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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!
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.
Blizzard never innovates. They just do what everybody else does without the suck. I LOVE THEM!!!