SCII the copy-cat is crap! DoWII is a wayy better game! Uh... no?

[rant]

So I've been going around looking up videos for Starcraft II and when I'm bored some Dawn of War II videos, and to be frank, the amount of pro-Warhammer Starcraft haters is ridiculous, and that's not even as disturbing so much as the logic they possess. I happen to be a large fan of both the Dawn of War series and the Starcraft games as well as the Warhammer table-top game, and I personally don't care if you just outright prefer one game or the other. Despite what people say, they're two different kinds of games and they have different gameplay and different settings, so when people have different opinions, fine.

But, the sheer level of people who are spouting nonsense about Starcraft II being objectively a pile of shit in comparison to Dawn of War II is just disturbing. I've mostly kept my opinion to myself on the matter for... well... since the two games have been released/announced to the public. But I feel that with both games being released very, very soon, and having played both series extensively, I feel that I have a right to express my feelings on the matter, and I would like all of your opinions on it too.

So, to start off with, which series do I think is better? Neither. Which one do I prefer? Starcraft, because I grew up on that style of gameplay. But I stress that I don't think either game is superior to the other in terms of actual quality.

So, onto the meat of the rant, I guess I’ll mostly just discuss what I frequently see from Starcraft haters more than anything else, as most of the hater comments in both the Starcraft II videos and articles AND the Dawn of War II comments come from someone dissing Starcraft. So, moving on:
Frequent illogical statements:

Starcraft sucks because they obviously just copied everything from Warhammer!

Only true in that a large part of Blizzard’s inspiration for Starcraft did come Warhammer. When I saw those Reaper units for the first time with their jumpjets, images of Raptors and Assault Marines from the Imperium and Chaos immediately came to mind, and everyone knows about the Zerg and the Tyranids. So yes, Blizzard ripped off a lot of stuff from Warhammer. But, ultimately Starcraft’s come into its own with its own unique backstory, characters, and universe. While the Marines share similarities with the Imperium in terms of appearance and the Zerg with the Tyranid, and the protoss with the elder and the Imperium and the like, the races themselves have a completely different backstory and have different drives and different beliefs. And, regardless of all that, how does a game’s inspiration affect the actual quality of the game itself? It doesn’t.

No cover system or terrain bonus in Starcraft.

Different scales. In Dawn of War the game is zoomed in so that you micro-manage almost each and every squad. In Dawn of War II it’s even more extreme, to the point where losing even one squad could result in losing the entire match. With the scale being small enough so that individual squads are of importance to you, of course cover would be an important aspect of the game. Keeping your squads alive is important!

But in Starcraft? Tch. One “squad” is hardly worth the attention, to be honest, especially if a Tier 1 unit like a marine, or a zergling. To give you an illustration of the scale, take note of the fact that in Dawn of War 1, the maximum squad cap is 20. One single squad of space marines equals 2 on your squad cap. That means you can have a total of 10 squads of Space Marines and you’re done.

In Starcraft, you’re total squad cap is 200. One marine= 1 on your squad cap. Thus you can have up to 200 marines total. That’s two hundred squads of marines. In the first five minutes of the game you can have a full command queue of 12 marines (you can control up to 12 of any unit(s) at any one time in Starcraft 1). So in five minutes you can make two squads more than the maximum you can realistically have at any one time in a full match of Dawn of War. They’re cheap as hell in Starcraft 1 to boot and it literally takes only ten seconds to make one, so there is virtually no significance to one single squad of marines. Thus, an extensive cover system of hiding in a ditch barely big enough to fit one full squad would be dumb. What would be the point of having cover for one squad when you’re strike force has thirty at a time? There isn’t a point. One squad isn’t worth the attention. Not laziness on Blizzard’s part, just a conscious choice to adhere to a certain type of play.

Wow. In Starcraft all you have to do is just mass enough of one unit and you’ll win. No strategy at all. Dawn of War pisses all over it in strategic depth!

Uh- no. First off, any Starcraft vet will tell you that if you play against a skilled opponent, massing only one unit type will always result in death. This comment always irks me especially because you’d have to either be an idiot, or someone who has never played the game very much to know how it works, to actually believe that. Either way, neither of those two types of people has any right to talk any snuff. It’s pure ignorance. DoW and SC, while both are RTS’s, follow two different formats of the RTS genre. Starcraft is large-scale army combat with an emphasis on manipulating very large task forces with efficiency and tactical base managing, while Dawn of War has always been more about small skirmishes and ultra micro-managing individual squads of people. One unit, I.E., one little man on Starcraft, is equal to one squad of four or five guys in Dawn of War. It’s just a difference of scale.

