Lost in a Blizzard of Hype

“I don’t care about Starcraft II.” — Me last year.

“Oh my God, is it time for Starcraft II yet?” — Me at present.

Somewhere down the line I will make the grand argument that my reverse course on Starcraft II was born from the unflagging dedication to quality that Blizzard exemplifies in their game development. While the game maker's once mighty guiding North Star is riding low on the horizon of late, its record as a premier game maker remains relatively unimpeachable, so I expect that when I make this argument -- and I will make it -- it will seem pretty damn convincing.

“They just made too good a game to ignore,” I will proclaim emphatically and with the benefit of empirical evidence on my side.

Let me tell you now, it’s a smoke screen made entirely of vaporized, high-grade, Oscar Meyer baloney. A delicious yet questionably toxic smoke screen designed to distract you from the truth, which is that I crossed Blizzard's hype event horizon, and was pulled inextricably into their fold.

I never really really cared for the original Starcraft. I grew up a Warcraft II kind of guy, wielding the unimaginable power of the Orcish Horde across Lordaeron and Kalimdor with impunity. It is, in many ways, the last game that I learned at a depth that made me consistently competitive, and even I — the man that multiplayer games forgot — once invested countless hours on Kali or whatever IPX emulator software I could find holding court and taking on all challengers.

Starcraft failed me not because it wasn’t a well created game. It simply was not Warcraft II. I was a victim of familiarity, and as a result my slow extraction from the RTS genre once powerfully set in motion gathered momentum enough to carry it through decades. In fact, with the possible exception of Rise of Nations, every other RTS game I have played failed for basically the same reason, and so I cared not a whit for Starcraft II at its announcement.

The problem is that Blizzard may be at the top of the game when it comes to promoting their product. There is no better company in the biz at announcing a game. After too many years of website countdowns that lead to the announcement of vague product-point promises and a snazzy logo, watching as Blizzard unleashed videos, gameplay and legitimate content at their announcement set a powerful foundation for mania in the fertile space of gaming media.

It’s like Lays Potato Chips. The more you get, the more you want.

But, it wasn’t until the beta replays starting hitting YouTube that the hook finally sunk its barb into my cheek. Somehow the broadcasting of this game that was still months out, this title that threatened to become an event unto itself, finally fired the right cocktail of chemicals in my brain.

I suppose most of us have had that moment where something you cared nothing about suddenly becomes a thing that you sinfully covet. Watching my first Protoss 4-gate push online as enthusiastic match-casters talked arcane strategies and identified key moments of play by people with unimaginable skill was the zombie bite that muddled my brain and turned me into the mindless automaton I now am.

I’m not suggesting that Blizzard’s approach should be the new model by which every game maker needs to launch a title. Let’s be honest, they can get away with this strategy because they know how to deliver the goods. They have the phenomenal luxury of spending months in a sophisticated beta that outshines most other companies’ release code, because they have authority, they have power and they have leverage. Or, more succinctly, they have cash.

However, breaking from traditional models, even on a budget is not only possible, but potentially a great way of keeping your game current. Look only at what Stardock is doing with Elemental, and you have a great example of how you can leverage a fanbase into visibility.

This industry is far too ridiculously secretive and restrictive, as though every publisher were designing elaborate Manhattan Projects of gaming. There is under-explored benefit to the timely release of meaningful and substantive game information, and by letting a following grow organically rather than through some artificially constructed marketer’s wet dream, there is not only opportunity for generating fan interest, but you might just end up making a better game as well.

As always, Blizzard isn't creating a platform for the new direction all companies should take, but they are showing that by being both daring enough to break traditions and receptive enough to their customers to change course when necessary, they can chart a sophisticated path toward success.

Comments

MeatMan wrote:

I was willing to pay $50 for a good RTS SP campaign, but not $150.

But would you pay $150 for 3 good RTS SP campaigns?

Or wait a month until there's a good deal somewhere, or buy the inevitable battlechest.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
MeatMan wrote:

I was willing to pay $50 for a good RTS SP campaign, but not $150.

