f13.net

Opening cinematic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_XwzBMTJaM

Archon summoning in glorious HD  :heart:

Nov 10th launch date, for the three or four people interested.

Already pre-ordered over the summer.  Heart of the Swarm single player was pretty good (but the ending to the story in that one was terrible).  I've given up on laddering some time ago, just no time to keep up.  The changes to the multiplayer part of the game are interesting and might get me to play a little.  Anyway, Starcraft is great, so I'm not going to miss it regardless.

I found the trailer to be underwhelming.

Wasn't going to grab this and it did nothing to change that thought.

Probably going to grab it myself when it goes on sale.  It annoys the shit out of me that Blizzard has started including all this bonus content for Game X that you can only get by buying the collector's edition of Game Y, so even though I'd like to get this game I don't want to get the standard edition, and the deluxe edition is ridiculously expensive for the tiny little bonus WoW pets and junk.  So, I'll wait and grab it during the inevitable summer sale next year I guess maybe.

Blizzard games go on sale?

Starcraft II did. I'm going to wait for a sale as well, I don't want to pay the full price, especially after experiencing Heart of the Swarm's story.

Holidays. Picked up Heart of the Swarm for $20 last year. Wasn't worth $40, considering I only play the single player story, and half of the cost is the multiplayer support.

I might pick this up at launch if the campaign is worth it. Plus the free Artanis hero for HotS isn't a bad deal either.

If we are talking about in-game cinematic only than SC:BW was best so far. (Might be some nostalgia involved with this too..but I don't think so actually)

Even after all the years I especially remember two.

The opening (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GMOTrIjVao)

It's almost perfect really.
The initial combat part, showing the Zerg as really scary alien things up to "Where is the air support?!!" *search lights coming on*.
The conversation scene inside the cruiser, between the two generals.  "Are you prepared to go all the way with this, Alexei?" and "Take us into orbit, Mr. Malmsteen. We've seen enough." Just oozing with atmosphere.  :heart:

And the battle on the science ship (https://youtu.be/OVabu3Vour8). The entire feel of this one is stolen from Alien films of course, but it works really well.

Conciderng I havent bought the other 2 parts of this can I buy this and play the protoss campaign. Because fuck humans and Kerrigan being emo.

I think you can, yeah.  Though at this point I'm not exactly hoping for a great story for this entry either.


That's pretty much the iconic Starcraft cinematic for me.  As far as I know, it has nothing to do with the story, no Raynor or Kerrigan or any of the other big names, it's just "here's what the world is like."

I was really looking forward to this but the story telling has really gone downhill compared to the original Starcraft. What really irked me is Kerrigan's character arc is all over the place in these new ones. Oh well, still getting it for the multiplayer and looking forward to the new co-op mode Allied Commander.

Looks like I got in to the beta for this, are there any good resources for learning about the basics?  I haven't played much multiplayer since early SC2 so I'm totally lost with the changes in Heart of the Swarm or whatever they're doing in Void.  I can't get bot matches to work and I don't think trying to figure out what the units are supposed to do while it's raining siege tanks would be very effective.

Oh yeah, you just reminded me about the awful custom game interface. And yes, for some reason you can't set up vs. ai matches or at least they're well hidden. As for learning, best thing I can recommend is to check out Day9's youtube channel, he has a whole playlist on learning how to be better at SC2 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9636F0243659B1D4 check out the back to basics ones further down.

Does Day9 even do Starcraft dailies anymore? I feel like every time I see Day9 on twitch he's playing Hearthstone. Badly.

FYI: Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm are 10 bucks a piece on sale right now on the Blizzard store. 

https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/game/starcraft

I'd planned to wait until a complete edition was released back when they first announced it was going to be "3 parts." I only care about the story and hate RTS games in general.

At this point they've waited so long I've seen all the cut scenes and read the story online. I wasn't tempted by that $10 sale even a little bit. Looks like I save all my money here and Blizzard's gambit failed on me. Too bad it worked on so many others.

Ah, thanks for that.  Never bothered picking it up before, so I'll nab it now.

I mean, with due respect, you can hardly blame them for not winning over someone who "hates RTS games in general."  :oh_i_see:

Heh, yeah.  If "I only care about the story, not the game play" is your driving force, Starcraft 2 basically does those things in the opposite order.  Not sure why you would care if anyways if you don't like RTS games.

It worked on me and after playing it for a while I regret buying it. It's just so meh.

Someone bought me HoS despite my quite clear views on how Blizzard can die in a car fire.

