[firenze]

Unless I'm blind there's no Starcraft II thread. Now, I'm an 80s-90s PC gamer who is now nearly console exclusive... but WTF people, even I am getting excited about this game. Is it just because it's cool to hate WoW that we aren't talking about SC2 (hey wow another acronym to confuse me and make my brain read Soul Calibur 2)? Or maybe I'm dumb and there's a thread with a title that's too clever for me to get.

I'll start off with this mod video. I also normally don't care about this kind of stuff but oh my god it's really awesome: http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/30560

(And here's another, this one's a Metal Slug remake. http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/30247 I dunno about trying to emulate Metal Slug, but it sure does look like you can make a viable action side scroller with this stuff)

Discuss Starcrafting. Go.

[another god]

SC2 is big.

It's really big.

The game is Street Fighter 4 times a million.

More people play SC1 competitively *and* casually than any fighting game ever made. The original is a joy to watch, and the sequel is nothing but more of the same. Do you know how gorgeous it is to watch zerg drones morph into buildings? It's fucking gorgeous.

This game doesn't need to do a thing to be phenomenal. It just needs to be.
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interdimensional

[Gironika]

Well, for one I have no money on hand to pick this up, and then there's the problem of getting a proper gfx-card in the first place. If it weren't for those, I'd already have bought this, even though I played the first one once and only for half an hour or so.
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[notbov]

it's not that i don't want SC2, it's that i happen to have a bunch of other games i should/rather be playing, and the fact that i remembered that i am god-awful at the original.

personally, i'm more interested in the wacky shit people will do with the editor than the game itself.

(and i'm still bitter that Blizzard sent me a beta invite 2 days before the beta ended. bastards.)

[Sniper Honeyviper]

[notbov]

looking at the requirements, they seem to line up with a top-end system from about the time WoW was released (2004)

i wouldn't worry too much though, they have their Korean playerbase to consider. with that said, you can still have a card that doesn't support SM 3.0 or (ugh) some integrated shit. that'd stop a lot of modern games from running.

[Predator Goose]

[Loki Laufeyson]

ajutla wrote a pretty good article about starcraft in an issue of the gamers quarter
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[notbov]

[firenze]

[T.]

seeing 'sc2' makes me think star control 2 :/
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o tempora, o mores

[astralpancakes]

Somewhat interested in this, provided I can get it to run on Linux. Will have to wait until the release. I don't understand why they don't make an official client while they're at it, considering they already make one for OS X.


Mostly waiting for Diablo III though...

[firenze]

[Predator Goose]

firenze, it's the level of complexity and fanaticism that's the turnoff. It's complex enough that it's really hard to just jump into a game and hold your own against anyone. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but contributes to being hard to get into. You really can't say the same about pickup baseball.

The fanaticism on the other hand is analogous to baseball. And it's one of the reasons I fucking hate watching organized sports. If I had to play with those people I'd chew my arms off. And admittedly this is where the real rub lies. Because it's really hard to put up with the complexity of SC, and the memorization it requires, to play with people who live and breathe these games.

I never meant to say other people can't enjoy all that. But multiplayer RTS games always seemed like way too much work for not a lot of payoff to me. And the single player campaigns have rarely done it for me, so you're one up on me there.

So there's no problem with other people being incredibly pumped about it. I'm just saying there's no hook here for someone like me. Didn't mean to be a downer.

Edit: And thanks for the suggestion notbov, I might just do that.
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I can no longer shop happily.

[CubaLibre]

It's usually worth getting the game for free and cheating your way through the single player. Just to see who backstabs who and like, the crazy units you can get. And stuff. Anyway that's how I played the first Starcraft.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Talbain]

Did you actually need to, or was it just because you got bored?
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[CubaLibre]

I can't play RTSes worth a good god damn.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Flylighter]

[Pat the Great]

I wrote up a quick tips for SC2 newbies on my blog, submitted it to Reddit, and got over 11000 hits. behold the power of bored nerds. http://ohsnapson.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/how-to-play-starcraft-2/

Hours later, my boss walks in and says, "Pat, you know what would be really cool? A beginner's guide to StarCraft II."

It'll be on the PCWorld front page over the weekend, if I'm not mistaken. Fun stuff.
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-pat m.
twitter

[CubaLibre]

Wow. Congratulations man.
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[EU03]

I couldn't get into the original SC as a kid. Didn't have the mentality for RTS back then.

