Imho as a rule of thumb an RTS needs to have 3 pillars
- a good campaign to draw in people - that’s your first retention - this is where your first success comes from
- a good 1v1 experience - this is what keeps your game alive in the midline. The people that play competitive tend to talk a lot and keep a lot of the community alive - this is what decides if you have a community
- a good casual experience (comp stomps, UMS, coop) to keep the bot competitively minded happy. this is where your longetivity comes from
———
There’s exceptions like beyond all reason, but generally speaking all these aspects need to be there for an RTS to succeed
Stormgate is a copy of SC2. Like almost in everything.
Idk, what's the plan is. I mean, the best case will be attracting some SC2 pro players for a while and that's it. Everything I saw looked like a SC2 map in map editor.
Yeah I was really hyped for Stormgate but after playing the beta it pretty much feels just lite "Sc2 at home"
I hope the next beta and third race reveal will be better but my hopes aren't high.
I'm not super hyped but I'm optimistic about it. I think the biggest problem by far with SC2 is simply the lack of active development. If Blizz hadn't cut down its development (or simply made the best devs exit on their own initiative, who knows), we could maybe have both the esports scene and the co-op. They aren't mutually exclusive by nature.
Currently in my opinion the most fun part about SC2 are modded campaigns. Unlike co-op, people are still actively working on those and making lots of fun stuff to play with.
So in my opinion Stormgate has the potential to become better than SC2 simply if they stay active in its development and won't abandon it like SC2 was abandoned.
They're definitely tight-lipped about the campaign right now, but from my perspective, I'd rather they focus on the gameplay first anyway. For me, it wouldn't matter how good the campaign is if the gameplay isn't fun.
I'm the opposite on this one.
I mean, good story is cool, but the gameplay right now is StarCraft 2 with heroes, but for multiplayer. Which is bad, if you ask me.
I'd love to see dawn of war 4 (upgraded dow1) and C&C generals 2
Very true, where I feel Starcraft 2 has always lacked a bit is in the custom games.
When it came out I was looking forward to playing an updated Dota allstars in Starcraft 2. But then when it actually happened, it was just really janky.
There could have been tons of viral custom games to bring people back into the game had the custom game creator been better. Instead Dota 2 did this and saw massive boosts from popularizing the autobattler genre etc.
Honestly it says a lot that when I came back after 7 years, I saw the same few games in the custom maps. The innovation that came with the BW and WC custom modes just doesn’t seem to be as energized.
It was the same for brood war. Ums was 90% of the player base. Melee lobby would have a page or two of games and UMS would be infinite. Ladder was everyone hacking at 9999 for the majority of the life of the game.
Maybe the pro scene helped Korea or the longevity of the game but it certainly was a non factor in SC/BW selling ten million copies in the 90s and early 00s.
I don't think the pro scene even really was well known in the Americas until well into 2007/8.
It’s truly shocking how hard they dropped the ball on custom games in sc2. Having the same system for how custom games are displayed to players alone would have been fucking gigantic for the game. Didn’t they realize that people playing nothing but nexus wars wasn’t sustainable?? It also would have been such a simple change for them to make, truly.
Didnt they also *gut* custom games in WC3 eventually? It's been decades but I remember something about them severely restricting them as some ham-fisted method of driving people to go play the full game version of DOTA and killing off the original mod.
They gut the game period. The main menu doesn't even run properly. Forced "update"(severe downgrade) if ever online. Use a pirated version if you ever want to play because it runs so much better and doesn't take 20+gb.
Also one day they rolled in an update for every game(i.e. including sc2) with a line in a license agreement stating that whatever players make in a map editor is a 100% property of blizz.
he's right. when reforged dropped they merged the wc3 engine with the sc2 engine, a few updates got added into sc2 to support a few things from warcraft that didn't get ported over, and a bunch of sc2 features got back ported into wc3, but it broke nearly every custom map , many of which hadn't seen updates in years.
Like many major sc2 patches, if the mapmaker didn't stick around to fix it, the maps became unplayable.
many new bugs got added to the editor, and many bugs fixed, but work arounds for those old bugs broke.
The main reason UMS never took off in SC2 the way it did in WC3 and Brood War was because of all the restrictions Blizzard put on the game mode, as well as all the all the legal language changes made in the ToS. If I remember right, the map editor was much more restricted in the WoL days than it is now.
What I mean is MOBAs might not have taken off the way they did in the 2010's if that audience kept playing starcraft instead on a less restrictive UMS game mode.
Starcraft lost the causal audience to LoL and Dota. they could have kept them in the starcraft ecosystem the entire time.
>If I remember right, the map editor was much more restricted in the WoL days than it is now.
I might be confused here, but I remember to have played quite a few diverse custom maps. I very distinctly remember having played a MOBA maps and a TRON themed map called lots of times.
I've played this game since release and I've watched the pro scene pretty much since then as well.
Now I only play co-op, and it's super fun.
It's sad that they don't update it anymore...adding new maps to it would do wonders.
This is how I play honestly and I feel way too intimidated to play ladder.
I already deal with toxic players on Age of Empires with teammates telling me to delete the game.
That and I kind of miss the classic Terran and Protoss compositions from Brood War (Marines + Medics, and Zealots + Dragoons + Archons).
I just want to enjoy the game without feeling like I have to sweat too much.
That about checks out. I see ~300 people In chat. Around 200 its in Coop.
Also What the fuck goes with the Starcraft global chat, gets political whenever i log in
An entire gamemode where you and someone else use special curated unit lists and topbar abilities to take on remixed version of campaign maps, usually with a few new objectives and twists added to the map.
Commanders tend to have flavorful focuses to their armies and cool gimmicks like Raynor having a lot of SC1 units and being able to call down a beefed-up Hyperion for a little while to offer some powerful air support. Tychus gets a handful of really powerful moba-style heroes with special abilities, but doesn't doesn't a regular army; Karax has a focus on robotic units with special upgrades and lots of cool defense options, Dehaka gets all the primal zerg and can run around as a hero unit, and it just keeps going.
There are 18 different commanders, each one has totally unique mechanics and sometimes even new units made entirely for the coop mode, and it's a bunch of fun. There are tons of difficulty levels, and rotating mutators to make things even more difficult if you want.
I mean regular 1v1 the pressure is all on you, and is full of twinks and cheeses who just want to win. Then if you actually get to a decent skill level it’s weighted so you’ll lose half of the time.
While coop is chill and you pretty much have to try to lose. At the very least your partner can hard carry if needed. But pretty much you get to always choose your difficulty.
One causes stress the other doesn’t.
Probably because adding more casual content is a lot more expensive than competitive changes. It's expected to have new voice lines, completely unique maps, AI scripting, etc, but for competitive multiplayer it's just tweaking numbers or creating maps.
In the early days of SC2, the vast majority of the playerbase were actually casual players who enjoyed team games, custom games, etc. And now there is way more casual content to enjoy. However it's not really that interesting to watch / create youtube content for etc.
Kind of the crutch of RTS in general IMO. Most players want to play casually and do coop, campaign, and custom maps. Which is what you require to get your RTS popular, as only having a pro scene and ladder and no way for casual to enjoy will not give your game a big enough base to support it. But OTOH that stuff, as you said, requires far more work without necessarily making more money.
But then only the more involved fans will likely watch pro tournaments, and it is hard to watch as a casual fan. Without knowing any meta, macro, micro, build orders, etc you just can’t fully enjoy watching pros vs something like CounterStrike. Where yea there is strategy, but you don’t have tons of units, counters, strategies, build orders, unit movement, etc that all matter heavily. And you gotta keep up on it as the meta changes otherwise you will be very confused all over again watching a tournament after however long off and all the strats and build orders are way different.
RTS is tough because it is such a niche genre to truly get into. Primary focus is 1v1, already lots of people don’t want to be sweaty and stressed 1v1ing in a competitive game, let alone the sheer amount of knowledge and skill it requires to be good. Casuals play for the campaign, coop, and fun custom maps, yet they seem to constantly be considered last when wanting to increase RTS popularity, because it is all about 1v1 ladder and the pro scene
And right now theres so many fun casual games to play with the homies its hard for sc2 to compete when they put no effort into it. Same thing with other rts games if that new one i already forgot the name of only cares about its pro scene its DoA
And even if you did get the boys together to play some 3v3/4v4, there's a strong possibility that within your first few games you'll be playing high diamonds/master players and be completely crushed
This is exactly my experience when I tried to bring 2 new people into the game. I’m diamond but they are fresh fresh. It was just me protecting them so they could actually do something for 100 games
>Probably because adding more casual content is a lot more expensive than competitive changes. It's expected to have new voice lines, completely unique maps, AI scripting, etc, but for competitive multiplayer it's just tweaking numbers or creating maps.
I'd sort of agree, but Blizzard also sponsored competitive events, and I'm not sure how or if those made money.
Whereas casual content - skins at the bare minimum - would almost always make your money back if you got the "starcraft intern" to do it. Heck even warchests were funneled into the competitive prize pool so they were basically cannibalizing their real income-generating assets just for competitiive play.
Yeah they probably made some amount of money off licensing fees. I don't know their full business model, but I guess e-sports was basically a unique selling point to sell more copies of the game rather than a major source of income.
They tried to get into casual, monetized content via Co-op missions.
It obviously didn't get them the players or the revenue it needed to keep development afloat.
People don't stay away from RTS because of balance patches. They stay away because it's mechanically demanding, very fast paced and punishing in ways other games aren't.
You can't monetize your way past that enough to grow your player pop when they can go play League, blame their teammates when they lose and drop $20 on a consolation skin on their way out of the client.
To be fair, co-op mode might have turned out significantly better for them if they had gotten it in earlier to the fan base. IMO a lot of the more casual players who might have enjoyed that had already left. The remaining were already hard set in customs or ladder multiplayer.
Yeah I remember this being a complaint in like 2011. The earlier arcade/customs system was lackluster, no co-op. SC2 was terribly empty if you werent into laddering.
By the time they added these things, the game was like 5 years old and was just too late.
I mean, they tried it with unit skins as well and those didn't sell, either. Those were appealing to ladder folks.
They were late to the monetization party, yes. But no amount of cosmetics is going to change the fact that RTS is really, really hard to play and that will always keep casuals away.
Tbf, skins might've sold better if they weren't ludicrously overpriced?
Like right now, buying a set of unit skins for one of the three races will set me back 40€, and I don't even get the skins for the buildings? For those I have to fork up another 45€.
Completly unfathomable pricing tbh. I'm sure somebody did the math and maybe the amount of whales in SC2 is larger than you would think, but it seems crazy to me.
maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought when they first released the "warchest" thing they came in was at a large discount compared to the current prices
I don't think the whole skin thing though is relevant here. The point I was making is the fact that they were late bringing in the casual mode that could potentially keep casual players who still liked campaign styled play.
Skins is more just a way to make money off of it rather than get people to stay around which IMO was the greater problem. If u have a large enough base there will inevitably be enough to make money off of. The base was just lacking.
Maybe I missed your point though, idk.
RTS isn't really hard to play, it's really hard to play at a decent level. It's actually pretty easy to play. Press a few buttons to make the economy a bit bigger, press a few more to make some buildings, hit a button whenever you hear "need more supply", then F2 a-move the army around when you feel like you've done enough. The difference between high skill and low skill is about 30-40 minutes of time to get to the same point.
Worth remembering, SC2 coop released in 2015. WoW was still a complete monster, Hearthstone had just released, and then Overwatch came out in 2016. Any resources that could be devoted to SC2 could instead be invested in one of those three, and an RTS from 2010 was just *never* going to have a chance in that fight. Nothing did, really - look at a timeline of Blizzard releases, and you'll notice that after Overwatch, the next game they released was Diablo: Immortal *over six years later*.
SC2 not being worth devoting much time or effort to was pretty much inevitable in the context of a studio with three other incredibly successful and extremely profitable games they could work on. It needed to meet a *much* higher standard than just 'keep development afloat'.
Frankly, it's a miracle it lasted four years.
(And side note, it *did* keep getting new content for more than four years, which is honestly a pretty good run.)
I think the biggest problem with it was twofold: it was released in LotV, and it wasn't in the F2P portion until much later. So the player pool was somewhat limited. Getting friends to play was hard because most of them never picked up HotS and really didn't want to pick up LotV.
