The WWI event in Paris gave Blizzard a chance to showcase many of the new changes to StarCraft 2 in the latest build. Some of these, the most important ones, we’ve covered during the event, but there are still many interesting tidbits to discuss. Here, we will gather up all the remaining pieces and get a clearer view of the puzzle.

First up, this artistic presentation provides a direct comparison between Blizzard’s first attempt at some of the units of StarCraft 2 and their current look. It’s evident that Blizzard won’t rest until they’re all perfect, Blizzard-style. Pictures courtesy of SCLegacy.

Here are a couple of units that have been restyled to fit better with the StarCraft 2 theme:

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This part of the presentation explains Blizzard’s art direction with StarCraft 2:

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Next in the presentation, a Q&A session. Here are the highlights:

Q: How are you going to make the nydus worm travel through different types of terrain (water, space, etc)?

A: We still have to work on that but in your current build there is no worm it functions as a nydus canal - creep here, creep there, it shows up there.

The Nydus worm previously acted like a normal transport unit, actually traversing the terrain to reach its target location. Now, it functions like the StarCraft 1 Nydus Canals - point, click, and the Worm pops out at its destination after a short delay.

Q: Are you still creating units?

A: Everytime we have a finished race we end up redoing half of it. I’m sure that once we’re in Beta you good people will show us the error of our ways and we’ll make new units to fix those. And of course we’ll end up patching it for ten years .

Q: Will the dark templar be changed - have they changed - especially considering all the flak you’ve received?

A: The dark templar is still a unit that we’re going to go over. What I’d like to do is go over it and make the old dark templar and maybe have people vote on it. I can’t promise that but it’s still in the process of being worked. And we’re still working on our cloaking mechanic so that will have an impact on the design as well.

Check out SCLegacy for the rest of the presentation and Q&A.

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Lucky visitors to the WWI event also got the chance to glimpse a new unit joining the Zerg roster: the Changeling. No picture is available for this new unit yet, but it did get the honor of a full exposition by Dustin “Cavez” Browder, lead game designer:

Overseers can create a Changeling by spending energy. The Changeling is a small unstable Zerg creature with timed life. When he gets near an enemy structure or unit he will change shape into the correct basic unit type and color to match that player. So if you get near a Blue Barracks you become a Blue Marine. If you get near a Red Stalker you become a Red Zealot, etc.

The Changeling is very vulnerable and has no attack. It cannot actually fight or take any damage, and is only meant to be a spy for the Zerg. The opposing player cannot control or even select the unit, making this attempt the only way to find out the Zerg agent amongst the ranks of real troops.

What it does for the game:

1) Gives the Zerg a fun way to scout (though really they already have plenty of scouting options). 2) Makes enemy players constantly fearful of all of their own units. Is THAT a Changeling?! What about THAT GUY!?

In live games it is pretty difficult to keep on top of the “Changeling Problem” if an enemy Zerg player is trying to sneak into your base. However when you do catch them it feels pretty good.

This is a cool concept for the Zerg, reminiscent of the Queen’s old “Parasite” ability, which served a very similar purpose. This ability/unit contributes to the Overseer’s role as an intelligence gathering unit for the Zerg, along with its extremely large sight radius, which increases the longer it stays in the same position, and its detection ability.

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Eurogamer.net have an extensive interview with a few of the top figures at Blizzard: Frank Pearce, the executive vice-president in charge of product development; Bob Fitch, the lead software engineer; and Sam Didier, senior art director. This interview won’t surprise any devout StarCraft 2 fan, but a few gems can be found:

Eurogamer: The in-game editing package in StarCraft - did that push the game’s development and community?

Bob Fitch: When I play other people’s games, one of the things I’m constantly saying to myself is, “Boy, I wish this game had X,” and every time I say it to myself I come back here and say, “we’re having that”. So every time I played a game and I said “I wish this game had a map-editor” I come back here and our game has a map editor. That’s how these things get into the games.

It’s no secret that one of Blizzard’s greatest strengths is gathering the best features from all games in a genre and applying them perfectly in the game that they create.

Eurogamer: You sold 1.5 million copies of StarCraft in the first year, over ten million copies of WOW so far. What keeps you going?