But that doesn’t mean strategy isn’t necessary! Again, massing a big of army of whatever unit you want won’t work, even if the one unit you’re massing has the most hit-points and attack stats than any other unit! For example I could mass an army of 200 marines and attack someone, but my entire force would be slaughtered by a group of nothing more than 12 zealots, 8 dragoons, and 4 Reavers. 24 Units, can decimate my entire squad of 200 men. So obviously, some strategy is needed on my part. Okay, the biggest enemy is the reavers so I’ll target them first with a lock-down from some ghost units I made, use a science vessel to EMP the dragoons and Zealots and send in a troop surge of marines, medics to heal them, and firebats with a siege tank or two or three in the back for artillery support. Bing bada boom his whole army is decimated(That actually wouldn’t work, as it’s expensive to build all those units and the Reaver and science vessel would take a lot of time, but it’s for example purposes). But wait- my marines are clumped together in one big group and he uses a stasis web on the whole group, then uses an arbiter to freeze my science vessel and warp in a group of zealots behind the siege tanks while dropping a pair of reavers out of range of my marines. My poor army is being slaughtered and while this is happening he takes the opportunity of me being distracted to fly an arbiter into my base and warp in a couple of reavers right next to my command center. Shit, I didn’t think to build detectors or anti-air turrets and now he’s destroying my SCV’s and thus raping my entire economy! I better think of a new strategy fast, I still have those ghosts from earlier…

And so on and so forth. The above scenarios can all happen one after the other in only a matter of minutes, so yes while Starcraft may not require micro-managing and emphasis on single squads, it does still require quick-thinking, an awareness of the level you’re playing, acute knowledge of the units you’re commanding, and a general sense of strategy. It’s gameplay is different, not bad.

Look at the difference in graphics! Dawn of War’s gameplay looks ultra-realistic! The untis are all well proportioned and it looks vivid and real. Starcraft’s graphics look cartoony and goofy! That’s not realistic at all! Some of the units even look like toys!”

Wut? Have you ever heard of art styles? Do you look at Kingdom Hearts and say the graphics suck because the character’s feet are disproportionately large in comparison with the rest of their bodies? No! Do you look at Street Fighter and say it’s graphics suck compared to Soul Calibur 4? No! Why? Because they’re different art styles. Street Fighter 4’s graphics are designed to be cartoony looking to be in-sync with the rest of the series. Kingdom Hearts has cartoony art styles form some of its characters in tandem with Disney’s disproportionate characters (Have you seen Mickey Mouse’ feet compared to the rest of his body?). Blizzard wants the game to look nice and polished. They do not want the game to look photo-realistic all the time. What they wanted to do looks perfect! The animations are flawless, the textures on the vehicles and the units and buildings are great, when they want a battlefield to look wartorn, it looks wartorn. Just because the people don’t look like real people and the siege tanks look a bit like toys doesn’t mean the graphics are bad, they’re just different.

Starcraft II’s gameplay looks just like Starcraft 1’s gameplay, in fact it’s just Starcraft 1 with good graphics! Dawn of War II at least has a lot of gameplay changes, it’s like an entirely new game!

Good for Dawn of War II, but innovation does not equal excellence or quality, and it never will. Being different doesn’t make you better; in fact sometimes it’s even the opposite! Fact of the matter is that Starcraft 2 sticks to its guns, which is a tried and true traditional RTS formula that we the fans have loved for over a decade and continue to love. Why fix what ain’t broke? As long as you mix it up with some new units and thus new strategies, a new story, and a fresh lick of paint, people will be happy, and that’s not a bad thing, and it’s something that Blizzard appears to have delivered, with flying colors.

