pleasantly surprised by Starcraft 2
II admit it: I wasn’t excited to get Starcraft 2. Yes, I pre-ordered it because… I mean, it *is* Starcraft 2. 11 years in the making. 11 years? Wow. I mean, I remember playing networked SC in college, was college that long ago? *checks* Well, shit, I guess it was.
But, I was feeling pre-underwhelmed. I haven’t played a strategy game that really grabbed me in a while, maybe since Civ 3 or something… and even that was mostly just the “1 more turn!!” addiction. Also, Blizzard’s whole bizarre/stupid privacy changes (saying they were going to force people to use their real names on the forums, then kinda going back on it), integrating battle.net & SC2 with Facebook… all things to make me cringe.
But, you can ignore those things and just play the game. I think. It does make me sign into battle.net before it even lets me play the single player campaign (which is 7 kinds of stupid)… I guess this is so you can use the in-game messenger thing (yes, it has an in-game messenger, but so far you can very easily not look at it) to nag your FB friends to play with you or buy the game. Or something.
Also, playing the beta may have burned me on the game because it was multi-player only, and MP was only a portion of what I loved about SC. Certainly it’s not where I expect to spend most of my time. I kind of figure that once I finish the campaign I’ll only play online as a lark – League of Legends covers my online/pvp/multiplayer needs quite well.
Anyway, I just went and played the game. League of Legends was down anyway, so might as well.
And I had a lot of fun. Went through maybe 5 missions.
- The between-mission spaceship/prep scenery where you can talk to the characters is actually pretty cool.
- I really like the special tech you can unlock via Zerg/Protoss research. I like that you have to make choices there, and can’t get every option.
- I like the rate at which new units are coming, usually 1 per mission and on a mission kind of keyed to that unit so you can see their strengths.
- I love the research and mercenary options. I thought it (research done outside missions) would be annoying, but I love it. It adds … something to the game. Makes it more rp-like, maybe?
- The units look good, and seem quite varied.
Some weird/negatives:
- It doesn’t run as well as I think it should on my (still pretty good) laptop.
- It doesn’t recognize my video card… which seems insane as it’s an Nvidia card with pretty new drivers. maybe because I’m using the beta drivers?
- I had to turn down the detail, which is really frustrating as it looks pretty damn good with stuff turned up.
- It tends to kind of crunchlag during some of the cutscenes – mostly just when the big convict guy is talking, but occasionally in game as well – usually when someone is talking over the action. I don’t see why this is at all because, while the game is good looking, frankly I don’t see how it’s anything that should be pushing a decent graphics card – even one from last year.
- The install is 12 gigs!! (I’m sure 80% of that is the movies)
I need to see if I can play without the disk… I have a feeling I can’t because I heard it spinning up and down, but maybe if there’s a way to trick it and put all the data on disk that will help a bit.
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