A Moderate to Fairly Jumbled Look at StarCraft
Posted by Jonny Richardson on 01.12.2009
With StarCraft II up for release later this year, now seems an idyllic time to don the rosy tinted nostalgia goggles and have a look at the impact the international phenomenon known as StarCraft has had on the gaming!
You! Me. Him? Her. Them. Us! That odd homeless guy with the cute dog . Everyone. We have one thing in common above all else. We’re all critics. We look at the world through scrutinising, squinty eyes; judging how good something is by comparing it against what we know from experience to be bad – but don’t let this panic you. Being critical doesn’t necessarily equate to being a cynical bastard. Often people confuse critical opinion with being an argumentative troll – the latter generally being a type of person for whom it’s obligatory to possess a thick aura of snobbery and smugness, which visibly emanates from them like an unhygienic and unloved Sim. This is just one extreme, however. What we’re going to be critical about today, ladies and gentlemen, is Blizzard Entertainments legendary real time strategy title, StarCraft. With StarCraft II coming up for release later this year, now seemed an idyllic time to don the rosy tinted nostalgia goggles (oh come on. We all own a pair!) and examine the impact StarCraft has had on gaming since its release, almost 11 years ago, in March 1998.
By all accounts, StarCraft has been ludicrously successful. The account which stands testament to this above all others has to be Blizzards bank account. To this day, StarCraft and its 3 official expansion packs (Brood Wars, Insurrection and Retribution) have generated a whopping 9.5 million sales, easily securing StarCraft a spot in the top 10 selling PC games of all time. It has been suggested that if you were to take every single one of the 9.5 million copies of StarCraft which have been sold worldwide since 1998, and stack them on top of each other in a tower like construction for no purpose other than to illustrate the sheer enormousness of the number - you’d be clinically insane. Get a job!
Despite what some people would have you believe, money isn’t everything. High sales don’t automatically entail that the game is any good; and vice versa, poor sales don’t always mean that the game is bad. While fantastic sales do indicate the continuing popularity of the StarCraft franchise, these figures alone don’t tell us anything of the quality of the title. They don’t tell us of how it’s affected the RTS genre; on how it sparked a national e-revolution in Korea (not quite as dramatic as it sounds, perhaps), why its maintained incredibly loyal and active playerbases or even begin to answer the question of why the game is so damned good.
Ted Dibiase. Don't trust his reviews!
Returning for a second to the philosophical ramblings that opened this article - we are all critics. We subconsciously rank each experience against others of similar stock. It’s easy to say that a movie is great if it makes us care about the characters, has an engaging and suspenseful plot, and has at least one scene where we get to see boobies. Don’t forget that it’s because we’ve seen movies with these qualities, that we are in a position to use them to define what’s good. By the same token, we can say that a First Person Shooter is great if it has qualities we identify in other classic shooters, and at the same time delivers new features which then become benchmarks of the genre, a la Half-Life 2 & it's physics engine.
StarCraft received rave reviews at its release, and thus it makes sense to say that compared to RTS games that came before it, StarCraft was thought of as something special. With this shamelessly wafer thin, flimsiest of pretexts for a retrospective: Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to look at the world of the real time strategy before StarCraft was released so we can examine how it’s influenced the genre as a whole……we go.
Gaming ‘BSC’. (Before StarCraft. Because ‘BS’ would have been too rude an acronym)
History time! Pay attention Davis! Spit out that gum Jackson - NOW!...If you're all ready, we can begin. (For a well written account of the history of RTS, as opposed to this woefully abridged version, check out the MAXIMUM LINKAGE section at the end of this feature.)
Traditionally, the mantle ‘daddy of the modern RTS’ is worn by Westwood Studios ‘Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty’, released in 1992. While strategy titles had existed in one form or another before 1992, Westwood’s first effort provided us with a bucket load of features which are still alive and kicking in the modern RTS - including; the mouse controlling all units and the HUD, tech-trees, resource gathering, base building, etc. Looking at Dune 2 now is really like looking at baby pictures of loved ones who are now in their 30's. While the camera that took the picture was the technologically crappy, and the clothes baby is dressed in seem dated - you can still make out characteristic features which are present in the subject to this day.
MODERATE TO FAIR(LY) INTERESTING FACT! (#553): Did you know that it was Westwood’s Brett Sperry that coined the term ‘Real-Time Strategy’ to describe Dune 2? He wanted a term that would illustrate how the new style of game would play out, without frightening too many people off by calling it a ‘War-game’ or ‘Real time War’.
With the possible exception of clairvoyants, little did anyone know in 1992 that the RTS genre would become the battleground of choice for two game-dev superpowers – Westwood and Blizzard. Yet it wasn’t until 1994 when Blizzard launched their first title, ‘WarCraft: Orcs & Humans’, that this competitive rivalry was realised. If wrestling has taught me anything, it’s that competition is needed to bring out the best in a product. While it’s perhaps a little unfair to compare the Monday Night Wars to RTS gaming from 1992-98; I don’t care! During this time Westwood & Blizzard released absolute classics which helped establish the PC as a true gaming platform. 1995 brought us ‘Command & Conquer’ (Westwood) and ‘WarCraft 2: Tides of Darkness’ (Blizzard). In 1996 we we’re given ‘Command & Conquer: Red Alert’ (Westwood), a game which pretty much took over my life. I still get curiously aroused goose pimples when I hear a Tesla coil power up.