Closing Statement

So, there’s my rant. Again I stress that I don’t think either series is superior to the other in terms of quality. They both contain very well made games that I feel define the modern definition of Real Time Strategy. And that’s why I think it’s such a shame to see people bicker over which game is so much better and which one is objectively shit, when ultimately It just comes down to what kind of game you prefer to play. If you’re an avid DoW fan and you’ve never even played Starcraft but you diss it anyway, I say why? Play it at least and give it a chance. Who knows, you might even like it. I mean, honestly people let’s be real. How many of you can say, with a straight face, that you don’t feel a chill of excitement run down your spine when you’re fleet of warships runs into an enemy fleet and your screen lights up with the fury of two armadas dancing for space supremacy? Or the sense of triumph and accomplishment as your army of zerg finally overruns that pesky entrenched Terran base, after its defenses had claimed literally hundreds of your mens’ lives? Or that badass feeling you get when you see the end game statistic and realize that you trailed the second place player’s kills by over a hundred? If someone were to ask me these questions and I’d said no, I’d be a stone-cold liar.
/rant

So, that’s the end of my rant. I know most of you are going to do that little “Tl : Dr” thing, and that’s cool. I don’t expect most of you to read it anyways, not even Ush has all that patience I think. 😂 I’ve just had that on my chest for a long time and I wanted to say it, so I did.
But for those of you who did read, what is your opinion? Do you prefer one to the other? If so, why? Are there pro-Dawn of War or pre-Starcraft fans that irritate you? Feel free to talk about it.

LOL. Maybe that person confused SC with C&C3 predator/scorpion/seeker spam? I wouldn't be surprised.

I've seen those comments from hundreds of people over years.

Haters are never logical. It's also irritating to see those who think the Tyrannids are ripping off the Zerg.

Blizzard's strengths are obsessive attention to detail, balance and perfectionism, which comes at a cost of enormous development times of course.

Relic have different priorities (like making DoW as violent as possible) but they are also into innovative game mechanics, like squad-type mechanics in an RTS, morale systemsm, suppression, cover etc. And I do have t say that at this point in the market, innovation is extremely important to the RTS genre, and I do find it a valid criticism of SCII if it is too similar to the original.

I preferred Dawn of War to Starcraft, but then it came out years later. Also, even when it only had four races, DoW was never as balanced as Starcraft. When it had 9 races- not a hopoe! But actually it mattered surprisngly little unless you are trying to make an e-spotrt out of it (an area where Starcraft will always dominate). I am not saying a game does not need balance, but I AM saying that there's a limit to how much it needs to be fun. DoW was, by the end of its cycle at Soulstorm, balanced enough. That's all you need. Meanwhile, DoW has given me one of the best money spent to time enjoyed ratios I have ever, ever had, and to me that meant Relic was proving a point.

I actually have worries for SCII because I am not sure what is distinctive about it yet and I am unsure that a straight sequel is really what I want. I do want to hear more about their single player mode. DoWII in comparison is looking far more innovative- and as I say, these innovations are an important factor and I feel it is a mistake to dismiss the importance of such innovation.

But as I have said in the DoWII thread, I worry about DoWII for its steep learning curve putting off the casual gamers it purports to want to bring into a dying genre, the limited maps on release (I understand why, but that's stll a negative) and also criticism of its single player mode is alarming. Still, if their downloadable content plans go ahead well, that could make up a LOT of ground.

They've BOTH gone down the road of a campaign for only one race at first, it is worth noting...

In the end, though, I'm definitely going to buy SCII as the original was awesome and Blizzard have earned my faith. And here's the best news- as SCII is very much looking a traditional RTS, whilst DoWII- sucessfully or otherwise, time will tell- is trying something new... it means that the two games are distinctive enough for playing and enjoying both to be extremely viable.

I now own DoWII; I'll let people know my thoughts. My instincts right now? I really like DoW II's innovations, I've come to greatly appreciate them over the beta. I am sure many others will not like them. The AI needs a lot of work (which they have in fact promised they will do). I also think SCII will be better balanced.

But DoW II, from what I can tell right now, gets my vote. We'll see how SCII performs.

I liked the first DOW more than I did Starcraft. But DOWII felt like a step backwards to me in a lot of ways. Obvious innovation aside, I just don't think it's quite as fun or satisfying, at least in multiplayer, as the first.

With single player Blizzard simply tells better stories then pretty much any other RTS maker and that's a big reason why I play through an RTS game. First DOW was fun but there never was a particularly interesting plot. Where as SC has some great plot twists and memorable characters that kept me going - I wanted to see what would happen next. And since DOWII is taking the approach of the DOW expansion packs, which pretty much do away with all story telling and just tell you 'hey go conquer this planet because you want it' I doubt I'll enjoy DOWII's campaign as much as SCII's.

