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StarCraft II To Be Released On July 27
Blizzard announced today that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the first game in a series of three, will be released on July 27. The game will contain the Terran campaign (29 missions), the full multiplayer experience, and "several challenge-mode mini-games," with "focused goals designed to ease players into the basics of multiplayer strategies." It will launch alongside the revamped Battle.net, which we've previously discussed. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said, "We've been looking forward to revisiting the StarCraft universe for many years, and we're excited that the time for that is almost here. Thanks to our beta testers, we're making great progress on the final stages of development, and we'll be ready to welcome players all over the world to StarCraft II and the new Battle.net in just a few months."
I've been waiting for this half my life!
Nerds unite! Now you can logout of WoW for 30 minutes to get your ass handed to you by a Korean teenager again!
in power plants in South Korea. I hear they're going to have a boom come July.
They required more vespene gas.
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
The beta sometimes crashes? The horror!
Clearly they won't fix those for the final version.
The game can be quite micro-heavy, especially for certain unit types, but with the matchmaking system if you're not capable of playing at that level, you will rarely get stuck playing against someone who is and is capable of easily wiping the floor with you. The general idea behind their match-making system is that you should win about as many games as you lose so that it will always be a challenging and enjoyable experience. At least that's the theory. We'll have to see how well it actually works when the game finally launches.
If you don't care to learn those abilities, you'll likely play other people who can't or can't be bothered to learn them either.The original Starcraft tended towards high micromanagement ability requirements at the highest levels of play, but it may just be that you never got that far or even thought about how to effectively micro the vanilla units. You should check out some of the video casts of the various SC tournaments if you're interested in seeing some great high-level play. It's absolutely crazy watching some of the best players.
I've been in the beta for a week and it's alright but I liked warcraft 1/2 and starcraft 1 more. BW and WC3 required too much micro so I didn't like them. Currently some SC2 units seem useless and some of the new ones are OP.
The matchmaking system in SC2 is working rather well and matches you against similar skilled players. There are some concerns over it because it's loosely based on the Elo rating system used for chess and other competitions, but some people argue that they've destroyed everything good that the Elo system does. Elo gives people a starting pool of points and then trades points between the winner and loser of a match and the amount traded depends on the difference between the numbers. This makes it so that a good player beating a poorly rated player will gain hardly any points whereas if they lose then they lose a lot of points because they're good but lost to someone bad, and if they're evenly skilled then a moderate number of points will be traded. Eventually you top out and reach a number that corresponds with your skill and will stay roughly the same unless skill changes. With the SC2 rating system there are 5 leagues that separate skill levels, and within each league are divisions consisting of 100 players. Each division has its own Elo ratings and if you change leagues because your skill is out of place then your rating resets and you start a new Elo rating all over again in the new league/division. There are also 'bonus' points that accumulate while you're not playing that you can then gain once you do gain, much like WoW's rested xp system. These bonus points cause inflation within each division. For these reasons you can't compare the Elo style rating between divisions or leagues, your rating only shows how good you are within your division.
The trouble with multiplayer RTS games is that, after a while, they appeal largely to the type of folks who want to learn the recipe for success on a given map and then practice until they're able to apply it faster than the other loser they're playing against.
What I'd like to see in the next wave of RTS games, then, is a method by which they screw with the various units just enough from game to game that simply being able to do the same thing over and over again as quickly as possible does not equal success in multiplayer -- somehow introduce a measure of creativity and quick-thinking rather than just "zergling rush the bitches until Blizzard patches us"-style tactics.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
The press release is missing from blizzard.com, it's on the Activision site: http://investor.activision.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=466030
I do hate it when people neglect to cite their sources, but most journalists probably received this as an email.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Blizzard never innovates. They just do what everybody else does without the suck. I LOVE THEM!!!
And I'm ultimately unimpressed. Here's Blizzard's history:
I honestly cannot tell if you are being sarcastic or not. In the event that you are not being sarcastic, allow me to elaborate on your points.
Warcraft -- First RTS
It was not. Usually Dune 2 by Westwood Studios gets credit for this. Warcraft 1 did have some innovations, but both of those games are really horrible if you try to play them now.
Warcraft 2 -- Added sea/air units, multiplayer
Thats innovation isn't it?
Starcraft -- Asymetric factions, battle.net
Ok, now here is one where the innovation, or at least the execution, cannot be overstated enough. There weren't just three factions each basically the same with slightly different units and maybe a faction specific unit and building or two. Starcraft had three entirely different factions, with almost entirely different build mechanics, and definitely with entirely different feels and strategies that work. They also managed to balance the factions fairly well, after many balance patches (they never quit making balance changes until it got to be just right). People are still playing it now, 10 years later. In Korea it has become something of a sport (leagues, teams, televised games, etc) and over here it is gaining momentum, and has been since I got into it two years ago. Oh, and the best players in the world don't play on the Battle.net server, they play on a server called ICUP
Warcraft 3 -- Hero units, 3D
Maybe not as much innovation. It took balls though to not just rehash SC or Warcraft 2. Blizzard's main competition was the Command and Conquer series of rts games, and those got rehashed and made into so many sequels that I didn't even know C&C 4 came out a week or a month or something ago, and didn't care either. Also, WC3's map editor is quite robust and has spawned many interesting games, including something called DoTA, which in itself is becoming a new genre of competitive multiplayer gaming
Starcraft 2 -- I can select 255 units at once now?
Is there anything I'm missing other than a conspicuous lack of risk or innovation?
Probably, yeah.
It's actually not that bad, and it doesn't take long to get into the understanding. SC2 goes a long way toward assisting with all the micro and macro elements of the old SC. Matchmaking is also pretty good. I'm horrible, and play in the Copper ladder, and I when about half my games. They are challenging and fun, and I'm slowly seeing improvement in my game. I don't feel like I'm getting rolled all the time. I can usually look back on games and say "Yup, I should have worked on building an army and not just more drones." or "I failed to properly keep tabs on my opponent and he kept tabs on me, and that let him trounce me."
At the same time, I've also learned how to keep fighting and still remember to build units back at the base.
The thing is, SC2 is gonna be around a while. So I know the number of hours I get from the game will be worth it from a dollar's spent pov. It's like TF2 in that regard. That game was well worth the price (even moreso because it was in the Orange box).
Jason Lotito