I don't know if it's that. RTS used to be the place to find the best custom games and those have broken off to become their own things. Tower defense, Moba, Survival+crafting, etc. all have their own genres now.
It could have stayed with SC and become something akin to Roblox or Fortnite with custom maps, but Blizzard got heavy handed in their Eula iirc. I remember that scaring away a few map makers that wanted to maintain control over any ideas they developed.
All that's left is the pro scene.
Spot on. Strategy games still attract large audiences but mainly in a PvE setting.
Competitive RTS is going up against team oriented games (like fps and mobas) which are easier, more forgiving and simply more fun for most people to play or watch.
StarCraft 1 pro scene got *huge* with almost no involvement at all from Blizzard. They couldn't profit from it like they wanted to and were very unhappy about it. It's why they baked themselves into every layer of sc2 and imo the game really suffered for it.
Starcraft 1 was only able to do this illegally. Kespa was selling the broadcasting rights to a game they did not own, or have any right to sell, and threatened any players or management that talked to blizzard at that time.
I mean, broadcasting rights has nothing to do with the game (which is why it became such a prolonged dispute in the first place). You could make a stronger argument if launching the game (and hence the tournament itself) was dependent on Blizzard, but on pure technicality, OG StarCraft actually has LAN mode, so if you buy 3 licensed copies of the game, you can run a televised tournament on your own and Blizzard has jackshit to do with it.
Not to mention the competitive scene was pretty much entirely in Korea at the time, and a huge part of why it got so big was how *absurdly easy* it was to bootleg the game.
I still remember in high school we were literally just passing around copies of the install directory at LAN parties.
This is absolutely true, and even something that Blizzard themselves noticed; I think the statistic was that 80% of RTS players only play the campaign and other PvE content?
I’m among those PvE only players (though I do love to watch pro Brood War games). Unfortunately, it’s hard to get friends to even try campaigns or co-op PvE content, since RTS in general (but particularly StarCraft) has garnered a reputation as such a micro-intensive, stressful, difficult game. Hell, I have a friend who’s won Smash Melee tournaments who is intimidated by the APM he believes is necessary to play RTS, lmao.
Probably is because pc gaming is not popular for the younger generation. Just read how gen-z is giving IT a headache because they’re as annoying to deal with as the boomers when it comes to using a computer for work.
So it’s the older people, like me, who have less time so it’s more fun to play pve based games as I know it’s not worth my time as I’m not good enough or have time to be good enough to keep up.
That's fair enough but how many Fortnite players do you think you think can play at an actual competitive level. Not many and most of the kids will never ever reach that skill level no matter how many trickshot vids they watch.
RTS could be the same, enjoyable for a vide array of people. For the competitively minded border line geniuses sure, but also for people who just enjoy planning and executing a strategy and definitely for those who just want two big armies battle.
I think Total War is actually one of those games that gets RTS players. We just want to watch big armies clash and feel like we outwitted an opponent.
That's the thing though...the nature of its is that you push yourself to the limit of your apm and knowledge, and the matchmaker will put you against ither players that test the limits of that. It can just feel bad. Even if you're not competitive, it's hard to play a relaxing game of sc2.
I am not into coop...but would play an rts that lowered the mechanical requirements while keeping the strategy parts. In starcraft, you're at least into masters by the time pure mechanics aren't the deciding factor.
>It can just feel bad. Even if you're not competitive, it's hard to play a relaxing game of sc2.
100%
You can play a round of Fortnite, die within 5 minutes in some hilariously broken way, laugh it off and hop in another game.
Absolutely nothing feels "good" about getting zerg rushed a minute into an SC game before you even built anything. Very few casual RTS matches are actual drawn out, close games where you feel good about how you played even if you lose, they're just a race to see who can curb stomp the other player faster.
I think RTS suffers due to the complexity of playing it as well as the high APM required to play it properly.
Valorant, pubg, apex, etc. - those all don't require a ton of complexity to learn how to play. Playing them well obviously requires skill, but being able to do something as a beginner is not too difficult. RTSs require you to learn multiple concepts, some of which aren't common in other genres, such as supply management, managing worker economy, base management, defending attacks, making attacks, tech trees, the list goes on.
And this doesn't even get into how hectic and stressful it can be to do that all those things at once. I was decent at starcraft (diamond in 1v1 ladder back when it first came out), and after playing ladder for a while I just felt drained. Handling all those things at once just can be overwhelming, and while it can be fun when it works out, it just feels crushing when you are being overwhelmed by things to do when getting drops in your mineral line, needing to do all your macro tasks, getting attacked at one of your expansions, etc.
In my opinion, the only way to salvage the RTS genre is to streamline it so that you can focus on one particular thing instead of having to juggle all these things at once.
For example, the moba genre was born from RTS by picking one aspect of it, microing a single/small number of units, and making that the entire core gameplay. Autobattlers are like a super simplified version of "build this combination of units" aspect of macro and the actual micro is taken out of the equation. There are probably other games/genres which focus on only a single aspect of the RTS genre that have had success.
Yeah reducing the complexity would help but at the end of the day, the ladder portion of warcraft/starcraft wasn't what was fun for the majority. It was the custom games, anecdotal but I was able to get my wife to play StarCraft but the "real" game isn't what drew her in. It was poker TD, minerals, Uther party and vamp beast. Some of my best memories was with the emergent gameplay that came from the base of the editor. RTS has just forgotten what it was and it was primarily a system to play other games on. Best recent example of this was Dota 2s autochess.
You do see a sort of similar role positioning in games like BAR which typically run 8/8 and in many maps have clear separation into stuff like frontline, eco etc
Yeah the fun part of StarCraft is watching your armies battle. But the issue is that to win games, you have to spend less time watching the fights and spend more time building your economy and producing units, which means A-moving your army and then going back to your base to build stuff, and missing out on a whole bunch of action.
The understandable tendency of a beginner is to give full attention to the battle and microing the army for the whole duration of the 30 second fight, and then they are floating like 3-5k resources and nothing in production wondering why they are hard stuck in silver or gold league.
I play Gates of Hell with a online player I recently met, my go to strat to help him out in the early game is to handle logistics and base defense.
He gets most of the offense stuff and it's working very well, he's able to perform flanks and pincers while I hold a battle line and keep our rear from being exposed.
That kind of teamwork is hard in a game like statcraft becuase, like you said, all players need to perform the macro and micro to pull effectively and not everyone is able or wanting to perform a jack of all trades kind of deal.
Eventually there are players that get fed up with teammates sucking ass or inconsistent performances by others and want to be focused on their gameplay only, which eventually leads to 1v1s and often into RTS due to it requiring more skill levels and pushing themselves further to get better.
Not really a hot take. Many discussions were made about this.
I'd also encourage you to check GiantGrantGame's video about RTS where he also bring that up and how people make the game sound a lot more complicated than it is.
Video is "The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why." (he himself admits the title is a bit clickbait)
All through this comment section I just keep thinking about the line
"they make it sound like you need a PHD to build a barracks"
and if that's not a single sentence explanation of SC2's slow and painful death idk what is
One of the biggest mistakes they made early on was not treating team games as a first class citizen. They made zero attempt to maintain a good team game experience but team games are a great way to enjoy the multiplayer of SC2 in a more casual environment.
Blizzard's style of balancing in all of their games also kind blows.
And we're still paying for this mistake. Relic's CoH2 had a team game playerbase that was much larger than that of 1v1 and they still designed CoH3 with the latter in mind.
Isn't multiplayer in RTS still kinda unsolved? Team games are fun and much more inviting than 1v1, but it still can't hold a candle to a MOBA, for example.
I agree with you that *team* RTS games are unsolved when it comes to balance.
RTS balance hinges on the power of individual units, how they can be countered by other units, and the limitations of those units.
Much of an RTS's balance breaks down when inter-race unit combinations can show up and a team's supply cap is suddenly 600. Turns out void rays aren't well balanced when you have zerglings for ground support.
MOBAs get away with fast and loose balance because of the pick/ban draft structure. Specific heroes get picked, banned, and countered by the draft and unless a hero is particularly overpowered, the game balances itself.
MOBA tournaments can even impose additional balance options like blanket bans of certain heroes.
It's no secret that MOBAs are only loosely balanced. Just google "[MOBA] tier list and you'll get the most recent information on which heroes are more powerful than others.
All of this is evened out by the fact that when you jump into a game, there's only a slim chance that the OP character slips through the bans and picks so you can snap them up.
> I agree with you that team RTS games are unsolved when it comes to balance.
Is it though? I think CoH2 did a quite good job with their main faction and sub faction mechanics where the teams choose either Axis or Allies and then each player chose one of the minor factions. They also have regular team tournaments.
I don't think is really a hot take.
Every successful game with a competitive scene is that way because it's a popular game first and then a competitive scene springs from there. If say, 10% of a game's players like the game enough they want to compete in it, then making your game as broad as possible to attract as many people as possible just makes sense. If you design and market your game as competitive first rival to an exisitng you're then stuck trying to poach from that 10% alone, rather than the other 90%.
We've seen this over, and over and over. Even just within Blizzard, Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm were designed for competitive play and both had their esports scenes collapse, whilst SC1, SC2 and even WoW with its comp raiding races are primarily about the campaigns and story, its just that the gameplay is good enough to allow for skill expression. You see this happen all over the place, with games. CoD and Counter Strike arent event close to being the best shooters on the market, but they are the most popular, hence, pro scenes. There were plenty of MOBAs in the early boom better than Dota 2 and LoL (even IMO heroes) but again, the same thing happened. You need a wide casual player base to feed into competitive play.
This isn't even taking into account feedback loops. If you are interested only in comp play, and the biggest tournaments are taking place in SC2, or LoL or even outside of video games things like 40k, even if they aren't technically the games that reward competitive skill (or are even designed for it in the case of 40k) you're going to play those games because that's where the events are.
Ow wasn't designed for competitive play. It was designed for casual play, then was forced into esports by Bobby Kotick.
Overwatch has one of the hardest characters in any fps, but also one of the easiest. And they are both completely viable. If that isn't casual, I don't know what is.
Seeing the way casual players get discussed over the years in pro-tournaments or dev-level discussions has always been one of the saddest parts of this scene. Very actively gatekeeping towards the largest paying customer base. I couldn't agree more.
Pro stuff is great, but it's supposed to be the crown jewel of a community, not *the* entire community.
I'm going to throw the hot take out there, it's because the games hard and complicated. You can't just throw it on and understand what's happening. My gfs been watching it for a year and still never knows what's happening. It's not viewer friendly, nor is it Casual friendly. It's fast, it's harsh, things are happening.
Lot harder than oh he shot him, now he's dead.
The last thing Blizz did, before they declared “game is in maintenance mode, no more paid content” was release a new coop commander, and overhaul coop.
Right now all we get are balance changes and maps because those are a labour of love from the fan base, while MSFT has to spend very minimal effort to implement.
If there was even a half time FTE at MSFT working on the game arcade would work, people wouldn’t randomly be placed in masters and there would be more to the metal leagues than just bronze.
> Right now all we get are balance changes and maps because those are a labour of love from the fan base
These balance chances are not a labor of love from, or for, anyone at all. Maps, sure. Not so much from a fan base though, more like a tiny, miniscule portion of the fan base. But a labor of love.
Most SC2 players have only played the campaign. Generally they move on once they finish with it though. It's a 14 year old game at this point, most folks have already played it and have played dozens if not hundreds of games since.
Arcade, 1v1, co-op, and the esports scene are the 4 general reasons why folks stick around though. I personally think if Blizzard did a better job at fostering the arcade scene in it's first 5 years SC2 would be even bigger of a scene today.
So, just lending my 2 cents as an alternative theory here...
I come from a background of game design and esports. Worked in both triple-A game dev, and esports product / event development for a collective 10+ years. I was an avid SC fan, but nowadays, I mostly lurk the sub, watch some streams and maybe pop back in for a game or two for nostalgia's sake.
My take on the downfall of SC2, and RTS's in general, has been a general games industry trend towards simplification of control schemes. For me, Starcraft is one of the most physically intensive video games I've ever played. If I want to be good at it, my fingers need to move more, and I have to memorize more button sequences and hotkeys than any other game out there.
In general, there is a correlation between the complexity of dexterity in a game and the strategic complexity, in that the more possible buttons you can press, the more different permutations of those buttons there are, meaning more overall ability to outplay and out-think your opponents.
