It's too hard for most players. Dota and LoL have similarity in being real time, but you get the comfort to blame teammates for your loss and it's much slower paced. In starcraft, you are literally playing by yourself as fast as possible for the entire match, win or lose, no breaks for respawns or waiting, and you can lose in some spectacularly frustrating ways. Ever move command your army into theirs and lose it all? Ever hit yourself with a spell? Find their hidden tech or hidden base way too late? I love it but it's seriously a masochistic genre of gaming.
I think StarCraft (2)'s pacing and focus on fast 1v1s is its downfall here. Personally, I find both Chess and Hearthstone very stressful because of how much thinking ahead is required. It's analysis paralysis, amplified and gamified. In an RTS, you're generally not working at that level of strategy and have a much smaller state space to search through at the tactical level.
Today gamers don't like to multi-task and Starcraft(and its clones) is a multi-tasking monster(scouting,economy, building, combat), so similar RTS which force multiple issues at same time are outfoxed by simpler game mechanic games where attention is more deeply focused and players can gain skills easier.
Another factor is RTS are anti-casual, they don't forgive mistakes and only a tiny % of gamers can handle the stress of constant losing/failing, in context of highly demanding, multitasking heavy game. The genre doesn't accept game style variations either - a single cookie-cutter build order is the best one, the rest is suboptimal and loses you either time or money.
StarCraft is not just a strategy game. It is a real time strategy game. The focus on real time is why APM and micro etc are so important. Broodwar is my personal favorite game, on the surface it is easy to not know video games can be physically taxing.
Starcraft is no fun between even somewhat unequal opponents. At least MOBAs give you a little bit of fun first before getting decimated, and proceed at a somewhat relaxed pace compared to the manically frenzied rush-fests that RTSs seem to be.
Starcraft 2 kind of ruined what made Brood War special and turned the RTS genre into a kind of rock paper scissors where the computer does most of the work. It was almost certainly unintentional but in Brood War the game is soooooo mechanically challenging that you have to make very careful decisions about whether you want a big army that's dumb and hard to control but can outnumber your opponent, or a small army that's smart and can be used for very efficient tactics. As a human you simply can not have it all and so you have to constantly make very difficult and creative tradeoffs. You can set up cool tactical positions, have way more opportunities for multipronged attacks, and also you can retreat if you think an engagement won't go favorably.
In SC2, the game became a lot more streamlined and automated so you as a player don't really get to express your play style as much as in Brood War. The game kind of has a very blunt set of rules about what counters what and as a player your job is to focus mostly on macro/economy, scouting, and unit production, you build up a kind of death ball army and then send it into a battle that lasts under a minute and whoever wins, wins.
Another annoying aspect of SC2 that's a consequence of how automated the game is, is that it is also often very cheesy, where an opponent can rush out an army that's very easy for the computer to control but the defender has to click like crazy to defend it. I'm fairly high level in SC2 (top 4%), and I can literally tell an opponent I'm going to "cannon rush" them, which is a cheesy strategy that has a very specific defense. I can even tell my opponent what that defense is, and they will still lose to it because the defender needs to click like crazy to defend it while I can let the computer basically do almost all of the work for me. The same goes for a bunch of other cheesy strategies where you rush out a small number of units that the computer has an easy time controlling for you, and force your opponent to have to literally engage in very awkward and precise hand gestures in order to defend the attack, and the vast majority of people simply don't know or care to learn to move their hands that way.
I don't like Brood War as a game, both to play and to watch. I much preferred Starcraft 2 over the original, but unfortunately the esports scene died for it. In any case, RTS games just don't seem like good games for humanity, it's very easy to get repetitive stress injuries from them at high APM play.
I think another thing is that MOBA's have downtime. You need to walk to places, you need to back, buy items, etc, etc. It's been a while since I played Starcraft, but my memories of it were basically that if you weren't doing things at literally every moment, you were probably going to get beat. You could try and use better macro, and tactical understanding but you'd eventually run up against someone who was equivalent and had better micro/apm and just lose. Which meant that every match basically felt like a sprint from start to finish, which was exhausting. Eventually it got to a point where it was hard to jump into a match because I just wanted to game and not go all out. I had pre-emptive anxiety/exhaustion about the intensity of a match. A moba can still feed that competitive desire and has moments of intensity, but it feels much more balanced than RTS' ever did to me.
