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Protoss For a Day
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Jul 30, 2007 10:35 AM
from the in-the-pipe-five-by-five dept.
from the in-the-pipe-five-by-five dept.
1up had a man on the ground at the announcement of StarCraft II to a legion of South Korean fans. James Mielke also had the chance to sit down with the developers of the game for a one-on-one hands-on with everything they're willing to share so far. Includes video with some new footage of the title. From the article: "Dustin Browder admitted that the Black Hole attack was something that would have to be nerfed immediately, as both he and Sigaty laughed at the sight of my entire fleet taking a nosedive in one fell swoop. As I stated earlier, there's still a lot of balancing that needs to go into the game, and this play session was one way for the developers to see what things need it the most. After all, Blizzard has been working on this game for two years already, and we were the first fresh eyes to see the game in a long time, so things that the dev team may now take for granted, are still a surprise to new players. Whether the Black Hole will be nerfed to absorb a limited number of ships, or do a specific amount of damage, or powered-down in some other way hasn't been decided, but the tide of battle will undoubtedly require slightly more skillful play than simply producing a Mothership and hitting 'Black Hole' on the enemy."
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Blizzard Announces StarCraft 2 550 comments
We'll be returning once again to the world of StarCraft, it appears, and not in the form of a Massively Multiplayer game. Blizzard has announced StarCraft 2 at their packed event in Seoul, South Korea. IGN is liveblogging the event, describing gameplay footage being played as well as full cinematics. From the description of ongoing events there are massive changes to the way the game plays, new units, a physics system within the game engine, and the capability to show over 100 units onscreen at a time. "Showing gameplay footage - Looks like protoss ships - floating over asteroid/ base structure - entering protoss ase - similar looking buildings - vespene gas still in the game - character pane shows up on right side - some protoss guy - shifts to terran bases floating on rockets over same type of territory - sill collecting crystals as resources - marines load out. Dustin is actually playing the game - nothing in the game is final." Additional coverage from Milky at 1up.
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I love it. I won't buy it. (Score:2, Interesting)
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I do agree that the requirements were high, but to say that it wouldn't run on a one year old, top of the line computer is incorrect (unless there is just something wrong with the computer itself).
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It seems to make sense, because having system requirements that amount to "buy the computer when the game comes out" would severely limit their customer base. If they design around not making it too hardware intensive -- or have settings that can be turned down and not affect gameplay -- they can ensure that almost anyone who wishes to play it c
Re:You love it... You should buy it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fortunately Blizzard typically "low balls" their system requirements to pull in the largest audience possible. Starcraft and Broodwar had very low system requirements, even at release. Warcraft, Diablo, and WoW were the same ...
In a way they are the antithesis of iD Software...
Parent
Re:You love it... You should buy it. (Score:4, Interesting)
In a way they are the antithesis of iD Software...
I'm kind of sick to death of RTS games at this point. I mean, I love the genre but I haven't seen anything innovative since Total Annihilation. My biggest beef is with the AI's. Back in the glory days of Dune 2, the top-down view was simplistic enough that you could micromanage all of your units and not feel arsed about it. As the graphics grew prettier and the maps larger, especially with isometric view in some games, it soon became an exercise in frustration to even play. I was a huge, HUGE fan of Warcraft 2 but it got a bit tedious trying to line up my missile units outside of the range of a tower to take it out, knowing that a unit that gets too close would be engaged by the tower and thus run gleefully into certain death. And how about when you order units to engage? You've got a blob of five units, they advance on the target, and the first one in range stops dead to engage. The units following behind get confused, then try to route around the guy holding up the show, then the second one in range stops, and the third one has to walk around him. By the time the blob of five are engaged, the first unit is beaten to a pulp before the target is destroyed. Smarter AI would have all of the units move into better firing positions for the given target automatically.
If any of you guys have seen the footage for World in Conflict, that's enough to make your jaw hit the floor. It's "holy fucking shit" brilliant, at least when you watch the demo movies. The only problem, yes it's all "in-game" footage, but you are NEVER going to be watching a battle from the soldier's-eye-view, you'll be up in god mode looking down clicking frantically. Dawn of War was exactly the same way, the engine could let you zoom in and enjoy the fight but you'd be slaughtered if you did that.
Now whenever I talk about this sort of thing some people say "you want the game to play itself." That's not what I'm getting at, it's more a matter of setting the pieces in motion and watching the results. In a game like Master of Orion, a planetary invasion consisted of nothing more than icons representing your guys on one side of the screen and icons representing the other guy on the other side. The computer would calculate the strength of both sides and start rolling the dice. Icons on both sides of the screen would start popping and it could actually be quite enthralling seeing whether you would come out with any troops left, probably the same fascination that comes from watching the spinning rollers on a one-armed bandit in a casino. Well, we've got the graphics these days. Why not animate that fight?
