The Story

I always assumed the story would be the highlight of the game’s single player, but it really isn’t. The game feels a bit like Dragon Age: Origins in so far as there is an overarching story that’s hardly touched except for the very beginning and the end of the campaign while all the rest is filled up with smaller missions and story arcs that have hardly anything to do with the main story around Raynor and Kerrigan. The whole thing feels as if one could directly step into the final missions after completing the first few if it wasn’t necessary to collect money and research points first.

Of the various mini-stories you can play through, only two have an actual connection to the happenings in the main story and both of these seem rather construed. It’s not bad to play through the campaign missions at any rate, but Starcraft I story material this is not.

The Hyperion

The Hyperion is Jim Raynor’s very own Battlecruiser and your hub for all things in between missions for the most part of the game. As far as we know the ship consists of four rooms which are practically connected via the very innovative method of button travel. You can’t really move through your ship or anything, all you can do is click a button in the menu to transport you into another room. These rooms – the bridge, the armory, the cantina, and the laboratory each have exactly one main function and a lot of click-able doodads that don’t really do anything. Yeah there a few fun descriptions to be seen when clicking stuff and sometimes you even get a video. You can even talk to your crew members and see a little conversation sequence that loosely fits the current state of the campaign. The thing is that these conversations are completely non-interactive and don’t affect anything.

Don’t even get me started on the news reports on TV. These are always up-to-date with reports of your latest exploitations which is cool, but virtually all of them end in the same joke. They might as well put a huge sign in front of the TV that says “the Dominion controls the news channels and stifles any attempts to report the truth” and be done with it. It’s a good and interesting message, but do you really need to make it so blatantly obvious?

Choices

You get to make a few choices during the campaign that steer the missions you get to do. You can side with the spooky assassin spectre Tosh to lead a prison break or you can side with the ghost Nova to prevent that breakout from happening. This decision has influence on your game insofar as you get different units to use in the campaign but just as all other decisions has no influence on the overall story. I’ve been dreaming about a Mass Effect style game that uses a different method of combat for a while, and Starcraft II is a baby step into this direction. The whole things feels inspired by Mass Effect, trying to tell an actual RPG-like story but using RTS controls for the gaming elements instead of action RPG/shooter elements. It really is just a baby step though and Starcraft still has a long way to go until it can give us a real interactive experience in between missions.

Useless Units

Throughout the campaign you get to collect new units to build and get to research and buy upgrades for the units that you have. At a relatively early point in the game I got Hellions for example, a fast skirmish unit with a flame thrower attack that can hit multiple enemies at once if positioned correctly. In multi-player these are often used to harass the opponent’s workers while the main army is out of town. In a pinch they are also quite good at fighting light melee units such as the Zergling and the Zealot.  The Hellion is a very nice addition to the arsenal of the Terran army, so naturally I started buying upgrades for my Hellions as soon as I could. Little did I know that the mission in which I got the Hellions was the only one in which it was actually good to use them. The system of giving you one new unit per mission tends to put a lot of focus on these new units so that old ones get forgotten. The Hellion suffers even worse from this because the computer enemies usually start with fully defended bases in missions which makes harassing them very inefficient. In the end you are very likely to finish most missions with a basic selection of units plus whatever special unit is new in that mission and will forget about all the other tools in your belt.

Incredibly Strong Upgrades

You don’t get enough money throughout the campaign to buy all the upgrades that are available to you. Naturally players will upgrade those units that they use most which only shoehorns them more into using those units and no others. Additionally, what’s the point in giving the player extremely strong units only to then throw more and more enemies at them to balance that? I like the general idea of upgrades and research and tailoring your force to your needs, but it doesn’t really fit into a structure of tailored and scripted missions.

Too Few Challenges

Challenges are a special type of single player mission with the goal of preparing you for multi-player fights. Challenges train such things as effectively countering enemy army composition, quickly building and defending a base, and using specialist units to defeat superior forces. These challenges are cool (in fact they’ll likely make it into Monday’s list as well) but there are only nine of them, two of which have hardly anything to do with preparation for multi-player. There are so many common game situations that could be taught in these challenges so that players don’t get roflstomped as soon as they play against other players, but Blizzard chose to restrict these to nine. Bad idea.

