Starcraft II Sucks!

Hi,

I've been playing SC2 a bit for the last week, and I found the experience infuriating. ZK was my first RTS (other than OTA which I played for a year when I was ~10), so maybe my expectations were a bit skewed. However, I was astounded that a game with this type of design could become so popular.

For anyone who hasn't tried SC2 or similar games, I'll outline the experience:

[Spoiler]

In short, ladder play in SC2 is an inflammatory experience. I'm 1-11 after ranking into the second lowest league. Compare with ZK, where I actually won the second game I ever played ( http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/265827 ). The barrier to entry in SC2 is ridiculous and frustrating. Worse, the design goals of SC2 are terrible. It's unbelievable that a game whose primary virtues are button mashing, tedium, and rote memorization has become so popular (46,000 games running worldwide as I type this). I also realized that if ZK could become 0.1% as popular as SC2, it would be a wildly successful open source game. IMO, ZK is much more than 0.1% as good as SC2, I would actually say 1000% :)

This sort of got me to thinking, how is something like SC2 a blockbuster hit, but ZK is a marginalized blip even within the OSS community? I reject the notion that it has anything to do with gameplay. ZK is fun and accessible even to people who have never played RTS games, SC2 is a Kafkaesque exercise in minutia and complexity. I think it has to do with more superficial things:

- Visibility: ZK is kind of hard to find. I've been using OSS for almost nine years and I've just found it last May or so. Since it's not packaged, the millions of people using linux (i.e. the users with the best disposition to try ZK) have to look outside the typical source for almost all software, the package manager. Instead of stumbling accross it, they will only find it via an active google search for a free RTS. Maybe license stuff makes ZK ineligible for Debian etc, but I stand by this observation.

- Production Value: Obviously, something with a budget like SC2 is going to be leagues ahead of ZK. That being said, I think ZK looks pretty damn good on high settings. I think there's still some low hanging fruit though. Clunky animations, goofy sounds, that sort of thing.

- UX: I hate to bring this up, because I know the term gets thrown around a lot. But I'm willing to bet we lose a lot of newbies to UX stuff. I'll put the website aside, and specifically address ZKL. This is the entrypoint to a person's experience with ZK, and whether it's fair or not the interface heavily influences someone's impression of the game. Further, UX/interface bugs can cause an otherwise happy player to walk away in frustration (e.g. if the game crashes during launch, maps fail to download, lobby hangs, bugs out, becomes unresponsive). Not only that, it's pretty hard to look at. It was pretty clearly designed by a programmer :) Has any ever thought of contracting some static mocks? You could get a lot of high quality designs to choose from for a couple hundred bucks on 99designs. I guess implementation is another question, but it might be a good start.

I don't really have a point, just that SC2 sucks and ZK should be more popular :<

Oh you have no idea. Give Zerg a try. In addition to having to queue a worker every x seconds (this now takes one more click, yippie!) you now have to inject larva with your queens into every single hatchery every y seconds and order every one of your creep tumors to expand every z seconds.

TheSponge you articulated my thoughts precisely and much more succinctly.

I wouldn't say it outright sucks, it's still a decent RTS. I don't find it as much fun as ZK though.

I've played it in the past (1500 ranked 1v1 games) and I found the process interesting. I guess it was mostly about the challenge of improving and beating better players. While ingame the game wasn't so enjoyable since concentration was 100% on performing as well and as fast as possible, there simply was no time left to enjoy the game itself. Watching/analyzing own replays afterwards and seeing improvement was somewhat rewarding though.

What made me stop playing was how unhealthy the game is. It screws one's wrists up. Lots of people get carpal tunnel and whatnot from playing SC2. Since I started getting some discomfort in my wrists I stopped playing. Better safe than sorry I guess.

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oh all i play on sc2 is arcade :D play it

oh also it takes some practice...

quote: I don't really have a point, just that SC2 sucks and ZK should be more popular :<

This is your opinion and is propably shared between people on this forum as well. But if you would start questioning some real fans of SC II or even Warcraft III then they would have entirely diffrent opinion. That being said it is biased to hell even more because like you admited it was your first RTS you have ever played.

Another thing is kinda what Sprung talked abaut. People don't like the new things. They prefer to stick to mechanics they are fammiliar with. Do you have any idea how much controvencial the multi unit selection from SC II was? Now imagine introducing line move in the newest SC II expansion! SC II just continues exacly the legacy of C&C and just continues to very slowly introduce some new gameplay elements (as they dont have any competition). That's because SC II has dominated the market of RTS's. So this oughs to have some competition right? Something that makes for "better SC game"! Problem is that if a RTS game wants to succed on the market it needs to be diffrent. So we have our OTA and games that it has spawned (SupCom, PA, Spring games), we have DoW and CoH alikes, we have Total War (I know that TW is older than C&C). Oh smuck! There is even entire new genere that has spawned from it! MOBA games. Yet all of them (besides MOBA's but that is a diffrent story) seem to be less succesfull than mainstream RTS C&C like titles!