Total War seems to do this a bit. I played the Shogun game a bit and watched the demo for Medieval sputter and wheeze on my computer. I like how you are ordering about formations rather than individual units along with the modeling of morale and courage. Of course, Starcraft isn't that kind of game. It looks like Starcraft 2 is shooting to just be a graphical update of the original game. I suppose that's fair. There are more than enough fans who will pay full price for exactly that and say "thank you" to boot. But I won't be surprised if the AI is every bit as dumb as it was ten years ago.
Parent
Re:You love it... You should buy it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Blizzard purposely provides less "auto-cast" options to encourage micromanagement. It's a keystone of their game style and it's the divide between C&C/TA and Blizzard RTS's. It means there is a huge skill divide that does not exist in the "mass rush" style games like Supcom/TA/C&C/most RTS's. It's pretty much why a lot of skilled players prefer War 3/ SC to the list above. Thats why the total population stillplaying SupCom/TA/C&C all is less then half of the active player sin war 3.
The pathing AI is much better so you have less of the "running around" you had in SC or War 2. but ti's still nto perfect and it atcually become a strategy to make bases confuse th epathing. In SC it allowed you to take on an arbitrary number of melee units of the player didn't tell them to atatck the impeding object. In war 3 after 2 secnds of not beign able to atatck due to pathing they attack the nearest object which is a improvement. I suspect SC 2 will be similiar.
If you dont' like micro I guess SC 2 won't be for you.
Parent
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They have decent artists, and great FMV devs, but holy moley their in-game graphics are always so amazingly terrible its a testament to the AAAA+ gameplay
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compare War 3 to it's contempararies or Sc or WOW to it's and you'll find that despite the graphics being a bit behind it aged better due to better art dir
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If WoW was built on a stronger 3D engine with higher-quality models, it would look stellar.
Well, ok, I agree with your comment if you're talking about WoW. With regards to War3, that thing looked like ass the day it came out and it looks like ass now as well.
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lookg here [slashdot.org]
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Age of wonders 2 [www.sg.hu]
Stronghold: crusader [cheats.ru]
Warlords: battlecry [wikipedia.org]
Commandos 2 [peliplaneetta.net]
Warcraft 3 ROC [carlsguides.com]
compared to it's contempararies it held up pretty well. Considering 4/5 above used voxel/2d graphics. It was one of the few "true" 3d games of that time. Blizzard does aim low to ensure it can do 6 players of 12-30 units (72-180) on screen at a time with little to no lag On my 5 year old computer.
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Really? I rather liked War3 graphics. Or, perhaps, I should say I see nothing wrong with them, even today. What makes you feel War3 is/was a visual disaster?
Cheers,
Fozzy
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They aimed low for system req and I think the art direction help up pretty well against it's competators. I think yoru objection to them is simply a subjective style preference. You liek photo realistic they aimed for something else. I found the graphics perfectly acceptabel at the time and even now. Com
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Bad 3D is worse than good 2D, for sure. But their 2D was nowhere near as good as it could have been. Also, while it may have taken a bit more effort to keep improved visuals as unobstructive as SC's happened to be, we've seen it done countless in other games.
Why bitch ahead? (Score:5, Insightful)
And you do that, based on... what? Command and Conquer 3. It's not even the same bloody company. C&C is by Westwood, Starcraft is by Blizzard. It's like saying you'll avoid Ford cars because you had problems with a Toyota.
Blizzard games, for all their other faults they may have had, were always quite forgiving on the hardware front. Diablo 1 and 2 were still 2D games in an age when everyone was going 3D, Warcraft 3 wasn't that horribly hardware intensive either by comparison to similar games, and World Of Warcraft... let's just say I know people who've played it perfectly well on an underpowered laptop with integrated graphics. By comparison to, say, Everquest 2 which needed the graphics severely turned down even on top-end graphics cards available at the time, or City Of Villains which also needed a lot of graphics power even in the newbie villain area, WoW actually ran ok on pretty underpowered machines. As an anecdotal comparison, one of the guys with laptops had no problem in WoW except in the massively over-populated Ironforge auction house area (which at the time was the only alliance auction house, so there were _hundreds_ of players and tens of pets there), while the same laptop just choked on COV.
Mind you, I'm not saying that you should buy Starcraft 2. But it seems a bit ridiculous to dismiss it in advance, based on what _another_ company has done.
Parent
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Re: C&C3 on an older machine, or laptop? (Score:2)
Can you please tell me your specs? I just bought a laptop (HP dv6000), and I find it distressing that despite having a dual core 1.75 Ghz chip, the specs suggest I couldn't play (the C&C3 box says 2.2 Ghz min). Granted I didn't buy the Lappy for gaming, but if I can get the occasional RTS on it, I'd be happy. I'm curious if I could play the game (with
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Unfortunately, stand-alone $50 cards don't exist in the world of laptops. Your only real options with laptop gaming are from ATI or nVidia.
Blizzard != EA (Score:2)
I'd first of all give it a shot. SC2 might run just fine on current machines (which will be old machines by the time it goes gold).
