Man, I remember an early beta game where Artosis hellion’d Idra’s immortal rush for like a 4 minute gg. Idra then did his Idra thing.
Seems weird hellions were never a big part of the metagame. Even if MMM was so strong in 1v1, seems like hellions had a place in 2v2 to address the inability of terrans to quickly respond to attacks against their ally.
Little things I don’t like:
I can’t hit Pause during campaign play and still give units or bldgs any orders. It’s kind of hard to set a patrol, for example, that covers the whole map without pausing, as there’s no way to jump the view to a different part of the map without that also setting the patrol point and de-selecting the group. Also hard for my non-IC mind to keep track of what every bldg or unit is doing, and sometimes a pause helped me “match” the processing speed of the AI. Now I can’t do that.
I hate that you can’t just hit ESC to back completely out of the game, you HAVE to click EXIT GAME or you just endlessly toggle between 2 different menus. What’s really got my goat about this is that their most popular game, WoW, allows you to ESC out of the game menus so that eventually (2 screens) the game is shut down. So I guess Blizz can’t even make that kind of thing “standard”, it’ll be different for every game they make.
I don’t like the inclusion of the subtitle “Wings Of Liberty”. It smacks of pandering and is completely unnecessary. It’s not like anyone was ever gonna get the title “StarCraft 2” confused with “StarCraft 1”.
I hate everything about Blizzard’s Battle.Net, RealID and how they have been implemented. I just want to play your freaking game, not become a lifetime member of your cult, Blizzard.
So far, I still think the story is crap and that the voice acting is “meh” at best. I cannot understand at all why they drew everything for the cut scenes rather than just film real people and then animate over them. It’s just bizarre that people and things are more realistic in-game than they seem in the cut scenes.
Little things I do like:
It looks great.
Sometimes the voice-overs during gameplay don’t just seem like a total rip-off from Command & Conquer.
So far, it’s a mostly fun game, and I appreciate the fact that they did move closer in with this game, rather than farther out (like C&C3 did), but it just kind of feels like an update that should have happened 6 years or so ago.
I suppose I could feel more enthusiatic about this game, except that the game I want now isn’t this, it’s World of Starcraft. If this game is setting the stage for that game, then fine. Otherwise this will be fun for awhile and then, like so many other RTS games (Warcraft, C&C, Age of Empires, etc.), forgotten in the rush to the next shiny thing on the horizon.
I know lots of y’all are loving this game, and and for the most part I’m having fun too, but these little things keep bugging me, so I wanted to vent about them. I hope I didn’t harsh anyone’s buzz or anything ya know what I’m sayin?
There’s several ways to do that. You can give the patrol command directly onto the minimap. You can bring up the patrol targetting (where the cursor turns into a crosshair waiting for a destination) and right-click on the minimap to move the view to that spot without dropping the targetting. Or you can give a patrol command, do whatever you want in between, then hold shift while adding another patrol command onto your previous unit(s), thus creating two (or more) patrol waypoints that they will then cycle between. I had two Diamondbacks circling through all the replenishing-scrap points on Deadman’s Port for the entire mission with a waypointed patrol order.
Alt-F4. It’ll do the same thing as exit game, and (after a confirmation dialog box) allow you to quit out of the game directly from during a battle.
Even the first Command & Conquer game had a subtitle. It’s to distinguish it as part of the planned trilogy. “Heart of the Swarm” will be the next one, and focused on the zerg, although I’m not quite sure how they’ll handle that considering how the first part ends.
Even by the end of the beta, I don’t think the meta-game was at all evolved yet, there’s a lot that remains to be played with and worked out. Remember, even midway through the beta, siege tanks, a premier unit, were considered “useless” until people worked out all the vulnerabilities of M&M, and then once tanks actually started getting used (after a minor AOE placement tweak) were promptly nerfed for being too strong. The Phoenix was ignored completely until Nony comes along and gives an obvious example of what graviton beam can do, and even late into the beta you’d see people like Idra throwing entire armies of roach/hydra away uselessly one right after the other, despite obvious evidence that it wasn’t viable in late game and change-up was needed.
It took six or seven years for SC1 to shake out, and while all that gives SC2 a big head start, even the top players are slow to change habits until someone comes along and demonstrates a concrete reason to.
Interesting story-question. I’m curious if they will ever show the various Confederate/Dominion Ghosts getting their heads on straight. Apparently after Kerrigan left, they began doing mindwipes on Ghosts. (Presumably, these only lock away memories instead of completely erasing them, otherwise they’d be left and helpless infants). Poor bastards. Nova, for example, is somewhat different than she used to be personality-wise, after being mindwiped. Twice.
Thanks, that did help some. At least I wasn’t setting patrols to odd places as I tried to center the map any more.
