By Jim Rossignol on August 24th, 2009 at 12:23 pm.
So Blizzard’s Starcraft: Ghost action game might not have seen the light of day, but it seems you’re going to be able to build your own third-person shooter within Starcraft II anyway. What? Yes, the editor is super-flexible, and is even going to support mouselook. Building a third-person shooter inside the RTS editing suite is going to be a possibility, as Blizzard demonstrated with their proof of concept at BlizzCon. Video of it in action below. The scrolling shooter is also acceptable. Cheers to sub edii for pointing out this link.
24/08/2009 at 12:32 Mike says:
Wow. That’s very LBP. Cross-genre mod tools aren’t so common.
24/08/2009 at 12:37 ulix says:
Pretty amazing.
Makes their intention on making customers pay for content created by mod-makers much more understandable.
Quality control will be the crux.
24/08/2009 at 12:37 Aldaris says:
Well, even if the game itself sucks, this means that the custom levels will still be awesome enough to buy the game.
And with a nickname like mine, I’m really happy about that.
24/08/2009 at 12:39 Mike says:
I think the whole idea of regulating UGC is backwards though. You need to leave it to the community to filter it, I can’t think of many cases in which developers have been very good at it. TF2′s selected maps are often pretty ‘meh’.
Sporecasts are probably the best balance. EA oversees it, but it’s the community doing the pickin’.
24/08/2009 at 12:40 StalinsGhost says:
Finally something to be genuinely excited about with SC2. I think it might just be a day 1 buy for me now.
24/08/2009 at 12:41 James Benson says:
Jesus christ that is amazing, it’s so worth blizzard taking their time to facilitate this stuff. The mod community is going to have a god damn field day. Wow
24/08/2009 at 12:42 ourdreamsoffreedom says:
Everyone is expecting SC2 to be some sort of orgasmic rapture, but when I look at the videos it seems really daft.
I didn’t even like SC1, and now they’re re-making the exact same game in 3D. Am I missing something?
24/08/2009 at 12:48 alset says:
Blizzard (abloo abloo) Starcraft 2 (abloo abloo) ripoff…
And with that out of the way, I can’t be more excited about the mods that are gonna come from this game. Starcraft and Warcraft 3 had some pretty amazing custom maps. Everything from full blown RPG’s to tactical shooters to puzzle games. That alone is worth the asking price and no other developer but Valve even compares to what Blizzard gives to its community.
24/08/2009 at 12:51 Vandelay says:
This all looks amazing. Some of my favourite parts of the original Starcraft and Warcraft 3 were the custom maps, so this gets me really excited.
24/08/2009 at 12:54 Vandelay says:
@ourdreamsoffreedom – You’re shocked that a sequel to a game you didn’t like doesn’t appeal to you?
I await the inevitable parade of people who demand that Starcraft 2 be exactly like Dawn of War 2.
24/08/2009 at 12:56 Skinlo says:
I don’t really get Starcraft, it just seems like a rush fest, which gets very boring very quickly.
Saying that, the 3rd person feature is nice.
24/08/2009 at 13:04 Azhrarn says:
O.o that was pretty impressive, it would have been a day 1 buy anyway, but dang, that makes it even more awesome.
24/08/2009 at 13:10 Sagan says:
This proves that John Carmack was wrong, when he claimed games get too complicated for modding.
I’ve said something similar in the forum discussion about this: Looking at Half Life 2 or Unreal Tournament 3 is the wrong direction. Those games did get too complicated. All the exciting modding stuff since Half Life 1 has happened in Warcraft III. Entire new genres have sprung out of that editor. And this looks like a very natural evolution to the Warcraft III editor. Custom UI and mouse control are things that were always wanted.
And you can bet that Starcraft 2′s modding community will again be much larger than anything Rage or Left 4 Dead or whatever can assemble.
And if they follow the Warcraft III model, with super easy scripting, and super easy mod sharing, then you can bet that Battle.net will again be overrun by mods.
