Asymmetric Warfare

Modern strategy games are, at their core, quite simple games.  I consider Starcraft and a variety of other games as fundamentally derived from the game of chess.  You start the game with the same types of basic pieces, you make more pieces (added to the chess formula), and you move those pieces around the board.  The ultimate objective is to checkmate your opponent by making them unable to move.  However in a game where you can make more pieces the main way to do this is to eliminate your opponent’s ability to make additional pieces.

There are some philosophical underpinnings to this model that most players have seldom considered as maxims of game design.  For example, the idea of “game balance” is hotly discussed for any mainstream game on every corner of the internet.  While the discussions range from thought-provoking to positively inane, everyone seems to agree that the game must be “balanced.”  This is the main principle behind symmetric games.  However many players don’t seem to realize there is any other way you might make a game at all.  Asymmetric games are rife with possibilities, almost certainly more possibilities than the entire space of symmetric wargames, begging to be explored.

Starcraft 2 Patch 1.4 PTR (Luke’s Thoughts)

First off, this is by far the best SC2 patch to date. It seems to address with little ambiguity some of the biggest concerns voiced by the SC2 community to do with balance issues and gameplay dynamics. It is a bold and daring patch, and Blizzard, in my opinion, should be commended for listening to the players, filtering reasoned criticism from the noise, and then patching the hell out of their precious RTS baby.

Nerfs and buffs a plenty!

Logistics

In this article, I’m going to cover a topic that most RTS games designs won’t touch, and this ‘fifth rail’ of strategy games actually has an immense amount of potential to improve the genre.  I am referring to logistics.

Apologies (and Explanations)

Firstly, welcome and/or welcome back! Sincere apologies go out to you the readership for the lack of content from our team this past year, but in particular from myself who is supposed to co-ordinate this stuff for you. But fret not RTS lovers, for the site is not yet lost to the wolves.

The short and straight of it is that I bought Starcraft 2. Yep, that’s about it. The longer waffle-rant would be more to do with work and general “life stuff” that takes hold but is incredibly boring to blog about — so I won’t!

OK, so Starcraft 2. It came. It saw. It conquered. I guess one could proclaim that the future of RTS gave birth to its long-prophesized prodigy child. ALL my spare time has hitherto been a mixture of aforementioned “life stuff” and various pragmatically-oriented projects, each competing fiercly with SC2 game-time. It’s such a fun and incredibly deep, dynamic strategy game that it’s blown my mind infinitely more than I could have ever predicted.

But this I vow to you, dear readers and fellow bloggers: more RTS coverage and articles. More rants and crazy ideas. More speculations and analyses. Just more stuff in general!

Stay tuned and thanks so much for your valuable time and saintly patience. Happy gaming!

Why Starcraft Won

Blizzard has shown once and for all that they know how to produce a game that beats out all competition.  Starcraft 2 is a rare animal in that it is a sequel set out to fill some big shoes, and has succeeded beyond all expectation.  It pains me to say this, as I am firmly in the Total Annihilation camp of RTS game design philosophy, but Starcraft has absolutely crushed all competition in the RTS genre.  It is without question the most popular RTS game of the current generation of games, and for the foreseeable future as well.  Starcraft 2′s future as an eSport is brighter than any video game’s has every been.  All signs seem to indicate that Starcraft 2 is going to hit the big time, and be the first video game of any kind to seriously go mainstream as a sport in the western world (meaning outside of Korea).  Starcraft 2 is a clear winner of the RTS wars, and there’s no reason Starcraft 2′s shelf life will not exceed its predecessor, which is still played today, a whopping 13 years after its initial release.  This post analyzes what it is about Starcraft that makes it such a successful game, while being game-philosophy agnostic.