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New Details For StarCraft 2's Zerg
Posted by
Soulskill
on Mon Aug 25, 2008 07:57 PM
from the expect-more-at-blizzcon dept.
from the expect-more-at-blizzcon dept.
Blizzard had a playable demo of StarCraft 2 running at Leipzig, and Kotaku's Michael McWhertor had a chance to sit down and spend some time playing the Zerg. The Zerg weren't available in previous demos; the Protoss and Terran campaigns were showcased earlier. GameSpy took the opportunity to interview two Blizzard employees about what people can expect from the game. Gameplay footage is also available which shows a Terran vs. Zerg battle. Blizzard PR rep Bob Colayco had this to say:
"One thing that's new, as you go through the campaign... you know, normally in RTS games how they start you off with a couple of units and then it's like, 'Okay, two missions later we're going to give you tanks...' One of the things we're looking at doing with StarCraft II's campaign is putting the choice more in the players' hands. So maybe you like dealing more with infantry? You can purchase those upgrades and make your marines and other infantry stronger. Or else you'll save up the credits you get from the missions to get tanks sooner than you normally could."
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StarCraft 2 Terran Gameplay, Single Player Info 107 comments
It isn't all World of Warcraft at BlizzCon this year. That little sequel they're making to StarCraft has gotten quite a bit of attention as well. Gamespot has a liveblog transcript of a StarCraft II demo. This one, unlike the last, focuses on the Terrans rather than the Protoss. Several new units and build options are described, along with a bit about the single-player campaign. The campaign is the focus of Kotaku's game coverage, starring Jim Raynor and the crew of the Hyperion. "Part of the campaign in StarCraft II will be focused on Raynor's efforts to make money but taking jobs like this one, missions that ultimately tie into a larger plot. As you earn money, those funds will be put into purchasing technology--upgrades for units and units themselves. Pardo purchased (read: unlocked) the Viking ship for his next mission. This has been done to give players control over the tech progression of the game, instead of following a locked down set of upgrades. Hiking back up to the bridge, Raynor checks out the Star Map. This is where you'll choose your missions. They're much more open ended than in the previous StarCraft campaigns. You'll be able to pick the planet or system you want to tackle next, progressing the story in your own way. Mission briefings provide the summary, objectives, bonus objectives, mission bounty, and recommended technology, so you'll have to choose which best suits your current needs and matches your current level of tech."
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I will never forgive the Zerg (Score:5, Funny)
For what they did to Kerrigan.
Re:I will never forgive the Zerg (Score:5, Funny)
Those damn zerg. *dreamy siiiiiigh*
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Me neither. I mean, what were they thinking, making her so freakin' awesome and all. Now, I can't stop thinking about her, and all other female video game protagonists have lost their appeal.
Those damn zerg. *dreamy siiiiiigh*
Don't forget about the rogue [wikipedia.org] chick in Diablo. Something about her voice makes her blow Kerrigan away. There is no way that Kerrigan could ever compete with that voice.
(There's a joke in there somewhere)
Re:I will never forgive the Zerg (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps the fact that the same person voiced both characters?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
That was Tonya Harding.
Re:I will never forgive the Zerg (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a little slow... please explain this further, what does the name "Kerrigan" have to do with "Tanya"??
Something to do with figure skating [slashdot.org].
Nor will figure skating fans forgive Jeff Gillooly (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:I will never forgive the Zerg (Score:5, Funny)
But, can you forgive the Klingons for what they did to your boy?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
For what they did to Kerrigan.
Ice skating's a tough world, bitch.
Woah, all of a sudden the Zerg are out?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
What's the rush? (Score:3, Funny)
6pool
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Linked video... (Score:5, Insightful)
...is in lower resolution than the actual original game, and then made worse by crappy encoding. You'd get a better idea for the game by firing up starcraft 1 than trying to watch this.
