To Frost Giant Studios
Hello. I wrote the bulk of this before watching some podcast with Frost Giant Studios. The reason for the changes is because Frost Giant asked questions to us, the players, the community, what have you, so I figured I’d trim the fat and try to put more thought into my reasons. It’s probably still going to be long so bear with me. First off, Frost Giant is a new developer made up of some former Blizzard employees and they plan to make a new RTS. They have a lot of good people from the looks of it. The game director was the lead campaign designer for The Frozen Throne so that’s promising. If you read my last post you know how much I love Frozen Throne. But this isn’t going to be what I want from an RTS so much but rather what I liked and disliked from my past experiences.
For me, I’ve pretty much only really got into Blizzard’s RTS games, WarCraft and StarCraft. I’ve played others but they’ve just been cumbersome or the scale is just overwhelming. I tried playing Supreme Commander. It starts out simple enough and small scale but soon you’re like trying to control units over a continent, then a whole planet. I can’t handle that, that’s too much stress. I kind of had the same issue with Sins of a Solar Empire. I tried Command and Conquer 3 but I got bored of it pretty quick. It’s hard for me to really put a lot of effort into a multiplayer game if my friends aren’t into it as well, which they weren’t. Pretty much the same reason for Dawn of War too. So I have played RTS games but I grew up with WarCraft and StarCraft and they just make sense for me.
Let’s start with StarCraft 2. I did have a big list of what I didn’t like about the story and what not but I’ll try to leave as much of that out as I can. What I did like from each campaign were the different upgrades for units and buildings. It was fun to play with different units that didn’t show up in multiplayer. The co-op commanders had some special buildings and other unique elements to them as well but I didn’t really care for the mode much. There’s only so much playing against AI I can handle in StarCraft. I mean it’s nice to go through with a friend and go through the missions but typically I don’t want to do it again. I see mission lists like a check list, once I’ve done it I just move on. Something I was disappointed with was how the expansions worked with SC2. In the past Blizzard’s expansions were you know, EXPANSIONS on what was there. There was the base game that taught you how to do then the expansion put you to the test. But they went with a different approach and made an expansion for each races campaign. I talked about liking the difficulty of Blizzard’s past expansions in my last post so I won’t reiterate here. I HATED in Heart of the Swarm how much the game would hold your hand and tell me what to do. There were air units attacking some throw away building in the far corner of the map and the game insist on telling me “you know, hydralisks would take care of that pretty quickly.” It was like eight missions into the game, I fucking know!!! They eased up on that in Legacy of the Void and some of the missions were more challenging. Something else I didn’t like is that they started turning every unique ability a unit had into a hotkey. I kind of understood why they changed it for Void Rays but there was no reason to do that for the charge-lots or the Immortal’s shield. I don’t want to be micromanaging every single one of my units. Caster units I understand but not every unit needs a hotkey. I just trimmed three pages of story complaining, you’re welcome.
If I had to choose between WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 2 I would still say that WC3 is my favorite. I played it the most; I pretty much grew up with it in high school. One thing I liked more in WC3 was the attack and armor type for the units. If you were fighting a unit and weren’t sure how to counter them you could click on the unit, hover over the armor they have and it would tell you. Hover over a heavy armor type and it’ll tell you they are weak to magic, better go make some casters. In SC2 I have no idea what counters what. You practically just have to know what unit works against what unit. Last I knew a Roach was considered biological/armored. Well what the hell does that mean? My Sentry’s melt Zerglings and Marines that are bio, do they work? Nope, they melted. How bout some Stalkers they’re good against armor right? Oh, they melted too. Colossus? Oh, too late, I lost. Obviously the more you play the more you’ll know what to do but it’s just easier to be able to check on the fly. I liked the hero units in WC3. I think I like WC3 because the army sizes weren’t as large and the pace was slower because you had the heroes and had creeps that dropped items so you could charge at your enemy but it was typically better to try to find a few items to give you an edge in the fight. I also mentioned that two of my favorite things from The Frozen Throne’s campaign are the Tomb of Sageras Night elf mission and Rexxar’s campaign. I think the reason I like them so much is because there’s a limited unit count and I don’t have a base or resources to worry about. I feel like I really would like some kind of RTS dungeon crawler. I don’t know if there are any kinds of games like that. Like, I don’t want a typical dungeon crawler like Diablo 3 because I don’t like constantly stopping to see what was dropped and if the pants numbers are higher than my numbers. I hate having a bag full of crap that I have to sift through every five minutes. So I don’t know if it’s still considered an RTS if you only control a small group of units and don’t have a base and an economy, maybe at that point it’s just an ARPG. But it’d be a good co-op game, if each player had or choose a set of two or three heroes and went around fighting mobs. Maybe you could buy units or mercenaries at certain points to help if you’re having trouble with a certain boss or something. Don’t know if that could turn into a good multiplayer though.
Now, multiplayer. My fondest memories from multiplayer come from Halo 3 and WarCraft 3. I just remember being able to get into games and play with chill people. I did a lot of random 2v2’s in WC3 and just remember starting the game and someone would ask the other “ranged or melee.” I would choose one, my partner would choose the other and you knew what you were doing for a majority of the match. There’s still plenty of variety between units and if you made the “wrong” unit it wasn’t as much of a death sentence as it is in SC2, I feel. When I played 2’s in SC2 I still felt like I had to do the same thing I would as if I was alone. An issue I have is how everyone acts online. Everyone is trying to be pro or “tryhard.” Like, look at this video and this one. Holy crap, I have no interest of ever being at that level, my heart would burst. BUT people try to be like them and get mad if you aren’t. I don’t want to play with people like that. Playing casual in Rainbow 6 Siege is a crapshoot. I feel like most of the time the games are very one-sided. Very rarely do I get into a “fair” game. Also in R6S I hate doing placement matches because I’m not great. I’m better than average but I’m still a burden to people who are trying to get back to Diamond or whatever. SC2 was the same; I got into my placement matches and might actually play one game and the other four were all people quitting because they were trying to lower their own score or something. So my wood league ass gets sent right to gold and I’m just like “uhhhh.” R6S is even worse. I got into the game in year four I think so you have people who have been playing for all those years that know the maps and everything and I’m just getting destroyed from god knows where because there’s no limit to who you can play with in casual. You can play with a noob or a pro. Actually, now that I think about it, I think Halo 3 and WC3 had like, player levels. I’m remembering seeing a number by my name in WC3 but I defiantly remember it in Halo. I was hard stuck on 49 or something in lone wolf. But yeah, what happened to that? What was that even, MMR? I kind of remember people complaining about MMR. I remember each game type had its own number be it lone wolf, team slayer, doubles. I think there were two playlist types, a ranked one that had the typical games and an unranked that had slightly more casual games that didn’t have player levels maybe? I remember a game that was 2v2v2v2. That was fun and hectic. But, anyway, it was because of those MMR numbers that I consistently played with people at the same level as me AND had a good time. I could be totally remembering things wrong but I do remember not doing anything like placement matches.
So there, I just turned two posts into one with half the pages. What do you think of that rambling? I’m interested to see what Frost Giant Studios end up doing. Maybe this will push Blizzard to do something with their IPs as well. Competition creates… something. Motivation? Inspiration? If you’ve got no one challenging the model you’ve capitalized on then there’s no reason to change it. What even is Blizzard working on now that they’re not supporting SC2? Hopefully someone at Frost Giant reads this at the very least. Until next time!
Beastyqt Open Letter: link
The Pylon Show podcast: link
DreamHack podcast: link
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