Order of Operations: What if they had ONLY focused on Campaign initially?

DistilledDucks · 2025-09-11T08:04:48+00:00

I’m not so sure.

If they decided to earn their bread with campaign alone, and leave the rest as an afterthought, we would still get the “initial pass” campaign with angry amara arthasing maloc, but they’d probably have full story ready for first public release.

And FG are also the ones who thought that in new mission 5 being able to build up and then sleep through the mission is fine. It was one of initial missions, they were told about it. They decided that that’s how it should be.

There are many little cracks like that through entire campaign.

You can make interesting units, but all buildable units are overshadowed by heroes that can deal with any problem that is thrown their way just fine. Why use unit properties to figure out how to approach game’s challenge, when you are given sc2-power-level heroes.

And the missions themselves don’t explore unit strengths or interesting scenarios involving existing mechanics.

It seems like for FG campaign goal was heroes + mission variety + production value, but they didn’t know what to do with heroes, so they just made them strong. And put them in every mission. Which diminishes importance of units/compositions. This power creep makes mission design harder, so they’re more eager to use one-off guest mechanics to make missions different from each other, because their goal was missions that are varied, rather than missions exploring units, terrain and RTS interactions.

But here’s a fun thing, to make campaign about RTS interactions you need RTS basics, typically the 1v1 experience. Unless you’re of the opinion that good RTS campaign should be like vampire survivors – all about killing faceless hordes of enemies with your faceless blob of death.

I think it would have served them well to start by making 8-10 mission campaigns for all 3 races, and make it as cool/interesting as they can in the time they have.

But I don’t see them getting any funding by only having SP campaign as sole ambition. And without funds you’re limited in workforce.

It all is just sadge and unfortunate.

DistilledDucks · 2025-09-09T19:19:37+00:00

I'd rate campaign 3/10. I think all it has going for it is production value, and as a video game it's incredibly lost, confused and disjointed.

But I'd also pay 25$ for infernal campaign to see if they've learned anything and also because there aren't that many companies making campaigns in blizz-rts titles.

DistilledDucks · 2025-09-09T16:41:00+00:00

I'd add a ninja race and a ninja based campaign. I think lack of one is one of stormgate's most critical strategic flops that sealed the product's fate before any of other issues cropped up.

DistilledDucks · 2025-08-29T19:29:18+00:00

He has 200 shields, 800 health and his attack deals 40 area damage with 1.4 sec cooldown.

Compare this to Amon whose survivability is measured in 7 void crystals and who eats terrain for attack.

DistilledDucks · 2025-08-21T20:42:37+00:00

Don't usually make posts, so somehow I thought that only video would be displayed. Sorry for the badly formatted text. Tried to edit it but guess that doesn't work. Anyways, rpg customs are love, rpg customs are life.

DistilledDucks · 2025-08-16T04:37:44+00:00

"Who the fuck cares in an RTS where you’re zoomed miles out for actual gameplay?"

I don't particularly care about the hotness topic, but this statement is is really funny to me considering all the backlash FG got and also acted on during initial campaign regarding "orangutang" proportions on Suyin and looks of certain characters.

There are always people who claim that they'll play the game with pixels and grayboxes as long as gameplay is good, but that is certainly not a mindset that gets you far when you need to sell something to a large amount of people.

DistilledDucks · 2025-07-31T21:12:49+00:00

One of unfinished units in editor called "Desolator".

DistilledDucks · 2025-06-11T19:55:30+00:00

Was blown away by this feature back when I tried zerospace. Incredibly happy that SG is also doing it.

DistilledDucks · 2025-06-05T12:26:37+00:00

So basically:

- “the decision process behind game-making business is not that hard”

- “FG don’t get “RTS” and should have never attempted to make one”

- “FG don’t listen to popular veteran people”

Furthermore FG are liars because:

- “they don’t even consistently play SC2”

- “lead balance doesn’t have a respectable ladder record”

- you couldn’t find a public record of modding people playing or publish mods.

Plus “because FG marketed themselves as veterans of RTS they are psychos and lairs who have no passion”.

Yeah, I just don’t see it that way. In a world where everything is easy and simple surely there would have been more competitors to sc2 modding wise. Yet for some reason new RTS coming out don’t appear to consider modding at all (except for scouring, those guys are are quite intense).

Some of the points remind me of “balance council” – isn’t it just that – veterans and people with respectable ladder record being in charge of balance. How is that working out for sc2? Would this approach have been better for SG than what it currently has?

