StarCraft II Official! (Pictures)

[WB]

It was inevitable.

"My new campaign is in the works! Defeat of the mighty Alliance is a large 500-levelled campaign. It involves a drunken Artanis, along with Humphrey Gyldyker, a NEW AND COOL Firebat hero, fighting a war against Infested Kerrigan, leader of the Hybrids.
SPOILER: You'll see Kerrigan get killed by the Hybrids as they fight for the Hybrids in the depths of space.
However, I really need twenty unique voices, unit artists and anyone else interested to help me out making this, since I'll be busy creating it. Anyone wanna help out on Defeat of the mighty Alliance then?"""

http://www.stormcoast-fortress.net/down ... 8455b98125

[Magic]

Sup dudes. Ready for one more crazy round of modding a Blizzard game? 

It was inevitable.

"My new campaign is in the works! Defeat of the mighty Alliance is a large 500-levelled campaign. It involves a drunken Artanis, along with Humphrey Gyldyker, a NEW AND COOL Firebat hero, fighting a war against Infested Kerrigan, leader of the Hybrids.
SPOILER: You'll see Kerrigan get killed by the Hybrids as they fight for the Hybrids in the depths of space.
However, I really need twenty unique voices, unit artists and anyone else interested to help me out making this, since I'll be busy creating it. Anyone wanna help out on Defeat of the mighty Alliance then?"""

http://www.stormcoast-fortress.net/down ... 8455b98125

Glad to see I've left some legacy within the days of StarCraft.  That brings back memories.
(I wrote all the text for SI and he coded and compiled it.)

[Ross]

I can see them giving Raynor and Zeratul there own unigue units sorta like they did with certain heros in Wc3.

[Marco]

Maybe it was just because I was more involved in SC then I was WC3, but it seems like WC3 campaigning never really got the attention it got with SC.  Of course, more than a few chose to focus on pure-cinematic rather than campaigns.

Yo Magic.  Another of the Gallantry crew.  You, Maglok, RCX, Joel, me, all here.  Now if we could get Ming, Xavier, BZ, Wargiant, and Legion in here we could have ourselves a little reunion.  After all this time, I still think RCX had the perfect voice for our main character, Rane Lance, and I still don't know why he wanted to back out of that.  Ah yes, the Gallantry.  That was a very ambitious project.  We had a very good pool of talent for that one.  I think that would have been -the- campaign of the era if it continued.

[Maglok]

*snif* Now you went and got me all emotional.

[AA7Dragoon]

So..

They finally tell me at Star Alliance that Campaign Creations is back.  Every time I've been on, the site is down or the forum is reset.  So finally!  It's good to see everyone up and running again!

AA7 is back.  It's time to restart the good ol' days.

[Anonymous]

Gameplay video is up - with the same WoW logo as all the others.

edit - Upon closer inspecting, those portraits are probably NOT pre-rendered.

[Maglok]

Yeah I DLed the high res gameplay movie and it looks pretty not pre-rendered.

Goon! Long time no see.

[Marine]

God I cannot wait it has finally happened, I knew it would finally return because they would come back to sci fi war. Then again a WC4

Woohoo! Cannot wait till it comes! On Blizzplanet they made a report that it might come out around October 2007! And the map editor will be awesome! New campaigns!

[WB]

A fresh start with SC2~! I can finally remake my old SC campaign in a way that doesn't suck ass.

[Hercanic]

Dear everyone:
Some observed new units and abilities:

Zealot Dash - If you notice, Zealots get a burst of speed a little ways away from their target, closing the gap much faster.

Cliff Navigation - Seems Blizzard is playing with various ground-based navigation abilities. A type of Terran infantry has jetpacks allowing them to jump cliffs, the Protoss walkers can simply step over cliffs, and the teleporting Protoss unit can bypass any obstacle with said power.

Superunits - Protoss cityship thing demonstrated three very powerful abilities: an area-effect shield that you could use to protect your forces (and the cityship too), an underside deathray that obliterates anything below the cityship, and a horrifying black hole generator that can take out at least three Battlecruisers. My guess is that each race's superunit will act as a final end-game solution to matches that progress for a long time.

Beamships - A Protoss vessel that looks and attacks rather similar to the ships of Star Trek: Voyager's "Species 8472". Very powerful against tough targets like Battlecruisers, but poor against weaker units like Marines. Four are seen taking out three Battlecruisers, but a squad of Marines easily brought the beasts down with minimal losses.

Rollypolly - New Zerg ground-based suicide unit, which seems to mutate from Zerglings. Glowing green and rolls across the ground, a mass of them took out several Protoss walkers.


Dear Lavarinth:
Might as well get used to Max, as Maya was bought out by Max a while ago and the two will eventually be merged.

[IskatuMesk]

Another thing to note is that psi storm ticks faster and is a lot stronger. Photon cannons are seen 1shotting lings in the concept art video but barely scratch reapers.

[Petelee]

this is only in alpha stages, which means the final version is gonna be, to quote the overmind, "...perfect."
whenever I get happy, my back starts to hurt and I stutter. when I found out about SC 2, my back broke and I was rendered mute.

[JoelS]

I really don't think you all should be making so many assumptions about units and how they work and balance and really anything about the game other than its confirmed existence.  In one of [url=http://"http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/starcraft-2/790164p1.html"]Gamespy's articles[/url], they say

the game's been in development since 2003, starting right after the Warcraft III expansion pack was released, and has not yet reached alpha stage.

and

...In fact, the single-player game has not had much beyond theoretical work completed on it.

...

the team's initial focus on multiplayer precludes much work being done on the single-player experience until the last year or two of development.

So really, it looks like what has been shown so far is basically a tech demo with some of the new units in it, but judging by how much things changed in SC1's alpha through to release, I doubt anything about SC2 is final.  At least, unlike Ghost, it will certainly release... eventually.

Regarding the prerendered / non-prerendered portrait question, for all we know those could just be placeholders... I haven't seen the super high-res videos yet (thanks to Blizzard's travesty of a bittorrent client) but the animation cycles repeated an awful lot in the video I have seen.  Note how many times the zealot looks to his right in the same manner.  Of course, that could just be because they haven't added much in the way of animations to that segment of the game.

The more I think about it, the more odd it seems that Blizzard would release such obviously incomplete and potentially misleading video of the game.  But then, stoking the fires of fandom and getting people all abuzz is probably worth any small confusion that is caused by what's been released.

[Maglok]

I can debunk that super unit theory Hercanic. I think it was Gamespy that quoted that the protoss mothership would be unique and the game assymetric.

Well Joel if you download the gameplay trailer from the official site it has talking added to it and at the start before they begin they explain how this is only a demo and nothing is at all finished. So your right about that part.