I'm sure you all know me well. I've finally got my grubby lil hands on SC2 (actually, I have my friend's account
)I can't believe the most popular maps are all sc1 ports :\ with no creativity.
So what'd I do? Criticize them!
I'm hoping to make a series and start posting this on other websites, so any feedback will be greatly appreciated.
I'm also thinking of adding images/videos to accompany this long-winded passage.
So, put on your reading glasses, boys and girls.
Quote
I guess I should introduce myself, right?
Hi, I'm UnholyUrine. I've come from a longwinded background from mapping in the SC1 community. Times were tough back then; we had to work with what we had. There were no "attributes", no "behaviours", and definately no customizable spells. We had to use Hyper Triggers, incorporate units into spells, work around units' limitations, and shoot hoops and marbles out on the fields. All we had were Conditions and Actions, aka the old fashioned "If, than." Heck, there wasn't even an "Else" after that.
Even so, this did not deter the blistering ideas of the nerdiest of the nerds, who wasted their time to understand the system, and created thousands of different maps that I, till this day, still endear.
But the one thing that SC1 has taught me is to be cynical. Shit's gonna come and it ain't going to miss that fan, folks. Maps that are popular in SC1 are rarely good, and are usually designed to melt the pubbies’ (public players) brain into mush, which is something they really enjoy. Being a game designer at heart, I aimed to criticize all the shitty gayass maps out there that dared to be hosted on B.net. I want to point the finger at the people who produce maps that are imbalanced, boring, or have been done before. These are the people that take a concept and ruin it. These are the people that try to design a game that just cannot and should not be done on an RTS. These are the people that sacrifices gameplay for everything else. These are the people that I have only two words to say, "Fuck You!”
Now that StarCraft 2 is here and has bestowed us this monster of an editor, the geeks are back, and are once again fighting for glory; the glory to show off who has the best mega ultra combo map out there. Yet if you look at the most popular maps, they're usually awful, tasteless, or have at least not reached its full potential. While everyone's so happy snappy and excited about the raging river of content that is flooding their little minds, I want to start pulling them out of it so they can wipe themselves and realize that they were swimming in a river of piss. In other words, I want people to be more critical about the maps that are being played. This way, we can improve and evolve the maps that will be made in the future. See, I’m a nice guy, right?
Note: Being named “UnholyUrine”, you’d expect me to have a bit of a potty mouth. Please don’t take it personally. And if you feel offended, drop me a comment and see if you can convince me otherwise. And don’t be a bitch and complain, because nobody likes a bitch.
Hi, I'm UnholyUrine. I've come from a longwinded background from mapping in the SC1 community. Times were tough back then; we had to work with what we had. There were no "attributes", no "behaviours", and definately no customizable spells. We had to use Hyper Triggers, incorporate units into spells, work around units' limitations, and shoot hoops and marbles out on the fields. All we had were Conditions and Actions, aka the old fashioned "If, than." Heck, there wasn't even an "Else" after that.
Even so, this did not deter the blistering ideas of the nerdiest of the nerds, who wasted their time to understand the system, and created thousands of different maps that I, till this day, still endear.
But the one thing that SC1 has taught me is to be cynical. Shit's gonna come and it ain't going to miss that fan, folks. Maps that are popular in SC1 are rarely good, and are usually designed to melt the pubbies’ (public players) brain into mush, which is something they really enjoy. Being a game designer at heart, I aimed to criticize all the shitty gayass maps out there that dared to be hosted on B.net. I want to point the finger at the people who produce maps that are imbalanced, boring, or have been done before. These are the people that take a concept and ruin it. These are the people that try to design a game that just cannot and should not be done on an RTS. These are the people that sacrifices gameplay for everything else. These are the people that I have only two words to say, "Fuck You!”
