"For I believe in you, StarCraft II". Beta version review

*If you have never been into esports games, you are not just surprised, but simply bewildered — how can someone dedicate five years, seven, or even all ten to a single RTS?! It's almost abnormal… The mind, searching for any kind of explanation, puts forward a theory about the competitive component. It seems people just enjoy winning, improving, and fighting. But surely, only the most hardcore gamers would last ten years on this alone. Yet in WarCraft III, StarCraft, and Dota, it’s not some elite, not a narrow circle of users, but actually a vast number of people. And it's unlikely that they’re all esports professionals…*

What then is the reason for this phenomenon (and there’s no other way to name it) and why can millions of people stay with one game for years where there’s no grinding, no need to acquire new gear or accessories, where all in-game communication boils down to gl, hf, gg?

Today we will talk about StarCraft 2, but not from the point of view of a seasoned player, nor how this strategy appears to dads from platinum and gold leagues, or how it’s seen by those who have fought for years on Lost Temple. This review is for those who have never encountered the first StarCraft or have only played it briefly. After all, fans of the original will likely buy the second part, but what about a new player? Let’s figure it out.

Who are you, boy?

I think there’s no need to talk for long about the genre. Even if you’ve never seen the first StarCraft, you’ve probably encountered other RTS games. So I’ll just briefly remind you. You and your opponent start with one building and a handful of workers each. They can build structures, scout, and gather resources. In StarCraft, there are two types of resources: minerals and gas. The first is a consumable material. It is needed for everything. Gas is more expensive and always in less supply. It is required for creating powerful combat units, constructing high-level buildings, and for various research developments.

At the very beginning, we only have one location to gather resources. But there are quite a few on the map, so we can occupy newer and newer locations — if the enemy allows.

In principle, nothing groundbreaking. Resources are everywhere, and capturing new territories is on the table as well. So everything is very typical and in the spirit of other RTS games. StarCraft 2 is actually hard to call a new word in the genre, as it’s such a classic strategy that there’s really nowhere else to go. Of course, this project differs from the original, and the higher the skill level of the player, the louder they yell that the second and first parts are two such different games that only a blind person wouldn’t understand. But there aren’t that many seeing people, in fact. And since this is not a review for “gov”, I’ll just say it plainly. StarCraft 2 is like a Brood War of the 2010 model. The game has changed, but it remains the same classic, just with a friendly smile directed at the new generation of players.

How much this has affected micro-control, whether macro play has changed, and so on — those are not our topics, let’s focus on whether it’s fun to play and how difficult it is.

But before answering that, I’ll describe how battles take place here.

Basics of Strategy Building

The battle begins, workers either greedily or reluctantly rush to the minerals and start gnawing, cutting, and looking at them with their protoss squint. Then, as a Terran, I build the first supply depot, which allows me to increase my troop limit, and I order barracks. After the first constructions at the base, the period of scouting begins. The enemy comes to me, I go to him. It’s important to understand what’s happening with the enemy at all. And then, avoiding his army and following my own tactics, I must start producing an army.

A Lyrical Aside or a Tale of How Soldiers Kill Each Other

Yes, in StarCraft 2, there is a rock-paper-scissors system, but it's somewhat embarrassing to compare it to something similar from other games. It's much more complex. Here, for example, a rock can be more expensive than scissors, so if you make a lot of the latter, they can indeed cut through the boulder. Plus, fights where pure paper goes into battle are rare. It will inevitably be supported by other “classes”.

Moreover, the items in StarCraft 2 are far more than three. There is normal paper, and there is steel that can only be cut by a special clipper. Therefore, it’s crucial to correctly compose your troops and react to the enemy's actions. There was a fight recently. The enemy was making roaches and hydras while I was producing infantry in response: marauders and Marines. I strengthened them, gave them special abilities, and was confident — I will win.

