Blizzard Unveils StarCraft II

[Melissa Niedringhaus]

Blizzard Unveils StarCraft II

Blizzard Entertainment's announcement at the 2007 Blizzard Worldwide Invitational event in Seoul, South Korea, turned out to be the unveiling of StarCraft II.

Blizzard has designed StarCraft II to be the ultimate competitive real-time strategy game. It will feature the return of the Protoss, Terran and Zerg races, albeit overhauled and re-imagined. Each race will be further distinguished from the others with several new units and gameplay mechanics, as well as new abilities for some classic StarCraft units that will make a reappearance in the game.

StarCraft II will include a unique single-player campaign and online play through an upgraded version of Battle.net. The game will also come with a map editor that will put the same tools used by Blizzard's designers into the hands of players.

Mike Morhaime, President and Co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, said, "We recognize that expectations are high following the long-running popularity of the original game, but we plan to meet those expectations and deliver an engaging, action-packed, competitive experience that StarCraft players and strategy gamers worldwide will enjoy."

Blizzard is developing StarCraft II for simultaneous release on the Windows and Macintosh PC platforms. Further information about the game will be announced in the months ahead.

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[Joe]

It's bold prediction day here at The Escapist.

This one's gonna blow. Seriously, Brood War kinda sucked. Warcraft 3 was a dog. How much of the original StarCraft team is still around, and are they really going to be able to capture lightning in a bottle again?

 

[Blaxton]

It's bold prediction day here at The Escapist.

This one's gonna blow. Seriously, Brood War kinda sucked. Warcraft 3 was a dog. How much of the original StarCraft team is still around, and are they really going to be able to capture lightning in a bottle again?

As much as it absolutely pains me to agree, I must. The game looks to be StarCraft 3-D. Hopefully I'm wrong, but it looks so standard that I'll already be tired of the gameplay before I open the box.

I think Warcraft 3 was so bad because they claimed to have all these RPG elements, then watered it down so much so that you could have a couple of "Heroes" which determined the tide of battles on their own. Then, they made it nearly impossible to beat a CPU component in a skirmish. I liked the smaller, squad based combat, I think the incredible micromanagement required in most RTS games is a hindrance, not something that gives me added joy. But forcing the player to remove their most powerful unit from the base in order to level him up is an awful thing to do.

 

[LxDarko]

The demos of Starcraft 2 don't really impress me at all. Really to me this seems years behind what Relic has been doing with the Warhammer 40k series.

For example look at this demo [http://youtube.com/watch?v=9V0cL7ofmwA] at 1 min 10 seconds. There is no sign from the black ship that it is actually taking damage, no reaction what so ever to the laser beams destroying it. You don't even see a difference in the ship until it explodes.

In 40k the ship would have been thrown back or hull on fire something, but here you have nothing. Also did anyone find a video of them showing a close up of the interaction between the enemy units? I couldn't seem to find any.

This game seems very generic to me hopefully I'm wrong but right now it looks like it will sell primarily off the brand and not the actual game.

 

[Goofonian]

Personally I like the fact that not much has changed since the original. I loved the way starcraft played, and having the same game again with prettier graphics and few new units is just fine by me.

And Cheeze's point about elevation is quite right. The terrain played a big part in starcraft, in that higher ground was a tremendous advantage partly because non-flying units needed to find a ramp to traverse cliffs. Now they are revisiting this and adding units that can hop up and down to different levels with ease, it will add a new level of depth to the strategies found in the old game.

I really disliked the way warcraft 3 turned out with its lackluster rpg elements, so in my mind less change (incremental change) is much better than a complete overhaul.

Then again, I've not properly played a PC game for several years so I'm not familiar with advances in RTS's that games like company of heroes seem to have brought to the table.

 

[Andy Chalk]

Was anyone disappointed to find out it was an RTS title at all, regardless of the franchise in question?

 

[Goofonian]

Was anyone disappointed to find out it was an RTS title at all, regardless of the franchise in question?

