Starcraft 2.

[Emion]

Holy Banelings!

Don't do anything to the forum the month this thing launches. You know, in my complete absence from the real world.

[GreatScott]

Some friends of mine got their hands on the beta. Needless to say, they are fucking ecstatic. It's going to be good.

[Godson]

wait, there is a new Star Craft coming around?

[harper]

yeah, Starcraft II was announced like two, three years ago. It was playable at the Penny Arcade Expo two years ago, and the beta dropped last week.

I'm not exactly a Starcraft guy (the one time I played in a LAN with my friends, I set my user name to "cannon fodder") but I can appreciate how big this is. Sounds like it's a great, more-of-the-same update — they can't tweak it too much, but they've added in lots of unit changes and slight balance tweaks along with updating the look. All the stat tracking looks fucking epic too

[Godson]

I might actually pic this up if thats the case

[Ian]

Starcraft Breakup

meh...prolly fake.

[Alan P]

Wow, she got issues.

[Emion]

Crazy, bitchy, glasses, hot...

...hitiyat.

[Godson]

I would give her some dick that's for damn sure

[GreatScott]

Out tonight...

[Mortavian]

Wonder how Brad's been holding up?

[YW_Slayer]

Check with his social worker, though I'd imagine that he might be let out of the house tonight.

Also, hittyat.

[Tom Servo]

Got the box on the way here from Amazon, it'll be tough to sit at work with it.

[YW_Slayer]

Not free until this weekend anyway, and in no hurry.

[Tom Servo]

I'm liking it so far. Didn't get to play quite as much as I wanted to last night but played through a few missions.

What I'm liking:
- It's still StarCraft. It really hasn't changed all that much, and I think that's a good thing. I loved the old game and this feels like an evolution of it, not a complete reworking.
- It looks fantastic, and even on my few year old box (Athlon 64 dual-core 3200, 2 gigs of RAM, Nvidia 260 GTX) it runs smooth as can be at 1920x1200 with everything turned up to max.
- The real-time rendered cut-scenes look pretty awesome. I'd love to see BioWare take a page from their graphics on the cut-scenes, they don't have that really creepy uncanny valley look to their faces like the guys in Mass Effect 2 & Dragon Age have, where they stare sorta around whoever they're talking to like Asperger's sufferers.
- While the voice acting and writing aren't all that far above your average Sci-Fi B-movie, they do a good job of keeping the story going and linking together what would otherwise feel like disjointed missions.
- The variety on the missions so far has been pretty good with a few twists thrown in that I didn't expect.
- The new in-between mission interface where you can use earnings from previous missions to buy things like equipment upgrades and Mercenaries to help you out in tight spots adds a nice new layer to the single-player campaign.

What I don't like:
- I miss the pre-rendered FMV movies from other Blizzard games. They always looked awesome, and while the real-time stuff is pretty amazingly good, it's still nowhere near as good as a really well done FMV.
- Activision have put their little money-grubbing hands on things, as evidenced by the shit manual that comes with the normal box. I got the box over just doing digital because I always thought Blizzard did a pretty bang-up job on things like the manual. I actually have my Diablo II manual in the room and it's awesome. The one that comes with SC2 isn't even a manual, just a 20 page or so booklet on how to install the game and some story stuff, with a couple of pieces of the normal Blizzard artwork. Guess you have to spend $100 on the fancy box set if you want to get what used to come with Blizzard games.
- Having to have an internet connection to play at all. There are a lot of games people play here after hours, but the network is firewalled, not all outgoing ports are open. We can't play SC2 here at work because it can't call home.

The bottom line though is: If you liked StarCraft, you'll love this. It's everything that made StarCraft great only with a better single-player campaign (though only Terran, I guess Zerg and Protoss are going to be separate games which I hope are priced like expansion packs, but will probably be full price) and a hell of a lot better version of Battle.net for putting together online matches. It looks gorgeous, plays great even on older hardware, and is one of those games where I'm itching for work to end today so I can play some more. Good stuff.

