I know Grubby since his WC3 days. Never watched any WC3 but he was that famous that you just knew him watching other games. I found this channel some days ago and I never knew I needed this. Very thoughtful and chill content. Please keep it up, this channel is going to the moon.
Back in my days, the gaming community as a whole was just smaller and closer. We all knew each other's memes and gods. You could be like a WC3 only player but also know about Boxer's SCV rush, FPS Doug, etc. And people from other games would have heard of the 4K roster and probably catch a game or two on WCG Finals
I'm not a pro, but SC2 broke my heart in a similar way, when LotV released I just stopped playing. Blizzard was so paralyzed when it came to action. I always said that the races are balanced in win statistics, but completely inbalanced in the strategic options. Now since the community makes patches, the game is in a better state, but the playerbase also got used to all the mechanics that I hate, the whole game is balanced around them, including worker harass creates the coolest moments, the macro mechanics, and the emphasis is on reaction time rather than strategy. Something I realized is that in Broodwar a lot less units fit through avenues on the map at once. In SC2 they're clumped up, but also so close to each other that they're clipping into each other. This means that a whole death ball can close the distance to an enemy all at once, something that in Broodwar just isn't the case, the army always trickles in and not only due to pathfinding but also the space between units. I wish there were a balance mod contest or something, and that the best balance mod would get a matchmaker. I would be so excited to try these! I've started my own mod when I stopped playing, but who's gonna play that? It was more like a design ideas showcase anyway, not very balanced but with unit design ideas I collected from the forums that were cool, and a few of my own. Tackled all the issues with Broodlings, Forcefields, SH, warpgate. I even redesigned the Cyclone in a very similar way to how the community patch did it years later. I still wish for that to happen since it's something the community can take into their own hands, but even if they did I probably wouldn't notice.
SC2 is in a great state rn, but I think that a RTS is bound to be "unfit" for some players' taste depending on where its design is on the "real time" vs "Strategy" spectrum of RTS. For one favoring Strategy over reaction time, AoE4 seems a better fit for exemple.
The extreme clump was a deliberate design choice, but one that makes the game now very all of nothing. Whole armies get vaporized in seconds. You either melt them or get melted right away.
Yup. Making her into this boss B after she, during being free and of her own choice, massacred a bunch of worlds (if I remember correctly), is certainly, as you say, "a choice." The companion to "no good deed goes unpunished" is apparently "no bad deed goes unrewarded."
I still remember the ending of SC1 making me feel very uneasy as a kid, like an unsettling Lovecraftian horror. You get to know the Zerg and the Protoss, then Duran betrays you, you learn of this crazy prophecy-type thing, and it's all very strange and uncomfortable. Then in SC2 you uninfest Kerrigan so she can REinfest herself, Narud (Like, for real?) and the whole Xel'naga blows its load, and then like you said: magic space angel. Very Marvel-esque. No weight, all flash.
Great video, incredible analysis. Broodlord-Infestor era was why I quit playing SC2. I still hop on every now and then but I haven't really truly laddered since (was master league in WoL). Typo in your timestamps by the way "Bid Bad #1" instead of "Big Bad #1" Zerg's ability to spread creep and see the whole map that way I think is one of the biggest balance issues. StarCraft 2's unlimited unit selection and pathing also made controlling the Zerg swarm far to easy. I like your idea to keep Gateways relevant in the later game. I think larvae is actually another major reason why Zerg were/are so OP. If I went mech as Terran and suddenly needed Bio, my production structures couldn't support it - Zerg on the other hand can switch to mass any unit they need using their existing unit production, so long as they had the proper tech researched or built.
I also completely agree with you and Grubby that Zerglings (speedlings specifically) ruin the game by forcing the other races to always wall. That creates a boring, non-dynamic gameplay, and it's also extremely punishing because 16 lings, which is only 400 minerals (same as 4 zealots, who cannot do the same) can easily sneak into your base at any time since they are so fast, and simply lay waste to your eco and production whilst a fight is happening elsewhere. Combine it with the map control that the speedling + creep gives Zerg, it makes it extremely easy to dominate the map as Zerg. It was meant to be a swarming race, not a "full map control" race. I've quit SC2 several times, and it's mostly because of PvZ frustration.
“If I went mech” I always thought it was hilarious that Terran players felt like they should just be able to choose - at a whim- what play style they want to go with What a luxury
I remember someone saying that Protoss couldn't be balanced properly because of the Warp Prism. If their units were as powerful as you might expect warping them directly into the enemy base would be ridiculous. So they had to toe a delicate line that made the late-game "stand together" death ball style that could have given Protoss a distinguishing identity less effective than it needed to be. I feel like this problem contributed to a heavy Zerg-Terran focus because they couldn't get Protoss right without unravelling the identity they'd made for them. Personally I think removing the Prism's ability to make a Pylon field may have let them buff Gateway units to where they needed to be? But the highest I got was Gold so maybe I'm talking rubbish.
i mean people are also forgetting archon toilet and mothership core shenanigans were a thing for a pretty long time as well at the very beginning. There are other imbalances though not just the warp prism; colossus can ignore terrain cliffs. Game devs probably thought protoss would be able to do sneak attacks like that but the issue is protoss lost shuttle and reaver which were a lot more mobile and same with templar drops (storms got nerfed to sc1). I absolutely hated the fact that the protoss had reaver removed from their arsenal and replaced with colossus/disruptor. It's like people didn't watch sc1 and didn't know what made it fun to watch... All they needed to do was give people more units not less...like take all of sc1 units then add a few more new ones...no they decided to take everything and replace it with the cracked up version of as much toxiciy as possible: you want goliaths? too bad here is lock on from 21321 units away beep jeep instead or this massive juggernaught which 2 shots most things and that can be picked up in medivacs. you want vultures or firebats? neah take these hellbats that are like twice as effective and get free psi storms on every hit. you want spider mines? how about widow mines which autofire and destroy 40 units in 2 s and are rechargable? you want siege tanks? how about liberators which can fly and do the same thing whilst sitting away from your mineral line. you want scanner? sure but how about we make it so the same upgrade can be used to drop free workers to repair and take minerals for free? you want dragoons? neah take immortals which two shot tanks and take forever to kill. you want reavers? neah take the instant death laser long range colossi instead or disruptors that are like infinite scarabs with no real downside until after it fires but is compensated with an army deleting punch.. you want corsairs or scouts? neah take these super fast hit while running away phoenixes and void rays that can just kill anything with armor or flying siege tanks like tempests. you want lurkers? neah lets get swarm hosts who never run out of summons which can fly and can also relocate easily. you want queens&defilers? neah lets get infestors which have fungal growth that is basically a cross between the two and can move while burrowed. It's atrocious how much protoss got shafted in spells too...they lost dark archon, arbiter and corsairs and gained sentries/mothership and blink. Only when oracle showed up did they get some more spell options. TL:DR sc2 devs not only didn't know anything about balance and were slow to respond, they created poor design philosophies with little counterplay which are boring to watch.
They also have the ability to teleport their whole army at once, every 60 seconds which is ridiculous, and the only unit in the game that can dodge anything all the while being the core of the army (stalker) and ze alots that requires 0 micro while you have to micro heavily to kill them.
Warpgate shouldn't be just an upgraded gateway, just like Grubby said. That contributed to gateway armies being weak, but so did blink, since Stalkers can get out of harms way for extremely long. And how about that Blizzard needed 10 years to nerf warping in speed? I think, warpgate tech should come later, warpgate cooldown should be longer, blink should come later or the whole Stalker unit as well, in it's place could be the Dragoon. Then warp gate armies could be stronger. And then to compensate for the warp-in of a stronger army with the prism, the prism itself could cost more. Blizzard did already a price increase, but even more could be good. It should be an investment like the Arbiter in BW. And for that investment it should be more durable and carry 12 unit slots instead of 8. Thing is, it's a chain of changes, one change requires another one till you are at a point where the whole game is redesigned. Blizzard isn't going to do this, it's always "no the unit can't be made stronger because warp-in harass would be too strong" or "no that tech cannot come later or this race can't defend themselves". But in reality what you have to do is make the tech later AND the army stronger at the same time (this is just an example).
I noticed another thing and that's how many units can squeeze through normal pathways in BW. It's not just the pathfinding, the unit radi are a lot bigger in BW as well, in SC2 units actually clip into each other. The result is that a whole deathball can close the distance all at once, while in BW the units trickle in, even if you manage to make 5 unit groups and send them all at once.
David Kim's zerg bias basically killed SC2. Literally everyone I knew that played the game quit over BL/Infestor. The one time someone came up with a way to counter it, MVP with the Ghost snipe spam, it was instantly nerfed to uselessness. Remember that game on WCS or MLG I think where a top Korean Terran wrote IMBA IMBA IMBA before GG? Yeah, and they still did nothing for so many years. Absolutely baffling decision making, to the point where rumors that DK was close with top western Z players were going around.
This take is so frustrating to read, since its so blatantly false. For the longest time in early WoL, Terran was absolutely broken, and Zerg was nowhere to be seen at all. The race was unplayable competetively at launch. Like for the love of god, you used to be able to blink or pickup Terran units (preventing all damage, mind you!) from Fungal. The changes that made Zerg competetively playable arrived middle 1.3 - almost two years into SC2's lifetime, with the infestor changes. Increasing the damage and disallowing pickups/blinks once you were caught by it. Afterwards, Terrans STILL had the highest overall competetive winrates for almost six additional months, before the final ladder map pool was released. This final ladder map pool, plus Stephano's roach maxes, is what allowed the Broodlord/Infestor comps to shine. Too many bases were defensible for such an immobile army - on top of which, since they were so clumped, attacking into them with such a slow army was also feasible. This gives us practically two years of Terran dominance, but because the final few months of Wings of Liberty was Zerg favored, thats all everyone remembers. I don't disagree with you, by the way, that Broodlord Infestor on those maps was horrific to go up against. However, when even in the period you're calling out, Terrans were more competetive than Zerg was at their weakest, it screams that -you- are biased. MarineKingPrime, MVP, NaDa, Taeja for Terran. Squirtle, MC, PartinG, HerO for Protoss.. and then you have JulyZerg, Nestea, Life and DRG as the performing Zergs. It really was not half as imbalanced as you'd like to make it out.
@@ladylynxelot9925 People don't care about Terran dominance because it's not as frustrating to play against. We're talking about the era that made the most people QUIT. What he's saying isn't blatantly false at all, it's objectively true. Everyone knew that BLFestor made large swathes of the playerbase quit. Pro play is a small sliver of the community that any game is built around. Ladder play is hugely fundamental to balance around, regardless of what some people may tell you. Boring to play is far worse than boring to watch, because people only want to watch what they find somewhat fun to play.
Grubby we met at MLG Dallas 2011, I was one game off from playing against you on the big stage. You ended up playing the guy who beat me 2-1 named DJE, a terran who opened blueflame hellion against you and the game ended up lagging something horrible for some reason, very frustrating. I was ecstatic to meet you, and have followed you since the first replay from wc3replays that I downloaded some 20 years ago. Glad you are still doing the same thing all these years later, and I hope you never stop
The 5-6 last years, sc2 became such a banger. Serral, Reynor and Clem in europe make the game such enjoyable to watch. You Grubby, with Huk, were my protoss inspiration back in the days. I will forever remember the day you won against MVP in WCS europe allowing you to qualify for bracket. The "Grubby line" has been crossed by Grubby himself ! Thanks for those days. A lot of what you don't like in starcraft has changed, you should give it another try :p
@@nevosisthere are no high calibre or team left, no more team houses, no the most important team tournament, and the kr scene shrinked by a ten. With a high Korean competition, rogue always was a mediocre player, but now is considered one of the goats
@@FF-zy1sp Most games don't have any of this...SC2 just had a half million dollar tournament, there are endless countless tournaments that happen almost every single day, there are tons of extremely high level pros, lots of competition and more. I'd say it's not in a bad spot at all, and very good considering how old the game is.
@@FF-zy1sp Yes Korean scene shrank, but its still alive, and outside of Korea sc2 is doing well, its much bigger then sc1 for example. There are amazing players like Serral, Maru, Hero, Reynor, MaxPax and amazing tournaments. I see this time and time again where sc1 fanatics dump on sc2 with arguments that arent relevant for more then 5 years. They dont know whats hapening in sc2 for years, but still comment as if they knew.
I've been wanting to watch a video like this for such a long time. I know you've alluded to some of these topics many times before... But I still remember watching your SC2 streams religiously, and being a bit heartbroken when you switched to HOTS. XD Ofc SC2 is a brutally frustrating game, and I can't imagine what practicing as much as a pro-gamer during the InfestorBL, and then Swarm Host, era must have felt like. You definitely made the right choice from all points of view, it seems. Thank you for making the video, is all I'm saying. I feel it will provide some closure, for many SC2 fans. 🙂
One thing that really doesn't come across much in this video how much I loved SC2 in 2011, 2012; the slow descent in falling into an unenamored state with the game was a slow grinding away of faith that Blizz Balance understands what makes playing vs SH or Brood/Infestor not a good experience
This really makes me appreciate the creators of starcraft and starcraft brood war, that had a similar unit that outranged everything else: the carrier. But interceptors cost minerals. Seems like having locusts cost resources would have been such a difference to the whole equation.
You also had to get the upgrade for 8 interceptors total and interceptors release one by one so you would need to always babysit them to keep moving so their interceptors from deploying instantly to be effective
Locusts held out long enough for the next Locust wave to spawn, while the Swarm Hosts could freely run around and the enemy was occupied. That are 2 major design flaws combined in one unit. Otherwise free units would be fine, they simply need a counter. I as a test redesigned the Swarmhost to produce Locusts every 5s only when it was rooted, and those Locusts were way weaker and couldn't get farther than a tank can shoot. Idea was that you can pick them off with Tempests or Liberators or Banshees, or just match it with equally many siege units. I made this when LotV released because I hated the game too much to play, but sadly so did most of my friends and I didn't have anyone to test this with.
Interceptors costing 25minerals was such a big deal too. Killing the interceptors with Goliaths is a legitimate strategy against carriers and is better than trying to kill the main unit
I think you know this by now, but its worth mentioning that SC2's engine is both its biggest blessing and curse. The SC2 engine used a networking architecture known as the deterministic lockstep, where every action/movement was recorded on both clients and servers, and the current gamestate was calculated by the summation of all gamestates before it. This engine allowed the game to be able to process so many animations and handle the state of thousands of units at once with minimal networking/performance hitches. This is what makes the Engine good enough to be in your "pros" list. However this exact same setup is also the reason why it and HotS also have out of game features like the crappy replay system, lack of an ad-hoc spectator mode, or the lack of a reconnect feature (or the sorry excuse of a reconnect system in the case of HotS). Because of this deterministic lockstep system, the game needs to know every state of the game prior to the state you're in right now, it means that if the game was to support ad-hoc spectating, it would require your CPU to process and calculate the entire game state up to the point you start watching (this is what your PC does when you try to reconnect to a game in HotS). In other words, sacrificing these features is what lets SC2 to play so smoothly during actual gameplay. Now this tradeoff might be excusable in SC2, but in HotS...
