Amazing news! Though I didn't play it competitively, StarCraft was a big part of my life -- my friends and I made custom scenarios to be played in 'Use Map Settings' mode, like dozens of iterations of tower defense and the like.
Given the impressive list of tune-ups, I'm hoping that some improvements will be made to mapmaking -- or perchance, even "modding", which was never really supported aside from third-party hacks. On the low end, support for mp3, Vorbis, or some other compressed audio format for custom sounds would be nice instead of .wav, but if they aimed higher they could rejuvenate a player-generated content community for years to come.
Around 2005, I converted about 3 AOE2 playing friends into StarCraft players. I had created some melee and team based maps over the years prior if I had an idea, but it wasn't long before everyone was making their own maps. For a while, there was a new one about every other week. We would call each other about every night asking if we could get on B.net, then wait 20 minutes if there was a new patch.
Do you have sources on this? The conventional wisdom in the community is that it's the SC2 engine -- a view backed up by the game's origins as an SC2 map, similarities in internal file formats, folder structure, the nature and availability of video settings, and this 2014 article by Polygon that confirms it outright [1]. Other articles from 2014 [2][3] talk about how the same team handled the development-until-release of SC2 and Heroes of the Storm.
It does use the same engine as StarCraft II. It originally started as Blizzard All-Stars and was supposed to be a custom map for the SC2 arcade, but the team ran into technical roadblocks that pushed them into making HotS a separate game.
Sorta related… a fun podcast interview with someone who's been involved in the Age of Empires II modding community and is now helping release official expansions. Some anecdotes about the performance impact of changing from assembly-coded 2D sprites to 3D graphics.
I still don't think I understand the appeal to closed source games vs. completely open, 0AD (https://play0ad.com) still strikes me as the most complete open RTS out there but I am wondering if people are more adapt to a smaller closed game vs. large open game just due to the faster adaption and release rates. Is there anyone else who thinks the AI-based APIs of these games are driving these updates or (for example) the machine learning challenges in RTS balancing, etc.
0ad is fun but it lacks a lot of polish for the UI and has performance problems (even though, it is getting resolved). A lot of new content is added but there are problems of balance. I wish they will stop to add new civilizations and concentrate and making a release version.
When someone doing a research using popular closed source game half of game related press publish some news about that research full of buzzwords. And company that own copyright on it could even dedicate few engineers to help because why not - it's cheap PR.
Same exact research for open source game would likely only bring attention of actual developers and ML crowd. Oh, on top of that many would expect to see your data and source code.
In SC2 you have multi building selection and you can select and group as many unit as you want under one hotkey. In SC:BW you can only select and hotkey one building and unit groups are limited to 12 units. So you can have e.g. 36 units bind to keys 1-3 and 7 buildings bind to keys 4-0. Population cap in game is 200 and depending on game quite a lot of that cap will go to workers which you don't have to manage. That still leaves you with easily around 100 population or more of units that you have to micromanage.
When you understand this watching somebody like Jaedong play zerg you'll understand how insane it is. He'll usually have hatcheries (buildings that build almost every zerg unit in the game) bind to 0-9 keys and then he'll manage and micro huge swarms of zerg units. Zerg are the quantity race in the game, you'll often have a ton of cheap units (e.g. zerglings or hydralisks) supplemented by few bigger units (ultralisks) and you have to manage them all (usually without keybinds), keep producing units, cast spells (using defilers) and do that all at around 400 apm (action per minutes) facing against another dude who is doing the same.
I remember the competition between Starcraft vs Total Annihilation. I was very much into TA at the time, which was a beautifully crafted game. I could play against my friend across the country on 33.6kbps modem with 500 units each without crashing. Sure, each frame would take a second or so, but we would set up our attacks and just sit there and watch without worrying it would crash, it was amazing.
Obviously Starcraft ended up winning, but boy was TA an amazing game.
Total Annihilation was great. The big difference for me that made Starcraft superior was the uniquely balanced set of races to choose from. The two factions in TA were essentially mirror images of each other. Starcraft always felt like it had another layer of depth to strategy as a result of the various matchups between races.
Totally agree that the different balanced factions made Starcraft superior BUT, the beautifully designed interface made TA superior in another way. Coming from clunky predecessors like Red Alert, the removal of micromanagement in TA was a revelation.