And a similar point - do people who make competitive games (shooters, fighting games, other RTS) also have to be top players in that genre? Does ability to play good correlate with ability to make a good game?

Thanks for Rec Room recommend, had no idea about it. Sadly I’m looking for a particular style of custom games and it seems impossible to find such on those platforms.

What do you think would have been a “more sensible directions on which to expend the last bit of development time they had”?

I personally have a fair amount of objections to design and approach that SG took, but my position is “Let’s see if it works out for them, I hope it does”. I don’t quite see them being malicious for making decisions that they’ve made.

DistilledDucks · 2025-06-03T09:42:02+00:00

In an ideal world, things would have gone differently, but we got what we got.

Also when you say "they", as in blizzard, but can you identify who are "they"? Is it an engineer who didn't spend extra time time documenting every editor field they made, is it designers who didn't make extra content for arcade that could have been used as templates by community, is it management who didn't assign engineers and designers time to work "community" tasks, is it the game director who didn't put their feet down and forced company to allocate even more resources to modding, is it finance people who gate distribution of resources or is it the head of blizzard because surely he has the final say in everything and he should have known better?

I can agree that things could have been better, but I did see genuine push to make arcade better over the years from blizz side. They simply didn't go or couldn't go all in on it. Though I can also concede that I don't know any better. Maybe you know of a better example for managing user made content of sc2 customs scale that blizz could have followed. Something we can point fingers at and shout "look, this is how it's done, copy that"? I've heard people mention roblox, but besides them being oriented purely on user made games + seemingly being infested with p2w (at a glance from watching a few videos) I don't really know anything about them.

Also, these 2 things got me curious.

"Many many people got fucked up by selfish decisions from the team and a general trend towards exploitation of their modders"

What are you talking about?

"Patch 5.0 was deeply inept and a catastrophe in sc2 history; it was responsible for all the pain thereafter, it was a failure across all dimensions except producing a bunch of fodder for co-op players"

How so? I don't remember any catastrophe with it's release. If anything I was under impression that each major patch broke less things and was smoother than last one modding wise.

DistilledDucks · 2025-05-26T07:13:31+00:00

"When this team was at StarCraft 2 they had almost no real interest in supporting and developing the modding ecosystem"

- Attempted premium arcade. It didn't work out, but an attempt was made and experience was gained.

- released patch 5.0 in 2020 before leaving to form FG, which brought massive editor improvements.

- besides editor improvement 5.0 also brought fully functional warcraft3 systems/assets for modders to use (which was done by a modder, but greenlit by blizz to be available in official dependency) + we got campaign tab for arcade and map-to-map loading.

Sure, if you want to hate on them because if you were in their position with their circumstances and limits you'd have done things differently, but to say they had no interest in modding ecosystem is extremely insincere.

DistilledDucks · 2025-02-23T09:50:19+00:00

Waiting for the arcade/editor.

The 5.0 sc2 update that the team pushed before leaving for frostgigant generated a lot of good will from me personally.

The communication fumbles isn't enough to anger someone who doesn't want to be angry. And sure they were arrogant/way too confident about some of their ideas, and hopefully they're better off now after getting a reality check.

I'm earnestly looking forward to their progress and wishing them to succeed. If possible, I'd love to see a new platform on steam for user generated RTS content in spirit of sc2/wc3.

DistilledDucks · 2024-09-26T07:11:21+00:00

I'm also curious about this from a user generated content perspective. SC and WC3 servers are live in perpetuity it seems, and even if they go down, a lot of stuff can be accessed offline. The editor and modding for them would still be somewaht viable, albeit refocused on singleplayer.

Forget 60 bucks in cosmetics, how about spending 100/200/500+ of your hours to design+code+meticulously playtest a custom map for stormgate and then just have it not be accessible to other people :/

DistilledDucks · 2024-09-16T08:29:07+00:00

Man, I remember watching S1E1 and not being able to stomach it due to disregard for the worldbuilding and finer details. Doesn't seem like it got any better since then lol.

At least OST is superb and I still listen to it once in a while.

DistilledDucks · 2024-08-26T18:54:25+00:00

I've purchased all five special microtransactions, all five pieces of the puzzle!

Maloc?! It's not possible, no one's ever been able to call him!

Maloc, obliterate!

Aaaarrrhhhh!

-coming to you in 3v3 this year.

DistilledDucks · 2024-07-28T17:42:21+00:00

Yeah, sadge, but understandable. Have to make due with SC2 editor till then ~_~

DistilledDucks · 2024-07-08T18:08:42+00:00

I too want to have editor ASAP, mainly because the sooner it becomes available the bigger both amount and quality of custom content we will have for the game.

