StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Message Board older than one year ago

Our e-sports correspondent is Jeb Boone.

The e-sports community is in the midst of a mad scramble to organize tournaments. There are such a large number of events this month it’s enough to overwhelm even the most dedicated fans.

While many prominent members of the community argue over tournament oversaturation and eschatological speculations, this November is one of the most important months for the industry in recent memory. And it’s been an important time for that e-sports staple, Starcraft II.(more…)

See Australia and New Zealand’s top StarCraft II players compete for places at the Battle.net World Championship.

If it had been any other game, I would have politely declined and gotten on an airplane to go home. But if you know me, you know that StarCraft II alone would have the power to snare me for an extra day in southern California directly after a grueling week of E3, so Drew and I made the quick jaunt over to Anaheim last Friday to check out the latest multiplayer build of Heart of the Swarm, being shown at the Major League Gaming event going on over the weekend there.

Honestly, not a lot has changed dramatically with HOTS multiplayer since Brian Leahy gave us an exhaustive look at all the new units from BlizzCon late last year. If you just want the quick info dump on where things currently stand, watch this!

If you remember the BlizzCon report, you'll notice the Terran shredder and Protoss replicant are both gone, the latter because, according to Dustin Browder, it was actually causing opposing players to avoid making units they didn't want turned against them. That's counter to the goal with HOTS of increasing the level of complexity and range of options available to all players of the game, not removing them. In lieu of the shredder, Terrans will still get some area-denial and passive defense capability with the widow mine, which itself sounds heavily subject to change. And although I don't care much about playing Terran myself, I'm happy for the inclusion of the warhound's auto-casting missiles that auto-target other mechanical units such as, oh, I don't know, siege tanks? Blizzard is confident that this one ability will help to break up a lot of the viking-tank stalemates you see in pro play, and I hope they're right; I think TvT is by far the least interesting matchup to watch at the moment.

The least-significant-sounding but probably scariest change in the current version is a late-game hydralisk upgrade to movement speed, which Browder said is actually the single tweak having the most profound effect on the metagame in Blizzard's tests. That one change seems like it might restore the ubiquity of the hydra that you saw in Brood War, though I'm not looking forward to dealing with a big mobile ball of pure DPS flying up and down the creep highway all the time. The swarm host and viper don't seem all that different from a few months ago, but since zerg is such a mechanically complex race I'm not even going to speculate about what broad effects these things will have.

Actually, as a Protoss player who's basically never touched the other races, I can only speak with any sort of authority at all about the changes on the Toss side, and I'm extremely excited about what's going on there. Right now it's very difficult not to make a robotics bay in every single matchup--just for the observer's scouting and detection, if nothing else--so Blizzard is making an obvious push to legitimize the stargate as a viable tech path in its own right, primarily with the oracle. In addition to that thing's unchanged ability to entomb an entire mineral line with a single 75-energy cast--which I can tell you from my brief experience is amazing--the oracle's preordain ability, which gives you a long period of vision on a target building, will now also add detection to that vision. Of course, that will make it about a million times safer to go stargate now, without having to worry as much about cloaked banshee or dark templar rushes. Neither of those would have a very easy time hitting the oracle.

In exchange for the replicant we now get the mothership core, which you can build quickly and cheaply straight out of your nexus in the early game (and then upgrade into a full mothership with a fleet beacon as usual). This thing has amazing potential to change how aggressive you can be early on, since it has the same mass recall as the bigger version. So you can try an initial push and then get the hell out of there if things are going badly, or get your army back to base for defense if necessary. The core can also briefly act as an overly powerful photon cannon, which should make you feel a little more secure about taking a quick expansion. The core can warp between bases for very little energy and seems like an invaluable addition to early-game defense. I'm really bad at using group hotkeys above 5 (that's where my nexus goes) but the mothership core will most certainly occupy a current home on 6 when I play.

