DISCLAIMER: Note, this is a BETA. Any and/or all of the observations made here may or may not be included in the final release. Starcraft and all references herein are owned by Blizzard Entertainment.
How I Came Across a BETA Key
Shortly after Blizzcon '08, I was feeling a little down for reasons related to my personal life (and odds are it had something to do with women too). Luckily for me, I had some awesome friends who went to Blizzcon and they gave me a feel better present.
"Here Nam, this should make you feel better," and he hands me a card and I look at it. It's a card with a BETA key for Starcraft 2. At the time, it made me feel a little bit better, but the reality didn't hit me yet. I would like to thank my friend Zubes for giving it to me. Thanks man.
It was the same when some of my other friends gave me a pre-order copy of SC2 for my birthday... in '08. It's actually been on pre-order for so long that I changed some of my verification information since then.
BETA Starts
I got word from my Starcraft enthusiast brother (7 years younger than me- but stays way more informed on SC happenings than I do) gave me a phone call to notify me that the SC2 BETA was live last week on Wednesday (2/17/2010). Awesome! It was confirmed by my friend who works at Blizzard later that day. That night I pulled out my BETA key card and registered my key and created a new battlenet account.
The tense part was the wait. After you register your key, you had to wait until Blizzard sent you a SC2 code to download the client. I waited 48 hours and finally decided "they'll send it to me whenever they'll send it to me."
Needless to say, I was not disappointed. Not more than 5 days later, I got an email on 2/22/2010 at 8:47pm saying "Congratulations, this is your invitation to the beta test for Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft® II: Wings of Liberty™!" Unfortunately I was out that evening and didn't get the email until about 11:15pm.
At that time, I immediately used the code to download the client. It was over one and a half GB and downloaded at about 1 MB every 3-5 seconds. It took over 2 hours. It was a weeknight and I needed to go to sleep so I could go to work the next day... but I wanted to see if I could play one game before I went to sleep. I started the install, and that took more than an hour- at which point I gave up and went to sleep (it was well past 3am).
I planned to wake up the next morning early so I could go to work early so I could leave work early to go home and play SC2. I told some co-workers about it and they told me that I had "some discipline." I went to work, thought about it all day (except for when I was thinking about my girlfriend of course!), and then drove home.
First Impression: GUI
I logged into the game and found the GUI to be pretty clean and smooth. I actually missed some of the old sound effects because I've played SC for probably a decade now, but the transition between screens is less jarring/sudden.
I feel like the buttons respond as expected. They are stylistically thinner, longer buttons than in the first game, but they work well.
The in-game control pane is very similar to the previous game and intuitive to anyone who has played SC before. The observable menu gives you game options and help. The most useful part for strategizing is actually included in the game menu. It has a chart of each race's tech tree and a list of units all the units (with counter unit strengths and weaknesses). The only thing you seem to be missing is the upgrade/ability list.
The New Battlenet
Don't take my word as the end-all be-all, because I really only briefly looked at it. But the new battlenet system seems really good. Joining a game is a heck of a lot less hassle. Creating a game is easy as 1-click-2-click-3-click (there are a limited number of maps included in the BETA, but I imagine the map pools in the future will change the meta game as they are created and released).
For the BETA, they gave you practice games before they start rating you for "placement." Which I assume they would put in a group/bracket with people your own skill level. I think this is a great system because then you eliminate the gradient in skill level. Let's hope it actually works the way I think it does.
When creating a game in the BETA, I found out that you could wait for a human to join, or add a computer AI. If you added AI, only "Very Easy" difficulty was available. There were several speed settings, but the relevant ones seem to be "Fast" and "Faster". I am unsure of the 1v1 or 2v2 games can be created in the BETA. Once in, you may choose your race (as always), color and a handicap percentage. Everyone starts off at 100%, so I imagine if you choose a lower percentage, you will have more difficulty, however that percentage translates into the game (I did not experiment with it at all). As the game loads, it will show you a map preview with indicated spawn point and you can briefly plan your strategy.
First Game
Before the first game I played, I did not know that I could play a single player game against a computer. So I ended up playing against a human. It was a TvT on a 2 player map. I tried to do an early contain with a bunker contain outside of the enemy's natural expansion. I seemed to hold back the enemy pretty effectively. I applied pressure with Siege Tanks and eventually lost my hold. However, I took that opportunity to expand with a second CC.
After gaining the economic lead, the rest of the match was quite elementary as I just overran the opponent with a variety of units.