You could queue multiple units to build, adding in multiples of 1 or 5 (Supreme Commander later made this into an even more powerful system). You could queue an infinite amount of orders for each of your units - not just pathing waypoints but everything. I used to set my Commander up to do about 15 minutes of building at the start of the game.
You could tell buildings to "move" somewhere and all units coming out of those buildings would go there when built. You could tell construction units to patrol and they'd automatically repair damaged units and collect resources on the way. You could tell construction units to assist buildings and they'd help build new units. You could press Ctrl-A to select all units, Ctrl-W to select all fighting units, and other ones for airplanes, ships etc. And so on.
I think it pretty much shaped the attitude I have today where in game design, I think everything that has one "correct" answer should be automated away, and everything else made as simple as possible.
Of course when TA first came out the battle wasn't yet between TA and Starcraft, but between TA and Dark Reign.
If I remember, each unit was rendered in 3D so it was visually stunning as well, as opposed to Starcraft that looked flat and old to me. The graphics during huge fights were really awesome, and you got a lot of time to admire it when you had huge battles and it slowed the frame rate down to a crawl.
Yep and not only are the units rendered in 3D but the unit's projectiles really move in 3D and get blocked by terrain etc, and line-of-sight gets blocked by hills and so on as well. The terrain is just an image but it's calculated via a 3D mesh that underlies it.
Also, TA supports all screen resolutions your monitor does, so far from needing a Remaster, TA still looks surprisingly good today at high resolution. The interface (which is designed to work with 640x480) quickly gets tiny though.
This made the green race (forget their name) in Supreme Commander quite overpowered - as artillery doesn't suffer from line-of-fire and that race had the most powerful artillery.
The simulation of projectiles also made the game run like a dog, but we loved that slow dog.
StarCraft had a much more fully featured custom map editor. I'd say that StarCraft had way better mods. It was the base game in TA that I really loved. I played that for my RTS fix, and I played Use Map Settings games in StarCraft for everything else. I never really played the base StarCraft game in multiplayer; TA was more fun.
I'm very curious to see just how much they feel okay changing game-altering systems or behaviours. Ie. Even widescreen alters how the game will get played to some extent.
I think the hard part is knowing where to draw the line in order to keep it "authentic"
> how much they feel okay changing game-altering systems or behaviours.
Apparently they made sure to keep a lot of what we would probably consider bugs. Goliaths and Dragoons still have "derpy" [they used this word] pathing and Reaver Scarabs will sometimes not connect or bug out.
The HD client will actually be able to play current version replays so it seems like they managed to stick to graphics and UI changes almost exclusively.
Interestingly, that's apparently because they're keeping the old gameplay code. That's great to hear because units like the Reaver and Dragoons are only balanced because of their issues.
Does it matter? If competitions want to keep to a specific format, they won't use this version? Or the competiton will change, brining more excitement?
There may only be so much they could do and maintain compatibility with the old game, but I don't think the remastered graphics look that great. A clear step up from the original on modern screens, but not that great.
In the example on the page, I think the Zerg spike-things (forgot what they're called) stand out. In the remastered version they are a bit too shiny, and look like they're just sitting on the creep, which makes them look more like plastic miniatures. In the old version they appear grimier, and they look more like they're growing out of the creep.
An effect somehow related to the Donkey Kong shots at the middle of this article[0], where being "too crisp" breaks the "blend" between the sprites and the background.
Before it was released (or much was known), I was hoping that SC2 would look more like this. In SC2, Terrans lost all of their scrapyard dweller vibe, and Protoss look like TF2 superheroes.
They're higher-resolution and a better colour-depth, but it's a bit jarring how they're all identical... at first-glance the game's overall visuals feel like a low-production-value freemium web-game.
If they did things like apply random aesthetic changes (like dirt, grime, slightly different greebling) to structures of the same class then I think that would make the game look better - some games did that, for example CNC Generals had different models for the GLA Technical vehicle, and non-functional animation speeds for infantry units were randomised too.
That would make the game look better, but play worse. One of the things that BW's art does very well is that all of the units and buildings are instantly identifiable and distinguishable, and adding variation in the appearance would hurt that.
One of the peculiarities with starcraft's hardcore player-base (and probably anyone that still plays it today is hardcore) is that they are very, very conservative.
