BlizzCon Impressions

Pardon me while I spew massive quantities of BlizzCon all over you guys.

In line before my first play: When building structures, it gives you a series of dots that will be its sight range, and if applicable, attack range if you were to place it at any given location.

The guy talking to us in line confirmed that SC2 will be playable on widescreen.

Only Terran and Protoss are playable. No Zerg to be seen.

We’re still at 8 max players per game. They say they’re still working on that: they need to balance fun and performance.

The Soul Hunter was to be a mid-tier unit, to consume friendly Zealot souls after they die. Testers shot that down because they did not like the idea of making units just to have them sacrificed for other units to work properly. They then switched them to consuming enemy souls, at which point they became overpowered and got the axe.

I see something invisible on someone’s screen, it turns out to be the new Dark Templar. When you see cloaked units, they are partially invisible, partially lit up with bright lights. Makes them very ghostly.

I see some of the new Siege Tank. Yes, it is more scary than the first version. Has 6 treads. From the art panel I learned that the new Siege Tank was created from a rejected Thor concept.

At this point in the line, they started showing an un-voiceovered version of the Terran gameplay demo they would show later in the day on the big screen near the front of the line. I got my first glimpse of the Battlecruiser’s Plasma Torpedos, laying waste to a munch of Marines. I won’t elaborate, as this video must be everywhere by now.

My first game was a 2v2, TP vs. TP. I was the P on my team. I kept pressing the wrong keys because I was not used to the big block of function keys on the left of the keyboard. Everything played like the original SC, except I didn’t really know the tech tree. I spent most of the game defending- I couldn’t pump out units fast enough to spend the money I was getting. Later on, other players commented on the insane rate of income compared the rate you can spend it at. In this game I never teched past Stalkers. Both Terrans had a lot of infantry. In later games I see a different trend, where Terrans go for tanks with Vikings more than anything else. At any rate, once my ally started making tanks, it was as if he was fighting both of them for the whole team. I did get to use my Phase Cannons to defend my nexus, just like the Phase Cannon video clip showed- note Phase Cannons can travel over unpowered ground, and can stack on top of one another while in phase form. The other team eventually broke me, and took out my Nexus, leaving me without enough minerals to rebuild. As I predicted, I lost my first game. I realized later that a lot of my problems had been interface-oriented. The mouse I was using was slow, and the screen was… weird. Perhaps too large for me to see everything properly without turning my head. Most other computers in the LAN area didn’t have this problem, but when I got to a bad one again, I did win that game, so it was obviously mainly a skill thing.
on this game I also built my first Warp Gate (once researched, you can transform between Warp Gate and Gateway for free, the only cost is the 3 second transition). I didn’t understand how it worked at the time, but I learned later that it works like this: you place a unit, in warps-in where you want it, then the Gate has a cool down equal to the unit’s build time. If you want to make a bunch of units at once, you need a bunch of Warp Gates. They can be grouped and set to a hotkey, so it is not to much of a problem. You do need to provide the necessary minerals, gas, and Psi in advance if you want to place them, though.

Warp Gate/Warp In strategy. Used in combination with a Phase Prism, the Warp Gate and Warp In are just as deadly as everyone imagined. Most players were putting little anti-air, or even local defense on their bases. They though blocking off their entrances would be enough. But no, just 1 (preferably loaded, 3 Zealots and a Probe?) Phase Prism and, maybe 8 Warp Gates, and you can start pumping units into the weak underbelly of the enemy. Combine this with a simultaneous attack with your main force at their front door, and they’ll have to choose between stopping your tiny(but growing) warp-in army, or your very real main army pounding on their defenses. There is a good reason to switch back to the Gateway, at least, for players without insane micro: once a Warp Gate has charged back up, it just waits for you. There is no build queue, so you can’t just order your Gates to spew out an army while you’re out doing more important things. So if you don’t need the army right here, right now you’re better off with the plain Gateway mode. It’s easy to switch back, so it’s not a real problem. The only hitch I encountered when murdering vie warp-in, is that, if you’re warping in to islanded areas, your units get stuck (duh) because the Phase Prism can only hold a few units. You’d need to dedicated Phase Prism fleet to haul your newly-created units around… or Recall. There were no units with Recall even though (or perhaps because) it would have been incredibly useful.

