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Since I've found myself in the SC2 forums a bit now, I thought I'd introduce my perspective on SC2.
It looks to me like they have taken the War3 engine, and SCBW characters (roughly). Blizzard likes to alternate their franchises (hence bringing back Warcraft) because it's good for business, so that's why we're getting Starcraft 2 now instead of Warcraft IV.
They have made many gestures to the serious BW community, because I think they would, ideally, like the game to replace SCBW in Korea. I suspect that when they come closer to their internal deadlines (pushed back until they won't anymore) they will release a game that does not achieve this goal. This is just my gut feeling, based on the way War3 and BW came out similarly.
It is also clear that the game is not "building" on the existing SCBW balance whatsoever. They may try to make the play "inspired by" SCBW, but I think the matchups and races, appearances aside, will be as entirely new as War3's were to SCBW players. The alpha or beta or whatever play we have seen so far confirms this, as does their decision to completely change damage and armor types (to the War3 system basically), meaning existing unit stats balance has gone out the window. The amount of new units also means an entirely new balance.
So thinking of the game in terms of SCBW is wishful thinking. If you think feature X will ruin the balance between M&M and sunkens, think again because there is no such balance as we speak, and if one comes about, it will be entirely new. From scratch.
I also think Blizz will be more concerned with the War3 audience than the SCBW audience, as far as non-korean audiences go, and they will expect (rightfully) to be able to integrate all interface changes of War3 (and ones people expect in new RTS's) to be present in SC2. This is just common sense, whether it's best for "pro gaming" or not. Maybe they will have a "pro" mode to take this away.
What I think will happen is, SC2 will not catch on in korea, but SC2 will replace War3 for the most part. SC2 will follow a similar pattern of War3 of having constant patches and broken matchups, but it will be more interesting than War3 maybe, to those of us who didn't like it. It has lots of fresh cool ideas, but they aren't really RTS ideas, just unit or spell ideas that are cool, so while I expect a "solid" RTS (in the sense that War3 is still better than non-Blizzard RTS), with lots of cool ideas, I don't expect anything that builds on what I keep going back to in SCBW, or what keeps it a pro game in korea.
 
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Sweden33723 Posts
That's an overly pessimistic view if I ever did see one..
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I think you're jumping to conclusions. Just because the armor system of SC2 is more like WC3's armor system that doesn't mean that SC2 will play more like WC3 than SCBW. Maybe the armor system in warcraft 3 is actually superior to that of BW for a good number of reason and that's why they've chosen that model. The most important thing about SC2 is that it's going to have the same style of fast gameplay with the rock-paper-scissor counters that the original starcraft also featured and yet has lots of dynamic counters and unit combinations.
I agree with you that SC2 will never replace BW, especially not in Korea, and that there are a ton of atrocious gameplay errors in the game as it is now - mainly how overpowered air units are compared to ground units, but it's all going to get fixed! Don't worry about it Blizzard is king of balancing.
Things aren't supposed to be balanced yet, shit, they haven't even created the zerg race yet and we're complaining about balance issues?
Cheer up, warcraft 3 was about killing critters, SC2 will be about killing your opponent.
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I think I have withheld a lot of pessimistic views that one should almost have to conclude after seeing all of the available videos so far. FrozenArbiter, some of my guesses may be pessimistic, but really, overly so? Do you really think Blizzard is trying to make a product that will replace SCBW's role on Korean TV? What are the signs that this is successfully happening?
born-to-porn, I'm not saying SC2 will play more like WC3 by pointing out the changes to WC3's armor system and the like, only that it shows that we are seeing an entirely new game from scratch, meaning the balance is being built from scratch and is unlikely to be much better than currently achieved (by now!) in War3.
I don't really agree that Blizzard is the king of balancing. It was map authors who created the balance, and before that, Lost Temple which coincidentally was closest to balanced in Blizzard's haphazard changes around the time of BW. Blizzard has seldom to never balanced anything in SCBW besides initial excessive imbalances in betas of SC and BW (and not completely, as you know), and overreactive patches. And that was the old Blizzard which is gone now. The current one seems to introduce a horrible new bug every other patch, and could not balance War3 even years after releasing it.
I'm not complaining about balance issues born-to-porn, because you're right, there is no balance yet. I'm just predicting that the game is going to come out with the success we can expect from Blizzard (considerable, compared to other RTS makers), but nothing more, nothing like what SCBW has come to, and certainly nothing improving on it.
And yeah, it will be a better War3--no critter killing, no heros, less races to try to balance, an auto-mated ladder. I look forward to it, but in the end I bet SCBW will still be better.
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Thats like my greatest fear of what will happen, and very possible at that.
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If Blizzard would just come out and say something like, "we are going to make sure Boxer agrees that the mouse feel and unit responsiveness and visual clarity meets or exceeds SCBW," I would have a lot more hope. Obviously similar decrees would have to be made for the quality of the map balance/race balance/matchups.
In SCBW we have good and bad matchups, and I don't see any signs that SC2 is made with the idea in mind that we need to create all new matchups, yet ones that take the best elements from SCBW and new ones that take it to a new level. Instead at this point we will be lucky if we have an equal average quality of the matchups in SCBW. We will be lucky if SC2 is as fun as ZvZ or TvT let alone PvP, PvZ let alone say, TvP, TvZ. Won't we?
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a better war3? you obviously know little about the true differences between starcraft and warcraft.
did war3 replace bw? no. they are different game entirely. from resource gathering to unit power to counter-types to heroes to critter killing to unit cap. i truly think sc2 will be the follow-up to starcraft that war3 was to war2. they won't replace each other, and in fact, will have very, very little in common.
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No, SC2 is going to be a different game entirely just like War3 was. It will be slightly more of a follow-up than War3, only because they will toss out their ideas that no one really liked (Heros and Creeps), and, at best, put some effort (however in vain) into pleasing high-level play (they actually tried to do this in War3 too so don't hold your breath).
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