So I played it and it was utter shite.

The End.

(http://mediafiles.cineplex.com/Blog/English/Listed/PrincessBride_peter350.jpg)

I'm ok with the kissing.

I'm more or less happy I passed on the second starcraft 2 for $10.  I was seriously considering it.

But then I bought Shadow of Mordor instead.

Ummm, so this drops on Tuesday, the 10th. 

I had completely forgotten until is saw  that the release cinematic had been shown at BlizzCon.

Oh boy.  Maybe some of the SC2 commentators will put up some SC2 videos again for a week or month before everyone loses interest again!

Apparently they're trying to keep interest by releasing single-player "mission packs" next year. Nova's getting her own campaign this coming Spring.

It's pretty good.  I pre-ordered a while back and played the 3 preview missions - they were pretty decent.  On par with Heart of the Swarm mission quality, which I thought was better than Wings of Liberty.

On the bigger issue:

I think the days of RTS are basically just past us.  Ironically Warcraft 3 spawning DOTA heralded the end of the genre.  The control one unit with several abilities spin off of the genre (and I consider DOTA/LoL/etc to be the descendants of RTS), is just a much more interesting way to play to most people. And to be fair, building a base and controlling an army and managing an economy makes this style of RTS just not very accessible, certainly not multiplayer.  The Starcraft Arcade is, I think, vastly underrated, but as I recall the arcade is actually freely available now so it doesn't give anyone reason to buy the game.  The single player missions are fine, but unless you are going to play at least some multiplayer I have a hard time recommending buying it for anything more than half price.

The Arcade came out like 5 years too late. I remember being super hype for how fancy the SC2 map maker was supposed to be, but it was years into the game and that shit still didn't exist properly.

Fuck we didn't have chat channels for like two years.

I dunno... I had a ton of fun with Dawn of War's campaign mode for Soulstorm and Dark Crusade.  Way more than I had with DoW 2's Dota-ish campaigns.  I haven't played much of the Total War series, but what I've seen seems similarly fun, though less focus on the RTS and more on the turn based stuff.  I feel like if Blizzard had made SC2 an iteration of these RTS rather than ignoring everything since SC1, I at least would be more entertained.

StarCraft 2 just plays like StarCraft, which is like seventeen years old at this point.  It's the same "here's a mission, here's a cutscene, here's another mission" game that SC1 was back in the 90s.  It's the same format as a wannabe cinematic game like The Last of Us or Metal Gear, except here the story is some of the worst garbage I've ever had to sit through.  The mission gameplay is fine, but they seem to be relying increasingly on gimmicks to give their levels texture, rather than letting the core mechanics carry things.  They're disposable content (I don't think I failed a mission once in Heart of the Swarm on my normal playthrough, presumably since having to replay the entire mission is a huge timesink) you blow through in a half hour to see the next mind wilting cutscene.

When we went from Warcraft 2 to Warcraft 3, virtually the entire game was reworked, and in the end we got a bunch of crazy stuff like Rexxar's campaign and DotA.  But with StarCraft, Blizzard wanted an e-sport so they barely touched the core mechanics and this is what we ended up with.

Yeah, Wings of Liberty's multiplayer "experience" was profoundly terrible. Unless you were willing to read Team Liquid (forums that are formatted to be nearly unreadable the first few times you go there), there was basically no place to "enter" multiplayer gracefully.  You basically just had to hit the matchmaker button and get murdered by people who knew how to play the game until you went looking for help or quit the game.  I'm thinking a lot of people quit.

Heart of the Swarm did improve a lot of that, but it was already too late, as you say.  I will say that if there are fans of the classic RTS games around here that haven't played Starcraft 2, or just got turned off by Wings of Liberty's feature-anemic release, it is worth checking out the arcade now.  

The Starcraft 2 map maker DID exist from the beginning, but it was essentially impossible to find anything because Blizzard is, like many developers now, totally opposed to the idea of a god damn list of games you can join.  Combine that with the lack of chat channels and there was absolutely no way to build any kind of community inside the game. I don't understand why this has fallen so far out of favor, it bothered me that it was gone in Diablo 3 too.  But we've all had this discussion before.



This is a fair point. To me the core of RTS as a genre is Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Starcraft, etc.  It may be very old, but it's still the kind of gameplay I want.  By comparison the Total War series is almost an entirely different genre in my mind.  

I didn't know they even had custom games (or Use Map Settings maps as we called them from the old days) in SC2; that was by far my favorite part of SC1 and WC3. I played tons of silly shit on there for hours and hours: Marine Wars, Madnesses, the various RPGs, God games, etc.