Now that StarCraft 2 is here and has bestowed us this monster of an editor, the geeks are back, and are once again fighting for glory; the glory to show off who has the best mega ultra combo map out there. Yet if you look at the most popular maps, they're usually awful, tasteless, or have at least not reached its full potential. While everyone's so happy snappy and excited about the raging river of content that is flooding their little minds, I want to start pulling them out of it so they can wipe themselves and realize that they were swimming in a river of piss. In other words, I want people to be more critical about the maps that are being played. This way, we can improve and evolve the maps that will be made in the future. See, I’m a nice guy, right?
Note: Being named “UnholyUrine”, you’d expect me to have a bit of a potty mouth. Please don’t take it personally. And if you feel offended, drop me a comment and see if you can convince me otherwise. And don’t be a bitch and complain, because nobody likes a bitch.
Now that the introduction's finally over, let’s start reviewing one of the most popular maps out there, Nexus Wars.
For those that have been either living under a rock, or living under the massive throbbing caucus of “melee”, Nexus Wars is a “massing game” where you run around building specific buildings which will faithfully spawn the unit it is named after every so often. And the object of the game is to get these units to break through and kill the enemies’ nexus on the other side. But oh wait, they’re gonna build units too! So now you gotta counter their units. You can also build defensive buildings and other stuff that would increase your income, which would allow you to build more buildings to spawn more spawns to screw over your opponent’s nexus.
This is all fine and dandy, until you’ve actually played the game a few times and realize some big, bad problems brewing like a benign tumor bulging from the bottom of your buttocks.
First of all, one problem that I encounter is that, for some magical, unknown reason, one team's units will cluster and start forming what I'd like to call the "Blob of Death". You can build, and defend, and scream, and say as many "your mom" jokes all you want, but there's no stopping that blob from devouring all of your units. This genuinely pisses me off because you're helpless, and no amount of strategy can help. Incidentally, the mapper realized this fiasco and put in a one-time use, emergency Nuke, which is the only way to utterly destroy the blob. "So, what's wrong with that?" you might say. Well, just because it's a completely linear, 1 dimensional strategy, doesn’t mean it is a godsend put in by the map’s creator.
Another thing that pisses me off is that every building has its own timer, making it so that units don’t spawn at the same time. This completely throws away the idea of “massing”. This is especially bad during one of those “Blobs of Death” moments, where your units just march intermittently into the slaughterhouse.
Fear the Invasion of The BLOB
Looking deeper, I can see that units have around the same stats as in melee, and while I do agree that it may be easier on the newbie, it also makes it very boring. This also makes teching up somewhat redundant. Teching up all the way to broodlords just doesn’t feel very satisfying as it is in melee. This is probably because you have infinite amount of cash income, and that you don’t have to worry about your units dying because you’ll have an endless supply of it. There is no micro and no macro. In other words, the two biggest factors from melee gaming are gone from this map, yet the creator decided to keep everything else is the same… This doesn’t make any fucking sense! If you take away the core gameplay from a game, you have to add your own gameplay!
The only way to fix this is to actually be CREATIVE and add interesting units rather than copying melee units, because this is NOT melee. Isn’t this what UMS is all about; being cool and implementing your own ideas? Units should all have a specialized function “en-mass”. For example, stalkers are too similar to marines and marauders in that they’re all ranged and have no other functions (blink and concussive shells do diddly-jack when you have so many units and no terrain variations). Or, for example, compare reapers to roaches. Obviously, in melee, they’re very different, but when you pit them together without any way to control them, there’re almost no differences other than their health and damage.
Even better, you could’ve introduced a three tier system, where everyone starts with zerg, build a specific zerg building to get terran units, which are stronger. Then, they can build a specific terran building to get protoss buildings, which are the strongest. Obviously, some zerg units should still be strong and specialized, like broodlords should still be able to rape terran bio. Doing this introduces something that every game should have, “Strategy” and “Real-time tactics”, aka RTS (d-uh). Nexus wars, the way it is right now, is just a big clusterfuck.
