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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.
...but what I'm really looking forward to is Diablo III. clickclick clickclickclickclickclick clickclick clickclickclick
will run on both XP and Vista.
Like most recent Blizzard releases, it will also ship simultaneously for the Mac.
I guess that means no Linux or OSX version.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Blizzard are usually pretty good at supporting Mac. Will there be a Mac OS X version of Starcraft II, and if so will it be released at the same time as the Windows version?
"Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." - Arthur C. Clarke.
Run on XP and Vista? What about Mac OS X? I can't remember any Blizzard game that hasn't run on Mac too. They've always been pretty good about supporting that platform. If only they would focus on Linux too . . . :(
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
From all the screenshots and demos it looks like very little of the battlefield is visible at a time. This is one thing I didn't like about Starcraft, but I understood because it ran at such a low resolution. I hope Starcraft II supports higher resolution or different battlefield zoom levels. Scrolling around all the time can be a pain in the ass.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
A quicktime video for a game only available in XP/Vista; thats lame.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
Guys, right on the FAQ at www.starcraft2.com , they answer the question, of course there will be support for OSX. http://www.starcraft2.com/faq.xml It is listed under their "Technical Aspects" area.
The Protoss Mothership will have not 'equivalent' in that the Terran and Zerg have no super unit that they can only have one of, but they will have counters. This is the kind of difference in races I want to see. A real difference in the build structure, the buildings, and the units means more variety of tactics and more fun. I can forgive the lack of a new race if they really do a good job differening the three normal races. Rather than having similar tech trees, I hope to see a complete dichotomy between the three. The recent Rise of Legends is a pretty good example of this, although there could still be more difference. In RoL, switching between races for the first time usually leaves you completly lost and confused, but once you get past the names and images, they still maintain a similar tech tree between the races, with only a handful of major differences in the building (granted those differences are deep rooted in the different stragies of each race, but there could have been more.)
Starcraft already has a good bit of differentiation between the races, but there could be so much more. I could see each of the three races' buildings and tech trees taking on more characteristics of the races' themselves. Protoss should still be a strong, yet immoble build race, though the flexable teleportation and mobile pylons do serve to balance overall immobility. Terrans could be mobile, but more modular than before, with more CC addon slots and types and perhaps more addons for other buildings. Let the terrans be flexable with enough mobility as before but at the cost of the flexability the abandoned addons would provide. For instance the terrans could have access to different unit types and enhance units in different ways depending on what addons are activated. Perhaps the Reaper would be active with one addon to the barracks, but a different addon allows for medics. The Zerg have some awesome building tricks as it is; I don't know of anyother game (except WCIII) which you lose a harvester to build their buildings. But the Zerg could do more; perhaps encourage the player to expand the creep far and wide by giving an extra larva spawn at each creep colony to enhance the overwhelming force and plague-like gameplay nature of the zerg. The Zerg should be all about expanding, flexability and mobility; overwhelming forces and expanding across the whole of the map in infestation as they go.
Demented But Determined.
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!
I thought they meant experience points...
"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
lame,unoriginal rip-off of project revolution with physics effects.
I bet its would lag too.Havok engine is pretty resource heavy.
I'm not even bothering to get a pirated copy.
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.
"built with competitive play in mind"
So, uh, I might be alone on this, but I really like the single player mode of Blizzard's games (SC, WC, etc). Does this mean that they'll be neglecting the single-player aspect of the game (i.e., an actual storyline). Not sure I want to buy it if it has no single-player value.
I watched the High Definition trailor and I was impressed with the graphics of it, but the Terrian Marine smoking a cigar the whole time the machines installed his suit was a little hard to get. Plus at the end of the trailor, his space suit's visor closes with that damn cigar still in his mouth....I'm no rocket scientist...but it seems like that'd be a bad idea to seal yourself in a spacesuit with limited oxygen and a cigar...
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.
I'll add that to my "101 signs that you are playing too much WOW" list.
I am on the road crew. This is my stop sign.
