Executor Akamia

I don't think all, or even most, games really need an easy mode. Accessibility is one thing, but difficulty is another matter entirely. Some games – particularly those that are played for their competitive multiplayer – can, in fact, be negatively impacted by both. To illustrate, I want to talk about a game series that I greatly enjoy: StarCraft For those who don't know, StarCraft is a series of sci-fi RTS games created and published by Blizzard. There are presently 2 games in this series: StarCraft, released in 1998, with an expansion (StarCraft: Brood War) being released later that year. Its full sequel, StarCraft II, was released in 2010 with the title StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, with 2 expansions releasing in 2013 (StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm) and 2015. (StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void) StarCraft is one of the earliest examples of esports in gaming history, predating the first MOBAs by several years. Fighting games like Street Fighter might be even earlier. StarCraft, however, is on a different level entirely; it's particularly popular in Korea, where it may as well be considered the national sport. I myself am a StarCraft player, particularly a StarCraft II player. I'm not particularly good at it; on the ranked ladder, my highest finish was top Silver League, which is really, really low. Part of the problem is my computer having mouselag with the game, which hinders my accuracy and speed significantly, but in all honesty, the lion's share of my problems are that I'm just bad. Period. I can improve, and will if I keep at it enough; perhaps even overcoming that particular limitation, but I don't have that kind of patience. I prefer to lose on my own terms, not because of bad hardware. Or maybe it's my OS that's the problem... The mouselag wasn't a thing before I upgraded to macOS Sierra a couple of years ago... Anyway. There is a faction within the playerbase – a few, actually – who believe StarCraft II overall was watered down from what the StarCraft: Brood War experience was. Not just in the campaign, but in the gameplay itself. After having some lengthy discussions with some of these people in my spare time, I can see where they're coming from for certain. I don't like Brood War myself, and a lot of the reasons I like StarCraft II are a few of the reasons these people hate it, because these are things they believe lowered the skill ceiling for the game compared to what it was in Brood War. First, let's talk about the campaign. In StarCraft: Brood War, the campaign was more or less designed to teach you how to play the game. How each unit works, and when you need to use them. Except for hero units, every unit you play with in the campaign can be used in the multiplayer, and they work pretty much the exact same way in both modes. That said, the campaign is very difficult for those not used to the (in my experience) very restrictive UI, and in some cases, very difficult even for those who are. More on that later. In StarCraft II's campaign, this is a whole different ballgame. While the game does teach you the very basics of how to play, it doesn't teach you how the units work the same way Brood War did, and in fact, the units in the multiplayer can end up playing completely different roles than they did in the campaign due to balance changes completely overturning the metagame. Sure, you'll learn how units work in that campaign, but those units don't necessarily work the same way in the multiplayer, and some of those campaign units – Terran Goliaths, Protoss Dark Archons, Zerg Guardians, for example – don't even exist in that mode. Conversely, some multiplayer units don't exist in the campaign. Blizzard even added a completely different mode at some point that was intended to aid in the transition from campaign play to multiplayer play because the disconnect was so big. This mode was called "Training". In addition, multiplayer is played at a faster speed than most campaign difficulties, the exception being Brutal difficulty, which is played at multiplayer speed. I didn't spend enough time with Brood War to notice a speed difference between the modes; I doubt there is one. Speed is an important factor to consider here, because it affects timings. But that's getting into gameplay... ... which is the next thing I want to talk about. In StarCraft: Brood War, you're only allowed to select either 1 building at a time, or up to 16 units at a time. While commonly attributed to hardware or software limitations of the time, I'm... having a hard time buying that excuse, as it's the only RTS game I've ever played that had that limitation. Granted, I haven't played any other RTS games from the 90s or earlier, so for all I know, this could be completely true. I'll have to ask some fans of early Age of Empires or Command & Conquer games later. Anyway, regardless of the technical reasons for this being the case, the effect was that players had to be smarter about unit management. It was excruciatingly difficult to send what are called "death balls" over to the enemy base and roll over them because of a combination of this and less-than-stellar unit pathing algorithms, the latter of which affected the Terran Goliath and the Protoss Dragoon the most of any other unit in the game, or so I'm told. In addition to this, worker units had to be specifically ordered to gather resources, even when rallied to them from the primary base structure, or they would do nothing at all. StarCraft II? You can select as many units at one time as you want, and even have more than one building in your selection. This streamlined several things, but it also made it painfully easy to build those death balls I talked about in the previous paragraph. In the Protoss arsenal in particular, there's a unit that rather annoyingly enables and borderline encourages death ball play: The Mothership. As a Protoss player myself, I personally avoid building this thing on principle, though it does usually fall off in the upper echelons of play as death balls do anyway, at least in current versions of the game. Early on in the game's lifetime, though? Death balls were everywhere. This has frustrated quite a handful of series veterans enough to write the game off entirely. All of this because of an effort to make the game more accessible. It worked, but it came at a price. I'm not gonna deny there's some elitism at play; there totally is. However, it doesn't change the fact that these seemingly innocuous quality-of-life changes have altered the game in such a way that it very nearly took the "strategy" out of the real-time strategy game. I'm sure there might have been a better way to make the game more accessible to new players without alienating the old ones, but in the end, as much as I like StarCraft II over StarCraft: Brood War, I don't think this was it.