One of the best games ever has finally made it out of development and is available for sale.

This is the main page, at Blizzard's StarCraft 2 page

And this is some talk about it, over at the BBC's StarCraft 2 page.

Strap on your Marine armour, load up your Protoss machines or breed your Zerg...
...And enjoy !!

And now the entire populace of South Korea has called in sick today.

Must have sucked having to live up to this level of expectations.

Personally I have no plans to buy this game, even though I'm big on Strategy games. Partly because I don't like that they've split up the campaign into three separate games (Last I heard anyway) and I don't feel like buying three games so I can get one game's worth of content. Partly because I'm not such a fan of twitch gaming, which SC is to an even greater level than most FPS games.

That's quite some hyperbole. Have you actually played it, or are you just parroting industry hype?

You're forgetting another key bit to how terrible the dearth of content is, SCII is the same damn game with better graphics. Despite this Activision is going to make billions.

Honestly, I'd prefer another WH40k Dawn of War game, more 'dark crusade' than 'dawn of war 2' stuff tho.I like the tactical/strategic 'build a base and kill the fark out of everything'. Dawn of war 2 (and chaos rising) were fun.

Yeah, my main fear is SC2 is going to be SC1 just gussied up in new graphics. I mean that's cool and all, but you have to consider just howmany games of that genre have come out since SC rolled around.

I'd love a new homeworld game like thats gonna happen

Played the beta, less than underwhelming. Maybe once the SP episodes are leasead in one pack I'll buy it.

It's not SC1 with better graphics. It's Brood War with better graphics, and a massive downgrade in multiplayer functionality.

I might get it when its £5 ish but I didn't enjoy the twichy micro managing of the 1st.

I didn't even buy SC1 until 3 years ago, and I haven't even finished the Terrans section of the story... I love RTSs like Empire Earth and Age of Empires (The originals, not the sequels) but SC just seemed to limiting compared to those games. I might get SC2 when they have the whole thing (all three storylines) and all expansions in one box for $15 down in the bargain bin at Walmart, but until then... meh

Diable 3, however, I'm am almost definitely getting when it comes out.

They don't need to. It's probably a national holiday.

Besides, playing SC is what they do for work there.

Bye
Thanee

Nah. What they make off of first annum SC2 sales WoW will make for Blactivizzard in about three months.

No way! That is EXACTLY what it must be. SC1 was perfect already. No need to ruin it by trying to make it all hip and everything.

All it needs is a modern game engine and a bit of polish here and there. Blizzard knows their stuff.

Bye
Thanee

I love those. Games where it is about long term planning instead of twitchy mouse controls. I loved it when I managed to get nukes before most people were even in the right age (EE). I also enjoyed playing the Britons and almost being able to outdistance the trebushe with my archers.

Im all for modern polish on older games, if they could redo Wing Commander, or the old Fallout games, that would be awesome, but its not 'pay full game price' awesome.

Another Bridge Commander game for Star Trek would be nice too.

If you hit No Mutants Allowed, an enterprising fan went through and pretty much finished up all the stuff in Fallout 2 that they were going to add but didn't due to time/budget constraints.

I think it's like three times Fallout 2's original size. Fallout 3 is also a hoot, I find it to be a worthy successor to the original series.

Ah yes...after awhile I got so good at managing resources and planning in EE that whenever my friend would challenge me to a game I would usually begin bombing runs on his castles within the first 2 hours... That's right everybody, "Bombing runs"
with planes on his "castles". That's one thing I really love about EE. Long term planning because you would be in it for a LONG time.

In my experience, SC games are usually over in 20-40 minutes (sometimes longer, sometimes shorter) but Age of Empires and especially EE were usually over after at least an hour and a half, usually more. And there was never a dull moment either.

I may have to check into that. I really liked fallout 2 but the non-completed stuff was fairly annoying. Along a similar line anyone else like me play and love Acanum? They really need to come up with a sequel to that, alas it will never be.

He linked in a ton of things, expanded/rebuilt a lot of the old stuff (seriously, Klamath looks nothing like it used to), and it all runs pretty solid. It was a few years' labor of love.