But would you pay $150 for 3 good RTS SP campaigns?

Exactly. It's not expansions or updates that we're paying $50 more for. It's a complete game. It's like buying Megaman 2, 3, and 4, think of it like that.

kexx wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
MeatMan wrote:

I was willing to pay $50 for a good RTS SP campaign, but not $150.

But would you pay $150 for 3 good RTS SP campaigns?

Exactly. It's not expansions or updates that we're paying $50 more for. It's a complete game. It's like buying Megaman 2, 3, and 4, think of it like that.

Well, fans of the original SC1 were expecting the story to continue on all three fronts. So now we get to play the most generic of the three races first and have to wait at least one more year for the Zerg and twice that long for the Protoss. In that regards it's more like three totally different games. And to be honest, I am not yet sold on thirty Terran missions keeping the suspense up until the very end. The Terrans have about half that many units and unless they do a lot of gimmicky tech demo missions (third person shooter, tower defense, DoTA clone etc.), they'll lose momentum before the finale. It is Blizzard, so making a ten to fifteen mission campaign is childs play for them. I just am not really sure yet, if they'll be able to keep up the quality over thirty missions using basically the same mechanics.

They have said that there will be short missions with the other races. Not full strategy missions, more like the escort and survival missions from the first.

That should break it up a little and give some extra flavour.

Are there any reviews yet? The thing is, the game isn't out yet. It's still unknown if the game is going to be a sack of faeces or like drinking the tears of the gaming lord and saviour. Within a fortnight you'll have a pretty good opinion as the unwashed masses get at it.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
MeatMan wrote:

I was willing to pay $50 for a good RTS SP campaign, but not $150.

But would you pay $150 for 3 good RTS SP campaigns?

Yeah, but isn't SC2 $60? I've been thinking about this. I have little tolerance for the ass-hattery of online play, so I've been looking at this for single player only. I'm not sure I can justifty a "stock" game that has the play-life of single player only for $60.

Edit: It's the price bump that I see as Kotick's influence.

Nevin73 wrote:

Edit: It's the price bump that I see as Kotick's influence.

Yeah, this more than anything else. Modern Warfare 2 and Starcraft 2 are going to prove to Activision, and other publishers, that $60 is an acceptable price point for really big games.

For anyone that plans to play SC2 multiplayer for an extended period of time, you've got to be prepared to buy all 3 versions of the game. New units will draw the community, and also custom map makers will follow. I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard released all 3 at $60 because they can and people would pay the price. To their credit, they are clear about their plans, so gamers can budget in the future additions.

To those that say each version is it's own game, I'm calling foul. They are campaigns, not games, not even total conversions. If I get SC2 at all, it will be the full set at once.

Blizzard seems to be saying that in the Terran campaign, you'll get units that you won't be getting in the multiplayer mode. That's a sensible divide. Some play modes are better if you develop them for SP specifically.

That said, the meat and potatoes of that kind of unit diversity is really in the SC2 community map development. The best map designers and modders can really make those kinds of things shine. I'm also a bit concerned at this front since Blizzard has been up front about limiting access to the best maps for monetization purposes, and it's not like modders can avoid Battlenet 2.0. Current EULAs or TOS (forget which) seem to say that you can't put up free maps in Battlenet 2.0 without Blizzard's say so. It's reasonable, but it may put a damper on the vibrance of the community scene.

LarryC wrote:

I'm also a bit concerned at this front since Blizzard has been up front about limiting access to the best maps for monetization purposes, and it's not like modders can avoid Battlenet 2.0. Current EULAs or TOS (forget which) seem to say that you can't put up free maps in Battlenet 2.0 without Blizzard's say so. It's reasonable, but it may put a damper on the vibrance of the community scene.

I hope you have that wrong, because that does seem to be the opposite of what they should do. I'm thinking of TF2 where they take the best community maps, acknowledge that they're brilliant and include them in the base game for everyone to play with no extra charge. With the strength of the editor, it does allow people to make a whole new gametype so I really hope they save charging, donations, micropayments or whatever for the most substantial mods and maps that come out, and even then very sparingly.

