As a data point, the Blizzard sales team’s projections were that we would sell 4,000 copies of StarCraft in a year in South Korea, so there was no reason to in localize the game.
First year sales were on the order of 100x that amount, quite the surprise for everyone at Blizzard!
Patrick Wyatt - game developer and programmer (Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, Guild Wars, battle.net) - co-founder of ArenaNet - blogger: www.codeofhonor.com
Damn. That reminds me, I really wish there were more information about the early days of ArenaNet. I think what they did with servers and networking in GW1 (and eventually GW2) is legendary. They had instancing, no realm sharding, streaming updates, etc. years before anybody else. And GW1's gameplay design in general was so unique.
One less talked about thing when discussing StarCraft, that might be more pertinent to HN audience, is that this game was almost endlessly hackable. And I mean that in the truest sense of that word. Many a careers were launched by playing around with OllyDbg and learning to reverse engineer code all so you could create an awesome plugin [0] for the community.
Which brings me to my next point, which is that the community aspect of StarCraft is a huge part of why it remained popular for so long. As previously mentioned, there were hackers and programmers developing awesome tools that helped the scene, but also there were map makers which were essential in keeping the game balanced. One little known fact about StarCraft is that the last balance patch released by Blizzard was in 2001, at the early beginnings of the pro scene. After that, the game was kept fresh and balanced by community map makers.
Combine that with people who created websites where you could follow news about Korean pro scene (TeamLiquid has its roots here), talk with other people about StarCraft, and other people who organized tournaments and did everything else; and you get a formula which almost ensures the longetivity of the game. I wouldn't be surprised if there are people playing and following this game in 20 years time. I know I'll be one of them.
Dota, and so LOL, is often thought of as something coming from Warcraft 3 Defense of the Ancient, but the concept really started as a starcraft mod as well.
Of lot of the gaming culture is born on the original Battle.net.
SC 1 was one of the most influential game ever created.
I remember the map “V-TEC paintball” as a forerunner of the DotA and LOL styles - endless waves with you the (battlecruiser | marine | ghost) running around making the difference. HotS, LOL, DotA all seem to trace back to those “paintball” custom maps and the creators who made terrific use of the tools on offer.
> Many a careers were launched by playing around with OllyDbg and learning to reverse engineer code all so you could create an awesome plugin [0] for the community.
My career was launched by StarCraft! I've never been to high school or college. I played waaaaay too much StarCraft in my teens, and ended up writing a bot to maintain the chat room my friends were in.
The entire network stack had been reverse engineered, criticized, and documented if you knew where to look. Eventually that documentation made it to the public.
I interviewed with Blizzard a decade ago. I heard one of the interviewers state that the community documentation [0] is better than Blizzard's own internal documentation.
I now write software to fly drones. It's fun as hell and I'm glad of ye olde Blizzard. I know some are here on HN -- thank you guys for being awesome :)
> As previously mentioned, there were hackers and programmers developing awesome tools that helped the scene, but also there were map makers which were essential in keeping the game balanced.
Starcraft came out when I was a kid, the online community of Battle.net is really what got me into programming and development.
The game also had custom maps that allowed for sandboxed programming / scripting.
A lot of very clever custom maps ("use map settings" / UMS) were made.
MOBA genere spawned from a Starcraft custom map called Aeon of strife. Starcraft also had a map called "the unknown" which is basically Among Us - made years ago.
There were "turret defense" maps, RPG maps, maps where you controlled one unit and tried to dodge things (bound maps) and many other maps that just changed the balance.
In the golden times players didnt have to play the cutthroat 1:1 all the timr - you could spend days playing custom maps (archives have tens of thousands of them), custom campaigns, modes with more players like 2v2, 3v3 or 4v4, or even 8 player everyone for themself.
Apart from "difficult" maps, there was a whole community playing maps with (nearly) unlimited resources - "fastest maps" and "big game hunters" (BGH). Those maps were easier so no "ladder anxiety" by having to play the best all the time.
Starcraft 1 gave a lot of freedom to have fun. You didnt have to participate in the incredibly difficult duels. You could play a custom map, or some 3v3 with your friends - where overall skill level was lower, but fun level was high.
Killing custom maps is in my opiniin one of the reasons why Starcraft 2 failed. Blizzard wanted to capitalize on them, but didnt know how.
In Starcraft Brood War there was this game list - you could select UMS mode and pick from probably 100 open games. In Starcraft 2 you could only play what blizzard wanted you to play.
I guess Blizzard was unhappy that Warcraft 3 spawned the whole DOTA game - which was also a custom map.
Regarding hacking - many people learned java writing bots for Diablo 2.
> In Starcraft 2 you could only play what blizzard wanted you to play.
5 years ago when I played SC2 for the first time there was plenty of (iirc) “Arcade” maps which were UMS, and I’m pretty sure, community made. Are you perhaps talking about early days of SC2 when that still wasn’t a thing or? One map I was most impressed by and had lots of fun playing it, was called “Assassins”. I won’t explain what it is, but if someone took it to develop a game based on it, I strongly believe(d) that it’d be another hit game that spawned from SC
Im talking about the early days when there wasnt a "game list" where you could see the maps hosted by actual players. So the list only showed maps open at a moment.
Last time I tried SC2 arcade there was a list o hundreds of maps with zero players inside and you had to pray that some other players wanted to play the same map as you. So you would have to coordinate by a forum or friendlist to even play a game. So arcade was an empty desert.
Killing the "currently open games list" was such a antipattern... does SC2 have it now?
as far as I know it does have it, and my experience doesn’t match yours-on EU there was 20ish open lobbies (hosted by people) for different custom maps/arcades at all times. but yeah if it was like you are saying it was, I agree with your point. also, check the other reply to your comment from someone who is more up to date
Yeah. He explained it as it was in the early days. Battle.net for Starcraft 2 really destroyed the game from getting popular. It's so sad that the Battle.net from 1998 was better than the Battle.net from 2012... They implemented chat several years after SC2 released. Clans even longer after.
They released it when the online connections were terrible, then everyone left before they got good.
They deliberately hindered the release of Starcraft 2 by releasing the online experience completely unfinished. No clans, no chat (at all), no PMing, no custom games. Nothing. It was like that for several years.
At that point, with 3 years of hype for the game, people came, played a bit of 1v1 then left. It was a botched job. Blizzard died with the release of SC2.
To be fair to the team, Tor (from PirateSoftware fame) reported that Blizzard made more money selling one horse in WoW than with the entire Wing of Liberty:
They killed custom maps by killing the search mechanism. Not sure if they fixed it now, but on release it custom games were ranked by popularity… which just creates a feedback cycle where only already-popular games would show up anywhere on the top and get sufficient players to run. With no discovery, you ended up with the first acceptable maps, usually remakes of sc/wc3 maps, dominating the list and no way for new maps to compete.
The particularly stupid thing is the map editor for SC2 is ridiculously powerful, but afaik nothing interesting came out of SC2 custom map scene.
I played this custom map called "Assassins", and it was one of the best things I ever played, I'm not exaggerating. Idk if something similar already existed, or if it came out from SC2, but I was really hoping for someone to make a real game based on it. Everything I can find on the internet is just this one yt video, but it's an older version, I didn't play under 3.0 I think - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX4hpQouvKA
> Regarding hacking - many people learned java writing bots for Diablo 2.
I remember it being Javascript, not Java. I forget the name of the tools involved, but I do remember creating a lot of Javascript bindings in C or C++, so that scripting engines would have interfaces to various bits of game engine code.
What? Starcraft 2 was a commercial and critical success, selling 6 million copies. It wasn't as successful as the original (11 million), but hardly a failure. It was the leading esports game before MOBAs took over.
The modding scene as we knew it is dead, also for the FPS genre. There are several explanations: games becoming technically more complex, commercial practices, cheating being taken more seriously, gameplay being more refined, with many of the good ideas having already being turned into their own games, the indie scene going for purpose made engines rather than mods, etc...
SCUMS! (StarCraft Use Map Settings). These maps provided a wide array of games and I believe popularized or gave birth to a few. I remember tower defense, level up games where you and the other players explore the map and gain upgrades, a predator game where one player is chosen randomly to be the killer in a horror style hunt. Imagine, each map, possibly an entire new game, sometimes being discovered for the first time together with strangers. Such a fun and amazing time!
I’ve recently started watching StarCraft games again. Lee young ho aka Flash aka the GOAT returned from the military, and it’s been fantastic to watch. Artosis is a great commenter as well.
There’s something really unique with this game, I feel no other RTS has the same depth. I plan on returning to this game when I retire, in 20 years. See you then.
I see many people in the comments nostalgically talking about the custom mapping scene and how it got them into programming.
The same is true for me, so I think here is a good place to plug my starcraft custom map archive website [0]. In 2020 because of the pandemic StarCraft enjoyed a surge of popularity again, I went looking for some custom maps that I remembered from the early 2000s but I couldn't find them. The existing websites at the time were not solving the problem for me so I set out to solve it myself. The website is a passion project for me, I don't want it to generate any revenue. It's been a fun ride and it's now easily the largest map archive that has ever existed. I think eventually I'll make a show HN post about it when I implement a few more cool features, but that will have to be for a later date.
