The Earth shakes(Starcraft 2 Announced)

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Oh, and the trailer was stupid. It was obviously more interested in showing off their ability to do nice CG with an overwrought, wankish, impractical fitout for a Space Marine (can you imagine how much fucking infrastructure you'd need to outfit a platoon at a time?) than something that actually made any sense.

It's still a source of frustration for me that Blizzard's stupid cinematics are held in such high regard. They were cool in Starcraft and even Diablo II, but everything since has just been senseless wank ("o hay look we can do rly kewl movies lol am i rite"). I'm still at a loss trying to figure out why World of Warcraft's insipid, pointless intro movie beat out Dawn of War's for (US) PCGamer's "Best Intro Movie" a few years ago, the latter having, y'know, some kind of structure, plot and point to it all, not to mention being just plain more interesting, if slightly less technically masterful.

[Ace Pace]

A friend says that DoW looks like shit and SC2 looks better. Does anyone have some pics that, in particular, will show just how crappy the current pics of SC2 look compared to DoW?

Sure, don't expect to win.

They look roughly equal on my scale, that is, DoW:DC and SC2 alpha both look roughly similar to digested shit. With SC2 having slightly neater art.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

A random comparison image - honestly I think they got the look for the Terran units pretty close to their original metallic look:



All the screen shots on StarCraft2.com have high-resolution versions available and from those the graphics look far more impressive. The Protoss in particular look way better as you can actually see the lighting on their armour, making them look a little less like Dranaei rejects.

[Steel]

All the screen shots on StarCraft2.com have high-resolution versions available and from those the graphics look far more impressive. The Protoss in particular look way better as you can actually see the lighting on their armour, making them look a little less like Dranaei rejects.

Your random comparison image... isnt a comparison of SC1 to SC2. The left battlecruiser is not from the original starcraft They looked like this: so of course there are going to be similarities... just not between the new look and the old

And eeer nope... still looks like wank to me: http://eu.media.blizzard.com/starcraft2 ... -hires.jpg

I have to say that while the actual look of the engine may or may not be shoddy, the fact that the game appears to be intentionally produced in a cartoony style is what makes it look bad to me. Just look at the terran siege tank- it looks like some kind of '70s bubblecar. Just shit. And the terran bunker has what ~2 polygons??

Hopefully they'll make the units look less cartoony by release date, but i dont hold much hope for a massive style overhaul.

Also they seem determined to make everything much more mobile, with multiple units being able to ignore terrain etc and jump around. I hope this doesnt make the game into an even more massive clickfest...

[brianeyci]

This is what I hear: in order for Starcraft 2 to show up properly on Korean interlaced television (tv ladder), they need to make text and graphics a certain style. What is the point of putting in loads of graphics in that their main fanbase won't be able to see. Also, I hear that they will make Starcraft runnable on the latest integrated graphics cards. Not just runnable, but ideal. Koreans may be close to a first world nation, but look at their average income. They cannot afford the latest greatest computers.

As for the cartoon look, fucking good. If it looks terrible to some people, I imagine it's because they're used to a certain style of graphics. The cartoon look actually looks good to me.

The game will be a clickfest, and it will not look like the latest greatest games or be DX10 or even take advantage of graphics cards from five years ago. If people don't like it I suggest they buy another game.

EDIT: Or at the very least, get the demo before you buy SC2.

[K. A. Pital]

The cartoonish look and the plastic smooth effect applied to everything from the battleships to the smallest troopers on the ground is absolutely hideous for my eyes.

The 3D-engine exhibits roughly the same FX capabilities as Dawn of War, but DOW was far grittier and it didn't apply "plastic smooth" effects to it's units.

The colors burn my eyes, and the small troopers are not as well worked-out as in the already mentioned DoW or C&C III which beats this shit hands down.

Sorry, cartoon looks may be good for the Starcraft fanbase, but 10 years since I was expecting something better already.

[brianeyci]

That plastic smooth effect is actually what I imagined Starcraft 2 to be like. Maybe I have a lack of imagination or maybe I just haven't played enough strategy games. But back when marines were blowing their guts with blood all over the place and spikes were coming out of the ground, I knew that any future Starcraft 2 would look more like anime than realism. The cinematics never fooled me. If you had to ask me two weeks ago to imagine what a Starcraft 2 would look like, I would say exactly what it seems to be now. More micro, cartoon.

