Review: StarCraft II

[abija]

Well you haven't played enough RTS' to compare SC2 to the market can you? This just makes your opinion poorly founded and ignorant.

How about you make a list of the minimum required RTS someone has to have played in order to express it's opinion on SC2.
This is what I played though (in no real order and most likely missing stuff):
most of the old school (dune, warcraft, c&c series, ta etc) *, starcraft, homeworld series, myth series * (except last one), total war series, rise of... series, age of ... series *, cossacks series, battle for middle earth series, world in conflict, anno series, warcraft 3 *,coh, dow series*, dow 2, supcom 1 *, supcom 2
* are the ones I played in multi, favorite being warcraft 3

SC2 has a depth that consists entirely of unit composition. That's as deep as excel.

No, not even close. It's extremly obvious in any zerg vs protoss ground clash at high food count. If zerg doesn't flank, it gets obliterated even if it should win according to excel.
Same, really obvious in the case of terran mech, usually if you frontal attack without abusing the low mobility your army disappears even if it's 2-3 times as strong according to excel.

...buggy graphics engine and schizophrenic art style. Yeah, highly polished.

Again your own personal opinion. And buggy graphics engine? Really?

- Stop being pedantic. My point about photo-realism was that it helps games. And yes, DoW 2 is far more realistic than SC2. Try to argue that if you want, I'd love to see some 'evidence' from you.

It doesn't help unless the game can do it perfectly, otherwise every flaw is exacerbated. That's why both DoW2 and SC2 do it mostly on terrain and environment because in those areas it can be done right.

Learn about DX's. Procedurals and tessellation are two major components of DX10 and 11 and would undoubtedly help out every RTS.

How would tessellation help SC2? Make zerg look tiny bit better when zoomed in? Who actually gives a crap about that? And if you refer to procedural shaders for terrain, what's wrong with how the terrain looks in SC2? And why would they move stuff from cpu to gpu when it's already the one taxed more at high quality? Just because you can?
Can you even point out the DirectX 10 only effects present in your beloved DoW2?

So you think it's okay to have a schizophrenic artstyle? Why not have it gritty in game?

Because the game is fast and it's supposed to be easy to follow. Not to mention how far of a stretch is calling the artstyle schizophrenic.

 

[ecoho]

OK everyone there a little thing next to his name called ignore just ignore the troll it will make your lives alot easier and to matzy i have you on ignore but i tned to read the other comments stop insaulting people you made your point now let this flame war die if you dont ill be forced to report you and i realy dont want to do that so just stop.

 

[Woe Is You]

A point that seems to change every other page.

I mean, at first you claimed that Starcraft was way slower than Supreme Commander (or even more ridiculous, slower than Sins). Then suddenly it became too quick for you to lose matches. Now you're suddenly the master of Korean level strategy in this game? (Yet clearly you haven't seen Boxer's play where he plays Starcraft in ways nobody has seen before and wins by simply being way smarter than the opponent. Excel that.)

Why is it that you are the only one who is clinging to the idea that the opposition hasn't played strategy games before? Seriously, you're the one who came to this thread with second hand knowledge about the game and only started playing it after your claims were proven incorrect. This is what you've provably done while your comments of the opposition have been pure speculation.

The fact of the matter is that Chess has been solved. Yet that hasn't stopped the game from being a highly entertaining and deep game for human players. If anything, Chess is closer to Excel as it doesn't involve the element of player execution.

Yes, I've played Dawn of War 2. It is such a wildly different type of game from Starcraft that I hesitate to even classify them in the same genre. Is DoW2 a better game or just a different game? I'd argue it's the latter. I've also played Supreme Commander. Age of Empires. Total Annihilation. Homeworld. Dark Reign. Dune II. Command & Conquer (every installment of the Tiberium saga). Sins of a Solar Empire. The Total War series. I'm probably forgetting some others I've played in my past.

