Less than a week, can't wait.
I've been missing RTS games to the point that I almost installed Command and Conquer 3 again. Looking forward to the new Star Craft.
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I'm looking forwards to it a bit, to the point of replaying SC2, but I'm not as stoked about it as I should be. I was an old-school, major fan of STARCRAFT, it was my favourite RTS for about eight years until COMPANY OF HEROES came out.
My problem with SC2 is that it was simply SC1 in 3D with a few new units and a considerably less interesting plot. The gameplay was good fun, but it felt like Blizzard had simply done a remake of the first game in a new, shinier engine. The writing was also flabby and self-indulgent, with quite a few filler missions.
I'm also extremely disappointed with Blizzard for not living up to their promises. We were promised that HEART OF THE SWARM would be priced as an expansion, but it's coming out as a full price game (£29.99 here in the UK). We were promised there would be an equal amount of content to SC2 itself, but instead it's almost a third shorter (20 missions to SC2's 28). And of course we've had to wait almost three years for it, which is absolutely ludicrous for an expansion using the exact same game engine.
I'm sure I'll have a huge amount of fun with it, but definitely the shine's gone off the franchise for me. I'm actually looking forwards to COMPANY OF HEROES 2 and PLANETARY ANNIHILATION more at the moment.
Best part was that mission 3 in SC1 and SC2 was essentially exactly the same - bunker defense until relief comes.
If your looking for good RTS why are you going to StarCraft though, I ask curiously in an attempt to understand despite such a question being likely to offend people?
So much better fare on the market.
Ummm.... Show me the mythical better fare please. We all have opinions of course but I haven't seen an RTS with the same replay value ever. I like C&C almost as much but in multilayer, Star Craft is the 800 lb. Gorilla. I might have lost respect for Blizzard through the years, but no other RTS comes close to Warcraft/Star Craft. Both sp and mp modes are pretty fun. With C&C, I never had the urge to play multilayer.
I still want to see an RTS that is as good as a Blizzard RTS.
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Yeah I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with that statement. I've found Star Craft to be extremely over-rated. Most popular I certainly agree with, best is hardly implied by that however.
Now for the mythical better fare we have Total Annihilation. Here you go, only $5.99 too for it and all the expansions.
There are others out there too if you look for them. Something newer how about X-COM? You've got several games to pick from all that are extremely enjoyable.
XCOM is sublimely brilliant. However, it is not an RTS. It's turn-based and it's a squad-based combat game. No base-building, no real-time combat, no resource management. It's not in the same genre.
TOTAL ANNIHILATION and its modern successor, SUPREME COMMANDER, are both very fine strategy games. However, they are also totally raving bonkers. There's some great strategy and tactics you can deploy, but the games can both be won by building either 10,000 units (and in SUPCOM controlling them from a view so zoomed out that you're basically in orbit) or deploying ludicrous super-weapons. TA also had the problem of having (including expansion and downloads) about 15,000 units. Great games, but you can't really master them in as much detail as you can with SC1 and 2.
DAWN OF WAR is pretty good, almost as much so as SC, but it does have a fairly tight unit cap. You also need to buy all of the expansions to get the best variety of factions (although given you can buy the whole thing now for a trivial amount, not a problem). The SP campaign is pretty dull though, and you can win the entire game by just building the basic infantry unit. Which given the basic infantry unit is the Space Marine does make sense by the lore, but still feels a bit odd. DoW2 is a different genre (more of a DIABLO in space) so isn't really in the conversation.
There's also tons of RTS games with a much better SP campaign than SC2: GROUND CONTROL 1 and 2, HOSTILE WATERS, COMMAND AND CONQUER 3 (but definitely not C&C4 or RED ALERT 3), maybe a few others, but their multiplayer is nowhere near as sophisticated.
So for me the only game which scores higher than STARCRAFT across the board is COMPANY OF HEROES. The biggest improvement is the focus on the actual combat rather than counters, build orders and APM like STARCRAFT. SC2 is often lost by a single bad decision (like failing to scout the enemy early on to discover what they are building, leaving you with possibly useless counters) and recovery can be virtually impossible. CoH requires you to build up your forces and advance quickly (even moreso, as the resource model requires you to hold positions on the battlefield, so turtling is not possible), but it's rare that you get into a situation that you can't get out of with a good selection of units. You have more flexibility in that sense. There's also more of an uncertainty element, as your units can miss (every shot fired in SC2 automatically hits). The battlefields are also deformable, allowing for strategies involving blasting through supposedly impassable bits of the map to come at the enemy from an unexpected angle.
It's not perfect, and of course if you prefer SF to WW2 then you're going to prefer SC anyway, but CoH is a better game for me as it focuses on intelligent combat, whilst SC is more like a bonkers game of hyperfast 3D chess (which is certainly not a bad thing, just different).
Just finished HotS. An improvent on SC2 itself, with a campaign that's a lot more fun. I actually quite liked the structure of it, as Blizzard arranged things to give HotS its own, almost self-contained plot with a definitive end. Helped it avoid 'middle installment of a trilogy' syndrome.
There were a few problems. The tutorial mini-missions were a nice idea, but I get the impression they were there to pad out the mission count almost to parity with the original, to make it look like a game of the same length. The tutorial missions are only about 3-5 minutes long each, however, and the game overall is easily a third shorter than WoL. Fortunately, the excellent production values, great CGI and a really fun campaign make up for it. And the Zerg have always been my favourite race (just), which helps.
Also, Abathur is highly amusing. The best addition to the SC cast of characters since BROOD WAR.
I've been playing HOTS online.