Terran Only

We knew for quite a while that Starcraft II would be split into three instalments. The first, Wings of Liberty, is what just came out and it deals pretty much exclusively with the Terran part of the game. Yeah you can play all three factions in multi-player and you get to play a little bit of Protoss during the campaign, but really it’s all about the Terrans.  Now, I don’t mind at all that I get to play 20ish Terran missions now and will get about as many Protoss and Zerg missions at a later point in time (though it is true that simply a new campaign won’t make a good sales argument for the other 2 parts) but I do wonder what this will do to balance in online games. Won’t pretty much every new player start out as Terran now since that is what they know?

Only One Battle.net Character

When logging onto battle.net for the first time you get to create a profile with a name and avatar that your achievements and ratings will be bound to. This is all fine and dandy until you try getting somewhere in the ladder. I for example play at an OK platinum level with Terran but am not remotely as good with Protoss and Zerg. I would like to try out the other races on the ladder as well, but don’t really want to ruin my ranking by doing so. Now you could say that my ranking doesn’t really matter anyway and you would be right if it wasn’t for the fact that it influences who I get to play against. When I’m playing Protoss or Zerg I don’t want to fight against the (relatively) strong players that I fight as Terran and vice versa.

Aside from trying out different races, would it be so odd if I wanted to let a friend or family member play the game on my computer from time to time? Why can’t they have their own profile that they can play in the practice league with or something?

Boss Monsters

Dawn of War 2 has shown us how fights against boss type enemies in real-time strategy games can be. You can make players dodge missiles, run out of fires, use specific abilities to counter what the enemy does and so on. It seems as if the designers of Starcraft II saw these boss fights, liked them, but then failed in actually implementing them well. There are a couple of super monsters that you will meet in the campaign (including, spoiler alert, a certain female) but these generally just have a lot of life, hit very hard, and have an ability that simply kills units or buildings. Fighting them generally just means to send a huge army to attack them and maybe microing hurt units away so that they don’t get killed. In one single case I remember there was an area effect attack that you could run out of, but that’s it.

Price Gauging

I almost got the game through digital distribution, having cancelled my pre-order when they announced that digital distribution would be available on launch day. Luckily we had an extra copy of the game lying around so that I didn’t have to buy from the Blizzard store. For some reason they want €21 more than a retail copy costs me at Amazon, a 55% increase in price. What’s up with that?

There you have it; I actually found ten bad things to say! See y’all on Monday when things get more positive.

In Blizzard’s RTS games of old, campaign missions would be very similar to multi-player games. You would build up a base and deal with ever-increasing attacks until you were strong enough to attack and defeat the opponent. Single-player maps would only differ in so far as that the opponent started out with complete bases instead of an even footing but was limited in how he could attack you.

At the start of the campaign your unit selection will be as empty as this armory on the Hyperion. Both will change soon enough.

Starcraft II missions rarely take the simple form of build base, build arm, kill opponent , but even those that do offer quite the different experience to multi-player. For one, there are various units available (such as the Goliath) that aren’t available to those who play against other players. You also get to improve certain aspects of your army in between missions. These upgrades vary from a pure improvement of a unit’s strength, through changes in functionality up to complete new units for your use. Finally, single-player missions give you a lot to consider other than killing your opponent. Maybe you are on a map with tides of lava that make mining and travel difficult, or maybe you are simply trying to achieve some bonus objective instead of simply winning the game.

I think this separation is a clever move by Blizzard in general. All the new elements make it so that playing the campaign missions really never gets boring because no mission is like another. there’s always a new unit to use or a new twist to the mission objectives to take care of. I would go so far as to say that there are more fundamentally different missions in Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty than in the whole World of Warcraft.

While great for single player, this would be a pretty bad multi-player experience. Multi-player is about learning, about understanding and recognizing patterns in the game, and about formulating strategies to beat your opponent. You wouldn’t want each multi-player match to have some new unforeseeable twist in it. those twists come from your opponents and part of the fun is predicting what twists they will come up with.

