StarCraft 2: Power Overwhelming?
Prepare for serious geekage. You’ve been warned.
I’m not the only one totally stoked about the upcoming StarCraft sequel. The original StarCraft took many a boring summer day (or painfully studious college day…ahem) and turned them into an amazingly addictive competitive futuristic space war. My brother and I played each other all the time. My cousin would play us. My friends would play us. Random people on the internet would play us. It was heavenly. Well, until my brother declared himself “unfairly good” with the Zerg. He wasn’t lying, either. The boy had a gift. Needless to say, I am beyond excited about the sequel. Lots of people are doing the highly professional bellyaching about how it’s not a MMORPG. Whatever. I fell for it as an RTS, and I’ll likely fall for it again as an RTS. It’s a pattern that just works. Works so well, it got its own television channel in South Korea. Seriously. I watched it during my visit to Seoul. StarCraft had has a rabid fan base. It was an amazing game. Hopefully the sequel, StarCraft II, will match up.
I spent some time looking over the movies that have been released so far, and I have come up with the following questions. If you’re interested, feel free to chime in on any of them or add your own.
-What are the laser beams that appear to be cutting the crystal? Are they dangerous? Are the resources capable of taking damage? I could foresee cutting off an enemy by sending a targeted attack to their resources instead of to their collection building. It’s far more permanent that way. It’s how I used to kill off computer players in “comp stomps” with my brother.
- Do the environmental features have purposes (starports / light poles / adverts)? The guy comments on them, but never says if they do…anything. Just wondering. I think it would be neat to have to deal with the environment as well as with the enemy combatants.
- Is the HUD toggle ready in the actual game, or just for demo purposes? I’d love to be able to kill it when I didn’t want it on screen. There are plenty of keyboard shortcuts that make it useless once you establish a base and get things rolling. (In an all out attack, dropping the HUD off screen would let you do your work with group controls and attack shortcuts, for instance. Awesomeness.)
- Similarly, what is the bullet-time effect for angle change with the sound warp effect at the end? Is it event triggered? Is it player triggered? Is it for screenshots? Just curious.
- Has “StarCraft retardation”** been fixed? Ok, this is a big deal. In my opinion, they should really have solved this by now. In the demo, they only used what I consider to be a small number of units, so direction management wasn’t an issue. However, in the old game, directing large groups of units to a single location (especially via the minimap) was problematic. You would frequently find one or two guys lost and unable to discover the ramp 2 inches to his left. It was really aggravating. Sometimes they would meander in the exact opposite direction, ostensibly searching for a walk-around path. I dunno, but I really hope that they fixed this problem. **Not my term. Coined by others.
- Are Ghosts / burrowed Zerglings not detected by ANY of the vehicles used in the “epic battle?” Let me rephrase…how is the mothership not a detector? How are none of those vehicles detectors? Geeeze. I see a huge glaring weakness in the Protoss if they cannot detect cloaked units with any of their heavy hitters.
- The resources are said to be handled in a new way. In the old game, you could only fit so many harvesters on a single resource node. (Unless you were playing custom maps…aww yeah.) Are there limits on simultaneous harvesting units?
- Are there still neutral units roaming the open areas? I didn’t see any in the demo. I quite liked them. Especially when you click them repeatedly to make them explode…
- Are there new types of terrain? I remember lava, snow, ice, dirt, rock, grass, and metal as navigable terrain. I noted that one of the developer guys mentioned the “deep sky” image. Does this mean that all worlds will be “hovering?” Or does this mean that there is the possibility of space combat without ground units? There was a reference to the lack of “naval” warfare on a website recently. That could be navigable space or water. Water? Ships? That would be pretty cool.
- One of the fellows at IGN brought up a good point in his take on things. Why is Blizzard sticking to the ramps and flat terrain modeling? Why not hills and 3d stuff? Is it that important to game mechanics? That makes little sense to me. Thought I’d pass along his thought.
- CARRIERS?? ARCHONS??? I was an admitted “carrier whore”** and awfully fond of archons as well. Neither made an appearance in the demo. Please, please, please tell me that they have not been phased out in favor of a new unit (like the dragoons were for the new stalkers and immortals). I loved nothing more than getting 12 carriers at full capacity to sweep in and annihilate an enemy with a small number of archons as ground support… Whatever shall I do without them? 
- How are pylons and phase prisms related to unit capacity? In the original, if some enemy stormed my base and killed off pylons, it would be like me eradicating supply depots in a Terran base – both drop the maximum number of units I can build. If the cap is linked to the power grid, could I theoretically activate a few phase prisms and get a temporary surge in sustainable units? For a rush, for instance? Hmmm.
- The units in the demo were almost instantaneously built. I know that they said they want an average game to last no longer than 20 minutes (which is a joke compared to some of the epic battles we’ve had on the original), but sheesh – units’ build time was a factor to consider.
- Related to the above point, can you use the warp in ability to summon ships as well as ground units? How many can you warp in simultaneously? If I wanted a huge army in the old SC I would just get 12 stargates going at the same time, and I’d have units ready in batches, just like the Zerg spawn them. If you must use the warp in, does it bottleneck the number of units you can queue for preparation? Does it limit the number you can have ready in a given timeframe? Cause…that would be lame…
- Can we use stuff found on the maps? I saw some barrels in one of the doodad areas. Could I somehow blow them up to make a ramp or destroy one? What about a fast acting guy after the missiles stopped by the time bomb were to shoot them? Could he send an explosion up to weaken the mothership? That would be cool.
- Lastly, are the physics passive or active? For instance, are they just there to let the pieces of an exploded ship slide down the terrain for effect, or could I theoretically trip a colossus for a tactical advantage? Fun thoughts.
Like I said, feel free to reply or to add your own quandaries. 
Ok, geekage off.