What there is to take is that while some of these have had more features and tried some new things, none of these have gotten the balance between micro and macro, the balance between three vastly different races and the balance between the amount of units at disposal and their usefulness quite right. Except for Starcraft. That's why people love the game.

Now Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander have a larger scale and more units. What that causes, though, is that the game becomes more unbalanced on a competitive level. Homeworld had a nice selection of different units to use but had only 2 sides and both of their tec trees were the same. Age of Empires has a huge selection of races but they don't really diverge until the later stages of the game. Command & Conquer has been trying to reinvent itself since Tiberian Sun and has had good ideas but again, balance has been wonky. My opinion to all of this is that while a larger scale would in theory grant for more strategy, it's pointless if the balance doesn't work.

I can't of course claim Starcraft II is completely balanced as of this moment but I can say that Blizzard is completely devoted to getting that balance as that's what made the first game so successful in the first place. So far I haven't encountered a tactic that doesn't have a counter. So far almost all of my losses have been poor reads of what the opponent is trying to do. But that's just my experience with the multiplayer portion.

If you're asking why people love mechanics that worked 12 years ago, it's because the age of the mechanic says doesn't say anything about whether it works or not. People still play Super Street Fighter II Turbo for instance. The game is 16 years old. Why? Because it Super Turbo only really has aged in its graphics department. The actual meat of the game, the mind games, are on par in depth with all the fighters out there. It's even had a resurgence with new players coming to the scene.

Old is not bad. There's no one RTS continuum. Sometimes old stuff works. Sometimes new stuff doesn't.

Sometimes those last two sentences get reversed.

 

[Lord_Bryon]

snip

I'll keep this simple - I think that SC2 is inferior to Dawn of War and Supreme Commander, each with expansions. You have not played these games so you cannot argue that point. If you want I can tell you exactly why I think this and then you could try to argue, albeit somewhat from a point of ignorance, but until then you cannot criticise my view.
Plus if you really think tessellation wouldn't make an RTS look better, you need to go watch some demos of tessellation in action. And I was referring to procedural animation. DoW2 doesn't use DX10, but the art style is consistent, which is my biggest gripe with SC2. Plus thinking that moving the DX up from 9 to 10, or even 11, wouldn't improve graphics is just trolling.
How is it a reach calling the art style schizophrenic? The battleships are gritty in the cutscenes and then in-game you literally can't tell what material anything made by either the Protoss or Terrans are made from. That's just a poor art style. In SC1 you could tell, so saying it's done to make it easy to follow the units is nonsense as that wasn't a problem in the first.

Um Mazty ... I'm not sure you even read abija's post because he said right in it that he has played Dawn of War and Supreme Commander

 

[ecoho]

snip

I'll keep this simple - I think that SC2 is inferior to Dawn of War and Supreme Commander, each with expansions. You have not played these games so you cannot argue that point. If you want I can tell you exactly why I think this and then you could try to argue, albeit somewhat from a point of ignorance, but until then you cannot criticise my view.
Plus if you really think tessellation wouldn't make an RTS look better, you need to go watch some demos of tessellation in action. And I was referring to procedural animation. DoW2 doesn't use DX10, but the art style is consistent, which is my biggest gripe with SC2. Plus thinking that moving the DX up from 9 to 10, or even 11, wouldn't improve graphics is just trolling.
How is it a reach calling the art style schizophrenic? The battleships are gritty in the cutscenes and then in-game you literally can't tell what material anything made by either the Protoss or Terrans are made from. That's just a poor art style. In SC1 you could tell, so saying it's done to make it easy to follow the units is nonsense as that wasn't a problem in the first.

Um Mazty ... I'm not sure you even read abija's post because he said right in it that he has played Dawn of War and Supreme Commander

plz for the love of god stop quoteing him he doesnt care put him on ignore and just let him live in his fantisy world. im sorry man but ive heard enoth out of him so im asking all other posters to be bigger then him and just drop the argument if he contenues to quote us after weve stoped quoteing him we report him he gets banned we all sing a happy song

 

[metalhead467]

Well the opposition to their own admittance HASN'T played many, if any, other RTS' before so why are you acting as if I'm making it up?