Studying alien artefacts will help you improve your own technology. There might be side effects though...

Keen wonders why we can’t use all the units available in single-player when playing against others. Simply put, it would be really hard to balance and in some cases take away from the uniqueness that the individual races have. Additionally it would put quite the strain on the players when suddenly scouting a factory doesn’t mean just mean that you’ll be facing either Hellions, Tanks, or Thors but also leaves the option for Diamondbacks and Vultures. The latter two are also a good example of redundancy in the unit selection available in single-player. Both these two and the Hellions are fast skirmishers with slight differences. One can hit multiple units, one can lay mines, and one can shoot while driving but they all do essentially the same style of hit and run attacks.

These new units are fun in single-player because they allow the level designers to design missions strictly around them (such as the train robbery which greatly favours Diamondbacks), to bring back nostalgic units from Starcraft I without having to think about balance, and to introduce transitory units for the campaign. Medics, for example, were probably added to the game because players weren’t supposed to have flying transports just yet at that stage of the campaign. (The replacement for the Medic in multi-player is the Medivac which can both heal and transport units.) By separating the two types of gameplay, the designers could simply throw the medics in there and be done with it without having to worry about the implications for multi-player.

There are disadvantages as well, of course. You might find the Diamondback to be your new favourite unit and then be quite disappointed when you don’t get to use it against your friends. You also don’t really get prepared for multi-player in the single-player campaign, but that’s expected anyway if you really want to make the campaign enjoyable instead of just a set of battles against AI opponents. All in all I applaud Blizzard for this move and at least the core elements of gameplay stay the same in both modes (*cough*DawnofWarII*cough*).

The Past

When I started out I was still playing World of Warcraft and most of my posts revolved around it. While I never really got into the whole “How to play the game” type of posts (which I’m sure would have given me quite a few more readers than I got with my style) I did cover a lot of raid leading issues. I even went so far as to dig deep into what I know about philosophy, dissecting Machiavelli and others (yeah that’s 4 links) for insights into how to best deal with those pesky raid members. The depth that some of these posts had is something I’d really like to get back at some point but it is hard to achieve when combined with a regular update schedule and, you know, actually getting things (or gaming) done as well. Additionally I got the feeling that those posts were a little too deep for the majority of the readers – or at least my visitor counts tell me so.

October marked the first surge of posts that dealt with game design principles and the dissecting of game mechanics for their entertainment value. The topics from back then are pretty much still valid today, dealing with itemization and classes among other things. October also had a terribly named post on content for different player types and what I find to be an under-appreciated post on the two dimensions of the casual-hardcore scale.

November then started out with the first instalment of my 10 good/bad things series of game reviews. Personally I like this style of looking at games and my visitor statistics would agree with me, but the low amount of comments I get on these makes me feel like maybe they aren’t as appreciated as I think they are. How about you, loyal reader that made it this far, do you like these types of posts?

November ended with me getting Dragon Age and subsequently realizing how much I actually like playing single player games and, conversely, how bored I was with playing World of Warcraft. December mostly consisted of musings in the same direction as well as complaints about Icecrown Citadel. If you skip a month in my archives, December should probably be it.

January is, in my opinion, a much better read. You’ll find musings on interaction in MMO combat, games that are worth telling stories about,  holding the player’s hand, and creating a better raiding experience by designing your game around command structures.

February saw the post with the most immediate (first-day) visits I’ve ever had on the blog. The post talked about micro-transactions and how to do them right. It wasn’t a bad post, but it only got these high numbers of visitors because I got a link from the Starkington Post, a Magic the Gathering news aggregator. Thanks guys for the link and apologies to all those who expected a more Magic-centred post. I also touched on death penalties and vertical advancement that month as well as talking a whole lot about Mass Effect 2.

Death penalties came up again (and were actually discussed in the comments, hooray!) in March in my post on making failure acceptable. I also talked about a concept of what I consider the best MMO not yet made, my inability to vote with my wallet where good games are concerned, and what it would take to make me go back to WoW.

Moving on to April we don’t find a whole lot, but there is a post about the concept of a home in an MMO that stirred a bit of interest around the net as well as the arrival of That Retarded Horse in which I call my readers stupid and get called out for it.

