StarCraft 2

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Originally Posted by Dyne

That would really suck if each one is months apart as well for people who only play single player if somebody likes one of the later races.

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But if you wanted the last race to be released and they waited to release SC2 for when everything was done, it would take the same amount of time. Congratulations, nothing's been gained!

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Originally Posted by Grave

I had no clue that it was gonna get worse.

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How is it worse? You wait and get the race you want, now you don't even have to bother playing the ones you don't like.

I'm not entirely sure I understand the complaints here. Is it a pricing issue or that everyone is willing to wait through the delays? I don't recall people bitching this much when Frozen Throne was announced, and 90% of that expansion was story too.

I fail to see what was really wrong with the way they were doing it before, other than the fact that people only bought it once.

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Originally Posted by MechDeus

How is it worse?

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If they want to make an expansion, they can make an expansion. What I said before was a fairly minor complaint. Say that you're waiting for the zerg version and have no interest in the terran campaign, and it's the last of the three. If you want to play MP in the meantime, you're stuck buying one you don't want to start with. So if they release them little by little, they're still alienating people, and if they release them all at the same time it's a cash grab. Frozen Throne wasn't, say, an orc followup to a human-only game. That's nothing like this.

I just don't know how anyone can defend this decision to begin with.

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Originally Posted by Grave

I just don't know how anyone can defend this decision to begin with.

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So why the change? It really comes down to scope. "We always start with this really gigantic scope", Sigaty explained. Basically StarCraft II got bigger than they expected. They have a huge, solid Terran campaign that needs a bit of fleshing out at this point, and once you figure out the dev time needed for the other two campaigns it would have delayed the game for years. After months of discussion, this was their solution.

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Originally Posted by Grave

Say that you're waiting for the zerg version and have no interest in the terran campaign, and it's the last of the three. If you want to play MP in the meantime, you're stuck buying one you don't want to start with.

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Again, the alternative is that the game isn't released until the last one is finished so you won't play it until then anyway. This changes nothing, and if you buy an extra copy just to play part of it early that's your own fault (like everyone who bought the Spore creature creator).

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So if they release them little by little, they're still alienating people, and if they release them all at the same time it's a cash grab.

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Well they've already said the entire point of this was because they couldn't release them all by the date they wanted so that nixes the latter, and they don't appear to be doing the former since the MP is still the MP no matter which version you get, so, uh, what's the third choice?

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Frozen Throne wasn't, say, an orc followup to a human-only game. That's nothing like this.

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You're right. Unlike Frozen Throne, these expansions (so far) don't need to be purchased for the MP. So it's actually better!

I'm not saying this is the best solution for the consumer's dollar, but it is a decision that doesn't affect the majority of the people buying the game and who made it the still popular games it is today. It also gives the people that do want to play it primarily for the single-player much more than they would normally get. I can understand not wanting to pay more, but it's not like they aren't giving the content to back it up and is probably going to end up faring better than some other attempts at episodic content.

I don't like not being able to play through all three different races in each expansion. I want to play as the protoss, but now I'm going to have to wait what? 3 years before I get to play them?

I'd rather it be like all the past game and expansions have been where you get to play as all races in each.

Yeah, this really throws off the learning curve of going from single player to multi. It was great how you were introduced to the mechanics behind each race slowly through the campaign and by the end you were familiar enough with them all that you could hop into multi and not feel lost.

I told you they couldn't figure out any other way to make an expansion. Brood War required a huge rebalancing. This way is easier.


I'm sure you won't have to worry about the learning curve that much since most of the basics seem to be intact, including most of the unit types, which return. Figuring out the higher-level play will be all you have to do.

I expect that with every new release of SCII the multiplayer will get a huge overhaul as well. As long as the campaigns are as substantial as they are purporting, the only thing really being sacrificed is a finished story and the other campaigns. Just think of it as Blizzard saying they plan on two expansions for SCII instead of the one we were all expecting at some point.

This is pretty rad too:

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"Not having to worry about multiplayer really freed us up creatively," Browder said as we moved into a discussion of the game's design. "We were able to put in extra units and fool around with stuff without having to worry about multiplayer balance, just whether a particular mission worked." Among the other goodies awaiting players of the single-player campaign are the possible return of the Goliath, the Wraith and the medic units from the original StarCraft. "The rationale is that Jim Raynor's been around for a while and a lot of this older technology is cheaper and would be the kind of thing a guy like him would have access to." The game will also sport an interesting economic system in which the player will be able to purchase various upgrades that would never pass muster in multiplayer, such as the ability to build both a reactor and a tech lab on a barracks or a larger splash damage radius for units that do AoE.

One of the examples Browder gave us was to build the single-player Zerg around Kerrigan's growing power and new mutations. Unlike the Terrans who have "hero" units but play much like their multiplayer versions, such a Zerg concept would make single-player Zerg more like Warcraft III. Zerg armies would need to be built around the need to get super-unit Kerrigan onto the battlefield and protect her while she garners what she needs to go up in power.

The Protoss, on the other hand, are apparently trying to hold their race together in the face of fractious tribalism. Their mechanic would therefore be based on exclusion -- the knowledge that using certain units from one tribe precluded using other units from another. In both cases not only would each race play differently from the Terrans, they'd play radically differently from the multiplayer versions of themselves.

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They're really differentiating the single player from multi this time around. Sounds good so far.

Live SC2 stream from Blizzcon. Old SC pro YellOw is playing Protoss against some Zerg right now.

http://www.blizzard.com/blizzcon/video/stream-rts.xml

This game looks very very good in motion. I didn't think I'd really want to get back into RTS but yeah this has me pretty excited.