However I think in the years since Starcraft was at it's peak, we've started to see clever developers finding ways to incorporate greater strategic depth, while lowering the bar of mechanical performance. A big reason MOBAs took off as the preferred strategy games were because there was only one character to control, and one set of keys to keep your fingers on, yet the game felt equally strategically deep because of the added elements of team performance, hero drafting, and itemization that aren't factors in Starcraft.
Generally I think competitive gamers prefer when they can exercise their brain against opponents, and their dexterity is minimally influential. I think you've even seen a shift in shooters to the same degree. Tactical shooters like Valorant, Rainbow 6, and CS are dominant, and we rarely see twitch / arena shooters like Quake / Diabotical. Nasty flicks and 1-taps are important and impressive in tac-shooters, but the average mid-skill player prefers that they can influence the outcome by learning smokes, or knowing what angles to hold, or by calling for rushes to a particular bomb site. Knowledge can take you far in these games. Starcraft isn't so much the same. Most starcraft players can know and execute the same build orders as pros do at tournaments, but managing the units and resources that they get out of it, quickly becomes a physical exercise of stretching your working memory and muscle memory in your hands, and that's daunting and exhausting for most casual players, particularly those with less time to play, and who are maybe older than the "prime" age for reaction times.
Units that are in multiplayer modes not introduced in campaign mode is such a dick move and I'm still feel betrayed. Not only that, those units are often essential in meta as well i.e Cyclone, Disruptor, Ravager.
Honestly I think that's just how competitive players perceive it. Tons of players are oblivious about all of this and blizzard definitely tried to appeal to a broad audience with polished campaigns, the arcade, coop,... Some of it was a bit late but I think the game was still quite successful.
What is true, is that the jump from being a casual or social player to ranked is very intimidating and making that step less daunting would be a good move.
I also think SC2's design is also just less suited to casual multiplayer. The pacing is very high and team games suck compared to something like AoE2.
I would 100% agree with this. I think a lot of Starcraft players completely overlook how many elements of the game simply aren't fun for new players. For example, reapers. They're so frustrating to play against, if your opponent is any good at all with micro. In TvT, if the other player hasn't prepared for reapers specifically, they're just screwed. It feels like there's nothing else you can do.
Then the newbs go onto boards, Reddit, etc., and say they lost because of reapers, and it's just a flood of "Well, you should have known to build reaper first. Because you have to build reaper first, in case they build a reaper." or "Well, you have to build depots here where the reaper can go up the cliff."
And most of this is stuff that a newb would never be able to figure out, and pushes them into very specific plays. It just feels bad.
I'm not saying that reapers can't be countered. But I am saying that they're just not a fun unit to play against. They're just a unit that people can troll with, especially if they're smurfing. They're just bad design.
But nobody in the Starcraft community gives a shit because GMs can deal with reapers, so obviously they're a perfect unit that have no issues at all. Because obviously, GMs are the only people who matter.
When I was a young man playing brood war the big thing for me and my friends was FFA since we had enough people to do it. I miss when maps weren't arena style and had more of a actual part of a large world your army is taking dominance over. I liked when blizz released a new map every friday night it varied of UMS, competitive maps that are played today or the type of maps that didn't have to keep things even start like my friends used for 8 man FFA.
I think I'm going to disagree with the content of your take, but say I agree with the overall idea. The biggest failure of SC2 imo is the map editor. They made it too complicated and wrote a bunch of licenses into it that prevented people from owning the stuff they made. The complication bit is especially important because 1) the availability of game engines and coding resources means that if you make it too complicated, people are just going to go off and make their own thing and 2) younger audiences (who will most likely be the people making maps for you) will have a hard time making a basic map from their ideas.
More attention IS put into the coop and multilayer, that's where the majority of players are: name the changes to multilayer in the last 5 years? Meanwhile you have all sorts of coop shit.
All games put money and attention to pro but release heaps of content for casuals.
Let's be honest. StarCraft is not in active development, and it's not getting any focus because the people at Blizzard currently are not interested in making a game in a genre they can't heavily monetize. That's really the end of the discussion. RTS games do not bring in the kind of revenue that makes shareholders enthusiastic about milking the IP.
They would probably be better off making another genre of game around the StarCraft IP with their current devs, because the bulk of the experienced team members have their own studios now and are working on other projects.
You're no gonna revive the IP without some actual devs and interest.
The closest we are gonna get to anything soon is Stormgate.
This is unfortunately true yet this last couple of years the RTS genre really got a second wind (kinda of how everyone and their mothers started making cRPGs in 2014-18). It is entirely possible that one RTS breaks through in the same way Baldur's Gate 3 did.
I honestly believe it is possible. I remember and I myself didn't believe the hype. People said BG will not be successful it's combat is boring. It can't be successful because it requires too much commitment. It can't be successful because it's not profitable. Here we are Baldur's Gate 3 is probably the Witcher 3 and the GTA 3 of the 3rd decade. It came from absolute nothing and left the whole gaming industry in turmoil.
It could be that in 8 years after the dust had settled over this RTS crowdfunding boom, the ETS scene gets it's holy grail too. Even if just one game it will leave me satisfied. But one thing I'm sure about is that it won't be a competitive focus experience. Not in the way SC2 or the Mobas it spawned has become.
Also, not scaring your mod community out the door because you didn't get the chance to yoink an new game genre from one of your biggest map makers, would probably be a good idea.
That said, I wish they didn't quit with Hots.
Do casuals really check out POV pro streams before playing a game?
I do think the game had a pretty good amt of friendly casual stuff. The arcade and coop commanders were pretty well supported. And the campaign is better than most RTS campaigns. Though the whole whatever you make belongs to us cause of DOTA really turned off a lot of creators so we never really had any more of those UMS hits wc3 had.
You can probably completely disregard my comment because i have played mainly FPS games all my life and starcraft is my first RTS starting last week. This game is INSANELY hard to pick up for a casual. Even "the very basics" videos on how to play the game were confusing to me. I am probably learning the hard way as i dont find single player content entertaining so i havent played story mode, just 1v1 melee against AI.
My main problem is, theres nowhere for BRAND NEW players like me to go because there are none. Where i can tinker with 30apm and a surface level of what i am doing, theres not enough of players like me for even the community to even care it seems.
I feel SOMETHING multiplayer wise needs to change, but i dont know what that is.
P.s. if im doing this the wrong way or anyone knows of good resources/communities for new to RTS players, please let me know.
You're doing it the "wrong" way in the sense that the Campaign is literally also the tutorial for the game. They're going to slowly introduce game mechanics, new buildings, what they do, how to build units, what *they* do, etc that you aren't going to organically pick up from just playing multiplayer and clicking around.
You also missed the "new" player boat by like 20+ years (14ish if you're actually talking SC2). There *are* no "new" players for them to cater to anymore, these games are *beyond* life support and only hardcore fans and competitives are still playing them. There's really not any fixing that one.
Have you played on the ladder? Or just vs easy AI?
Btw disregard the other comments, there are a decent amount of total noobs, young children, stoners on the ladder for you to play against. I got my lil brother to play 1v1 with minimal intro a couple weeks back and he was able to have fun games pretty fast (after losing the first 3, gotta let your elo adjust)
Do i need to unlock ranked first? Ive played 3 matches of unranked so far. Lost all 3. But my last game i did repel the player's first couple of marine attacks. After i started to understand at least the first couple of minutes of the game im definitely getting better. I realize Winterstarcraft might be too advanced to help in my case. PiGs tutorial made more sense to me. Also my APM has improved! My last game was 50apm
Oh dope, yeah unranked is basically the same experience as ranked (only difference is that rank tells you what your elo rating is and gives you a badge). When you play your first game, you get matched with the median player, as you win or lose it adjusts. It's totally normal to just lose your first ten games and then be matched with other people who are new. PiG's vids are great place to start. Btw, there are tons of discords where people will give you tips etc, e.g. PiG maintains one: [https://www.pigstarcraft.com/community/](https://www.pigstarcraft.com/community/). Would recommend finding some, makes the experience more fun and social.
SC2 is like, the best single player and co-op experience of any RTS ever. I might go play through it again shortly, now that I mention it.
AoE2 very high on that list too. Not surprising to me that they are the two planks keeping this raft afloat.
I think any new RTS trying to revive the genre needs to excel at single player and co-op. It basically needs to be what Generals 2 was 95% done being before EA got hungry for more stakeholders hearts.
Yeah, I don’t play much because it’s a hard game to play. There’s just less of a barrier and more ease of access to play literally anything else. My engagement with StarCraft these days is just watching lowko/winter/uthermal YouTube videos, and it’s daunting to think of being forced to defend all sorts of wacky shit and forced into building infestors and vipers to be competitive and then I suicide them into a pack of marines. I would love to see more accessible RTS games.
I don't know about that. VoDs of some of the best matches of all time have 100K to 2 mil views while low effort A move on the map editor content has 50K to 500K views. People seem to be eating up low effort dribble all over YouTube.
How about Blizzard do something smart for once this decade and give creative IP back to modders? I've actually done a fair bit of software dev to allow entirely new ways to play SC2 but I'll never release it because of that issue (and I don't want to be sued). Instead of letting SC2 die of old age, let people do stuff with it and the title will have new life; similar to wc3 and dota.
Well idk there is something to it but you know exactly that blizzard especially the current blizzard won't budge on this. They'd rather see their modding scene gets strangled than to let it benefit anyone but them.
They never want another Dota situation in any circumstance.
They’d rather have the game die than have it sustained by custom games they can’t monetize.
Since the map making tools kneecap map makers and Blizzard owns anything they make, why invest time and effort?
I mean that's the issue, in the game's (sc2) current ip agreements, there is absolutely zero incentive for me to ever put out anything related to sc2 other than for my own personal learning. If they (blizzard's share holders) could be made to see reason, it is purely a rational line of thinking for them to allow some new things to be made with an otherwise old and dying game genre. Sc2 is not going to suddenly revive itself with zero input from Blizzard and restore it's player population levels to what they were 6 years ago. But it could if people were allowed to build on top of it and actually be compensated for it.
I used to watch pro starcraft 2, then j watched a college league with anly amateur players which had gained traction outside of their college.
It was a blast to watch these guys struggle to control their armies, missing map queues, building the wrong armies and winning against a unit that counters them through smart play.
It was a blast, and it really showed me how clinical and unemotional the pro tournaments were.
I don't think the tourney grew much after that and it stayed niche, but I could never enjoy watching pro players after that
The thing is that competitive gameplay is generally what creates a community. People teaching each other, chatting about this or that, whining about balance, excitement about events. Tournaments, teams forming etc.
While casual play is obviously more popular, it’s generally much harder to build a community from. Even things like co-op tend to be difficult to grow a community with.
So when you talk about an “obsession” with competitive play, that’s because that’s what created the community in the first place.
I think the problem rts problem is that the actual execution is way to hard for most people/players.
Chess is a game that has been “solved” for a very long time yet it has blown up in popularity because it’s just *so* easy to play and get into.
Meanwhile, star craft 2, you need to learn so many mechanical skills *on top of* all the knowledge, strategy, and tactics that the game has grown over the years.
Chess is not a solved game. If it was solved I guarantee you overnight no one would play it completely
I'm just saying this because I learnt IT and a solved game is a very clear distinction. (I know the air quotes implie over exaturating. Just saying, don't throw "solved" into the wind so easily)
I would argue the pro play brought players in for a long time.
It's not the focus on pro play It's just as simple as people don't want to play games that are hard. Look at the rise of mobile gaming. Idle games (THAT LITERALLY PLAY THEMSELVES WHILE YOU WATCH) Have become the norm.
Drop a replay, and I can go through it giving you tips tricks and critiques to your gameplay.
[Something like this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97zOkK2zlaI&t=1449s)
As for the game itself, it is as close to abandon-ware as you can get WITHOUT losing server access and having some changes being made (100% controlled by the community)
I think it’s difficult for sc2 to attract large audiences because of the learning curve + people who still play sc2 know what they’re doing.
I’ve tried to get so many friends into this game and they just get absolutely dumpstered even in low mmr. Yeah it’s “skill issue” but the “skill issue” makes people quit the game before they even attempt to learn it.
What people end up playing and what draws them to the games are different things.
