Slashdot Mirror
StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm Released
Today Blizzard launched its first expansion to StarCraft 2, titled Heart of the Swarm. When initially developing StarCraft 2, Blizzard made the decision to split the game into three parts, each with a campaign as long as the original StarCraft. The initial release in 2010, Wings of Liberty, centered on the story of the Terrans. The newly-released Heart of the Swarm is focused on the Zerg. The final release, Legacy of the Void, will dedicate its campaign to the Protoss (and does not have a projected release timeframe yet). In addition to the new campaign, new units have been introduced for multiplayer and new maps have been added, which ought to shake things up in the competitive landscape. Blizzard has also made long-awaited improvements to the social system, including support for groups and clans.
Here I am working, when I could be playing. Thanks Slashdot, now I'm going to have to kill my productivity and go home and kill some zerg!
So, does this one, like the previous, require an always-on Internet connection to Blizzard's authentication servers, the ones that are tied to all their games? Because I really don't like the idea of not being able to play a single-player game just because some recent update to WoW is overloading their servers.
I just wish blizz would split Starcraft into the two games it clearly is : Single- and Multi-player.
I thoroughly enough the campaign missions, the overarching story, and everything else associated with the single player mode, but have zero interest in multiplayer. I've got plenty of other PvP games. I'd wager that there are plenty of people in my camp, as well as people who never touch the campaign, instead favoring multiplayer.
This signature is false.
If we really want to deter North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, we need to preemptively deploy SC2.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
I want my DRM !!
Make me pay like the swine I am and you want me to be !!
And do it as a playfore slashvertizement to get me going !! Then DO ME !!
I started playing the campaign for Heart of the Swarm today, and am very pleased with it so far. The cinematic sequences are really well done, and it has a great storyline so far.
Enjoy post-apocalyptic and singularity science fiction? Check out www.demonarchives.com, a new online graphic-novel.
Great, a $40 expansion from Blizzard who decided they were too cheap to include the content in the original $60 game. Between this expansion and the next, Starcraft 2 has become a $140 game.
DO NOT WANT.
Why is this here? Every single person who gives a damn knew this already.
Why does Slashdot have an article as soon as Blizzard release something, but barely any for any other games?
I only ask because in this day simply being able to play the game on release day is reason for joy
That way you can always fork if c55 decides to DRM it :D
Do I own the expansion pack I'm buying? Can I play it anywhere I want, any time, and do whatever I want in the single player mission without fear of being banned and losing everything I've paid for?
No?
Fine, I'll take my $60 elsewhere.
Long Answer: There's an offline mode that you can use to play campaign & custom maps. The caveat is that you need to log in using your battle.net account once every 30 days for it to work.
My internet's been down for the last hour or so and I've been playing the campaign without a problem.
Now if it just wouldn't crash the computer. To be completely fair it is seems like a known bug that will be fixed in a future patch. However, that is little consolation to those who can not play it.
triple the revenues!
(10 years ago it would've been released as a single game AND at half the price of a single part AND would not have had a single-use activation code)
I'm cheap and I'd rather not pay for content I have no interest in using.
Why would you be?
All of the content (like art assets) is used by both multi and single player modes.
The only thing you are in theory paying for and not using, is the code that allows a human to control the opposing forces instead of the computer, and some additional map design.
But the large bulk of effort that you paid for goes for the game you can play single player.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yawn
I paid for that game and now I can't play anymore. What the hell?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I'm not a Starcraft fan, but my bro is, and they ruined it for anyone that doesn't play online. The entire single player campaign was one long tutorial mission to get you ready to play online, My bro spent 4 hours on a level because he kept trying to play it with different tactics than what the designers wanted him to learn. Not do, learn. Plus it was buggy out the door, but since this is an expansion I can't imagine it's busted. Still, come on. With so much money couldn't they have made a good freakin' single player game? I bought it to get him mind off all the shit in the world and it really, really didn't help.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
GP had it right, and parent is trolling.
Blizzard knows what is best, most "usable" for the customer, but creates an artificial feature bottleneck and then uses the dumbest way ever to capitalize on it. It is bad management. I guarantee the game designers did not choose to do this.
It's a fuck up. Borne from a chain of anti-user decisions, and it ruins game franchises (or at least that iteration). This version IS screwed up and it will cost Blizzard in the long run. Unless you've been to Korea (I taught Enrish there), you have no idea. The LAN battles in Starcraft created an **entire professional gaming industry**
LAN Battles on broadcast TV.