Not the same thing, but thanks. I’ve already clicked on whatever the button is for “Exit Playing the Game” and now I just want to hit ESC a few times to back out of the SC2 program completely. You know, like almost every other freaking game lets you do. I don’t see the point of making me click on “Exit Game” when it was ESC that backed me out of the previous 2 menus. Another ESC should just back me out of the program, like it does with so many other games (you know, like, prolly all that I can think of on a pc).
Ah ok I didn’t realize that. I’ll retract my original complaint and put it back out there as “something silly that bothers me but i can’t articulate why very well”.
The pause thing really bothers me. I hear an alarm or something (“Our base is under attack!”) and I can’t see what’s happening because I’m in another part of the map. Normally, I’d hit pause, scroll to where the situation was, and then start play again. Now I can’t even scroll when the game is paused. I could see not allowing players to give commands to build, move, attack, etc. But come on, I can’t even look at the map? I bet the AI knows exactly what’s going on everywhere at all times because AIs aren’t limited to 2 eyeballs for certain types of input.
And I still hate Battle.Net and RealID.
Doesn’t spacebar still take you right to the location? That was one of the better interface features in the original; I’d be surprised if they took it out.
I just want to post that i am officially terrible at this game. Also, it is officially awesome.
This is my first experience with RTS, and i’m hooked after just a few hours of gameplay. Me and my WoW guildies were playing some 4v4 vs the computer and getting facerolled, and it was still a blast. Though it is kind of odd that if you set the computer players to easy, its REALLY easy, but if you set them to medium we get blown off the map.
Not really. Difficulty is a stairstep. As you learn new skills and improive the old, you’ll become vastly better.
Yep. On normal setting, the game is allowing me to get away with some pretty sloppy play, and I’m trying to quash that: when I start doing multiplayer, my opponents won’t afford me the same privilege. I’m doing my best to maintain tight build orders, keep resources near zero, group units intelligently, and use hotkeys for everything.
I finished the Campaign on Normal, and I am now replaying it on Brutal. In Normal, I could have one barracks in just about every mission, except those where time was an issue. In Brutal, You need 3 barracks just to stay on top of things, and good multiplayer skills, like Left Hand of Dorkness mentioned, are necessary to win.
I just spent an hour replaying the last 5 minutes of the Evacuation mission, and I couldn’t win, despite perfect micromanagement. I finally realized why: I had about 1200 minerals by the end! I needed another barracks. I was so focused on keeping groups of infantry surrounding the transport, that I forgot about what was going on in my base.
I’m trying to get used to hotkeys and was mind-boggled to see that the game did not allow me to customize what keys do what. I thought the grid option would help me to learn faster but having T as the attack key means I have to move off my grid every time I wanted to move my units which makes me lose my place. I keep forcing myself to use them but 3 minutes later I revert to using the mouse for most everything in order to get anything done. I’m almost done the campaign on hard without much sweat and I am in the gold leagues, but I know I’m losing a ton of advantage by being a hotkey newb.
So, I loved the first StarCraft (even though I was relatively terrible at it), but I didn’t care very much for Warcraft 3, so I’m a little afraid this will sully my good memories of SC 
Opinions on that? Ya’ll think I’ll be into it? I’d assume that much of what I didn’t like about WC was a lot of the micro around the heros, which aren’t present here so it should be fine…
Also, is there a demo? Couldn’t find info on one but I’ve never found any of Blizzard’s websites to make sense to me for some reason.
Stupid payday not having come yet!
SC2 doesn’t focus on hero units. Most of your units’ special abilities are automatic. This game is all about managing a big army. There are a few special units in the campaign, but they are just beefier versions of the normal units. Blizzard left the RPG elements out of this game, but you do see features that were inspired by WC3, like the bonus objectives, and the resource items scattered around some maps. They also tailor many of the levels around the unit that gets revealed in the mission. Overall, its more similar to the original Starcraft then Warcraft 3
Before you get the massive mech unit “Thor,” Tychus gets to pilot a jumbo version of it that you don’t get to control. In the ghost/spectre missions, you get to control either Nova or Tosh to do covert ops while your army supplies the fire power.
A feature I really like about this game is that there isn’t a limit on how many troops you can select or have in a group. I always hated playing zerg in the original game, because I would need 5 or 6 groups of 12 units, and have to issue the commands to each one. I haven’t reached a limit on group size in SC2 yet. Its probably 4 or 5 “tabs” of 24, so either 96 or 120 (if you have more than 24 nits selected, the portraits at the bottom of the screen get arranged in tabs with numbers on them.)