This was probably one of the reasons it was extremely difficult for them to make any changes that are too wide-ranging even for starcraft 2 (which never pretended to be the same game).
Um... could you maybe show a screenshot and save me the trouble of having to think through that? I was just looking at their "before and after" slider visualizations.
As a huge fan of Starcraft and its expansion Brood War, I am really excited.
I bought StarCraft 2 after it was released but I simply didn't like it, maybe I grew older and life was busy then. However, I think it's more about the focus was shifted, when adding fancy graphics effects, the RTS elements are gone, plus added complexity.
I think the remastered version will re-ignite the faded friendship between a group of guys/gals. The original game used to be our bond. However, the bond is fading over the years as I moved overseas, most folks have their own family/people/things to care about.
The best thing is: "Most importantly, the strategy gameplay that StarCraft perfected years ago remains unchanged."
It's impossible to say, TA never took off and so never had a large competitive scene like SC/BW had, and so you can't really evaluate its balance. And the balance is probably the most legendary thing about Starcraft 1, that it was so well-balanced even though each faction was radically different.
I always felt like SC was too balanced. TA at LAN parties was more fun because most people weren't so practiced at it
(To be fair, Blizzard is excellent at doing balance. So good in fact that it also took a lot of the fun out of WoW; four hours of grinding for a +2% stat increase...)
There's a certain type of fun that comes from experimenting and figuring things out and wacky times. And there's a certain type of fun that comes from mastery of a well-designed system.
That got revised and rewritten as the FOSS game ZeroK [1]. The original is still under copyright, but the guys who did ZeroK started with it as the code base and then gradually removed all the proprietary code. Surprisingly for a FOSS game project as big as it is, it's still actively developed.
Boy am I optimistic for this game. I fondly remember UMS Sunken Defense, tower defense originators and of course Big Game Hunters maps. I'm really hoping a robust map editor is included.
Mac friendly would be nice too, especially considering Overwatch(?!) is Windows only.
Overwatch is windows only because apple has given up on gaming on OSX, further evidence: they dont have OpenGL 4.x (which has existed for 7 years now), Vulcan, or drivers for the nvidia 1xxx series of cards.
Overwatch runs fine on either Bootcamp (so the hardware is capable enough) or in Parallels (which can't access the GPU directly, hence goes through some translation layer that end up as regular OpenGL calls, so the OS X OpenGL stack is capable enough, let alone Metal). Blizzard is just being cheap here.
> they dont have OpenGL 4.x
Nitpick: 4.1 is fully supported on my mid '14 Intel GPU. You sounded like OS X is locked at 3.3
I had to double-check that it wasn't April 1st already. This is really cool and I personally didn't think something like this would happen (I was worried Blizzard would consider it an admission of defeat for SC2's competetive play).
I've played countless hours of this game on 56k when I was a kid. Needless to say, I was ridiculously excited after hearing about this. But seeing the before and after footage in the video on StarCraft.com has left me pretty disappointed. The maps nearly look identical and that's where I hoped the biggest improvement would lie. A little more detail than the original in the environments would go a long way towards me wanting to shell out some cash. What I've seen looks like a new skin on the old engine and literally nothing else in terms of aesthetics.
I was going to say that they should offer a discount if you own the original version, but then I remembered I bought the game almost 20 years ago and probably have no proof of purchase.
I was able to find my copy maybe 5 years ago and added it to my Battle.Net (now Blizzard) account as "StarCraft Anthology". It then could be downloaded and managed from the blizzard launcher like any of their other games, which I thought was cool. They also released an version for intel macs around that time, which was nice since I had just gotten a mac.
Blizzard has maybe the best track record for supporting their old games.
I actually think I may have some kind of proof of purchase since I linked the game to the battle.net account at some point. But I can't imagine the cost being too outrageous in any case.
It is common among people who still play bw to have bought 2-4 copies of the game over ~15 years as discs and keys get lost. What's one more copy at this point? :) I hope it will at least have tie-in content for other Blizzard games, though.
I doubt it but I imagine the Battle.net servers bursting on day 1 to 10 of the release, as so many people who grew up with this game would give it a play.
Is that QR code on the Terran's forehead the introduction to an ARG? I don't have time to decode it at the moment, so I'm wondering if anyone else has.
