StarCraft II

Format PC

Developer Blizzard Entertainment

Publisher Sierra

Genre Sim / Strategy

5 Comments

This is terror incarnate. I am in deep, deep trouble, and national pride is at stake. It's a 2v2 match, UK versus Germany, on a lush forest map. Germany are the Zerg. The UK are the Terrans. The Zerg have spread their sinister influence over two-thirds of the map, dropping their hatcheries and hives near the majority of resource points. The Terrans are hemmed in, facing a constant barrage of Zerg ground troops: little Zerglings that form a mass of flailing grey-brown limbs. They have hordes of Roaches - weird balls on legs that spit acid and slash at their enemies with vicious claws. And they have Banelings - suicidal bugs that charge at their enemies, blowing themselves up in a gloopy green explosion.

The pressure is immense. At the entrance to my base, I've built a wall of support structures, behind which Siege Tanks plant their heavy feet into the ground and drop splash damage artillery into the melee. I click on one. The interface shows an animated portrait of the driver. He's a jumped-up trucker in a boiler suit and cap, incongruously laid-back. He turns to the camera and flashes a broad, brilliant grin. It looks like he's having a whale of a time. So am I. StarCraft II is nearly finished. And it's going to be brilliant.

This is the first game that Blizzard, the developers of World of Warcraft, have produced since that MMO took over the world. The original StarCraft was a genuine PC classic, probably the best- loved real-time strategy game of all time. It told a weird tale of space-truckers and cowboys, rebellions and aliens, and a fight between three races.

There were the Giger-esque alien consortium called the Zerg, led by a hive mind, and (OMG SPOILERZ) later by a psychic special forces marine named Kerrigan (she's the one on our cover). There were the Protoss: a species of elegant and aggressive space-elves riven by factional differences, now united to face the Zerg threat. And the Terran Confederacy: intergalactic future-humans on the fringes of space, run down by decades of rebellion and warfare. Shit blew up really, really good.

Before StarCraft, RTS was about two very similar forces fighting. StarCraft's three races were radically different in their unit makeup, abilities and playing style. StarCraft birthed asymmetry: the idea that three very different playing styles and armies could be equally matched.

But StarCraft wasn't just about how individual armies fitted together: it was about the pace at which they fought. Its super-accelerated strategy and massive scale (pro players tend to click the mouse 150 times per minute as they spread their armies and resource collections across acres of map-space) created the template for real-time strategy gaming. It was, essentially, the perfect game. Untouchable.

In the process it spawned one of the most spectacular and vibrant web communities and worldwide followings, including the legendary South Korean e-sports scene. Here StarCraft matches are still filmed and televised nationwide, at the sport's peak attracting 125,000 people to watch the live finals of the national Starleague. That's 125,000 people, on a Korean beach, watching two teenagers play a videogame.

So there's a certain amount of pressure on the StarCraft II team to deliver - not just a strategy game, but a fully fledged multiplayer and multimedia phenomenon. That's a problem for Dustin Browder, one of StarCraft II's senior designers, staring down the barrel of the game's forthcoming beta release. The game, he says, is in a good state. "All the units are in, and the singleplayer campaign is taking shape." But there are problems. The back-end, the infrastructure to support matchmaking, is causing problems.

They're still working on the basic look and feel of the individual units, and whether all the units they've currently created should even stay in the game. Blizzard won't hand a final unit list over even as I'm playing the pre-beta version. The problem? Everything is subject to change, from the damage from a single Protoss Stalker to the speed at which that same walker can move and rotate its cannon.

As Dustin puts it, "we don't even know if we can balance the game right now. We'll only find out if it's possible once we get into beta, and we see the really hardcore gamers hammering on it for weeks." Right now they can play the game themselves, and they can run simulations of units fighting each other, tweaking every variable until stuff works, but that's nothing. What they need is the data only gamers provide: detailed recordings of matches, win-loss ratios for each of the sides, angry forum posts declaring balance problems the end of the world. And they need a lot of it.

But that's fine. Because as I test this early version of the game, I start to get a feel for how StarCraft II will play in the real world. And if you want the one-line description, try this. It's like StarCraft, but with a two on the end. Those expecting a radical reinvention of the real-time strategy genre should look away now. Those expecting a radical reinvention of StarCraft should look away, too.

The basics are identical. The three races must all gather blue minerals and vespene gas, and convert them into a trickle, then a steady stream, and eventually a flood of units. Success in the multiplayer game is about expansion - leaving your starting zone and claiming new mineral nodes, then efficiently placing new units on the field. Outside of your base, the other skill to be tested is your micromanagement: isolating enemy targets by boxing them in or blocking their path with your own units, or dancing your own troops around an enemy's lumbering turning circle. In StarCraft II, there are units that seem designed specifically to cause chaos like this: Zerglings swarm around the larger units, trapping them in place.

There appears to be no end to the ways in which you can be pwned. In the day I spent playing, I found dozens. Try a Terran marine rush: build two barracks and attach a reactor to each. A reactor is a modular add-on that doubles the production capacity, but limits the type of troops you can make. With two barracks and an attached reactor you can churn out four marines every 20 seconds - the perfect rush force. Upgrade them with armour, health and stim-packs, and they'll simply refuse to die.