There’s a 7-hour guest pass included in each Starcraft 2 retail box. Actually, I think there might be 2. I’ve PMed you one of mine. (If anyone wants the other one, PM me.) You’ll have to download the game client, though. It expires after 7 hours of gameplay or 14 days, whichever comes first. It should give you a fair taste of what the game’s like.
(Go to www.starcraft2.com/guest, create a battle.net account and log in. Then you need to go to the “activate game” bar and enter the trial key. That’ll take you to where you can download the free trial client.)
ETA: You don’t seem to have PMs enabled, so I’ve e-mailed you instead.
ETA2: Hmm, delivery failure, seems like the e-mail you’ve got registered with on the boards is invalid. Having a valid e-mail is required to be a member of this board - please correct this as soon as you can.
It’s not Warcraft in Space!
It’s much more sophisticated!
I’ve tried playing on Brutal to try and get my skills up. I am a terrible multiplayer because my left hand doesn’t sit in the right place to press hotkeys and I keep going into turtling habits. Then when my units get too many I start forgetting things like what units are where and to buy upgrades at the engineering bay or the armory. I’ve had to bump down to Hard just so I can keep from getting crushed by the AI.
So, in the first game Jim Raynor was a regular guy, the sheriff of a small colony who got swept up in epic events. In StarCraft 2, suddenly he’s the grizzled God of Beef. He isn’t barrel chested – he’s double-barrel-chested. He looks like they took two grizzled, beefy guys on steroids and duct taped them together. I’m only a couple of missions in, but it looks like we’re pretty blatantly set up for the…
[spoiler]Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal. I mean, I imagine the conversation in the writing room went something like this:
Writer 1: How about this? What if Raynor’s menacing friend with mysterious motivations doesn’t betray him?
Writer 2: Are you fucking kidding me? StarCraft is about betrayal. Especially betrayal of Jim Raynor.
Writer 1: But think of how surprised the players will be when suddenly, out of nowhere, Jim Raynor doesn’t get shit on by the galaxy?
Writer 3: Are you insane? Who do you think we are, BioWare? We don’t surprise people. The last time we surprised anybody was when the hero jammed Diablo’s horn in his own head for no apparent goddamned reason. And we’re still getting e-mails about that.
Writer 1: That was more gratuitous and confusing than surprising.
Artist: Hey, are you guys in there talking about not betraying Raynor?
Writers 2+3: No!
Artist: Do you know how much trouble we’ve gone through to carve a menacing ‘would-betray-Jim-Raynor-for-cigar-money’ look on Tuccus’s face?
Writer 1: Tychus.
Artist: Yeah, whatever. And the masterful balance we’ve struck between gruff comically-beefy fleshpile and soulful kickable-puppy in Raynor’s model? Does that mean nothing to you people?
Writer 1: I’m not saying we don’t let Kerrigan break his balls. I’m just saying let his clearly evil friend who is working for an apparently benevolent organization not turn out to plotting against him.
Writers 2+3: You’re fired.[/spoiler]
Man, is anyone else having trouble with the last level of the campaign? I’m playing it on Hard, and while I had do restart a few of the missions once or twice, “All In” is really kicking my ass (I think I’ve had to restart it a dozen times at least, furthest I’ve gotten is 82%).
[spoiler]I guess I just have troubles with doing both micro and macro at the same time… I can usually build up a pretty decent army, but then lose track of Kerrigan and she just smashes everything - or I can focus on positioning my units well, pulling back big units from the front and focus-firing Kerrigan with stimmed marines etc… but then I forget to build more. It just seems like once Kerrigan gets to your front door you’re f*cked.
I took out the Nydus worms so I’m just up against mutas/brood lords - I figured that might be easier thanks to vikings with splash, but now I’m wondering if the other would have been easier - any thoughts from people who have done both? I think I also made some poor decisions on upgrades, I really wish I had picked the tank friendly-fire reducing upgrade now :smack:[/spoiler]
Jim Raynor has always been a god among men. The rebels in the original game didn’t do anything until he joined them afterwards they overthrew the government. He went to Char with only a handful men and left with the Protoss only to overthrow their government (more or less) helped kill the Overmind and when everyone else was leaving Aiur as it was overrun with rampaging Zerg his response was “Naw everyone else go on ahead I’ll find my own way out”. And he did. Only if the Protoss had been smart enough to bring him along for the final assault in Broodwar Kerrigan would have been finished.
As for your spoilerI don’t think his betrayal is meant to be a surprise. They bring it up after just about every mission. If you talk to the psychic in the bar it’s all he talks about after awhile. I hope that the drama is supposed to be if he succeeds or not because if they were going for a ‘twist’ they needed to cut the foreshadowing back by about 99%
[zoidberg]Alright, so you’re foreshadowing already. Quit rubbing our noses in it![/zoidberg]