Backhand of Justice

Has Blizzard caught lightning in a bottle a second time? Is Starcraft II any good?

Starcraft II will be released in a few short days. Hopes run high among its fan base that Blizzard can recapture the magic that vaulted the original Starcraft to the top of the RTS heap. Blizzard has an impeccable track record, and many fans have received an extended free look at the multiplayer during beta testing. How did it stack up?

Balance

Real time strategy games usually only distinguish themselves through innovation. Balance is typically a prerequisite to being a passable RTS; without balance what does it matter what unique strategic decisions you allow? Rarely, however, is balance not just a building block but a distinguishing characteristic. By rarely, I mean only in one case: Starcraft. Include Starcraft II, and that makes two cases.

RTS games are complicated enough to make - designing tech trees, animating units, creating maps, scripting single player campaigns and recording sound effects is a tall order. Considering that poorly balancing a game can render all other work meaningless, developers usually just make factions symmetrical in function and slightly different in appearance.

Not Blizzard.

The iconic 3 factions from Starcraft: the Zerg, Terran and Protoss, return for Starcraft II. By some black magic Blizzard has managed to make each faction distinct yet perfectly balanced. Many baby seals must have been sacrificed to successfully perform this feat.

These guys might look hardcore, but they are slaughtered by the truckload in-game

Gameplay

A great game is easy to learn but impossible to master. While Starcraft II is slightly more complicated than chess, it is conceptually simple. You harvest resources with workers, and use those resources to build production facilities which in turn consume resources to build an army. You use that army to (hopefully) kill your opponent before they kill you.

There are of course many complicating factors. You don’t have perfect information as you can only see what your units can see. Imagine in chess if your pieces could only see the squares immediately surrounding them. You wouldn’t know how your opponent opened or how his pieces are positioned until you got close, so you would have to make decisions with less than complete information.

A good player in Starcraft II will try to counter what their opponent is doing, so initially you want to be able to scout out their strategy while preventing them from doing the same. You also need to be able to make educated guesses about what your opponent is doing from what you are able to see. At the highest levels, nearly as much can be gained through knowledge of what your opponent isn’t doing as from what he is doing.

The Immortal is one of the most powerful Protoss units that perfectly exemplifies how units are never obsolete even in longer games: it shrugs off powerful attacks but is susceptible to weaker tier 1 units

In addition, you can trick your opponent by allowing them to scout what looks like a certain strategy, destroying their scout, then changing your strategy to what will counter how he was planning to counter you. You can go around in circles trying to outmaneuver your enemy, but like in actual warfare many battles are won or lost before they even happen.

Decisions don’t end when a battle begins, however. There are many tactical and strategic decisions to be made that influence the outcome of a fight. You can take the same 2 armies and have them face each other with different positioning and on different terrain, and the outcomes will be drastically different.

Certain units and armies thrive by being in wide open space with the ability to maneuver around their enemies. Certain units do lots of damage to a small space and funneling an enemy army through a small choke point leads to total annihilation. Air units can outmaneuver their opponents in complicated terrain. Some units can tunnel underground and surprise their enemies from below, or circumvent static defenses.

Even within large battles, certain individual units can turn the tide. Some units can convert enemy units to your side for a small period of time. Stealing a key unit can make the difference between victory and defeat. Some units are good against clusters of enemies but become weak if their enemies are spread out; controlling your army is key. Having the correct parts of your army in the front, and in the back, and sometimes even flanking or surrounding your enemy is paramount. Even if you have a bad army composition because you misjudged your opponent’s strategy, you can still win with proper troop micromanagement.

In Starcraft II you are almost never out of the fight. The further behind in a game you are, the higher risk strategies you must implement, because conventional thinking won’t get you back into a losing game. Never give up. Never surrender!

The Corruptor is basically one of those squid things from the Matrix. Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the corruptor is. They have to see it for themselves

User Friendliness

Starcraft II will be the first game to utilize the full Battle.net 2.0 interface. While many fans of the original Starcraft criticize the system for being too ‘simplistic,’ that is because they’re living in the past. Battle.net 2.0 is a streamlined and comprehensive gaming system.

Games can be set up with the push of a button, and everything is taken care of automatically behind the scenes. Ladders ensure you’re going to be facing players of comparable skill level, and the wait to get into a balanced game is frequently a couple seconds for a 1v1 game, and a couple minutes for a 4v4 game. I’m sure those times will decrease in release as there will be orders of magnitude more players compared to the beta.

In addition, there is a great replay system where you can watch and analyze old games. There are achievements and custom user portraits and decals to individualize yourself in-game. Finally, there is a friend system where you can chat both in and out of games, and eventually across Blizzard games. Battle.net 2.0 might not yet be perfect, but it’s a great start, and over time players will wonder how they lived without it.

Interesting that the protagonist in Starcraft bases his operations from a Terran Battlecruiser. In game, however, Battlecruisers are powerful but still slaughtered by the truckload. Maybe it's a special battlecruiser? Otherwise this might be a short campaign

Custom Content

The award for the game with the most longevity has to go to either Counter-Strike or the original Starcraft. While the actual game of Starcraft II has the potential to be just as long-lasting, its lifespan will be prolonged by user-generated content. Even though the game hasn’t even been released, there are already hundreds of custom game mods created for the beta.

Some of the most popular include variations on tower defense and tug of war game modes. In the popular Battlecraft: Armageddon mod, players receive money every few seconds and have to choose which units they want to spawn to run at their opponent. They can’t control these units, which merely mindlessly run at the enemy. The skill comes in using your money to choose units which counter your opponent’s units for lower cost. The number of game types that will emerge during release when millions get their hands on the editing tools mean that people will be playing Starcraft II far into the future, even if the standard game modes have long been forgotten.

Starcraft II is going to be a massive success. Blizzard has created the RTS that will long be the gold standard considering its polish, balance and refined gameplay. It will storm the sales charts and more than return the $100 million spent on its development. Video gamers around the world are about to find out what we beta testers have known for the past few months: Blizzard has created something really special that we will be playing for a long time.