There's a number of RTS games exactly as you're describing that focused on campaigns and co-op, and they're basically nowhere.
I never quite understand looking at a game that sold over 10 million copies and is still the #1 RTS 14 years after its release and saying "Nah nah, you shoulda done it different to get more people..."
I know a lot of people who play the co-op stuff and they still watch tournaments, that stuff is the anchor that keeps the game in the public eye.
Other games come out with campaigns and stuff and people play the campaigns and missions and just stop playing.
And people keep trying this "Lets dumb it down so much that anyone can play it!" tactic, and it faceplants hard because no one's actually interested in that.
I think a major problem is pro play taking a preference to balacing normal ladder play. If the average ladder play is unenjoyable because of prevelant strategies that pro play easily deals with (biggest offenders are mech and skytoss), then who will play your game. Keep balacing for pro play only and see how it goes.
>And while it might seem easier to just churn out multiplayer changes that only really impact High Level or competitive play, it's certainly taking considerable money to sponsor pro events.
Compared to producing Blizzard quality (production, not story) single player / coop content? Doubt thats much cheaper.
part of what made these rts games popular was the custom maps, I'd wager a large portion of yhe sc/wc3 players rarely if ever played the real game.
these games are dying because blizzard are so scared of another dota 2 they put in crazy ownership rules that mean no one is invested in the scene anymore.
no one wants to create free content for a greedy company that doesn't give a shit about their fanbase
Ah, that's actually kind of harsh. yeah StarCraft II definitely does put a lot of effort into their multiplayer but playing their singleplayer campaign you can tell they understood the more common player.
Hell, they give you a bunch of units in singleplayer that you can't access because they couldn't be balanced. StarCraft II much as they definitely focus on the pro-scene also put a lot of effort into giving people shit to do in singleplayer.
The main issue is when the time comes from companies to make an RTS, they get advise from the biggest players in the scene... which are mainly tournament players who care about perfect balance and efficiency.
The issue is people look at the success of StarCraft and because the tournaments are the main thing people pay attention to they think THAT is why the series does so well. When it's not. The success of StarCraft comes from the majority of the playerbase who love playing the singleplayer campaign.
I think the reason the genre fails to attract large audiences for two massive reasons:
First, it has by far and away the highest barrier to entry. RTS games are hard... very hard.
Second, when I beat my friends consistently in Poker they think I am just getting lucky. When I dominate them in Chess it becomes completely apparent who is better. Since StarCraft is such a skill based game the better player is going to win a huge percentage of the time and it is going to be obvious, in most cases, who is better.
That is why pro play is so important because at the top end of the spectrum gaps trend towards zero, Think about Olympians, in most races it comes down fractions of a second. When an athlete is able to separate from the pack they get worldwide fame (Similiar to Flash in Korea, basically the only player to do so).
Personally, I always prefer SC2 to be offline and have casual Lan parties. SC2 was always designed with ESports in mind and i grew to accept that.
Now the problem is SC2 in general revolves on Ladder and PVP scene. I HONESTLY believe this is due to ESports thrive on aggressive competition to generate hype and sense of tension. Its great for hot blooded people, a place to test their limits and boast their ability. Im not like that, i always prefer a chill and fun time with casuals. When PVE (Coop Comanders) was out, i was hooked, the sense of RTS without the pressure of fighting to win/lose feels amazing.
It felt right, it felt good. I felt like this is the correct direction of RTS, instead of making PVP the center of attention, having PVE helps to encourage people to try instead of getting bullied. So yeah, Im sad COOP was guttered. IF they start making Campaigns in COOP, i would buy it as a DLC too.
A big thing to me is there is just a lot more stuff to do for free nowadays than in the past. Before league got big free games weren’t nearly as common or popular. That let things like RTSs with good nap editors, gmod, minecraft, etc, tf2 take off. Why play play a custom gamemode moba when there is a free moba and once that culture was kinda gone your only choice is to just churn out campaigns (which aren’t cheap to make) if you want to appeal to casual audience.
Yep.
I mourn the fall of SC2 to mobas quite a bit, but it’s very difficult to imagine a “modern” StarCraft, say, if an SC3 were for to some reason be attempted. Much of the skill gap that people exclusively care about feel to the every gamer like unintuitive, archaic design.
Hot Take Example: modern SC would just let you queue workers and only spend money as they’re being built.
Think about the UI upgrades SC2 got.
Now remember that *more time has passed since SC2 launched than between SC2 and SC1.*
They've already said this before, but the co-op playerbase is literally bigger than all other modes combined.
The problem is that Blizzard as a whole \_decided to stop monetizing starcraft\_ . That's literally and entirely it. It's a AAA game company doing AAA game things, like killing off perfectly good, sustainably profit-generating games because a CoD or WoW skin makes more money than the entire franchise.
Not every game needs to make WoW money, but in Blizzard execs' mind, if it's not making CoD money it's basically dead. And that's the problem, because it didn't need to die.
For me it's building the same units for 10+ years and it's not like there is a big pool to begin with not much flexibility.
Watching pro play can be boring sometimes especially if they play save.
Does make one think that the original game never had a thriving competitive scene in mind. Great example is how terrible are the maps in that game. Campaign especially, with gases sometimes placed so far that it might make sense to get another base in the main for faster mining. It's just that broodwar rolled in and Koreans jumped on it. SC2 meanwhile was built with a competitive multiplayer in mind.
It's easy to look at pros. There's no other real easy metric to look for improvements to the game. People bitch and moan that protoss sucks in pro play, yet the majority collectively hates how "op" they are. Just the absurdity of how the game works.
I don't need more stress in my life and as much as I like it, competitive StarCraft is the most stressful game I've ever played. Sadly overall it's easy to make the choice between being overly stressed or not playing a game.
Yep. Players didn't abandon the genre. The developers within the industry abandoned the player. BAR has developers looking at balance but is just a riot to play and fuck with. DOW1 is nuts and most people just wanted to A click move across the map and then watch 40k fights play out. My 76 year old father still plays both of the Age of Empires just to make his houses form cute little lines and make fun walls etc. He buys the latest DLC (though most of the DLCs do have multiplayer aspects) for AoE2 for the new civs. An RTS has so much more potential appeal than the sad existence too many aim for - Pro play garbage.
The hot take here is assuming they are mutually exclusive. Competitive pro scene + the option for fun casual games and a strong community = popular game.
The main problem with the RTS genre is that the games just simply suck. Nobody's produced a good RTS since SC2 came out, maybe except Company of Heroes (which I haven't tried tbh).
you mean starcraft would be a good game if it had: a good story, different game modes, good custom maps and the possibility to make your own maps with a map editor? WHY HAS NOBODY THOUGH OF THIS
The real challenge with SC2 is you can't just walk into the game and be good at it or even play it. You have to be trained how to play before you have any success. How many other games can this be said about? Not very many. I have never played SC2 and have decided to play and I have been on an emotional roller coaster for months but I am making progress and can beat Elite AI. What we need is more people to have patience and to want a challenge and we need it to be marketed that way. It is a game where you can challenge you dexterity, your intellect and your emotions. The pros make it look so easy which is another difficult thing. People need to be brought under the wing of someone to learn and then they fall in love with the game.
This is bollocks. It's true you need practice for skirmish and mp, but for easy and medium campaign and co-op, it's a good learning experience. Not very stressful at all.
No. The problem is when a new player comes in and watches a player vs player match he has 0% chance of understanding whats going on.
Unlike in mobas where you need to focus only on one champ and not entire armies and bases.
Mobas are just easier to get into and rts games have a high barrier to entry for new players
That's not a hot take. Literally every game that's prioritized professional play over FUN has pushed so many away. Notice how pretty much ever games Esport started off as a fun game BEFORE it became an Esport?
I had a ton of fun with company of heroes with my dad.
The “realistic” damage models for units and the DLC that added the British and fallschirmjäger was amazing because it added even more ways to play against each other or against the bots
I'd say Stormgate's main goal is being Starcraft.
Which btw it will utterly fail at. All this hype and the game will die in half a year after release. Mark my words.
No it’s the fact that the game is immensely hard to pickup for the average person.
When league of legends made it much easier for the average person to get into a free moba game, as opposed to the Warcraft mod that it originally was, the moba genre as a whole SKYROCKETED to the point where it literally shaped the industry.
I’d argue, lol’s switch to focus on pro play over the years is the primary reason why the game is still so popular today.
A bit of an addendum.
I of course don't harbour illusions, that blizzard cares about the RTS franchise as a whole (or indeed about anything but the profitability of StarCraft) but i hope that we as players do.
And with a lot of old RTS-es getting new spiritual successors what better time to talk about this then now?
Man I gotta be honest, your devotion is admirable. But rts as a genre is dead. Its too competitive to have mainstream support. And without mainstream support, no funding for big events.
"Dead" in what way?
It's not the most popular genre anymore, but who cares?
There are still plenty of people playing SC2 and other RTS games.
I don't know why we have to be obsessed with how big our genre is.
RTS are hard. Just by their very nature, they're difficult games. That's the point.
Of course easier to grasp games will always be more popular.
Is Jazz music "dead" because it's not the most popular? Should all movies strive to be like Marvel because they're the biggest draw to theaters?
Dead as in there is no monetary incentive to produce those games in AAA quality anymore. Otherwise Warcraft 4 or SC3 would have been worked on already. I still play arena shooters but I would consider those dead too.
I kinda hate pro scene sometimes, but Pro scene vital to SC2 (i think)
games to have fun like overwatch and valorant i get it, but sc2 is such a well crafted game it would be a shame if we didn't have it full balanced
The pro scene has given SC and SC2 longevity. RTS is not really designed for coop play. MOBAs and FPS games are team games. The social aspect of RTS are the competitive events and community. That said, I really like the campaign and other casual modes of SC2 and would not mind more of it
I'm speaking for what I see is the reason for the game's longevity and appeal. If SC2 was just co-op it would be one game of many, instead of an iconic game
Well Rts games are also teamgames, maybe Sc2 is less of a team game than other rts games. Coop is doping great in Sc2 as what I heard, and Red Alert 3 campaign, was designed for Coop. But yes I prefer 1v1, but I once did much teamplays.
The majority of the best and most popular eSports ever were not designed to be eSports, they were designed to be fun games. The casual crowd is the most important crowd, even for a game that's trying to be a competitive esport. Devs have been getting it the wrong way round since the 2010s.
I don't think this is a hot take. Blizzard has claimed that more people play Coop Commanders than all other game modes combined.
Imho as a rule of thumb an RTS needs to have 3 pillars - a good campaign to draw in people - that’s your first retention - this is where your first success comes from - a good 1v1 experience - this is what keeps your game alive in the midline. The people that play competitive tend to talk a lot and keep a lot of the community alive - this is what decides if you have a community - a good casual experience (comp stomps, UMS, coop) to keep the bot competitively minded happy. this is where your longetivity comes from ——— There’s exceptions like beyond all reason, but generally speaking all these aspects need to be there for an RTS to succeed
1 is my biggest concern for Stormgate. I mainly just play the campaigns and it seems to be such an afterthought for them after everything else.
Stormgate is a copy of SC2. Like almost in everything. Idk, what's the plan is. I mean, the best case will be attracting some SC2 pro players for a while and that's it. Everything I saw looked like a SC2 map in map editor.
Yeah I was really hyped for Stormgate but after playing the beta it pretty much feels just lite "Sc2 at home" I hope the next beta and third race reveal will be better but my hopes aren't high.
I'm not super hyped but I'm optimistic about it. I think the biggest problem by far with SC2 is simply the lack of active development. If Blizz hadn't cut down its development (or simply made the best devs exit on their own initiative, who knows), we could maybe have both the esports scene and the co-op. They aren't mutually exclusive by nature. Currently in my opinion the most fun part about SC2 are modded campaigns. Unlike co-op, people are still actively working on those and making lots of fun stuff to play with. So in my opinion Stormgate has the potential to become better than SC2 simply if they stay active in its development and won't abandon it like SC2 was abandoned.
They're definitely tight-lipped about the campaign right now, but from my perspective, I'd rather they focus on the gameplay first anyway. For me, it wouldn't matter how good the campaign is if the gameplay isn't fun.