Scratched:

They're redesigning Battlenet with months and months of dev time and costs for precisely that: the monetization of community content and UGC. I don't really know to what extent they're corral the best content for sale, but my gut tells me that they didn't go to all that trouble just to use it sparingly.

They will sell lots and lots of Starcraft 2 in-game horses.
And rainbows in Diablo 3.

MrDeVil909 wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

Edit: It's the price bump that I see as Kotick's influence.

Yeah, this more than anything else. Modern Warfare 2 and Starcraft 2 are going to prove to Activision, and other publishers, that $60 is an acceptable price point for really big games.

This is an interesting topic of its own. Because I think you are absolutely right. They will not lose many sales at $60. The question is, how many more do they pick up as the price goes down, which is a classic Econ 101 problem.

Batman: Arkham Asylum used special deals with specific retailers to sell a ton of games in the first week at $30. This drove a ton of sales, and got the game into the hands of folks that talked it up later. This then drove a ton of sales at the $60 price point.

But they won't need to do this with the sequel. They can rely on internet hype to drive first week sales, so a lower price point is only going to cost them $$$, not increase sales significantly.

This is where SC2 falls. This game is going to sell X number of copies in the first month, regardless of price (to a degree, of course). But Blizzard has also done a nice job of training some of their customers to wait for the inevitable deals. I think this is fair, and a good way to maximize revenue from people who view the game differently.

What will be the difference between multiplayer for SC2 part1 and part2? Is the multiplayer game being kept equal between all three parts, so is someone who only has part 1 equal to someone who only has part two, is equal to someone with two and three?

I can understand the 3 campaigns being in different products, and that was the reason they gave when they initially announced the split, but have they detailed how multiplayer works? With their precious balance, even something like Company of Heroes seems unlikely

Luggage wrote:

Well, fans of the original SC1 were expecting the story to continue on all three fronts. So now we get to play the most generic of the three races first and have to wait at least one more year for the Zerg and twice that long for the Protoss.

Relic has done very well doing 15-20 missions each game with only one race. I didn't see many complaints about having just the Blood Raven campaign hurt DoW2.

Scratched wrote:

What will be the difference between multiplayer for SC2 part1 and part2? Is the multiplayer game being kept equal between all three parts, so is someone who only has part 1 equal to someone who only has part two, is equal to someone with two and three?

For the first expansion, I can see two distinct hoppers: 1 for people with it, and 1 for people with just the regular game.

The third is pretty difficult to predict. My gut feeling is that they're going to go to the 2 hopper approach again, either forcing people with the 1st expansion to get the second, or forcing people with just the vanilla game to get the 2nd expansion.

However, I have a feeling that it won't be as much of an issue, because Blizzard has traditionally put a battle chest out very soon after the expansions with everything for a full price game. It hurts early adopters, but if you wait, there will be the anthologies. I can't see them not doing that.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
MeatMan wrote:

I was willing to pay $50 for a good RTS SP campaign, but not $150.

But would you pay $150 for 3 good RTS SP campaigns?

I'm no longer much of a fan of the RTS genre, so no I would not pay $150 for 3 good (separate) RTS SP campaigns. I was willing to pay $50 for a full SC2 game containing campaigns for all three races (like SC1 had), but I'm certainly not going to pay $50 $60 for a Terran campaign. Related question: is Blizzard going to charge $60 for the digital version from battle.net? If so, I call bull-f*cking-sh*t.

kexx wrote:

Exactly. It's not expansions or updates that we're paying $50 more for. It's a complete game.

Actually, no, they won't be complete games. According to Rob Pardo:

the plans are to do something along the lines of a full single player campaign and some additional features to the multi-player side. It'll obviously use the same engine; so that, to me, is an expansion price point. If we decided to put in 3 new races and a bunch of new technology and features, maybe that would be a stand-alone product. But right now, we're looking at much more of an expansion-like feature set.