So I charge into his base, and begin to obliterate the roaches like pesticide, the hydra flanks from the side, surrounds, but I am stronger. Yes, I can’t maneuver, there’s only a path back, and zergs are shooting at me from everywhere, but my army is winning. And just when I’ve calmed down and see how the bugs are falling apart, from behind my army rolls in a bunch of banelings, which simply melt my infantry. And just like that, the Terran is no more, the zerg can come in and abuse his women and children.

A small mistake, and the battle is lost. However, such fatal blunders are exceptions. Usually, players know the approximate composition of each other's armies and already have an idea of what the opponent is doing before the final battle. And a game isn’t about “long development, defense-defense-defense, and then attack, and someone wins”.

StarCraft 2 is an incredibly dynamic game, it really never allows you to relax. As soon as the first scout arrives at your location in the first minute — active actions begin.

Basics of Strategy Building. Continuation

Let’s return to our battle. An opponent plays Protoss, and my worker just happens to arrive at his base at that moment; I see — there are already two gateways (something like barracks), the enemy is actively producing infantry while I decided to delve a bit into upgrades, and thus one barracks gets an add-on, and the second is only being placed — so I have no troops. So, I quickly build a bunker near the entrance to my base, and I manage to put two soldiers inside. Everything happens exactly as I planned; at that moment, five enemy soldiers come rushing at me, but they take hits from the bunker and retreat. The opponent realizes that breaking me with a quick strike won’t work anymore and that I might be preparing to defend.

This concludes the first stage of the match. Players could have rushed each other, but that didn’t happen. I managed to defend. Now I need to decide what to do next. I suspect the opponent thinks I’ve gone into defense (a complex structure, right). I have the bunker after all, plus few troops. And if there aren’t any soldiers, then I have tech. However, developing it takes time, and then it will take even longer to start producing an army. In general, he quickly sets up a second base, as he does not fear an early attack.

And I suspect this, so I build a starport and plan to order dropships there. To be absolutely sure — I go for a scout. Just at that moment, when my suspicions are confirmed, and I see the enemy’s second location, my forces are already loading onto the ships and heading along the edge of the map for a very important diversion. Landing, hit, base destroyed, the punishing army of the enemy appears, I lose some of my forces but quickly escape.

According to my calculations, the enemy must have placed the base about a minute ago (there were few workers, he couldn’t order more, and if you know their spawning speed — it’s not hard to calculate everything), so he couldn’t pay off when I attacked. Plus, I count how much I lost, how much the enemy — I find myself in the plus.

Now, presuming that I won’t have time to return my troops or have lost too much in battle, the opponent rushes at me. His soldiers haven’t appeared on the horizon yet, but I am confident in the impending attack. I quickly gather “rocks” against his “scissors” and starting building a second command center, but not near the minerals, instead at the base. Why at that moment, just before the attack? Because I am sure the enemy won’t break through the defense but will lose a lot of troops in the attack, and when he retreats, he won’t be able to attack again immediately. He’ll have to regroup, figure out a tactic, scout. So I will have time to develop the second base, fully pay it off and start making profits. At the same time, if I decide to counterattack and lose, I’ll surely have enough resources from the two bases for defense, while I’ll barely manage with one.

And literally twenty seconds later, the enemy soldiers arrive, they charge in, take hits and retreat. I can’t go in for a counterattack — simply don’t have the troops, so I adjust my “deck”, plus scout the opponent a couple of times and begin building an excellent counter-army. The opponent no longer sees my trump cards; I purposefully made it so he wouldn’t spot my base. So when the huge thor units appear, the enemy has nothing to say except the joyous abbreviation “gg”.

This block isn’t a tale of how great I am, or how I think two steps ahead and generally win games. No, not at all. I quietly sit in silver and still have no idea when I’ll be able to reach gold. I’ve had my share of games where opponents easily wiped me off the floor — a million. The main point I wanted to demonstrate is how they play StarCraft 2. This, I repeat, is not merely fifteen minutes of building and two minutes of battle. We are constantly doing something. And while your hands are frantically trying to execute all your commands, you’re already devising one plan after another. What if this… What if he does that… What if he’s got this here… Or maybe I’ve got that there...