This negative you list is not a limitation of the engine at all. If you have a lockstep engine, you can definitely also create a state based system parallel to it. As you said, if you need an ad-hoc spectator mode, your CPU needs to simulate the game. Well the CPU already simulates the game while playing, all you need to do is to save the states instead of discarding them and you have a replay system where you can jump to any timestamp whenever you want. And the good part is, that simulation can be a completely external thing, running parallel to the game, just for spectators. In that way, having spectators would have no influence on the game lag or anything else. It was just a decision they made not to include this, but it is very easy to have with a lockstep engine. You obviously get the benefit of having very small replay sizes, but you can also have bigger replays with ad-hoc spectating. With the other engines, you just dont get the choice and the benefits that came with it. So in the end, it is not the engines fault that it is just better, but blizzard decisonmaking on not implementing features to extend it.
Which is bad, cause yeah protoss is cool and i like em more than terran and zerg maybe my protoss bias but i think each race should be equally balanced and protoss to be less cheese and more late game like in sc1
@@shaedeymamlas5496 grubby hit the nail on the head, as many other people did back in the day, the warpgate idea had potential but it needed some kind of drawback, rather than just being a no-brainer thing that you always would get. Increase the build time of units if it's warpgate or something
@@Bobby_Smith799 Not quite yet. The issues is mostly that for some reasons, Protos are the only one balanced around pro players. Turn out in Korea in the top percentile Protos was dominating. Combine that with the fact Gate are extremly powerfull and can do many cheese. It just that the nerf they got back then make Protos VERY hard to play correctly when past a certain rank. It just really hard to find data about race balance due to the fact there a lot of skill and matchup knowledge that come in play at top percentile.
My biggest issue with SC2 was how fast it was and how weak each individual unit was. As a fairly bad player, if I made 1 mistake, I could lose 50 pop in a split second to banelings, sentries, widow mine. The speed caused very explosive game play, but it switches the game play to being position based to how fast could you be with micro.
The Swarm Host incident shows how Blizzard cares less about their community until they realize their player base (which I believe for them is just the numbers for profit) is dropping significantly, only then they take actions to actually change something... -_-
I used to watch all the SC2 I could back during WoL. You were one of my favourite players and I was always rooting for you, Grubby. Sadly, as a protoss player myself I was getting more and more frustrated with the points you brought up in this video. Even back in 2012 when SC2 was huge I remember tuning in to the final seasons of Brood War Pro League and the game play and metas just felt more interresting. I feel like SC1, perhaps partly because of its control scheme, encourages more splitting of armies. The pathfinding and control scheme also makes armies less clumped naturally which makes battles a bit slower, dynamic and harder to predict. The macro is much more difficult which creates huge skill differential even among the top pros. Units such as the reaver (which you talked about in your favourite units video) are also super fun to watch since they can either be a big waste of resources or in the case of someone like Snow a complete wrecking ball. There are so many cool micro tricks in SC1 like moving shooting with flying units or even SCVs if you're crazy good, carriers can do several tricks to influence interceptor behaviors which are completely missing in SC2, etc. There are also the interresting games within the game such as - Defilers being a huge threat to terran - > Terran get science vessel to irradiate them - > Zerg gets scourge to suicide into them -> Terran tries to cover science vessels with marines to snipe the scourge - > Defilers plague the marines to make lurkers one shot them, etc All these hunts and chases within the games make it super fun and interresting to watch. I love SC2 in many ways and I've played a ton of multiplayer and the campaign more than any other game. But when you showed that Parting vs Soulkey game I just remember how frustrating and boring it was, and that's painful for me as well. I'm happy you changed gears when you didn't enjoy it any more. Thanks for still being awesome!
I really like these types of thoughtful discussions on things you're really deep into and passionate about. Especially since I wasn't really into sc2/rts at the time (didn't have a pc to play games) so it's interesting to see how things were.
53:32 I remember a ladder game in WoL "Impa vs Grubby" where you got proxy2gate'd on a 4 player map because the dude was maphacking, i was super impressed how you managed to keep calm and eventually win
That Impa guy sucked balls though. Imagine if he just split his Zealots from the start. Unstoppable. But he was a plat level player trying to cheat against a pro and got what he deserved.
1. Having all the units available in SC2 campaigns only to have them gutted for MP 'balance'. 2. The SC2 Zerg queen. 3. Banelings/Widowmines/Disruptors 4. Terran Nukes suck harder than #3. 5. RIP Dragoons
They have to, though. Otherwise it would be an even bigger nightmare. I can understand that units have special abilities in campaign or coop. But it's too much, the campaign units have their craziness at 10000%, and it also means that players have to learn 2 or 3 different balances, and they can't learn the game through the campaign and then jump into multiplayer with the knowledge. Also the campaign missions are mostly designed for one specific unit, like where you get the tank you never have to leave your base, or when you get the banshee all enemy units are anti-ground, or the SH in the missions works still like it did when Hots released. In BW I got asked a few times whether I can teach someone how to play. I always told them that they should play the campaign, they will enjoy an amazing story while learning the basics, and then they can come back and test their knowledge against other players and then that's where I can help. Nowadays players learn by copying builds they see on youtube though. Sad times.
I agree about Terran music being the only iconic one, but i must say that Zerg music in the background while Grubby was talking about Broodlords and Swarm Hosts was VERY effective and drove the point home even more.
They are thematic, but not iconic. They fit the theme and the style but they lack the spark that makes it iconic for sure. Which is odd because if you look at starcraft 1, zerg music was as iconic as terran with it's very strong synth 'creepy' style. Although i'd argue even there protoss was kind of lackluster. Legacy of the void is probably the best protoss music across all of starcraft.
i disagree. I disagree with many of the complaints grubby has here. especially in the big and small bad sections. One thing i know about game dev is that any mechanic should be somewhat polarizing. for example. If you have one mechanic that half the player base loves and half the player base hates, versus another mechanic which nobody has any strong opinions about, which do you think is the better mechanic? i've never seen grubby play starcraft but i can almost guarantee, just because of his complaints, that he mains protoss and plays zerg the least. it sounds like he wants a clunkier game to control with less interesting units.
@@jummyplays4864 Bruh, after the broodlord shenanigans everyone hoped for better unit design, and them they repeated the same unit but worse. It does not matter if you play T,Z or P, that shit is cheesy, unfun and does not require any skill while the other guy struggle to survive. and Z vs Z its a perfect proof of it, a stalemate where someone only loses if he just get tired and give up. Not to mention the "unintentional" difficulty to counter then especially as protoss. I play terran btw and i think protoss got done dirty while that dude responsible for the balance was sucking a zerg dick
@@jummyplays4864 did you even watch the video? He didn't just shit on Zerg but explained why certain units are designed badly, the sentry a protoss unit was one of them. It's also not polarizing to make strategies which lack a counter. It's just bad. Everyone hates it besides a tiny minority. And the argument you used was the one Ryan Johnson used to defend his aweful movie. He doesn't want to make bland movies but polarizing ones. How about making good games instead of polarizing? How about that, Buddy? Like do what WC3 and SC did. Make an RTS. Learn from your mistakes and correct them with an addon. Don't double down on mistakes and tell others: jokes on you, I actually wanted to make you mad. You can polerize with quality. Batman dark knight was polerizing. But not between people who think it's a garbage tier movie and a god tier movie. That's fractions. It's polarizing by its themes not by the quality.
@@Noqtis yes i watched the video lol.. and let me start by saying your comment reads like you are worked up or mad or something, and if thats the case i think you should chill. I am a grubby fan, i just disagree with him on most of this video.. and that is okay by the way. yes i saw he put sentry on the list and i think it was kindof a cop out. most of the stuff he is complaining about is old, but i have never in my starcraft career been bothered by people dropping a sentry in my base and force fielding off my natural from my main (or seen it, or heard anyone complain about it or the sentry in general), and even if i did i cant imagine it being nearly as annoying as any of the real harass a player has to deal with. also you could argue that is as much an issue with map design as with the unit itself. Or you could complain about any unit in the game in the same way. reapers can just walk into a base and kill drones for free. oracles can just fly over and kill drones for free, cyclones can hunt all overlords off the map. I didnt hear him complain about building a proxy shield battery and having an unkillable void ray abusing your opponent. I agree that making strategies that lack a counter is bad design, but thats not what im talking about. Also maybe its possible that you, or grubby just dont like the counters. for example winter always talks about the counter to siege tanks is not pushing into them. I dont really love that counter personally but i also dont love being forced to go into hive tech the second i see a tank. but i wouldnt say siege tanks are unfun unit or need to be changed, i will just have a more nuanced style of play than see X = build Y. He even says in the video something along these lines when he is talking about why protoss has a reputation for cheese. i mean he is complaining about swarm hosts.. a slow, expensive, large unit, with incredibly long cd beetween attack, that cant shoot up. it literally cant shoot up. anything that flies and shoots down is a counter to it.. but its exceptionally effective at sieging with a "swarmy" feel. I dont know who ryan johnson is, I learned the concept about making interesting mechanics on a video from a game development conference. and starcraft is the #1 rts so its pretty hard to say its not a good game. the problem i see with your statement is that you think polarizing and good are mutually exclusive, but thats kindof the ENTIRE reason the game is asymmetrical. when banelings blow up an entire bio ball it feels good for the zerg and bad for the terran. when terran is shelling my natural with 2 tanks and 12 marines protecting them 4 minutes in it feels good for the terran and bad for me.. when 4 dt's kill the only spore in my mineral line and i havent even started lair yet it feels good for toss and bad for me. but even though i dont have my counterplay ready doesnt mean it doesnt exist. This buddy here is what makes me think you are getting a little worked up. I dont think there is a strategy in starcraft that doesn't have a counter, and i think the huge variety in high level games makes that very clear. Protoss suffers from success in my opinion. for example its pretty easy to use scv's or drones to max / near max efficiency. They are not good enough units to have a very high skill ceiling, but probes have a near infinite skill ceiling b/c of the way they build. It would be very difficult for a human to use probes to maximum efficiency at least in comparison to scv's and drones, and i think this is a phenomenon that occurs with most protoss units. they are individually superior units, and you pay the cost for that every time, but its more difficult to get the full value back from them because of the level of control it takes. just think of shields alone.. if you could perfectly micro every unit you could probably cut protoss casualties like in half or more by sending damaged units back to repair their shields.. but even just blink micro-ing stalkers is difficult for a human nevermind watching all zealots and their shields and controlling them correctly.
I couldn't believe when the Swarm Host came out after dealing with Broodlord Infestor for so long. Grubby definitely stirred up memories and I feel that anger coming back as well.
Very valid points Grubby. The reason I still love SC2 nowadays is how the game feels and interacts. I play Random and that kinda eliminates some of the biases and having multiple accounts on ladder really makes it fun.
His complaints are outdated and if you still play you should know the balancing has changed-also maybe you are low level, but there is no bias' ..it is a well balanced game-Terran are the strongest race, but a tiny small margin, Zerg has to be very high level intelligent play or they will get massacred now. Alot of Protoss and Terran cheese works well against Zerg aswell even in the diamond and above level, who is stronger Protoss or Zerg? it depends on the player and the map, just like SC Brood War. Alot of Protoss players just complain I've noticed when players like MaxPax is showing them how it's done.
@@BattleBrotherCasten The game is balanced in win ratio statistics, but not in strategic choices. That's what Grubby talked about. He gave extreme examples from the Wings of Liberty era, and it's not as apparent anymore if we don't have 3h SH games, but the problem still persists. It's fine that pros can do chores very efficiently, but that doesn't mean the game is well designed or fun to play. BW is 1000x slower, yet the meta still changes. In SC2 every matchup goes the exact same way for 10 years now.
My biggest disappointment was in campaign, how they make Kerrigan somewhat good and reasonable, she does not betray people anymore and how every race should combine their efforts to beat big evil demon in the end. It is just so lazy, generic storytelling.
I think they wanted to make Kerrigan likeable which is a fine idea for me. You can't betray other people all the time, it gets boring. She has the place of Illidan in the SC universe. That being said they didn't have a villian with as much of a character as Arthas for example. If they had that you guys maybe wouldn't find Kerrigan's changes in personality so bad.
@@GrubbyTalksThe gameplay is in a good place- a lot of your complaints do not exist anymore, idk why people don’t understand…things change..for example swarm host are garbage and unusable because of the complaints.
I played a lot of SC2 back in the day. I managed to reach master league in the old seasons and replayed 2 years ago and reached diamond 1 as protoss doing nothing but 8 warpgates 2 bases all-in. I always hated how SC2 felted cheap most of the time. You either win or lose super fast by some ultra cheese strategy, or either play a "macro" game of 50 minutes where you go 200/200 and then win or lose in a battle that lasts for 10 seconds.
when players are good enough the ' lose in 1 fight ' thing hasn't been true for many years, just look at current top level pros like serral dark herO maxpax maru clem and how many great back and forth games they play every week
Completely true. It's just not fun to play games where everything comes down to the 10 second fight. The pacing should be like Dota/LOL where individual battles matter but come backs are completely possible and fucking up one fight does not make or break a game.
I discovered you thanks to SC2 and I was always was rooting for you! Thanks for making this video! I never understood why you quit and it makes so much sense in retrospect. And as a Protoss noob player I can totally get the frustration because it also happened on lower leagues, mines and zergling runbies were brutal and as you say, if you have to spent so much time into the game it just makes the lows even lower. Seems the next months will be interesting for the RTS genre and I'll keep an eye open!
It truly is the most nostalgic game for me, and the evolution of how scene was able to find new ways to get around these small imbalances from tournament to tournament were incredible. I am glad because I was able to meet You at IEM Katowice thanks to it! My only hope, now that I am old and grumpy, is that Blizzard has one more good RTS in them, and learns from all what happened to SC2 in the future. I would love to see all their lessons from wc reforged, from sc2 lotv how it is now, and how broodwar scene is still alive, and put that together into something brand new. I wish I live up to that day. It was a great content, thanks for that video, and the last words made me think of InControl, IdrA, day9 dailies and all the early Homestory Cup times, when Apollo was still playing, Sheth was the nicest guy to watch, and life was so good and simple. Take care, back to watching You playing Warcraft!
I appreciate you making these vids, I often have questions like this in my mind when I'm watching your content, and I'm sure you get asked about this shit all the time.
The biggest problem with the infestor broodlord meta was that fungal growth was so dominant at low level play. At top tier pros could usually find a way to hit 50/50 win rates, but casual players felt hopeless and that's when you lose your player base and community. I also felt it was in a place where it was the zerg players game to lose by making a mistake, not their opponents game to win with a good play.
So much of what was fucked about Protoss was created because they didn't want to fix how good sentry and warpgate was so they just destroyed the rest of the race.
Carrier required money to make small ships. The fact that Zerg did not require anything was an issue, in my mind, sure let them make it for free, slowly very slowly and you have the option to go into overdrive for money, so the enemy has a choice of presuring you and dancing. Yes he loses a few units but forceses you do unload and now you have a choice press the button to reload faster or let the opponent do what he wants and this dance could had been nice. Another option would had been to have a limit/cap per special unit, like, only 50 population can be broodlords and swarmhost.