In May I talked about how there are way too many items to be found in games these days. According to a friend of mine, my two-parter was way too short to do the topic justice though. Maybe I’ll revisit this someday. I also for the first time wrote a “part 1″ post that never got a part 2 for completion. My post on how to survive Starcraft II multiplayer simply didn’t gather remotely enough interest to warrant writing a follow-up.

In June I first realized how good controversial posts are for your statistics. I wrote on the topic of paying to keep the casuals away, a title that was far more controversial than the rest of the post but it was good enough to get me links and comments galore. I might be known as an elitist jerk to some people now, but hey, at least they know me now, right? In less controversial territory I had a row of what I consider to be interesting posts that didn’t really see much traffic at all. My response to Keen’s series on MMO mechanics of old got a decent acceptance but my suggestion of a Dungeon Keeper MMO and my musings on the fairness of esports weren’t really considered at all by many people.

June brought us the RealID scare of course in which I stood almost alone in a sea of hatred. Interestingly enough the numbers of readers I have went up since then instead of dropping as I feared they might do. Apparently being honest about what you believe is appreciated even if no one shares your beliefs. I like that.

The Present

I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who has linked to me, commented on a post, or even just read one in the past year. Readers are really what keeps me going and motivates me to improve. I’d especially like to thank those other bloggers who have me on their blogroll, first and foremost Larísa who has linked to me since what feels like forever. Then there’s Tesh of course, and Chris, and Joar as well as Gordon who doesn’t have me on his blogroll but does link to me from time to time. Your help is much appreciated guys!

If you don’t have a blog or don’t feel like giving me the honour of a link you can still make me quite happy by commenting on my posts. I love me some praise, of course, but dissent is also fine. As long as you keep it civil I’m really happy to discuss with you in the comments. And hey, maybe we’ll someday even see some discussion among the commenters on here. Wouldn’t that be something?

Of course I’d love to get more links, comments, and especially readers and I must say that looking at the statistics can sometimes be disheartening. We’ve had a steady growth in readers since launch but it is really slow. While I don’t get anything substantial out of additional readers (No ads or anything. The only direct result of additional readers is additional traffic on my server which costs me money.) you guys are what I (my blog persona) lives by. If I don’t get read, my work here seems pointless. So hey, tell your friends – and leave a comment when you like or dislike something. It may seem like nothing to you, but I cherish even the smallest comment of them all.

The Future

Enough of the doom and gloom, as long as I have readers, this blog is here to stay! I have a lot of ideas for the future, but most of them rely on me getting more readers first. I would love to do more interactive content in which you influence what I write as well as maybe actually getting something productive out of a community of people who are interested in game design. Until then I will continue to write about whatever comes to my mind as long as it is somewhat game related. I have yet to find a game that sparks as many interesting topics for debate as World of Warcraft did when I still played it, but I am sure that will come sooner or later.

Next up is Starcraft II, of course, but I have already realized that the interest of my readers in it isn’t as high as my ow, so I won’t dwell on it too much, I promise. Summer will therefore be filled with a variety of theoretical topics until new and interesting games hit in fall. I will be on vacation for two weeks in August, but don’t fear! WordPress will be filled with scheduled articles for your perusal even if I don’t really know where to take topics for two full weeks from just yet.

On to a second year my dear readers!

[Here's the link for those who can't see the embed: click me]

The sci-fi action RPG is scheduled for spring 2011 and I really wouldn’t mind a good action RPG to bridge the gap to Diablo III (which should hit sometime later in the same year if I’m not mistaken). But why oh why make any connection to Spore at all? The game is set “in the Spore universe” – which means pretty much nothing – and uses a new version of the Spore creature creator for the upgrading of your character.  Yeah, that doesn’t make the game any more attractive to me at all.

This wouldn't look half bad if you hadn't, you know, called it Spore. (image: darkspore.com)

Everyone who has played Spore (or read a review) knows how little actual impact your creature designs had on the game. Certain body parts would give you stat boosts or abilities just like equipment in other games, but the actual design of the creature didn’t matter at all. Putting extra legs on the back of the creature would still give you a speed boost and a horn on the creature’s belly was just as dangerous as one on the head or the tail. For all I can see, Darkspore will be similar. Sure you can make your creature look really cool, but you’d still pick up equipment (body parts) and equip it.

