StarCraft II Closed Beta Begins

Blizzard announced today that the multiplayer beta test for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is now underway. The client downloader is available through Battle.net for people who have received invites, and the system requirements have been posted as well. A list of known issues is up on the official forums. StarCraft II and the revamped Battle.net are planned for release "in the first half of 2010."

Comments

Mac

[Chris Lawrence]

No Mac version yet, unfortunately. Both Mac and PC versions are going to be released together on the same media, but no word yet if Mac users will get to play with the beta.

Re:Mac

[verbalcontract]

According to the beta FAQ, the Mac version is coming:

Will there be a Mac version of the beta client?
We plan to release a Mac version of the beta client at some point during the beta test period. We’ll have further details to share as the beta test progresses.

via the beta FAQ.

Lost my interest

[Kitkoan]

When they declared it would be sold as three different packs, one per race. While they do have a history of expansion packs, it's never been 1 with 2 more like this, nor planned this far in advanced to break it up and sell the parts.

Re:Lost my interest

[megamerican]

It seems a little odd to be upset that they are more upfront about their plans for expansion packs and the content that will be in them. Each race will still be playable in multiplayer. There is no indication that the SCII won't have as much single player content as the original SC, albeit you'll only be able to play one races campaign.

I'd much rather wait and see more details on what it entails before passing judgement.

Re:Lost my interest

[sopssa]

Do we really have to go thru this in every StarCraft II story?

Why would you lose interest in the game because of that? Please tell me. They're separate stories and most likely priced as expansions too. And it's not like they made the 100% ready and are just keeping the two later expansion packs with them self now.

Re:Lost my interest

[jollyreaper]

When they declared it would be sold as three different packs, one per race. While they do have a history of expansion packs, it's never been 1 with 2 more like this, nor planned this far in advanced to break it up and sell the parts.

Wouldn't be so bad of an idea if done intelligently. For games we really like, expansion packs are loved. Figuring full retail, that's $40 for the game (back in the day), $20 each for the expansions. You could end up spending $80 if you bought it all new, or you could get the bundle months later for $40. You paid for two games and the developer probably didn't have to expend as much effort on two expansions as with the full original game. Win win for all.

What gets to be bullshit is when the $60 game is chopped up and you're left paying the full freight for the original game plus the expansions.

What I always thought would be fair is something like this: the developer plans out the game with maybe six races total. Starcraft has a lot of Warhammer 40k similarities and just think of how many races you have in that setting, it's more than orks and humans and eldar. But we'll stick with Starcraft. You sell the game with three races. The development of additional races is proceeding alongside. Sell the game for full price and then release additional races with full campaigns as add-ons. Don't skimp on the details but charge a fair price. The customer knows he's getting another 20 hours of gameplay with the expansion, plus he can use the new race in multiplayer. Then after the game's been out for a while, all the add-ons can be bundled in a battlechest and the people who skipped it when it launched can catch up with the fun. The publisher makes more money which is an upside, the fan gets more game which is another upside.

Of course, this can be more complicated than I think. I thought the idea of episodic content for shooters was a good idea, sell the game in affordable, bite-sized serial format but the reality was less enjoyable. And the dick move usually is the one that gets made. So you buy a full game like Dragon Age and are getting propositioned for add-ons that were developed at the same time as the original game and should have been included in the first place. That's not like Lord of the Rings where they're releasing three movies at once, always planned on doing so and you feel you're getting your money's worth, this is more like Kill Bill where it was supposed to be one movie and they just released it as two to make more money and planned on soaking the fans by releasing multiple versions on DVD.

Re:Lost my interest

[Kitkoan]

Why would you lose interest in the game because of that? Please tell me.

Because it's a bad for the industry as a whole. When a big player can suddenly decide to stop selling a full product and instead just sell it in parts with each part at full price, or near enough, is shows others that they can get away with this too. Its been shown with the downloadable content thats running rampant and wild to the point that it's being planned upon and worked on before the basic product is available, and being available on the games release date. Now instead of having a full game being sold we can buy something like RE5 and spend more money to open up the multi-player modes, or games like Sonic where you can pay to open up the harder difficulty mode. Refusing to buy and not just refusing but mentioning way is what helps. Or we can all look forward to buy every game a small sub-sets at full prices.

Re:Lost my interest

[Nos.]

I remember seeing numbers posted here. The initial game will be a campaign for one race, approximately 40 missions. This was comparable (maybe even slightly more) than the original Starcraft. The expansions to SCII will each have another campaign for one of the races, with around 40 missions. This is more than BroodWar had. So, if instead, they released SCII with ~13 missions for each race, which is basically how the original was released, you'd be okay with that?

Seems like nitpicking to me.

Re:Lost my interest

[HeronBlademaster]

I'm not upset that they're being up front about it, I'm upset that they're doing it at all.