"This is what I played though (in no real order and most likely missing stuff):
most of the old school (dune, warcraft, c&c series, ta etc) *, starcraft, homeworld series, myth series * (except last one), total war series, rise of... series, age of ... series *, cossacks series, battle for middle earth series, world in conflict, anno series, warcraft 3 *,coh, dow series*, dow 2, supcom 1 *, supcom 2"

"Yes, I've played Dawn of War 2. It is such a wildly different type of game from Starcraft that I hesitate to even classify them in the same genre. Is DoW2 a better game or just a different game? I'd argue it's the latter. I've also played Supreme Commander. Age of Empires. Total Annihilation. Homeworld. Dark Reign. Dune II. Command & Conquer (every installment of the Tiberium saga). Sins of a Solar Empire. The Total War series. I'm probably forgetting some others I've played in my past."

"I give you a list of RTS's I've played: CnC, Age of Empires II and III, Warcraft II, SCBW, SCII, Empire At War, Battle for Middle Earth II and I could add more: I went back and played WC: Orcs and Humans, Age of Empires I, CnC Tiberian Sun, Age of Mythology, Galactic Battlegrounds, but because I haven't played the ONE game you happen to like, I'm not a fan of the RTS genre?"

"I play CoH and DoW2, I played Supreme Commander, I find StarCraft 2 better than all three of those."

"Actually I've played both Dawn of Wars, both SupCom's, every Command and Conquer and Warcraft 3."

"Oh, and for the record I played DoW1/2, a bit of Supreme Commander but never got into it too much, Shogun and Rome Total War, and the C&C series through Generals. Oh, and Battle for Middle Earth. And a bit of Homeworld."

Find a new goddamn argument, dude.

 

[abija]

DoW2 doesn't use DX10, but the art style is consistent, which is my biggest gripe with SC2.

Exactly it doesn't use DX10, and it's the reason I was asking you to give examples from ~10 pages ago. You can change to DX10 iirc changing an ini but it doesn't add anything. You wanna know why? For the same reason SC2 doesn't use it, it wasn't necessary for what they were trying to do in the game.
You could not give those examples because there aren't any good RTS games using that kind of tech for anything remotely meaningful.

As for the art style comment... you're just a tool. Next time stop when your trolling at least has some "consistency".

 

[Woe Is You]

And which game haven't you played, just as almost everyone else arguing with me? The original Dawn of War. So please, stop being so ignorant and criticising me when I compare SC2 to a game you've never played.

Just because it wasn't in the list doesn't mean that I haven't played it. I did play the original DoW. All of its expansions too. The original was fine and they did get it decently balanced at one point while patching it. Every expansion since only managed to muck up that balance and by Soulstorm, the game was a big mess in that department.

SC2 is an RTS which strives to be balanced...like all other RTS...Great to know.

I'm not sure if other developers are making balance their top priority. Look at Relic for instance: they turn out interesting spins on the genre but can you really keep a straight face while claiming that something like Soulstorm, DoW2 or CoH even tries to be a balanced e-sports game the way Starcraft is. Please, Relic is pumping out games and expansions so fast that it makes it hard to argue they're even making an effort on that front. Same goes for Gas Powered Games.

I mean, at first you claimed that Starcraft was way slower than Supreme Commander (or even more ridiculous, slower than Sins). Then suddenly it became too quick for you to lose matches. Now you're suddenly the master of Korean level strategy in this game? (Yet clearly you haven't seen Boxer's play where he plays Starcraft in ways nobody has seen before and wins by simply being way smarter than the opponent. Excel that.)

Where did I claim it was too fast...?

Why is it that you are the only one who is clinging to the idea that the opposition hasn't played strategy games before? Seriously, you're the one who came to this thread with second hand knowledge about the game and only started playing it after your claims were proven incorrect. This is what you've provably done while your comments of the opposition have been pure speculation.