And according to Dustin Browder (SC2 lead designer):

One of the exciting challenges for multiplayer for Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void is we don’t really want to add more units on top, right? That would take us to maybe seventeen units per race and in Legacy of the Void that would be twenty-one units per race. That would be insane, right? There would be no way for us to effectively balance that

So chapter 2 and 3 will each have a single player campaign and additional multiplayer features (new maps?), but no new units. Even though Pardo said he expects an expansion price point for them, considering that Blizzard is charging $60 for chapter 1, I wouldn't put it past them to charge at least $40 for chapter 2 and 3.

EDIT: I just found a transcript to a dev chat with Dustin Browder posted a few days ago and saw this Q&A:

Will future expansions of SC2 lead to new units in the Mutliplayer?

DustinB: Yes.=) We will add more units. How we will deal with the games growing complexity is the really interesting challenge that we don't yet have the great answer for. We don't want to have 15+ units per race in the game, so we need to think of something clever that will allow us to add new strategies to the game without making the game too complicated.

According to the wiki, in the current build of the game, Terran and Zerg have 14 units each and Protoss has 15. How is Blizzard going to add new multiplayer units and avoid having 15+ units per race? The only way I see that happening is if with each expansion they remove some previous units from multiplayer, which would be foolish. Maybe Mr. Browder forgot that each race already has 14-15 units when he answered that question.

Like Elysium, I slowly gained interest in StarCraft 2 thanks to the battle reports, but I also lost interest in purchasing the game not because of Blizzard's RealID shenanigans or their pricing model but because of, oddly enough, those same battle reports. The official StarCraft 2 recaps did a great job of getting me excited about the game and of revealing the layers of complexity that make the game an interesting multiplayer experience, but what I came to realize while watching them again was that I was more interested in the game as a spectator than as a player. I have no more interest in playing StarCraft 2 than I do in playing hockey, but I would love to watch footage from a StarCraft 2 tournament if the game recaps were as well-produced and narrated as Blizzard's were in much the same way that I enjoy watching NHL games.

MeatMan wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
MeatMan wrote:

I was willing to pay $50 for a good RTS SP campaign, but not $150.

But would you pay $150 for 3 good RTS SP campaigns?

I'm no longer much of a fan of the RTS genre, so no I would not pay $150 for 3 good (separate) RTS SP campaigns. I was willing to pay $50 for a full SC2 game containing campaigns for all three races (like SC1 had), but I'm certainly not going to pay $50 $60 for a Terran campaign. Related question: is Blizzard going to charge $60 for the digital version from battle.net? If so, I call bull-f*cking-sh*t.

kexx wrote:

Exactly. It's not expansions or updates that we're paying $50 more for. It's a complete game.

Actually, no, they won't be complete games. According to Rob Pardo:

the plans are to do something along the lines of a full single player campaign and some additional features to the multi-player side. It'll obviously use the same engine; so that, to me, is an expansion price point. If we decided to put in 3 new races and a bunch of new technology and features, maybe that would be a stand-alone product. But right now, we're looking at much more of an expansion-like feature set.

And according to Dustin Browder (SC2 lead designer):

One of the exciting challenges for multiplayer for Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void is we don’t really want to add more units on top, right? That would take us to maybe seventeen units per race and in Legacy of the Void that would be twenty-one units per race. That would be insane, right? There would be no way for us to effectively balance that

So chapter 2 and 3 will each have a single player campaign and additional multiplayer features (new maps?), but no new units. Even though Pardo said he expects an expansion price point for them, considering that Blizzard is charging $60 for chapter 1, I wouldn't put it past them to charge at least $40 for chapter 2 and 3.

EDIT: I just found a transcript to a dev chat with Dustin Browder posted a few days ago and saw this Q&A:

Will future expansions of SC2 lead to new units in the Mutliplayer?

DustinB: Yes.=) We will add more units. How we will deal with the games growing complexity is the really interesting challenge that we don't yet have the great answer for. We don't want to have 15+ units per race in the game, so we need to think of something clever that will allow us to add new strategies to the game without making the game too complicated.