Competitive StarCraft (and it's successor) is very much alive still today! I recommend checking out sc2casts's best-of-year lists[0] for each year where you can find a selection of what ends up being the most "interesting" matches played throughout the year.
These can range from games that explore a new aspect of the meta, to nail-biting matches where the apparent loser makes an unbelievable comeback, to the career-making game of an upstart unseating the king.
It is incredible that you could run such game on a 486 and play online using a 28.8 Kbps modem. StarCraft II requires far more resources and bandwidth to play while not being necessarily more fun in a directly proportional manner.
it barely ran on 486 fwiw, it would have a major ongoing pause every 2 seconds or so at beginning, getting worse as game progressed. -anecdote from a boy that badly wished for a 586.
That's not 100% true. The pathfinding is atrociously bad in SC1, which is usually attributed to how they took the WC engine and made it isometric, but I assume was partly also due to performance. Whenever I go back to play it, that's the one thing that frustrates me every time when playing the campaign.
This sort of "atrociousness" is also why it made the competitive scene work, because it allows skills to show through. If you select-all, attack, the pathing will cause you to lose the fight against someone micro-ing the units.
I don't disagree, but when I'm playing the campaign or custom maps, I'm not too worried about skill expression and micromanaging these brain-dead units is not all that fun.
The bit about Starcraft being a hit in Korea also misses that there was a 50+ year ban on importing Japanese culture that was loosened in late 1998 through the early 2000s, which made Korea a much more receptive market for non-Japanese game makers up through that period of time.
Add into that the different domestic cryptography requirements, and you get a lot of explanation of the uniqueness of the Korean computing landscape.
While there was a ban, it wasn't an all-encompassing ban on everything Japanese. To give you a video game example, both NES and SNES were licensed to Hyundai and released as Comboy (컴보이) and Super Comboy (슈퍼컴보이). This came with the expected large releases, as you can see in Korean adverts of the time, literally singing about Super Mario, Bubble Bobble, Megaman III, Ninja Turtles, Doctor Mario, Dragon Quest, Zelda, etc.[0][1]
Manga and anime were available as well, as long as they were translated and adapted to local references accordingly. Dragon Ball was available by 1989 officially[2] and Crayon Shin-chan by 1995[3]. Music and regular films were the most impacted since Japanese language could not be kept in media.
Reading through the Wikipedia article for it[4], it's quite incomplete as it makes it sound like all things Japanese were banned in Korea. At least for games, anime, and manga, by mid-90s, quite a lot were available officially. While a bit biased (a whole separate issue about Namuwiki[5]), here's a perspective on the history of it if you can read Korean (or want to read through a translator)[6]
I’ve attended Blizzcon 2018 and it was a very memorable experience. Not just because it was the pinnacle of Starcraft for me, but also the moment when i saw the first non-korean player to win the championship. Serral, the champion on that year and one of the greatest Zerg player ever, wouldn’t be coming as underdog to the matches with Koreans that dominated the stage for almost two decades. Once the final match was over i heard the most humble and respectful words from the champion to the audience and other players. This was such an inspirational moment for me. Shortly after my starcraft journey ended, the interest faded, but that speech left a huge mark on my further activities and perception of the competition in anything. Reminded me that the race is long and at the end it’s always with yourself.
Starcraft was already well and truly dead by 2018. Koreans don't really want to excel at dead games. The OGs may stick around but they won't really try hard.
Korea stopped dominating because Starcraft dropped in popularity inside Korea relative to newer games. Then the world's much larger population size produced a few players who could outcompete them.
They are probably referring to:
1. Infinite unit selection (SC1/BW were capped at 12, this is doubly important for buildings).
2. Rally workers directly to mineral patches
3. Smart cast for spells (pairs with #1 to allow you to cast spells more easily)
4. Better unit control, more deterministic
5. Removed high ground advantage (SC1/BW 50% hit chance up hill).
Maybe others... that said, anyone that pays attention to both games knows that the lack of complexity in unit and macro mechanics in SC2 leaves room for other actions, such as more intense "micro" mechanics. Neither game is more demanding then the other, it turns out in both games you never run out of things to do.
Not OP but I can answer this. The most obvious example is in Starcraft 1 you can’t select more than 12 units at a time, with a population cap of 200. This meant to move your army you had to make many, many more actions than in SC2 where you can just drag a box around your whole army (and/or hotkey that whole group) and attack+move.
Personally I think that was a technical limitation of the first game and a huge ergonomic improvement in the second.
Other things like having groups of buildings on hotkeys means you don’t have to go back to your base to order more units and set the rally point (where units go when they’re built) for all those buildings at once. This makes StarCraft to be an insanely micro-mechanic intensive game at high levels.
As the person who implemented it originally, it was not a technical limitation but a design choice.
In the early implementation of Warcraft 1 (1993-ish) I made it possible to select all the units on-screen at once with drag-select, and even more by scrolling and shift-clicking or shift-click-dragging.
Allen Adham (president of Blizzard, and exec producer for Warcraft) argued convincingly that only 4 units (for War 1) should be selected at a time. I argued against it pretty vociferously at the time … and in later days (post launch, most likely) came around to his way of thinking. Attacking with a superfluid of units takes less skill than selecting troops in small batches, and so requires to use more intent & skill.
Warcraft 2 allowed 9 units to be selected, and StarCraft more.
Thanks. Much of the discussion I used to enjoy about post-mortems in game dev. There was some kind of choice that went into the design process.
On the unit selection, a personal view on the situation is that nigh-instantaneous unit commands and obedience approaches valley of the dolls. It becomes too much like Wargames calculating theoretical death scenarios, abstracted from the issues of actual army logistics.
It takes some non-zero time. Units are not always doing exactly what they're supposed to. The fog of war is often worse not better than the game abstraction.
I don't think it's about blizzard but gaming culture in general that caused the gradual change. Gradually lowering the bar on skills required to play in some way.
Starcraft 2's F2 to select the whole army on the map is the other extreme and where it eventually landed right (I think that was introduced in a SC2 expansion, it was not a launch feature?)
I personally always hated limits on selecting in RTS games. Anything that would require micro-management was a turn off for me: it was immersion breaking, like that tank just sits there doing some stupid thing because the high supreme commander hasn't personally reached out to him to give a specific order what to do in this specific combat engagement. No.
I have such fond memories of the original Starcraft. When I was like 7 or 8, my parents got a computer for the first time (this was ~2004) and installed Starcraft on it. We still didn't have internet so all I got was the single player aspect but I loved it and must have dumped close to 100 hours playing it over the next 2 years or so.
After that I stopped playing Starcraft but when I was in high school I picked it up again and started playing online. The regular matches were cool but the coolest matches were "custom scenarios", my favorite being "mouse hunt". It was a scenario where one team had the weakest players and the other team had the strongest players but the weak team could create barriers that the strong team couldn't destroy. From there the small team would slowly build up and defeat the stronger team or the strong team would wipe everyone out before they could.
It's been years since I played the OG Starcraft but I think I'll be picking it up again soon. It's just such a damn good game and it's really stood the test of time where even if you pick it up today it doesn't feel like a dated game, Blizzard made a truly timeless game with Starcraft and that's not an easy thing to do.
Never played Starcraft II but from what I heard they mostly kept to the original formula and many folks love that game.
My pops wouldn’t let us play on the internet at first so my brother played Warcraft and StarCraft using AppleTalk. I remember the only cable we had barely reached between the two computers so we had it hanging tight and if someone tripped over the cable we’d disconnect and have to start over.
Nice synchronicity — I just reinstalled Brood War last week.
Does anybody know the current state of Battle.net emulation for the older non-Remastered game? The bnetd drama was twenty years ago at this point and I would like to be able to play online without the Microsoft-Vivendi-Activision-Zenimax-Blizzard Borg having any say in it. RE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd
I prefer to patch only up to 1.15.x to keep network compatibility with the Classic Mac OS version of the game :)
It's a project that few of us started almost a decade ago to ensure the longevity of this game. We don't try to emulate Battle.net at all, but instead we take only the gameplay itself and reimplement everything else ourselves.
It's a work in progress, so please let us know what you'd like to see in there that's currently missing if you do check it out.
Microsoft owns both GitHub and all Blizzard IP, so it's only a matter of time before they send a DMCA takedown order to themselves to remove this copyright-infringing material :)
Circumventing an effective copyright measure (use) is a violation of section 1201, as is trafficking in circumvention tools (distribution). The major difference is that the act of circumventing itself may be protected by one of the exemptions approved by the Librarian of Congress every three years; there are no exemptions of any kind for the act of trafficking (which means that distribution of bnetd and PVPGN is illegal in all cases).
Near as I can tell, circumventing the access restrictions to enable netplay on a video game that is no longer distributed is not a DMCA exemption. (Circumventing DRM for a game whose DRM servers have been shut down is an exemption for local play only.)
Protocol reversal is not a DMCA violation. Otherwise MS would be in big trouble for when they reverse engineered the AOL protocol for the MSN Messenger.
You can't copyright a protocol.
So long as these systems aren't enabling pirating these classic games they are free and clear.
