StarCraft 2

[ImCoolerThanRichard]

I kinda figured since a) they just announced it and B ) it's blizzard; it would take forever and a half for launch

Edited June 4, 2007 by ImCoolerThanRichard

[kuhla]

......it would take forever and a half for launch

no no no no ..... the ONLY game that takes forever is DUKE NUKEM FOREVER. All other games come out eventually.

[ImCoolerThanRichard]

Ah, it's so easy to forget about duke nukem forever. I think maybe the devs did too.

Edited June 4, 2007 by ImCoolerThanRichard

[Jedi2155]

Agreed with kuhla, all other games come out, and blizzard games are usually out within a year or 2. But many other games I keep track of, take much longer while many games from EA seem to come out far sooner than expected.

[kuhla]

Zerg stuff: http://www.gameshot.net/common/con_view.ph...GA47d4cc61d74ea

[kuhla]

So wait, what the heck are these units.... starts at about 0:20 and you see lots of them at like 0:28.... first instinct was "oh they are just marines" but if you look at 2:30 you can see some normal marines in the upper right hand corner firing which are both smaller and shooting rifles. Upgraded marines??....

 

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/41336.html

[T1no]

http://pc.ign.com/articles/918/918895p1.html

Blizzard says it made the change to make each story that much more epic and to flesh out the StarCraft universe. By splitting the game, the company says that players will access more story content, more characters, and more customization. Rob Pardo, executive vice president of game design, said that each game would be approximate in size to the original StarCraft. Each game will be a stand-alone installment ? not an expansion.

Pardo explained that the multiplayer remains relatively unchanged; each StarCraft II game will have a fully functioning multiplayer suite with all three races playable. "[in] the shipping product, all three races will be fully featured and balanced in gameplay and also in content," he said. We asked whether that meant the multiplayer suite in each game would be exactly the same, and he said, "More than likely, the successive products will add multiplayer content; we haven't decided right now what that is." That brought up the question as to how multiplayer would work if some players only buy the first game while others only buy the second or third games. He said that they haven't made any determinations yet as to how that would work.

[ren]

So wait, what the heck are these units.... starts at about 0:20 and you see lots of them at like 0:28.... first instinct was "oh they are just marines" but if you look at 2:30 you can see some normal marines in the upper right hand corner firing which are both smaller and shooting rifles. Upgraded marines??....

 

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/41336.html

they're space marines, obviously.

[kuhla]

So I guess the splits have names now.

 

source - http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=13161

 

.....

 

The first game in the trilogy will consist of the Terran campaign, and will be called "Terrans: Wings of Liberty." The second campaign will focus on the Zerg and will be called "Zerg: Heart of the Swarm," The third campaign will be focused on the Protoss and will be called "Protoss: Legacy of the Void."

.....

 

According to the Shacknews article, each of the campaigns will have different play styles with the Zerg campaign implementing RPG elements, the Protoss campaign will implement diplomacy elements, and the Terran campaign will implement a Protoss mini-campaign.

 

The very important multiplayer component will be unchanged despite the separation of the campaigns. Some units will be specific to the each campaign and will not be available in multiplayer.

[ren]

so if you dont care about single player just buy 1? thats pretty cool. someone will find a way to mod in those "unavailable" units anyways for custom maps so people can fck around with em.

[kuhla]

someone will find a way to mod in those "unavailable" units anyways for custom maps so people can fck around with em.

Probably lol.

[Malaphax]

Well at least blizzard wizened up on that point.

 

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/55283

 

They may end up being 1 year or more between them anyways. That's pretty freaking slow considering it's just a damn singleplayer campaign. I mean come on... unless this thing is more than 40 hours of gameplay and several huge CG movies there's no way it should take a year in between releases.

[kuhla]

old bump I know but wow....

 

source - http://kotaku.com/5304113/no-lan-play-for-starcraft-ii

 

We don't currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.

 

Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we're encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II. We're looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future.

[ren]

WHAT

 

3TUYP2QYT;ASD;GHASE;GOH4['WTA'SDJF'ASHG'W4'TAOJ'ASJD'FIHW['4HITG'AWSJF'AJSEF'HAW'EGHA'SERJA'SDJFG'AHRG'AWJIE'FTGAW

[Malaphax]

Was not surprised at all by this. A few years ago this might have been a problem, but now that any pc gamer has a decent internet connection I don't really see any problems. I do however wonder how their tournaments/koreans will play this.

 

Also now that any major and even minor lan party normally has internet access and generally plays games online, I don't understand what the big issue will be...

[ren]

theres no point in excluding lan support in a game thats marketed for competition play

its like shooting yourself in the foot

[kuhla]

source - http://kotaku.com/5330873/starcraft-ii-off...delayed-to-2010

 

Saw this coming from a mile away.