I noticed the same playing protos vs free unit zerg to the point where after a late patch where blizzard heavily nerfed protos early builds due to the insane cheeses everyone was raving about from tournaments, protos stoped being 'fun' for me to play and I ended up completely quitting SC2 to never install it back again.
I remember there were some serious attempts by community members around WoL/HoTS to change pathing and macro to be more in line with BW - e.g. diminishing returns for worker saturation on minerals and more spread to prevent deathballing and encouraging individual unit micro, both by using mods and by trying to convince Blizzard directly. Blizzard responded directly at one point, saying the game was made for 3-base economy and no pathing changes would be made. It's a shame that any attempts at making it more focused on macro and wide front battles like in SC1 were killed by their design philosophy. Which really shows with how every unit in LoTV was designed with some ability to micro rather than fundamental core gameplay in mind; as said in their idea with the swarmhost, it seems like they were more interested in recreating some vague idea of "cool moments" from BW, but misunderstood how those moments were really made by players doing a lot with very basic units and pathfinding, rather than by forcing it through design. Felt like a lot of wasted potential.
Yup games like starbow for example. Fell on deaf ears then I like many others quit at HOTS. I went back to BW after seeing how freaking cool it was watching Sayle cast the mixed broodwar and sc2 proleague
TL exacerbated all of these design problems by only allowing discussions about how great the design and D Kim's decisions were. If grubby posted all of this amazing experience, analysis, and information on TL back in the day he would probably get banned
Yeah but Grubby was also insanely biased Notice he never addresses that Protoss dominates most of the ladder and many people have done braindead low APM challenges and gotten to master with Protoss
Protoss has had design issues in having their gateway units balanced entirely around warp gate, and warp prism in particular, which requires them to be comparatively underwhelming - especially later game, since the ability to very quickly build an entire army anywhere is inherently extremely powerful. This, when the protoss is not cheesing, leads to an, imo, pretty problematic play pattern/fragility while teching up to disproportionately powerful units such as disruptor, colossus and such. There have been band-aid fixes to this since hots - mothership core, which got removed afterwards, and shield battery + shield battery overcharge which we have now, that bring their own play pattern issues with them. Now, I am not a game dev or even a professional player, but I do wonder a bit how good/bad it could have worked out if they either removed the warp in from the power field of a prism, or made warp in speed MUCH lower the further away from the closest nexus you are
For me SC2 is just too much busywork. I feel like WC3 gets you to the fun part faster and better. Part of that is RNG sure, but I think making the most of every item in combination of your heroes and their skills, even if its not the item you hoped for, is still very much skill based. And it simply leads to more dynamic gameplay with much more variety on how the game will play out. Plus fighting creeps while you build up your strategy really helps with the pacing of the game and leads to a whole new dimension of scenarios like creepjacks for example. So, heroes, skills, creeps, 4 races and all that, simply help making WC3 a game with much more variety, and thats fun, both to play and to watch. Because SC2 doesnt have this variety and RNG, the gameplay becomes much more rigid: If you do this,. your opponent has to react so because thats objectively the best response and vice versa. It feels like all the options are already decided and whats left is just about how well you execute them. And sure, watching somebody do this with incredible skill is fun, but it gets predictable. If you get too creative you are almost always playing suboptimal in Starcraft, while in Warcraft 3 there are so many combinations of heroes, units, skills, items and creeps that unpredictable things will occur, even after more than 20 years, and that keeps it interesting.
For me, the micro and strategy are what makes a rts game fun and interesting, not how good you are at clicking injects every 30 sec. I always hated sc2 partly because it felt like it focused more on the latter.
@@mvpmvp2980 Agreed. The macro side of things is only interesting when you have to make money decisions (do I buy more units now, or invest in more production structures, or try to tech up, etc.) but the actual drone-work of having to mash buttons to make sure you're constantly producing workers/units is super uninteresting and not great gameplay imo
I agree with you all, lol. I think, the OP explains the reason why the meta never changes in SC2. But in Broodwar, too, you could get creative and that makes the meta change to this day. I tried replicating what uThermal does in his games, but goddamn it feels impossible without GM micro and multi-tasking. Meta just easily beats it every time. And as for the chores, can't be more true. David Kim said that he wanted to force Zergs to regularly look into their base, that's why inject exists. He made a chore. And then with 12 worker start he sped up the game as well, meaning more bases and more chores. I always say, imagine you have to play Need for Speed on 16x speed. Would that still be fun?
Going from Broolord to Swarm Host is a completely inexcusable blunder. It was shocking, and it broke my heart as well. It's impossible to watch, it's impossible to play.
I love Grubby's point about warpgate. As a protoss player, I always thought warpgate was the worst designed thing in the game. In my opinion, another massive improvement, in addition to the type of suggestion he made, would have been for the warp gate tech to be more expensive, slower to research, and only available after at least 1 more tech building. By pushing warpgate to require more investment, and arrive later in the game, it would be perfectly reasonable for it to be powerful, and not be something that ultimately led to poor balance around protoss units. I am a bit surprised more people don't hate the design of marauders, as it's a very infrequently called-out unit. Effects (like fungal growth) that disable or slow movement, are always the strongest abilities. For example even broodwar maelstrom is absolutely bonkers, and that has to be just about the weakest ability of that type in an RTS. Marauders having an omnipresent micro-free slow was such an awful design decision, as it made skirmishing irrelevant, and vastly contributed to the early onset of 'millisecond victories' that make SC2 so much less interesting to play or watch than its predecessor. I stopped playing multiplayer late in WoL though, so perhaps its just overshadowed by the myriad of other problems that came later.
I really hope the team of stormgate watch this video and learns about what u are saying because its truly an amazing feedback and as a sc2 player I have been feeling the same for so long that I am not playing anymore.
Look, we have to accept that Blizzard's talent pool just got hollowed out after ATVI acquired the company. It didn't happen all at once, but it did happen, and the same kind of low-effort, passionless content farm slowly corroded the brand, until there was nothing left.
Slightly unrelated, but the Blizzard game that broke my heart was actually Overwatch. For me the main problem was kind of the opposite of SC2: devs trying to fix things which were never problematic in the first place. I am not a professional player and see things from the middle of the ladder, so maybe some of those fixes made sense for top players; but for me they didn't feel so, and many changes were ruining the identity of the heroes. At some point Blizzard flattened health pool for all heroes (except tanks), and that made them less unique. They changed Reaper by removing healing spheres, which he got when killed anyone, simplifying the character; I thought it was a cool mechanics. They changed Lucio by substantially raising skill requirements for him, which was not necessarily good, because he used to be a really good entrance point for new players, but became something exclusive for very high skilled ones. And honestly, I don't see any reason for such changes. I think, the game balance was fine, and all the heroes had their purpose or their niche since the beginning, no one felt bad or underused (except Bastion, which was nearly useless, and then Blizzard nerfed it, decreasing range and damage, because Bastion was also very annoying for new players). When they reworked my main character, Mercy, which was the best healer pick for low-skill players like me, and removed mass resurrect, I left the game. But another problem was how devs handled toxicity among players. The game always had a problem with players who didn't take matches on ladder seriously and were ruining experience for other players. So Blizzard started increasing timeouts for leavers. But it didn't work, and players instead started picking Symmetra or Torbjorn and doing random stuff instead of playing. Then Blizzard started punishing this too, but it didn't increase players' motivation either; they kept doing the same but more covert. I think, the fundamental problem was with matchmaking. Often the very first encounter with the opposite team was so one sided, that many players just didn't want to continue, but had to play for another 10-15 minutes. Developers were replying to this that they don't want people to leave, they want them to re-group, adapt, pick different heroes, try new tactics. And while often that was good advice, I felt that in many cases there were an actual problem with matchmaking, and teams, which levels were no even close, were matched against each other. But Blizzard never addressed it, or even admitted it, they just looked at their statistics, and thought that it was all good, and the problem was with players. And all of this was long before the Overwatch 2 drama.
You honestly had a problem with them removing mass rez? I still play OW2 from time to time (though i don't know why) and you'd really hate it now lol. Healers are now better dps. Mercy should honestly be deleted at this point because she is just too different and sets the team that picks her automatically at a huge advantage. Fastest char in the game every 3 seconds, heals and damage boosts through walls periodically, good dps from across the map ect. Really made heroes like mcree obsolete since every healer now has same or better damage output.
@@GameOgreDonkey I actually did. And I heard, that this change actually buffed Mercy, but it was not the point. Gameplay just didn't feel good. Yes, I probably would hate the game as you describe it now. I'm not a DPS player. Originally Overwatch was specifically advertised, that it is not just for FPS players, but for players with different experiences and skillsets. I was bad at most of DPS (maybe except Pharah), but quite decent on some tanks and supports, so if supports are now DPS, it makes no sense for me.
I also think that Blizzard should have copied their own design regarding splash damage. The most powerful spell of BroodWar was arguably the PsiStorm, and it what prevented it to be completely insane was the non-overlapping design, it was pointless to cast multiple storms on top of each others. The same should have applied on ALL AoE in SC2. Including Collosus and Widow Mines. It would have been much easier to balance and less frustrating with fights ending in two seconds.
They found splash damage is too strong in SC2 because units are much better at clumping and flowing. So that unit ports from BW to SC2 such as Lurker or High Templar were way too good, so the Lurker never made it in, and HT storm was weaker because of it. Such that Zerg would often just stand still in some storms with Roaches. Even Archon loses to Zerglings in SC2, whereas in SC1 archons ROCKED zerglings' socks off
@@GrubbyTalks I'm surprised you didnt mention the fact that Blizzard said - after announcing SC2 will come in 3 parts - that they want people to be able to play together irrespective of what expansion they have, that they don't want to introduce new units because Sc2 will come out as a "full game" by itself and the expansions focus only on campaign missions. What a load of BS that turned out to be.
a lot of good points here, and i think the last grand finals may have shown how some of these turtle tactics are still an issue. that fight with clem and serral showed that terran has so many siege and leave opportunities they can just focus on ghosts to snipe while zerg has to coordinate every unit type to break their turrets tanks and liberators. meanwhile protoss is just a dead race :P
I absolutely loved my SC2 days, really went hardcore on it, but I absolutely hated a lot of the new unit designs... it all just felt forced - designed for the sake of having a new unit, not for the sake of plugging gaps in the race' kit or filling a need. Swarm host, Cyclone, etc etc. SCBW Remastered came out shortly after and of course I went back to that and it really showed up SC2's unit designs. Not necessarily the balance, but the design choices were just night and day between SC2 and BW. Things in SCBW were simpler, more straightforward, and their existence was justified - sometimes simple is just better. And it was so frustrating to see the SC2 team try to be hipsters and out-do tried and true designs to force fancy new designs - which isn't necessarily bad but.. you gotta chill sometimes.
as a casual player and viewer of SC2 (and SC1), you really hit the nail on the head with the constructive criticisms. 👍 And beautiful idea about warp gate / gateway. I've had similar thoughts!
I only played the campaign when it came out. I started to play online 1 year ago and Im having a blast. So much too learn and improve I love it. Great learning curve.
I completely agree with the reasons you set out. I would add one more though, and it also has to do with the zerg OPness. The queen chain heal, this is massively op, and makes a group of 5+ queens basicaly unbreakable for insanely long time. If you make zerg units rank list once :) (will ya? :D), I think queen should be three levels above tear S (like S+++). It is a unit that can inject, spread crp, has very solid, both, antiair and antiground, is insanely fast on crp and can fktn heal. Why would anyone make such a versatile and massively op unit :)? I cannot think of any protos or terran unit that would come anywhere close in this regard to the versatility and value provided by the queen. This is massively unfair and this one broke my heart :).
Everyone complains about everyone else because it's a deeply frustrating and punishing game. For example as a Zerg just because BL/Infestor is amazing doesn't make cannon rush, the fact Zerg has nothing baseline which shoots up or any detection so you can insta lose to banshees/dt/void ray/oracle etc.. not incredible annnoying, unfair and unfun.
@@bengreenbank Only real comparisions with broodlord infestor and with the swarmhost on the protoss side would be Kaydarian amulet which was erased pretty early back in WoL; the sentry immortal all ins, which were a direct response to how dumb broodlord infestor was but still sentries were too much withouth ravagers; and maybe old carrier which I am not even sure because when most zergs were crying about that we only had zerg champions in every single tournament as well as GSL and world championships. About your other remarks: So you are comparing things that were never a problem to somehting that had a lot to do with the game dying. -Cannon rush: blizzard gave zerg the little destructible rocks so you did not insta-died. This was super early in the game. If you are dying to this now have faith, know that once your overall level improves you will never die to this again unless you are a protoss yourself which is the only real dumb thing with cannons tbh. At least is not in most maps. -Dt, absolutely not op. Lurkers are insanely frustrating to deal with and there are some rushes to them that feel very hard to defend. I would not say Lukers are op, nor dts wich you can defend with some lings as long as you understand how to interpret what you scout. -Banshee has never been op. If you actually think this, my guess is there's no way you are above plat. -Quees shoot up? also queens with the old short range that lasted less than a third of the time sc2 has existed. After that people slowly realized queens defend almost everything. Most pro zergs think that withouth the queen zerg would be erased. I know I won't convince you because you already have decided what is true. But still I wanted to at least respond to that, since it had almost no truth behind it. Be sure I will read your response, but I won't answer unless it comes from a logical perspective which I would say it's about 0.3% possible.
It was always so intense, from the first seconds to the final seconds. This is why I basically resorted to proxy rax in the end, in every single game. Simple and it didn't raise my blood pressure. Probably raised the enemies though...
@@TheVanillatech having to adapt and be creative felt better than doing similar builds over and over. Beating a cheese always felt good. Loosing to it not so much.
@@thisisyol I found that beyond plat everything just turned into build orders and rushes and blind counters (or cheese). All of it was too stressful. Unless I just make 15 marines outside your base...
Man this video really puts into perspective why I, as a protoss player, gave up during heart of the swarm and quit sc2. I kept saying it was bs fighting zerg and terran but all my friends (zerg and terran scumbags xD) just told me I was being a noob. The internet said the same thing to me when I looked for help and who was I to argue? I was hardstuck in diamond and didn't know how to win anymore so maybe I was a noob. All I knew at the time was I hated banelings, I hated widowmines/mules, and more than anything I HATED swarm hosts. I wasn't having fun so I quit. I wonder if I had picked terran or zerg if I would have stuck around longer. My two friends who still play to this day are zerg players.
What I also disliked, specifically with Zerg, was the art design of some units. For example, the Infestor didn't look scary enough compared to the Defiler from SC1. They look like a pulsating blob of something. The lurkers in SC1 were so, so scary, specifically because they looked like an even more scarier form of Hydras, but in SC2 they looked so unrecognizable and overall not scary enough. And don't get me started with the Broodlord design. I hated the look, the mechanics, the lot of it. The Guardians in SC1 were something that I used to dread, not only because of range attack but because they look so amazingly scary. Even the portraits of the Guardians gave me nightmares. The SCII Broodlords were glorified butterflies. Horrible art design.
I feel like this was every Blizzard game though, in that era. Diablo III is a travesty when compared to the grittyness of Diablo I and II. Even now if you compare how bland Diablo IV looks with the grittyness of POE; it kills something in my soul.