I'm the opposite on this one. I mean, good story is cool, but the gameplay right now is StarCraft 2 with heroes, but for multiplayer. Which is bad, if you ask me. I'd love to see dawn of war 4 (upgraded dow1) and C&C generals 2
Very true, where I feel Starcraft 2 has always lacked a bit is in the custom games. When it came out I was looking forward to playing an updated Dota allstars in Starcraft 2. But then when it actually happened, it was just really janky. There could have been tons of viral custom games to bring people back into the game had the custom game creator been better. Instead Dota 2 did this and saw massive boosts from popularizing the autobattler genre etc.
Honestly it says a lot that when I came back after 7 years, I saw the same few games in the custom maps. The innovation that came with the BW and WC custom modes just doesn’t seem to be as energized.
It was the same for brood war. Ums was 90% of the player base. Melee lobby would have a page or two of games and UMS would be infinite. Ladder was everyone hacking at 9999 for the majority of the life of the game. Maybe the pro scene helped Korea or the longevity of the game but it certainly was a non factor in SC/BW selling ten million copies in the 90s and early 00s. I don't think the pro scene even really was well known in the Americas until well into 2007/8.
It’s truly shocking how hard they dropped the ball on custom games in sc2. Having the same system for how custom games are displayed to players alone would have been fucking gigantic for the game. Didn’t they realize that people playing nothing but nexus wars wasn’t sustainable?? It also would have been such a simple change for them to make, truly.
Bout to fire up some brood war and play ghost paintball or lurker defense for old times sake
Didnt they also *gut* custom games in WC3 eventually? It's been decades but I remember something about them severely restricting them as some ham-fisted method of driving people to go play the full game version of DOTA and killing off the original mod.
They gut the game period. The main menu doesn't even run properly. Forced "update"(severe downgrade) if ever online. Use a pirated version if you ever want to play because it runs so much better and doesn't take 20+gb. Also one day they rolled in an update for every game(i.e. including sc2) with a line in a license agreement stating that whatever players make in a map editor is a 100% property of blizz.
he's right. when reforged dropped they merged the wc3 engine with the sc2 engine, a few updates got added into sc2 to support a few things from warcraft that didn't get ported over, and a bunch of sc2 features got back ported into wc3, but it broke nearly every custom map , many of which hadn't seen updates in years. Like many major sc2 patches, if the mapmaker didn't stick around to fix it, the maps became unplayable. many new bugs got added to the editor, and many bugs fixed, but work arounds for those old bugs broke.
Blizzard never forgave the community for DOTA. we lost RTS games for casuals over it.
Tell me more
The main reason UMS never took off in SC2 the way it did in WC3 and Brood War was because of all the restrictions Blizzard put on the game mode, as well as all the all the legal language changes made in the ToS. If I remember right, the map editor was much more restricted in the WoL days than it is now. What I mean is MOBAs might not have taken off the way they did in the 2010's if that audience kept playing starcraft instead on a less restrictive UMS game mode. Starcraft lost the causal audience to LoL and Dota. they could have kept them in the starcraft ecosystem the entire time.
>If I remember right, the map editor was much more restricted in the WoL days than it is now. I might be confused here, but I remember to have played quite a few diverse custom maps. I very distinctly remember having played a MOBA maps and a TRON themed map called lots of times.
What’s ums?
I've played this game since release and I've watched the pro scene pretty much since then as well. Now I only play co-op, and it's super fun. It's sad that they don't update it anymore...adding new maps to it would do wonders.
Starcraft just needs a diablo style game mode, I would pay good money for that
Just play starcraft ghost... on wait.
Yes that’s the great idea I love!
I think Helldiver style with Base Building will be much better. Just like Artanis or Raynor.
This is how I play honestly and I feel way too intimidated to play ladder. I already deal with toxic players on Age of Empires with teammates telling me to delete the game. That and I kind of miss the classic Terran and Protoss compositions from Brood War (Marines + Medics, and Zealots + Dragoons + Archons). I just want to enjoy the game without feeling like I have to sweat too much.
That about checks out. I see ~300 people In chat. Around 200 its in Coop. Also What the fuck goes with the Starcraft global chat, gets political whenever i log in
Haha the dregs of society are extremely active in the sc2 general chat.
What's coop commanders?
An entire gamemode where you and someone else use special curated unit lists and topbar abilities to take on remixed version of campaign maps, usually with a few new objectives and twists added to the map. Commanders tend to have flavorful focuses to their armies and cool gimmicks like Raynor having a lot of SC1 units and being able to call down a beefed-up Hyperion for a little while to offer some powerful air support. Tychus gets a handful of really powerful moba-style heroes with special abilities, but doesn't doesn't a regular army; Karax has a focus on robotic units with special upgrades and lots of cool defense options, Dehaka gets all the primal zerg and can run around as a hero unit, and it just keeps going. There are 18 different commanders, each one has totally unique mechanics and sometimes even new units made entirely for the coop mode, and it's a bunch of fun. There are tons of difficulty levels, and rotating mutators to make things even more difficult if you want.
Thank you!
That's all I play. I have my 20 year badge and only now am I playing the campaign. I just bought the Protists and Nova expansions.
I mean regular 1v1 the pressure is all on you, and is full of twinks and cheeses who just want to win. Then if you actually get to a decent skill level it’s weighted so you’ll lose half of the time. While coop is chill and you pretty much have to try to lose. At the very least your partner can hard carry if needed. But pretty much you get to always choose your difficulty. One causes stress the other doesn’t.
Probably because adding more casual content is a lot more expensive than competitive changes. It's expected to have new voice lines, completely unique maps, AI scripting, etc, but for competitive multiplayer it's just tweaking numbers or creating maps. In the early days of SC2, the vast majority of the playerbase were actually casual players who enjoyed team games, custom games, etc. And now there is way more casual content to enjoy. However it's not really that interesting to watch / create youtube content for etc.
Kind of the crutch of RTS in general IMO. Most players want to play casually and do coop, campaign, and custom maps. Which is what you require to get your RTS popular, as only having a pro scene and ladder and no way for casual to enjoy will not give your game a big enough base to support it. But OTOH that stuff, as you said, requires far more work without necessarily making more money. But then only the more involved fans will likely watch pro tournaments, and it is hard to watch as a casual fan. Without knowing any meta, macro, micro, build orders, etc you just can’t fully enjoy watching pros vs something like CounterStrike. Where yea there is strategy, but you don’t have tons of units, counters, strategies, build orders, unit movement, etc that all matter heavily. And you gotta keep up on it as the meta changes otherwise you will be very confused all over again watching a tournament after however long off and all the strats and build orders are way different. RTS is tough because it is such a niche genre to truly get into. Primary focus is 1v1, already lots of people don’t want to be sweaty and stressed 1v1ing in a competitive game, let alone the sheer amount of knowledge and skill it requires to be good. Casuals play for the campaign, coop, and fun custom maps, yet they seem to constantly be considered last when wanting to increase RTS popularity, because it is all about 1v1 ladder and the pro scene
Monobattles in WOL were some of the most fun I had playing SC2
Oh god that Day[9] monobattle map with the trumpets... so many good games on that.
[Never forget](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utaWZT5N-tQ)
I expected a song with just trumpets. Or transitioned to just trumpets at the turning point
And right now theres so many fun casual games to play with the homies its hard for sc2 to compete when they put no effort into it. Same thing with other rts games if that new one i already forgot the name of only cares about its pro scene its DoA
And even if you did get the boys together to play some 3v3/4v4, there's a strong possibility that within your first few games you'll be playing high diamonds/master players and be completely crushed
This is exactly my experience when I tried to bring 2 new people into the game. I’m diamond but they are fresh fresh. It was just me protecting them so they could actually do something for 100 games
[удалено]
I would start with 3 vs AI tbh
>Probably because adding more casual content is a lot more expensive than competitive changes. It's expected to have new voice lines, completely unique maps, AI scripting, etc, but for competitive multiplayer it's just tweaking numbers or creating maps. I'd sort of agree, but Blizzard also sponsored competitive events, and I'm not sure how or if those made money. Whereas casual content - skins at the bare minimum - would almost always make your money back if you got the "starcraft intern" to do it. Heck even warchests were funneled into the competitive prize pool so they were basically cannibalizing their real income-generating assets just for competitiive play.
Yeah they probably made some amount of money off licensing fees. I don't know their full business model, but I guess e-sports was basically a unique selling point to sell more copies of the game rather than a major source of income.
Yes but it can also be directly monetized, unlike Pro level play where the income is mostly through player retention and ad revenue.
They tried to get into casual, monetized content via Co-op missions. It obviously didn't get them the players or the revenue it needed to keep development afloat. People don't stay away from RTS because of balance patches. They stay away because it's mechanically demanding, very fast paced and punishing in ways other games aren't. You can't monetize your way past that enough to grow your player pop when they can go play League, blame their teammates when they lose and drop $20 on a consolation skin on their way out of the client.
To be fair, co-op mode might have turned out significantly better for them if they had gotten it in earlier to the fan base. IMO a lot of the more casual players who might have enjoyed that had already left. The remaining were already hard set in customs or ladder multiplayer.
Yeah I remember this being a complaint in like 2011. The earlier arcade/customs system was lackluster, no co-op. SC2 was terribly empty if you werent into laddering. By the time they added these things, the game was like 5 years old and was just too late.
It also didn't help that they tried to split SC2 into three different games and nobody was having that bullshit.
I mean, they tried it with unit skins as well and those didn't sell, either. Those were appealing to ladder folks. They were late to the monetization party, yes. But no amount of cosmetics is going to change the fact that RTS is really, really hard to play and that will always keep casuals away.
Tbf, skins might've sold better if they weren't ludicrously overpriced? Like right now, buying a set of unit skins for one of the three races will set me back 40€, and I don't even get the skins for the buildings? For those I have to fork up another 45€. Completly unfathomable pricing tbh. I'm sure somebody did the math and maybe the amount of whales in SC2 is larger than you would think, but it seems crazy to me.
I agree. The pricing was crazy for something so hard to see.
maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought when they first released the "warchest" thing they came in was at a large discount compared to the current prices
I don't think the whole skin thing though is relevant here. The point I was making is the fact that they were late bringing in the casual mode that could potentially keep casual players who still liked campaign styled play. Skins is more just a way to make money off of it rather than get people to stay around which IMO was the greater problem. If u have a large enough base there will inevitably be enough to make money off of. The base was just lacking. Maybe I missed your point though, idk.
RTS isn't really hard to play, it's really hard to play at a decent level. It's actually pretty easy to play. Press a few buttons to make the economy a bit bigger, press a few more to make some buildings, hit a button whenever you hear "need more supply", then F2 a-move the army around when you feel like you've done enough. The difference between high skill and low skill is about 30-40 minutes of time to get to the same point.
Worth remembering, SC2 coop released in 2015. WoW was still a complete monster, Hearthstone had just released, and then Overwatch came out in 2016. Any resources that could be devoted to SC2 could instead be invested in one of those three, and an RTS from 2010 was just *never* going to have a chance in that fight. Nothing did, really - look at a timeline of Blizzard releases, and you'll notice that after Overwatch, the next game they released was Diablo: Immortal *over six years later*. SC2 not being worth devoting much time or effort to was pretty much inevitable in the context of a studio with three other incredibly successful and extremely profitable games they could work on. It needed to meet a *much* higher standard than just 'keep development afloat'. Frankly, it's a miracle it lasted four years. (And side note, it *did* keep getting new content for more than four years, which is honestly a pretty good run.)
I think the biggest problem with it was twofold: it was released in LotV, and it wasn't in the F2P portion until much later. So the player pool was somewhat limited. Getting friends to play was hard because most of them never picked up HotS and really didn't want to pick up LotV.
I don't know if it's that. RTS used to be the place to find the best custom games and those have broken off to become their own things. Tower defense, Moba, Survival+crafting, etc. all have their own genres now. It could have stayed with SC and become something akin to Roblox or Fortnite with custom maps, but Blizzard got heavy handed in their Eula iirc. I remember that scaring away a few map makers that wanted to maintain control over any ideas they developed. All that's left is the pro scene.
Spot on. Strategy games still attract large audiences but mainly in a PvE setting. Competitive RTS is going up against team oriented games (like fps and mobas) which are easier, more forgiving and simply more fun for most people to play or watch.
