StarCraft, Nothing But StarCraft

Now that the news has been out for a few days and game journalists have had a chance to chat with the folks at Blizzard, there are a number of new stories detailing parts of the StarCraft II world. A massive press briefing about the game fills in a few more details on the game; only three factions, no new races, the game is built with competitive play in mind, and will run on both XP and Vista. For more nitty-gritty elements, the company held panel discussions on the art design and gameplay elements of the upcoming game. Video from the event is now widely available as well; check out the official trailer, some example gameplay, or the epic 22-minute long developer walkthrough.

Starcraft II is all well and good...

...but what I'm really looking forward to is Diablo III. clickclick clickclickclickclickclick clickclick clickclickclick

Re:Starcraft II is all well and good...

As opposed to Starcraft 2. clickclick clickclicklclickclickclick (spacebar) clickclickclick click.

Re:Starcraft II is all well and good...

7-s-z 8-s-z 9-s-z draaaag ctrl+1 click draaaag ctrl+2 click draaaag ctrl+3 click draaaag ctrl+4 click

1-a-click 2-a-click 3-a-click 4-a-click enter FOR THE SWARMMMM!!!~!~~!

Subscription fees for Starcraft 2 multiplayer?

One thing this article didn't mention: the Blizzard reps were asked whether there would be subscription fees attached to battle.net, and they refused to comment. Not even a peep.

They were willing to give "tight-lipped" responses to plot spoilers, but this issue they wouldn't comment on at all.

I can see why they'd want to keep silent if subscription fees are in the works for battle.net, as it would put a damper on the hype cyclone that's been stirred up in gaming news since its announcement. I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't just deny it if the option weren't at least on the table.

Considering this game's market position (a blockbuster RTS hasn't been released in years and obviously there is great interest), Vivendi's/Blizzard's great post-RTS success with WoW, Starcraft's international appeal (especially in the launch country, South Korea, where subscription-based games across all genres make up the majority of the PC game market) and other previously non-subscription genres testing the waters (e.g. Hellgate: London [wikipedia.org], the "spiritual successor to Diablo" made by ex-Blizzard employees)... Starcraft 2 seems like the perfect property to add a monthly fee to -- even if it did rouse some negative sentiment, it would likely still be successful.

I strongly suspect there's some form of fee in the works. If not, it would be nice if Blizzard would make that clear.

Re:Subscription fees for Starcraft 2 multiplayer?

I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't just deny it if the option weren't at least on the table.

If they deny false rumors, then refusal to deny anything else becomes instant confirmation. So, unless it's your intention to broadcast all your plans to everyone ahead of time, you most both refuse to confirm true rumors and refuse to deny false ones. You must do both, you can't just do one or the other, or else there's no point in doing either.

Re:Starcraft II is all well and good...

Get in line. We've been clamoring for this on the SC longer than you have! You'd think with the massive popularity of the game that either some hacker would have figured out how to mod it, or Blizzard would have tweaked it to support higher resolutions by now.

Re:Starcraft II is all well and good...

As one of my friends said way back when even 1024x768 was thought to be miraculous about 320x200: "Pixels the Size of my Hand!"

Who cares about XP and Vista?

will run on both XP and Vista.

Like most recent Blizzard releases, it will also ship simultaneously for the Mac [starcraft2.com].

Re:Who cares about XP and Vista?

I have to wonder why Blizzard consistently releases their titles for Mac.. I buy all their games as a result, but what's their motivation? (surely the sales are far far lower)..

Re:Who cares about XP and Vista?

That's a good question. I suppose it could be a few things - it forces them to develop better code by targetting several platforms, maybe they've been using the same tools over the years, and the tools make it easy to target the Mac as well, maybe they've sold enough Mac products in the past to make it profitable to continue to do so (though it's hard to support this theory - recent releases have contained the Mac/Win binaries on the same disc - maybe they could tell by battle.net/World of Warcraft connections just how many of each platform are connecting), or maybe they just love the Mac platform. Regardless of the reason, Blizzard should be applauded for the effort, and other devs should take notice.

Re:Who cares about XP and Vista?

