StarCraft II Closed Beta Begins 268
Blizzard announced today that the multiplayer beta test for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is now underway. The client downloader is available through Battle.net for people who have received invites, and the system requirements have been posted as well. A list of known issues is up on the official forums. StarCraft II and the revamped Battle.net are planned for release "in the first half of 2010."
Been so long (Score:2)
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It was at Blizzcon. I believe they gathered enough info there to do more work, and will release that beta when all the classes are finished.
Re:Moar liek BlizCOON 2k10. Vivendi sux donkyballs (Score:5, Funny)
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Mescaline is a psychedelic stimulant with subjective effects similar to LSD, magic mushrooms, and MDMA. To wit: morphing colors, compassion and understanding, creative thoughts. Pretty much the exact opposite of belligerence.
I think you might have mescaline confused with destructive drugs, like alcohol and/or PCP.
Re:Been so long (Score:5, Informative)
StarCraft II - May 19, 2007
Diablo 3 - June 28, 2008
Although, it would not be inconceivable for Blizzard to have done that. They are all about taking as much time as it takes to get things done and have never shied away from pushing a title or patch back in order to ensure it was as polished as possible. This is why all of their games kick ass and kill Koreans imo. They go for quality over cutting content for a early release (KOTR2) or a pretty release date (Hellgate).
They don't accounce dates (Score:2)
Unless you mean when they told people they were going to make a sequel.
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hellgate was rushed by the publisher because they wanted to see the monies, unfortunately unpolished mmo-like product usually doesn't get a second chance and the game failed. Blizzard is unique because they are immune to the hard gamedev reality thanks to endless stream of money from WoW. If there was no WoW they would be in trouble, after all SC2 is in development for 7 or 8 years already.
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Maybe they didn't like the WC3 engine, and wanted something better?
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His point was that Blizzard takes the time to do it right, not to refer to using w3s engine for sc2
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Was it that hard to release a Starcraft version based on the Warcraft III engine a couple of years afterwards? Why did they have to make a new engine? The mind boggles.
No, it wasn't that *hard*, but it wasn't *good enough*. WC3 sorta worked because they made it about small parties of units with a hero. Starcraft is a game about massive epic battles with zillions of zerglings, and would have choked the WC3 engine to death.
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I have no problem whatsoever with (b), as long as (a) works as advertised.
Mac (Score:5, Informative)
No Mac version yet, unfortunately. Both Mac and PC versions are going to be released together on the same media, but no word yet if Mac users will get to play with the beta.
Re:Mac (Score:5, Informative)
According to the beta FAQ, the Mac version is coming:
Will there be a Mac version of the beta client?
We plan to release a Mac version of the beta client at some point during the beta test period. We’ll have further details to share as the beta test progresses.
via the beta FAQ [battle.net].
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Excellent news! I've been registered for the beta for a long time (along with my system info), so I hope they send me an invite when the Mac version is ready.
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It makes perfect sense. They're going to *have* to do a beta test for the Mac at some point, as they are going to release the final game on that platform. My guess is, Mac system profiles on people's battle.net accounts actually make for greater odds in getting in, as there will be less of them. It'll just take longer to get in if you're so lucky.
Lost my interest (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Lost my interest (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems a little odd to be upset that they are more upfront about their plans for expansion packs and the content that will be in them. Each race will still be playable in multiplayer. There is no indication that the SCII won't have as much single player content as the original SC, albeit you'll only be able to play one races campaign.
I'd much rather wait and see more details on what it entails before passing judgement.
Re:Lost my interest (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not upset that they're being up front about it, I'm upset that they're doing it at all.
See, instead of selling me "Starcraft II", they're selling me "Starcraft II, Terran Campaign" and pretending it's a full sequel to the original.
The reality is, to get the full sequel to the original, I'm going to have to buy three games.
Between that and the lack of real LAN play, they can count me as a lost customer.
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What if SC2 has as much content as the original Starcraft? And what if SC3 had as much content as the Expansion?
Guess what?
