Oh man, I'm super ready for this. A few weeks back I put together a new gaming PC, and now I can't contain my excitement for 4K StarCraft goodness.
For a few years I followed SC2's e-sports scene, but my interest slowly died out. With this new release, just imagining all the possibilities is getting me really hyped. I'm gonna call it now and say that it's a given that we'll get a few tournaments with all the big StarCraft names.
And it'll be a blast to re-play a bunch of those older UMS (Use Map Settings) games. I remember spending countless hours playing custom games. It was my first introduction to tower defense games, stacking hundreds of cannons and hoping you'd make it past one more level. And the countless challenge survival maps which required you to pull off exploits and glitches to reach the next part. Probably a bit silly, but one of the maps I remember best is Dragon Ball Z RPG. Even if they don't quite stand the test of time, getting to replay them just for nostalgia will be fun.
The game has aged beautifully, thanks to great continuous patching by Blizz, keeping the game running on modern OS's without finicky behaviour. This 4K remaster in my opinion is purely icing on the BW cake rather than a burning desire of the community. From a business perspective, I think Blizzard is hoping the BW eSports scene can become more international , vibrant, and bring in some active revenue for being a much-loved game.
> For a few years I followed SC2's e-sports scene, but my interest slowly died out.
if it's any consolation your interest died with the game. :(
still one of the greatest games of all time. just always had a hard time finding traction in the west where players and fans seem to prefer games like Dota/CS. i'm not sure why exactly.
I'm glad you brought up UMS maps. They were my favorite part of SC and BW also, and I hope to see a lot of other people playing them in SC Remastered.
I've uploaded my old custom map folder left dormant for years, that includes all the maps you mention. Tower defense, glitch maps (I hope the old glitches will still work!), and dragon ball Z maps. Here: https://mega.nz/#!yE9jTZYS!EegEFOhl0uycGxChVwwlJS-zrAXcAGBmC...
When I played a lot of these custom maps couldn't be opened in the map editor even though they were playable, the authors would corrupt the file somehow. Was that problem ever solved?
I just watched the GSL finals that happened a few hours ago, for the first time in a few years, and it was thrilling. RTS is the only genre of game that makes a great spectator sport to me, and I hope Remastered brings the whole RTS scene together again.
For me, it's definitely CS:GO. It's also probably the best game for non-gamers to watch competitively. You can explain the game to virtually anyone in 5 minutes, and it's easy for a beginner to see and appreciate when true skill is on display (kills, aim, coordination, etc.). A truly entertaining game to watch imo.
Did you ever play Defend the Temple scenario? Spent soo many hours on that one and I havent found anything close in new games. Really hope this gets released on time and someone makes a new DtT.
Interesting, I am not sure if I agree with the 4K decision or not, since lately I have been playing a lot of C&C RedAlert through http://www.openra.net/, and I kind of like the pixelated graphics, but I understand it is not for everyone.
OpenRA is an open source re-implementation with newer controls, so for an example you can use middle-click for dragging the camera, they also introduced a widescreen mode, and support for modern screen resolutions.
I then tried to play the original, and it felt really rough, almost unplayable.
I'm hoping this attracts more attention to building Starcraft AIs to solve games. (http://www.starcraftai.com/wiki/Main_Page as a springboard) It's a unique problem with respect to not having a fixed number of unique game states; which grow exponentially over time. From anecdotal experience in watching technologies evolve in my lifetime, some of the greatest leaps in computing research (hw+sw) have been covariated with solving algorithmic problems, with the latest being the use of neural nets to beat the very best humans at Go. Excited to see if an official API would be written to allow greater programmatic control for hobbyists!
For those interested, here's how to get a simple bot running in 30 minutes or less. Click the Twitch link to see the end goal and see how good/not-so-good various bots are today.
Watch StarCraft Broodwar bots live on Twitch now (runs 24x7 showing newly uploaded bots, commentary on Sunday afternoons): https://www.twitch.tv/sscait
I dabbled with SC bots back in late 90's and early 2000's. The game isn't very open-ended. The "board", so-to-speak, is constrained by trade-offs such as resource gathering, "unit tiers", "unit counters", "current meta" and map designs that reduce the number of things you can do at any given minute.
