This article was written by Halfthought for the Battle.net and Teamliquid forums and has been edited for publication on The Ghetto.

Almost all of Starcraft II’s current balance problems can be pinpointed on the Roach.  The majority of gripes about Starcraft II balance and unit diversity more-or-less stem from this completely misguided unit.

The Roach’s role is screwed up.  It originally gained 15 health per second in its 2008 reveal.  It has now been nerfed to earning this regeneration when upgraded and burrowed.  Its initially-creative role has been nerfed out of existence.

They are now a unit that costs 75 minerals and 25 gas, but somehow do the most basic ranged damage per second in the entirety of the Tier 1 tech tree.  They have 145 health, the highest for its cost, and the highest period outside of the Protoss army.  They are also a ranged unit, although they cannot attack air.  They cost one supply.  I almost forgot, they start off with two armor points.  To make things even more absurd, they have upgrades to allow them to move at fast speeds, faster than any basic unit except Zerglings, and also regenerate their health when burrowed.  And they can move while burrowed with the upgrade.

That is absurd. If someone told me a unit like this would stand a chance at making it to retail before the finish of the Starcraft II beta, I would have told them they were insane.  On paper, the unit is simply absurd.

I am not complaining Roaches are overpowered, and that’s precisely what’s wrong with the game.  They should be overpowered.

In order to ensure the Roach is not overpowered, the Protoss and Terran received Marauders and Immortals.  Without these two units, Terran would lose every game against the Zerg, and the Protoss would be at a ridiculous disadvantage.

Blizzard ensured the Roach isn’t overpowered by creating an equally-overpowering counter.  An overpowered counter.   These counters are easily available.  Located at Tier 1.5 and for a price of 100 minerals and 25 gas, the Marauder does 13.5 damage per second against the Roach.  With Stim Packs, it deals 20 damage per second.

While most Tier 1 units do very good damage for their cost, they are usually balanced because they are easy to kill.  For cost, Marines will deal three times as much damage as Carriers, but Marines die easily to splash damage.  The Marauder does not.

Once again, in a vacuum, the Marauder is overpowered like the Roach, because of the Roach.  Specifically, they are overpowered against Roaches.  And as a result, against armor in general.

Finally, the Protoss have the Immortal.  The Immortal single-handedly makes Terran mechanical units nonviable.  Sure, Terrans can EMP, but it is not nearly as reliable as infantry builds, or more recently, massing Marauders.  The Immortal, by any measure, is an overpowered unit.  It is also the single largest “counter” in Starcraft, doing thirty extra damage versus Armored, and is the only unit to carry more than a 50 percent bonus.  Against Armored, they deal 35 damage per second.  With the exception of Battlecruisers, that is the single highest damage per second in either Starcraft or Starcraft II.

What we have is an arms race caused by the Roach.  Starcraft II damage is generally higher, but by a magnitude of 30 to 40 percent.  Not 200 percent.  The Marauder has too much health for both its damage potential and in relation to the theme of Terran play.  And the Immortal simply deals too much damage versus armored units.

Remove it, or drastically rework it.  Rebalance the game accordingly, and most of the current gameplay problems in Starcraft II will no longer exist.  Terran Mech will be viable.  Infantry play will be more diverse.  Protoss versus Zerg will be more dyanmic.  Templars will be able to be balanced correctly.  Zerg were not designed for a 145-health, two-armor, 16-damage, 75-mineral, 25-gas unit.  Starcraft is not designed around such a unit.

Not quite equals with the class of the first-person shooter genre, 1995’s Descent was closer to Steel Battalion than Doom.  Winning an audience as the first true three-dimensional shooter, it firmly held the crown as “Game Most Likely to Induce Vomit” until the arrival of Mirror’s Edge.  We’re now eleven years removed from Descent 3.  And the current word is that Interplay, creator of the franchise and company risen from the dead, reclaimed the Descent copyright about two years ago.

I’m all for a return to one of my childhood time sinks.  I just don’t know what audience Descent appeals to in 2010.

Certainly popular in its day, Descent was totally unapologetic about what audience it was appealing to. And when it now costs millions to make a video game for the shooter audience, who is going to buy in?

When older gamers claim newcomers have it easy, Descent is the archetype.  Any synopsis of the game is disclaimered with “once you figure out the controls”.  Yes, the game is too complicated for a mouse and keyboard.