SC2 "Episode 1" has as much content as the original.
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SC2 "Episode 1" has as much content as the original.
What does "as much content" mean?
The original let me install spawn copies of the game on multiple computers, so I could play multiplayer with my friends even if they didn't own the game. That's a lot of "content" that SC2 won't have, in my view.
If they had announced it as three full games, I'd still be irritated: it's the same effect.
SC2 doesn't have "as much content" (in the sense of missions) because it's only showing 1/3 of the storyline. We only get the Terran viewpoint.
That was the great thing about
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Saying "I'm getting a fixed portion of the story, where that portion is less than one -- and I don't like paying to get the rest" is meaningless when we don't know what the denominator on that fraction is, when it stops,
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A few of other points to back you up here...
The "equal number of missions" thing will probably just mean lots and lots of filler, or a far slower progression in terms of techs/units involved.
Starcraft 2 also has a lot of RPG elements that RTS players don't care about or want. The reason Blizzard gives for splitting the game into three parts essentially boils down to the extra time involved to create the "content" that makes you do between-mission "quests" instead of a nice straight-forward mission briefing
Re:Lost my interest (Score:4, Interesting)
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Multiplayer in particular is also where most of the serious replay value lies. Of course you didn't really "forget", you just lied.
multiplayer is where replay value lies but i like to play single player content from time to time, i like SC lore. For noobs single player is where they learn units, strats and stuff. Besides if you think that hardcore players spending night and day at battlenet are a majority you are mistaken, casuals who like single player because they won't be owned there are a significant chunk of customer base.
You said "total shill" when you meant "someone with different tastes than me". This further proves you a liar.
no i mean people that think blizzard can do no wrong and their every design decision is the best thing since s
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Re:Lost my interest (Score:4, Informative)
I was about to ask why I got modded Troll, and then I realized that it was probably just someone modding me "-1 Disagree".
Note to moderators: You may like Starcraft 2. Heck, I'm sure I would like Starcraft 2. But I'm willing to forgo its potential awesomeness, because Blizzard has made some choices with which I strongly disagree. This is called "voting with your wallet", and I am in no way saying you're wrong for buying the game; I'm simply saying I'm upset about it. This isn't trolling, it's simply an explanation of why I won't be buying the game.
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I'm not buying it until I can get each at 1/3 the cost of a new game.
Re:Lost my interest (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't really matter whether Blizzard even notices. See, some of us have these things called "principles" and "values", and we stand up for them even if nobody else cares.
Blizzard wants to shove a LAN-less multiplayer game at us. That's fine, but I'm not going to buy it because I like LAN games.
It's also a demonstration on Blizzard's part that they no longer care about their own roots. Starcraft was so popular largely because of its LAN-friendly multiplayer games. I don't like it when companies abandon their roots.
Heck, Blizzard even provided spawn copies of Starcraft you could use for multiplayer games, so you could play with your friends even if they didn't have their own copies of the game. Do you think they'll be doing that with SC2? Of course not.
My decision to refuse to buy Starcraft 2 has as much to do with Blizzard's attitude as it has to do with the game itself.
Re:Lost my interest (Score:4, Insightful)
Starcraft was popular because it had an amazing single player campaign, had great multi-player balance, was polished like hell, and had an active modding community. To claim LAN made the game is a wild wild exaggeration.
Also, to claim that Blizzard doesn't care about its roots is just your opinion. I mean, if they didn't care about their roots, why would they still be supporting Starcraft? So, your opinion is just wrong.
And on top of that, you have no idea how it will be implemented. It probably will just need to authenticate and then will play over the LAN since the server is on a computer and not at their site. So it probably won't even be a big deal...particularly now that we are in the future and most people have a connection.
But yes, ultimately Blizzard won't notice your little boycott. You can just sit behind your keyboard knowing your principles and values are so much better than all of us poor sheep enjoying the hell out of Starcraft 2. Feel free to pat yourself on the back now.