So much so that I think the 300-400 APM we see consistently being pumped out by the top players isn't the human limit, it's the actual game limit. In which case I would consider the game solved.
My first question is what will they change with regards to UI and pathfinding? The original SC is very finicky by today's standards which means it'll be tough to get anyone interested for reasons other than nostalgia. But the particulars of strategy and tactics are strongly influenced by things like the maximum army size selection, the frankly bizarre path finding, etc. So making any change will alienate long term fans.
The article suggests they aim to make this version pretty much bug-for-bug-compatible, to retain the original feel of the game (and original strategies, which often took game's idiosyncrasies into account).
Whoops, I actually didn't read most of the article, you're right! I went straight to starcraft.com, which has much less information (but pretty visuals).
The press release says "gameplay and balance have been precisely preserved". If that doesn't include the pathfinding algorithms, complete with bugs, I don't know what would.
It would be nice to have a post or two from Blizzard employees to see what went into this effort. I would assume most of Starcraft was written in C++, and that performing this kind of an upgrade without impacting other aspects could be non-trivial.
Why wouldn't they be able to pretty much just reuse all of the old engine code, if this is just a graphical update? Changing the graphics without changing the rest of the game should be fairly straightforward as long as it was written reasonably.
what you call a bug others call a feature. BW players invested a lot of time learning to manage their units to take advantage of those bugs/features. Starcraft solves most of those issues.
hopefully nothing changes. lots of players based their technique around those bugs. having it behave "correctly" would make it a pretty different game.
There is a great deal of old classic games that could be remastered. I wonder sometimes if the companies that developed them, if not defunct or totally convoluted legally, understand the goldmines they are sitting on.
AoE 2 HD is not even really "remastered", just updated to run on modern hardware. It still uses the same assets, so everything will look incredibly small when you run it at 4K.
Given the job descriptions which Blizzard had out for a while before this release, I think it's Diablo 1 & 2 which are more likely to find themselves remastered next.
> The gameplay balance and idiosyncrasies have been painstakingly preserved from the original game. Mutalisk stacking, magic-boxing, unit pathfinding, control-group limitations, and more will all remain intact, allowing veteran players to enjoy playing and watching high-level competitive matches as before.
I get that esports are serious business by now, but are we really at a point where we have to stay bug-compatible with old releases?
You do realize that Street Fighter 2 "super canceling" was a bug, which has been painfully recreated in virtually every future 2d Fighting Game, right?
Within a gaming community, bugs can often become features.
Mutalisk Stacking is an important strategy for Zerg players, and requires the Magic Box to work. So... yeah. Unless you want to completely screw high-level Zerg players over... you have to recreate Mutalisk Stacking and Magic Boxing. Its part of the balance of high-level play.
Some bugs, like animation cancelling, turned out to make the games why more technical and challenging. It would dumb the game down to take it out. It's not a bug anymore, it's a feature.
Its not so much a "glitch" but an idiosyncracy. There's a special magic box "size" that you eventually learn in Starcraft. When all the units are "inside" of the Magic Box, they will move as a group, synchronously.
However, if even just one unit is "outide" of the Magic Box, they will all move individually.
The technique of "Mutalisk Stacking" involves burrowing a Zergling, and then making a group of 11 Mutalisks + 1 Zergling as a group. The burrowed Zergling is always outside of the box, and therefore the Mutalisks will "stack" on top of each other (moving as if they were individuals). You control them perfectly synchronized.
Because the Mutalisks are all flying units, they'll "stack" together.
Here's an example video of JaeDong's expert Mutalisk Stacking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4ipBj1sO3M . Notice how the Marines instantly die before the Medics can heal them... but the intense focus-fire and micro ability of JaeDong allows the Mutalisks to instantly KO Marines.
-----------
In contrast, the Protoss player would use the Magic Box to perform Dragoon Dancing instead. In this case, the Protoss player wants to keep the Dragoons all together inside of the Magic Box (while the Zerg Example above was the opposite). You want your Dragoons to stay in formation during a Dragoon dance, which requires them to be "inside" the magic box.
Because the Dragoons are grounded units, they'll bump into each other as the AI pathfinding gets confused.
