The 5 ways that Starcraft II BROKE MY HEART
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- čas přidán 5. 06. 2024
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00:00 Transition From WC3 to SC2
02:34 The Ui/Ux Leader
03:47 Engine, Pathfinding & Campaign
04:27 Soundtracks
08:39 The Esports Scene
11:25 Small Bad Sides of SC2
13:32 Bid Bad #1
29:23 Big Bad #2 & #3
49:25 Big Bad #4
52:35 Big Bad #5
#GrubbyTalks #React #Thoughts #Starcraft2 #Heartbreak - Zábava
Kerrigan turning into a magic space angel was… a choice
Yup. Making her into this boss B after she, during being free and of her own choice, massacred a bunch of worlds (if I remember correctly), is certainly, as you say, "a choice." The companion to "no good deed goes unpunished" is apparently "no bad deed goes unrewarded."
I still remember the ending of SC1 making me feel very uneasy as a kid, like an unsettling Lovecraftian horror. You get to know the Zerg and the Protoss, then Duran betrays you, you learn of this crazy prophecy-type thing, and it's all very strange and uncomfortable. Then in SC2 you uninfest Kerrigan so she can REinfest herself, Narud (Like, for real?) and the whole Xel'naga blows its load, and then like you said: magic space angel. Very Marvel-esque. No weight, all flash.
@@emalinedickinson7492 worse than marvel. She's now a nature loving "primal zerg". So stupid, this and Diablo 3 story were just god awful.
As an arthropod, Zerg music is an absolute banger. Terran music is for animals with emotions or something.
I know Grubby since his WC3 days. Never watched any WC3 but he was that famous that you just knew him watching other games. I found this channel some days ago and I never knew I needed this. Very thoughtful and chill content. Please keep it up, this channel is going to the moon.
Came here to say this. Honestly great content.
I was a W3 player myself, but people who watched WCG for Counter Strike for example knew him as well.
@@moonriva
When Grubby was really famous the eSports scene was a village 😅 I kinda miss that flair rly hard :(
its crazy that half the heartbreak was just trying to be a top pro while playing protoss
Which is bad, cause yeah protoss is cool and i like em more than terran and zerg maybe my protoss bias but i think each race should be equally balanced and protoss to be less cheese and more late game like in sc1
Blizz undermined themselves really hard when making warp gate+prism, which made all gateway units NEED to be balanced around the mechanic
@@shaedeymamlas5496 grubby hit the nail on the head, as many other people did back in the day, the warpgate idea had potential but it needed some kind of drawback, rather than just being a no-brainer thing that you always would get. Increase the build time of units if it's warpgate or something
The 5-6 last years, sc2 became such a banger. Serral, Reynor and Clem in europe make the game such enjoyable to watch.
You Grubby, with Huk, were my protoss inspiration back in the days. I will forever remember the day you won against MVP in WCS europe allowing you to qualify for bracket. The "Grubby line" has been crossed by Grubby himself ! Thanks for those days.
A lot of what you don't like in starcraft has changed, you should give it another try :p
yeah the last 5-6 i.e. the post KR scene death era after 2016.... what a banger......
@@FF-zy1sp Rogue, Maru, Dark, Stats, Byun, Zest, TY, Inno were all there majority of 20162018-now. wtf are you talking about ?
@@nevosisthere are no high calibre or team left, no more team houses, no the most important team tournament, and the kr scene shrinked by a ten. With a high Korean competition, rogue always was a mediocre player, but now is considered one of the goats
@@FF-zy1sp Most games don't have any of this...SC2 just had a half million dollar tournament, there are endless countless tournaments that happen almost every single day, there are tons of extremely high level pros, lots of competition and more. I'd say it's not in a bad spot at all, and very good considering how old the game is.
@@FF-zy1sp Yes Korean scene shrank, but its still alive, and outside of Korea sc2 is doing well, its much bigger then sc1 for example. There are amazing players like Serral, Maru, Hero, Reynor, MaxPax and amazing tournaments. I see this time and time again where sc1 fanatics dump on sc2 with arguments that arent relevant for more then 5 years. They dont know whats hapening in sc2 for years, but still comment as if they knew.
The Terran music in SC2 very much reminded me of the Sci Fi show 'Firefly'
My biggest disappointment was in campaign, how they make Kerrigan somewhat good and reasonable, she does not betray people anymore and how every race should combine their efforts to beat big evil demon in the end. It is just so lazy, generic storytelling.
The missions were pretty good but yeah the story was a complete dumpster fire
“One day, I’m gonna be the man that kill- I mean kisses you, Kerrigan.” Jimmy, 1998-2015
The story is definitely lackluster. But on the bright side there's quite a lot of fun and silly mods that came out of SC2
I think they wanted to make Kerrigan likeable which is a fine idea for me. You can't betray other people all the time, it gets boring. She has the place of Illidan in the SC universe. That being said they didn't have a villian with as much of a character as Arthas for example. If they had that you guys maybe wouldn't find Kerrigan's changes in personality so bad.
@@GrubbyTalksThe gameplay is in a good place- a lot of your complaints do not exist anymore, idk why people don’t understand…things change..for example swarm host are garbage and unusable because of the complaints.
I remember someone saying that Protoss couldn't be balanced properly because of the Warp Prism. If their units were as powerful as you might expect warping them directly into the enemy base would be ridiculous. So they had to toe a delicate line that made the late-game "stand together" death ball style that could have given Protoss a distinguishing identity less effective than it needed to be. I feel like this problem contributed to a heavy Zerg-Terran focus because they couldn't get Protoss right without unravelling the identity they'd made for them.
Personally I think removing the Prism's ability to make a Pylon field may have let them buff Gateway units to where they needed to be? But the highest I got was Gold so maybe I'm talking rubbish.
i mean people are also forgetting archon toilet and mothership core shenanigans were a thing for a pretty long time as well at the very beginning. There are other imbalances though not just the warp prism; colossus can ignore terrain cliffs. Game devs probably thought protoss would be able to do sneak attacks like that but the issue is protoss lost shuttle and reaver which were a lot more mobile and same with templar drops (storms got nerfed to sc1).
I absolutely hated the fact that the protoss had reaver removed from their arsenal and replaced with colossus/disruptor. It's like people didn't watch sc1 and didn't know what made it fun to watch...
All they needed to do was give people more units not less...like take all of sc1 units then add a few more new ones...no they decided to take everything and replace it with the cracked up version of as much toxiciy as possible:
you want goliaths? too bad here is lock on from 21321 units away beep jeep instead or this massive juggernaught which 2 shots most things and that can be picked up in medivacs.
you want vultures or firebats? neah take these hellbats that are like twice as effective and get free psi storms on every hit.
you want spider mines? how about widow mines which autofire and destroy 40 units in 2 s and are rechargable?
you want siege tanks? how about liberators which can fly and do the same thing whilst sitting away from your mineral line.
you want scanner? sure but how about we make it so the same upgrade can be used to drop free workers to repair and take minerals for free?
you want dragoons? neah take immortals which two shot tanks and take forever to kill.
you want reavers? neah take the instant death laser long range colossi instead or disruptors that are like infinite scarabs with no real downside until after it fires but is compensated with an army deleting punch..
you want corsairs or scouts? neah take these super fast hit while running away phoenixes and void rays that can just kill anything with armor or flying siege tanks like tempests.
you want lurkers? neah lets get swarm hosts who never run out of summons which can fly and can also relocate easily.
you want queens&defilers? neah lets get infestors which have fungal growth that is basically a cross between the two and can move while burrowed.
It's atrocious how much protoss got shafted in spells too...they lost dark archon, arbiter and corsairs and gained sentries/mothership and blink. Only when oracle showed up did they get some more spell options.
TL:DR sc2 devs not only didn't know anything about balance and were slow to respond, they created poor design philosophies with little counterplay which are boring to watch.
They also have the ability to teleport their whole army at once, every 60 seconds which is ridiculous, and the only unit in the game that can dodge anything all the while being the core of the army (stalker) and ze alots that requires 0 micro while you have to micro heavily to kill them.
Warpgate shouldn't be just an upgraded gateway, just like Grubby said. That contributed to gateway armies being weak, but so did blink, since Stalkers can get out of harms way for extremely long. And how about that Blizzard needed 10 years to nerf warping in speed?
I think, warpgate tech should come later, warpgate cooldown should be longer, blink should come later or the whole Stalker unit as well, in it's place could be the Dragoon. Then warp gate armies could be stronger. And then to compensate for the warp-in of a stronger army with the prism, the prism itself could cost more. Blizzard did already a price increase, but even more could be good. It should be an investment like the Arbiter in BW. And for that investment it should be more durable and carry 12 unit slots instead of 8.
