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There was a Reddit post recently expressing frustration with the vision of StarCraft II, specifically that it's not cohesive and too narrow-minded. I'd like to link but I believe that's against Reddit's ToS (brigading I think), you can find it if you want to look for it.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this particular subject a lot lately. I wanted to re-post my reply to that thread here because I think the development process of game is an interesting thing to think about and discuss.

"Personally, I don't think there's a lack of vision; instead I see a lack of a concrete framework for execution and measuring success, or at least communicating it.

When I say "vision" I mean a high-level vision of what the game should be on a long-term (two to three year) basis. I think Blizzard has been transparent about what their vision is. They want to see more action, they want to see more harassment, they want to see constant fighting. This is straight from LotV's community feedback. Over the years they've also talked about things like a high skill ceiling - that's straight from developer interviews.

The problem I see is that in-between that high level vision and the actual execution (stat tweaks and the like), there is a middle layer of defining what that vision means in practical terms and medium-term goals. For instance, what does "more action" mean? If two players turtle to 200 supply, have one fight where 300 units die, and one player wins, how much "action is that" compared to a five minute game where one player rushes and a total of 30 units die? Is more action the % of a game where fighting is occurring? Number of units killed? Bases destroyed? etc

My point is that vision is important for defining big picture goals and guiding the game to a better place in the long-term, but it's not measurable. Someone in-between the person coming up with the vision and the person changing game files to add one range to Hydras needs to define a framework for what that vision actually means. Couple examples:

-- "More action" means no more macro games. We define our success as the % of games where a player does a one or two-base all-in.
-- "More action" means at least X% of a player's workers die in a game.
-- "More action" means its infeasible to defend more than two bases at once, creating huge incentive for a player to attack once three or more bases have been taken.

Not saying these are good ideas. They are just examples of concrete frameworks for defining the vision in terms of concrete, tractable problems.

The problem I see is that Blizzard is transparent about communicating what their vision is, but not transparent about communicating what their concrete framework for achieving that vision is. My first example (no more macro games) seemed to be implied by LotV's map pool, so folks gave feedback assuming that's what they were trying to accomplish. But that feedback ended up being useless when the Season 3 map pool came out and people realized that's not what Blizzard was trying to do. That was frustrating for those people.

It's hard to give feedback on progress toward an abstract vision, which makes it hard for the community to engage with Blizzard. I've played many RTS games over the past fifteen years and Blizzard is much more transparent with their design vision than any other I've seen; I think their problem is they don't state their path to achieving it in a concrete way which makes it hard for the community to reliably understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, and what they'll do next.

My personal opinion is that they have some set of concrete frameworks that they work toward internally, but they don't communicate them. The changes they make probably make a lot of sense and seem more cohesive when considered in terms of those frameworks. For instance if you go back and look at pre-release interviews, the design framework of "increase the skill ceiling by adding abilities" has been the ethos in StarCraft II since before the game came out.

I don't work for Blizzard and have no inside information, this is just my personal opinion based on developer interviews, community feedback, etc."