After it was over, I figuratively jumped for joy and looked at the statistics. Some of the same statistics from the first game are there, but the most notable addition (to me) was the build order tab. It allows you to compare any two players' build orders with time indicator up through the first few minutes. This will prove greatly important for hardcore strategists, pro players and SC/RTS enthusiasts.
General Gameplay Observations
Things that are similar to the original SC.
The races are the same. Some of the units are the same. There are units and buildings and you try and use it to defeat your opponent.
Things that differ than the original SC.
Instead of depending on just sounds alone, there is a text list that shows up on screen that notifies you of what has just finished (construction, research, unit creation, and other game notifications such as "Nuclear launch detected"). Very, VERY useful.
Many hotkeys have been changed. Some are no longer intuitive, but I understand what they were trying to do. If you get the chance to look through all the hotkeys, you'll notice that they are all mostly on the left side of the keyboard. I think this is done to reduce overall movement across the keyboard for speed and efficiency. Once you learn the hotkeys, I think your play will be better overall.
The F1 key helps you find idle resource gatherers. Other RTS games had this functionality already, but the first SC did not. They finally put it in, and it's useful.
Vespene geysers when depleted no longer yield any gas. This changes the economy of the game quite a bit. Cost of units and buildings have been scaled to be a multiple of 5 because resource gatherers now carry 5 resources (as opposed to 8 in SC) each trip.
"Smart" rally points for resource gatherers have them auto-mine when the rally point is set to a mineral patch or vespene geyser (with appropriate gas structure atop it).
Multiple building select- allows you to hotkey many buildings to one hotkey. You're probably wondering how they curbed the hotkey advantage for certain buildings with certain races? Well, I think their solution will take some getting used to, but the best situation that they could have come up with. If you want to me 5 units, you have to hit the hotkey 5 times. Even if you have 5 buildings selected, you must tap the hotkey 5 times to create 5 units (it does intelligently distribute production to idle buildings).
Cloaked/hidden/burrowed units are no longer detectable. You will not see a distortion where the hidden unit is. It is purely hidden from view without a detecting unit. There are still 2 detectors per race: one static structure and one mobile flying unit (as before).
One of my favorite new mechanics: you can queue up many actions in a unit's waypoint. In the first SC, I wanted to build buildings in a waypoint to queue them up (like scouting/evading patterns) but I could not. Now you can! Make plopping down 5 pylons all at once immensely easier.
Things that I thought were really cool additions.
The game will tell you when it thinks your computer is causing slowdown in the game! It suggests to close unnecessary programs and applications. AWESOME. You will no longer accuse everyone else of latency. It'll just freeze and everyone just waits.
When you're playing a game against a computer AI and you clearly defeat it- it will auto chat "gg" to you to indicate its surrender before you destroy every building!*
* For those of you unfamiliar, GG is an acronym for "Good game" usually messaged at the end of a game to informally signify the end of it. In Korean e-sports, this tradition eventually became the official signal from a player to indicate conceding of the game.
The Races
Luckily for you guys, I enjoy playing as all three races. I believe it helps get a better overall understanding of the game, and eases future strategizing. However, I was only able to play 6 games (3 VS "very easy" computers just to explore the tech tree of each race, and 3 practice games against humans).
I do not believe I can review the differences of each race yet, but give me some time and I should be able to. Let me just say that there are a TON of different units for each race, a TON of different upgrades and a TON of ridiculously crazy abilities.
I sense where this game is trying to take the Starcraft franchise to a place where it is less dependent on macro skill than micro skill. The abilities seem to play more of an important role in this game than before. But macro is still important because the change in economic momentum seems to differ enough that the economics I feel are more sensitive to harassment and tempo. I predict that many will find this game very fun, albeit different than the first one.
Whether it'll be as big as the first SC, no one knows. That's speculation. I decided to leave the decision for years down the line, after they patch it to make it perfect. Until then, it seems as though it's decently balanced enough for the casual player for now. I can't wait until the Koreans get a hold of this and show us how it's really done.
I hope you enjoyed. Thanks for reading.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Pokemon Birth, Evolution and Documentation (Case Study: Nidoran)
By: Nam Ngo
Copyright January 2010
(NOTE: This article is food for thought and for entertainment only.)
I recently sat down with my friend Shannon at our local coffee shop- it's become a routine every Saturday- and had our usual random tangent chats. The paths we usually take are related to nerdy/geeky things (of course not limited to that, but that's where they usual go). She and I are fans of Pokemon- not ridiculous crazy fans (well, I'm not- she's played so many more of them that I have!), but fans enough to know what they are, play the card game and familiar with at least the first 150 (or 151!) Pokemon.