I played my second game after the opening ceremony. About 12:00pm I chose Terran this time.
The new add-on system is cool, at the time it seemed ideal to have a 2:1 ratio of Barrackses with Reactors and ones with Tech centers. That way you can make 4 Marines for every Medic. With Factories, you might want to go for a higher ratio of Tech Centers, because Siege Tanks take a while to build, and are much scarier than Vikings. This game was probably one of the coolest games I played. Our enemies went for the super-units: one made a Thor, the other, a Mothership. I am proud to say that I was responsible for dispatching both of them. The Thor, killed by Marines that got behind it, the Mothership, because it apparently can’t attack air. This map was the SC2 version of Lost Temple. Bases are set up like LT, and there is a observatory in the middle, the secondary expansions were 6 gold mineral clusters and 1 geyser. This game ended at the timer. At the time, they were closing in on us (well, my ally had already had to put up with a Mothership and three Colossi (I killed those too), so he was kind of licking his wounds) with a small army and some Battlecruisers. I did not have a whole lot to fight back with, but I had a lot of money, (3 expansions) and a good production capacity. I think, given another 10 minutes I would have turned it around. That game was a draw at the clock.
I stopped fearing the super units after this game. My main problems involved not recognizing the new unit art (I found SCVs hard to pick out from among buildings, for instance) and the tech tree, but that’s stuff that I was able to figure out quickly enough.

From here I went to lunch, skipped the first panel while making my update post and eating, then went to the Sound/Music panel. They talked about how they created the ambient music in WoW, one of the speakers was the guy that did the Zerg music for StarCraft. I learned that the background sounds are actually tuned to the music so that they sound good together. They told us that a StarCraft soundtrack was now available. It’s about time!
The next half hour of the panel was a live performance of some of the new WoW tavern music and one of the unlockable sons in WoW, played and sung live. I recorded it with my camera, just the audio of that last song, which, because it is not made for that kind of thing, is not too awesome. It was great live though.

In the Cinematics panel, they talked about how they make Blizzard cinematics. They talked about how the cinematics group is now working on the in-game cinematics in addition to the big ones. They stated that there would not be as many cinematics between levels as the original game. It will be more along the lines of WC3, which had fewer. They showed videos of different stages of the Teaser Cinematic with Tychus. They showed us a video of the storyboards for an incomplete, actually, unstarted cinematic for SC2. There was a room with floating rocks… it was all very dramatic. They also included the Raynor/Zerataul in-game cinematic that was shown in the gameplay/story mode demo. They also showed several unit animations, including one Zergling animation where it actually lifts itself off the ground with its wings. Watch out for Zerglings in your hair!

In the WoW UI talk, the first two rows on the left side of the room were filled with the WoW UI team, (there to cheer the presenters on) and me. They sat beside me, talking about stuff they hadn’t yet put into the game, it was all very cool. They refer to one another by their WoW screen names. The talk itself was a bit over my head, because it was a technical tutorial on how to create WoW UI add-ons, and I don‘t know any of the scripting or markup languages they used.

I’ll now just break down into observations from gameplay.

Build times seem slower, so if you don’t have the right units at the right time, it’s not good. I think this is to counteract the fact that you start with 6 workers. The build times make it so that really powerful rushes are fairly impractical.

Multiple Motherships possible.

There are destroyable rock/debris barriers on some maps that are used to block off expansions or alternate entrances.

CC has no add-ons, only upgrades: the Planetary Fortress or the Surveillance Center.

Protoss seems a lot more geared towards mobility now. The Zealot’s Charge and the Stalker’s Blink are scary abilities. I once had an enemy Blink past some rock barriers that blocked off the back entrances to our bases and go at my workers. Most of the maps feature sets of platforms that bridge bases to be used by Reapers, Stalkers, or Colossi. The Stasis Orb is great for grabbing fleeing enemies for your Stalkers or Immortals to pound away at. I imagine it would require insane micro to get much focused use out of it beyond that, though.

