Starcraft2

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Per
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Starcraft2

Post by Per »

I have been busy playing Starcraft2 lately, and I have made myself some thoughts about what they managed to do right, and wrong, and what we could learn from that. It is a different game with a different focus, but it is still valuable to look at the competition sometimes :-)

The bad.
Not so much. It is an incredibly well-polished game. I missed the ability to queue up production beyond current resource limits. I personally dislike that micromanaging the economy is so heavily rewarded (Chrono Boost, MULE, Queen), in addition to micromanagement still being heavily rewarded in combat through the use of special abilities. The campaign story was really weak. You could choose the order you played the missions yourself to a great deal, and that made the storyline less cohesive and in some rare cases somewhat messed up (eg people were talking about doing things in the future they had already done).

The good - campaign.
There is a huge variety of missions, and each felt fresh and fun. Lots of good game mechanics employed to spice up the missions. The cinematic sequences were astonishing. The small touch of role-playing elements did make things more interesting, even though they turned out to have little effect. You could restart a mission at any time, and choose a different difficulty setting if you wished. At the end, you could go back and replay every individual mission at another difficulty settings, or try to achieve a better completion time, or to rack up more achievements. Campaign progress is saved on battle.net, so you can continue on a different computer without copying files around. This turned out to be a real boon for me.

The good - multiplayer.
The quick match system is really good. It takes away all the drudgery of waiting in pregame for other players to get ready, to change options, to go for a pee, etc.. You just select the desired game options (1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 or FFA) and what race you want to play, then hit go. The master server matches you up with someone else who wants to play the same game type, and the game begins - no pregame dialog at all. You can still make custom games, of course.

The terrain system is the same as in the first game. Units at an elevation higher are usually not seen by those on a lower elevation, and shoot harder vs those on lower ground. While it is a really primitive vision system compares to ours, it works remarkably well. The ground is flat, but I did not miss the uneven surfaces of Warzone. Probably because proper lighting makes up for it.

The small units vs large units balancing mechanic works quite well, too. Generally balance is good, but for longer games, versatile units that can fire at both air and ground seem overpowered, like in the first game. We should also have a surrender option. It is nicer than just quitting. Even the AI will offer a surrender when it knows it has lost.

Much has already been written elsewhere about the atrocious online map support, so I will not repeat that. However, the ability to store your own maps on battle.net is nice.

The friends system is nice, like an integrated instant messenger, and you can invite friends who are online playing into your games. The party system is a very nice touch as well. You can set up a "party" of people, who will join games together with you in team games. That makes it so much easier to setup and arrange matches between multiple people when people on each side (or one side) know each other.

The ability to change alliances in-game seem to be missing. I do not miss it.

Okay, that was what I had to say for now. Now add your thoughts :lecture:
Per
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Re: Starcraft2

Post by Per »

I would like to add a few more things about the Starcraft2 vision system. Like ours, and unlike SupCom1's, it does not permit shooting or otherwise acting at any entity that is not currently observed. Like SupCom1, it has both vision sensors (units, detectors), and a longer range radar sensor (Terran race only) that shows only radar blips. Unlike SupCom1, you cannot fire at radar blips. Our radar sensors allow you to both see the type of unit, and fire at them, although they are shown as radar blips as they pass in and out of view. (Also, in my ECM patch, jammer units are only shown as radar blips until they drive into vision range.)

I think SupCom1/Starcraft2 has a much clearer separation of the two types of vision than Warzone, and the withholding of unit type information until they are in range is a nice touch that increases the fun. Better being given many small treats than one big one :lol2: What was so frustrating about the SupCom1 vision system was that you never saw what was on the way, because your long range weapons picked the enemy off long before they came into vision range. While more realistic, it is far less fun.

Oh, and Zerg can place the Nydus Canal (building that can make an instant teleport exit any place on the map) any place where you have vision now. That is one nasty way of dealing with turtles and campers. Combined with Terran's jumbing cyborgs... I mean, marines with jetpacks, that can jump up/down impassable cliffs, and the Protoss new short-range teleport ability, it makes it far less safe now to start the game by choking off crucial map points, and leave your base undefended.
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Zarel
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Re: Starcraft2

Post by Zarel »

It certainly gets quite a bit right. I particularly like its power system, though I think it could be improved with the addition of queues. ;)

I agree about the level of micromanagement required - I don't mind micromanagement, what I don't like is having to micromanage more than one thing at a time. I don't mind manually setting up Yamato Cannon; I do mind having to stop my micromanagement of my battlecruisers to call down some more MULEs.

One thing you didn't mention about StarCraft 2 is that its terrain visibility model is significantly simpler than Warzone's. There are exactly two terrain heights, low and high. You can see anything from high ground, but you can't look from low ground into high ground, and you can fire at anything you see. This avoids all of Warzone's "the ground is slightly curved so your bullets can't fire into an area that you can clearly see" problems.

I agree with your assessment of the game in general. StarCraft 2's plot was bad, but the gameplay was excellent. A few things I noticed: The early missions were extremely good, but the later missions started to feel repetitive. They all started to feel like "destroy/collect X things, and optionally collect Y relics for research". And while the "one new unit a mission" and "each mission optimized for the new unit" was nice at first, it started feeling like I had to use the new unit, and I could rarely just use the unit I wanted.
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NoQ
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Re: Starcraft2

Post by NoQ »

One thing you didn't mention
He did (: