StarCraft II Official! (Pictures)

[Xenon]

Lol, looks like those "Starcraft" maps for Warcraft III.

[Lavarinth]

Lol, looks like those "Starcraft" maps for Warcraft III.

This. It's kinda cool, for like a 5 minute preview.

[IskatuMesk]

Looks like PR

[Death_Wing]

This is just another one of those: "This is Warcraft in space!" things.

[Taeradun]

it looks a bit weird, but I like the fact that everything is still recognisable and playable on a more basic computer

means I might even be able to play it on my laptop (my basic Lenovo laptop, not my Eee PC netbook )

[Frozty]

Well, Blizzard definitely found a way to make the whole "playable on almost all machines" concept at least sort of viable. I just don't know if I could personally deal with having to play with graphics so incredibly watered down.

[IskatuMesk]

SC2 uses a lot of fancy shit. Heavy use of shaders, some crazy lighting system HKS was telling me about that Tabula Rasa used (this is probably one of the biggest performance killers in the game), very large texture files and a lot of them, ect. ect. To get it to play on low-end systems they kill pretty much every single thing the engine does.

Which is kind of amazing when you think about it because they practically turn off the lighting engine and such which most games can't begin to do.

[tipereth]

After the last patch it got really shiny with no real performance drop.

[Hercanic]

Yeah, I was thinking something was different about the Infestor and Brood Lord's appearance, wondering if they might have updated the models, but without comparison screenshots I can't say for certain. When playing as Protoss, I noticed there's a much more prevalent glow.

[Taeradun]

Well, Blizzard definitely found a way to make the whole "playable on almost all machines" concept at least sort of viable. I just don't know if I could personally deal with having to play with graphics so incredibly watered down.

did you ever play Warcraft III?

makes me wonder how awesome shit like this would look though

[IskatuMesk]

Thing is, wc3 can murder even high-end comps, especially with computer AI. SC2 is performing pretty well across the board right now. Remains to be seen if their actual AI will be that efficient, but they've done a pretty damn good job, comparatively far superior to wc3.

[Frozty]

Well, they've definitely had plenty of time to figure out how to make it run efficiently under such a load.

[WB]

who wants SC2 beta? I has an invite to send out, (lol,wtf? didnt see that comin).

[Xenon]

I does! ...but I probably wouldn't use it much until the editor comes out. 

How do you go about actually giving the invite to someone?

[Xelxiuz]

Well, Blizzard definitely found a way to make the whole "playable on almost all machines" concept at least sort of viable. I just don't know if I could personally deal with having to play with graphics so incredibly watered down.

Oh, then you couldn't possibly deal with living in my situation, since my graphics are even worse when I used the replay thing.

who wants SC2 beta? I has an invite to send out, (lol,wtf? didnt see that comin).

I'll take it if no one else wants it, since if that's the case I can always borrow a high powered PC from work, or a friend. Or maybe it'll just give me incentive to get off my ass and buy a PC.