They have BW storms, which have their own custom animation and are absolutely devastating with how bunched up units can be in SC2, and with the relatively high amount of worker saturation.
Edit: they've also started recreating modern BW ladder maps to SC2 for use with the mod; right now they have Polypoid and Retro playable, with tilesets that match really well.
All the sound effects have been ported over, and the mod team is chipping away at making Brood-War-accurate models and animations for the three original races (even when there are existing SC2 models). It's been pretty satisfying hearing SC2 casters remark on how impactful and recognizable the sound effects from OG StarCraft are.
The evolution mod is interesting in what can and cannot be changed. SC2 basically remains unchanged from ladder, but translating Brood War units to this engine requires some interpretation and nudging of numbers. Brood war concussive/explosive damage re-interpreted as damage vs light/armored with the most room for nudging damage breakpoints around. SC2 macro mechanics would blow the economic pants off of BW workers so the latter are somewhere around 15% faster miners.
General pattern of BW stuff being better at straight up brawls and SC2 stuff being more flexible.
Implementing BW builds is weird since you start with 12 workers and not 6. I don’t think anybody has calculated it but I think a 6 worker start BW Zerg vs SC2 Terran reaper rushing is an impossible matchup for the Zerg. 12 start may have made interfacing the two possible.
Starcraft show matches at Evo announced. Starts at 3:30 on Evo's Twitch 3 channel this Saturday!
Oh, SC Evolution which is the hype is what Dover posted about a couple of weeks ago?
So there's a vod of pros trying it out? (At work so can't look rn)
Yeah, Tasteless just posted vods of the third of these SC: Evo tournaments he's been hosting. A lot of other showmatches have been done as well, almost all in Korea. Winter has casted several vods, as well as Harstem and I think Grubby. Artosis even dipped his toe in playing some showmatches with his BW Terran builds, and came away feeling, well... it's Artosis.
The evolution mod is interesting in what can and cannot be changed. SC2 basically remains unchanged from ladder, but translating Brood War units to this engine requires some interpretation and nudging of numbers. Brood war concussive/explosive damage re-interpreted as damage vs light/armored with the most room for nudging damage breakpoints around. SC2 macro mechanics would blow the economic pants off of BW workers so the latter are somewhere around 15% faster miners.
General pattern of BW stuff being better at straight up brawls and SC2 stuff being more flexible.
Implementing BW builds is weird since you start with 12 workers and not 6. I don’t think anybody has calculated it but I think a 6 worker start BW Zerg vs SC2 Terran reaper rushing is an impossible matchup for the Zerg. 12 start may have made interfacing the two possible.
Unfortunately, BW zerg seem to be struggling in a lot of matchups. BW zerglings are straight up better (their DPS is insane even without adrenal) but they build juuust slightly slower, and zerg's econ is pretty strict in the early game without injects. You have very little to answer early air harass with, as well. Spore colonies are great, but they eat a drone, and while hydras are cheaper, faster to produce, available earlier, and hyper supply efficient, they're physically weaker than modern hydras, and that means you need to spend even more larvae on them.
Again, though, balance is up in the air as far as I'm concerned. I've watched Brood War style hydra busts wreck SC2 protoss even with oracle harass, because of the aforementioned advantages they have. Even Brood War pros have a lot to learn when coming into the StarCraft 2 engine, and they're fighting against players who are comfortable with all of SC2's nuances and mechanics.
Edit: Whoops, that was meant to be an edit and not a double post
I think the mod would have eclipsed traditional SC2 in popularity for at least a while if people could have just found it. Unbelievably the custom map stuff and social systems of battle.net are still classifiable broken in terms of useability.
IF YOU WANT TO PLAY — the following video will show you how in detail. You have to make a game under the 'Custom' tab then navigate to the 'Melee' tab and right-click create it with an 'Extension Mod'. From there you create the game with the 'SC Evo Complete' mod. If you want the BW maps you have to know their name and search for them, but you can put it on any conventional ladder map.
Its just tough for people to find it and get some games going without having to dip into some 35 channeled Discord labyrinth. It made the power and height of the fad a bit reduced but its still chugging along on its own merits.
I think the mod would have eclipsed traditional SC2 in popularity for at least a while if people could have just found it. Unbelievably the custom map stuff and social systems of battle.net are still classifiable broken in terms of useability.
IF YOU WANT TO PLAY — the following video will show you how in detail. You have to make a game under the 'Custom' tab then navigate to the 'Melee' tab and right-click create it with an 'Extension Mod'. From there you create the game with the 'SC Evo Complete' mod. If you want the BW maps you have to know their name and search for them, but you can put it on any conventional ladder map.