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C&C3 was made by someone else so beign disappointe din EA is unrelated to SC2. And you'l
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What is "top-of-the-line" (Score:2)
Black hole attack sucks! (Score:5, Funny)
Its about 3 minutes in and it just makes them whirl around and get sucked down the drain.
Where is the spaghettification and dilation effects?
Let me give orders in pause! (Score:3, Interesting)
So I do just fine at Rise of Nations or Rise of Empires, or WH40K:DoW, but I am absolutely worthless at Warcraft or Starcraft. And, having learned this, I just don't play them any more, at all.
If they were to make it so that I could pause the game, scroll around the map, and give orders, I would probably really enjoy the game. I love RTS when they can accommodate my quirks.
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But what you are talking about is a good system that works well for multi-member RPG parties in a single-player game. It was used in Baldur's Gate and BGII to great sucess.
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Don't feel bad; I'm just the same for the most part.
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It sounds to me like the genre you're after is Turn-based Strategy. The pressure of having to get everything done quickly and cope with multiple demands on your attention are the very essence of what makes an RTS different.
Nah, he's just looking for an RTS game that allows pausing while still issuing orders.
Turn-based are not the same as RTS. The problem with turn-based is that you have tons of rules designed to make the game FEEL like it's occurring in real-time, a way of working around the limitation of not running in real-time! I can understand it when we're talking about playing a miniatures wargame since there's no computer. It always felt weird when playing it on a computer because you could do some very weird things.
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how exactly would it be "real time" if you could pause?
Part of the challenge is learning to multi task effectively.
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Try WH40K or Rise of Foo. Both allow orders and review in pause; neither has suddenly become turn-based.
I understand that part of the challenge is learning to multitask effectively. I can't. My brain won't do it; you might as well build me a game based on learning to instinctively read facial expressions.
For me, it's a question of needing an occasional chance to pause and flush my queue; I can handle
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Why not just play Civilization?
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In Civ-like games, there's weird strategies that are introduced by the fact that all actions occur in turns. In RTS games, you don't have situations where first-strike goes to whichever unit's turn it is; it's down to unit attributes. I like that, and enjoy it; it's just that the same thing that makes it a major accomplishment requiring years of training and practice for me to mostly remember that I have food in the oven makes it
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One of the things that always killed me in Warcraft was difficulty mousing fast enough and reliably enough; I could fail because I couldn't select a unit fast enough.
Some suggestions (Score:5, Informative)
If you want true task isolation together with realtime action, try a Total War game. You can either get the latest Medievil II iteration or the now-cheap Rome, Medievil or Shogun varients. The campaign, with building, recruitment and deployment are turnbased while battles are realtime. In these realtime battles, not only can you move the camera and give orders while paused, you can only have one battle and there is no base to worry about when that happens. Furthermore units are grouped into formations of 40-200 soldiers depending on type so you've only got a very finite amount to worry about (up to 20 formations and not always that many). Plus pinning an enemy flank with a couple of phalanxes then breaking them with a charge by heavy cavalry from the side makes you feel like a big man nomatter how many times you do it, but that's beside the point. Also beside the point is that its one of the only games where battle organisation counts for far more than base building, citys have limited productivity and so you've gotta make what you can produce count and the units are grouped and simulated in a way that you CAN do clever things with them such as ambushes, flanking, hit and run, encirclement and use weapons of fear and they work a lot better than a blunt charge with superior numbers.
If you wanna stick strictly in the genre though, try Supreme Commander which allows you to pan, zoom and give orders when it is paused, queue up orders, edit order queues, automate some tasks (like construction, rebuilding and air transportation) or even split your screen and point half of it at your base to give a wakeup call when something explodes in it. Its pseudo precursor Total Annihilation is similar but doesn't need the same computational grunt as SupCom.
Anyway, I hope you try either of those games, I believe they accommodate your quirks well and they are great games to boot. Another thing to consider is that both games also allow you to change the speed of time in single player battles which could help you no end.
Parent
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Given even a little pausing, though, I can really enjoy singleplayer. I'm okay with not being able to play some parts of the game, but I really like the basic structure of the RTS genre, and Warcraft in particular was excellent fun... Until the levels got too hectic for me, and I couldn't cope anymore.
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I could, at the slowest speed, pausing and giving orders and restarting constantly, just barely outperform the computer...
But in fact, even then, it was just that I made decisions better; I had the nearest peasant build something, not just a random one. I queued things up in an order that maximized income growth. Things like that; underneath it all, the computer was still pushing buttons way faster than I could.
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Really though, I would like an RTS with better friendly AI and scenarios that used it, so that I can issue general orders to competent commanders instead of having to move my units around like they were plastic army men.
Geologists are stunned (Score:4, Funny)
I still think this [cad-comic.com] is the funniest portrayal of South Korea's reaction to Starcraft II.
Protoss (Score:2, Funny)
I still think that Protoss admiral was an idiot for flying his carrier into the giant brain. I assure you, I had that battle well under control.
20 or so of those big terran mobile missle launchers'll do the trick just fine...