Blizzard Probably Envies This Fan-Made StarCraft MMO

[Mathak]

Despite what Mr. Grumpypants here says, SC2 was one of the best games of 2010 so you really can't go wrong with it

Except when you're absolutely balls at ultra-fast micromanagement. Like me.

Not that I blame the game for it, I just know that when I'll be playing this online, I'll be raging like a bull in a china shop.

Meh, micro is nice and all, but really...in the lower leagues you can just move-attack your entire army 100% of the time and win, as long as you remember to keep macroing. Up to platinum or so macro wins the game, only after that micro really becomes important.

 

[Mathak]

Also, there's barely any exposition. The game doesn't have many characters or objects to deal with, and you still don't get almost any fucking information about them. This is inexcusable.

Lack of exposition is not a SC2 problem, but a wholesale Blizz thing. Back when I played WC3 I had no idea what was really going on..I mean, Lich King, who? What's a World Tree and why can it destroy the world? Illidan..should I know that guy?

Only after you read the 50-page pdf on the disk did you have any sense of what was happening. Ah, LK = Ner'Zhul? That would've been nice to know. Oh, so that's why the Tree's important, and why Illidan was locked away.

Personally, I blame Metzen.

 

[Low Key]

Color me surprised Kotick didn't put his big fat foot down on this. It's even more surprising than the cool gameplay.

How could he do this? The whole point of releasing a powerful map maker is so people can make good maps.

The irrational Kotick hate needs to stop.

OT: Saw it already, looks amazing for a mod.

It was an attempt at being funny at the expense of a guy who may or may not deserve it, nothing more. This darn internet and things getting lost in translation, I tell ya what.

 

[Lunar Templar]

oh? they let it continue eh?

cool, be fun for the SC fans, i will be else where though

 

[Torrasque]

I see two possible outcomes for this:
1. This game is made, and Blizzard makes their own Starcraft MMO, borrowing most of their ideas from this, but making an actual game out of it, not a UMS.
2. This game becomes the next UMS that everyone plays (like DoTA was)

Either way, color me very excited DDD

 

[Torrasque]

Please please PLEASE tell me I can play Zerg!

I doubt it.
Of the three races, they're the most likely to be the enemies.
A third faction WOULD be interesting story-wise, but I've always imagined an SC MMO being Terran vs. Protoss.

I see two possible outcomes for this:
1. This game is made, and Blizzard makes their own Starcraft MMO, borrowing most of their ideas from this, but making an actual game out of it, not a UMS.
2. This game becomes the next UMS that everyone plays (like DoTA was)

Either way, color me very excited DDD

3, and the most likely of these. The map doesn't take off, whether it be for the limitations of B.net or simply being unenjoyable to play.

I've seen much less interesting games become huge successes, and seeing as this is the dream of most people who play Blizzard games, I see no reason for them to freak out when this is finally finished.
But yeah, I can imagine this game taking an insane amount of load time, and being really laggy.
We'll see.

 

[Freechoice]

snip

Imma go out on a limb here and completely agree with you.

Wall of text warning if you didn't already figure it out.

The campaign's gameplay was just bad for the most part. There are some maps where you just need to build the unit they give you and nothing else. Likewise, half the missions have a timer or a mechanic timer that forces you to complete the mission within a set limit. I don't know about anyone else, but the fun of the original's campaign was turtling hardcore until you got a maxed out army or finding a way to beat what should be hour long missions in 186 seconds. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACCYvuQb17A]


Compound this with the fact that they had 12 years to not screw it up. It didn't matter that they had other projects at the time. The problems are largely a matter of concept as opposed to execution.
Who remembers the "leaked HotS" trailer? The one where Kerrigan kills Mengsk and "frees" the zerg? It eventually got dismissed as the alpha version of Starcraft 2's ending. That's disturbing to me. Who would even imagine that as a viable ending to such a dark tale? It's not even good to say that they cancelled it. The fact that it exists is a sign that something is very wrong in the minds of the creative developers.

I'd also like to raise the hiring of a guy from the Command and Conquer series as the senior designer. C&C is known for nonsensical plots, cheesy LA cutscenes and tanks. The original Starcraft was great on its own. They did not need to hire a man who, accounted himself that, "he brought no knowledge from his previous job at EA, since he wasn't working on games designed for esports there" as quoted from the SC wiki.