I've heard of Arcanum, but I haven't tried it. I'm also debating whether or not to play SC2 right now.

Arcanum? I LOVED that game! I can't even count the number of times I have played that game, restarted, and started anew with a different character concept. Gentleman Thief, Elven Sorcerer, Dwarven Rifleman, Old West Gunslinger, Gnome Technophile, Half-Orc Warrior and tons and tons more. Not to mention how so many of those older games (Fallout, Arcanum, Elder Scrolls, etc) were so easy to mod so there was always an abundance of custom story arcs and maps to play.

I would love a sequel to Arcanum, but they'd have to do it right! As much as I loved Fallout 3, I don't want Arcanum to end up like that. If Sierra or whoever owns the license to Arcanum ever decide to make #2, please keep the mechanics generally the same...

Sounds familiar but don't think I've ever actually played it. Was likely one of those games that I looked at and wanted to get, but never had the money when I kept spending it on other games ;P



Agreed. I liked Fallout 3, and it kept very nicely in line with the theme and feel of the older FO games, but the total redoing of the mechanics was kind of.. I don't know, I'd have liked something more along the lines of BoS a bit better. Updated graphics, few new mechanics, etc.

I'd have to say, Arcanum actually sort of sucked. It's the only game I've ever played where the difficulty level is set more by your choice of 'classes' than by the slider in the game. It was full of bugs, terribly balanced, and hugely easy to game.

However, it was also a beautiful concept, a lot of fun to play, and something I too would definitely want to see redone. Modern graphics and balanced gameplay would simply make it wonderful.

I can see what you mean, there were so many patches for that game. It will, however, continue to rank as one of my all time favorite games, and I even have it installed on my Vista machine now (yes! there is a patch to let you run it on vista and win7!)

What do you mean unbalanced? Just because a Summoning+Time mage could easily beat the game without ever allocating any points after level 20 or so doesn't make a game unbalanced...

There's a school of thought that I'm partially sympathetic to (unfortunately I cannot now recall where I first read this argument) which holds that balance is a largely meaningless concept in a single-player game. There's no one else to measure your character against, so what do you care if your character is more or less godlike than another?

That's true to some extent, yet you can still measure balance against yourself (Ie, the game is easier with one class than another), but the thing is that you don't care nearly as much that X is overpowered or Y is underpowered.

Well to be fair getting dog in in (ashbury?) that one town made all the difference in the world difficulty wise.



When i played magic types I always went with harm on the low end for the day to day stuff and ran up the chain to disintegrate as quickly as I could for the golems, automations and other assorted stuff.

But i agree, not all choices in Arcanum were equally balanced but a whole bunch of them were a ton of fun to play and explore.

Only downside to Arcanum was the only way to support my technology habit was picking shopkeep locks in Tarant. Which once you got your lockpicking up to the point you could do it reliably was pretty much all the cash you ever needed. I bought Bates Mansion on pretty much theivery profits alone and had my mechanical army following me around to save the world.

Meh I've beaten fable useing only the stick and the 2 starting will and ranged weapons with out resurrection veils. I've also played the same game maxing my guy out before the first quest. In morrowind I've played mages of grate power or a warror forever gimped by the way hits are scored. Blanced this is not but its jolly good fun. That's all I care for.

I like the way you think sir. One player games don't need balance so much as they need fun.

And beating Fable with the stick, eh? How long did those fights take? I've maxed out all melee skills and even when using an iron weapon (which I believe is the lowest, next to the stick) it still takes forever just to kill something...

I think that one thing that everyone is forgetting about SC and WH:DoW is that they are RTS's that's why they're so twitchy. You're supposed to think quick and move quick like in an FPS(if you stop moving you die) and plan ahead like in a strategy game. You get you butt handed to you for a while until you learn what each unit you have is good at and not so good at then you stat using them in the right place at the right time.

I've seen most of you bad mouth SC and Blizzard but the sales speak for themselves... They have to be doing something right. Besides how can you go wrong with a James Raynor Dog-tag 2Gb USB drive that has the original and broodwar on it(yes, I got the collectors edition.)

