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Starcraft II is all well and good... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Starcraft II is all well and good... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Starcraft II is all well and good... (Score:5, Funny)
1-a-click 2-a-click 3-a-click 4-a-click enter FOR THE SWARMMMM!!!~!~~!
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10 years and still waiting... (Score:3, Funny)
Subscription fees for Starcraft 2 multiplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Subscription fees for Starcraft 2 multiplayer? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Starcraft II is all well and good... (Score:5, Funny)
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Starcraft still looks good (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Starcraft II is all well and good... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Who cares about XP and Vista? (Score:5, Informative)
Like most recent Blizzard releases, it will also ship simultaneously for the Mac [starcraft2.com].
Re:Who cares about XP and Vista? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Who cares about XP and Vista? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Who cares about XP and Vista? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Who cares about XP and Vista? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Blizzard's games have such large sales numbers that even their Mac sales are significant and easily warrant it. If the number of Linux gamers (that don't use Wine/Cedega and don't dual boot to Windows) was significant - I'd imagine they'd have a Linux version as well.
Re:Who cares about XP and Vista? (Score:5, Insightful)
Money.
Money.
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.
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Re:Supply and demand, simple as that (Score:4, Informative)
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
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Plus it does not run on $(OPENSOURCEOS)
Re:Who cares about XP and Vista? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:Who cares about XP and Vista? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Game resolution (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Game resolution (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Game resolution (Score:4, Informative)
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
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Re:Game resolution (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Game resolution (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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FAQ on the Site! (Score:4, Informative)
Diversity in the races (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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When they said "will run on both XP" (Score:5, Funny)
My only request(s)... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I'd also like to see combat be more deadly, where one or two shots would kill a basic unit, but many shots don't h
Re:My only request(s)... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:My only request(s)... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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In your example, if you wanted two marines and two ghosts, you'd select two barracks, and click marine, ghost, marine, ghost. The units would be assigned barracks one, then two, then probably one because marines have shorter train times, then possibly one again because maybe it takes longer for
pretty, but the same (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Terrain (Score:3, Insightful)
And yes, there were only two noticeable levels of terrain shown, but there might be more possible on different maps. Heck, even original S
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After the nuclear strike, there are indeed craters. But just like the debris they disappear after a few seconds and did not appear to effect where the units were able to walk. Indeed, it would be stupid if it had that functionality because people could nuke chokepoints. Unlike
Not to complain... (Score:3, Interesting)
I know the trend is toward dumbing down technology so it isn't as "scary" to the average user but how about everyone trend upward instead? How about we INCREASE the intelligence of the average user by giving him/her a good system and encouraging them to LEARN? Wow, what a concept? A highly educated populace that isn't afraid of technology! Everybody gets smarter!!
Guess that would mean the techno-elite like Bill would lose their place in the world and innovation might have to happen... hmmmm, guess that highly educated populace might not come to fruition after all. Bah, it feels like Monday all over again and I needed a rant
Re:Multiple OS Support (Score:5, Informative)
Say what you will about them, but they take cross-platform compatibility seriously.
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Polished games and excellent Mac support makes for many happy Mac gamers.
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Mac gamers? Really? Sounds like Paint graphic designers.
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GOML (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day if you wanted a game on your Mac you had very few options. Blizzard, Bungie, Maxis, Broderbund and MacSoft were about it. If you had a Mac back then and gamed you knew these names.
Even if a game was ported to the Mac by some other developer, it was usually horrendously buggy, slow, and you could only play with other Mac players (I'm looking at you Age of Kings).
These facts didn't really begin to change until the iMacs came out and Macs became "cool", or at least popular after some fashion. Of course, it sort of went hand in hand with the decline of PC gaming.
Anyway, get off my lawn.
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Re:internet play (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Mac version? (Score:5, Informative)
There will be one version that works on both Mac and PC. Buy the game and you're set either way.
As someone who uses both, Blizzard has my undying praise for not making me buy two different copies. I will buy every non-MMS the company makes for this alone. (Not to mention that make awesome RTS games.)
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Re:Smoking in Space (Score:4, Funny)
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One line of dialogue (Score:5, Funny)
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.'"
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