The matchmaking was really terrible too, but the main reason I quit was all the excess micro they added for the sake of micro; zerg's was the Queen's injection thing, I think. Fuck that shit.

Starcraft 2 was far less intensive than Starcraft 1 when it came to building units.  They did quite a lot to make that easier.  The macro mechanics for each race (chronoboost, MULEs, queen inject) did seem a little tacked on, but overall it was WAY easier than in Starcraft 1.

I'm remembering SC1 poorly then, I guess. How did unit production change between the two for zerg, other than inject?

The BIG difference is being able to group buildings on a hot key.  SC1 allowed you to only hotkey one building at a time,  which meant you would use your screen hotkeys (f1, f2, etc) and they manually click on the hatcheries near that screen location to effectively macro.  In Starcraft 1 it took a lot more clicks to go around to all your hatcheries and keep building units.  Like, a lot more.  "Off screen macro" wasn't really possible, and having to do it all on screen made for a lot more "actions" to keep up unit production (for all races, not just zerg).

Edit: So, the inject thing is a new/"extra" thing to do, but in brood war you would have spent those actions going around to each hatchery to build units very frequently because the max larva per hatchery was a measly 3 on top of the fact that there was no real way to make your life easier via hotkeys.  With some clever hotkey use injecting is actually pretty manageable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e62139xYILU

Yea, SC2 is absolutely leaps and bounds easier to play. There's no real question about it.


My biggest issue with SC2 is I have never seen a competitive game be so utterly predictable. When was the last time you saw someone 'comeback' from any kind of substantial deficit? When was the last time there was truly a honest to goodness base race? 99 out of 100 SC2 games come down to one fight and only one fight and that one fight isn't terribly interesting and once it is over everyone knows who won and lost. I'm a big fan of fighting your games out to the bitter end and I fucking haaate the early GG, but SC2 has really and truly devolved into a boring pile of predictable shit.

The worst part is that one fight is usually predictable too, at least for the viewers and casters. The fight will have been decided minutes in advance to the way decisions cascade in pro-level play.

I agree for the most part.  There are definitely games that are decided by being all over the map, but much less so than in Brood War.  The ease of controlling large armies in this game has made it a much more viable strategy.

The game is still fun to play.  The fact that you can recognize a loss before the real loss condition is met (lose all buildings) doesn't actually bother me.  As an "eSport" it has several problems though.  For people who are very casual viewers, it isn't very obvious what's going on a lot of the time.  For experienced players, as you say, the decisive moments in the game are often not when the game is "won" on screen, and having full information let's you have a good sense of who's winning. Also, when I am watching, say, DOTA 2 I watch the players and what they are doing - the action.  When I am watching Starcraft 2 I am almost always watching the supply counts, army size, worker counts, basically anything BUT the action to get a feel for what is actually going on in the game. 

Ah man, HuskyStarcraft stopped putting up videos about six months ago.  A shame, I enjoy his commentating.

Apparently he put out a cookbook recently.   :oh_i_see:

I enjoyed the gameplay in the WoL campaign, but HoTS took too long to come out, as did this. There's no reason why the development cycles for this sort of content need to be this long, other companies manage to be far more agile, and that's killing Blizzard.

I think it's telling that I've seen literally zero promotion for this game, either online or in the real world. Whereas Fallout 4 is all over billboards and TV, and everywhere online. When the first game came out there was a LOT more fanfare.

Yeah, 5+ years for two expansions is really too much.  I think that there is a good chance that this is the last major Starcraft release we ever see. 

The only excitement in the beta was the removal of macro mechanics.  The they changed their Minds.

So, today is release day. Yes you can play it without the other games. The have a pack of the 3 for 20 bucks more than the game only which to be honest is somewhat tempting me. They also have a "Digital delux" pack for your 20 dollars that includes a couple of skins and BONUS STUFF FOR OTHER EXCITING BLIZZARD TITLES!!!

for some reason, for starcraft 2 they have consistently done the opposite of their mantra with every other Blizzard game, and listened to the pro's instead of more casual players.

And I think it shows - starcraft 2 is definitely the lesser of the three big franchises now. The complexity in Brood Wars arose out of the game, it wasn't artifically imposed like they keep trying in SC2. When they did the preview of all the new units it was just depressing, because every unit was "an opportunity for skilled micro play to show". That's not what made Brood War great, and it's not how to get the masses playing an RTS. The macro mechanics in particular are simply obnoxious, pointless micro for the sake of micro.

