Starcraft 2: Crap....you will buy it anways.

[UnusualStranger]

Yeah, the actual ingame play has changed, I have been following some replays on youtube for the longest time now. I was watching through the second one just now and noticed a bunch of little things about it that they changed.

Though if this is the basic foundation of the single player game that they decided was good enough to present, then I'm pretty stoked. I hope they stuck to something like this as well. The single player is probably something they kept secret on purpose. Since one of the big reasons for getting this game is for the continuation of a storyline that was left silent for so many years.

Yeah, things have changed quite a bit. And not all of em small things. For example, Vikings really suck now. You would not want to upgrade to them

Yeah, they kept it a secret for a reason. I just hope it was a good reason. I would not want to see it fall on its face, for that might be the only reason for myself to get the game now. Since things just don't look good online. But then again, maybe they will get a lot better.
I'm not too excited, but then again, I've been playing it for a pretty good while now. So I guess its lost its flair.

This is true for nearly any game series. Popularity always creates overconfidence and too much reliance on name recognition and marketing, while original titles have no reputation to carry them and succeed or fail mostly on how interesting and good they are.

In Starcraft's case, I see Starcraft 2 like this: it's a mountain of gold buried under a bucket of crap. No LAN, crap. B.net 2.0, crap. The RealID New Coke scheme (look up New Coke, you people are being fooled), crap. Facebook integration, crap. Achievements, crap. Map publishing, crap. Open-ended campaign, crap. That bimbo Helfer stealing Glynnis' role, crap. 100-man divisions, crap. Crap, crap, everywhere. Maybe a single bucket is an understatement, it could be a whole swimming pool of rancid liquid feces.

Blizzard seems to be trying as hard as they can to cover that mountain of gold with all the crap they can come up with, and make no mistake, all the crap still sucks no matter how you look at it. However, underneath it all is still A FREAKING MOUNTAIN OF GOLD.

So yeah, everything Blizzard is doing is rage worthy, to the point I'm starting to like EA more than Blizzard, but somehow despite it all, their actual design team is able to push a game through their marketing and B.net team's "systems" that is such pure gold it's still worth it all.

Blizzard has the gaming equivalent of the golden goose, we just have to pray they're satisfied to sell us an egg every couple years.

This is what I am getting at here. There is a lot of extra crap attached to this game that is not what we need. At all. They ditch things we liked, and added new things we didn't want in the first place. It is a pile of gold, and it seems there is crap on it. Is there going to be more gold than the crap? We will see eventually.

You're precious. Can I take you home with me?

I mean, I don't if you were around on release day for World of Warcraft, but I was. A launch doesn't get any rougher than that. And yet the game still became a massive success.
No matter what happens on launch day, or even on launch week, Starcraft 2 will be a big hit with a lot of people.

I understand that you want people to think more critically, but Blizzard has never disappointed me yet. I loved even World of Warcraft for quite a while, despite it being my least favorite release by them at this point. That's why they have a loyal following of at least 7 to 10 million players. You aren't going to change any of their minds about how great Blizzard games are, and about how great they expect Starcraft 2 to be.

Yeah, perhaps the launch won't be all that bad. It will just not put any faith into that new BNET 2 that they have been pushing to be amazing with all these great features for it to crash spectacularly on the first day.

You're dancing around the fact that single-player looks amazing. Balance changes don't affect the unique gameplay elements of the campaign in the least. There are still plenty of features present which have never been seen before in other RTS campaigns.

Looks amazing is different from plays amazing. There may be features which haven't been seen before, but we have not really seen them. A lot can change from when the presented that, but we really don't know what. Its all hush hush, and that doesn't raise my confidence at all.

 

[UnusualStranger]

The question is, what lowered your confidence to begin with? Right there was about fifteen minutes of single-player gameplay footage. It can only have gotten better from there. I guarantee they haven't decided to scrap any of the features they showed, only add to them. So either your standards are ridiculously high, or you'll just never accept the writing on the wall.

Only have gotten better? Just because an idea seems good does not mean that someone can't screw it up.
I don't have too high standards, I just worry that all this silence may be bad for the single player campaign. I have faith in them, but recent activities in their own forums, and what I have read being done to the modding community has lowered it.