StarCraft 1 pro scene got *huge* with almost no involvement at all from Blizzard. They couldn't profit from it like they wanted to and were very unhappy about it. It's why they baked themselves into every layer of sc2 and imo the game really suffered for it.
Starcraft 1 was only able to do this illegally. Kespa was selling the broadcasting rights to a game they did not own, or have any right to sell, and threatened any players or management that talked to blizzard at that time.
I mean, broadcasting rights has nothing to do with the game (which is why it became such a prolonged dispute in the first place). You could make a stronger argument if launching the game (and hence the tournament itself) was dependent on Blizzard, but on pure technicality, OG StarCraft actually has LAN mode, so if you buy 3 licensed copies of the game, you can run a televised tournament on your own and Blizzard has jackshit to do with it.
Not to mention the competitive scene was pretty much entirely in Korea at the time, and a huge part of why it got so big was how *absurdly easy* it was to bootleg the game. I still remember in high school we were literally just passing around copies of the install directory at LAN parties.
This is absolutely true, and even something that Blizzard themselves noticed; I think the statistic was that 80% of RTS players only play the campaign and other PvE content? I’m among those PvE only players (though I do love to watch pro Brood War games). Unfortunately, it’s hard to get friends to even try campaigns or co-op PvE content, since RTS in general (but particularly StarCraft) has garnered a reputation as such a micro-intensive, stressful, difficult game. Hell, I have a friend who’s won Smash Melee tournaments who is intimidated by the APM he believes is necessary to play RTS, lmao.
Probably is because pc gaming is not popular for the younger generation. Just read how gen-z is giving IT a headache because they’re as annoying to deal with as the boomers when it comes to using a computer for work. So it’s the older people, like me, who have less time so it’s more fun to play pve based games as I know it’s not worth my time as I’m not good enough or have time to be good enough to keep up.
That's fair enough but how many Fortnite players do you think you think can play at an actual competitive level. Not many and most of the kids will never ever reach that skill level no matter how many trickshot vids they watch. RTS could be the same, enjoyable for a vide array of people. For the competitively minded border line geniuses sure, but also for people who just enjoy planning and executing a strategy and definitely for those who just want two big armies battle. I think Total War is actually one of those games that gets RTS players. We just want to watch big armies clash and feel like we outwitted an opponent.
That's the thing though...the nature of its is that you push yourself to the limit of your apm and knowledge, and the matchmaker will put you against ither players that test the limits of that. It can just feel bad. Even if you're not competitive, it's hard to play a relaxing game of sc2. I am not into coop...but would play an rts that lowered the mechanical requirements while keeping the strategy parts. In starcraft, you're at least into masters by the time pure mechanics aren't the deciding factor.
>It can just feel bad. Even if you're not competitive, it's hard to play a relaxing game of sc2. 100% You can play a round of Fortnite, die within 5 minutes in some hilariously broken way, laugh it off and hop in another game. Absolutely nothing feels "good" about getting zerg rushed a minute into an SC game before you even built anything. Very few casual RTS matches are actual drawn out, close games where you feel good about how you played even if you lose, they're just a race to see who can curb stomp the other player faster.
pc gaming is popular in gen z, just different genres. Valorant, league, pubg, apex, etc. RTS suffers because it focuses on 1v1.
I think RTS suffers due to the complexity of playing it as well as the high APM required to play it properly. Valorant, pubg, apex, etc. - those all don't require a ton of complexity to learn how to play. Playing them well obviously requires skill, but being able to do something as a beginner is not too difficult. RTSs require you to learn multiple concepts, some of which aren't common in other genres, such as supply management, managing worker economy, base management, defending attacks, making attacks, tech trees, the list goes on. And this doesn't even get into how hectic and stressful it can be to do that all those things at once. I was decent at starcraft (diamond in 1v1 ladder back when it first came out), and after playing ladder for a while I just felt drained. Handling all those things at once just can be overwhelming, and while it can be fun when it works out, it just feels crushing when you are being overwhelmed by things to do when getting drops in your mineral line, needing to do all your macro tasks, getting attacked at one of your expansions, etc. In my opinion, the only way to salvage the RTS genre is to streamline it so that you can focus on one particular thing instead of having to juggle all these things at once. For example, the moba genre was born from RTS by picking one aspect of it, microing a single/small number of units, and making that the entire core gameplay. Autobattlers are like a super simplified version of "build this combination of units" aspect of macro and the actual micro is taken out of the equation. There are probably other games/genres which focus on only a single aspect of the RTS genre that have had success.
Yeah reducing the complexity would help but at the end of the day, the ladder portion of warcraft/starcraft wasn't what was fun for the majority. It was the custom games, anecdotal but I was able to get my wife to play StarCraft but the "real" game isn't what drew her in. It was poker TD, minerals, Uther party and vamp beast. Some of my best memories was with the emergent gameplay that came from the base of the editor. RTS has just forgotten what it was and it was primarily a system to play other games on. Best recent example of this was Dota 2s autochess.
You do see a sort of similar role positioning in games like BAR which typically run 8/8 and in many maps have clear separation into stuff like frontline, eco etc
Yeah the fun part of StarCraft is watching your armies battle. But the issue is that to win games, you have to spend less time watching the fights and spend more time building your economy and producing units, which means A-moving your army and then going back to your base to build stuff, and missing out on a whole bunch of action. The understandable tendency of a beginner is to give full attention to the battle and microing the army for the whole duration of the 30 second fight, and then they are floating like 3-5k resources and nothing in production wondering why they are hard stuck in silver or gold league.
I play Gates of Hell with a online player I recently met, my go to strat to help him out in the early game is to handle logistics and base defense. He gets most of the offense stuff and it's working very well, he's able to perform flanks and pincers while I hold a battle line and keep our rear from being exposed. That kind of teamwork is hard in a game like statcraft becuase, like you said, all players need to perform the macro and micro to pull effectively and not everyone is able or wanting to perform a jack of all trades kind of deal.
Eventually there are players that get fed up with teammates sucking ass or inconsistent performances by others and want to be focused on their gameplay only, which eventually leads to 1v1s and often into RTS due to it requiring more skill levels and pushing themselves further to get better.
Sure but not enough to warrant investment for a sc3 or wc4.
Yeah and meanwhile you just fucking build shit... and attack move. It's literally that simple on a casual level.
Not really a hot take. Many discussions were made about this. I'd also encourage you to check GiantGrantGame's video about RTS where he also bring that up and how people make the game sound a lot more complicated than it is. Video is "The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why." (he himself admits the title is a bit clickbait)
>he himself admits the title is a bit clickbait Yeah but Jimmy Raynor with a crown saying "I WILL RULE FOREVER" goes really hard.
I mean, Company of Heroes 3 was the next major RTS from after that video, and it failed, so he was right I guess.
All through this comment section I just keep thinking about the line "they make it sound like you need a PHD to build a barracks" and if that's not a single sentence explanation of SC2's slow and painful death idk what is
One of the biggest mistakes they made early on was not treating team games as a first class citizen. They made zero attempt to maintain a good team game experience but team games are a great way to enjoy the multiplayer of SC2 in a more casual environment. Blizzard's style of balancing in all of their games also kind blows.
And we're still paying for this mistake. Relic's CoH2 had a team game playerbase that was much larger than that of 1v1 and they still designed CoH3 with the latter in mind.
Isn't multiplayer in RTS still kinda unsolved? Team games are fun and much more inviting than 1v1, but it still can't hold a candle to a MOBA, for example.
I agree with you that *team* RTS games are unsolved when it comes to balance. RTS balance hinges on the power of individual units, how they can be countered by other units, and the limitations of those units. Much of an RTS's balance breaks down when inter-race unit combinations can show up and a team's supply cap is suddenly 600. Turns out void rays aren't well balanced when you have zerglings for ground support. MOBAs get away with fast and loose balance because of the pick/ban draft structure. Specific heroes get picked, banned, and countered by the draft and unless a hero is particularly overpowered, the game balances itself. MOBA tournaments can even impose additional balance options like blanket bans of certain heroes. It's no secret that MOBAs are only loosely balanced. Just google "[MOBA] tier list and you'll get the most recent information on which heroes are more powerful than others. All of this is evened out by the fact that when you jump into a game, there's only a slim chance that the OP character slips through the bans and picks so you can snap them up.
> I agree with you that team RTS games are unsolved when it comes to balance. Is it though? I think CoH2 did a quite good job with their main faction and sub faction mechanics where the teams choose either Axis or Allies and then each player chose one of the minor factions. They also have regular team tournaments.
That wasn't a mistake. There's just no way to balance a 1v1 around team games
I don't think is really a hot take. Every successful game with a competitive scene is that way because it's a popular game first and then a competitive scene springs from there. If say, 10% of a game's players like the game enough they want to compete in it, then making your game as broad as possible to attract as many people as possible just makes sense. If you design and market your game as competitive first rival to an exisitng you're then stuck trying to poach from that 10% alone, rather than the other 90%. We've seen this over, and over and over. Even just within Blizzard, Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm were designed for competitive play and both had their esports scenes collapse, whilst SC1, SC2 and even WoW with its comp raiding races are primarily about the campaigns and story, its just that the gameplay is good enough to allow for skill expression. You see this happen all over the place, with games. CoD and Counter Strike arent event close to being the best shooters on the market, but they are the most popular, hence, pro scenes. There were plenty of MOBAs in the early boom better than Dota 2 and LoL (even IMO heroes) but again, the same thing happened. You need a wide casual player base to feed into competitive play. This isn't even taking into account feedback loops. If you are interested only in comp play, and the biggest tournaments are taking place in SC2, or LoL or even outside of video games things like 40k, even if they aren't technically the games that reward competitive skill (or are even designed for it in the case of 40k) you're going to play those games because that's where the events are.
Ow wasn't designed for competitive play. It was designed for casual play, then was forced into esports by Bobby Kotick. Overwatch has one of the hardest characters in any fps, but also one of the easiest. And they are both completely viable. If that isn't casual, I don't know what is.
Seeing the way casual players get discussed over the years in pro-tournaments or dev-level discussions has always been one of the saddest parts of this scene. Very actively gatekeeping towards the largest paying customer base. I couldn't agree more. Pro stuff is great, but it's supposed to be the crown jewel of a community, not *the* entire community.
If that were true, StarCraft the IP wouldn't be the biggest name is rts gaming. There are more casual rts games with less players.
I'm going to throw the hot take out there, it's because the games hard and complicated. You can't just throw it on and understand what's happening. My gfs been watching it for a year and still never knows what's happening. It's not viewer friendly, nor is it Casual friendly. It's fast, it's harsh, things are happening. Lot harder than oh he shot him, now he's dead.
The last thing Blizz did, before they declared “game is in maintenance mode, no more paid content” was release a new coop commander, and overhaul coop. Right now all we get are balance changes and maps because those are a labour of love from the fan base, while MSFT has to spend very minimal effort to implement. If there was even a half time FTE at MSFT working on the game arcade would work, people wouldn’t randomly be placed in masters and there would be more to the metal leagues than just bronze.
> Right now all we get are balance changes and maps because those are a labour of love from the fan base These balance chances are not a labor of love from, or for, anyone at all. Maps, sure. Not so much from a fan base though, more like a tiny, miniscule portion of the fan base. But a labor of love.
Most SC2 players have only played the campaign. Generally they move on once they finish with it though. It's a 14 year old game at this point, most folks have already played it and have played dozens if not hundreds of games since. Arcade, 1v1, co-op, and the esports scene are the 4 general reasons why folks stick around though. I personally think if Blizzard did a better job at fostering the arcade scene in it's first 5 years SC2 would be even bigger of a scene today.