Frank Pearce: [Shouting along with Bob Finch] Because we want to play cool games!

Frank Pearce: One of the best ways to ensure that we get to play the games we want to, is to make them.

“Be the change that you want to see in the world” - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

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SC-Source have written a long, comprehensive review of each of the three StarCraft 2 races. These offer valued insight into the game as it currently plays. Here are a few interesting excerpts. There are many, so be sure to check out the rest at SC-Source.

Terran:

The Terran have been reimagined, and I think they are the most interesting race in Starcraft 2. They have retained their identity, but they have gained flexibility and adaptability that they were clearly lacking in the original. The new Terran are fast, mobile, and offensive.

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The real improvement the Marines have gained is the UI. The Marines clearly gain more from large groups than their Zerg or Protoss counterparts, the Zergling and the Zealot. Their ranged attacks make them extremely devastating in large groups, and now the UI allows you to manage these groups effectively.

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Reapers are the true guerrilla fighters of the Terran. With their ability to hop cliffs, no base is safe from raid. At the WWI, most players were still leaning on original Starcraft build strategies, and because of this, 90% of players were wide open for a Reaper attack in the earl-mid game.

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The Siege Tank has not changed at all since the original Starcraft. Due to this lack of change, I don’t feel that it factors in well with the new Terran feel of guerrilla fighting. Siege Tanks are great for base defense, however that is about it. Largely, I ignored this unit in many of my games.

Zerg:

The Zerg are very frightening, everything about the makes you feel like you really are controlling a massive swarm. Visually, they have done some amazing things. First off the creep. They have changed the way creep looks from the gritty purple mass to a purple slime that appears to ooze and move. When creep expands they have changed it from adding blocks of creep to an effect that appears to be creep tendrils stringing out, corrupting the land. It makes everything else seem much more alive.

The buildings of the Zerg have also gotten a great overhaul. They all ooze and pulsate. Its almost to the point where you get dizzy from all the constant movement on the screen. The Zerg really are a living race now, instead of just having ugly buildings on strange purple stuff.

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Roaches are your tanks before you get Ultralisks, so for the majority of games, they will be taking the damage. The Roaches however, are not perfect. They lack a speed upgrade which means that unless you spend a lot of effort micro’ing your units they will blaze right past your Roaches and go straight into the fight, negating the Roach’s entire role.

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The Baneling is a unit that I feel has been over hyped. It is fun to watch and interesting indeed, but beyond basic harassment, it falls short. The Baneling is too weak to send into battle, and although it does do massive damage, it is extremely hard to deliver effectively.

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The Ultralisk is extremely powerful. Its new cleaving attack makes it so that it can dispatch mass amounts of units. It has a huge amount of life and armor which makes it a great front runner for your Hydralisks and Lurkers.

Protoss:

Once your base is up and running, Zealots are a must. Considering there is no goons anymore, pumping Zealots seems to be the only viable strat after the first gateway.

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Warping works great and is really efficient, especially used with MBS. Just assign all your Warpgates to a group, and once your Psi Field is set up you’re just making new units in 5 seconds, straight into your enemy’s workers. By the time he cleans up that attack, the cooldown is already over and you can Warp some more!

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Concerning the Mothership, it’s pretty much useless. It comes with all its abilities fully upgraded, but since you build it from the Nexus, you’d have to go all the way across the map to get into your enemy base. Which wouldn’t be a problem really, if it wasn’t so ridiculously slow. It’s probably slower than a Reaver in BW, except you can’t load the Mothership into a transport unit to make it go faster.

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Along with the screenshots we posted previously, three new ones have appeared on StarCraft2.com:

Epic battles in all three!

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The OnlineWelten has conducted an interview with Rob Pardo, Executive Vice President of Blizzard. Rob is mainly asked about the development process of Blizzard’s latest games and Blizzard’s game creation philosophy. Of note is this answer:

OnlineWelten: A few months ago you offered a job on the official Blizzard webpage, considering a next-gen MMO. A community manager added that it’s an unannounced title. Is there any information? Is Diablo 3 the next-gen MMO?

 

 Rob Pardo: No, obviously, since it’s not an MMO! We have another dev-team, that’s …

 

 OnlineWelten: So there is still one project, which is … ?