SO there, that is where my confidence went. That, and the new failings of the New BNet.

 

[UnusualStranger]

What forum activities? The RealID fiasco? If anything, that reinforced my faith in them. How many companies would have decided to go against their development plans in order to facilitate the wishes of their players? Not many. But they decided against it because of that feedback.

They aren't really doing anything to the modding community ATM, but some of what they have done with the new editor is disagreeable. That doesn't mean it won't be changed and tweaked in the future. For all we know, the restrictions were only placed on it for testing purposes and won't be present on release day.

The only continued failing of the new Battle.net is lack of LAN. Which I certainly don't agree with, but if they're pleased with that as an anti-piracy measure rather than going overboard as many companies have done (Ubisoft), I can live with it. We're sure to see some scene group or another release a LAN crack within a year of release anyway.

Yes, I was referring to realID. The thing is it was a stupid idea in the first place. It should not even have been an issue to begin with. It simply showing its face was a cause for me to worry.

One can only hope the limitations were just for the beta. But they had a very well defined list of limitations, which I find somewhat worrisome. Defining something so perfectly means that there is probably a plan already in place for it.

The failing of Bnet isn't only the lack of LAN, it is other things as well. Randomly getting disconnected by the server, terrible connections, and downright silly filters for even hosting on BNET 2.0. And I shouldn't have to crack my own game for a feature that someone is going to crack it for that many people will get.

The company should be doing that.

 

[Canid117]

If they didn't care if it sucks they wouldn't have spent ten years making it.

 

[snow]

Oh god, there's a lot to snip and edit here, please bare with me if i screw this up the first 80 times.

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The RealID New Coke scheme (look up New Coke, you people are being fooled), crap.

I looked up New Coke and couldn't find anything that was related to it at all, could you please post a link?

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Its all hush hush, and that doesn't raise my confidence at all.

Of course it's all hush hush. If they revealed every single detail about a game, there would be no surprises for us to have when the game comes out. If those surprises are good or bad, we will just have to wait and see.

-snip-

You can browse "Starcraft 2 single-player" in Youtube to confirm this. There are plenty of newer videos showing off some pretty amazing stuff.

Could you link some? My previous post to UnusualStranger contained the older videos for they were the only ones I could find.

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The failing of Bnet isn't only the lack of LAN, it is other things as well. Randomly getting disconnected by the server, terrible connections, and downright silly filters for even hosting on BNET 2.0. And I shouldn't have to crack my own game for a feature that someone is going to crack it for that many people will get.

Have others experienced the terrible connections and disconnections from 2.0? I just talked to a friend of mine who was playing beta and he said he had no problem with it. 0.o;

edit: Holy crap I got this right on my first try! Yay...

 

[Tony2077]

i plan to buy it even if i suck at mp but well what can you do

 

[TheLaofKazi]

I already expected the game to be hyper competitive. But I'll just moderately suck and then be placed in a lower rank or whatever and I'll be just fine. Plus, with Warcraft 3, it wasn't the normal game that I really got into, it was the custom games and the world editor especially. I can't wait to bring some of the stuff I worked on in Warcraft 3's world editor and use Starcraft 2's technology. The one full, completely playable map I made never was as good as I wanted it to because I wanted to have more enemies and stuff happening on screen then Warcraft 3 could handle. But in Starcraft 2, the stuff I struggled to make work in Warcraft 3 will run like it's nothing.

 

[TerranReaper]

I'd like to know where these disconnection claims are coming from now, a lot of the things the OP said up until that have had some sort of valid points to it. I think I've only had one or two disconnections from B.net 2.0 in my entire time playing the beta, and my router is known to be very unreliable.

I don't have too high standards, I just worry that all this silence may be bad for the single player campaign. I have faith in them, but recent activities in their own forums, and what I have read being done to the modding community has lowered it.

