I’m going to split up the impressions of the games I played at Blizzcon so  first up I’ll talk about the game I had the briefest amount of time playing, Diablo 3.

Last year left a pretty sour taste in my mouth. The game interface was (and still is) totally different from Diablo 2, the level of power for the class I played was far far weaker than I expected, and the game in general felt slow paced due to dumping out my mana on just one enemy. This year, I’m a little more prepared for what’s going to happen so the interface differences weren’t as jarring as they were last year. For the wizard, 1-3 were bound to non targettable spells (things like self buffs or aoe spells) and you had some health pots on 5 I think. The left mouse button was attack and the right one was your main nuke which you could press tab to swap out with a secondary nuke. The tab thing is really weird, but since I hadn’t played Diablo 2 recently, I wasn’t as annoyed as last year when I kept trying to open the minimap. Read the rest of this entry

Saturday August 22nd

Remember all the junk I told you about in the bag? Well today was the day to pour through a lot of that stuff. We started by doing the fishing quest which starts you at Brady Games and gives you a small burlap bag and a map. You’re instructed to go through the convention center to various other booths and get 5 lures and then to come back for a sort of raffle prize. It was crazy how many people ended up doing this, the lines were so freaking long. They were the longest lines I stood in all convention but they still went by fairly quickly, no longer than 30 minutes max and some we went through in under 5 minutes. We got all the lures, but only Ashley and Jon actually went to the raffle later. I saw the line for it and it had to be as long as all 4 halls combined. They went when Ozzie was on or before that when the line was super short. For me, all I got was 5 lures and a burlap sack. Read the rest of this entry

Friday August 21st

Housekeeping again swings by early as a wakeup call which sets us all into motion. It’s way too early though and the doors don’t open until 10 or something, maybe 9. So instead of waiting in the mass of humanity, we casually chill out in our hotel room watching the throngs of people move towards the convention center. I’m up in the room browsing through Reader hoping to catch wind of any new news that may slip out since the doors opened, but amazingly, there wasn’t any. Unlike years past where once the doors are flung open people’s vision is set upon the new area of greatness, they very carefully hid what was to be unveiled. The program as well wasn’t being handed out until after the opening ceremony. It was incredible that after 4 years they got it right! Read the rest of this entry

Tuesday August 18th

Driving Route

We set out using the route TomTom gave us and it was a taxing ride. After cutting over to the 40 in Amarillo there was non-stop crazy rain until about the border of New Mexico. My 3 wiper settings went from sprinkle to crazy to shut your eyes because you’ll see about as well. Incredibly, I navigated through that mess. Read the rest of this entry

For my 3rd year in a row, I’m setting out once again to the Bizzcon convention in Anaheim happening this weekend. Hosted by Blizzard Entertainment, they plan to offer insight into gaming’s largest franchises: Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft.

This year the reality was set upon me that due to traveling earlier this summer I wouldn’t be able to attend, however a friend of mine decided on a whim that she and her brother would love to go to this year’s show. We’re all poor so plane tickets for the 3 of us weren’t as financially viable (like I said I’d already done some traveling earlier this summer) as just carpooling it, so we’re going on a road trip. In real life if you ask me about this trip I’d say I’m dreading it, but I may have played that one a bit too thick as I know the fun of the trip will vastly outweigh the terrible terrible drive ahead of us.

I’m looking forward to many things at this year’s show. The first time I went Starcraft 2 had just been unveiled and it was announced that they’d have playable demos at the show. At the time the lines were so obnoxiously long I stood in one line, played maybe 2 games and called it a day. The game was great back then. Last year I was far more determined to get in some quality time with SC2 and I played for around 6 hours in the last man standing area. This year I was hoping beta would have started before now and my appetite for this game would be a little diminished however this is not the case. As such I’m in overdrive for playing and will see about playing as much as possible if not more than last year. However since I’ll be there with friends and they aren’t much into the RTS thing, I may have to abstain.

An NDA embargo was lifted today concerning a lot of single player elements (see my reader shares today) from gameplay in late July. My continued speculation is this: until the press is shown Battle.net 2.0 for the first time, the beta won’t start. I also think that since it’s been said that Battle Report 4 will come out sometime in September, I think that’s the earliest we will see beta, but only if some Battle.net 2.o info is unveiled. So this is putting beta farther and farther out of my mind. Kind of a bummer, but ah well.

On the Warcraft front, lots of rumors abound about Cataclysm. One of the most prominent WoW news outlets has a huge barrage of info: here. I don’t have too much to say about it, but I do have a sneaky suspicion that the info will be unveiled at Blizzcon.