I'm really bad at it! D:
Well, good presentation, but the plot was way, waaaaay to predictable. If I, who often gets surprised even by mild plot twists in movies, can predict two missions in advance where the plot will go, it could have done with a bit more spicing up.
Gameplay was... well, Starcraft 2. The Zerg never were one of my favorite races, so I'm looking ahead to Legacy of the Void.
I hope Raynor punches Zeratul in the face, btw.
You can go to Zerus before ever setting foot on Char. I went that path first. I might try the other next time to see what's different.
It was too short. It did not make me want to play achievement hunting, unlike WoL. The dialogue was... Taxing, to say the least. Abathur is a respawn of Mordin Solus of Mass effect, sadly. The cameos, like Nova, were far too short and felt like they were added just because they needed to put them in, not because the storyline demanded it. Oh, and... kerrigan gets flopped into the SAME outfit as last time??? For serious???
Yeah, pretty heavy list. Still, I did have fun playing it, so in total, I think it is a reasonable addition to Starcraft, and I am looking forward to LotV.
I had quite a bit of fun with the campaign. The gameplay was inventive and dynamic enough, even though I've never really enjoyed playing with the Zerg. The story was not particularly good, but neither it was instantly forgettable; after all, StarCraft has never been known for inspired storytelling. Good enough to justify the campaign.
As for the multiplayer changes, I've been enjoying them a lot. I play every Sunday with a group of friends and we're all having a lot of fun with the new stuff (Reapers with regeneration, awww yeah!).
Overall, an excellent purchase. I highly reccomend it.
I was actually surprised and impressed with the story. Blizzard has a habit of taking heroes and corrupting them into irredeemable villains (which, frankly I'm tired of) but they avoided that this time around. I thought they did an excellent job of turning Kerrigan into a sympathetic and tragic character. I especially enjoyed the cinematic with the shapeshifter in light of this.
Part of what was fun about the Wings of Liberty story was it was a classic Save The Damsel In Distress tale. Sure it had some twists, but it was basically one man's quest to save the woman he loves. I think Heart of the Swarm builds off that story really well - much more than I would have expected.
With the introduction of the Primal Zerg, the Hybrids, the concept of Feral Zerg cut off from the Swarm, all the different Terran factions, and a growing number of Protoss factions, I'm curious if they're also using this trilogy as the foundation for a StarCraft MMO. /shrug
Time will tell, no doubt.
As for gameplay, it's nothing new. However, I remain much at worse at this game than I was at StarCraft and StarCraft: Brood War, which is frustrating. Blizzard's forums and online community has also repeatedly proven to be antagonistic and just flat out unpleasant, so I've had an overwhelming number of negative exerpiences with the match-maker rather than positive ones. It's good at pairing me with opponents of similar ability, but civility seems to be absent the majority of the time.
All in all, I'd say it's certainly a good addition to StarCraft 2 and it definitely improves upon the core game. Maybe not to the same extent that Brood War improved StarCraft, but an improvement none-the-less. In retrospect though, I do NOT, think the game is worth the price of a full stand-alone game. $60 is a bit pricey for what you get out of this. $40 would have been more reasonable.
It's disappointing because of the improvements - the UI in particular - but I think STARCRAFT/BROOD WAR remains the superior game. I think Blizzard hit a very special spot of balancing three completely different sides in that game and have never been able to quite recreate it since. In particular, SC2 seems to just have a couple too many units and lacks the focus of the original. Certainly pre-HotS, the Zerg also seemed slightly underpowered compared to the other two sides, whilst the original game balanced them out much better.
SC1's units with their same stats but in the SC2 engine (there's got to be a mod for this in the works, surely?) would be something special indeed.
I was actually surprised and impressed with the story. Blizzard has a habit of taking heroes and corrupting them into irredeemable villains (which, frankly I'm tired of) but they avoided that this time around. I thought they did an excellent job of turning Kerrigan into a sympathetic and tragic character. I especially enjoyed the cinematic with the shapeshifter in light of this.
She's horribly inconsistent. On one hand, she's supposed to be sympathetic and still show that she is not as monstrous as the Queen of Blades v1. OTOH, she gleefully massacres planet garrisons to test her newest Zerg toys. I found her a pretty bad main protagonist, if the idea is that players should identify with her plight.
I was actually surprised and impressed with the story. Blizzard has a habit of taking heroes and corrupting them into irredeemable villains (which, frankly I'm tired of) but they avoided that this time around. I thought they did an excellent job of turning Kerrigan into a sympathetic and tragic character. I especially enjoyed the cinematic with the shapeshifter in light of this.She's horribly inconsistent. On one hand, she's supposed to be sympathetic and still show that she is not as monstrous as the Queen of Blades v1. OTOH, she gleefully massacres planet garrisons to test her newest Zerg toys. I found her a pretty bad main protagonist, if the idea is that players should identify with her plight.
I didn't find her inconsistent at all. Kerrigan has always been my favorite character of the series, so having the expansion focus entirely on her was an absolute blast for me. Bias, I know, but I acknowledge that.
So yeah, I didn't find it inconsistent. I found her return to evil to be organic and engaging.
Just finished it (took my time with it).
All in all, I liked it a lot and I thought the story was great. I'm glad Raynor took a back seat and the game was all Kerrigan. The UI was cleaner, and the evolution missions, troop strains, and Kerrigan skill tree were all nice touches too. I also love some of the new units like the Locust battery thingie (made expansion defense setup very quick).
Looking forward to the next one.
I don't know what my deal is, but I am MUCH worse at this game than I was at the original StarCraft. Even just in progressing from WoL to HotS I'm worse! lol
I must be getting old or something. Unacceptable!
Game was fun. I enjoyed the missions as each one seemed to introduce a new zerg and how to optimize using it.