The default controls, a.k.a. “wat”.

Let me put it this way: Know how real-time strategy players discussing what control groups they use?  Descent players discuss what control schemes they use. By the time Descent 3 rolled around, some combination of the keyboard and a premium joystick was the best way to go.  Descent is stuck in a bizarre void untouched by any other shooter in the history of the industry.

I’m going to assume there weren’t a lot of moms and dads who had their eyes on a Sidewinder joystick instead of a Nintendo 64.  So not only was the game built for an older audience, it was built for one patient enough to drop the change for the equipment and master the learning curve.

The surprising thing?  The twin thumbsticks on a controller are actually ideal for Descent.  Shooting required you to orient the nose of the ship on whatever you wanted to die, so the game has no twitch factor.  But there isn’t enough buttons to go around, nor is there a comfortable way to handle Descent’s third axis of movement, verified when the Playstation port of Descent proved inadequate.

And obviously, the economics bely producing the title for its proven audience.  We’re now eleven years removed from any brand recognition the game may have had.  And with shooters even more detached from Descent than they were in 1995, how are you going to sell Descent to the Call of Duty audience?  A game whose combat is best compared to a bullet hell shooter?

So you have one option to make Descent work: Create a really fucking good video game that appeals to a wide audience.  And while we never held it against the shooter, it never proved it could do that.

Every April 1st, creative mongrels use the internet to wreak havoc on the human condition.  I don’t have the time for an epic April Fool’s joke.  Let me comment on another.

Teamliquid.net is “introducing” SC2ProMod: Because we already determined the public won’t watch Starcraft if players don’t play regional manager with their mineral line.  In a world oblivious to time zones and the concept of April Fool’s, where each part of the Earth operates on a different clock, people missed the fucking point:

As future reference for Starcraft III and the mind-control headset that will dumb down the game for noobs with slow fingers, it is important to remember why people would think this isn’t an April Fool’s joke.  Let’s travel back to 2007 and 2008, when the internet learned Starcraft would have a competent interface and the internet lost its fucking mind.

And since Blizzard put multiple building selection in their coffee, Starcraft II was ruined and the company was never heard from again.

Right?  Right?

It’s always struck me curious that Blizzard Entertainment has done little to dictate the direction of the real-time strategy genre despite owning it for fifteen years.  At least when it comes to the enemies of Infinity Ward and Nintendo, developers act like computer worms, merely replicating Call of Duty and Mario.  Compare the gameplay direction of Blizzard’s best to their closest competition (Age of Empires, Company of Heroes, Total Annihilation), and it’s like a world where nobody tried to copy what made Street Fighter so successful.

See, Blizzard strategy games are what real-time strategy would be if it had originated in the arcades.  No other competitive games demand a skill set that twists hand-eye and mental dexterity into knots.  And  surprisingly enough, nobody’s taken their cue.  So I would like to thank Blizzard Entertainment: It is a guarantee that Starcraft II will ruin the next decade of my life by consuming it.

When I tore into Starcraft II, I did it because “this game has issues” is better criticism of a beta build than “I want to make love to you, Dustin Browder!”  Enough of that crap.  This is going to be one of the greatest games of all-time.  Not just “quality game that chewed our time” material, this game is a fucking statement, a gigantic middle finger to anyone who believed the company couldn’t create a legendary strategy game without the company’s founding fathers or a crappy, outdated interface.

I totally called it: Starcraft II would be Blizzard’s arcade-strategy style wrapped in a web of mindgames.  And so far, we’ve only seen smudges of potential, where David Kim rolls a Baneling amoeba into some bastard’s dignity, where Orb fulfills the wet dream of any Protoss-on-Zerg hate crime.

Really, has it dawned on people yet?  We’re discussing and embracing a beta build as though it has a rich history!  The “Who’s who?” of international Starcraft discovering that talent from all walks of the genre can match them blow for blow.  This divide’s proving close enough that Starcraft fans are resting hope on the Koreans still locked into KeSPA contracts.  Did you see Major League Gaming’s beta-cast between IdrA and CauthonLuck?