[fud]

Damn it. If I ever get paid, I may have to pick this up.

[Cam]

Need an internet connection to play?

[Emion]

It sucks, but that's the model everyone is going to. We complained hard enough about shit like SecuROM and other anti-copying/pirating stuff, that now they just require the games to phone home in order to play them.

[fud]

Give it up already...

[Dudley]

Originally Posted by Cam

Need an internet connection to play?

Forget the internet connection, why does it cost as much as a new xbox 360 game when they don't have to pay £15 to Microsoft?

But yes, thanks for warning me, was considering picking it up for my mac so I had something to play on there, now I know to avoid it.

[fud]

*almost* bought the digital copy Friday, but $60 is a little rich for me at this point. WTF.

[Emion]

From: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/review...tarcraft-2.ars

The other issue, and this is a big one, is that Blizzard does not support play across any of their supported regions. We noticed this during the beta when both myself and Ars Technica's Peter Bright had beta keys, but we couldn't team up online because Peter is based in the UK. Peter can certainly purchase a game to register on US servers, but then he wouldn't be able to play with his friend down the street in the UK. It's a rubbish situation, and it's unique in the world of strategy gaming. If they're worried about lag, why not give us the option of only playing against those on our own continent? All I want to do is team up with some friends across the pond and play against the AI, and that's not possible. Disappointing and needless.

A reader commented on this issue in relationship to his location. You see, he lives in Quebec, Canada. "Although the vast majority of the population speaks French in the province, a sizable chunk of the population speaks English. And since the quality of the video game translation is often pretty dubious, there are lot of French speakers who, like me, prefer to buy the original English version.

"But now, here is the problem. To ensure that the people who buy the French version play against other French-speaking players, Blizzard connects them to the European server, where they can play against people from France, Belgium, etc. I think it is a very nice thing to do. But the problem is for the English-version buyer like me, we connect to the American server." That means he can't play against other Canadian gamers, all because of the region lock. Thanks, Blizzard.

Ouch.

[Godson]

hmmm....wonder if they will do anything about that. As that would kill the longterm playability of the game IMO

[RoyC]

Originally Posted by Emion

From: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/review...tarcraft-2.ars

Ouch.

Same sort of thing as with world of warcraft then. You have to buy the american edition to play on american servers and vice versa.

Sucks.

[Cam]

That stuff that Emion quoted.

Yikes. That's messed up.

[Denetti]

I picked it up over the weekend. I've played a couple of regular games (with friends against AI) and I've played about 8 missions into the single player campaign.

So far I really like the changes, though I worry the game is too deep now. Perhaps things will be fine once I learn the new units, but right now there's a lot of items to try and remember. Having played SC1 really helps the learning curve.

I'm really enjoying the single player campaign. It seems much more polished then the previous version. It's been many years since I played the SC1 single player, but I don't remember there being this many scenarios and paths. The single player campaign is fairly close to Mass Effect2 in it's depth. There are a lot of storyline choices to make, and even upgrade paths to choose.

I'd definitely recommend this game, especially if you enjoyed Mass Effect 2. Though I need to qualify that -- if this game wasn't a Blizzard game with long term re-playability for me then I wouldn't have bought it. I don't like the always-on internet connections that games are requiring these days. Plus I already had a Battle.net account so sign up was a bit easier.

[RoyC]

Copied and pasted this from Gamefaqs for anyone who doesn't know:



The following information was taken from: http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archi...ating-bug.aspx

"Anyone else have StarCraft II try to melt their hardware? Blizzard admits that it's a known issue and has a fix for you.

Apparently, the game's menu screens aren't framerate-limited. This means that when there's nothing else going on, your graphics hardware renders the bejeezus out of those screens, causing nasty overheating problems. The fix is easy, requiring players to add the following lines to your "Documents\StarCraft II\variables.txt" file:

frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60

[GreatScott]

Heh...