Blizzard has said on multiple occasions that one of the primary reasons they release on both Mac and PC is quality. After farming out [I think it was] Starcraft's port to a 3rd party company, and having numerous problems and delays, they developed their own in-house port team for [maybe it was] diablo II. Working on both platforms allows them to find/fix more bugs and make a more solid product on both platforms.

Some bugs will exist on both platforms, but reproduce easier on a particular one, so developing on PC (which is what I assume they do) while doing a concurrent port for Mac improves the end quality of both products.

I'm a bit blurry on which game's porting they were miffed about, leading to performing the next major project in-house, so replace the two game titles above with ones that make sense to you.

At any rate, I'm looking forward to the big collector's edition box, and playing Starcraft II on my mac.

Re:Who cares about XP and Vista?

Firstly, Blizzard has a long history of supporting Macs. From the very first WarCraft to WoW, they've always released Mac versions. Given the small number of Mac developers in the old days, that earned Blizzard a place in the home of every Mac gamer.

Secondly, there simply wasn't competition. Blizzard didn't need to work hard on advertising because there was nothing else for people to buy. If you wanted an RTS on the Mac, you bought WarCraft or StarCraft. The other options were buggy, poorly ported, or otherwise incompatible with their PC brethren.

Lastly, they are very good at game design. It's easy for them to program in such a way that a Mac version is barely an effort, as most of the data and code is stored and written in such a way as to be platform inspecific. It's good practice to begin with, and Blizzard does a good job of it.

Re:Who cares about XP and Vista?

I have to wonder why Blizzard consistently releases their titles for Mac.

Money.

I buy all their games as a result, but what's their motivation?

Money.

(surely the sales are far far lower).

Sales are lower? Lower than what, the number of potential buyers if they don't support the Mac?

Do you have any doubt that Startcraft 2 will be among the top 20 titles of the year? Blizzard doesn't have any doubt. Now take a look at the top 20 titles of 2006. How many of them currently offer a Mac version? Gee, pretty much all of them do. Why do you suppose that is? Maybe because it is profitable?

The real question is "why wouldn't a develop make a Mac version?" The answer is, it costs sore up front to build nice, portable code. If the initial investment is a big concern and you don't know if there will be a payoff, it sometimes makes sense to cut corners and develop just for DirectX+Windows. Then, if your game is a flop, you've lost less money. If your game is a success, you can shell out to port the code. The thing is, this latter method, costs more money overall than just writing portable code. Thus, any company that is sure their game will be successful (Blizzard, Id, etc.) tend to plan for the Mac version from the onset. There are a few exceptions to this rule, almost all of whom are owned by Microsoft.

Re:Supply and demand, simple as that

Civilization - not RTS
Warlords - not RTS
Company of Heroes - Gamespy's 2006 game of the year - not on the Mac
Age Of Empires III - Gamespy's Best RTS of 2005, not 2006.

0 for 3

RTS games actually seem to have low support on the Mac, not sure why

Re:Who cares about XP and Vista?

This has been bugging me for the last couple of days.
Mac's run some sort of UNIX, don't they?
Does mac have DirectX, or what graphics library is blizzard using?
If it compiles for mac, why dosen't it compile for any other *nix?
(as always, by *nix i mean linux)

In short... Yes, the guts of Mac OS X will be familiar to anyone with a UNIX background. No, Mac doesn't have Direct X. It has OpenGL for 3D graphics, and various other libraries which manage other Direct X features such as sound and input.

There are many programs which, if they are working fine on Mac OS X, they will work just fine without any trouble on Linux or BSD or some other common *nix. A game is pretty much a shining example of a program where I would not expect that to be true. (We don't know for sure that SC2 wouldn't build on some additional platforms -- I just expect that it wouldn't.) When making a game you will generally use some platform specific code for the UI, graphics, low level audio handling, etc. A port to Linux might not be very difficult, but it would still require some work to rip out the Mac sound code and replace it with ALSA, and to replace the Quartz window management code with X11 code.

So, in short, for many types of programs it doesn't matter if the guts of an OS share a lot in common. There are some programs where the guts can be very different and it will work without any trouble, and others which rely mostly on higher level libraries and don't really care that the implimentation of some particular syscall is the same between two different platforms.