Thing is, it's a chain of changes, one change requires another one till you are at a point where the whole game is redesigned. Blizzard isn't going to do this, it's always "no the unit can't be made stronger because warp-in harass would be too strong" or "no that tech cannot come later or this race can't defend themselves". But in reality what you have to do is make the tech later AND the army stronger at the same time (this is just an example).
I noticed another thing and that's how many units can squeeze through normal pathways in BW.
It's not just the pathfinding, the unit radi are a lot bigger in BW as well, in SC2 units actually clip into each other. The result is that a whole deathball can close the distance all at once, while in BW the units trickle in, even if you manage to make 5 unit groups and send them all at once.
@@attractivegd9531 zerg has always had the army teleporting ability in the nydus which is far worse than proto's time/location/mana limited recall
When the Senior Balance Designer has a preferred race
What I also disliked, specifically with Zerg, was the art design of some units.
For example, the Infestor didn't look scary enough compared to the Defiler from SC1. They look like a pulsating blob of something.
The lurkers in SC1 were so, so scary, specifically because they looked like an even more scarier form of Hydras, but in SC2 they looked so unrecognizable and overall not scary enough.
And don't get me started with the Broodlord design. I hated the look, the mechanics, the lot of it. The Guardians in SC1 were something that I used to dread, not only because of range attack but because they look so amazingly scary. Even the portraits of the Guardians gave me nightmares.
The SCII Broodlords were glorified butterflies.
Horrible art design.
mmm very true
Agree
I feel like this was every Blizzard game though, in that era. Diablo III is a travesty when compared to the grittyness of Diablo I and II. Even now if you compare how bland Diablo IV looks with the grittyness of POE; it kills something in my soul.
I've been wanting to watch a video like this for such a long time.
I know you've alluded to some of these topics many times before...
But I still remember watching your SC2 streams religiously, and being a bit heartbroken when you switched to HOTS. XD
Ofc SC2 is a brutally frustrating game, and I can't imagine what practicing as much as a pro-gamer during the InfestorBL, and then Swarm Host, era must have felt like.
You definitely made the right choice from all points of view, it seems.
Thank you for making the video, is all I'm saying. I feel it will provide some closure, for many SC2 fans. 🙂
One thing that really doesn't come across much in this video how much I loved SC2 in 2011, 2012; the slow descent in falling into an unenamored state with the game was a slow grinding away of faith that Blizz Balance understands what makes playing vs SH or Brood/Infestor not a good experience
Grubby we met at MLG Dallas 2011, I was one game off from playing against you on the big stage. You ended up playing the guy who beat me 2-1 named DJE, a terran who opened blueflame hellion against you and the game ended up lagging something horrible for some reason, very frustrating. I was ecstatic to meet you, and have followed you since the first replay from wc3replays that I downloaded some 20 years ago. Glad you are still doing the same thing all these years later, and I hope you never stop
I'm not a pro, but SC2 broke my heart in a similar way, when LotV released I just stopped playing. Blizzard was so paralyzed when it came to action. I always said that the races are balanced in win statistics, but completely inbalanced in the strategic options.
Now since the community makes patches, the game is in a better state, but the playerbase also got used to all the mechanics that I hate, the whole game is balanced around them, including worker harass creates the coolest moments, the macro mechanics, and the emphasis is on reaction time rather than strategy.
Something I realized is that in Broodwar a lot less units fit through avenues on the map at once. In SC2 they're clumped up, but also so close to each other that they're clipping into each other. This means that a whole death ball can close the distance to an enemy all at once, something that in Broodwar just isn't the case, the army always trickles in and not only due to pathfinding but also the space between units.
I wish there were a balance mod contest or something, and that the best balance mod would get a matchmaker. I would be so excited to try these! I've started my own mod when I stopped playing, but who's gonna play that? It was more like a design ideas showcase anyway, not very balanced but with unit design ideas I collected from the forums that were cool, and a few of my own. Tackled all the issues with Broodlings, Forcefields, SH, warpgate. I even redesigned the Cyclone in a very similar way to how the community patch did it years later. I still wish for that to happen since it's something the community can take into their own hands, but even if they did I probably wouldn't notice.
SC2 is in a great state rn, but I think that a RTS is bound to be "unfit" for some players' taste depending on where its design is on the "real time" vs "Strategy" spectrum of RTS.
For one favoring Strategy over reaction time, AoE4 seems a better fit for exemple.
dude that sounds really cool you were able to do all that....
David Kim's zerg bias basically killed SC2. Literally everyone I knew that played the game quit over BL/Infestor. The one time someone came up with a way to counter it, MVP with the Ghost snipe spam, it was instantly nerfed to uselessness. Remember that game on WCS or MLG I think where a top Korean Terran wrote IMBA IMBA IMBA before GG? Yeah, and they still did nothing for so many years. Absolutely baffling decision making, to the point where rumors that DK was close with top western Z players were going around.
"Thank you David Kim"
Said bias is the evidence that Blizzard lost their passion of making great games years ago.
Yeh, the guy sucks at balancing the game and quite an asshat too for being bias toward zerg. But bilzard was kinda dead at that point.
This take is so frustrating to read, since its so blatantly false.
For the longest time in early WoL, Terran was absolutely broken, and Zerg was nowhere to be seen at all. The race was unplayable competetively at launch.
Like for the love of god, you used to be able to blink or pickup Terran units (preventing all damage, mind you!) from Fungal.
The changes that made Zerg competetively playable arrived middle 1.3 - almost two years into SC2's lifetime, with the infestor changes. Increasing the damage and disallowing pickups/blinks once you were caught by it. Afterwards, Terrans STILL had the highest overall competetive winrates for almost six additional months, before the final ladder map pool was released. This final ladder map pool, plus Stephano's roach maxes, is what allowed the Broodlord/Infestor comps to shine. Too many bases were defensible for such an immobile army - on top of which, since they were so clumped, attacking into them with such a slow army was also feasible.
This gives us practically two years of Terran dominance, but because the final few months of Wings of Liberty was Zerg favored, thats all everyone remembers. I don't disagree with you, by the way, that Broodlord Infestor on those maps was horrific to go up against. However, when even in the period you're calling out, Terrans were more competetive than Zerg was at their weakest, it screams that -you- are biased.
MarineKingPrime, MVP, NaDa, Taeja for Terran. Squirtle, MC, PartinG, HerO for Protoss.. and then you have JulyZerg, Nestea, Life and DRG as the performing Zergs. It really was not half as imbalanced as you'd like to make it out.
@@ladylynxelot9925 People don't care about Terran dominance because it's not as frustrating to play against. We're talking about the era that made the most people QUIT. What he's saying isn't blatantly false at all, it's objectively true. Everyone knew that BLFestor made large swathes of the playerbase quit. Pro play is a small sliver of the community that any game is built around. Ladder play is hugely fundamental to balance around, regardless of what some people may tell you. Boring to play is far worse than boring to watch, because people only want to watch what they find somewhat fun to play.
This really makes me appreciate the creators of starcraft and starcraft brood war, that had a similar unit that outranged everything else: the carrier. But interceptors cost minerals. Seems like having locusts cost resources would have been such a difference to the whole equation.
You also had to get the upgrade for 8 interceptors total and interceptors release one by one so you would need to always babysit them to keep moving so their interceptors from deploying instantly to be effective
Locusts held out long enough for the next Locust wave to spawn, while the Swarm Hosts could freely run around and the enemy was occupied. That are 2 major design flaws combined in one unit.
Otherwise free units would be fine, they simply need a counter. I as a test redesigned the Swarmhost to produce Locusts every 5s only when it was rooted, and those Locusts were way weaker and couldn't get farther than a tank can shoot. Idea was that you can pick them off with Tempests or Liberators or Banshees, or just match it with equally many siege units. I made this when LotV released because I hated the game too much to play, but sadly so did most of my friends and I didn't have anyone to test this with.
Interceptors costing 25minerals was such a big deal too. Killing the interceptors with Goliaths is a legitimate strategy against carriers and is better than trying to kill the main unit
Great video, incredible analysis.
Broodlord-Infestor era was why I quit playing SC2. I still hop on every now and then but I haven't really truly laddered since (was master league in WoL).
Typo in your timestamps by the way "Bid Bad #1" instead of "Big Bad #1"
Zerg's ability to spread creep and see the whole map that way I think is one of the biggest balance issues. StarCraft 2's unlimited unit selection and pathing also made controlling the Zerg swarm far to easy.
I like your idea to keep Gateways relevant in the later game.
