Won HotS! Impressions without the B-word

Bog

Netherlands49 Posts

October 19 2012 14:41 GMT

Hello everyone! I recently won a HotS beta invitation, through TeamLiquid.net, and wanted to do a little something in return. Especially since the winners thread was so horrible. I felt really bad for winning actually. The entire thread was filled with dissatisfaction and sore winners who behaved like ungrateful spoiled children

. So I made a list of the things I really like about the beta and also some of my woes. I won’t touch balance, as mentioning this seems like a sure way to generate spite and hate on the internets ^^

So without further ado, some of the good things of Starcraft!

The Phoenix Graviton Beam has some nice new animations! The lifted unit now struggles in the grasp of the beam, fighting for his life. Especially the Hydralisk animation is very funny. The reason I like this change so much is that it is a very minor aspect of the gameplay, yet probably a lot of work went in all the extra animations. To me this little addition says the developer really cares about the expansion and good things are to be expected when final polish is applied!

The Widow Mine. For me, this will be the most important and fun change in the game and the best reason to purchase the expansion. The mine looks and feels great. I’ve got massive enjoyment seeing my opponent walking in 2 or 3 Widow Mines with some Stalkers and then quickly turning around, fearing there might be more. Or catching a Drone on its way building a 4th Hatchery. But the best part about the mine is probably that facing them from the opponent is almost equally fun. In a way that it gives great satisfaction seeing my opponent using the mines and then walking around them, negating his plans.

When compare the mine to, for example, the Mutalisk, something which beats me regulary on the ladder, I see in the mine an opportunity to gain a kind of proudness in bypassing the mines. Something unavailable with the Mutalisk, which are extremely annoying, frustrating and rage inducing sometimes, but when I kill them, it’s just that: they’re death and afterwards no level of suspension or excitement is coupled to the late Mutalisks.

Also, the mine really has different utilities. I see a competitive player using these for assault, harass, defence and control purposes in all kind of different scenarios. It will be great for spectators!
The Mothership Core. I’m a religious GSL watcher, but lately I’m almost bored to death when a PvZ matchup is on. I might fail to really see the small intricacies. It’s almost a source of excitement in itself when another unit besides the Zealot or Stalker on the Protoss’ side enters the battlefield before the 9 minute mark. The MSC adds a wheel to the car that is Zealot-Stalker-Sentry. This car just got upgraded from being a tricycle for the mentally deficient to be a nice sportmobile! It is my hope that the added defensive options as well as the aggressive potential this unit has stimulates some more aggressive play.

To a lesser extent, I believe the new Reaper might do the same for Terran. Stimulating early game plays and smart moves/scouts/denial of scouts around the map later. Which are super fun to watch in competitive plays.
Unranked Matchmaking. All casual players around the world breathed a sigh of relief when this feature was introduced. This made me play from 2 games a month to 5 games a day. Great for removing ladder fear or for ‘warming up’ purpose. I love it!

There are also some things I dislike in the current game right now. I’m not sure what I want to accomplish writing these down, but maybe someone will agree.

The Helion portrait. I think it’s safe to assume the Hellbat is going to stay. All the new units have cool new unit portraits (although the Swarm Host seems to have some unfinished textures in it), but the Hellion/Hellbat portrait is horrible. The transformation animation is really cool, the unit shivers en trembles and you can almost feel the whizzing and buzzing of all the motors and pistons, but the portrait does not represent this at all. Below are the 3 Hellion portraits: Normal Hellion, Hellion with the Transformation Servos upgrade and the Hellbat.

The little HUD that appears when you upgrade the Transformation Servos randomly moves up and down, somewhat annoying. The bar over the face of the Hellbat looks like a cheap way of ‘upgrading’ the model. What I’d like to see is the actor being shaken around, charred and chipped ceramics insulator plates. Maybe even just let him put on those goggles like the Banshee model does. The new visuals don’t appease to the Hillbilly characteristics of the former Hellion at all.

The Tempest missile animation looks very good! The thing breathes ‘alien technology’ to me and I like the trailing plasma remains (or whatever it is) and the statics noises on impact very much. With one exception; its size. The current projectile has the size of 4+ marines. Intuitively one would assume the unit to do splash damage. To me, the animation gives the wrong visual clues about its function and the projectile needs to be scaled down a bit (0.5x ?).

The Viper is one of my favourite additions to the game. It just screams awesomeness out of the screen! The model looks really Zergy as some kind of reptilian and insectoid hybrid and it doesn’t have any dull abilities. Abduct and Consume make for some great easy to understand visuals. And then there is Blinding Cloud which looks like this;

Which on a not-so-great stream (f.e. GSL Free Stream) probably looks similar to this, there might be 10 Blinding Clouds in the picture below, or 2, or 0, I don’t know (it’s not a HotS screencapture);

I’m not convinced the current visual of Blinding Cloud is just a placeholder, like the Phase Shields one was. The little flies look nice, but the animation has to stand out more to be spectator friendly.

There is more, but for now, this will do. Thank you for reading this far