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Dude, fail. This is why our political system in the US sucks. No one votes for a third-party candidate because, as you put it, "ultimately [whomever] won't notice your little boycott".
I for one applaud HeronBlademaster for doing what he thinks is right, no matter what anyone else thinks. Remember, character is how you act when no one is watching.
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Re:Lost my interest (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but it's not what I want from the game, and if they're going to call me a pirate for wanting LAN play, well, they get to lose my sale.
I'm just voting with my wallet. You don't have to agree with me.
Re:Lost my interest (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't say it's too little content for the money. I said it's not the content that I want for the money.
All I'm saying is that I'm voting with my wallet. Why is it so hard for you people to accept that?
Re:Lost my interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but while clever, SCI was not fantabulious because you could play all three race's stories on release day.
Starcraft 1 was fantastic largely due to its LAN play support (and, related to it, its ability to spawn multiplayer copies of the game for your friends), which not only let us play with our friends in large, internet-less groups, but introduced people to the game who later bought the game because they had a chance to play it for free. I'm one of those people who bought it thanks to a spawn copy (in fact I bought two copies of the game).
Starcraft 2 lacks both of these things.
Starcraft 1 also told a fairly compelling story between its three campaigns, and the campaigns were paced well enough to keep you interested without letting you get bored with the factions.
It's possible Starcraft 2 will be able to keep us entertained through 30 or more missions playing the same faction. It's possible the storyline will remain compelling and feel somewhat complete, even though we'll be missing two-thirds of the storyline.
Starcraft's multiplayer was great. But when Brood War came out, non-expansion Battle.net became a ghost town (and for good reason; BW was better). But BW only cost $20, and it contained three more campaigns to boot.
With Starcraft 2, this won't happen once, it'll happen twice - and if you believe they'll only charge $20 per installment, you're being deliberately naive. Sure, they claim the installments "will be expansions and priced as such", but that could mean anything. All it really means is that they're tentatively planning on charging something less than the full price of the first installment. I will not be surprised one bit if they forget their statements and charge full price anyway.
Then there's Blizzard's whole attitude toward gamers. Rather than doing their best to get the game out there, to expose it to as many people as possible (which was the purpose of multiplayer spawn copies), they're doing their best to force everyone who wants to play to pay up front.
That is, they're treating everyone as pirates until proven otherwise. It's an attitude that I find repugnant. The fact that it is the prevalent attitude in the game industry as a whole doesn't soften the blow at all.
They've claimed on multiple occasions that only pirates want LAN play. I'm not a pirate, yet I want LAN play. What does that reveal about their attitude toward me? It reveals that they're not interested in my money.
Well, if they want to sneer at my money, I see no reason to give it to them.
If you fault me for that, you're a moron.
Would you care if they took 3x as long in development, then released a truly MASSIVE amount of content in one installment, charging 3x as much?
They've taken long enough to develop the game as it is. Did you ever stop to wonder if maybe that's the whole reason they're splitting it into three releases in the first place?
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I'm not saying they can't continue the story in a sequel. I'm saying it's freakishly annoying to only give you one-third of the same story per game.
It would be like taking the Wheel of Time series and stripping out every chapter that's written from Perrin's point of view and selling it as a separate add-on series, without lowering the cost of the original books.
The reality is that you will buy this game like everyone else and enjoy it.
And that's why Blizzard won't bother adding in LAN play. They feel the same as you - they think nobody will follow through on their intentions.
Wel
Re:Lost my interest (Score:4, Insightful)
Do we really have to go thru this in every StarCraft II story?
Why would you lose interest in the game because of that? Please tell me. They're separate stories and most likely priced as expansions too. And it's not like they made the 100% ready and are just keeping the two later expansion packs with them self now.
Re:Lost my interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you lose interest in the game because of that? Please tell me.