In contrast, look at how Reach uses these Dragoons. They are perfectly synchronized, because of the "opposite" effect of the Magic Box.
I don't know if concept exists in SC but in dota 2 (dota and warcraft 3), casting a spell, making an attack has a "backswing" animation that does nothing. if you give a new order, you can cancel this animation and go to next order. For example attacking and ordering moving towards as soon as projectile is launched. It does not make you attack faster but it lets you to move and attack at the same time.
Many of the top competitive games are good by accident, brood war is a classic example. Yes, it should stay bug-compatible, otherwise they can call it starcraft 3.
StarCraft was a great game but what I never liked was the fact that terrans were incredibly hard to counter.
Terrans had 75 minerals missile turrets, 75 minerals vultures that come with 3 mines, far reaching siege tanks, comsat, flying buildings for vision, medics that could heal each other, medics could blind detectors, ghosts could take away energy and protoss shield with EMP, and the science vessel could be very abusive as well (irradiate ability)...
A lot of those things got balanced for StarCraft II: medics were replaced by medivacs that cannot heal each other, EMP only takes 100 shield rather than all and area is smaller, turrets are more expensive. Some tricks got replaced by new ones, like using seeker missile on friendly units which seems like a bug to me.
The fact that you cannot lower supply depots will be particularly annoying to people that got used to StarCraft II supply depots.
The game is widely considered to be well-balanced, which is in part why the game has prospered on a professional level for so long. From what you've listed, Vultures are the only problematic unit (they're the most cost-efficient unit in the game and it plays an important role in every matchup).
If you're curious: Turrets struggle against small units due to their attack type, leaving Terran highly vulnerable against small, mobile Mutalisks in the mid-game. Siege tanks are gas-intensive and immobile in siege mode. Flying buildings' advantage is negligible (Zerg have flying supply depots for that matter). Medics play a very limited role in competitive play: Medic/Marine is sub-optimal against Protoss and Terran, and lately we've found that it doesn't scale well late-game against Zerg too (I find it fascinating that the meta changes dramatically even to this day)! Their blind skill has been used in professional play maybe twice in 15 years. I assume you mean Science Vessels, not Ghosts, can EMP - SVs are gas-intensive, slow, and squishy, but unfortunately are Terran's only effective high-tech unit (Ghosts are expensive and difficult to use well, Battlecruisers are expensive and slow and only see limited use in mirror matchups).
On the other hand, SC2 has struggled with balance issues (perhaps still does? I don't follow it any longer). Anyway the point of this isn't to call you out on lack of BW knowledge (very few people like me care about these details anyway), but I wanted to point out potential confirmation bias: SC2 appearing to nerf or remove these problematic units is not an indication that they are problems in Brood War. Merely a coincidence, if I had to guess! :)
True. At the professional level it is balanced, but at lower skill levels it becomes really hard to counter a terran. Especially the spider mine/turret/tank advancing cycle.
Mutalisks can be countered with Science vessels's irradiate ability since they're low HP.
Sorry, got confused since EMP got moved from Science Vessel to Ghost in SC 2.
That's funny. The last time I played (probably about '05-'06) Terrans were the only ones I could consistently defeat (using the Protoss and carrier rushes). That's because at the time they tended to make mass siege tank and vulture armies (which are slow, and have no anti-air ability). My opponents were considerably more experienced with the game (I hadn't played in some years, and tactics had changed considerably), and I'd get slaughtered in most matches that weren't Protoss vs. Terran (never found a great strategy for any of the others). Still, it was interesting to find that you could still use unconventional strategies to win.
Personally, I think Starcraft (like many games) is the most fun and interesting when you get together a bunch of inexperienced players. People aren't just trying to implement the same cookie cutter strategies, they're experimenting with the game and trying out different strategies.
Skilled usage of goliaths with missile upgrade can counter carriers.
Carrier is the last unit in the tech tree, it's hard to call it a rush. Terrans can find about your carriers using comsat scans, especially because in Starcraft 1 comsats can only scan.
Yeah, a good player could stop it with proper scouting. Against average players I've had a lot of success, though - once they find your main base, they focus tanks and vultures on it and stop scouting other areas. They almost never seem interested in scouting other areas. If you build up carriers in secret on a side base, they don't realize what's coming, and by the time they finish off your main base you have a sizeable fleet.
