Day 279 of writing every day.
Usually when playing against the computer, the difficulty can be adjusted to make it easier or much more challenging for a wide range of users from casual players to serious players who pay attention to little details and plan everything out. If there’s something that I have to say about StarCraft Remastered, it’s that the difficulty level of the game’s single player campaign by default is for gamers with a solid amount of experience after a few levels.
To keep games challenging in a fun way, game designers have to scale the difficulty so that players get to play with training wheels on at first when learning the game, then start playing the game with everything gradually unlocking and using their built-up experience to figure out the rest. Even games said to be very hard follow this flow to an extent. The catch is that even knowing the rules and tricks that it’s still going to be hard, which is why games designed to be hard are made with a target audience in mind.
Of course, StarCraft Remastered keeps all the original units and numeric values in place, so the difficulty of it may stem from the game being made in the 90s when not as many games have been around to serve as references for how to create a more balanced game.
Anyone who’s played RPGs is familiar with the presence of healers that restore health, for example. In many cases, the ability to restore hit points to a unit is a must as part of strategy. You don’t want to train and build units and characters with the mindset they’re single use unless they’re the self-destructive type that outputs more damage and causes the enemy to pay a higher price than you.
The healing mechanics in StarCraft original are quite rudimentary and hard to apply in actual battle. You have a race with builder-units that can repair mechanical units but not biological units, a race that slowly regenerates health, and a race that has both health and shields where the shield slowly regenerates or can be renewed by a specific building. If your units manage to survive a skirmish, there might be a way to get them patched up or allow them to regenerate to an extent, but during a battle, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to extend a unit’s lifespan.
Losing a unit means training more units and nothing comes for free, so there’s also a resource management side to the game that you need to be aware of besides simply being able to micromanage units enough to defeat the opponent. Luckily, the expansion pack changes things somewhat, but I think StarCraft 2 really changed things for the better many years down the road since StarCraft the original game. I’ll get to writing about that game maybe in the future but that’s it for today.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 