StarCraft was never meant to be played the way Koreans played [video]
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In a sort of "surivorship bias" way, the games which can be played to an extreme level often end up in that position. Some of the craziest speedruns of games are being played in ways the game designer never intended.
How game designers choose to react (or not react) to those unintended strategies/techniques and what effect that has on the longevity of the game is a topic I'd find interesting to discuss.
One time the topic was something about allowing pilots to be armed in the cockpit.
After the first couple rounds we realized our jokers were scheduled to face an equal opponent for what promised to be an epic showdown:
Pro: Yes pilots should armed, because it is hard to fly a plane with only their feet.
Con: Pilots have no business in a cock-pit. Cock fighting is a horrible sport, not to mention being illegal in many states.
Sadly the opposing coach pulled their team before the round started.
The signs of this are in features/functions in the game that are just ignored; sometimes you can figure out what the designers intended them to be used for - and with modern games being patched (even board games get rule clarifications and changes, and add-ons and expansions almost always changed some rules) you can see it live.
Heroes III is a perfect example; watch some online videos of pro players and it's nothing like the compstomps we did back in the day.
Scrabble is an example of Ayers following the rules while distorting the game.
What is nice is if you have an active publisher reacting in a timely fashion. But then, if that’s the case, you as a participant need to keep up.
Mind this only happens in competitive tournaments. While at home and in clubs folks tend to favor fun, gameplay, and goodwill over pedantic rule making. It can lead to interesting discussions at high volume however.
That said, I’ve seen tournament games lost because someone whipped out an obscure ruling from an official source. In a “Sorry you can’t do that.” “What do you mean?” Kind of way.
But it was good to participate in games with an active publisher, doing things like gathering after action reports across local tournaments nationwide, looking for unbalanced components or techniques and, rather than tweaking the game directly, just applying changes to the tournament rules set.
Basically, they saw a hardcore community form around their family friendly fighting game, and tried to axe it.
If anything, it sounds like they took in some feedback from the community.
https://www.ssbwiki.com/Dash-dance#/media/File:Dashdance.gif
If you did this sequence in Brawl, you'd certainly trip.
Dash-dancing kept your momentum, allowing you to instantly move at full dash speed at a moment's notice. But it took great amounts of finger-dexterity to alternate left-right-left-right at this speed and keep the character's momentum at maximum.
The way splash damage (using aoe attacks) is used to detect invisible units is another.
It's a game with wonderful complexity and lots of possible permutations. Most Blizzard games are built with this complexity from the start, and blatant exploits are patched. Their approach is to enable creativity and tweak things.
The first few (Quake, Starcraft, CS1.6) were definitely more organically designed, but it's also more a product of the time and the budgets.
It felt like everyone who played games played all the big ones even if they weren't huge fans of a particular one; so everyone understood somewhat what was happening in a Starcraft match.
I've subscribed to see if the rest pays off
As a SC1 and SC2 player, I think the most reasonable analysis to the title is that Blizzard never intended Starcraft 1 to be played with 400+ APM like the Korean Pros were doing.
The speed is just insane. I doubt any SC1 developer even surpassed 200 APM when developing the game.
Yes, Allies and USSR had special units in RA2, but the differences were much more pronounced in SC. It made for very different possible gameplays and strategies.
Also, maybe building on top of the warcraft brand helped. WC2 was pretty amazing back then.
RA3 obviously tried to follow that pattern, and failed miserably.
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I've become strong-casual (1000 Elo) in Age of Empires 2 by the way. Juggling Wood, Food, Gold and Stone has far more strategic depth than just Starcraft's Minerals + Gas.
Age of Empires 2 has less micro: in particular, there's no such thing as "spells" like Psi Storm. Furthermore, all units move much, much slower. Yes, Hera and Viper (trading for #1 and #2 spots in the world) both still clicks at 400 APM when fights start, but this is far away from Starcraft's insane 800 APM professionals (short-term burst of course, I think everyone has a long-term average of 300 APM).
AoE2 has a high-skill ceiling for APM still, but strategic implications are far more important compared to Starcraft due to the slower speeds in AoE2. Cavalry in Age of Empires is the fastest unit, but Cavalry feel slower than Protoss Brood-War Carriers IMO.
And then infantry crawl, and siege units and elephants (ie: Battering Rams) are extremely slow.
With such slow movement, its far more important to decide that "moving out is a good idea", there's not as much APM dedicated to crazy things like Muta-micro, Vulture-micro (vulture / mine / siege tank pushes). It also means that there's more time to think about the implications of your attacks (while IMO, most Starcraft matches feel like they're won or lost by a well placed Psi Storm or other such micro-trick, like a good Lurker-dodge, a well placed Baneling, Scourge or whatnot).
AoE2 still has Monk micro, Siege attack-grounds, and arrow dodging as far as micro-tricks go. So its not a dearth of micro, but its very much refreshing compared to the Psi Storm / Siege Tank / Mine pushes of insane APM that a typical Starcraft BW match has.
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AoE2 still has two very "swinging" situations. Monk conversions swing the game extremely, and Onagers basically shoot a Psi-storm like area-of-effect high-damage siege shot every 5 seconds or so.
In both cases, a game can be won or lost in a matter of seconds (much like how one good Psi-storm can turn the tide of the entire match). But both Monks and Onagers are the slowest units in the game, and both are weak vs the cheapest Scout Cavalry (Onagers have minimum HP, while Monks take longer to convert scouts while Scouts deal extra damage vs Monks).
So... if you scout out the opponent and keep track of these incredibly powerful units, then everything's pretty much predictable and less "surprising" than Starcraft. And that's a good thing IMO.
