If you’re a fan of Starcraft/kinky sadist stuff, you’ve probably read/jacked off to the Starcraft II Battle.net forums recently. If you buy the forum’s take on a pre-Beta build featuring two playable races that only a handful of people have gotten to test, you know that Starcraft II is on the path to becoming an abysmal disappointment.

The concern amongst fans of the professional Starcraft scene (twenty-something virgins who think chess stole its depth from Starcraft) is the inclusion of multiple-building selection. This gameplay feature is a modern real-time strategy mechanic that allows you to select multiple buildings and have them all take the same action. Example: if you need all of your Barracks to train marines, you would highlight all of these buildings and tell all of them to build a Marine with a single mouse click or hotkey. The reason? Creating this user interface convenience would lessen the skill gap between second and third-tier players and eliminate macromanagement (allocation of resources) as a required skill. This would damage the legitimacy of the game as their chosen sport and trust me, you wouldn’t want to lose the Starcraft NCAA Tournament because of something this silly.

Now, before you jump the wagon and berate this vocal minority (which I will do plenty of further down the page), I think it’s best our readers understand there is some precedent for this argument. Subliminally (and Starcraft fans are too retarded to articulate this), they feel current video game trends are fueled primarily by a business model which trades depth for accessibility in order to widen its potential buyer base, and that Starcraft II will be the extension of this model into the real-time strategy genre. When you consider that side of things, it’s not such a crazy concept. The Halo series took a genre defined by its frenetic gameplay and disguised slow, mind-numbing tactical combat as “accessible”. Guitar Hero made it by tapping an unbreached library of mainstream music and rigging it to the easiest gameplay mechanics in any notable rhythm game. World of Warcraft took the nerdcore image of EverQuest and taught them it’s okay to dump hundreds of hours into a time sink. I’d say Blizzard’s marketing scheme is the equivalent of teaching heroin addicts it’s cool to shoot up, but that takes far more skill and would be disrespectful to the drug.

Now, if you skipped over the first couple paragraphs looking for a Sarah Kerrigan hentai link, go ahead and read my three arguments against the lunacy of the anti-MBS argument:

1) “pre-Beta build featuring two playable races”
For the unaware, the Starcraft universe revolves around three playable races, and since the game isn’t being published by Electronic Arts, we can feel fairly confident the pre-Beta build isn’t going retail. Given the speculation that the Zerg gameplay structure was already scrapped once (at the cost of months of development time), it’s anyone’s guess whether the game beats the Playstation 4 to release.

2) The game is not Starcraft. It is Starcraft with a two on its rear end.
From the information I’ve seen and read, Starcraft II’s gameplay will be the combination of Warcraft III’s micromanagement (direct unit-by-unit control) with the original Starcraft’s multitasking (necessity to manage several spheres of influence at once). In theory, the idea of three or four micromanagement-intensive battles critical to the outcome of a game ocurring all at the same time should make most hardcore players salivate. If you play World of Warcraft, you will be disappointed to know that there is no third-party user interface that will let the game play itself for you. You should also be disappointed to know you are a piece of shit. Stop playing World of Warcraft.

3) Selecting every one of your fucking Gateways and telling every one of them to fucking build a Zealot IS NOT FUCKING FUN.
I only purchased the Starcraft Battle Chest to curb my enthusiasm for the two weeks prior to the release of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. So imagine the aggravation one faces when they attempt to casually play a game that, amongst other things:

- Requires the player to individually command each worker unit to gather resources as it comes out of the production center. Hardcore players are against automating this process.
- Allows a twelve-unit cap on unit groups. Many Starcraft players claimed nightmares after Starcraft II’s proposed 150-unit cap made word around the forum circuit.
- Casting an ability with a group that possesses a specific ability, on a target, will force every unit in the group to cast the spell on said target. If you don’t understand what I said, just understand it makes basic spellcasting such a chore that this use of Lockdown is one of the most memorable moments in Starcraft’s competitive history. Take a guess where the Starcraft community stands on this one.

The number one rule of any video game is entertain the player, and telling each of my Barracks to produce a Medic is not entertaining. Note this rule is not hypocritical in the face of my tirade against Halo and kin because Starcraft’s menial tasks are being translated into more entertaining and equally-deep gameplay devices. So I can assure you, being President of both Blizzard and the United States, that this game is not the gloom and doom story some would like you to see.

Despite the added emphasis on multitasking, micromanagement, tactics, and common sense, these human beings (and I use that term loosely) argue the de-emphasis on macromanagement will render Starcraft II a game, if not as shallow as Halo, certainly not worth their sophisticated palate. As a final weapon of assault, the hardcore community loves assailing skeptics with quotes made by professional gamers arguing against multiple-building selection. And I agree with this. Professional gamers possess an incalcuable level of integrity and would never speak out against an evolution of the skill set required to put food on their table. Ever heard of George Mikan, the dominant Minneapolis Lakers center who marqueed as the National Basketball Association’s first superstar? It’s not as though his two-year layoff from the game was stymied by a particular rule change modern basketball fans take for granted. Never heard of the shot clock? Until I researched it, neither had I.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 12:04 am 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.