Slashdot Mirror
StarCraft, Nothing But StarCraft
Now that the news has been out for a few days and game journalists have had a chance to chat with the folks at Blizzard, there are a number of new stories detailing parts of the StarCraft II world. A massive press briefing about the game fills in a few more details on the game; only three factions, no new races, the game is built with competitive play in mind, and will run on both XP and Vista. For more nitty-gritty elements, the company held panel discussions on the art design and gameplay elements of the upcoming game. Video from the event is now widely available as well; check out the official trailer, some example gameplay, or the epic 22-minute long developer walkthrough.
That's a good question. I suppose it could be a few things - it forces them to develop better code by targetting several platforms, maybe they've been using the same tools over the years, and the tools make it easy to target the Mac as well, maybe they've sold enough Mac products in the past to make it profitable to continue to do so (though it's hard to support this theory - recent releases have contained the Mac/Win binaries on the same disc - maybe they could tell by battle.net/World of Warcraft connections just how many of each platform are connecting), or maybe they just love the Mac platform. Regardless of the reason, Blizzard should be applauded for the effort, and other devs should take notice.
Blizzard's sales usually dwarf the average PC game. Many developers cannot justify the added cost when it will bring them sales in the 10000-20000 range.
Blizzard's games have such large sales numbers that even their Mac sales are significant and easily warrant it. If the number of Linux gamers (that don't use Wine/Cedega and don't dual boot to Windows) was significant - I'd imagine they'd have a Linux version as well.
Too many young'ns with Apple Powerbooks these days.
Back in the day if you wanted a game on your Mac you had very few options. Blizzard, Bungie, Maxis, Broderbund and MacSoft were about it. If you had a Mac back then and gamed you knew these names.
Even if a game was ported to the Mac by some other developer, it was usually horrendously buggy, slow, and you could only play with other Mac players (I'm looking at you Age of Kings).
These facts didn't really begin to change until the iMacs came out and Macs became "cool", or at least popular after some fashion. Of course, it sort of went hand in hand with the decline of PC gaming.
Anyway, get off my lawn.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Shit, you should see it on my 1920x1200 LCD monitor.
I'd pay 20 bucks for an extension to D2 that updated its graphics to 2007 standards, even if they didn't change anything else (well, maybe a few bugfixes would be nice - like the friggin' Trang-Oul's FCR bug...)
"Pardo also suggested that Warcraft III might have been a more forgiving game for beginners--differences in skill levels seemed less pronounced in that game. The VP said that in Starcraft II, there will be many more nuances that will separate highly skilled players from beginners, and good players from great ones"
So it's going to be crap online then? People don't like getting beaten. They partcicularly don't like getting beaten outright by players who, in the grand scheme of things, are only slightly better than themselves. Trying to make that happen more will just make multiplayer starcraft rubbish. Here's hoping they do a map editor to rival War3's, we can then have enjoyable custom maps at least.
FGD 135
Absolutely, after I played Supreme Commander I can't stand RTSs that don't allow zooming out.
This isn't some lame complaint about how it doesn't run on an OS that nobody runs.
I hope that Blizzard quits defining 'skill' as how fast a player can click, especially when we're using the mouse to play. I don't mean to overstate this - the better player is going to win, usually. But it is very telling that pro SC1 players measure clicks per second. And while it is 'athletic' in one sense, I am not fond of risking carpal tunnel syndrome just so I can be good at a computer game.
The most glaring aspect of this is in the limitation of units that can be selected at once. If you watch the gameplay videos, there are a huge number of zerglings that attack simultaneously. How backwards is it that although that is feasible in Starcraft (probably not to that scale) it is a huge pain in the ass? In order to do it you need to separate them out into groups of 12, and assign them to number keys along the top. To attack, you'd hit the 1 key, then hit a, and click behind the attack point. Now, you need to repeat that step for every group. The first group will get there slightly before the others because they have a head start, which is inefficient if you're trying to swarm the enemy. The natural thing would be to double click on the zerglings, and have them ALL be selected at once. I'm glad to see that Rob Pardo is working on SC2, but I know he has strong feelings on this sort of thing. I can't recall the exact reason, but I believe the cap is in SC1 for the purpose of 'encouraging smaller battles.' Sorry, but if they've played it at all, it just doesn't work that way. People get into bigass battles all the time, that is half the fun of SC1. And it is aggravating to know that the UI doesn't scale with the scope of battles. Oftentimes, you don't have control over how big the battle gets.
