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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.
Nice completely uninformed jab. Not only does Blizzard ALWAYS release a mac and a pc version at the same time, they also tend to make the final product compatible with WINE. WoW used to play beautifully in WINE, though I haven't tried it out in a while.
Say what you will about them, but they take cross-platform compatibility seriously.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Polished games and excellent Mac support makes for many happy Mac gamers.
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?
The game will be available for Mac OS X as well, and the videos hosted on the official StarCraft II site are in DivX format - I'm guessing the gametrailers.com site converted them.
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...
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.
Woohoo! One less person that I'll have to beat (read: lose to) on the Ladder!!
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.
Are you new to online play in general? If your significantly behind in the skill curve then you can either play similiarly skilled friends or play and lose a lot to gain more skill. It's true of all games. Blizzard RTS's tend to focus on "skill" over "strategy" but I think the gridation of skill is a lot smoother then you think.
It's apparent you want skill to matter less. A person who masters a few keys skills will win over those without them. Preserving units with low health, the ability to focus fire and good special ability targetting are skills that you need. If your missing this control you will lose to someone with that control 100% of the time. Once you master those skills you would then move from Noob to Newb. A noob is one is is persistantly bad who does not improve with practice because they beligerantly cling to the way they think it should be player. A newb is simply someone who need practice. If you think the system is insurmountable then you are a noob.
The amount of skill needed is fairly low but if you can't grasp the basics nothing can help you. Now once you grasp these basics then it's all strategy. For instance I have a perfect record against my cousin. I'm 73 : 0 against him in war 3. The difference isn't micro. I have decent micro skills but nothing special. He has awe inspiring micro. He clicks and manage so many groups at a time that I cannot win battle with even numbers of troops. If we are even I would lose and frequently lose skrimishes during a game. However I have much better big picture strategey and despite losing a few battle I win the war through better resource management, expansion/expansion denial, ability mix, and recon.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Nethack ?
Save the Music; Save the World at http://www.TuneTriever.com (Our latest Android game)
If Blizzard conforms to recent form, no there won't be a Mac version.
There will be one version that works on both Mac and PC. Buy the game and you're set either way.
As someone who uses both, Blizzard has my undying praise for not making me buy two different copies. I will buy every non-MMS the company makes for this alone. (Not to mention that make awesome RTS games.)
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 demand a CP/M port!
http://xkcd.com/386/
Sure beats the vespene gas that would be generated in the suit after eating at the intergalactic taco bell.
today is spelling optional day.
Polished games and excellent Mac support makes for many happy Mac gamers.
/i kid because i love.
Mac gamers? Really? Sounds like Paint graphic designers.
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.
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.'"
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.
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.
from the look of it (with the his hands and feet being chained ) he just got out of prision back to his old marine job from ten years ago. 10 years no smoking hes gotta smoke when hes killing zerglings
Civ is turn-based, not real time.
He effected a bored affect.
I just want to be able to play casually without being completely destroyed every time by some kid who plays from his mom's basement for 20 hours a day.
I have no problems with them being better than me, I just want to play someone for fun.
You might be better off with private games with friends until you can get basic skills down. Then play public games to improve your timing and intuition. I started off really bad and over time (2 games a day, 6 on weekends) I got better. I peaked at 17th US west for 2v2 in warcraft 3. I've gone down hill since but it doesn't take a lot of games. The normal course of mild video game addiction will get you prepped for online play. You just have to want to get better and have someone help you. I got tutored by a friend who was #3 for 2v2 at the end of a certain season. He's the guy you refer to, 20 hours a day type. Incidentally he lives in his mums basement too. He's actually the complete opposite of what you would think such a person would be. He owns that house, a NSX, is 6'1 built, a label whore, and so metro you'd think he was gay. He's just highly competitive. Everything he does is to win. From his paint ball hobby to his hockey nights to bidding for job contracts.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Civilization - not RTS
Warlords - not RTS
Company of Heroes - Gamespy's 2006 game of the year - not on the Mac
Age Of Empires III - Gamespy's Best RTS of 2005, not 2006.
0 for 3
RTS games actually seem to have low support on the Mac, not sure why
I used to really be into Starcraft for a time, and I think the main reason I enjoyed it so much was because it was so intense - everything you did mattered. It was easily the best RTS I had every played.
,FP-VODs and live streams from MBCGame. For those of you who watched the final between Iloveoov and JulyZerg (I think it was either the OSL 2006 final? Or it could've been SkyLeague? Might be wrong *Shrugs*), the game was won by JZ due to ONE MEDIC which was surrounded and killed my JulyZerg's zerglings before the medic could get behind the marine line. The marines were subsequently raped and the game was decided.
As I'm sure you already know, Koreans are huge on Starcraft - and I have watched replays, VODs
Now most of you who haven't played SC:BW probably have no idea what I'm talking about, but what I'm trying to say is Starcraft is a game more focused on your control of each single unit.
It is far from realistic, which is why I'm hoping the new engine for Starcraft II doesn't add physics to the game. Half the reason it is so good is it is very fast. This fast once again, means that your micro can really be used to huge levels. I find in slower games, micro is a lot more worthless to utilize, since it doesn't do much.
I guess it all is up to what audience Starcraft II is aimed at. If they want to aim at the people who play the latest RTS for a couple of months and give up, they need to make it a game where the aim is to mass units and send them into the base. This is what most gamers I've encountered do. They don't care about build orders, about micro or macro, etc. It's all about graphics and super weapons. People mass units for 30 minutes then both attack each other till one person wins.
If they want to aim it at the current Starcraft audience - a multi-million dollar industry in Korea that is still at its peak after 10 years - then it needs to be the kinda game the former gamers would find boring or really hard.
For instance, for a player who has an Actions Per Minute of 30, who just builds units, sends them into the enemies' base and twiddles their thumbs, Starcraft is NOT a balanced game. Lurkers for instance, are units that burrow under ground and attack - able to hit many units at once. Say the said player masses hundreds of marines, sends them in - he goes 'oh no' when three lurkers wipe them out. But this *is* balanced for a player who knows what he's doing - that is, he stops his marines movement using his macro (and hotkeys!), scanner sweeps the area (revealing hidden units) and takes them out with his Siege Tanks.
Many players who are into RTS's like Generals, Red Alert, Act of War etc seem to dislike Starcraft. So it really depends how they make it - I doubt they can satisfy everyone.
~Jarik
I never liked this argument. Its true that in most FPS network connection and hardware give you and avantage. Its also true that if you can affored a lighter bike for the triatholon you have and advantage. Why should someone who just spent a lot of money on a good machine and connection be "held" back because someoneelse didn't?
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?