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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."
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.
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.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
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).
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.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
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.
I for one welcome our zerg..."You need more Overlords".
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.
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?