I think larvae is actually another major reason why Zerg were/are so OP. If I went mech as Terran and suddenly needed Bio, my production structures couldn't support it - Zerg on the other hand can switch to mass any unit they need using their existing unit production, so long as they had the proper tech researched or built.
I also completely agree with you and Grubby that Zerglings (speedlings specifically) ruin the game by forcing the other races to always wall. That creates a boring, non-dynamic gameplay, and it's also extremely punishing because 16 lings, which is only 400 minerals (same as 4 zealots, who cannot do the same) can easily sneak into your base at any time since they are so fast, and simply lay waste to your eco and production whilst a fight is happening elsewhere. Combine it with the map control that the speedling + creep gives Zerg, it makes it extremely easy to dominate the map as Zerg. It was meant to be a swarming race, not a "full map control" race.
I've quit SC2 several times, and it's mostly because of PvZ frustration.
You should join the SC2 Balance Council. I like the Gateway idea!
just some weeks ago i was thinking about it too ... as a bronze ... i wonder what this button does ...
Grubby you should really be consultant for any upcoming RTS multiplayer with potential
i disagree. I disagree with many of the complaints grubby has here. especially in the big and small bad sections. One thing i know about game dev is that any mechanic should be somewhat polarizing. for example. If you have one mechanic that half the player base loves and half the player base hates, versus another mechanic which nobody has any strong opinions about, which do you think is the better mechanic?
i've never seen grubby play starcraft but i can almost guarantee, just because of his complaints, that he mains protoss and plays zerg the least.
it sounds like he wants a clunkier game to control with less interesting units.
Also his complaints are outdated..balance patches have come out since he played it I think. @@jummyplays4864
@@jummyplays4864 Bruh, after the broodlord shenanigans everyone hoped for better unit design, and them they repeated the same unit but worse.
It does not matter if you play T,Z or P, that shit is cheesy, unfun and does not require any skill while the other guy struggle to survive. and Z vs Z its a perfect proof of it, a stalemate where someone only loses if he just get tired and give up. Not to mention the "unintentional" difficulty to counter then especially as protoss. I play terran btw and i think protoss got done dirty while that dude responsible for the balance was sucking a zerg dick
@@jummyplays4864 did you even watch the video? He didn't just shit on Zerg but explained why certain units are designed badly, the sentry a protoss unit was one of them.
It's also not polarizing to make strategies which lack a counter. It's just bad. Everyone hates it besides a tiny minority.
And the argument you used was the one Ryan Johnson used to defend his aweful movie.
He doesn't want to make bland movies but polarizing ones.
How about making good games instead of polarizing? How about that, Buddy?
Like do what WC3 and SC did. Make an RTS. Learn from your mistakes and correct them with an addon. Don't double down on mistakes and tell others: jokes on you, I actually wanted to make you mad.
You can polerize with quality. Batman dark knight was polerizing. But not between people who think it's a garbage tier movie and a god tier movie. That's fractions. It's polarizing by its themes not by the quality.
@@Noqtis yes i watched the video lol.. and let me start by saying your comment reads like you are worked up or mad or something, and if thats the case i think you should chill. I am a grubby fan, i just disagree with him on most of this video.. and that is okay by the way.
yes i saw he put sentry on the list and i think it was kindof a cop out. most of the stuff he is complaining about is old, but i have never in my starcraft career been bothered by people dropping a sentry in my base and force fielding off my natural from my main (or seen it, or heard anyone complain about it or the sentry in general), and even if i did i cant imagine it being nearly as annoying as any of the real harass a player has to deal with. also you could argue that is as much an issue with map design as with the unit itself. Or you could complain about any unit in the game in the same way. reapers can just walk into a base and kill drones for free. oracles can just fly over and kill drones for free, cyclones can hunt all overlords off the map. I didnt hear him complain about building a proxy shield battery and having an unkillable void ray abusing your opponent. I agree that making strategies that lack a counter is bad design, but thats not what im talking about. Also maybe its possible that you, or grubby just dont like the counters. for example winter always talks about the counter to siege tanks is not pushing into them. I dont really love that counter personally but i also dont love being forced to go into hive tech the second i see a tank. but i wouldnt say siege tanks are unfun unit or need to be changed, i will just have a more nuanced style of play than see X = build Y. He even says in the video something along these lines when he is talking about why protoss has a reputation for cheese. i mean he is complaining about swarm hosts.. a slow, expensive, large unit, with incredibly long cd beetween attack, that cant shoot up. it literally cant shoot up. anything that flies and shoots down is a counter to it.. but its exceptionally effective at sieging with a "swarmy" feel.
I dont know who ryan johnson is, I learned the concept about making interesting mechanics on a video from a game development conference. and starcraft is the #1 rts so its pretty hard to say its not a good game. the problem i see with your statement is that you think polarizing and good are mutually exclusive, but thats kindof the ENTIRE reason the game is asymmetrical. when banelings blow up an entire bio ball it feels good for the zerg and bad for the terran. when terran is shelling my natural with 2 tanks and 12 marines protecting them 4 minutes in it feels good for the terran and bad for me.. when 4 dt's kill the only spore in my mineral line and i havent even started lair yet it feels good for toss and bad for me. but even though i dont have my counterplay ready doesnt mean it doesnt exist.
This buddy here is what makes me think you are getting a little worked up.
I dont think there is a strategy in starcraft that doesn't have a counter, and i think the huge variety in high level games makes that very clear. Protoss suffers from success in my opinion. for example its pretty easy to use scv's or drones to max / near max efficiency. They are not good enough units to have a very high skill ceiling, but probes have a near infinite skill ceiling b/c of the way they build. It would be very difficult for a human to use probes to maximum efficiency at least in comparison to scv's and drones, and i think this is a phenomenon that occurs with most protoss units. they are individually superior units, and you pay the cost for that every time, but its more difficult to get the full value back from them because of the level of control it takes. just think of shields alone.. if you could perfectly micro every unit you could probably cut protoss casualties like in half or more by sending damaged units back to repair their shields.. but even just blink micro-ing stalkers is difficult for a human nevermind watching all zealots and their shields and controlling them correctly.
1. Having all the units available in SC2 campaigns only to have them gutted for MP 'balance'.
2. The SC2 Zerg queen.
3. Banelings/Widowmines/Disruptors
4. Terran Nukes suck harder than #3.
5. RIP Dragoons
Disruptors at least require skill to connect with the target.
They have to, though. Otherwise it would be an even bigger nightmare.
I can understand that units have special abilities in campaign or coop. But it's too much, the campaign units have their craziness at 10000%, and it also means that players have to learn 2 or 3 different balances, and they can't learn the game through the campaign and then jump into multiplayer with the knowledge. Also the campaign missions are mostly designed for one specific unit, like where you get the tank you never have to leave your base, or when you get the banshee all enemy units are anti-ground, or the SH in the missions works still like it did when Hots released.
In BW I got asked a few times whether I can teach someone how to play. I always told them that they should play the campaign, they will enjoy an amazing story while learning the basics, and then they can come back and test their knowledge against other players and then that's where I can help.
Nowadays players learn by copying builds they see on youtube though. Sad times.
Grubby scarred by swarm hosts and brood lords 😆 Good fair points though
The Swarm Host incident shows how Blizzard cares less about their community until they realize their player base (which I believe for them is just the numbers for profit) is dropping significantly, only then they take actions to actually change something... -_-
from the LOTV ost:
Stars Our Home, Attack on Korhal
WoL ost:
Escape from Mar Sara, Mengsk
certified bangers!
53:32 I remember a ladder game in WoL "Impa vs Grubby" where you got proxy2gate'd on a 4 player map because the dude was maphacking, i was super impressed how you managed to keep calm and eventually win
I remember that game also. I think that was the first time i heard about Grubby wich together with witera was my favorite players
That Impa guy sucked balls though. Imagine if he just split his Zealots from the start. Unstoppable. But he was a plat level player trying to cheat against a pro and got what he deserved.
The protoss soundtrack is so good in the zeratul part of the terran campaign, it has an end of of times kind of vibe.
Very valid points Grubby. The reason I still love SC2 nowadays is how the game feels and interacts. I play Random and that kinda eliminates some of the biases and having multiple accounts on ladder really makes it fun.
His complaints are outdated and if you still play you should know the balancing has changed-also maybe you are low level, but there is no bias' ..it is a well balanced game-Terran are the strongest race, but a tiny small margin, Zerg has to be very high level intelligent play or they will get massacred now. Alot of Protoss and Terran cheese works well against Zerg aswell even in the diamond and above level, who is stronger Protoss or Zerg? it depends on the player and the map, just like SC Brood War. Alot of Protoss players just complain I've noticed when players like MaxPax is showing them how it's done.
