Why isnt it out yet, dammit!?
Because it's not the release date yet. I could get all philosophical about it, looking at the concept of time from many perspectives, and so on, but I won't.
Instead, I go and trample aliens under my iron boots (unless I play Zerg, then I trample them under my bare, armoured feet).;-)
(I got myself the beta and one of those single-player skirmish launchers to test it out, and it looks nice. I know I'll spend money on a certain computer game in a couple of days..)
I'm all for this game. Which is unusual, since I am a luddite.
Actually went to my first midnight gamestop release for this. :)
game looks great at 1680x1050 ultra high. played through the tutorials because im too afraid to start the campaign because I need sleep!
Nvidia users update your drivers if they arent current, SC2 didnt like my older 197.13 drivers.
Got it, installed it, cannot run the first scenario for more than roughly a minute before black screen of death as something overheats or thinks that it's overheating and triggers a failsafe shutdown. I am not pleased by this. Hardware is all above the minimums, and it's a bug that quite a number of people are reporting, and it makes the damn game as awesome as it seems for a minute or less of play, unplayable.
>.<
Got it, installed it, cannot run the first scenario for more than roughly a minute before black screen of death as something overheats or thinks that it's overheating and triggers a failsafe shutdown. I am not pleased by this. Hardware is all above the minimums, and it's a bug that quite a number of people are reporting, and it makes the damn game as awesome as it seems for a minute or less of play, unplayable.
>.<
Sounds frustrating. For those of us yet to buy, can you post your system specs? Win or Mac OS? What hardware?
Thanks,
Greg
Sounds frustrating. For those of us yet to buy, can you post your system specs? Win or Mac OS? What hardware?Thanks,
Greg
Win XP
Intel dual core 2.673.25GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
Sounds frustrating. For those of us yet to buy, can you post your system specs? Win or Mac OS? What hardware?Thanks,
GregWin XP
Intel dual core 2.67
3.25GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
Thanks. We have "similar" systems except mine's an iMac. And by similar, I mean I have the same dual core processor, and the ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro. I'm hoping the operating systems and respective drivers will prove the difference.
Good luck with that. Hopefully Blizzard will solve your problem soon enough.
Greg
Sounds frustrating. For those of us yet to buy, can you post your system specs? Win or Mac OS? What hardware?Thanks,
GregWin XP
Intel dual core 2.67
3.25GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XTThanks. We have "similar" systems except mine's an iMac. And by similar, I mean I have the same dual core processor, and the ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro. I'm hoping the operating systems and respective drivers will prove the difference.
Good luck with that. Hopefully Blizzard will solve your problem soon enough.
Greg
Did some testing, and around 1 minute of playing raises the temperature of my graphics card 50-60C (it maxed out at 111C before I quit before it tripped a failsafe and black screened of death like it was before), and that temperature raise is while I've had the case open and a massive fan blowing directly inside to flush heat).
Did some testing, and around 1 minute of playing raises the temperature of my graphics card 50-60C (it maxed out at 111C before I quit before it tripped a failsafe and black screened of death like it was before), and that temperature raise is while I've had the case open and a massive fan blowing directly inside to flush heat).
You may want to head over the Starcraft II forums. I was over there and there appears some bad FPS issues with macs. Even those that bootcamp to Win are getting better performances on the Windows side than on the Mac side (I, fortunately, have that option). The other thing I noticed is that NVidia seems to be hit a lot harder on macs than the ATIs.
Anyways. I've waited for this for 12 years, but I'm not going to wait too much longer. I'll buy it, and if there are problems, I'll wait 'till it or the OS is patched.
Greg
Just finished the campaign, which had me hooked from the beginning. Each mission is unique in its own way, and they way they introduce the new units over the course of the game makes each one feel useful. I wish the game was longer, but with as good as it was I don't think they could have made it long enough. I'm certainly anxious for the second game, though I'm curious on how they're going to create anywhere near as good a cast of characters as the first game when the game revolves around the Zerg.