And let's not bring this "ten years" thing in. Ten years later, ten years earlier, twenty years later is truly irrelevant. If it looks like shit say it looks like shit, but in my opinion there's no reason to say Blizzard is "behind the times." That's as silly as saying the ultimate pinnacle of games is photorealism and anything which doesn't contribute to that is a step backwards. If it looks like shit, just say it looks like shit. Don't have to bring up some meaningless timeframe.

[K. A. Pital]

That's as silly as saying the ultimate pinnacle of games is photorealism and anything which doesn't contribute to that is a step backwards.

For a certain category of games, like Earth-set FPS, that's very much true actually. Strategies are not so striving towards photorealistic images, but quite a few of them are improving the realism of effects - blood, explosions, metal burn, et cetera. Starcraft is apparently not one of those.

Though I agree, knowing what the latest Warcraft looked like I should've known that it will be the same shit wrapped in a different setting. Only with yet more plastic.

And please don't tell me that blocky, out-of-scale landscapes from Starcraft are some sort of "artistic vision" rather than just copying the same shit from SC 1, regardless of the possibilities of modern 3D engines to render fully 3D, to-scale landscapes with highs and lows. Because at the times of SC1, this type of landscape was considered normal for RTS.

The ultimate goal of strategies is not realism, but a dumb copy of the old game with newer graphics is not something I call achievement. I rightly call this shit.

[brianeyci]

I rightly call this shit.

Well fine, that's your perogative.

But beware that you might find yourself becoming as bad as the people you probably hate. I assume you hate the Fallout whiners who complain about their sacred franchise being descerated, or the kind of people who want a game to move a certain way and when it doesn't and sells a lot of copies, they feel it's betrayal. The purists are bad, but just as bad are people who demand every new game to be a completely innovative groundbreaking creation and declare it a failure if it's not. At the least I would give the demo a chance, and if the demo sucks I wouldn't buy it, end of story.

[K. A. Pital]

I assume you hate the Fallout whiners who complain about their sacred franchise being descerated, or the kind of people who want a game to move a certain way and when it doesn't and sells a lot of copies, they feel it's betrayal.

I do hate the more obsessive Fallout fans, definetely. But I don't want Fallout to be completely rehauled either, of course, there are some things which you take from the older game.

Sure, I'd give the demo a chance, why not. But I don't hold much hopes, that's all. I've already seen the gameplay and suddenly realised that clickfests of SC-style are no longer any fun for me.

I must be getting old.

[Hotfoot]

I'll admit I'm torn on the issue. If someone were to come to me and tell me that Freespace 3 were to come out, and it was essentially Freespace 2 with better graphics and a few refinements, I'd be on that shit in a heartbeat.

On the other hand, I dislike the idea of Starcraft 2 being just like Starcraft with better graphics and a few refinements. I think that at the core, the reason for the difference in my reaction is that, to me, Freespace 2 was the pinnacle of the genre. No game since has really improved on it, and fuckit, let's face it, there have been very few games of that type since. Space sims came into their own and died out very quickly. Right now, they're straggling along, and the single greatest example of their breed was Freespace 2.

Meanwhile, RTS games have gone through multiple variations, with Ground Control, Homeworld, Dawn of War (and particularly Company of Heroes), all redefining what it is to be an RTS, when back in the days of Warcraft 2 and Command & Conquer, it was all pretty much the same. However, I don't think anyone can realistically play C&C3 and CoH and NOT see them as extremely different game experiences. Sure, they have some similarities, but at their cores they are different experiences, and the RTS crowd has since fractured beyond "Blizzard vs. Westwood".

Now, I personally think that the Ground Control/Company of Heroes model is the way things should be, they've come up with fun innovations to the genre that make playing more fun to me.

I still have a fair amount of nostalgia for C&C and *Craft, but Blizzard blew a lot of their capital with Warcraft 3. One of the main reasons I got the game was for the storyline in singleplayer, and just three missions in I hated it with a deep passion. Gameplay was similarly frustrating, as the game had essentially become Diablo tactics.

Starcraft was a fun game at the time, but I'll be honest, I fell more in love with Homeworld because of the singleplayer storyline. Starcraft just kind of fell to the wayside, and I really just couldn't get very into it. Now they have the chance to continue the story, to use current technology to paint a picture grander than they could back when the first game was released, and what do they do? The same thing as before. I could deal with RTS games have stupid scale back in the day, because you couldn't zoom in or out, they were sprites. Now it's nothing to make a squad of marines the appropriate scale to a Terran Battlecruiser, and even if it's not exact, you could make it closer. Make it large enough that people will believe it's a massive spaceship like the cutscenes made it out to be, rather than a dinky little piece of shit like they showed in the game.