Fetishes aside; just naming the RTS games that two companies released in a period of 6 years presents a star-studded A-list composed of titles which I’m sure most of us will have played. We haven’t even begun to talk the plethora of other, now legendary, RTS titles which were released by other developers between these years. As such, we won’t bother trying to. Let’s just name drop to give the impression of being knowledgeable: Cavedog Entertainments 1997 hit, ‘Total Annihilation’, The Bitmap Brothers criminally underrated ‘Z’ (1996), Ensemble Studios ‘Age of Empires’ (1997). And so on and so forth.
Suffice to say, When StarCraft was released by Blizzard in early 1998, real time strategy was a genre that was blossoming quite nicely, thank you very much.
StarCraft. Was it really all that and a bag of potato chips?
A Protoss warrior and a bag of chips? A curious comparison indeed.
The simple answer would be yes. StarCraft deserves every bit of praise it has ever received. And then some. And then some more. Don’t stop! However, on paper StarCraft brought nothing notably new to RTS. One can look at Total Annihilation and say “This is the game where RTS moved into the realms of 3D units and landscaping”. StarCraft won’t let you do that - because it brings nothing radically different. Instead, Blizzard managed to do for RTS with StarCraft what it would later do with for MMORPG’s with ‘World of WarCraft’: It took all the good things previous games in their respective genres did well, and put them together in an amazingly polished and cohesively shiny box. As such, calling the impact of StarCraft revolutionary or the next evolutionary step in RTS from C&C or WarCraft II is wrong.
Does this make Total Annihilation the better game? I honestly couldn't say. Despite not focusing on technological advancements, StarCraft put its energies into other departments. StarCraft was a game with fantastic balance. While RTS had long since invented opposing sides with differing units, StarCraft was one of the first to have 3 races (the Zerg, Terrans and Protoss) with completely different units. Not only were there no equivalent units to one another, but Blizzard managed to balance this so that no one side has a clear advantage. This encourages a range of different tactics for each race.
Mechanically the game is exemplary, smooth and intuitive. However, it’s the story where StarCraft excels. Each race has their own lengthy campaign with individual storylines, and memorable characters. These stories are told through a mixture of pre-battle briefings, in game developments and cut scenes. Blizzard seem happy to infect each of their games with a certain dry sense of humour, and StarCraft is certainly no different. This leads to endearing characters, good voice acting, and memorable unit catch-phrases.
Yet it seems strange to suggest that the reason StarCraft has excelled itself above and beyond so many of its peers, is because it's so highly polished. There have been plenty of other games that have been honed to a blinding shine with no particularly innovative features which haven’t gone on to achieve cult status. What’s so different about StarCraft? The answer is two words long, and has a dot in the middle - Battle.net
In the English language we have words which are absolutely indivisible from one another. Yin and Yang would be one example. Peas and carrots would be a tastier, but equally profound example. The pair relevant to this article, however, are StarCraft and Korea (apart from, maybe, ‘Jonny’ and ‘For the love of God - please stop writing’).
Since StarCraft’s release in 1998, game sales in South Korea have accounted for an incredible 4.5 million of the 9.5 million overall. The main reason that Korean gaming is synonymous with StarCraft is due to its fiercely active multiplayer circuit, made possible through Blizzards online gaming-severs. In the Asian market, gaming is considered every bit as serious a sport as football or hockey; and StarCraft is a national darling.
Perhaps one reason StarCraft gained and maintained so much popularity is the balanced gameplay which allows for so many different strategies and tactics. This would definitely help to create competition, which is both held in check and regulated by an in built ranking system in StarCraft battle.net servers, which has helped keep competition rife. The fact of the matter is that SC is still included in pro-gaming tournaments to this day. For an 11 year old game, that’s impressive going, and shows that the pros consider StarCraft to be the quintessential real time strategy title.
Do you know what your future will be?
On May 19th, 2007 StarCraft II was announced to the surprise of nobody and to the unbridled joy of Korea and fans across the world. Seeing as Blizzard are developing it, any suggestions that it may not be every bit as polished and complete as in its original outing seem rather silly. It’ll be interesting to see how Blizzard will handle the leap from 2D rendered environments, to 3D virtual bliss. From what we’ve seen from screenshots, it looks great, but how this added dimension will effect gameplay remains to be seen.
The big, somewhat controversial news is that StarCraft II will be a trilogy. While the original StarCraft was a single game with 3 campaigns, SCII will divide each campaign into a separate expansion pack, currently under the working titles of ‘Wings of Liberty’, ‘Heart of the Swarm’ and ‘Legacy of the Void’ (Terran, Zerg and Protoss campaigns respectively). While some have been quick to label this a money grabbing scheme of much nastiness, it’s actually offering the player a ton of content. Each campaign will be between 26-30 missions long, which is roughly the size of all 3 campaigns of the original, combined.
Blizzard appear to be subscribing to the ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ school of thought. The original StarCraft was so incredibly complete in every aspect, that nothing really needs changing. In that case, all you can do is add a crap load of new content. What can we say about the expectations for StarCraft II? Simple - Be as good StarCraft.