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 irony of that is I have neither played WOW nor WC3.
However, I have played Final Fantasy and Disgaea games.
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.
In the movie Thank You for Smoking the lobbyist goes to Hollywood to talk to an agent about placing cigarettes in movies. The agent mentions a screenplay set on a space station and suggests a scene with the main characters smoking cigarettes after sex.
The lobbyist says: "Sounds great! But wouldn't smoking in an all oxygen environment be dangerous?"
The agent responds: "I guess so. But it's an easy fix. Just one line of dialogue, 'Thank God they invented the whatchamacallit device.'"
Will it work in Windows 2000?
1) Presumably it cleans the air. Considering the tech, it's hardly a stretch.
2) It's about the artist look. Big deal, it looked good. The smoke, and the details? fantastic.
Sometimes it's ok to appreciate the look of thing without looking at the precieved reality.
If that's to much for you, then I suggest you avoid all action movies. None of which are realistic.
Or chose number 1
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Are there fewer Mac users than Windows users? For sure. Are there fewer game studios developing for Macs? Erh... is there one but Blizzard?
Name the RTS games that came out for the Mac recently. Well? Any? So if you want to play a RTS on a Mac, will you buy SC2?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... but Blizzard kept getting told to build more pylons.
but I am. Sort of. If the game can work on Windows XP then I see no technical reasons why it cannot run on Windows 2000 Pro. There are MANY people still using that system since it is stable, does everything we need it to do, and we don't have to un-prettify it to get basic functionality and ease of control back. Admittedly, all it takes to get most of the basics back on XP is a few clicks of the mouse but why should I have to?
:-p
I know the trend is toward dumbing down technology so it isn't as "scary" to the average user but how about everyone trend upward instead? How about we INCREASE the intelligence of the average user by giving him/her a good system and encouraging them to LEARN? Wow, what a concept? A highly educated populace that isn't afraid of technology! Everybody gets smarter!!
Guess that would mean the techno-elite like Bill would lose their place in the world and innovation might have to happen... hmmmm, guess that highly educated populace might not come to fruition after all. Bah, it feels like Monday all over again and I needed a rant
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Who cares about SC2 ? I am still waiting for Duke Nukem Forever!
No sig for now.
It would also lend a (possibly unfair) advantage to those who were able to support better video cards. At a farther zoom out, lots of on-screen action might be a bit laggy on some cards, resulting in a "few clicks too slow" scenario.
As long as they allowed the zoom limitations to meet up with midline machines though, it should be fine.
One thing this article didn't mention: the Blizzard reps were asked whether there would be subscription fees attached to battle.net, and they refused to comment. Not even a peep.
They were willing to give "tight-lipped" responses to plot spoilers, but this issue they wouldn't comment on at all.
I can see why they'd want to keep silent if subscription fees are in the works for battle.net, as it would put a damper on the hype cyclone that's been stirred up in gaming news since its announcement. I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't just deny it if the option weren't at least on the table.
Considering this game's market position (a blockbuster RTS hasn't been released in years and obviously there is great interest), Vivendi's/Blizzard's great post-RTS success with WoW, Starcraft's international appeal (especially in the launch country, South Korea, where subscription-based games across all genres make up the majority of the PC game market) and other previously non-subscription genres testing the waters (e.g. Hellgate: London, the "spiritual successor to Diablo" made by ex-Blizzard employees)... Starcraft 2 seems like the perfect property to add a monthly fee to -- even if it did rouse some negative sentiment, it would likely still be successful.
I strongly suspect there's some form of fee in the works. If not, it would be nice if Blizzard would make that clear.