Beta hits, and after being drilled by my roommate for about an hour and just watching a simple build order video, I'd say I'm doing ok. Just all the additions that Blizzard added from the original to WC3 to SC2 makes it infinitely more accessible to casual level play. I'm particularly interested in what Blizzard is going to do for their in-game tutorials for the "my first RTS" crowd.

If you're just starting, just go for MMM as Terran. Pretty unstoppable against lower level play. Just watch out for muta/void ray massing. Noob killers for sure.
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[drobe]

Chunken colony chunken colony PLAGOOOO GEE GEEE

I don't know guys, I remember my Starcraft as a kid and it was all about Reaver drops, BS, and that cool shit that happened when an arbiter flies over your mineral patch. There was a wonderful mystery that unfolded every time the fog of war regenerated and a nuke suddenly did something new to your star of ultralisks. The new starcraft is cool and competitive and stuff, but it's like watching Fight Club over and over again. Sure, there's some new detail here and there, but it's all the same thing over and over again. And people seem to love it.

I mean, it seems highly formulaic in the eyes of the viewer and in the eyes of the aspiring competitor. There are guides, essential strategies, people chose races based on their APM. If you want to be a serious SC player, you feel obligated to pump your APM and to learn the hard and soft counters to every popular strategy.
Mind you, the game itself is fantastic. It manages to balance three races that do completely different things. Just, the way people have tackled the game and tied it down into a series of discrete, concise movements and phases kills a lot of the enjoyment that you could get from having a novel experience.

Pat: I like your guide, but it's a guide that I've seen before. I think it's a problem when the defacto beginner's guide to 'becoming competitive' in a game tells you explicitly what to do with your units. Instead, I think it's healthier to have a competitive community that focuses on abstract movements--things as simple as "Gather information," "split your enemy's forces," "identify their oversights and capitalize on them." A beginner's guide should say "left click to select, right click to move and attack," not "Move an overlord to the enemy base and keep mining with your first four workers in order to get the fastest lings."

The gg and hf stuff is pretty silly.
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[haze]

[Pat the Great]

RE: Starcraft 2, I don't think the childhood wonderful mystery is what kept it in action for 12 years. It evolved into a fine-tuned competitive game. I'm guessing the only reason you remember it for the wonderful mystery is because you played the single player, dicked around online for a few weeks, and went off to play something else. That's certainly what I did, until I dusted it off in like, 2003 and realized that there was a lot more to it than I had thought BECAUSE people had dissected the game to death. And even then, there's plenty of wonder and mystery in the high level play--like Boxer's marine/medic micro against a Lurker.

Now I'm an adult, and I don't play games for wonder or mystery. I only really play fighting games and Starcraft (not even other RTSes, just Starcraft).

RE: The guide, it isn't really a "Beginner's Guide" so much as a "Guide For People Who Have A Lot Of Bad Habits From Single-Player".

Why are generalizations like "gather information" and "split your enemy's forces" competitively healthier than specifics like "send a worker to scout" and "You can use force fields to split an enemy's army on a ramp"? I must confess that this irks me a little bit, mostly because I've come across plenty of disdain for StarCraft among self-avowed "strategy buffs" because they like to imagine themselves as some kind of visionary general who can win wars by paraphrasing Sun Tzu and can't be bothered to learn how to play Starcraft.
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-pat m.
twitter

[CubaLibre]

I think it's telling that those same strategy buffs actually use that Sun Tzu nonsense and win actual strategy games, like e.g. the Total War series or Hearts of Iron. The reason you only play fighting games and Starcraft is because Starcraft is basically a fighting game.

EDIT: I don't mean to attach any positive or negative connotations to that, it's simply a statement of observed fact. It is the reason I can't play it for shit, though. I can't play fighters for shit either. They require the exact same kind of thinking and execution, both of which I tragically lack.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[parker]

I hate this shit. I just want to build forts, not think about shit like "build orders" and "lower level play". I had a handful of good times playing Starcraft 1 multiplayer with other shitty players the first few weeks the game came out but I think that door is closed to me now.
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[Pat the Great]

Then play Dwarf Fortress.
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-pat m.
twitter

[drobe]

I hope that we're thinking about high level play as something that involves more of a fluid response to events and not a programmed response to events. Being able to spontaneously develop an adhoc plan to a unique condition, I think, requires a far 'higher level of play' than being able to match an event with an standard optimized response.
Now you're right, Pat, there are a few 'high level' players that genuinely inject new strategies and new concepts into the game. My problem is that as you descend down the ladder, everything becomes imitation and replication. Players who want to become competitive become dependent on 'what works' and they end up dismissing otherwise creative and spontaneous strategies. This kind of mentality only subtracts from the game experience. It turns something that can have an uncountable number of possibilities into something that has a finite number of possibilities. You end up with a turn-based rock-paper-scissors.

