StarCraft II To Be Released On July 27

Blizzard announced today that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the first game in a series of three, will be released on July 27. The game will contain the Terran campaign (29 missions), the full multiplayer experience, and "several challenge-mode mini-games," with "focused goals designed to ease players into the basics of multiplayer strategies." It will launch alongside the revamped Battle.net, which we've previously discussed. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said, "We've been looking forward to revisiting the StarCraft universe for many years, and we're excited that the time for that is almost here. Thanks to our beta testers, we're making great progress on the final stages of development, and we'll be ready to welcome players all over the world to StarCraft II and the new Battle.net in just a few months."

Re:All your base are belong to us

[Anonymous Coward]

I know its a joke, but the Korean server is completely separated and blizzard's matchmaking system usually puts you against someone of your exact skill level. It surprisingly works very well at the lower levels, high level players have a larger skill difference though and don't match up as well.

Re:Not excited

[alvinrod]

The game can be quite micro-heavy, especially for certain unit types, but with the matchmaking system if you're not capable of playing at that level, you will rarely get stuck playing against someone who is and is capable of easily wiping the floor with you. The general idea behind their match-making system is that you should win about as many games as you lose so that it will always be a challenging and enjoyable experience. At least that's the theory. We'll have to see how well it actually works when the game finally launches.

If you don't care to learn those abilities, you'll likely play other people who can't or can't be bothered to learn them either.The original Starcraft tended towards high micromanagement ability requirements at the highest levels of play, but it may just be that you never got that far or even thought about how to effectively micro the vanilla units. You should check out some of the video casts of the various SC tournaments if you're interested in seeing some great high-level play. It's absolutely crazy watching some of the best players.

It's alright

[phizi0n]

I've been in the beta for a week and it's alright but I liked warcraft 1/2 and starcraft 1 more. BW and WC3 required too much micro so I didn't like them. Currently some SC2 units seem useless and some of the new ones are OP.

The matchmaking system in SC2 is working rather well and matches you against similar skilled players. There are some concerns over it because it's loosely based on the Elo rating system used for chess and other competitions, but some people argue that they've destroyed everything good that the Elo system does. Elo gives people a starting pool of points and then trades points between the winner and loser of a match and the amount traded depends on the difference between the numbers. This makes it so that a good player beating a poorly rated player will gain hardly any points whereas if they lose then they lose a lot of points because they're good but lost to someone bad, and if they're evenly skilled then a moderate number of points will be traded. Eventually you top out and reach a number that corresponds with your skill and will stay roughly the same unless skill changes. With the SC2 rating system there are 5 leagues that separate skill levels, and within each league are divisions consisting of 100 players. Each division has its own Elo ratings and if you change leagues because your skill is out of place then your rating resets and you start a new Elo rating all over again in the new league/division. There are also 'bonus' points that accumulate while you're not playing that you can then gain once you do gain, much like WoW's rested xp system. These bonus points cause inflation within each division. For these reasons you can't compare the Elo style rating between divisions or leagues, your rating only shows how good you are within your division.

Re:What I'd like to see...

[Anonymous Coward]

learn the recipe for success on a given map and then practice until they're able to apply it faster

That just doesn't work against any competent player (given the game is properly balanced). The "recipes" are like openings in chess. You can know your opening book by hearth and still suck. What goes on later in game is as much a mind game as a click-fest.

"zergling rush the bitches until Blizzard patches us"-style tactics

That's just for losers and the balance changes in the beta try to avoid that. It works for Brood War at the moment; there's no one winning strategy, the game and the community is evolving constantly, even after 10 years.

Re:bout time

[The Snowman]

Honestly, I think this may be fake.

Is Blizzard's site [blizzard.com] a fake?

I think I can safely say that Blizzard said it will be released on July 27, 2010.

For completeness, here is the press release [blizzard.com] on blizzard.com.

Re:What I'd like to see...

[Myji Humoz]

That's like saying chess appeals to folks who like memorizing openings and practicing until they're able to apply it better than the other loser they're playing up against. I'm sorry it takes practice and "skill" to not get stomped, but surely you wouldn't want to play with losers anyway eh?

At any decently high level, RTS games are a reactive series of attacks and counterattacks. Starcraft: Brood War in particular became popular in large part to how dynamic strategies became, and how much properly managing one's army matters.

Screwing with random units from game to game will just frustrate newbies and introduce an unneeded luck element.

Re:But I haven't even gotten my Mac Beta to work y

[Anonymous Coward]

I got it to run fine on my macbook. Didn't have to stress over anything even the least bit. It's crashed once or twice but...it's a beta. Given the laptop is using the 9400M chipset, I didn't expect it to deal with the game easily but it does the deed. Maybe there's something particular to your setup that's fubaring it?

Concerning balance issues, I've noticed each race favors different methods of gameplay. Much like the last game but to a larger extent. Also, considering the large gap between player ability on battlenet could result in alot of unnecessary complaining.

There's no way BootCamp will be a requirement with the release. This isn't Cedega/Transgaming/Wine/Nonsense...it's a game being released for mac by a reputable gaming company.

And before anyone yells at me for complaining about Wine, I swear I miss the joys of getting some god forsaken windows game to run on my mutant linux box of doom.

Now, I'm going to get back to being pwned by children and koreans.

Re:Finally!

[sourcerror]

You can't adopt if you're living in your mom's basement.

Re:Not excited

[2obvious4u]

Wasn't Supreme commander the sequel to Total Annihilation [wikipedia.org]? That was an awesome RTS.