24/08/2009 at 13:14 greenB says:
…and then, a couple of years in, when there really are some stellar maps and many good ones being played all the time by a sizeable community, they’ll patch it in a way that destroys most scripts and forces mappers to do all their awesome stuff all over again, from scratch, in a new system.
24/08/2009 at 13:16 Sports Gambling Review says:
Very nice read. Thank you for the information.
24/08/2009 at 13:20 Howard says:
@Sagan
Carmack didn’t say modding was too hard for non-pro’s, he said modding id Tech 5 was too hard for non-pro’s. People really have got that quote stuck in their craw…
24/08/2009 at 13:23 Tei says:
@Sagan: FPS engines tend to make crappy RTS mods, and RTS engines tend to make crappy FPS mods. If you are happy with a subset of tools, I suppose mapmaking + LUA scripting is your friend. But what If you want^H^Hneed a custom particle engine?
24/08/2009 at 13:23 OKami says:
@Sagan: Carmack hasn’t stated that games themselves are getting too complicated for modding. As far as I know, he was talking about id’s own engine and that making their tools accessible to the community wouldn’t really be worth it, because the required workflow, skills and tools are beyond most modders.
There’s a difference between modding a tileset/height map based lofi rts like Starcraft 2 and creating assets for an ultro high tech shooter like Rage.
24/08/2009 at 13:25 Orta says:
bah, I had been tempted to boycott due to the LAN stuff, but after that, no wai. +1 for the Mac day 1.
24/08/2009 at 13:25 Dracko says:
Skinlo: StarCraft is a brawler under a different name.
24/08/2009 at 13:26 ourdreamsoffreedom says:
@Vandelay: I’m just at a loss as to what makes SC so worth being enamored with. It’s ridiculous how little the RTS has evolved since Warcraft 1.
If you wanted to describe SC 2 to someone who moved to Mars in 1994, you’d just have to say “Warcraft in Space with a 3D engine.” The said hypothetical person would probably say “Oh. Sounds kinda boring.”
Meanwhile any games that tries to push RTS forward, like Supreme Commander, gets ignored completely.
24/08/2009 at 13:27 LionsPhil says:
So, yes, it’s got flexible modding. And that’s good. But, erm, is that a reason to buy it? There’s nothing there the UT games couldn’t do, but they had the advantage of being FPS-born and supporting enough multiplayer players to give us the likes of Air Buccaneers. Also, very good, very mass-popular games in the first place, so an excellent chance your friends also had the game upon which to play the mod.
The TPS, in particular, is only impressive because you’ve set your expectations for “RTS mod”. As a TPS, it’s terrible—the camera even clips straight through a wall!
24/08/2009 at 13:44 StalinsGhost says:
Better than not having that ability though right? Starcraft/Warcraft III spawned numerous excellent proof of concept type mods. Would we have had Demigod without them for example? Producing FPS engine mods takes a lot more effort than whacking down a few units/tiles etc and tying them together with scripts.
24/08/2009 at 13:45 OKami says:
@LionsPhil: There’s the entry level barrier. It’s quite easy to learn tileset and heightmap based editors and it only takes some practice in order to create decent looking maps with them. The WC3 scripting tools were also really easy to learn, even if you had no clue about programming and I expect it will be the same for Starcraft2.
Of course brush based FPS editors like Hammer and Unreal are more flexible and more powerfull. But they’re much harder to learn, you need bigger teams and have longer development cycles for your mods.
Can you create something like Air Buccaneers with the SC2 editor? Most likely not. But there will be an absolutely huge amount of mods and maps beeing churned out for SC2 by thousands upon thousands of modders, who’d never even think about opening the Unreal editor.
Of course most of this stuff will be complete and utter bullshit. But expect to find some real gems among that.