Just finished the campaign, which had me hooked from the beginning. Each mission is unique in its own way, and they way they introduce the new units over the course of the game makes each one feel useful. I wish the game was longer, but with as good as it was I don't think they could have made it long enough. I'm certainly anxious for the second game, though I'm curious on how they're going to create anywhere near as good a cast of characters as the first game when the game revolves around the Zerg.
Do you know approximately how long it took you to finish the game? What's kept me from snapping this up is the prospect of paying $180 for all 3 separate factions/games, when I remember paying X 12 years ago for 1 game w/ all 3 factions.
And I only play the single-player campaigns, so multiplayer "replayability" doesn't count for anything w/ me.
I've heard rumors that the Zerg and Protoss campaigns will be priced as expansions (namely, much lower). Also, I hear the Zerg campaign will have a fair number of RPG elements to it.
Update:
I've got the game working, and it was worth the headache and black screens of death. Between the menu refresh rate fix that Blizzard gave as a stopgap, and me finding (and fixing) that my graphics card was quite literally clogged with so much powder fine dust that the fan was running but not circulating over the card itself, things are running smooth. :D
And I so badly want the Zerg expansion ASAP.
I've heard rumors that the Zerg and Protoss campaigns will be priced as expansions (namely, much lower).
I think this would need to be true for me to get this. I'm simply not paying $180 for what should be one complete game.
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Do you know approximately how long it took you to finish the game? What's kept me from snapping this up is the prospect of paying $180 for all 3 separate factions/games, when I remember paying X 12 years ago for 1 game w/ all 3 factions.
I believe the Terran campaign is 26 missions, with average playtimes of around 30 minutes (some run shorter, some longer). With the secondary objectives, it might take a few attempts to get some done. The original Starcraft had a total of 30 missions spread across all three campaigns.
The "waiters" are missing out. Its not $180 for a complete game, the first is 26 missions a full game by itself. As someone said, the original was 30 missions with all three races.
This time around, Starcraft is even better IMHO.
1) Go down to the Armory, spend your credits on permanent troop/building upgrades.
2) Go to the cantina, spend credits and hire out Mercenary Squads (sorta like Hero Units, one time fee, permanent access afterwards).
3) Go to the Laboratory and research Zerg or protoss inspired upgrades to your units/buildings (love the automated vespene gas refinery btw). These dont cost anything, you buy these with the zerg/protoss relics you accumulate during the missions themselves.
and dont even get me started on the cutscenes, there are so many blizzard quality cutscenes within the game. Before and after every mission. I cant believe how much they packed into a single dvd. All this is definately not a partial game. :)
Ok, you guys are starting to win me over ;-)
My problem is I play on a Mac, and PC prices dive much quicker and more substantially than they do for us. So I'll still wait a while.
wow. why is this even on here? Go to the starcraft forums. don't waste paizo space plugging a video game.
Yeah! How dare you post stuff about a video game ... in the video game sub-forum ... I mean that's just not ... oh never mind.
My leave ended two days before this game came out. Hopefully this will come out while I am over here.
You don't need a reliable online connection in order to play, do you? Like Steam or any of that crap.
You don't need a reliable online connection in order to play, do you? Like Steam or any of that crap.
You need to log in to battlenet when you start the game, I dont think you need the connection after that, I dont think itll eject you from the single player campaign if you time out or lose internet stability.
Multiplayer of course is another thing.Personally, I dont like 3rd party frontends like Steam or Games For Windows, etc. Battlenet works the same way but its not 3rd party. If you have your friends "Battlenet Real ID" then you can communicate with them over any Blizzard game (WoW, SC2, etc). I see most publishers going this route also for authentication/combat piracy reasons as well.
You don't need a reliable online connection in order to play, do you? Like Steam or any of that crap.You need to log in to battlenet when you start the game, I dont think you need the connection after that, I dont think itll eject you from the single player campaign if you time out or lose internet stability.