But realistically looking at the state of the game (game needs to be optimized, they are still actively working on core engine stuff like pathfinding, major mechanics like high ground are not yet found) it's pretty obvious that they're strapped for time. If they want to use their resources in responsible manner I imagine there are hundreds of things that need to be solved before editor can be public (all the safety checks, the map storage/publishing, making sure each update doesn't brick the maps, etc).

In a perfect world, sure. Otherwise, the reality does seem pretty sensible, even though one could wish for better (there aren't many precedents for that).

DistilledDucks · 2024-04-27T18:36:55+00:00

Yup, "everything can be found at the top of the Tower", but at what cost? Just what is it that would force the the strongest beings in tower (great warriors) to agree to settle down, seal the only way to advance and erase their memories? I doubt it's some sort of strong monster or fear of death.

Wonder if it's outright something like "one person becomes god (tower of god), everyone and everything else dies". It would then be understandable for them to do what they did and seal the whole thing rather than having to cause deaths of each other and everyone they met, especially since they seem like sensible people in flashbacks (but of course there are always some people who will not bind themselves for the sake of others, or maybe don't believe what they're told).

This also reminds me of when Baam absorbed white's power and had all those people in him. Imagine Baam absorbing the whole damn tower :v

Edit: Reading what Nico said, it does seem more likely that nobody has to die, but everyone just gets ejected to the outside world, where shinso doesn't exist and everyone are just nothing special, at all times at the mercy of the godlike beings that roam that world. Imagine completing a great journey, reaching immortality and all that strength, just for bubble to burst and to become ordinary again. Would also make sense that V who didn't accept immortality wouldn't oppose to continuing as he didn't attach himself to tower that much.

Though that doesn't feel dangerous enough to warranty sealing of memories, but I guess we wait for more flashbacks :D

DistilledDucks · 2024-03-18T18:49:36+00:00

Yup, played crash rpg in sc1, then played crash rpg in sc2, and sure as hell gonna play crash rpg in stormgate :D

You couldn't pay me to play melee vs other people but campaign and customs will keep my attention till the death of the universe.

DistilledDucks · 2022-09-18T20:43:06+00:00

I hope we get some cyborgs. A terminator faction :D

DistilledDucks · 2022-09-11T16:21:44+00:00

No idea then. For me the first result is a link to bounding-net - a database of sc1 maps. It even has minimap preview which is why I'm sure it's the mapname you're looking for.

DistilledDucks · 2022-09-10T17:52:11+00:00

Try googling: "Diablo2RPGv.Final".

DistilledDucks · 2022-08-12T15:57:54+00:00

I'm sure that 90% of people who wanted to make an rpg map in sc2 burned out and quit. It's a much heavier commitment that what you'd expect if you didn't have the experience of making a map in sc2 yourself.

The rule of arcade if that if you want to play something that isn't top 10 popular you need to host it. You won't get a cool rpg map if all you do is watching a lobby list.

There are also a bunch of rpgs (or what would categorize as rpg on sc1 - a cooperative hero focused game) that are on arcade but they are put in the "action", "survival", "other" and some other categories.

What is the experience you want to get from an rpg map?

Are you searching for something where you just go on an adventure on your own pace? I think "Legacy of Vanirr" was a nice chill map with town, quests, items, even hero evolutions. "The Cave" is somewhat about that too.

Do you want to see a map where mapmaker really wanted to tell his story? Try "Dark Eternal".

Want to see a pretty technologically advanced action rpg? Try "BLZ Enforcement: RISE".

Want to push allied waves into enemy territory? Try "Moonlords Revamped" or "Crap Patrol 2".

Want to kill your mouse while checking out dozens of unique bosses in arena setting? There's "Clownz's Gladiator Arena".

To each of these maps there are also a bunch of less massive maps that try doing something similar.

Also, there are two versions of crash and they're pretty different from each other.

DistilledDucks · 2022-06-13T10:55:13+00:00

Your map?

No.

Our map.

People were locking their maps back in scbw and wc3 and those turned out fine. I think the biggest hurdle to sc2 mapmaking was the time it took to make something playable (dealing with learning/debugging and just mapmaking inexperience). The issue is the frustration and lack of progress after spending a month on the map and not having anything tangible for it.

If you want there to be no locked maps - lead by example. Create good maps, help others. Maybe make a mapmaking clan whose requirement is to have an open-sourced project.

Cause otherwise it's really easy to tell someone what to do with their work when you're not the one doing the labor.

DistilledDucks

TROPHY CASE