 

 Rob Pardo: Yeah, there is still one unknown project!

World of WarCraft was announced on September, 2001, and released a little more than three years later, on November of 2004. Four years later, what are the chances that Blizzard is NOT working on a sequel?

A new StarCraft 2 gameplay video has surfaced on YouTube, featuring a late game battle between two opposing Terran armies. The forces mainly consist of Thors, Siege Tanks, Battlecrusiers, and a single Banshee. The video exposes new facets of the StarCraft 2 Terran race, which we will explore here.

Thors are used as all-rounded units and are produced in relatively large numbers. Although they were recently relegated to an anti-air role, they are clearly capable in most battlefield situations. The Thors have massive amounts of hitpoints and long range attacks for both ground and air targets, making them valuable for just about any situation. In the video, they can even be seen functioning as damage tanks - even for Siege Tanks themselves!

As has previously been mentioned, the Thors aren’t destroyed immediately when taking enough damage, but instead become wreckages - which stay immobilized on the battlefield, stuck until the player repairs them. It’s not clear whether the repairs are undertaken by SCVs or if the Thor can be “revived” by a click of a button (and some resources). At the 3:57 time point, A Thor wreckage can clearly be seen coming back to life without an SCV working on it.

Siege Tanks, on the other hand, seem somewhat inadequate when facing Thors. The relatively large amount of artillery damage, which usually stops most attackers in their tracks, isn’t enough to deter even a small force of Thors. Do the Terran possess any other means of stopping Thors, aside from even more Thors?

The answer is yes. Like the Thor, the Battlecruiser is an all-rounded unit - possessing the same qualities of the Thor, but in flying form, and with additional powerful offensive abilities. The videoed game seems to revolve around just these two units - a bit disappointing for a game of StarCraft. Hopefully, this battle doesn’t represent the typical Terran versus Terran endgame in StarCraft 2.

Other notable things in the video are the harassing Banshee, which tries to hunt down enemy SCVs, new voices for it and a few other units, and a couple of Medivac Dropships that are aimlessly flying around, as no infantry units are present. The Banshee is seen firing its new focused, non-AoE attack for the first time. At the moment, it seems a bit feeble.

This game likely doesn’t represent the full gamut of effective play styles for the Terran race, focusing solely on the two heavy hitters. Hopefully, even though the Battlecruiser and Thor appear to be extremely well-rounded and powerful, they are not the only late game options available for Terran players.

Incgamers has conducted a very informative interview with Blizzard’s top developers: Dustin Browder (Lead Designer), Chris Sigaty (Lead Producer) and Samwise Didier (Art Director). They ask some important questions and receive detailed responses. Here are the major highlights:

The Mothership seems like an extremely powerful unit, are there any counters to it?

 

Sure! It has been changed significantly since BlizzCon. You can use Corruptors, Hydras, Vikings or Phoenixes, depending on your race. It is a unit that you only should build if you have air superiority, as it can relatively easily be defeated if you can’t defend it. It is not a unit you make unless you have air superiority as it will be run over. You wouldn’t choose to make a Mothership without backup.

The Mothership has clearly not been designed to be cost-effective in battle, unless it is able to survive long enough to make good use of its powerful abilities. The Mothership will probably not be used by smart players unless the player is confident of his air superiority or in his the ability to repel direct attacks against the Mothership. Such problematic design might condemn it to the role of a mere coup de grace unit, a common fault in RTS games.

Are there any changes to Creep as such?

 

Creep has the same functionality as before, besides the new graphics, and how it spreads.

Creep, unlike in StarCraft 1, can now spread through ramps between different height levels.

The Queen seems very much like a Hero Unit, like in WarCraft III, is that the meaning of the Queen?

 

The Queen can die just like any other unit, and isn’t “resurrected” like Heroes of WarCraft III. If she dies you need to make a new Queen and upgrade her again, to the former unit’s strength. While she definitely isn’t invincible, she can easily take on an Ultralisk for example. She is mainly a really good base defence as she can heal a building for 100 HP very fast early on, and do it several times. What can happen is that your opponent start hammering your building, taking the HP all the way down, and then it’s up all of a sudden, so they might have to beat it down several times. During this time, they could possibly already be dead from the other base defences, or that the Queen’s player have time to do some other action.

