Campaign Impressions (hidden or no spoilers)

[zEmini]

I have so many questions...

1. How many difficulties are there? I was under the assumption that there is Casual, Normal, Hard and finally Brutal.

2. Different difficulties have different achievements associated with them correct? I could check profiles but I fear of being spoiled.

3. You probably are not far enough in the campaign yet, but can you "fire" or "decommission" mercs/tech to try out other mercenaries and technology? Or do you have to start a new campaign from scratch? Or I guess a better question would be, can you create multiple profiles like in War3, SC1?

[spychi]

Well B.net just went down so I thought I'd share some impressions while I have a quick break from the singleplayer.
\.

now this just pist me off, if i will need to have my internet connection online just to be able to play sp all the time...this just sucks

battle.net online experience shmirience

[Maul]

Not story spoilers, but just a bit more of the things I've uncovered as I've progressed:

Hidden Content:

There's an arcade game called the Lost Viking which is a top down space fighter which is quite cool. Shows what the editor can do. There's a few games like this people have created already but this is much more polished

With the units I was talking about, in addition to the critters that got added in a later patch, there's dogs, cows and probably more that I've missed because as I said earlier there's so much going on. In SC1 we had civilians, and they return as colonists this time, but there seems to be about 4 or more different models. One of them looks remarkably like Husky...

Armory has been cool so far but I've only got upgrades to the basic units, but the cool feature is when you get an upgrade you don't have to research it anymore. Ie the stimpack and marine shield upgrades are on marines every mission thereafter from the get-go. There's also the alien tech researched from the laboratory which brings about some cool enhancements, like an auto-turret on bunkers and orbital supply depots, which effectively is instant supply.

Firebats are quite awesome, being as large as marauders, 100hp and 12 dmg to light. Medics are great too. Both units have new voices and sound really good.

Mercenaries are a bit of a let down as they're not much stronger than the regular units, but they only cost a fraction more than the standard unit so it's not so bad. Again I've only seen one type so far so I can't really comment much further on that

Playing around in the bar and cantina inbetween missions is lots of fun, with the news being really amusing (very similar to fox news in the US lol) and lots of little jokes here and there in other parts of the story.

Great game so far

[GnaReffotsirk]

now this just pist me off, if i will need to have my internet connection online just to be able to play sp all the time...this just sucks

battle.net online experience shmirience

I thought we could still play off-line in sp?

[Maul]

You can still play SP in offline mode, but I chose not to for the achievements/cloud storage etc

[Santrega]

now this just pist me off, if i will need to have my internet connection online just to be able to play sp all the time...this just sucks

battle.net online experience shmirience

Yep.. That pissed me off too when I read it.. I can't believe how mad I am right now..

I was under the impression an internet authentication was needed in the start, not that you have to be continuously on the internet all the time in order to play.

There are too many points of failure in this decision. It's a stupid decision by blizzard, and I guarantee it will piss people off several times in the first few months. They better change this and do it soon, otherwise they are going to severely piss people off and lose a lot of sales. They may have kept quiet about it for there first million copies sold, but everyone will know soon that it requires the internet and lots of people will not buy it because of that requirement.


EDIT- Maul, can you play it on your character offline? Like do you progress through the campaign offline?

[Caliban113]

Hold on, can you play skirmishes against the AI without being logged into Bnet?

[Noctis]

If you all would READ what he posted

He wasn't playing b/c with b.net down achievements wont register and the cloud storage would be offline. However, you can play single player with b,net down it doesnt matter.

Jesus people.

[Maul]

I'll try and answer as many questions as I can inbetween missions, as I'm in no rush to tear through it :P If I miss your question just post it again

This is awesome news! What exactly makes brutal difficulty so hard? Does the enemy get bonuses to their stats and damage, or do they just play smarter than the lower difficulties? Hell, is it both?

Anyway, for someone just "okay" (I was Gold and Platinum during the beta) at Starcraft 2, do you think brutal (thus far) is worth trying first?

I'm not sure exactly what makes it so hard because I haven't tried the easier modes. There's no handicap on your own units, and the enemy units seem to die as per normal. I think it may just be more enemy units. I don't think the enemy plays any smarter as I haven't really played a "standard" game yet where you kill an enemy base as the objective.

I have so many questions...

1. How many difficulties are there? I was under the assumption that there is Casual, Normal, Hard and finally Brutal.

2. Different difficulties have different achievements associated with them correct? I could check profiles but I fear of being spoiled.

3. You probably are not far enough in the campaign yet, but can you "fire" or "decommission" mercs/tech to try out other mercenaries and technology? Or do you have to start a new campaign from scratch? Or I guess a better question would be, can you create multiple profiles like in War3, SC1?

1. Easy, Normal, Hard and Brutal

2. Some missions have achievements that need to be done on a certain level or higher. I haven't seen any brutal only achievements yet, but an example would be "Finish map in <5 minutes on hard"

3. I'm not sure yet, but it seems that once you purchase a contract you can use those mercenaries every game without spending additional credits, but they do have a mineral/gas cost in-game and a cooldown as well. You can only hire them x amount of times too. The warpigs (marines) can only be hired 4 times.

EDIT- Maul, can you play it on your character offline? Like do you progress through the campaign offline?

You probably do but like I said I chose not to play in offline mode so I'm not sure. I think Blizzard said you can still play as normal in offline mode but you miss out on achievements and the cloud storage

[Santrega]

If you all would READ what he posted

He wasn't playing b/c with b.net down achievements wont register and the cloud storage would be offline. However, you can play single player with b,net down it doesnt matter.

Jesus people.

Well i was actually told by a friend that the way it works is you play offline as a guest. If thats not the case, then I feel better about everything.

I want to progress through the campaign whether I am online or not.

Here is what I want to do, please tell me if its possible:

I want to play online most of the time, but if I lose connection to battle.net or lose connection to the internet, etc; I want to be able to play offline and continue where I left off in the campaign and have my campaign progress be saved. Is this possible, yes or no?