STARCRAFT II WINGS OF LIBERTY PLATFORMS TV

The victims of this cull will be determined by whether or not they're part of the 'essence' of StarCraft. Aware of the tactical and visual chaos that ensues from simply slinging more and more stuff at a game, StarCraft ZZ is being kept lean. There's no longer a limit on the amount of selectable items, for example, and the fog of war applies to higher ground - but it's still identifiably and defiantly StarCraft. That said, small tweaks with larger ramifications abound. Blizzard are going out of their way to distance themselves from the 'big new feature' kind of showmanship, instead focusing on developing the features that made the first game so strong. There's still the simple 'minerals and gas' resource management, and the 50/50 division between resources and combat. How about radical changes to the gameplay then? Again, no. The emphasis will instead be on making the three races even more distinct, to make each set of tactics more varied. There was much speculation about the Protoss/Zerg hybrid race mentioned in the first game, but no - playable races will remain limited to the Protoss, Zerg and Terrans. This came up again and again the Koreans definitely want another race.

STARCRAFT II WINGS OF LIBERTY PLATFORMS TV

Will the adherence to Korean expectations stifle the innovation - the 'big new feature' that we fickle Westerners demand? Will Korean gamers reject the sequel as a reinvention of chess, or will it eventually displace the original game, and cause the gaming TV channels to suddenly look like they're in the right decade? Fourth Race?

So, let's ask the questions the Koreans are asking, because their demands are going to have a huge impact on what Blizzard end up providing. The atmosphere at the event was equal parts excitement, nervousness and resentment - it was like The Phantom Menace all over again. Now the sequel is real, this nascent reality is fighting against a decade of fantasy. You see, Korean gamers love StarCraft - it's part of their regular TV scheduling for god's sake - and they've had nearly ten years to imagine how they'd change it if they were king. In short, I witnessed the birth of a nerd-fury. Occasionally a suspicious or aggressive question would emerge, made more blankly hostile by the translation. That said, it was interesting to note the tone of the crowd, after the initial hooting and cheering died down. It was, without crawling too far up Blizzard's arse, the greatest RTS of its time, and if you can suffer the dated graphics, it's still among the best.īy revealing the game in Seoul, Korea, the master tacticians at Blizzard chose the friendliest ground possible for their announcement. StarCraft had an elaborately constructed universe, finely tuned combat and a cracking story. It was the combat between these three very different races that was the basis of StarCraft, and it was the fine balance between their very different modes of combat that made it so breathtakingly unique. The Protoss gained psionic powers that singularly failed to stop them from waging civil war, while the Zerg were given advanced parasitic powers, turning them into a hive-like plague, wiping out or infesting everything in their path. The Protoss and the Zerg are enhanced alien races given an evolutionary leg-up by a meddling superrace called the Xel'Naga. The Terrans - human colonists - are torn apart by civil war and find themselves stuck in the middle of a war between the Protoss and the Zerg. In 1998, Starcraft told the story of three races in conflict, and it went a little something like this.

Starcraft ii wings of liberty platforms