24/08/2009 at 13:46 diebroken says:
“Meanwhile any games that tries to push RTS forward, like Supreme Commander, gets ignored completely.” I think you can chalk Metal Fatigue up with that statement (sort of… *stares at Stormrise*)
24/08/2009 at 13:50 Sagan says:
Alright maybe I got Carmack’s quote wrong. But during the discussion here on RPS the dominant notion was definitely, that games in general are too complicated for modding now.
And the reason for that is, that FPS developers don’t look at Blizzard. And FPS mod developers don’t look at Warcraft III mod developers. Because if you don’t make custom models, and custom AI or a custom particle system, then you can still easily make mods. And If you look at the amount of quality mods for Warcraft III as opposed to the amount of quality mods for HL 2, I would argue as well that you can make better mods.
If Rage would automatically download mods upon joining a new server, and if that was guaranteed to always take less than a minute, and if Rage shipped with a level editor that only allowed you to use the default assets, and had very easy scripting, and would not allow you to mess with any code other than the scripting, I bet it would be the greatest FPS for modding ever.
24/08/2009 at 14:03 Rinox says:
Superb.
I can’t say I was ever a HUGE fan of Blizzard’s games (tho I did play and enjoyed all of them up until WC2), but now that they’re one of the only developers of AAA games left that don’t bend over for the multiplatform madness and its subsequent loss of quality they’re increasingly falling in favor with me.
This mod tools presentation is one of the best illustrations of how superior a PC only title can be compared to its console brethren in terms of user-created content and longevity.
24/08/2009 at 14:05 NewName says:
@Tei: Then you write one. There are even custom physics engines for Warcraft 3.
24/08/2009 at 14:14 Über Nerd says:
I demand Battlezone:Starcraft.
24/08/2009 at 14:20 Heliocentric says:
Now i have a reason to buy the game. Custom maps were always the best bit of wc3. I wish coh, wic or mow had first/third person combat. Men of war had direct fire, but you are not inside the vehicle.
But yes, whee, battle zone . I hope they can model ballistics to make hull down and flanking matter. Or there’ll hardly be any point.
24/08/2009 at 14:22 Gap Gen says:
I think Starcraft was better for tactics than Warcraft 3, which was almost entirely based around who had the best micro strategies and build order. That said, I played Starcraft far more and with people closer to my skill level, so I dunno.
As for SupCom, I think it’s a little too clinical for a game that involves giant robots nuking each other. The interface is pretty great, but it does miss some of the joy of TA – if you’re zoomed out, a million robots exploding looks rather like one robot exploding closer up. Then again, SupCom is all about economy, and revels in base-building where other games are trying to eschew it.
24/08/2009 at 14:25 Fenchurch says:
@Über Nerd
Oh good gravy, yes. :-3
24/08/2009 at 14:28 Freudian Trip says:
I see people questioning Starcraft. You’d think with an 11 year old game people would get it or give up on getting it.
Some people don’t like Godfather I & II, that doesn’t make them poor but it doesn’t mean the people not liking it are wrong either.
Different strokes for different folks people.
24/08/2009 at 14:36 Jayt says:
cool bananas
24/08/2009 at 14:39 Tupimus says:
Oh, Christ.
So, this is basically a hugely improved Warcraft 3 engine. Which by on it’s own, has spawned… let’s see… two worldwide competitive games and a HUGE community that has managed to get sooo much out of such a simple editor (They’re custom maps, not mods! Almost everyone gets this wrong, gah).
I’m calling this the second coming of Christ.
24/08/2009 at 14:42 subedii says:
Gap Gen: Really they’re different styles of game in both scope and intent. Although from what we’ve seen of SupCom 2, it looks like they’re really trying to make things faster paced whilst still keeping the massive scale that we (well, fans of SupCom) love, which is something I can get behind. So a bit less emphasis on economy, more on strategy.
