Saturday, February 20, 2010

Starcraft II Beta Impressions

I have of course been following the beta. I got lucky this time around. No beta key in the first wave means that I don’t have to test an unfinished game. I find way too many bugs in far more exiting financial applications as my day job, so I sure got lucky here.
unit-colour
(Well, yeah this line of reasoning does not work for me either. I just had to try).
So far I am pretty underwhelmed by what I have seen of the beta. I clearly remember getting Starcraft in April 1998 and upon starting it realizing that “it really didn’t look that great”. And Neither does Starcraft II in 2010.
This is a disappointment to me, but hopefully the game will be so great that we can ignore that it isn’t the prettiest it could be.
In game the units seems fragile when you look at them. Like stick men. creep-colourAnnoying when compared to the first games more solid and robust units. Everything also seems to take up less space and bases mine out faster. Will we ever see a Protoss base in Starcraft II with 15 gateways? Now there is definitely room for them in all bases.
Take a look the top screenshot. This is from a 2v2 where two allies are advancing together. Hard to see when the colors are so much the same. The second screenshot is showing how a red Terran almost look the same as the purple Zerg and the creep.
I’m sad that the original much brighter color-scheme of Starcraft II was ditched in favor of this.

1 comment:

  1. Many agree with you on the color-scheme. If you look at HDstarcraft's channel(look just at his most recent ones which have the actual games) you get to see how powerful the zerg can be. I laugh at the people who said in the Alpha version that the zerg suck in SCII. I think I'll become a randomer in SCII because I like all the races too much to pick just 1 lol.

    In 2vs2 its a lot more like SC:BW's 2vs2 games. The Hydra rush is still deadly, but the hard counters are just TOO HARD. Now 8 zealots and 3 immortals or 8 zealots and 4 stalkers are CRUSHED EASILY by 15 roaches, even if microed.

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