The issue presented here comes kinda to the fact that when you say "RTS" you think of a abbreviation of "Dune 2" or "C&C" or "Red Alert" and this is your mainstream root of RTS's and then you have all of these branches
wich grow separatly from the root. And yet even though the branches are evolving the mainstream... seam to have stopped and not moving much but it is still the largest araund! Also now it consist of one game wich is putting itself even tighter.
The problem being like Sprung said - SC II is the deflaut RTS. You want to play RTS? You try SC II... and then it throws that player off because of not feasable controls, unclear unit combinations etc (at least they have proper tutorial). So the player will just say "meh RTS's suck man. Ima gonna play CoD, Battlefield or LoL.

In summary Starcraft is compleatly diffrent from ZK. Because of that most of people from SC II WILL stay and play it until it dies off or Blizzard really piss them off for some reason (bad sequel, that is SC 3). They have grown acustomed with this game and have no intention on giving up their "uber skill" of having 1000x clicks over fight command of ZK (not mentioning other strategies that they have learned).

quote: Now imagine introducing line move in the newest SC II expansion!

The whole SC2 balance is based upon the lack of line move! If you could line move marines, every single one of their counters would've stopped working because they are all based on AoE, while their own effectiveness would rise due to proper concaves.

Here's an example from SCBW: oov does a very crude version of line move - basically a split of 20 units into three groups - and bam, Pimpest Plays 2004. Meanwhile in ZK anybody can just drag the mouse and achieve like a split that is like five times better.

While Starcraft (1) is not the first RTS I've ever played, it's the one that had the most impact on me (as you can see from my nickname) ... before Spring/*A=>Zero-K. And I agree that Starcraft gameplay is now mostly obsolete, with Starcraft 2 not having made many changes to the gameplay formula.

quote: (I know that TW is older than C&C)

Huh?
Command & Conquer 1 was released in 1995.
Shogun Total War was released in 2000 (it even has 3D battlefields with units as 2D sprites)

Here's an important quote :

quote: cd August 19, 2014 at 4:17 pm “Make a better game if you want it to sell for more than a dollar.” To the clear industry professionals making this ingenious statement, I offer a brief explanation of reality… A game’s monetary success is based on four things, ranked in order of importance: 1) The size of the target audience 2) The product’s market visibility 3) The price point of comparable existing products 4) The quality of the game I’ll elaborate on these points a little. To start with, it doesn’t matter how good your game is or how much you advertise it if there’s a very small target market. For example, if i were to spend four years and 10 million dollars making the greatest, most awesome, groundbreaking furry relationship simulator, it really wouldn’t matter how good the game was, how much I was selling it for, or how well I advertised it… I’d only be selling copies to lonely furries that play computer games, which is indeed a very small subset of the population. The product’s market visibility is pretty obvious in why it’s important. If they made the new Elder Scrollz 7: CoD Hardline Madden Edition… and they released it silently without ever saying a word… do you think they’d be selling millions of copies? Obviously not — and that’s even true for well-known AAA developers and IPs. What if an indie team released a game without ever telling anybody? The answer to that one is well documented. They’ll sell maybe 50-100 copies, max. The product’s comparative price point is next. If your game has a large market, and it’s got lots of exposure, the next question is how much does it cost in comparison to the competition. There’s plenty of times throughout gaming history where the superior option was shunned by the community as a whole because it was the more expensive choice. Countless multi-platform releases on consoles bear this point out. Last, and least, is how good your game really is. The ultimate proof of this one is everywhere. Do you care how good those games really are in the bundles that you purchase? Or are you just buying them because they’re cheap and you happen to see it? Why would CoD sell well every single year? It’s well polished, but it’s certainly no masterpiece… but it does have the first three things in my list 100% perfected. TL;DR — Quality doesn’t determine success.

Zero-K (and Spring) is going to get that visibility once it's released on Steam... hopefully it will be polished enough for the general (multiplayer-interested) RTS public by then.

quote: balanceing araund 3 factions is much simpler because you go rock papers scissors everywhere

Huh? RPS is unrelated to faction amount and is definitely something that you do not want to use between factions. ZK also goes RPS everywhere.

quote: factionless flat techtree and unclear empirical damage, reload etc. its very hard to acheive (not mentioning some pure support units like dijjin for example)

ZK is in theory factionless but factory choice is a soft faction choice. Damage and reloads are clear, what do you mean?
SC also has pure support units, eg. Observer or Medivac.

About balance, I'd say ZK is harder to balance because of
1) the complexity. In SC, stuff just shoots and hits; units are either high-ground or low. In ZK, projectiles are dodgable, units need to turn their turrets to actually shoot, height difference is gradual.
2) the throughput. ZK sees only a few games with meaningful balance feedback each day, these are the high level duels. The extreme here is sea which is usually avoided so there is barely any meaningful balance feedback. Compare to SC where the balancing team has access to hundreds of games by professionals.