 

Her Deep Tunnel ability makes it possible to escape most dangerous attacks, by just tunnelling to another building, or tunnel between bases. Still, you should be careful with that, as it will be 15 seconds before she can use that ability after it has been activated. In worst case you might find yourself loosing the Queen as you got attacked at a bad time. You’ll find that the Queen can be used in offensive action, but she is better designed for defence, as she walks slowly, and her abilities require creep or buildings, like making poisonous creep.

The Queen is tough enough to fight small forces and even powerful units, like the Ultralisk, but due to her cost and the fact that the Zerg rely on her for some of their most important abilities, it’s better to quickly tunnel away from battle rather than try to engage anything more than a minor enemy company.

What is the Overlord’s new role in StarCraft as it doesn’t transport or detect?

 

The Overlord can also be mutated into an Overseer, to give you detection. They currently have the ability to slowly increase their sight radius as long as they remain stationary, so you can see more. If you move with the Overseer, you will loose the sight you got by staying stationary, and will have to regain it slowly when it stops again. The main reason the Overlord/Overseer was split is to make cloak more useful, as the Zerg are somewhat “detectorific” if they just send a bunch of Overlords with their units. This way it matters a bit more with cloaking and detection.

The Zerg of StarCraft 1 had what amounted to free detection. Since Overlords were abundant, cloaked attacks were rare (compared to the other races) unless a specific effort was made to get rid of the Overlords first. The Overseer, especially with the new sight radius increase mechanic, provides both a fairer and a more interesting approach to detection for the Zerg.

Can Corruptors corrupt any unit on the field? For instance, can they corrupt a Mothership?

 

Yes, they can corrupt any flying unit. It depends on the unit’s HP regarding on how long it takes to corrupt it, but all units can be corrupted.

Which race do you feel has changed the most since the original?

 

The Protoss maby? That is the race we feel has had the most success in development, and currently feel the most developed and most “crisp”. It is really hard to say. You guys are the ones that really should tell us about these things!

That’s how we at the SC2Blog feel as well. The Protoss have been by far the most “stable” race, and we can safely expect that Blizzard is doing all it can to bring the Terran and Zerg to the same level of “crispness” prior to releasing the beta…

Next up, three GameTrailers interviews with Chris Sigaty [1|2|3]. Here are the highlights:

• Blizzard is experimenting with even faster game speeds than the StarCraft 1 “Fastest” setting.
• When the Blizzard strategy team started making StarCraft 2, they decided to remove the hero system of WarCraft III and other mechanics that were added to that game in order to keep franchises separate. They wanted to go back to the “micro heavy, huge army fighting of StarCraft, with more base management“.
• The team did learn a lot from WarCraft III, and added a plenty of UI and battle.net features into StarCraft 2.
• “The ability for players to easily get into matches is key”
• “We have a beta coming up and we look forward to seeing feedback“

And we are looking forward to showing it to you, Chris.

One of the major issues people have with StarCraft 2, at this stage of development, is the updated control scheme. The new User Interface (UI) constitutes a major overhaul to the now-outdated, almost-10 year old system of the original game. Among the obvious improvements, some changes are the cause of many arguments that are raging all over StarCraft 2 fan sites and forums.

The changes all deal with automation. The new UI will require less attention from the player and will not force him to micro-manage his game as much as the old one did. Some people argue that this represents a cheapening of the game and the skill it requires to play, while others claim that this is a logical progression and a clearly warranted update to the outdated control scheme.

In this post, we will review the proposed changes:

1) Auto-Mining Peons

In StarCraft 1, every peon (Drone, Probe or SCV) a player built out of his headquarters building would idle near its selected rally point. Unlike other, more modern games of this type (including Blizzard’s WarCraft 3), it was impossible to rally the workers to the resources by right clicking them. Instead, a player had to manually select each and every one of his peons and send them to the a mineral patch or to the Vespene Gas extractor. When selecting a group of workers, high level players would still send them to the minerals individually, since they tended to clump together trying to mine one patch, slightly reducing efficiency.

This proved to be a major hindrance to slower players - having to focus on one’s base to keep the economy going every time a new peon popped out meant having less time to focus on the battle itself.