You leave the Infestor alone, you evil being. It looks perfect. It *is* a pulsating blob of something - thats why its an Infestor. It blobs you in goo.
Well said. I always thought that increasing the starting worker count from 6 to 12 was a stealth nerf to protoss because it takes away a ton of time where the probe can harass, sneak, scout, build, etc. One of my best builds was to send an initial probe to the enemy base and it would get in before they built their first depot at the ramp. I had been probe harassing since brood war in year 2000. They nerfed me so hard - and added widow mines. They catered everything toward being a fun to watch game and not fun to play.
Great video as usual with very interesting points. I am only a casual, but SC2 is so frustating sometimes that I have unistalled it more than once. However, after playing it and following the competitive scene, the very same things that make it so frustating missing in games like Stormgate make them less enjoyable to me. It is like after getting used to Tequila later going for a mild and soft beer. Losing the whole army in a second if you aren't careful, losing to all kinds of cheese, watching games where a few disruptor shots or a widow mine changes everything in a fraction of a second creates such tension and thrill (and often frustration) that later games like Stormgate to me feel dull.
This is legitimately the most refreshing thing to hear from another person in a position of authority on the subject. Grubby thank you so much, these are all my feelings as an early sc2 protoss player. I appreciate you very much for this video, I really appreciate your perspective on RTS in general and your content. Thanks
I know you see the game through the lense of a protoss player, but I can tell you that as a zerg, I absolutely hated having to deal with sentries splitting all my units and killing them instantly, without there being a single counter play to them. Zerg had to tech to brood lords because they were never efficient enough to deal with sentries. By the time zerg developed the brood lord infestor meta (at the end of WoL), protoss had that nasty mothership/archon/voidray deathmass that produced the archon toilet, and I can tell you, nobody had fun against that. Starcraft 2 was a flawed game by many regards, but the worst part about it, is that the TTK was insane. AoE spells really killed the game. Banelings, widow mines, fungals, seeker missles, disruptors (the worst) even things like the oracle attack ability just seemed insane and completely unfun to play against. All that game planning, mind games, macro just for the game to be decided by a massive attack that killed your whole army in 3 seconds.
Protoss players I've noticed just complain instead of push themselves and say Zerg is OP, when they are NOT. Meanwhile players like MaxPax is showing them how it's done.
All races have big design problems. Grubby just mentioned the problems that he understands from the Protoss viewpoint, it is a bit biased but doesn't mean his points are invalid, there's equally valid criticism from Zerg and Terran players. The TTK by the way is also related to how quickly units can close the distance in SC2. A whole deathball always fits through every pathway on the map with the exception of the entrance to the main. In BW, no matter how well you managed your army, the units always trickled in. This isn't just due to the perfect pathfinding in SC2, but also the unit radii which is SO SMALL that units touch and even clip into each other while walking around. This changed a lot, not just AoE spells. But more importantly that players no longer have to fight over the map to gain control over pathways. If they did hold 2 or 3 positions with 2 or 3 armies, the deathball could just cut through one position and reduce one players army by 30%. Blizzard tried to fix the symptom by giving units escape mechanisms, Medivac boost, recall, blink, even SH can cast locust and then just walk away to safety for a minute at least. This however makes the game more reactionary than strategic, you no longer control areas of the map, but you need to react immediately when it's time to boost away with your medivac.
@@BattleBrotherCasten I think grubby is complaining about the state of the game during Hots not current meta, he never even said its op in the video he said the win rate was about 50/50 but didn't find it fun because all the protoss wins came from winning the game before 11mins
If you look at the numbers, there’s twice as many Protoss GMs as Zerg. Protoss get farmed by Terran in tournaments. If they nerfed marauder and Viking damage just a little bit, that matchup would be more balanced. It wouldn’t affect ZvT too much because marauders and Vikings aren’t used much in ZvT, and if marauders are used it’s to soak up banelings.
I remember before SC2 came out and we got hints and sneak previews of the game (Battle Reports), in my mind this was going to be the killer of Broodwar and a revolutionary new RTS. What we got instead was so-so designed units with so-so sound design, so-so cutscenes, and just about anything else.
I still remember MaNa vs FireCake marathon game. Swarm host, Broodlord, infestor, spine/spore vs Tempest, Carrier, cannon. The highlight of the game was the impromptu rap that caster pulled out around the end of the game.
It’s funny how you thought Zerg was OP vs. Protoss, because I still remember Scarlett very publicly mentioning that Protoss was OP. She even played under the username “TossImba.” And who can forget that one game where she switched from Zerg to Protoss and defeated a fellow Zerg player, DRG? (Though to be sure, she did win with an early game all-in, which kind of reinforces the point you were making.) Overall I believe SC2, while still my favorite game of all time, IS indeed a delicate balancing act. This is because of SC2’s focus on macro over micro, with armies that can be built up in a few minutes only to be obliterated in seconds. I don’t think ANY other RTS out there had such a fast-paced gameplay. Even Stormgate seems to be favoring more of a slower pace of gameplay that resembles WC3 and HotS .
Protoss and Zerg were imba at certain phases in the game. Protoss could do some very strong all-ins to win the game in the early or midgame, but if you reached the late-game zerg was basically unbeatable, because their late game composition was so incredibly cost-efficient. Funnily enough something similar happened with Terran at the end of Heart of the Swarm, where mech compositions led to super long games, because mass Raven was able to block all attacks with PDD, allowing the Terran to expand around the map at a snails pace while trading extremely efficiently by killing of units from a distance with Yamato and Seeker missile.
I remember a lot of people complained about Protoss in specific times. Like when Archon toilet was a thing, but that was arguably cheese. Then there was a certain moment in the balance when "Tossball" was a thing due to stuff like Sentry Guardian Shield plus Immortals plus Colossus, where it felt like they could just A-move and win battles lategame - but that was also mostly against Terran. Skytoss was also thrown around a lot both when Void Ray spam was a thing and later when Tempests got introduced. Also lots of Terran players liked to go for Mech in TvP, fearing Psi Storm and other factors, when Mech was always a losing strategy on that matchup. Once people got better at microing Bio armies TvP became one-sided again.
Great review of SC2, a game I was all-in on both playing and watching from 2010 to 2013. I think SC2 died for two reasons: 1) the atrocious design of brood lords and especially swarm hosts 2) not going free to play for multiplayer when LoL shifted to that model. Basically, all the 10-15 year olds without a credit card played LoL because it was free, creating a massive playerbase, and then they grew up and became the massive fanbase of the game. Two years of bad game design and a bad business model was enough to sink SC2 and allow for the rise of LoL. I think there would have always been MOBAs, but I think there would have been room for SC2 alongside them if Blizzard hadn't been so painfully slow and frankly bad after release.
Thanks for your thoughts, I always suspected the SH meta was the reason you left the game but it was nice to see your perspective on this. I played the game as Zerg in the very beginning, the first year or so of WoL when Zerg was generally considered underpowered, so I never had to live through the worst phase of the meta. What I remeber is Terran early aggression being almost impossible to hold. There was a time where you could produce Reapers without techlab (iirc). Reapers are faster then slowlings and queens at that time had a melee attack. So it was almost impossible to defend one base mass reapers without taking a lot of eco damage, at least at a casual/mediocre level like mine. Which obviously led to you dying of M&M shortly after. I loved this game to bits, but as you said some of it's flaws ended up making it too frustrating for me. - too volatile, where you could lose an entire base to a drop in a couple of seconds - the above also means that cheese tends to be really effective since you have limited ways to defend your base, which was really frustrating for a casual like me (maybe less so for a pro). Especially if you compare to, say, AoE games - degenerate playstyles. Zerg ended up producing the worst of it, but they certainly weren't the only ones *cough* Archon Toilet, mass void rays in WoL *cough*
Agreed that protoss ground army was never allowed to be strong because of centuries and warp gate. It's also a league problem, because protoss are able to tech in three directions with hidden information they decimate the middle of the bell curve of players, you could hit master doing a variation of a 4 gate push every game because the timings were so sharp and quite easy to execute. Blizzard wasn't willing to further skew the balance for the average player in order to have tournament balance be correct. I'm very concerned that celestials in storm gate will have a similar problem.
Really good video. Its been a long time, but I recall that during WoL and HotS eras and blizzard had some kind of policy not to do major balance patches during 3/4s of the year. And when they did, the changes were fairly conservative.
For me, as a Protoss player who played them since the original Starcraft because I liked their look and their music the most, what made me quit playing multiplayer of Starcraft 2 when Heart of the Swarm came out was just the feeling that Protoss is the worst race, and Blizzard was going to keep it that way. Sure, Protoss could still win high level tournaments, like world championships or something like GSL Code S *could* be won by a Protoss player. But Terran and Zerg were just better, more complete races that had all the tools they needed to win any kind of game. My favourite faction/race wasn't given the same care as the other two, and it just killed any desire to keep playing.
I personally think that the free units were a symptom of another problem. Zerg was supposed to be swarmy, which zerglings could pull off, the problem was that they added too much massive splash in the game. Hellions, banelings, siege tanks, high templar, colossus, archons, and that's just in the base game. If they had reduced all splash by 50-75% and removed all free units, I think the game would have balanced itself.
zerg is still very much swarmy even tho broods and swarm hosts have been mega nerfed. broods and swarm hosts were just a terrible idea period, there was no reason to put such shit design into the game
When it comes to protoss music, I feel like they could have made bangers fitting for the race if they made it orchestral but epic orchestral, in the vein of something by Two Steps From Hell or Antti Martikainen. Imagine something like United We Stand - Divided We Fall, Archangel, or SkyWorld in the protoss music. Maybe a bit toned down since TSFH's music is more center pieces than background music, but still.
I was just a lowly Diamond player, but i also dropped this game many years ago and never looked back. It felt like Protoss existed so Zerg would have a shiny, high-value target to destroy and use their 'swarmy' units and abilities on, and then we could all be in awe of the amazing skills of the Zerg players. Protoss and, to some extent, Terran were there to be the losers since all ZvZ would be boring.
One huge thing that has always been a problem according to me is that creep provides full vision. Information is so valuable in a game like Starcraft. Honestly at best, creep should provide vision like sensor towers do. And I totally agree on the free units spawned by abilities being a problem. Tell me why carriers have to buy them, and swarmosts and broodlords puke them out for free? Nonsense really -.-
I always thought the "gateways build faster but warpgate has reverse CD" idea was good. Finally vindicated! I also feel like the "Zerg gets free units" thing is one of those good ideas in theory that's hard to be both balanced and fun for both sides. The thing I felt Zerg needed the most was a way to break into a base when they're ahead to end the game but both brood lords and swarm hosts were also so good against army units that it made the game silly. Seems like the Ravager was the best unit of the bunch for that reason.
Every iteration of the Swarm host was designed stupidly. Every unit that spawns free stuff and then is able to run away to safety will be problematic. Now it's a harassment tool, but I wonder what Blizzard had in mind when they designed it for Heart of the Swarm. Did they want the Zergs enemy to slow push over every wave till they reach the Zerg base? No idea, makes still no sense.
Creep and overlord vision op as fuck too. They have maphacks! Protoss Walling with UNIT vs lings stupid design but kept due to Day9 and Artosis saying its good! Influencing the devs with shit and ideas design. Advanced alien race cannot make a wall with a door??? Atleast Terran can open and close the wall! Protoss walls also stops archons and immortal blocking out key units in your main unless..
I completely agree with warpgates, it always felt so strange that it was just this mandatory 50/50 upgrade, it was basically to balance and avoid even more protoss cheeses I guess, but gateways should've had their own flavour throughout the game. idk just felt lazy. pretty sure I heard a suggestion like yours many times before, but maybe it was hard for the design team to make it interesting
I really agree on the unit and building designs, they aren't recognizeble, in wc3 I look and instantly know which unit/building it is, the same not happen in sc2
I know Grubby since his WC3 days. Never watched any WC3 but he was that famous that you just knew him watching other games. I found this channel some days ago and I never knew I needed this. Very thoughtful and chill content. Please keep it up, this channel is going to the moon.
Came here to say this. Honestly great content.
I was a W3 player myself, but people who watched WCG for Counter Strike for example knew him as well.
@@moonriva
When Grubby was really famous the eSports scene was a village 😅 I kinda miss that flair rly hard :(
Back in my days, the gaming community as a whole was just smaller and closer. We all knew each other's memes and gods. You could be like a WC3 only player but also know about Boxer's SCV rush, FPS Doug, etc. And people from other games would have heard of the 4K roster and probably catch a game or two on WCG Finals
I'm not a pro, but SC2 broke my heart in a similar way, when LotV released I just stopped playing. Blizzard was so paralyzed when it came to action. I always said that the races are balanced in win statistics, but completely inbalanced in the strategic options.
Now since the community makes patches, the game is in a better state, but the playerbase also got used to all the mechanics that I hate, the whole game is balanced around them, including worker harass creates the coolest moments, the macro mechanics, and the emphasis is on reaction time rather than strategy.
Something I realized is that in Broodwar a lot less units fit through avenues on the map at once. In SC2 they're clumped up, but also so close to each other that they're clipping into each other. This means that a whole death ball can close the distance to an enemy all at once, something that in Broodwar just isn't the case, the army always trickles in and not only due to pathfinding but also the space between units.
I wish there were a balance mod contest or something, and that the best balance mod would get a matchmaker. I would be so excited to try these! I've started my own mod when I stopped playing, but who's gonna play that? It was more like a design ideas showcase anyway, not very balanced but with unit design ideas I collected from the forums that were cool, and a few of my own. Tackled all the issues with Broodlings, Forcefields, SH, warpgate. I even redesigned the Cyclone in a very similar way to how the community patch did it years later. I still wish for that to happen since it's something the community can take into their own hands, but even if they did I probably wouldn't notice.
SC2 is in a great state rn, but I think that a RTS is bound to be "unfit" for some players' taste depending on where its design is on the "real time" vs "Strategy" spectrum of RTS.
For one favoring Strategy over reaction time, AoE4 seems a better fit for exemple.
dude that sounds really cool you were able to do all that....
The extreme clump was a deliberate design choice, but one that makes the game now very all of nothing. Whole armies get vaporized in seconds. You either melt them or get melted right away.
@@Leonhart_93It was the worst design choice and my least favorite thing about SC2
@@Leonhart_93 Such a bad choice, the clumping is what kills SC2 for me.
Kerrigan turning into a magic space angel was… a choice
Yup. Making her into this boss B after she, during being free and of her own choice, massacred a bunch of worlds (if I remember correctly), is certainly, as you say, "a choice." The companion to "no good deed goes unpunished" is apparently "no bad deed goes unrewarded."
I still remember the ending of SC1 making me feel very uneasy as a kid, like an unsettling Lovecraftian horror. You get to know the Zerg and the Protoss, then Duran betrays you, you learn of this crazy prophecy-type thing, and it's all very strange and uncomfortable. Then in SC2 you uninfest Kerrigan so she can REinfest herself, Narud (Like, for real?) and the whole Xel'naga blows its load, and then like you said: magic space angel. Very Marvel-esque. No weight, all flash.
@@emalinedickinson7492 worse than marvel. She's now a nature loving "primal zerg". So stupid, this and Diablo 3 story were just god awful.