Its just tough for people to find it and get some games going without having to dip into some 35 channeled Discord labyrinth. It made the power and height of the fad a bit reduced but its still chugging along on its own merits.
I think it's a fun idea but trying to balance it I don't think makes sense if they attempt to. Right away in this video we see that it is using the Starcraft2 econ system, which is completely different. We also see each worker is getting 5 minerals per trip versus 8 in the original game. I'm sure gas is the same (8 per trip in Starcraft1), but there's only 1 geyser. Then there's also fundamental differences in that Starcraft1, units at a higher level than lower units reveal themselves and can be shot at, whereas in Starcraft2 vision is NOT revealed. Plus I think units with a height advantage only have a 75% chance to be hit in Starcraft1, I don't recall Starcraft2 bringing this forward. Plus huge differences in 2D vs 3D. For example, carriers are super strong in Starcraft1. Part of what makes them that strong is the huge swarm of interceptors makes it VERY difficult to single out each carrier. In 3D, it becomes a lot easier to target them because you don't have the overlap problem that the 2D game has.
I saw give balance a try. It might be impossible to 1:1 all of the BW units/mechanics because of the 2d->3d translation, but that's just a thing that has to be sacrificed. Getting it close enough will probably make most people happy enough.
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I saw give balance a try. It might be impossible to 1:1 all of the BW units/mechanics because of the 2d->3d translation, but that's just a thing that has to be sacrificed. Getting it close enough will probably make most people happy enough.
I bet you can get the BW clones close enough to each other, but trying to balance BW vs non-BW is a fool's game.
I'd say part of the success is how the lack of a matchmaker has made playing it and talking about it chaotic enough to mute some of the endless balance chatter. Balance discussions in the abandonment era of SC2 tend to be depraved and circuitous.
I just like seeing Goliaths walk around. I think StarCraft players should be wearing Hawaiian shirts and sweat pants at this point when they play but the general community needs some help to lighten up. Consider this a fruity drink in a gourd carved like a tiki head.
Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
edited July 16
We're a long way before the time where balance starts to matter, cos everyone is still figuring stuff out.
Look at how some of the fundamental, early balance changes in Wings of Liberty turned out to be completely unnecessary with the direction the game evolved. Things like the pylon radius nerf that were designed to make low-ground 4gate warpins weaker, and then they turned around and just made pylons not spread power to highground but never reverted the pylon radius.
This is just everyone figuring out what works. Actual imbalance will become more obvious in time.
EDIT: Also, I find this easier to get excitement from if, rather than thinking of the BW races as "the BW races ported to SC2" you think of it as "alternate races inspired by BW". They're different enough to SC2 counterparts that it really does feel like SC2 just straight up got 3 new races.
We're a long way before the time where balance starts to matter, cos everyone is still figuring stuff out.
Look at how some of the fundamental, early balance changes in Wings of Liberty turned out to be completely unnecessary with the direction the game evolved. Things like the pylon radius nerf that were designed to make low-ground 4gate warpins weaker, and then they turned around and just made pylons not spread power to highground but never reverted the pylon radius.
This is just everyone figuring out what works. Actual imbalance will become more obvious in time.
EDIT: Also, I find this easier to get excitement from if, rather than thinking of the BW races as "the BW races ported to SC2" you think of it as "alternate races inspired by BW". They're different enough to SC2 counterparts that it really does feel like SC2 just straight up got 3 new races.
in my opinion, Blizzard completely botched the handling of the balance in Starcraft2. Stop fucking around with the game. Get to a decent spot and then leave it alone, let people figure stuff out. Nope, they had to keep making changes. In general, pros usually hate constant changes because you keep nullifying the things that they have practiced, trained, and honed. It just boggled my mind how they repeatedly (and I think still do) kept making changes. Starcraft1 stopped getting balance changes after 2001, 3 years after the game was released. Strategies did eventually coalesce around a few, but that's what happens when people play the same game non-stop. You never know though when new things can be found. In Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, like 25 years after the game came out, people figured out how to do some crazy shit with T.Hawk.
If Microsoft was smart they’d start turning some blizzard titles into characetr action style blockbusters like god of war or uncharted or whatever, but I just don’t think they have any teams that can do that. Blizzard especially just doesn’t have a team that could pull it off without massive staff ups or spinning up a new studio
They couldn’t even get a single player overwatch done
the StarCraft 2 DLC about Nova probably contained whatever they had in the tank that was still relevant about that character and it was absolute trash
The opening cutscene of Nova: Covert Ops is her being held prisoner and her captors are like — "Okay Nova now test your invisibility suit for us!". Then she disappears and they are like 'Where'd she go????'. Narratively the whole thing has the tone of a midnight drive-in Starcraft exploitation movie.