Because it's a bad for the industry as a whole. When a big player can suddenly decide to stop selling a full product and instead just sell it in parts with each part at full price, or near enough, is shows others that they can get away with this too. Its been shown with the downloadable content thats running rampant and wild to the point that it's being planned upon and worked on before the basic product is available, and being available on the games release date. Now instead of having a full game being sold we can buy something like RE5 and spend more money to open up the multi-player modes, or games like Sonic where you can pay to open up the harder difficulty mode. Refusing to buy and not just refusing but mentioning way is what helps. Or we can all look forward to buy every game a small sub-sets at full prices.
Re:Lost my interest (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember seeing numbers posted here. The initial game will be a campaign for one race, approximately 40 missions. This was comparable (maybe even slightly more) than the original Starcraft. The expansions to SCII will each have another campaign for one of the races, with around 40 missions. This is more than BroodWar had. So, if instead, they released SCII with ~13 missions for each race, which is basically how the original was released, you'd be okay with that?
Seems like nitpicking to me.
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According to 1up [1up.com], Blizzard is promising between 26-30 missions per game. If so, that puts each game at 2/3 the size of SC1 (at least in terms of missions). But do you think they'll be charging 2/3 the price? Of course not. Do you have a reliable source where blizzard promises 40 missions per game?
The other potential issue I see is that once the second game comes out, anyone who plays multiplayer is going to have to buy the second game too if they want to keep playing multiplayer (as happened with SC1 an
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The only problem I have with the inclusion of only one race's campaign in each game is that I don't have an opportunity to practice anything but that race offline. The three races (at least in SC1, and I'm assuming this is still the case) are so completely different. You can't learn to play Terran and win every match and then switch to Protoss and expect to be any good. They don't just have the same set of buildings with different names. The three races have completely different technologies, build orders,
Re:Lost my interest (Score:4, Insightful)
There are actually protoss and zerg mini campaigns to teach you how to play them. You really shouldn't be critical of this game because of some morons ranting about things they don't know anything about.
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Where have they said they aren't releasing a complete game at launch and where have the released their pricing scheme?
You are simply making assumptions.
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They're separate stories and most likely priced as expansions too.
They have given no indication the second and third games will be priced as expansions. In fact, given their claims about campaign lengths, they're indicating that they will be priced as full games, not as expansions.
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Re:Lost my interest (Score:5, Interesting)
When they declared it would be sold as three different packs, one per race. While they do have a history of expansion packs, it's never been 1 with 2 more like this, nor planned this far in advanced to break it up and sell the parts.
Wouldn't be so bad of an idea if done intelligently. For games we really like, expansion packs are loved. Figuring full retail, that's $40 for the game (back in the day), $20 each for the expansions. You could end up spending $80 if you bought it all new, or you could get the bundle months later for $40. You paid for two games and the developer probably didn't have to expend as much effort on two expansions as with the full original game. Win win for all.
What gets to be bullshit is when the $60 game is chopped up and you're left paying the full freight for the original game plus the expansions.
What I always thought would be fair is something like this: the developer plans out the game with maybe six races total. Starcraft has a lot of Warhammer 40k similarities and just think of how many races you have in that setting, it's more than orks and humans and eldar. But we'll stick with Starcraft. You sell the game with three races. The development of additional races is proceeding alongside. Sell the game for full price and then release additional races with full campaigns as add-ons. Don't skimp on the details but charge a fair price. The customer knows he's getting another 20 hours of gameplay with the expansion, plus he can use the new race in multiplayer. Then after the game's been out for a while, all the add-ons can be bundled in a battlechest and the people who skipped it when it launched can catch up with the fun. The publisher makes more money which is an upside, the fan gets more game which is another upside.
Of course, this can be more complicated than I think. I thought the idea of episodic content for shooters was a good idea, sell the game in affordable, bite-sized serial format but the reality was less enjoyable. And the dick move usually is the one that gets made. So you buy a full game like Dragon Age and are getting propositioned for add-ons that were developed at the same time as the original game and should have been included in the first place. That's not like Lord of the Rings where they're releasing three movies at once, always planned on doing so and you feel you're getting your money's worth, this is more like Kill Bill where it was supposed to be one movie and they just released it as two to make more money and planned on soaking the fans by releasing multiple versions on DVD.