You don't even have to vastly change the balance or gameplay value of it. Yeah, I know it's a "style", but with most of the other games Blizzard has produced since the age of 3d graphics, the gameplay graphics have tried to maintain at least some sort of parity with what the cutscenes showed. A kilometer long battleship shouldn't be the size of an overgrown SUV.

That's my opinion, of course. I'm sure there are people who are just plain pleased as punch that virtually nothing has changed and that they have their 3d Starcraft. Frankly, I've seen it before, in a game that was clearly a Starcraft clone. Making it 3d is nothing special to be blunt. If you don't actually do anything WITH the technology that couldn't be done with sprites, it just seems wasted to me.

[InnocentBystander]

Warcraft 3 and Starcraft were fun games, but for me they really shine because of the map editor. There are thousands upon thousands of fantastic custom maps out there to play and thats really what I enjoyed the most about Warcrat 3 and Starcraft. I had loads of fun with the regular game, don't get me wrong, but it was the custom maps that made the games what they are for me.

If you were playing Warcraft 3 and Starcraft for no reason other than the vanilla melee game, you really missed out on some fun stuff (at least, thats my opinion.)

[starfury]

The 3D-engine exhibits roughly the same FX capabilities as Dawn of War, but DOW was far grittier and it didn't apply "plastic smooth" effects to it's units.

The colors burn my eyes, and the small troopers are not as well worked-out as in the already mentioned DoW or C&C III which beats this shit hands down.

Sorry, cartoon looks may be good for the Starcraft fanbase, but 10 years since I was expecting something better already.

That is actually a Fairly good Comparsion, Warcraft III/Starcraft II With Dawn Of War, Sicne the 3-D Engine seem so similar and the Memory Requirements to play the damm game is the Same. If you had Computer Powerful enough to play the Starcraft II/Warcraft III then you Play Dawn of War, was a much superior game.

I pretty much abandoned Starcraft after getting Age of Mytholgy, I was Pretty much Tired of the Clickfest, Way to much hands-on Mirco, that was Ok and Actually Fun for Diablo/Diablo II, but for a RTS, is just way much Excess mico.

This is what I hear: in order for Starcraft 2 to show up properly on Korean interlaced television (tv ladder), they need to make text and graphics a certain style. What is the point of putting in loads of graphics in that their main fanbase won't be able to see. Also, I hear that they will make Starcraft runnable on the latest integrated graphics cards. Not just runnable, but ideal. Koreans may be close to a first world nation, but look at their average income. They cannot afford the latest greatest computers

Seems the Case for me, The relatively weaker computers on their main Fanbase in Korea, also offers Blizzard a easy way out of Improving graphics greatly as you stated, most Computers in Korea simply can't play some of the newest games, which tend to usually add to having more processing power without greatly enhancing the games, for those with relatively shitty computers, they had to settle for games with these graphics.

[Covenant]

My biggest issue with the graphics, even the high rez ones, is the stuff mentioned. I was a huge proponent of the cartoony look for WoW and of the C&C3 distorted-cartoony look (factories as big as a mammoth tank, but no larger!) because I felt it worked and looked nice.

But nothing 'reads' well. It's hard to tell at a glance what's going on. It's not just 'chaotic' in the sense that DoW has dirt and grime and blood spraying everything as shells rain down and such. But it's physically difficult to distinguish between units and the background. The lack of adequate dynamic lighting really makes things suffer, and it seems like the spastic coloring scheme forces units and structures to blend into the background.

Also, since all the units are themselves rouded and dense, as if Blizzard were trying to cram as much into a sphereical bounding box as possible, they all look way too heavy. The Immortals are good, but the marines are pretty hard to read. Zerglings are even less discernable than they were in the previous game, and just look like a pile of brown with spines. The ships look bad, but that's because of how they act less than how they are modelled and textured.

I think this is just bad art direction. As a 3D animator myself, I consider these models very poorly designed by and large, since it's so hard to tell what they are. You can get a better sense when you see movement, but there's ways to make it very very easy to tell what's going on, and they deliberately chose not to. All they needed to do was stick a little closer to their amazing concepts.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

One thing I wonder about - in the original game when you had a mass of air units they could all "stack" on top of each other graphically without it looking too silly because they were already just 2D sprites. I wonder how they are going to handle that in 3D? In the videos a big swarm of Mutalisks just sort of mash into each other, their meshes actually intersect when they are close together. Because they are fairly small units moving rapidly it's not so noticeable - however it would look like ass if Battlecruisers and other large units did that.