Diablo 3, from what I played last year and my unfair impressions, doesn’t have me too excited for what’s going to be shown. I expect another class to be revealed and maybe some more mechanics, but the game feels so early in development it’s not yet time to get excited about it. Also, the game stations will probably again highlight either solo play or team play at a low level with weak gear. My memories of Diablo 2 are having uber gear and high levels completely decimating armies of monsters with little downtime. This isn’t the impression you get and not the impression that you get to have with the demos. If you load up Diablo 2 and run around without being twinked around, that’s what you get to play, and for me, that wasn’t what I remembered making Diablo 2 so great.

As for the unannounced MMO, some people have slim hopes of that being announced. I’m extremely skeptical of this since the Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 stuff that they show off are extremely mature builds of these games. I don’t know when they started working on this game but I feel like the timeline is far too early for it to be announced. If I had a guess as to what Blizzard expects to get done, I’d say it’s Starcraft 2, WoW Expansion, Diablo 3, then unannounced MMO, with possibly another WoW Expansion after Diablo 3. Heck, maybe even the Zerg expansion for Starcraft 2 somewhere in there as well.

I’ll be taking pictures and twittering so expect lots of action there and probably a lot less reader link spam for a few days. I’m leaving Tuesday night and coming back sometime on Monday.

I had this whole long thing written up about the fundamentals of RTS (specifically Starcraft/Warcraft) games thinking about how to better elaborate on a starting point for new people. I’ve since decided it’s not learning how to harvest with probes and when you should start making buildings that’s really important to getting into games, but really the nuances of each element of the game that are really the defining characteristics between the gaps in player skill.

For instance, you can have too many people on a mineral patch. If this happens then your remaining probes will find another patch nearby, however the delay in this action will cost you some early minerals. In Starcraft 2 the AI for this is much much much better, but still something that you might not know or realize until later in your playtime. Even though the basic rule of thumb is always to be making your probes/drones/scvs you will hit a limit on effective resourcing. Long before you hit this limit you should have expanded.

Units are designed to counter other units generally speaking. From what I’ve been reading it seems like counters don’t intend to be as hard as they were in Starcraft 1, but I’m hoping that’s just a random statement from the developers. What this means is, if unit A is designed to counter unit B, and you’re making unit B and your opponent is making unit A, you should probably stop making unit B. There’s no amount of brute force (again generally speaking) of throwing the unit inferior to the opponent that will make you come out on top. There are a lot of units in Starcraft so this is something you’ll have to research on your own.

Cliffs and hills are much more advantageous in Starcraft 2. In Starcraft 1 if a ranged unit was attacking from the top of a hill it is possible (if the attacked unit is ranged) that the player at the bottom can attack up the hill with a chance to miss the target. In SC2 this is gone, unless you have a unit that can see up the cliff, you cannot fight back.

Right clicking is context sensitive and generally does what you want it to. Be aware however that if you’re under attack right clicking to move your units can doom you. When any unit is selected, right clicking on the map tells them to move unconditionally to the spot you tell them to go to. If you instead press “A” or issue the attack command and then right click, they will move but stop if they run into combat and fight. It’s really easy to spot and punish noobs for right clicking and issuing the wrong orders.

Holding position to help create chokepoints in Starcraft is also a very important skill. If you’ve seen battle report 3 you’d know just by seeing the force fields go up how important this can be when faced with an overwhelming army and you aren’t quite ready for it. If you combine the hill advantage on your incoming base ramp with a blockade you create a situation where the ability for mass melee units becomes less effective since they’re unable to surround you. With range you create line of sight problems which plays out to your advantage. There’s also the new tall grass map mechanic that might be useful for escapes as long as you hold your battle line right at the perimeter of the grass.

Space bar is a special hotkey that takes you back to the last unit transmission. If a unit comes under attack and they shout that out and you’re looking somewhere else, if you press spacebar your screen will center on that last transmission. In SC1 it only did the last immediate transmission, but Warcraft 3 had a transmission queue that you could cycle through. Don’t waste your time scrolling around the map/minimap when you can just press space bar.

Speaking of queues, buildings can queue up many units for creation, however it’s in better practice that you shouldn’t probably use more than the 2nd spot for the queue if you can avoid it. The reason for this is that you’re spending money for the long long term when you can spend that money on more immediate things. If you have only one barracks and you are constantly trying to make 7 marines or something, you’d be better off making at least 1-2 more barracks and limiting the line. In the end you’ll be able to make 3+ marines at once as opposed to waiting for 7 to come out in order.

