I played the beta several times, and there's a lot of new features and changes.

• First off, you begin with 12 workers with the 15 max supply/14 max control/14 max psi at the start of the game.
  
• Missing Command Cards Actions such as "Move", "Stop", "Hold Position", "Patrol", and "Attack". You can't see them on the bottom right corner of the screen, but they can still be activated via hotkeys.
  
• Reapers have KD8 Charge, hotkey D. Reapers also have Combat Drugs, a passive ability that heals reapers while out of combat.
  
• Battlecruisers can literally "Tactical Jump" or teleport (Hotkey T) anywhere in the map by using 125 energy. This also includes unexplored areas. This ability does not have to be researched, since it's there by default. They will be invincible during the 4 second warp.
  
• Medivacs can carry a Siege Tank in siege mode, while occupying the entire space. You will see the Siege Tank under the Medivac while in the air. This is basically similar to Shuttles and Reavers.
  
• You can research Hyperflight Rotors for Banshees for 200 minerals, 200 gas and waiting 93 seconds. This will increase the speed of banshees.
  
• Terran Liberator is a new air unit that costs 150 minerals, 150 gas, 3 supplies. It takes 43 seconds to build in the Starport. It's an anti air unit that can go to defender mode. While in defender mode, it will be stationary and can only attack ground units within a radius. Think of a flying Siege Tank
  
• Terran Cyclone is a new ground unit that costs 150 minerals, 150 gas, 3 supplies. It takes 32 seconds to build in the Factory. It can attack both air and ground. It has a passive ability to lock on air units. It has an Autocasting Lock On ability (Hotkey C) with a cooldown of 4 seconds. It will deal 600 damage over 14 seconds. The Cyclone will be able to attack while moving.
  
• Protoss Adept (Hotkey H) is a new ground unit warped from the Gateway/Warp Gatecosts 100 minerals, 25 gas, and 2 psi. You can research Shield Upgrade for 100 minerals, 100 gas, for 100 seconds which increases the Adept's shields by 50. They can cast Psionic Transfer (Hotkey F), which projects an invulnerable shade for 7 seconds then cooldown for 11 seconds. After the 7 seconds, the Adept will teleport in place of the Shade's.
  
• The Immortal no longer use Hardened Shields. Instead, you will cast Barrier (Hotkey B) to absorb 200 damage for 2 seconds. The cooldown is 43 seconds.
  
• The Warp Prism can pickup units at a slightly further distance.
  
• Protoss Disruptor (Hotkey D) is a new ground unit warped from the Robotics Facility. It costs 100 minerals, 200 gas, and 3 psi, takes 43 seconds to warp in. They cannot attack, but they can cast Purification Nova (Hotkey V). They will gain 89% increased movement speed and then after 2 seconds emits a powerful nova dealing 145 splash damage and additional 55 shield damage to nearby units. Purification Nova only affects ground units.
  
• The Colossus deals less damage
  
• Carriers can now "Release Interceptors" (Hotkey R). This allows Carriers to launch all interceptors and leave them at a designated area for 43 seconds. After 43 seconds, they expire. This allows Carriers to flee while the Interceptors remain to fight, then you can build more interceptors since they will not go back to the specified Carrier.
  
• Overlords are now required to "Evolve Ventral Sacs" (Hotkey T) for 25 minerals, 25 gas and 12 seconds. This upgrade only applies to individual Overlords, which means only select Overlords you decided to upgrade will have it. This upgrade allows each individual Overlord to carry units.
  
• Roaches can now morph into Ravagers for 25 minerals, 75 gas, 1 control for 9 seconds.
  
• Zerg Ravagers are new ground units that can only attack ground, cannot move while burrowed or have rapid regeneration like Roaches. They can cast Corrosive Biles (Hotkey C), which launches a missile at a target location, dealing 60 damage to all units in the area upon impact. Corrosive Biles can also destroy Protoss Force Fields.
  
• Hydralisk Den can morph into Lurker Den (New Zerg building) for 150 minerals, 150 gas for 71 seconds. Obviously, this allows you to morph Hydralisks into Lurkers. You can upgrade Hydralisks with Muscular Augments for 150 minerals, 150 gas for 71 seconds. This increases Hydralisk movement speed while off creep by 25% and their attack range by +1.
  