Lastly there's the tempest, which is a capital ship that back at BlizzCon was meant as an air-to-air AOE monster suited for dealing with tons of mutalisks. The tempest has now changed roles to some kind of bizarre long-range aerial siege weapon that by default can fire about as far as a siege tank, which has a range of 13. But with the fleet beacon range upgrade, the tempest has a whopping range of 22. Yes, TWENTY-TWO. On the downside, the DPS is pretty low, so you'll need a lot of tempests to do much actual damage, and of course you'll need a spotter for them to fire that far, since their upgraded range far exceeds their sight range. I'm not sure exactly how the tempest will fit into the final game, since it's extremely expensive for the amount of damage it can do, and Browder seemed doubtful the range upgrade will remain in there as-is. It's also worth noting that Blizzard has mostly reversed course on its plan to cut existing units from the game, with the current exception of the carrier. But Browder said the team is having fights every day about the fate of the carrier, so who knows if even that most-disused unit will ultimately exit the roster. I imagine every pro game where a carrier is used effectively moves the minute hand on the carrier doomsday clock back just a little bit.

The most natural way to get a sense of how a lot of this stuff works would be to watch this video with Day[9] and Blizzard's Rob Simpson commentating a sample HOTS match in an instructional sort of way. If you're new to watching StarCraft II, note that this is the general format of what a pro match is like, but you're going to find a lot more energetic and dynamic scenarios taking place in actual pro-level play (much of it commentated by Day[9] himself). It gets way better than this!

Well, if you made it through all of that dry, amateur analysis, odds are you care an awful lot about StarCraft and everything going on with it, so let's talk about MLG a bit. I blew out of town Friday afternoon before the tournaments got started, but spectating through the weekend from my couch, this was the best event these guys have put on so far that I've seen. Full disclosure: my employer has a business deal with MLG, but I've been fairly critical in the past about their failures, which have mostly centered on flimsy production values and basic logistical issues like making sure matches don't lag out, and keeping the video stream running. The production and scheduling this weekend was much more professional by comparison, with quality commentary throughout, multiple matches running almost all the time, and not much downtime in between. Hell, the casters even classed things up a bit by wearing coats and ties. I had some issues with the highest-quality HD feed consistently crapping out on me, but otherwise MLG is inching closer to the point where I can wholeheartedly recommend throwing down the cash for a weekend pass.

The big tentpole aspect of MLG this weekend, and the main reason I even bring the event up, was the absurdly hyped KeSPA invitational tournament that featured the all-time biggest names from current Brood War competition. KeSPA is the governing body that essentially made competitive StarCraft what it is in Korea, but it's been notoriously hard to work with and it initially shunned StarCraft II altogether, since the lack of LAN-only play meant it had to do business with Blizzard in order to run SC2 tournaments. Now that the two organizations are playing nice together, KeSPA's top players are starting to transition over, and this weekend was the first public chance for true legends of the game like Bisu, Jaedong, and Flash to show what they can do.

Just as a lot of people predicted, they didn't exhibit a lot of especially creative play--the broad strategies were the same sort of thing you'd see in your average match between existing pro players. But the pure mechanical execution from some of these guys was very exciting to watch. Considering they've only been playing SC2 at all for a few weeks, seeing a guy like Flash keep up a staggering rate of production while also being able to split his marines and otherwise micro his units as well as pros who have been playing for two years... well, that makes me really hopeful that there are levels of skilled play in StarCraft II that we haven't even seen yet. I'm excited to see how well these guys are doing after a few more months of practice.

Around the office and in the games press at large, I feel like I've made little headway in getting other people to care about competitive SC2. And maybe I'm not one to talk, since I sort of feel the same way about competitive fighting games (appreciate them academically, glad they're there, little interest in actually watching them) and MOBAs (don't find the game flow interesting to watch at all) that most people do about StarCraft. But here and there, I keep running into likeminded individuals in unlikely places who secretly harbor the same passion. How about the Sony booth at E3? There, I got a chance to meet Shawn McGrath, the lone developer behind Dyad, an indie action game coming to PSN that seems like it is to Tempest what Geometry Wars was to Asteroids (and I mean that in the best possible way). Shawn seems like an all-around swell guy--you'll see an interview about Dyad hitting the site soon--but I also discovered we share a mutual love of two-rax pressure builds and baneling landmines over the weekend while tweeting feverishly about the competition taking place at MLG.