I want to focus on the action, not the fifty inane things needed to sustain the action. I understand and appreciate that some of it has to happen, but it can be rather unpleasant sometimes. One example of this is building units. In particular, you should be able to build multiple unit production buildings, issuing build requests and they are load-balanced between the two, i.e. if I want two marines, and I have two barracks, I should be able to select both barracks, and ask for two marines. Both barracks would build one simultaneously. Currently, the Blizzard games allow you to queue, but do not load-balance in this way. If you wanted to do what I just described, you need to select each building individually. More clicks, more thought needed to accomplish a common goal. Another example is unit queuing. This is fairly common among RTS games now, but it is a shame that the Blizzard games effectively penalize you for using it. I say this because they deduct the unit cost when you queue the unit - not when the unit starts being built. For the period of time between the queue and the unit being built, you have fewer resources available to expend in the event of an emergency. (The interesting thing is you are not charged for upkeep of the queued unit until it starts production.) The hyperactive player who can remember to build units right when they come out does not suffer from having less available resources. In the event of a financial emergency, they can divert resources without needing to stop the queue of units.
Nevertheless, I have high hopes for this game, and will probably upgrade my PC to play.
Money.
I buy all their games as a result, but what's their motivation?Money.
(surely the sales are far far lower).Sales are lower? Lower than what, the number of potential buyers if they don't support the Mac?
Do you have any doubt that Startcraft 2 will be among the top 20 titles of the year? Blizzard doesn't have any doubt. Now take a look at the top 20 titles of 2006. How many of them currently offer a Mac version? Gee, pretty much all of them do. Why do you suppose that is? Maybe because it is profitable?
The real question is "why wouldn't a develop make a Mac version?" The answer is, it costs sore up front to build nice, portable code. If the initial investment is a big concern and you don't know if there will be a payoff, it sometimes makes sense to cut corners and develop just for DirectX+Windows. Then, if your game is a flop, you've lost less money. If your game is a success, you can shell out to port the code. The thing is, this latter method, costs more money overall than just writing portable code. Thus, any company that is sure their game will be successful (Blizzard, Id, etc.) tend to plan for the Mac version from the onset. There are a few exceptions to this rule, almost all of whom are owned by Microsoft.
Still no appreciable terrain, just two non-deformable levels flat as a griddle. Units still pretty much just walk up and stand still while they grind each other down. Everything still explodes cleanly with no wreckage to block the way or mark the battle. Nothing in the demo resembling high level orders ("attack and move" doesn't constitute high level order).
I guess Blizzard is smart to not mess with a formula that works, but the operative word here is "formula". I guess I can wait til it's in the bargain bin.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Wait. You're joking, right? You're claiming that the sequel to game that is built entirely on Blizzards original IP is a ripoff of a fan project. Furthermore, and fan project dedicated to recreating the original (in another Blizzard game mind you). Further yet, a fan project you haven't played because it's not bloody well done?!
Who's letting these kids sit unattended on the internet?
Starcraft may run at 640 x 480 but it still looks nice even on a much higher resolution monitor. The artists did an amazing job with that game. I reinstalled it a couple years ago and was surprised that it still looks pretty good compared to modern games. Some old games (like Diablo II) look very pixelated, but Starcraft has great anti-aliasing, animation, and structure that looks nice despite the relatively primitive technology. It's a lot like a well-designed font that's readable even when it's scaled too small for a simplistic vector-to-pixel translation to work.
The reason is because it slows down your control over the battlefield. The unit proportions in Starcraft were designed with a static camera in mind; that means battlecruisers, which in reality would be enormous ships, are really only six or so marines long on screen. This means you can individually control your marines and your battlecruisers simultaneously without worrying about the zoom level; you can give split-second decisions to each of your units, and the game view lends itself perfectly to that.
On the other hand, Supreme Commander was designed with a zoom camera in mind, which means they took the liberty of using more realistic proportions for their units. In theory you could control all your troops on the same zoom level, but in reality the zoom camera is anything but optional; the unit proportions force you to zoom in and out to give your troops individual tactical orders. It makes even the simplest tactical commands, such as focus firing, difficult, tedious, and extremely slow to execute.
Did you actually watch the gameplay video? The ramps are inclined and debris from air units slides down the ramps into piles at the base. I didn't see whether the debris hampers movement but the narrator hinted that it would. There were also big freaking craters in the ground after the nuclear strike. I'll be surprised if those don't have more than a cosmetic effect.
And yes, there were only two noticeable levels of terrain shown, but there might be more possible on different maps. Heck, even original Starcraft actually has at least three levels for certain terrain types. Most people just choose to play on maps like Big Game Hunters and Lost Temple that only use two of them.
Protoss in general has the most powerful starcraft, so I'm not surprised that countering carriers is difficult.
With that said, here's my experience with countering them:
I think you missed the entire point of the game....
Starcraft is for Micro. Its all about the micro. Focus fire and all that.
Supreme Commander is about the Macro. You build an army you send it to attack.
Most units don't have user controlled special abilities as opposed to Starcraft. (see Starcraft: Psionic storm)
The whole point of Supreme Commander is to command an army, have a good army composition to counter your enemies. Not to focus fire on one marine at a time and rotate damaged units out.
So yeah... You missed the point of an awesome game.