A large amount of customization options is nice to have in an MMO where there are lots of players running around – but in a single player/co-op game? I’d rather have, you know, good gameplay. And if you hadn’t put the Spore tag on the game I might actually have taken a closer look to see if it’s any good. Fool me once…

The Starcraft II beta was completely multi-player centric, the single player campaign wasn’t available to us testers at all. If you have no real experience with RTS games then multiplayer Starcraft will blow you to pieces. Not because the game is easy or hard but because the game is very skill-oriented and most other players will be more skilled than you. I can understand completely why Spinks would be scared away by losing every single game she played. Who likes losing after all?

The thing is, you aren’t really the target of the game’s open multiplayer just yet. The original Starcraft offered an amazing single-player experience and I’m sure Starcraft II won’t be any worse in that regard. It will not only work as a tutorial introducing you to the concepts of the game but also tell a very interesting story, full of heroic rescues, backstabbing, and tough decisions.

The game will take you by the hand every step of the way. (image: Vi Hart in Blizzard's comic contest)

If you aren’t into real-time strategy yet, don’t get the game for the multiplayer or for what you’ve seen in the beta. Judging Starcraft II by those aspects is a bit like judging World of Warcraft by a heroic Lich King raid – if you are a veteran player that’s where it’s at but, as a newbie you can admire the view at best. Get the game for the single player mode and the story it will tell. Get the game for fantastic characters, the rise and fall of galactic empires, and beam weapons. (Beam weapons!)

Then, when you’ve mastered the campaign, the game will slowly guide you towards competitive play. You will get to defeat computer controlled opponents in a human-like setting and then you will get into the practice league with other players that have just as little clue as you. Even if this part isn’t for you though and you never want to play against another human being ever, I’m pretty sure you won’t regret buying the game for the single player alone. If you do end up enjoying the multiplayer, all the better. It is, however, by no means required to enjoy the game.

Am I hyping parts of the game I haven’t even seen yet? Absolutely. Blizzard’s track record is a good one (even looking at all the quarrels I have with them) and there’s no way on earth they’ll screw this up.

Now, I don’t care too much about getting Starcraft II immediately (I’ll probably even have to wait a couple of days for delivery.) but if this was an MMO I’d be all over it. No lengthy installs, maybe even patches already applied and downloaded – sounds good to me. The one thing I don’t understand is that boxed copy owners can’t use the same service. Why can’t I  download the game and then simply apply my boxed copy code to my battle.net account on release day? Seems like an unnecessary hurdle to put in the way of those who still buy retail.

If Cataclysm was a new MMO you might see me hailing it as the next big thing. The new starting zones seem to provide an awesome and slick newbie experience, teaching and entertaining at the same time. (Check out TotalBiscuit’s videos on the topic over on YouTube.) Questing feels a lot less like a chore that needs to be done in order to get to the maximum level quickly but makes you part of a story and an evolving world instead. In fact you actually get to feel as if you are influencing the world, even though what you are seeing is really only scripted phasing technology. By showing a different world to different people, individuals can have an impact without negatively affecting other players’ gameplay experience. Clearly phasing must not be overused or you’ll end up in a massively single player game, but in the right dose it can greatly add to the immersion the game provides.

There are many other overhauls as well that just make the game feel a lot more slick. The talent trees are being revamped to provide more direct impact of your talent choices, for example. You used to be able to start spending points in your talent trees at level ten (just as you will be in Cataclysm) but those choices really didn’t have much of an impact until much later in the game. The lower tier talents were generally weak and often only provided small passive bonuses. Whether you were an arms, fury, or protection warrior didn’t really matter until much later, the first relevant abilities being learned at level 40. In cataclysm you will feel the impact of your decision right there at level ten. Protection Warriors get to attack with their shield right off the bat as well as getting passive bonuses to health and being able to hit harder when hit themselves while fury warriors will get to wield two weapons and use bloodthirst as an extra damage dealing ability.