One of the things about battle.net though was that pirated StarCraft copies couldn't connect to it. Battle.net thus served as an "effective" copyright protection device -- circumvention of which is illegal under the DMCA. This has been tested in court, and the court found in favor of Blizzard. So yes, a judge has ruled that reversing the Battle.net protocol is a DMCA violation. That's why the bnetd.org domain was awarded to Blizzard (though a US court could not prevent the distribution of bnetd outside the USA).
Did anyone else think gameplay was not anywhere near as enjoyable in SC2? There was something a bit more raw about SC1/Brood War which I felt went missing in SC2. I didn't invest enough time into SC2 though.
For me, I think it's that you learned every nook and cranny of StarCraft. You knew the units and their strength, their health, how quickly 12 of unit X would wipe out 24 of unit Y. You could basically predict health bars in combat (assuming you knew upgrade level.) In StarCraft II, everything felt softer, less crisp, less exact. Throw 40 marines at something. Throw 100 zerglings at something. Just keep throwing things out while you focus on upgrades and expansion. You didn't know if you would win or lose a battle, so you just spam the enemy with the units you expected to do best. But you never felt quite so in control as you do with the original.
I think part of it is just growing up as a human. I don't think I'll never enjoy games as much as I enjoyed Starcraft and Halo 1 & 2. It was just the perfect age for me
I think it's also the age of blizzard and the era of computing. Certain dark patterns common today weren't possible in that era, so games had more soul, and for most people Blizzard had already sacrificed it's soul to WoW before SC2 was announced.
A bit disappointed to see the discussion peter out at the release of SC2. Pro Brood War is not where it was at the time, but is still alive and well, with a much less exploitative business model, in fact. No more team houses and skeezy managers, the pro players make their money streaming these days.
Gameplay-wise, it is still in an incredible place. New builds are still being developed, not just one-off cheese builds but legitimate new approaches to matchups. Depending on matchup and player, you might watch a game where the core build hasn't changed in 15 years or a game that would be unrecognizable from 3 years ago.
Also, I would love for this guy to do a deep dive on the SC:BW approach to balance, which is map-based rather than based on traditional unit-based balance changes. This way the community is effectively able to balance the game themselves.
> Also, I would love for this guy to do a deep dive on the SC:BW approach to balance, which is map-based rather than based on traditional unit-based balance changes. This way the community is effectively able to balance the game themselves.
Yes, that it something really important that the modern landscape of competitive gaming lost and the frequency of patching increasing. Not just in BW, older fighting games, especially those arcade based ones, people found ways (which sometimes blur the lines between exploit or technique) to keep pushing the bounders. Things like Kara-cancels in 3s, were one is using a mechanic meant to facilitate the throw input to extend the range of the throw. Or wave dashing. It is wild how even character tier lists changed in the original SmashBros 64.
And also how people adapt to this meta changing discoveries, like the bisu-build in BW or when Ricki Ortiz unleashed v-cancel in sfa2!
Kara-cancels were a glitch in SF2 turned into a feature in all subsequent games, in SF3 devs added ability to kara cancel into throws, probably because of Alex being a protagonist (:
That is because I only mentioned them, didn't explain them.
Kara-cancel is a mechanic that lets you extend the range of your moves, in 3s is used for throws.
So the input for throws in 3s is lp+lk. Now, what happens if while one is trying to press the buttons at the same time they press one slighty before the other? A move will start to come out and then you can't throw because you are doing another move. To make it easier to input throws, devs made so that _any_ move can be canceled into a throw in the first 5 frames of the move. 5 frames is 5/60ths of a second.
Separate to that, some moves move the character forward. Ej. Chunli's HK. So people figured out that if you press a move that moved your character forward and then canceled that into a throw you can extend the effective range of your throw.
Mind you doing this means pressing a button 83 milliseconds before the other one. Which is of course not something you can do by thinking about it, instead you learn to position your hand in a way so that when you move it down together one finger lands before the other two. The name kara-cancels comes from the Japanese word for empty, because you are canceling a move that never came out.
Now I don't know the history, whether the mechanic was first found in 3s and then in SF2T or not, but it is an example of a mechanic intended to ease the input of something being used to expand the toolkit of a character.
V-cancel (not sure if that was the name ppl used for it, didn't play sfa2) refers to the fact that in sfa2 the number of frames to go from standing to downblock is more that the number of frames a character needs to go from standing to a low attack if the character is in v-ism. This means that if two characters are standing next to each other and one activates their v super, they have a guaranteed hit.
This was first used by Ricki Ortiz in a tournament setting in a finals and that is how it became wildly know. The story of it was documented in Sirlin's Play to Win book, which is how I learned about it. https://www.sirlin.net/ptw
I was just making a statement on depth so was not expecting a actual explanation but thank you for that. I personally have a hangout where terminology makes things seem harder than it is, I just have to dig in and learn the terms and then things fall into place.
I’m looking forward to FlaSh getting back to the top of his game and hitting the #1 spot again now that he is back from his military service. Been watching every one of the Artosis casts for the past week or so. I suck at the game but it’s always a good time watching the pros.
I’d also comment on Broodwars approach of balance by making everything overpowered (in the right circumstance) rather than nerfing anything that stood out at any point.
There were a lot of units that could single handedly turn the tide in the right scenario. Vulture mines could stop a rush in their tracks, storm could wipe an army, dark swarm could negate a dug in fortification, a reaver in a shuttle could take out all production.
It led to crazy chaos and it was an incredibly entertaining spectacle.
Most (probably all?) tournaments require you to pick your race and keep it for the whole tournament. No switching based on map or matchup. But you can pick random.
I've yet seen another game with as good pathfinding as StarCraft 2. The way 100s of units flow around another 100s of moving units like water is very impressive, even today.
> whenever harvesters are on their way to get minerals, or when they’re on the way back carrying those minerals, they ignore collisions with other units
Maybe that's part of the fluid behaviour you noticed.
The blog contains more technical posts about StarCraft 2, so you might find that "special sauce" somewhere else in there :)
The blog is interesting, but it is about sc1. Pathfinding in sc1 is so terrible that moving units where you want is part of what's make one a pro player.
This game brings me so much nostalgia. I used to play SC when I was a middle school student from 2000 to 2002. I was so good at the game that around my age group I was probably the best in Seoul. I also participated at a pro tournament (ongamenet I believe), but lost to NaDa during the knockout stage. Then I moved to the states so I stopped playing.
There’s a story behind the no lan play + mandatory account thing. As the article says, StarCraft was huge in South Korea.
The lesser known part is that most people there did not play the game on their home PCs, they played it at PC cafes (PC bangs). These establishments engaged in large scale piracy of the game, installing it on hundreds of PCs without a license. They used the LAN play feature to bypass Blizzard entirely. So the lack of LAN play and the account requirement are a direct response to mass piracy of their game in Korea.
The spawn installation feature only supported 8 copies of the game per CD and was only intended for personal use among friends and family. Those PC cafes in Korea were renting out the game 24/7 as a commercial operation.
One may wonder if you should respond at all, given how well it played out for StarCraft in Korea. Sometimes what you see as an impediment is in fact the essential part of the success.
The game being a big hit in SK is nice theoretically but doesn't mean you can afford to develop patches or sequels if nobody is actually buying copies of it.
SC was successful in large part thanks to the community, so maybe to replicate the success, game developers need to figure out how to recreate the same thing and coexist with a robust community. I think monthly subscriptions are an absolute blocker for some great community contributions, for example.
What are you talking about? At least 4.5 million copies were sold in SK. The question is, did lan clubs reduce or increase the sales? It's hard to know for sure, since no AB-test was made but I strongly suspect that they did increase the sales by a huge amount even if the clubs themselves didn't buy a single copy. Give 'em the razor, sell 'em the blades.
That combination is also when I stopped playing blizzard games, except for a short stint with Hearthstone. I also wonder how many were lost because they didn't continue to cater to the core player base.
Or maybe they did, and people like you and me were just left behind. Maybe a cultural difference between those who experienced LAN parties and those who didn't.
>Maybe a cultural difference between those who experienced LAN parties and those who didn't.
I think this is it more than anything. If all you know is "quick match" matchmaking, it's hard to realize what you're missing. LAN parties were really awesome.
I did one (bunch of 35 yo guys) a few weeks ago, and it’s still just as awesome as before. It’s just a shame you cannot play any game released in the past 15 or so years, so you go back to Warcraft III :/
It killed it for me also, and really gaming in general.
If I need permission from your server to play, then it's not really mine. And the whole thing with StarCraft for me and my friends is that this was our thing.
Several of us are now network engineers because we had to learn that skillset to play StarCraft at a LAN party without lag. The phone lines weren't cutting it.
Injecting blizzard servers into the loop, to be tolerated without recourse, totally ruined it for those of us who didn't live near a decent ISP. We were so excited about the sequel and it turned out to be pretty much unplayable online.
On one hand, open source thrives in a very well connected computer world, on the other hand, the fact that programs can phone home and update themselves every day has redefined software entirely, and not always in a good way. We are making much less robust software today. Both because it relies on connectivity, and because we can ship it first and fix it later.
There is a lively stage of SC2 YouTubers, be they commentators (like LowkoTV) or gammers. Harstem is dark and edgy, including his iconic series "Is it IMBA or do I suck?". At the same time, it is lovely to watch challenges by MaNa and uThermal - especially on how much fun they have, regardless of whether they are winning.