I appreciate that these things maintain some cryptid-like mystique but the StarCraft lore bits of that project probably were made irrelevant by other story developments. While the game parts were some 00s era 3rd person shooter stuff which has likely long gotten out of style. I guess you can reframe the wish as 'maybe there should be a completely new AAA StarCraft FPS' and sure. I am surprised how little information that ever got out about Dustin Browder's secret StarCraft Battlefield game which was in development for like 2 years. You'd think at least something from that would be upcycled into StarCraft 2, like a unit or 3d model, or turning some storyline into a comic or whatever.
One thing they could do is well, Overwatch is trying to metaverse itself with consumer mashups such as these ones with Porsche and Transformers. So if Overwatch is a platform then a one-off group of single player missions with a Nova-skin of Widowmaker and some custom abilities could be a direction. Minecraft which operates as a mashup platform frequently did something parallel with a Megaman experience.
That was a mouthful but the idea would be if they are going to try to examine interest in these brands then a game would be best and even small games at Blizzard seems to still take a monumental time (see WarCraft Rumble). So this is the lightest commitment thing I could think of. To be honest if David Kim's Battle Aces would have been a StarCraft project it could have pitched itself more as a Gaiden/Side Quest in the genre rather than the 'paradigm shift' of where it needs to go. Imagine working backwards from that game to other modes with buildings and conventional StarCraft stuff.
I do think StarCraft may have became associated with Mike Morhaime as he often stood up for its relevancy and as he warred with management it could have bore some of that resentment long after his departure. With management finally changed and Microsoft coming in there have been hints of a reassessment of the game. Still its on shaky legs given that the departing maintenance team took a hammer to its innards in order to prop up their own shitty ripoff game's development. Angry Janitors!
redraptor on
0
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard for it's IP. That's why you acquire something like that.
Outside of Call of Duty, Activision proper doesn't have much in the way of memorable IP to make that massively expensive acquisition make sense.
Blizzard is sitting on three of the most beloved franchises in gaming history in Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo, so all three would absolutely would be in the conversation of 'what do we do with these IP to make some money'.
I still feel upset that we were cheated out of a stealth espionage game starring Nova. Those early screen shots looked amazing. Seeing the SC universe in that perspective was awesome.
Then the generic marine shooter trailer hit and all was lost...
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Honestly while I would love it if Microsoft did anything with blizzards IP, at this stage it feels like they bought activision for call of duty and candy crush, and blizzard was just a bonus, one that they don’t really seem interested in doing much with at all. I could see direct sequels to be clear, but I don’t think we’re getting anything crazy given how lean and specified blizzards teams seem to be
Some new vods for Winter to cast; everyone is still grappling with how SC: Evo is supposed to be played, including the casters. Rogue in game 1 is clearly a player who is still figuring out how to manipulate Brood-War-style zerg. Game quality is rapidly increasing, though, and it's a lot of fun to watch.
Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard for it's IP. That's why you acquire something like that.
Outside of Call of Duty, Activision proper doesn't have much in the way of memorable IP to make that massively expensive acquisition make sense.
Blizzard is sitting on three of the most beloved franchises in gaming history in Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo, so all three would absolutely would be in the conversation of 'what do we do with these IP to make some money'.
Buying beloved IP and doing nothing with it while actively preventing anyone who wants to do anything with it from being able to is kind of how the games industry works these days.
I like the classic Brood War Archon — naked blue guy in a floating immersion tank. Rather than the the SC2 Archon — armored giant zealot top with a lovely blue puffball prom dress on the bottom.
The main trick with modern day Blizzard making new games is that everything they do is live service now, so each of their games occupies a team of developers in perpetuity, unless they pull a HotS (RIP). So the studio needs to keep growing over time, or loan out the franchises to other studios. I guess they did just cancel their new franchise though.
I could totally see Microsoft push for some kind of "call of duty koprulu sector". Like one of the biggest complaints is that every CoD looks the same. So now they can just reskin it and slap the names on there and sell gangbusters.
Some new vods for Winter to cast; everyone is still grappling with how SC: Evo is supposed to be played, including the casters. Rogue in game 1 is clearly a player who is still figuring out how to manipulate Brood-War-style zerg. Game quality is rapidly increasing, though, and it's a lot of fun to watch.
this series of Battle Aces design blogs has been great if you like seeing RTS units being made some of the artists formerly of SC2 and Heroes of the Storm:
Their art director is MrJack who was probably the best SC2 concept artist. He seemed to really be the main voice in the visual design of the modern Zerg.
the beta went down for now and if there's anything I'd like to see its a plan for how they intend to develop in the future. Best guess would be units coming out in something like a Hearthstone season/expansion pack with each chunk of units having some new mechanics involved. As well there's some hints that they might expand the scope of the factions beyond purely robots to some alien forces with that Kraken unit used as an example of a wider universe. It'd be neat to see them deepen their commitment to that promise when they fully explain how the game will be developed.