Seriously? What was the point if he didn't even bring experience to the outfit?


I claim no expertise in the multiplayer arena, but by my observation, there's both errors in practice and concept.

In practice, units like the viking are clear reactionary units that were designed not with "this would be both cool and useful" but "this unit is too effective against this race. There needs to be a counter."

Take a look at the lore justification.

"Wraith combat fighters and valkyrie missile frigates proved to be an unwieldy combination against agile zerg airborne organisms. In addition, ground-based anti-air support from goliath assault walkers was too limited in its mobility: all too often airborne attackers would simply move out of the goliath's range."

Granted, wraiths sucked against mutalisks, but to level such injustice against my beloved valkyrie is pure bullshit. That thing beat the bejesus out of mutalisks. And I've rarely seen terran get vikings to counter mutalisks. It just doesn't happen. But do you know what's even more retarded logic? They made the "counter" to the fast and agile mutalisks a slow ground unit that, with proper micro, is rendered useless against mutalisks. Magic box ftl.
Likewise, the only units the viking can beat one on one are actually mutalisks (again, never employed in play) and the nerfed/buffed void ray. It used to be that a ray could outrun a viking and negate micro since the ray can fire on the move, but the VR's speed is now 2.25 to the viking's 2.75.

Also, the goliath with Charon Boosters matched the range of both the guardian and the carrier. So yeah, Blizzard covering their asses with a handkerchief.

You can look at the patch lists to see how many unit tweaks have been made in the last year. It's roughly the same amount that occurred in the entire history of Brood War. Does that not speak volumes about how much the game still needed fixing?


And on a personal note, I was goddamn pissed off that Tricia Helfer won the Spike VGA for Kerrigan. She had like 2 minutes of very flat, unenthused dialogue while Yvonne Strahovski got shafted. Hell, they wanted to get rid of Robert Clotworthy as the voice of Raynor and it was a miracle that Neil Kaplan was the ADR or something and just happened to swing the job as Tychus. And they killed Tychus, the only memorable (read: good) character in the entire goddamn campaign.

 

[Sabinfrost]

Blizz have the best customer service I've personally ever experienced, doesn't surprise me they gave this guy a long leash in the end, they were always good with Defense of the Ancients.

Looking forward to seeing what becomes of this, I'd like to play it, I am also very interested now in seeing what this map editor can create.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

Holy shit this looks so awesome.

They should really let these guys go ahead and try to make it in an MMO.I would definitely play it,even though the setting is rather similar to WoW but within the Starcraft universe.

 

[John Funk]

Mkay. First, judging something completely on its own merits is a nonsensical statement, it has to be compared to something by default, otherwise no progress would ever be made.

Then the Battle.net comment. Do you really have to stretch this hard to make Blizzard look better? Battle.net is a badly designed atrocity of an online service, some of the reasons for which are in the article I linked a little bit earlier. Unless you're telling me to judge the game completely on the merits of its core gameplay, leaving out Battle.net from my critique doesn't make sense. It's there, and it deserves to be judged. Furthermore, it's lacking more as a service than what we had 9 years ago. It's beyond stupid to just let it go for no good reason.

I definitely disagree that Battle.net is a "badly designed atrocity of an online service." I think that Bnet has some crippling issues, certainly. I hate how they handle custom games, I really would like proper clan and league support and cross-region play, etc. But calling it a "badly designed atrocity of an online service" is nothing but hyperbole. Yes, Bnet is lacking some features I really, really would want to have, and its implementation of others is lackluster to say the least.

But when I want to just play a fairly evenly-matched melee game? It does *exactly* what I need it to do, which is finding me a player of somewhat-similar skill to play against in a timely fashion. And hell, even the Facebook integration which people were whining about actually helped find me some people I hadn't been in touch with since high school who were playing, and we played some games and reconnected.

For a hardcore gamer, it is absolutely insufficient; I do not deny this at all - and even the steps that Blizzard has taken, adding rudimentary chat channels, etc, are still rudimentary steps at best. But I think you are drastically overestimating the amount of people who care about the things that matter to "core" gamers in comparison to the amount of people who want to just get on and play a Melee match - and for that, Bnet works perfectly.

