StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void

[Lightstalker]

So the big new feature is a "shared control" checkbox?

This was (unintentionally) in Age of Empires back in 1997.

[Sir T]

If a game is requiring me to micro 8 special abilities to do shit then count me out. I'm in my 40s, I don't have the micromanaging skills of an octopus anymore and even in my 20s I'd have said sod that as it was a pain in the behind.

I imagine there are underground micromanaging programs to manage all this crap being written as we speak to "give pros an edge!" If I buy this I'd stick to single player because who wants to deal with "Pros"

[Margalis]

The problem I have is that part of the point of SC2 was to remove micro.

When SC2 was announced a lot of people were like "but you're removing so much micro and that is critical to the game!" The response was along the lines of "STFU randomly clicking a lot isn't a valid skill, automated abilities 4 life!"

The second expansion is a strange point to decide that those original complainers were right all along. Didn't that ship sail?

That said I assume they are trying to add micro because they realize that SC2 is super boring to watch and don't know how to fix that. By adding micro and more player skill maybe there will be more stuff to be excited about?

[Malakili]

For Zerg that feels absolutely false. Building units seems to take way more work in SC2, since each hatchery now requires a queen injecting nonstop.

I don't know if it "feels" false to you or not, but go back to Brood War and actually Macro well.  You can't select more than one hatchery (or any building) at a time.  That means you have to individually click on each hatchery to build your units and because there was no inject you had to had a lot of hatcheries to actually spend your money. You got 1 larvae per 20 seconds per hatchery and they maxed at three.  

Injecting larvae can be done by putting all your queens in a group, hitting backspace to cycle through them, and injecting with each. When I was playing zerg I re-bound the inject hotkey to "\" because it is next to back space and you can inject all your hatcheries in literally 1-2 seconds using a really simple keystroke pattern.  Sure remembering to do it is "hard" but remembering to macro well in general is hard so I don't see how that makes a big difference.

[Typhon]

Last couple of days I'm finding what you find to be fun fascinating.  It seems like you require some amount of of tedium/work/"earning it" in your games.  Almost like, if you haven't suffered, how can you have fun?

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't express it like that, so apologies.  How would you express it?  Are you left cold by games without ... I don't even know how to lead the question.  What is it in addition to "fun" that you are looking for?

[Malakili]

The thing that is fun to me is learning to master something difficult.  I don't care if it's video games or some other "real life" hobby. 

[Ironwood]

Try marriage.

No, wait, Don't.

[Malakili]

Try marriage.

No, wait, Don't.

I've already been married for a few years, it's going quite well thanks.

[Typhon]

Thanks for the answer. 

So we're at least similar on the, "enjoy mastering something".  I think the divide is on the amount of tolerance we have for the systems involved.  The difficulty has to make sense to me or I just reject it.  Starcraft micro seems to be a pointless level of difficulty.  Why would I have minions that require that much handholding?  To me it makes no sense and I get turned off.

A musical instrument, on the other hand, is only as complex as it absolutely needs to be to make music.  It's not arbitrary at all.

I'm also guessing you have a larger amount of tolerance for delayed gratification.  Especially with games, if I'm not getting some amount of positive feedback pretty quickly I turn off.  Life is too short.

[Paelos]

To me mastery of a game is pointless because it has no impact on the real potential of my life. It's much more important to me to master my writing, or master my job, or master my public speaking/teaching, etc.

That's not to say I don't enjoy wasting my time on games because I do. This isn't about that at all. But a game like Starcraft requires a level of input to be good at it that I'm simply not willing to spend. I eventually got the same way with WoW. At some point I pick my head up from a game, realize I'm wasting my life on something, and move on to more important pursuits.

This is certainly not something I said to myself in my 20s.

[Malakili]

I don't disagree with that.  I haven't played much Starcraft lately because it's, like you said, kind of all or nothing and lately it has been nothing. But it's still a very good game, even if in practice I'm more likely to play Diablo 3 lately.  But Diablo 3 isn't really "fun" to me, it's just relaxing.