Re:Who cares about XP and Vista?

Mac OS X has a BSD/unix/posix layer, but there's a lot of other stuff (Quartz, Aqua, display PDF, cocoa, carbon, etc) involved.

A chainsaw and a car both run on gasoline and oil, but I wouldn't ride a chainsaw.

Game resolution

From all the screenshots and demos it looks like very little of the battlefield is visible at a time. This is one thing I didn't like about Starcraft, but I understood because it ran at such a low resolution. I hope Starcraft II supports higher resolution or different battlefield zoom levels. Scrolling around all the time can be a pain in the ass.

Re:Game resolution

From all the screenshots and demos it looks like very little of the battlefield is visible at a time. This is one thing I didn't like about Starcraft, but I understood because it ran at such a low resolution.

Heh, I still habitually flick the scroll-wheel on my mouse whenever I boot up a game of Starcraft because I feel as though I'm zoomed in much too closely! I hope that SC2 will have a much greater (i.e. actually has one) zoom function, but that the demos are so closely zoomed in order to show unit details.

Now what I'd really like to see is multi-monitor support that would give me a 2D map on my second monitor instead of the little minimap in the corner. SupCom kinda fired my imagination as to how useful that can be in an RTS. I rather suspect, however, that such a feature won't be seen because of the focus of competitive play and the lack of a second screen for many players.

Re:Game resolution

The developer walkthrough is running at a 16x9 resolution, which I found to be quite strange since widescreen monitors are 16x10; I assume it was set up that way to match a widescreen projector rather than a monitor. The screenshots at IGN are all 4x3. This probably means the game is designed to run at any resolution and aspect ratio. In 3D games, though, the resolution is irrelevant to the size of objects on the screen. You're interested in the zoom level, and it doesn't look like that will be something you'll be able to modify.

Scrolling around can be a pain, but zooming around would probably be much worse. The developers for Starcraft 2 cited the zoom camera in Supreme Commander as being one of the things that held it back from being a competitive game. Good Starcraft players don't generally find panning to be a hindrance because there are a large number of hotkeys that can help you navigate around the map.

Holding ALT and pressing a number will center the view on that control group, as will double tapping the number. Holding CTRL and pressing F2 to F4 will save the current view to that function key, and pressing that function key will restore it to the saved view. Pressing space after any event will center the view on that event. Clicking the unit photo in the UI centers the view on the currently selected units. We'll likely see nearly identical hotkeys in Starcraft 2. At tournament levels, some players use the arrow keys to pan, because the half-second it takes to move the mouse to the edge of the screen leaves your units at the hands of the enemy for far too long ;-)

Re:Game resolution

The reason is because it slows down your control over the battlefield. The unit proportions in Starcraft were designed with a static camera in mind; that means battlecruisers, which in reality would be enormous ships, are really only six or so marines long on screen. This means you can individually control your marines and your battlecruisers simultaneously without worrying about the zoom level; you can give split-second decisions to each of your units, and the game view lends itself perfectly to that.

On the other hand, Supreme Commander was designed with a zoom camera in mind, which means they took the liberty of using more realistic proportions for their units. In theory you could control all your troops on the same zoom level, but in reality the zoom camera is anything but optional; the unit proportions force you to zoom in and out to give your troops individual tactical orders. It makes even the simplest tactical commands, such as focus firing, difficult, tedious, and extremely slow to execute.

Re:Game resolution

No, they didn't. You could change the elevation of the camera for a different vantage, but it always preserved the same distance from the ground at the center of the screen. The result is that you got a sort of shoulder-level zoom, that wasn't at all useful when playing, but could be kind of fun when watching replays.

One of the advantages of rendering the game in 3d is that different resolutions and battlefield scales are easy to implement. Allowing people to zoom in and out like in Total Annihilation would be a big thing. It's not a decision to be made lightly. I'm sure Blizzard will consider (or has considered) it.

FAQ on the Site!