[Nephtys]

I'll admit I'm torn on the issue. If someone were to come to me and tell me that Freespace 3 were to come out, and it was essentially Freespace 2 with better graphics and a few refinements, I'd be on that shit in a heartbeat.

That's because unlike Freespace 2 or Fallout, nobody's gotten a game of that genre to be better mechanically yet. However, DOZENS of games have improved and far exceeded the same formula Blizz has been using since 1993.

Forced max unit-box limitations? building a stupid population increaser every 5 units? Gigantic buildings who are just blocks of HP? At least now they're at least considering making it so bullets and shells have a chance to miss a fast moving target, after what? C&C1 did that?

---

Again on the graphics, we're not talking about technological sophistication. We're talking about art and aesthetic style. Homeworld 2 is a beautiful, wonderful looking experience, and it's five years old now. It certainly looks better than a lot of newer games, even mainstream ones coming out this year.

Dawn of War was special because it had a gritty, visceral look as you zooned in on your dozens of little troops doing their thing, or punching each other or whatever. Or utterly insulting a guy they beat in melee by ripping their faces off.

Supreme Commander looks nice on good systems, because of sheer scale. The units are largely not a big deal, yeah. But when the hell are you zoomed in? You're usually watching 400 tankstry to maneuver and fire at each other, while battleships are blowing up fifteen of them a shot.

C&C3 is really the best comparison I could make. It a traditional RTS, it came out very recently, and it's from a first rate developer. It's got pretty low requirements to run, provided your computer has anything better than integrated video. And guess what? It looks and plays great. It's actually improved some on their old formulae.

At this stage, I can't say Blizz seems to have. There's still the same buildings, a vespene refinery, a barracks, etc. The units move and act the same, and just look slightly more plastic. Yawn, color me unimpressed. It gets annoying listening to starcraft fans gush on this without any of them actually being open minded enough to try out the dozens of other RTS games that've long since surpassed their standby.

[Covenant]

And like Starcraft, C&C3 had a built-in fanbase. All they needed to do was flash some Kane and we were sold.

But not only that, they tapped into the very core of nerd-dom and got Battlestar Galactica, Starship Trooper, LANDO CALRISSIAN... and others to show up in the game. How can you not expect to do well with that?

The gameplay wasn't inspired and the balance is flawed, but it moved forwards and did new stuff. I think that's all I wanted from some starcraft, but we're not even getting that.

[Stark]

It's still a source of frustration for me that Blizzard's stupid cinematics are held in such high regard. They were cool in Starcraft and even Diablo II, but everything since has just been senseless wank ("o hay look we can do rly kewl movies lol am i rite"). I'm still at a loss trying to figure out why World of Warcraft's insipid, pointless intro movie beat out Dawn of War's for (US) PCGamer's "Best Intro Movie" a few years ago, the latter having, y'know, some kind of structure, plot and point to it all, not to mention being just plain more interesting, if slightly less technically masterful.

I know this was ages ago, but this is crazy. The DoW intro was silly, but Blizzard cinematics don't even mean anything. They're like the GW intro - here are some guys doing some cool stuff! WOW!

[starfury]

C&C3 is really the best comparison I could make. It a traditional RTS, it came out very recently, and it's from a first rate developer. It's got pretty low requirements to run, provided your computer has anything better than integrated video. And guess what? It looks and plays great. It's actually improved some on their old formulae.

That was thing, I don't think the main Audience in Korea tend to have the Computers that allow the more sophistcated Titles above, therefore allowing Blizzard a easy out.

This is what I hear: in order for Starcraft 2 to show up properly on Korean interlaced television (tv ladder), they need to make text and graphics a certain style. What is the point of putting in loads of graphics in that their main fanbase won't be able to see. Also, I hear that they will make Starcraft runnable on the latest integrated graphics cards. Not just runnable, but ideal. Koreans may be close to a first world nation, but look at their average income. They cannot afford the latest greatest computers.

That was the Point I was also emphasis, lack of willingness to shell out top dollars for high-end machines meant their Korean buyers and more casual american audience put up with the dumb Cartoonly graphics.

Again on the graphics, we're not talking about technological sophistication. We're talking about art and aesthetic style. Homeworld 2 is a beautiful, wonderful looking experience, and it's five years old now. It certainly looks better than a lot of newer games, even mainstream ones coming out this year.

This However I agree on 100 %.