Kill William, part 1 & 2 (Score:2)
I only paid about $24 combined for KB 1&2, so I don't know how they were 'soaking' the fans by releasing them separately. That is about the same price as you would pay for a two disk, 4+ hour feature anyway.
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>>So you buy a full game like Dragon Age and are getting propositioned for add-ons that were developed at the same time as the original game and should have been included in the first place.
Warden's Keep came with my copy of the game, but I agree the whole DLC thing has become kind of despicable. Sure, they're free to do whatever they want to make more money and kill the resale market or whatever, but when something becomes blatantly mercentary, there's blowback from annoyed customers.
Build up enough
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You mean like Grindhouse that was both movies in theater but then had to be sold as 2 different movies when it went to DVD just to make more money (the money they were hoping to make during the theater run but didn't get). Strangely, in both movies it was centered with movies by Quentin Tarantino.
Well, I'd be willing to pay money not to own a copy of Death Proof. If I were ever going to buy the Aliens movies, I'd want to pay to get the first two unbundled from the rest of the crappy ones. :)
But yeah, those are dick moves. This isn't the publisher saying hear me out, this is going to be good for all of us and winning you over. This is the publisher pissing down your neck and not even making that much of an effort to convince you it's rain.
From my perspective I think "Hey, we can release more expansio
Re:Lost my interest (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand knocking Blizzard for splitting this into three releases. There's going to be 26 to 30 missions in the first Terran-only single-player campaign (source [starcraft2.com]), which would put it on par with the first Starcraft. Presumably, there will be 26-30 missions in each of the following stories, plus additional units (as Blizzard has done whenever they've released an expansion to the game). Blizzard has never developed and released a half-baked expansion in its entire history; the closest thing might be Diablo: Hellfire, which was developed by an outside company, and I don't know if it was priced appropriately on release.
So what's the hate for, beyond the usual fishing for things to hate? If you really don't think it's going to be good value to you, wait until it goes on sale, or just don't buy the game. Chess is freely available to all.
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Hellfire was developed by Sierra, and priced at 29.00, iirc. (What a crappy expansion that was. No surprise they never farmed out to a 3rd party again).
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Thing is, 30 missions straight of Terran-only is going to mean a lot of filler, a really slow progression in tech trees, and probably a fair bit of boredom doing the same things with the same units over and over. I'd gladly take three different races at 10 missions apiece, without any silly RPG stuff between-missions, and a stable multiplayer platform Blizzard can spend time balancing.
I can't wait to... (Score:4, Funny)
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Not if you want to fire it up... with Terrans, it's Supply Depots.
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Sure sounds good. Need a light?
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Stop poking me!
FOR THE HORDE! (Score:2)
Entaro Tassadar! Ahh yeah that's the right game. Does anyone know if the closed beta is under a restrictive NDA?
Also, knowing Blizzard's excessive tinkering, and the fact that we are already almost halfway through the first half (50% of 50%) of 2010, I find it highly unlikely that the game will be released "in the first half of 2010."
Re:FOR THE HORDE! (Score:5, Informative)
Post 6: Just in case any of us want to create some videos for YouTube ... may we share any replays?
Zhydaris: There will be no NDA.
( http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=112115 [teamliquid.net] )
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We're pleased to announce that we have decided to lift the confidential nature of the StarCraft: II Beta Test. This means that beta testers are free to show and discuss the game with your friends, as well as take screenshots, record gameplay videos, etc. So feel free to share that amazing game you just played. Enjoy!
disclaimer bigger than the article (Score:4, Informative)
Nice the disclaimer at the end is bigger than the article.
Article == 338 words
Identifier == 88 words
Disclaimer == 393 words
So if nothing happens in the end they are coverd.
Two questions.... (Score:2)
Will SC2 support true LAN play, or just that pseudo-LAN thing where one have to 'authenticate' first?
Will SC2 support multi-core systems? I got this fancy quad-core system and core 1 thru 3 get pissed when core 0 is being pegged.
