I just tried and yes, you can still save your campaign if you play as a guest. You won’t get the Achievements if you play as a guest, tho.
I really love the autosave feature. I’ve been out of the gamer world since warcarft 3, so I don’t know if this is a standard feature these days, but It sure is handy!
I was playing one mission, and I completely underestimated the AI’s ability to rebuild what I had destroyed. When I went in for a final attack, I was overwhelmed. I was annoyed at the thought of replaying the entire mission for such a stupid mistake, but then I realized there was an autosave right before I launched my first attack. I just loaded it up, beefed up my numbers, and took out the enemy in one massive wave.
And yes, the game is worth the cost for the single player campaign. It also includes a not-so-hidden minigame that’s worth $5 on its own!
Yes, your saved games will be there I believe.
How is the SP campaign structure like? I know from previews that it is non-linear, so is it akin to Dawn of War II? Do you bring along any units or heroes from each mission to the next?
First impressions, about five missions in (no spoilers)…
Gameplay is stellar so far. The missions are generally well-designed, with a good mix of “build and destroy” and more specifically objective-based missions so far. Cutscenes look great, even on my POS rig with almost all graphics settings set at minimum. I like the between-mission “RPG” bits, as limited as the interactivity is. The upgrade and research systems add a nice twist to the meta-game.
The dialogue and voice acting are leaving something to be desired. SC1 had top-notch writing and some nicely understated voice acting. SC2 seems to trade that in for entire conversations constructed of war movie cliches and long dramatic pauses between every… goddamned… line. Even the characters whose actors have remained the same (Raynor, Mengsk) sound different - less naturalistic, more affected. Raynor’s newly exaggerated drawl is especially annoying.
That being said, Tychus Findlay is rapidly becoming one of my favorite characters. But I’m a sucker for morally ambiguous cynics who make sarcastic comments from the sidelines.
Yeah, the game is fun but the story and the voice acting suck. I think they’re going for a Joss Whedon’s StarCraft kind of thing, but all I’m getting from it is that they’re for some reason desperately trying to co-opt another franchise, even though SC2 is prolly the most anticipated game of the year, and really didn’t need to do it.
I mean, srsly, 10 years and this is the story they settled on?
(Also, everything about RealID sucks. I stopped logging in when I realized that it was displaying the name on the credit card used to pay for the account right next to my (only) character name when I looked at my achievements. Blizzard really screwed up with the whole inception of Battle.net, IMO and I don’t think I’m going to be very happy with Cataclysm and whatever they try and do with RealID at that point.)
Heh. Oddly enough, I was just thinking the opposite - the campaign in Starcraft 1 was very Firefly-ish in my mind. Interesting, complex characters in a morally ambiguous scifi-western world. Smart dialogue that gradually revealed character motivations and internal thoughts in bits and pieces rather than length exposition. Just to give one example, I liked that Mengsk lured you into his web with high-minded talk of saving the people (and just enough genuine action to back up the words), while slowly ramping up the atrocities. It made Kerrigan’s decision to trust Mengsk after the annihilation of Tarsonis believable, because we as the player have been set up to give Mengsk some of the benefit of the doubt ourselves.
Admittedly, I’m probably less than a third of the way into the campaign, but so far that level of sophisticated storytelling has been absent in Starcraft 2. To use the same example - Emperor Mengsk is so over-the-top evil that he seems like a completely different person from the smooth-talking, charismatic rebel of before. And the “UNN” broadcasts are a too-obvious parody of Fox News; a gentler hand, one that offered only hints of the bias behind the organization, would have served Blizzard better in establishing a believable fiction.
C’mon, guys. You should know that Starcraft 2 is fundamentally a multiplayer game, and that most of the effort will have gone into polishing that aspect of the game.
If you’re not online, you’re really missing out.
Eh. Then they shouldn’t have bothered making a single-player campaign at all. If it’s not worth doing right because what they really want is to make an online game, that’s fine, but presumably they included the campaign because they also want money from folks like me, who don’t care about online play but want an interesting single-player experience.
But if they didn’t make a single-player portion, how would they justify charging $150-300 for the completed game?
Game looks pretty complete right now.
Except there are two more campaigns…that aren’t exactly stand-alone, and aren’t exactly expansion packs, and Blizzard’s being very, very cagey about what they’ll cost, or even when they’ll come out.
Sorry, I was trying to say that your “Starcraft 2 is going to cost $300 and you’re all sheeple for going in on it” remark or whatever you were going for was stupid.
Nowhere did I say anything about “sheeple.” Merely a snarky comment about the hidden true cost.
I’ll probably pick it up myself sometime, though I’ll likely either wait for the collection, or at the least a good sale.
But good on you for deciding what opinions other people are allowed to have.
Guys, let’s channel all that energy into some SatrCraft Multi-Player!!!
Who’s with me?
I know people are probably still busy playing the campaign mode, but if there’s any interest I’d like to get a game going tonight 9:00 pm EST.
I’ll set up a vent server and come back with the details in a bit. It looks like the Battlenet Voice chat is on the fritz for a lot of people (including me).
For the horde! Wait, wrong game, En Taro Adun!
Ok I hope I set up the vent server right. IP: 69.248.249.92
No password needed.
I’ll be on steam as well, so feel free to IM me. We’ll figure out the type fo game we launch based on how many players we get.
Game time is in an hour!
Not a crtiticism at all, just a pedantic observation: we’re currenty in Daylight Saving time. So that would be 9pm EDT, not EST. In order to avoid confusion I always write times like 9pm Eastern.
Right you are. I’ve got to get into that habit myself.
35 minutes people! Be there or be square.
If I have your character name and character code I can add you to my friends list easily.
Mine are:
Character: Kinthalis
Code: 775
Ok only 1 person so far. Probably not enough notice, I guess. Maybe we can get something up and running tomorrow night? We’ll be playing in case any one else wants to join up.