The Most Persistent Misunderstanding About StarCraft II Is That It's Not Accessible

Let's think about accessibility wholistically

One of the more persistent ideas I’ve seen since I started to play StarCraft II is the idea that it’s not accessible; that the game features large barriers that make it difficult for more casual players to enjoy it. I think it’s worth clarifying what this means in practice because I think it gives people the wrong idea about how this game works and thus compels them to build solutions that aren’t solving the right problem.

For example, a common issue people raise with the game is that overall army DPS is high and the game moves fast, which creates a high skill floor for more casual players. And I think that’s a reasonable enough observation, so much so that the game already includes some mitigations for it - for instance, you can play it at a lower speed (in custom games) or on a lower difficulty (in the campaign and co-op), which has the side-effect of reducing the speed.

I think part of the reason these mitigations don’t always come up is that folks get their wires crossed with regard to target audience - they observe that the game’s competitive mode is not very accessible, but forget that it’s not intended to be accessible in the first place.

But I don’t think it’s all just competitive players. I’ve gotten a number of emails over the years voicing similar complaints about the campaign - that the game is too twitchy, that their army melts, that their units are dumb, etc.

And I’m genuinely empathetic to this perspective because I think it’s to a large extent true.

For instance, units in StarCraft II are pretty good at killing each other - strong pathing, good AI, fast target switching, all that good stuff. Add a counter system on top of this, like tanks killing bio, and they melt each other. And in a lot of cases, the adage of “just build more stuff” is contingent on your ability to control your units, which many casual players cannot do well. And this creates some weird situations in the campaigns where you can make the generally right decisions, but still get pancaked. (The bonus objective on The Great Train Robbery and the entire Battlecruiser mission come to mind). The Terran and Zerg missions are particularly punishing in this regard, with the developers seemingly internalizing this lesson a bit in Legacy of the Void.

Let’s suppose that we agree that “armies melting in the campaign” is an accessibility issue - that it’s raising the skill floor above where we want it to be, because it places unnecessary demands on players to control their units. One way we could fix this would be to simply slow the game down, either in literal terms or in tuning units to have less DPS or move slower or have more HP or however you want to do it.

I’ve thought about this idea off and on over the years. And throughout that time, I couldn’t get two facts out of my head. One is that StarCraft II is indeed an incredibly fast game compared to what else is out there in RTS; two is that it is orders of magnitude more popular than what else is out there in RTS.

If you want a slower-paced RTS, it’s hard to go wrong with anything else on the market. Age of Empires II, for example, features a much gentler pacing than StarCraft II. But it’s only about 1/10 as popular. And this is broadly true across the board; whether it’s Northgard or Age of Empires IV or Planetary Annihilation or whatever else you want to look at, none comes even close to the king of RTS that is StarCraft II.

Now, of course, there are many factors that go into popularity. My point is to highlight that when players in this genre are choosing what to play, they are overwhelmingly picking the fastest game. (And this was true long before free-to-play). So somehow, someway, StarCraft II’s speed is not dissuading very large numbers of people from continuing to play it, more than a decade after release. And this should give you pause if you’re out there suggesting StarCraft II should be slower to become more accessible - if you were to enact an across-the-board speed change to try to pull players in, chances are you would inevitably also push other players out, players who already have the option to play something slower, but choose not to. Design choices have trade-offs.

Accessibility (more people can play this game) must be paired with, well, playability (more people want to play this game). If you want to improve accessibility while at least maintaining playability, you need to make StarCraft II more accessible within the context of its particular interpretation of the RTS gameplay loop. And it’s here where I think Axiom is an instructive example.

The Axiom Example

Axiom is a mod for StarCraft II intended to lower the game’s barrier to entry and provide a gateway to competitive play. I reviewed it more than five years ago to better understand the accessibility concerns folks had around StarCraft and how they thought they should be fixed.

While I enjoyed my time with Axiom, I felt that the mod consistently created trouble for itself: whether it was by creating complexity where none previously existed or breaking game mechanics like pacing.

For example, Axiom tried to simplify army management by offering global, rather than per-building, rally points. But this was actually more confusing than relying on the blunt instrument of the select-all-army hotkey.

Axiom also tried to simplify the economy by moving to a pay-as-you-go production system, in order to eliminate the problem of dead money. This allowed players to focus on the what rather than the how of production, but it also introduced a new complexity of overbuilding. When costs exceeded revenues, production would deadlock, a much trickier problem to solve than having units queued up in a production building.

I could go on and on; you can read my full review if you’re interested. The point is that each time Axiom tried to fix something, it ended up making some other part of the game worse. Bear in mind that this was a mod whose primary aim was to lower the barrier to entry to StarCraft II; it was developed and playtested by prominent community members who shared that accessibility concern; and it received glowing marketing, from being played on Polt’s stream to being retweeted by the official StarCraft account.

And in the end, it actively made the game less accessible.