Ya the game feels incredibly smooth
@@TheWhiteWolf2077 im first lieutenant. so high-mid rank. i kept an open mind that is why i have no confirmation biases towards races and culture.
@@TheWhiteWolf2077 The game is balanced in win ratio statistics, but not in strategic choices. That's what Grubby talked about. He gave extreme examples from the Wings of Liberty era, and it's not as apparent anymore if we don't have 3h SH games, but the problem still persists.
It's fine that pros can do chores very efficiently, but that doesn't mean the game is well designed or fun to play.
BW is 1000x slower, yet the meta still changes. In SC2 every matchup goes the exact same way for 10 years now.
@@TheWhiteWolf2077 game is still atrocious with a bad design its terrible thats why its dead and no one likes it
I really like these types of thoughtful discussions on things you're really deep into and passionate about. Especially since I wasn't really into sc2/rts at the time (didn't have a pc to play games) so it's interesting to see how things were.
I played a lot of SC2 back in the day. I managed to reach master league in the old seasons and replayed 2 years ago and reached diamond 1 as protoss doing nothing but 8 warpgates 2 bases all-in. I always hated how SC2 felted cheap most of the time. You either win or lose super fast by some ultra cheese strategy, or either play a "macro" game of 50 minutes where you go 200/200 and then win or lose in a battle that lasts for 10 seconds.
when players are good enough the ' lose in 1 fight ' thing hasn't been true for many years, just look at current top level pros like serral dark herO maxpax maru clem and how many great back and forth games they play every week
Completely true. It's just not fun to play games where everything comes down to the 10 second fight.
The pacing should be like Dota/LOL where individual battles matter but come backs are completely possible and fucking up one fight does not make or break a game.
They should've gotten Hans Zimmer to do the Zerg and Protos music.
The music piece "A Card To Play" sounds like a piece from Steve Jablonsky's Bayformers soundtrack.
I think you know this by now, but its worth mentioning that SC2's engine is both its biggest blessing and curse. The SC2 engine used a networking architecture known as the deterministic lockstep, where every action/movement was recorded on both clients and servers, and the current gamestate was calculated by the summation of all gamestates before it. This engine allowed the game to be able to process so many animations and handle the state of thousands of units at once with minimal networking/performance hitches. This is what makes the Engine good enough to be in your "pros" list. However this exact same setup is also the reason why it and HotS also have out of game features like the crappy replay system, lack of an ad-hoc spectator mode, or the lack of a reconnect feature (or the sorry excuse of a reconnect system in the case of HotS). Because of this deterministic lockstep system, the game needs to know every state of the game prior to the state you're in right now, it means that if the game was to support ad-hoc spectating, it would require your CPU to process and calculate the entire game state up to the point you start watching (this is what your PC does when you try to reconnect to a game in HotS). In other words, sacrificing these features is what lets SC2 to play so smoothly during actual gameplay. Now this tradeoff might be excusable in SC2, but in HotS...
This negative you list is not a limitation of the engine at all. If you have a lockstep engine, you can definitely also create a state based system parallel to it. As you said, if you need an ad-hoc spectator mode, your CPU needs to simulate the game. Well the CPU already simulates the game while playing, all you need to do is to save the states instead of discarding them and you have a replay system where you can jump to any timestamp whenever you want. And the good part is, that simulation can be a completely external thing, running parallel to the game, just for spectators. In that way, having spectators would have no influence on the game lag or anything else.
It was just a decision they made not to include this, but it is very easy to have with a lockstep engine. You obviously get the benefit of having very small replay sizes, but you can also have bigger replays with ad-hoc spectating. With the other engines, you just dont get the choice and the benefits that came with it.
So in the end, it is not the engines fault that it is just better, but blizzard decisonmaking on not implementing features to extend it.
Zerg should have music inspired from the Predator (1987) theme
I couldn't believe when the Swarm Host came out after dealing with Broodlord Infestor for so long. Grubby definitely stirred up memories and I feel that anger coming back as well.
Slightly unrelated, but the Blizzard game that broke my heart was actually Overwatch.
For me the main problem was kind of the opposite of SC2: devs trying to fix things which were never problematic in the first place. I am not a professional player and see things from the middle of the ladder, so maybe some of those fixes made sense for top players; but for me they didn't feel so, and many changes were ruining the identity of the heroes. At some point Blizzard flattened health pool for all heroes (except tanks), and that made them less unique. They changed Reaper by removing healing spheres, which he got when killed anyone, simplifying the character; I thought it was a cool mechanics. They changed Lucio by substantially raising skill requirements for him, which was not necessarily good, because he used to be a really good entrance point for new players, but became something exclusive for very high skilled ones. And honestly, I don't see any reason for such changes. I think, the game balance was fine, and all the heroes had their purpose or their niche since the beginning, no one felt bad or underused (except Bastion, which was nearly useless, and then Blizzard nerfed it, decreasing range and damage, because Bastion was also very annoying for new players). When they reworked my main character, Mercy, which was the best healer pick for low-skill players like me, and removed mass resurrect, I left the game.
But another problem was how devs handled toxicity among players. The game always had a problem with players who didn't take matches on ladder seriously and were ruining experience for other players. So Blizzard started increasing timeouts for leavers. But it didn't work, and players instead started picking Symmetra or Torbjorn and doing random stuff instead of playing. Then Blizzard started punishing this too, but it didn't increase players' motivation either; they kept doing the same but more covert. I think, the fundamental problem was with matchmaking. Often the very first encounter with the opposite team was so one sided, that many players just didn't want to continue, but had to play for another 10-15 minutes. Developers were replying to this that they don't want people to leave, they want them to re-group, adapt, pick different heroes, try new tactics. And while often that was good advice, I felt that in many cases there were an actual problem with matchmaking, and teams, which levels were no even close, were matched against each other. But Blizzard never addressed it, or even admitted it, they just looked at their statistics, and thought that it was all good, and the problem was with players.
And all of this was long before the Overwatch 2 drama.
You honestly had a problem with them removing mass rez? I still play OW2 from time to time (though i don't know why) and you'd really hate it now lol. Healers are now better dps. Mercy should honestly be deleted at this point because she is just too different and sets the team that picks her automatically at a huge advantage. Fastest char in the game every 3 seconds, heals and damage boosts through walls periodically, good dps from across the map ect. Really made heroes like mcree obsolete since every healer now has same or better damage output.
I used to watch all the SC2 I could back during WoL. You were one of my favourite players and I was always rooting for you, Grubby. Sadly, as a protoss player myself I was getting more and more frustrated with the points you brought up in this video. Even back in 2012 when SC2 was huge I remember tuning in to the final seasons of Brood War Pro League and the game play and metas just felt more interresting.
I feel like SC1, perhaps partly because of its control scheme, encourages more splitting of armies. The pathfinding and control scheme also makes armies less clumped naturally which makes battles a bit slower, dynamic and harder to predict. The macro is much more difficult which creates huge skill differential even among the top pros. Units such as the reaver (which you talked about in your favourite units video) are also super fun to watch since they can either be a big waste of resources or in the case of someone like Snow a complete wrecking ball. There are so many cool micro tricks in SC1 like moving shooting with flying units or even SCVs if you're crazy good, carriers can do several tricks to influence interceptor behaviors which are completely missing in SC2, etc. There are also the interresting games within the game such as
- Defilers being a huge threat to terran
- > Terran get science vessel to irradiate them
- > Zerg gets scourge to suicide into them
-> Terran tries to cover science vessels with marines to snipe the scourge
- > Defilers plague the marines to make lurkers one shot them, etc
All these hunts and chases within the games make it super fun and interresting to watch.
I love SC2 in many ways and I've played a ton of multiplayer and the campaign more than any other game.
But when you showed that Parting vs Soulkey game I just remember how frustrating and boring it was, and that's painful for me as well.
I'm happy you changed gears when you didn't enjoy it any more. Thanks for still being awesome!
Carrier required money to make small ships. The fact that Zerg did not require anything was an issue, in my mind, sure let them make it for free, slowly very slowly and you have the option to go into overdrive for money, so the enemy has a choice of presuring you and dancing. Yes he loses a few units but forceses you do unload and now you have a choice press the button to reload faster or let the opponent do what he wants and this dance could had been nice. Another option would had been to have a limit/cap per special unit, like, only 50 population can be broodlords and swarmhost.
Love these long talking videos! Perfect for listening at work
So much of what was fucked about Protoss was created because they didn't want to fix how good sentry and warpgate was so they just destroyed the rest of the race.
Zerg was just way too fucking strong at the peak of SC2 competitive scene in HoTS.
