Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Starcraft II coverage sucks

It just does and I am annoyed by it. In fact the Starcraft I tournament at Blizzard's World Wide Invitational almost got more coverage that the new game (and by the way: Stork won the tournament and no Korean lost a best-of-three-games match to a non-Korean).

The best articles to come out of WWI are the following:

All in all, not a very impressive coverage. Some key observations are:

Gas is radically different. It means that you now have two geysers, but with only 1000 gas. They can be replenished by paying 100 minerals. It seems a bit weird, but will probably work out.

20 min limit to games. One article mentioned that games that last more than 20 minutes stop there and end in a tie. I really, really hope this is temporary while they work out the balance of units so that they balance between the sides is kept, all the way to late-game.

Not out this year? During one of the streamed interview a Blizzard employee said something like:

The campaing is about 30% done, so obviously I can't talk much about it. This is something I am looking forward to talk a lot about at the end of the year.

I think this is a clear indication that they don't think the game will be out come Christmas. I'm not really surprised, but I had hoped it would be out sooner.

Zerg looks truly scary. This is something one has to see in a video. Look at how the creep is disgustingly alive. Amazing.

Protoss nullifier. It is my new favorite unit. The force field this supporting spell caster can cast is awesome. Something that has to be seen.

Terran medivac. I didn't like that the medic was gone and replaced by a healing dropship. But the game play seen so far, looks very promising.

Overall the game looks faster than the original and visually stunning. I'm very impressed and look forward to wasting a couple of years playing this game.

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