Where Randy Couture versus Brock Lesnar could embrace “world-class game-planner versus the most terrifying professional wrestler of the last twenty years”, you can now have “Premiere American Starcraft player discovering one of Warcraft III’s original superstars can hang with him”. Styles sell tickets, storylines sell tickets, and in Starcraft II, the storylines are the playstyles. Think this isn’t serious business?  I’ll be damned if gamers won’t look down upon each other for playing shitty games like Warcraft III, and tune in to watch competitive gaming prove the superiority of Starcraft above all else.

And it’s doing it with a balance build more playable than any Command and Conquer game ever was, more playable than Reign of Chaos ever was.  Just wait until Blizzard uses the next three years to tweak the finer things.  And then watch the superstars turn the game into clockwork, a game of Blitz chess with two-hundred-and-fifty pieces jockeying for position.

Yes.  This game is at least two months away from retail.  And it’s already that good.

For whatever reason, I’ve had little luck finding people to agree with me on this.  It’s really unfathomable I need to explain the benefits of surprise attacks in a real-time strategy game.  But I’m going to lobby for this until my fingers are stubs or IdrA wins an important showmatch: Starcraft II needs a Hold Fire command for every unit on the battlefield.  The only reason to go without a Hold Fire command is that “The game is not balanced for Hold Fire”.  And if that’s the case, I have to wonder how Blizzard Entertainment used the last two decades to become game development rockstars.

Scary enough, Blizzard strategy games have earned a perception that they reward mouse speed and nothing else.  The entire post-announcement development cycle of Starcraft II has been a stab at changing this, transforming mechanical game abilities (fighting the twelve-unit selection cap and single-building selection) into various decision-making skills.  Hand-eye coordination will maintain its value, but it’s clear this game is supposed to be a cerebral cage fight.  So why deny gamers access to a significant micromanagement and strategy option that has been validated by Command and Conquer, Supreme Commander, and nearly every military conflict in the history of this damn planet?

Starcraft lacked a true Hold Fire command, and even proved dangerous there; clever use of the Hold Position command could turn a minefield of Lurkers into a crime scene.  Hell, Blizzard has already granted a dedicated Hold Fire button to any unit in Starcraft II that can cloak.  Presumably to, you know, allow players to set traps and conceal their position.

Mindrape.

The benefits for Siege Tanks are obvious enough, but it would extend to any ranged unit with a high damage rate or high mobility.  And when you’ve built your competitive map pool on “valley leading towards a ramp that leads into a base on higher terrain”, there’s no need to explain the benefits of making things a little too quiet.

And hasn’t Blizzard made every implication they want this game built for a television audience?  An American audience infatuated with sports that can hinge on a single play?  When Youtube’s most popular competitive gaming videos are limited to that lucky knife kill in Modern Warfare 2, dare to say how much publicity you can reap from “the ten seconds that turned the world’s largest Starcraft tournament”?  The part where some shmuck gets his pro gaming career defined by the day he got mindfucked?

There is absolutely no reason to go without a Hold Fire command when Starcraft II’s development and Blizzard’s ambitions indicate the game would benefit from it.  Hold Fire embraces the perception of mind-over-micromanagement, and the gameplay mechanic would be a benefit to both of those skills.

Jim Sterling of Destructoid is awesome.  He’s mainstream gaming journalism’s harbringer of British cynicism, a loose cannon who openly rejects “news that isn’t news” while finding room for strong opinion.  And I want to thank him for the indie game shitstorm that has spilled over for a larger audience to read about.  The first salvo?  Artgame developers need less art and more game.

What most of you are doing right now is easy. It’s easy as fuck to make some vague shapes and rambling poetry dialog and claim that it has meaning. Actually try making an artistic, important, introspective game, but try making it fun at the same time. Try and do more with your message than throwing some obscure ideas together and telling us to figure it out. You’re not being clever, you’re not being deep, and you sure as fuck aren’t being unique. You’re being like all the other indie games that act like indie games.

The second? Big-budget doesn’t mean “stale”, and indie doesn’t mean “creative”.

The most perfect example of this problem came from G4TV’s Sterling McGarvey, who I briefly mentioned in a more humorous post. His response to the whole debate was one that, I think, truly sums up my major issue with those who defend art games.

“I’ll take a ‘pretentious artsy-fartsy indie game’ over creatively bankrupt bullshit any day,” is what he said.

