StarCraft II

[TheDM]

Well it's about time!

Just a heads up, in case you weren't aware. StarCraft comes out on Tuesday, tomorrow. Should be interesting to see if it lives up to the hype and to it's worthy predecessor!

[TheDM]

So I picked up StarCraft II yesterday late in the evening. I only got to play through 2 missions before it was already way past my bedtime. But my first impressions is that it's a remake of the original in a lot of ways with better graphics, but so far, very similar gameplay to StarCraft I.

I am hearing that they built the game to be first and foremost a multiplayer experience and then built the single player campaign. So will be interesting to see how the multiplayer aspect works eventually.

More to come as I find time to slowly play it....

PS Yes Scott, Terrans still have NUKES!

[Greylen]

I was all set to buy this when one thing stopped me. LAN play was disabled... WHAT? I'm looking to see if this is actually true. Troy, have they removed all the options to play locally? without going to battlenet?

[TheDM]

Lorin. I have heard that it doesn't support LAN play. I haven't looked in to the mulitplayer options yet, so I cannot confirm that. Still doing the single player campaign, but even that has you sign in to your battle.net account to play... So I would not be surprised if they limited it to battle.net for multiplayer mode.

[Just Rob]

It is true. They removed the local LAN play option and require BattleNet to play with your friends. According to this article () they built the game for multiplayer and only added the single player/single mission stuff after beta testing had confirmed the multiplayer parts were working well. Sounds pretty good in the review, but the LAN only option being taken out has me scratching my head some.

[Zanther]

Nuclear launch detected

No other phrase strikes fear like those three little works. At least in starcraft.

Please say that they still use it.....

[TheDM]

YOU better bet all your minerals and vespene gas that they have nukes in StarCraft II !!!

Here's a link, watch the video, there's a short clip near the end in it where it shows a nuke going off on a Protoss base... apologies to Lorin.





And as for no LAN support, not an issue for me, never played it much on LAN mode in StarCraft, sorry if that's an issue for others...

At any rate, I do have 2 FREE Guest Pass Keys for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, if someone is interested in giving the game a try without having to pay for it and then can decide if they want to buy it. The Key gives you 7 hours of game time or 14 days from activation (whichever comes first) So let me know if you're interested. i am sure I will be itching to do some multiplayer games soon and would sure be nice to play it that way first with you guys.

More Review:
Okay... I am a few more missions in to the single player campaign so here's how my impressions so far. I feel that it is a remake of the game in many respects. If you were to look at SC and ask... given the new technologies, better graphics, higher processing speeds, the uibiquitousness of the internet at faster than dial up speeds, etc, everything that has advanced over the last decade..how would you redo the game and make it better where ever you could, without losing anything essential in feel or balance and instead of just re-doing the same story, move the original story forward with the same main characters in an interesting way and add many more units just like a massive expansion... What do you get?

That is SC2.

So in a lot of respects it feels like an expansion of SC and Brood Wars, as the story just picks up, 4 years after the end of BW with Jim Raynor and his struggle against the treacherous Emperor Mengsk... with the return of an old times outlaw buddy of Jim's named Tychus showing up... (he's the prisoner in the opening cinematic that is being placed in the armor) with an interesting business proposition.

Instead of just throwing everything at you at once the campaign ramps up with new Terran units as you progress through the story, so you have a chance to get a good idea of what each unit is capable of. There are some added bonuses you can add to what you can do with units as you progress by buying upgrades, and accumulating Zerg or Protoss research points on the maps of each encounter, which allows you to integrate some of those races tech in to your abilities. (example: you can add warping technology to your vespene gas collectors, so the SCV don't need to mine it, it just warps to your command center, leaving the SCVs to be available elsewhere... NICE eh?)

Old familiar units all have some tweaks done to them, making them both easy to deploy properly and interesting to see them in action again, and the new units are fun to play too. It's a blast rolling through your enemies with a group of Thor units blasting everything thrown at you to bits...

You get points for completing each mission and credits. You get more points for completing them on different difficulty settings. Brutal is the highest setting and is, for my play skill level, aptly named. I had to move all the way down to normal after the first missions to have any chance of success... (but I'm not as good as Scott or Lorin got at SC, so I wasn't surprised.... disappointed in myself, yes... but not surprised.. )

The 3D graphics are stunning, and the higher your system components the higher you can put the setting the more detailed they get. Going from the original SC graphics level, an animated palette, to almost cinematic level displays, and everywhere in between depending on what your gaming rig can handle.

I only have one frustration to report. Almost every mission has a timed element to it, so I don't get a lot of time to explore the new units abilities until I've lost or restarted the mission a few times... but that's probably my fault because I haven't done any of the tutorials... AND

I also bought the BradyGames official guide book. I just jumped in and started playing without reading any of it. (too eager to play I guess ) Now that I've had a chance to read some of it, I might just start the campaign over using it to leverage the tactics it has in it's 432 pages,160 of which are a campaign walkthrough. the rest is mostly tactics and multiplayer advice.

Well that's all for now... Hope to see you all in kicking my Zerg-loving butt online real soon!

Here's a link to an overivew of the campaign that is pretty good.

[TheDM]

Guess no one else is interested then?

[Greylen]

I'm game, Troy, Just as soon as I can get over my anger at Blizzard for charging $60 for 1/3 the game, removing all my local LAN capabilities and making me login online to even play a one player game.

Basically your just renting the game from Blizzard.

But as soon as I can get over those facts, I'll be picking it up.

[TheDM]

Okay... Let me know...

In the meantime, consider the following;

it isn't 1/3 of the game. They are just pre-announcing that it will have 2 expansions. Whereas SC1 had brood wars.

OR think of it this way..

11 years in development... In order to justify the cost of that, I'd say that releasing this way makes perfect sense.. Would you have preferred that they charge $160-$200 up front and priced themselves out of the market?

You can play the game without logging on, it just doesn't track your achievements for ranking for online play so that it can match you up with an opponent of equal ability...

Lack of LAN? Sorry that's an issue for you. I can only remember playing SC1 that way once in the past, and I found battle.net was perfectly suited to play when we played in the past. So it doesn't bother me that it doesn't have it. I still have yet to play against a human opponent, just the AI online...

SC1 has been supported and sustained by the internet competitions community, so it makes perfect sense to me that they have catered the experience around that fanbase. I had no idea how big that was until playing SC2 and seeing how many (I don't know what to call them... So I will say internet Scasters) there were that post up thrilling game matches on YouTube and comment on the game like a sportscaster! Some of them with professional sponsors and high production values...

That being said, I did not feel like I had only gotten 1/3 of a game for the money by the point where I finished the game. YMMV, but I fully felt like I had gotten my money's worth, nor do I feel like I am just renting the game from Blizz...