Multiplayer of course is another thing.Personally, I dont like 3rd party frontends like Steam or Games For Windows, etc. Battlenet works the same way but its not 3rd party. If you have your friends "Battlenet Real ID" then you can communicate with them over any Blizzard game (WoW, SC2, etc). I see most publishers going this route also for authentication/combat piracy reasons as well.
I'll give it a try. I'm in Iraq, and the connection in my room, while improved recently, isn't always reliable.
Just finished the campaign, which had me hooked from the beginning. Each mission is unique in its own way, and they way they introduce the new units over the course of the game makes each one feel useful. I wish the game was longer, but with as good as it was I don't think they could have made it long enough. I'm certainly anxious for the second game, though I'm curious on how they're going to create anywhere near as good a cast of characters as the first game when the game revolves around the Zerg.Do you know approximately how long it took you to finish the game? What's kept me from snapping this up is the prospect of paying $180 for all 3 separate factions/games, when I remember paying X 12 years ago for 1 game w/ all 3 factions.
And I only play the single-player campaigns, so multiplayer "replayability" doesn't count for anything w/ me.
I'd say 25-30 hours or so. It certainly seamed a lot longer than the original which I could probably beat in a day.
some of my friends are playing; say it is awesome; they havent reported any issues; just a good time.
My problem is I play on a Mac, and PC prices dive much quicker and more substantially than they do for us. So I'll still wait a while.In the past, Blizzard titles were always hybrid discs. According to Best Buy this remains the case.
I bought the original Starcraft battlechest on sale in the PC section while it was 3x the price in the Mac section of the same store, took it home and installed it on my PowerBook :-)
R.
Ooh! I forgot about that. Another reason to wait for the price to drop a bit.
And Prince That Howls, thanks the estimate on how long it took you to finish. That would be perfectly acceptable, though most reviews I've seen say from 13-15 hours. But I tend to be a little slow when it comes to RTS games so I'm sure I could expand on that lower estimate.
My problem is I play on a Mac, and PC prices dive much quicker and more substantially than they do for us. So I'll still wait a while.In the past, Blizzard titles were always hybrid discs. According to Best Buy this remains the case.
I bought the original Starcraft battlechest on sale in the PC section while it was 3x the price in the Mac section of the same store, took it home and installed it on my PowerBook :-)
R.
Ooh! I forgot about that. Another reason to wait for the price to drop a bit.
And Prince That Howls, thanks the estimate on how long it took you to finish. That would be perfectly acceptable, though most reviews I've seen say from 13-15 hours. But I tend to be a little slow when it comes to RTS games so I'm sure I could expand on that lower estimate.
Make sure to work on how fast you can beat it. There's an achievement for beating it in 8 hours or less.
My problem is I play on a Mac, and PC prices dive much quicker and more substantially than they do for us. So I'll still wait a while.In the past, Blizzard titles were always hybrid discs. According to Best Buy this remains the case.
I bought the original Starcraft battlechest on sale in the PC section while it was 3x the price in the Mac section of the same store, took it home and installed it on my PowerBook :-)
R.
Ooh! I forgot about that. Another reason to wait for the price to drop a bit.
And Prince That Howls, thanks the estimate on how long it took you to finish. That would be perfectly acceptable, though most reviews I've seen say from 13-15 hours. But I tend to be a little slow when it comes to RTS games so I'm sure I could expand on that lower estimate.
Truth be told I made sure to take my sweet time with the game. Wasted more than a little time on the lost viking arcade game ;)
Truth be told I made sure to take my sweet time with the game. Wasted more than a little time on the lost viking arcade game ;)
Me too, but not the viking arcade game. I dont understand why folks would want to rush this epic story :). I also try and get all the secondary objectives done each mission too, so im in no rush.
I'm running a four-year-old single core AMD 3700+ with 3GB of RAM and a 512MB nVidia 8500. The game cheerfully told me that my computer is below minimum spec, but bizarrely it then proceeded to run absolutely fine with everything on Medium detail (turning shadows off helps a lot on busy missions as well) at a good speed. So the game is very forgiving of low-spec set-ups.
