I was talking to a few of my friends who are avid warcraft fans, they went from the RTS to the MMO and most of the time they play that. But whenever I talk to them about custom maps for sc2 they say their opinions based on warcraft versions, kind of makes me wish I had wc3. Anyways I was asking them what map they liked best and they basically told me maul(I think) and dota. Which sounds about right I guess for wc3 fans. Then I asked what about hero arenas and I asked them what made those good. I was given the answer lots of heroes(no clones), and lots of builds.
So I'm here asking what do you guys think makes a hero arena good? My friend says 15 heroes is too low which I thought that was about medium size.
My favorite hero arena in War3 was the Fireblade Arena. I have no idea how many heroes it had but it had to be close to 50. Also, when your hero got to level 10, it would evolve into a stronger version of itself. This amounts to almost 100 heroes.
Depending on the gameplay...the importance of things may be different.
Like angel arena was quite fun even tough it had many similar heroes and not too many unique abilities. (it had manyyy heroes)
On the other hand smashcraft has only handfull of unique heroes but its still really fun.
Its most important just to make it fun. It can be extremely fun when you just have simple abilities and just kill other players with them....so I guess i dont know whats important, just keep it simple and fun?
15 heroes is a lot. Making abilities with levels takes a huge amount of time. Especially passive abilities (although, I decided to have triggers add an additional stack of a buff to the unit when the unit increases the level of a passive ability). The amount of effects you have to duplicate is very large.
If you really want to make that many, you have to decide very early on how you design your heroes. It might be easier to have abilities scale with stats.
The most important thing is not quantity. The three areas which to me are most important:
1) Having a logical reason behind each addition to the map. Everything you add should have an explicit reason. A hero doesn't need two abilities that do the same thing, but look different. There don't need to be two heroes that play with the same gameplay. If you correctly design the way each hero plays, you can get away with only having as many heroes as players. It's important that each one have a unique experience. If you have 10 heroes, and they each take hours of play to master their technique, then it's essentially 10 different games in one.
An example of good diversity in heroes is World of Warcraft (before the expansions, at least). You'll notice how few spells each class has, and how different the spells of each class were (everything is blending together in recent expansions, so I quit). If you really take a minute to look closely at each spell and class, you'll realize that it probably took hours, or even days (or months?) for teams of people to decide each ability, and which class it should use it.
Make sure your abilities can be used easily, but also that they can be used in ways that require much more skill. Look at the Shock Core (I forgot what it's called) from Unreal Tornament. Abilities with synergy are very good.
Players also love abilities that yield opportunities for 1-in-a-million kills. Look at all the videos on YouTube of Halo games where a player randomly throws a plasma grenade across the map, and it bounces off 2 forcefields, hits a wall, and sticks to a player, then kills the entire team at once.
2) Present the map well to the player. Add little things that are "cool". Players love it when maps keep track of how good they are. Print out a simple message at the start how many other heroes they've killed using the bank system. Or even display a leaderboard.
3) Awesomeness. Play around with movers and actor events. An example of a way you can make a simple damage ability awesome could be to take any generic missile mover, and add a stage to the beginning where the missile barely moves at all (so that it looks like the hero holds it for about a second before it flies at the target). In the missile actor's events, have its scale be increased to a larger size over half a second at actor creation.
Now, you've got a simple damage ability that appears to "charge up" (because it floats at the hero for a second, and gets bigger) before it launches. If you choose a model for the projectile that looks like a ball of energy, you've turned what used to be a generic (but required ability type for most heroes) into an awesome ability that looks like something from Dragon Ball Z.
Have you never played dota ... or a custom hero arena?
Try League of legends..... for a good MOBA/AOS type game.... doesnt get much better then that.
as for hero arenas...
For me it was the "custom Hero arenas" in wc3
SC2 has two major failings at making these
you could pick type.... str,agi,int
sc2 kinda fails at doing these unit types... you can but ... doesnt cut it IMO
you could pick your own abilities for the hero
sc2 kinda fails at this again because you have to pre add the abilities to the command card
thats basically it....
Side note
Hero arenas really arnt meant to be "competitive" they are meant to be fun, and entertaining. Truely competive players are always gonna go to the truest form of competive play they can get. Generally that wont be found on a custom map. Now Dota was the exception(and it took years for it to get there), but I believe that time has past. Theres so many stand-alone (dota clones) out there now that offer a better exerience than what you can ever get on a custom map these days.