[Ironwood]

Try marriage.

No, wait, Don't.

I've already been married for a few years, it's going quite well thanks.

That changes.  Usually after a few years.  Or the introduction of Spawn.   

[MrHat]

Try marriage.

No, wait, Don't.

I've already been married for a few years, it's going quite well thanks.

  Or the introduction of Spawn.   

Seriously.  Our daughter hasn't slept through the night yet at 11 months old.  330 days without a full night sleep can be....trying.

[calapine]

The entire "amount of micro" and "APM needed" issue is why, despite enjoying SC when young, I really got stuck (+500 hours *blush*) on Wargame.

Units do not have "special abilities" at all and the speed of units and combat in general is slower, so everything depends more on when and where to attack, how your unit make up is, how well you are co-ordinating with team mates, etc... There still is some micro of course, but slower and (with few exceptions, such as radar-based AA and SEAD planes) not of the "busy-work" kind.

[Sir T]

Yeah, I still play Supreme Commander when I need my RTS fix for the same reason.

[Merusk]

Try marriage.

No, wait, Don't.

I've already been married for a few years, it's going quite well thanks.

  Or the introduction of Spawn.   

Seriously.  Our daughter hasn't slept through the night yet at 11 months old.  330 days without a full night sleep can be....trying.

Tried rice bottles? When ours wouldn't sleep it was due to hunger. A small spoonfull of baby rice into the overnight bottle (you have to widen the nipple by cutting 2 of the holes into a larger slit) and they were sleeping fully.

[lamaros]

The thing that is fun to me is learning to master something difficult.  I don't care if it's video games or some other "real life" hobby. 

Things can be difficult without that difficulty being repetitive tedium.

[Malakili]

Here's the panel from Blizzcon about the Legacy of the Void single player campaign.  I just started the video myself so I don't know just how clown shoes this is going to be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsvHY7YaxUg

[Margalis]

I don't know that selecting a bunch of units and pressing backspace to cycle through and inject is what I'd consider an interesting example of mastery. That sounds like mastery of busy work.

SC2 is largely about periodic chores. Injecting, spreading creep, using mules and the Protoss speed boost. These chores aren't particular hard or interesting and being good at them just means doing them on a tight as schedule as possible.

[Malakili]

I don't know that selecting a bunch of units and pressing backspace to cycle through and inject is what I'd consider an interesting example of mastery. That sounds like mastery of busy work.

SC2 is largely about periodic chores. Injecting, spreading creep, using mules and the Protoss speed boost. These chores aren't particular hard or interesting and being good at them just means doing them on a tight as schedule as possible.

It's doing them while also doing everything else. But it wasn't meant as an example of mastery, it was just meant to show that that kind of thing is fairly trivial in terms of actual keystrokes.  People like to pretend their fingers just aren't fast enough for a game like SC2 - but its their brains that have trouble keeping up. And that is fine.  It's fucking difficult to remember to do everything, and move your army intelligently and be in good position, and so on.  But those are mental hurdles, not physical ones. Build orders, timing, and basic good decision making - the things people claim to care about - will get you into the 10% of players easily with only basic mechanical proficiency.

It's a pet peeve of mine because it dismisses the genre as for ADD addled children, when the real problem is that they just don't know how to play properly.  You can play Starcraft 2 at a reasonable high level (like say, Masters league the top 2%) with only about 80 APM.   Most of you complaining can probably type more words than that per minute.

[Rendakor]

My complaint has never been about APM; it's the quantity of things you need to keep track of constantly which seems higher than it was in BW. Maybe I'm just remembering BW poorly; I just know that I played BW nonstop while I was done with SC2 1.0 within weeks of it's launch.

[Malakili]

My complaint has never been about APM; it's the quantity of things you need to keep track of constantly which seems higher than it was in BW. Maybe I'm just remembering BW poorly; I just know that I played BW nonstop while I was done with SC2 1.0 within weeks of it's launch.