Well things like that are no fun. However much of the popularity and skill required to play Starcraft is not in because it is such a greatly designed game. Most of the challenge come from the point that the development team has found creative solutions around its limitations and that leaves a lot of opportunities to exploit and hack its shortcomings.
Supreme Commander for instance has much better user interface and unit control mechanisms. This makes it much more of a macro game, since micro managing units is not necessary to the same degree. And indeed some people really like micro managing stuff and for the others it serves as an excuse to why they suck at the game.
Although I love Starcraft 2 I think its UI is horrible in comparison to what else is out there. However it is an essential part of the game and it gives it character.
Yikes. I'm a very keen RTS player and I couldn't disagree with this any more strongly. Starcraft is a very milquetoast RTS that follows a basic formula and takes no risks. It's the Marvel movie of RTS games.
I can't think of any type of game that's harder than a micro-heavy RTS like StarCraft. The difficulty of playing that game competitively at the highest levels is off the charts. The amount of stuff you have to manage simultaneously is absurd.
That's probably why I liked Total Annihilation more back in the day. It wasn't as micro-heavy, so the gameplay was more about broader strategic and economic concerns, and you'd end up winning by throwing larger hordes of units at your enemy than they could throw back at you.
I never liked the move to really fast-paced, micro-intensive play. Real Time doesn't have to mean such a flurry of movement and clicking. From Starcraft on it seems like the genre has pushed more and more towards the micromanagement game. Heroes exemplified that in WC3.
A battle with more, slower moving units and simplified commands makes for a more tactical match-up that's less about hotkeys and razor-sharp reaction time and more about the art of war.
Does anyone know if there's a franchise out there moving in that direction?
Starcraft is an incredibly complex game. 10^26 possible moves at any point (you can click/drag anywhere on the screen, pressing a keyboard button as you do so), imperfect information, real-time constraints, etc.
I think it’s more about being player-friendly than being spectator-friendly. Starcraft is just a far more difficult game to play at even a modest level of competence than a MOBA or even an FPS, and it seems to be very difficult to establish a big esports following without a big player community.
This is true of DotA and LoL, but not really Starcraft. Starcraft is fairly easy to pick up and almost all the relevant information to understand who is ahead, who is behind, and how the game is going is easily visible on the screen.
Games like DotA and LoL have too many mechanics built into them that are just debt from their origins as a Warcraft 3 mod. They're not really intuitive or sensical to the uninitiated.
Moreover, in Starcraft if lots of different things are happening at once, it's as technically challenging for the players to keep track of as it is for the viewers. With MOBAs the action is scattered across 3 to 6 areas of the map at the same time, so it's way more complicated to keep track of as a spectator.
The Blizzard MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, was kind of designed from the ground up to be a lot more watchable. They got rid of the item stuff and moved the complexity from being focused on the character builds to more strategic stuff that's visible on the map. But it doesn't seem to have taken off that much.
Real time strategy games like starcraft are stupid because of the wasted cycles. The game can grow too complex for even a high capacity sub 24 year old easily. I'd rather program my harvester, grunt, [choose your metaphor] than micromanage them or let real people control them.
Maybe there's some underground scene for hardcore RTS players, but as a (formerly) casual follower of the Starcraft 2 pro scene, it seems like MOBAs ate their lunch.
It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap...
As much as I've tried, I simply cannot make any sense of the on-screen visual overload of MOBAs like DOTA or League of Legends. Why is it so much harder to find myself engaged by MOBA battles than RTS (mostly Starcraft) battles? I don't really know.
I stopped playing SC competitively because it's too stressful. Both physically and mentally. Hitting 300 APM continously in a game for up to 60 minutes at a time makes your hands go numb. And the adrenaline rush makes you want to go running afterwards. With games like LoL/DoTA at least you have a chance to take a break after a gank/farming/ team wipes. With starcraft every decision has a significantly higher compounding effect
What people miss is that StarCraft is a physical game primarily, with tactical elements, not the other way around. There are a lot of fans who know the game well and can make all the right decisions, but will never be able to execute it in real time.
Execution of strategy is what separates the professional StarCraft players, and in that way it's much closer to professional sports than Go / Chess.
I disagree that Starcraft doesn't seem harder. The strategic depth is arguably comparable, but the difference is you need the dexterity of a master pianist to execute.
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