Stofsk wrote:The only thing I am going to play Starcraft 2 for is the story. That is it.
And Blizzard is still going to screw everyone by releasing the game three times. Or something. What they're doing is complete and utter bullshit, but people will accept it.
Youtube protects citizen.
"game will play itself"
Which is bad... why? Human players consistently beat the AI, so even if you played the game where, unless noted, the AI ran everything, you could still improve performance.
He means just watch the cutscenes on youtube and avoid feeding your money to the Blizzard beast 3 separate times.
And this is why you don't watch anything produced by Ronald D. Moore after he had his brain surgically removed and replaced with a bag of elephant semen.-Gramzamber, on why Caprica sucks
Darksider wrote:He means just watch the cutscenes on youtube and avoid feeding your money to the Blizzard beast 3 separate times.
Playing the game is actually part of the charm. The most enjoyable experience I ever had playing Starcraft was playing the missions. The occasional multiplayer game with a mate notwithstanding, that was it.
Good lord, if all I really wanted to know was what happened I could read about it on wikipedia five seconds after some hopeless geek plays it and decides to write a wiki article about it. I want to play it for the story, not read about it or watch it on youtube. On one hand I can understand Blizzard's motive in this, it wants to make money and its guaranteed to sell. On the other hand, I think it's ass-backwards and shows actual contempt for their consumer base. And to tell you the truth, it's actually left me with a bitter taste in the mouth that I may end up foregoing it altogether. But it all depends on what the finished product is like.
Stofsk wrote:On the other hand, I think it's ass-backwards and shows actual contempt for their consumer base. And to tell you the truth, it's actually left me with a bitter taste in the mouth that I may end up foregoing it altogether. But it all depends on what the finished product is like.
Why not wait for the inevitable SC2 "Battle Chest" which will be released eventually containing all 3 campaigns? It's not like you need to play SC2 right now for the cutting edge graphics or anything, and there are surely loads of games to keep you occupied in the mean time.
Why not wait for the inevitable SC2 "Battle Chest" which will be released eventually containing all 3 campaigns? It's not like you need to play SC2 right now for the cutting edge graphics or anything, and there are surely loads of games to keep you occupied in the mean time.
That is pretty my option for many games nowsdays I didn't even get dawn of war till the Platiuum edition and picked that as opposed to seeing it seperately and how I got the original Diablo and Starcraft as well, I got the battlechest well after release.
"a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic"-Joseph Stalin
"No plan survives contact with the enemy"-Helmuth Von Moltke
"Women prefer stories about one person dying slowly. Men prefer stories of many people dying quickly."-Niles from Frasier.
Maybe you should have bought some punctuation at the same time?
Even for a cynical person with high standards (ie me) there's enough games around that you NEVER have to buy a game 'just to see what happens'. If you really feel that strong a compulsion to buy a crap game at launch, you should look at your life to find the problem.
And then just buy a fucking 360 and you won't run out of games anymore. Pc gaming = LOL.
Is there even a reason to buy a game at launch when you can wait a few months and the price will come down, or you get it with an expansion. Hell, I can get a game five bucks cheaper if I wait a few days and get a used one at gamestop, and then I get to return it If I don't think it's worth the money.
I can't remember the last time I bought a game at launch.
And this is why you don't watch anything produced by Ronald D. Moore after he had his brain surgically removed and replaced with a bag of elephant semen.-Gramzamber, on why Caprica sucks
It's best with 'big name' games; stores overstock, and if they suck (like Mass Effect) you can pick them up nearly half price inside a month because they don't want all the traded copies.
Sorry, back to nerds buying games they know are shit because they're hooked on 'the story' or 'the brand' and so will buy any crap and then complain OH WHY IS THE GENRE SO DEAD.
Nobody minded the 'irrelevant tangent' about RTS Design History 101.
The "i like the story" sales will probably be grossly overshadowed by the "crazy obsessive ELITE PRO-GAMERS" sales; if anything we have the Korean progamers and their American wannabes to thank for it. The only thing the dwindling single-player market segment is responsible for is the encouragement of the Blizzard hack who actually writes their drivelous* plots and backgrounds.