• Zerg Lurker is a returning ground unit, which you need 50 minerals, 100 gas, 1 additional control to morph a Hydralisk into a Lurker (Hotkey E)

And of course, the self explanatory new Archon Mode.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Aug 17 2015, 4:50 am by KrayZee.

I played one single game about a month ago. Zerg vs Toss. I won using Nydus worm distraction to pull his force away from his expansion, then attacked exp, then placed another nydus worm while his main force engaged my main force, then the nydus deployed uncontested and was able to deploy additional reinforcements to hit him from two directions at once.

I too noticed the sped up early game. I very much approve. Less focusing on build order and timings and more on getting straight to the ACTION.

Gotta say I didn't notice any new units on either side though. My army consisted of roaches, zerglings and hydralisks.

Yes, removing strategic elements to an RTS is definitely something to approve of.

@KrayZee I imagine this was designed to create discussion about the beta, and since you didn't actually write anything but a list of changes that you noticed, I'll have to work off of that assumption with my reply. I don't think SC2 has ever been good, single- or multi-player. I think that Legacy has way too many steps in the wrong direction this late into the game's life cycle and it won't do anything but confuse the already-ridiculous metagame and kill professional play. Even if it doesn't, the fact that they've had to go to such extremes with their rock-paper-scissors gameplay design that it's wound up this convoluted is retarded.

They've had to give literally game-breaking abilities (Siege Moded tanks being droppable, Battlecruisers being teleportable to anywhere on the map) in order to keep their idea of 'correct' builds/army compositions relevant while further driving out any potential for interesting developments with their changes by artificially accelerating the early-game with double the workers and bonus starting supply. Most of the new units are downright useless at the moment besides the blatantly-broken shit and the only way they're going to be used in the future is if Blizzard makes them broken, too, because there's presently no incentive to buy them when so many other pre-Legacy units have been made stronger (or were already cancer to begin with).

Remember the removal of Warhound from melee back in HotS, and how that perfectly showcased Blizzard's absolutely terrible and reprehensible design philosophy? They've hardlined themselves into designing so many new units every expansion pack, and an RTS' metagame's worst nightmare is feature creep - the act of stuffing your game with so many under-developed, bullshit concepts while also tacking shit on to older, already-present concepts that there are only a few ways that people have to keep things viable at high level play. Legacy will likely make it worse than it's ever been previously.

Blizzard's attitude throughout the years seems to be that they want SC2 to be an e-sport, but the way they go about designing their game's melee makes it obvious that they have no idea how to do that and that they've just been throwing money and their logo at the game from the start. It's likely that SC2 by any other name and developer would have shit the bed on launch like it should have, and been forced to either be abandoned or be genuinely fixed in some ways in order to be a success in the market. The way to make your game an e-sport is to design an intelligent metagame where there is a dynamic balance of power between the various viable build orders and army compositions. When you look at the game and how it's basically been WarCraft III'd in terms of what's viable and what isn't, it's way worse than the Scout in Brood War. It's more like every other unit is the Scout.

And of course the story is puke. Somehow their three-mission prologue was worse than the entirety of HotS by a considerable degree.

It seems like you're being sarcastic, but as I can't judge sarcasm without audio queues well I'm going to agree with you here.

Real time strategy is about real time, not about pre-planned strategy. Build orders and such will still be there, but there will be less time, and a greater importance on scouting and reacting to your opponent quicker, hence real time strategy. With more workers, you get a much faster start, and it's much harder to cheese in things like 6 pool and cannon rushes.

In terms of the feature creep you mention, I think they need to make sure they continuously add new features to the game in order to promote people to purchase the game. The beauty of Starcraft is how well they've balanced the ridiculously complex game. It's not been perfect from the start, and the patches they produce usually make the game better by nerfing something that has been abused.

I'm more interested to know what people think Starcraft's path will be now? Will they continue adding expansions to the game, or will they leave it to die? Will they continue adding to the RTS genre (I hear rumours of Warcraft 4) or will they abandon it entirely? Will they transition to the free-to-pay modules that seem to be raking in the cash for them (Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm), or will they continue with their current business model?

Thoughts?