See, instead of selling me "Starcraft II", they're selling me "Starcraft II, Terran Campaign" and pretending it's a full sequel to the original.

The reality is, to get the full sequel to the original, I'm going to have to buy three games.

Between that and the lack of real LAN play, they can count me as a lost customer.

Re:Lost my interest

[HeronBlademaster]

It doesn't really matter whether Blizzard even notices. See, some of us have these things called "principles" and "values", and we stand up for them even if nobody else cares.

Blizzard wants to shove a LAN-less multiplayer game at us. That's fine, but I'm not going to buy it because I like LAN games.

It's also a demonstration on Blizzard's part that they no longer care about their own roots. Starcraft was so popular largely because of its LAN-friendly multiplayer games. I don't like it when companies abandon their roots.

Heck, Blizzard even provided spawn copies of Starcraft you could use for multiplayer games, so you could play with your friends even if they didn't have their own copies of the game. Do you think they'll be doing that with SC2? Of course not.

My decision to refuse to buy Starcraft 2 has as much to do with Blizzard's attitude as it has to do with the game itself.

Re:Lost my interest

[HeronBlademaster]

Sorry, but while clever, SCI was not fantabulious because you could play all three race's stories on release day.

Starcraft 1 was fantastic largely due to its LAN play support (and, related to it, its ability to spawn multiplayer copies of the game for your friends), which not only let us play with our friends in large, internet-less groups, but introduced people to the game who later bought the game because they had a chance to play it for free. I'm one of those people who bought it thanks to a spawn copy (in fact I bought two copies of the game).

Starcraft 2 lacks both of these things.

Starcraft 1 also told a fairly compelling story between its three campaigns, and the campaigns were paced well enough to keep you interested without letting you get bored with the factions.

It's possible Starcraft 2 will be able to keep us entertained through 30 or more missions playing the same faction. It's possible the storyline will remain compelling and feel somewhat complete, even though we'll be missing two-thirds of the storyline.

Starcraft's multiplayer was great. But when Brood War came out, non-expansion Battle.net became a ghost town (and for good reason; BW was better). But BW only cost $20, and it contained three more campaigns to boot.

With Starcraft 2, this won't happen once, it'll happen twice - and if you believe they'll only charge $20 per installment, you're being deliberately naive. Sure, they claim the installments "will be expansions and priced as such", but that could mean anything. All it really means is that they're tentatively planning on charging something less than the full price of the first installment. I will not be surprised one bit if they forget their statements and charge full price anyway.

Then there's Blizzard's whole attitude toward gamers. Rather than doing their best to get the game out there, to expose it to as many people as possible (which was the purpose of multiplayer spawn copies), they're doing their best to force everyone who wants to play to pay up front.

That is, they're treating everyone as pirates until proven otherwise. It's an attitude that I find repugnant. The fact that it is the prevalent attitude in the game industry as a whole doesn't soften the blow at all.

They've claimed on multiple occasions that only pirates want LAN play. I'm not a pirate, yet I want LAN play. What does that reveal about their attitude toward me? It reveals that they're not interested in my money.

Well, if they want to sneer at my money, I see no reason to give it to them.

If you fault me for that, you're a moron.

Would you care if they took 3x as long in development, then released a truly MASSIVE amount of content in one installment, charging 3x as much?

They've taken long enough to develop the game as it is. Did you ever stop to wonder if maybe that's the whole reason they're splitting it into three releases in the first place?

Re:Lost my interest

[Loomismeister]

There are actually protoss and zerg mini campaigns to teach you how to play them. You really shouldn't be critical of this game because of some morons ranting about things they don't know anything about.

Re:Been so long

[Conchobair]

Nope. Announced Dates:
StarCraft II - May 19, 2007
Diablo 3 - June 28, 2008

Although, it would not be inconceivable for Blizzard to have done that. They are all about taking as much time as it takes to get things done and have never shied away from pushing a title or patch back in order to ensure it was as polished as possible. This is why all of their games kick ass and kill Koreans imo. They go for quality over cutting content for a early release (KOTR2) or a pretty release date (Hellgate).

Re:FOR THE HORDE!

[Kratisto]

There is no NDA.

Post 6: Just in case any of us want to create some videos for YouTube ... may we share any replays?

Zhydaris: There will be no NDA.

( http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=112115 )

Oblig Alien Over...

[Bobfrankly1]

I for one welcome our zerg..."You need more Overlords".

Re:Oblig Alien Over...

[HeckRuler]

Really? Do you realize how many overlords slashdot has by this point?

Re:Oblig Alien Over...

[OverlordQ]

Assuming we were assigned named in alphabetical order, at least 17.

Re:Moar liek BlizCOON 2k10. Vivendi sux donkyballs

[oatworm]

Ladies and gentlemen, this is why you don't do mescaline.