Starcraft 2 Announced!

[A Black Falcon]

All this time I thought they were announcing Lost Vikings 3...

I wouldn't have minded seeing that, actually... :)

Lost Vikings 1 was the first Blizzard game I owned. Great game.

As is standard for Blizzard ever since Warcraft, it's going to be PC only.

Technically Warcraft II and its expansion, Starcraft and Brood War, and Diablo I have console ports... none of them were particularly good though, and after SC64 Blizz pretty much said "never again" for very good reasons. This won't be on consoles, thankfully.

It seems from their FAQ that the races will be "even more different" from each other. Either they really are just doing an incremental update, or they just don't want to tip their hand. Blizzard can be almost Nintendo-like in their secrecy, that's for sure, and Rare-like in their time between games and delays.

I'm interested in what sort of additions they are planning for Battle.net. Considering how good the system was in WC3, it'll take some doing to add more. My guess is they'll be taking some pages from XBox Live's system and adding a lot that way. One thing they could do in that regard would require a patch for ALL their other online games that allows a shared friend list across all Blizzard's games and the ability to see exactly the status of all your friends, like "Playing Warcraft 3" and the ability to invite them to Starcraft 2 from there. Really the big missing component though? Live voice chat built into the experience.

Aside from the "shared interface features" Xbox Live basically DOMINATES in, they could take the time to completely rip off all those interface options in Halo 3's Beta.

There's also the matter of improving the game's interface even further from Warcraft 3. For example, in creating units, due to the sheer numbers I've seen in those pictures, instead of queing up just one at a time, toss a slider bar in there to just say "build exacltly this many" or maybe even a "built this unit until I say stop" option. I wanted this patched into WC3, but the use of the scroll wheel to scroll back and forth through "sub groups" in a selected group would be much appreciated for speed's sake.

I agree. I kind of get the feeling that they're trying to make it play like "SC with more stuff" because of how popular the first game is in Korea, but they really should go beyond that and truly change things, like they did between each Warcraft game. Those two gameplay videos look great, but it looks so much like the first game, design-wise, just with more features and units... I don't know. What's there in those videos looks awesome, as do the graphics. But...

Well, it is really early. Anyhing could change, it's not like anything is set yet... the first version of SC Blizz showed, after all, was running in the Warcraft II engine... :)

Anyway, lazy you should pick up either Starcraft or Warcraft 3. I'd lean towards the latter as it's got pretty much everything in the online part done right, but maybe you'll want some background story. Blizzard's instruction manuals are traditionally only part instructions and mostly MASSIVE TOME OF STORYLINE.

Starcraft has better single player, Warcraft III better multiplayer, but both are great on both fronts... you're quite right about the manuals, though. :)