 

It's official. You won't be playing StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty this year, as Blizzard has moved the release date of the real-time strategy game to the "first half of 2010." No, they never dated it; but they have now.

 

Activision Blizzard's reason for the delay of StarCraft II is reportedly tied to the relaunch of its upgraded Battle.net service, which handles multiplayer for all things Blizzard.

More info at source.

[Malaphax]

So, one of the starcraft 2 panels was just voice actors jacking each other off and saying how awesome they were... but it was absolutely useless and not even remotely about "lore". Also I have nothing against tricia helfer in fact I think she's a great actress... but i would have vastly prefered the original kerrigen voice actress.

 

Now the other panel was about the mod tools and map tools. I will go over some of the crazy shit they did.

 

Custom units, custom tiles and a significant upgrade to the way you can create maps... including UNDERGROUND (one of the only times I've seen this in an rts). You can also create custom ui's and all sorts of different scripting that means you can do pretty much EVERYTHING.

 

Then they start showing some demos... one of them had an "uberlisk" that had spinecrawlers (ground base defense) on his back and he used them to shoot down projectiles and even had a custom death animation blah blah... pretty boring.

 

All of a sudden they change to star craft ghost... wait... it's not starcraft ghost... it's a ghost in third person in their game where you can use MOUSE LOOK to aim and can use a custom ui and do all sorts of crazy shit. They had dialogue iteration between different characters and town and building that you could enter, not to mention underground areas like caves and caverns.

 

Then they swap over to a side scroller (shump: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot_%27em_up ) it was straight up arcade style with different flying units coming at you and even seeing ships come from different "level" on the z axis coming up towards the layer you occupied (seeing them in the distance and then coming up to you).

 

Now... most of the stuff about starcraft and even most of blizzcon has been pretty boring and they've just sat on info and pretty much dodged any questions they didn't like and just sat there and gave a few pieces of canned footage... But when I saw these custom maps I just about shit my pants... I mean their mod tools are pretty much as flexible as the source engine... and this is from and rts. The good thing about this is that we might get some awesome mods (dota will look like shit compared to what they can make with this) and yet it makes me slightly sad, because it will probably end up a bit like source where people won't release maps for YEARS just because they want it to be perfect from the beginning. That being said if I ever doubted buying starcraft 2... this probably sold me on it. Their mod tools are so ridiculous that that just some of the mods that will come out will make this game worth it...

[Malaphax]

Here's the video that I was talking about:

 

Video Games | StarCraft II | BlizzCon 09: Custom Editor Walkthrough

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

[kuhla]

Same thing I said to malaphax after he showed me this video a few days ago:

 

It seems like they spent 75% of their time just building an engine. You get the impression they have plans to keep using the engine for other things/sequels. Starcraft II is obviously not using the full capability they have available to them. It seems almost a little valve-ish in comparison to the source platform.

[Malaphax]

I do not know if this is the same engine being used for d3. I would not be surprised if it was. That being said... all of blizzards games are designed with low system requirements I understand that. But they actually mentioned recently that they're not looking for photorealism, which actually makes me wonder if they really are trying to stylize their games or if they just use shitty textures so it will run on everyone's computer and say that it's not supposed to be realistic...

[ren]

thats pretty cool

they might release warcraft 4 on the same engine or something

that said all of blizzard's previous games have been new engines each time

they will probably make full use of it with the expansions to starcraft 2

 

blizzard's rts have always been known for its huge modding/mapping community so im guessing this time they decided to capitalize on it

and the d3 engine is much more impressive imo, its unlikely that they are the same.

[Malaphax]

How is d3 even remotely impressive from a graphical point of view ren? It looks like wow with slightly less shitty textures. The in game cutscene for the monk looks pretty crap personally it almost looks exactly like some of the in game sc2 cutscenes. The detail on individual heroes it higher but the amount of units on the screen is far lower.

 

That being said, I do doubt that d3 is on the same engine as sc2, but mostly because even if it was the amount of extra/different code needed to make maps dynamic and various tweaks with physics. They also mentioned something about how the backend of d3 is far too complex to allow for any modding, which is why they won't release any tools for it.

[ren]

It looks like wow with slightly less shitty textures.

are you serious?

just stop, this isn't /v/

im not gonna argue with retards

[Jedi2155]

The graphics between the two games do look relatively similar as well as the view distance. I do give some credibility to the idea that they share a similar "graphics" engine. If you guys know anything about programming, a graphics engine essentially a set of functions that do certain things, an API to an API. The differences between the two games are not different enough to force the idea that graphics itself share a similar codebase.