The idea that pro StarCraft is leading to little stuff like this in the indie scene--the place where the most consistently invigorating game design is happening these days--makes me feel like just a little bit less of a "yeah sure professional video games whatever buddy" pariah. This stuff is great! Just give it a chance! I very earnestly believe there's no purer an expression of complex video game mechanics and the human ability to approach mastery of them than what's going on with pro-level StarCraft these days.

Anyway. It should go without saying that I'm really eager for Heart of the Swarm to come out, mainly because competitive play in Wings of Liberty has largely settled into a repetition of similar builds and strategies, and because I've also kind of hit a wall in my own game that has me sitting around mid-platinum without much hope of advancement unless I quit my job and play full-time. Heart of the Swarm should give a nice boost to both of those problems. We'll have video interviews with Dustin Browder and designer David Kim later in the week to provide some more depth on the new stuff, and reading between the lines a bit while talking to those guys, I'm hopeful that beta may not actually be all that far away.

The wait is over! Our 2011 Game of the Year awards begin right now and will continue through the rest of this week. Check back every day until Friday for new awards and Top 10 lists from both the site's staff and some special guests. Curious about how we arrived at this list of winners? Check out today's companion podcast to hear our deliberations in full.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

Look, we're not even sure how we define this category from one year to the next. Sometimes it's the game from last year we played the most, or at least thought about the most, in the following year. Other times it's the game that got the most and best post-release support and DLC from its developer. Hell, the first year we created the category simply to honor a game we felt didn't get its full due in the year of its release. It's a weird category, OK?

Anyway, we're pretty sure about one thing: StarCraft II continued to make its presence known in 2011. On a core mechanical level, it was an expected matter of course that Blizzard would continue to refine and perfect the game's three-way balance, but it's great to see that even at the highest competitive level, StarCraft II is holding up as well as you can expect as a venue for top-tier players to fairly showcase their skills against each other. Speaking of that tournament competition, it's a safe bet that relatively few people would be saying anything about "esports" right now if it weren't for the continued fervor around the endless high-dollar professional competition taking place entirely within StarCraft II.

And then there's the fact that Brad played more StarCraft II in 2011 than anything that actually came out this year. That guy should probably look into professional help at this point.

Runners-Up: Rock Band 3, Call of Duty: Black Ops

Saints Row: The Third - http://deckers.die/

How do you pick a single moment to highlight from a game packed to the brim with highlight reel-worthy moments? Such was the question pitted to us as we attempted to choose a best level from Saints Row: The Third, a game so replete with crazily memorable missions and events that this category might as well have just been called "Best Mission/Level in Saints Row: The Third." Don't worry though, we did at least consider other games. It was only sporting.

When the dust settled and Jeff had stopped screaming, the end result of our deliberations settled upon the http://deckers.die/ mission. As anyone who has played the game knows, this is the level where you play, at various times, a sentient toilet/sex doll/gun-armed TRON man trudging through a virtual reality world filled with giant murderous avatars, ancient arcade game references, and a straight-up text adventure sequence.

Did you get all of that? Good, because even typing all of that was kind of exhausting. http://deckers.die/ is easily the most ludicrously insane mission of a game predicated entirely on the concept of ludicrous insanity. We're not sure how much better we can sum it up than that.

Runners-Up: Gears of War 3 - Cole Train Flashback, Uncharted 3 - Lost In the Sands

Portal 2 - Wheatley

2011's best new character doesn't have arms or legs or... a face, or many distinguishing features at all, really. Portal 2's Wheatley is a metal sphere with exactly one darting, eye-like viewport, but he does more with that single eye--and the breakneck dialogue that comes pouring out of him courtesy of Stephen Merchant--than any other character this year, no matter how many appendages they have. And considering Wheatley shares the stage with both the inimitably sadistic GLaDOS and none other than the disembodied voice of J.K. Simmons, that's a damn impressive feat. So impressive that he's our favorite new character in 2011.

