Starcraft 2 It Is
Here’s the official site, but if you want gameplay videos and don’t want to deal with Blizzard’s broken downloader, go to GameVideos.com.
My take: the RTS genre hit some big roadblocks many years ago, and has been unable to progress beyond its core gameplay from the days of C&C and Warcraft: hard-core, micromanagement intensive multiplayer that punishes all but the die hard player; single player campaigns that involve repeatedly building up a large base and army from scratch, then overrunning the clueless AI opponent.
Supreme Commander, the biggest RTS innovator in many years, still hit a lot of those issues. They may be impossible to overcome. Most people are not good at dividing their attention, as you must in an RTS: here’s my scout; here’s my main army; here’s another army. This guy’s set up on a path to go over here, and I’ll check in with him in a second to cast this spell. These other guys need to dance annoyingly back and forth to screw with the AI on those guys. I need to upgrade this building, and make some more dudes out of that one. And so on. If FPS games are like Microsoft Word, the RTS genre is vi.
It’s clear from the gameplay footage that Blizzard is not attempting to change the genre. Blizzard will make (awesome) iterative improvements, and spit-shine the hell out of the game. The core gameplay will still be vintage Starcraft.
What does this mean? It means Starcraft 2 is a huge gift to the hard core. It’s for anyone who’s ever been really into Starcraft (and still wants more). I watched the gameplay videos, noticing things like the removal of the 12 unit selection cap, or how much faster the Zealots appeared to get in melee range with the Terrans (game-changing!). A Warcraft 3-style interface will have huge repercussions for all of the powerful special abilities: finally, I can execute a multi-Battleship lockdown with my 3 Ghosts! I can get a Dark Swarm from whatever Defiler is nearest and has the mana! If this kind of stuff gets you excited, Starcraft 2 is for you.
What else this means: expect to see the hype start for World of Starcraft after the Starcraft 2 expansion pack. Starcraft 2 is just to charge the batteries. World of Starcraft is for the masses.
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:22 pm
“What else this means: expect to see the hype start for World of Starcraft after the Starcraft 2 expansion pack. Starcraft 2 is just to charge the batteries. World of Starcraft is for the masses.”
I completely agree; but I’m still glad that this is the path they decided to take. Mostly I think I am not ready to jump into a brand new MMO (heck, I don’t feel “done” with WoW yet); but I think it is actually a good thing to get StarCraft ramped up again, get people excited about the universe, and give their plot/storyline people some time to set things up. Besides, I don’t think WoW in space would really work right off the bat, there’s a whole lot of things to consider.
I guess foremost in mind is this - Starcraft has always been about balance by diversity - ok, it took them 3 or more major and tons of minor patches to get there - but it was always the design goal. I’m not quite picturing how that would work in a MMO - blizzard has learned that while it is fun to have 2 different sides competing, most things need to have parity. Trying to make WoSC 3-sided while maintaining the parity and diverseness seems like an exercise in madness. Or will there be some crazy cross-faction grouping allowed? (So, 2 hydralisks, a marine and a templar walk into a bar…) Not to say they have not done an excellent job with WoW (their subscriber base speaks for itself), but I hope they really take more time to learn more about what works and what doesn’t before jumping into their next MMO.
… and besides, I need some time to get more epix!
May 24th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
Not that I haven’t rambled on enough already, but so far it looks like SC:2 is going to follow the original starcraft mold (lots and lots of units) and not the WC:3 model (heroes and small support armies). I’m still curious to see where they go with that one; WC:3 was now obviously the direct bridge to get the warcraft universe from rts to rpg - most of the heroes you could plan in the campaign are now faction leaders or raid bosses of some kind; many of the place names are significant areas/instances; and wow is set in the direct aftermath of events of WC:3.
Perhaps the multiplayer of SC:2 will retain the massive army engagements of it’s predecessor, but the single player will be more wc:3-ish in setting up some main heroes and some terrible cataclysm to usher in WoSC?