The Geekscape StarCraft II Beta Review

I recently received an invite to participate in the Starcraft II beta test. For the sake of those of you who haven’t gotten in yet, I’ll highlight some of what I’ve been able to check out so far.

First off, the game’s polished, well designed user interface is really striking. Battle.net is completely integrated into the game client and the automated player matching is fast and painless. The matchmaking system takes player skill into account when assigning opponents/teammates but the beta’s low player population is forcing them to tweak the system a bit to err on the side of reducing wait times rather than finding an even match-up. This was a cause of some frustration, but it should work even better when the game is released. One new client feature I found really handy was the timestamped log available post-match that details each player’s build order, nice to have if you find yourself consistently pummeled early on.

Battle.net went through a relaunch early last year and players were forced to link their World of Warcraft accounts to the service a few months ago. Blizzard seems to be preparing for the end of an era of having one incredibly successful title on the market. With Starcraft II coming out soon and Diablo III to follow, they want to provide a way for players to easily stay involved with all three titles and perhaps even do cross promotion between them. Battle.net features like Xbox Live style friends lists, rankings and other goodies are hinted at in the beta menus.

In-game it doesn’t take much to top the look of the original. Starcraft came out in 1998 and used a 2D graphics engine with sprites made from prerendered 3D models. It is nice to finally play the game in a modern, 3D engine. Much like they did with World of Warcraft, Blizzard is casting a wide net with relatively reasonable hardware requirements. I use a three year old laptop, and after turning off most of the extra eye candy I was able to get it to run smooth in my native resolution. Even with dozens of units on the screen I didn’t notice any stutter.

They’ve kept the core gameplay very similar to the original and it didn’t take long for my muscle memory to kick in. I’m straining myself to recall major unit/ability differences from 11 years ago… I am pretty sure the terran supply depots didn’t have the ability to retract into the ground in the original. For better or worse, the terrans still have the whole “hicks in space” theme. It is reflected in the voice acting of the units and the soundtrack is vaguely reminiscent of the music of Firefly/Serenity. Seeing the zerg in the new engine was a real treat. Despite the economical use of polygon counts, their building and unit animations look very organic as they throb and pulsate. The lighting effects for the protoss units are spectacular. I really enjoyed building a large fleet of void rays and watching them all fire their beams on a single target.

At the moment, only a few multiplayer modes are available to play. The single player campaign is not included, there are no sneak peeks at the cinematics, and some of the Battle.net features haven’t been implemented. It seems a major purpose of this beta is to gain information for balancing the units/races. While I favored the protoss because they require a little less micromanagement, I wasn’t able to see any clear race advantage. I suppose the number of matches I played probably wouldn’t be sufficient to make a clear judgment anyway. Everything has stayed so close to the original that I expect any race balance issues are minor and what little there may be will be ironed out before launch.

While race balance doesn’t seem to be a big issue, I hope the developers use the beta to take a look at how games play out in general and maybe tweak things to ensure that winning feels satisfying and losing doesn’t feel cheap. While the matchmaking system helps with this, I don’t think it fixes everything. In the original Starcraft, pvp matches seemed to devolve into a single strategy: either rushing the opponent with low level units or getting rushed yourself.  This scenario kind of defeats the purpose of making advanced units and upgrades available to the player.  From what I’ve experienced in the beta, Blizzard hasn’t done anything about this and may not even see it as a problem. There isn’t much of a tug of war involved in a match, once you or an ally gets hit hard, it is nearly impossible to recover. Add in the fact that the ladder system gives players incentives to get in fast wins and you have a recipe for a lot of quick games that feel aborted whether you win or lose.

Blizzard has stayed very true to the original. So true in fact, that I lost interest in playing a couple days after I started. Once the novelty of seeing an old title updated to today’s standards wore off, I was left with the same game I grew tired of playing over a decade ago. The developers may have been a little too cautious in trying not to tamper with what worked the first time around. Certainly there are players that are simply looking forward for an excuse to relive their Starcraft experience in a much improved package and rest assured they will receive exactly that. I may have already had my fill of what the beta has to offer but I am still confident that I will find a way to enjoy this game when it releases. The single player campaign will have more scripting involved which should shake-up the core gameplay a bit and make things more interesting. More than anything I look forward to the wealth of community developed mods that will become available after launch because the game engine is solid and should serve as an excellent foundation to build upon.