I'm not sure I agree with you on that point - I own TA, and my friends and I played it, well, sparingly. TA was fun for a short while, and it was a good game, but I would hardly claim it's the best game of the decade.



Once again, I don't agree with this. Perhaps to you they are the best two games of the past decade +1, but I would like to see some evidence.

The best games are games that innovate, but still manage to provide a solid gaming experience. I agree with the poster who stated that innovation doesn't count for much if the game isn't fun. Games with little 'new' features can still be fun if they are polished and play well. However, they can get a little dull after some time.

Really, new features in games make them fresh and exciting, and are absolutely neccessary to keep a genre alive. However, developers must find the fine balance between innovation and good gameplay. A game may be totally original, but if it's completely foreign, people usually won't enjoy it. Then again, if a game uses the same old conventions, but pulls them off seamlessly, then it usually will have some longevity because it will be fun. Unfortunately, then it seems to come down to which developer has the most funds to make it look better and can take time to 'polish' it. I played Starcraft for years with my friends, and we also played a bit of Warcraft 2 and 3. I enjoyed all these games, but Warcraft became a little tiring after a while.

Why?

The problem was that when playing against my friends, I could effectively use similar strategies over and over again to win. I was the fastest with a mouse, and knew the shortcuts better than everyone else. Therefore, I always won. Now, I realize that Warcraft has far more depth than this, and that playing online would present other new ways of playing, but the pattern would be the same. You learn a few more strategies, then you execute them. If you can micromanage better, you usually win. Besides, the real 'magic' of a game came out when my friends and I would get together and play. The internet always felt like an advanced AI player to me, and winning usually gave me very little satisfaction. I know that isn't true for everyone though.

As great as Sins is, it doesn't do anything terribly new, but the way it presents it's features is innovative. I would like to see a little more depth, and more methods to win other than total conquest, but as a whole, Sins is greater than the sum of its parts. Sins provides solid gameplay, while presenting RTS conventions in a new manner. Also, the focus has been shifted from micromanagement to macromanagment for the most part, and this is refreshing for those who don't click as fast as others. I can't wait for the expansion, as I hope to see greater depth in Sins, and that Ironclad continues to innovate in its developments.

I am with those who are taking the wait and see look but in my personal I dont see BLIZZARD making any big changes in SC2 game play. It will be the same old thing gather completed mission move the story ahead. Which I don't mind a little but I am hoping for some real design changes in the game like "World in Conflict"." That will make you ADD people happy.
You can change the name or type of a game but WarCraft and StarCraft 1 thru 3 were all the same with a continued story. ;p
I dont need simple I dont have ADD as I wrote before I was looking for something with a lot of depth and Sins works for me "I have battles, politics, "pay-for-hire hit men", Insurgencies, management Oh yes this is a very deep game. :CONGRAT:
If it keeps crashing "UPGRADE THAT CHEEP PC" :SNIFF!:
I would like to see a Single player campaign up to the stopping of the Varsari and Advent.

The next gen RTS will be Dawn of War 2. It's about the only upcoming RTS that appears to shift the genre in a different direction.

However true future will be some form of no base building on combat maps, focus on smaller amounts of units with better independent AI, persistent campaigns where your army and your success has an impact on future battles and territory you fight over, that's where the future is.

The whole resource gathering is a legacy component from the days of the early RTS and it needs to go. Instead a requisition / territory control system would do better.

Ok ive tried to keep my mouth shut and watch this debate happen. Admittedly some of you have very good points to make but, i am siding with Wyvern because he has looked at this from a non sins fanatic perspective. but honestly what is there left for you to do in an RTS game that has not been done before. I played total annihilation and i must say the gameplay was awesome and the fact that there were the different unit types such as air water and land was unique for its time. starcraft also had its own innovation in that it had three distinct unique races to choose from, and to those who say the campaign was crap, name one RTS made between 1990 and 2000 that did not have the same types of missions I know TA did and age of empires and warcraft one and two, and command and conquer shall i go on.

now even since the start of the millennium i have yet to see a game that did not require you to start from your base build an army/fleet and take over and destroy the enemy's army/fleet and base even in sins you must still do that. oh and the 3d combat found in sins means shit when it comes to the actual tactics and strategy used to play the game since you cannot command the ships on the vertical axis. basically the 3d is in this game to make it look pretty when you look in on the battle.

and once again i must stress the point that warcraft 3 was not developed by the same team that has been working on starcraft 2, should we not have bought the call of duty four game because call of duty 3 sucked due to it being made by a different team. no we should not. infact the very fact that starcraft takes place on a map with terrain and obtacles changes the gameplay required from map to map where as in sins we only have to worry about how many planets away he is since you have to destroy all of the opposing forces planets in order to obtain victory.