Also, it is still interesting to see the diversity of grandmasters' personal play styles. In a mature game, one would expect it to converge to a single "optimal" playstyle. Yet, even after the dust of a new balance patch settles, it is impressive. And for a reminder, SC2: Legacy of the Void is over 8 years old.
>Adham and Morhaime fostered as non-hierarchical a structure as possible at Blizzard, such that everyone, regardless of their ostensible role — from programmers to artists, testers to marketers — felt empowered to make design suggestions, knowing that they would be acted upon if they were judged worthy by their peers.
General question, how do you balance between trying to get everyone's feedback vs just being more fast and efficient?especially in the early stages where time is usually pretty critical
Blizzard was famous at the time for having a release date of "when it's done" for all of their project. One of the lessons to learn from their success in those times is that, at least in art/wntertainment, time is not nearly as critical as quality.
I used to play Starcraft a lot, but i don't know anything about mods, extensions, multiplayer, etc.
From where can I download the best current release (official or not, i don't care) + maybe some extra such as better/HD textures? Is there any easy path to follow?
I cannot tell from your comment if you're aware of StarCraft: Remastered - it's $15, includes original/Brood Wars, and has modernized skin, but plays identically (and is compatible with) the original. $15 USD.
to be clear because this is often a point of confusion (I believe it was done intentionally to be confusing but I digress). The remastered client is actually free, the HD skin (and ladder play) is $15. So you can play online with custom maps and the campaign and so on for free.
What I really want to know is why all three worker units float. What caused that design? Was it a result of having to balance spider mines? A happy accident? A conscious design from the start? If so why? This keeps me up at night.
It's a remnant of the 1996 “orcs in space” version of StarCraft where the minerals were floating space rocks and Vespene didn't exist yet. Check out this early screenshot with a harvesting Drone for example: https://tcrf.net/images/f/fa/SC-WCII-2.GIF
What do you mean by float? If you mean that work units can move through other units when mining minerals, that is a conscious design decision that was made for performance reasons. Having upwards of 40 worker units having to constantly calculate paths to and from the command center without being allowed to move through each other or move through other units that might cross their path would have slowed the game down to a crawl.
Of course people figured this out and managed to exploit it for other purposes, but those were seen to be too minor to bother fixing.
The mechanics of spider mines is they "hit anything that touches the ground". There are several units they don't hit such as all workers, vultures themselves, archons etc... This is all because those units "float".
I think “floating” units also have a different movement behaviour. They move a lot more like flying units. Do they also stack and transit through each other? I don’t recall.
The person who returned to them the source code disk has done everyone dirty. I’m optimistic Microsoft will eventually open source stuff but goddammit.
An open source StarCraft could have lead to a renaissance of the genre, but he found it more important to get like 250 quid of unsold Overwatch trash from the blizz store.
I did check was there any follow-up on the story and found out the guy in question has since gotten into NFTs, an irony so great I can only laugh.
Really hoping that Microsoft buying Blizzard, might lead to a resurgence in interest and development, along the lines of the resources put into Age of Empires.
My only beef with the article was in how in North America, broadband was challenging. We had cable modems back in 1994. I grew up in a single wide trailer with a single mom and even we could afford it. I was downloading from Napster in 1996.
You were definitely a very early adopter if you had broadband in 1994. It wasn’t until the late 90s that most people started switching away from dialup.
Sounds like it. My house in Miami was subject to Adelphia (a notorious scam company) while my friend 20 miles away had fiber to the curb in 2002 or something.
The first residential availability of cable modems was by @Home Network in 1996 and served only the San Francisco Bay Area. By the end of 1996, @Home Network had 20,000 users.
I highly doubt you were one of them but I suppose it's possible.
I grew up in an American suburb and dialup was the norm for me through high school (early/mid-2000s). We did have a solid 56K connection though (which usually ran at about 53.3 kbps) thanks to MSN (back when it was a full-fledged ISP and not a news aggregator).
It wasn't until the latter part of that decade that home broadband became relatively common, and it wasn't particularly fast (ca. 10 Mbps IIRC) nor symmetrical (upload speed was a small fraction of download speed). I had a friend out in the sticks who had to contend with satellite+dialup past 2010.
Decent speeds (50 Mbps+) didn't roll out en masse until the middle part of the 2010s, especially as Netflix exploded.
You were very much not the norm. Also, cable internet wasn't even released to the public until 1996. The only residential "broadband" options at that time were DSL and ISDN, which were both expensive and had very limited proliferation. Only 10 million people had cable internet in 2002.
As a data point, the Blizzard sales team’s projections were that we would sell 4,000 copies of StarCraft in a year in South Korea, so there was no reason to in localize the game.
First year sales were on the order of 100x that amount, quite the surprise for everyone at Blizzard!
> First year sales were on the order of 100x that amount
To be fair, that kind of proves you did not really need to localize the game.
"we"? Were you on that team? I'm a long time StarCraft lover, so huge Kudos if so.
From the profile info:
Patrick Wyatt - game developer and programmer (Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, Guild Wars, battle.net) - co-founder of ArenaNet - blogger: www.codeofhonor.com
Edit: remove backticks
Damn. That reminds me, I really wish there were more information about the early days of ArenaNet. I think what they did with servers and networking in GW1 (and eventually GW2) is legendary. They had instancing, no realm sharding, streaming updates, etc. years before anybody else. And GW1's gameplay design in general was so unique.
oh what a surprise, legend
One less talked about thing when discussing StarCraft, that might be more pertinent to HN audience, is that this game was almost endlessly hackable. And I mean that in the truest sense of that word. Many a careers were launched by playing around with OllyDbg and learning to reverse engineer code all so you could create an awesome plugin [0] for the community.
Which brings me to my next point, which is that the community aspect of StarCraft is a huge part of why it remained popular for so long. As previously mentioned, there were hackers and programmers developing awesome tools that helped the scene, but also there were map makers which were essential in keeping the game balanced. One little known fact about StarCraft is that the last balance patch released by Blizzard was in 2001, at the early beginnings of the pro scene. After that, the game was kept fresh and balanced by community map makers.
Combine that with people who created websites where you could follow news about Korean pro scene (TeamLiquid has its roots here), talk with other people about StarCraft, and other people who organized tournaments and did everything else; and you get a formula which almost ensures the longetivity of the game. I wouldn't be surprised if there are people playing and following this game in 20 years time. I know I'll be one of them.
[0] - https://github.com/TheEngineeringBay/Awesome-Broodwar-Resour...
Tower defense was popularized by Starcraft mods.
Dota, and so LOL, is often thought of as something coming from Warcraft 3 Defense of the Ancient, but the concept really started as a starcraft mod as well.
Of lot of the gaming culture is born on the original Battle.net.
SC 1 was one of the most influential game ever created.
I remember the map “V-TEC paintball” as a forerunner of the DotA and LOL styles - endless waves with you the (battlecruiser | marine | ghost) running around making the difference. HotS, LOL, DotA all seem to trace back to those “paintball” custom maps and the creators who made terrific use of the tools on offer.
Yep DotA was just a port of AoS: https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Aeon_of_Strife_(map)
> Many a careers were launched by playing around with OllyDbg and learning to reverse engineer code all so you could create an awesome plugin [0] for the community.
My career was launched by StarCraft! I've never been to high school or college. I played waaaaay too much StarCraft in my teens, and ended up writing a bot to maintain the chat room my friends were in.
The entire network stack had been reverse engineered, criticized, and documented if you knew where to look. Eventually that documentation made it to the public.
I interviewed with Blizzard a decade ago. I heard one of the interviewers state that the community documentation [0] is better than Blizzard's own internal documentation.
I now write software to fly drones. It's fun as hell and I'm glad of ye olde Blizzard. I know some are here on HN -- thank you guys for being awesome :)
[0]: https://bnetdocs.org/
> As previously mentioned, there were hackers and programmers developing awesome tools that helped the scene, but also there were map makers which were essential in keeping the game balanced.
Starcraft came out when I was a kid, the online community of Battle.net is really what got me into programming and development.
My late brother was very serious about hacking and modding the shit out of StarCraft.
Thank you for the fun memory I wouldn’t have found otherwise, his birthday is around the corner and you’ve made my day.
So true, many new game genres originated from StarCraft mods.
Tower defense, DoTA, among us, its legacy is legendary :D
The game also had custom maps that allowed for sandboxed programming / scripting.
A lot of very clever custom maps ("use map settings" / UMS) were made.
MOBA genere spawned from a Starcraft custom map called Aeon of strife. Starcraft also had a map called "the unknown" which is basically Among Us - made years ago.
There were "turret defense" maps, RPG maps, maps where you controlled one unit and tried to dodge things (bound maps) and many other maps that just changed the balance.
In the golden times players didnt have to play the cutthroat 1:1 all the timr - you could spend days playing custom maps (archives have tens of thousands of them), custom campaigns, modes with more players like 2v2, 3v3 or 4v4, or even 8 player everyone for themself.
Apart from "difficult" maps, there was a whole community playing maps with (nearly) unlimited resources - "fastest maps" and "big game hunters" (BGH). Those maps were easier so no "ladder anxiety" by having to play the best all the time.