Those are the really basic nuances of Starcraft. Some advanced ones from old old Starcraft 1 were the reaver drop. In Starcraft 1 the reaver is the siege weapon of the Protoss. It attacks very slowly (time between attacks) but hits very hard with aoe damage. Someone noticed one day that when you drop units out of a shuttle they attack immediately. They then thought about what would happen if you were to pick up the unit and drop it out again faster than it’s attack speed? Well it turned out at the time it would fire regardless of cooldown. What ended up happening is that pairing the reaver with the shuttle made it a rapid fire death machine. It was eventually patched so that it wasn’t as potent. Stuff like this learned in the game is what’s going to be really important compared to the really fundamental things you learn as you cruise through single player. You may never even notice or learn of things like this and once you face off with someone that knows the trick you’d be at a crippling disadvantage.I really can’t wait to see what all kinds of things will be discovered in Starcraft 2.

Brutal | Crazy | Tense | TownTrade

The first three are 2v2 games and the last is a 3v3.

Games are posted in order of interest, so the first game is less interesting than the next. There’s a lot of back and forth gameplay. Tense is interesting because all 4 players are noobs who never expand so the endgame is a play on who can keep an expansion up.

Town trade is funny because we mentioned that we never use OT and so, Krib steps up to the plate.

When thinking about getting ready for Starcraft 2, it seems natural to think of playing Starcraft 1 or Warcraft 3. However Starcraft 2 is only just related to these games and playing them can teach you good things, but when you get hands on with Starcraft 2 you’ll find it quite different.

Starcraft to Stacraft 2
This is generally going to get you most acquainted with and prepared for SC2 except for the vast vast improvements in building grouping, resource gathering, and smartcasting.

War3 added in multiple building selection and allowing them to be hotkeyed, whereas in SC1 you can’t do this. Reading over Sirlin’s sit in at the SC class this semester I read that one of the pro gamers tip was that you hotkey one gateway and you double click it and quickly select each gateway nearby with hotkeys for unit creation for a rapid fire mass build. In SC2 you can just group all your gateways into one control group, press the hotkey, then for as many of the unit you want you press the unit creation key. So if you want 3 zealots you press z 3 times.

In SC1 you want to constantly produce your probe/drone/scv units. Since you can’t group buildings together, you have to manually check each town hall spot to create the unit. Additionally you can’t rally them to minerals/gas and have them start harvesting on production. So you must babysit them once created to get max use out of them. Again, in War3 you can rally straight to resources and have units begin gathering automatically. To me, the SC1 setup is very tedious, but it does force you to remember to keep producing your economy.

Starcraft 1 had no setup for smartcasting. If you had 3 templar and pressed the psi storm and fired it off, 3 would go off at once. You’d think this is great except the game didn’t allow stacking of psi storm, so 2 are wasted. In War3 they implemented a feature where the casters would cast one at a time in this situation. Tab subgrouping also really helps to quickly select your casting units, again something added into War3.

Other than that, SC1 should teach you the basics of SC2 very well. Many units are removed/replaced in SC2, but the fundamentals of economy, building, and unit counters are all there.

Wacraft 3 to Starcraft 2
So in all those points you’ll notice that War3 made great UI improvements which makes SC1 frustrating to play. I’m taking the War3 to SC2 route, but I’m also aware of the problems and differences in War3 style play to SC2 style play. War3 is a very hero-centric game with many RPG elements. Hard counters are not as hard as they are in SC2 and the economic model is far more simplistic.

The hero-centric nature of War3 means that for the most part, armies always move as one with the hero. Through the course of patching and such, they made it so that you don’t have to move with the hero (hero still gains exp if your hero isn’t around) but in the world of min/maxing I think it’s somewhat foolish to split your army away from your hero. Because of this, one of the main tactics I employed in my days of SC1 isn’t as easily done (coupled with the fact that you require a neutral building to do it anyway) which was always having a drop ready when my main army was in battle. Heroes are so powerful that you want them in the army to help turn the tides. An army fighting without a hero vs an army with one is most probably doomed.

The RPG element of leveling your heroes made games over long before the actual ending. You will find very few if any games where the victor had lower level heroes than the loser. How you play your hero and how early battles play out can many times plot the course of victory long before you see the summary screen. You can easily lose the game in the first 5 minutes and not even know it NOR make a large comeback in time before the more powerful hero presses his advantage.

Starcraft is a game of hard counters and low health. Battles can be over in the blink of an eye because of the unit matchups. In War3 you try to preserve anything and everything so that the enemy doesn’t get an exp advantage, but in SC tactics and map control are far more important than making sure the first zergling you ever made lives to the end of the game. War3 has a lot less of this and stresses the continued importance of micro during battle.

One thing about the economy in Starcraft that pro players do is they always have an scv/probe/drone queued up. You must have continued economic growth in Starcraft whereas in War3 you can only have so many people on the gold mine. That’s not to say you shouldn’t keep making peons in War3, but expanding is much more natural in SC than it is in War3, or at least, how I play War3, which can still be very incorrect. War3 has a sort of set it and forget it style about the single town economy. You only need so many guys on gold/lumber. In Starcraft you cannot have enough guys getting minerals ever, and if you do, you should be expanding to move excess onto the new hall.