The original poster has made my point clear: STARCRAFT (I and II) IS OVER RATED.

As for Blizzard making no new changes to Starcraft: Can you blame them? Based on what I've read (and know), these games are unimaginiative. Three factions? Been there, done that. (No harm to Sins.)

Starcraft II being a major disappoint? DUH! They're terrified of making changes that will disrupt "Starcraft" feel. That "feel" being just about every single RTS out there.

Blizzard could have been imaginative, and added another faction. But no! We have to make the same game over again, and delay it! Blizzard is too worried about the $4 a day Koreans that worship their games to be "disappointed". People I know have been to South Korea. Yeah, Starcraft is big there. Other games are getting popular there, too.

A few more things. Blizzard is popular for no good reason these days. They continue to dwell on the fact that they made one good game a long time ago. Now they rely on South Korea, which is obsessed, and the fan-boy gushing of PC Gamer and the other game mags. If it weren't for them, Blizzard would not be a prominient developer.

I'm also betting money that when another really good game comes to South Korea, the people there will toss StarCraft out the window, and play the new game.

Etrius

i dont call a comp that runs crisis on full cheap so if it isnt me who is it?

A lot of very bitter people here. I sense a lot of people actually resent SC because it completely overshadowed their personal favourite RTS games.

Seriously, if SC isn't your cup of tea, that's fine. However, to say it has little strategy is like saying sins is pure micro. SC wasn't originally designed with hard core micro (to the level of the Koreans) in mind. However, at some point, there will be a limit to the amount of strategies you can use. What separates great players from good players at that point is their ability to micro.

If you've seen the trailers and read the features of the game, it's blatantly obvious that it will be a step forward for SC. They're not radically changing the gameplay as they did with WC2 -> WC3 with the introduction of heroes and low unit counts. They're keeping the same core gameplay that made SC so popular and "levelling it up". SC will sell well not just from hype, but because it will be a good game.

Lastly, WOW didn't become the biggest MMO in history because it's Blizz that's making it. It's because it's honestly the best mainstream catering MMORPG out there right now. It destroyed its competition by being *better* than them and not because it's warcraft IP and it came from Blizzard. Take off your jaded glasses and see it for what it is.

We already did, my friend, and if you lift the veil from your face, you'll see that WOW isn't very good. Once again, Blizzard depended on extreme hype, inflated reviews, and the "I'm better than you for no reason" attitude. Thanks to that, many people have fairly bad lives playing something that is very unentertaining. Same for Starcraft. I'd rather people check out other strategy games that have scored high reviews, or even look into whole new genres.

One more thing. If any game series were to be deserving of a Uwe Boll movie adaptation, it would be StarCraft or WarCraft.

Etrius

No it isn't!



You're wrong, that "feel" IS Starcraft, I've tried a lot of RTS and Starcraft is Starcraft. In Starcraft every low tech unit counts; you produce zealots/marines/zerglings even when you have the tech to produce tanks, goliaths, dragoons, ultralisks and whatever you want to use AND they serve for more than a cannon fodder. Unlike Supreme Commander where you get the higher tech and forget for the lower tech army. In Starcraft, not only there are 3 unique races, every race have more than 10 unique units; and when i say unique, I mean that this:

In tier 1 you have:
Zealot: 100 minerals, 160hp, 16dmg.
in tier 2 you don't get another unit like
XXX: 150 minerals, 250hp, 25dmg.
and in tier 3 you don't get another unit like
YYY: 200 minerals, 350hp, 35dmg.

when I look at the above, many, many games come to my mind. And they are not good games...



What new game?
Maybe you're right, but for the last 10 years, they're not playing so much Red Alert 2, Dawn of War, C&C3, Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes or whatever is on your mind...

Greatest RTS of the past decade? You're right, I doubt that SC2 will be any competition for Rise of Nations. Still, it's worth at least playing the demo to see what they've done with it. Starcraft was fun enough for its era.