The parent comment is 100% troll face, but GP has it right completely.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Once upon a time I was eagerly looking forward to Starcraft 2 and even Warcraft 3, assuming that Blizzard would finally get around to including the AI options other RTS had introduced and refined. I mean this is a 'strategy' game, right?
Wrong. It's an action game. In fact, it is so much an action game that I would argue most online FPSes are quite strategic in comparison. They actually measure player skill in APS, that's actions per second. Once you progress beyond the noob skill level, your success is almost entirely a product of your twitch, with less than a half dozen cookie-cutter strategies you must blindly follow as fast as you possibly can if you are to have any hope of success.
I loved the original SC/BW campaigns and since the singleplayer difficultly usually isn't too bad I'm sure I'll love SC 2's (I'm waiting for them to release all 3 as a bundle), but I simply don't understand the appeal of a "strategy" game that foists so much mandatory micromanagement on you that actual strategy becomes a wisp of an afterthought.
Wrong.
SC1 had 10 Terran, 10 Zerg and 10 Protoss missions.
SC1: Brood War, otoh, had 10 Protoss missions, 8 Terran missions and 8 + 1 secret Zerg mission.
At least be factual when you "correct" other people.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
BW in fact has 8 Protoss missions, 8 + 1 alternate Terran mission, and 10 + 1 secret Zerg mission.
so BW has 28 missions in total.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
Wake up gamers and stop supporting companies that implement shitty DRM and profit mongering schemes by dangling products like this in front of you. Just because Star Craft 2 didn't have some naive DRM protection scheme implemented, Blizzard still unleashed Diablo 3 on the world.
Game companies will wake up when they start losing money because nobody is buying their defective products.
But 99.99% of the people reading this are like "Oooh, a Star Craft 2 expansion, how quickly can I throw money at Blizzard...". The same people rushing to throw money at EA for SimCity in spite of the controversy.
Of course its easy to throw your parent's money around I guess.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I don't get the whole thrill of StarCraft. I've watched a few competition videos and honestly the game seems about as fun as watching a chess match.
Outside of South Korea, I mean.
Been playing PC games for the past 20 years, I haven't bought or played any Blizzard games since they turned (thank you Vivendi) from a company focused on making games that deliver a great user experience to a company focused on making money at the expense of user experience. They broke every gaming "don't" in existence in my book : always online DRM, in game micro transactions, patches that degrade the game experience for purpose of making you buy the next extension/pack or to cater to the whining dum-dums of the world, given up on innovating just rehashing their last succesfull game over and over again, no LAN cooperative play, triple dipping by deliberately splitting a game in parts and selling them as individual games (and pricing them as such) .
Shame on them and any idiot who supports their business model. Get Company of Heroes or Sins of a Solar Empire instead.
Did you liked TA, you might like Supreme Commander (Supcomm,and Forged Alliance, not Supreme Commander 2).
You might also find the Planetary Annihilation kickstarter of interest.
Sounds like you're in a rush...
We heard of the problems with Simcity, now we apparently have a problem with HOTS. Bought my copy yesterday--- battlenet can't authenticate today. Over paying good money for games that don't work out of the box.
Ok Omestes...you have to respond directly to this, from my original post:
"Blizzard...creates an artificial feature bottleneck and then uses the dumbest way ever to capitalize on it."
They removed a usable feature. Don't tell me about what *you* think *personally* about *your* gaming preferences. You probably have the ability to think from the perspective of the decision maker, Blizzard.
It's wrong to abuse your users by removing features that **many use** (don't fuck with me on that last phrase, asshat, it's a fucking pro sport in Korea...it's popular to use LAN...) in order to force them to give you personal data via constant link.
You can't deny that. That mean's your point is disproven.
I want to see you try, but you fail if you don't directly counter the argument I made...the deliberate removal of a usable feature to force users to give up personal data.
Thank you Dave Raggett
But in this day and age constant internet access is pretty much a given.
You are very much mistaken.
Lots of people still have to use a dial-up phone line to get to the internet.
Some people cannot get faster than 28.8 because of distance from the central office.
LAN play? Households with two computers, and dialup internet service; more common than you think.
Or ... how well does this system handle 3 or 4 people behind a router sharing a single IP address? Can they all play together? Is it really as fast as a direct LAN?
Ormestes...I win...
I said, in my original post: "Blizzard knows what is best, most "usable" for the customer, but creates an artificial feature bottleneck and then uses the dumbest way ever to capitalize on it."
I accept your apology
Thank you Dave Raggett