Blizzcast 13

[dreadmourn]

I sincerely hope 3 months beta, lol

I think Terran macro mechanics is a bit on a disadvantage once your opponents attacks you using cloaking units and units with burrow, because If I where facing a terran opponent and I am a zerg I will go in for roach who can burrow while moving and make their command center waste energy for scanner sweep rather than use it for mule or I where a protoss I would go for DT rush.

[Asfastasican]

Shortest Blizzard beta EVER.

I'm betting Goliaths have a better chance of being put back into the game than Blizzard has a chance of executing a 3 month beta. The single player better be ready to take names and kick ass as of right now if they want to have a chance of that happening.

I mean come on, the manual has to be printed right? When will they finalize the units and ship this sucker out? Within two months? Good luck on that!

EDIT - Keep in mind that I am very impressed with the game's balance right now and that I think it's shippable balance-wise atm, but still. I'm skeptical.

[Norfindel]

Yeah, too short a beta can have very bad consequences. I know they're going to provide patches, and 2 expansions, but still would be lame to wait for expansions to fix balance.

[hiru]

Well it's been going really well. We've put a lot of work into the research system as you mentioned specifically to really give the player some additional choices. Previously, the version we've shown players was Raynor's raiders could go out and acquire things like protoss artifacts or strange zerg organisms and bring them back to the Hyperion, dissect them or take them apart and try to get some additional technology out of these strange alien devices or creatures. It was really much more like a shop, you'd get points and you'd spend points on a type of technology you wanted. There was no connection, you could get zerg creatures but buy something that felt like a protoss technology and we weren't very happy with that. So we went back to the drawing board on that one and we came up with a system that feels a little bit more like research. You still go out and you get points for acquiring these things but there's a zerg tree and there's a protoss tree, right. If you get zerg creatures or protoss artifacts you get technologies that seem to relate to those races. Then when you get to certain levels in the tree you have to make a hard decision. Do I want technology A or technology B and once you choose, you're done, you're never going back to that other technology. So it really feels like a much harder choice, a more challenging choice and it doesn't feel like another type of tech purchase which is what we had elsewhere in the game. It's a lot better research system, it's still a simplified research system compared to what you might find in a big empire building game, but that's not what we are, right, we're still a real time strategy game. Where you want to get these things and take them down to the battlefield and burn up some zerglings and that's what you want. It's definitely a vast improvement over what we've shown previously.

Seems like the Tech lab part of the Hyperion got the tweaks it needed. Single Player and Staredit seem promising and fun eventho we wont see those in beta.

As for the shorter then expected duration for the beta, isnt the beta more balanced then starcraft 1 was at release? Or is my memory affected by my old age?