Everything about how she was written in that game is vomit inducing.
What way to kill a franchise's story.
The Terran music in SC2 very much reminded me of the Sci Fi show 'Firefly'
They can't take the sky from you, browncoat brother.
Great video, incredible analysis.
Broodlord-Infestor era was why I quit playing SC2. I still hop on every now and then but I haven't really truly laddered since (was master league in WoL).
Typo in your timestamps by the way "Bid Bad #1" instead of "Big Bad #1"
Zerg's ability to spread creep and see the whole map that way I think is one of the biggest balance issues. StarCraft 2's unlimited unit selection and pathing also made controlling the Zerg swarm far to easy.
I like your idea to keep Gateways relevant in the later game.
I think larvae is actually another major reason why Zerg were/are so OP. If I went mech as Terran and suddenly needed Bio, my production structures couldn't support it - Zerg on the other hand can switch to mass any unit they need using their existing unit production, so long as they had the proper tech researched or built.
I also completely agree with you and Grubby that Zerglings (speedlings specifically) ruin the game by forcing the other races to always wall. That creates a boring, non-dynamic gameplay, and it's also extremely punishing because 16 lings, which is only 400 minerals (same as 4 zealots, who cannot do the same) can easily sneak into your base at any time since they are so fast, and simply lay waste to your eco and production whilst a fight is happening elsewhere. Combine it with the map control that the speedling + creep gives Zerg, it makes it extremely easy to dominate the map as Zerg. It was meant to be a swarming race, not a "full map control" race.
I've quit SC2 several times, and it's mostly because of PvZ frustration.
“If I went mech”
I always thought it was hilarious that Terran players felt like they should just be able to choose - at a whim- what play style they want to go with
What a luxury
As an arthropod, Zerg music is an absolute banger. Terran music is for animals with emotions or something.
based
I remember someone saying that Protoss couldn't be balanced properly because of the Warp Prism. If their units were as powerful as you might expect warping them directly into the enemy base would be ridiculous. So they had to toe a delicate line that made the late-game "stand together" death ball style that could have given Protoss a distinguishing identity less effective than it needed to be. I feel like this problem contributed to a heavy Zerg-Terran focus because they couldn't get Protoss right without unravelling the identity they'd made for them.
Personally I think removing the Prism's ability to make a Pylon field may have let them buff Gateway units to where they needed to be? But the highest I got was Gold so maybe I'm talking rubbish.
i mean people are also forgetting archon toilet and mothership core shenanigans were a thing for a pretty long time as well at the very beginning. There are other imbalances though not just the warp prism; colossus can ignore terrain cliffs. Game devs probably thought protoss would be able to do sneak attacks like that but the issue is protoss lost shuttle and reaver which were a lot more mobile and same with templar drops (storms got nerfed to sc1).
I absolutely hated the fact that the protoss had reaver removed from their arsenal and replaced with colossus/disruptor. It's like people didn't watch sc1 and didn't know what made it fun to watch...
All they needed to do was give people more units not less...like take all of sc1 units then add a few more new ones...no they decided to take everything and replace it with the cracked up version of as much toxiciy as possible:
you want goliaths? too bad here is lock on from 21321 units away beep jeep instead or this massive juggernaught which 2 shots most things and that can be picked up in medivacs.
you want vultures or firebats? neah take these hellbats that are like twice as effective and get free psi storms on every hit.
you want spider mines? how about widow mines which autofire and destroy 40 units in 2 s and are rechargable?
you want siege tanks? how about liberators which can fly and do the same thing whilst sitting away from your mineral line.
you want scanner? sure but how about we make it so the same upgrade can be used to drop free workers to repair and take minerals for free?
you want dragoons? neah take immortals which two shot tanks and take forever to kill.
you want reavers? neah take the instant death laser long range colossi instead or disruptors that are like infinite scarabs with no real downside until after it fires but is compensated with an army deleting punch..
you want corsairs or scouts? neah take these super fast hit while running away phoenixes and void rays that can just kill anything with armor or flying siege tanks like tempests.
you want lurkers? neah lets get swarm hosts who never run out of summons which can fly and can also relocate easily.
you want queens&defilers? neah lets get infestors which have fungal growth that is basically a cross between the two and can move while burrowed.
It's atrocious how much protoss got shafted in spells too...they lost dark archon, arbiter and corsairs and gained sentries/mothership and blink. Only when oracle showed up did they get some more spell options.
TL:DR sc2 devs not only didn't know anything about balance and were slow to respond, they created poor design philosophies with little counterplay which are boring to watch.
They also have the ability to teleport their whole army at once, every 60 seconds which is ridiculous, and the only unit in the game that can dodge anything all the while being the core of the army (stalker) and ze alots that requires 0 micro while you have to micro heavily to kill them.
Warpgate shouldn't be just an upgraded gateway, just like Grubby said. That contributed to gateway armies being weak, but so did blink, since Stalkers can get out of harms way for extremely long. And how about that Blizzard needed 10 years to nerf warping in speed?
I think, warpgate tech should come later, warpgate cooldown should be longer, blink should come later or the whole Stalker unit as well, in it's place could be the Dragoon. Then warp gate armies could be stronger. And then to compensate for the warp-in of a stronger army with the prism, the prism itself could cost more. Blizzard did already a price increase, but even more could be good. It should be an investment like the Arbiter in BW. And for that investment it should be more durable and carry 12 unit slots instead of 8.
Thing is, it's a chain of changes, one change requires another one till you are at a point where the whole game is redesigned. Blizzard isn't going to do this, it's always "no the unit can't be made stronger because warp-in harass would be too strong" or "no that tech cannot come later or this race can't defend themselves". But in reality what you have to do is make the tech later AND the army stronger at the same time (this is just an example).
I noticed another thing and that's how many units can squeeze through normal pathways in BW.
It's not just the pathfinding, the unit radi are a lot bigger in BW as well, in SC2 units actually clip into each other. The result is that a whole deathball can close the distance all at once, while in BW the units trickle in, even if you manage to make 5 unit groups and send them all at once.
@@attractivegd9531 zerg has always had the army teleporting ability in the nydus which is far worse than proto's time/location/mana limited recall
David Kim's zerg bias basically killed SC2. Literally everyone I knew that played the game quit over BL/Infestor. The one time someone came up with a way to counter it, MVP with the Ghost snipe spam, it was instantly nerfed to uselessness. Remember that game on WCS or MLG I think where a top Korean Terran wrote IMBA IMBA IMBA before GG? Yeah, and they still did nothing for so many years. Absolutely baffling decision making, to the point where rumors that DK was close with top western Z players were going around.
"Thank you David Kim"
Said bias is the evidence that Blizzard lost their passion of making great games years ago.
Yeh, the guy sucks at balancing the game and quite an asshat too for being bias toward zerg. But bilzard was kinda dead at that point.
This take is so frustrating to read, since its so blatantly false.
For the longest time in early WoL, Terran was absolutely broken, and Zerg was nowhere to be seen at all. The race was unplayable competetively at launch.
Like for the love of god, you used to be able to blink or pickup Terran units (preventing all damage, mind you!) from Fungal.
The changes that made Zerg competetively playable arrived middle 1.3 - almost two years into SC2's lifetime, with the infestor changes. Increasing the damage and disallowing pickups/blinks once you were caught by it. Afterwards, Terrans STILL had the highest overall competetive winrates for almost six additional months, before the final ladder map pool was released. This final ladder map pool, plus Stephano's roach maxes, is what allowed the Broodlord/Infestor comps to shine. Too many bases were defensible for such an immobile army - on top of which, since they were so clumped, attacking into them with such a slow army was also feasible.
This gives us practically two years of Terran dominance, but because the final few months of Wings of Liberty was Zerg favored, thats all everyone remembers. I don't disagree with you, by the way, that Broodlord Infestor on those maps was horrific to go up against. However, when even in the period you're calling out, Terrans were more competetive than Zerg was at their weakest, it screams that -you- are biased.
MarineKingPrime, MVP, NaDa, Taeja for Terran. Squirtle, MC, PartinG, HerO for Protoss.. and then you have JulyZerg, Nestea, Life and DRG as the performing Zergs. It really was not half as imbalanced as you'd like to make it out.
@@ladylynxelot9925 People don't care about Terran dominance because it's not as frustrating to play against. We're talking about the era that made the most people QUIT. What he's saying isn't blatantly false at all, it's objectively true. Everyone knew that BLFestor made large swathes of the playerbase quit. Pro play is a small sliver of the community that any game is built around. Ladder play is hugely fundamental to balance around, regardless of what some people may tell you. Boring to play is far worse than boring to watch, because people only want to watch what they find somewhat fun to play.
Grubby we met at MLG Dallas 2011, I was one game off from playing against you on the big stage. You ended up playing the guy who beat me 2-1 named DJE, a terran who opened blueflame hellion against you and the game ended up lagging something horrible for some reason, very frustrating. I was ecstatic to meet you, and have followed you since the first replay from wc3replays that I downloaded some 20 years ago. Glad you are still doing the same thing all these years later, and I hope you never stop
The 5-6 last years, sc2 became such a banger. Serral, Reynor and Clem in europe make the game such enjoyable to watch.
You Grubby, with Huk, were my protoss inspiration back in the days. I will forever remember the day you won against MVP in WCS europe allowing you to qualify for bracket. The "Grubby line" has been crossed by Grubby himself ! Thanks for those days.
A lot of what you don't like in starcraft has changed, you should give it another try :p
yeah the last 5-6 i.e. the post KR scene death era after 2016.... what a banger......
@@FF-zy1sp Rogue, Maru, Dark, Stats, Byun, Zest, TY, Inno were all there majority of 20162018-now. wtf are you talking about ?
@@nevosisthere are no high calibre or team left, no more team houses, no the most important team tournament, and the kr scene shrinked by a ten. With a high Korean competition, rogue always was a mediocre player, but now is considered one of the goats
@@FF-zy1sp Most games don't have any of this...SC2 just had a half million dollar tournament, there are endless countless tournaments that happen almost every single day, there are tons of extremely high level pros, lots of competition and more. I'd say it's not in a bad spot at all, and very good considering how old the game is.
@@FF-zy1sp Yes Korean scene shrank, but its still alive, and outside of Korea sc2 is doing well, its much bigger then sc1 for example. There are amazing players like Serral, Maru, Hero, Reynor, MaxPax and amazing tournaments. I see this time and time again where sc1 fanatics dump on sc2 with arguments that arent relevant for more then 5 years. They dont know whats hapening in sc2 for years, but still comment as if they knew.
I've been wanting to watch a video like this for such a long time.
I know you've alluded to some of these topics many times before...
But I still remember watching your SC2 streams religiously, and being a bit heartbroken when you switched to HOTS. XD
Ofc SC2 is a brutally frustrating game, and I can't imagine what practicing as much as a pro-gamer during the InfestorBL, and then Swarm Host, era must have felt like.
You definitely made the right choice from all points of view, it seems.
Thank you for making the video, is all I'm saying. I feel it will provide some closure, for many SC2 fans. 🙂
One thing that really doesn't come across much in this video how much I loved SC2 in 2011, 2012; the slow descent in falling into an unenamored state with the game was a slow grinding away of faith that Blizz Balance understands what makes playing vs SH or Brood/Infestor not a good experience
This really makes me appreciate the creators of starcraft and starcraft brood war, that had a similar unit that outranged everything else: the carrier. But interceptors cost minerals. Seems like having locusts cost resources would have been such a difference to the whole equation.
You also had to get the upgrade for 8 interceptors total and interceptors release one by one so you would need to always babysit them to keep moving so their interceptors from deploying instantly to be effective
Locusts held out long enough for the next Locust wave to spawn, while the Swarm Hosts could freely run around and the enemy was occupied. That are 2 major design flaws combined in one unit.
Otherwise free units would be fine, they simply need a counter. I as a test redesigned the Swarmhost to produce Locusts every 5s only when it was rooted, and those Locusts were way weaker and couldn't get farther than a tank can shoot. Idea was that you can pick them off with Tempests or Liberators or Banshees, or just match it with equally many siege units. I made this when LotV released because I hated the game too much to play, but sadly so did most of my friends and I didn't have anyone to test this with.
Interceptors costing 25minerals was such a big deal too. Killing the interceptors with Goliaths is a legitimate strategy against carriers and is better than trying to kill the main unit
I think you know this by now, but its worth mentioning that SC2's engine is both its biggest blessing and curse. The SC2 engine used a networking architecture known as the deterministic lockstep, where every action/movement was recorded on both clients and servers, and the current gamestate was calculated by the summation of all gamestates before it. This engine allowed the game to be able to process so many animations and handle the state of thousands of units at once with minimal networking/performance hitches. This is what makes the Engine good enough to be in your "pros" list. However this exact same setup is also the reason why it and HotS also have out of game features like the crappy replay system, lack of an ad-hoc spectator mode, or the lack of a reconnect feature (or the sorry excuse of a reconnect system in the case of HotS). Because of this deterministic lockstep system, the game needs to know every state of the game prior to the state you're in right now, it means that if the game was to support ad-hoc spectating, it would require your CPU to process and calculate the entire game state up to the point you start watching (this is what your PC does when you try to reconnect to a game in HotS). In other words, sacrificing these features is what lets SC2 to play so smoothly during actual gameplay. Now this tradeoff might be excusable in SC2, but in HotS...
This negative you list is not a limitation of the engine at all. If you have a lockstep engine, you can definitely also create a state based system parallel to it. As you said, if you need an ad-hoc spectator mode, your CPU needs to simulate the game. Well the CPU already simulates the game while playing, all you need to do is to save the states instead of discarding them and you have a replay system where you can jump to any timestamp whenever you want. And the good part is, that simulation can be a completely external thing, running parallel to the game, just for spectators. In that way, having spectators would have no influence on the game lag or anything else.
It was just a decision they made not to include this, but it is very easy to have with a lockstep engine. You obviously get the benefit of having very small replay sizes, but you can also have bigger replays with ad-hoc spectating. With the other engines, you just dont get the choice and the benefits that came with it.
So in the end, it is not the engines fault that it is just better, but blizzard decisonmaking on not implementing features to extend it.
its crazy that half the heartbreak was just trying to be a top pro while playing protoss
Which is bad, cause yeah protoss is cool and i like em more than terran and zerg maybe my protoss bias but i think each race should be equally balanced and protoss to be less cheese and more late game like in sc1
Blizz undermined themselves really hard when making warp gate+prism, which made all gateway units NEED to be balanced around the mechanic
@@shaedeymamlas5496 grubby hit the nail on the head, as many other people did back in the day, the warpgate idea had potential but it needed some kind of drawback, rather than just being a no-brainer thing that you always would get. Increase the build time of units if it's warpgate or something
My understanding is that Protoss is the weakest race to this day. Ridiculous.
@@Bobby_Smith799 Not quite yet. The issues is mostly that for some reasons, Protos are the only one balanced around pro players. Turn out in Korea in the top percentile Protos was dominating. Combine that with the fact Gate are extremly powerfull and can do many cheese. It just that the nerf they got back then make Protos VERY hard to play correctly when past a certain rank.