Of course they'll try to rush your expansion and pump out goliaths and turrets, but by that time it's usually too late. Even a handful of turrets and goliaths aren't going to give 8-10 fully upgraded carriers much trouble, and their turrets and goliaths are going to have simply too much space to cover (all of the production at the original base, but all the minerals coming from expansions). With a bit of skill and using the terrain to your advantage, it's pretty easy to pick them apart.
At least, that's what worked for me. I guess everyone needs to find a strategy that suites them. If you find Terrans to be the best race, play as Terrans.
I don't really agree with you.
What made BroodWar balanced was meta development and map creation that took a long while.
Every race had some things that could seem imbalanced and outright crazy.
Reaver single scarab killing 20 marines or your entire SCV line, storm nearly killing everything. Plague reducing all army to 1HP, lurkers that wreck havoc.
And yet, no single race dominated over all of history.
There were times when Terran we're most dominant. Then came Savior and rest of zergs who were suddenly winning everything. Until Bisu's revolution that is...
Point being every style had a counter, you just had to make it work (with builds and pure skill).
<3 yes please. Always preferred SC1 to SC2 in pretty much every regard. It's also probably the only video game in which I feel remotely competent. It will be fun to play it again, and I hope the scene will get revived enough that there are many people to play with.
Why did you prefer SC1? Obviously, you're not the only one with this opinion (judging by the relatively low interest SC2 gathered compared to the Brood War years), but most of the time people say vague things like "SC1 is more challenging, requires more strategy" which make me think they haven't played SC2 competitively or watched pro-players.
My reasons are completely unrelated to multiplayer.
Primary reason - I liked the storyline of SC1 much better than of the sequel. SC1 story was pretty dark, and full of interplanetary political dramas. SC2 felt much more like fantasy in space, and focused mostly on individuals and their romantic relationships. I know I might be in minority here, but I strongly prefer stories about the world to stories about the people [0].
Secondary reason - graphical style. Again, SC1 had these dark and serious tones. In SC2, everything feels plastic and cartoonish.
--
[0] - I remember someone accusing many sci-fi writers of producing "flat" characters that lack depth. My response to that is that if I wanted to read about people and their interpersonal dramas, I'd pick up romantic novels instead.
SC2 is better now after the expansions, but for a while it was pretty dominated by various boring and/or cheesy strategies.
And SC1 has some mechanics that are almost like fighting games, which are often basically subtle bug exploits. It is VERY difficult to physically pull off some of the motions required to compete at a high level.
I prefer SC2 but there are real reasons people prefer Brood War.
Long term player here (haven't played in years though), and still having my original key and CD just one meter away from this laptop. Should we consider this version as an upgrade or a sole new game?
The protocol remains the same so both SC and SC:R are compatible but it seems to me that you would need to repurchase a new key to be able to use it.
You can get the full expansions for free with a CD key of the original game on their website, I found out a while ago when I found SC1 at a thrift store.
> Mac is not supported this patch, but is in progress
This bit is good to know. As usual Linux support will unlikely happen. You can guess from that as well that SC:R would lack macos support if they are not able to address the existing issues until its release.
A new game. My understanding is that SC:R will be a new purchase, while the original StarCraft Anthology becomes free for everyone. So your key won't be terribly helpful.
Makes sense to me - they've put a bit of time and money in to remastering it, so they'll want a return on that. And they know plenty of people will be willing to pay for it.
Few game developers make with as much longevity as blizzard. Wow has been running for over a decade. And people are still playing this game competitively. It's not like they remaking for nostalgia, they're remaking for people who haven't stopped playing! (And nostalgia)
I've actually played SC1 over VNC while on a tablet, casually. With the exception of the noticeable click lag from the network, it was actually very enjoyable. I would definitely buy a version made for that form factor.
It's definitely not a feasible setup for playing against humans. You absolutely need a keyboard to play SC1/2 seriously. The use case, if I remember correctly, was the height of laziness-driven innovation for me: I wanted to play a bot match while lounging in a hammock and didn't a laptop at the time.
