Protoss For a Day 138
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."
Re:I love it. I won't buy it. (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Re:I love it. I won't buy it. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 can on their current system.
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...
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.
Re:Let me give orders in pause! (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't feel bad; I'm just the same for the most part.
Re:Let me give orders in pause! (Score:3, Insightful)
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. I always thought it was funny how you could have one enemy guy standing in the open, then you could move three guys near him and open fire. The more advanced designs allowed you to keep movement points reserved after your turn so a unit could expend those points to return fire during the enemy's turn. Some games allow any attacked unit a chance to counter-attack no matter how many turns were expended so three attackers will see three counter-attacks. But it just feels so artificial and funny.
I think the real problem is that twitch rules current RTS's and there are no games intended for a more sedate pace. It'd be like if cartoony action-movie shooters ruled the roost and meant you could never find reality-based shooters. At least with shooters there's room for both. Sometimes you want to play as Rambo, sometimes you want to play by the rules of physics and logic.