The Medic’s Heal animation is lame. It just creates little crosses over the target unit, you don’t even see them unless you’re looking for them.

I kept losing with Terran. I wasn’t used to the sheer number of Factories you seem to have to build in order to keep up with your income.

I like the personality of the Viking, “Churn and burn!” The unit itself seems to only be useful in large numbers, which is fine, since you can build the Reactor.

Reapers are dirt cheap, 50 minerals and… some not very large amount of gas. Built at the Merc Haven, they are constantly in production (up to 4, at least), but you don’t have to buy them right away. As units, they have next to no health, do very small damage. But they work great in packs. I’ve seen their bombs do nasty things to enemy bases. The unit likes to refer to itself as “The Reaperman.”

When you set a group of units or buildings to a hotkey, an image of the unit appears on a tab above the command panel along with the key it‘s assigned to. This, combined with the fact that you can order groups of buildings to produce, and the divide the orders between them, means that hot keyed production is much smoother now. For example, I was setting all of my Nexuses to one key, my Gateways/Warp Gates to another, My Stargates to a third, and then the rest would go to either subsets of those, or groups of units.

Being able to select more than 12 units helps immensely. I mean, it’s like night and day.

When you have a group of Marines and Medics selected, or a group of Stalkers and Zealots, abilities like Stimpack and Blink remain on the command panel even though not all of the units can use the ability. I found myself selecting my Marine subset just to stim even though I didn’t have to anymore. This does not seem to carry on when larger, more diverse groups of units are selected.

The banshee is a sweet unit. Great, even in small numbers, for base raiding. In larger numbers, with cloak, they absolutely dominate. I don’t know how Terrans are supposed to counter Protoss heavy air, like Carriers and Warp Rays, though. I’ve seen some unholy devastation caused by Warp Rays in large numbers.

I am not sure how fair it is that the CC can transport SCVs. It lets them expand to island expansions even faster than they could in the original.

In one game, we agreed not to rush so that we could go through all the tech. I got to make Ghosts, nukes, and drop pods…. Ghosts are pretty decent compared to the original. Nukes take much longer to drop than in the first gameplay demo. Drop Pods are built, like nukes, at the Shadow Ops. Each Shadow Ops can hold 1 nuke and 1 Drop Pod. Drop pods drop 6 Marines, so they take up 6 supply. Interestingly, they don’t cost 300 minerals, so you actually get a discount for buying them in bulk. That said, while it takes longer to hit, and takes up more supply, the nuke is a lot more dangerous, at least where I’ve seen it, than the drop pods.

On the second night, I played for a few hours with these three guys that were together. During this time, I got Cannon rushed, saw masses of Warp Rays, Terran metal, killed another Thor, and used Warp-In to absolutely devastate a player.

To use observatories, you have to have one unit beside them at all times. Some maps have just 1 (Lost Temple) while others have up to 6.

Terrans did not lose Scanner Sweep with the inclusion of the Radar Tower. It comes with the Surveillance Station upgrade to the Command Center.

Strong rush counter? Engineering Bay>Planetary Fortress+nearby Sensor Tower. Stops Dark Templar in their tracks, plows though all but the most dedicated attacks. Interesting note: the Engineering Bay cannot lift off.

I never used the Starbase: the mobile version of the Starport, but I saw it used by an enemy in my first game. I am not sure how useful it is: it’s main advantage seemed to be the fact that it didn’t take up space on the ground, while I suppose it makes it easier to make a forward base, air units tend to reach the front lines quickly anyway.

The Mothership has been toned way down, so that you can make more than one. Can’t attack air, Time Bomb seems smaller, Planet Cracker is smaller, no Black Hole. Has the ability to cloak other units when sitting still and the ability is activated.

When casting large AoE attacks, like Nuke or Psi Storm, it shows the “blast radius” of the attack. All units that will be affected are highlighted in red.

Being able to rally workers to minerals frees up a lot of time to do other things. It’s really awesome.

