I absolutely adored original siege tank looks. The way it switched to the siege-mode, the siege mode itself with that huge nice-looking cannon (especially when it's not in its default rotate position). The whole vehicle just looks pretty imposing. And the sound... goddamn the cannonfire sound is pure masterpiece.. I really hope they'll make a carbon-copy of it in SC2 bcause the current sound heard in the demo was pathetic.
And that's assuming Starcraft was never quite realistic and gritty in the first place -- it was more Marvelesque: accentuated colors and forms, somewhat exaggerated even, but not too much so it looks like borderline realistic. Starcraft 2 seems to take it more to the non-realistic direction, despite having all the resources to go for the purely realistic look (like in C&C3 for instance), so I would assume it's an art director's decision (and art director is Samwise Didier who is known for his exaggerated cartoony conceptart).
In the original SC, Mutalisks were the ones with the spinning "glaive" attack.
And though to me the acid attack makes more sense if we're talking about a mutalisk, yet the glaive attack was, to me, a much more gameplay-friendly decision. I liked the ricochet it made and how it affected the tactics. That's what made mutalisk so versatile and so effective at harassment.
Suicidal said:
-Has walkers simillar to the new Colossus
Oh come on. The walker and even tripod concept is so overdone in ANY game out there that it's not really a "sign" of anything. Just like the walker-robot concept (goliath) -- would you then say that SC:BW had to become something of, say, Battle Tech or another game featuring walker-robots?
Besides, the walker that can step over the cliffs is a new and interesting concept to a game like SC.
-Has spider like units that shoot balls of energy and can blink, like the new Stalkers.
Remind me please, which C&C unit could do that? The masterminds (if that's the unit you're referring to) didnt really blink like that.
And oh yes I do love the stalker concept... except for its looks which i dont find appealing.
By the way, blinking is another universal concept that was done in TONS of games. Remember Battle Realms with those black sabotage units (forgot their names)? Or WC3 with its Warden?
Now, while all of the aforementioned were somewhat special (warden is a hero and that unit from battlerealms was not something you could build en-masse), the stalkers are not too expensive ( i thinK) and can be massed quite easily, which makes them a very interesting unit, especially from micro perspective. Despite the fact that their presetnation was poorly conducted (they could instead give the controls to some progamer who would micro those blinkers REALLY well), it still does illustrate the point that stalkers are good only when microed well, adn with the right set of hands you can do real magic with those. Which, in turn, makes them viable throughout the whole game.
I like the concept of protoss having units that are quite crafty and that require more attention to their special abilities. I wonder how would that compare to other races? In SC:BW terrans and protoss had similar emphasis on special abiltiies, while the zerg were mostly about macro.