Now, McGarvey’s comment was but one of many that shared similar sentiments, but it was a perfect snapshot of the big fallacy among those who stand up for art games — this idea that art games cannot be creatively bankrupt themselves, and that if you are against the indie crowd, you are against originality. This also leads onto a further incorrect but all-too common assumption — the idea that because something is innovative, it is automatically good.

I’ve played video games for twenty-one years and concluded they are a strong candidate for social history.  Technological limitations aside, the black-and-white storytelling in eight-bit Nintendo games can tell you much about the black-and-white Cold War climate they were created in.  It’s difficult to deny gaming can be a form of expression.

But like Mr. Sterling, I recognize artgames have issues.  And I don’t like that any criticism of the movement means we “don’t get it” or that we are “generalizing”.  Pick any criticism out of his articles: He’s either “trolling for views” or “doesn’t understand what art games are supposed to be” (in the same way a gamer doesn’t get World of Warcraft because he only got one character to level eighty).

The “No Russian” scene in Modern Warfare 2 was deliberately designed to make us feel uncomfortable.  BioShock’s approach to libertarian philosophy was a conduit for provoking thought.  And even indie darling Braid used an ambiguous, “the story is whatever you think it was” approach.  These games were capable of making statements because they were fun to play.

And with the artgame movement, I see the nether reaches of the internet responding to large-budget games that use graphics and technical superiority as a guise to cover up poor gameplay.  How are they doing it?  By using art and technical gimmicks…as a guise to cover up poor gameplay.

It’s quite telling in a period of time where Japanese game development has gotten its ass kicked on any front that doesn’t include “Wii” or “Mario”, the Japanese indie scene has thrashed this side of the ocean.  For every Braid, there’s a Cave Story, Melty Blood, or Touhou that dares to be as professional and playable as its commercial counterparts. And while these games may not be artistic expressions, Japanese doujin developers have developed a greater foundation for making “art” when they feel the time is right.

So believe me: People aren’t rejecting games that want to express themselves.  They just don’t want to play bad video games.  And as difficult as it is for one or many amateurs to press the right buttons and make a game fun, you’re going to be judged against the game industry you aspire to change.

I hold dual allegiance to Warcraft III and Starcraft.  My beef with Starcraft has always been its community’s disdain for the role-playing strategy model.  Ironically, their hatred is always cut from the same mold: “I played Reign of Chaos in 2002.  Since bashing newbs was never as competitive as that Starcraft tournament I won money at, the game sucked.”

Yes, the impact of random items and the power of hero units were legitimate gripes.  Warcraft III was not a perfect game and it had some particularly glaring issues.  But since the dirt sheets claim Starcraft II is not a hoax, we need to clear something up: All of the gameplay issues that plagued Warcraft III’s early days will return to haunt Starcraft II.  The question is whether Starcraft players will put aside their hatred for the Warcraft series and come to terms with that.

All the same arguments can be compared to Starcraft’s leap forward from Warcraft II:  Dynamic balance between three factions?  Didn’t know “Terrans can’t stop a six-food Spawning Pool build” and “Zealots can’t compete with Zergling mobility” were racial specialties.  And way to bridge the gap between the elite and scrubs with your pointless interface upgrades.  You may have a centralized gaming server to work with, but good luck being the competitive standard Warcraft II was.

Didn’t turn out that way.  But just as it took several years for Boxer to demonstrate Vultures and Dropships weren’t useless pieces of metal, Moon and Grubby had to beat the crap out of each other to flesh out Warcraft’s fantastic metagame.

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Ironically, a role-playing game inspired me to write this entry.  I won’t tackle it until Dragon Age is an afterthought, but the reviews suggest the soon-to-be-legendary Mass Effect 2 is akin to “Borderlands, this is how you do a role-playing shooter.”  However, I had an allergic reaction to one review snippet:

Gears of War fans should feel right at home with the cover mechanics and controls. Thankfully, there is still a huge emphasis on tactics and RPG stats – Modern Warfare 3 this is most definitely not.

Four years since Gears of War popularized cover mechanics, and as good as Uncharted 2 worked the flavor, I’m already sick of hiding behind walls.

It’s been a decade since Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena were the creative heights of twitch shooting.  Since then, developers have gone out of their way to prevent pinball wizards from permeating the new pay-to-play shooter culture of X-Box Live and beyond.