The only problem I have is that occasionally the graphics driver crashes, turning the screen white. I can exit out to the desktop through alt-tabbing (or hitting the Windows key) and then reboot using key commands, so it's not a massive problem, just annoying. Apparently the driver can't keep up with the information being sent through it, which nVidia are apprently working on for the next driver update.
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32
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Am I the only one seriously underwhelmed with this game? The single player campaign missions are nice, if a little too gimmicky for my taste. A few missions where you're not on some kind of clock (be they fire walls, infected villages, train timers or whatever) would really have been nice.
Storywise, I am almost offended. The story is simplistic and a kiddie pool has more depth. We get it, Raynor still pines for Kerrigan, but that's not enough to float the entire thing. Other than that, Space Marine Bruiser is offensive, Scientist Girl is Nerdy-but-hot, Scientist Guy is nerdy², Captain Guy is honorable. Anyone I missed?
The Viking Minigame rapidly eclipsed my interest to the main game... It's been years since I had a decent shoot-em-up. Too short, though.
It seems 90% of the effort into the game went into Multiplayer - which is admittedly nice, but not entirely my cup of tea. The massive reprise of identical or near-identical units likewise seems a bit cheap - "Esport use" be damned, I wanted a new game, not a glorified mission disk.
It wasn't a waste of money (got it for cheap on Amazon) but nearly so - and I can't even trade it in. All in all, I was on the fence on getting it - and probably shouldn't have.
Am I the only one seriously underwhelmed with this game?
Probably.
The single player campaign missions are nice, if a little too gimmicky for my taste. A few missions where you're not on some kind of clock (be they fire walls, infected villages, train timers or whatever) would really have been nice.
Most of the missions are without a timer. Theres quite a few in the beginning that do operate on timers of a sort. Personally, I hate timers.
Storywise, I am almost offended. The story is simplistic and a kiddie pool has more depth. We get it, Raynor still pines for Kerrigan, but that's not enough to float the entire thing.
Im going on the assumption that youve only played through the first few missions after reaching the Hyperion, and that you may not have played through all of the first game.
Theres more to the current story coming as well. It also continues to build on Raynor's character from the first game. Its not just pining away, Raynor's character seems like the type that wont just give up on someone no matter how much time is past, hes also been shown (in both games iirc) to feel responsible for Kerrigans plight, and then theres his need for revenge on Mengsk for using him, which is what led to Mengsk becoming emperor and Kerrigan being abandoned and getting taken by the Zerg in the first place.Later in this game, you will find out why....
Other than that, Space Marine Bruiser is offensive, Scientist Girl is Nerdy-but-hot, Scientist Guy is nerdy², Captain Guy is honorable. Anyone I missed?
You missed Swann the dwarf-looking armorer. There are alot of cliches, and I attributed Tychus to be the typical redneck, alot of terran troops have that kind of voice-over since the first game. Tychus is also a convict with a cool backstory which gets resolved in the final video when you beat the game.
Every game has some cliches and stereotypes. StarCraft is like playing through an interactive movie if you are looking for deeper story, theres always a good book. Video games will be video games. :)
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Im going on the assumption that youve only played through the first few missions after reaching the Hyperion, and that you may not have played through all of the first game.
Wrong assumption, I'm sorry. I finished the campaign, as well as SC 1 and and Brood War.
Theres more to the current story coming as well. It also continues to build on Raynor's character from the first game. Its not just pining away, Raynor's character seems like the type that wont just give up on someone no matter how much time is past, hes also been shown (in both games iirc) to feel responsible for Kerrigans plight, and then theres his need for revenge on Mengsk for using him, which is what led to Mengsk becoming emperor and Kerrigan being abandoned and getting taken by the Zerg in the first place.
Later in this game, you will find out why....
** spoiler omitted **
You mean the Zeratul Mini-Campaign? Yeah, Dark Voice is foreboding. It didn't work at all for me, I am afraid. It seemed like a ham-fisted justification of Raynor's behaviour, kind of like you are always "right" after one of the story branches. If I can choose to do X, I want to be able to do wrong, not...
