and honestly, i fail to see all the hype it gets. I admit although i played lot of RTSes in my gaming "career" and love the genre, i am not very good player, i tend to do probably better on Call of Duty, which i played a lot for the majority of the last year, or sports games (football, ice hockey) which i always played a lot.
Anyway after playing Sins or SupCom SC2 feels like the relevation from the past... you cant zoom and your average armies consist of 10 units at best... hardly a trait of strategy, more like RPG. Simply i have no feeling i am commanding an army, this is quite an important aspect to me when it comes to RTSes. BTW i would say on average you can have 5x more buildings in your base than units in your "army"- thats pretty weird ratio, if you ask me.
Other thing, game speed, i played at Fast level, and the game is both superfast and slow at the same time. I mean the building and teching take ages, while battles are incredibly fast. I lost my army literally in a time period, i was scrolling to the place of the battle. This leads to interesting and IMHO quite stupid consequences: you lose you army in 5 second long battle and although you have money to burn and base spreading through the quarter of map, you wont be able to rebuild your units, before enemy turns majority of your base to dust...
Finally those 5 second long battles, i wonder where is the strategy part in that? Seriously unless you have 200 APM, youhave no chance to issue any commands in such a battle. All i see then is a game promoting the reflexes and faster hands, there is no strategic thinking involved.
To be fair, i never played old SC that much, so maybe my expectations were bit out of place, i expected something like Command and Conquer Generals, which i liked pretty much. SC2 however is nothing like that and i am really disappointed. Here is the hoping, that next CnC wont be trying hard to be EA´s Starcraft and will rather continue the CnC tradition with maybe few improvements taken from recent RTS hits like CoH or Supreme Commander.
How so? I thought it was overall exactly what I was expecting. I just wish they hadn't decided to make the zerg and protoss campaigns into expansions.
-Twilight Storm
Play through the campaign first then go multiplayer. By time you're done you will know if you want to play Terran or Protoss.
Play supreme commander 1 and 2.
1 for nostalgia and training, and 2 for multiplayer.
I just uninstalled both BroodWar and StarCraft II and I haven't even gotten all the campaign achievements(!)
I just don't have any desire to play them. Feel like playing alot of other games but not StarCraft.
....Feels like the end of an era to me....StarCraft was once my favorite game. The game that was standard for me to play every day online or offline.
If I had told myself this back in 2000 when I was 18 I wonder if I would have believed myself....
Oh well, people change.
Onwards to Company of Heroes and Dawn of War II. Relic is the new RTS kings for me.
I bought SC2 for the custom maps, unfortunately it seems the custom maps are generally less interesting than those from wc3.
I remember back in SC1 how scary invading the zerg beast seemed with my terran marines the first time. The buildings were giant organs, some beating hearts, others blood canals reaching from one stretch of the map to the other. It left this strange feeling of old SciFi movies such as Fantastic Voyage. Like being a microcosm insect inside a giant body and the body is fighting back with all it's defenses. So very alien. Now zerg are completely insectoid and the buildings are just larger versions. Hell the infestor building is the world's biggest tick. Way way too much like the tyranids or starship troopers.
Generally, most decent maps are some derivative of the DOTA and Tower Defense formula, though there are really inventive maps out there if you dig. Blizzard's terrible interface, however, hides basically all but the most played maps - which are generally the oldest ones. Regional Restrictions also ensure mean that only the largest regions - EU and NA - have active map making communities producing decent maps. And it's only going to get worse once HOTS arrives - the Map Store is going to kill the already incredibly weak custom map scene for SC2.
I modded wc3 for years, and sc2 was going to be a holy grail of modding. I get beta access the night the editor is released, and over the week I was constantly disappointed with it. It was a pretty engine, but the UI was so terrible. Copy/pasting a unit took 5 seconds in wc3. Copypasting a unit in sc2 takes 5 minutes.
During the beta you could only have 5 maps making up 20 mb. It was easy for a map to hit 5 mb with just terrain. From what I understand blizzard bumped the upload limits up significantly, but you still have to upload making quick testing of online maps near impossible.
The editor felt like blizzard purposefully made it terrible. Some decisions and lack of functionality could not have been sanely made. On release it offered no code, only a gui that was less effeciant and more confusing than the one wc3 shipped with. Code-support was what kept the wc3 modding scene alive.
Lastly (and most importantly) map makers want their map played and appreciated. Blizzard put in place a popularity system that made it impossible to get anyone who wasn't your friend to join your custom game. Maybe blizzard has improved that, but I don't know.
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