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Edit: they've also started recreating modern BW ladder maps to SC2 for use with the mod; right now they have Polypoid and Retro playable, with tilesets that match really well.
then some modders make Brood War again and its better than all of that
Do... do the lurkers.... sound like the terrifying monsters from bw?
Even their attacks which slice through your soul with impunity? Or is the attack sound like the sc2 soft scratch of a baby turtle?
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
Oh, SC Evolution which is the hype is what Dover posted about a couple of weeks ago?
So there's a vod of pros trying it out? (At work so can't look rn)
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
General pattern of BW stuff being better at straight up brawls and SC2 stuff being more flexible.
Implementing BW builds is weird since you start with 12 workers and not 6. I don’t think anybody has calculated it but I think a 6 worker start BW Zerg vs SC2 Terran reaper rushing is an impossible matchup for the Zerg. 12 start may have made interfacing the two possible.
Yeah, Tasteless just posted vods of the third of these SC: Evo tournaments he's been hosting. A lot of other showmatches have been done as well, almost all in Korea. Winter has casted several vods, as well as Harstem and I think Grubby. Artosis even dipped his toe in playing some showmatches with his BW Terran builds, and came away feeling, well... it's Artosis.
Unfortunately, BW zerg seem to be struggling in a lot of matchups. BW zerglings are straight up better (their DPS is insane even without adrenal) but they build juuust slightly slower, and zerg's econ is pretty strict in the early game without injects. You have very little to answer early air harass with, as well. Spore colonies are great, but they eat a drone, and while hydras are cheaper, faster to produce, available earlier, and hyper supply efficient, they're physically weaker than modern hydras, and that means you need to spend even more larvae on them.
Again, though, balance is up in the air as far as I'm concerned. I've watched Brood War style hydra busts wreck SC2 protoss even with oracle harass, because of the aforementioned advantages they have. Even Brood War pros have a lot to learn when coming into the StarCraft 2 engine, and they're fighting against players who are comfortable with all of SC2's nuances and mechanics.
Edit: Whoops, that was meant to be an edit and not a double post
IF YOU WANT TO PLAY — the following video will show you how in detail. You have to make a game under the 'Custom' tab then navigate to the 'Melee' tab and right-click create it with an 'Extension Mod'. From there you create the game with the 'SC Evo Complete' mod. If you want the BW maps you have to know their name and search for them, but you can put it on any conventional ladder map.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMchkhLTKrc
Its just tough for people to find it and get some games going without having to dip into some 35 channeled Discord labyrinth. It made the power and height of the fad a bit reduced but its still chugging along on its own merits.
Plus, the wife will also benefit 😉... as long as I remember my stim (iboprufin) pack!
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
I think it's a fun idea but trying to balance it I don't think makes sense if they attempt to. Right away in this video we see that it is using the Starcraft2 econ system, which is completely different. We also see each worker is getting 5 minerals per trip versus 8 in the original game. I'm sure gas is the same (8 per trip in Starcraft1), but there's only 1 geyser. Then there's also fundamental differences in that Starcraft1, units at a higher level than lower units reveal themselves and can be shot at, whereas in Starcraft2 vision is NOT revealed. Plus I think units with a height advantage only have a 75% chance to be hit in Starcraft1, I don't recall Starcraft2 bringing this forward. Plus huge differences in 2D vs 3D. For example, carriers are super strong in Starcraft1. Part of what makes them that strong is the huge swarm of interceptors makes it VERY difficult to single out each carrier. In 3D, it becomes a lot easier to target them because you don't have the overlap problem that the 2D game has.
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Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
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I bet you can get the BW clones close enough to each other, but trying to balance BW vs non-BW is a fool's game.
I just like seeing Goliaths walk around. I think StarCraft players should be wearing Hawaiian shirts and sweat pants at this point when they play but the general community needs some help to lighten up. Consider this a fruity drink in a gourd carved like a tiki head.
It's to have fun and rejoice in the golden age of starcraft.
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
Look at how some of the fundamental, early balance changes in Wings of Liberty turned out to be completely unnecessary with the direction the game evolved. Things like the pylon radius nerf that were designed to make low-ground 4gate warpins weaker, and then they turned around and just made pylons not spread power to highground but never reverted the pylon radius.