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1. No, this has been answered plenty of times. Blizzard obviously has no interest in catering to the small percentage of the population that wants to play multiplayer with no internet connection.
2. I would imagine that the answer is yes, though that is just my speculation. This game has been in development for a while, with what is sure to be quite an impressive team. Further, even the relatively resource light WoW supports multi-core execution. Blizzard would have to try quite hard to fail this criteria.
small percentage of the population that wants to p (Score:3, Insightful)
small percentage of the population that wants to play multiplayer with no internet connection?
how about tournament play????
the last thing that you need is some kind of a internet hiccup to mess up a tournament.
Define "small percentage"? (Score:2)
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If a teenage boy lives in a house without internet in this day and age he probably has bigger issue than playing StarCraft II
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Blizzard obviously has no interest in catering to the small percentage of the population that wants to play multiplayer with no internet connection.
They've obviously also not done any market research on how big that percentage of the population might be, and I doubt you have either.
Out of me and the dozen friends that play Starcraft, exactly zero of us play on Battle.net if we don't have to. During high school, all of us regularly played without access to an internet connection - one still regularly gets a group together in a local church gymnasium to play Starcraft LAN games, and there's definitely no internet access there. I guess they'll stick wit
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I certainly have not done the research about the size of this segment; it is a question that does not really affect me in the slightest. However, to say that Blizzard has not is bordering on insulting. They have put in a ridiculous amount of resources into this game, and any sort of business wants to make sure such an investment will net at least some return. Of course they would spend at least a bit of time looking into this matter, especially since it keeps cropping up on popular tech sites such as this o
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Of course they would spend at least a bit of time looking into this matter, especially since it keeps cropping up on popular tech sites such as this one.
I still disagree; Blizzard has repeatedly made statements which effectively convey their feeling that the only people who want LAN play are pirates.
Neither I nor any of my friends (the aforementioned group of LAN players) have pirated Starcraft; many of us, including myself, have purchased multiple copies of Starcraft.
For Blizzard to claim that the only people who want LAN play are pirates betrays a complete lack of market research on the subject, and their disdain for the very group of gamers which made th
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Blizzard obviously has no interest in catering to the small percentage of the population that wants to play multiplayer with no internet connection
The percentage of the population that wants to be able play multiplayer with no internet connection is roughly equivalent to the percentage of the population who has had an internet outage. That is, just about everyone.
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We must know different people. Few of my friends would suggest dealing with an Internet outage by playing a LAN deathmatch in StarCraft II. Generally the first point of action would be to call the ISP, and figure out what the hell happened to the internets. Afterwards, if my friends happened to be present when the outage occurred we would be more likely go somewhere, or spend some time talking, or any number of alternate activities that do not necessarily require a network connection. Worst case, one (or al
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Eventually, of course it will be cracked. You cannot design a system that is perfectly secure, unless this system is going to languish in a locked room for eternity. The question that matters is how long will it take for this system to be cracked. I imagine they made it as hard as possible, so for the short term they should be secure.
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Before you go any further please read your statement, and consider how utterly unlikely this sort of situation is. You would need to be a special level of hardcore to want to have an ad-hoc SC2 LAN party while camping. I know many gamers, and I cannot think of a single person that would think this was a good idea for a whole myriad of reasons.
For rural areas, any sort of internet connection should be sufficient. They may not have your 50mbps connection, but I'm sure they could at least pull a dialup connect
Oblig Alien Over... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oblig Alien Over... (Score:4, Funny)
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Yeah well, how many zerg could there be?
Re:Oblig Alien Over... (Score:5, Funny)
Assuming we were assigned named in alphabetical order, at least 17.
Does not matter (Score:3, Funny)
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Spawn more overlords.
