Verdict: Does SC2 play close to SC1? - Page 6

On February 18 2010 23:04 Jyvblamo wrote:
I find I can distinguish most units from a low quality stream, except when they're on creep. Then I don't know fuck all that's going on.

On February 19 2010 10:54 GGTeMpLaR wrote:
I like it more than any game i've ever played.

On February 19 2010 14:21 gumbum8 wrote:

The beta is better than anything you've ever played and you've played it for a day?
A little soon maybe lol?

On February 18 2010 23:46 jdr_ wrote:


As someone that was a pretty solid Ladder player on WC3:TFT that recently dropped WC3 alltogether to pick up starcraft, im kinda baffled at your comment.

WC3 is the easier of the two games by far, standard play is always better than unstandard play unless you're going for a pure shock win, races like human can abandon map control indefinitely and still win because towers are fucking overpowered and have been for the last 3 years.

I can tell you that as a C- zerg player i've had to master infinitely more RTS-pertinent skills than I ever had to in wc3, a game where I actually managed to use variations of fiend builds in every matchup. In WC3, map control doesn't matter(very much), macro doesn't matter, and random luck of the draw can lose you a game(tome of experience, blademaster getting a bunch of circlet drops, etc)

SC players are superior.

On February 19 2010 17:05 IskatuMesk wrote:
My opinion;

Sc2 is twice as fast as sc1. The economy comes very fast, the units do insane amounts of damage and generally attack faster as well. Big battles can end in seconds except for specific matchups. Flanking is probably more important than individual micro at this point, especially when you are talking about carriers or colossi both of which can utterly decimate most of the things you can throw at them head-on. In my opinion it's too fast, units do too much damage. At first it's very hard to keep yourself from floating tons and tons of cash but as you get used to the game it becomes easier to control that; except for gas, I'm still having problems managing gas and I always run out because I'm too used to sc1-style gas management.

Is it easy? No. Is it easier than sc1? Yes. In my experience it is, once you start getting used to it you start realizing you don't need to pay attention to units as much as you used to because the damage values are so high it devalues unit control. If you have this unit and he has that unit there's a 70% chance you'll curbstomp him no matter what he tries to do. The damage bonuses on some units, like Immortals, are insane. If they reduced the damage values considerably I think the battles would play much more like sc1 and be much more interesting.

Does it play close to sc1? It bears a passing resemblance. But the gameflow is extremely different and more bursty and sporadic. Momentary decisions have mattered more for me than strategic planning or tactical powress. I prefer sc1 over this, but sc2 has its own charm.

Readability? My friend and I built 300-400 zerglings a piece and set the pathing engine to a big test with lings and moving and ultras and such, making huge writhing masses of zerglings that filled about half the screen so dense you could only see flailing wings and legs. Was easy for me to tell whose lings were which. I have zero problems reading the game, and I'm not exactly experienced in that kind of thing. Graphics are crisp but terrain could be higher resolution, it's kind of blurry. I do not believe this a game you want to watch on a 320x200 fuzzy resolution. It won't work. You need HD streams or videos for this. That's just the way high-resolution games are. Sometimes the colors of zerg units do mesh together but ingame it's very easy for me to tell them apart. The differing quality of video codecs and such will most certainly skew this at the lower resolutions.

Performance? My i7, which they've said has performance issues, handles nuking 500 zerglings, 300 overlords, and a bunch of other stuff with no hitch. They've done a really good job with the engine. There is one way to cripple the game though - burrow those zerglings over and over and spawn thousands of burrow decals. Guaranteed to knife your fps. Battles do not impact my performance while frapsing 1920x1200. Geysers can impact my performance; probably a bug of some kind related to their distortion shader.

Everything is subject to change. My opinion now is meaningless because it's a beta. It will change. What I do now will probably not work in a month. It certainly won't apply to release. So I'm just enjoying sc2 for the moment and not caring about specifics.