Does AoE have the unit caps as well? That's the resource I think is hardest to manage, though I think Warcraft handled it better with the upkeep. It made macro far more interesting when watching competitive play, as creating too many gatherers still hampered you beyond being unprepared for a rush.
So you can have 200 Paladins (strongest unit in the game), while in Starcraft you can have either 33 Battlecruisers (strongest combat unit one-vs-one) or 400 Zerglings (weakest but most numerous).
Exception: the unique unit "Karambit" from the Malay has a special ability where they count 1/2 population. So you can have 400 Karambits (much like Zerglings in Starcraft:BW)
From the few professional player videos I have watched, a lot of that looks like mindless, repetitive clicking. Some kind of Goodhart's law where because APM is important to be good, it gets internalized early.
For sure, the professionals do need an elevated level of actions, but not the mass spamming I have observed.
What's ironic is that by "fixing" all units to move gracefully, it seemingly made Starcraft2 more of a deathball-oriented game. In many ways, Starcraft is fun because many powerhouse units move so wonky and unreliably... negating "deathball" as a strategy.
But no newbie would want to practice a game with such weird movement mechanics. We need to evolve past expert-knowledge just to move-and-shoot, and yet still achieve a high level of strategic thought.
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I do think AoE2 is moving along that path however (!!). The new DLC (lol, yeah, DLC for a game released nearly 25 years ago) is pretty fun.
I don't think it's hard to innovate in this area. Unfortunately most game companies don't see profit in a "proper" game, and instead chase after "games as a service" that optimize for in-game purchases, and having a product life that is meant to die once the cow has been milked.
I think that is a missed opportunity (in hindsight though). Had Blizzard taken SC in a more chess-like direction, it could have easily spread as much as chess did. It's not that SC2 is bad, it's just a completely different game that is only building on top of the art and backstory of the previous one, when it could have been a greater success had they also built on top of the game design that was already tried and tested. I don't play AoE, but it seems that franchise is doing this to some extent, at least it doesn't seem to be reinventing their own wheel.
Spending hours of practice inside of Starcraft, memorizing the size of the magic box *IS* Starcraft:BW. IMO, its hellish kinds of unfun and I personally won't be subjecting myself to it today. (Though when I was younger, I had the pretense that I could get good enough at it and/or respected through this skill).
Then sitting in Starcraft practice maps / UMS games to master each of these mouse-movements and finger-dexterity to be able to play at a competent level... nahhhhhh. Starcraft:BW is absolutely too much of a twitch-game, and too much strategy relies upon wonky micro-details that IMO, its a surprise that we ever called it a strategy game. Its closer to a mouse-driven fighting game, honestly.
If you fix this wonky movement, you simply don't have Starcraft: Brood War anymore. Its so fundamental to the meta, and the mechanic is fundamental to Muta-harassment, Dragoon Dancing, Psi Storm micro, etc. etc. that its literally the core element of combat.
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That's the primary difference between Dragoons (SC:BW) and Stalkers (SC2). Stalkers are smooth and easy to move (and also have a bit of blink-micro).
Dragoons need the player to memorize the size of the magic-box to "Dragoon Dance" and effectively enter combat.
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I appreciate the engine-rewrite to SC2. There are *OTHER* problems Blizzard/Activision had that caused SC2 to collapse. But fixing the movement/magic boxing so that it was easier to have units move together and flock together is a *GOOD* thing.
But there needed to be more deathball mitigations. Too many games turned into boring deathballs.
I think fighting games like Tekken, Street Fighter are good examples here. Tekken has largely remained the same game, with the same moves, with new features built on top. Every sequel is expected to maintain this transfer of the core "rules" (not necessarily mechanics) such that players can master their Tekken skills over decades. Also, you have SF6 adding a new "assisted" controls for new players. This allows a stepping stone for players to later reach the harder controls which are equivalent to the 300 APM micros in SC.
RTS has to make a comeback. It's like a better version of chess, if only game companies would innovate the genre in that direction.
Magic Box micro is more obvious once you see it. Its a simple concept, but implementation (IE: memorizing the size) is the difficult part.
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Muta-harass forces "Big magic box" by adding a burrowed zergling (or Overlord in early game) to your 12-group of Mutalisks. That is, 11-mutalisks + 1x slow (or burrowed) unit "outside the magic box". This means every click you do collapses in to a single point.
Dragoon-dancing is "little-magic box", allowing dragoons to walk and shoot in synchronously (like how the High Templar shot Psi Storm together at the beginning of this Youtube video).
In SC2, the game became a lot more streamlined and automated so you as a player don't really get to express your play style as much as in Brood War. The game kind of has a very blunt set of rules about what counters what and as a player your job is to focus mostly on macro/economy, scouting, and unit production, you build up a kind of death ball army and then send it into a battle that lasts under a minute and whoever wins, wins.
Another annoying aspect of SC2 that's a consequence of how automated the game is, is that it is also often very cheesy, where an opponent can rush out an army that's very easy for the computer to control but the defender has to click like crazy to defend it. I'm fairly high level in SC2 (top 4%), and I can literally tell an opponent I'm going to "cannon rush" them, which is a cheesy strategy that has a very specific defense. I can even tell my opponent what that defense is, and they will still lose to it because the defender needs to click like crazy to defend it while I can let the computer basically do almost all of the work for me. The same goes for a bunch of other cheesy strategies where you rush out a small number of units that the computer has an easy time controlling for you, and force your opponent to have to literally engage in very awkward and precise hand gestures in order to defend the attack, and the vast majority of people simply don't know or care to learn to move their hands that way.