Where does single-player fit in with all of this? Considering Starcraft is oriented towards multiplayer, I think you're the only one to address the lack of single-player information. Which is quite odd, because if they just reveal everything, there wouldn't much point of having one now would there?

what about the ingame stuff they have NOT dropped like "real friends" in starcraft2 and (likely soon in WoW)

You act like it's mandatory to add people as "real friends". I ask you this, have you played the beta and tried out the features before making any opinions on it? In any case, your name is only known to people that added you (And you adding them) using the email for your B.net account. Otherwise, you have an identifier code to go along with your username, so your real name will not be known. In my opinion, RealID is fine as long as it's kept optional.


As for the problems with B.net 2.0, they are concerning, I'll say about that much, however, there are very little games/services out there that were completely perfect at launch. I address to anyone here, do you know any game or service that did not require patching or tweaking to make it perfect at launch?

 

[snow]

-snip-

Sweet! Thank you! My ability to search for things have been failing me lately, so I appreciate this.

 

[TheBaron87]

snip

The RealID New Coke scheme (look up New Coke, you people are being fooled), crap.

I looked up New Coke and couldn't find anything that was related to it at all, could you please post a link?

Basically, Blizzard proposes a terrible idea (that they know is terrible) pretending like they're doing it for our good. Naturally, everyone hates it. Blizz then "takes back" their decision and brings back the classic way of doing things everyone loves, claiming to "listen to the fans." Everyone loves Blizzard and says nice things about them for "caring" about what they want, totally forgetting that THEY NEVER SHOULD HAVE PROPOSED SUCH A STUPID IDEA IN THE FIRST PLACE. Blizzard gets their name in the news, TWICE, and reminds everyone that they "care" and "listen," simply because they took back an incredibly stupid idea and are back to square one. Win for them, the idiots love them even more, and the rest of us put up with a week of drama for nothing.

 

[snow]

snip

The RealID New Coke scheme (look up New Coke, you people are being fooled), crap.

I looked up New Coke and couldn't find anything that was related to it at all, could you please post a link?

Basically, Blizzard proposes a terrible idea (that they know is terrible) pretending like they're doing it for our good. Naturally, everyone hates it. Blizz then "takes back" their decision and brings back the classic way of doing things everyone loves, claiming to "listen to the fans." Everyone loves Blizzard and says nice things about them for "caring" about what they want, totally forgetting that THEY NEVER SHOULD HAVE PROPOSED SUCH A STUPID IDEA IN THE FIRST PLACE. Blizzard gets their name in the news, TWICE, and reminds everyone that they "care" and "listen," simply because they took back an incredibly stupid idea and are back to square one. Win for them, the idiots love them even more, and the rest of us put up with a week of drama for nothing.

lmfao!!!! Here I thought New Coke was an actual thing that I had to look up! Major d'uh on my part. Sorry about that! Meh, I'm just glad that they're not doing it, regardless of it being a possibly being a scheme or not.

I just don't understand what would be the benefit of them doing this if they did set it up this way on purpose. It's not going to bring them anymore fans, and it's apparent by your reaction that, even if it was set up to get more approval, there will still be some people who aren't going to let them off the hook that easily. So if anything, by stating it was a set-up, it didn't help them at all despite getting their name put in the news twice.

 

[Keava]

Except it doesn't suck. Battle.net 2.0 isn't great, but the game itself is awesome. You can play ladder even if you're really bad since you'll just get placed in a league with other bad players. Then of course there's limitless custom map potential with one of the best map editors I've ever seen. No LAN and no chat are really my only gripes, but they'll be adding chat later and I guarantee we get a third-party LAN play patch within a couple months of release. So yea.

No. Battle.Net 2.0 is a flop. It's not good for anything else than Ladder and Custom Games with friends. Everything is else needs serious work on Blizzards side. Starting from chats, through clan support and custom game naming to adding friends based on their screen name not e-mail.
The 'best map editor' is just a joke. Have fun creating maps with its functionality or rather lack of it, 5 map limit for upload, 10mb limit in size, 20 mb limit in total and no cross-region uploads. You can't host the maps locally either if you want them playable on multiplayer.

