StarCraft II @ ESL Finals 2009

[Whiplash!]

StarCraft II was playable this past Friday and Saturday at ESL Finals 2009 for the Alpine region in Vienna, Austria. It was most likely the same build as from BlizzCon 2008. One of StarCraft Legacy's members, FoxSpirit, had the chance to play a few matches as Zerg. Here are some of his findings:
    * The game's readability is pretty nice. It just takes getting used to all the new units. In person, I found this game to look very clean; I'm sure the final version will look awesome.
    * I only played Zerg and lets just say...there are many, many units. It also doesn't hurt that you can now select 40 of your little Cracklings into one large group.
    * Hatcheries have two rallypoints, one for Drones and one for the rest of the units.
    * When you select multiple Hatcheries and hit the Larva button, all Larvae will be selected. Then each keystroke will mutate one Larva. Had a lot of fun in the first match, over-mined a lot, then pumped from five Hatcheries. Every minute there'd be 25 new units
    * Queen now has something like Razor Swarm, basically a mobile Psi Storm with insects shredding units.
    * Warp Rays kill buildings...fast. If you have no AA when they come, you better have multiple expos. Banshees too - they are very, very strong. Six Banshees can wreak havoc.
    * I never noticed this in the screenshots, but in person, you can feel that the game is much more zoomed out. 25 Lings + 10 Hydras only occupy a surprisingly small portion of the screen.
    * For the gas mechanic, you had two nodes, which would occasionally run out of gas and then automatically shut down and refill after some time. It felt slightly odd, I'm not sure what they are trying to achieve with that.
    * Units move in a blob, until they come to a corner... then the group tends to stretch out, sort of like in the original. But they'll fall back into that blob shape at the destination.

StarCraft II was played on Asus Republic of Gamers G71V laptops during the event with these specs:
    * Intel® Quad Core QX9300
    * DDR2 800MHz SDRAM, 4GB
    * Nvidia GeForce 9700M GT, with 512MB GDDR3 VRAM

However, this is nowhere near the actual game requirements. These laptops ran the game at max settings at a very smooth frame rate, and were mainly at the event to promote Asus laptops.



Source: StarCraft Legacy