Guys, right on the FAQ at www.starcraft2.com , they answer the question, of course there will be support for OSX. http://www.starcraft2.com/faq.xml [starcraft2.com] It is listed under their "Technical Aspects" area.

Diversity in the races

The Protoss Mothership will have not 'equivalent' in that the Terran and Zerg have no super unit that they can only have one of, but they will have counters. This is the kind of difference in races I want to see. A real difference in the build structure, the buildings, and the units means more variety of tactics and more fun. I can forgive the lack of a new race if they really do a good job differening the three normal races. Rather than having similar tech trees, I hope to see a complete dichotomy between the three. The recent Rise of Legends is a pretty good example of this, although there could still be more difference. In RoL, switching between races for the first time usually leaves you completly lost and confused, but once you get past the names and images, they still maintain a similar tech tree between the races, with only a handful of major differences in the building (granted those differences are deep rooted in the different stragies of each race, but there could have been more.)

Starcraft already has a good bit of differentiation between the races, but there could be so much more. I could see each of the three races' buildings and tech trees taking on more characteristics of the races' themselves. Protoss should still be a strong, yet immoble build race, though the flexable teleportation and mobile pylons do serve to balance overall immobility. Terrans could be mobile, but more modular than before, with more CC addon slots and types and perhaps more addons for other buildings. Let the terrans be flexable with enough mobility as before but at the cost of the flexability the abandoned addons would provide. For instance the terrans could have access to different unit types and enhance units in different ways depending on what addons are activated. Perhaps the Reaper would be active with one addon to the barracks, but a different addon allows for medics. The Zerg have some awesome building tricks as it is; I don't know of anyother game (except WCIII) which you lose a harvester to build their buildings. But the Zerg could do more; perhaps encourage the player to expand the creep far and wide by giving an extra larva spawn at each creep colony to enhance the overwhelming force and plague-like gameplay nature of the zerg. The Zerg should be all about expanding, flexability and mobility; overwhelming forces and expanding across the whole of the map in infestation as they go.

Re:Diversity in the races

I am glad that the developers have mentioned that they wanted to get away from the click-fest model of gameplay and move more towards commanding groups. I love starcraft, but the micromanaging of individual units is the part that I hate the most. I would rather just have some kind of 'build order' that functions like a script. My units get busy creating the town, and then I create groups and assign missions. When things get hairy, I step in and micromanage. Meanwhile other objectives and missions take place on their own.

I always thought that the races should be more differentiated by their building and scout types. As it stands in SC, Terrans and Protoss are basically cloned in terms of their buildings and workers. You have a base, and you have workers. You build another building for different types of warriors. Zerg are a little different as far as workers becoming buildings and larvae becoming warriors, but the building tech tree is basically the same.

Zerg should be more swarming, with less individual AI and abilities. Just mass numbers. Protoss should be slow and powerful, with a few large, lumbering ships. The humans should be a patchwork of different unit types working together in mixed groups.

I always looked at it like this. What would each race want to do, and how would it help their perceptions?

What would Protoss want to do? Fill the screen with Pylons. It would be cool if Pylons had a synergistic effect, where two or more pylons covered a greater range than an individual pylon. The Protoss objective, then, would be to arrange pylons so that they would provide cross-coverage with all of your buildings. Protoss could see inside the energy field of any pylon on the screen. The greater the synergistic energy field, the greater the sight range.

The Zerg would want to fill the screen with creep. Connected creep would provide map sight throughout the connection.

Humans would be the most micromanaged, but the most flexible. They can build anywhere, they don't need pylons or creep. However, they would also have the most limited sight.

When they said "will run on both XP"

I thought they meant experience points...

internet play

"Pardo also suggested that Warcraft III might have been a more forgiving game for beginners--differences in skill levels seemed less pronounced in that game. The VP said that in Starcraft II, there will be many more nuances that will separate highly skilled players from beginners, and good players from great ones"

So it's going to be crap online then? People don't like getting beaten. They partcicularly don't like getting beaten outright by players who, in the grand scheme of things, are only slightly better than themselves. Trying to make that happen more will just make multiplayer starcraft rubbish. Here's hoping they do a map editor to rival War3's, we can then have enjoyable custom maps at least.

