In the world of gaming, everything is always on the brink of extinction – whether it’s PC or console gaming, hardcore gaming, casual gaming, gaming in general, or even competitive gaming scenes like StarCraft II.
In a recent discussion on Reddit, competitive (and somewhat controversial) StarCraft II player Destiny predicted that StarCraft II would be dead within soon “if Blizzard doesn’t change its course.”
Comparing the game with other hugely popular competitive games like League of Legends and Dota, Destiny pointed out that “There are no million dollar StarCraft II tournaments,” and that the game needs to expand to other audiences.
“Blizzard HAS to make some kind of serious attempt to appeal to the casual player and to bolster interest and support from the casual gamer,” he wrote. “The ball’s in your court, Blizzard.”
In response, StarCraft II production director Chris Sigaty told Kotaku that Destiny’s claim that StarCraft II must keep up with what other games are doing is simply wrong.
“eSports is not a zero-sum game where if one thing does well, that means others must be doing poorly,” he explained.
“StarCraft is a very unique game with a unique audience. League of Legends is a very different game with a different audience. Call of Duty, Street Fighter, and Halo are also different competitive games with different audiences. The NFL, MLB, and NBA manage to coexist and flourish serving different audiences that have some overlap. They each work as hard as they can to best serve their sport and their audiences. That analogy applies to the various franchises within the eSports ecosystem.”
In spite of this uniquely unique uniqueness, Blizzard has also just announced that they’ll be rolling out a new levelling system with the Heart of the Swarm expansion – a system that closely resembles that of, oh, League of Legends.
Sigaty also elaborated briefly on some of the additional upcoming features, like:
- Groups and clans system — We will very soon have a blog post detailing what this looks like and what the functionality will be.
- Global play — users will be able to jump between regional ladders they wish to play in.
- Unranked matchmaking — lets you have the benefits of skill-based matchmaking without the anxiety of seeing your ladder ranking move up and down.
- UI updates with improved stats tracking and more — see blog post here.
- Multiplayer resume from replay — this will not only act as a failsafe in terms of dropped connections for pro tournaments, but also acts as a failsafe in cases where LAN would not have helped (hardware failure, client crash, etc).
- Multiplayer replay viewing — this feature will allow you and friends to jump in and watch replays together over Battle.net.
- Multilanguage support
“As you might guess, we’re putting a specific focus around features that will help give players more ways to enjoy online play,” he said. “Unranked matchmaking and the leveling system are just a couple examples of how we’re addressing online play that doesn’t focus as heavily on the hyper competitive aspect of StarCraft.”
Man, whatever happened to people playing games because games are fun?
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