I actually expected the "big announcement" to be starcraft 2 as an RTS. And no I'm not disappointed.

Historically RTS's have been Blizzard's speciality, so its not unusual for them to be making another one, and with the disaster that was starcraft ghost I think they really needed to try and re-establish what the franchise was all about.

Plus WoW is still too big and popular (and growing) to think about replacing it, or even offering alternatives. No point splitting up the userbase between sci fi and fantasy fans.

The only other announcement that would have made sense to me would be diablo 3, which coincidentally would also be the best fit for MMO-ification, or at the very least an expanded online multiplayer.

 

[TomBeraha]

Personally, I'd love to see a real time strategy where you produced squads instead of individual units, so firefights lasted long enough for actual battlelines to emerge. But I'm totally happy to be getting StarCraft2 in the meantime!

Check out Dawn of War, It is squad based real time strategy, the standalone expansion Dark Crusade is a great starting point for a great price point. If you're more daring, the campaigns aren't really special, and are probably forgettable if you don't already like the 40K universe.

 

[Ajar]

I keep forgetting that I'm the only person who loved War3. War3 was the game I'd been waiting for since War2; StarCraft, while I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to the sequel, was ultimately just one of the games I played in the meantime. The other standout from that time period for me was the Myth series, which did away with pesky resource management entirely and focused on pure tactics. Awesome, though I never got to be all that good at it.

As for War3... low unit cap, penalties for (relatively) high headcount, incentives for skirmishing and hit-and-run, subgroup selection, and just a dash of Myth. Units with enough abilities to make combat tactically interesting even at a low skill level. Yup, just what I wanted. I still play it with friends from time to time.

Personally, I'd love to see a real time strategy where you produced squads instead of individual units, so firefights lasted long enough for actual battlelines to emerge.

The Homeworld series does this -- small ships like fighters and bombers are produced in squadrons. I've only played the second one, but I find it quite enjoyable. Being able to make full use of 3D space is extremely refreshing.

It looks like they're going to fix my biggest beef with StarCraft, though: the 12-unit selection cap. For a game with such large armies, the cap seriously hindered my ability to maneuver my troops. I guess they've taken a page from the Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander/Rise of Nations playbook.

I was expecting a World of StarCraft MMO, which would have been a disappointment to me since I have no interest in the MMO space. So I was pleased to see them announce a new RTS. I've enjoyed every Blizzard RTS I've played (War2, StarCraft, War3), so I expect I'll enjoy StarCraft 2.

Also, simultaneous crossplatform release is extremely positive from my perspective as a Mac user.

 

[Goofonian]

Also, simultaneous crossplatform release is extremely positive from my perspective as a Mac user.

Cheers to that!

 

[Bongo Bill]

It's interesting to hear everybody echoing the same basic criticisms that I have with the RTS genre. I do enjoy RTS, but only the more experimental titles in the genre are really playable for me. Things like Pikmin, Darwinia, or Defcon. I like that they take place in real-time, as that makes the strategy deeper, but I always feel that I'm being rushed, and end up being bogged down in babysitting individual units who can't take care of themselves, when my time would better be spent managing the battle as a whole. I guess RTS games just tend to focus down to the scale of an individual skirmish.

This is the reason why, by and large, I play more turn-based strategy games, even though they're on a broader scale than I'm interested in (e.g. managing a political entity, rather than fighting a battle).

 

[te2rx [deprecated]]

hah, I'm late to the party. I imagine what prevented Blizzard from doing something substantially different (or anyone tasked with creating a Starcraft sequel) is its massive fanbase in places like Korea with all its pro televised tournaments and whatnot. In that context everything new you make has to be precisely to spec, or else your tournament-driven fanbase will be up in arms. You can't make a super crazy sequel like Tiberian Sun. It's both easier and probably necessary for Blizzard to just make a 3D mod of oldschool Starcraft 1. Besides, doing something fantastically original is not Blizzard's forte... Starcraft 2 is likely just another highly derivative but decently-produced Blizzard title like everything else they've made since Warcraft 2.