Starcraft 1 gave a lot of freedom to have fun. You didnt have to participate in the incredibly difficult duels. You could play a custom map, or some 3v3 with your friends - where overall skill level was lower, but fun level was high.
Killing custom maps is in my opiniin one of the reasons why Starcraft 2 failed. Blizzard wanted to capitalize on them, but didnt know how. In Starcraft Brood War there was this game list - you could select UMS mode and pick from probably 100 open games. In Starcraft 2 you could only play what blizzard wanted you to play.
I guess Blizzard was unhappy that Warcraft 3 spawned the whole DOTA game - which was also a custom map.
Regarding hacking - many people learned java writing bots for Diablo 2.
> In Starcraft 2 you could only play what blizzard wanted you to play.
5 years ago when I played SC2 for the first time there was plenty of (iirc) “Arcade” maps which were UMS, and I’m pretty sure, community made. Are you perhaps talking about early days of SC2 when that still wasn’t a thing or? One map I was most impressed by and had lots of fun playing it, was called “Assassins”. I won’t explain what it is, but if someone took it to develop a game based on it, I strongly believe(d) that it’d be another hit game that spawned from SC
Im talking about the early days when there wasnt a "game list" where you could see the maps hosted by actual players. So the list only showed maps open at a moment.
Last time I tried SC2 arcade there was a list o hundreds of maps with zero players inside and you had to pray that some other players wanted to play the same map as you. So you would have to coordinate by a forum or friendlist to even play a game. So arcade was an empty desert.
Killing the "currently open games list" was such a antipattern... does SC2 have it now?
as far as I know it does have it, and my experience doesn’t match yours-on EU there was 20ish open lobbies (hosted by people) for different custom maps/arcades at all times. but yeah if it was like you are saying it was, I agree with your point. also, check the other reply to your comment from someone who is more up to date
Yeah. He explained it as it was in the early days. Battle.net for Starcraft 2 really destroyed the game from getting popular. It's so sad that the Battle.net from 1998 was better than the Battle.net from 2012... They implemented chat several years after SC2 released. Clans even longer after.
They released it when the online connections were terrible, then everyone left before they got good.
BGH and UMS are where I spent my entire StarCraft life. Lot of wonderful hours into those!
Blizzard missing the Moba train is when I understood it was not the same company anymore and they started to be corporate.
They stopped following the fans and community and started to push for business plans.
It worked, they made tons of money.
But I stopped admiring them.
The seed was there before that...
They deliberately hindered the release of Starcraft 2 by releasing the online experience completely unfinished. No clans, no chat (at all), no PMing, no custom games. Nothing. It was like that for several years.
At that point, with 3 years of hype for the game, people came, played a bit of 1v1 then left. It was a botched job. Blizzard died with the release of SC2.
To be fair to the team, Tor (from PirateSoftware fame) reported that Blizzard made more money selling one horse in WoW than with the entire Wing of Liberty:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHZru-6M8BY
That would screw up anybody's motivation a bit.
Players get what they incentivize, and thanks to video games getting more and more popular, the tragedy of the commons applies.
Still, it sucks.
> Killing custom maps is in my opiniin one of the reasons why Starcraft 2 failed.
+1. The first time on bnet venturing into one of those BGH games, I was like, what the hell is this? Loved those custom maps.
They didn't kill custom maps in sc2, it's just in a section called arcade
Use map settings are the only thing keeping sc2 alive right now.
The game is now free to play which attracted a bunch of players who don't really know how to play melee
They killed custom maps by killing the search mechanism. Not sure if they fixed it now, but on release it custom games were ranked by popularity… which just creates a feedback cycle where only already-popular games would show up anywhere on the top and get sufficient players to run. With no discovery, you ended up with the first acceptable maps, usually remakes of sc/wc3 maps, dominating the list and no way for new maps to compete.
The particularly stupid thing is the map editor for SC2 is ridiculously powerful, but afaik nothing interesting came out of SC2 custom map scene.
I played this custom map called "Assassins", and it was one of the best things I ever played, I'm not exaggerating. Idk if something similar already existed, or if it came out from SC2, but I was really hoping for someone to make a real game based on it. Everything I can find on the internet is just this one yt video, but it's an older version, I didn't play under 3.0 I think - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX4hpQouvKA
> Regarding hacking - many people learned java writing bots for Diablo 2.
I remember it being Javascript, not Java. I forget the name of the tools involved, but I do remember creating a lot of Javascript bindings in C or C++, so that scripting engines would have interfaces to various bits of game engine code.
> Starcraft 2 failed
What? Starcraft 2 was a commercial and critical success, selling 6 million copies. It wasn't as successful as the original (11 million), but hardly a failure. It was the leading esports game before MOBAs took over.
The modding scene as we knew it is dead, also for the FPS genre. There are several explanations: games becoming technically more complex, commercial practices, cheating being taken more seriously, gameplay being more refined, with many of the good ideas having already being turned into their own games, the indie scene going for purpose made engines rather than mods, etc...
3v3bgh was my jam. No no rush.
SCUMS! (StarCraft Use Map Settings). These maps provided a wide array of games and I believe popularized or gave birth to a few. I remember tower defense, level up games where you and the other players explore the map and gain upgrades, a predator game where one player is chosen randomly to be the killer in a horror style hunt. Imagine, each map, possibly an entire new game, sometimes being discovered for the first time together with strangers. Such a fun and amazing time!
I’ve recently started watching StarCraft games again. Lee young ho aka Flash aka the GOAT returned from the military, and it’s been fantastic to watch. Artosis is a great commenter as well.
There’s something really unique with this game, I feel no other RTS has the same depth. I plan on returning to this game when I retire, in 20 years. See you then.
I see many people in the comments nostalgically talking about the custom mapping scene and how it got them into programming.
The same is true for me, so I think here is a good place to plug my starcraft custom map archive website [0]. In 2020 because of the pandemic StarCraft enjoyed a surge of popularity again, I went looking for some custom maps that I remembered from the early 2000s but I couldn't find them. The existing websites at the time were not solving the problem for me so I set out to solve it myself. The website is a passion project for me, I don't want it to generate any revenue. It's been a fun ride and it's now easily the largest map archive that has ever existed. I think eventually I'll make a show HN post about it when I implement a few more cool features, but that will have to be for a later date.
[0] https://scmscx.com
Competitive StarCraft (and it's successor) is very much alive still today! I recommend checking out sc2casts's best-of-year lists[0] for each year where you can find a selection of what ends up being the most "interesting" matches played throughout the year.
These can range from games that explore a new aspect of the meta, to nail-biting matches where the apparent loser makes an unbelievable comeback, to the career-making game of an upstart unseating the king.
(I have no affiliation whatsoever with sc2casts.)
[0] https://sc2casts.com/best-of-2023/
I strongly recommend reading Pat Wyatt's blog [1] for some insights about an early Starcraft development from more technical point of view.
[1] https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...
He's in this thread
It is incredible that you could run such game on a 486 and play online using a 28.8 Kbps modem. StarCraft II requires far more resources and bandwidth to play while not being necessarily more fun in a directly proportional manner.
Another similar article from that era: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/1500-archers-on-a-...
Is there any game which is proportional more fun for the computational resources it uses compared to late '90s games?
Some things were basically perfected back then.
It technically ran on a 486, but was painfully slow.
IIRC the box stated 100MHz Pentium minimum, but we found for LAN sessions that you really wanted a 200MHz MMX CPU to never suffer slowdown.
it barely ran on 486 fwiw, it would have a major ongoing pause every 2 seconds or so at beginning, getting worse as game progressed. -anecdote from a boy that badly wished for a 586.
Exactly, I remember the game for not being technically impressive upon release. 2D games were looked down upon in 1998.
I worked at another game studio at the time of release and all our titles under production were 3D.
We played the hell out of it at LAN parties but felt that technically it already was dated.
I would not say it looked dated.
The low polygon count 3D games of 1998 were still not aesthetically superior to 2D games.
Even if you had a GPU back than (better known at the time as "graphics accelerator"), the graphics were not that good.
That's not 100% true. The pathfinding is atrociously bad in SC1, which is usually attributed to how they took the WC engine and made it isometric, but I assume was partly also due to performance. Whenever I go back to play it, that's the one thing that frustrates me every time when playing the campaign.
This sort of "atrociousness" is also why it made the competitive scene work, because it allows skills to show through. If you select-all, attack, the pathing will cause you to lose the fight against someone micro-ing the units.
I don't disagree, but when I'm playing the campaign or custom maps, I'm not too worried about skill expression and micromanaging these brain-dead units is not all that fun.
SC1 is a game where the player makes a very significant different in the outcome.
And where the difference in skill level are huge.
Thank you for this link.
I'm busy reading through the blog and there are some incredible programming insights in there.
Highly recommended.
The bit about Starcraft being a hit in Korea also misses that there was a 50+ year ban on importing Japanese culture that was loosened in late 1998 through the early 2000s, which made Korea a much more receptive market for non-Japanese game makers up through that period of time.
Add into that the different domestic cryptography requirements, and you get a lot of explanation of the uniqueness of the Korean computing landscape.