I’ve come to tolerate it.  Twitch shooters didn’t die because they were an inferior format; the business of gaming changed.  My problem?  We’re still hailing and deriding “Doom clones” that embodied nothing Doom and its successors were about.

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I have unkind things to say about Nintendo’s products.

The first?  I’d like to congratulate the designers of The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks.  I went twenty-three years without a babysitter and did pretty good for myself.  Thanks to Captain Obvious: The Game, that streak is now dead.

The second?  The point of this entry.  New Super Mario Brothers Wii doesn’t quite have the same ring as Super Mario World, but it’s a much better game than I was expecting. Too bad the designers nearly wrecked the multiplayer aspect.

In single-player, the Super Guide feature allows Luigi to complete sections of the game that you weren’t man enough to endure.  Unsurprisingly, people had a problem with this.  Surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad as one would expect, since you have to die a number of times before you get the option to employ the feature.  In addition, Satoru Iwata’s comparison of the Super Guide to the P-Wing was actually an intelligent and rational headshot.

In multiplayer, that option is substituted with pressing the A-button.  This encases your character in a bubble, allowing the remaining players to continue the level and free you at a later point.  As a means for clearing the hair-pulling timed jumps in the game’s later levels?  Freeing a player that’s been trapped by the camera’s confines?  It’s justified.  But in a defiance of common sense, you can “bubble” as many times as you want (as can be seen in this video).

PRESS A TO NOT DIE

I understand a swath of this gaming generation has a skill level somewhere close to “I know where the buttons are and I’m not afraid to press them”.  I understand that I’ve railed against retro gamers for being stuck in the past, and I am now complaining about an “everybody wins” gameplay mechanic.  But if you are not going to play the game, why bother playing it?

The Mario formula has endured twenty-five years because it is the most universally-loved pick-up-and-play concept in gaming.  And part of that formula means you must be punished for doing stupid things.  Now, you are telling people they can use the bubble to save themselves from the depths below, from a nasty run-in with a bipedal turtle.  And the kicker?  If you use the bubble to save yourself and the rest of your teammates die, you will not be penalized for it.  Nope.  The level starts over and you do not lose any lives in the process.

I’m all for a game that does its best to accompany players of all skill levels, but when a device-of-last-resort is portrayed as an “easy button”, it damn sure cheapens the fun.

Author’s Note: This is one entry in a series highlighting the “greatest” games of all-time.  This is not a “best” games list. “Quality” is only part of the story.  This list exists to recognize the impact and legacy of selected video games. It is written from the perspective of a North American gamer who has witnessed the North American reception to the business of video games.  Thus, Pro Evolution Soccer will not make the list because soccer is just football without cage fighting.  Mother 3 will not be featured because in the States, Mother 3 is a porno.  And despite the injustice in a medium where Charlie’s Angels and Big Rigs were sold in the name of the dollar, Cave Story and Counter-Strike are disqualified because they weren’t intended as commercial releases.  For that reason. I do not care if Game X was totally better than Game Y.  I do not care if your friends jerked to Game Z until four in the morning.  Don’t like a selection?  Argue it on the criteria I’ve established.  We good?  Good.

Author’s Note, Part 2: This was originally intended to be a sliver of a year-end “Games of the Decade” entry.  But given my criteria, it proved impossible.  Go ahead: Argue that the three-month-old Uncharted 2: Among Thieves belongs on a list designed to highlight video games that changed the industry for years down the road.

Halo: Combat Evolved
X-Box (Later Ported to PC)
Developed: Bungie Studios
Published: Microsoft Game Studios
Released: November 15, 2001

It’s a dose of polarization: Halo is gaming’s modern-day, love-hate affair.  If Doom or Unreal Tournament is your fancy, you hate it.  You hate it because it’s driving the most shooter-capable platform to irrelevance.  You hate it because it ripped Starsiege: Tribes’ blueprint and turned the dial to half-speed.  You hate it because college campuses are now colonies for half-gamer-half-drunk adults who think they’re the baddest men in competitive gaming.

That hate is your concession: Halo: Combat Evolved is one of the most important video games in the medium’s history and one of the all-time greats. It was the perfect game for the right system and the right audience at the right time.  And whether you think the industry is better or worse off, it changed a whole lot.

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