"What's wrong with RTS games" is indeed how you have to babysit your clueless units. This prevents multi-tasking, and that puts a stop to sophisticated, multi-layered strategies. The result is a game of collecting resources and building structures/units faster than the next guy, and throwing your massive traffic jam army at the enemy base.

What needs to happen are truly smart units -- the kind you can just tell to "attack this enemy base using this route" and you can trust that they'll
1. intelligently stick together in a sensible formation
2. not get shot up by turrets, not engage enemy units that they are particularly vulnerable to, and more generally not get themselves killed for nothing
3. not get stuck or traffic-jammed or decide to do the exact opposite of what you need them to do
4. dynamically choose the best approach to obstacles and challenges, according to your emphasis (e.g. stealth, return fire only, destroy this, avoid that, return to base if casualties mount, etc.)

or you can just tell them really general stuff like "explore" or "search and destroy" or "defend this base" and they'll just f---ing do it on their own. There have been games in the past like the Total War series of strategic crowd-simulation mayhem games (and somewhat similarly Homeworld) that have some aspects of what I've described, but still. The only state this kind of game exists currently is in turn-based strategy games which allow you to micromanage every aspect of the battle simultaneously without "multitasking" issues. But in a real-time context, some amount of AI needs to be there to take the load off your shoulders or else the game is going to turn into Donald Rumsfeldcraft very quickly

 

[Goofonian]

I think you've hit the nail on the head there te2rx. Only problem is figuring out what level of AI turns "playing a game" into "watching the AI run a battle simulation".

As much as I'd like to see it, I don't think its possible to make a real time game with the same level of strategy as a turn based game and still have a game that regular people can play. My hope is that someone gets creative and finds a way to try and bridge the gap as best as possible, perhaps by finding a way to speed up turn based games or even introducing a sort of bullet time effect into an rts so that you can still micro-manage when you need too, but it doesnt waste so much of your precious time. Thats what I'd like to see.

 

[Blaxton]

You know, in the extended gameplay video there is a sort of stop-the-action thing going on at one point. My friend seemed to think it was a point at which you would be able to select units or enemies as well as choose targets for them. He also seemed to think that would a feature available in multiplayer. I don't know why, but I find myself unsure of any of these things except for the fact that yes, the game froze on a single instance and the camera was moved by a player during that time.

As far as bullet timing goes in general, when you factor in multiplayer you're talking about a whole new set of issues. There would have to be a lot of problem solving to make sure it wasn't a pause-start fest (like I remember doing in so many NES games when I was younger).

Watching the video again kind of made me sad. It just looks so standard :-\

 

[te2rx [deprecated]]

I played an RTS game recently (but not online) with a pause and slow-mo features -- Perimeter I think, and maybe something else. Slow/pause makes multitasking easier but it's still frustrating when too much is happening simultaneously. It's not really the same as turn-based where your units, one-by-one, follow your exact orders until their action points are exhausted. When the situation becomes complex, instead of executing sophisticated tactics and strategies, you're inching time forward second by second, jumping from scene to scene trying to counteract the inherent AI stupidity of your units and "bug-fix" the unfolding chaos into a vaguely winnable scenario. But during all of that, you probably didn't notice your base getting jacked on the other corner of the map until after the fact. Your army's not smart enough to defend their own base without you. In other words it's still the babysitting hell of other RTS games, except in a denser, slower form... micro-babysitting

 

[Bongo Bill]

I think you've hit the nail on the head there te2rx. Only problem is figuring out what level of AI turns "playing a game" into "watching the AI run a battle simulation".

Ideally, you'd draw the line at the same place that separates your rank from the one below it in the real world. Is it a small battle? You're the commander. Is it a single, large battle? You're a field general. Is it an entire theater? You're top brass. The whole war? Commander-in-chief.

Everything you'd normally handle at that level is left up to the player. Everything that you'd delegate is covered by the AI. Maybe take a rank or two below that rank to keep it interesting.