Speaking of Uwe Boll and WarCraft:

WWW Link

But no, WoW isn't so popular because it crushed all the competition alone. It did a lot of things better than the other MMOs, and as MMOs go it's pretty good if you have a nice group of people to play with. But a lot of the lure was translating the Warcraft universe into an MMO. Most people I've gotten to know during my time in WoW have never played MMOs before, they signed up because it was Warcraft

Maybe you should check out Ground Control 1 and 2 and World in Conflict? No base building there. And you don't win by destroying enemy forces (even though it obviously helps), but by holding important positions on the map.



Yes you can. Just assign a key for it in your settings and you're ready to go.

Cheers!

I can understand that people have different opinions on whether a game is good or not. However, I strongly object to the people who seem to think that people keep playing a game because of its hype. If a game sells well, and people continue to play the game for years, they aren't playing it because of the hype. Trust me.

I've bought and played games that were hyped up, but if they weren't fun, I stopped playing them. I can only believe that other people would do the same, since people aren't morons (for the most part). Assuming people will continue to play a game that they don't find fun, just because it was hyped up, is a wildly ridiculous notion. I think people deserve a little more credit than that.

If you didn't like Starcraft, then don't play it. If you didn't like Starcraft, you probably shouldn't buy Starcraft II. If you enjoyed Starcraft, and other Blizzard titles, then Starcraft II would probably be a wise purchase. If it isn't fun, people won't play it. If it is, then people will play it. Don't think people are so stupid that they'll play a game they don't find fun just because it was made by a certain developer or got good reviews. Please.

I'm joining with the TA heads. Honestly I found Starcraft to be unplayable after spending time in TA. I couldn't even get past the Terran campaign, even though I really enjoyed the story.

My personal Starcraft experience ended on the Terran scenario where you had to build air transports to cross the chasm to get to his base. I built 3 transports and loaded them up. I send all three transport over and unload on his side. His base defenses started firing on my units. My units are TOO STUPID to fire back or get out of the way. By the time my 3rd transport unloaded, half my units were already dead! I regrouped and rebuilt. Same thing happened again at which point the map ran out of resources. I put the game down and never played Starcraft again. I went back to TA where my Fido can run away from a unit and his turret will rotate backwards and shoot at his pursuer. And no, I'm not a n00b, I could have figured out how to micromanage those units...I just didn't *want* to. Not when most other games on the market at the time where already going towards 3D units that could move and shoot at the same time.

Starcraft units couldn't move and shoot at the same time remember? They didn't react to getting shot at. They pathed terribly. You can only put 9 units in a group, unless you were Zerg. Factories didn't queue beyond 5. No unit formations. The unit balance was terrible. I mean, the game was years behind the state of the art at the time. Maybe it improved after patches? I loved the story though, in fact I'm the dork that bought the Starcraft DVD. I agree with the poster above who said that back in 1998 the market was probably 90% solo play. The campaign, if you could stomach the gameplay, was fantastic from a story telling point of view.

Blizzard games have certain polish, style, and story element that gets you involved. Starcraft was reheated 5 year old goods, but probably dressed as well as it could possibly be. Blizzard devs were quoted in interviews saying that they realized the game engine itself was years of out date, so rather than go through another re-write they polished the other aspects of the game as well as they could. History shows that they made a good decision. But I still find the game unplayable and I won't be buying Starcraft 2.

Personally, I will buy it if I can pause during gameplay and micromanage when I choose for single player. I would more than likely play SP most of the time. I thought that was what missing from Warcraft 3, and it seems common enough these days, most
RTS games have this feature now..

Once again; Starcraft will (and would have) died if it wasn't for the huge modding community. Much like oblivion.

Let me fix that for you: a bunch of people form many spheres of gaming will migrate over to a shiny new game made by a popular developer. Then all of us will get tired of it and move on to other things.

The thing with Starcaft II is that it will not bring any new innovations into the RTS genre. It will be the same crap: conquer a tiny bit of 120 X 120 tile with some units that you tediously micromanaged. It will be a game that will be dominated by mass dirt farming, 7+ unit constructing structures continuously pumping out units, and "Actions Per Minute," much like it's predecessor.

Sins set a different pace by combining elements of both RTS and 4X genres, with empire building, exploration and colonization, in addition to the battles. All at a pace I can manage.

I guess the real difference for me is that I enjoy Sins. I can actually sit back, watch things unfold and take action. For those of us who can't compete with a sweaty Korean kid hopped up on Mountain Dew, Sins is an island of quality in the murky swamp of RTS gaming.

My biggest complaint with SC2 is that they're basing it around the necessity of micro, rather than making better use of autocast (existing for some abilities in WC3). Autocast should be available for (almost) all abilities, rather than require the microing of those abilities. Leave the option of micro available for those that want it, but include Zoom and autocast for those that are more interested in strategy!