Re:Linked video... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/39088.html [gametrailers.com]
Parent
Re:Linked video... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/39089.html
Hi-Def video link
Parent
HD Video Link ^^^ (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The ones on the Starcraft 2 webpage use to be of acceptable quality, if it's not there yet it will get there I guess. (Not the reviewers of course, maybe he should had made it private and used Vimeo? =P)
Re:Linked video... (Score:4, Funny)
It always drove me up the wall playing with ppl who INSISTED on being Protoss and INSISTED on playing on a map with pretty much unlimited resources.
Gee whiz, fighting Protoss yet again on a map that completely negates their weakness ($$). How fun.
Hopefully they'll put in a few different balancing stats/players into this one.
Parent
Re:Linked video... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're playing Zerg with huge resources, can't you build huge numbers of hydralisks and/or mutalisks and/or guardians, instead of huge numbers of zerglings? I mean, six or eight hatcheries pumping out, say, hydralisks and guardians gets pretty nasty pretty fast. Or heck, Ultralisk rush. It seems to me that it's not so much that Protoss has to spend more money, but that they make fewer, more powerful, more expensive units. But then I'm no champion.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
On maps with lots of resources you might be building several things at once early on. That's several less peons terran and zerg have harvesting.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah that's true, that gets them going earlier.
Re:Linked video... (Score:4, Interesting)
IANAGP, but to my understanding, until the game engine (specifically in 3d games) is finalized and tuned and tweaked, the frames per second sucks ass, so its not a surprise the showing the game off in lower res so that it runs smoother. Judging only from WoW, they have a firm understanding on large resolutions, and wide-screen, God bless 'em.
J
Parent
Re:Linked video... (Score:4, Interesting)
You're missing something. Blizzard intentionally limited the original Diablo, Starcraft and Diablo II to small (even for the period) resolutions. Why? Not for optimization. To force a 'level playing field'.
I've never understood the obsession with competitive Starcraft. It was a clickfest game with very little overall strategy. Age of Empires II and Myth: the Fallen Lords were more along the lines of games that put the Strategy in RTS.
Parent
bullcrap (Score:5, Insightful)
in starcraft you have 3 different races with TOTALLY different units all having totally different abilities.
no unit has a clear anti unit. there are many different units that can stand against and be an anti unit of a particular unit because of their different abilities.
and this makes the game an infinite variation of strategy. there are countless ways to win a matchup. you can go mass production, but if your opponent has good micro (management, meaning using units very effectively individually) and uses very little number of units and their abilities perfectly, you are totally screwed.
no sir, either you dont know zit about strategy, or havent really played starcraft by giving its due.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
no sir, either you dont know zit about strategy, or havent really played starcraft by giving its due.
I know I'll probably get the modstick for this, but if I wanted to play a strategy game I'd go play Total Annihilation, not kekeke zerg rush ^_____^
Re:bullcrap (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Big shift in the gameplay dynamics away from 'simcity, rush nuke' to something a little more reliant on going out and controlling territory. And make experimentals and nukes a bit more 'usable, but not instant victory' which as someone who likes a 'proper' lategame, rather than a 'he who nukes first wins' suits me well.
Re:bullcrap (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like you're looking for turn based strategy games. You can easily take 50 actions in a game of civilization within a single turn, and a turn is simply a unit of gametime. RTS games have multiple turns per second, so if you expect to execute the same complexity of strategy, then yes, you'll have to be able to perform numerous actions per second.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Strangely every good Starcraft player I've met seems to have restricted himself (it's always a him, strange huh?) to a handful of proven tactics and apart from that spent most of his time practicing to become really really fast at clicking and ordering his units around, basically what you complained about other games encouraging.
Myself? I'm still looking for a game that's essentially Command & Conquer but that emphasizes long drawn out battles that last for hours and where you actually have to do things
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You need to manage your economy, scout your enemy base locations, scout which units he was building so you could build the appropriate counter units, and then control your army closely for tactical combat, by taking injured units to the back for repairs, drawing enemy forces into geographic bottlenecks so
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sprite-based games were obviously limited to that resolution, because with the technology sprites could not be scaled for arbitrary resolutions.
