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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!
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.
The previous one doesn't require you to be alway-on.
They removed that in one of the first patches.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
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 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.
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"AT RELEASE", SC2: Wings of Liberty had an offline "guest" mode that could play single player and custom maps, but could not play any multiplayer (no LAN support). It continues to behave in exactly this way.
Keep in mind that some other dudes want you to pay a recurrent monthly fee for playing on their servers. All Blizzard titles provide free access to battle.net and a replayability that I have yet to find in other games. I have had played SC 1 for several years before SC 2 came out. I think I have good zerg-bang for my protoss-bucks.
Have you played the Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty campaign? It is a full game all by itself. Starcraft 2: Wings of Libery + Starcraft 2: Heart of Swarm + Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void, = 3 Games. Most triple-A companies would charge you $60 per game which comes out to $180 for the series. Assuming the final game is also $40, Blizzard is charging you $140. They are $40 cheaper than most triple-A companies.
No...after more research, it was a bug, and it is mostly fixed. See here for details.
TL;DR:
Blizzard screwed up offline mode at one point.
Currently to go offline, you must have:
1) The game fully downloaded (makes sense)
2) Go online once after patching (they are working on fixing this).
So right now if you are a hermit in a cave with no online connectivity, but you happened to pick up the open wi-fi of a passing hiker and patch SC2, but then did not go online after the patch....then you are screwed.
Otherwise, yes, you can apparently play the campaign offline.
If you check later on in the topic you've linked, you'll see that it was officially confirmed as a bug. Whether or not they're fixing it is an open question, of course, since at this time it appears to still be an issue.
Yep...I first saw that thread last year, but never went back to read the entire follow up.
It's definitely a bug, and mostly fixed at that.
Not quite. Ever since the 2.0.4 update the Guest button has disappeared. The "workaround" is to disconnect from the net (I tend to just disable the network device in Windows), start SC2, log in using your account and when it fails due to a lack of net connection, you just click Play Offline. Previous you only had to click Guest and pick a guest account and off you'd go.
Raenex is a dickhead
Sorry...I'll try to be more indecent in the future.
To expand a bit on this...
Wings of Liberty has a campaign that takes around 20 hours, plus a few "skirmish" modes and multiplayer.
Heart of the Swarm has a campaign that - going off early reports - is around the same length as WoL's. It is built on the same engine, so fewer development costs there. However, it has entirely new cinematics, voice work etc (a good chunk of the costs), new mission design and a radically designed multiplayer.
As a standalone, Wings of Liberty is roughly equivalent value to... say... the original Dawn of War, at the time of its release. It's a good length singleplayer campaign (albeit where you only play as one faction), plus skirmish and multiplayer. And it has generally higher production values than Dawn of War (which isn't intended as a slight on that game - I loved it).
Heart of the Swarm also justifies its cost, on the basis of everything I've seen so far. The technological platform is aging a bit now, though; if they want to put the third installment out at the same price point, then they probably need a much smaller release-gap to avoid justifiable rip-off allegations.
Have you played the Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty campaign? It is a full game all by itself. Starcraft 2: Wings of Libery + Starcraft 2: Heart of Swarm + Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void, = 3 Games.
No. I count one game and two fairly expensive expansion packs. They include a few extra units, some multiplayer tweaks, and a map pack.
Most triple-A companies would charge you $60 per game which comes out to $180 for the series. Assuming the final game is also $40, Blizzard is charging you $140.
How much koolaid did you drink?
So you'd have rather either waited an extra year or two, or accepted around 1/3 less content for the same price?
Pretty rational, if you ask me.
Don't get me wrong, Blizzard has been on my shit-list for a while now, and I probably won't be buying this expansion, but I really can't complain. Its a full length game, as big as the original, for less money. Back before this DLC bullshit that we accept now, games released giant $40 expansions, as opposed to miniscule $10 DLC. This was an accepted practice. And it is a practice I wish we could return to.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
No. I count one game and two fairly expensive expansion packs. They include a few extra units, some multiplayer tweaks, and a map pack.
And a full length single player campaign.
I paid for that game and now I can't play anymore. What the hell?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
By those terms, you can't own a condo either.
Doesn't Blizzard go to great lengths to ensure competitive balance between the three races? I would imagine that a substantial portion of the time and money invested in multi-player goes toward balance-testing and re-calibration; balancing single-player only seems inherently less complicated.
The guest mode disabled certain features that tracked your single player campaign progress. My internet went out during a particularly long mission, no notification popped up, it just silently went to guest mode, and I had to redo the mission. I didn't find the game anywhere near as fun as the original, and with no LAN I ended up just going back to SC:BW. I won't be wasting my money again this time round.
That depends if you count campaigns or missions as your metric. SC1 had 30 missions with 10 for each race. SC2: Wings of Liberty has 25 missions with one secret mission and 3 alternative ones. These are the ones where you have to pick between two different choices like whether you picked to get ghosts or spectres as a unit. But after you complete the campaign you can go back and play the other choice. The majority of the missions are Terran but about a few are Protoss. Total mission count is 29.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Spoken by someone who's never had to do voice overs.
You have no idea how expensive and time consuming voice works and pre-rendered cinematic's are.