You missed Swann the dwarf-looking armorer. There are alot of cliches, and I attributed Tychus to be the typical redneck, alot of terran troops have that kind of voice-over since the first game. Tychus is also a convict with a cool backstory which gets resolved in the final video...
I know. It just... well, one relatively short video sequence doesn't turn this beast around for me. The story nowhere near stands up to the predecessor (hands up if you saw Mensk's actions coming), the "Redemption story" feels cheap, arbitrary and negates the drama of the original arc, plus it is achieved by a "magic de-Zerger" instead of any personal quest or loss for the infected.
It is not dramatic, it reads like a bad fanfiction making the "cool villain" some Mary Sue's boytoy.
Plus, over half the missions have zero to do with the story at all ("Gather the golden minerals. Now Gather the violet vespine. Now do a solo mission to break out some criminals. Now you got spectres" or "Save some colonists", "Move some colonists", "Exterminate these colonists)
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RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32
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There's a Lost Vikings mini-game? That's so cool! I know it's a shoot 'em up, but does it have any reference to the old Lost Vikings game from years ago?
As for Starcraft 2 I've had to settle for replaying a bit of Starcraft 1 for now. My computer is halfway around the world and my netbook is unlikely to cope very well with this game unfortunately!
There are minor nods, but mostly it is a straigh shoot-em-up with a Viking (one of the new units, a transformers-style mech/fighter) in the main role.
To each their own Terra, but you sound a little jaded. Gathering mineral, vespine, terrazine or whatever resources is a sacred cow among RTS games. Resource gathering in any game rarely has anything to do with the story, its just the cost of building troops. SC/Brood War was the same way. C&C with Tiberium, WarCraft with gold mines and lumber, etc.
I also thought the solo/limited # of troop quests were a welcome rest from the harvesting/base-building ones. And there were choices to be made in the game like the colonists example you gave. You had to choose to help or exterminate the colonists in the final sub-mission, not both. These were sub-quests (colonists, zeratul missions, etc), imho, sub-plots make a story more enjoyable, even if they have little to do with the main plot.
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RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32
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Just to be clear, I do not object at all to resource gathering, base building and conquest as the basic gameplay elements. On the contrary, what got my goat a bit was the need to introduce some twist in every other mission. Be it intercepting trains, protecting trains, stopping sealing of vents, evading a screen-filling wall of fire, alternating survival/attack frenzy cycles, protecting non-controlled units or just generic timers.
STARCRAFT 2 is an immensely conservative game. If it had been released in its current format in 2002 or 2003 or so, it would have been more timely and gotten a lot more acclaim for being ahead of the curve with regards to the RPG-like bridging sections between missions and so forth. As it stands, it feels like SC2 has borrowed all the best bits of DAWN OF WAR (the RPG stuff is more than slightly reminiscent of DoW 2) and other RTS games to emerge in the intervening years and bolted them to the SC1 engine (but redone in pseudo-3D).
There's nothing wrong with that as far as it goes: the game is fun and enjoyable. The story is cheesy as hell, and way too close to WARCRAFT 3 for comfort (Chris Metzen badly needs some new inspiration), but it performs its job of giving you reasons to blow stuff up. It is very much a mild evolution of the game, however, even milder than STARCRAFT 1 which was pretty conservative even when it was released back in 1998.
The most telling problem with the game from my POV and those of my online co-players was that we spent months playing SC1 on LAN when it came out and periodically revisited it for years afterwards. After just a week of SC2 we got bored and were dragged back into COMPANY OF HEROES by a new update to the splendid EASTERN FRONT mod, and haven't thought about playing SC2 again since. We've played that game enough in the past, and wanted something more than the same thing with slightly prettier graphics.