Gonna just come down to what you want. Want something new DOWII will be your thing, if you just want more SC with better graphics and new units, SCII will be your bag. In the end I'll probably get a lot more play time out of SCII then I will out of DOWII.

That's actually not what DoWII has done with its campaign, which is still not to say that the stpry is necessarily any good.

It hasn't? I watched one of the video reviews and it showed them at the planet scale map, and they said you can choose missions and what not. So there's an actual plot then?

Nah, it's not like Dark Crusade, it's not a metamap. You choose a mission to just give some choice about which assets ou are going to attack or defend at that stage in the plot, and they are interspersed with specific storyline misisons which are apparerently very good; it is about a Tyrannid invasion of the Blood Raven's recruiting worlds and it is fully storyline missioned and even, I understand, cutscened up.

But the criticism has been that the strategic choice missions between the storyline missions are too repetitive. We'll see.

Oh, I see.

That's reassuring.

But I very much agree that SC had a better single player plot than DoW.

I've just never been a fan of Dawn of War and yes i have played it, I'll stick with Blizzard for the strategy games.

After seeing how much Blizzard copied... I now tend to like Warhammer series better

we're not just talking similarity here... we're talking nigh-complete conceptual and game design ripoffs.. its disgusting

Yes I like SC.. but SC2 looks to me, like it wont be taking the crown off of SC anytime soon

I've never heard anyone (none of my friends at least) say that you can just mass 1 unit and win at starcraft.. cuz thats a pile of crap

eventually SC2 and DoW2 have their differences.. but the influence is clear and almost insulting

I like them all.. but c'mon.. its time for blizzard to grow a pair and design their own shit..

what are we left with in WoW?.. walrus people.. spider people.. bird people.. cow people.. ANCIENT cow people.... /sigh..

Yes because Games Workshop didn't rip off anybody when they created their series...no sir, totally original.

People tend to overlook that.

In any case, the amount of things Blizzard created in Starcraft without inspiration from GW is considerable.

Originally posted by Pyron_Knight
Yes because Games Workshop didn't rip off anybody when they created their series...no sir, totally original.

who cares about elves and goblins and demons and all of that crap..

the point is.. when someone clearly denies you of their intellectual property, and you go ahead and made a blatant rip-off to spite them.. its not going to give the best impression

warcraft / warhammer

starcraft / warhammer 40k

These lil matchups speak worlds all by themselves.. but thats not really the only thing that gets me..

They constantly re-write their lore to ret-con
(belf paladins and dranei shamans)
"Oh mai god.. out of all the known universe.. we've "crash landed" on Azeroth.. what a co-inky dink..."
and
"Lawl...palliez dont get thur powerz from a god or anything.. its just this lil alien right here.. and now we shall drain all their powerz and make a mass army of insta-pallies.. /win"

I've also heard that War3 has nearly the exact story layout as Starcraft lol.. ugh

I like blizz just about the same as the next person.. but the only thing (and I'm only speaking from a concept standpoint.. as obviously the gameplay they make is always fun) they really can call their own is probably diablo, through and through

SCII isnt crap... and I'm definitely gonna try it

anyways, you'd probably rather gather opinions from people who actually PLAY these games... anyone who talks some mess about spamming 1 unit is an imbecile, and needs to go play some Halo Warz and keep away from the computer

They had better not mess up D3.. cuz thats all I really care about

Originally posted by SaTsuJiN
even tolkien ripped off of people.. thats besides the point..

who cares about elves and goblins and demons and all of that crap..

the point is.. when someone clearly denies you of their intellectual property, and you go ahead and made a blatant rip-off to spite them.. its not going to give the best impression

warcraft / warhammer

starcraft / warhammer 40k

These lil matchups speak worlds all by themselves.. but thats not really the only thing that gets me..

Everyone friggan rips off things in one way or another and half of the time they call it inspiration.

Originally posted by Final Blaxican
I've mostly kept my opinion to myself on the matter for... well... since the two games have been released/announced to the public.

Come on now, seriously? It's the internet, if jackasses can freely rant wanna-be irrefutable shit, why can't you? Especially if there's sense within your rant. I don't understand the DoW/SC II hate either, all I understand that SC II is taking it's sweet ass time... So just vent when you feel like it man, someone will read it.

I partly agree with SaTsuJiN. I don't like(never did) the direction the lore took in WoW; it feels uninspired as hell right now.

Starcraft, on the other hand, feels so much more inspired and interesting right now(it always was, but more than ever atm.)