*("that's not a word" i don't own a care)
also my opinion on this matter is probably ignorable anyway since my favorite RTS campaign "plot" was Tiberian Sun**
** if we want to talk about singleplayer fans encouraging poor games, C&C would be it
"There is no "taboo" on using nuclear weapons." -Julhelm
What is Project Zohar? "On a serious note (well not really) I did sometimes jump in and rate nBSG episodes a '5' before the episode even aired or I saw it."- RogueIce explaining that episode ratings on SDN tv show threads are bunk
Darth Wong wrote:Well, pro-gamers are clearly an important market. Somebody has to buy those ridiculous $750 high-end gaming video cards, after all.
The irony is that a lot of the games that attract "hardcore" gamers don't even require high specs. There are still thousands of people who obsessively play games like Counter-Strike and Warcraft 3 (not to mention Starcraft which is over ten years old now) and those games could run perfectly on a computer you could pick up used for just a couple hundred dollars.
I think there's a lot of people who aren't anywhere near being pro-gamers that just like to blow money on blinged-out computer status symbols. I know one guy that bought a 40" HDTV to use as his monitor.
"There is no "taboo" on using nuclear weapons." -Julhelm
What is Project Zohar? "On a serious note (well not really) I did sometimes jump in and rate nBSG episodes a '5' before the episode even aired or I saw it."- RogueIce explaining that episode ratings on SDN tv show threads are bunk
Uraniun235 wrote:The irony is that a lot of the games that attract "hardcore" gamers don't even require high specs. There are still thousands of people who obsessively play games like Counter-Strike and Warcraft 3 (not to mention Starcraft which is over ten years old now) and those games could run perfectly on a computer you could pick up used for just a couple hundred dollars.
I think there's a lot of people who aren't anywhere near being pro-gamers that just like to blow money on blinged-out computer status symbols. I know one guy that bought a 40" HDTV to use as his monitor.
My best friend does have this sort of behavior, but on the other hand, his computer is his sole entertainment center. Doesn't have a TV, DVD, or any game console so he uses it for all of the movies he rents as well as any games he plays. He also tends to a) shop one generation behind the current CPU/graphics card/monitor/what-have-you and b) look for cheap-ass deals for online and self-build his own computer.
I think pro-gamers have managed to get a disproportionate amount of attention by games developers. I'm still sure most people who buy an RTS never end up playing online, maybe on LAN with a relative or flatmate. Yet all the attention seems to be on making a game which is targeted at the slim majority who treat playing a game online like a serious activity. It's these hardcore people that whine incessantly on the forums about balance being broken (read the exact specific tactic they like to use with their favourite side is ineffective) or post shitty ideas about how the game could be improved if it was even clickier. I think it's easy for a developer looking at their game's forum to get a skewed view of what their audience actually want.
For the RTS genre the worst two offenders for me in this respect were Dawn of War 2 and Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. DoW2 just has far too many clicky unit abilities and the make the game super fast paced design decision (so your pro-gamers can get games done in ten minutes) alienates people who just want to sit back and have a long epic game. Forged Alliance had an extensive beta where the balance was basically done by the top ranking folk on the leaderboard. They decided that to make for better (ie shorter and more micro intensive games) gameplay they had to change the economy model so that turtling wasn't a viable strategy and made it so that most ranked matches don't make it to the T3 units or experimentals which are the ridiculous and fun ones for most people.
It doesn't help when RTS that try different things like SupCom sell comparatively badly - mostly due to SupCom's ridiculous learning curve, godawful system requirements when it came out and fugly UI.
They decided that to make for better (ie shorter and more micro intensive games) gameplay they had to change the economy model so that turtling wasn't a viable strategy and made it so that most ranked matches don't make it to the T3 units or experimentals which are the ridiculous and fun ones for most people.
Maybe I'm remembering wrong but I thought that in SupCom, the turtle economy was itself pretty micro-intensive to grow and run for maximum efficiency; such that Forged Alliance basically shifted the micro from the economy to the units. Now, I'm not a fan of micro, but if it's going to be there, I'd much rather play a game where the micro is on the combat and not on the economy.
