Written by Gifted |
Wednesday, 06 January 2010 07:31
News -
StarCraft II
A little work has been going on in the world of Blizzard since the first of the year. When looking at the official StarCraft II General Discussion Forums, the company is back in swing after their yearly vacation. First, Xordiah returned to a thread regarding the set of Protoss missions included in Wings of Liberty.
I won't go into details, since we don't give out information on the campaign of StarCraft 2, but I can confirm that there will be a Protoss mini-campaign that lets you control Protoss units. This part of the campaign mode is of course way shorter than the Terran part, but it is very fun to have a very different playstyle to add even more variety to the game. I am sure every Protoss fan will love this part of the Campaign! That being said, the Protoss mini-campaign will not prepare you for the multiplayer as Protoss, you won't be using all units or getting to know buildings and upgrades. In general, even for Terran, it is not the objective of the singleplayer to show how to play the game effectively, it is to tell a story and do a lot of fun things, that would not be possible in multiplayer. The Challenges, mini-missions, that ask you to complete a very specific task, are more suited to give players the opportunity to learn how to use the units and how to play the game.
Just to clarify, this is not a separate campaign set apart from the Terran campaign. These are missions in the campaign where you play as Protoss.
Rickymm3, a member of Blizzard's forum community, took some effort describing the basis of a StarCraft themed trading card game. It involved so many ideas that it caught Zhydaris' attention and received a response. You can read about his suggestions in the thread: SC: The trading card game.
Nevertheless, I congratulate you for your effort, this is a really interesting project and it deserves some visibility ;) I find the ambush mechanic particularly fun by the way, keep up the good work!
Another recent forum thread brought up the concerns of diminishing value of individual units in terms of micromanagement and their ability to provide comebacks like in the original. When the conversation shifts it's focus towards smartcasting and a poster's belief that it reduces the ability to provide solid comebacks, Zhydaris provides his thoughts on the matter.
I personally believe that Smartcasting actually means a better placement of TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE DAMAGE™ dealing abilities, take psi-storm for once. The time you invest in placing the different psi-storms could mean more units taking damage, and casting a storm after another doesn’t really take a huge amount of time, just like the force fields being cast in the Battle Reports for example. Talking about support units: is putting some focus on support units necessarily a bad thing? Why is that? Don’t you think that including these kind of dependencies between different units will deepen the strategies involved in battles? Mixing your units in order to have a diversified army has always been a key element that SCII inherited from the original StarCraft, just think of the marine+medic combo. Snipe the medics and you'll have an easier job killing the marines, right? I believe the same mechanic applies to StarCraft II as well. Sure, the units are going to be different, the control groups management will be different as well, but are these negative things? I honestly don't think so. What do you think about this?
Blizzard's Twitter account has provided a new gem of information since the turn of the new year. An interesting trivia note is that these tweets include the first time they've used the word "final" since they used it in February 2009 when they spoke the line "in the final stretch".
The #StarCraft2 balance team says Protoss casters are approaching the final stages of development.
They also announced the above tweet on their Facebook account, accompanied by the following screenshot.
Sources:
Battle.net - Protoss short campaign in Wings of Liberty
Battle.net - SC: The trading card game
Battle.net - The slippery slope
Twitter.com - StarCraft
Facebook.com - StarCraft
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