StarCraft II Official! (Pictures)

[Mucky]

Yeah, I'm not fond of the way Zerg air works either. It's like each of them HAVE to do something novel with their attacks.

[Maglok]

Couldn't get any clearer then this:

Related to the social side of gaming is also the map-making community that has grown over the years, starting with the classic WarCraft II, and revamped initially for StarCraft and then WarCraft III. The new StarCraft II Map Editor program does everything. Players will even be asble to make their own full-size campaigns with Story Mode using all the features and tools Blizzard has. "I'm not saying it'd not extremely complicated," Browder said, "It's EXTREMELY complicated, but it's possible". No game mods are needed either, everything is possible to add to your own games using the editor.

[Rocco]

The Ultralisks flailing like they have epilepsy was putrid, and why were they just standing around in the middle of the protoss base not attacking?

[Marco]

I wonder if implementing those 'cinematics' would be more an exercise in scripting than triggers.  One thing that's kept me focused is KISS, keep it simple stupid.  Ignoring all the BS aspects that used to slow me down has allowed me to make tremendous progress compared to the days of olde.  It's going to take a lot of experimenting and trial and error before I decide how far I'll be willing to go with my own creations.  Gotta see what kind of time commitment is in store for tackling each of the aspects.

StarCraft II has basically become a 'create your own sci-fi game' toolkit for ambitious and creative people, and its widespread enough to reach a great portion of the masses.

[Thalraxal]

Yeah, I expect we're going to see a lot more over-ambitious projects that collapse under their own weight with SC2's Map Editor, which'll be sad.  I'm pretty sure that despite my best intentions, whatever my first project is will probably suffer that fate, and I've already learned that lesson in SC1.  It's just that with Ultimate Power at your disposal, it's hard to not try and bite off more than you can chew.

[Mucky]

Yeah, I expect we're going to see a lot more over-ambitious projects that collapse under their own weight with SC2's Map Editor, which'll be sad.  I'm pretty sure that despite my best intentions, whatever my first project is will probably suffer that fate, and I've already learned that lesson in SC1.  It's just that with Ultimate Power, Ultimate Rage at your disposal, it's hard to not try and bite off more than you can chew.

Fixed.

[DrumsofWar]

The Ultralisks flailing like they have epilepsy was putrid, and why were they just standing around in the middle of the protoss base not attacking?

Does anyone know how the actual unit AI will be? 

One of the small flaws about Brood War's unit AI was "luring".  If you have a bunch of Scouts, you can stimpack up to one with a Marine, shoot and run, which will lure one in.  When you pull that one back, the others will also go in and the player will wind up having to continually order the entire group one by one to back off.

Granted, it's a legitimate strat but one of the few things the AoE/Ensemble games did right was a custom setting for formations and for aggressiveness.

[IskatuMesk]

Couldn't get any clearer then this:

They said the same with Warcraft 3, and look how far that got you. You still needed mpqdraft and an asston of third party applications if you wanted to make a mod. Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Remember, Blizzard thinks dota is a mod.

[tipereth]

Blizzard clearly doesn't give a shit about people wanting to MODIFY GAME FILES in order to change the way the game works, and honestly, why should they? Moddability should never be a selling point of a game, at least not in that sense. They've already hyped up the editor way more than it deserved.

[Hercanic]

Not really fond of the new Spine Crawler attack. Looks hokey. Part of me wishes it remained as it was in SC1, and we all just ignored fishy things like it attacking over gaps and water.

Actually, I really liked it when I saw it. A definate improvement over the previous SC2 Spine attack (poke ground, magically damage enemy). This new attack makes it very clear what unit is being attacked. Reminds me of Half-Life 1's Tentacles.

[imgwh 200x150]http://pnmedia.gamespy.com/planethalfli ... tacles.jpg[/imgwh]

[Whiplash!]

http://www.gosugamers.net/starcraft/images/news/sc2_zerg_techtree_big.jpg

Look at the spinecrawler pic here. That is what i want, a huge bloody sythe membrane ready to shread something apart.

[Maglok]

Couldn't get any clearer then this:

They said the same with Warcraft 3, and look how far that got you. You still needed mpqdraft and an asston of third party applications if you wanted to make a mod. Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Remember, Blizzard thinks dota is a mod.

They did oversell the WC3 editor a little, but I seriously doubt he would lie to their faces. They know what a mod is, Lavvz was there. Seriously though I am just intrigued cause this means we get to tweak the starmap and story space for sure, from within the editor. I gotta admit you can be skeptical about things like AI hacking, etc. then again these guys have always come through to make great games, I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Besides, I don't give anything about AI changing.

[IskatuMesk]

Making great games and then making games great for modders is unfortunately a pair that don't often go hand in hand. Supreme commander is pretty much a terrible game but a paradise for modders. The game needs to be built from the ground up, as does the infrastructure of multiplayer, to really support mods. In wc3, you could load a mod through mpqdraft just like in Starcraft, but unlike starcraft you had a dozen more hoops to jump through to get content working on a global platform when dealing with triggers and stuff like that. As wc3's custom content became extremely dependent on triggers, the difficulty in making them function globally cut off modders and seriously hurt modding overall.

We know that SC2 has a mod loader but most mod loaders don't support every aspect of the game (such as main menus, for example. I expect you'll be able to modify the ingame ui, but the main menus?) AI is one of the things I actually expect to be fairly interchangeable through their mod system, as long as it functions like the Worldedit campaign editor in that you toss files into a global directory and they end up replacing stuff. The AI is most likely no different than it is in wc3; a set of Galaxy files that will require insane C mastery to even touch with little hardcoded parts here and there that will give you a headache when you start toying with them.

Blizzard will try to sell the game off as mod-friendly and it can do this and that, that's to be expected; it's marketing. But their support for worldedit was far less than stellar and I won't be surprised if they shaft us once again either out of ignorance, lack of time, or carelessness.

But they have two more expansions after this is done. I hope that for once Blizzard will "support" their editor and justify the community's efforts to better the modding experience.

[Maglok]

AI does sound rather complicated, needing the insane C skills sounds about right.

[IskatuMesk]

New screenshots, again shamelessly jacked from TL.

[imgwh 640x480]http://www.ingame.de/pics//59180.jpg[/imgwh]
[imgwh 640x480]http://www.ingame.de/pics//59179.jpg[/imgwh]
[imgwh 640x480]http://www.ingame.de/pics//59178.jpg[/imgwh]
[imgwh 640x400]http://www.ingame.de/pics//59177.jpg[/imgwh]
[imgwh 640x480]http://www.ingame.de/pics//59181.jpg[/imgwh]
[imgwh 640x480]http://www.ingame.de/pics//59182.jpg[/imgwh]
[imgwh 640x400]http://www.ingame.de/pics//59183.jpg[/imgwh]
[imgwh 640x480]http://www.ingame.de/pics//59184.jpg[/imgwh]

Thoughts:

I really like how the zerg are looking, now. But I feel as though the terrain is far too low rez in comparison to the high-rez units, it looks really weird like dawn of war where the terrain textures were extremely low quality. Hopefully they fix that; they've done pretty well with the graphics so far.

I really wish some of the effects were more intense, though. Like the spore colony attack. It doesn't look nearly as impressive as some of the other weapons in the game.