Re:internet play

So it's going to be crap online then? People don't like getting beaten. They partcicularly don't like getting beaten outright by players who, in the grand scheme of things, are only slightly better than themselves. Trying to make that happen more will just make multiplayer starcraft rubbish. Here's hoping they do a map editor to rival War3's, we can then have enjoyable custom maps at least.

Are you new to online play in general? If your significantly behind in the skill curve then you can either play similiarly skilled friends or play and lose a lot to gain more skill. It's true of all games. Blizzard RTS's tend to focus on "skill" over "strategy" but I think the gridation of skill is a lot smoother then you think.

It's apparent you want skill to matter less. A person who masters a few keys skills will win over those without them. Preserving units with low health, the ability to focus fire and good special ability targetting are skills that you need. If your missing this control you will lose to someone with that control 100% of the time. Once you master those skills you would then move from Noob to Newb. A noob is one is is persistantly bad who does not improve with practice because they beligerantly cling to the way they think it should be player. A newb is simply someone who need practice. If you think the system is insurmountable then you are a noob.

The amount of skill needed is fairly low but if you can't grasp the basics nothing can help you. Now once you grasp these basics then it's all strategy. For instance I have a perfect record against my cousin. I'm 73 : 0 against him in war 3. The difference isn't micro. I have decent micro skills but nothing special. He has awe inspiring micro. He clicks and manage so many groups at a time that I cannot win battle with even numbers of troops. If we are even I would lose and frequently lose skrimishes during a game. However I have much better big picture strategey and despite losing a few battle I win the war through better resource management, expansion/expansion denial, ability mix, and recon.

My only request(s)...

This isn't some lame complaint about how it doesn't run on an OS that nobody runs.

I hope that Blizzard quits defining 'skill' as how fast a player can click, especially when we're using the mouse to play. I don't mean to overstate this - the better player is going to win, usually. But it is very telling that pro SC1 players measure clicks per second. And while it is 'athletic' in one sense, I am not fond of risking carpal tunnel syndrome just so I can be good at a computer game.

The most glaring aspect of this is in the limitation of units that can be selected at once. If you watch the gameplay videos, there are a huge number of zerglings that attack simultaneously. How backwards is it that although that is feasible in Starcraft (probably not to that scale) it is a huge pain in the ass? In order to do it you need to separate them out into groups of 12, and assign them to number keys along the top. To attack, you'd hit the 1 key, then hit a, and click behind the attack point. Now, you need to repeat that step for every group. The first group will get there slightly before the others because they have a head start, which is inefficient if you're trying to swarm the enemy. The natural thing would be to double click on the zerglings, and have them ALL be selected at once. I'm glad to see that Rob Pardo is working on SC2, but I know he has strong feelings on this sort of thing. I can't recall the exact reason, but I believe the cap is in SC1 for the purpose of 'encouraging smaller battles.' Sorry, but if they've played it at all, it just doesn't work that way. People get into bigass battles all the time, that is half the fun of SC1. And it is aggravating to know that the UI doesn't scale with the scope of battles. Oftentimes, you don't have control over how big the battle gets.

I want to focus on the action, not the fifty inane things needed to sustain the action. I understand and appreciate that some of it has to happen, but it can be rather unpleasant sometimes. One example of this is building units. In particular, you should be able to build multiple unit production buildings, issuing build requests and they are load-balanced between the two, i.e. if I want two marines, and I have two barracks, I should be able to select both barracks, and ask for two marines. Both barracks would build one simultaneously. Currently, the Blizzard games allow you to queue, but do not load-balance in this way. If you wanted to do what I just described, you need to select each building individually. More clicks, more thought needed to accomplish a common goal. Another example is unit queuing. This is fairly common among RTS games now, but it is a shame that the Blizzard games effectively penalize you for using it. I say this because they deduct the unit cost when you queue the unit - not when the unit starts being built. For the period of time between the queue and the unit being built, you have fewer resources available to expend in the event of an emergency. (The interesting thing is you are not charged for upkeep of the queued unit until it starts production.) The hyperactive player who can remember to build units right when they come out does not suffer from having less available resources. In the event of a financial emergency, they can divert resources without needing to stop the queue of units.