I agree that the surround micro is an interesting feature of WC3 and has a lot of skill expression. While SC2 doesn't have that, there are many other unit interactions with extremely high skill ceilings as you know. Watching Serral consistently pull a ling to dodge widow mine shots for example is mind boggling. And watching Viper dodge arrow shots in AoE2 was also very impressive, coupled with using bait units to lure arrow shots in large fights or quickwalling. I'd say that each game just happens to have very different places where you express skill in micro.
If SC2 is in a "better place" it's because nobody's left but the die-hards who like the game as it is.
I discovered you thanks to SC2 and I was always was rooting for you!
Thanks for making this video! I never understood why you quit and it makes so much sense in retrospect. And as a Protoss noob player I can totally get the frustration because it also happened on lower leagues, mines and zergling runbies were brutal and as you say, if you have to spent so much time into the game it just makes the lows even lower.
Seems the next months will be interesting for the RTS genre and I'll keep an eye open!
For me SC2 is just too much busywork. I feel like WC3 gets you to the fun part faster and better. Part of that is RNG sure, but I think making the most of every item in combination of your heroes and their skills, even if its not the item you hoped for, is still very much skill based. And it simply leads to more dynamic gameplay with much more variety on how the game will play out. Plus fighting creeps while you build up your strategy really helps with the pacing of the game and leads to a whole new dimension of scenarios like creepjacks for example.
So, heroes, skills, creeps, 4 races and all that, simply help making WC3 a game with much more variety, and thats fun, both to play and to watch. Because SC2 doesnt have this variety and RNG, the gameplay becomes much more rigid: If you do this,. your opponent has to react so because thats objectively the best response and vice versa. It feels like all the options are already decided and whats left is just about how well you execute them. And sure, watching somebody do this with incredible skill is fun, but it gets predictable. If you get too creative you are almost always playing suboptimal in Starcraft, while in Warcraft 3 there are so many combinations of heroes, units, skills, items and creeps that unpredictable things will occur, even after more than 20 years, and that keeps it interesting.
For me, the micro and strategy are what makes a rts game fun and interesting, not how good you are at clicking injects every 30 sec. I always hated sc2 partly because it felt like it focused more on the latter.
@@mvpmvp2980very true, it was a game of chores not a game of strategy and control
@@mvpmvp2980 Agreed. The macro side of things is only interesting when you have to make money decisions (do I buy more units now, or invest in more production structures, or try to tech up, etc.) but the actual drone-work of having to mash buttons to make sure you're constantly producing workers/units is super uninteresting and not great gameplay imo
I agree with you all, lol.
I think, the OP explains the reason why the meta never changes in SC2. But in Broodwar, too, you could get creative and that makes the meta change to this day. I tried replicating what uThermal does in his games, but goddamn it feels impossible without GM micro and multi-tasking. Meta just easily beats it every time.
And as for the chores, can't be more true. David Kim said that he wanted to force Zergs to regularly look into their base, that's why inject exists. He made a chore. And then with 12 worker start he sped up the game as well, meaning more bases and more chores.
I always say, imagine you have to play Need for Speed on 16x speed. Would that still be fun?
@@EB-bl6cc but your complaints here apply infinitely more to brood war which artosis would zealously disagree with.....
In wc3, heroes will get lots of xp if undead go mass nec. That’s a really good balance system to against “swarming”
And there is dispell.. they could have implemented technological version of dispell for protoss in SC2
i kind of regret having a heartbeat of over 9000 for 30+ minutes each game. Sounds unhealthy.
It truly is the most nostalgic game for me, and the evolution of how scene was able to find new ways to get around these small imbalances from tournament to tournament were incredible. I am glad because I was able to meet You at IEM Katowice thanks to it! My only hope, now that I am old and grumpy, is that Blizzard has one more good RTS in them, and learns from all what happened to SC2 in the future. I would love to see all their lessons from wc reforged, from sc2 lotv how it is now, and how broodwar scene is still alive, and put that together into something brand new. I wish I live up to that day. It was a great content, thanks for that video, and the last words made me think of InControl, IdrA, day9 dailies and all the early Homestory Cup times, when Apollo was still playing, Sheth was the nicest guy to watch, and life was so good and simple. Take care, back to watching You playing Warcraft!
Captain my Captain!
Is Zerg IMBA or does Protoss suck?
I also think that Blizzard should have copied their own design regarding splash damage. The most powerful spell of BroodWar was arguably the PsiStorm, and it what prevented it to be completely insane was the non-overlapping design, it was pointless to cast multiple storms on top of each others. The same should have applied on ALL AoE in SC2. Including Collosus and Widow Mines. It would have been much easier to balance and less frustrating with fights ending in two seconds.
They found splash damage is too strong in SC2 because units are much better at clumping and flowing. So that unit ports from BW to SC2 such as Lurker or High Templar were way too good, so the Lurker never made it in, and HT storm was weaker because of it. Such that Zerg would often just stand still in some storms with Roaches. Even Archon loses to Zerglings in SC2, whereas in SC1 archons ROCKED zerglings' socks off
@@GrubbyTalks I'm surprised you didnt mention the fact that Blizzard said - after announcing SC2 will come in 3 parts - that they want people to be able to play together irrespective of what expansion they have, that they don't want to introduce new units because Sc2 will come out as a "full game" by itself and the expansions focus only on campaign missions.
What a load of BS that turned out to be.
6:57 naaah this exact song is always giving me goosebumps! such an amazing melancholic tune
I don’t put the Zerg soundtrack on when splitting wood outside. But, I would put it on whilst splitting wood in the bedroom. /s
33:11 -- buuuut... Orc COULD already heal their units *in Reign of Chaos as well..* ... Ever heard of that thing called... *WITCH DOCTORS ??*
Just mass 'em every game and a-move for the win... -_-
I think you meant to say that *UNDEAD* finally got a way to heal their units in TFT -- *Obsidian Statues !!*
.
Your only heal being at tier 3 was pretty terrible
I think the SC2 dev team grossly overestimated how hard the microtask of injecting larvae, mules, and warp gates would end up being. It just ended up being an uninteresting drain of your APM that you were forced to do
My biggest issue with SC2 was how fast it was and how weak each individual unit was. As a fairly bad player, if I made 1 mistake, I could lose 50 pop in a split second to banelings, sentries, widow mine. The speed caused very explosive game play, but it switches the game play to being position based to how fast could you be with micro.
Grubby, do you have the playlist or any links to your SC2 campaign playthrough? I only managed to find what appears to be LOTV campaign... :(
he only recorded the lotv one
@@norberthiz9318 megasadge :(
I remember there were some serious attempts by community members around WoL/HoTS to change pathing and macro to be more in line with BW - e.g. diminishing returns for worker saturation on minerals and more spread to prevent deathballing and encouraging individual unit micro, both by using mods and by trying to convince Blizzard directly. Blizzard responded directly at one point, saying the game was made for 3-base economy and no pathing changes would be made.
It's a shame that any attempts at making it more focused on macro and wide front battles like in SC1 were killed by their design philosophy. Which really shows with how every unit in LoTV was designed with some ability to micro rather than fundamental core gameplay in mind; as said in their idea with the swarmhost, it seems like they were more interested in recreating some vague idea of "cool moments" from BW, but misunderstood how those moments were really made by players doing a lot with very basic units and pathfinding, rather than by forcing it through design.
Felt like a lot of wasted potential.
Yup games like starbow for example. Fell on deaf ears then I like many others quit at HOTS. I went back to BW after seeing how freaking cool it was watching Sayle cast the mixed broodwar and sc2 proleague
I only played the campaign when it came out. I started to play online 1 year ago and Im having a blast. So much too learn and improve I love it. Great learning curve.
I love Grubby's point about warpgate. As a protoss player, I always thought warpgate was the worst designed thing in the game.
In my opinion, another massive improvement, in addition to the type of suggestion he made, would have been for the warp gate tech to be more expensive, slower to research, and only available after at least 1 more tech building. By pushing warpgate to require more investment, and arrive later in the game, it would be perfectly reasonable for it to be powerful, and not be something that ultimately led to poor balance around protoss units.
I am a bit surprised more people don't hate the design of marauders, as it's a very infrequently called-out unit. Effects (like fungal growth) that disable or slow movement, are always the strongest abilities. For example even broodwar maelstrom is absolutely bonkers, and that has to be just about the weakest ability of that type in an RTS. Marauders having an omnipresent micro-free slow was such an awful design decision, as it made skirmishing irrelevant, and vastly contributed to the early onset of 'millisecond victories' that make SC2 so much less interesting to play or watch than its predecessor.
I stopped playing multiplayer late in WoL though, so perhaps its just overshadowed by the myriad of other problems that came later.