I am pretty sure the Protoss tried to curb the Zerg advancement by planetary exterminatus. It was at least mentioned in briefings, if not even shown in a cutscene.
Ridiculously excited. Nothing in my life was better than BW+1.6. Rotated those games religiously and went pro, wasted about 5 years of my life but damn it was the most fun 5. Love that new life is being breathed into such a mechanically (but graphically lacking) engaging game.
I used to play an MMO called The Realm Online from ~2003-2007.
It had a player-run economy, so I offered millions of the in-game currency for someone's Starcraft CD key, as all I had was a burnt CD. I was itching to play online with a friend of mine.
Eventually I got that key and enjoyed many, many hours of online play with a good friend. I never did get to play the expansion, although I'm well aware it's considered the definitive experience.
Counter-Strike is similarly something else I had to miss out on, I just didn't have a way to purchase games digitally. Steam was around as well as services like Direct2Drive but my Mom didn't have a bank account, so I just accepted that I'd be missing out on these multiplayer experiences as a teenager.
I did manage to keep up my subscription to The Realm for a long time, but that was thanks to the wonderful concept of money in birthday cards. Once WoW launched it basically killed The Realm anyway, I could have spent that money more wisely in retrospect.
Starcraft was a rare multiplayer exception for me, along with Jedi Academy, and UT. It'll always have a place in my heart because of that.
Later in life, I ended up putting over 800 hours into CS:GO and now own over 300 games on Steam, so I lived my multiplayer dreams eventually.
I've shelled out enough for Hearthstone packs by now that I don't feel guilty about trading that now worthless huge chunk of The Realm Online gold for that valuable Starcraft CD key.
OT but how did your mum not have a bank account? Was this common where you're from? I can't imagine it working anywhere i've lived (for one you won't be able to get paid).
As a poor American you will run into many people that don't have a bank account. Lots of things can hurt your credit here and once your credit is wrecked it can be challenging to have even a savings account.
There is an entire industry here to serve (many would say take advantage of) people in this situation. Many shops will cash payroll and government checks for you since otherwise you would not be able to. Usually from what I have seen they charge somewhere around a dollar per hundred dollars on the check.
Wow, that's the first time I've heard anyone talk about The Realm in a long time. I played it from its release in 1996 until EverQuest came out in 1999. How did you end up getting into The Realm in 2003, long after its prime?
A good friend of mine played the game, I'd often be over at his house playing it with him or simply watching him play.
The novelty was phenomenal to me at the tender age of 12.
Here was a chat room, and a game, all rolled into one. I'd never seen anything like it. I wanted my own account.
It would be a few years until that happened. When I was 15 I started with an annual subscription for 49.99, playing on my mother's computer at first after assuring her it wasn't a virus.
This was before the launch of DAoC, so maybe early 03? The game still had a relatively active population (500-750 players near peak hours, something I would scoff at today and declare dead. relative!)
After the launch of WoW in '04 the regulars became less regular and eventually the population was under 200, then 100, etc. It had 25 players online last time I got nostalgic and installed it to hear the startup tune.
Anyway, I had a great time with The Realm Online. I loved it. I made friends and liked talking to them. So I stuck around and watched it slowly wither away, at least until 2007-8 or so.
It was clear that the "developers" who purchased the rights to the game had no interest in developing the game any further.
I still think The Realm Online would do fine in the F2P space, stuffed full of microtransactions. The turn based combat would be perfect for a touchscreen. Apparently it's coded in a dead language invented by Sierra, so I'm not holding my breath. It'd be nice to see a private server, at least.
Over the years I made many friends, some of whom I still regularly play games with.
I imagine many folks had a similar experience with their first MMORPG, whenever I see people talk about Runescape or WoW, I always think of The Realm and my time with it.
I never played it myself, but I last I checked the game is still running just fine! (as in, there are official servers to pay subscription and play the game).
I occasionally watched professional Korean Starcraft games for a few years.
The graphics of Broodwar are so much better for the audience’s sake (and I assume also for the players’) than Starcraft 2 or similar 3D games.
Having pixel sprites and a fixed isometric view is a huge advantage in character legibility/contrast.
3D everything demos well and looks more “realistic” (i.e. more like a high-budget space film), but it’s horrible when you’re trying to see past the clutter to figure out what’s going on.