I agree the story is not as great. It's okay. Blizzard storytelling post-WoW has always been 'okay'. I think the problem is their transition from Game of Thrones storytelling where it was characters versus characters, betrayals, etc. to this Lord of the Rings style where it's a simplistic battle of good versus evil. I think that does work more for children than adults. I do prefer the Game of Thrones style though. I mean, isn't the average age of a gamer like 30 something? You'd think they would make their games targeting the adult demographic, not the children.

I do wonder if the poverty of the writing is because of the stranglehold the likes of Chris Metzen and the other core writing staff have on the universes, or if it's something less conspiratorial...

I read an article where they talked about how they were considering going back to Warcraft, and then possibly coming back to make Starcraft 3, but they said that it wouldn't be in the Koprulu Sector or related to the current storyline at all.

Brood War has never had a new unit added to it, and look how long it's lasted. Longevity is a thing they need to think about, but you do it through gameplay, not by just adding new things that break the game. It's like League of Legends where a new, imbalanced champion is released every month (sometimes less). And then after each of those champions are released, several patches are needed to actually balance the champion and make the game playable again. It doesn't make the game better; it just makes it more of a clusterfuck. If Blizzard plans on continuously adding features to the game, it's going to take forever to actually balance anything, and by that point, people will have lost interest in the game.

Post has been edited 5 time(s), last time on Aug 17 2015, 5:35 pm by Dem0n.

Not exactly true.

The article with the following quotes:

-> nobody survives or what?

-> very unlikely that they will do SC3 next given they just worked on SC2 for a decade.

-> likely to create WarCraft IV, but they will consider every idea. But this means that a Diablo RTS would be possible, too.

I assume it is pretty much set in stone that Blizz will do an RTS after SC2 although Blizzard stated a few weeks/days ago that the SC2 team keeps working on SC2 for a while after LotV launch. But I guess their engine team and a core group of devs try to come up with the basics of a new, different RTS.

I think it is very likely, that their next RTS keeps using the galaxy platform, too (= the engine that SC2 and Heroes of the Storm uses -> mapping would be fairly similar). Due to Heroes of the Storm, they need to keep supporting the engine anyway.

If they do not want to invent a lot of new aspects, WC4 would be the easiest game to make. If they want to surprise everyone, they won't do WC4. But WC4 would be surely financially the most beneficial choice (wc3 is old and playerbase might want an upgrade, nostalgia sales, WC universe has tons of fans, fantasy has already been established, only story and gameplay required to be invented, general gameplay is already defined by wc3).

Yep.


Nope. RTS has the S at the end for a reason. If pre-planned strategies weren't a part of StarCraft then build orders and reactionary unit comps wouldn't exist. You go on to describe an incredibly simplistic case of scouting being something you and your opponent both respond to, but professional players have contingencies that they pre-plan based on when their opponent scouts them, what their opponent builds, etc. and have pretty close to perfect timing executions on mechanics like larvae injects, chrono boosts, and MULEs on top of knowing when to build a certain thing in their build order down to the game second (roughly 1/2 of a real second). Pre-planning plays a huge part of the early game and by removing or reducing that, Blizzard has made it more dependent on which race has the easier path to a more powerful army. When people find out what that is, it'll be abused, and Blizzard will spend several patches trying to sort shit out - something they could have avoided by fixing core melee problems during Wings of Liberty's beta, or by simply not exacerbating these pre-existing issues by retaining the worker count at 6 and not throwing a fucktonne of random units at each race.


The current meta is actually a lot more prone to cheese, mostly due to the high worker counts and the ease at which certain races can achieve armies that are imbalanced compared to what their opponents can field, but that's partially due to the fact that SC2 has never been balanced and partially due to the fact that people are still getting used to the changes. I'm sure new cheese will come up, it's all that most diamond players can pull off anyways.


No, they don't. They should need to make a good game for people to want to buy the game, but all they have to do is slap their logo on the box and call it a day, because they're Blizzard.


I don't know how long you've been playing melee, but they've taken years to fix individual units (infestor) and things have never looked worse for overall game balance than LotV's beta. This level of bad is not something you can write off to being a beta, either, because as HotS showed us, they clearly have no interest in sticking to their previous plans. The removal of the Warhound was handled exceptionally poorly and they literally consigned all the work their unpaid interns did to their made-in-a-weekend campaign because they were too busy reading reddit to design a game. Their patches almost always eventually fix outlying issues while core problems go unaddressed and the e-sports scene continues to be laughably disgusting.