Also if you think the engine in HOTS is exactly the same as the engine that was released in WOL, you need your head examined. There's been continual patching. I've only played the first 5 levels of HOTS but you can spot a lot of work put into level design, they haven't simply slapped together some new maps with voiceovers. This isn't COD and EA for fucks sake, they actually put some work into it.
Frankly $40 for an expansion pack (yes, it's an expansion pack, like what we used to have in the Good Old Days(TM) before DLC) that has almost as much content as the original is a godsend when they charge $5 for a hat and $15 for a single map DLC.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Been playing since the 3AM release. It's worked *nearly* perfect. The achievement server has been up and down, but that does not impact any aspect of gameplay.
How am I stealing anything? I haven't taken anything and left one less copy in anyone's inventory. I wouldn't have paid for it anyway - if it was impossible to pirate, I just wouldn't have played it. Either way no money would have changed hands.
Am I dishonest? ABSOLUTELY. Does it matter? Depends. I used to feel the same way about principles, but getting older I've learnt that sticking to being legal all the time ultimately fucks you over. Companies still treat the buying like shit with continually more aggressive always-on DRM and activation bullshit, so it's not like sticking to your principles is worth anything if you don't get anything out of it.
Also, the "pirated" edition doesn't have binary cracks per-se. Everyone uses the same technique as I do - offline cache files a license generator. The mandatory account is a new thing as part of the 2.0.4 update.
As for real change? Huh! Major corporations don't give a shit. I buy indie games, not AAA titles.
I'm not making excuses for piracy. I'm merely explaining why I do it. I don't care if it boils your blood - you can't physically do anything to stop me. But I will stop if it becomes impossible to pirate anymore - say if the majority of games are hosted on cloud servers and so cracks are impossible. But if that happens I'll probably just give up gaming entirely.
Raenex is a dickhead
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.
That's really bullshit. I've watched a lot of high-level games on channels like HuskyStarcraft or HDstarcraft, and if all you can do is blindly follow half a dozen cookie cutter strategies, your play is extremely limited. Yes, twitch is huge, but strategy is pretty deep.
Just to back up what others have said:
"Does Steam Trading mean I can sell my used games?
No, only games that have been bought as a gift, and thus have never been played, can be traded. Once the Steam Gift is opened and added to your game library, you won't be able to trade it again."
That was quoted from the link you referenced.
no lan ability is honestly why I haven't bought Starcraft 2. We still play Starcraft 1 at LANs and for a more modern strategy game it usually falls to Sins of a Solar Empire... Starcraft II doesn't even enter into the list due to the connection requirements. My house connection can't handle the retarded protocols with 8 computers going at it even with a 75mbit connection just due to the latency increases. My internal LAN doesn't even bat an eyelash at it though.
Maybe I should have qualified that particular comment with mid to mid-high level games.
Strategy applies to those to. It seems to me you never did any serious watching of high-level games and tried to apply the same analysis to your games. There's much more than deciding at what supply to make a barracks. Casters like Husky, HD, or Psy are not "absolute top end", but they have some really interesting things to say about strategy.
I mean more of, early expansion or no, early units or teching, harassment vs. assault, etc. Are there really many more than a half dozen viable choices of this sort to make?
The map-specific choices already lead to more than 6.
As a reminder, specifically excluded from the commonly accepted definition of 'strategy' is anything 'tactical', i.e. techniques for conducting any one battle.
The line between tactics and strategy is often blurry. For example, if you decide to kill off a certain unit and then make a counter-unit to take advantage of that, that's both tactics and strategy.
To get back to what you were originally saying, you said it was dominated by "twitch", but there are many, many decisions that come down to what you decide to do with things like positioning, what units to make, tech switches, what and how to attack, etc. The situation is often dynamic, and you have to play the situation.
The problem is, Blizzard is just so damn good at 1. balancing radically different sides, 2. storyline, and 3. overall polish that people are willing to overlook the fact that SC2 still doesn't have strategy-enhancing features that reviewers widely bemoaned were missing in Starcraft 1.
It really sounds like you just want the twitch element removed, which is a different game than what StarCraft is. If you want strategy without the twitch then play a turn-based strategy game.
By the way, a lot of micromanagement was removed when they made SC2. Group management alone with vastly improved. Pathing was improved. Unit targeting has been made more intelligent. They could go even further, as you suggest, but at some point the people who like microing their units around will complain that all the micro skill is being removed.
I'm not trying to rationalize here.
Stop lying to yourself and everybody else. Somebody called you an asshole and you tried to justify yourself by claiming you didn't want to support Blizzard's business model.
Thing is (and you're free to not believe me) I'm not a habitual pirate.
So you aren't trying to rationalize by saying this?
I don't even really pirate that much since a lot of AAA games don't really interest me.
Ah, so you only pirate the AAA games you really like. Bravo?
Given that I really doubt Blizzard is going to go backrupt because of little ol' me.
Still not rationalizing? Isn't everybody entitled to that sentiment? Why should anybody pay, when somebody else can?
You can be legit most of the time and bend the rules on occasion. It's FINE not to be black and while all the time people.
Is what you are doing FINE? I thought you weren't rationalizing?