And for those that play you can find me as Nightshade on Battle.net

-Netwraith

I'm not saying SC is a bad game, I'm saying that it isn't a game I particularly like. Personally I think there are two very distinct RTS styles. One of them is the one where yes, things happen in real time, but you don't need to be a TM with advanced overclock to be able to move your units quickly enough, and then there are games like SC in which your ability to quickly click back and forth between two different units and move them around is more important than anything else.

Personally I like the former, because it requires more relies more on strategy and thinking, while the latter relies more on being crazy fast with your mouse. I'm not saying that SC necessarily requires less strategy and thinking to play well, but it does require quicker manual reflexes. I have sucky reflexes, I get my butt kicked in FPS games, not because I can't get advantageous positions, can't sneak up on people, stand still any, or anything like that, it is simply that I can't coordinate my mouse/joystick quickly and accurately enough to ever hit people. I constantly run up behind people and start shooting them in the back of the head, and yet they still manage to turn around and kill me because half my shots are missing and they get nothing but critical headshots. I don't feel like losing a game that is supposed to be about strategy because the other person can easily switch out between two units and have them fall back by using 30 clicks a second, while I have trouble even clicking accurately enough to target one of the units.

So yeah, if I'm going to play a game that is supposed to be about strategy, I want to win or lose because of my strategy, not because the other person can click their mouse faster than I can. So give me games like Empire Earth and Settlers over SC any day. (Indecently, Settlers 7 may be one of my favorite games ever)

SC is about strategy and tactics. If you don't have a solid macro strategy, you are not likely to win the war. If you are good at tactical level micromanagement, then you might be able to turn the tide of the battle more easily.

I never said it didn't have strategy and tactics. I know that the macro level is important, but being able to click quickly is also very important, and I don't particularly care for that in my strategy games. I'm not even talking about being able to respond quickly to something happening, I'm talking about pure mouse speed/accuracy. If I wanted a game that relied heavily on that, I'd go play an FPS.

I just never really cared for SC because it seemed to "simple" for me. Now, I'm not saying the game is easy, or anything like that, I'm saying that compared to games like Empire Earth or Age of Empires, it is simplistic and restrictive.

In Empire Earth you have 14 ages you can span through, from Prehistoric age, where war is conducted with hairy men and their rather large stones (the ones made of rock, not the ones between their legs), all the way to the Nano Age, where you start sending out robots and stuff like that.
Each of these ages has its own, fairly sizeable technology tree, which when combined with the rest of the ages means you are going to have thousands of different options.

Age of Epires takes you from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, and only has 4 ages, but gives the benefit of having 12 different civilizations you can pick from, each with there own special units/weaknesses/strengths/building designs/etc. So you can either choose a favorite (Persians from AoE 2 were my favorite, Turtle Boats ftw!) or play them all.

StarCraft had three races, no different ages to go through and a comparatively small technology tree. Keep in mind, this doesn't make it a bad game. AoE and EE games take hours and hours if you play them to the end, while SC takes maybe, what, 30 minutes? So its good for quick online games, but I grew up with AoE and EE, so SC just seems lacking to me.

I have played it, and enjoyed the story behind the campaign mode, but I agree with Karoline, too twitchy for my tastes in an RTS.

I've been playing a bit of Company of Heroes lately, and I have to say I really like it. Things like pinning and flanking add tactical depth while also making the combat seem more real. Good stuff.

I'm quite sure I've done a run with no leveling as well as stick only. Awhile is the answer and you need to master dogde and block.

On the straterty games. Sins of a Solar Empire can take days and hom world hours. In home world screwing up your straterty can mean failiure before you even enage some fleets are that slow. In both macroing can turn the tide keeping the longrange units farback mantaining fighter screens ect.

I want FIFA to keep the same player positions, I want the bishop to move diagonally, I want to tap a forest to add one green mana to my mana pool, I want a quarter circle forward plus punch to activate a hadoken. I want dust2 to be a staple of the map rotation. I want my space marines to be fearless. And I want to press 1 and S to make an SCV out of my main command center

the single player is icing, or did you think the beta was for ironing out campaign missions? In the end, starcraft really wasn't made to be about a story. I don't care when I get to play the campaign bits. I've played the game since release and haven't even begun the first mission. Too much like SC1 is the point. There are games that elevate to a certain level of sport and looking at it with a traditional videogame point of view will just be disappointing.

