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.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Gameplay, Starcraft, Starcraft II. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.