Well the opposition to their own admittance HASN'T played many, if any, other RTS' before so why are you acting as if I'm making it up? It's fantastic how many people claim my points are wrong, yet have not played the RTS' I'm comparing SC2 to. I had second hand knowledge/beta knowledge and after playing it, my view had not changed so what's your point in bringing that up? How was I proven wrong? What was pure speculation??

Let's see. You come to the conversation claiming that Starcraft is too slow for you (way slower than Sins was the claim, actually). This is a claim you've made before and obviously it's a claim that was unsubstantiated: you yourself admit to have played Starcraft last very very long ago while a lot of people were talking about their present experiences with the game. Now within this thread, however, you've reversed your stance claiming that there are no long matches in the game. If that isn't a 180, I don't know what is. Second, look up. While there've been one or two folks who have admitted so, there've been several others that have played RTS games a lot before. That is where you've been proven wrong. Yet you persist in your silly claims. First mistake, making assumptions. Second mistake, revealing that you're operating on second hand knowledge.

Not to mention the concept of scouting going over your head for a while means I have a reason to doubt it's you who hasn't played a lot of RTS before. RTS 101, dude.

How the hell did SupCom not get micro and macro in balance? Macro - size of the armies etc. Micro - how you use the armies, workers, build queues etc. How was SupCom not balanced?? You can't just say "SC does 'X' better" and not say why.

I thought Funk and the others had explained it, though: modern strategies either downplay the micro part of the game and make the game all about economy management or they go do the opposite and concentrate on it. This means little to no structure building, no mucking around with the economy. The former produces games like Victoria while the latter philosophy produces a game like Dawn of War 2. SupCom is somewhere in between but there's a huge macro aspect to it. Starcraft II is deliberately squarely between those two. You have to take care of your economy and keep it harassment-free or you won't have anything to make units with but at the same time you have to spend a lot of brainpower in coordinating your troops. Removing harvesters and adding a morale system really doesn't mean that the game has gotten more deep. It merely means that you've traded one complex system for another.

You're constantly mentioning that SC2 is rock-paper-scissors but using your analogy it's a version of that where paper can win scissors with genius maneuvering. Why is it that players like Boxer manage to win scenarios where unit composition would dictate them to lose badly?

The answer to this is that Starcraft automates very little. There are units that flat out lose to others at certain ranges but it's up to the player to make sure they don't enter those ranges. Who knows, maybe you want those troops to be killed as part of your master plan. The game doesn't make assumptions for you there. Is it better or worse for not automating things? Not sure but it does add a very human factor to the game that goes beyond just picking the right counter.

And how was SupCom unbalanced? Again, completely unsubstantiated claim and frankly utter crap.

My experience with SupCom was that all the people I played with just teched to T4 as fast as possible and then let it rip. The first one there was usually the winner of the game. The sequel did not change this.

Not to mention SupCom having community balance patches implies that my claims really aren't as unsubstantiated as may first seem.

By the way, your "Perfect Dark was rated poorly" argument pretty much falls flat when you see that it's around the 80 in Metacritic for instance. It might not have gotten universal praise that it got in the past but I'd say that it proves that there's nothing inherently broken in Perfect Dark's formula despite the saturation of FPS in today's market. I'd also say that PD's situation is also a bit different in the sense that we have exactly the type of balls to the wall arcade FPS that it is, while Starcraft II is a highly polished version of an RTS type we haven't seen in a long while. So yeah, bad example that doesn't even prove your point. Good job.

 

[abija]

He's played them for the sum total of about 5 minutes, if that. That hardly qualifies as being able to have a decent opinion on a game.

Really? And on what you base this retarded affirmation?

How are good graphics not meaningful???? And how am I a "tool" for saying the art style is utterly inconsistent? Amazing how your argument has boiled down to flaming.

Because arguing that Blizzard's art style is inconsistent makes you a tool.
Also, where are your examples to demonstrate how DX 10/11 is required for good graphics? Even your beloved DoW2 is in DX9. Are you saying that game has bad graphics too?