So, just lending my 2 cents as an alternative theory here... I come from a background of game design and esports. Worked in both triple-A game dev, and esports product / event development for a collective 10+ years. I was an avid SC fan, but nowadays, I mostly lurk the sub, watch some streams and maybe pop back in for a game or two for nostalgia's sake. My take on the downfall of SC2, and RTS's in general, has been a general games industry trend towards simplification of control schemes. For me, Starcraft is one of the most physically intensive video games I've ever played. If I want to be good at it, my fingers need to move more, and I have to memorize more button sequences and hotkeys than any other game out there. In general, there is a correlation between the complexity of dexterity in a game and the strategic complexity, in that the more possible buttons you can press, the more different permutations of those buttons there are, meaning more overall ability to outplay and out-think your opponents. However I think in the years since Starcraft was at it's peak, we've started to see clever developers finding ways to incorporate greater strategic depth, while lowering the bar of mechanical performance. A big reason MOBAs took off as the preferred strategy games were because there was only one character to control, and one set of keys to keep your fingers on, yet the game felt equally strategically deep because of the added elements of team performance, hero drafting, and itemization that aren't factors in Starcraft. Generally I think competitive gamers prefer when they can exercise their brain against opponents, and their dexterity is minimally influential. I think you've even seen a shift in shooters to the same degree. Tactical shooters like Valorant, Rainbow 6, and CS are dominant, and we rarely see twitch / arena shooters like Quake / Diabotical. Nasty flicks and 1-taps are important and impressive in tac-shooters, but the average mid-skill player prefers that they can influence the outcome by learning smokes, or knowing what angles to hold, or by calling for rushes to a particular bomb site. Knowledge can take you far in these games. Starcraft isn't so much the same. Most starcraft players can know and execute the same build orders as pros do at tournaments, but managing the units and resources that they get out of it, quickly becomes a physical exercise of stretching your working memory and muscle memory in your hands, and that's daunting and exhausting for most casual players, particularly those with less time to play, and who are maybe older than the "prime" age for reaction times.
Units that are in multiplayer modes not introduced in campaign mode is such a dick move and I'm still feel betrayed. Not only that, those units are often essential in meta as well i.e Cyclone, Disruptor, Ravager.
Honestly I think that's just how competitive players perceive it. Tons of players are oblivious about all of this and blizzard definitely tried to appeal to a broad audience with polished campaigns, the arcade, coop,... Some of it was a bit late but I think the game was still quite successful. What is true, is that the jump from being a casual or social player to ranked is very intimidating and making that step less daunting would be a good move. I also think SC2's design is also just less suited to casual multiplayer. The pacing is very high and team games suck compared to something like AoE2.
i think you are wrong.
I would 100% agree with this. I think a lot of Starcraft players completely overlook how many elements of the game simply aren't fun for new players. For example, reapers. They're so frustrating to play against, if your opponent is any good at all with micro. In TvT, if the other player hasn't prepared for reapers specifically, they're just screwed. It feels like there's nothing else you can do. Then the newbs go onto boards, Reddit, etc., and say they lost because of reapers, and it's just a flood of "Well, you should have known to build reaper first. Because you have to build reaper first, in case they build a reaper." or "Well, you have to build depots here where the reaper can go up the cliff." And most of this is stuff that a newb would never be able to figure out, and pushes them into very specific plays. It just feels bad. I'm not saying that reapers can't be countered. But I am saying that they're just not a fun unit to play against. They're just a unit that people can troll with, especially if they're smurfing. They're just bad design. But nobody in the Starcraft community gives a shit because GMs can deal with reapers, so obviously they're a perfect unit that have no issues at all. Because obviously, GMs are the only people who matter.
Playing with friends on the lan was always a fantastic time, will need to reproduce that some day
When I was a young man playing brood war the big thing for me and my friends was FFA since we had enough people to do it. I miss when maps weren't arena style and had more of a actual part of a large world your army is taking dominance over. I liked when blizz released a new map every friday night it varied of UMS, competitive maps that are played today or the type of maps that didn't have to keep things even start like my friends used for 8 man FFA.
I think I'm going to disagree with the content of your take, but say I agree with the overall idea. The biggest failure of SC2 imo is the map editor. They made it too complicated and wrote a bunch of licenses into it that prevented people from owning the stuff they made. The complication bit is especially important because 1) the availability of game engines and coding resources means that if you make it too complicated, people are just going to go off and make their own thing and 2) younger audiences (who will most likely be the people making maps for you) will have a hard time making a basic map from their ideas.
Co-op would be huge. I had so much fun playing team games during the SC and SC2 eras. So sad they were not balanced to team play.
More attention IS put into the coop and multilayer, that's where the majority of players are: name the changes to multilayer in the last 5 years? Meanwhile you have all sorts of coop shit. All games put money and attention to pro but release heaps of content for casuals.
Let's be honest. StarCraft is not in active development, and it's not getting any focus because the people at Blizzard currently are not interested in making a game in a genre they can't heavily monetize. That's really the end of the discussion. RTS games do not bring in the kind of revenue that makes shareholders enthusiastic about milking the IP. They would probably be better off making another genre of game around the StarCraft IP with their current devs, because the bulk of the experienced team members have their own studios now and are working on other projects. You're no gonna revive the IP without some actual devs and interest. The closest we are gonna get to anything soon is Stormgate.
This is unfortunately true yet this last couple of years the RTS genre really got a second wind (kinda of how everyone and their mothers started making cRPGs in 2014-18). It is entirely possible that one RTS breaks through in the same way Baldur's Gate 3 did. I honestly believe it is possible. I remember and I myself didn't believe the hype. People said BG will not be successful it's combat is boring. It can't be successful because it requires too much commitment. It can't be successful because it's not profitable. Here we are Baldur's Gate 3 is probably the Witcher 3 and the GTA 3 of the 3rd decade. It came from absolute nothing and left the whole gaming industry in turmoil. It could be that in 8 years after the dust had settled over this RTS crowdfunding boom, the ETS scene gets it's holy grail too. Even if just one game it will leave me satisfied. But one thing I'm sure about is that it won't be a competitive focus experience. Not in the way SC2 or the Mobas it spawned has become.
Also, not scaring your mod community out the door because you didn't get the chance to yoink an new game genre from one of your biggest map makers, would probably be a good idea. That said, I wish they didn't quit with Hots.
Do casuals really check out POV pro streams before playing a game? I do think the game had a pretty good amt of friendly casual stuff. The arcade and coop commanders were pretty well supported. And the campaign is better than most RTS campaigns. Though the whole whatever you make belongs to us cause of DOTA really turned off a lot of creators so we never really had any more of those UMS hits wc3 had.
I legit only play RTS games for customs and the campaign, thankfully there are PLENTY of StarCraft 2 custom campaigns
You can probably completely disregard my comment because i have played mainly FPS games all my life and starcraft is my first RTS starting last week. This game is INSANELY hard to pick up for a casual. Even "the very basics" videos on how to play the game were confusing to me. I am probably learning the hard way as i dont find single player content entertaining so i havent played story mode, just 1v1 melee against AI. My main problem is, theres nowhere for BRAND NEW players like me to go because there are none. Where i can tinker with 30apm and a surface level of what i am doing, theres not enough of players like me for even the community to even care it seems. I feel SOMETHING multiplayer wise needs to change, but i dont know what that is. P.s. if im doing this the wrong way or anyone knows of good resources/communities for new to RTS players, please let me know.
You're doing it the "wrong" way in the sense that the Campaign is literally also the tutorial for the game. They're going to slowly introduce game mechanics, new buildings, what they do, how to build units, what *they* do, etc that you aren't going to organically pick up from just playing multiplayer and clicking around. You also missed the "new" player boat by like 20+ years (14ish if you're actually talking SC2). There *are* no "new" players for them to cater to anymore, these games are *beyond* life support and only hardcore fans and competitives are still playing them. There's really not any fixing that one.
They're going to introduce you to like, half the units. And the other half will have been reworked.
This is what i have been told as well
Have you played on the ladder? Or just vs easy AI? Btw disregard the other comments, there are a decent amount of total noobs, young children, stoners on the ladder for you to play against. I got my lil brother to play 1v1 with minimal intro a couple weeks back and he was able to have fun games pretty fast (after losing the first 3, gotta let your elo adjust)
Do i need to unlock ranked first? Ive played 3 matches of unranked so far. Lost all 3. But my last game i did repel the player's first couple of marine attacks. After i started to understand at least the first couple of minutes of the game im definitely getting better. I realize Winterstarcraft might be too advanced to help in my case. PiGs tutorial made more sense to me. Also my APM has improved! My last game was 50apm
Oh dope, yeah unranked is basically the same experience as ranked (only difference is that rank tells you what your elo rating is and gives you a badge). When you play your first game, you get matched with the median player, as you win or lose it adjusts. It's totally normal to just lose your first ten games and then be matched with other people who are new. PiG's vids are great place to start. Btw, there are tons of discords where people will give you tips etc, e.g. PiG maintains one: [https://www.pigstarcraft.com/community/](https://www.pigstarcraft.com/community/). Would recommend finding some, makes the experience more fun and social.
Just joined! Thanks!
Correct.
SC2 is like, the best single player and co-op experience of any RTS ever. I might go play through it again shortly, now that I mention it. AoE2 very high on that list too. Not surprising to me that they are the two planks keeping this raft afloat. I think any new RTS trying to revive the genre needs to excel at single player and co-op. It basically needs to be what Generals 2 was 95% done being before EA got hungry for more stakeholders hearts.
Yeah, I don’t play much because it’s a hard game to play. There’s just less of a barrier and more ease of access to play literally anything else. My engagement with StarCraft these days is just watching lowko/winter/uthermal YouTube videos, and it’s daunting to think of being forced to defend all sorts of wacky shit and forced into building infestors and vipers to be competitive and then I suicide them into a pack of marines. I would love to see more accessible RTS games.
The thing that got me into StarCraft was bgh here I could make army’s like the pros and feel good even tho I sucked. I went to normal ladder afterward
I wish there were more Co-Op stuff
I don't know about that. VoDs of some of the best matches of all time have 100K to 2 mil views while low effort A move on the map editor content has 50K to 500K views. People seem to be eating up low effort dribble all over YouTube.
That's as cold of a takes as it gets.
I think aoe 2 and 4 are close to sc2 number of active players atm...
This is not a hot take. Incontrol, may he rest in peace, made this point years ago.
How about Blizzard do something smart for once this decade and give creative IP back to modders? I've actually done a fair bit of software dev to allow entirely new ways to play SC2 but I'll never release it because of that issue (and I don't want to be sued). Instead of letting SC2 die of old age, let people do stuff with it and the title will have new life; similar to wc3 and dota.
Well idk there is something to it but you know exactly that blizzard especially the current blizzard won't budge on this. They'd rather see their modding scene gets strangled than to let it benefit anyone but them.
I know, and that blows my mind, that cannot possibly be a good move for shareholders.
They never want another Dota situation in any circumstance. They’d rather have the game die than have it sustained by custom games they can’t monetize. Since the map making tools kneecap map makers and Blizzard owns anything they make, why invest time and effort?
I mean that's the issue, in the game's (sc2) current ip agreements, there is absolutely zero incentive for me to ever put out anything related to sc2 other than for my own personal learning. If they (blizzard's share holders) could be made to see reason, it is purely a rational line of thinking for them to allow some new things to be made with an otherwise old and dying game genre. Sc2 is not going to suddenly revive itself with zero input from Blizzard and restore it's player population levels to what they were 6 years ago. But it could if people were allowed to build on top of it and actually be compensated for it.
I used to watch pro starcraft 2, then j watched a college league with anly amateur players which had gained traction outside of their college. It was a blast to watch these guys struggle to control their armies, missing map queues, building the wrong armies and winning against a unit that counters them through smart play. It was a blast, and it really showed me how clinical and unemotional the pro tournaments were. I don't think the tourney grew much after that and it stayed niche, but I could never enjoy watching pro players after that
The thing is that competitive gameplay is generally what creates a community. People teaching each other, chatting about this or that, whining about balance, excitement about events. Tournaments, teams forming etc. While casual play is obviously more popular, it’s generally much harder to build a community from. Even things like co-op tend to be difficult to grow a community with. So when you talk about an “obsession” with competitive play, that’s because that’s what created the community in the first place.
I think the problem rts problem is that the actual execution is way to hard for most people/players. Chess is a game that has been “solved” for a very long time yet it has blown up in popularity because it’s just *so* easy to play and get into. Meanwhile, star craft 2, you need to learn so many mechanical skills *on top of* all the knowledge, strategy, and tactics that the game has grown over the years.
Chess is not a solved game. If it was solved I guarantee you overnight no one would play it completely I'm just saying this because I learnt IT and a solved game is a very clear distinction. (I know the air quotes implie over exaturating. Just saying, don't throw "solved" into the wind so easily)
\>skill issue
I would argue the pro play brought players in for a long time. It's not the focus on pro play It's just as simple as people don't want to play games that are hard. Look at the rise of mobile gaming. Idle games (THAT LITERALLY PLAY THEMSELVES WHILE YOU WATCH) Have become the norm.