You hit it right saying that Starcraft focussed more on “tactics”. Most modern RTS’s focus in that direction, emphasising smaller scale skirmishes. That’s why I love the fact that SupCom goes in the opposite direction and instead tries for grandiose strategy with battles sprawling across what are basically entire continents. If you’ve ever been engaged in simultaneous ground, air, and naval battles, you’ll know how awesome that is. There’s less emphasis on micro in the SupCom series, given that for example, none of the units make use of “spells” or activated abilities that you need to time.
Anyway, back on topic, and I’m sure tower defence will be amongst the least of the creative ideas spawned from this one.
24/08/2009 at 14:50 Mike says:
“Meanwhile any games that tries to push RTS forward, like Supreme Commander, gets ignored completely.” I think you can chalk Metal Fatigue up with that statement (sort of… *stares at Stormrise*)”
SupCom was ruined by the T4 units, if it were actually about huge numbers of units then it would be fine. Metal Fatigue? wow, been a while since I had to think about that train wreck. that game was the classic case of great ideas, terrible execution. throw Universe at War in that category as well
24/08/2009 at 14:53 Nimic says:
I was never any good at Warcraft 3, but I considered myself quite good at the custom maps. I only played regular WC3 online a couple of times, and didn’t really fancy it. On the flip-side, I played a lot of custom maps.
Aaah, Helms Deep… :D
24/08/2009 at 14:59 rob says:
That took SC2 from my ‘maybe’ list to my ‘oh hell yes’ one.
24/08/2009 at 15:05 Swiv says:
I heard from a friend of mine watchin’ the streams the next day that they later clarified that mod-makers could still upload the maps on different websites.
24/08/2009 at 15:07 CMaster says:
It looks like this might let people take SC2 off in some really interesting directions, which is more interesting to me than SC2 itself. (I played and loved SC1. I don’t feel any particular urge to play the same game again now).
On a similar topic, has anyone seen the kind of things that have been done with modding Civ 4? People have made it into pretty dramatically different games.
I actually found SC demanded annoying amounts of micro, seeing as friendly units would quite happily bombard other friendlies, and also units would sit and shoot a hillside while taking damage rather than move. You had to babysit your huge armies of moronic robots to an alarming extent.
24/08/2009 at 15:11 Tei says:
I repect the W3 modding community. And I agree with Sagan last comment.
24/08/2009 at 15:24 Zyrusticae says:
I WANT THAT SHOOTER.
Someone needs to make a Starcraft clone of Tyrian, ASAP.
24/08/2009 at 15:29 LionsPhil says:
SupComm’s biggest failing in not avoiding micro was that individual tanks were still individual tanks, and the thick buggers would sit there and be picked off one-by-one by an AI enemy sitting in the periphery of range. Ridiculous micromanagement could also win you fights through focused fire with appropriate splits to avoid overkill (low ROF units like submarines are a canonical example, I believe).
Needs more of a Dawn-of-War squad-level arrangement, methinks—particularly so I can click on an enemy squad, not have to shift-queue a whole bunch of individuals, or just march into range and hope for the best. And unit AI which can effectively co-ordinate fire by itself. Not very sexy features, but would really help let you focus on the strategic end.
(Re: actual topic, yes, OK, I can see the barrier-to-entry point to some degree, but genre-bending by modding the wrong game is still sort-of-cool daftness rather than an actual good idea. Like fitting an afterburner to your street car.)
24/08/2009 at 15:29 JKjoker says:
this would be nice if they hadnt shot the custom community in the foot with the bnet only crap and the “map marketplace” BS
24/08/2009 at 15:51 LeFishy says:
Starcraft not exactly my thing. This, exactly my thing. Insta purchase from me.
24/08/2009 at 15:53 Alaric says:
StarCraft was an excellent game. Unfortunately I never got to play Brood War… so I went and bought it a few weeks ago. I must report that I am on my third Zerg mission at this time, and having a lot of fun playing.
Can’t wait for StarCraft 2!
