StarCraft, Nothing But StarCraft 303
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.
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:Multiple OS Support (Score:5, Informative)
Say what you will about them, but they take cross-platform compatibility seriously.
Re:OS requirments? (Score:3, Informative)
Polished games and excellent Mac support makes for many happy Mac gamers.
Re:WTF (Score:3, Informative)
FAQ on the Site! (Score:4, Informative)
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Re:Starcraft II is all well and good... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Supply and demand, simple as that (Score:2, Informative)
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