It just really hard to find data about race balance due to the fact there a lot of skill and matchup knowledge that come in play at top percentile.
When the Senior Balance Designer has a preferred race
You mean Terran?
Bc brood fester sim city strategy came about because Zerg straight up lost to Terran and Protoss army to army
The protoss soundtrack is so good in the zeratul part of the terran campaign, it has an end of of times kind of vibe.
My biggest issue with SC2 was how fast it was and how weak each individual unit was. As a fairly bad player, if I made 1 mistake, I could lose 50 pop in a split second to banelings, sentries, widow mine. The speed caused very explosive game play, but it switches the game play to being position based to how fast could you be with micro.
The Swarm Host incident shows how Blizzard cares less about their community until they realize their player base (which I believe for them is just the numbers for profit) is dropping significantly, only then they take actions to actually change something... -_-
I used to watch all the SC2 I could back during WoL. You were one of my favourite players and I was always rooting for you, Grubby. Sadly, as a protoss player myself I was getting more and more frustrated with the points you brought up in this video. Even back in 2012 when SC2 was huge I remember tuning in to the final seasons of Brood War Pro League and the game play and metas just felt more interresting.
I feel like SC1, perhaps partly because of its control scheme, encourages more splitting of armies. The pathfinding and control scheme also makes armies less clumped naturally which makes battles a bit slower, dynamic and harder to predict. The macro is much more difficult which creates huge skill differential even among the top pros. Units such as the reaver (which you talked about in your favourite units video) are also super fun to watch since they can either be a big waste of resources or in the case of someone like Snow a complete wrecking ball. There are so many cool micro tricks in SC1 like moving shooting with flying units or even SCVs if you're crazy good, carriers can do several tricks to influence interceptor behaviors which are completely missing in SC2, etc. There are also the interresting games within the game such as
- Defilers being a huge threat to terran
- > Terran get science vessel to irradiate them
- > Zerg gets scourge to suicide into them
-> Terran tries to cover science vessels with marines to snipe the scourge
- > Defilers plague the marines to make lurkers one shot them, etc
All these hunts and chases within the games make it super fun and interresting to watch.
I love SC2 in many ways and I've played a ton of multiplayer and the campaign more than any other game.
But when you showed that Parting vs Soulkey game I just remember how frustrating and boring it was, and that's painful for me as well.
I'm happy you changed gears when you didn't enjoy it any more. Thanks for still being awesome!
I really like these types of thoughtful discussions on things you're really deep into and passionate about. Especially since I wasn't really into sc2/rts at the time (didn't have a pc to play games) so it's interesting to see how things were.
53:32 I remember a ladder game in WoL "Impa vs Grubby" where you got proxy2gate'd on a 4 player map because the dude was maphacking, i was super impressed how you managed to keep calm and eventually win
I remember that game also. I think that was the first time i heard about Grubby wich together with witera was my favorite players
That Impa guy sucked balls though. Imagine if he just split his Zealots from the start. Unstoppable. But he was a plat level player trying to cheat against a pro and got what he deserved.
1. Having all the units available in SC2 campaigns only to have them gutted for MP 'balance'.
2. The SC2 Zerg queen.
3. Banelings/Widowmines/Disruptors
4. Terran Nukes suck harder than #3.
5. RIP Dragoons
Disruptors at least require skill to connect with the target.
They have to, though. Otherwise it would be an even bigger nightmare.
I can understand that units have special abilities in campaign or coop. But it's too much, the campaign units have their craziness at 10000%, and it also means that players have to learn 2 or 3 different balances, and they can't learn the game through the campaign and then jump into multiplayer with the knowledge. Also the campaign missions are mostly designed for one specific unit, like where you get the tank you never have to leave your base, or when you get the banshee all enemy units are anti-ground, or the SH in the missions works still like it did when Hots released.
In BW I got asked a few times whether I can teach someone how to play. I always told them that they should play the campaign, they will enjoy an amazing story while learning the basics, and then they can come back and test their knowledge against other players and then that's where I can help.
Nowadays players learn by copying builds they see on youtube though. Sad times.
Took away dark archon because it was op... Then give Zerg infestors!??
@@nightmareTomekor play vs AI to learn?
@@growtocycle6992 Another unnecessary hurdle to seperate the two game modes? It's not play vs AI, it's work to learn.
I agree about Terran music being the only iconic one, but i must say that Zerg music in the background while Grubby was talking about Broodlords and Swarm Hosts was VERY effective and drove the point home even more.
They are thematic, but not iconic. They fit the theme and the style but they lack the spark that makes it iconic for sure. Which is odd because if you look at starcraft 1, zerg music was as iconic as terran with it's very strong synth 'creepy' style. Although i'd argue even there protoss was kind of lackluster.
Legacy of the void is probably the best protoss music across all of starcraft.
@@netneo4038 Protoss have overall the most 'meh' music for sure.
Grubby you should really be consultant for any upcoming RTS multiplayer with potential
i disagree. I disagree with many of the complaints grubby has here. especially in the big and small bad sections. One thing i know about game dev is that any mechanic should be somewhat polarizing. for example. If you have one mechanic that half the player base loves and half the player base hates, versus another mechanic which nobody has any strong opinions about, which do you think is the better mechanic?
i've never seen grubby play starcraft but i can almost guarantee, just because of his complaints, that he mains protoss and plays zerg the least.
it sounds like he wants a clunkier game to control with less interesting units.
Also his complaints are outdated..balance patches have come out since he played it I think. @@jummyplays4864
@@jummyplays4864 Bruh, after the broodlord shenanigans everyone hoped for better unit design, and them they repeated the same unit but worse.
It does not matter if you play T,Z or P, that shit is cheesy, unfun and does not require any skill while the other guy struggle to survive. and Z vs Z its a perfect proof of it, a stalemate where someone only loses if he just get tired and give up. Not to mention the "unintentional" difficulty to counter then especially as protoss. I play terran btw and i think protoss got done dirty while that dude responsible for the balance was sucking a zerg dick
@@jummyplays4864 did you even watch the video? He didn't just shit on Zerg but explained why certain units are designed badly, the sentry a protoss unit was one of them.
It's also not polarizing to make strategies which lack a counter. It's just bad. Everyone hates it besides a tiny minority.
And the argument you used was the one Ryan Johnson used to defend his aweful movie.
He doesn't want to make bland movies but polarizing ones.
How about making good games instead of polarizing? How about that, Buddy?
Like do what WC3 and SC did. Make an RTS. Learn from your mistakes and correct them with an addon. Don't double down on mistakes and tell others: jokes on you, I actually wanted to make you mad.
You can polerize with quality. Batman dark knight was polerizing. But not between people who think it's a garbage tier movie and a god tier movie. That's fractions. It's polarizing by its themes not by the quality.
@@Noqtis yes i watched the video lol.. and let me start by saying your comment reads like you are worked up or mad or something, and if thats the case i think you should chill. I am a grubby fan, i just disagree with him on most of this video.. and that is okay by the way.
yes i saw he put sentry on the list and i think it was kindof a cop out. most of the stuff he is complaining about is old, but i have never in my starcraft career been bothered by people dropping a sentry in my base and force fielding off my natural from my main (or seen it, or heard anyone complain about it or the sentry in general), and even if i did i cant imagine it being nearly as annoying as any of the real harass a player has to deal with. also you could argue that is as much an issue with map design as with the unit itself. Or you could complain about any unit in the game in the same way. reapers can just walk into a base and kill drones for free. oracles can just fly over and kill drones for free, cyclones can hunt all overlords off the map. I didnt hear him complain about building a proxy shield battery and having an unkillable void ray abusing your opponent. I agree that making strategies that lack a counter is bad design, but thats not what im talking about. Also maybe its possible that you, or grubby just dont like the counters. for example winter always talks about the counter to siege tanks is not pushing into them. I dont really love that counter personally but i also dont love being forced to go into hive tech the second i see a tank. but i wouldnt say siege tanks are unfun unit or need to be changed, i will just have a more nuanced style of play than see X = build Y. He even says in the video something along these lines when he is talking about why protoss has a reputation for cheese. i mean he is complaining about swarm hosts.. a slow, expensive, large unit, with incredibly long cd beetween attack, that cant shoot up. it literally cant shoot up. anything that flies and shoots down is a counter to it.. but its exceptionally effective at sieging with a "swarmy" feel.
I dont know who ryan johnson is, I learned the concept about making interesting mechanics on a video from a game development conference. and starcraft is the #1 rts so its pretty hard to say its not a good game. the problem i see with your statement is that you think polarizing and good are mutually exclusive, but thats kindof the ENTIRE reason the game is asymmetrical. when banelings blow up an entire bio ball it feels good for the zerg and bad for the terran. when terran is shelling my natural with 2 tanks and 12 marines protecting them 4 minutes in it feels good for the terran and bad for me.. when 4 dt's kill the only spore in my mineral line and i havent even started lair yet it feels good for toss and bad for me. but even though i dont have my counterplay ready doesnt mean it doesnt exist.
This buddy here is what makes me think you are getting a little worked up.
I dont think there is a strategy in starcraft that doesn't have a counter, and i think the huge variety in high level games makes that very clear. Protoss suffers from success in my opinion. for example its pretty easy to use scv's or drones to max / near max efficiency. They are not good enough units to have a very high skill ceiling, but probes have a near infinite skill ceiling b/c of the way they build. It would be very difficult for a human to use probes to maximum efficiency at least in comparison to scv's and drones, and i think this is a phenomenon that occurs with most protoss units. they are individually superior units, and you pay the cost for that every time, but its more difficult to get the full value back from them because of the level of control it takes. just think of shields alone.. if you could perfectly micro every unit you could probably cut protoss casualties like in half or more by sending damaged units back to repair their shields.. but even just blink micro-ing stalkers is difficult for a human nevermind watching all zealots and their shields and controlling them correctly.
I couldn't believe when the Swarm Host came out after dealing with Broodlord Infestor for so long. Grubby definitely stirred up memories and I feel that anger coming back as well.
Very valid points Grubby. The reason I still love SC2 nowadays is how the game feels and interacts. I play Random and that kinda eliminates some of the biases and having multiple accounts on ladder really makes it fun.
His complaints are outdated and if you still play you should know the balancing has changed-also maybe you are low level, but there is no bias' ..it is a well balanced game-Terran are the strongest race, but a tiny small margin, Zerg has to be very high level intelligent play or they will get massacred now. Alot of Protoss and Terran cheese works well against Zerg aswell even in the diamond and above level, who is stronger Protoss or Zerg? it depends on the player and the map, just like SC Brood War. Alot of Protoss players just complain I've noticed when players like MaxPax is showing them how it's done.
Ya the game feels incredibly smooth
@@BattleBrotherCasten im first lieutenant. so high-mid rank. i kept an open mind that is why i have no confirmation biases towards races and culture.
@@BattleBrotherCasten The game is balanced in win ratio statistics, but not in strategic choices. That's what Grubby talked about. He gave extreme examples from the Wings of Liberty era, and it's not as apparent anymore if we don't have 3h SH games, but the problem still persists.
It's fine that pros can do chores very efficiently, but that doesn't mean the game is well designed or fun to play.
BW is 1000x slower, yet the meta still changes. In SC2 every matchup goes the exact same way for 10 years now.
@@BattleBrotherCasten game is still atrocious with a bad design its terrible thats why its dead and no one likes it
from the LOTV ost:
Stars Our Home, Attack on Korhal
WoL ost:
Escape from Mar Sara, Mengsk
certified bangers!
My biggest disappointment was in campaign, how they make Kerrigan somewhat good and reasonable, she does not betray people anymore and how every race should combine their efforts to beat big evil demon in the end. It is just so lazy, generic storytelling.
The missions were pretty good but yeah the story was a complete dumpster fire
“One day, I’m gonna be the man that kill- I mean kisses you, Kerrigan.” Jimmy, 1998-2015
The story is definitely lackluster. But on the bright side there's quite a lot of fun and silly mods that came out of SC2
I think they wanted to make Kerrigan likeable which is a fine idea for me. You can't betray other people all the time, it gets boring. She has the place of Illidan in the SC universe. That being said they didn't have a villian with as much of a character as Arthas for example. If they had that you guys maybe wouldn't find Kerrigan's changes in personality so bad.
@@GrubbyTalksThe gameplay is in a good place- a lot of your complaints do not exist anymore, idk why people don’t understand…things change..for example swarm host are garbage and unusable because of the complaints.
Love these long talking videos! Perfect for listening at work
Grubby scarred by swarm hosts and brood lords 😆 Good fair points though
I played a lot of SC2 back in the day. I managed to reach master league in the old seasons and replayed 2 years ago and reached diamond 1 as protoss doing nothing but 8 warpgates 2 bases all-in. I always hated how SC2 felted cheap most of the time. You either win or lose super fast by some ultra cheese strategy, or either play a "macro" game of 50 minutes where you go 200/200 and then win or lose in a battle that lasts for 10 seconds.
when players are good enough the ' lose in 1 fight ' thing hasn't been true for many years, just look at current top level pros like serral dark herO maxpax maru clem and how many great back and forth games they play every week
Completely true. It's just not fun to play games where everything comes down to the 10 second fight.
The pacing should be like Dota/LOL where individual battles matter but come backs are completely possible and fucking up one fight does not make or break a game.
I discovered you thanks to SC2 and I was always was rooting for you!
Thanks for making this video! I never understood why you quit and it makes so much sense in retrospect. And as a Protoss noob player I can totally get the frustration because it also happened on lower leagues, mines and zergling runbies were brutal and as you say, if you have to spent so much time into the game it just makes the lows even lower.
Seems the next months will be interesting for the RTS genre and I'll keep an eye open!
6:57 naaah this exact song is always giving me goosebumps! such an amazing melancholic tune
It truly is the most nostalgic game for me, and the evolution of how scene was able to find new ways to get around these small imbalances from tournament to tournament were incredible. I am glad because I was able to meet You at IEM Katowice thanks to it! My only hope, now that I am old and grumpy, is that Blizzard has one more good RTS in them, and learns from all what happened to SC2 in the future. I would love to see all their lessons from wc reforged, from sc2 lotv how it is now, and how broodwar scene is still alive, and put that together into something brand new. I wish I live up to that day. It was a great content, thanks for that video, and the last words made me think of InControl, IdrA, day9 dailies and all the early Homestory Cup times, when Apollo was still playing, Sheth was the nicest guy to watch, and life was so good and simple. Take care, back to watching You playing Warcraft!
I appreciate you making these vids, I often have questions like this in my mind when I'm watching your content, and I'm sure you get asked about this shit all the time.
The biggest problem with the infestor broodlord meta was that fungal growth was so dominant at low level play. At top tier pros could usually find a way to hit 50/50 win rates, but casual players felt hopeless and that's when you lose your player base and community. I also felt it was in a place where it was the zerg players game to lose by making a mistake, not their opponents game to win with a good play.
So much of what was fucked about Protoss was created because they didn't want to fix how good sentry and warpgate was so they just destroyed the rest of the race.
Exactly.
If SC2 is in a "better place" it's because nobody's left but the die-hards who like the game as it is.
You should join the SC2 Balance Council. I like the Gateway idea!
just some weeks ago i was thinking about it too ... as a bronze ... i wonder what this button does ...