Or try some stealth dickery. Protoss units are expensive and take a long, long time to warp into the battlefield. And you're going to need lots to break through an organised defence. So don't. Build Dark Templars - vicious melee warriors armed with a Darth Maul lightsaber staff. They have a neat trick: they're invisible. The only way to spot them is to have detector units or buildings in your army.

Sneak a few Dark Templars into the rear of an unprepared base and let them ravage supply lines and support structures. Game over.
Or try some Zerg molestation. Take, first, the Corruptor. This flying squid has a neat way of causing a unique headache - if it kills an enemy, that unit becomes a stationary anti-air turret. Pair the Corruptor with an Infestor: it burrows underneath an enemy base, ready to cause chaos. Ability one: infect and then explode any enemy unit. The splash damage is devastating. Ability two: take complete control of any surviving enemy unit for ten seconds. Make it something big and angry.

Ability three: release five infected marines from egg-sacs on its back. The resulting chaos might not win the match, but it will significantly dent any economy and distract your enemy. The first moments playing StarCraft II are overwhelming, and not just because of the mechanics. When you start playing you're hit by a wave of nostalgia. The sounds and music have the same feel as of old. The same laconic guitar themes, the same sarcastic responses from your foot-soldiers.

The interface is near identical, but with tweaks pioneered elsewhere: idle units can be selected by tapping the tilde key, while StarCraft's old and baffling selection limit has been removed. The gatherer units are the same: fleshy drones for the Zerg, floating eyeball probes for the Protoss, and SCVs - men in robot suits - for the Terrans.

The same basic tricks still work - Terrans can blockade the front of your base with farms and supply depots. The Zerg can expand early with a truly unholy number of Zerglings, then rush them right into the centre of an enemy base. The Protoss can still warp their armies from one base to another via their pylon networks.

It's impossible to overstate just how powerful that rush of nostalgia is. Sitting down to play is like revisiting 1996. It's like riding a bike. Except the bike needs a constant supply of vespene, and there's another cyclist
out there looking to murder you. What has changed is the singleplayer campaign. The big news is difficult to swallow: StarCraft II will have just a single campaign, for the Terrans, subtitled Wings of Liberty. Campaigns for the Zerg and Protoss will follow in standalone expansion packs (working titles: Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void) in much the same way expansions for Dawn of War and Company of Heroes include a new singleplayer campaign for each side. But don't think that StarCraft II's singleplayer is lacking: it will come with 26-30 missions, and you might find it more branched and open than you'd expect.

As Dustin explains it, you'll be able to choose your missions and route through the story, dependent on the rewards. In the course of building StarCraft II, the team at Blizzard built dozens of units to test ideas that didn't make it into the multiplayer game: old favourites like the Firebat (a flamethrower infantry unit: the perfect counter to a Zerg rush), or Wraiths (a triple-wing air-and-space superiority fighter). Those units are in place in the singleplayer campaign.

Each mission completed will reward you with either a new unit, or an upgrade to an existing unit. The idea, Dustin explains, is that "your singleplayer army will look nothing like your multiplayer army." He gives a practical example: "It might be that you get the medic, and decide the medic is awesome, and so you buy lots of upgrades for him. Or you may find that you think 'the medic is OK, but I use my marauders a lot (jump-jet troopers that bounce along the ground and over cliffs: they're a spectacular economy raider).

I missed out in a few upgrades in the last mission, so I'm going to spend my cash on upgrading my marauders.' Each mission unlocks a single unit, and that unit is key to that mission, even if they're useful for all the other missions. Each unit has two additional upgrades that you can choose to purchase for cash." The excuse Dustin gives for throwing fans a few favourites? "Raynor is a down-and-out freedom fighter and he's forced to use some older technology. So he uses Wraiths (an old triple-winged space-fighter)."

That isn't the only improvement to StarCraft's II's storytelling mechanics. In between missions, you'll retire to the Hyperion, a battered and bruised battlecruiser owned by the hero of the hour, Jim Raynor (see 'Who's Who'). There, you'll catch up on the latest news, talk to the crew, settle down for booze in the bar, or order the ship to warp to a new planet.

Making this campaign work is a big job for Blizzard and Dustin's team. While other RTS games have experimented with non-linear campaigns, (such as Dawn of War II's RPG-lite story or Red Alert 3's Risk-style map) rarely have they allowed for such massive differentiation in the rewards given to players. "We've never created a non-linear campaign like this before," Dustin acknowledges. "It really changes the way you play an RTS. There are a lot of balance problems we're trying to deal with. We're working on the units to make sure they're distinct from each other."

That scale of problem goes some way to explaining why Blizzard have split their three campaigns into three different games. But it doesn't make the waiting any easier. Even if StarCraft II comes out this year (and that's probable, but not confirmed), we have no idea when the two further expansion sets will be released. Given some very quick back-of-the-napkin maths, we could still be waiting for the end of StarCraft 2 in 2011. And still be playing in 2012. And probably beyond.

Put that to Dustin, and he lets out a near panicky laugh. "Oh God, I hope not. I hope we can have all three games out before then, but this is my first game at Blizzard... oh God. Maybe you're right. We should say that we want to get the next chapter of story out as soon as possible... Oh God."

In the meantime, my base is overrun. While I was holding out against the ground threat, my German journo opponent was building Hydralisks and Banelings. The Banelings crawl up to my farms and blow a hole in the defence. The Hydralisks follow, decimating my last line. It's over. We quit and immediately reload. We want to play again. And again and again. It's a very GG.

Tim Edwards