posted on August 9th, 2010, 11:23 pm
Yeah, the thing about Starcraft is that it's so pick-up-able. You copy the folder to a few comps, people who've never played it before can pick it up and have fun. All the game mechanics were so simple and elegant.
Starcraft 2 has good changes and bad changes. The races are all more streamlined but also feel more similar to each other. People say it plays faster but that is simply not true. Starcraft 1 used to take me and my friends an hour and a half to play because we were bad at it, but the pros average 5-15 minutes a game in Starcraft and they still do in SC2.
The fact that people call it faster paced is a tribute to how hard Blizzard has worked to explain the game. The campaign and challenge missions go through almost every unit in the game 1 at a time, showing you what it can do and how to use it. So if anything Starcraft 2 is even EASIER to learn than SC.
As for the money issues, Blizzard is trying to create a bubble community. It annoys me that you must log in to play the game at all, but you have to admit people WOULD steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from them if they didn't make it this way. So far I've seen that it really is making a big difference with how many people buy it/try to crack it.
Another thing I want to mention is, battlenet 2.0 interfaces with Facebook as well as WoW and regular Starcraft. I can be playing the SCII campaign and chatting with my friend playing WoW, to tell him to go buy this game so we can play each other.
When you buy it, you also get 2 'guest keys' that allow people to play multiplayer with you. They need to install the full 7GB game to do it, unfortunately, but at least the Starcraft LAN party is not as dead as people say.
I'm afraid of getting "tl;dr"s here, but one last thing I want to mention. The good thing about Starcraft has always been its polish. Blizzard didn't stop fixing problems for almost a decade, while a lot of other games get dropped right after launch. Like Star Wars, Empire at War which was an AMAZING game, really fun to play but it simply WASN'T FINISHED. The game developers ran out of time and money and simply released what they had when the day came. Blizzard is famous for not doing that, even delaying the launch if they have to in order to get it right.
