StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void

[luckton]

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

Archon summoning in glorious HD 

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

[Malakili]

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.

[Fordel]

I found the trailer to be underwhelming.

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

[Kail]

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.

[Merusk]

Blizzard games go on sale?

[Mosesandstick]

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.

[luckton]

Blizzard games go on sale?

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.

[calapine]

Archon summoning in glorious HD 

I found the trailer to be underwhelming.

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

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. 

And the battle on the science ship. The entire feel of this one is stolen from Alien films of course, but it works really well.

[Sir T]

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.

[Kail]

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.

And the battle on the science ship. The entire feel of this one is stolen from Alien films of course, but it works really well.

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."

[Teugeus]

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.

[Kail]

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.

[Teugeus]

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.

[Malakili]

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

[Malakili]

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

[Merusk]

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.

[Teleku]

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

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

[Malakili]

I only care about the story and hate RTS games in general.

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

[Teleku]

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.

[Mac]

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.

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

[Ironwood]

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.

[Yegolev]

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.

[Ironwood]

I'm ok with the kissing.

[Soulflame]

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.

[Father mike]

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

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

[Soulflame]

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!

[luckton]

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

[Malakili]

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.

[Fordel]

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.

[Kail]

I think the days of RTS are basically just past us.

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.

[Malakili]

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.

I think the days of RTS are basically just past us.

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.

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.  

[Rendakor]

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.

[Malakili]

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.

[Rendakor]

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

[Malakili]

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