Pokemon and Their Birth
Have you noticed that since the first batch of 150 Pokemon there have been a ton more Pokemon? For those of you who have been out of the Pokemon scene for a while, according to the Official Online Pokedex, there are 493 different Pokemon. Yeah. Believe it. There's almost 19 times more Pokemon than letters in the alphabet. And I bet you that there are some little kids out there that must know their Pokemon and probably don't know the entire alphabet yet.
Back in the day, it was simple. "This [Pokemon] evolves into that [Pokemon]" and so forth. Since then, there has been the introduction of baby Pokemon. Pokemon that are found in the wild are considered basic/regular/normal Pokemon. Higher level evolutions are Stage 1 or Stage 2 evolutions of Pokemon (depending on how many evolutions away from the basic one it is). Then there are baby Pokemon. These have been obtained only because of Pokemon breeding.
So my first question is: how do many Pokemon come into existence in the first place if there's a baby evolution form? How do normal Pikachus come into existence? Are female Pikachus pregnant and have a little of other Pikachus? Why are they not born as the baby evolution Pichu?
What about "wild" legendary Pokemon? Many of the legendary birds in the first 150 Pokemon are born from eggs. What put the eggs there in the first place? It's not a mystery to figure out where Mewtwo came from because we all concede that he was a Pokemon created in a laboratory (the motivations for why was to create a living, enhanced replica of Mew- but that's not the topic of this article). Back to the legendary birds, how do the eggs come into existence? It's like the chicken and the egg problem here- except that we suspect our "chicken" eggs started out as an egg of something else and mutated/evolved into the current chicken eggs we know and love today! How did the legendary eggs come into existence in the first place? If there was a previous Pokemon of he same legendary kind, is it still considered legendary? So sure we have theories of evolution in our world- but Pokemon evolution works differently.
Pokemon and Their Evolution
In our world, evolutionary theory basically describes the changes as gradual changes through generations of offspring. Typically it was necessary to mutate/adapt to be able to best survive/use the environment. Why do Pokemon evolve? Some "level up" and become better than they were- in terms of strength, skills and abilities. So that's understandable. Is it because of necessity to survive in the wild or necessity because the people in the Pokemon-world force them to battle each other?
One question on my mind- how did the people in Pokemon know how to evolve certain Pokemon (the ones that required some sort of item, like a stone of some sort to evolve)? What possessed some Pokemon-world person to place a stone next to a Pokemon? I guess as great scientific discoveries occur, I'm sure the initial discovery was probably an accident, but how come all the resulting effects of evolution are inherently considered positive? Why are there not stones that randomly de-evolve types of Pokemon, or make them forget attacks or yield some negative effect? One would usually assume if there's a type of item that grants positive results that something similar could grant negative results as well? It seems to be lacking in the balance between Yin and Yang.
Pokemon and Their Documentation
I recently found out that in the newer Pokemon games that all the Pokemon you capture have a gender. So if you capture a Pikachu- it can be male or female. Okay- awesome. But what of Nidoran? For those even remotely familiar with the original 150 Pokemon, there was Nidoran (male) and Nidoran (female). They each counted separately in the original count of Pokemon (numbers 32 and 29 respectively). However, I feel that the male and female versions of Pokemon shouldn't count as separate Pokemon. No other Pokemon's genders are classified differently as separate Pokemon, so why should Nidoran?
From a game development stand point, I understand that it was probably easier to have different evolutionary paths separated for coding purposes/etc. But in the Pokemon-world, some could argue that there are different physical characteristics- okay. I understand that. But we have lions. Male and female lions have different physical characteristics- and yet they're both lions still. We don't separate the species of male and female lions. Some could also argue that the Nidorans have different evolutionary paths. While this is true, Eevee also has many different evolutionary paths (at least 8 I think!). You don't count male and female Eevees differently. Okay, you're probably wondering about the consistency in which the male evolves to Nidorino and female to Nidorina. I don't have an answer for this- but let me pose this question to you: perhaps it's the male/female version of the same Pokemon that some professor badly classified? Who knows. But I am essentially arguing that the first 150 Pokemon are actually the first 149 Pokemon, and that the total current number of Pokemon is 492 instead of 493.