According to the wiki, in the current build of the game, Terran and Zerg have 14 units each and Protoss has 15. How is Blizzard going to add new multiplayer units and avoid having 15+ units per race? The only way I see that happening is if with each expansion they remove some previous units from multiplayer, which would be foolish. Maybe Mr. Browder forgot that each race already has 14-15 units when he answered that question. :lol:

Well...I stand corrected. Thanks for clearing that up. Has the price been confirmed to be the same for all 3 packages? Maybe it'll be like you said, $50/$60 for the first, then $40/$30 for the other two. I dunno. Maybe. Hopefully.

I have not heard enough about game play changes to be too excited about the game yet. It looks neat, but after playing Dawn of War II and Company of Heroes, I just need more from an RTS than what was great ten years ago.

Still, I am being all blase now, but the day it comes out, I will probably just HAPPEN to be at Best Buy and say, "Oh gee, look at that. Oh... ok, I guess I'll get it."

I'm not going back to WoW though. No sir.

MeatMan wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
MeatMan wrote:

I was willing to pay $50 for a good RTS SP campaign, but not $150.

But would you pay $150 for 3 good RTS SP campaigns?

I'm no longer much of a fan of the RTS genre, so no I would not pay $150 for 3 good (separate) RTS SP campaigns. I was willing to pay $50 for a full SC2 game containing campaigns for all three races (like SC1 had), but I'm certainly not going to pay $50 $60 for a Terran campaign. Related question: is Blizzard going to charge $60 for the digital version from battle.net? If so, I call bull-f*cking-sh*t.

And if the 3 campaigns were each 30 missions long, with a different theme for each? From what RPS said, Blizzard's looking at a 30 mission long campaign for the first game, with a few non-terran missions in the mostly Terran campaign. They're also planning on making each campaign very distinct, with the Terrans having a money management/research tree, the Zerg having an RPG-type campaign, and something else with the Protoss.

By comparison, SC1 shipped with 30 missions across 3 campaigns. The first 2 missions for each race were tutorial, though, so for actual missions, it was more like 24-25. Brood War shipped with 26 missions.

Blizzard, has also said that they're going to be pricing the expansions as such. I'd expect $40, as that's what they charge for WoW expansions on release.

ClockworkHouse, burntham777:

I don't know how it is stateside, but much of what was good about Starcraft (and Warcraft 3!) in my locality was the custom-made maps and the opportunity to play them and work with them on a personal level.

It comes from the social aspect of LAN gaming (in shops, natch).

You play a few maps with some guys and then you notice that for your particular skill level, the map makes so and so technique and so and so strategy the only one that's likely to win - so you all agree to change the map to neuter that strategem and allow other strategems. Map changes, you playtest for a few weeks, then make some more changes.

It sounds like work, I'm sure, but it's quite enjoyable. Getting together to make and play themed maps (made for the holidays, natch) or exchange maps with other communities is a blast.

This is why I'm so against the removal of LAN and why I think Blizzard is making a mistake by driving this activity underground when it used to be open. I'm hopeful that a community like GWJ or at least Team Liquid can hit critical population to get this kind of thing going, but it's iffy now, when it used to be more or less assured.

The SC Map Editor and the more exciting Galaxy Editor to ship with SC2 allows you to tailor your SC2 experience to your fancy.

Do you not like base building?

You know, many SC players didn't like that either. So they made a map where you made money by killing enemies and you had instant access to all defensive units which you placed strategically on the map. This eventually evolved to become Tower Defense and the sub-genre spawned the great game Plants vs. Zombies.

I'm optimistic about being able to create a macro for the game along the lines of a "Base Governor." Basically, I want to create in-game AI where you select the units you want to emphasize, and the game automatically creates the buildings and adjusts worker focus and content to follow suit. Basically, you still have your worker lines, but you don't have to macro as much - the game does much of it for you.

My main concern is not having a bunch of gamers and a local LAN to test map builds on. Much of map building is tweaking the map from player feedback to get the feel and flow of the game just right. Harder to do that with a pure online community.