When it comes to protoss music, I feel like they could have made bangers fitting for the race if they made it orchestral but epic orchestral, in the vein of something by Two Steps From Hell or Antti Martikainen.
Imagine something like United We Stand - Divided We Fall, Archangel, or SkyWorld in the protoss music. Maybe a bit toned down since TSFH's music is more center pieces than background music, but still.
Ahh, adding that extra bit at the end got rid of my Grubby heart, nooo!
It’s funny how you thought Zerg was OP vs. Protoss, because I still remember Scarlett very publicly mentioning that Protoss was OP. She even played under the username “TossImba.” And who can forget that one game where she switched from Zerg to Protoss and defeated a fellow Zerg player, DRG? (Though to be sure, she did win with an early game all-in, which kind of reinforces the point you were making.)
Overall I believe SC2, while still my favorite game of all time, IS indeed a delicate balancing act. This is because of SC2’s focus on macro over micro, with armies that can be built up in a few minutes only to be obliterated in seconds. I don’t think ANY other RTS out there had such a fast-paced gameplay. Even Stormgate seems to be favoring more of a slower pace of gameplay that resembles WC3 and HotS .
Protoss and Zerg were imba at certain phases in the game. Protoss could do some very strong all-ins to win the game in the early or midgame, but if you reached the late-game zerg was basically unbeatable, because their late game composition was so incredibly cost-efficient.
Funnily enough something similar happened with Terran at the end of Heart of the Swarm, where mech compositions led to super long games, because mass Raven was able to block all attacks with PDD, allowing the Terran to expand around the map at a snails pace while trading extremely efficiently by killing of units from a distance with Yamato and Seeker missile.
that is not what grubby said, he said it was unfun balance in the different stages of the game.
I remember a lot of people complained about Protoss in specific times. Like when Archon toilet was a thing, but that was arguably cheese. Then there was a certain moment in the balance when "Tossball" was a thing due to stuff like Sentry Guardian Shield plus Immortals plus Colossus, where it felt like they could just A-move and win battles lategame - but that was also mostly against Terran. Skytoss was also thrown around a lot both when Void Ray spam was a thing and later when Tempests got introduced. Also lots of Terran players liked to go for Mech in TvP, fearing Psi Storm and other factors, when Mech was always a losing strategy on that matchup. Once people got better at microing Bio armies TvP became one-sided again.
After you mark all your army units with F2 (or in control group), you just hit tab and it swap between unit types - so you can cast special abilities just by those units, and also, it will jump on correct page of selected units.
I really hope the team of stormgate watch this video and learns about what u are saying because its truly an amazing feedback and as a sc2 player I have been feeling the same for so long that I am not playing anymore.
I still remember MaNa vs FireCake marathon game. Swarm host, Broodlord, infestor, spine/spore vs Tempest, Carrier, cannon. The highlight of the game was the impromptu rap that caster pulled out around the end of the game.
I know you see the game through the lense of a protoss player, but I can tell you that as a zerg, I absolutely hated having to deal with sentries splitting all my units and killing them instantly, without there being a single counter play to them. Zerg had to tech to brood lords because they were never efficient enough to deal with sentries.
By the time zerg developed the brood lord infestor meta (at the end of WoL), protoss had that nasty mothership/archon/voidray deathmass that produced the archon toilet, and I can tell you, nobody had fun against that.
Starcraft 2 was a flawed game by many regards, but the worst part about it, is that the TTK was insane. AoE spells really killed the game. Banelings, widow mines, fungals, seeker missles, disruptors (the worst) even things like the oracle attack ability just seemed insane and completely unfun to play against. All that game planning, mind games, macro just for the game to be decided by a massive attack that killed your whole army in 3 seconds.
Protoss players I've noticed just complain instead of push themselves and say Zerg is OP, when they are NOT. Meanwhile players like MaxPax is showing them how it's done.
I agree sentries are BS lol
All races have big design problems. Grubby just mentioned the problems that he understands from the Protoss viewpoint, it is a bit biased but doesn't mean his points are invalid, there's equally valid criticism from Zerg and Terran players.
The TTK by the way is also related to how quickly units can close the distance in SC2. A whole deathball always fits through every pathway on the map with the exception of the entrance to the main. In BW, no matter how well you managed your army, the units always trickled in. This isn't just due to the perfect pathfinding in SC2, but also the unit radii which is SO SMALL that units touch and even clip into each other while walking around.
This changed a lot, not just AoE spells. But more importantly that players no longer have to fight over the map to gain control over pathways. If they did hold 2 or 3 positions with 2 or 3 armies, the deathball could just cut through one position and reduce one players army by 30%.
Blizzard tried to fix the symptom by giving units escape mechanisms, Medivac boost, recall, blink, even SH can cast locust and then just walk away to safety for a minute at least. This however makes the game more reactionary than strategic, you no longer control areas of the map, but you need to react immediately when it's time to boost away with your medivac.
@@TheWhiteWolf2077 I think grubby is complaining about the state of the game during Hots not current meta, he never even said its op in the video he said the win rate was about 50/50 but didn't find it fun because all the protoss wins came from winning the game before 11mins
If you look at the numbers, there’s twice as many Protoss GMs as Zerg. Protoss get farmed by Terran in tournaments. If they nerfed marauder and Viking damage just a little bit, that matchup would be more balanced. It wouldn’t affect ZvT too much because marauders and Vikings aren’t used much in ZvT, and if marauders are used it’s to soak up banelings.
as a casual player and viewer of SC2 (and SC1), you really hit the nail on the head with the constructive criticisms. 👍
And beautiful idea about warp gate / gateway. I've had similar thoughts!
Well said.
I always thought that increasing the starting worker count from 6 to 12 was a stealth nerf to protoss because it takes away a ton of time where the probe can harass, sneak, scout, build, etc. One of my best builds was to send an initial probe to the enemy base and it would get in before they built their first depot at the ramp. I had been probe harassing since brood war in year 2000. They nerfed me so hard - and added widow mines.
They catered everything toward being a fun to watch game and not fun to play.
I always thought the "gateways build faster but warpgate has reverse CD" idea was good. Finally vindicated! I also feel like the "Zerg gets free units" thing is one of those good ideas in theory that's hard to be both balanced and fun for both sides. The thing I felt Zerg needed the most was a way to break into a base when they're ahead to end the game but both brood lords and swarm hosts were also so good against army units that it made the game silly. Seems like the Ravager was the best unit of the bunch for that reason.
Every iteration of the Swarm host was designed stupidly. Every unit that spawns free stuff and then is able to run away to safety will be problematic. Now it's a harassment tool, but I wonder what Blizzard had in mind when they designed it for Heart of the Swarm. Did they want the Zergs enemy to slow push over every wave till they reach the Zerg base? No idea, makes still no sense.
19:20 your forgot infestor Terrans
those were brutal, nothing like seeing 100 infested terrans pop up around something. Definitely one of the things I disliked in the game back then.
incredible talk. great stuff, would love to see SC2 people react to this
Even in those two times, the WoL Broodlord Infestor era; and the HotS swarmhost era, Zergs complained about protoss
Everyone complains about everyone else because it's a deeply frustrating and punishing game. For example as a Zerg just because BL/Infestor is amazing doesn't make cannon rush, the fact Zerg has nothing baseline which shoots up or any detection so you can insta lose to banshees/dt/void ray/oracle etc.. not incredible annnoying, unfair and unfun.
@@bengreenbank
Only real comparisions with broodlord infestor and with the swarmhost on the protoss side would be Kaydarian amulet which was erased pretty early back in WoL; the sentry immortal all ins, which were a direct response to how dumb broodlord infestor was but still sentries were too much withouth ravagers; and maybe old carrier which I am not even sure because when most zergs were crying about that we only had zerg champions in every single tournament as well as GSL and world championships.
About your other remarks:
So you are comparing things that were never a problem to somehting that had a lot to do with the game dying.
-Cannon rush: blizzard gave zerg the little destructible rocks so you did not insta-died. This was super early in the game.
If you are dying to this now have faith, know that once your overall level improves you will never die to this again unless you are a protoss yourself which is the only real dumb thing with cannons tbh. At least is not in most maps.
-Dt, absolutely not op. Lurkers are insanely frustrating to deal with and there are some rushes to them that feel very hard to defend. I would not say Lukers are op, nor dts wich you can defend with some lings as long as you understand how to interpret what you scout.
-Banshee has never been op. If you actually think this, my guess is there's no way you are above plat.
-Quees shoot up? also queens with the old short range that lasted less than a third of the time sc2 has existed. After that people slowly realized queens defend almost everything. Most pro zergs think that withouth the queen zerg would be erased.
I know I won't convince you because you already have decided what is true.
