Disappointment…?
This is the very first in a series of updates brought to you with my soon to be patented technique, the No Look Hunt and Peck™ technique. Yes it does suck. I shall, hence, be less wordy than usual (shush you). Broken finger ahoy!
On to why I’m potentially disappointed. Starcraft 2.
I know, right? I should be all excited. I should be jumping for joy. I’ve been wanting another Starcraft game for awhile now…but then I read the previews and watched the admittedly small video of gameplay footage. And I started to remember Blizzard while being the WoW, Warcraft 2 and Diablo guys are also the Warcraft 3 guys.
And then we have little nuggets of information like this:
The last group of questions concerned the game’s obvious similarity to the original. While many present thought the game looked great, it was hard to miss how closely the footage shown seemed to hew to the original’s gameplay. Pardo seemed to feel the question a bit negative and said that during the design phase of the game, the team took a look at a lot of competitive products and felt that all of the big new “meta-features” they advertised (he specifically mentioned Supreme Commander’s zoom camera) actually help keep them from being competitive.
So those new fangled features those damn kids use now days, like zooming (wtf?), are ruining those games…that doesn’t bode well.
Well, what changes do they plan on to answer the questions of similarity between this one and the original?
StarCraft II is being designed to meet the needs of both the pro and casual gamers and the team is sticking with what works and isn’t trying to go radically far afield. They’re focusing instead on much smaller innovations (often at the unit and UI level) that serve to deepen and alter the game’s strategic structure and gameplay.
Hmmm… Anyone else getting that, omg the War3 team is working on this and they saw nothing wrong with War3! feeling?
To be fair, we don’t have much to work with at this point AND they are still in heavy development. So anything could happen, the game isn’t locked down and we don’t really know much about it at this point.
What worries me is this… They see newer RTS features as holding the genre back. They don’t plan on making big changes, but instead releasing a minor upgrade, it sounds, to SC1. Blizzard, good buddy, RTSes have moved on. They have evolved. They have “meta-features” because stagnation was setting in in the industry. If you’re going to release a straight sequel to SC1 a decade later, I don’t know how interested I’m going to be. I load up SC1 from time to time for nostalgia purposes, not because the gameplay is so innovative compared to today’s games.
What Would Matt Do: One, I’ll continue to hold out hope. Maybe the game will be fun. But I won’t be half as interested in a Blizzard RTS as I was before the release of War3. And the previews aren’t making me think they’ve learned lessons from War3. Oh, just think how much raving I could have done with all of my fingers!
Interesting thoughts.
The whole pro/hobby gaming problem is going to be a bigger nut to crack than a lot of people think. You have to change something, but there are so many established Starcraft clans and leagues. You want them to move to your new game, though, not play the old one.
You *can* do a new-old RTS - CnC3 showed that. And SupCom is such an experts-only RTS in many ways that it really isn’t S3’s competition.
I would like to hear better justifications for avoiding the changes in the new wave of RTS though.
Yeah, I didn’t really talk about the pro gaming vs. hobby gaming because I think this is the first time it’s really hit RTSes and I’m not sure how it’s going to affect it.
And while I can see a fair amount of people did like C&C 3, I didn’t. It felt far too much like a throw back blow em up game for me. I’m hoping that’s not where these guys are leaning.