The things that bother me about this is that the classification system is arbitrary. In the Pokemon-world, you might not be able to answer those questions about Pokemon birth and evolution that I have posed. However, as new Pokemon "discoveries" come along, they should change the classification system. Right now, the almighty Pokedex has the entire library of known Pokemon. How does it sort them? It can sort them by Pokemon name (which has a lot of usability), and by Pokemon number. If sorting by name, it makes sense, but if you want to see the Pokemon evolutions, the name might not be best thing to sort by. Number is almost useless except in the situation of when you want to see the evolution of the Pokemon- except in the case of baby Pokemon. Pikachu evolves into Raichu and have Pokemon numbers 25 and 26. Pichu, the baby evolution of Pikachu, is number 172. With the Pokedex, you can easily see the evolutionary chain- but why is the number so important? It is all but useless (perhaps except to determine when it was "discovered" in relation to other Pokemon). And you can't even scroll through any organization to see all the associated evolutions conveniently- you have to know which Pokemon you want to inspect! This is more of a criticism of the Pokedex user interface design, but you can only look at one Pokemon's details at a time.
I was telling my roommate Rob about this article, and he thinks that there should be a taxonomy of Pokemon organization to more easily organize/view them. I tend to agree. At the end of the day, if you like Pokemon, you're still going to play- but they can really do a lot to improve the organization of Pokemon.
Copyright January 2010
(NOTE: This article is food for thought and for entertainment only.)
I recently sat down with my friend Shannon at our local coffee shop- it's become a routine every Saturday- and had our usual random tangent chats. The paths we usually take are related to nerdy/geeky things (of course not limited to that, but that's where they usual go). She and I are fans of Pokemon- not ridiculous crazy fans (well, I'm not- she's played so many more of them that I have!), but fans enough to know what they are, play the card game and familiar with at least the first 150 (or 151!) Pokemon.
Pokemon and Their Birth
Have you noticed that since the first batch of 150 Pokemon there have been a ton more Pokemon? For those of you who have been out of the Pokemon scene for a while, according to the Official Online Pokedex, there are 493 different Pokemon. Yeah. Believe it. There's almost 19 times more Pokemon than letters in the alphabet. And I bet you that there are some little kids out there that must know their Pokemon and probably don't know the entire alphabet yet.
Back in the day, it was simple. "This [Pokemon] evolves into that [Pokemon]" and so forth. Since then, there has been the introduction of baby Pokemon. Pokemon that are found in the wild are considered basic/regular/normal Pokemon. Higher level evolutions are Stage 1 or Stage 2 evolutions of Pokemon (depending on how many evolutions away from the basic one it is). Then there are baby Pokemon. These have been obtained only because of Pokemon breeding.
So my first question is: how do many Pokemon come into existence in the first place if there's a baby evolution form? How do normal Pikachus come into existence? Are female Pikachus pregnant and have a little of other Pikachus? Why are they not born as the baby evolution Pichu?
What about "wild" legendary Pokemon? Many of the legendary birds in the first 150 Pokemon are born from eggs. What put the eggs there in the first place? It's not a mystery to figure out where Mewtwo came from because we all concede that he was a Pokemon created in a laboratory (the motivations for why was to create a living, enhanced replica of Mew- but that's not the topic of this article). Back to the legendary birds, how do the eggs come into existence? It's like the chicken and the egg problem here- except that we suspect our "chicken" eggs started out as an egg of something else and mutated/evolved into the current chicken eggs we know and love today! How did the legendary eggs come into existence in the first place? If there was a previous Pokemon of he same legendary kind, is it still considered legendary? So sure we have theories of evolution in our world- but Pokemon evolution works differently.
Pokemon and Their Evolution
In our world, evolutionary theory basically describes the changes as gradual changes through generations of offspring. Typically it was necessary to mutate/adapt to be able to best survive/use the environment. Why do Pokemon evolve? Some "level up" and become better than they were- in terms of strength, skills and abilities. So that's understandable. Is it because of necessity to survive in the wild or necessity because the people in the Pokemon-world force them to battle each other?
One question on my mind- how did the people in Pokemon know how to evolve certain Pokemon (the ones that required some sort of item, like a stone of some sort to evolve)? What possessed some Pokemon-world person to place a stone next to a Pokemon? I guess as great scientific discoveries occur, I'm sure the initial discovery was probably an accident, but how come all the resulting effects of evolution are inherently considered positive? Why are there not stones that randomly de-evolve types of Pokemon, or make them forget attacks or yield some negative effect? One would usually assume if there's a type of item that grants positive results that something similar could grant negative results as well? It seems to be lacking in the balance between Yin and Yang.