I remember the feeling of leveling my first character in WoW very well. I got talent points and I spent them but it really didn’t seem to make any difference. Talent trees as they are are really uninteresting to the new player which not only makes the game as a whole less interesting for them but also leads to players reaching max level and starting to raid which still don’t take talents seriously. Cataclysm is going to change that, and that’s awesome.

Spinks worries that this change might take flexibility out of low level characters, such as a fury warrior not being able to put on a shield to tank an instance in a pinch. I remember tanking instances as a non-protection warrior back when shield slam still required you to be level 40 and it worked out alright. I don’t see why this would be any different with this change. Sure, protection warriors will be quite a bit better at tanking than those who chose to mostly deal damage, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? For all the altoholics there’s always dual spec.

Even though all this is great (and there is more), I won’t buy the expansion unless something major happens. If it was a new game I would be enthralled by the exciting newbie experience, but it’s not. From a max-level perspective the talent trees are pretty much the same, the new starting zones irrelevant, and raiding the same old dross. What about you, do you feel the urge to get Cataclysm and resubscribe? What is it that lures you in?

One of the new Starcraft 2 achievements, for example, is earned by canceling a building that is under attack by an opponent. Doing so will return a part of the resources invested into the building, making it a good choice once you realize that you won’t be able to save your building from your opponent’s forces anyway. If you are a somewhat experienced player you will get this achievement naturally while playing. It won’t be a big deal but you will feel reinforced in your style of play and know that you did something right. If you are a new player though you might not know that canceling is something you should be doing. But when you check the list of achievements available to you, you might see this one and might be guided into improving your gameplay through it.

An example of a well done achievement in Starcraft 2.

Blizzard has really taken this guiding functionality of achievements to heart with Starcraft 2, going so far as to actually include achievement groups called guides that are designed to lead you slowly into competitive play instead of just throwing you into cool water. Play some practice games against the computer with each race and get achievements for that. Then maybe you should go on and play some placement matches against real players to determine the level at which you should play and so on.

I also quite like achievements that reward you for doing something cool, such as killing a lot of units in very little time or dodging a missile. These are good plays that happen naturally in games but again make you feel as if you are playing well. In contrast to the ones above, these aren’t really intended to teach players the game. You don’t go out intending to kill a lot of units in one stroke, it’s just a result of good placement and unit composition.

Teaching proper use of Warp Prisms is a good thing. Warping in fifty units does not qualify as proper use.

A problem arises when there are achievements that look like one of the types above, but really are more of the jump-through-hoops type. An example would be the Yamato Master Blaster achievement from Starcraft 2. It requires you to shoot 20 units with a low-usage-frequency ability of a high end unit that is always never seen in a serious game. Getting far enough in a game to complete this achievement is more a sign of bad play than good play, teaching exactly the wrong things. World of Warcraft has lots of these types of achievements as well. Loatheb in Naxxramas for example has an inherent mechanic that increases player damage. This is counterbalanced by the boss having an insane amount of health. The achievement is to kill the boss without using the extra damage which isn’t really harder, it just takes ages.

If these kinds of achievements were merely annoying  I wouldn’t care much since I could just ignore them, but they take away part of the teaching functionality that the other above-mentioned achievements have. I think one could put a lot more effort into the good types and leave the bad ones out altogether.

Don’t get me wrong, I doubt going through with this would have had a lasting impact on player numbers or even the number of forum posters, but there simply is no reason to go through with this against such resistance.  That all said, I am quite sad about this whole affair. I’ve seen people I greatly respect drop down to blatant demagoguery regarding this issue which not only drowns any reasonable voices to the contrary, but also hides the real arguments that might exist among a pile of junk.

Aside from the whole discussion, I’m also quite sad to see that so many people still seem to be afraid to out themselves as gamers. In some cases this fear might not be reasonable, but in others it probably is. Gaming isn’t mainstream yet, but I sure thought we were past the point were gaming makes you a bad person or even a bad employee. I wonder how much of that is actually caused by anonymity… but I suppose I shouldn’t open that whole can of worms again.