Received and started playing my not-removed-from-inventory copy. Thoughts:
- Oh wow, Amon really is Sargeras.
- Remember when Blizzard said each campaign would be unique? The strategic mechanics are literally just a copy of the Zerg campaign except instead of powering Kerrigan you power the Spear of Adun. Down to going to the
homeworld of the Zerg homeworld of the Protoss midgame to what I presume will unlock the 3rd unit customization options just like in HotS.
- Unlocking units mission by mission is kind of bullshit by the third expansion. It would be so much more interesting to have most of the units and them get the alternate unit types by mission. The unit customizations are cool but so far the only unit I see as not having a clear-cut best choice is the Sentry.
- Spear of Adun is bretty gud. At least it can't flat out solo maps like Kerrigan. Warping in Pylons is pretty handy, being able to dump into half a dozen immortals is hand, freezing units is a bit OP but not too bad. Knowing Blizzard I'm guessing its going to get silly OP by the endgame like Kerrigan was though.
- The really annoying thing about Protoss is that they basically 100% rely on balling. If your base gets attacked while you are fighting somewhere else you're gonna lose a huge amount of stuff before you get back. Thankfully the Shield Batteries + Cannons perform pretty decently (far better than pure cannons, which are shit) at holding off small attacks but still get utterly destroyed by large ones. This wasn't a problem in earlier campaigns (Terran could hold off almost anything with some siege tanks + bunkers, Zerg had creep tumors that gave you ample advanced warning), but as Protoss you now basically need to guess when the enemy will attack and bring your units home ahead of time. This leads to needing about 1 or 2 reloads per map because you haven't figured out the attack temple and half your base gets destroyed while your 200/200 ball was somewhere else. And you can't split that ball or it dies horribly. Thankfully about half the maps provide an expansion which gives the glut of minerals needed to spam cannons.
- Missions are generally alright. Most don't have a hard timer but instead the enemies simply keep sending stronger and stronger forces at you, so if you aren't actually trying you'll run out of resources pretty quickly. The one annoyance is that some maps don't have waves coming from enemy bases but just spawning in. Destroying the enemy bases does almost nothing to decrease the number of attacks you suffer. Fuck that shit. It's kind of a 50/50 whether you should be clearing out the map methodically or just rushing the objective, and again this necessitates a retry if you guess the wrong strategy.
- There's a lack of mission options. Really wish it was like in WoL where you had 4-5 separate plot threads you can do at once, but I guess that would be too non-linear for the AMAZING story Blizzard is trying to tell.
People here are seriously overrating the story and the writing of the first StarCraft game... not to say that one was partially developed by Kevin J. Anderson, the sci-fi hack.
The motivations of all of the characters and factions made sense, it was well-paced, it didn't stray from the point, it didn't lose track of its own tone, it obeyed the rules that it set for itself, and it stayed on the same logical arc from start to finish all the way through all six campaigns.
You'll notice that almost all "good" writing is just writing that's consistent. Was Starcraft some majestic feat of science fiction excellence the likes of which not even Frank Herbert could conjure? Fuck no, but it was consistent and consistency is what generally leads to a satisfying experience in fiction.
Pretty much this. RTS doesn't exactly set a high bar. Either be cheesy and funny (C&C series) or just be decent with characters/plots that make sense. Starcraft 2 could almost go for the cheesy and funny if Blizzard wasn't trying so damned hard to make it seem serious and dramatic.
That said some of the cinematics were absolutely top-notch shit.
I've tried investigating about Manatee's suggestion, but I'm confused.
Apparently that speed hack would work but you'd need to slow down the entire game, down to the movies, at a configuration level.
That'd be annoying, not to mention there's the whole issue of the thing not being allowed if you are connected and such.
You can bind a hotkey to different things in Cheat Engine. i.e. numpad 1 = normal speed, numpad 2 = .75x, numpad 3 = .5x. Seemed to work very well in a quick test. Only problem I can see is that if you edge-scroll the map it will go up and down with the speed.