I think the big problem is that Custom games were just impossible to find in SC2 when it was new and take away chat rooms (which only came later) and suddenly it was hard to find games except for ladder.  So now you're on the ladder against people who are trying to play well and are playing the base game.

It was easy to have fun with playing Brood War while being absolutely garbage at it (believe me, I'd know) because almost no one knew how to play properly.  Hell, most people didn't even know there WAS a way to play properly. 

[lamaros]

It's not that people don't know how to 'play properly'. It is that 'playing properly' is boring.

If I want to do tedious things for the sake of it I could just stay at work.

[Malakili]

It's not that people don't know how to 'play properly'.

K.

[lamaros]

Is that what we are doing now? K.

I can't believe you don't recognise how great SC2 is. It has really hurt my feelings that you guys have all said (in my imagination, where I am easily offended and delusional) it is just a game for ADD children.

You know what would be cool? If you had to go back to your command centre every 3mins and 33 seconds as Terran and hit a 'megaphone' active ability, otherwise a (hidden) screensaver would kick in and cause someone inside the command centre to panic and mash their keyboard and cause the command centre to lift off and then explode.

Requiring players to remember to do this at least once every 3mins and 33 seconds wouldn't be tedious and boring at all, it would be an innovative mental hurdle that most players just aren't good enough to master. It's like, fuck-all AMP, even a sloth could do it. If they were smart enough. Which of course they're not, because only the top 10% have such capabilities, and they're a sloth.

[NowhereMan]

I'd say the challenge in SC2 (they kind of mastery that will get you into the top 10%) isn't about APM or about being mentally agile enough to deal with the task loading. It's about developing habits that allow all that base micro to be taken out of the mental task loading. No injecting with your queens to keep unit production up isn't a huge number of clicks, nor is it a particularly complex task. New players are never going to manage to keep doing it while controlling everything else though, even if they're capable of 120 APM pretty easily, because they're thinking about the strategy they're trying to employ.

Starcraft is difficult to engage as a strategic game because it has half a dozen little distracting mini-games in there to keep unit performance optimal, those mini-games aren't mentally or physically challenging but they are distracting if you're thinking about them and very easy to forget if you're not. So the only way to get the best out of your performance is to get to the point where you don't need to think about them. Pro gamers aren't thinking to themselves that they need to switch back to their queen to inject in 24 seconds because they play so much they just reflexively do it. When you say that simpler keyboard shortcuts will help you get into the top 10% all I'm really hearing is that it makes the task easier to do habitually without thinking.

Edit to contribute an opinion: I can see why you might find the game itself rewarding once you've gotten to that point, there is strategy in SC2 but the model of all those little mini-game abilities doesn't add anything much beyond artificially inflating the difficulty curve in competitive play in a manner that rewards intensive play and will weed out players not capable of a very high level of APM. I think that works well for professional gamer type stuff but it simultaneously makes it very time consuming for players to reach the point where they can fully engage the strategy part of the game in a competitive match. If your opponent is able to micro much more efficiently than you there's a very good chance he can beat you even if he's just rushing marines without any particular strategy.

[Paelos]

It's a pet peeve of mine because it dismisses the genre as for ADD addled children, when the real problem is that they just don't know how to play properly.  You can play Starcraft 2 at a reasonable high level (like say, Masters league the top 2%) with only about 80 APM.   Most of you complaining can probably type more words than that per minute.

It's easy to dismiss the genre because despite your defense of the game, it still comes down to the "mental hurdle" of being able to perform mundane tasks quickly while focusing on larger goals. That's not really strategy in the real sense.

If we look at chess as the ultimate in mental strategy, at no point are the players supposed to prime their pieces with certain mini-games in order for them to make moves. In war games like TW or EU strategy isn't about unit ability so much as it is about politics, positioning, economic shortages, and timing. At no point in those games are you required to master a series of busy work just to make strategic decisions.

It's not about clicks. It's about your brain putting up with that kind of minutia focus. Some would call that a skill. Some would call it a disability.

