I’ve attended Blizzcon 2018 and it was a very memorable experience. Not just because it was the pinnacle of Starcraft for me, but also the moment when i saw the first non-korean player to win the championship. Serral, the champion on that year and one of the greatest Zerg player ever, wouldn’t be coming as underdog to the matches with Koreans that dominated the stage for almost two decades. Once the final match was over i heard the most humble and respectful words from the champion to the audience and other players. This was such an inspirational moment for me. Shortly after my starcraft journey ended, the interest faded, but that speech left a huge mark on my further activities and perception of the competition in anything. Reminded me that the race is long and at the end it’s always with yourself.
Starcraft was already well and truly dead by 2018. Koreans don't really want to excel at dead games. The OGs may stick around but they won't really try hard.
Korea stopped dominating because Starcraft dropped in popularity inside Korea relative to newer games. Then the world's much larger population size produced a few players who could outcompete them.
SC2 was never that popular in Korea to be honest. SC1 pros came over to the game because there was decent money in it, but in PC Bangs people were still playing SC1 and League far more often. Blizzard tried to spend a lot to market the game in Korea but it didn't really take off with the general public.
Even today the GSL (the most competitive individual league for SC2) just had its last championship and is cancelled while the ASL (the most competitive individual league for SC1) is still going strong. However it was much bigger before SC2's release.
Not to take anything away from Serral, he's a fantastic player, but Korea was never as invested in SC2 as they were in SC1. Players were getting by on extremely strong mechanics and there wasn't the kind of professional team infrastructure that existed around SC1.
They are probably referring to:
1. Infinite unit selection (SC1/BW were capped at 12, this is doubly important for buildings).
2. Rally workers directly to mineral patches
3. Smart cast for spells (pairs with #1 to allow you to cast spells more easily)
4. Better unit control, more deterministic
5. Removed high ground advantage (SC1/BW 50% hit chance up hill).
Maybe others... that said, anyone that pays attention to both games knows that the lack of complexity in unit and macro mechanics in SC2 leaves room for other actions, such as more intense "micro" mechanics. Neither game is more demanding then the other, it turns out in both games you never run out of things to do.
Not OP but I can answer this. The most obvious example is in Starcraft 1 you can’t select more than 12 units at a time, with a population cap of 200. This meant to move your army you had to make many, many more actions than in SC2 where you can just drag a box around your whole army (and/or hotkey that whole group) and attack+move.
Personally I think that was a technical limitation of the first game and a huge ergonomic improvement in the second.
Other things like having groups of buildings on hotkeys means you don’t have to go back to your base to order more units and set the rally point (where units go when they’re built) for all those buildings at once. This makes StarCraft to be an insanely micro-mechanic intensive game at high levels.
As the person who implemented it originally, it was not a technical limitation but a design choice.
In the early implementation of Warcraft 1 (1993-ish) I made it possible to select all the units on-screen at once with drag-select, and even more by scrolling and shift-clicking or shift-click-dragging.
Allen Adham (president of Blizzard, and exec producer for Warcraft) argued convincingly that only 4 units (for War 1) should be selected at a time. I argued against it pretty vociferously at the time … and in later days (post launch, most likely) came around to his way of thinking. Attacking with a superfluid of units takes less skill than selecting troops in small batches, and so requires to use more intent & skill.
Warcraft 2 allowed 9 units to be selected, and StarCraft more.
Thanks. Much of the discussion I used to enjoy about post-mortems in game dev. There was some kind of choice that went into the design process.
On the unit selection, a personal view on the situation is that nigh-instantaneous unit commands and obedience approaches valley of the dolls. It becomes too much like Wargames calculating theoretical death scenarios, abstracted from the issues of actual army logistics.
It takes some non-zero time. Units are not always doing exactly what they're supposed to. The fog of war is often worse not better than the game abstraction.
I don't think it's about blizzard but gaming culture in general that caused the gradual change. Gradually lowering the bar on skills required to play in some way.
Starcraft 2's F2 to select the whole army on the map is the other extreme and where it eventually landed right (I think that was introduced in a SC2 expansion, it was not a launch feature?)
I personally always hated limits on selecting in RTS games. Anything that would require micro-management was a turn off for me: it was immersion breaking, like that tank just sits there doing some stupid thing because the high supreme commander hasn't personally reached out to him to give a specific order what to do in this specific combat engagement. No.
