~2v2@GoW!!!~
For some reason I woke up this morning and really wanted to play some old school Warcraft 2. In my opinion, it’s the best RTS of all time, but I am biased via serious nostalgia. It’s been forever, and by that I mean at least 5 years since I have even set foot inside the lands of Azeroth, Lordaeron, and Draenor. To my dismay, I didn’t have OS 9 Classic installed so I couldn’t boot up my disc image and hop on over to Battle.net so I was left to look at some YouTube clips (see below) of other people playing. On a good note, I saw some clips had come onto YouTube within the last month which means people are still playing and that is awesome. I look forward to playing again once I get my computer adequately equipped.
So I was thinking about what I liked War2 so much and thought I’d write about it. The game was originally release by Blizzard in December of 1995 when I was 8 years old. It dominated my life for the next 5-7 years with varying degrees of obsessive attachment. For a while in elementary school, I would wake up at 5:30AM, 2 hours early, just to get a few games in before the drudgery of school. I would come home and put off my homework for 3, 4, 5 hours at a time because of playing War2. All my closest friends played and we would either sync up over IM, phone, or bring computers to each other’s houses and play sometimes for 12 hours at a time. And yes that meant carrying desktop machines. We would sit on the phone together while playing just for fast hands-free communication, tying up both the phone line for the dialup modem and the house phone. My parents were usually less than pleased. It was an addiction. It was a serious problem. But boy was it fun.
So why was it so fun?
If I could make a product with even half the long-term appeal as War2, I’d die happy. That said, I decided to think back and dissect what made it so great.
The game was relatively simple with only a handful of unit types, buildings, upgrades, and players generally stuck to a handful of maps (GoW, Friends, PoS, HSC, and maybe a few more). It was a relatively newbie friendly game with a not-so-steep learning curve to capture the basics, but gave enough room to grow that seasoned veterans could wipe out more novice players with ease. The game was both inviting in the short-term and challenging in the long-term, a combination that is hard to get right.
The end-game scenarios begged you to play one more. By that I mean winners always felt they could play a rematch to win in even grander style and losers always felt as if they ‘knew why’ they lost and could correct it next time. This is an interesting dynamic, that games always seemed closer than they really were. Moreover, the games were relatively lightweight and you could be up and playing again in literally less than a minute from ending the last game, greatly reducing the psychological barriers to deciding to play again.
The unpredictability of gameplay was so fascinating in that the same exact game setup could yield very different types of games. A 2v2 Garden of War could be over in 5 minutes with a well-coordinated rush or could last 2+ hours with players choosing a long-term power strategy. When you were launched into a new game, you never knew if you were in for a quick, scrappy scrum or a drawn-out epic battle and this kept things interesting. You played for the epic games, but quick fights were also very gratifying, so you left happy no matter what. But overall, the variable degree of satisfaction and surprise kept things new and alluring each time you immersed yourself in a game.
The tension of the rock, paper, scissors dynamic creeps in at the beginning of each game. All you can see is you and your allies’ base, with the fog of war obfuscating the rest of the map. Every second the apprehension builds. Will it be a rush, a power, an offensive tower, a quick expansion, or some hybrid? The complexity compounds when you have a team-game. Both rush? Both power? One of each? And what if it’s 3 or 4 players per side? Wow, it gets crazy. A good strategy is 20% guesswork and 80% execution, but great guesses can prove to be powerful. The serendipity of choosing the right or wrong counterstrategy to your opponent is enough to create anxiety but not enough to leave the game to pure chance.
The masculinity of destruction is so empowering for the players, who, by the way, were mostly male. There is simply nothing like a group of fully upgraded and bloodlusted ogres pounding a townhall down or a death knight casting death and decay in an enemy’s gold flow. It feels amazing to slaughter your opponents troops and leave a path of razing and sheer destruction behind you. It’s one of these things that feels so indescribably good but you don’t know why and you just can’t explain it to someone who “doesn’t get it”.
The game is very much a social experience both for real-life friends and friends made through online play. As I said earlier, my friends and I would play religiously day in and day out. If any of us was lukewarm on playing on a given day, the others could easily convince them to play ‘just one’ that turned into many games and many hours of fun. Like all bad decisions, you will almost certainly follow a few of your friends jumping off that bridge if they push hard enough. After all, they need you or they can’t play that awesome 4v4 match!
Rankings and clans pushed the achiever-types to constantly want to pump their stats. Playing with some of the big online personas (the best players) was awe-inspiring. I remember wanting to be in some of the best clans so badly that I would dream about it. It was something to aspire to that never got old. If you made it, you were in the club and got to append a clan symbol to the end of your name, a sign that you were among the elite and obviously cool. I would seek out games with the top players and try to impress them. Because I never quite made it, I was always looking up to them and their God-like statuses. It kept me going.
The gameplay was not long tail in that there were a few core setups that were played over and over again. I would say 80+% of games were GoW or Friends with high resources on fastest speed. This meant that everyone was training to perfect the same set of tactics and it was not as though every player had their niche map and setup. This made the competition all the more fierce and wins all the more rewarding. If you can win on some obscure map because you have specialized unique knowledge of the terrain and strategy, that’s okay. However, if you can win consistently on the map everyone is an expert at and plays many times a day, then you are really powerful.
Every game was about the team and not the individual. In games like Diablo and WoW we see the end goal as a selfish one, to advance your character. Although I did play Diablo a lot and loved it, there is something unique when the win involves the whole team and is for the whole team, especially if you’re playing with real-life friends. The ‘Aha! We did it together. Yes!’ moment is what meant the most for me. It’s like going to war with your best friends and coming out the victors, something that’s so uniquely special.
So what got me to stop playing?
The last key War2 moment I remember was a 2v2 Garden of War match where my friend Derek DiPietro and I were beating Metal and Azteca, the top-ranked two-some in the world at that time. Upon sensing defeat, they disconnected their modems and dropped. We got a ‘disc’ instead of the win. Somewhere in the depths of the hard drive of an old machine in my house, there is a screenshot of the pending victory, and that’s what counts. I guess having won the ultimate prize was enough and my play trailed off from there.
I still played a few times off and on since then. Even more surprising is that now I am 21, it’s 13 years after release, and I still have the urge to play. Blizzard definitely did something right.