BOOOM bitch! As cool as this picture looks, it's actually boring b/c it needs to be used every game. There's no other way around it... *yawn*
Yes, there are some redeeming factors about this map. Everything works perfectly fine, and the terrain is straightforward – minimalism at its best. Heroes can be built for a hefty price, and are the only units that you can control. Most important, however, is that after 40 minutes, every unit spawns once and does a final battle, just to stop things from becoming too long. Thank god! While this is a less than elegant way of ending things, at least we won’t start doing Nexus Wars marathons and starve our babies. (But I think some of us already have…)
Now, if you are thinking, "waitaminute, Mr. ponce-brains, how can you criticize one of the most popular maps on b.net?"
Well, my answer would be "Because Battle.Net is Shit!"
And not just b.net 2, mind you, b.net 1 suffers from the exact same fate. Maps that are played the most often are always massing games with little to no strategy or authenticity to it. It’s amazing how everyone just goes, "Here are a bunch of units, and there are a bunch of other units. Gee, I bet it’ll be fun to see what happens if we made a bajillion of them and then clusterfuck them together"...
Well I'll tell you what happens. After years of data collecting and playing games on b.net (and a bit in b.net2), doing tons of research and compiling every single detail into one, perfectly legitimate sentence, "You get a clusterfuck of units (d-uh), in which you continually feed (d-uh) until by some magical way one blob outfucks the other.”
Real life Clusterfuck. So much more awesome, don't you think?
Now, if you’d listen to my story, I only recently got my friend’s account for SC2. I didn’t get SC2 right away because of the piece of shit that is called “Battle.net 2.0”. I was ready for some awesome maps, because of all the fuss about the new and awesome abilities of the editor. Imagine my surprise (not) when three-quarters of most “popular” (I say “popular” with quotations because the popularity system can go fuck itself) maps are massing games. That is just sad. And I don't see how this... disease… this ritual, this CULT… was able to extend its slithering tentacles all the way into Starcraft 2 and start “what-every-tentacle-monster-does-once-it’s-got-its-tentacles-wrapped-around-something-ing” it so readily.
No, actually, I do see how, some bastards took the idea from sc1 and ported to sc2, claiming it their own (and making the previous creator their bitch)!
And that's the biggest bombshell of this map. It is completely, 100% doable on Starcraft 1!! Seriously guys, this is based off a map called "Sand Castle Wars" and “Nexus Destroyers” from SC1 UMS. While for us, both maps were a triggering marvel, and had actual fun micro elements, you guys have a massively orgasmic editor that can do so much more. This is like going back to the stone-age of mapping, where their idea of fun were throwing rocks at each other to see who’s skull will crack. This map is just a plain old massing game, and that was boring 5 years ago! Doing it in a new, 3D environment doesn't make it fun again... That’s like thinking “oh gee, I’m getting bored masturbating to female pornography, let’s try masturbating to males, I bet it’ll be fun as hell!” … well actually, maybe that’s why futa… EHH let’s get back on topic.
It’s just depressing that absolutely no new features were added. You could've done something crazy, but instead you just did what anyone could've done several years ago. I mean, from the top of my head, I would’ve made the SCV something to do rather than sitting around. You could’ve given it spells, like a stasis field ability that can block the path for a while, allowing you to use ranged/air units or regroup your units. You can give it an anti-air spell attack or you can use it to buff units near it, but risk it being trapped and killed. Obviously, it can be rebuilt, but with a price.
Overall, it is an apocalyptically boring game, and it doesn't warrant itself to be so popular. Only because everyone loves to see masses of shit dying and burning their 500$ graphics card, doesn't mean it is a good map.
I hope that by reading this, you will better appreciate the ingenuity and hard work that some mappers put into their games. I’m not saying all massing games are bogus. Why, one of my favorite classic maps back in SC1 was penguin wars, a massing game. But Nexus Wars does not deserve its popularity.
I’m sure that we can do better than that.
Ragequit!! I don't blame him.
Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Oct 12 2010, 1:36 am by UnholyUrine.
None.
, that's why I didn't choose to review that one.
wish me luck!
