[drobe]

Chunken colony chunken colony PLAGOOOO GEE GEEE

I don't know guys, I remember my Starcraft as a kid and it was all about Reaver drops, BS, and that cool shit that happened when an arbiter flies over your mineral patch. There was a wonderful mystery that unfolded every time the fog of war regenerated and a nuke suddenly did something new to your star of ultralisks. The new starcraft is cool and competitive and stuff, but it's like watching Fight Club over and over again. Sure, there's some new detail here and there, but it's all the same thing over and over again. And people seem to love it.

I mean, it seems highly formulaic in the eyes of the viewer and in the eyes of the aspiring competitor. There are guides, essential strategies, people chose races based on their APM. If you want to be a serious SC player, you feel obligated to pump your APM and to learn the hard and soft counters to every popular strategy.
Mind you, the game itself is fantastic. It manages to balance three races that do completely different things. Just, the way people have tackled the game and tied it down into a series of discrete, concise movements and phases kills a lot of the enjoyment that you could get from having a novel experience.

Pat: I like your guide, but it's a guide that I've seen before. I think it's a problem when the defacto beginner's guide to 'becoming competitive' in a game tells you explicitly what to do with your units. Instead, I think it's healthier to have a competitive community that focuses on abstract movements--things as simple as "Gather information," "split your enemy's forces," "identify their oversights and capitalize on them." A beginner's guide should say "left click to select, right click to move and attack," not "Move an overlord to the enemy base and keep mining with your first four workers in order to get the fastest lings."

The gg and hf stuff is pretty silly.
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[drobe]

I hope that we're thinking about high level play as something that involves more of a fluid response to events and not a programmed response to events. Being able to spontaneously develop an adhoc plan to a unique condition, I think, requires a far 'higher level of play' than being able to match an event with an standard optimized response.
Now you're right, Pat, there are a few 'high level' players that genuinely inject new strategies and new concepts into the game. My problem is that as you descend down the ladder, everything becomes imitation and replication. Players who want to become competitive become dependent on 'what works' and they end up dismissing otherwise creative and spontaneous strategies. This kind of mentality only subtracts from the game experience. It turns something that can have an uncountable number of possibilities into something that has a finite number of possibilities. You end up with a turn-based rock-paper-scissors.

My point about teaching beginners an abstract goal hinges more on teaching the player how to think about about the engagement, not simply to teach how to perform in the engagement. Once they have the concepts, it's up to them to figure out how to implement those concepts using the tools that are available to them.

Now, since you brought it up, I played SC online far more than I did alone. I played touches of ladder, did the whole clan thing, but I've mostly played free-for-all games with friends, family, and random internet peoples. I had three main streaks of play: first at release, but I spent most of my time playing with the map editor and skirmish. I had my competitive streak when I got a broadband connection, that was sometime between 2004 and 2006. I had roommates in 2008 and 2009 who were into starcraft, so I ended up playing with them. That was around the same time that we were watching tournaments and Korean players. To date, I have only finished the Terran and Zerg campaigns. That was back at release.
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[drobe]

(Off Topic Parker Discussion: Dwarf Fortress after the first year is more dependent on how well you're capable of 'sticking to it' and tolerating idle workers. You're not forced to build one fortress. You can just keep making seven-dwarf fortresses, and maybe stick them together when they're ready.)
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[drobe]

Guys, lets play OMFG NOT SERIOUS starcraft.
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[drobe]

~use map settings~
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[drobe]

[drobe]

Kappuru, I still want to know your secret. Is there a certain juice from a certain fruit that you drink?
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[drobe]

I was pleasantly surprised when the first mission did not ask me to provide food for the king's army.
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[drobe]

The protoss, if my memory serves correct, are kind of like a dying-out species. But they are technologically overdeveloped, and they have a tendency to stumble across human worlds and burn then before the afternoon is done. They're also kind of territorial, and don't really like it when things-that-are-not-them are digging minerals on their sacred lands.
I don't think they reproduce.
And also, sometimes they totally don't know how to deal with one another, so they exile one another like hotcakes. And uh, their home's been taken over. So, that's kind of how they're like in SC2.

