This is going to be at Blizzcon this year.
They're teasing new unit/FX sounds on their soundcloud page.
More info this weekend, for certain.
This is going to be at Blizzcon this year.
They're teasing new unit/FX sounds on their soundcloud page.
More info this weekend, for certain.
Looking forward to it. My expectations for the story are at least starting to slightly rebound from the all-time low they were after WoL. HotS wasn't too substantial an improvement, but I think they've been trending in a better direction at the very least (same for D3 with RoS). I hope they can salvage that mess they cobbled together in the first two parts into something with a bit more substance behind it (less throwaway characters, inconsequential/pointless "choices", and oh please god less painfully childish dialogue). Still, not expecting too much, and don't really mind at this point. I've got plenty of other outlets for good stories told well, gameplay is far more important to me.
And as far as that goes, I am pretty excited. SC2's campaigns have both done gameplay well as far as I'm concerned, lot's of varied mechanics and interesting maps/objectives. HotS improved on WoL and I'm hoping LotV does even more. In addition, I was always a Protoss player back to Vanilla SC days (don't hate :kappa, so I'm pretty happy it'll finally be their turn for a full campaign.
And multiplayer really needs the shake-up. Blizzard has it kind of hard compared to a game like DotA, where Valve can regularly make big design changes without worrying TOO much about the effect on the pro scene because of the existence of captain's mode and a pick-ban system. Blizzard's fear of fucking things up too much has instead lead them to focus almost entirely on small numbers changes to keep win rates close, only verging into design extremely cautiously to take the edge off particularly destructive mechanics that regularly lead to boring gameplay. This has meant very little refresh to the way the game is played and observed over the years. Very little to look forward to.
Like it or not, without a big change to their online matchmaking (to setup something more like a captain's mode so they can force the general populace to find bugs/gameplay faults for them without destroying the professional scene), expansions are their only big design outlet. And this is the last one. They will add new units. They may remove units. They can make fundamental changes. This is really their last opportunity to get the design just right, something that can age well. Can't wait to see how well they do.
Unit changes getting tweeted here
All races now start with 12 workers
Mineral patches reduced to ~1000 per.
Protoss Units:
Disruptor - robotics bay unit, basically a walking bomb
Nexus Cannon - only fires at ground units
Tempest - can place a long range dot on units, 500dmg/60s
Carrier - faster, 90s build, interceptors keep fighting after a carrier dies
Zerg Units:
Lurker
Ravager - Siege weapon with 3 sec suicide mortar
corruptors can now channel damage to a single target void-ray style
Nydus worms now completely undetectable while burrowing
Swarmhost no longer burrows
Terran Units
Herc - high HP melee unit, can grapple to friendly units
Cyclone - high mobility, moves while shooting, long range
Medivacs can now pick up tanks in siege mode
Battlecruisers can warp to anywhere you have vision.
Banshee - range increase, don't need to research cloak
Kotaku has posted the Blizzcon announcement trailer.
Unfortunately it's just a rebroadcast of the livestream so the audio sucks.
Higher quality videos
It's been so long since I played SC2....... and yet.. I feel the hype!!
Played some of the campaign and a 1v1 multi-player. Game feels quite a bit different, but I haven't played in a long time so can't really tell too much. Base mined out so fast, started with so many workers, new units were interesting (played Terran for multi). Being able to pick up and drop seiged tanks seems imba.
Watch protoss - wow op, watch terran - wow op. Think to myself: Zerg better not get fucked.
Watch zerg - no disappoints at all.
I'm hyped!
The mineral/worker changes are going to make this game much more accessible I think. It'll be interesting to see how that works out at higher level play.
Also lurkers FUCK YES
I don't know who is getting the fatter piece of pie with this expansion, they all get something that I think is absolutely broken.
After watching some showmatches on stream today, that terran lockon unit seems the most crazy broken. God damn.
I haven't played campaign in a long time, can someone refresh me on a point: I thought the big threat was a rouge/banished zel'naga who was trying to destroy everything. In the trailer it seemed like the return of the zel'naga in general was an issue. Or am I forgetting something?
If I remember correctly, didn't the Zerg kill off almost all the Xel'naga? It's been a long time since I've played it as well, but return might just be in reference to there only being him left.
I can't wait for the expansion but I'm not looking forward to redownloading the game. I guess I'll just have to digitally download all three when it comes out. That should take a while...
Beta Launching March 31st
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/182...view-3-18-2015The StarCraft II Legacy of the Void Beta is on the way, and with only two weeks left until its launch we wanted to take a look at the goals and expectations around the multiplayer beta. As you are likely aware, we’ve been trying to be as open as possible with the status of our development, and strongly believe that the increased cooperation between developers and players is beneficial to StarCraft II. To be clear, our goal for this expansion is to work together with all of you to make Legacy of the Void as awesome as possible.
For this reason, we decided to start the beta sooner than we normally would have in the past. This should provide ample time for feedback and iteration. However, this naturally results in a few things:
• Some things at the start of the beta will feel more rough than usual.
• We will be missing some units, improvements, features, etc.
• The beta will run for a longer period of time than usual.
• We will need your play-testing support, as well as the feedback about your experiences in the beta, in order to really work together on this expansion.
2 weeks till launch? Wow, that snuck up on me in a good way. Sweet!