Search:

And yet, the only thing you can say negatively about the in-game graphics is that the shadows are too "geometrical".

The shadows are still there. They are still doing their job. They are still...

The purpose of the scenes in terms of storytelling is different. In the Amerigo scene, the corridor is the harbinger of doom. Death happens here; the lighting environment exists to emphasize the...

You're misunderstanding the point we were making.

It's not that the in-engine cinematics can't do lighting tricks. It's that Blizzard doesn't do them. There's a difference. They didn't show anyone...

I don't even need to do that; I could go boot up Twilight Princess for the GameCube and take a snapshot of the sunset from the top of the Desert.



I don't buy your explanation of Blizzard's...

You're talking about a space battle scene. Light and shadow aren't the hardest things in the world. There's precisely one main light source; that's not exactly stressful for hardware.



Please....

Why not just do it in-engine? If you're going to settle for lower quality, just do it in engine and get it over with.

Personally, the quality of the cinematic rendering was just fine. If anything...

First, I'm fairly certain they said something along those lines in 2008. I may be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure they said that 2008 was their original goal for at least the beta if not the actual...

I think that represents something of a misunderstanding of what I was trying to say.

I wasn't saying that Blizzard necessarily calls these phases Alpha, Beta, or whatever. That's why I spelled out...

For several reasons:

1: I don't consider changing unit stats to be significant changes, as far as historical development is concerned. And those are the main changes we saw in the beta.

2: The...

Conclusions

So, what can we deduce from all of this information about how Blizzard designed SC2?

Zerg Fail

It is conventional wisdom that the SC2 Zerg are the least interesting of the three...

Macro

Sometime in early to mid 2008, Blizzard came to a realization about StarCraft II. They realized that in modernizing SC2's interface, they had also reduced SC2's mechanical complexity. I'm...

Eradicate and Evolve

The Zerg were revealed in early 2008. And their reveal was quite revealing indeed.

The Protoss reveal was very formal. It was at a major event, and Blizzard clearly wanted...

No Matter the Cost

The Terrans were the second SC2 race to be revealed, a few months before BlizzCon 07. A few Terran units were shown at the initial SC2 reveal, but it wasn't until later before...

En Taro Adun

We will start our look back at the development of SC2 with the first race that was officially revealed to us: the Protoss.

Overall, we see that most of the basic mechanics remained...

Introduction

So, StarCraft II is out. For those who played the beta, SC2 has been out for over a year now. But SC2 has been in development for much longer than that.

Blizzard gave the Internet...

An interesting assumption. But last I checked, StarCraft is an RTS game. The real-time nature of the game means that knowledge of X is necessary, but insufficient to deal with M. Because you need...

Do you have any evidence to support either of these statements?

You take it on faith that balancing around "poor players" will "introduce imbalance." Says who? By your logic, the only way to...

But not completely false, as you stated. It is still potentially valid under certain circumstances.



Nor can you state that FD didn't overcome a disadvantage.



I never assumed anything; I...

In math, perhaps. But not in actual sciences. A single counterexample does not necessarily mean that a hypothesis is "completely" false. If a hypothesis explains 99% of reality, but there's this one...

Obviously you failed science when you were in school. A single point of data doesn't actually mean anything; you need many points of data to prove something. Blizzard knows that, which is why the...

Probably the fantasy world where they have the ability to test these changes quickly and easily, and thus would know more about how adjusting Marauder damage would affect Marauder vs. Roach more than...

You mean the guy who said Mutas need a bonus to light? Don't worry; he was just high. Very, very high.

That's an easy question to answer: get more information ;)

What are you trying to find out? Which unit you can just mass and win with? Well this is StarCraft; there isn't one. Your question is irrelevant and has no answer.

Mutalisks, Hydralisks, and...

So what you're saying is that VRs got a 40% damage buff back in 1.1, but nobody noticed except the low-skill crowd, because they're the ones who use VRs for something besides base raiding. Before...