My point about teaching beginners an abstract goal hinges more on teaching the player how to think about about the engagement, not simply to teach how to perform in the engagement. Once they have the concepts, it's up to them to figure out how to implement those concepts using the tools that are available to them.

Now, since you brought it up, I played SC online far more than I did alone. I played touches of ladder, did the whole clan thing, but I've mostly played free-for-all games with friends, family, and random internet peoples. I had three main streaks of play: first at release, but I spent most of my time playing with the map editor and skirmish. I had my competitive streak when I got a broadband connection, that was sometime between 2004 and 2006. I had roommates in 2008 and 2009 who were into starcraft, so I ended up playing with them. That was around the same time that we were watching tournaments and Korean players. To date, I have only finished the Terran and Zerg campaigns. That was back at release.
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[parker]

Dwarf Fortress was great when it was me and a handful of dwarfs hanging out. Then the game just became me having to come up with shit for all the constant stream of immigrants to do. I was hoping the they would become more self sufficient as the game went on, not less.
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[drobe]

(Off Topic Parker Discussion: Dwarf Fortress after the first year is more dependent on how well you're capable of 'sticking to it' and tolerating idle workers. You're not forced to build one fortress. You can just keep making seven-dwarf fortresses, and maybe stick them together when they're ready.)
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[Pat the Great]

Parker: I just mentioned DF because it sounded rather literally like what you wanted to do.

drobe: I don't think that Starcraft deviates from any other competitive activity in that regards. I am something of a competitor in various fighting games and, uh, actual fighting sports, and in all of these you need to learn the rules first before you have a chance to be creative. Boxing, for instance, teaches you to always keep your hands up, but the pros frequently drop their hands as necessary because they're good enough that it doesn't always matter.

"Spontaneous strategy" from a newbie isn't nearly as creative, nor as interesting to me, as an unorthodox play from a veteran player, which is performed not out of ignorance of traditionally successful strategies, but rather because they're so intimately familiar with the traditionally successful strategies(and the underlying gaps) that they believe they have a better answer. That initial stage of development, where you have to learn the conventional plays and responses, is necessary to be creative in a competitive game.

As for "teaching the player how to think about the engagement", I maintain that it's far more intuitive to give the player a technique, explain why it works, and watch them figure out how to apply the underlying philosophy. "Divide your opponent's army" _might_ get a player to try forcefielding a ramp, or it might encourage them to bum rush a seemingly scattered group of enemy units--only to find that a good surround is actually what the enemy wanted. "Corner your opponent" could get one player to establish map control by slowly denying the enemy an opportunity to expand, or it could get him to send his Zergling mob to attack a bunch of Zealots that have their backs to the wall (which is ideal for Zealots, because the Zerglings can't surround them).

I'd much rather say "hey, these Sentries can use Force Field to divide an army in half on a ramp"--he'll realize how well it works when someone tries it on him (and owns half his army), and I'll be pleasantly surprised when he shows me a week later that the same principle can be applied by burrowing an Ultralisk or dropping a Thor onto a ramp at the right time (something which I haven't see yet, but want to try out now).
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-pat m.
twitter

[parker]

I should of said "I want to build a fort and then play Starship Troopers"
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[CubaLibre]

If they make World of Starcraft, I will probably play it. :(
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Ronnoc]

Gonna wait a few years until there's a battle chest of all three games, then beat the first handful of levels and use cheats on the rest. I don't have any interest in the multiplayer.

[Tulpa]

nothing anyone has said in this thread so far has indicated the game ever gets away from execution of optimal strategies. Everything I've ever heard or seen just makes Starcraft look like the Tekken of RTS.

Total Annihilation forever.
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[haze]

good gravy. not too long ago I had to put up with doofuses on BGG who claimed starcraft had no strategy whatsoever. apparently they had "solved" the game (1. rushing is an automatic win, 2. it doesn't matter what units you build)

the Tekken of RTS would hopefully have kangaroo marines, and breakdancing zealots. I'd buy it.

[Tulpa]

[Pat the Great]

[Tulpa]

That sounds pretty interesting. I was talking about the first one but that wasn't exceptionally clear from my post.
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[Pat the Great]

Also, http://www.pcworld.com/article/201780/how_to_dominate_starcraft_ii.html?&tk=sb
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-pat m.
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[firenze]