Wheatley is so great. He's great because he's not just there for comic relief, though he certainly does serve that role at first. It would have been easy enough for the writers to just let Wheatley coast through all of Portal 2 on cheeky quips and lovable buffoonery, but this wayward personality sphere goes through a hell of a character arc, emerging as a villain so menacing that he threatens to bring the roof down on all of Aperture Science with... well, with his runaway ineptitude. Plenty of great characters this year made good on a single hook or gimmick, but Wheatley maintains his core personality trait and yet plays a role in the game's story that's much larger than himself. Then he goes on to take part in what at least one member of the Giant Bomb staff considers to be the most sublime final moments of any game in memory. In a way, it's not too surprising that the sequel to Portal offered some damn memorable new characters, but that doesn't make the game's achievement in writing any less special.

Runners-Up: L.A. Noire - Captain Donnelly, Shadows of the Damned - Johnson

Dead Island

Duders! Let's be honest. This category began as much so I could make The Hunt for Red October jokes as to highlight the overly-ambitious, but lovingly quirky games that hail from the post-Soviet regions where the PC still reigns King. In most cases these were titles that I'd only recommend to older, more patient gamers who enjoyed novelty above polish. 2011 then marks the year where that explanation no longer fits. From Poland came two games, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and Dead Island, that were downright blockbuster releases accessible to just about everyone. That leaves Cargo! The Quest for Gravity then to slide in under the previous expectations of this "genre". That is to say, Cargo! was a bizarre, creative game that could only come from guys with lots of Vs in their names.

Dead Island then wins by a hair. And by a hair, I mean it's the game I played the most of the nominees. Remember, this is Dave's Eastern Bloc Game of the Year and while you'd think my tastes would lean towards a pure RPG, the early difficulty and clumsy controls of The Witcher 2 made me hold off on that adventure till a proper patch appeared. Dead Island in contrast was an immediately playable and worthwhile experience that brought true innovation to melee-based combat in the first-person perspective. It's something that is sure to be copied by many games going forward and at least in my opinion was the only reason to see any major fault in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, whose combat felt mechanical in comparison. I really don't think any of us saw that coming. Welcome to the New World Sir.

Runners-Up: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, Cargo! The Quest for Gravity

Bastion

In a year that saw new music from the likes of Akira Yamaoka, Jeremy Soule, Danny Baranowsky, and Koji Kondo, it's clear just how great the music Supergiant Games audio director Darren Korb created for the studio's isometric action RPG Bastion was to be the clear-cut winner in this category.

In crafting a genre Korb describes as "acoustic frontier trip-hop," he created the perfect soundscape to compliment both the surreal, cartoon art style of the game's visuals, with its folksy, narrator-driven storytelling. The slight variances in arrangement and style give each stage its own unique quality.

The songs themselves even become central to the game's story arc. Think about the instant wave of sadness and ache that swarms over you the first time you hear Zia humming out "Build That Wall" in the middle of the chaos around you, or the little lump in your throat you got when you first heard "Setting Sail, Coming Home" swell up over the final credits. Every single note of music feels utterly interwoven with the fabric of what the game shows you. It's original, ingenious, and eminently listenable stuff, and easily stood out as the top class of this year's musical crop.

Runners-Up: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Rayman: Origins

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Ryan shows us the winners of today's categories, as well as what the users think his favorite game is.

It seems like only last week that I found myself watching men playing Countertstrike and wondering how they came to be so good at man-shooting and here I am today watching two people playing Starcraft 2, which makes me realise how bad I am at mouse-clicking. These people though? Very good at mouse-clicking. They’re playing in the Grand Final of Blizzcon’s Starcraft 2 tournament and the winner scoops $50,000, which is probably half of America’s forecast GDP for 2012. I don’t follow the competitive Starcraft community, but I believe the two fellows playing have what the kids call ‘beef’ with one another. Enjoy

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