They didn't have to scale it, they could have simply let you see more onscreen at once. They didn't to keep a level playing field.
Ooh ooh I know this one! (Score:2)
1) Send Overlords to scout for enemy bases.
2) Crank out Zerglings as fast as you can.
3) ???
4) Profit!
If I could change the resolution (Score:5, Interesting)
If I could change the resolution on good old StarCraft, I'd be very happy.
I don't want a 3d look. It seems to make things harder to see and it's a waste of processor power. I just want to be able to see more of the map on the StarCraft I have.
Howabout making a StarCraft 1.9? Blizzard could do that for almost nothing, compared to this new release, and people like me would mail in the checks to get it.
Re:If I could change the resolution (Score:4, Insightful)
WC III uses 3D as well but since only the almost-from-the-top-view is the only good one everyone use that and it look pretty flat. Sure you can look around some stuff, hide a unit behind a tree or building somewhat and it makes ground units very hard to click on when there are lots of air units on top but I'd say it works well.
It doesn't look as cool as on screenshots from a lower angle and more up close but it works very well for playing the game.
Also I guess it's easier to support more resolutions and aspect ratios and such when it's rendered vs uses animations.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
hide a unit behind a tree or building somewhat and it makes ground units very hard to click on when there are lots of air units on top but I'd say it works well.
You can hit insert or delete to temporarily turn your camera roughly 120 cw or ccw (in its horizontal plane). You can also hit page up and page down to raise or lower your camera. These camera adjustments makes it much harder to hide your units behind your opponent's UI limitations. I suspect Blizzard learned something from watching SC replays ;)
Re: (Score:2)
They don't want to do that. They're even constraining SC2 to have a limited field of vision where regardless of screen resolution you can't zoom out too much.
Personally, I hate that and want to be able to see everything at once, but they feel that players should be limited in this fashion. I doubt you'd see the original SC updated to allow zoom out for the same reason.
Re: (Score:2)
and people like me would mail in the checks to get it.
Only problem is that you would mail those checks to a Swedish bay affected by global warming :p
Video is terrible quality (Score:3, Funny)
I could see there was a Zerg base and the player was building some Zerg stuff (could barely see what it was). Then some grey blobs came in and pointed some yellow flashing triangles and then the player played poorly, made some Zerg that ate only some of the marines. Then something happend and some tanks came. I couldn't watch anymore because my eyesight was going from trying to focus on the blurry video.
Here it looked like this:
"OOO {iii"
And now you've seen the crummy movie.
Oh god find the red dot! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I've set Thunderbird to use that half-second chirp as a you-got-mail ....
indicator. I still jump whenever it goes off
I don't think Starcraft2 will have the same appeal (Score:2)
The video looks great (the High Def one that AC linked for us). But I worry about what the content from TFS. The reason that Starcraft didn't give you tanks until a few levels in, was so you could learn just a few new things each level. The first 3 levels of every game as complicated as Starcraft should be learning. Even if you've played dozens of RTS before, including Starcraft, you're still going to have to learn the new units, upgrades, and controls.
It looks like Blizzard is going for the "RPG" element t
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt this is ever a real problem in Warcraft 3 / TFT. Not once did I ever feel the need to replay a level simply so my hero could get more powerful. Unless you intentionally avoid using them they get plenty powerful enough even through casual use. If you actually got stuck as a result of this then I wo
Hmmm... (Score:2)
What, like Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends? Woopie do.
Video! (Score:3, Insightful)
Custom AI (Score:3, Interesting)
I've always wanted to be able to customize the units' AI. Imagine using an interface like Yahoo pipes or Quartz Composer for example, to make the damn ghosts cloak when attacked.
I think it could be very positive for the game, and, it could teach the youngsters a lot about logic an programming.
Re: (Score:2)
SC: Ghost was also being developed by another studio, and SC 2 is in house.