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Hey folks,

There was recently a community update on StarCraft II, and one of the topics discussed was StarCraft II feeling too hard. This is just a quick post to get some thoughts down; I’ll probably go into this topic in more detail at a later time in a video or blog post.

You can find the update at this link: http://us.battle.net/forums/en/sc2/topic/20749247146. The exact quote I’ll focus on is here:

“[Korean coaches and professional players’] main complaint was that StarCraft II is way too difficult to master even for the highest level pros.”

I think the solutions that are being suggested ignore the core design decisions that lead the game to feel “too difficult to master”, and will likely make this situation worse rather than better. The goal of this post is to provide my perspective on what these design decisions are and why they have the effects that they do.

Let’s start with the macro design. StarCraft II streamlined macro mechanics through a number of design decisions, such as multiple building select, tabbing through selected buildings and waypoints. Players in older RTS games had to spend a lot of time just executing the basic tasks of production; with this time freed up in StarCraft II, they instead focus on other things. One of the impacts of this is a much more technical macromanagement that emphasizes the order in which buildings are built, where they’re built, what add-ons are gotten (for Terran), etc. Timing strategies are relatively more emphasized because players have more time and attention to crisply nail them consistently and play around with small differentiations in build orders.

The key here is the shift in time and attention - competitive players don’t simply do nothing now that they can macro more efficiently. They shift their focus to doing something else. It’s not to say that technical macromanagement wasn’t important before, it’s just relatively more emphasized now that the other tasks have been streamlined.

The micromanagement design was streamlined, too. Units in StarCraft II are very good at doing what they’re supposed to do thanks to better AI, pathing, and unlimited unit selection. Micromanagement is relatively less focused on the execution of basic tasks like attacking and moving; it instead emphasizes more technical micromanagement around ideal positioning, focus firing, and so on. Intentional design is important here, too, with the relative additional focus on abilities. Simply moving a unit across the map in older RTS games required substantial attention because pathing was quite poor. In StarCraft II, this has been streamlined, so competitive players use the time savings to focus on other, more technical aspects of micromanagement.

The key impact of these streamlined mechanics is that simple tasks are easier to get right - but this is a double-edged sword with regard to how difficult the game feels. It also means that simple mistakes are much more punishing than in previous games. Failing to see a drop, even for a few seconds, can result in game-ending damage because your opponent’s units are very good at doing what they’re supposed to do. In older RTS games, effectively getting units to move and attack required substantial attention. Executing harassment effectively often monopolized the player’s attention and led to deficiencies in other aspects of their play. This is lessened in StarCraft II; your opponent is much less likely to see a substantial hit to their core macromanagement as a result of executing harassment. Their dropped units require far less hand holding than they did previously to do lots of damage relative to their maximum potential, which frees up the player’s time and attention to do other things. This makes the game feel very hard and very punishing; a simple mistake can be game-ending.

The same applies to engagements between large armies. The more a basic task is streamlined, the more the focus gets put onto much more technical tasks. Armies in StarCraft II have a tendency to poke and bait each other rather than engaging full-on. Units, on their own, get much closer to their maximum potential when uncontrolled relative to older RTS games, meaning that players are much less likely to try to control their way to winning a tough engagement - the spectrum spanning from little control to optimal control is much thinner than previous games. But players still have the same total amount of time and attention that they did previously, which they spend engaged in tense stand-offs with the other player, trying to get the exact perfect position before fighting. This, again, contributes to a game that feels very hard: taking an engagement in a slightly non-ideal way will result in a much more than slightly non-ideal result.

Some of Legacy of the Void’s design changes helped fix these problems by introducing units whose strength lay primarily in the ability of the player to control them. They shifted focus away from very technical management to the more basic tasks of simply getting a unit to move and fight; the Adept and Ravager are both good examples of this. However, the core design decisions around AI and pathing would have been difficult to undo at this point in the game’s lifecycle, so the basic management of these units is still very technical because it relies on abilities. Furthermore, these units are still effective even when uncontrolled, because they retain the same smart AI that everything else has.

When easy tasks like building units or moving an army require less attention, players focus on harder tasks. Simple actions like executing a drop become more powerful because they result in fewer trade-offs for the player in terms of their time and attention. The game naturally ends up feeling harder and more punishing, even though it’s been designed to be easier.

This is why I think one of Blizzard’s solutions to this problem will not create the desired result:

“First, the Korean coaches and players felt that zerg requires many more actions than the other two races to be able to compete. To address this, they suggested that we bring back the automated larva injects that we tested in the beta.”

Removing one of the core macro mechanics of Zerg - manual injects - will only make the game feel harder. Zerg players will move from spending their time on an easy task to spending their time on harder tasks. This isn’t a judgment of that design - perhaps players find harder tasks more interesting, or viewers of competitive games find them more enjoyable to watch. But if the goal is to make the game feel less hard, this is not the right approach to take. The correct approach is to put more emphasis on simpler tasks that introduce more substantial trade-offs in making decisions; when a drop is harder to control or an army is harder to produce, it’s much less punishing to fight against because the player can feel confident that any strong moves by their opponent must have resulted in lost time and attention that would have spent doing something else. It’s also much easier to practice, since players focus on improving their execution on tasks that are relatively easy.

If the designers want the game to _feel_ easier, then making the game _be_ easier will not achieve this - it will just force players to spend time doing harder things, which will feel harder and more punishing. They should instead incentivize players to spend their time on easier tasks, like the basics of macromanagement and micromanagement - making these tasks harder to execute will actually make the game feel much easier, since they’re easier and more predictable to execute and less punishing to fight against. My ideas for how to do this within the context of the existing design of the game are still hazy so I won’t go into them here.

(By the way, I’m not suggesting that we make Zerg’s macro mechanics even more difficult to solve this problem. I think solving this issue of the game “feeling too difficult” requires more fundamental design changes that affect all three races.)

Thanks for reading. Let me know how you feel about these shorter, quicker blog posts that I turn around in a day or two; they’re more in response to ongoing events rather than the stand-alone pieces you see on my blog or YouTube channel.

See you next time!