Brood War was an accident in terms of it's compelling gameplay and balance. A combination of engine quirks, clever player made maps and a few lucky hits balance wise made BW what it was (actual vanilla SC without BW was an awful game in its own right in regards to multiplayer).

Blizzard has yet to come close to recreating anything on par with BW in terms of competitive play. War3 never hit the mark, WoW is a disaster in terms of competitive pvp, we have a entire thread mocking Hearthstone's competitive play. We'll see if HotS and Overwatch can manage anything, but nothing I've seen of those make me think compelling and dynamic.

So I bought the full game 3 game package because I'll probably play their campaigns out of curiosity at some point.

And I paid through Battlenet via paypal and Blizzard confidently told me that "starter edition restrictions will be lifted once payment has been processed, which may take up to 72 hours."

So I'll have to wait up to 3 days to play the game I paid for today, unless I want to play the first 5 missions of the Terran campaign and other starter edition restrictions. I've never seen that with any online purchase I've made. I could have gone to the local Ganestop and picked up a copy and played it when I got home.

My online experience has been "Fuck you, Blizzard."  :pedobear:

Given how shady and wierd people can be with paypal transactions, I quite honestly dont blame them.   Don't want to wiat for Blizzard to verify that you acctually paid for your shit, and arent going to try to yank the money back somehow after unlocking the game? Then pay with a proper creditcard.

For me, Total Annihilation and its expansions and downloadable units shone over C&C and I think Dune should be in that core too.

I was devastated at the mess Planetary Annihilation became, it's like the looked at TA and decided that they could do it better - and made it shit.

Yeah, this is very true.  Brood War was accidentally great.  It also lucked out that it coincided with the rise of PC Bang culture in Korea. 

I think unit pathing is probably the big one.  The unit pathing in Starcraft 2 is so good that it actually makes units a lot harder to balance because they are so efficient.  Siege Tanks in Brood War were such a key part of the meta game and worked in part because of the bad pathing of other units.  Their damage was also off the charts high, but their AI was stupid enough to shoot at the same targets, so that also made them not TOO efficient.  It let to micro both in trying to bait shots and micro trying to control tanks not to waste volleys.  In Starcraft 2 pathing is way better to it's much easier to get on top of Siege Tanks without units bumbling into each other, but the tank AI is also much better and will choose different targets than the Siege Tank next to it.  On the surface that actually sounds good, but the ramifications for that kind of thing are widespread in SC2.

Yep absolutely, a lot of right place and right time things went into BW's popularity.


I remember being SO hyped up for SC2 and the first few tournaments that came with the open beta/initial release were great... but they were great because no one knew how to play the game and every match someone figured out something new. A new build order, a new tactic, a new use for a unit etc. SC2 today (and the previous like, 2+ years) is a solved game. Solved the way ticktacktoe is solved. The only barrier now is execution and frankly tuning in to see which korean has spent the most time perfecting their precision is not compelling enough.

It's the same thing gameplay wise, for the overwhelming majority of the playerbase the best way to 'improve' or win is to just perfect one single build order to perfection. It's better to be perfect at one shitty catch all plan then to try and execute a good plan sloppily. It's not until you reach that tip top percentile that decision making actually matters and even then with how the game plays out you make like, 2 or 3 important decisions and have to wait 10-15 minutes to see if they were the right ones, with no hope of correcting them half way through.

It's a immensely frustrating and unsatisfying experience.



Even the single player is spoiled by the steaming pile of Metzen left on it's doorstep.


（╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I will say that Proleague's format is actually still quite good.  The fact that they have much more interesting and varied (and in fact not really "balanced", but they don't have to be in that format) maps is a huge deal. As is the fact that they know the map and the opponent a week in advance, which means all kinds of specialized strategies can be devised and practiced to aim at particular maps or particular opponents.  Unfortunately, it's also on in the middle of the night.

You still get some formulaic games, to be sure, but what they are doing goes a long way to capturing at least some of the Brood War magic.  The normal tournament format that we saw at western tournaments like MLG (when they did starcraft), ESL, etc, don't really allow for any of that.  It rewards just grinding 1000 games on the map pool and essentially preparing as best you can to compete in what you probably rightly call a solved meta game. 

The storyline in this is hilariously bad.  HILARIOUSLY.

Yup.

