Note: This is a review of both the base game and Brood War, as it’s hard to talk about them in isolation.
If there’s one thing fighting game fans and RTS fans have in common, it’s holding a very patronizing view of people who expect any level of success after finishing the single-player campaign. Sure they present some interesting scenarios, and the way they give some background for the action is nice, but when it comes to conveying the advanced mechanics or the real competitive experience, they tend to fall short. On one hand, it makes sense to differentiate the experiences of different modes, but ideally, the single-player options should give players a way to orient themselves and prepare for the unpredictability of human opponents. For fighting games, this is pretty tough, since so much of the game is about reading other players’ patterns on a second-by-second basis and adjusting your play accordingly. However, I think RTS campaigns actually have a lot of potential to emulate the multiplayer experience. For example, there could be a mission where you’re told that one of the enemy factions has lost functionality of their warp gates, and can’t produce units. Instead, they will attack by cannon rushing, a common strategy to see from people attempting easy wins against unskilled players. Maybe there could be a scenario where you either encounter an enemy that sticks to ground-based units or one that only uses fliers, and you have to scout and punish them accordingly before they construct a death ball. In this way, players become exposed to real strategies and learn good fundamentals that are applicable in all levels of play. Unfortunately, the typical scenarios in Starcraft do the opposite of this sort of teaching. It’s rare that the scenarios are relevant at all, and the strategies that are incentivized would actually set you up for failure online. Most maps include enemies with pre-established bases with loads of static defense, rewarding your attempts at scouting and harassment by immediately destroying your unit. You just build up your own ball of units and smash it against subsequently higher levels of defense, instead of actually learning to watch your enemy, harass their workers, prevent base expansion, and counter their strategy.
To be fair though, the base game can be forgiven for some of this, given how the concept of an online meta was less of a design concern in 1998, and it actually does a small amount of smart tutorializing at the very start. It gives you a basic level of functionality, but your enemies have access to units and abilities one step up the tech tree, so you learn how to counter them in a controlled environment. Then, in the next mission, you get to use what they were using, already fully cognizant of what makes those things effective, and the cycle repeats with new tools to learn about. While Brood War’s campaign is a huge improvement over the base game’s in most ways, it doesn’t take the next step with this learning process and still consists of breaking established bases with piles of units, even when the developers at that point had experience with what the game was like in a real multiplayer environment. It would have been fantastic to see the expansion run with the knowledge that players were already familiar with each faction and the general pace of the game to then teach more advanced concepts. Not only would this benefit people when they go play multiplayer, but by providing a set of challenges more robust than “break the base”, the entertainment value of the campaign increases in its own right. It’s not that these campaigns are unenjoyable or anything, the stories are still pretty fun and overrunning defenses with a line of tanks or a wave of acid-spitting monstrosities is always satisfying, but a shallow level of strategy being required in a strategy game campaign is a missed opportunity, which goes on to cause problems with how much it’s required in the multiplayer.
Well, at least some of the multiplayer. I’m sad to see there aren’t many custom games being played anymore, which were the refuge for kids like me who sucked at ladder matches. If you played a lot of Tree Defense, Bunker Wars, Jail Break, Stacked Cannon Defense, Raccoon City, and all the others back in the early 2000’s on US East, you may have played with a baby Uni. If so, I apologize, but I also thank you for being a part of a very foundational part of my love for games, even if nowadays I have more fun criticizing the single player campaigns that no one cares about anyways.
If there’s one thing fighting game fans and RTS fans have in common, it’s holding a very patronizing view of people who expect any level of success after finishing the single-player campaign. Sure they present some interesting scenarios, and the way they give some background for the action is nice, but when it comes to conveying the advanced mechanics or the real competitive experience, they tend to fall short. On one hand, it makes sense to differentiate the experiences of different modes, but ideally, the single-player options should give players a way to orient themselves and prepare for the unpredictability of human opponents. For fighting games, this is pretty tough, since so much of the game is about reading other players’ patterns on a second-by-second basis and adjusting your play accordingly. However, I think RTS campaigns actually have a lot of potential to emulate the multiplayer experience. For example, there could be a mission where you’re told that one of the enemy factions has lost functionality of their warp gates, and can’t produce units. Instead, they will attack by cannon rushing, a common strategy to see from people attempting easy wins against unskilled players. Maybe there could be a scenario where you either encounter an enemy that sticks to ground-based units or one that only uses fliers, and you have to scout and punish them accordingly before they construct a death ball. In this way, players become exposed to real strategies and learn good fundamentals that are applicable in all levels of play. Unfortunately, the typical scenarios in Starcraft do the opposite of this sort of teaching. It’s rare that the scenarios are relevant at all, and the strategies that are incentivized would actually set you up for failure online. Most maps include enemies with pre-established bases with loads of static defense, rewarding your attempts at scouting and harassment by immediately destroying your unit. You just build up your own ball of units and smash it against subsequently higher levels of defense, instead of actually learning to watch your enemy, harass their workers, prevent base expansion, and counter their strategy.
To be fair though, the base game can be forgiven for some of this, given how the concept of an online meta was less of a design concern in 1998, and it actually does a small amount of smart tutorializing at the very start. It gives you a basic level of functionality, but your enemies have access to units and abilities one step up the tech tree, so you learn how to counter them in a controlled environment. Then, in the next mission, you get to use what they were using, already fully cognizant of what makes those things effective, and the cycle repeats with new tools to learn about. While Brood War’s campaign is a huge improvement over the base game’s in most ways, it doesn’t take the next step with this learning process and still consists of breaking established bases with piles of units, even when the developers at that point had experience with what the game was like in a real multiplayer environment. It would have been fantastic to see the expansion run with the knowledge that players were already familiar with each faction and the general pace of the game to then teach more advanced concepts. Not only would this benefit people when they go play multiplayer, but by providing a set of challenges more robust than “break the base”, the entertainment value of the campaign increases in its own right. It’s not that these campaigns are unenjoyable or anything, the stories are still pretty fun and overrunning defenses with a line of tanks or a wave of acid-spitting monstrosities is always satisfying, but a shallow level of strategy being required in a strategy game campaign is a missed opportunity, which goes on to cause problems with how much it’s required in the multiplayer.
Well, at least some of the multiplayer. I’m sad to see there aren’t many custom games being played anymore, which were the refuge for kids like me who sucked at ladder matches. If you played a lot of Tree Defense, Bunker Wars, Jail Break, Stacked Cannon Defense, Raccoon City, and all the others back in the early 2000’s on US East, you may have played with a baby Uni. If so, I apologize, but I also thank you for being a part of a very foundational part of my love for games, even if nowadays I have more fun criticizing the single player campaigns that no one cares about anyways.
Dief88
1 year ago