You still can’t order Bunkers to focus fire. What’s up with that?

Pathfinding is, if anything, worse than the original. My units kept getting hopelessly stuck in places that shouldn’t give them any kind of problem. I imagine they are still working on that.

The Immortal’s Hardened Shield is an upgrade. It makes it so that the unit takes a maximum of 10 damage when it is hit. Just as the first demo showed, this unit is awesome for absorbing blows from the now incredibly powerful(100 damage against armored!) Siege Tank.

Note that they switched the colors on the Carrier and the Warp Ray.

The new “Science Vessel” is the Nomad. It is really, really ugly. I only ever built one, and I never used it, so I can’t comment on its combat performance.

The Predator is the new Terran AA unit. I used three of these to take down a Mothership (Note, the Mothership couldn’t fight back, and the player was too dumb to bring in help). I never used it’s missile-blocking ability, and I am not sure how useful it would be.

Upgrades now have a build queue, so you can just tell a building what to research for the next 10 minutes and not bother with it again unless you need to change something.

In one of the panels, they mentioned they they’re trying really hard to squeeze the Firebat back into the game. I would personally like that, because upgraded Zealots are scary.

I don’t miss the Reaver at all anymore. The Colossus replaces it and then some. It’s just so magical.

This is what BlizzCon is like. And I mean, if you were to loop this video and watch it for 12 hours, that would be my day, except I did less spinning.

 

wow. welcome back!
does the immortals hardened shield activate to all attacks when upgraded?
i had another question... but i forgot it in reading everything lol.

 

nice post man. I liked the detailed analysis of all the units and your opinions. yay!

I'm glad they are considering bringing the firebat back at least ^_^. Thanks for clearing up warping-in cause I really didn't get it at first too lol.

 

Yeah....You have a bit of catching up to do though. Awesome post. I was grinning like a total idiot through the whole thing.

 

Nice! Great explanations! I have been waiting for you to reply for a while now! owerup:

 

Looks like a good place to go steal some wallets. HAhaha.
Anyway, can the prism carry a colossus?

 

*Cough*whatwasthebetakeyfore*Cough Cough*

 

its still inactive and unknown i think he or tym said.

 

Drat. That's really bugging me lol

 

Welcome back and thanks for writing your input on SC2. I really learned a lot more about the game after reading your article especially on the Warp-Ins. Your battle report was also a great read too.

Big props owerup:

 

oh, i remembered my other question:
what abilities does the stasis orb have other than slowing, and is slowing a splash/aoe effect?

 

None, all it does is target one unit, and zap it. While the unit is being zapped, it moves as if Ensnared. Pretend it's a cowboy with a lasso.

 

have you cheked out the art table? what can you comment on it?
this website has their representers take some pictures from Blizzcon and they have some pics from art table. (some interasting once) http://www.sc2armory.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=350&start=0

 

Wow, that's incredibly disappointing. Is that the Stasis Orbs ONLY purpose? I hope that it returns to being the Star Relic like it was before, or even that the MS turns into a Star Relic like unit and removes the Orb altogether. I don't really see the point of slowing ONE unit down, since Starcraft is all about massive armies clashing on the battlefield, and this seems completely contradictory to that.

 

awesome dude, very nice. this sounds very neat, but i do agree the statis orb seems bad.

 

im dissapointed in the stasis orb. it should at least have one spell. or splash. or both.

does it have to be firing at the unit for it to be slowed, or will the slow persist after the attack is over?

 

sounds like the stasis orb was a last minute thing if you ask me just slaped down for blizzcon to fill an empty unit space should be scraped

 

i found a random pic of me playing SC2 on flickr ^_^ here http://www.flickr.com/photos/sc2armory/1004708115/in/set-72157601213606904/
The status orb isn't bad if you throw one in with the other units its handy, espesially on big/ expensive units that could normally pound you (colossus).

 

lol, what are the odds? anyways, neat. are there any pics of this statis orb and if not what does it look like?

 

little ball with some sticks poking out that shoots lightning bolts and floats around... not too creative. I'll look for pictures.