Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Not Another Starcraft 2 Review!

I’m not trying to write a review of Starcraft 2 here. I think reviews are generally a bad idea and, especially when interacting with a product like Starcraft 2, incredibly difficult to write. Because really it’s not a genuine assessment of a quaint, objective sense of “quality” in a product. It’s, in most cases, an overwrought statement of opinion, an opinion which was likely informed long before the product was released by a combination of inscrutable factors like personal history, interactions with the people producing the product and expectations going into the game. While it’s certainly hip and easy to smear reviews, there are a handful of people who manage to make this discussion transparent. They’re quiet, intelligent and reserved, and many of them have over time left the terrible world of games writing for greener pastures, but they’re there. But the review atmosphere surrounding Starcraft 2 is a cacophony of howling creatures, cheering blindly for a product, and it makes any sort of genuine discussion difficult.

I just want to make it clear that I’m not denigrating the quality of Starcraft 2. It’s incredibly solid, and one of the few games I’d suggest to almost anyone I know who plays. I’ve even tried to pitch it to non-RTS players in an effort to get some of my smarter, RTS averse friends to hop aboard. But the reviews surrounding this game, the bombastic, overly intense and purposefully uninformative reviews, are not help at all in determining whether or not Starcraft 2 is good. I read one review, for god’s sake, that had a breakdown at the end assessing the game’s “Fun Factor.” That’s right, “Fun Factor.” Everyone’s favorite Nintendo Power assessment score. Starcraft 2, in case you’re curious, scored an “eight,” which I guess means it could’ve been more fun?

Asinine points like this color nearly all of the reviews, most of which take on an ejaculatory tone with the long-awaited product. People refer to the single player campaign as “epic,” (long) “exciting,” (with lots of cutscenes) and “well written” (characters occasionally curse, and most of the sentences are grammatically correct). But when it comes to defining and describing the manner in which these qualities are manifested, they come up consistently short. It upset me pretty seriously until I spoke with a co-worker about its incredible metacritic average and he made a good point.

“I guess that means it’s meeting people’s expectations.”

Indeed, Starcraft 2 is a game upon which a lot of expectations, fair or unfair, were placed. With its long development time, lengthy marketing lead up and the exceptional pedigree of the game’s creators, it is certainly understandable to expect quite a bit from Starcraft 2. It’s also totally reasonable to expect to see it delivered. And, indeed, Starcraft 2 is exactly what we expected from it: a refinement of the original game, an improvement on many of its systems which kept the heart and soul of Starcraft, what made it great, intact. Sure, it has all the same problems the old Starcraft had: the single player campaign can get a little repetitive, it is completely obsessed with doling out new pieces of equipment toy by toy, it either takes itself incredibly seriously or puts on blackface and hurls pies into the faces of its players, and its competitive community is pretty hostile to new players, even with the introduction of a “practice mode.” It is, in many ways, a flawed masterpiece, a great game with a lot of little problems. But it passes the good game test.

The good game test is a highly scientific measure I’ve constructed wherein if you and the people who play a game together can remember a moment from that game together fondly and recall it without being embarrassed, the game can be considered good. Bonus points if the event is emergent.

Great examples include watching a sunrise in Far Cry 2, tackling Marley and Moe in Borderlands, or nearly any play in any given night of Heroes of Newerth. Starcraft 2 began presenting me and my friends with those moments almost immediately. The first multiplayer game we started up a friend who doesn’t generally compete in RTSes and I were set against a pair of scheming individuals who, judging by their player tags, had played way too much already. My friend and I started off by probing the area around us, looking for the enemy base. What we found was an early expansion where the enemy hoped to build up a massive force of troops right away. But in making his expansion he’d left himself wide open, so we pushed through his meager defenses and wiped out his base. It was the start of campaign of attrition where we removed enemy structures one by one, using a combination of carefully controlled heavy ground units and air units in order to defeat the massive waves of zealots and marines that our opponents churned out at us. When we finally broke into their base their defenses were obliterated, their resources exhausted. We burned their nexus, defiled their probes, and took their bases apart brick by brick while churning in more units. We’d won our first game.

While this story might be kind of dull, try to look at it as a “remember that time” story. Remember that time those idiots tried to production rush us? God, that was hilarious. We barely even knew what we were doing and they tried to get all tricky. That didn’t end well for them.

These are the stories which fundamentally codify the quality of a product, the stories which make a product worthwhile. This is the way we can actually assess a product. If we can recall the games we’ve played, the time we’ve spent with the game and the systems of the game with genuine fondness and memory that’s what actually counts. Not how pretty a game is or how long it is or how great the voice acting is or isn’t: what matters is that these shared experiences continue to exist in our collective memory. Look at other bombastically well received games like Killzone 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV. Do you still think about those games? Do you still discuss them in the context of other games? When you think about storytelling in games, or greatness in world building or even having fun does your hand reach out for either of their discs? Perhaps someone’s does, but the vast majority would have to shake their heads. We’ve buried these properties within our collective memory, for better or worse, and moved on to new experiences, experiences we find more relevant.

At the crux of this argument is a simple statement, one Blizzard seems to always have gotten in the manner in which they design games, but never understood in the way they tell stories: it’s all about the play.

Blizzard has delivered an amazing product in Starcraft 2, an engine for competition and cooperation more polished than anything else the company has ever put our before (except perhaps Warcraft 3’s venerable multiplayer system). Their obsessed with making games that play well, games that hold up to sustained play and can be fun from a number of approaches. Unlike something like, say, Supreme Commander 2, which seeks to guide players into certain types of play and wants to see their games develop in a particular way, Starcraft 2 offers players a number of routes of play and wants to see our games develop as existential cat and mouse matches wherein players do their best to guess each other’s tactics and work to counter them.

Really the only problem, and this seems to be one Blizzard is more or less uninterested in ever solving at this point, is that Blizzard has no idea how to mix gameplay and story together. They keep the two firmly divorced, their stories tightly controlled affairs which occur in locked down game-engine sessions or cutscenes surrounding these sections. They attempt to break out of this by making missions literal narrative devices, presenting us with a crystal that allows us to unlock information by playing level after level. But the end result is less a solution and more an exacerbation of the awareness that we only learn things at the beginning and end of each level, and that we really have no control over how the story of Starcraft 2 will unfold. It’s been designed for twelve years, after all, and they’d hate to see us cock it up the way their various franchise fiction authors have managed to over the last decade.

But in terms of the actual game, the thing we’ve all really come to see in Starcraft 2, it has been executed incredibly well. And rightly so. This is a team of seasoned veterans working within a system they already know to a T. All they had to do was update the system, make the UI a little better, eliminate silly things like capping unit selection at a dozen units, and generally work on making the game cool. But it is a bit of a shame that in a time where so much of our gameplay is becoming emergent Blizzard remains so fervently attached to the concept of separating gameplay and narrative from one another. It is perhaps the only major issue I have with their latest creation.