I believe the reason why they aren't including "auto-cast" abilities is precisely because of the aforementioned sweaty Asian demographic. In order to make the game artificially harder and appeal to the pro gaming community, these newer innovations won't be included.

Wait; sc2 won't have any support for auto-cast abilities? Or will it be similar to heroes where melee won't have them, but you can mod them into the game?

I never finished the terran campaign in starcrap either.

It's a terrible game people, sorry. The graphics were as bad as red alerts were, which were just cnc's repackaged. The UI was even more archaic and irritating than previous games. A small scale tactical UI for a large scale strategy game, retarded. It would have made more sense for a party based rpg than an rts. The resource system was only chalked up as some huge advance just because Westwood was still stuck on one, the game impact of it was nil because the method of collecting them was as retarded as it gets, assign massive numbers of drones to harvesting them. The story, so original. Alien monsters start attacking outlying worlds... Where have I heard that before? But they used cgi cutscenes!

The "imaginative" races that they stole from games workshop, almost without modification, were the high point of the actual game itself. Now if only you didn't get carpel tunnel syndrome playing it.

Starcrap is like vhs. It's utter shit, inferior in every way to a vastly superior competitor, but it has much better advertising and gains mass appeal, suffocating the competition. Betamax was a superior method of storing and replaying video, but you could sell more vhs copies to all the tards that bought what was advertised the best. When you try to get a game of starcrap going, you start your room, people join in seconds, and you play. When you try to get a game of TA going, or any of the myriad of vastly superior games, you sit. It can take days to get a game for some of them, simply because there isn't anyone playing them. Sure, they're actually fun to play, but who has time to wait two hours for someone to pop into the lobby?

I don't like WOW at all. I find it a boring game. However, from a design point of view, it's a great game. It's well designed, well balanced (when considering the scale), and there's lots to do for everyone. It's just not my kind of game.

I'm sorry to say that I have read very few objective and intelligent posts that criticize SC or WOW. Almost every post on this thread that's against SC can basically be summed up as "SC/WOW sucks because I hate it! That's why it sucks!"

If you don't like micro or if plainly suck at SC, don't bash it on those grounds alone. A game doesn't "suck" when YOU don't enjoy it. It sucks when it has design flaws, technical issues, crippling imbalance, etc. SC/WOW don't really have any of these, therefore they do not suck.

I may sound like a Blizzard fanboy, but I work for their competitor. However, I'm still at least sensible enough to recognize polish, refinement, and brilliance when I see it.

Ok i am deffinately not a fanboy of blizzard's either. I hate WOW and the entire image it has created for the Warcraft franchise. they took a deep involved story diluted it altered it and chopped it into tiny pieces for mass distribution. Diablo one and two were great, and should have been the basis for the "defense of the ancients" gameplay found in Warcraft 3 separate from the RTS aspect entirely. But once again this is not starcraft.

Starcraft was not stolen from games workshop it was acquired because the team behind it was being dissolved. The micromanaging was used in most games made at the time because of computer limits but when you get good at it you simply have an easier to control army. So what if the resources at the time were harvested by mass numbers of drones, which by the way take away from your command ability. Command and conquer still uses the exact same method to gather resources plus the drones were an easy way for you to increase your income rates. is sins any different when you put multiple refineries or tradeports on a planet. at least the drones could be used as last resort defensive units and as construction units plus get this when one of them dies you can build a new one what a fucking concept bet you didnt think of that did you stardock.

also the pathfinding in starcraft is no worse than it is in sins. since there seems to be a problem with ships randomly phase jumping to who the hell knows where and you get a report of your brand new capital ship dying on a planet half way across the galaxy from your factory. in fact the units did not go anywhere unless you told them except to engage enemies within a certain radius.

one more gripe i have with the people talking about the heroes and unit cap on warcraft 3 need to take a look at this game you have very costly in both command and resource ships that level up and gain experince as you use them. to me it sounds alot like the heroes from WC3

being a fan of SC, WC, Dawn of War, TA, C&C, Age of empires, total war, and sins. i must say that this thread is nothing more than a display of ignorance from the stardock fanboys.

I didn't see Sins or Stardock as the focus of this thread...

fanboys will be fanboys

Sins fanboys and SC2 fanboys will always disagree even though they both games have many many things in common that make them great games.

However I'm glad devs for Sins are continuing to develop the game.