"There is no "taboo" on using nuclear weapons." -Julhelm
What is Project Zohar? "On a serious note (well not really) I did sometimes jump in and rate nBSG episodes a '5' before the episode even aired or I saw it."- RogueIce explaining that episode ratings on SDN tv show threads are bunk
Wow. I mean, the game SHOULD take place mostly in T1/2 units, where you jockey for position in securing resource deposits and raiding the other person's fields. Tech 3 is basically gamewinner stuff that is good enough to smash through any non-T3 defensive position if used right, and is for seigebreaking. Tech4 (And Super-Heavy Arty) is for when the game has somehow survived the Tech3 Massacre, and REALLY NEEDS TO END.
SupCom never had that crazy a learning curve, since everything handles itself logically. You can have builders assist builders to go faster, or assist units to repair. You just need to watch the net input number at the top, and build more mines and such when it dropped too low.
One of the reasons why I still play Company of Heroes today is because the repetitious chore of churning out more units than your enemy has virtually been eliminated by limiting the player's primary resource (in CoH's case, Manpower). This in turn requires the player focus on other aspects like conserving their units and making maximum use out of them instead of fighting to hoard as many resources as you can so you can out-spam your opponent. Micromanagement of your units is still a problem though it's not as atrocious as Warcraft 3, IMO. In any RTS that includes "battle-of-attrition" type gameplay that plagues most RTS', it's difficult for me to keep up since at some point, I just simply lose all interest and capacity to keep up with the tedious task of hoarding and spamming.
Pint0 Xtreme wrote:One of the reasons why I still play Company of Heroes today is because the repetitious chore of churning out more units than your enemy has virtually been eliminated by limiting the player's primary resource (in CoH's case, Manpower). This in turn requires the player focus on other aspects like conserving their units and making maximum use out of them instead of fighting to hoard as many resources as you can so you can out-spam your opponent. Micromanagement of your units is still a problem though it's not as atrocious as Warcraft 3, IMO. In any RTS that includes "battle-of-attrition" type gameplay that plagues most RTS', it's difficult for me to keep up since at some point, I just simply lose all interest and capacity to keep up with the tedious task of hoarding and spamming.
I find CoH very micro heavy though - all the non-automatic clickable abilities, etc. It's a really good game, I just wish it was less manual. It's not as absurd as DoW, of course. WiC is good for the same reason (although it uses a shooter style points that regenerate faster the less you have up to a cap, so being wiped doesn't take you out of the game for long but getTing 100% max units requires keeping your guys alive)
On a purely philosophical note, I also strongly dislike the game mechanism which encourages players to think of their units as disposable cannon fodder. It would be interesting to make a game where unit morale was affected by heavy casualties or tactical choices which clearly place little value on your mens' lives. At some point, maybe they would refuse to follow your orders, factory output would drop, and parts of the army might even revolt or desert.
Of course, that would get in the way of the "I can click/spam/hoard faster than you can" style of gameplay, so it MUST NOT BE DONE!!
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Games with strong veterancy are generally not well liked. In WIC (man I can go on) high veterancy units are extraordinarily valuable due to faster ability cooldiwn and damage, so working with support and repair can be effective. People whinge all the same - I can't imagine how they'd complain if you did it at the army level and negative.
What am I saying? They'd make morale a resource you spent to buy units and gain by harvesting civilians and builing tv stations and churches.
That's frustrating as hell, and of course, we know why they dislike strong veterancy traits: they like to treat their units as worthless cannon fodder in a war of fast-click attrition and unit spamming.
I personally find it frustrating as hell that you can level up a unit to some kind of three-star rating for veterancy and it seems to make little difference to its abilities and zero difference to its behaviour.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
On that note, CoH is similar. I'm not sure if unit veterancy in CoH is as significant as the veterancy in WiC but losing a highly experienced unit hurts a lot if your faction's units gain veterancy through time (some factions gain veterancy through other units or "upgrades"). But like Stark said, micromanagement is on the high end, especially with experienced players. I personally love the way machine gun suppression is used in the game.
Last edited by Pint0 Xtreme on 2009-07-29 08:40pm, edited 1 time in total.