What happened with Axiom is I think what happens a lot when folks discuss accessibility around StarCraft II - they fail to appreciate that there are trade-offs around accessibility features and that one man’s quality of life is another man’s tedium. And it’s not at all a trivial problem, or some kind of lack of will on the part of the developers.

If you’re unwilling to change the core gameplay loop or sacrifice a large portion of the player base, it’s difficult to make the game more accessible than it already is.

And so I think the onus is on folks who claim the title is not accessible to point out 1) the specific mechanics they take issue with, 2) what they would do to fix them, and 3) the expected impact of these changes on the gameplay loop and player count; rather than just waving their hands around and saying “I don’t want to play anymore” or “look at how much more popular League is”. It’s to Axiom’s credit that its developers actually drew a line in the sand and made specific claims about the accessibility issues they felt were present in the game. But I also think the fact that the game mode was unsuccessful should give pause to anyone confidently making claims about StarCraft II’s accessibility problems.

The Problem Is Right There In The Name

I think it’s no secret that co-op is the most popular game mode in StarCraft II. It was so popular upon launch that it even surprised its developers. I wanted to understand this phenomenon better, so back in 2018 I did an in-depth review. I’ll let you watch the video if you’re interested in my longer take, but for the purposes of this newsletter I’ll just paste in the conclusion, and bold the part that I think is relevant:

Co-op is a fantastic experience. It solves many of real time strategy’s pernicious accessibility problems without watering down the experience or taking away from the competitive multiplayer. The linear progression tree pushes players to play the game in a fun and effective way; the strongly structured objective design ensures games have a good pacing that flows smoothly from one moment to the next. In terms of level design, the missions use consistent, wave-based mechanics to build an engaging but easy to understand experience, and they leverage a grab bag approach to commander characteristics in order to tease out the complexities and nuances of every single commander. Players are encouraged to cooperate, sometimes through explicit instruction, but mostly through strong implicit incentives that reduce the need for clumsy communication. The endgame is not necessarily what it could have been, but that’s a lesson in and of itself: as it turns out, there’s an audience of hardcore players looking to grind out missions and play competitive challenges, but still within the comfortable confines of a strongly structured and proactively paced game mode.

Structure, structure, structure. Co-op maintains many of the mechanics from the base game, including things that people love to complain about - macro mechanics, high DPS armies, fast gameplay, etc. The main philosophical change it makes, from my perspective, is that it’s heavily structured - it pushes the player to play the game in a certain way, at a certain pace.

Another way of putting this is that it removes the “strategy” component of real-time strategy.

And while that seems like cheating, realistically, it’s very, very hard to make tactical and strategic decisions in real-time while controlling an army and managing an economy. It’s just, by definition, hard. So what the designers of co-op decided to do was to emphasize one part of the gameplay loop (execution) and de-emphasize another part (strategy). That doesn’t mean there isn’t any strategy - just that it’s hard to pick a “wrong” strategy the way you can in the campaign, and there’s a lack of that baseline “what should I do next” feeling you sometimes get when you play RTS.

And what’s inserted in place of strategy, for lack of a better word, is a lot more army melting. (Hopefully, your opponent’s).

What mods like Axiom do is try to maintain the same gameplay loop, but tweak it around the edges to lower the skill floor. And I think it’s a credit to StarCraft II’s accessibility design that they struggle to do so successfully. The game has already implemented so many accessibility features that there’s not really any easy, low-hanging fruit left over that we can “just fix” without trade-offs.

Here’s some examples, just for completeness’s sake. Select-all army is an amazing accessibility feature that trivializes huge amounts of unit management. Unit control is made simple through excellent pathing and AI - implementations that were intentional and aligned with the design vision to emphasize mobility. There’s a comparatively limited number of units and technologies; maps are static; the economy features only two resources; production is streamlined and smart (tabbing through heterogenous groups, precedence being given to the least-busy building, etc).

Could you further lower StarCraft II’s skill floor? For sure, you could. But that’s not a very useful observation; the trick is doing so in a way that attracts more players than it pushes out.

Even with all that hedging, StarCraft II is still, in absolute terms, pretty darn easy to pick up and play - there’s a reasonable tutorial, the campaigns walk you through every single unit, and between select-all army and attack move, you really don’t need to do very much in order to manage your army on lower difficulties.

The corollary to this is that I see the success of co-op not as a signal that there’s a lot of opportunity left in making StarCraft II more accessible, but as a pivot that a more powerful way to draw and retain more players is to modify the fundamental gameplay loop, in this case by de-emphasizing the strategy component. Co-op proved that’s a tremendously powerful lever - instead of asking players to figure out what to do, the game just tells you.

As it turns out, a lot of people really like that.

Until next time!
brownbear

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P.S. Probably the most underappreciated aspect of co-op is the way it makes multiplayer seamless, for example through strong implicit incentives to cooperate; I think there’s a huge additional opportunity in extending that philosophy to other game modes. I’ll write more on that later.