Hopefully it gets sucked down Ropar's gravity well and stays there. I don't want them to return to the universe, not after seeing what they did in the three-mission prologue (let alone everything else).


Qualifying the story as 'okay' is akin to committing a holocaust to your brain cells. I'm actually not surprised since, if you played the campaign, you probably wouldn't have many left.


No, their writing has always sucked. Brood War was complete and utter garbage. I can name one moment in the entire campaign where I felt like the writers had even a tiny understanding of nuance and it concerns two of the worst characters in the entire game (Infested Kerrigan and Raynor). You actually name the culprit behind all this nonsense later on in your post.


Game of Thrones is pretty abysmal when it comes to storytelling, so I wouldn't offer that as a compelling example of how to do it right. They certainly went from focusing on events that could potentially make sense to honing in on a half-assed retcon-filled nonsensical love story, though, and that is downright reprehensible.


Metzen - n. A singularity of incompetence

There's really no way any project with Metzen involved in it can ever be good in any fashion. He somehow manages to be involved in some of the worst acquisitions the company has ever made, such as David Kim and Dustin Browder. But what did you honestly expect from Blizzard? To assume they'd be good when they haven't released a single good game is to set yourself up for disappointment.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 18 2015, 1:02 am by Roy. Reason: Language

1) You knew exactly what you were getting into when you purchased Starcraft 2. The exact same thing that happened with Starcraft and Brood War.
2) Why are you on a Starcraft site if you hate Starcraft?
3) Legacy of the Void is a different game from Heart of the Swarm and Wings of Liberty. Of course changes are going to fuck build orders. Of course strategies are going to be different. Why would anyone purchase a game if they already own a copy of the game?
4) Removing the first 2 minutes of every game speeds them up, removes unnecessary low APM prep times, and will be properly adapted to. Nothing significant happens in the first two minutes of most starcraft games. Most people scout at 10 because that's the time when they need to build supply anyway.
5) If you like the beginning of the game so much, then why not bring it back down to 4 workers at the start like Starcraft? Why boost it to 6?

How is what Blizzard has done to SC2 in any way similar to what they did to Brood War? SC:BW is still played competitively to this date. SC2 is already forgotten besides a couple of half-assed tournaments here and there.


SEN isn't a StarCraft site. Not anymore. And I don't hate the first game, I just find it reprehensibly bad. It's still the best game ever made, but being the best doesn't mean you're good - it just means you're the best.


I wasn't arguing that build orders should remain stagnant forever, I was arguing that Blizzard's method of introducing new things into the meta is piss-poor and needs to be reconsidered if they want their game to be good when it comes to its melee, since the campaign was a lost cause after Wings of Liberty and so was non-melee multiplayer due to Galaxy being the worst thing they've made since WoW. They are literally throwing shit into the game with no regard for the consequences, and as we've seen from the Warhound in HotS, they will pull it at a moment's notice as soon as a few redditors upvote their fedoras enough times. And the way you worded the only question you actually posed in this paragraph makes it impossible to understand what you meant. Could you rephrase?


The assumption you're making is that the first two minutes of every game should be removed and that the early game of SC2 melee should be a non-factor, as evidenced by the ignorance you display in your next statement:


Once again, I never claimed that strategies need to remain the same across decades (BW to SC2) or even expansion packs (WoL to HotS to LotV). Brood War was done correctly, though, be that by accident or by intelligent deliberation, and Blizzard hasn't made the faintest of efforts to rekindle that level of balance, skill ceiling, and dynamic play in SC2. Not one time have they even bothered to try, because then we'd have at least seen things start to improve. Much like WoW, the production values of their melee and their game as a whole have gone down since release, with each expansion pack heralding a marked drop in quality and an extreme lack of gameplay readability and clarity.

