I waited a long time for Starcraft II. It looked so promising, and considering my experiences with the editor so far during the beta, it really is. But there are murmurings surrounding the massive pile of intrusive DRM and data-mining systems that is Battle.Net 2.0 that have made me question whether I really want to support this game at all.
Could it really be back to Warcraft III, after all this?
The Galaxy Editor, as those witty people at Blizzard have dubbed the mechanism by which I shall destroy Starcraft II, is a very complicated beast. Though it is perhaps made worse by the complete lack of example data; with the beta, we get the melee data set and that is it.
So here are my first impressions. I’ve probably missed a lot of things, but there’s plenty of study-time left to consume.
I don’t care about Starcraft. After getting all up in Warcraft III‘s junk I thought it prudent to explore the game that came up so often in Warcraft literature. It was distinctly average to my eyes, certainly no Age of Empires II.
Considering the leap that Warcraft III made from Starcraft, though, the announcement of SC2 did pique my interest. Granted, they answered a lot of useless questions about the editor (“will there be more than 256 units?”) as if WC3 had just never existed (though I suppose to the Korean pro-gamer audience that Blizz are so obviously courting (at the expense of everyone else), it probably didn’t).
So I’ve been following SC2 with bated breathe. I fully expect it to be impossible to model/texture for (even the possibility of dodgy re-colours seems in doubt, but there are teams of reverse engineers hard at work already), but some of the general map-making possibilities look quite bitchin’.
Why am I talking about this? The delightful CHUNK and Leord at StarCraftWire conspired to give me, little old me, a beta key. Hell, it was about time.