This would be peak
Carrier required money to make small ships. The fact that Zerg did not require anything was an issue, in my mind, sure let them make it for free, slowly very slowly and you have the option to go into overdrive for money, so the enemy has a choice of presuring you and dancing. Yes he loses a few units but forceses you do unload and now you have a choice press the button to reload faster or let the opponent do what he wants and this dance could had been nice. Another option would had been to have a limit/cap per special unit, like, only 50 population can be broodlords and swarmhost.
Swarm hosts would have been cooler as ground carriers
I noticed the same playing protos vs free unit zerg to the point where after a late patch where blizzard heavily nerfed protos early builds due to the insane cheeses everyone was raving about from tournaments, protos stoped being 'fun' for me to play and I ended up completely quitting SC2 to never install it back again.
I remember there were some serious attempts by community members around WoL/HoTS to change pathing and macro to be more in line with BW - e.g. diminishing returns for worker saturation on minerals and more spread to prevent deathballing and encouraging individual unit micro, both by using mods and by trying to convince Blizzard directly. Blizzard responded directly at one point, saying the game was made for 3-base economy and no pathing changes would be made.
It's a shame that any attempts at making it more focused on macro and wide front battles like in SC1 were killed by their design philosophy. Which really shows with how every unit in LoTV was designed with some ability to micro rather than fundamental core gameplay in mind; as said in their idea with the swarmhost, it seems like they were more interested in recreating some vague idea of "cool moments" from BW, but misunderstood how those moments were really made by players doing a lot with very basic units and pathfinding, rather than by forcing it through design.
Felt like a lot of wasted potential.
Yup games like starbow for example. Fell on deaf ears then I like many others quit at HOTS. I went back to BW after seeing how freaking cool it was watching Sayle cast the mixed broodwar and sc2 proleague
TL exacerbated all of these design problems by only allowing discussions about how great the design and D Kim's decisions were. If grubby posted all of this amazing experience, analysis, and information on TL back in the day he would probably get banned
Yeah but Grubby was also insanely biased
Notice he never addresses that Protoss dominates most of the ladder and many people have done braindead low APM challenges and gotten to master with Protoss
Protoss has had design issues in having their gateway units balanced entirely around warp gate, and warp prism in particular, which requires them to be comparatively underwhelming - especially later game, since the ability to very quickly build an entire army anywhere is inherently extremely powerful. This, when the protoss is not cheesing, leads to an, imo, pretty problematic play pattern/fragility while teching up to disproportionately powerful units such as disruptor, colossus and such.
There have been band-aid fixes to this since hots - mothership core, which got removed afterwards, and shield battery + shield battery overcharge which we have now, that bring their own play pattern issues with them.
Now, I am not a game dev or even a professional player, but I do wonder a bit how good/bad it could have worked out if they either removed the warp in from the power field of a prism, or made warp in speed MUCH lower the further away from the closest nexus you are
In wc3, heroes will get lots of xp if undead go mass nec. That’s a really good balance system to against “swarming”
And there is dispell.. they could have implemented technological version of dispell for protoss in SC2
For me SC2 is just too much busywork. I feel like WC3 gets you to the fun part faster and better. Part of that is RNG sure, but I think making the most of every item in combination of your heroes and their skills, even if its not the item you hoped for, is still very much skill based. And it simply leads to more dynamic gameplay with much more variety on how the game will play out. Plus fighting creeps while you build up your strategy really helps with the pacing of the game and leads to a whole new dimension of scenarios like creepjacks for example.
So, heroes, skills, creeps, 4 races and all that, simply help making WC3 a game with much more variety, and thats fun, both to play and to watch. Because SC2 doesnt have this variety and RNG, the gameplay becomes much more rigid: If you do this,. your opponent has to react so because thats objectively the best response and vice versa. It feels like all the options are already decided and whats left is just about how well you execute them. And sure, watching somebody do this with incredible skill is fun, but it gets predictable. If you get too creative you are almost always playing suboptimal in Starcraft, while in Warcraft 3 there are so many combinations of heroes, units, skills, items and creeps that unpredictable things will occur, even after more than 20 years, and that keeps it interesting.
For me, the micro and strategy are what makes a rts game fun and interesting, not how good you are at clicking injects every 30 sec. I always hated sc2 partly because it felt like it focused more on the latter.
@@mvpmvp2980very true, it was a game of chores not a game of strategy and control
@@mvpmvp2980 Agreed. The macro side of things is only interesting when you have to make money decisions (do I buy more units now, or invest in more production structures, or try to tech up, etc.) but the actual drone-work of having to mash buttons to make sure you're constantly producing workers/units is super uninteresting and not great gameplay imo
I agree with you all, lol.
I think, the OP explains the reason why the meta never changes in SC2. But in Broodwar, too, you could get creative and that makes the meta change to this day. I tried replicating what uThermal does in his games, but goddamn it feels impossible without GM micro and multi-tasking. Meta just easily beats it every time.
And as for the chores, can't be more true. David Kim said that he wanted to force Zergs to regularly look into their base, that's why inject exists. He made a chore. And then with 12 worker start he sped up the game as well, meaning more bases and more chores.
I always say, imagine you have to play Need for Speed on 16x speed. Would that still be fun?
@@EB-bl6cc but your complaints here apply infinitely more to brood war which artosis would zealously disagree with.....
Damn, even having a space to appreciate music is awesome; keep up the good work!
Going from Broolord to Swarm Host is a completely inexcusable blunder. It was shocking, and it broke my heart as well. It's impossible to watch, it's impossible to play.
Zerg was just way too fucking strong at the peak of SC2 competitive scene in HoTS.
I love Grubby's point about warpgate. As a protoss player, I always thought warpgate was the worst designed thing in the game.
In my opinion, another massive improvement, in addition to the type of suggestion he made, would have been for the warp gate tech to be more expensive, slower to research, and only available after at least 1 more tech building. By pushing warpgate to require more investment, and arrive later in the game, it would be perfectly reasonable for it to be powerful, and not be something that ultimately led to poor balance around protoss units.
I am a bit surprised more people don't hate the design of marauders, as it's a very infrequently called-out unit. Effects (like fungal growth) that disable or slow movement, are always the strongest abilities. For example even broodwar maelstrom is absolutely bonkers, and that has to be just about the weakest ability of that type in an RTS. Marauders having an omnipresent micro-free slow was such an awful design decision, as it made skirmishing irrelevant, and vastly contributed to the early onset of 'millisecond victories' that make SC2 so much less interesting to play or watch than its predecessor.
I stopped playing multiplayer late in WoL though, so perhaps its just overshadowed by the myriad of other problems that came later.
I really hope the team of stormgate watch this video and learns about what u are saying because its truly an amazing feedback and as a sc2 player I have been feeling the same for so long that I am not playing anymore.
Look, we have to accept that Blizzard's talent pool just got hollowed out after ATVI acquired the company. It didn't happen all at once, but it did happen, and the same kind of low-effort, passionless content farm slowly corroded the brand, until there was nothing left.
Slightly unrelated, but the Blizzard game that broke my heart was actually Overwatch.
For me the main problem was kind of the opposite of SC2: devs trying to fix things which were never problematic in the first place. I am not a professional player and see things from the middle of the ladder, so maybe some of those fixes made sense for top players; but for me they didn't feel so, and many changes were ruining the identity of the heroes. At some point Blizzard flattened health pool for all heroes (except tanks), and that made them less unique. They changed Reaper by removing healing spheres, which he got when killed anyone, simplifying the character; I thought it was a cool mechanics. They changed Lucio by substantially raising skill requirements for him, which was not necessarily good, because he used to be a really good entrance point for new players, but became something exclusive for very high skilled ones. And honestly, I don't see any reason for such changes. I think, the game balance was fine, and all the heroes had their purpose or their niche since the beginning, no one felt bad or underused (except Bastion, which was nearly useless, and then Blizzard nerfed it, decreasing range and damage, because Bastion was also very annoying for new players). When they reworked my main character, Mercy, which was the best healer pick for low-skill players like me, and removed mass resurrect, I left the game.
But another problem was how devs handled toxicity among players. The game always had a problem with players who didn't take matches on ladder seriously and were ruining experience for other players. So Blizzard started increasing timeouts for leavers. But it didn't work, and players instead started picking Symmetra or Torbjorn and doing random stuff instead of playing. Then Blizzard started punishing this too, but it didn't increase players' motivation either; they kept doing the same but more covert. I think, the fundamental problem was with matchmaking. Often the very first encounter with the opposite team was so one sided, that many players just didn't want to continue, but had to play for another 10-15 minutes. Developers were replying to this that they don't want people to leave, they want them to re-group, adapt, pick different heroes, try new tactics. And while often that was good advice, I felt that in many cases there were an actual problem with matchmaking, and teams, which levels were no even close, were matched against each other. But Blizzard never addressed it, or even admitted it, they just looked at their statistics, and thought that it was all good, and the problem was with players.
And all of this was long before the Overwatch 2 drama.
You honestly had a problem with them removing mass rez? I still play OW2 from time to time (though i don't know why) and you'd really hate it now lol. Healers are now better dps. Mercy should honestly be deleted at this point because she is just too different and sets the team that picks her automatically at a huge advantage. Fastest char in the game every 3 seconds, heals and damage boosts through walls periodically, good dps from across the map ect. Really made heroes like mcree obsolete since every healer now has same or better damage output.
@@GameOgreDonkey I actually did. And I heard, that this change actually buffed Mercy, but it was not the point. Gameplay just didn't feel good. Yes, I probably would hate the game as you describe it now. I'm not a DPS player. Originally Overwatch was specifically advertised, that it is not just for FPS players, but for players with different experiences and skillsets. I was bad at most of DPS (maybe except Pharah), but quite decent on some tanks and supports, so if supports are now DPS, it makes no sense for me.
Those david kim interviews make it sound like he only ever watched bronze league heroes
I also think that Blizzard should have copied their own design regarding splash damage. The most powerful spell of BroodWar was arguably the PsiStorm, and it what prevented it to be completely insane was the non-overlapping design, it was pointless to cast multiple storms on top of each others. The same should have applied on ALL AoE in SC2. Including Collosus and Widow Mines. It would have been much easier to balance and less frustrating with fights ending in two seconds.
They found splash damage is too strong in SC2 because units are much better at clumping and flowing. So that unit ports from BW to SC2 such as Lurker or High Templar were way too good, so the Lurker never made it in, and HT storm was weaker because of it. Such that Zerg would often just stand still in some storms with Roaches. Even Archon loses to Zerglings in SC2, whereas in SC1 archons ROCKED zerglings' socks off
@@GrubbyTalks I'm surprised you didnt mention the fact that Blizzard said - after announcing SC2 will come in 3 parts - that they want people to be able to play together irrespective of what expansion they have, that they don't want to introduce new units because Sc2 will come out as a "full game" by itself and the expansions focus only on campaign missions.
What a load of BS that turned out to be.
a lot of good points here, and i think the last grand finals may have shown how some of these turtle tactics are still an issue. that fight with clem and serral showed that terran has so many siege and leave opportunities they can just focus on ghosts to snipe while zerg has to coordinate every unit type to break their turrets tanks and liberators. meanwhile protoss is just a dead race :P
Once again, spot on Grubby. The Zerg macro mechanics (larvae and queens) is why they win every major tournament for the last 8 years.
They don't + they got nerfed quite recently. Serral would be OP in any race, if he switched. Without him, the stats would be quite even.
I absolutely loved my SC2 days, really went hardcore on it, but I absolutely hated a lot of the new unit designs... it all just felt forced - designed for the sake of having a new unit, not for the sake of plugging gaps in the race' kit or filling a need. Swarm host, Cyclone, etc etc.
SCBW Remastered came out shortly after and of course I went back to that and it really showed up SC2's unit designs. Not necessarily the balance, but the design choices were just night and day between SC2 and BW. Things in SCBW were simpler, more straightforward, and their existence was justified - sometimes simple is just better. And it was so frustrating to see the SC2 team try to be hipsters and out-do tried and true designs to force fancy new designs - which isn't necessarily bad but.. you gotta chill sometimes.
as a casual player and viewer of SC2 (and SC1), you really hit the nail on the head with the constructive criticisms. 👍
And beautiful idea about warp gate / gateway. I've had similar thoughts!
I only played the campaign when it came out. I started to play online 1 year ago and Im having a blast. So much too learn and improve I love it. Great learning curve.
I completely agree with the reasons you set out. I would add one more though, and it also has to do with the zerg OPness. The queen chain heal, this is massively op, and makes a group of 5+ queens basicaly unbreakable for insanely long time. If you make zerg units rank list once :) (will ya? :D), I think queen should be three levels above tear S (like S+++). It is a unit that can inject, spread crp, has very solid, both, antiair and antiground, is insanely fast on crp and can fktn heal. Why would anyone make such a versatile and massively op unit :)? I cannot think of any protos or terran unit that would come anywhere close in this regard to the versatility and value provided by the queen. This is massively unfair and this one broke my heart :).
Even in those two times, the WoL Broodlord Infestor era; and the HotS swarmhost era, Zergs complained about protoss
Everyone complains about everyone else because it's a deeply frustrating and punishing game. For example as a Zerg just because BL/Infestor is amazing doesn't make cannon rush, the fact Zerg has nothing baseline which shoots up or any detection so you can insta lose to banshees/dt/void ray/oracle etc.. not incredible annnoying, unfair and unfun.
@@bengreenbank
Only real comparisions with broodlord infestor and with the swarmhost on the protoss side would be Kaydarian amulet which was erased pretty early back in WoL; the sentry immortal all ins, which were a direct response to how dumb broodlord infestor was but still sentries were too much withouth ravagers; and maybe old carrier which I am not even sure because when most zergs were crying about that we only had zerg champions in every single tournament as well as GSL and world championships.
About your other remarks:
So you are comparing things that were never a problem to somehting that had a lot to do with the game dying.
-Cannon rush: blizzard gave zerg the little destructible rocks so you did not insta-died. This was super early in the game.
If you are dying to this now have faith, know that once your overall level improves you will never die to this again unless you are a protoss yourself which is the only real dumb thing with cannons tbh. At least is not in most maps.
-Dt, absolutely not op. Lurkers are insanely frustrating to deal with and there are some rushes to them that feel very hard to defend. I would not say Lukers are op, nor dts wich you can defend with some lings as long as you understand how to interpret what you scout.
-Banshee has never been op. If you actually think this, my guess is there's no way you are above plat.
-Quees shoot up? also queens with the old short range that lasted less than a third of the time sc2 has existed. After that people slowly realized queens defend almost everything. Most pro zergs think that withouth the queen zerg would be erased.
I know I won't convince you because you already have decided what is true.
But still I wanted to at least respond to that, since it had almost no truth behind it.
Be sure I will read your response, but I won't answer unless it comes from a logical perspective which I would say it's about 0.3% possible.
Captain my Captain!
Is Zerg IMBA or does Protoss suck?
i kind of regret having a heartbeat of over 9000 for 30+ minutes each game. Sounds unhealthy.
It was always so intense, from the first seconds to the final seconds. This is why I basically resorted to proxy rax in the end, in every single game. Simple and it didn't raise my blood pressure.
