(Continuing from my post in the 'games I got' thread...)
So I played three or four missions of SC2 yesterday. My cousin (we were visiting them this weekend) had it, so I played a few levels of the single player campaign. It's pretty much the same as the first SC, but with a few new units and 3d graphics. Not exactly pushing any major new ideas, unfortunately... I liked that WC1, WC2, and WC3 were each significantly different, Blizzard sequels felt like real sequels and not just add-ons. SC2 feels more like just a graphical overhaul.
I mean, because SC was the best game ever SC2 is great of course, but they could have pushed a bit more. I'm sure that they didn't because they didn't want to mess with what made the first one such a popular e-sport game, but still, somehow it makes it feel a little less.
Oh well, that's complaining about something really great. The real valid complaints are about the horrible restrictions and privacy invasions in the online mode and mapmaking... still and obvious must-buy though, despite how horrible that is. Does not buying it day one show Actiblizz my unhappiness about that stuff? :)
Once I found out that they do NOT let you save maps in the custom map maker to your own hard disk (except in the form of a caching file), I realized that they really dropped the ball. I really don't mind if their own online hosting system has those restrictions so long as I can just keep my copyright ignoring personal maps on my own system and play them with friends or just online with a "trading" system just like in SC1 and WC3. Unfortunately, that's gone, as is LAN. Yes, it's a big mistake. It is one that will always be fixable via a patch. It remains to be seen if Blizzard will provide that patch, or if some 3rd party will need to step up to do so, but it will eventually be fixed one way or another.
Yeah, mapmaking in SC2 is pretty much killed off, I think... why should anyone put effort into making an awesome map when the system is so broken? And that's really tragic, when the great variety of custom maps was one of the best things about SC and WC3 multiplayer! I always played custom more than regular multiplayer, and it allowed for so much creativity. The SC2 map editor is evidently pretty good, but with such ridiculously crippled and DRM-ruined saving, sharing, and rights restrictions, what's the point?
Yeah, I'm not seeing where the next "Defense of the Ancients" will come from in SC2...
DotA? Bah, Tower Defense is the best thing to come from the Blizzard fan community. :)
But yes, it's pretty sad. It's so tragic when the actual game is so good, unoriginal design aside, that they had to put this in and ruin a major part of it...
Yeah Tower Defense really took on a life of it's own. I mean I think it inspired all the games released after it got so popular like Plants vs Zombies or the Final Fantasy tower game. That said, technically Blizzard put it in there before the fans made their own maps for it. Remember the secret Blood Elf campaign level in Frozen Throne? That was tower defense.
Um, DJ, TD maps date back to Starcraft, not Warcraft III... to SC user maps, not Blizzard efforts from years later.
I'd be pretty interested to know what the first TD map was, but I don't know it, and neither does Wikipedia, evidently. But it was definitely a map for Starcraft, and Blizzard definitely had nothing to do with it. Looking on my hard drive (SC maps folder) the oldest one I can find is from October 2001, but I'm sure the genre is older than that.
Starcraft, pre-WC3 TD maps were seriously hardcore, if you never played them (as it seems you didn't, if you didn't know they even existed). They generally were called "Turret Defense" or "Lurker Defense"; the latter type, as you would expect, put you in control of lurkers, which you would then arrange under the ground in patterns that would hopefully kill the enemies without killing your allies with the spikes. Turret Defense used, well, turrets, against aerial enemies. "Bunker Defense" was probably the other major type. Later on more types emerged, getting more and more complex, but I think those were the major earlier ones. The golem ones were pretty complicated, you could make different types of defensive units by combining things or something... there are a bunch of kinds of SC TD.
Most pre-WC3 TD maps had two things in common, though -- first, they were almost always co-op, so that everyone had to work as a team or they would all fail, and second, you only got one life. If even one enemy got through, you failed, game over. As a result, TD maps were extremely, extremely difficult, and you almost never finished them. The first TD maps I can remember playing with lives were in WC3. I think some post-WC3 SC TD maps did adopt lives, but one life you fail was still common. WC3 TD maps are still often hard, but the versus ones always have a winner, and even the co-op ones are often not as hard as SC maps -- for one thing, you can leak some without losing in almost all WC3 TD maps.
Early WC3 TD maps weren't so great, it took a little while for the genre to figure out what to do with the new map editor... Arkguil's TD wasn't exactly the best (not terrible, but not the best). Finally WC3 TD was figured out though, and WC3 TD maps definitely surpassed SC ones. WC3 TD has an amazing amount of variety, from standard co-op to two or more teams of players facing off to maps where each player faces enemies alone to similar ones but where the players are the ones who send enemies to the next person over, as opposed to just having pre-determined enemy lists coming at you. My personal favorite WC3 TD comes from that last type, and is called Line Tower Wars. I have several dozen versions of that map. :D But it didn't start there, it started with SC. :)
As TD has become more popular in the last few years the multiplayer focus and difficulty of TD maps have both faded significantly. Now most TD games are single player, which completely goes against one of the major points of the Defense genre of maps, which was to force people to work together to accomplish something which they could not do on their own. Single-player TD really loses something. It's still fun, yes... but it's not quite the same.
One other type of map that I remember liking in SC, but mostly seemed to disappear in WC3, were "beacon strategy" maps, as I called them. They generally involved a huge map with many factions, full of units and armies already. Instead of getting money from mining resources, though, you got money by holding control points, wargame-style. You'd then get money periodically for the points you held. Many of these were "WWII" based, such as Axis & Allies. The Diplomacy and Risk maps are variants of this; I remember some WC3 Risk maps, but not much at all of the rest of the stuff, unfortunately. It's really too bad, these were interesting, strategically challenging maps with good depth. I used to love them, in SC.
That's interesting to know.