I can get a rich roleplaying experience at a table and good story from a book, but I like most of my games pretty lean and balanced

Oh. Mah. Gawd. You did not just play the "video games are sports!" card.

Company of Heroes is great stuff. I'm glad I bought the pack on Steam. Though the more recent expansions were a little..different compared to the core gameplay. I've been playing SC2 for the past couple of days now, rather like it, though at times the scenario layout which kinda encourages you to discard use of earlier troop types doesn't sit well with me.

I mean, I'm perhaps past the 50 percent mark of the campaign, I've got thors, and siege tanks and fighter air-support, and I find that I don't use infantry anymore. Which kinda makes me sad, since I remember in the earlier levels, getting enough resources to pop 2 or 3 of those boosted regular marines with medic support was just awesome. Nowadays tho, most of the stuff I encounter if I DARE field infantry chews it to pulp in seconds, even with medics.

The general apparent limit of 59 'support/control' on most maps annoys me too. Since infantry and such are so fragile now, its simply not worth making more than a handful of them (to man the bunkers) and field a more mechanized force.

I'm hoping some of these upcoming later levels will actually let me use all these neat anti-zerg deathfield explosive awesomeorgasm stuff .

I'd heard that SC2 was using a bit of a 'rock beats scissors' approach, so some stuff would be particularly useful against heavy armor and some against infantry and so on. Maybe you're just seeing alot of anti-infantry enemies right now.

Well, guess what I just got for my birthday this morning

A Pet rock?

And happy B-Day!

Sadly no

Thanks!

The last level. It's a classic "the terran must hold out against the zerg for X amount of time", only you've got everything at your fingertips.... and you'll need it.

It took four tries for me to beat it. It's the only level on normal difficulty that I had to play more than once (except for the ones where I did something stupid). It's hard. I chose to take out the air (you'll understand). I ended up having to field lots and lots of siege tanks (bunkers and the marnies inside die too quickly, and are too difficult to get into place after the second or third wave), along with a fair number of missile launchers (no attacking air units, but overlords that can drop zerg were still fair game), a set of 8 banshees to deal with nidas worms (cloak ftw), and all the units I could spare defending the two entrances: 3 battleships plus any vehicles i could squeeze out while not making seige tanks on the left, and 2 battleships plus what my barracks was spewing on the right.

It was utter chaos. And glorious. The end is worth it.

I'm currently re-playing on hard difficulty, trying to get achievements. I'm very much stuck on Tosh's second mission, the one with the purple gas; the protoss are fielding mid-game units (the giant walkers and warp rays) and all I have are marines, maruaders, medics, and goliaths. It's nowhere near enough to survive, much less beat the level, mush less prevent them from closing off any gas dealies. Very frustrating.

I'm stuck on this level as well (on hard). Funnily enough I did the best my first time around. I was sitting at 6 recovered and 6 sealed, and had a good sized force left after finally clearing out that base right next to mine, and then they started sealing the last alter, so I rushed my troops over to them and went strait after the probe because it was already almost done by the time I got there. It literally went "Probe finishes, probe turns around to move away, probe dies".

My biggest problem is actually with those stupid lazer ships, they keep tearing my goliaths and bunkers apart. Maybe I just need to field more infantry because they don't seem to be fielding anything particularly effective against them. My grenade guys and marines are just tearing stuff up with 3 or so medics behind them to keep them healthy. That marine shield really helps with survivability.

i've entertained the idea of buying this...any good? no spoilers please

If you like RTS games, the answer is a definite yes.

If you only want to play the Singleplayer Campaign, I'm not sure, it is worth it, even though I think the campaign is really good.

Bye
Thanee

Sounds like you are having fun with the game (even though it is not exactly your type of game in general).

Oh, and a slightly delayed Happy Birthday!

Bye
Thanee