Coming to the end of the Starcraft II beta
07 Jun 2010
Starcraft and Warcraft
Starcraft II is indeed a remarkable change from Warcraft 3, the sheer amount of macro required to be even slightly successful at this game is phenomenal.
If anything Starcraft in general needed some good press around now, especially considering the amount of negative press attention in Korea given to the game over the whole clan training house sweatshop debacle, not to mention potentially the largest gambling scandal in sports, but, that is hardly the fault of the game, rather, it is the fault of human beings and greed.
Balance, which has always been an issue in Warcraft 3 is almost spot on. What we have is a solid game concept with reasonable unit counters and rewards good macro and scouting over micro (to an extent), which is kind of what a good real time strategy should be about.
Going back to Warcraft 3 tonight – I felt sad, I’ve gone from playing a fast action packed game which even though it runs like shit on my Mac (I’m blaming Nvidia solely for this), to a game which runs on my machine really well but performs in my mind sluggishly – I’ve had to try and mentally slow everything down just to cope with the micro (or lack of) that Warcraft 3 requires, unit counters just don’t cut it as well as they do in Starcraft II, it’s almost like you are being punished for scouting.
Really think Blizzard are on to a winner here.