This game looks perfect. It has new units that up the strategic play in brand new ways, while still allowing older units to factor in as they did before but with new abilities, and interact with old and new units in new ways! It's good that they did not make this game technariffic like Supreme Commander (a game I do truly admire) because SCII will be accessible to such a wider audience with its easily apparent lower requirements.
Blizzard has crafted a game that does not mess with what was top notch, while still adding layers of depth to the gameplay. This sequel is how to do a much longed for and commentary-prone sequel the right way.
I do agree that what has been released so far is not revolutionary. Those who view this positively have told me that it is not intended to be revolutionary. If you read the FAQ on Blizzard.com, they say that its a rollback to the game play of Starcraft rather than the developments they made in WC3.
Rather than having 20 unit armies and focusing on the different abilities of each unit, SC2 will focus on having a lot more units without a need of micromananging abilities.
The focus will be your build order and rushing, rather than having to creep to level your hero.
I think a lot of fans want that old Starcraft game play back. If you are looking for revolutionary, play Supreme Commander.
If the screenshots are anything to go by, Starcraft 2 will not be that great of a game.
Alright, so there are a few new cool special effects, but I saw nothing about the game that stood out as revolutionary. Zerg tactics still seem based on swarming, Protoss units are powerful yet expensive, and terrans lie somewhere in the middle.
In fact, the game actually looks a little bit less fun. Certain units having the ability to walk over hills, Protoss defense units don't even need pylons for power, and from what I read on Starcraft2, zerg and Protoss both have instant teleport abilities. Hmmm...all of these "improvements" just take away from the games challenge--a player needs much less strategic thinking to win.
Last, and not least, Where is the economic management aspect to Starcraft 2? Age of Empires is still lightyears ahead of both Starcraft and Warcraft in this regard.
@Laoldar, thanks for pointing out the error. Something got put in the wrong form. We will be rolling out a feature that allows players to change release dates just like the summaries.
Blizzard updated their homepage with a full gameplay demo. This is a MUST SEE. There are 1280x768 and 720x404 versions. The links to Blizzard's bittorrent-style downloader have been added to the video page. Be warned, the 1280x768 video is 450 megs.
Bittorrent downloads help more Blizzard fans get the content faster. Thousands of people trying to download directly from Blizzard over HTTP would be a nightmare. With Bittorent, users are helping each other get the content faster. I've found that downloading WoW patches is quite fast if your router is actually configured properly.
SERAPHRowen, thanks for the numbers. I agree that many people doubt the selling power of the PC, even though in a year there are more PCs sold than the PS2 has sold in its whole lifetime. Thought it can be agree that most of those PCs never become 'gaming' PCs, there is still a lot of potential systems to sell games on. I think it would be a nice idea to have a website like vgchartz but that tracked the sales of PC games (vgchartz only has some PC games, not many), (unless there already is a site like this, then provide the link).
With the knowledge that the original Starcraft sold around 9.5 million copies, I agree with SERAPHRowen that the 6.5 might be a little conservative of an estimate, around 7.5 million or 7 million might seem more accurate. But, again, we will have to wait for more information to come out in order to see how this game measures up.
For anyone interested, I just put up some gameplay videos for this game, it looks incredible, and is yet another factor to back up indications that this game is going to be HUGE.
4
This game looks perfect. It has new units that up the strategic play in brand new ways, while still allowing older units to factor in as they did before but with new abilities, and interact with old and new units in new ways! It's good that they did not make this game technariffic like Supreme Commander (a game I do truly admire) because SCII will be accessible to such a wider audience with its easily apparent lower requirements.
Blizzard has crafted a game that does not mess with what was top notch, while still adding layers of depth to the gameplay. This sequel is how to do a much longed for and commentary-prone sequel the right way.