While there was a ban, it wasn't an all-encompassing ban on everything Japanese. To give you a video game example, both NES and SNES were licensed to Hyundai and released as Comboy (컴보이) and Super Comboy (슈퍼컴보이). This came with the expected large releases, as you can see in Korean adverts of the time, literally singing about Super Mario, Bubble Bobble, Megaman III, Ninja Turtles, Doctor Mario, Dragon Quest, Zelda, etc.[0][1]
Manga and anime were available as well, as long as they were translated and adapted to local references accordingly. Dragon Ball was available by 1989 officially[2] and Crayon Shin-chan by 1995[3]. Music and regular films were the most impacted since Japanese language could not be kept in media.
Reading through the Wikipedia article for it[4], it's quite incomplete as it makes it sound like all things Japanese were banned in Korea. At least for games, anime, and manga, by mid-90s, quite a lot were available officially. While a bit biased (a whole separate issue about Namuwiki[5]), here's a perspective on the history of it if you can read Korean (or want to read through a translator)[6]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_C6azkQ7Mw [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzBHMmDBKuE [2] https://namu.wiki/w/%EB%93%9C%EB%9E%98%EA%B3%A4%EB%B3%BC#s-1... [3] https://namu.wiki/w/%ED%81%AC%EB%A0%88%EC%9A%A9%20%EC%8B%A0%... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_influence_on_Korean_c... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namuwiki [6] https://namu.wiki/w/%EC%9D%BC%EB%B3%B8%20%EB%8C%80%EC%A4%91%...
First time I see the Hyundai branded box
https://www.dibidibi.com/Data/GP/c65gadz83a/DETAIL/37996145-...
quite funny
I found this ban interesting and went looking:
https://web-japan.org/trends98/honbun/ntj981207.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Japanese_media_i...
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2003/09/17/national/south-...
Whoa, thanks for this!
I've always wondered why it was such a big thing in Korea, of all places.
I’ve attended Blizzcon 2018 and it was a very memorable experience. Not just because it was the pinnacle of Starcraft for me, but also the moment when i saw the first non-korean player to win the championship. Serral, the champion on that year and one of the greatest Zerg player ever, wouldn’t be coming as underdog to the matches with Koreans that dominated the stage for almost two decades. Once the final match was over i heard the most humble and respectful words from the champion to the audience and other players. This was such an inspirational moment for me. Shortly after my starcraft journey ended, the interest faded, but that speech left a huge mark on my further activities and perception of the competition in anything. Reminded me that the race is long and at the end it’s always with yourself.
Oh hey a barcode on hacker news.
HA so funny seeing one without | l and I being the same glyph
Starcraft was already well and truly dead by 2018. Koreans don't really want to excel at dead games. The OGs may stick around but they won't really try hard.
They dumb down the mechanics so much so that Korean supremacy is overthrown
Korea stopped dominating because Starcraft dropped in popularity inside Korea relative to newer games. Then the world's much larger population size produced a few players who could outcompete them.
Can you give specific examples of how the mechanics have been dumbed down?
They are probably referring to: 1. Infinite unit selection (SC1/BW were capped at 12, this is doubly important for buildings). 2. Rally workers directly to mineral patches 3. Smart cast for spells (pairs with #1 to allow you to cast spells more easily) 4. Better unit control, more deterministic 5. Removed high ground advantage (SC1/BW 50% hit chance up hill).
Maybe others... that said, anyone that pays attention to both games knows that the lack of complexity in unit and macro mechanics in SC2 leaves room for other actions, such as more intense "micro" mechanics. Neither game is more demanding then the other, it turns out in both games you never run out of things to do.
Not OP but I can answer this. The most obvious example is in Starcraft 1 you can’t select more than 12 units at a time, with a population cap of 200. This meant to move your army you had to make many, many more actions than in SC2 where you can just drag a box around your whole army (and/or hotkey that whole group) and attack+move.
Personally I think that was a technical limitation of the first game and a huge ergonomic improvement in the second.
Other things like having groups of buildings on hotkeys means you don’t have to go back to your base to order more units and set the rally point (where units go when they’re built) for all those buildings at once. This makes StarCraft to be an insanely micro-mechanic intensive game at high levels.
As the person who implemented it originally, it was not a technical limitation but a design choice.
In the early implementation of Warcraft 1 (1993-ish) I made it possible to select all the units on-screen at once with drag-select, and even more by scrolling and shift-clicking or shift-click-dragging.
Allen Adham (president of Blizzard, and exec producer for Warcraft) argued convincingly that only 4 units (for War 1) should be selected at a time. I argued against it pretty vociferously at the time … and in later days (post launch, most likely) came around to his way of thinking. Attacking with a superfluid of units takes less skill than selecting troops in small batches, and so requires to use more intent & skill.
Warcraft 2 allowed 9 units to be selected, and StarCraft more.
Thanks. Much of the discussion I used to enjoy about post-mortems in game dev. There was some kind of choice that went into the design process.
On the unit selection, a personal view on the situation is that nigh-instantaneous unit commands and obedience approaches valley of the dolls. It becomes too much like Wargames calculating theoretical death scenarios, abstracted from the issues of actual army logistics.
It takes some non-zero time. Units are not always doing exactly what they're supposed to. The fog of war is often worse not better than the game abstraction.
I don't think it's about blizzard but gaming culture in general that caused the gradual change. Gradually lowering the bar on skills required to play in some way.
Starcraft 2's F2 to select the whole army on the map is the other extreme and where it eventually landed right (I think that was introduced in a SC2 expansion, it was not a launch feature?)
I personally always hated limits on selecting in RTS games. Anything that would require micro-management was a turn off for me: it was immersion breaking, like that tank just sits there doing some stupid thing because the high supreme commander hasn't personally reached out to him to give a specific order what to do in this specific combat engagement. No.
[flagged]
Is this just some GPT drivel?
Seems to be a weird mishmash of two Quora answers to this question: https://qr.ae/psQebz. One AI-generated and the other human.
I have such fond memories of the original Starcraft. When I was like 7 or 8, my parents got a computer for the first time (this was ~2004) and installed Starcraft on it. We still didn't have internet so all I got was the single player aspect but I loved it and must have dumped close to 100 hours playing it over the next 2 years or so.
After that I stopped playing Starcraft but when I was in high school I picked it up again and started playing online. The regular matches were cool but the coolest matches were "custom scenarios", my favorite being "mouse hunt". It was a scenario where one team had the weakest players and the other team had the strongest players but the weak team could create barriers that the strong team couldn't destroy. From there the small team would slowly build up and defeat the stronger team or the strong team would wipe everyone out before they could.
It's been years since I played the OG Starcraft but I think I'll be picking it up again soon. It's just such a damn good game and it's really stood the test of time where even if you pick it up today it doesn't feel like a dated game, Blizzard made a truly timeless game with Starcraft and that's not an easy thing to do.
Never played Starcraft II but from what I heard they mostly kept to the original formula and many folks love that game.
My pops wouldn’t let us play on the internet at first so my brother played Warcraft and StarCraft using AppleTalk. I remember the only cable we had barely reached between the two computers so we had it hanging tight and if someone tripped over the cable we’d disconnect and have to start over.
Nice synchronicity — I just reinstalled Brood War last week.
Does anybody know the current state of Battle.net emulation for the older non-Remastered game? The bnetd drama was twenty years ago at this point and I would like to be able to play online without the Microsoft-Vivendi-Activision-Zenimax-Blizzard Borg having any say in it. RE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd
I prefer to patch only up to 1.15.x to keep network compatibility with the Classic Mac OS version of the game :)
You might be interested in: https://github.com/ShieldBattery/ShieldBattery
It's a project that few of us started almost a decade ago to ensure the longevity of this game. We don't try to emulate Battle.net at all, but instead we take only the gameplay itself and reimplement everything else ourselves.
It's a work in progress, so please let us know what you'd like to see in there that's currently missing if you do check it out.
Emulation of Battle.net is a DMCA violation, therefore a felony violation of copyright to use or distribute in the USA.
There is PVPGN, which has recent activity: https://github.com/pvpgn
Microsoft owns both GitHub and all Blizzard IP, so it's only a matter of time before they send a DMCA takedown order to themselves to remove this copyright-infringing material :)
I don’t think that is true? It would be a DMCA violation to distribute, not to use.
Circumventing an effective copyright measure (use) is a violation of section 1201, as is trafficking in circumvention tools (distribution). The major difference is that the act of circumventing itself may be protected by one of the exemptions approved by the Librarian of Congress every three years; there are no exemptions of any kind for the act of trafficking (which means that distribution of bnetd and PVPGN is illegal in all cases).
Near as I can tell, circumventing the access restrictions to enable netplay on a video game that is no longer distributed is not a DMCA exemption. (Circumventing DRM for a game whose DRM servers have been shut down is an exemption for local play only.)
Protocol reversal is not a DMCA violation. Otherwise MS would be in big trouble for when they reverse engineered the AOL protocol for the MSN Messenger.
You can't copyright a protocol.
So long as these systems aren't enabling pirating these classic games they are free and clear.
One of the things about battle.net though was that pirated StarCraft copies couldn't connect to it. Battle.net thus served as an "effective" copyright protection device -- circumvention of which is illegal under the DMCA. This has been tested in court, and the court found in favor of Blizzard. So yes, a judge has ruled that reversing the Battle.net protocol is a DMCA violation. That's why the bnetd.org domain was awarded to Blizzard (though a US court could not prevent the distribution of bnetd outside the USA).