[Ironwood]

lol

[Malakili]

I guess I don't see building units in an RTS as "busywork." But then, if you're really dismissing the genre than there is nothing I can say that matters to you anyway.

Chess and other Turn Based games are also awesome.  But Turn Based Strategy isn't real time strategy and I don't have the same expectations for it.  But playing pretty much any real time game is going to have that kind of thing.  If I'm playing Quake - or even something more casual like TF2 - you're at a big advantage if you can keep track of the spawn timers on health, ammo kits, power ups, and so forth. That's a really hard mundane task/mental hurdle too.  And you'll get crushed by someone who can do it well.

Anyway, I don't really care if people like starcraft or not.  I just think you're slamming the genre in general is stupid because you're blaming the genre for just being the genre.  Maybe the degree is "worse" in starcraft, but you've got to deal with the same things in any RTS.  Most of them just don't have the competitive community that pushes it to the limits so much.

[Sir T]

We're not slamming the genre. We're slamming the clikedy. And if it is so much fun how come there are so many Starcraft II Bots that will do this shit for people so they can go out and actually do the fun stuff like command the armies. I mean if it was fun to do clickedy there there would be no demand for them.

Clickedy is NOT an integral part of the RTS genre.

[Rasix]

I don't think that's an accurate representation of the conversation here.

Anyhow, SC2 has just gone down a path and focus that is incompatible with how many of us want to play games. 

For me, it's just a stressful experience in multiplayer, and I don't want to be stressed out while playing games.  I also hit a hard APM ceiling.  My progress was severely capped once I hit a certain tier and my opponent's APM was anywhere from 25-50% better.  Even with a micro-lite strategy and army composition, I just couldn't keep up mechanically and that was incredibly disheartening.

[Ingmar]

It's specifically the 'do X every Y' segment stuff that bugs me. It's basically a rhythm game element and I don't feel like that adds anything to my enjoyment of the game. Setting up an economy, building units, setting up base defenses, standing my guys in the right place - I want the game to be about those things. I just don't want the way it is about those things being about hitting a bunch of cooldowns on an exact rotation, that's not engaging. It's a big part of why I always preferred TA to SC/Brood War.

[Margalis]

It's specifically the 'do X every Y' segment stuff that bugs me. It's basically a rhythm game element and I don't feel like that adds anything to my enjoyment of the game.

This stuff feels arbitrary and tacked on because it is.

When they made SC2 they increased unit selection count, improved pathing, got rid of scoot and shoot and other control quirks, made it easier to cast abilities with groups selected, etc - then discovered that the resulting game was too simple and not clicky enough.

The race-specific abilities (mules, queens, protoss speed-up) were intentionally added to give players more busywork to do.

That's the problem with this stuff in SC2 - it's busy work. It's designed to be busy work, the design goal was literally "we need to give players more clicky stuff because we removed too much. Now the game is boring, so let's make the player press a button every 30 seconds!"

SC1 has a lot of clicky stuff but it's organic - you click to build units, to move them around, etc. All the clicky stuff stems from how the game works. Whereas in SC2 it was added on top to fix a problem in a very inelegant manner.

I don't mind having to click a lot. I'm never going to be super-pro at RTS but I don't care. What I do mind is having to click a lot knowing that the only reason I have to click a lot is someone on the design team said "the game doesn't require enough clicking, let's arbitrarily add more!" Remembering to call mules is not interesting or fun, it requires very little decision-making. It's just something you have to do, a barrier to entry that serves no purpose except as a barrier to entry.

People like to say that RTS games are all about managing resources, one of them being your time and attention as a player. But in most RTS games that comes naturally - there's a lot of stuff going on that you have to manage just due to the base gameplay - whereas in SC2 that comes from minigames they added on top of the game.
---

Another thing I would point out is that watching someone micro units in SC1 is fun. A guy who can micro units really well is impressive. A guy who can call mules down on a regular schedule is not impressive. That sort of skill doesn't lend itself to exciting viewing, which is probably part of the reason SC2 is so dull to watch.