All the rotating cameras and fancy animated backgrounds and tricky lighting and so on are pure gimmicks which distract from the gameplay.
So, you think this http://i.imgur.com/MAy4Pgl.jpg is more legible than this http://i.imgur.com/xrBPKda.jpg ? I disagree! And Starcraft 2 has a fixed isometric viewpoint. While it is technically possible to move the camera, no one ever does that in a real game.
Sibling comments already made good points, but the BW screenshot isn't actually in-game view, either. The mini-map adds to the noise and the shot is smaller. I don't know if the SC2 one is in-game with the HUD removed as well.
SC1 has less eyecandy and less random moving things; I find it much easier to focus on SC1 game than on SC2 one. I might be biased though; I spent much more time in SC1 than in SC2.
Brood war has more contrast than SC2. SC2 relies more on color to distinguish things, but BW uses brightness, which human vision is more sensitive to. I much prefer the BW shot.
Exactly, for top down rts games, 3d offers nothing but increased hardware demands.
It's not as if you have anything to gain by zooming in on a unit or rotate around it, pre-rendered graphics will look better and have less hardware demands.
The main problem with 2d sprites is animation. 2d sprites will never compare to 3d animation in terms of what an object can visually communicate to a player about what is happening in a game.
In full 3d, animation can tell a player a lot about what is happening on the battle field, such as where the bounding boxes actually are near a unit, what the actual angle is they are using to target a unit, or how a unit is physically affected by different buffs/debuffs.
Although I find well made 2d games to be remarkable for their own reasons, I don't there is a legitimate argument as to which provides the superior gameplay.
For me 2D graphics do look better (especially SC1 vs. SC2) because of the art style. When you go from hand-drawn sprites to 3D models, you always lose quality, because there's more computation to be done than any hardware could reasonably perform in real-time. Some games try to hide it by altering their art style, e.g. by making more cartoony-looking units. Warcraft 3 did that, and SC2 seems to have inherited it. Which for me was huge negative - the general atmosphere of SC1 was dark and serious; SC2 feels lightweight and more like a comedy at times.
>I don't there is a legitimate argument as to which provides the superior gameplay.
I think you're conflating graphics and gameplay too much here; different games need to communicate different things. If anything, well made 2D games, because of their economy of expression, possess superior legibility once you learn to read the sprites.
If I had fun for 100 years it would be a waste of time because after a certain amount of 'fun' your consumption turns into a net negative and becomes over consumption.
I was semi-pro Age of X player from 2002 - 2008, Never had chance to switch pro, since AoEII/III(M) were not so hyped and there were little money comparing to W3, SC:BW and Quake3.
What was your screen name? I was on team canada for a few years and largely involved in the scene so I'd definitely recognize it if it was around the early to mid 2000's. What team?
I played SC, SC2, and WC3 fairly competitively (top 100 or so in each of those games). I tried WC2 multiplayer once and I swear grunts were in my base within ~60 seconds of the game starting. I'm sure I would have figured it out if I continued but it felt faster than a 4 pool.
WC2 is actually an incredibly slow game. Like even BW is slow compared to SC2 (especially these days) but try going back to WC2 now and it'll feel downright glacial.
Remastering Starcraft should be done almost 10 years ago. While swimming in the money pool of WoW, Blz lost their entire charm of relentless demand on quality, innovation, and dedication.
They forcefully killed Starcraft with StarcraftII. They abandoned WarcraftIII, one of most popular game (among all genres) at its time. Warcraft III gets less balance patch then Starcraft, the game they intended to kill.
They remastered DiabloII, rebranded it DiabloIII. They released a great Moba game, called overwatch. After almost 10 years they witnessed WarcraftIII's demise and raise of the original Dota.
Now, they started reaping profit from their most loyal fans, with a remastered Starcraft. The very game that they tried to kill.
I think, to me, this is a milestone of Blz's own demise. Farewell Blz, you truly redefined yourself as a mediocre game developer.
Given the impressive list of tune-ups, I'm hoping that some improvements will be made to mapmaking -- or perchance, even "modding", which was never really supported aside from third-party hacks. On the low end, support for mp3, Vorbis, or some other compressed audio format for custom sounds would be nice instead of .wav, but if they aimed higher they could rejuvenate a player-generated content community for years to come.