As to the mod tools, I rarely play a game past the original single player story, and maybe an occasional multiplayer match. Still, it is very cool that the ability to create such varied custom content is there. A lot of people are going to spend many enjoyable hours both creating and playing.
24/08/2009 at 16:12 Turin Turambar says:
J.Carmack was referring not to the general modding scene, but the big Total Conversion mods from the Quake 2-up-to-HL2 age, which were almost equivalent to a commercial game, that era is over. And of course he was speaking about fps mod scene, not rts or any other kind of game.
I mean, it’s a bit different the time needed to make a doom 3 level in comparison with the time needed to make a Warcraft 3 scenario.
24/08/2009 at 16:36 Vandelay says:
@ourdreamsoffredom – You thought SupCom was ignored? I thought that it had been overrated myself.
I agree with Gap Gen’s assessment that it was far too clinical. Having said that, I think it would have been a great game if they could have sped it up a bit. Having to spend about half an hour building the awesome units, which has already taken about half an hour to reach an economy and tech level where they are accessible, didn’t make for a very interesting game for me personally. Which was a pity because I liked the core concept of the game, just would have preferred it if they had of cut down building times by half right across the board. It also suffered from exceptionally bland maps and lacking any diversity between the sides, something which Starcraft excels at.
As for Starcraft’s micro managing, I agree that Warcraft 3 had much more focus on microing your units and spell usage was much more important. Remembering hotkeys was much more essential. One of the main problems Starcraft had in this regards was the poor pathfinding, which meant watching units became much more important, in case they did something stupid. For some reasons, Dragoons seemed to be particularly susceptible to this and it could be pretty frustrating. Hopefully, this won’t be an issue in the sequel.
24/08/2009 at 16:39 Big J says:
Just to be clear, from what I understand, maps only need to be paid for if the map developer chooses to make it that way. Blizzard doesn’t make maps pay-only.
24/08/2009 at 16:43 subedii says:
@ Turin Turambar: I think it ultimately comes down to the tools and how intuitive they are. Most FPS level editors are NOT build with the home user in mind, and as such whilst they are capable of doing everything the devs did, they require a serious investment of time to get anywhere.
Compare that with something like the Crysis level editor (or Far Cry 2, which is even simpler and designed specifically around the home user), and it’s so intuitive to use that you can literally knock up a quick level in maybe 15 minutes. It won’t be good, but hey, it’s more than what you’d manage in Hammer.
This SC2 editor falls into the later category of something built with the home user in mind. No programming knowledge necessary, and I’d be willing to bet a very intuitive interface. It takes time and resources to create something like that, and it’s not really worthwhile for all developers to try for it. If Blizzard were instead to ship the development tools they likely use in-house, odds are it would be far too complex for the average person to get to grips with.
Carmack was right that total conversion like mods are really out of the question for casual modders today. Given the amount of polish expected and the escalating workload it’s a lot tougher to get something passable out there. But it’s still a very important route into games development, and more and more you see that the professional looking mods are actually being built by teams either looking to get into the games industry, or more likely, start their own studio. A professional product can be a very promising incentive for publishers to look at when you go to the asking for funding for a commercial project.
I think casual modding will still be around, but either it becomes smaller in scope, or it depends more on 3rd party tools and support from developers making intuitive and comprehensive editing suites like this.
24/08/2009 at 17:05 Psychopomp says:
@Uber Nerd
I would be my pants so much. So many memories of mine are attached to that little masterpiece.
24/08/2009 at 18:10 Vinraith says:
I’m not surprised, considering WC3, but I’m very pleased to see that Blizzard (unlike certain other developers, *cough*) still understands the value of cultivating a mod community around their game.
24/08/2009 at 18:24 Psychopomp says:
That was, um, supposed to be “pee my pants.”
@Vin
Aye
24/08/2009 at 19:19 Shalrath says:
I’m torn here. I really want this editor, but I don’t want the game, or frankly to put money towards the studio anymore.