But still I wanted to at least respond to that, since it had almost no truth behind it.
Be sure I will read your response, but I won't answer unless it comes from a logical perspective which I would say it's about 0.3% possible.
Really good video. Its been a long time, but I recall that during WoL and HotS eras and blizzard had some kind of policy not to do major balance patches during 3/4s of the year. And when they did, the changes were fairly conservative.
One huge thing that has always been a problem according to me is that creep provides full vision.
Information is so valuable in a game like Starcraft. Honestly at best, creep should provide vision like sensor towers do.
And I totally agree on the free units spawned by abilities being a problem. Tell me why carriers have to buy them, and swarmosts and broodlords puke them out for free? Nonsense really -.-
Great video as usual with very interesting points. I am only a casual, but SC2 is so frustating sometimes that I have unistalled it more than once. However, after playing it and following the competitive scene, the very same things that make it so frustating missing in games like Stormgate make them less enjoyable to me. It is like after getting used to Tequila later going for a mild and soft beer. Losing the whole army in a second if you aren't careful, losing to all kinds of cheese, watching games where a few disruptor shots or a widow mine changes everything in a fraction of a second creates such tension and thrill (and often frustration) that later games like Stormgate to me feel dull.
watching and playing are definitely two different things. But it sort of highlights how mobas are just.. a better concept.
i love the sc2 campaigns, they are hands down the best RTS campaigns ever made (from a gameplay perspective). as a wc3 veteran i also love wc3, but wc3 wasnt quite the level of the sc2 campaign mechanics. i finished them multiple times on brutal difficulty.
that said - after playing competitive 1v1 wc3 for years - i didnt play more than maybe 100 multiplayer games in sc2. it just isnt fun. i hate the turtling, the ramp blocking, the eco harass drops, the overly bland earlygame and the coinflippy lategame. some units and strats were insanely punishing. few games would go past the cheesy early/midgame with rushes, eco cheese and proxy stuff and then conclude in a barely controllable splatterfest with 60 supply loss per second.
if i had to sum up sc2 multiplayer in one word it would be "frustrating".
the battlenet was also a huge downgrade from wc3, custom games aswell. not one of my wc3 friends or clan members would migrate to sc2.
i also agree with everything grubby said in the video, also about the music, except the point about zerg swarminess. i totally agree that zerg has to be swarmy. the issue is that protoss, in particular, is missing a core identity - they are a mix of leftovers. that said, swarmhosts and broodlords are terrible units in design and function, never liked them, and i mostly played zerg. i loved playing zerglings, but early zergling rushes were very problematic, but mostly due to the bad earlygame base defense concept of sc2 - which means: block the choke or die. wc3 had solutions for most if not all of the problems sc2 had, but blizzard kinda ignored that and poked in the dark VERY SLOWLY.
I remember before SC2 came out and we got hints and sneak previews of the game (Battle Reports), in my mind this was going to be the killer of Broodwar and a revolutionary new RTS. What we got instead was so-so designed units with so-so sound design, so-so cutscenes, and just about anything else.
The biggest problem with the infestor broodlord meta was that fungal growth was so dominant at low level play. At top tier pros could usually find a way to hit 50/50 win rates, but casual players felt hopeless and that's when you lose your player base and community. I also felt it was in a place where it was the zerg players game to lose by making a mistake, not their opponents game to win with a good play.
The way SC2 broke my casual's heart had been mixing AT and RT ladders. The ultimate end of "solo Q" I knew from WC3.
My take on why Broodwar is better than Starcraft II:
1. lack of positional and defenders advantage in SC2
- in Broodwar highground and coverage gives you significant miss chance which makes moving around the map and capturing highground positions essential
- static defences do not do enough punch in SC2 to handle all those beefy tier 1 units
- warp in mechanics definitely promotes attackers advantage over defenders
2. combat is too fast in SC2
- big armies just evaporate in seconds
- units clamp too much and so aoe is very strong
- it is very difficult to do any defensive micro vs special abilities (storm, forcefield, emp, abduct, fungal chains...), in Broodwar doding spell projectiles/effects is very much part of the gameplay
3. ranged unit kiting fest
- almost every ranged unit is fast and easy to kite, this means that close ranged and melee units have hard time doing any damage and need special range closing abilities like charge, blink, psionic transfer
4. zerg creep + tumor spread
- while it is a interesting take on defenders advantage, the movement speed bonus feels quite broken (perhaps if it was something like +10% speed +10% dps +100% hp regen it would have been better)
5. overengineered, overspecialized units (hardcounters)
- in SC2 you have specially designed units to deal enormous damage to one or two unit types while dealing almost no damage to the rest
- in Broodwar you have 3 damage types and 3 armor types, that's it
6. constant balance patches
- Starcraft Broodwar by no means has perfect balance, however I find it better to just have map makers trying to balance things out than having constant balance patches (this would probably not work for SC2 at the moment but imo should be the target)
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Btw there is ongoing ASL in Broodwar with some very sick games so I recommend checking it out (Artosis + Tasteless casting).
Very well said!
I sooo agree with your points. I'd also like to add
1 & 2:
- micro to surround / block is just gone and missing (which Grubby also mentioned)
- not sure why, but probably because of the speed of battles, "deploying" an army is barely a thing in SC2. Having a wide line or arc, making sure some units are in front / behind others, making sure they're not clumped up, making sure they attack in the right order, planning so they arrive well timed, these are much less in SC2, and I not fully sure why. But it's certainly missing. Battles in BroodWar are not 5 minute distruptor dances and the first to make the smallest mistake has half of its army gone and the game is over. They are actually epic (well, most of them) because they're slower and there's no gigantic AoE death balls. And while they're slower, they're still a massive skill for the player to do, mechanically they still happen too fast, but viewing them is just beautiful.
- not only big armies evaporate in seconds, worker lines and buildings too.
On point 6, I wouldn't put that against SC2. I mean, they have to do something, right ? BroodWar, they were simply lucky to have that balance and still have evolving meta about 20 years or so after the last balance patch. While it would be nice that SC2 would've had that too, it's just not something that easy to do. We can argue they could've done a better job, at most.
Since I'm here, I'd like to also add a bit of complaint. While mechanically, the campaigns in SC2 are just awesome, the structure and the part outside of the missions themselves, especially in WoL, there's a thing that irks me. Well, two of them, but one is very subjective - the story just goes haywire from HotS. Well, WoL had some things I don't like either, like how they made Kerrigan be a hot chick instead of the nerdy witty woman she was in BroodWar (pre-remastered).
But, the other thing that irks me in campaign is the hand holding. I mean, first of all, in most missions I'm in orbit, we talk about where we're going and stuff, check what's there with scanners and stuff, and when you start the map, you don't even know the map layout. After just landing from orbit!! And then, in EVERY SINGLE MISSION there is SOMEONE ELSE who knows were stuff is on the map (basically all optional objectives) and tells you where to go and what to do. Ok, maybe not in literally every single mission, but in the vast majority of them. At least they had secrets and easter eggs.
Oh, and 7:
- at least one song in the Zerg OST in BroodWar is a banger. Well, if you like metal :D
Did you seriously just say broodwar doesn't have units designed to hard counter and deal insane damage to specific units? Broodwar is THE game you think of when thinking of hard counters for anything. This was some low elo narrative from like 15 years ago. How are people still parroting this shit?
Indeed, Broodwar Zerg OST is the best.
@@Winnetou17 I think the story is very cheesy with a lot of let's bring this character back to life and let's make this character abruptly change his behavior. (btw we see this trend in recent movies and tv shows as well)
The gameplay is very good however, well except of WoL campaign I guess where mass marines would just do the job... but LoV campaign might be one of the best designed campaigns gameplay-wise from all of strategy games.
Interesting that age of empires had the same brood lord spore scenario, but it's not problematic in the context of that game. There are matchups where one civilisation has an unstoppable endgame slow push with bombard towers and power units. In those matchups, the other player knows he has to win before endgame, but there are several windows to do that. It's ok because of multiple earlier windows to attack and it's only a few percent of game scenarios rather than 30% of all games.
The end made me chuckle and realise I haven't subbed to this channel compared to your other channels :D
I would have to go looking for it, but there was that very gateway change in some PTR a very long time ago, but the change was reverted very quickly. If I remember correctly it was broken early game, mostly in the PvP match up. This was definitely pre shield battery, so do I wonder what the gateway change would look like now.
Thanks for your thoughts, I always suspected the SH meta was the reason you left the game but it was nice to see your perspective on this.
I played the game as Zerg in the very beginning, the first year or so of WoL when Zerg was generally considered underpowered, so I never had to live through the worst phase of the meta.