Brood War wasn't even close to perfect - in fact, it wasn't even close to good - but it still had serviceable balance mixed with an extremely-high skill ceiling and the exact opposite of a rock-paper-scissors approach to tooling units and abilities. It showcased an understanding of mechanics, down to the damage values on upgrades and the coding behind iscript animations, that was required in order for the game's melee play to work. SC2 has nothing Brood War has. It is, and has always been, StarCraft in name only. LotV does nothing to change that, and, in fact, does quite a lot to take the bar of mastery and stuff it up its own anus. The fact that you continue to defend the title is proof that Blizzard's logo held enough sway for you to make up your mind about the quality of the game's content before even playing it, which, I imagine, is why you've failed to actually argue a single point and instead strawman what I've been saying (or read into stuff I haven't been saying? good job). I hope you can figure out what it is you were actually trying to say so I can respond properly next time instead of having to wade through horse shit in order to find the meaning behind posts.

Brood War introduced 6.5 new units into Starcraft. Heart of the Swarm introduced 6.5 new units into Wings of Liberty. Legacy of the Void introduces 6 new units into Heart of the Swarm. When Wings of Liberty was released, Blizzard announced that they would feature not one, but two expansion packs with each campaign being larger than the combined missions of each individual race campaign.
Since nothing is good in your life, this is not a big deal, especially for a company that produces high quality products which are purchased by many who actually enjoy things rather than complaining about them.
Why would anyone purchase Legacy of the Void if they already own a copy of Heart of the Swarm [and Legacy of the Void makes no changes to Heart of the Swarm].

Yes, but it's not an assumption, it's an assertion. There will still be an early game, and it will be much less boring for players, and the midgame will approach much faster.

You know that's not possible since everything is horse shit to you, even the best game ever made.

Brood War was released less than a year after the original game, when the meta hadn't fully developed and several more patches were necessary to establish total game balance. If HotS and LotV both made their changes almost immediately after the release of WoL, we wouldn't have this problem and Blizzard would be able to balance the game a lot easier. However, that was not a viable business model for them, so they decided to release shit and make money off of it instead of tailoring the content of each expansion pack to better serve an already-established meta by doing something like pushing everything to a public test realm before releasing it so professional and high-ladder players could give their feedback for a few months before the game goes live and the players have to use it.


You made a pretty bold assertion that because I don't like a game, I can't find value in my life. I never said that nothing in my life was good, and that's actually a pretty funny misread by you since if nothing WAS good in my life, I'd be more quick to settle for lower-value things on average based on statistics, so if your assumption had been correct we likely wouldn't be having this conversation right now.

Blizzard has never produced a high-quality game and that's what we are arguing when you cut through the shit and the veiled insults. There's no argument for Blizzard ever producing something good beyond Brood War's melee or release WoW's gameplay. Everything they've done before and since has been utter garbage. That being said, I don't care if you enjoy the game - I enjoy playing League of Legends and Just Cause 2 with my friends, even though they're pretty bad games - but I do care if you come on here to justify your interests and opinions by saying that they're high-quality games. SC2 is not a high-quality product. It never has been and it never will be. I think you've conflated my attacks on the game with me attacking your personal character, but I would only do that if you genuinely thought the game was good. So long as you can admit that it isn't, we won't have a problem.


Is the content Blizzard has added into SC2 with LotV the only way they could have gone in order to add 'quality' content to the game? Could they have done something different? Is it appropriate to say that, if they were aiming to produce quality content, LotV is a failure by all accounts?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that you keep assuming that I want things to stay as stagnant as possible over the years. That's not true at all - I want game balance to be achieved and I want an interesting mix of a high mechanical/strategic skill ceiling and nuanced approaches to claiming victory over your opponents through army compositions, build orders, tech/upgrades, and micromechanical use of your army. SC2 toys with all of those but doesn't ever get past the 'sad, empty shell' level of depth, which goes back to it being a shadow of Brood War and/or StarCraft in name only and nothing more.


If that's a positive direction for SC2's meta, then I won't try to debate its inclusion, but I'm still struggling to understand why Blizzard finds it so difficult to make the early game interesting when Brood War's was just fine and it was slower than even Wings'.


You have once again either deliberately or accidentally mistaken my grievances with regards to your being unable to send a clear and concise message in a post with whether or not I can find enjoyment in a game (or life? good job). I really don't know how you can be so dense. Are you actually Dustin Browder? Your name is the same as his on the battle.net forums.

LOL. So the best game ever made is reprehensibly bad? You sure are full of yourself.

What little credibility you had just went out the window with this assertion.

