Creative Vision in RTS Deserves More Appreciation

A few thoughts on the professional players balance patch for StarCraft II

Legacy of the Void introduced the Cyclone unit to the Terran army. At the time I was new to StarCraft II, so I didn’t have a lot of historical context on how Terran had worked in Heart of the Swarm or how the Cyclone fit into that. What I do remember is a lot of people complaining how the unit was badly designed:

• Blizzard, if the Cyclone isn't working out, please just consider adding the Goliath

• The cyclone is never going to have a role in the Terran army. At best it will only ever be an early game defensive unit.

• Unit Design Poll Results

… etc.

The Cyclone was rebalanced a bunch of times following release, and over time it started to see a lot more usage, especially in the TvP match-up as a defensive unit. For example, here’s ByuN using it against Dear at Blizzcon 2016:

What I always found interesting about this first year is that Blizzard was able to find a useful and interesting role for the Cyclone as a Terran defensive unit without fundamentally redesigning it. While the community complained about design, Blizzard focused on balance (successfully). And I thought that was pretty cool, offering an example of players just needing time to figure out how to use something, and maybe not “getting” the vision of it at first glance. And I think it’s an example of how sticking to the guns of your creative vision can sometimes pay off given enough time.

(Funnily enough, Blizzard did do multiple re-designs thereafter, including one immediately following Blizzcon 2016.)

The Carrier

My personal perspective has always been that Dustin Browder doesn’t get enough credit for his contributions to StarCraft II. And I arrive at that conclusion from the angle that at least the guy had a creative vision for what StarCraft II should be, and that creative visions are underrated and underappreciated in this genre. I often cite this interview in particular:

Q: What would be the greatest differences to SCI at the time being?

[Dustin Browder]: Above all, mobility. Thanks to the new devices of transportation, all factions are more flexible and more mobile.

Mobility really is the story of StarCraft II; in my mind, it’s the design idea that makes this game unique. And while I think it took the developers some time to get it to a good state, ultimately I think it’s what makes Legacy so compelling from a multiplayer perspective: the speed and ease of unit control paired with a relentless design direction to give you ways to inflict damage on your opponent from several directions all at once; the constant jockeying for a favorable position while fighting on several fronts; the gasp moments of catching an opponent off-guard.

Mobility is also what comes to mind when I think about one of my least favorite decisions in the history of Legacy: buffing carriers. This was first done by reducing interceptor cost, which was eventually tweaked back over the course of the following year, before being followed by a minor redesign which saw Graviton Catapult removed, but the carrier getting more health, faster build time, and more effective interceptors (8x1 damage instead of 5x2).

I cannot tell you how many team games this has ruined for me. It feels like anytime you’re up against Protoss, you’re on a timer against carriers. It’s one-dimensional and, honestly, boring.

Now, you’re welcome to tell me that the game isn’t balanced for team games, which, well, yeah, you’re right. What irks me is the motivation: “increase the combined power of Stargate play”. There wasn’t some grand creative vision about how Protoss should work, some sort of compelling rationale as to why Stargate is interesting or what role it plays compared to other late-game tech choices or anything like that: it was, hey, we don’t see a lot of Stargate, so let’s make some buffs to see more of it.

It’s like they took a spreadsheet of all the different late-game tech Protoss could pursue, and they stack ranked them by popularity, and they took what was on the bottom and said hey, let’s buff this.

And that’s not a great way to design a game!

I think a lot of people tend to think about games in terms of deltas; here’s how the game currently plays, and here’s how it could play if I made this or that tweak to it. And I think that while that’s a reasonable way to incrementally improve a game, it’s also very limited in how much better it can make things, because it’s not supported by a creative vision for where the game should go. It’s just trying to make the game less bad, usually without a lot of consideration for what makes it more cool, which can very easily go wrong, because people tend to quickly notice what pisses them off and fail to notice what they actually like.

Sometimes that results in stuff like the carrier buffs, which in my eyes made the game worse - while they were just intended to make it less bad, there wasn’t a clear picture as to how they made it more cool. And while that was arguably harmless, I think stuff like the Nydus buffs came from a similar intent, and inadvertently helped contribute to Zerg dominance in WCS 2019.

Leave it to the professionals

All of this context brings me to today, where the upcoming StarCraft II patch is being developed largely by a council of professional players.

And I think that while that’s not ideal, I honestly struggle to imagine what the alternative would be. There doesn’t appear to be much of a StarCraft development team left over at Blizzard (but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). If the idea is that the game should have a creative vision, but there’s no one on deck to provide that vision, should we just refuse to make changes to it on principle?

I mean, maybe! But if we think there are aspects of the game that are busted, and we’re committed to exclusively using incremental tweaks to fix them, then the folks most likely to succeed in fixing that are professional players. No one else has enough comprehension of all the nuances and subtleties of the game mechanics to understand all the different trade-offs of making changes. And the adversarial nature of a council of players from different races combined with players’ self-interest seems like a reasonable way to ensure no single race will receive favoritism or bias in the process.

And what this all reminds me of is that, regardless of whether this patch works out or not, there was a time when there were people working full time to make StarCraft II more cool rather than just less bad. And I failed to appreciate how nice that was. And while I can accept the less bad that professional players have to offer - assuming they’re successful, which is no guarantee - I really do miss the alternative.

One of the funny things about going back and reading critiques from early Legacy is the contrast between the doom and gloom within the community, and the knowledge in retrospect that 2016-2018 would be some truly incredible years in the history of the game. Personally, I always have this tendency to extrapolate a straight line out in front of me - things seem bad, and things seem to be getting worse, so things will continue to get worse, that kind of thing. And looking back, you can see how that’s just not the case.

It reminds me of the tumultous development life of Age of Empires II. Back in the late 2000s, its developer had been shut down, its publisher was focusing on console games, and the meta was dominated by Hun and Mongols mirrors on Arabia. I’m sure no one back then could have imagined it would re-emerge as a tremendous, tremendous success. So while pro players (somewhat haphazardly) balancing StarCraft II seems not ideal, I take heart that other games have gone through worse, and came out the other side stronger than ever.

Until next time,
brownbear

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