What really struck me, though, was how suited for a smallish tablet the original game is. If you dumb down the interface just a little it would be flawless. I've played around with a few mobile or tablet-based MOBAs trying to get my starcraft fix, but I can't find an equivalent in that or mobile RTS realm.
I'm more disappointed that there won't be an official Linux release. The 1998 version works fine with WINE so I can still hope that they don't break anything with the remake.
Since it won't even be using a 3D engine (let alone any modern APIs like DX 12) I would think that any tweaks needed for WINE to run it well should be pretty minor.
Using that same logic though, I would have thought that making a Linux release would have also been pretty trivial for Blizzard to do, but given their history I suspect they have a policy of avoiding this.
I used wine for a bit but feel its important to mention warzone 2100 its what seems to satisfy my starcraft urges. At one point i feel that it was more in depth. they have online servers ip play very detailed and still being updated muilti platform.
once I got my head around the game I am addicted to it.
https://wz2100.net/ They have many AI modes for the computer. Its very popular in the Linux world.
I had to mention it. I too would like there to be a Linux version available for the latest Starcraft. but until that happens I feel this is the best alternative.
note here is a tree of sorts that show what you need to build research to have said weapon or tech. with out this it was just a crazy world where you start playing the computer and all of sudden they have hover then planes and you are like how did they get to that.
I can see this as a way to revive the Starcraft e-sports scene, considering how SC2 pretty much failed in this regard (not an expert myself, just reporting what I heard from commentors and pundits very much into competitive SC such as TotalBiscuit/John Bain).
I don't know what is meant by "failed" in this context.
I've been watching professional SC2 for quite a few years now. I can't speak to the size of the player base, the size of the rewards in tournaments or the number of spectators, because I know very little about those things and how they compare to other e-sports.
What I can say is: the game keeps getting better. Legacy of the Void and recent patches make the game itself the best it has ever been. The players themselves keep getting better, with the standard for top-tier play reaching ever-higher levels. There is never a shortage of top-tier professional games to watch -- I watch only a fraction of the games from even the best tournaments such as the GSL, SSL and WCS because I just don't have time to see them all, no matter how good they are.
I don't think Brood War "died" either, but it has seen a major resurgence recently with the introduction of the ASL. As someone who never played or watched Brood War in its heyday I find the games just as interesting to watch as SC2. I understand the level of play has similarly continued to improve, even as the game fell into relative obscurity, so a top-tier player who hadn't kept up would now find himself at a severe disadvantage against the best in the world.
I strongly suspect it is the success of the ASL in revitalizing interest that has prompted Blizzard to make the decision to remaster Brood War.
StarCraft is a successful franchise. Both Starcraft I and II are excellent games with amazing playability. It never stops amazing me how creative strategies get.
Blizzard itself is also a very successful company.
Now, in fairness, Blizzard itself could be more successful if they paid more attention to successful mods. Defense of the ancients started as a Warcraft III map played in Battle.net, and multiple standalone versions of it were developed before Blizzard decided to implement their own game (Heroes of the Storm).
Yeah. RTS games are simply way too difficult to learn compared to MOBAs. You have to learn an entire race and at the very least a few basic build orders while you're developing this massive amount of muscle memory for macroing to keep your worker count high and your money low.
Something like LoL, on the other hand, makes it pretty easy to pick up and just learn one champion, one lane, one build order and be an effective team member. It's like the difference between learning to be an offensive tackle vs learning to be head coach, offensive coordinator, and defensive coordinator all in one person.
For a few years I followed SC2's e-sports scene, but my interest slowly died out. With this new release, just imagining all the possibilities is getting me really hyped. I'm gonna call it now and say that it's a given that we'll get a few tournaments with all the big StarCraft names.
And it'll be a blast to re-play a bunch of those older UMS (Use Map Settings) games. I remember spending countless hours playing custom games. It was my first introduction to tower defense games, stacking hundreds of cannons and hoping you'd make it past one more level. And the countless challenge survival maps which required you to pull off exploits and glitches to reach the next part. Probably a bit silly, but one of the maps I remember best is Dragon Ball Z RPG. Even if they don't quite stand the test of time, getting to replay them just for nostalgia will be fun.