Blizzard announced StarCraft II

Blizzard said last winter that for those waiting for new games in the StarCraft and Diablo universes, they wouldn't have to wait a decade. The original StarCraft was released 1998. It didn't contain anything that hadn't been seen in other games before. It just happened to combine the right things in the right way, and pull off being a really well balanced game with really well thought out controls, and still with large differences in how the different sides were played. And it used Blizzard's Battle.Net, which is the best online gameplay system for RTS games that I have seen.

StarCraft easily had the best gameplay feeling of all RTS games at the time it was released, and I would argue it can stand up to most RTS games of today on all areas except for graphics. I've been playing it for nine years, even if I turned to WarCraft III lately - more for the excellent custom maps than for standard gameplay. StarCraft still beats WarCraft III for standard gameplay.

Now some time back Blizzard said they had something to announce in Korea the 19th. Rumours were that it was either a new MMORPG - maybe World of StarCraft - or the next expansion to World of WarCraft. I was in fact about to give up hope of seeing an RTS ever being produced by Blizzard again. I know I shouldn't trust rumours...


Blizzard announced an RTS game (http://www.blizzard.com/press/070519.shtml):
StarCraft II (http://www.starcraft2.com/)

And I just know it'll be just as excellent as the first. Because if a game only ranks as "It's okay. Nice. Good even." then Blizzard would rather drop it than release it. Most "Good" games have a shelf life of a couple of months at best. Blizzard never produced a game that was merely "Good", and I don't think they are going to start with that now.

Yah I saw the news as well. Starcraft is a great game. If the first was so good, I would expect the sequel to be just as good, if not better. Oh the suspense!

I've checked out the official site. Ooh, nice screenshots. Looks like they've finally bumped up the resolution. I notice that the Protoss gets several new units and improved ones, but Terran and Zerg only seem to have one each. Maybe it's just early information.

I'll have dig mine out (*looks around* it's gotta be here somewhere) and play it again, freshen up on the story and the tactics.

Yeah, I heard about it as well. I'm looking forward to it. Starcraft is still worth playing today, it's a classic RTS game.

The original StarCraft was released 1998. It didn't contain anything that hadn't been seen in other games before.I may be wrong about this but wasn't it the first RTS to support 3 distinct sides?

Why do the newest games seem to be 3D but render it so well that it looks 2D? Prey was also pretty 2d looking in some places.

I may be wrong about this but wasn't it the first RTS to support 3 distinct sides?Depends on what you mean by distinct, I guess. That line isn't that obvious.Why do the newest games seem to be 3D but render it so well that it looks 2D? Prey was also pretty 2d looking in some places.I don't think it looks particularly 2D. It's just more looking like actual 3d and less looking like wire frame with painted facets.

Depends on what you mean by distinct, I guess. That line isn't that obvious.I don't think it looks particularly 2D. It's just more looking like actual 3d and less looking like wire frame with painted facets.It looks kind of like RedAlert 2. That was 2D but all the sprites were rendered really well from 3D, so it kind of looked 3D with a static camera or something.

It seems to be pretty hard to find a screenshot of prey to convey what I was saying about games looking 2D. I had Prey on the highest settings for 1280*1024 (the highest res my 17" tft does) and it looked a lot better (but strangely flat) than many of the screenshots I have found on google or IGN etc. With lower graphics settings some of the flaws make it look obviously 3D becaue you can see the edge of polys etc. The best screenshot I can find to illustrate what it looked like to me was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:928189_20060508_screen026.jpg It looks like concept art or something but it is ingame 3D at the quality I was playing (his hand gives away the 3d, but his gun and face etc look like 2D renderings)

In general though newer games seem to look more 2D. Project offset seems to look quite 3D though I think.

I wish games could do 3D like this: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_humanhead_home.html