I've been saying SupCom and DoW are better than SC2 for specific reasons only to be met by "Nah ur like totallz wrong". No explanation makes an argument worthless.

Basically you argue that SC2 is bad because it doesn't have specific features that work for DoW2 and SupCom. Like you argue graphics are bad cause they use only DX9.

 

[abija]

And now you've lowered yourself to flaming - nice going.
Because your comments on SupCom and DoW were utterly, utterly wrong.
Blizzard's artstyle IS inconsistent, unless I'm blind and the cutscenes showed clean, smooth plastic-like buildings & interiors.

What comments on SupCom and DoW, mind pointing to them?
You are comparing cutscenes with the game and complaining the game doesn't have the same detail... (also comparing the interior with the exterior of buildings)

Animated fur & vegetation - no fur to help with and already has animated vegetation
Softer/sharper shadows - has even translucent shadows on ultra
Richer scenes; complex environments - I see no problem with the complexity of the scenes and environments, maybe tiny bit overdone on the amount and detail.
Thicker forests, larger armies! - Let's introduce gameplay elements not because they're needed or because they're fun but because we can render them...
Dynamic and ever-changing in-game scenarios - same as above
Realistic motion blurring - really?
Volumetric effects and Thicker, more realistic smoke/clouds - take a good look at the special effects in SC2 on ultra.
Realistic reflections/refractions on water/cars/glass - really, you want reflection/refraction on unit materials in a RTS that tries to display up to 1000 units on screen?
Reduced load on CPU and Re-routes bulk of graphics processing to GPU - great, why would you do that when the GPU is taxed more than the CPU in most scenarios?

Exactly as I thought, you read/watch some publicity materials and think everything is as wonderful as they say.

I did not say SC2 was bad

Sorry, all your posts in this thread made me believe otherwise.

 

[metalhead467]

Stop trolling, flaming and making strawmen. Head over to gamespot if that's all your argument & attitude are.

Amazonian claiming his B&W TV is the best TV ever because he's never seen any other TV

It just sounds like SC2 fans are really, really bad at gaming in general if they play the same game day in day out for such a long time.

Plus sounds like you're not really a gamer, which I suspect with many SC2 fans. If your PC can't handle SC2 all that well, then damn, stop being cheap and get a new PC, otherwise stop talking about PC games as if you have experience with them.

You're a Blizzard fan. Go you. Now lift up your shirt so they can brand you with their logo.

Maybe you don't notice because of idiotic fanboyism blinding you?

I sense absolutely no hypocrisy here.

 

[Woe Is You]

Congratulations - you were awful at DoW. If you ignore the utterly useless 2 new teams, Soul Storm was actually perfectly balanced. Guessing you either didn't play online or just weren't very good at it. PS. My 80%~ win ratio backs up my point that I know what I'm on about.
Sup Com had one expansion which actually balanced the super units & prevented nuke spam...That's not balanced how?

Let me point out that your win ratio means nothing in a discussion about game balance. Let me also point out that if we start ignoring parts of any game, you can call a game balanced based on that tiny subset. This whole paragraph of yours has zero value.

Actually no one ever asked me why I thought DoW was better - I was instantly bombarded with "NO UR WRONG!".

No, actually, a lot of us did read why you thought DoW was better. What people thought was wrong was passing off DoW as something objectively superior to Starcraft when it really does end up trying to do its own thing.

Care to elaborate or just going to put a bunch of out of context quotes together and pretend it means something....? =S

Care to elaborate why you're being deliberately obtuse when your own strawmen and no true scotsman fallacies are being pointed out? 'sides, we've had the discussion about Starcraft more than a year ago, which had you claiming how much slower Starcraft was compared to the competition. In this thread you admit that a) you haven't actually played Starcraft that much and b) it's not that slow after all when you actually did play it.

Add some ad hominems to the list and -- if you're wondering why people have problems taking you seriously, it's this.