So how about some details about any improvements to non-blizzard custom maps and scenarios. There were a bunch of significant improvements from SC1 to WC3 but people still had to use modified tools to get at more customization. For example will they finally open up the unit spec and make it as simple as picking a skin, attack type, and so forth and make the existing units just predefined templates? Will they finally dump the lame trigger interface and just give a simple scripting interface instead? Basically a custom map/scenario is nothing more than a bunch of terrain, map, unit, item, ally/neutral/enemy, and win/lose definitions and a bunch of event scripting. Strangely enough, that's much like a webpage. Why not just make all of the definition part of some xml schema and have some scripting file (in another language other than markup) along with it.
does anyone else see the word "starcraft" and automatically think "noob" before the thought of the actual game pops up? Happens to me a lot....
the Political Inquirer
Check out www.TheRuinsOfHell.com for a private server.. It's based on the classic 1.09d patch, so classes are much more balanced, and there's no Enigma to ruin stuff. Plenty of people online :)
I was never great at all of the hot keying, but it never really bothered me. The thing that always bothered me was that groups would always funnel down to the target point, when sometimes, you would rather have them spread out. For instance, a group of marines spread out in a long front are an easy match for a siege tank, whereas the same group clumped together would be toast. Similarly, it would be nice to be able to group a group of mutalisks flying formation in front of a group of guardians, and have them stay roughly that way when approaching their target. This may just be too difficult to accomplish, but it would add tactics which are just infeasible without formations.
There is a reason they are still releasing patches for Starcraft 1: no RTS game, period, can be balanced perfectly.
When I look at that developer preview I can't stop thinking: This game is going to take forever to balance right.
-nick
No Necron? No Dark Eldar?
Lame...
all the patches released by Blizzard are just to correct random bugs and adding some new Korean-related support/feature.
Though the game is well balanced, I think Zerg late game is perhaps too strong against Terran (dark swarm + lurkers/ultralisks) while Terran heavy-metal (mass tanks/vultures) may also be too strong against Protoss mid-game.
For the Protoss, I would make hallucination cost cheaper so they could clear the massive mine fields and initial tank blasts by sending an initial charge of hallucinated units. Hallucination is too expensive anyways.
About the Terrans, I would make it so that burrowed lurkers can still receive splash damage. As it's now, you can't attack a burrowed lurker under dark swarm with anything but special abilities and firebats (who would die by the dozen if you used them in such a situation anyways)
Why didn't they call the game Starship Troopers? I read the novel recently and in light of the official Starcraft 2 trailer, it seems clear that those marines are as close to Mobile Infantry as you can get. That and the fact that Zergs are without doubts modeled on the Bugs. Are Protos the Skinnies? Hard to tell. Starcraft has a rich universe and when you play the game, you just want to know more about it. Basing it on an existing story would definitely add to the in-game folklore. I guess they wanted to save a few bucks on royalties. It's kind of sad because Starship Troopers should be in the public domain by now and Disney proved that re-telling and old (public domain) story with a new medium gives it a new life. I still recommend Starship Trooper to all Starcraft players. You will really feel the universe expanding with a rich social critic and the emotional challenges of a trooper in the Bugs War.
Blizzard is getting hella boring, How many times are they going to rehash the same old titles made new? Get some balls and go into new directions with your games and quit relying entirely on revenue streams...
Actually SC has a lot of roots in Aliens. It has been said as much. Some of the quotes of the SC1 unites come directly from the movies. The protoss was their addition to it. Starship Troopers just ripped all that off further.
What happened to the protoss battle cruiser with all the crazy miniature fliers. Those units would also cause lots of confusion and could attack from very far away.
Your argument is flawed. One doesn't start studying neuropsychology (which I'm considering) and expect it to come easily. Along the same line, I don't play a computer game and expect to spend lots time doing things that feel like work.
And I'm not arguing that these skills will make me a better player. There will be many people who can far outclass me, and that is fine. I just want to enjoy the actual game portion more when I decide to play. My suggestions are merely ways to reduce the mouse-intensive nature of the game.
You are exactly right in a sense. I do not want to work so much at it in its current shape because:
a. it is a computer game
b. it has a relatively shallow learning curve (when you compare it to actual, non-computer game activities)
c. it still needs skills that don't even apply much to other computer games.
