Comment by itsdrewmiller
19 hours ago
I think Brood War is the true apex - more than two races with significant differences and aggressive balancing. Warcraft II was what I LAN played the most so it has a special place in my heart though.
19 hours ago
I think Brood War is the true apex - more than two races with significant differences and aggressive balancing. Warcraft II was what I LAN played the most so it has a special place in my heart though.
Brood War IS the absolute apex. This is the game that started e-sports. It is what defined the modern RTS games. It is also the most difficult game. Flash, the best Brood War player, is arguably the best e-sports player of all time.
Oh goodness, Brood War most certainly is not the game that started e-sports, tho I of course appreciate your enthusiasm for the game.
Technically I guess Spacewar! was the one who started e-sports, was the first game people competed in. Personally, growing up in Sweden, I think FPS (namely CS1.5/1.6) was the first game that enabled people to play games professionally on a international level, so I'll always associate CS with starting that, but again, technically I guess Quake was the first FPS people competed in professionally, at least in the US.
Of course it wasnt the first time someone watched people playing video games against eachother.
The Korean Brood war scene was an entirely different level from anything that came before it though. The idea of announcers and gamers getting rich & famous from playing a video game live was unheard of before that.
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It started modern esports. There were gaming competitions in the 80s, but there weren't team houses, coaches, analysts, big money sponsors, regular huge events, dedicated TV channels, players in prime time commercials and dating actresses and pop stars, etc... Brood War hit in Korea like nothing before or after it. There were literally three full time, 24/7 TV channels showing Starcraft content at it's peak. No other game has ever done that.
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But it certainly was the game that made it popular across the world.
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In the RTS niche, it is definitely the game that started e-sports that had any sort of weight and global audience.
I'm honestly not even sure which other RTS game would be close? Age of Empires 1? I don't think it ever had the same traction or hype until AOE 2.
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I loved the campaigns so much that I spent many dollars to play with the campaign editor in a net bar back then. I never figured out how to recreate the Corsair scene at the beginning of Protoss level 2. It was only after many years that I found out that it requires a script not in the official editor — some modders created a new editor that includes all those “unofficial” scripts.
And it's still popular and actually playable today. Warcraft 2 is not really fun to play. Very clunky control, very outdated graphics, bad story telling. With Starcraft, my only real complain is terrible cinematics which just doesn't cut it today. Otherwise this game is as fun to play today, as it was 15 years ago.
The cinematics were the best part of Starcraft!
I still get a kick out of the fact that the units look completely different in the cinematics as they do in the game and even the instruction manual
I quite like the StarCraft remaster. It plays just like the old one (to me, at least; I am not a competitive player), and it looks much better.
> Warcraft 2 is not really fun to play.
Compared with a lot of ptesent games is luxury: no updates, no bullshit introduction, just play.
Personally I think Dawn of War is the apex. That game really fired on all cylinders. And then for whatever reason Relic completely abandoned the formula and made the next game something different entirely. Dawn of War 2 remains one of my greatest gaming disappointments to this day because of poorly it stood up to its predecessor.
Dawn of War 3 made DoW 2 look like Game of the Decade by comparison. I hear they're making a DoW 4, and they're not even mentioning 3 when talking about the history.