Typically, humans and protoss don't actually get to look at one another all too often. The protoss just sort of float about out there minding their own business while the humans collect junk and breathe vespene gas. If they ever meet, it's more of a 'lost contact with a salvage operation/colony' sort of thing. Humans know they they exist, they just don't really know if they're all that hostile. Like, they burn these fringe worlds 'almost at random' and maybe cap off a cruiser here and there, but nobody's actually been alive enough to crawl back from the ashes to definitely state "The Protoss are our enemy."
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[drobe]

If you side with the humans, you are faced with a battle with a Protoss Mothership that Independence Days the various colonies and then your base. The subsequent cutscene is like, 'Thanks Raynor.'

Actually, there's a mission a little later in the game where you are given the choice to help that chick from Starcraft Ghost or that dude who's been giving you missions to mine stuff faster than the enemy can kill you. Since the game has two ghost units, you're given the option to go and free the crazy ones in some Terran super-jail, or you can help the professional ones keep the crazy ones inside. So, I decided to go and spring the crazy ones out of jail and the game made me feel better by saying that I set free every free thinker that has been locked up for the past four years. Nova's totally a babe, though. Mengsk's got taste.
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[drobe]

So, it's suddenly reoccurred to me that the original Starcrafts had glaring inconsistencies between the stuff in-game and the stuff in-lore/in-cinematic. Like, remember those Hydralisks? Remember them in cutscenes? Man, those claws. They use them all the time in cutscenes. But not in-game. I always wondered why. I just figured they shot those claws out at their ranged attack. It didn't really make much sense to me, but I went with it.
And like, wraiths. I mean, what the hell. There was this awesome cutscene where these wraiths were like, blowing up entire space-platforms with their burst lasers. But like, in game, those lasers have tough times killing drones.
And uh, the Protoss don't have shields in cutscenes.

So, like, why is this important? They seem to have totally decided to 'fix that' in the second game. There's a cutscene with a certain character where they make a point of showing off the hydralisks spitting out their spines. And it's like, rapid fire green jets.
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[drobe]

BAD END

The colony wars games were also all about those wingcommander choices here and there. Sometimes you could totally chose to defend the refugees, but you lose your dreadnaught for it. Sometimes you can totally jump out and live to fight an even bigger force.

~

Though, the point here is that SC2 doesn't really care what you did. Except for that mission. Then it really cares. The entire campaign is an item and unit collection scheme designed to fool you into thinking that you're playing your own way, when instead, you're really just getting a little taste of everything before they toss you into the endgame with a variable difficulty level that is indirectly scaled do the number of bonus objectives that you performed and whether you decided that you needed to give your marines shields at the beginning of the game. And stuff like that.

More important than the game giving you a choice, because 'hell, what game doesn't give you CHOICES these days? PRESS X TO SAVE Y TO HARVEST,' those writers did a good job of giving you genuinely tough choices to make. I mean, when you're given the choice to save the colonists or to burn them, you can't really be sure what you want to do because:

You're been playing terran for six missions now and you're not interested in killing terrans
You're raynor and you've got this I CAN SAVE HER complex where you're just waiting to figure out how to uninfest people
The scientist lady likes you. Thanks Tychus. I really needed my penis to be involved in military decisions
Them protoss aren't nearly as close to you as your born and bred genetic siblings
How the hell am I going to use robots-in-disguise to burn a colony?
They're civilians, god

But also because

The Zerg are fricking scary
You have a I COULD HAVE FIXED THIS complex where you're kicking yourself for not nuking new gettysburg from orbit and saving yourself the necessity for an expansion pack
You're raynor and you make your decisions with scotch in one hand and a pistol in the other
Them protoss are SO COOL and convincing
That hellion mission was such a jerk
They're civilians, nobody likes a civilian

Amongst other things.

Simply, man. MAN. Way to make me feel bad, game. Way to go.
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