Looked it up, didn't know there was already history, and that sucks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd?wprov=sfla1
What was the name after it was called bnetd? I think I probably have it somewhere.
Iirc there was a games server that emulated a bunch of thing including starcraft. I'm drawing a blank here.
Did anyone else think gameplay was not anywhere near as enjoyable in SC2? There was something a bit more raw about SC1/Brood War which I felt went missing in SC2. I didn't invest enough time into SC2 though.
For me, I think it's that you learned every nook and cranny of StarCraft. You knew the units and their strength, their health, how quickly 12 of unit X would wipe out 24 of unit Y. You could basically predict health bars in combat (assuming you knew upgrade level.) In StarCraft II, everything felt softer, less crisp, less exact. Throw 40 marines at something. Throw 100 zerglings at something. Just keep throwing things out while you focus on upgrades and expansion. You didn't know if you would win or lose a battle, so you just spam the enemy with the units you expected to do best. But you never felt quite so in control as you do with the original.
That's what it was for me.
I couldn't get into it. I wasn’t sure if it was the game itself, my movement away from being a gamer, or just missing the game I knew so well.
I played SC2 for only a short time, so I may misremember. The transition to 3d does not feel great, it makes movement a bit sluggish and slow.
Additionally, 2d enables more / exaggerated visual effects (like tank shot blast) and consistent visual sprites.
You can turn off these effects.
Turn off which effects?
I think part of it is just growing up as a human. I don't think I'll never enjoy games as much as I enjoyed Starcraft and Halo 1 & 2. It was just the perfect age for me
I think it's also the age of blizzard and the era of computing. Certain dark patterns common today weren't possible in that era, so games had more soul, and for most people Blizzard had already sacrificed it's soul to WoW before SC2 was announced.
A bit disappointed to see the discussion peter out at the release of SC2. Pro Brood War is not where it was at the time, but is still alive and well, with a much less exploitative business model, in fact. No more team houses and skeezy managers, the pro players make their money streaming these days.
Gameplay-wise, it is still in an incredible place. New builds are still being developed, not just one-off cheese builds but legitimate new approaches to matchups. Depending on matchup and player, you might watch a game where the core build hasn't changed in 15 years or a game that would be unrecognizable from 3 years ago.
Also, I would love for this guy to do a deep dive on the SC:BW approach to balance, which is map-based rather than based on traditional unit-based balance changes. This way the community is effectively able to balance the game themselves.
> Also, I would love for this guy to do a deep dive on the SC:BW approach to balance, which is map-based rather than based on traditional unit-based balance changes. This way the community is effectively able to balance the game themselves.
Yes, that it something really important that the modern landscape of competitive gaming lost and the frequency of patching increasing. Not just in BW, older fighting games, especially those arcade based ones, people found ways (which sometimes blur the lines between exploit or technique) to keep pushing the bounders. Things like Kara-cancels in 3s, were one is using a mechanic meant to facilitate the throw input to extend the range of the throw. Or wave dashing. It is wild how even character tier lists changed in the original SmashBros 64.
And also how people adapt to this meta changing discoveries, like the bisu-build in BW or when Ricki Ortiz unleashed v-cancel in sfa2!
You might want to try SSF2: New Legacy; an unofficial fan-made fork of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo hack-rom.
https://newlegacy.fr
It gets rid of a lot of the randomness and glitches of the original game. If you don't know what bugs there are, here are the links for it:
https://youtu.be/LPFAEeIbRq4 ~ Transcript: http://zachd.com/nki/NKI-Vol12.Super.Turbo.txt
https://youtu.be/VQhwFORucV4 ~ Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aFZQxbHR91AyPZLWaxYuPjby...
Kara-cancels were a glitch in SF2 turned into a feature in all subsequent games, in SF3 devs added ability to kara cancel into throws, probably because of Alex being a protagonist (:
I work at Twitch and I can just barely understand this post, the level of depth people find in these "finished" games is astounding.
That is because I only mentioned them, didn't explain them.
Kara-cancel is a mechanic that lets you extend the range of your moves, in 3s is used for throws.
So the input for throws in 3s is lp+lk. Now, what happens if while one is trying to press the buttons at the same time they press one slighty before the other? A move will start to come out and then you can't throw because you are doing another move. To make it easier to input throws, devs made so that _any_ move can be canceled into a throw in the first 5 frames of the move. 5 frames is 5/60ths of a second.
Separate to that, some moves move the character forward. Ej. Chunli's HK. So people figured out that if you press a move that moved your character forward and then canceled that into a throw you can extend the effective range of your throw.
Mind you doing this means pressing a button 83 milliseconds before the other one. Which is of course not something you can do by thinking about it, instead you learn to position your hand in a way so that when you move it down together one finger lands before the other two. The name kara-cancels comes from the Japanese word for empty, because you are canceling a move that never came out.
Now I don't know the history, whether the mechanic was first found in 3s and then in SF2T or not, but it is an example of a mechanic intended to ease the input of something being used to expand the toolkit of a character.
V-cancel (not sure if that was the name ppl used for it, didn't play sfa2) refers to the fact that in sfa2 the number of frames to go from standing to downblock is more that the number of frames a character needs to go from standing to a low attack if the character is in v-ism. This means that if two characters are standing next to each other and one activates their v super, they have a guaranteed hit.
This was first used by Ricki Ortiz in a tournament setting in a finals and that is how it became wildly know. The story of it was documented in Sirlin's Play to Win book, which is how I learned about it. https://www.sirlin.net/ptw
I was just making a statement on depth so was not expecting a actual explanation but thank you for that. I personally have a hangout where terminology makes things seem harder than it is, I just have to dig in and learn the terms and then things fall into place.
Anyway appreciate the indepth answer.
I’m looking forward to FlaSh getting back to the top of his game and hitting the #1 spot again now that he is back from his military service. Been watching every one of the Artosis casts for the past week or so. I suck at the game but it’s always a good time watching the pros.
I’d also comment on Broodwars approach of balance by making everything overpowered (in the right circumstance) rather than nerfing anything that stood out at any point.
There were a lot of units that could single handedly turn the tide in the right scenario. Vulture mines could stop a rush in their tracks, storm could wipe an army, dark swarm could negate a dug in fortification, a reaver in a shuttle could take out all production.
It led to crazy chaos and it was an incredibly entertaining spectacle.
What I find really fascinating about StarCraft is that players stick to their races, even if they think the matchup is weak for their race.
Most (probably all?) tournaments require you to pick your race and keep it for the whole tournament. No switching based on map or matchup. But you can pick random.
My amateur impression was the following rankings:
Easy to hardest to play: Protoss, Zerg, Terran
Best when mastered: Terran, Zerg, Protoss
I wasn’t tapped into the pro/competitive side so I’m sure it played out differently for them.
I've yet seen another game with as good pathfinding as StarCraft 2. The way 100s of units flow around another 100s of moving units like water is very impressive, even today.
Does anyone know what's the special sauce?
From https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-...
> whenever harvesters are on their way to get minerals, or when they’re on the way back carrying those minerals, they ignore collisions with other units
Maybe that's part of the fluid behaviour you noticed.
The blog contains more technical posts about StarCraft 2, so you might find that "special sauce" somewhere else in there :)
This is about harvesters, which is only the case when they are mining minerals / gas.
The commenter was talking about army movements, units which actually collide with each other.
The blog is interesting, but it is about sc1. Pathfinding in sc1 is so terrible that moving units where you want is part of what's make one a pro player.
Apparently smart triangulation of the game world, A*, plus boids pretty much.
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014514/AI-Navigation-It-s-Not
What’s amazing about Blizzard is that they got me so early that I saw Warhammer Fantasy and 40K as the store brands until sometime in my twenties.
Someone should make a documentary about the history of StarCraft and where it's going next
I also wish we saw more AI leagues and gameplay
One of the best games of all time.
This game brings me so much nostalgia. I used to play SC when I was a middle school student from 2000 to 2002. I was so good at the game that around my age group I was probably the best in Seoul. I also participated at a pro tournament (ongamenet I believe), but lost to NaDa during the knockout stage. Then I moved to the states so I stopped playing.
I stopped playing when Blizzard made you create an online account to play your newly purchased single-player game.
and no lan play.
wonder if that kind of friction kills things.
There’s a story behind the no lan play + mandatory account thing. As the article says, StarCraft was huge in South Korea.
The lesser known part is that most people there did not play the game on their home PCs, they played it at PC cafes (PC bangs). These establishments engaged in large scale piracy of the game, installing it on hundreds of PCs without a license. They used the LAN play feature to bypass Blizzard entirely. So the lack of LAN play and the account requirement are a direct response to mass piracy of their game in Korea.
Starcraft shipped with a "spawn installation" feature that let you do this specifically to support LAN play
If you didn't intend to play on Battle.Net or play the single player campaigns, you never needed more than the Spawn installation
I would seriously question if these were actually pirates copies at all ...
The spawn installation feature only supported 8 copies of the game per CD and was only intended for personal use among friends and family. Those PC cafes in Korea were renting out the game 24/7 as a commercial operation.
