck. I think the reason people stopped playing is that it's really really hard (tiring) and it's not a team based game and can get quite lonely.
Even in Starcraft:Brood War days, it was common to learn from stronger players by playing 2v2 (where Strong+Weak player goes up against Strong+Weak player).
Starcraft 2 added "Archon Mode", where you can 2vs1 (Weak+Weak player vs Strong player), controlling the same team. There were far more opportunities to play teams in Starcraft2 than Brood War.
And the 2v2 was always an option in Starcraft 2 anyway.
It's still a lonely experience. Social and player discovery was badly done. 2v2 play was lonely too, it doesn't feel like a team game when you're getting rushed 2v1 at 8:00 clock time and your teammate is far away building their early econ. Compare that feeling to DoTA or counter strike which really feel like team games and not like two 1v1s that happen to be on the same map
Speak for yourself; I can't stand SC1 after all the quality-of-life features they added to 2.
There's nothing dumber and more immersion-breaking than watching 15 dragoons get stuck in a small opening because the game's pathfinding is the very best the mid-90s has to offer. Or watching a reaver's scarab just ... get stuck, on the way to a target. They solved all of this crap (and a whole lot more) in SC2, and I can't go back.
Dragoon pathing is actually a bug where the dragoons think they're smaller than they are IIRC. They just never patched it because it ended up becoming a part of the accepted balance.
I think its because their model changed their hitbox as they moved. So while their pathing was calculated at one point of the animation they could no longer fit and would re-path or something to that extent.
> They just never patched it because it ended up becoming a part of the accepted balance.
I wish people would do this today. Release your game and let the rules be the rules.
Last year, Magic: the Gathering announced "by all our metrics, we consider the metagame healthy. So we're doing something we've never done before: we're banning a bunch of cards purely for the sake of change."
> Blizzard kinda killed the RTS genre with Starcraft 1. It's basically the perfect RTS so everything that came after it seems inferior. Even Starcraft 2.
The overall market killed the RTS genre because everybody has a pretty clear idea of exactly how much money you're going to make selling an RTS and it's not that high. RTS games don't port well to consoles or mobile, and that's the majority of people and revenue.
Blizzard killed the RTS genre by completely optimizing for e-sports click-fests at the expense of everything else. A pox on their house.
I remember enjoying SupCom back in the day. I find it interesting that it still seems to have a small but loyal following thanks to ongoing, fan-driven development like Forged Alliance Forever. I can't imagine it's making anyone much money any more, but the game was good enough to build an enduring bubble around it.
I watch probably 10 hours a week between SC1 and SC2. I have to agree, BW is a much better spectator sport imo. Battles take longer, there are things happening on more on the map ect. But SC2 is still a lot of fun to watch.
I watch both too and I disagree. After a while I have to stop watching SC1 games, I can continue watching SC2 for much much longer. SC1 just gets way too boring. It really is like watching chess, slow and methodical (assuming the perfect control only the top players can achieve in this game, I could not stand watching any less skilled players, other than with SC2). I appreciate the much faster games in SC2. I think SC2 game play is more significantly more varied too.
Sure but mobas are much closer to action RPGs than RTS games in the actual game experience. The origin story as a mod for a RTS is interesting but doesn’t lock in the genre
Yikes. I'm a very keen RTS player and I couldn't disagree with this any more strongly. Starcraft is a very milquetoast RTS that follows a basic formula and takes no risks. It's the Marvel movie of RTS games.
There are still niches for specialized audiences, like historical battles with a more strategic bent, but for mass market RTS nothing has been able to beat a 23 year old game.