This weekend, one of my good gaming buddies explained to me why he wouldn’t be purchasing Starcraft 2. It went something like:

“Warcraft III was such a depressing experience for me. It felt like, no matter how hard I tried I would just get torn apart by someone way better than me on battle.net. I never even had an opportunity to learn, because when I got to the point where I started experimenting the game was already over. I don’t want to spend $60 just to get my ass handed to me all over again.”

This got me to thinking. See, I have been on the Starcraft II Beta for a while now, and I have to admit, losing is one hell of a depressing experience. You spend this large chunk of time building up your forces only to eventually be torn through by your opponent without seeing it coming or knowing how to counter. In fact, one miss-click can cost you an entire game, and one poorly thought out attack can end up with your opponent killing you with even the weakest of units.

I have to wonder, what is it that elicits this panicky “deer in headlights” reaction we always seem to get from RTS games. I remember I was pushing roaches in Starcraft II, and my opponent had rushed to Void Rays with the protoss. Instead of thinking “hey, it’s just one Void Ray, I can build a spore crawler and be done with it” I foolishly let my forces get decimated and soon lost the game by letting his one measly air unit hit my resource line. Along the same lines, I played against a protoss player who massed immortals while I went roaches, and while I knew that it was a bad matchup and all I really had to do to fix it was mass some zerglings, I once again saw myself get decimated because of this deer-in-headlights reaction I had.

Why? Are RTS games really that unintuitive? Well … yes actually. Good Starcraft skills are mostly rote memorization. There is no such thing as an intuitive build order unless you learned your build order from previous similar RTS games. Without help, one could easily be stuck at a “newbie” level for months and months.

So Starcraft, and other RTS games for that matter, do actually represent a game that needs a great deal of extraneous study to be able to become good at, and I can see how this could turn people off. No one really wants to play a RTS for a half hour just to be steamrolled by someone who is much better than you. One might argue that there should be more viable build orders and strategies such that being utterly destroyed happens less. However, I suppose that would be counter to the whole theory of Starcraft. In short, the price of entry to Starcraft is absurdly high, not in money but in time. Hopefully the new tiered battle.net system will change that a bit.

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• StarCraft II — It’s About Damn Time!
• The State of Starcraft II — A Beta Report
• Phase II of the Starcraft II Beta Begins
• Starcraft 2 Beta Shutting Down … Awwwww
• World of Starcraft: A Story of a Complicated Fan Mod
• Starcraft II Galaxy Editor — It Only Does Everything