Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty Message Board  

Thus far the game, in my opinion, has not really done much to impress. Of course, they have had around ten years to build up my anticipation. The play is smoother and the graphics are far superior. There are new units to annihilate your opponent(s) with, and new powers to overwhelm them as well. However, the handful of new traits barely compensates for the expectations I had in mind. It seems like the original with a wee bit of polish. To make the sale a little bit harder for me, it is all but frying my (yes I know it's dated) Radeon x1950 Pro. The temps have reached 74 degrees Celsius, or 165 degrees Fahrenheit. Hopefully the single player will prove worth while to dole out $60 (or $180 for all three... not to mention the $200-$300 for a new GPU). For now though, I liken this game's release to the introduction of Star Wars Episode One. WT

My M210 GeForce chip runs pretty cool playing the game. I'm enjoying the gameplay a lot and a lot of the micro intensive jobs from the old game were automated giving players more time to think about the mid and late game perspectives a lot more. This gives a lot more interesting meta-game which I find extremely well done.

What I am disappointed with the game is the horrible design that battle.net 2.0 is. They cut down on so many things that made the original starcraft stood out. Here are the main annoyance factors:

-No chat rooms like the old games. Seriously...most of my nights in my previous years were spent in a battle.net chat room having a good time then going on to play games with friends I've met over the internet.

-There's no LAN play. Most people won't care for this at all, but being and to go to a LAN party and throw a quick setup without internet is pretty fun to do. This was taken out over e-sports politics in South Korea which is stupid because the rest have to suffer now.

-No interaction between people across different regions. This means if you have a friend in a different nation, there's a good chance you won't be able to play online together. Want to play together? You have to buy the whole game again on that regional site. Pretty low blow there by Blizzard (more like Activision) to squeeze more money out.

-Forcing users to opt-out by email. I put this in red font because it's a HUGE privacy breach. In the new EULA, there is a clause stating that they will share your information you use on their battle.net website with 3rd parties. To get out? You have to send an email to them. Yes by email...there isn't a simply checkmark in the EULA agreement which is HORRIBLE PRACTICE. I expected better from Blizzard-Activision (especially using deception of fine print to get away with it).

Everything else that was added in was cute, but just meh. I don't know about buying it overall.

I agree with all that Neo7 has said above.

[Edited by aeonseraph, 6/3/2010 9:40:05 AM]

Good to hear your enjoying it neo.

I did not know about the last part.

Will have to email them. This is all becasue of Facebook. if u opt out on face book then your prob opt out but ill look into it more

well, if there are countless problems if you want to play via lan.. this definitly sucks..
hm, dunno.. so far, the game is quite well done, graphics are stunning (even on my gforce 9300m g it runs at 1920&1080)
i really hope that the single-player-mode will be as good as starcraft I, but they have to work on the AI..

but nearly 60€ for only the terran-campaign is quite a lot money..

Fortunately, Blizzard released a statement to the effect that Lan, Channels(chat), Cross-realm play etc will be in the production release.

We can go back to worshiping them now.

What's interesting though is that Blizzard only reinstated that LAN option because they finally got control of the scene in South Korea by striking a license deal with GOMTV in that GOMTV gives whatever Blizzard wants in terms of the professional scene while Blizzard gives them the right to broadcast and use their game legally. With that new control, they can give back LAN and simply strike legally if other companies like KeSPA use their games after August without a sub-license contract with GOMTV.

While I think Blizzard will be able to give a lot more support in that area, I still don't like the underhanded techniques they're using. Makes me uneasy to trust them.

I'm not too fond of the facebook integration as well. Although I can see it work for some people, I don't really mix in my friends on facebook well with the friends I have on battle.net. On facebook, I usually let myself be known where as on battle.net, I usually interact with friends on a more team-based setting. While I usually talk about life in some UMS maps that take a long time with very little effort put into to win, when I actually play the ladder games, I tend to want my friends to put up a challenge for me. They become more like practice partners for that small time frame even though I still consider them friends. Same thing with DotA, those friends become more like teammates with a common goal and I like that. We communicate so well and when we win, it's a victory I share with them.

[Edited by Neo7, 6/30/2010 10:52:31 PM]

KeSPA is more evil than Activision-owned Blizzard so I guess I'm going with Blizzard on this one.

Undoubtedly Blizzard was probably taken back by how much eSports adores them (SC:BW and WC3 being hugely popular still with appearances in WCG along with CS) and Activision trying to muscle into the market, which is hardly a bad business model. On the other hand, it's hardly convincing that Activision feared allowing LAN would destroy any influence on eSports. We've already seen plenty of showmatches and tournaments hosted on the (poor-performing) beta Bnet2. Withdrawing LAN would be a bigger blow to the players than to eSports.