What I remeber is Terran early aggression being almost impossible to hold. There was a time where you could produce Reapers without techlab (iirc). Reapers are faster then slowlings and queens at that time had a melee attack. So it was almost impossible to defend one base mass reapers without taking a lot of eco damage, at least at a casual/mediocre level like mine. Which obviously led to you dying of M&M shortly after.
I loved this game to bits, but as you said some of it's flaws ended up making it too frustrating for me.
- too volatile, where you could lose an entire base to a drop in a couple of seconds
- the above also means that cheese tends to be really effective since you have limited ways to defend your base, which was really frustrating for a casual like me (maybe less so for a pro). Especially if you compare to, say, AoE games
- degenerate playstyles. Zerg ended up producing the worst of it, but they certainly weren't the only ones *cough* Archon Toilet, mass void rays in WoL *cough*
I thought there was an earthquake happening. Then I looked back at the video and Grubby was typing lol
To be fair, the game is in a better state than ever imho.
I'm still following a bit WinterStarcraft and Harstem mainly, and the meta is really different and shifting a little bit due to the latest patch.
You can still be blown out of existence in a matter of seconds, so this fact won't change, but some "unfairness" of some units are being nerfed.
Yes you still need to get a unit or a probe to pop a pylon as a last line of defence (and hero still forgets regularly), and there is still a lot of cheese, not only for Protoss (go check beating grandmaster with stupid stuff).
There are quite a few very entertaining good players rn: ShowTime is still around and still very good, MaxPax is an incredible chill defensive toss player, Reynor is very impressive in PvZ as a Protoss, even if he is a Z main... and filthy Terrans can go check some Clem gameplay :D
In the end, like Blizzard usually does, they f*cked it up, and there is not a lot to do now. They should have listen a long time ago and did not. At least the game is still (slowly) evolving and in a playable state.
Unfortunately MaxPax is not a real player because he doesn't go to LAN. Or perhaps that's becoming an outdated opinion in this ever more online world.. It is strange though
@@GrubbyTalks Haha, true, he is the 'mysterious protoss', but I don't mind ^^
He probably has his reasons to do so, like fearing planes.
I don't know with your schedule how you found some time to follow a bit SCII (that is good news imho), but you might enjoy the latest PvZ from WinterStarcraft: it's a good example of high level play where the protoss doesn't rely on cheese to fight, and it's a true player :D
LANs are a bit out of fashion, the COVID didn't helped on that side, but it sure helped getting more people online.
If you feel strange now, how will you feel in a few months when there will be AI vs AI tournaments?
I also played wings of liberty only and rooted all wc3 players transitioning into sc2.
Too bad none of them saw the light but it was nice hearing your perspective of the story
I remember with the swarm hosts in HotS on some maps the zerg park the swarmhost just outside their base and assault your base on the other side of the map. Then there was also that long game 3+ hour TvZ online tournament game where the players where making tweets during the game. I think one of them got disqualified for it.
Just got back into sc2. Awesome game.
The memories the MUSIC brings me back to shows how insane that game was,
Ya but notice in your example video. The protoss has a ball army. Everything is clumped up. If they had a warp prism floating around waiting to move in just as the engagement happened from the Zerg they could have dropped like 10 zealots on the swarm hosts after they released their locusts to the main fight. I just feel like you would see a lot of zergs with several army groups being controlled at once and protoss all balled up with 1 army group and 1 for the templar.
I got into broodwar and sc2 esports recently. I'd love to see what tastosis' take on this video is. What's changed, how much they agree/disagree etc.
you could resume this whole video by: "I was unlucky to pick protoss as my race." it was obvious from the beginning that it was the worst designed race.
I personally think that the free units were a symptom of another problem. Zerg was supposed to be swarmy, which zerglings could pull off, the problem was that they added too much massive splash in the game. Hellions, banelings, siege tanks, high templar, colossus, archons, and that's just in the base game. If they had reduced all splash by 50-75% and removed all free units, I think the game would have balanced itself.
zerg is still very much swarmy even tho broods and swarm hosts have been mega nerfed.
broods and swarm hosts were just a terrible idea period, there was no reason to put such shit design into the game
Terran SC2 music is one of the best music soundtracks ever made, and I never played SC2 in my life.
that cut at the end was gold.
Candidly I think the biggest issue with SC2's unit design is that it went far too much towards a direction where the designers felt every race needed everything. Why do Marauders exist? Why do Roaches exist? Adepts? Disruptors? Tempests? These units muddle up the design of the armies and normalize them, when instead there should've been unit design that leaned harder into the uniqueness of the races, if they were going to add new units. Don't give me Adepts so that my Protoss army has an early harass unit like the Reaper. Don't give me Roaches so that Zerg army have a Stalker/Dragoon equivalent. Why give Zerg a long range siege unit like a Tank?
Over the last few years, I've actually found myself more and more interested in SC1. The unit design and composition is so much more interesting to me, because the army design is asymmetrical. There is no zealot equivalent in the other armies, there is no marine equivalent in the other armies, obviously there's some role overlapping because there are only so many roles, but the way the units that do share roles with units in other armies function is so vastly different. You don't spam Reavers like you do Tanks for instance, Reavers are more surgical, they're slow and must be protected.
I would love to see a huge cut of units from SC2: Marauders, roaches, adepts, disruptors, reapers, tempests, cyclones, the weird hellion battle mech mode, the upgraded roach mode, the widow mine, cut all that shit and go back to the drawing board.
I completely agree with you. I lost interest in SC2 around LOTV because it just felt too bloated with new units, among other things
+1
I'd go so far and say that SC2 is the only RTS in the world where it would be beneficial to remove units/assets from the game which is just ridiculous.
funny to read your comment now , after having just read another here that complained about units being cut , and suggested that all of bw's units should be included in sc2 on top of it all
I follow ASL, broodwar competive scene and I agree.
Early game is slow, each race have their unique early units.
Mid game each race leans to their straight in the matchup
Late game usage of high tech units usually decides the winner.
Unusual units also in broodwar have weight too. Valkyries were unused and treated as trash, until recently terrans have learned to use them against powerful mutalisks.
Dark archon sees a play sometimes.
Queen very rarely, but still, insta kill any mech unit.
Ghost ... never, extreme cases in TvT
It's funny because almost all the units you think should be cut were either added or reworked in expansions. In WoL adepts disruptors and cyclones didn't exist. Reapers and tempests were radically different. Marauders and roaches were somewhat different.
Agreed btw.
Kinda sad how they changed the protoss so much in sc2. In sc1/BW protoss was kinda imba lategame. I also think protoss music and unit design and quotes was so fucking badass back then
I was a Zerg player and I was annoyed at the direction they went. The zerg fantasy for me was that you had worse units, but they were cheap and you could make a lot. Especially post wings of liberty they became capable of making super powerful comps while maintaining their ability to ramp up economy. I always viewed this as a compensation for less "death-bally" armies before, but they definitely became too potent.
goosebumps after you play Terran soundtrack.
Ty. Like.
my life with an orc
fears is illusion
was also expecting you to mention crazy blink stalker allins vs terran in 2013 which were ridiculously hard to counter.
Never forget we could’ve had Kerrigan the bad bitch of the Zerg a galactic threat created by the hubris of Mengsk and unleashed by the overmind. Instead we got a feud between two godly space squids that ends with a trashy “redemption” arc for Kerrigan.
Would really love to see you play sc2 in the current patch. I left sc2 9 yeas ago too but recently startet it again and im having a blast! I think (as a diamond/Master) the game is in a good state and there is a solution to everything now.
So many years later the swarm host wasn't as bad as people said. The amount of games I have seen zvp were protoss is just spamming ground and losing to sh is insane. And the SH was a zerg siege tank in a way, it's attack were the locusts, all the "free units" memes were not well thought out. The "free units" were the attack of the SH and it costs supply just like the siege tank. When a siege tank attacks and damages and kills a few units it is also "free damage" because the tank shot and destroyed units.
Protoss has had design issues in having their gateway units balanced entirely around warp gate, and warp prism in particular, which requires them to be comparatively underwhelming - especially later game, since the ability to very quickly build an entire army anywhere is inherently extremely powerful. This, when the protoss is not cheesing, leads to an, imo, pretty problematic play pattern/fragility while teching up to disproportionately powerful units such as disruptor, colossus and such.
There have been band-aid fixes to this since hots - mothership core, which got removed afterwards, and shield battery + shield battery overcharge which we have now, that bring their own play pattern issues with them.
Now, I am not a game dev or even a professional player, but I do wonder a bit how good/bad it could have worked out if they either removed the warp in from the power field of a prism, or made warp in speed MUCH lower the further away from the closest nexus you are