161–170 of 210 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh goodness, Brood War most certainly is not the game that started e-sports, tho I of course appreciate your enthusiasm for the game.
But it certainly was the game that made it popular across the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the RTS games are underplayed nowadays. Starcraft 2 is maybe the most active still and has been all but abandoned by Blizzard. A good RTS has an extremely harsh learning curve and is not super monetizable. Someone would have to rethink the genre: make it easier for casual players and figure out how to get the addicting money making patterns in. Otherwise big companies are gonna have no interest. Sucks, I love Sta…
I think the problem is simply that for a large part of the playerbase, increasing your APM is directly correlated with increasing your win rate/ranking. And frankly, that's not fun for a lot of people. I don't want to win by clicking and mashing hotkeys like a schizophrenic on speed.
Yes, really good players click fast, but they also have impeccable resource management. The group I played with did run the obvious experiment: the best one of us was forced to play against the rest (one at a time) with an artificial click frequency limit. He felt like his abilities were greatly reduced, but he still beat everyone else quite easily.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh goodness, Brood War most certainly is not the game that started e-sports, tho I of course appreciate your enthusiasm for the game.
Of course it wasnt the first time someone watched people playing video games against eachother. The Korean Brood war scene was an entirely different level from anything that came before it though. The idea of announcers and gamers getting rich & famous from playing a video game live was unheard of before that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The spiritual successor of Starcraft is Stormgate. I cannot comment on it, I have no idea how good it is. AFAIK it is multiplayer only. I played Dune II, Warcraft II, C&C, Red Alert, Starcraft (didn't like, I never understood the hype), Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, Warcraft III as kid, but... only single player (at various difficulties). That is just how games were generally played in the 90s. I do remember using…
I agree, I think MOBAs superceded the "real time" part of RTS's, while the more turn based Civ/4x, Total War series strategy type games ended up taking a lot of the base building part. Having them both together was just straight up difficult and incredibly intense, like the game itself demanded you be on adderall because your attention cannot wane for a single moment. The better I got at competitive RTS's the less in…
I feel the exact same way. The ELO system saves you from getting steamrolled if you’re a casual player but improving just means the game becomes formulaic to the point of no longer being fun. Stronghold 2 was kind of interesting in that it was an unranked lobby with good variation in player ability and team-oriented maps. Most players knew the basic economic and combat metas, but you’d often end up in situations where one of your teammates dropped out on a 3 vs 3 and you’d still win.
I'd love to introduce my kids to this game - but it is so difficult to get multiplayer licenses that "Just Plain Work" in our environment. I don't want to resort to piracy or emulation - I just want to install it on the 4 gaming PC's in our house, and fire up a game - just like we used to do in the good ol' days, the 90's.
But its just not so easy any more, alas.
If there were a "family license pack" for Warcraft2 and Starcraft, I'd be in, in a second. My CS:GO-trading kids need to learn these games. Zug Zug!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The spiritual successor of Starcraft is Stormgate This was their claim, but it did not pan out in reality. It flopped on launch, hard . Peak player count since launch has been less than 100, and is currently hovering around 25.
It was really proof that gameplay often takes a back seat to visual identity, ESPECIALLY if the gameplay is extremely derivative, which this was. They had a massive amount of goodwill from fans of the genre, but when they started sharing screenshots it deflated fast - its not a 2025 game, its a 2010 clone of a popular 2005 game. Its nigh impossible to make a spiritual successor to genre defining games in WC3 and SC2…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet two of the most played games out there in 2025 are RTSes, Dota and League. The genre just progressed forward. WC3 was peak design with the mod support (maps) where Dota originates from and and it was also the bane of the company. They couldn't monetize it and IceFrog choose Valve instead of them. No wonder that later Blizz games has 0 community support.
> IceFrog choose Valve instead of them Icefrog went to blizzard first if i remember correctly. Blizzard kinda told him to make a restricted game, maybe within the sc2 engine, almost for free. Valve saw the value and invested more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It started modern esports. There were gaming competitions in the 80s, but there weren't team houses, coaches, analysts, big money sponsors, regular huge events, dedicated TV channels, players in prime time commercials and dating actresses and pop stars, etc... Brood War hit in Korea like nothing before or after it . There were literally three full time, 24/7 TV channels showing Starcraft content at it's peak. No othe…
> There were gaming competitions in the 80s ... and uh, inveterate cheating and lying accompanied it. Brood War brought professionalism to esport. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell_(gamer)#Dispute...