You really dont need to think a "hero arena" out too much as long as its fun to play.
tell me about it, im now being REQUESTED, to make 6 levels of every ability in Zealot frenzy.... ITs a fucking pain!!!
At thread OP, sc2 editor requires alot more work, so ignore any of what your war3 buddies tell you, Its way easier to focus on "mass" rather than quality in war3, Over here it takes an incredibly long amount of time to make any thing. I'd say 10 Unique heroes would be pretty good aiming point for your hero arena.
what contributes to a good hero areana?
Unique heroes
Unique Items
Good Terrain
Abilities that do more than just X takes X damage .
I'd rather say it's about being able to slaughter stuff with lights and explosions, being unable to really one-shot your opponents, making fights hard and of a calculated duration that makes you go all adrenaline fighting for your life, being surrounded and anyway pwning whoever surrounds you. Because, heroes are cool guys that destroy enemy mobs by dozens, have awesome abilities that make you feel uber and are able to have long combats against other heroes. If not, I don't think it will have too much success.
You can always focus on items and stuff, but you should ask yourself, what do you want, WoW or Diablo? (2 examples of completelly opposing RPGs)
Also, it's about getting to love the character you play. I loved one Enfos back at W3, that was goddamn hard, and I always played a blue mage that shot supernovas all across the map. The sheer awesomeness of it and the difficulty of the map made me play it again and again with my friends. Don't forget that "speed" is important, too. If you manage to make everything be quick, you'll get more action per minute, so players won't stop and will get all hyped playing.
It's cool being able to pick items, choose you stats and all... but in the end, you lose a lot of time there, time that would be better spent at killing stuff. Ninja vs Samurai was a great hero-fight map, too, and had nearly no customization at all aside from the abilities leveling, it was all about skill, and not builds and cheesy combinations.
I don't know if I'm explaining well... Actually, I'm working on a PvE 2-team competition arena, although that "awesome abilities" part will have to wait a bit, since I'm going to base off all my abilities from existing ones for the release version. I'm working a lot over these concepts, to try to make something new, where it's more about skill, and the customization options are shared and recyclable.
Whatever xDDD.
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I was talking to a few of my friends who are avid warcraft fans, they went from the RTS to the MMO and most of the time they play that. But whenever I talk to them about custom maps for sc2 they say their opinions based on warcraft versions, kind of makes me wish I had wc3. Anyways I was asking them what map they liked best and they basically told me maul(I think) and dota. Which sounds about right I guess for wc3 fans. Then I asked what about hero arenas and I asked them what made those good. I was given the answer lots of heroes(no clones), and lots of builds.
So I'm here asking what do you guys think makes a hero arena good? My friend says 15 heroes is too low which I thought that was about medium size.
@Keyeszx: Go
Play "Zealot Frenzy" MANY ideas for you in there.
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LOTS of heroes with customization capabilities.
My favorite hero arena in War3 was the Fireblade Arena. I have no idea how many heroes it had but it had to be close to 50. Also, when your hero got to level 10, it would evolve into a stronger version of itself. This amounts to almost 100 heroes.
Depending on the gameplay...the importance of things may be different.
Like angel arena was quite fun even tough it had many similar heroes and not too many unique abilities. (it had manyyy heroes)
On the other hand smashcraft has only handfull of unique heroes but its still really fun.
Its most important just to make it fun. It can be extremely fun when you just have simple abilities and just kill other players with them....so I guess i dont know whats important, just keep it simple and fun?
@Keyeszx: Go
15 heroes is a lot. Making abilities with levels takes a huge amount of time. Especially passive abilities (although, I decided to have triggers add an additional stack of a buff to the unit when the unit increases the level of a passive ability). The amount of effects you have to duplicate is very large.
If you really want to make that many, you have to decide very early on how you design your heroes. It might be easier to have abilities scale with stats.
The most important thing is not quantity. The three areas which to me are most important:
1) Having a logical reason behind each addition to the map. Everything you add should have an explicit reason. A hero doesn't need two abilities that do the same thing, but look different. There don't need to be two heroes that play with the same gameplay. If you correctly design the way each hero plays, you can get away with only having as many heroes as players. It's important that each one have a unique experience. If you have 10 heroes, and they each take hours of play to master their technique, then it's essentially 10 different games in one.
An example of good diversity in heroes is World of Warcraft (before the expansions, at least). You'll notice how few spells each class has, and how different the spells of each class were (everything is blending together in recent expansions, so I quit). If you really take a minute to look closely at each spell and class, you'll realize that it probably took hours, or even days (or months?) for teams of people to decide each ability, and which class it should use it.