Ahhhh, I think you're right. I forgot the exact terming. It's been too long since my last starcraft fix. (got into the large battles of supreme commander)
Can anyone post system requirements? (Score:2)
System requirements (Score:3, Informative)
Nice to know my trusty old 3.0Ghz P4 with 1GB RAM and an NVidia GeForce 6800GT is still available for friends wh
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The minimum system requirements for the Starcraft II Beta are as follows:
PC Minimum Requirements:
Windows XP SP3/Vista SP1/Windows 7
2.2 Ghz Pentium IV or equivalent AMD Athlon processor
1 GB system RAM/1.5 GB for Vista and Windows 7
128 MB NVidia GeForce 6600 GT/ATI Radeon 9800 PRO video card
1024x768 minimum display resolution
4 GB free hard space (Beta)
Broadband connection
*Note* the final requirements for Starcraft II have not yet been determined. Due to ongoing development the minimum requirements listed above are subject to change at any time. During this phase a Mac version will NOT be available, please check back.
Submitting system specs for beta via Wine (Score:2, Informative)
System Requirements, Screenshots, etc... (Score:4, Informative)
I am in the beta, all the info that was published this month (including the massive SC2 Beta FAQ) is there, system requirements, screenshots, and will soon be posting replays/videos. Currently 500 users online, so I can handle bit of slashdotting
Cheers.
But... (Score:2, Funny)
... does it run on Linux? D:
Battle.net required? No Thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do I need to join battle.net for a game I only want to play against the computer. Playing against people online gets very tiring. It's hard to find anyone online that doesn't act like a spoiled six year old. Just shut up and play.
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..curious, seems you exhibit the very attitude you bemoan..
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Maybe I missed it, but where does Blizzard say that you must play on Battle.Net?
StarCraft 2 ships with single-player campaigns, just like the first one did. And I haven't heard anything that says you cannot play games againt the computer.
What I *have* heard is that, during the beta, they are only focusing on player vs player games. And these, of course, require Battle.net. But I don't believe this applies to what will actually be shipping.
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From what I hear, you're required to have a battle.net account to play the game even in single player; this doesn't sit well with some people, including me - I also dislike playing online. Mandatory online-something also suggests that there'll be no provision for LAN play, and since this is generally the only way I like to play RTS games against real people it looks like I'm a bit stuffed. Additionally it means you're at the whim of corporate overlords if you want to play your game in a few years time, or i
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I don't understand why logging in online to play singleplayer would upset someone
You've obviously never been on a long airplane flight.
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Re:Incomplete StarCraft - LAN Play = NO PURCHASE (Score:4, Insightful)
The message I'm going to send to Blizzard is also quite simple.
Support my Mac (yet again) with another great game (yet again) and I'll buy it on release day (yet again). If my internet is down, I don't even want to touch my computer, so that's no big deal for me. I logged hundreds if not thousands of hours playing the original Starcraft with the woman who ended up being my wife.
With the number of people who will want to play in a LAN, you know the majority of the traffic isn't going to be routed through B.N servers where they'll have to pay for the bandwidth. Most networked apps in this NAT age use a variety of methods to try to learn a real IP address to connect to each other. The first is always "self-reported IP". So, SC2 would hypothetically connect to B.N, authenticate, and then keep 100% of traffic on the LAN, reporting the results of the play to the servers. That way, if some college kid spends the whole year playing on his lan, and then goes home to play against me on B.N, he's got some ladder rank that's going to put him about where he belongs (which is honestly a completely different realm than 33 year old me).
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1 Race per game - episodic like content - helps pace storylines (No one complains that a season of 24 takes 24 episodes, do they?)
As for the lack of LAN play - this kind of thing doesn't stop World of Warcraft from functioning. Lets face it, If you've got 11 million guaranteed buyers based on the fact that they meet the requirements and want to play your game - you'd implement it the same way Blizzard is to maximize sales.
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I don't think I'm overestimating at all. 11 Million WoW subscribers means probably 5 million SC2 purchasers right off the bat. Than the SC1 avids and WC3 players going in for SC2, and the professionals in Korea and such... 11 Million is not an unreasonable amount to expect.
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It is currently available in Europe. For at least one person in Spain, fore sure