This system would be replaced with something that already exists in WarCraft 3. All the player has to do is select the HQ building, right click on the resource location, and the built workers would get to work right as they came out.

SC2Blog Verdict: This should have been patched into StarCraft 1 by now.

2) Multiple Building Selection

Many recent RTS games have reduced the focus on building multiple buildings with the exact same purpose, like StarCraft does to increase the potential rate of unit production. StarCraft 2 still keeps to this formula, though, but an improvement in this scheme is proposed: Instead of having to select each building individually and issuing the unit production order, multiple buildings of the same type could be selected. That way, a player with 4 Gateways would be able to click once to produce 4 Stalkers (assuming he has sufficient resources for them).

This would streamline the often-tedious procedure of keeping unit production going, especially considering StarCraft’s 5 unit queue limit for each building and the need to churn out units like mad in some matches. Again, this reduces the player’s need to focus on his base and allows him to manage his units in exploration, battle or positioning on the field. Will this really reduce the gap between newbies and professional players?

SC2Blog Verdict: Another logical improvement.

3) Automatic Unit Formation

In StarCraft, and more than likely, in StarCraft 2 as well, unit positioning plays a very important role. The brilliantly executed meld of melee and ranged attacking units lives and dies on the starting position of each unit as it enters the battle. A group of properly positioned Marines, helped by a handful of Firebats, could repel a much larger number of attacking melee units like Zealots or Zerglings. The same attacking group would annihilate those Terrans if they managed to surround and/or separate them, taking few losses.

StarCraft had a very unforgiving unit formation/pathing system. Often, units (un)managed by less skillful players would march to battle in a single file and die before firing a single shot. Players had to make sure each and every one of their units were positioned smartly to make the best use of them, according to the threat they faced and the conditions of the battlefield.

The StarCraft 2 developers are now entertaining the idea of creating automatic unit formations. We do not yet know the nature of these formations, but can speculate as to how they will be implemented. Other RTS games have several formations you can choose from (e.g. box formation, arrow, straight line) while some do as much as make sure your melee units are positioned at the front while weaker, ranged units are protected in the back. How far will StarCraft 2 take automatic unit formation?

SC2Blog Verdict: Properly positioning units and “formatting” them to best take advantage of their strengths while hiding their weaknesses is one of the most important and skill demanding features of every RTS game - with StarCraft being no exception. We hope Blizzard doesn’t take this too far. We would like to see improvements to general pathing, however.

4) Context-Dependent Unit Behavior

Issuing an attack-move order? In StarCraft 1, Medics grouped with Marines who were given this order would run head first into the enemy while the marines paused to attack from a safe distance. In StarCraft 2, the dev team promised, the Terran Medics will receive additional training, allowing them to interpret their commands in a smarter way. We don’t yet know of other examples for more educated unit behavior, but with this precedent, others are sure to come.

SC2Blog Verdict: While we’re usually proponents of streamlining the game and increasing automation, this might be taking it too far. The player should be the one deciding what units do - even at the cost of them performing stupid moves when he doesn’t notice. If there’s anything that differentiates the pros from the noobs, it’s their ability to control all their units quickly and skillfully at all times.

5) Smart Casting

Another improvement to the normal (as of StarCraft 1) behavior of units. Previously, a group of the same units with a special ability who were given a command to use the ability would all activate it together. This would result in 12 Ghosts all locking down a single Carrier, a group of Templars Psi-Storming a single spot on the field, or Queens using up valuable energy by casting ensnare on a single position.

In StarCraft 2, “Smart Casting” would allow the player to use abilities when selecting a group - only this time, only one of the units (the closest one, no less) would use it. A smart player would select a group of Templars, shift click a few locations on the field, and cover a huge area with a devastating super Psi-Storm.

SC2Blog Verdict: We approve. The end result of this is the same, only less mouse clicks are required. Careful planning will still be needed to execute a good move, just like in StarCraft 1 - but this time, it won’t require superhuman dexterity.

Any changes to the winning formula that is StarCraft would obviously lead to many arguments among fans, and probably among the developers themselves. We will all have to decide which update is essential to the game and will allow all players to enjoy it better, while making sure they do not detract from the skill required to master StarCraft 2.