This is exactly the game that completely immerses you in the process. And it requires you to do far more than just frantically hit the keys. APM is, of course, important, but Blizzard, by dividing players into divisions, has managed to reduce the importance of this metric. Because if you are in bronze, it’s hardly likely that someone can fight on three fronts, drop paratroopers, break through the center, occupy two locations, all at once. Well, if you ascend to silver, then you’ve certainly learned a lot. They won’t just let you face stronger opponents.

Without External Interference

Surprisingly, the game keeps changing even though Blizzard isn’t touching it. The beta's been going on for nearly two months. During this time, not a single new fighter appeared, and there were no drastic changes. Testing is somewhat calm, but battles change almost every week. Even without patches.

Let’s take the reaper units. They wear jetpacks and can move very quickly, allowing them to jump up onto ledges. In the early days of the beta, only someone who thought that workers could fight well would use them. It was pleasant to suddenly find oneself at the enemy’s base, start breaking their buildings, killing workers, and just causing havoc. You see how the enemy gets frustrated, sending troops the wrong way, making mistakes.

But literally after eight or nine days, that tactic started to fade away. Even rookies from the copper league with almost negative ratings would say, “Am I a noob? Why not use reapers!!!”. And it began to be seen that an early attack with reapers was a sign of a noob. Only the unskilled want to gain such an overwhelming advantage almost for free. And that’s just not how it works.

For about a month, reapers sat on the bench, watching sadly at their jetpacks — they were no one's favorite. But then, the voices of gurus began to be heard. One Terran from platinum would say that we wrote off the brave troops too early, another would send them into action. The tactic was adopted, altered, and in every division, it took on its flavor. Just a week ago, practically every battle against Protoss began with an early attack using reapers.

No, it wasn’t a desire to win solely based on one type of unit. The craving for “free” gains had faded. Everyone started to objectively look at these soldiers. As a result, very early barracks are being constructed, an add-on attached, gas is gathered quickly, three reapers are made, and they get an upgrade. That’s it. Their production ends there, and now you need to justify these investments — by disrupting the enemy's economy. Everything is calculated. Exactly three reapers, as this number is enough to kill one worker. If you take more — one shot will always be surplus; if you take fewer — you’ll have to kill a worker in two shots, and if the first does full damage, part of the second one will go to waste.

And thus began the constant raids of reapers. Protoss players became frantic, hating this Terran tactic; and just three days ago, I jumped into the enemy base, and there was already the first stalker — the main destroyer of reapers, who could easily nullify efforts spent on 250 gas.

The tactic is gradually fading. Now, few Terrans will first build reapers. Now is not the right time. So, it’s not that the tactic is bad, the balance hasn’t changed, a patch hasn’t been released, or anything like that. It’s just that priorities are changing at the moment; it’s better to use something else, to revert to more traditional early-game builds or to modify this one. But time will pass, and reapers will sometimes be able to fight once more.

The game is alive and evolving. This is certainly not its greatest quality, but it’s simply wonderful. The developers don’t need to release expansions to change something. The community doesn’t stand still; it’s constantly evolving and changing StarCraft 2. Of course, homogeneous battles still occur, but they are few. At lower levels, you just do whatever comes to mind. In such a mess, you create clumsy but interesting tactics. The stronger the player, the more sophisticated and unusual strategies they conspire.

A Non-Strategic but Very Important Part

I would like to give a nod to the Battle.net system. When it was presented, they openly said: “We faced off against friends on Steam and also used X-box Live, we took many interesting ideas from them.” Well, later when I interviewed the game designer of StarCraft 2, I tried to tease him by asking: “Did you add anything new, something of your own?”. And he responded — no.