Pokemon and Their Documentation
I recently found out that in the newer Pokemon games that all the Pokemon you capture have a gender. So if you capture a Pikachu- it can be male or female. Okay- awesome. But what of Nidoran? For those even remotely familiar with the original 150 Pokemon, there was Nidoran (male) and Nidoran (female). They each counted separately in the original count of Pokemon (numbers 32 and 29 respectively). However, I feel that the male and female versions of Pokemon shouldn't count as separate Pokemon. No other Pokemon's genders are classified differently as separate Pokemon, so why should Nidoran?
From a game development stand point, I understand that it was probably easier to have different evolutionary paths separated for coding purposes/etc. But in the Pokemon-world, some could argue that there are different physical characteristics- okay. I understand that. But we have lions. Male and female lions have different physical characteristics- and yet they're both lions still. We don't separate the species of male and female lions. Some could also argue that the Nidorans have different evolutionary paths. While this is true, Eevee also has many different evolutionary paths (at least 8 I think!). You don't count male and female Eevees differently. Okay, you're probably wondering about the consistency in which the male evolves to Nidorino and female to Nidorina. I don't have an answer for this- but let me pose this question to you: perhaps it's the male/female version of the same Pokemon that some professor badly classified? Who knows. But I am essentially arguing that the first 150 Pokemon are actually the first 149 Pokemon, and that the total current number of Pokemon is 492 instead of 493.
The things that bother me about this is that the classification system is arbitrary. In the Pokemon-world, you might not be able to answer those questions about Pokemon birth and evolution that I have posed. However, as new Pokemon "discoveries" come along, they should change the classification system. Right now, the almighty Pokedex has the entire library of known Pokemon. How does it sort them? It can sort them by Pokemon name (which has a lot of usability), and by Pokemon number. If sorting by name, it makes sense, but if you want to see the Pokemon evolutions, the name might not be best thing to sort by. Number is almost useless except in the situation of when you want to see the evolution of the Pokemon- except in the case of baby Pokemon. Pikachu evolves into Raichu and have Pokemon numbers 25 and 26. Pichu, the baby evolution of Pikachu, is number 172. With the Pokedex, you can easily see the evolutionary chain- but why is the number so important? It is all but useless (perhaps except to determine when it was "discovered" in relation to other Pokemon). And you can't even scroll through any organization to see all the associated evolutions conveniently- you have to know which Pokemon you want to inspect! This is more of a criticism of the Pokedex user interface design, but you can only look at one Pokemon's details at a time.
I was telling my roommate Rob about this article, and he thinks that there should be a taxonomy of Pokemon organization to more easily organize/view them. I tend to agree. At the end of the day, if you like Pokemon, you're still going to play- but they can really do a lot to improve the organization of Pokemon.
Life, the Universe and Everything
Hello all!
My name is Nam. I'm known as Lukerson59 everywhere else, but let me first explain about the change in screen name!
A long time ago, I used to have a LiveJournal in which I would post about my life. It was pretty personal and it was never what I dreamed it all up to be. I used "Lukerson59" because it was a spin-off from my old AOL screen name. It stuck ever since, but it stopped describing me years ago.
I am a nerdy/geeky software engineer. Despite the fact that I sounded like a shy and quiet guy- I wasn't at all. I used to throw these crazy parties at my HOWZ (the proper name for the house I live in). I was pretty social. I defied the stereotype. Some say that I still do. I graduated college almost 2 years ago. Since then, I've had an immense amount of free time to do more things and have had great discussions about topics at length, new and old, big and small... and everything in between.
I'd like to share some of them with you.
My name is Nam. I'm known as Lukerson59 everywhere else, but let me first explain about the change in screen name!
A long time ago, I used to have a LiveJournal in which I would post about my life. It was pretty personal and it was never what I dreamed it all up to be. I used "Lukerson59" because it was a spin-off from my old AOL screen name. It stuck ever since, but it stopped describing me years ago.
I am a nerdy/geeky software engineer. Despite the fact that I sounded like a shy and quiet guy- I wasn't at all. I used to throw these crazy parties at my HOWZ (the proper name for the house I live in). I was pretty social. I defied the stereotype. Some say that I still do. I graduated college almost 2 years ago. Since then, I've had an immense amount of free time to do more things and have had great discussions about topics at length, new and old, big and small... and everything in between.
I'd like to share some of them with you.
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