Saturday, May 1, 2010

Starcraft II Beta, part 2

After playing with all the races, I can say that the Terrans are my favourite race.

The Protoss never really appealed to me, and the Zerg are unfinished.
I mean, I know it's a beta, but I would have expected the Zerg to be a bit more refined.

For example, almost all their units don't have any speaking portrait animations, the creep is this thin grey sheet rather than the purple we remember (which makes it hard to tell at a glance the difference between it and space floor),
Another big problem I have with the Zerg is the fact that they are not Zerg.

They sound different. They look different. They have new, different units that don't feel very Zerg to me.
I feel that Blizzard has taken a lot of pointers from Tyranids from Warhammer 40'000, and playing the Zerg felt like playing a strange new race that masqurades as the Zerg.

All the original units from Starcraft have been altered, in some ways for the worse. The Hydralisks have lost their awesome scythe-blade arms in favour of three giant fangs, which is completely unnessesary because they still can't bloody use them.
And their head crest has been modified to not be a bony crest anymore, rather a long, thin bony crest with two 'mandables' with a large flap of skin connecting the two which gives the impression of a large crest but clearly isn't after you look at it.

The Queen has been revamped entirely. First, they made it a ground unit and gave it a melee and ranged attack. Second, they made it so that they were the only thing that could expand creep. Last, they messed with her model so it looks like she's part Protoss (which looks great, by the way).

The Ultralisk looks better, and it now has two enormous blades and two smaller ones. It also sort of looks like an elephant grew jagged rocks instead of skin.

The Zergling has been made better, in my opinion. It still looks like the original one, and the wings it gets with Metabolic Boost make it look even better.

But that doesn't change the fact that the Zerg sound totally, totally different.
They got a bunch of incests, really pissed them off, recorded them and messed with them in a sound editor. Almost every Zerg (the clear exception being the Ultralisk, which sort of sounds like an elephant) sounds like this.
Since they sound like a completely different race, it's hard for me to feel like I'm back playing the good ol' Zerg again.

Moving aside from all that, there is one really annoying feature - resource collection. Specifically, Vespene Gas.
I don;t care if the AI has better pathing, Blizzard. The fact is you can only pick up 1 unit at a time per worker, and only 1 worker is allowed inside the refinery, and it's worth 4 gas. It's too damn low, especially for the Protoss who need a lot of it.

This could be worked around by giving the refinery an upgrade that costs, say, 250 minerals that increases the amount of gas workers can carry by 2. Thats a little more acceptable, and for only the cost of 5 Marines the player can get a decent gas income early on.

I think that's about it for now.
So, Reccomended Changes:
- Vespene Gas carry capacity upgrade
- Zerg unit speech animations
- Zerg speech changed to sound less like insects and more like the original Zerg

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