Also its been said before, but I was shocked that its basically the exact same game as Starcraft, only 3D. Uh, Supreme Commander evolved from Total Annihilation, guys. Homeworld 2 was different to Homeworld. Why could Blizzard not actually change up their game?

I am not shocked.

Metzen's self insert fan fiction needs to be told to the world, duh.

Oh god I just realized that Raynor is Metzen. :ye_gods:

Because Competitive Starcraft is a thing. They wanted to update the game without gutting that aspect of it.  The fact that SC:2 plays exactly like SC1 was a feature and 100% intended.

Of course at the competitive level, it really doesn't actually play like SC1 either.  :why_so_serious:

Yeah they failed pretty heavily for multiple reasons. Improved pathing and AI that was mentioned here being one of them. It was the goal, however.

Glad I wasn't the only one to think the story was terrible.  Wow, was this bad.  Level design and mission variety weren't that great, either.

Also in case it wasn't obvious, he is also Green Jesus (Thrall).

I'm not sure who he is supposed to be in Diablo, I don't really play that game to know either way.

There's like an 80% chance he is Hanzo in Overwatch, either him or the cowboy man.

He didn't have a part in Diablo because that came out of a different studio. I think he's looking to take on the role of Tyrael, though. Tyrael's the only guy who's got a chance at living on now that they've killed Decard Cain.

"Metzened" story http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4211013929
"How to write like Chris Metzen in 10 steps" http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4211604821

He's a fanfic writer who has naked pictures of somebody at Blizzard. I'm convinced of it.

Nah, he's just buddies with whoever runs Blizzard.

WAY Back when during War1/2, when it became they wouldn't be able to use the Warhammer license but still had like, a complete game they needed to sell, one of the Dev's was like 'Hey my buddy can draw pretty good, I'm sure he can pull some story out of his ass'.

Since the games sold ten jillion copies and they all got rich or whatever, why change anything?

What happened with Planetary Annihilation? I loved TA, the only reason I didn't get around to playing PA was because it wouldn't run on my computer.

HotS so far is very good competitively. Due to the game's strategic bent, it sacrifices the tight tactical and mechanical execution of DotA or HoN but has a much deeper strategic layer and generally much stronger game pacing as a result.

Sadly this means there's less room for outstanding individual playmakers, but that's ok given the broader focus on strategy and shot calling.

HotS is also super new still. Check the 8-ball in a year and see if it's the same answer.

Heart of the Swarm has been out for over two years, that ain't super new.

Wrong HotS.

Really disagree with the first post. Richard Knaak is a fucking terrible writer to start with - all the stuff about the Nephalim, or Ronin in Warcraft, came from him and was pure garbage from start to finish. Yes, D3s story was bad but it was never going to be great once they decided that ridiculous fan fiction crap was actually canon. Why the hell Blizzard so dramatically failed to understand what gothic horror was is still beyond me. It's as if they don't have a single person in the company able to critically look at their lore and world building anymore.

They don't, because that guy is Metzen.
 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Metzen

His title is "Senior Vice President of Story and Franchise Development." He guides or signs off on everything. When's the last time you had a guy with that ego and that fancy a title listen to criticism of underlings.

Now I agree that the nephalim stuff was drek, but they could have salvaged it rather than turned it up to 11 and run. But that never was going to happen with this creative pipeline.

What Rasix said.

Sorry, easy to mix them up when it's the same acronym for one of the StarCraft expansions and this is the StarCraft thread.  You know?

I'll forgive you, this time!

This is probably as good as Starcraft II multiplayer has been.

I am, shall we say, very dubious of your claim.

It's not a very high bar to clear.

I think the changes to multiplayer have been pretty good.  Starting with more workers means considerably less "wait around" time at the beginning of a game where bother players are basically just building workers.  Better for play, better for viewing.  The new units seem pretty good as well.  People are still figuring it out, and maybe that is partly why it's exciting/interesting again, but I think this is a far superior game to Heart of the Swarm in terms of the meta.

Disruptors are really goofy, though.

It's mostly that is my guess. So it's still in that 'can you DO that? is that ALLOWED? I guess so!'.

Here we go: https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/starcraft-ii-nova-covert-ops

Blizzard is not going to be releasing mission packs for Starcraft 2.  9 missions for 15 bucks doesn't seem great to me.  Definitely a no-buy in my opinion.

It's about the same price per mission as LoV if you only play it for the single-player campaign.

Is that a thing people have done? I thought they were just giving away the single player content free (or was that just the first SC2?).

I think they gave away the Prologue missions but you have to pay for the full campaign.