[blockquote]The story we have gone over a hundred of times. The fact of the matter is, SC2 possesses neither the depth of the story nor the characters that we've come to expect from Blizzard, and the story that's told is really short but extremely padded. Do I need to explain how padded it is? Also, there's barely any exposition. The game doesn't have many characters or objects to deal with, and you still don't get almost any fucking information about them. This is inexcusable. Then comes the single biggest plot hole and the worst writing concerning antagonists I've ever seen in a video game. And the worst and most unnecessary choices in a video game. This game can not be passed off as a serious attempt at storytelling, and the amount of content in its story could not conceivably warrant a full game.[/blockquote]

It absolutely possesses the depth of story and characters that *I've* come to expect from Blizzard. You had different expectations, and it did not live up to them. I was not expecting Shakespeare from a developer with the credo "Gameplay First," and I enjoyed the campaign for what it is.

Does every game have to be a serious attempt at storytelling? Are we to judge a game based on how long a book it would become in novelization form? I got 16+ hours out of the single-player campaign, and that's worth a full game to me.

[blockquote]The gameplay, sure, is fine. I give credit where credit is due. The upgrade systems in the game were pretty fun, and the varied missions didn't get all that old, even if they started getting really gimmicky and annoying the longer the game went on. But they don't hold the single player on their own. Fun distraction, but not much else. There's no substance to any of it. The competitive multi-player is the only part worth buying the game for. If you're into this sort of gameplay, go right ahead. This is not, however, what SC2 was selling it on (it was the story and the custom games, both of which were completely botched), because contrary to what you might believe, only a small minority of SC2 players actually play competitively or buy the game for that aspect of it. A much bigger part of the audience actually watches the tournaments, although that's a different matter altogether.[/blockquote]

Well, I'll agree that the competitive multiplayer is worth buying the game for, as that was the thing I was *most* buying the game for I also think you're very much underestimating the crowd that cares about playing online vs. playing custom games/the campaign. Most of the people I know who are just now getting into SC2 are doing so to play ranked ladder multiplayer - and yes, it's anecdotal which proves nothing, I'm aware, but until we have hard numbers it's tough to use any real data here.

 

[Spoon E11]

So is this going to be distributed via starcarft 2 in game channels or by a more traditional method? I suppose it will depend if blizzard sign a deal with the team or not.

 

[John Funk]

So it's not an atrocity, it's just bad in most aspects? Okay. For a company like Blizzard, it is an atrocity. Way too many oversights or super transparent business decisions making up the design of the game for a company of Blizzard's level to be considered passable. It's less functional than a 9 year old service which still had many things to improve. I don't even know how else to put it. If you don't consider this an atrocity and an example of everything that's wrong with the industry, I've no choice but to think this is your inability to criticise Blizzard speaking.

I said at the very beginning that it gets one thing right. You don't have to try to convince me.

Did you? Apologies, I missed that.

See, to me the thing is that... it gets one thing right, which is the most important thing it needed to get right - which is why I have trouble calling it an atrocity. A disappointment, sure, but it works for what I need it to do.

If you'll forgive the stretched analogy, it's like - imagine you got a new bed for your house. Now the bed is kind of ugly, it doesn't match any of the rooms in your house. It's too long to move between rooms, it doesn't have a headboard and the mattress is misshapen so it's hard to get sheets to fit on it. But yet, when you sleep on it it's one of the most comfortable beds you've ever used. Can you then really call it a failure, if it does correctly what you need it to do most?

I don't play custom games or have LAN parties anymore these days, so for me it does what I need it to do. Does Bnet 2 have miles to go before it won't be a disappointing service? Of course it does; I don't know why you're acting like I'm pretending that there's nothing wrong with it. There's *lots* wrong with it. But the SC2 team isn't working on Bnet 2 right now, they're working on Heart of the Swarm. So I think that (completely deserved) criticisms of Bnet as it exists right now don't really work as criticisms of StarCraft 2 the game.

Sure, expectations. Blizzard set them for me by producing much, much better stories in games. And while we're at it, better online services.