Hmm…
24/08/2009 at 21:18 Anthony Damiani says:
Supreme Commander didn’t try to push the genre forward, it was a barbaric throwback to the bad-old-days of Total Annihilation.
24/08/2009 at 21:30 Gap Gen says:
No, I think Total Annihilation fulfilled an interesting niche of games that concentrate mainly on economy, and rather than being small and focused as most other strategy games, is vast and sprawling. I think that it’s an interesting thing to do – sure, people work better focusing on one thing, but the interface in these games is good enough to allow you to pull it off.
24/08/2009 at 21:34 R. says:
@Shalrath – what a peculiar thing to say. Why is one studio less deserving of your money than another?
Anyway, yeah, I’m not an RTS fan but I saw the panel the other day and when they got to the map editor bit I was pretty much blown away. Sure, the draw distance was poor and it was very basic but the possibilities are pretty exciting.
24/08/2009 at 21:41 Jahkaivah says:
@ourdreamsoffreedom
It’s nice to stick to roots sometimes, Half Life 1 was more impressive than Doom, but that doesn’t mean we want to forget the “just shoot them” style games otherwise we wouldn’t have Serious Sam or Left 4 Dead.
There are alot of sub-genres that have formed, such as seen in Defense of the Ancients, Dawn of War 2, or the Total Wars games.
But like those and SupCom I can see some perfectly good reasons to prefer the staple resource-fighting micro-managing sub-genre Starcraft was a part of, and Blizzard are devlopers who can provide the quality-assurance fans of that sub-genre want.
24/08/2009 at 21:58 Railick says:
Something else I’ve noticed recently about Supreme Commander and it’s expand-alone that was lacking is that sometimes you have so many units moving at once your computer can’t relay the new commands to your units (i had this happen last night when I was trying to command 5 or 10 units to attack , they just stood there and did nothing until they were all destroyed O.o In my mind it was because I had 240 other units moving around at the same time and it couldn’t command them all or something O.o )
I like a lot of complaints about Supreme Commander can be fixed if you just play Supreme Commander :Forged Alliances. The build times for some of the giant units is MUCh shorter (and they are weaker I believe) and everything is much faster paced than the origonal game. The 4 sides are very diffrent in their strengths and weakness but you’d have to actually PLAY the game to see the difference since most of the units themselves are almost the same across the diffrent races. (The differeces are more on a grand level than on an individual unit level. For example Cybran players do well to use their stealth technology to their advantage and strike at enemies and also have fantastic tactical missles compared to the other races. Their tactical missles fire faster and when they are destroyed they split into several smaller missles instead of just disappearing ;P)
I like it is like other people said above, this games fill a niche and players want sequals to the games they like. That is why we’re seeing a Supreme Commander 2 and Starcraft 2 along with the newer RTS games like Dawn of War 2 and so on.
25/08/2009 at 00:10 JKjoker says:
@Big J: yeah, the map fee is “optional”, but then, who is going to post anything they spent more than 5 minutes on without asking for a fee ? plus its pretty likely any “free” maps worth a damn will be buried under a pile of dung and if, by any chance in hell, any of the free maps becomes popular it will turn into nonfree, anyway i doubt the system will be in place as they described it for long as it would clog with the amount of crap that will be uploaded by idiots, so expect changes
and i doubt Blizzard went out of their way to put this system into place while forcing bnet down our orifices so that they could release “free” maps, so you can expect anything from them for a fee except maybe a few promotions or demos
and after reading that press release about the maps im starting to worry about the ability to transfer or download maps, they might make that bnet only as well
25/08/2009 at 01:19 LionsPhil says:
@Railick: Yeah, they did a real hack-job on the supposed multithreaded engine; they distribute across threads by task, rather than by batch of units, AFAICT. This can lead to the hilarious incident where the UI is silky-smooth, but the units are all crawling about at half-speed, because the simulation thread is totally overloaded, and the other processor cores are twiddling their thumbs waiting for it. Yaaay.