[NowhereMan]

Yeah that's it at it's heart. The micro in SC2 feels artificial and doesn't really add to the excitement. Plenty of people here aren't saying they want Turn based strategy games or that they don't want any kind of micro but that 1) Crazy fast micro isn't a necessary part of an RTS and/or 2) The micro in SC2 feels like a tacked on requirement, a gameplay element in and of itself rather than a requirement of other game mechanics. SC1 doesn't get that kind of criticism for 2) because, as others noted, micro could be used to take advantage of the game mechanics and would let a properly managed army overcome a Random Number Generator type stronger army. It had the drawback though that it meant neglecting things like base management because you'd be dancing hydralisks or whatever people did.

SC2 changed the mechanics to make it more automated and newb friendly, which they discovered made higher level play uninteresting and far less challenging because it no longer required frantic APM. So it seems like they introduced a whole load of micro by task loading the players with a bunch of extra shit to do on top of the actual core gameplay. That's the aspect people don't enjoy because it seems to be difficulty either for difficulty's sake or to make competitive play more exciting to watch. The problem at lower skill levels is that it makes the micro and habitual actions one of the biggest factors in success until you reach a high enough level where everyone is pretty maximal on that front, which is the point where good strategy starts to be the deciding factor. People don't dislike SC2 because they dislike RTSes but because you need to be on par with your opponent in the rhythm game mechanics in order for the strategy portion of the game to matter all that much.

[Malakili]

Yeah that's it at it's heart. The micro in SC2 feels artificial and doesn't really add to the excitement. Plenty of people here aren't saying they want Turn based strategy games or that they don't want any kind of micro but that 1) Crazy fast micro isn't a necessary part of an RTS and/or 2) The micro in SC2 feels like a tacked on requirement, a gameplay element in and of itself rather than a requirement of other game mechanics. SC1 doesn't get that kind of criticism for 2) because, as others noted, micro could be used to take advantage of the game mechanics and would let a properly managed army overcome a Random Number Generator type stronger army. It had the drawback though that it meant neglecting things like base management because you'd be dancing hydralisks or whatever people did.

SC2 changed the mechanics to make it more automated and newb friendly, which they discovered made higher level play uninteresting and far less challenging because it no longer required frantic APM. So it seems like they introduced a whole load of micro by task loading the players with a bunch of extra shit to do on top of the actual core gameplay. That's the aspect people don't enjoy because it seems to be difficulty either for difficulty's sake or to make competitive play more exciting to watch. The problem at lower skill levels is that it makes the micro and habitual actions one of the biggest factors in success until you reach a high enough level where everyone is pretty maximal on that front, which is the point where good strategy starts to be the deciding factor. People don't dislike SC2 because they dislike RTSes but because you need to be on par with your opponent in the rhythm game mechanics in order for the strategy portion of the game to matter all that much.

I don't understand how you think this is special to SC2.  SC1 Macro was had much more APM intensive macro AND required the a similar rhythm thing of going back to your base to do it every cycle. The idea that calling in mules, chronoboosting and injecting larvae somehow make SC2 macro way more repetitive, taxing and boring than SC1 is insane.  Did you really like going back to your base to individually click on each barracks and start building another marine every 24 seconds so much more than SC2's macro mechanics?

Now, I agree that unit micro in SC1 was better than in SC2.  But things like the 12 unit selection limit made it aa lot more micro intensive than Starcraft 2 even with lots more activated abilities in the latter.  Talk about tedious - managing a maxed out army 12 units at a time while having to individually micro each individual caster (instead of being able to select them as a group and let smart cast make decisions about which unit will cast the spell).  Something like the new immortal shields where you literally add 2 keystrokes to the entire fight seems pretty manageable by comparison.

If you just want to say to hell with the whole bag, then fine. But then I don't really understand how people are rationalizing this as differences between SC1 and SC2 when on pretty much every beat SC1 required more APM and still more of that APM was being spent on tedious, repetitive things like macroing from individual structures or dealing with the 12 unit selection limit.