If you're so displeased with everything ever made then feel free to demonstrate to the world your own masterful storytelling ability! /s

Anything can be criticised. There is no talent in that. And no pride to be derived from doing so.

I'm not proud to have been a part of an industry that is likely the worst in the entertainment business. I don't derive credibility from my assertions, I simply speak my mind. I have not seen anyone argue an actual point here. The fact of the matter is that I've made a more compelling story in 3 maps of Brood War than Blizzard has in 63 maps of SC2 or 56 in SC:BW.

People seem to operate with the assumption that video games are good, when they really haven't ever been. I find enjoyment in playing a lot of them, but I can still tell where the flaws are and what needed to be fixed in order for the game to be good. It's a fair assessment of both fun and quality, where something that's horrendously put together can still offer some kind of enjoyment (Just Cause 2) and takes into account personal bias/nostalgia by allowing you to enjoy something without claiming that it's good. I don't understand how you can have a grievance with that, but I'm open to you explaining to me why accepting the fact that games can be fun to play while still being bad is an incorrect assertion.

I additionally find it hilarious that, because I don't agree with an opinion you have, I have no credibility in your eyes. Are you sure you're not a Christian?

No, silly. Game of Thrones is widely critically acclaimed for its storyline. It's not my opinion you're disagreeing with, but the opinion of thousands of critics more qualified than you.

No work of art ever gets 100% critical claim. This is because there are always people out there like you who enjoy disagreeing for disagreement's sake.

That which is asserted without argument can be dismissed without argument.

No, it's because no work of art is 100% perfect.


...but if you read my posts, you'd know that I made an argument and was confused at the constant lack of argument that I got as a rebuttal.

You've successfully managed to derail something that could have been productive in a discussion about the merits of Blizzard's actions with SC2 as a whole and especially Legacy, and turn it into a personal attack on a poster. If you aren't actually going to argue your point and instead write off my arguments as those of an unqualified buffoon, then there's really no point in engaging in discussion with you. You've constantly misrepresented what I've said over the past few posts, either deliberately or accidentally. You as a psych student should know that it's a lot easier to attack someone that you made up than it is to attack an actual viewpoint, which is not even what you were supposed to be doing anyways - you were supposed to be arguing your point and debunking mine.

Not an argument.
Not an argument.
Not an argument.
Not an argument.
Not an argument.

99% critical acclaim does not mean 99% of people said it was perfect and 1% didn't. It means 99% gave it a positive review and 1% didn't.


Go look up the difference between assertion and argument, make some, then people may start taking you seriously.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 18 2015, 4:18 pm by Oh_Man.

I have to admit, quoting five lines (most of which are jokes and reddit fedora memes) really sums up all of my post. Thanks, dad!

FWIW you didn't make any arguments either. I can quote five lines from your posts and prove it just like you did.

That which is asserted without argument can be dismissed without argument.

If you're too afraid to back up what you say, why bother typing it?

Scroll up and read. Everything I quoted was the entirety of your post directed at me. I guess you've said it for me: you don't have anything worthwhile to say, just jokes and reddit fedora memes.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 18 2015, 4:24 pm by Oh_Man.

Brood War's early game was the same way. Find me some games with build orders of 4-6 in Brood War. Starcraft's early game is boring. The endgame is more interesting. Speeding up the early game is a good thing. I believe many people agree with me, especially the players. Speeding up the early game significantly changes zerg's scouting ability however, so I'm not sure what affects that will have on the meta yet.

They have to add content to make people buy the game. Their original plan way back in 1996-8 was to add units to expansion packs which add units to the races. They have to come up with new and unique units in order to keep existing units viable. All games seem to fail you for being reprehensibly bad, so yeah all games are a failure by all accounts to you. I can almost guarantee you that LotV will sell a few million copies and will be largely considered a success by most people, and it will make money, not lose money, which makes is a fairly decent business success. By my accounts, no, LotV is not a failure.

We've known from the beginning that they were going to add 6 new units to the game in LotV. This is not a surprise, and this is the only way they can add content into the game. It's expected. It's how wars are fought in the real world: new technology.



I recommend to keep the thread on track, you quote Krayzee and explain in brief detail why each change is a bad change, and what would be a better change.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 18 2015, 5:00 pm by rockz.