Thing is, though, if you don’t have at least a proper Computer Science degree, you’re not going to be able to write nontrivial multithreaded code that works without either intermittently locking itself solid, or just silently trashing your game state all the time (read: hilarious bugs, nigh-impossible to track down and fix, and lots of them).
25/08/2009 at 08:22 army of none says:
Very cool. The customs on Wc3 (And no, not DoTA! All the other RPG’s and zombie maps!) consumed roughly 500 hours of playtime, so I’ll be buying SC2 solely for the customs. Awesome.
25/08/2009 at 09:04 Caiman says:
I must admit, this news item has finally convinced me to get SC2. I’m sure the game itself will be fun for a while, but the mod potential here is much more exciting. Just imagine the epic RTS / FPS / RPG / 2D hybrids…!
25/08/2009 at 10:35 SwiftRanger says:
Looks cool, if it’s really that easy as Blizzard says it is then we might see some beautiful things although it probably won’t come close to the detail and underlying systems of making such a mod with a shooter engine.
I’ll probably prefer SupCom 2 gameplay wise over the standard SCII game though. Or I’ll play Forged Alliance v3603 (yes, beta has just launched peeps!). Don’t make any misunderstandings about it: SupCom did much more for the genre control and scale-wise than StarCraft ever did and StarCraft II will ever do. I think that’s the tragedy surrounding Chris Taylor’s RTSs (and the likes of Dark Reign/Homeworld): they do everything to improve one of the most key parts of a strategy game (controls) to make room for more complicated stuff which doesn’t rely on who is having the fastest click but in the end people stick with a big name which just swaps some units for new ones and barely brings the UI to a standard level. It’s literally as if people would want a remake of Quake 1 with no mouse-look.
Praise to the polish, the new campaign mechanics, mod tools, art, and Battle.net features but SCII itself can’t excite my RTS heart as other, less polished titles do.
26/08/2009 at 08:15 JohnC says:
“I’m just at a loss as to what makes SC so worth being enamored with. It’s ridiculous how little the RTS has evolved since Warcraft 1.”
People are enamored with SC because of how deep the game is competitively. Its been evolving for 10 years, has an enormous global competitive scene and it takes literally years to learn all the strategies and creative tricks. You won’t beat anyone by spamming zerglings, try it if you don’t believe me.
Whereas I can play SupCom at the top level just by spamming T1 tanks and artillery, SupCom is a great game but competitively? Its degenerate.
26/08/2009 at 08:39 Jim Rossignol says:
It’s fair that people are judging SC2 on the basis that it looks like an old-school RTS. However, I think when it’s played we will realise the difference between Blizzard’s massive over-investment, and their rivals. It’s going to be beyond-slick.
26/08/2009 at 09:01 Heliocentric says:
I judge starcraft 2 based on the masters they serve. The koreans will not accept massive change, if they did they would have other more progressive games as smaller e-sports. Thus they are actually serving the need to stagnate, nothing to do with its visual style.
26/08/2009 at 17:38 SwiftRanger says:
“Whereas I can play SupCom at the top level just by spamming T1 tanks and artillery, SupCom is a great game but competitively? Its degenerate.”
Dunno which top level you’re talking about but spamming alone hasn’t saved anyone in SupCom’s top ranked matches (nor FA’s, where all the action is now). Its main focus on macro is its biggest strength, focusing on both micro and macro, mostly through UI loopholes and deficiencies as a sign of ‘skill’, would be a fine example of ‘degenerate’.
So no, you won’t beat anyone of equal skill by spamming T1 tanks and/or artillery in SupCom/FA.
02/09/2009 at 11:25 JohnC says:
Might be off-topic, but I beg to differ. Watching top SupCom players play on QuadV its just T1 spam and T3 air to end it. I follow the pro scenes for both games so…