Starcraft 2 gains the best parts of Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 and leaves the junk behind. And by junk I mean heroes. RTS games are all about economics, who has more resources on the battlefield, who is getting the most return on that investment, and how you are planning to incapacitate the enemy’s economy. You do this by evaluating what the opponent is showing you on the battlefield, responding appropriately, and combat while still keeping tabs on the basics like your probe production/teching. When you watch the best players play, their screen is just flashes of locations as they squeeze in just as much time as they need to on economy, combat, and  reconnaissance.

So what should you do to prepare yourself for SC2? It probably doesn’t matter if you’re choosing between SC1 and War3. SC1 is probably better for you since looking at the Protoss the transition to SC2 should be pretty seamless, although Terran are nearly 100% different. War3 will be more familiar control wise but fairly unfamiliar when you’re making units and deciding what to do.

Then again fundamentals are important. When teamed up with a new guy, you want to be able to say things that make sense to them and not totally confuse them. If you say “Go fiends/statues” you don’t want their response to be “Ok what do I do to make those?” This is probably a different topic altogether though. Maybe what I’m really saying is SC2 multiplayer prep.

So originally this was going to be a rant about how I would go about dissecting the game to teach a total noob how to play. I still think about this since there will be so many new people playing soon who don’t keep up as much as I obsess over it. So maybe this is something to look forward to.

Team Player

As I said in comments one of my big hangups right now is not finishing off low health units. This replay’s title is tongue in cheek as you’ll be wondering very frequently what the hell I’m doing. Obsession with killing heroes, not paying attention to what Krib is doing and splitting our armies, it’s kind of a subtle wreck.

2smass | 3smass | ltmayhem | aggresssion

More replays. Instead of spoiling each individual game I’ll just summarize what I’m slowly having to re-learn.

There are pronounced differences in the way 2’s and 3’s are handled. Maybe I never really explored the idea as fully as I should have in the past, but it’s much clearer now. Obviously the smaller size game type the more diverse the individual must be. You can play 3’s and 4’s with a large array of unit types, but it seems like your team will be much more successful if you each explore only 2-3 types of units which best fit your synergy.

Along with this, for War3 in particular, you don’t tend to see 6 barracks like you would in Starcraft. You don’t tend to see more than 2 really unless in extreme situations. I’ve finally realized with the way Krib and I play, our best plan of attack is dual rax, at least for me anyway. Usually I’m broken up over the speed of my teching coupled with how many units I need to make in tier 1. Krib usually prefers to fast tech for his second hero and for demolishers. As orc it might not be so bad since grunts are generally so durable. But when I’m caught teching with a single barracks it’s a painfully slow recovery. When faced with double massing opponents it’s very difficult to overcome unless our level of skill is notably higher. A few of the games I didn’t post highlighted just how well dual rax is for both of us since we tend to skip creeping and focus on keeping tension high on our opponents.

When we raced up the 3’s ladder there was only one strategy that we could not beat. Maybe we beat it once or twice, but in general, our success rate against the strategy was always losing. It was double NE/UD with both NE feeding money to the UD for fast tech while they harass with their heroes. The UD would get fiends and go to wyrms.  Once the UD was fine on tech or they cleared his expansion, the NE would focus full out on huntresses. It’s funny to hear that Starcraft 2 will not allow resource trading. I think in extreme circumstances it should be allowed, but after struggling with that particular stategy, I feel a sort of vindication. Our other partner in 3’s and my 1v1 tactics were just too poor to handle the NE harassment which led to our repeated demise. I never spent a lot of time dwelling on it, but I think if I had, we’d have eventually found a way around it.

When assaulting a base, one really needs to think about the buildings they attack. Krib and I know exactly what hurts the most to lose, however often times when attacks come in on us and we haven’t yet run in or TPed yet, it seems like the enemies more often than not, choose poorly in the buildings they choose to attack. If you suspect an opponent teching, destroy the dependency buildings. Often times it seems like farms are good to go after, but only if you know the opponent is near his population limit OR if you know you can kill enough farms in the time allotted that will actually hurt him. In War3 the shop is a very key building both for tech and for defense when fights occur in your town.

I feel like tonight was either 50% for wins or less. It wasn’t a great night but we also threw some 3’s in the mix with a guildy that isn’t familiar with non-DotA play so he’s going through a vicious crash course in War3. Much of the night I thought about how great Starcraft 2 will be. It’s freeing to think outside of one massive army all the time. War3 feels slow and clunky now. It also looks huge. I want to zoom out a bit more than the game allows. Hopefully in the weeks coming ahead I’ll be crashing my zealots in the field of battle instead of my footmen.