Contrast this to an activity like learning the guitar, where there is more challenge, the skill is actually useful, and you have a chance of doing something with it. At the end of the day, the time spent on 'training' in a computer game feels utterly wasted to me. And I am someone who is relatively carefree about my time. Obviously, I'm not cut out to be a cyber-athlete or whatever they're calling them these days. Darn. The chicks really go for them, too!
That doesn't mean I should withhold suggestions about how to improve the UI, however.
http://www.gucomics.com/comic/?cdate=20070521
:)
Everyone writes only about Starcraft 2
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
It's 2007 and the gameplay is still Space Invaders. I am not trolling or flaimbaiting, I am saying this in a generic way: although the element of strategy is plenty, it's still 'I shoot you, you shoot me' in the end.
Evidence for this is the example gameplay posted: too much shooting, little anything else.
I've only played the DOS port of Warcraft, so how is the Mac port better? Better interface? Higher resolution graphics?
Er, you're aware that Heinlein's novel (which is what the grandparent is talking about) was kinda written loooong before Aliens, let alone Starcraft, right? Right? ...sigh.
I have a Wii, a Mac Mini, and various Linux boxen.
But I'm not buying WinVista.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
With a good mouse you will not have carpal tunnel, I can say that because my own experience: ugly mouse= low clicks + pain; good mouse= many clicks + no pain.
I also believe that the click-fest issue is totally backwards as you see it.
Starcraft is and old game, it's a click-fest because that's what games of that time were.
We just kept jumping from game to game year after year the way other companies wanted us to do. Most of my friends jumped from SC to the ugly abomination that was AoE1, and then to AoE2, and then just forgot the genre. Americans don't like click-fests and they don't play SC anymore. They want easy wins, and to be 'entertained' and that's OK. Games now are trying to be as far away from a click-fest as they can be, so americans will buy them. There are tons of games that are not click-fests that you can play, and in fact you probably do.
However one country totally embraced Starcraft while most others forgot about it: Korea.
That SC2 will be a click-fest is because Koreans like it that way, not because Blizzard or anyone else in the gaming industry feel like it had to be that way.
And they embraced it because the competitiveness and the awesome things that some people can do while others only can watch. The fact that it takes some effort to be the best, and that being the best really pays off. They had made SC the RTS of choice for tournaments for many years.
In fact a lot of people have recently started playing SC again, thinking "Wow, after that many years and people still play it, so it should be good." And the competitive aspect of SC is unparallelled in the world. I know because I run a private SC server.
SC was a click-fest because Blizzard didn't knew better. SC2 will be a click-fest because a lot of people like it that way. That's a huge difference.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I've thought that the Earth 2150-2160 games are some of the most innovative RTS offerings to date, and they do just this -- particularly Earth 2160.
The two games -- 2150, and 2160 -- are very different. Earth 2150 feels a little like Total Annihilation: You have air, land, and sea units -- plus tunnels, all manner of deformable terrain (trenches, etc), long-range weapons... a full tech tree.... units you design yourself (choose chassis/weapon/etc combinations)... it goes on. It's pretty awesome.
Earth 2160 is a little more pared-down, so it feels more like Starcraft than TA. But that game does the Zerg like Starcraft should have: You don't have buildings; you just tell your units to reproduce! The other races, for their part, have very different building strategies: One race build bases compactly, stacking buildings atop one another in towers; another has sprawling tinker-toy looking bases, with all the buildings joined by tubes; and another has more traditional buildings. Not only that: Each race uses different resources! Some races need iron and water; others need silicon and water; etc.
Even the graphics rock. Earth 2150 looked sexy for its time -- it's TA-Spring-level graphics, roughly -- but 2160 is just beautiful.
Downsides? Lame single-player campaigns, bad voice-acting, and too few online players.
Still, I think the games are awesome. From the sorts of comments you're making about RTS games, you might like them too.
Cheers.
yes,there are many mmorpg games are at their beta testing...such as diablo 3,age of conan are both we wants.we look foreward to see it and play it more earlier.for me i was relly spent hope on diablo 3,and may it will give us fantasy and amazing world to live in.runescape accountsmore info