Probably raised the enemies though...
@@TheVanillatech having to adapt and be creative felt better than doing similar builds over and over. Beating a cheese always felt good. Loosing to it not so much.
@@thisisyol I found that beyond plat everything just turned into build orders and rushes and blind counters (or cheese). All of it was too stressful.
Unless I just make 15 marines outside your base...
They should've gotten Hans Zimmer to do the Zerg and Protos music.
The music piece "A Card To Play" sounds like a piece from Steve Jablonsky's Bayformers soundtrack.
Man this video really puts into perspective why I, as a protoss player, gave up during heart of the swarm and quit sc2. I kept saying it was bs fighting zerg and terran but all my friends (zerg and terran scumbags xD) just told me I was being a noob. The internet said the same thing to me when I looked for help and who was I to argue? I was hardstuck in diamond and didn't know how to win anymore so maybe I was a noob.
All I knew at the time was I hated banelings, I hated widowmines/mules, and more than anything I HATED swarm hosts. I wasn't having fun so I quit. I wonder if I had picked terran or zerg if I would have stuck around longer. My two friends who still play to this day are zerg players.
What I also disliked, specifically with Zerg, was the art design of some units.
For example, the Infestor didn't look scary enough compared to the Defiler from SC1. They look like a pulsating blob of something.
The lurkers in SC1 were so, so scary, specifically because they looked like an even more scarier form of Hydras, but in SC2 they looked so unrecognizable and overall not scary enough.
And don't get me started with the Broodlord design. I hated the look, the mechanics, the lot of it. The Guardians in SC1 were something that I used to dread, not only because of range attack but because they look so amazingly scary. Even the portraits of the Guardians gave me nightmares.
The SCII Broodlords were glorified butterflies.
Horrible art design.
mmm very true
Agree
I feel like this was every Blizzard game though, in that era. Diablo III is a travesty when compared to the grittyness of Diablo I and II. Even now if you compare how bland Diablo IV looks with the grittyness of POE; it kills something in my soul.
You leave the Infestor alone, you evil being. It looks perfect. It *is* a pulsating blob of something - thats why its an Infestor. It blobs you in goo.
Well said.
I always thought that increasing the starting worker count from 6 to 12 was a stealth nerf to protoss because it takes away a ton of time where the probe can harass, sneak, scout, build, etc. One of my best builds was to send an initial probe to the enemy base and it would get in before they built their first depot at the ramp. I had been probe harassing since brood war in year 2000. They nerfed me so hard - and added widow mines.
They catered everything toward being a fun to watch game and not fun to play.
Grubby, do you have the playlist or any links to your SC2 campaign playthrough? I only managed to find what appears to be LOTV campaign... :(
he only recorded the lotv one
@@norberthiz9318 megasadge :(
Great video as usual with very interesting points. I am only a casual, but SC2 is so frustating sometimes that I have unistalled it more than once. However, after playing it and following the competitive scene, the very same things that make it so frustating missing in games like Stormgate make them less enjoyable to me. It is like after getting used to Tequila later going for a mild and soft beer. Losing the whole army in a second if you aren't careful, losing to all kinds of cheese, watching games where a few disruptor shots or a widow mine changes everything in a fraction of a second creates such tension and thrill (and often frustration) that later games like Stormgate to me feel dull.
watching and playing are definitely two different things. But it sort of highlights how mobas are just.. a better concept.
This is legitimately the most refreshing thing to hear from another person in a position of authority on the subject. Grubby thank you so much, these are all my feelings as an early sc2 protoss player. I appreciate you very much for this video, I really appreciate your perspective on RTS in general and your content. Thanks
Zerg should have music inspired from the Predator (1987) theme
I don’t put the Zerg soundtrack on when splitting wood outside. But, I would put it on whilst splitting wood in the bedroom. /s
19:20 your forgot infestor Terrans
those were brutal, nothing like seeing 100 infested terrans pop up around something. Definitely one of the things I disliked in the game back then.
I know you see the game through the lense of a protoss player, but I can tell you that as a zerg, I absolutely hated having to deal with sentries splitting all my units and killing them instantly, without there being a single counter play to them. Zerg had to tech to brood lords because they were never efficient enough to deal with sentries.
By the time zerg developed the brood lord infestor meta (at the end of WoL), protoss had that nasty mothership/archon/voidray deathmass that produced the archon toilet, and I can tell you, nobody had fun against that.
Starcraft 2 was a flawed game by many regards, but the worst part about it, is that the TTK was insane. AoE spells really killed the game. Banelings, widow mines, fungals, seeker missles, disruptors (the worst) even things like the oracle attack ability just seemed insane and completely unfun to play against. All that game planning, mind games, macro just for the game to be decided by a massive attack that killed your whole army in 3 seconds.
Protoss players I've noticed just complain instead of push themselves and say Zerg is OP, when they are NOT. Meanwhile players like MaxPax is showing them how it's done.
I agree sentries are BS lol
All races have big design problems. Grubby just mentioned the problems that he understands from the Protoss viewpoint, it is a bit biased but doesn't mean his points are invalid, there's equally valid criticism from Zerg and Terran players.
The TTK by the way is also related to how quickly units can close the distance in SC2. A whole deathball always fits through every pathway on the map with the exception of the entrance to the main. In BW, no matter how well you managed your army, the units always trickled in. This isn't just due to the perfect pathfinding in SC2, but also the unit radii which is SO SMALL that units touch and even clip into each other while walking around.
This changed a lot, not just AoE spells. But more importantly that players no longer have to fight over the map to gain control over pathways. If they did hold 2 or 3 positions with 2 or 3 armies, the deathball could just cut through one position and reduce one players army by 30%.
Blizzard tried to fix the symptom by giving units escape mechanisms, Medivac boost, recall, blink, even SH can cast locust and then just walk away to safety for a minute at least. This however makes the game more reactionary than strategic, you no longer control areas of the map, but you need to react immediately when it's time to boost away with your medivac.
@@BattleBrotherCasten I think grubby is complaining about the state of the game during Hots not current meta, he never even said its op in the video he said the win rate was about 50/50 but didn't find it fun because all the protoss wins came from winning the game before 11mins
If you look at the numbers, there’s twice as many Protoss GMs as Zerg. Protoss get farmed by Terran in tournaments. If they nerfed marauder and Viking damage just a little bit, that matchup would be more balanced. It wouldn’t affect ZvT too much because marauders and Vikings aren’t used much in ZvT, and if marauders are used it’s to soak up banelings.
I remember before SC2 came out and we got hints and sneak previews of the game (Battle Reports), in my mind this was going to be the killer of Broodwar and a revolutionary new RTS. What we got instead was so-so designed units with so-so sound design, so-so cutscenes, and just about anything else.
The memories the MUSIC brings me back to shows how insane that game was,
I still remember MaNa vs FireCake marathon game. Swarm host, Broodlord, infestor, spine/spore vs Tempest, Carrier, cannon. The highlight of the game was the impromptu rap that caster pulled out around the end of the game.
It’s funny how you thought Zerg was OP vs. Protoss, because I still remember Scarlett very publicly mentioning that Protoss was OP. She even played under the username “TossImba.” And who can forget that one game where she switched from Zerg to Protoss and defeated a fellow Zerg player, DRG? (Though to be sure, she did win with an early game all-in, which kind of reinforces the point you were making.)
Overall I believe SC2, while still my favorite game of all time, IS indeed a delicate balancing act. This is because of SC2’s focus on macro over micro, with armies that can be built up in a few minutes only to be obliterated in seconds. I don’t think ANY other RTS out there had such a fast-paced gameplay. Even Stormgate seems to be favoring more of a slower pace of gameplay that resembles WC3 and HotS .
Protoss and Zerg were imba at certain phases in the game. Protoss could do some very strong all-ins to win the game in the early or midgame, but if you reached the late-game zerg was basically unbeatable, because their late game composition was so incredibly cost-efficient.
Funnily enough something similar happened with Terran at the end of Heart of the Swarm, where mech compositions led to super long games, because mass Raven was able to block all attacks with PDD, allowing the Terran to expand around the map at a snails pace while trading extremely efficiently by killing of units from a distance with Yamato and Seeker missile.
that is not what grubby said, he said it was unfun balance in the different stages of the game.
I remember a lot of people complained about Protoss in specific times. Like when Archon toilet was a thing, but that was arguably cheese. Then there was a certain moment in the balance when "Tossball" was a thing due to stuff like Sentry Guardian Shield plus Immortals plus Colossus, where it felt like they could just A-move and win battles lategame - but that was also mostly against Terran. Skytoss was also thrown around a lot both when Void Ray spam was a thing and later when Tempests got introduced. Also lots of Terran players liked to go for Mech in TvP, fearing Psi Storm and other factors, when Mech was always a losing strategy on that matchup. Once people got better at microing Bio armies TvP became one-sided again.
@@kingdomofthesaintful all the toss stuff got patched instantly too XD
Great review of SC2, a game I was all-in on both playing and watching from 2010 to 2013. I think SC2 died for two reasons: 1) the atrocious design of brood lords and especially swarm hosts 2) not going free to play for multiplayer when LoL shifted to that model.
Basically, all the 10-15 year olds without a credit card played LoL because it was free, creating a massive playerbase, and then they grew up and became the massive fanbase of the game. Two years of bad game design and a bad business model was enough to sink SC2 and allow for the rise of LoL. I think there would have always been MOBAs, but I think there would have been room for SC2 alongside them if Blizzard hadn't been so painfully slow and frankly bad after release.
Thanks for your thoughts, I always suspected the SH meta was the reason you left the game but it was nice to see your perspective on this.
I played the game as Zerg in the very beginning, the first year or so of WoL when Zerg was generally considered underpowered, so I never had to live through the worst phase of the meta.
What I remeber is Terran early aggression being almost impossible to hold. There was a time where you could produce Reapers without techlab (iirc). Reapers are faster then slowlings and queens at that time had a melee attack. So it was almost impossible to defend one base mass reapers without taking a lot of eco damage, at least at a casual/mediocre level like mine. Which obviously led to you dying of M&M shortly after.
I loved this game to bits, but as you said some of it's flaws ended up making it too frustrating for me.
- too volatile, where you could lose an entire base to a drop in a couple of seconds
- the above also means that cheese tends to be really effective since you have limited ways to defend your base, which was really frustrating for a casual like me (maybe less so for a pro). Especially if you compare to, say, AoE games
- degenerate playstyles. Zerg ended up producing the worst of it, but they certainly weren't the only ones *cough* Archon Toilet, mass void rays in WoL *cough*
Just got back into sc2. Awesome game.
Agreed that protoss ground army was never allowed to be strong because of centuries and warp gate.
It's also a league problem, because protoss are able to tech in three directions with hidden information they decimate the middle of the bell curve of players, you could hit master doing a variation of a 4 gate push every game because the timings were so sharp and quite easy to execute.
Blizzard wasn't willing to further skew the balance for the average player in order to have tournament balance be correct.
I'm very concerned that celestials in storm gate will have a similar problem.
Really good video. Its been a long time, but I recall that during WoL and HotS eras and blizzard had some kind of policy not to do major balance patches during 3/4s of the year. And when they did, the changes were fairly conservative.
The end made me chuckle and realise I haven't subbed to this channel compared to your other channels :D
incredible talk. great stuff, would love to see SC2 people react to this
Amazing Tier list man keep it up!
For me, as a Protoss player who played them since the original Starcraft because I liked their look and their music the most, what made me quit playing multiplayer of Starcraft 2 when Heart of the Swarm came out was just the feeling that Protoss is the worst race, and Blizzard was going to keep it that way. Sure, Protoss could still win high level tournaments, like world championships or something like GSL Code S *could* be won by a Protoss player. But Terran and Zerg were just better, more complete races that had all the tools they needed to win any kind of game. My favourite faction/race wasn't given the same care as the other two, and it just killed any desire to keep playing.
I personally think that the free units were a symptom of another problem. Zerg was supposed to be swarmy, which zerglings could pull off, the problem was that they added too much massive splash in the game. Hellions, banelings, siege tanks, high templar, colossus, archons, and that's just in the base game. If they had reduced all splash by 50-75% and removed all free units, I think the game would have balanced itself.
zerg is still very much swarmy even tho broods and swarm hosts have been mega nerfed.
broods and swarm hosts were just a terrible idea period, there was no reason to put such shit design into the game
When it comes to protoss music, I feel like they could have made bangers fitting for the race if they made it orchestral but epic orchestral, in the vein of something by Two Steps From Hell or Antti Martikainen.
Imagine something like United We Stand - Divided We Fall, Archangel, or SkyWorld in the protoss music. Maybe a bit toned down since TSFH's music is more center pieces than background music, but still.
Ahh, adding that extra bit at the end got rid of my Grubby heart, nooo!
I was just a lowly Diamond player, but i also dropped this game many years ago and never looked back. It felt like Protoss existed so Zerg would have a shiny, high-value target to destroy and use their 'swarmy' units and abilities on, and then we could all be in awe of the amazing skills of the Zerg players. Protoss and, to some extent, Terran were there to be the losers since all ZvZ would be boring.
One huge thing that has always been a problem according to me is that creep provides full vision.
Information is so valuable in a game like Starcraft. Honestly at best, creep should provide vision like sensor towers do.
And I totally agree on the free units spawned by abilities being a problem. Tell me why carriers have to buy them, and swarmosts and broodlords puke them out for free? Nonsense really -.-
I always thought the "gateways build faster but warpgate has reverse CD" idea was good. Finally vindicated! I also feel like the "Zerg gets free units" thing is one of those good ideas in theory that's hard to be both balanced and fun for both sides. The thing I felt Zerg needed the most was a way to break into a base when they're ahead to end the game but both brood lords and swarm hosts were also so good against army units that it made the game silly. Seems like the Ravager was the best unit of the bunch for that reason.
Every iteration of the Swarm host was designed stupidly. Every unit that spawns free stuff and then is able to run away to safety will be problematic. Now it's a harassment tool, but I wonder what Blizzard had in mind when they designed it for Heart of the Swarm. Did they want the Zergs enemy to slow push over every wave till they reach the Zerg base? No idea, makes still no sense.
Creep and overlord vision op as fuck too. They have maphacks! Protoss Walling with UNIT vs lings stupid design but kept due to Day9 and Artosis saying its good! Influencing the devs with shit and ideas design. Advanced alien race cannot make a wall with a door??? Atleast Terran can open and close the wall! Protoss walls also stops archons and immortal blocking out key units in your main unless..
I completely agree with warpgates, it always felt so strange that it was just this mandatory 50/50 upgrade, it was basically to balance and avoid even more protoss cheeses I guess, but gateways should've had their own flavour throughout the game. idk just felt lazy. pretty sure I heard a suggestion like yours many times before, but maybe it was hard for the design team to make it interesting
God I will never forget that damn series against Sting. I was rooting for you so hard dude.
Sadge
I really agree on the unit and building designs, they aren't recognizeble, in wc3 I look and instantly know which unit/building it is, the same not happen in sc2
Terran theme 4 is on ma playlist. love all terran songs since the first game!
The roaches in my house are dancing ROFL
that cut at the end was gold.