One thing i don't understand about 'fanboism' is the that if you just accept it and take it into behind from companies, how do you expect them to even bother producing good products? You basically accept whatever crap of an excuse they throw your way. You agree to pay full price for unfinished product that should stay in beta till they can resolve those issues. I would prefer to wait 6 months for release really if it would mean i'd get fully working B.Net.

And yes. SC2 has lower 'skill' requirement than SC1:BW. 'Casuals' will have it much easier to learn and enjoy the game. SC2 is a good game in itself despite some minor balances gripes, B.Net2.0 however is not.

*snipped*

That was Blizzard prior to merger. It changed a lot since then. The once "It's ready when it's ready" policy is pushed back ever since then. They depend on patches more than they used to.

 

[snow]

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-snip

Lol there actually was a new Coke. Around the time Pepsi first debuted, Coke found that a lot of people preferred their taste. So they created a sweeter Coke which did incredibly well, better than Pepsi, in taste tests. Problem was, they were just that: taste tests. One to two sips.

When they released the new Coke in mass market, people hated it because nobody could handle drinking a whole can. It was too sweet for reasonable amounts of consumption. So many people hated it that they reverted back to the Coke we know today, which is why it's now called "Coca-Cola Classic." They've been competing comfortably with Pepsi ever since.

But yea, they didn't switch formulas to gain attention on purpose. They truly thought the new formula was better because it was outperforming Pepsi in taste tests.

I must have been severely oblivious when this happened. 0.o;

Oh well, learn something new everyday! I still don't understand the reason why Blizzard would do the Real ID thing for attention though.

Starcraft fans are happy = starcraft 2 being mass purchased.

Blizzard announces Real ID = Starcraft fans not being happy, SC2 sales may be affected.

Blizzard takes it back = Starcraft fans happy again, SC2 sales boost but still may be affected by those that saw through the scheme.

Though the amount of buyers will severely outweigh those that have decided not to purchase the game, it's still a handful of sales that Blizzard will not make due to this. I'm not counting the possibility of newcomers seeing this and deciding to buy Blizzard products because... Well, I don't know about you, but I haven't seen any.

So even if this was their plan all along, it wasn't a very good one.

 

[Veleste]

After participating in the Beta, comparing the old with the new, and checking out the new battle.net 2.0, a thought came to me.

This new Starcraft isn't made for me. It is made for the professionals, the ones who perfected build orders, who do APM in the 70 and 80s, who have timed out builds for the race they play.

Not that I hate it. I think it is a fine game and will probably do better than the original just because its Starcraft.

And therein lies the problem.
Starcraft 2 and with it battlenet 2.0 could both be absolutely terrible, and a bunch of people would still go after it. Which brings me to the darkest thought in all of this.

They probably don't care if it sucks. They don't care if you can't have LAN, don't care if you are not a professional and can't really do online, and don't care that they have effectively isolated each nation to its own server, meaning it is next to impossible to play with friends in other countries.

They will get paid for the game by a bunch of people, and that is all that they want.

The discussion here is simple. Do you think that possibly the popularity of Starcraft has possibly already ruined the sequals? And what do you think of the lack of LAN, the compartmentalization of servers, and hell, while we are at it, the game in general?

I'm curious to see what you people think. Perhaps I'm just being a pessimist about the whole deal, but I do wonder what other people think of this.

I don't think you realise what a big deal Starcraft is in Korea. If Blizzard brought out a substandard game on a substandard platform it would be a prelude to war! (No really, it's a really freaking big thing in Korea) Blizzard never make 'bad games' in the way Activision or EA do. They might make games you do not like, and they might make mistakes with their patches (Item level overload in WoW anyone?)but they put a LOT of effort into their games and test them a ridiculous amount.

The reasons they removed lan are copyright and match logging reasons but it doesn't stop you playing with friends. You can invite them to matches just like a lan but it's done online. Not really unreasonable.

Furthermore they have Bronze, Copper, Silver, Gold and Platinum leages. Plat is pro only, bronze is for the people who don't know they're pylons from their medvacs. It takes a very long time to progress up through these levels and they 5 recruitment matches at the start decide which one you belong in by analysing your play apparnetly (not done this but it doesn't sound like an exact science so I forsee many noobs getting put in silver or gold and getting beaten down)