New Details For StarCraft 2's Zerg

Blizzard had a playable demo of StarCraft 2 running at Leipzig, and Kotaku's Michael McWhertor had a chance to sit down and spend some time playing the Zerg. The Zerg weren't available in previous demos; the Protoss and Terran campaigns were showcased earlier. GameSpy took the opportunity to interview two Blizzard employees about what people can expect from the game. Gameplay footage is also available which shows a Terran vs. Zerg battle. Blizzard PR rep Bob Colayco had this to say: "One thing that's new, as you go through the campaign... you know, normally in RTS games how they start you off with a couple of units and then it's like, 'Okay, two missions later we're going to give you tanks...' One of the things we're looking at doing with StarCraft II's campaign is putting the choice more in the players' hands. So maybe you like dealing more with infantry? You can purchase those upgrades and make your marines and other infantry stronger. Or else you'll save up the credits you get from the missions to get tanks sooner than you normally could."

Comments

Linked video...

[MooseMuffin]

...is in lower resolution than the actual original game, and then made worse by crappy encoding. You'd get a better idea for the game by firing up starcraft 1 than trying to watch this.

Re:Linked video...

[nasch]

If you're playing Zerg with huge resources, can't you build huge numbers of hydralisks and/or mutalisks and/or guardians, instead of huge numbers of zerglings? I mean, six or eight hatcheries pumping out, say, hydralisks and guardians gets pretty nasty pretty fast. Or heck, Ultralisk rush. It seems to me that it's not so much that Protoss has to spend more money, but that they make fewer, more powerful, more expensive units. But then I'm no champion.

Re:Linked video...

[DuckDodgers]

If the game had little strategy, building a massive force of your best unit was a sure path to victory. But Blizzard designed each unit in the game with at least one effective counter-strategy available.

You need to manage your economy, scout your enemy base locations, scout which units he was building so you could build the appropriate counter units, and then control your army closely for tactical combat, by taking injured units to the back for repairs, drawing enemy forces into geographic bottlenecks so you can focus your firepower, and making effective use of unit special abilities.

It's an extremely deep strategy game, far more than a simple "clickfest". If you don't like how fast it is, set the game speed to the slowest possible. Then you can enjoy the depth of strategy without having to click and hotkey at lightning speed.

Re:If I could change the resolution

[aliquis]

WC III uses 3D as well but since only the almost-from-the-top-view is the only good one everyone use that and it look pretty flat. Sure you can look around some stuff, hide a unit behind a tree or building somewhat and it makes ground units very hard to click on when there are lots of air units on top but I'd say it works well.

It doesn't look as cool as on screenshots from a lower angle and more up close but it works very well for playing the game.

Also I guess it's easier to support more resolutions and aspect ratios and such when it's rendered vs uses animations.

bullcrap

[unity100]

excuse me but age of empires and similar games dont have nothing to do with rts. they are basically "Whomever builds the baddest, fastest unit the most and sends them over, wins". there are small variation in tactics you can do, because every unit has an anti unit, but its nothing like starcraft. also the races, faction units are almost all the same, with only 2-3 different in 15 unit selections. they are basically the same.

in starcraft you have 3 different races with TOTALLY different units all having totally different abilities.

no unit has a clear anti unit. there are many different units that can stand against and be an anti unit of a particular unit because of their different abilities.

and this makes the game an infinite variation of strategy. there are countless ways to win a matchup. you can go mass production, but if your opponent has good micro (management, meaning using units very effectively individually) and uses very little number of units and their abilities perfectly, you are totally screwed.

no sir, either you dont know zit about strategy, or havent really played starcraft by giving its due.

Re:bullcrap

[kv9]

no sir, either you dont know zit about strategy, or havent really played starcraft by giving its due.

I know I'll probably get the modstick for this, but if I wanted to play a strategy game I'd go play Total Annihilation, not kekeke zerg rush ^_____^

Re:bullcrap

[bigstrat2003]

Any game where players' effectiveness is rated by how many actions per second they can perform is a crappy strategy game. Period. Strategy is about thinking, not how fast you can jump the screen around and send your units in 50 different directions.

Re:bullcrap

[MooseMuffin]

Sounds like you're looking for turn based strategy games. You can easily take 50 actions in a game of civilization within a single turn, and a turn is simply a unit of gametime. RTS games have multiple turns per second, so if you expect to execute the same complexity of strategy, then yes, you'll have to be able to perform numerous actions per second.

Video!

[brkello]

What was with the video? I mean, play the hardest core music you can find and it is still just some terrans invading a barely formed zerg base. You could have seen the same thing in first Starcraft. Just think they could have come up with something a little more compelling than that.