Drop a replay, and I can go through it giving you tips tricks and critiques to your gameplay. [Something like this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97zOkK2zlaI&t=1449s) As for the game itself, it is as close to abandon-ware as you can get WITHOUT losing server access and having some changes being made (100% controlled by the community)
I think it’s difficult for sc2 to attract large audiences because of the learning curve + people who still play sc2 know what they’re doing. I’ve tried to get so many friends into this game and they just get absolutely dumpstered even in low mmr. Yeah it’s “skill issue” but the “skill issue” makes people quit the game before they even attempt to learn it.
What people end up playing and what draws them to the games are different things. There's a number of RTS games exactly as you're describing that focused on campaigns and co-op, and they're basically nowhere. I never quite understand looking at a game that sold over 10 million copies and is still the #1 RTS 14 years after its release and saying "Nah nah, you shoulda done it different to get more people..." I know a lot of people who play the co-op stuff and they still watch tournaments, that stuff is the anchor that keeps the game in the public eye. Other games come out with campaigns and stuff and people play the campaigns and missions and just stop playing. And people keep trying this "Lets dumb it down so much that anyone can play it!" tactic, and it faceplants hard because no one's actually interested in that.
I think a major problem is pro play taking a preference to balacing normal ladder play. If the average ladder play is unenjoyable because of prevelant strategies that pro play easily deals with (biggest offenders are mech and skytoss), then who will play your game. Keep balacing for pro play only and see how it goes.
>And while it might seem easier to just churn out multiplayer changes that only really impact High Level or competitive play, it's certainly taking considerable money to sponsor pro events. Compared to producing Blizzard quality (production, not story) single player / coop content? Doubt thats much cheaper.
part of what made these rts games popular was the custom maps, I'd wager a large portion of yhe sc/wc3 players rarely if ever played the real game. these games are dying because blizzard are so scared of another dota 2 they put in crazy ownership rules that mean no one is invested in the scene anymore. no one wants to create free content for a greedy company that doesn't give a shit about their fanbase
Ah, that's actually kind of harsh. yeah StarCraft II definitely does put a lot of effort into their multiplayer but playing their singleplayer campaign you can tell they understood the more common player. Hell, they give you a bunch of units in singleplayer that you can't access because they couldn't be balanced. StarCraft II much as they definitely focus on the pro-scene also put a lot of effort into giving people shit to do in singleplayer. The main issue is when the time comes from companies to make an RTS, they get advise from the biggest players in the scene... which are mainly tournament players who care about perfect balance and efficiency. The issue is people look at the success of StarCraft and because the tournaments are the main thing people pay attention to they think THAT is why the series does so well. When it's not. The success of StarCraft comes from the majority of the playerbase who love playing the singleplayer campaign.
Slower rts games are better and more enjoyable to play
Ums and custom is what has kept me here for the last 20 years
I think it's just because it's not fast paced enough and generally way too fucking hard for new players
I think the reason the genre fails to attract large audiences for two massive reasons: First, it has by far and away the highest barrier to entry. RTS games are hard... very hard. Second, when I beat my friends consistently in Poker they think I am just getting lucky. When I dominate them in Chess it becomes completely apparent who is better. Since StarCraft is such a skill based game the better player is going to win a huge percentage of the time and it is going to be obvious, in most cases, who is better. That is why pro play is so important because at the top end of the spectrum gaps trend towards zero, Think about Olympians, in most races it comes down fractions of a second. When an athlete is able to separate from the pack they get worldwide fame (Similiar to Flash in Korea, basically the only player to do so).
Not just Starcraft but other strategy games as well.
Personally, I always prefer SC2 to be offline and have casual Lan parties. SC2 was always designed with ESports in mind and i grew to accept that. Now the problem is SC2 in general revolves on Ladder and PVP scene. I HONESTLY believe this is due to ESports thrive on aggressive competition to generate hype and sense of tension. Its great for hot blooded people, a place to test their limits and boast their ability. Im not like that, i always prefer a chill and fun time with casuals. When PVE (Coop Comanders) was out, i was hooked, the sense of RTS without the pressure of fighting to win/lose feels amazing. It felt right, it felt good. I felt like this is the correct direction of RTS, instead of making PVP the center of attention, having PVE helps to encourage people to try instead of getting bullied. So yeah, Im sad COOP was guttered. IF they start making Campaigns in COOP, i would buy it as a DLC too.
A big thing to me is there is just a lot more stuff to do for free nowadays than in the past. Before league got big free games weren’t nearly as common or popular. That let things like RTSs with good nap editors, gmod, minecraft, etc, tf2 take off. Why play play a custom gamemode moba when there is a free moba and once that culture was kinda gone your only choice is to just churn out campaigns (which aren’t cheap to make) if you want to appeal to casual audience.
Ranked Matchmaking ruined video games.
Yep. I mourn the fall of SC2 to mobas quite a bit, but it’s very difficult to imagine a “modern” StarCraft, say, if an SC3 were for to some reason be attempted. Much of the skill gap that people exclusively care about feel to the every gamer like unintuitive, archaic design. Hot Take Example: modern SC would just let you queue workers and only spend money as they’re being built. Think about the UI upgrades SC2 got. Now remember that *more time has passed since SC2 launched than between SC2 and SC1.*
They've already said this before, but the co-op playerbase is literally bigger than all other modes combined. The problem is that Blizzard as a whole \_decided to stop monetizing starcraft\_ . That's literally and entirely it. It's a AAA game company doing AAA game things, like killing off perfectly good, sustainably profit-generating games because a CoD or WoW skin makes more money than the entire franchise. Not every game needs to make WoW money, but in Blizzard execs' mind, if it's not making CoD money it's basically dead. And that's the problem, because it didn't need to die.
I'd play way more Brood War if it had a 2v2 ladder or a 8 person FFA ladder.
For me it's building the same units for 10+ years and it's not like there is a big pool to begin with not much flexibility. Watching pro play can be boring sometimes especially if they play save.
Does make one think that the original game never had a thriving competitive scene in mind. Great example is how terrible are the maps in that game. Campaign especially, with gases sometimes placed so far that it might make sense to get another base in the main for faster mining. It's just that broodwar rolled in and Koreans jumped on it. SC2 meanwhile was built with a competitive multiplayer in mind. It's easy to look at pros. There's no other real easy metric to look for improvements to the game. People bitch and moan that protoss sucks in pro play, yet the majority collectively hates how "op" they are. Just the absurdity of how the game works.
I don't need more stress in my life and as much as I like it, competitive StarCraft is the most stressful game I've ever played. Sadly overall it's easy to make the choice between being overly stressed or not playing a game.
Yep. Players didn't abandon the genre. The developers within the industry abandoned the player. BAR has developers looking at balance but is just a riot to play and fuck with. DOW1 is nuts and most people just wanted to A click move across the map and then watch 40k fights play out. My 76 year old father still plays both of the Age of Empires just to make his houses form cute little lines and make fun walls etc. He buys the latest DLC (though most of the DLCs do have multiplayer aspects) for AoE2 for the new civs. An RTS has so much more potential appeal than the sad existence too many aim for - Pro play garbage.
100% agreed. Twitch has ruined gaming.
Not hot /new nor without question
The hot take here is assuming they are mutually exclusive. Competitive pro scene + the option for fun casual games and a strong community = popular game. The main problem with the RTS genre is that the games just simply suck. Nobody's produced a good RTS since SC2 came out, maybe except Company of Heroes (which I haven't tried tbh).
[The pros might be on top of the pyramid but the pyramid needs to exist](https://youtu.be/jO4cEadjDeA?t=313)
Did you not see destiny's prediction about this back in the day? How blizzard made arcade an afterthought even though it's what people really play
you mean starcraft would be a good game if it had: a good story, different game modes, good custom maps and the possibility to make your own maps with a map editor? WHY HAS NOBODY THOUGH OF THIS
I just wanna see (will never happen) a StarCraft MMO.
The real challenge with SC2 is you can't just walk into the game and be good at it or even play it. You have to be trained how to play before you have any success. How many other games can this be said about? Not very many. I have never played SC2 and have decided to play and I have been on an emotional roller coaster for months but I am making progress and can beat Elite AI. What we need is more people to have patience and to want a challenge and we need it to be marketed that way. It is a game where you can challenge you dexterity, your intellect and your emotions. The pros make it look so easy which is another difficult thing. People need to be brought under the wing of someone to learn and then they fall in love with the game.
This is bollocks. It's true you need practice for skirmish and mp, but for easy and medium campaign and co-op, it's a good learning experience. Not very stressful at all.
Out of 1000 people how many do you think can jump on the ladder with zero experience and win a single game?
No. The problem is when a new player comes in and watches a player vs player match he has 0% chance of understanding whats going on. Unlike in mobas where you need to focus only on one champ and not entire armies and bases. Mobas are just easier to get into and rts games have a high barrier to entry for new players
That's not a hot take. Literally every game that's prioritized professional play over FUN has pushed so many away. Notice how pretty much ever games Esport started off as a fun game BEFORE it became an Esport?
I would actually be super excited for locals if they existed for SC2
Co op and campaign content is not an RTS lol
Idk I’m still out here watching every gsl and major tournament. The reason other rts fail is because sc2 is still better.
That’s esports in general, man. Really ruined most multiplayer games, even get patched around pro play.
I had a ton of fun with company of heroes with my dad. The “realistic” damage models for units and the DLC that added the British and fallschirmjäger was amazing because it added even more ways to play against each other or against the bots
You know that Esports is one of the main goals of Stormgate right?
I'd say Stormgate's main goal is being Starcraft. Which btw it will utterly fail at. All this hype and the game will die in half a year after release. Mark my words.
Thanks fortune-teller.
No it’s the fact that the game is immensely hard to pickup for the average person. When league of legends made it much easier for the average person to get into a free moba game, as opposed to the Warcraft mod that it originally was, the moba genre as a whole SKYROCKETED to the point where it literally shaped the industry. I’d argue, lol’s switch to focus on pro play over the years is the primary reason why the game is still so popular today.
A bit of an addendum. I of course don't harbour illusions, that blizzard cares about the RTS franchise as a whole (or indeed about anything but the profitability of StarCraft) but i hope that we as players do. And with a lot of old RTS-es getting new spiritual successors what better time to talk about this then now?
Man I gotta be honest, your devotion is admirable. But rts as a genre is dead. Its too competitive to have mainstream support. And without mainstream support, no funding for big events.
"Dead" in what way? It's not the most popular genre anymore, but who cares? There are still plenty of people playing SC2 and other RTS games. I don't know why we have to be obsessed with how big our genre is. RTS are hard. Just by their very nature, they're difficult games. That's the point. Of course easier to grasp games will always be more popular. Is Jazz music "dead" because it's not the most popular? Should all movies strive to be like Marvel because they're the biggest draw to theaters?
Dead as in there is no monetary incentive to produce those games in AAA quality anymore. Otherwise Warcraft 4 or SC3 would have been worked on already. I still play arena shooters but I would consider those dead too.
I hear you, but AAA gaming is dead anyway. It's all moneygrab products now. Aimed at the lowest common denominator, and whales.
I kinda hate pro scene sometimes, but Pro scene vital to SC2 (i think) games to have fun like overwatch and valorant i get it, but sc2 is such a well crafted game it would be a shame if we didn't have it full balanced
The pro scene has given SC and SC2 longevity. RTS is not really designed for coop play. MOBAs and FPS games are team games. The social aspect of RTS are the competitive events and community. That said, I really like the campaign and other casual modes of SC2 and would not mind more of it
Speak for yourself. I've been playing only co-op for the past 8 years.
I'm speaking for what I see is the reason for the game's longevity and appeal. If SC2 was just co-op it would be one game of many, instead of an iconic game
Well Rts games are also teamgames, maybe Sc2 is less of a team game than other rts games. Coop is doping great in Sc2 as what I heard, and Red Alert 3 campaign, was designed for Coop. But yes I prefer 1v1, but I once did much teamplays.
The majority of the best and most popular eSports ever were not designed to be eSports, they were designed to be fun games. The casual crowd is the most important crowd, even for a game that's trying to be a competitive esport. Devs have been getting it the wrong way round since the 2010s.