Here one might say that Blizzard is once more stealing ideas, but if only everyone could 'steal' like this. As it stands today, Battle.net and indeed the whole design of StarCraft 2 is the best I’ve ever seen. You create your match, add players from your friends list in seconds, and then, like folders on a desktop, you drag some into the spectator area, some into one team and others into another. There’s no need to right-click on names and then click “move”. Everything is extremely simple and convenient. Messaging friends, finding each other — elementary. In short, akin to a promotional slogan: “Convenience from Blizzard.”

But embellishments are far from everything. There’s the replay viewer here. The speed editor — that’s fine; it’s everywhere. But a host of tables, like troop displays from players, what has been ordered, the speed of resource gathering and consumption, APM, army stats, and so on. You can also see how both players click, where they’re directing soldiers, what and how they're doing. It’s allowed to enable a camera from the player’s eyes, or you can have a free-flying camera. After seeing this, other RTS games seem humorous. In Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars or Red Alert 3, there wasn’t even a tenth of what’s available here.

Blizzard's Religion

And yet StarCraft 2 is also a whole culture. Millions live for the game, they log in every day, discuss, and create something new. It’s very important that you can be confident — the interest in it won’t wane. I remember leaving World in Conflict with a heavy heart because it was simply being forgotten. Servers were empty, tournaments were hardly organized, and friends developed other interests. The same fate befell Red Alert 3. And it’s not just the players who lose interest; the developers drift away from their creation. And without competitions, there's no need for the community to evolve, resulting in a quiet dying out, and you forget the project...

With StarCraft 2, that won’t happen. Even now, so much has been created that wasn’t seen throughout the history of Red Alert 3. Constant streams, fresh strategies, and tactics, tournaments. You can easily find entertainment for the entire day without even logging into the game.

StarCraft 2 allows you to live exclusively through it. Yes, you go to work, you handle your affairs, but in your thoughts — it’s always there. You’re running through new strategies, contemplating VoDs from some Pro. On forums, you discuss the latest trends in strategies, what Korean beat whom and how, and in chats with friends, you concoct yet another combination that will finally allow you to “dominate everyone at once”.

I’m generally quite an engrossing player. I can focus entirely on one project, getting fully immersed in it, and derive enormous pleasure. But no other game has allowed me to dive into it so deeply. Modern Warfare 2 and everything else — that’s just a few percent of what StarCraft 2 provides. And these aren’t mere fantasies of mine; it’s been so with StarCraft: Brood War and WarCraft III.

However, the second part is also very colorful and vibrant. It’s genuinely interesting to watch. Lately, my wife and I have been watching tournament streams or VoDs in the evenings instead of laughing at another episode of “Scrubs.” The process is captivating. It’s like cheering for a football team. Just, in my opinion, even more engaging. When the ball is kicked across the field, we see beautiful moments, enjoy excellent strikes, skillful maneuvers, and dive into the atmosphere, but sadly, we don’t really see the tactics. In StarCraft 2, we see the entire strategy of the player. We observe more than just a couple of standard “home preparations.” And the battles turn out to be not only spectacular but also educational. You tell yourself: “Damn it, I need to try that clever approach!”

*In short, StarCraft 2 truly elevates esports to a higher level. You can argue for a long time about the game’s complexity, about how much micro-control matters, but the fact is that it is beautiful, it is spectacular, and captivating — that’s a given. If the first part of this RTS is no longer as popular now (I judge by the words of those who organize tournaments and know the business), then the second part will have millions of fans, admirers, and supporters come summer. So prepare yourselves; a new global phenomenon awaits us. And its name is StarCraft 2.*

*P.S. I clearly understand that all my words sound like the rosy nonsense of a fanboy (cliché, I know), but I realize this perfectly. Call me whatever you want, but I don't want to criticize the game. I don't want to hold back my emotions either. Perhaps this is my most vivid gaming experience in recent years. So, if you enjoy strategy games, if you love them — definitely try **[StarCraft 2](http://www.gamer.ru/games/594-starcraft-ii-terrans-wings-of-liberty)**. If it grabs you, it won't let go.*