This is just everyone figuring out what works. Actual imbalance will become more obvious in time.
EDIT: Also, I find this easier to get excitement from if, rather than thinking of the BW races as "the BW races ported to SC2" you think of it as "alternate races inspired by BW". They're different enough to SC2 counterparts that it really does feel like SC2 just straight up got 3 new races.
in my opinion, Blizzard completely botched the handling of the balance in Starcraft2. Stop fucking around with the game. Get to a decent spot and then leave it alone, let people figure stuff out. Nope, they had to keep making changes. In general, pros usually hate constant changes because you keep nullifying the things that they have practiced, trained, and honed. It just boggled my mind how they repeatedly (and I think still do) kept making changes. Starcraft1 stopped getting balance changes after 2001, 3 years after the game was released. Strategies did eventually coalesce around a few, but that's what happens when people play the same game non-stop. You never know though when new things can be found. In Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, like 25 years after the game came out, people figured out how to do some crazy shit with T.Hawk.
^^'
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
They couldn’t even get a single player overwatch done
The opening cutscene of Nova: Covert Ops is her being held prisoner and her captors are like — "Okay Nova now test your invisibility suit for us!". Then she disappears and they are like 'Where'd she go????'. Narratively the whole thing has the tone of a midnight drive-in Starcraft exploitation movie.
I appreciate that these things maintain some cryptid-like mystique but the StarCraft lore bits of that project probably were made irrelevant by other story developments. While the game parts were some 00s era 3rd person shooter stuff which has likely long gotten out of style. I guess you can reframe the wish as 'maybe there should be a completely new AAA StarCraft FPS' and sure. I am surprised how little information that ever got out about Dustin Browder's secret StarCraft Battlefield game which was in development for like 2 years. You'd think at least something from that would be upcycled into StarCraft 2, like a unit or 3d model, or turning some storyline into a comic or whatever.
One thing they could do is well, Overwatch is trying to metaverse itself with consumer mashups such as these ones with Porsche and Transformers. So if Overwatch is a platform then a one-off group of single player missions with a Nova-skin of Widowmaker and some custom abilities could be a direction. Minecraft which operates as a mashup platform frequently did something parallel with a Megaman experience.
That was a mouthful but the idea would be if they are going to try to examine interest in these brands then a game would be best and even small games at Blizzard seems to still take a monumental time (see WarCraft Rumble). So this is the lightest commitment thing I could think of. To be honest if David Kim's Battle Aces would have been a StarCraft project it could have pitched itself more as a Gaiden/Side Quest in the genre rather than the 'paradigm shift' of where it needs to go. Imagine working backwards from that game to other modes with buildings and conventional StarCraft stuff.
I do think StarCraft may have became associated with Mike Morhaime as he often stood up for its relevancy and as he warred with management it could have bore some of that resentment long after his departure. With management finally changed and Microsoft coming in there have been hints of a reassessment of the game. Still its on shaky legs given that the departing maintenance team took a hammer to its innards in order to prop up their own shitty ripoff game's development. Angry Janitors!
Outside of Call of Duty, Activision proper doesn't have much in the way of memorable IP to make that massively expensive acquisition make sense.
Blizzard is sitting on three of the most beloved franchises in gaming history in Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo, so all three would absolutely would be in the conversation of 'what do we do with these IP to make some money'.
Then the generic marine shooter trailer hit and all was lost...
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9W8n5TjZeY
Buying beloved IP and doing nothing with it while actively preventing anyone who wants to do anything with it from being able to is kind of how the games industry works these days.
The main trick with modern day Blizzard making new games is that everything they do is live service now, so each of their games occupies a team of developers in perpetuity, unless they pull a HotS (RIP). So the studio needs to keep growing over time, or loan out the franchises to other studios. I guess they did just cancel their new franchise though.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
Stephen Curry?! what the heck, haha
There was a TvT or TvP that was just so dumb and great.
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
Concept Designing the Bulwark
Battle Aces Environment
Art Spotlight on the Kraken
The First Game Units
Their art director is MrJack who was probably the best SC2 concept artist. He seemed to really be the main voice in the visual design of the modern Zerg.
the beta went down for now and if there's anything I'd like to see its a plan for how they intend to develop in the future. Best guess would be units coming out in something like a Hearthstone season/expansion pack with each chunk of units having some new mechanics involved. As well there's some hints that they might expand the scope of the factions beyond purely robots to some alien forces with that Kraken unit used as an example of a wider universe. It'd be neat to see them deepen their commitment to that promise when they fully explain how the game will be developed.