I'll add my voice to the others that were extremely excited for this game at one point, and now couldn't care less. I am unwilling to pay $60 for a PC game simply because they feel they can charge that much. I have paid $60 for plenty of PS3 games, as I understand that there are licensing fees associated with releasing your games on the consoles, but there are no such fees associated with Windows or OSX. I own collector's editions of both Warcraft III and WoW, which I paid quite a bit for, so I don't really consider myself a cheapskate.

Additionally, I'm not willing to pay a $10 premium on 1/3rd of a full game. To me, that's just asinine. I don't for a moment buy that each release will contain enough content to justify this release strategy. It feels like Activision / Blizzard expects the consumer to pay for the fact that they took an obscenely long time developing a game that isn't even really much of an update. I was in the beta from the beginning, and couldn't be bothered to log in more than a handful of times. I haven't even logged in once since the second round started.

The main problem I see with this ludicrous strategy of releasing the game in parts is that the single player campaign is where you are trained how to use the different units. So it seems to me that Terran players will have an extremely unbalanced advantage over Zerg and Protoss players.

Also, to those that are talking price drop, don't bet on it. The WoW expansions haven't really dropped in price at all, and those have been out for quite some time.

LarryC,

I definitely think that I'd enjoy StarCraft 2 more in a LAN shop environment as I imagine it would feel less competitive and more like a friendly neighborhood game of pick-up football. However, in the States there aren't many LAN shops and those there are, at least in my city, are populated mainly by people who come to the shops for the high-speed connection and aren't much interested in interacting with the other people in the store.

As it is, I'm keeping my ear to the ground as to whether or not the single-player campaigns are fun as that's the only aspect of StarCraft 2 that appeals to me in my situation.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

LarryC,

I definitely think that I'd enjoy StarCraft 2 more in a LAN shop environment as I imagine it would feel less competitive and more like a friendly neighborhood game of pick-up football.

My introduction to Starcraft, and gaming in general actually, happened at an internet cafe a friend of mine managed. After closing time we would have a group come in and play Starcraft and HL Deathmatch until 2 in the morning. It's freaking awesome.

Holy sh*t!

I may have to reconsider my decision to not buy SC2. Well, chapter 1 anyway.

I saw a Starcraft 2 commercial last night while watching Family Guy.

I have to say it was brief but pretty awesome. It was a lot of cutscenes and quick flashes of the major NPC's. I think Blizzard must hold a patent on glowing eyes that leak energy ;P

MeatMan wrote:

Holy sh*t!

I may have to reconsider my decision to not buy SC2. Well, chapter 1 anyway.

Heh, that's what I was trying to point out earlier in the thread

Even if you have zero interest in the single player campaign or in multiplayer, it's likely you'll be able to get more than $60 of value solely from the custom levels that will be created. The editor is far more robust than the Warcraft III editor, and some amazing creations were born there (DOTA, Tower Defense). I can't wait to see some of the crazy maps people create.

Dyni wrote:
MeatMan wrote:

Holy sh*t!

I may have to reconsider my decision to not buy SC2. Well, chapter 1 anyway.

Heh, that's what I was trying to point out earlier in the thread

Even if you have zero interest in the single player campaign or in multiplayer, it's likely you'll be able to get more than $60 of value solely from the custom levels that will be created. The editor is far more robust than the Warcraft III editor, and some amazing creations were born there (DOTA, Tower Defense). I can't wait to see some of the crazy maps people create.

Yeah, the price is unpalatable, but I don't doubt that there is value there. I'm really in agony over my decision not to pre-order.

In fact I will probably crack in the next few days.

Hi, single-player guy here. Yeah, not caring about multiplayer or LAN support.

Why would I care in a world that is either online or the game doesn't exist? Well, the statement on a video from Blizzard that says that this is the BIGGEST single player that they've done in a game and it's ridiculous huge...

Me happy.

The different segments of games they are releasing means that the game can get insta-expansions much faster than before.