Posted by DragonQ on November 14th, 2009 @ 07:38 a.m.
Blizzard have announced their annual Blizzard holiday card competition here! Three winners will receive a prize package full of gaming gear from Razer, along with an official 2009 Blizzard holiday card signed by the artist, Samwise Didier!
Also, the official StarCraft Twitter blog apparently posted a new screenshot that shows off a mahoosive Zerg creature. I say "apparently" because the official links do not seem to be working currently. However, you do not need to be upset, I have found a mirror (click to view large version):
Do not be afraid! The legendary Brutalisk doesn't do much more than intimidate...and die. It's one of a handful of non-playable unit types that StarCraft II brings to the table for the single player campaign; it cannot be used online so no need to worry about balance.
Posted by DragonQ on November 14th, 2009 @ 07:38 a.m.
Firstly, the bad but pretty expected news. A few days ago, Chris Sigaty, the lead designer of StarCraft II, confirmed to the Russian audience of IgroMir (GameWorld in English) that the StarCraft II Beta is planned for 2010:
Question from Audience: When is StarCraft 2 coming out?
Chris Sigaty: Tomorrow (audience laughs). Of course not. Normally at Blizzard we don't speak of dates. So far we're planning on making the beta-test next year. As soon as we feel that the game is ready, we'll release it.
Of course this created a flurry of panick with many people attempting to clutch at straws by suggesting he may have been referring to the Russian StarCraft II beta. However, yesterday saw confirmation from Xordiah, a Blizzard representative, that Chris was in fact speaking generally:
BlizzBlues User: If Chris Sigaty's comments about wanting to get beta out next year in 2010 was for Russia's beta, please just tell us "That comment was for Russia's beta". If it's true for all countries, please tell us that. It does not have to go any further than that.
Xordiah: He was talking about beta in general and not specifically about a Russian beta.
I guess that means I'm gonna lose the Beta pool. >_>
In more upbeat news, YouTube user HuskyStarCraft has posted a rather amusing custom commentary of the latest Battle Report, which you can watch below:
Posted by DragonQ on November 12th, 2009 @ 3:21 p.m.
The 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2010) will be hosting a StarCraft AI competition as part of the conference program. This competition enables academic researchers to evaluate their AI systems in a robust commercial RTS environment.
The competition will be held in the weeks leading up to the conference. The final matches will be held live at the conference with commentary. Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top performing bots.
Posted by DragonQ on November 07th, 2009 @ 4:18 p.m.
The 11th BlizzCast was released last week with the following summary:
In our eleventh episode of BlizzCast, we have a roundtable discussion with members of the community team to recap the major happenings, announcements, and other highlights of this year's BlizzCon. Join our discussion as we relive some of our favorite moments from the show.
You can listen to it or read the transcript, as well as take a look at the BlizzCast archives, here. It mainly covers BlizzCon 2009 but there are a few titbits about the StarCraft II single player campaign.
Also, in order to pass the time, I thought it might be fun to have a StarCraft II Beta pool. Everyone guesses a date that they think the beta will start on and whoever gets the closest gets a cookie and everyone's respect. Oh, and maybe an actual prize. We'll see. Post your guesstimate in the official thread!
Posted by DragonQ on October 30th, 2009 @ 3:52 p.m.
A thread at Blizzard's forums contains several people claiming to have gotten an email from Marcus Bishop telling them that they have been added to the beta invite database. However, there has been no official word on Blizzard's website or forums and the email's format doesn't seem to match normal Blizzard communications. Here's a screenshot of the email:
The thread can be seen here. Perhaps this type of email only applies to Twitter contest winners, perhaps it applies to all those accepted into the beta program, perhaps it is a joke. PaPaya, an AoMH Seraph, has also received such an e-mail. Have any of you?
Posted by DragonQ on October 27th, 2009 @ 5:59 p.m.
Gamasutra recently interviewed Dustin Browder regarding the design of StarCraft II. Topics covered include the complexity of the game, the difficulty of making it fresh and also true to the franchise, cutting units and inspiration from other games. Read the full three page interview here!
Posted by DragonQ on October 22nd, 2009 @ 09:45 a.m.
StarCraft II Battle Report 4 is out! Yeon-Ho Lee (Protoss) and David Kim (Terran) once again go at it, this time on the updated StarCraft map Lost Temple. You can watch it here:
Be sure to click the HD button and view in full screen to ensure you're watching in 720p High Definition.
If I learned only one thing from this fun encounter, it's that psi storms are awesome. Well, that and nukes seem overpowered... Post your thoughts here!
Posted by DragonQ on October 22nd, 2009 @ 08:24 a.m.
Q&A Batch 54 was released recently and in general it is more interesting than batch 53, thankfully. In particular the points about specific units (Infestor and Mothership) are intriguing. You can read it all below:
1. Does the Zergling vs. Zealot ratio remain at 4:1 or has it changed in the latest builds? One zealot can usually take out two, and sometimes three zerglings. However, the ratio is mainly based on positioning and micro-controlling. As the number of zealots grows, it will take more zerglings to win the fight since the zealots can clump up and reduce the attacking surface area. Smart use of terrain, such as a choke or backing up against a wall, will also help a protoss player reduce this attack area. Zerglings have to secure a good surround around the zealots to keep the ratio close.