Do you know approximately how long it took you to finish the game? What's kept me from snapping this up is the prospect of paying $180 for all 3 separate factions/games, when I remember paying X 12 years ago for 1 game w/ all 3 factions.I believe the Terran campaign is 26 missions, with average playtimes of around 30 minutes (some run shorter, some longer). With the secondary objectives, it might take a few attempts to get some done. The original Starcraft had a total of 30 missions spread across all three campaigns.
Yeah, I heard the "this is not a whole game" argument - and had the same reaction for like 20 seconds when I first read about it a couple of years back.
But I think it really is a whole game. There might be just one single-player campaign instead of three, but it's three times as long as the original campaigns - in other words, it's as long as the three campaigns from StarCraft combined.
There are 29 Terran single-player missions - the game tells you about 26, which includes a secret mission, but in three instances, you must have two possible ways to go and must decide on one or the other (example: There's a protess fleet getting ready to torch some infested settlers. You can decide to defend those settlers against the Protoss or help the Protoss to take care of the infestation). You can always go and play the other mission in the archives (though this doesn't have an impact on the campaign).
The missions are a lot more varied than they were in StarCraft (a lot less "create a base and overrun the enemy" missions - you can just run custom games against A.I., anyway).
Plus, the credits and research points, and the stuff you do with each, mean there is more to the campaign than just a number of missions one after the other (Will you buy the siege tank upgrade to have more powerful tanks in the missions, or will you hire some mercenary units to get elite support in the mission? Will you use the research points to research Predator or Hercules units?)
In addition, there is a Protoss mini-campaign with 4 missions, so you get as much, story wise, than in StarCraft.
And you still get full multiplayer support, too. You won't miss out on Protoss or Zerg multiplayer goodness just because the campaign isn't about them.
And, by the way, the challenges are a nice idea, too. They're like an advanced tutorial for things like unit match up (what's the best unit to attack those siege tanks with?), defence against rushes, and micromanagement.
I generally play games 2-3 years "late", since I don't have a tricked-out system
I haven't installed the game on my older computer yet, but I think it will work quite well, even though the thing is 4 years old. The game doesn't quite offer the sort of eye candy you get from games nowadays, but I for one don't miss it, and it does mean the game doesn't need anything near a tricked-out system.
My leave ended two days before this game came out. Hopefully this will come out while I am over here.
You don't need a reliable online connection in order to play, do you? Like Steam or any of that crap.
You need a connection to install. After that, you need a connection to play multiplayer games or to get achievements.
I'd say that if you play in multiplayer mode, you will need a decent connection. If all you want is the achievements, you could probably do with ancient dial-up.
And if you don't care about achievements at all (they're all about bragging rights and won't give you in-game benefits), you can play offline.
Technically, RTS does not include harvesting. Gathering and managing resources is "Sim".
Considering that the first game that was ever called a RTS (Dune 2) included it, I'm willing to ignore semantics like that :P
STARCRAFT 2 is an immensely conservative game.
Oh yeah. And since the fans wanted just that, it's perfect.
Sure, there are new games that play a lot differently, but this is not a brand new game - it's the sequel to StarCraft.
If they had changed the gameplay, Korea would have gone to war with Blizzard! ;-)
I want to remind to everybody, in order to avoid issues with the video card, that it would better to add these two simple text lines into the file named variables.txt (which can be found into the Documents\StarCraft II\ path):
frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60
The fact is that some people were the victim of an overheating bug, mainly while into the menu screens, caused by a programming error by Blizzard who didn't implement a framerate limit into the game. As a result, while running low-resolution screens (like, for example, the menu screen or the cockpit area between missions), the game forces the video card to refresh the image too much, in a way that can be very damaging to old or dusty video cards - some GPUs literally 'fried' as a result...
The settings above have been indicated by Blizzard as a 'manual workaround' to avoid this problem, while they are working to release a future patch in order to fix the issue automatically.
For better infos, THIS is the original article.
And THIS is the workaround on the Starcraft 2 forums (it is the second post from the top) - back then it was related to the Beta version, but it seems the problem is still present in the Final version.