Nevertheless, I have high hopes for this game, and will probably upgrade my PC to play.

Re:My only request(s)...

I am inexperienced. I'd love to enjoy the game in all its technical details, but it is such a pain in the ass to play. You do not need to tell me what 'pro' players do. Of course they play at maximum efficiency. The thing is, I don't want to be 'good' at precision clicking on units, I want to be good at the actual game portion of it.

You point out the group limit isn't a hindrance because there is a workaround. Sounds more like a tacit admission that it is artificial. Alt-clicking does not completely solve the problem, you are still issuing multiple commands when one would suffice. In regard to load balancing, it'd be only among the buildings currently selected. You do not want to limit the options available to a player or force them to work in a certain way. Having it automatically work on all buildings of a certain type would be asinine. I am no stranger to hotkeying the buildings, or placing them properly. I just find the UI shortcuts provided by Blizzard to be incapable of handling the sheer number of disparate tasks that need to be done to play Starcraft at any sort of decent level.

I am not sure how this is making it a less competitive game. The more the UI aids the user in doing tedious things, the more fun it is to play. This has nothing to do with dumbing down the game. Like I said earlier, I won't weep at all if the excessive mouse skills are no longer mandatory to play. I already use the mouse too much during the day at my tech job.

Re:My only request(s)...

I have to agree with the original poster. I played for awhile and was fairly good. Nonetheless these difficulties in unit training, queuing, and unit selecting were mostly not intended. No one at blizzard said, "Hey, lets substitute in some bad UI design that a more seasoned player can overcome to beat his opponents."

These tricks you've learned are crutches. You are apparently good at using crutches. You like them because you are better at using crutches than the average player, but don't think for a minute that these crutches are part of the game or that they enhance game play in the least.

I would like to see resources stay unused until unit starts building. Ability to make command centers rally their scvs on resources instead of sitting there. To select multiple buildings at once and hotkey them and use them to train. To be able to queue future commands on units that are in the process of building something. To research upgrades one after another in order. To allow infinite unit selection (already done). To queue units that aren't yet available while an advanced structure is building or upgrading. An easier way to select similar units that are mixed in a big blob of different units. A defend as well as a follow command. None of these is game breaking, but they allow you to get the base building done and forget about it for a couple minutes to manage combat or expansion.

I do not want scripting capability that some people are stupidly advocating. Anything that could be done in the background besides simple key rearrangement would be detrimental to barrier to entry and professional play. I also don't want it to start anticipating things like building overlords when it thinks you need them.

Smoking in Space

I watched the High Definition trailor and I was impressed with the graphics of it, but the Terrian Marine smoking a cigar the whole time the machines installed his suit was a little hard to get. Plus at the end of the trailor, his space suit's visor closes with that damn cigar still in his mouth....I'm no rocket scientist...but it seems like that'd be a bad idea to seal yourself in a spacesuit with limited oxygen and a cigar...

Re:Smoking in Space

Sure beats the vespene gas that would be generated in the suit after eating at the intergalactic taco bell.

One line of dialogue

In the movie Thank You for Smoking [imdb.com] the lobbyist goes to Hollywood to talk to an agent about placing cigarettes in movies. The agent mentions a screenplay set on a space station and suggests a scene with the main characters smoking cigarettes after sex.

The lobbyist says: "Sounds great! But wouldn't smoking in an all oxygen environment be dangerous?"

The agent responds: "I guess so. But it's an easy fix. Just one line of dialogue, 'Thank God they invented the whatchamacallit device.'"

pretty, but the same

Still no appreciable terrain, just two non-deformable levels flat as a griddle. Units still pretty much just walk up and stand still while they grind each other down. Everything still explodes cleanly with no wreckage to block the way or mark the battle. Nothing in the demo resembling high level orders ("attack and move" doesn't constitute high level order).

I guess Blizzard is smart to not mess with a formula that works, but the operative word here is "formula". I guess I can wait til it's in the bargain bin.

It would be out already...

... but Blizzard kept getting told to build more pylons.