2. In World of Warcraft pvp they found an issue over time that it was "very unsatisfying" to the player when they lost control of their character as it limited their ability to do their job or role. There is a noticeable increase in stuns and immobilization in Starcraft 2, which was barely present in Starcraft 1. From your experience in testing, do you feel abilities, which limit unit control, provide more dynamic game play so far or are you noticing more concern? First of all, there were actually some abilities in the original StarCraft that could cause players to lose control of units. These abilities include the ghost's lockdown, the corsair's disruption web, and the dark archon's mind control. It may be premature to suggest at this point that there's a "noticeable increase" in stuns and immobilization in StarCraft II. To address the comparison anyway, in World of Warcraft, you control a single character, unlike RTS games where you manage multiple units and bases. The difference in the World of Warcraft is when you lose control of your character you simply have to wait it out, assuming you don't have any control breaks. However in StarCraft, when units in your army are being controlled, you can still issue orders to the rest of your army, manage your base, build new units, etc. There are a lot of options and we happy with the diversity it brings to gameplay at this point.
3. What is the current status of the Mothership? What niche does it fill at this time, and if the unit were removed, would there be a reason to fill that niche with a different unit or would protoss still be fine? Currently the mothership has a passive cloaking field for nearby units and buildings, wormhole transit, temporal rift, and vortex as its abilities. We are happy with the state of the mothership at this time, and would like to hear feedback from the players once beta starts.
4. What is your overall goal for the Infestor? The units have had and removed so many abilities, are you trying to focus into a support role, or disruption and harassment, or just to have a wide variety of spells so it can be a quick response unit? It is intended to play more of the disruption/harassment role. They are meant to burrow and move up ahead of the swarm to soften up their opponent's forces.
5. Is EMP dodgeable, or there's some sort of indication that it's going to be launched? And does this cause a problem with Immortals? It's possible to dodge EMP, but it is difficult to do. Your options include anticipating your opponent will be casting an EMP by seeing the ghost or its shimmer and predicting it; being near the edge of the EMP range and moving out quickly; or using the stalker's blink ability.
6. Map/mod to site communication – Will there be support for map/mod makers to bridge a connection between their map/mod to their site? For example, if a person wanted their map/mod to submit scores/results to the site, and vice-versa the map/mod could pull the highest scores from the site and display it in the game. It is possible for players to make their own custom score screens but there are no specific plans to bridge map data to web sites via Battle.net.
7. Launcher support – Will maps/mods be able to have their own "launcher" (ala WoW's launcher), as in shortcut or start icon from the computer outside of StarCraft, and have their own screens, after a Battle.net authenticating screen (ala Twitter's, or Facebook's, application authentication). There are no plans to allow maps and mods to have their own launcher. However, making a loading screen or launch screen is still possible.
Posted by DragonQ on October 06th, 2009 @ 2:52 p.m.
You can check out the latest Q&A batch here! It covers topics such as postgame, pausing, voice actors and terrain types. As always, let us know what you think!
Posted by DragonQ on August 23rd, 2009 @ 4:35 p.m.
Some cool new stuff here folks. Let's try to break it down sensibly:
Blizzard's design chief Rob Pardo revealed the StarCraft II Marketplace - a place where members of the community can provide or sell content such as maps and mods. However, only "a portion of the revenue" from Premium maps would go to the creator. Also note that this will unlikely be available as soon as the game is released because they do not want this feature to delay the release date.
A new official FAQ has been released but it doesn't contain much new information.
The new Battle.NET will have a new ranking system according to Blizzard's executive vice president of game design, Rob Pardo:
One of the detriments of the old Battle.net was that matchmaking often pitted veteran gamers against those just learning to play. To alleviate this issue, Pardo introduced a new ranking structure that divided the player base into leagues. After between 10 and 12 games, players will be fitted into a league, where they are ranked against competitors of equal skill. Because of the new persistent profiles, players will also be prevented from gaming the system.
Also, multiplayer play will have modes for non-competitive play as well as competitive play. Each of the competitive play leagues mentioned above will contain 100-person divisions, allowing you to compete for the top of your division every season.
Like Age of Empires 3, only one online account will be allowed per product key.
A new chat system will allow players to communicate with those playing other Blizzard games as well as fellow StarCraft II players.
Another Rob Pardo quote regarding LAN play:
There's a few legitimate cases that we're going to try and address over time. Location-based tournaments, or let's say I'm in a dorm with a firewall or something like that, hopefully there's a way to determine that and maybe start a peer-to-peer game.
Again from Rob Pardo:
...the Starcraft II map editor will be more powerful than that which was available in Warcraft III.
Which leads on to...
Dustin Browder, the lead designer of StarCraft II, had some comments about StarCraft II's map editor. Apparently it's "the most powerful piece of software on the planet". Sounds impressive, obviously. It was shown that the editor allows first-person game creation, including the little but important things like custom UIs and inventory systems. Crazy.
An exclusive StarCraft II poker set has been announced here.