Um, yeah. SC2 was trying its best to be a serious attempt at storytelling. Did you not notice that from the cutscenes? You may get 16 hours of gameplay without any story whatsoever, but this is a game that's being marketed as the first part of a trilogy. You do know why Blizzard supposedly turned SC2 into a trilogy? Because the story was too big for one game. And would you look at that, the entire story of SC2 could barely fill up a campaign in their earlier games.

Blizzard's only passable stories have been SC1 and WC3. Clearly you have expectations in this regard that were much higher than my own. I do not expect a good story from Blizz, and I really never have. If I want a game with a great story I'll play Planescape Torment or something by BioWare.

But you're missing my point - yes, SC2 was certainly *trying* to be a serious attempt at storytelling. Pretty much every game tries to do that these days; pick a game and there's a 90+% chance that it'll have its share of overwrought cutscenes and the like. I'm saying that not every game needs to be a storyteller. Some games, like the aforementioned Planescape Torment, stand on the strength of their story (and certainly not their gameplay). Other games, like SC2, stand on the strength of their gameplay, not their story. Blizz's motto has been "gameplay first" for years, and I think expecting a great story from them is just kind of missing the point.

And too much content for one game =/= "the story was too big." What do you think takes the most development time on the campaign in SC2? Is it writing the story/dialogue for the missions? No, it's coming up with unique gameplay mechanics, building the missions, working out how the mission hub/upgrades are going to work/how you'll set it apart from multiplayer.

I really don't understand what you're getting at here. There were 16 hours of content in the single-player campaign, which by any modern standard should be good enough. Each of those missions had a story, some of which contributed to the larger plot and many of which did not. To me and many others, it was still an enjoyable experience that was certainly worth the full price of admission. Why does it matter how long the novelization would be?

Most people drop competitive multi-player as soon as they start. I don't know how much it changed since the baby patch [http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=203745], but a while back the ladders looked dead. Most of the people in them wouldn't have moved up or down in months.

Sorry, I don't have any evidence of this. I move up and down in the ladders all the time, flirting at the top of gold/bottom of Platinum. And anecdotally, like I said, all the people I know who pick up the game did it for the multiplayer - either from friends or by watching the eSports tourneys.

 

[Legendsmith]

StarCraft Universe could redefine our core standards of what makes a good videogame mod.

Ahahaha.
No.
There are mods of this level and higher out there already. This is hyperbole. Not just taht, it implies that this is new and different, that other mods aren't as good as this.

 

[fanklok]

Color me surprised Kotick didn't put his big fat foot down on this. It's even more surprising than the cool gameplay.

Well when it comes to blizzard he probably knows not to mess with the guys that own a solid gold diamond studded money printing blow job machine. If he did I'm sure Blizzard could perfrom some kind of witchcraft/financial fuckery and buy activision, or get a gillion shareholders with mutual interests to buy stock.

tl;dr don't fuck with dudes that own a solid gold diamond studded money printing blow job machine.

 

[samsonguy920]

Seriously, Blizzard, just hire this guy (and his team) already. He made this game in a map editor. Albeit an incredibly flexible map editor that was always touted as having the potential to build entire games, but a map editor nonetheless.

Even though he did back down, I am thinking Ol' Kotick is waiting until they declare the game done, and then come in with subpoenas and court orders to seize the game. That's gotta be the only reason he backed down when Blizzard spoke up in favor of it.
We may never know what all went on behind those doors in the Blizzard offices. But we may learn a bit come time.

Kudos to the work done, but I think Starcraft as an MMO would work better as a MMOFPS like Planetside, and not so much an RPG. Good luck to these guys but with WoW starting to show signs of weakening its interest base, people aren't going to be looking for another clone to it. Which this will be, and people will see it for that.

As impressive as the mod is I will name two reasons why I won't bother with it:
1) It looks like zergs aren't playable.
2) I don't own Starcraft 2 or a computer that can run Starcraft 2(this is 99% of the reasons).

1) As things stand in the canon, zergs are still mindless automatons controlled by cerebrates and the queen herself. Therefore playing them would just be silly and storybreaking(Possibly opening avenues to suits of defamation). Now playing as a cerebrate controlling your own 'lil horde of zerg' might be cool, although I imagine that would be considered unbalancing within any pvp. Things may change come Heart of the Swarm, though.
2) It's okay. Even though my system can, I have to repress the urge to express violence on those who like to throw their big hoitytoity system in our faces.