One may wonder if you should respond at all, given how well it played out for StarCraft in Korea. Sometimes what you see as an impediment is in fact the essential part of the success.
The game being a big hit in SK is nice theoretically but doesn't mean you can afford to develop patches or sequels if nobody is actually buying copies of it.
SC was successful in large part thanks to the community, so maybe to replicate the success, game developers need to figure out how to recreate the same thing and coexist with a robust community. I think monthly subscriptions are an absolute blocker for some great community contributions, for example.
What are you talking about? At least 4.5 million copies were sold in SK. The question is, did lan clubs reduce or increase the sales? It's hard to know for sure, since no AB-test was made but I strongly suspect that they did increase the sales by a huge amount even if the clubs themselves didn't buy a single copy. Give 'em the razor, sell 'em the blades.
That combination is also when I stopped playing blizzard games, except for a short stint with Hearthstone. I also wonder how many were lost because they didn't continue to cater to the core player base.
Or maybe they did, and people like you and me were just left behind. Maybe a cultural difference between those who experienced LAN parties and those who didn't.
>Maybe a cultural difference between those who experienced LAN parties and those who didn't.
I think this is it more than anything. If all you know is "quick match" matchmaking, it's hard to realize what you're missing. LAN parties were really awesome.
I did one (bunch of 35 yo guys) a few weeks ago, and it’s still just as awesome as before. It’s just a shame you cannot play any game released in the past 15 or so years, so you go back to Warcraft III :/
it doesn't. you're a radical
It killed it for me also, and really gaming in general.
If I need permission from your server to play, then it's not really mine. And the whole thing with StarCraft for me and my friends is that this was our thing.
Several of us are now network engineers because we had to learn that skillset to play StarCraft at a LAN party without lag. The phone lines weren't cutting it.
Injecting blizzard servers into the loop, to be tolerated without recourse, totally ruined it for those of us who didn't live near a decent ISP. We were so excited about the sequel and it turned out to be pretty much unplayable online.
> If I need permission from your server to play, then it's not really mine.
If you already need permission to even boot your PC, what more is it to need permission to start a game?
It’s a sad age we’re living in.
On one hand, open source thrives in a very well connected computer world, on the other hand, the fact that programs can phone home and update themselves every day has redefined software entirely, and not always in a good way. We are making much less robust software today. Both because it relies on connectivity, and because we can ship it first and fix it later.
There is a lively stage of SC2 YouTubers, be they commentators (like LowkoTV) or gammers. Harstem is dark and edgy, including his iconic series "Is it IMBA or do I suck?". At the same time, it is lovely to watch challenges by MaNa and uThermal - especially on how much fun they have, regardless of whether they are winning.
Also, it is still interesting to see the diversity of grandmasters' personal play styles. In a mature game, one would expect it to converge to a single "optimal" playstyle. Yet, even after the dust of a new balance patch settles, it is impressive. And for a reminder, SC2: Legacy of the Void is over 8 years old.
Who else still listens to the StarCraft music OST? I listen to it a few times a year and get in the zone.
I had the Terran 1 theme as my cell phone ringtone for a long time :-)
>Adham and Morhaime fostered as non-hierarchical a structure as possible at Blizzard, such that everyone, regardless of their ostensible role — from programmers to artists, testers to marketers — felt empowered to make design suggestions, knowing that they would be acted upon if they were judged worthy by their peers.
General question, how do you balance between trying to get everyone's feedback vs just being more fast and efficient?especially in the early stages where time is usually pretty critical
At that time, by working ungodly amounts of hours every week.
[edit] which is not sustainable and I do not recommend!
Thank you gor providing the thousands of hours of fun playing your games!
Blizzard was famous at the time for having a release date of "when it's done" for all of their project. One of the lessons to learn from their success in those times is that, at least in art/wntertainment, time is not nearly as critical as quality.
I think, as Blizzard demonstrated, it's not universally true that faster is better.
In some markets it's better to be slower to market with a better product, e.g. Apple
I just want to go play a game of broodwar now on battlenet. Guessing this isn't possible?
Of course it’s possible. Just buy SC Remastered and get online.
I used to play Starcraft a lot, but i don't know anything about mods, extensions, multiplayer, etc. From where can I download the best current release (official or not, i don't care) + maybe some extra such as better/HD textures? Is there any easy path to follow?
I cannot tell from your comment if you're aware of StarCraft: Remastered - it's $15, includes original/Brood Wars, and has modernized skin, but plays identically (and is compatible with) the original. $15 USD.
https://starcraft.blizzard.com/en-us/
to be clear because this is often a point of confusion (I believe it was done intentionally to be confusing but I digress). The remastered client is actually free, the HD skin (and ladder play) is $15. So you can play online with custom maps and the campaign and so on for free.
Whatever happened to Giyom (Gulliaume Patry)? I saw ElKY (Bertrand Grospeller) is a well known poker player now.
Running a French restaurant in Korea, according to korean wiki
https://namu.wiki/w/%EA%B8%B0%EC%9A%A4%20%ED%8C%A8%ED%8A%B8%...
What I really want to know is why all three worker units float. What caused that design? Was it a result of having to balance spider mines? A happy accident? A conscious design from the start? If so why? This keeps me up at night.
It's a remnant of the 1996 “orcs in space” version of StarCraft where the minerals were floating space rocks and Vespene didn't exist yet. Check out this early screenshot with a harvesting Drone for example: https://tcrf.net/images/f/fa/SC-WCII-2.GIF
These graphics have a lot that reminds me of Rock and Roll Racing for some reason
GUITAR SOUNDS
There is also a the man in the tower for terrans - doesn't count towards supply.
https://old.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/iod6dr/in_respon...
Legend has it that the missile turret operator and hurl a load further than a devourer.
What do you mean by float? If you mean that work units can move through other units when mining minerals, that is a conscious design decision that was made for performance reasons. Having upwards of 40 worker units having to constantly calculate paths to and from the command center without being allowed to move through each other or move through other units that might cross their path would have slowed the game down to a crawl.
Of course people figured this out and managed to exploit it for other purposes, but those were seen to be too minor to bother fixing.
He means that they literally hover over the ground. They don't walk, their movement animation doesn't involve legs.
I had no idea the terran SCV floated. I thought it had wheels.
The mechanics of spider mines is they "hit anything that touches the ground". There are several units they don't hit such as all workers, vultures themselves, archons etc... This is all because those units "float".
I think “floating” units also have a different movement behaviour. They move a lot more like flying units. Do they also stack and transit through each other? I don’t recall.
Workers transit through units when mining, but thats the only unique behavior I think. I'm not positive though.
I will never understand how Starcraft II failed
The person who returned to them the source code disk has done everyone dirty. I’m optimistic Microsoft will eventually open source stuff but goddammit.
An open source StarCraft could have lead to a renaissance of the genre, but he found it more important to get like 250 quid of unsold Overwatch trash from the blizz store.
I did check was there any follow-up on the story and found out the guy in question has since gotten into NFTs, an irony so great I can only laugh.
Strong agree. A game this old and this beloved should belong to everyone at this point.
Really hoping that Microsoft buying Blizzard, might lead to a resurgence in interest and development, along the lines of the resources put into Age of Empires.
> Starcraft was a superb game by any standard, the most tactically intricate, balanced, and polished RTS to date
I'd say M.A.X. was no less tactically intricate - albeit through infinite configurability of things.
My only beef with the article was in how in North America, broadband was challenging. We had cable modems back in 1994. I grew up in a single wide trailer with a single mom and even we could afford it. I was downloading from Napster in 1996.
You were definitely a very early adopter if you had broadband in 1994. It wasn’t until the late 90s that most people started switching away from dialup.
I guess my area in Florida had it good
Sounds like it. My house in Miami was subject to Adelphia (a notorious scam company) while my friend 20 miles away had fiber to the curb in 2002 or something.
We had Roadrunner
>We had cable modems back in 1994.
The first residential availability of cable modems was by @Home Network in 1996 and served only the San Francisco Bay Area. By the end of 1996, @Home Network had 20,000 users.
I highly doubt you were one of them but I suppose it's possible.
Roadrunner, south Florida, 1994 - I can second this
We even had sega channel, which was this insanely cool cartridge you plugged intoyour genesis and had a coax cable input.
You could download and play sega genesis games, rotating every month
I grew up in an American suburb and dialup was the norm for me through high school (early/mid-2000s). We did have a solid 56K connection though (which usually ran at about 53.3 kbps) thanks to MSN (back when it was a full-fledged ISP and not a news aggregator).
It wasn't until the latter part of that decade that home broadband became relatively common, and it wasn't particularly fast (ca. 10 Mbps IIRC) nor symmetrical (upload speed was a small fraction of download speed). I had a friend out in the sticks who had to contend with satellite+dialup past 2010.
Decent speeds (50 Mbps+) didn't roll out en masse until the middle part of the 2010s, especially as Netflix exploded.
Napster released in 1999
I was wrong on that point
You were very much not the norm. Also, cable internet wasn't even released to the public until 1996. The only residential "broadband" options at that time were DSL and ISDN, which were both expensive and had very limited proliferation. Only 10 million people had cable internet in 2002.