Make sure your abilities can be used easily, but also that they can be used in ways that require much more skill. Look at the Shock Core (I forgot what it's called) from Unreal Tornament. Abilities with synergy are very good.
Players also love abilities that yield opportunities for 1-in-a-million kills. Look at all the videos on YouTube of Halo games where a player randomly throws a plasma grenade across the map, and it bounces off 2 forcefields, hits a wall, and sticks to a player, then kills the entire team at once.
2) Present the map well to the player. Add little things that are "cool". Players love it when maps keep track of how good they are. Print out a simple message at the start how many other heroes they've killed using the bank system. Or even display a leaderboard.
3) Awesomeness. Play around with movers and actor events. An example of a way you can make a simple damage ability awesome could be to take any generic missile mover, and add a stage to the beginning where the missile barely moves at all (so that it looks like the hero holds it for about a second before it flies at the target). In the missile actor's events, have its scale be increased to a larger size over half a second at actor creation.
Now, you've got a simple damage ability that appears to "charge up" (because it floats at the hero for a second, and gets bigger) before it launches. If you choose a model for the projectile that looks like a ball of energy, you've turned what used to be a generic (but required ability type for most heroes) into an awesome ability that looks like something from Dragon Ball Z.
@Keyeszx: Go
Umm.....
Have you never played dota ... or a custom hero arena?
Try League of legends..... for a good MOBA/AOS type game.... doesnt get much better then that.
as for hero arenas...
For me it was the "custom Hero arenas" in wc3
SC2 has two major failings at making these
thats basically it....
Side note
Hero arenas really arnt meant to be "competitive" they are meant to be fun, and entertaining. Truely competive players are always gonna go to the truest form of competive play they can get. Generally that wont be found on a custom map. Now Dota was the exception(and it took years for it to get there), but I believe that time has past. Theres so many stand-alone (dota clones) out there now that offer a better exerience than what you can ever get on a custom map these days.
You really dont need to think a "hero arena" out too much as long as its fun to play.
I personally like less abilities, higher quality. Most abilities in PLO serve a unique purpose and change the heroes play style completely.
@Vexal: Go
tell me about it, im now being REQUESTED, to make 6 levels of every ability in Zealot frenzy.... ITs a fucking pain!!!
At thread OP, sc2 editor requires alot more work, so ignore any of what your war3 buddies tell you, Its way easier to focus on "mass" rather than quality in war3, Over here it takes an incredibly long amount of time to make any thing. I'd say 10 Unique heroes would be pretty good aiming point for your hero arena.
what contributes to a good hero areana?
Unique heroes
Unique Items
Good Terrain
Abilities that do more than just X takes X damage .
@Jinxxx123: Go
If your only gonna do 10 heros..... you prolly shouldnt bother in the first place to make a hero arena....
seriously.... your Wc3 friends are right..... its just its a lot harder to do in sc2. hence why I havent found one I like yet on sc2.
I don't think hero numbers are the key of this.
I'd rather say it's about being able to slaughter stuff with lights and explosions, being unable to really one-shot your opponents, making fights hard and of a calculated duration that makes you go all adrenaline fighting for your life, being surrounded and anyway pwning whoever surrounds you. Because, heroes are cool guys that destroy enemy mobs by dozens, have awesome abilities that make you feel uber and are able to have long combats against other heroes. If not, I don't think it will have too much success.
You can always focus on items and stuff, but you should ask yourself, what do you want, WoW or Diablo? (2 examples of completelly opposing RPGs)
Also, it's about getting to love the character you play. I loved one Enfos back at W3, that was goddamn hard, and I always played a blue mage that shot supernovas all across the map. The sheer awesomeness of it and the difficulty of the map made me play it again and again with my friends. Don't forget that "speed" is important, too. If you manage to make everything be quick, you'll get more action per minute, so players won't stop and will get all hyped playing.
It's cool being able to pick items, choose you stats and all... but in the end, you lose a lot of time there, time that would be better spent at killing stuff. Ninja vs Samurai was a great hero-fight map, too, and had nearly no customization at all aside from the abilities leveling, it was all about skill, and not builds and cheesy combinations.
I don't know if I'm explaining well... Actually, I'm working on a PvE 2-team competition arena, although that "awesome abilities" part will have to wait a bit, since I'm going to base off all my abilities from existing ones for the release version. I'm working a lot over these concepts, to try to make something new, where it's more about skill, and the customization options are shared and recyclable.
Whatever xDDD.