StarCraft II Closed Beta Impressions – Part 2 - News

by Craig S , posted on 21 February 2010 / 4,936 Views

Note - It's important to remember when reading these articles that this is just a Beta, so everything here is subject to change. This is StarCraft after all; expect the gameplay to have been tweaked and balanced to near perfection by the time the game finally releases.

This article focuses on some of the more significant gameplay and interface changes which are common to all three races.

Automatic Harvesting

This small tweak has been a long time coming. No longer do you have to manually select your Drone/SCV/Probe and command it to start harvesting minerals or gas. Simply select your Hatchery/Command Center/Nexus and set the rally point to the relevant resource patch, you're then good to go for the rest of the match. It will no doubt irritate some ('stop dumbing down!'), but who really wants to have to command every single worker unit to start gathering? An inevitable and welcome improvement.

Re-vamped Hotkey System

Another thing which will no doubt irk some of the more hardcore fans, but come as a welcome relief to most, are the changes that have been made to the hotkey system. More specifically, the ability to select multiple buildings, and then (if you so wish) group them together on a hotkey. This allows you to, for example, select several Gateways as Protoss and order them all to produce a Zealot each. Additionally, all of your hotkeys are now neatly displayed along the bottom of the screen just to the right of the mini-map, so they're now much more easily managed.

Visible Build Queues

Just as you could queue unit movements in the original StarCraft, you can now also queue building construction. Assuming you have enough resources, you can order a single worker to build a number of different buildings one after the other by simply pressing the shift button and then selecting the relevant building(s). Queued buildings appear transparent (in the screenshot above, the green outlines are buildings that have been queued for construction), and can easily be cancelled or added to by selecting the relevant worker unit and then inputting new commands.

New Environmental Features

If you've watched any of the StarCraft 2 [url=http://www.starcraft2.com/features/battlereports/1.xml]Battle Reports[/url] then you'll be familiar with these additions. First up there are now high yield mineral expansions (see the yellow mineral patches in the screenshot above). The drawback? They're often blocked by destructible environmental objects, like rock formations, and they're in hard-to-defend locations. The other important new additions are the Xel'Naga watch towers, which are ideal for scouting. Place a unit next to a watch tower and the surrounding area becomes fully visible.

Improved Teammate Interaction

There's now a message log! One of my long-standing complaints of the original StarCraft was the complete absence of an in-game chat log. This, coupled with the fact that messages would quickly vanished from the screen, was a major source of frustration for me. Well, that's now been fixed, and there's a full message log assigned to the F11 button. You can also share sources with, and transfer command to your allies. The map 'pinging' which was introduced to the original StarCraft in a patch update makes a return, and now you'll also receive alerts when your allies are under attack.

Smart Casting

Not all that good at picking out and utilising individual casters in the heat of battle? Then smart casting may be able to help you out a little bit. If you have two or more caster units of the same type in your army and you use their spell, only one of them will actually cast that spell each time you select it, ensuring you don't waste energy unnecessarily. For example, if you have several High Templars in your army and you order them to cast Psi Storm on the enemy forces, only one of them will cast it, rather than all of them.

Previous Article:

[url=http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=7096]Part 1 - A Quick Look at the New Battle.net and its Features[/url]

16 Comments

fortheovermind (on 23 February 2010)

I was awfully close to actually paying $350 on an eBay auction for a key..

Luckily some blog my friend linked me to on Facebook was giving out some invites. I thought it'd just be another scam, but I got an invite mailed to me in a couple of hours. Go figure...

Anyway here's the blog: http://starcraft2betainvites.blogspot.com

PolleyInYourPocket (on 22 February 2010)

this game will prob b too good for my PC :'-( lmfao!

Jereel Hunter (on 22 February 2010)

@deus837 WC3 is not just an upgraded SC though. Yes, they are both RTSs, but they have very different feels. WC3 has much smaller armies and hero units which can severely turn the tide of battles. (And late game, high level heroes are practically an army on their own) SC always was better balanced as well. There are many differences, from the feel to the tactics, and most people realize that.

White-Riderz (on 22 February 2010)

people people dont rip on blizz for these already exsisting innovations. The point is its a step up from starcraft 1. It will enhance gameplay whether its like W3 or not. So since ur such W3 pros then this shud come natrually.

fighter (on 22 February 2010)

You're keeping the good stuff for part 3 aren't you ? (Mmmmh Protoss)

vlad321 (on 21 February 2010)

A lot of these features were already in Warcraft 3 (not all though).

KungKras (on 21 February 2010)

This is nothing new. Why not talk about fun stuff like how DTs are possibly very OP or how roaches now has purpose, and how awesome the colossi are? :D

@deus837. Warcraft 3 is a good game, but it isn't even superior to the first starcraft.

huaxiong90 (on 21 February 2010)

Oh who cares, the game'll be great either way. You all know it. We haven't even seen all of what this game has to offer.

deus837 (on 21 February 2010)

Yeah so uh... I guess I'll go back to playing Warcraft III now since we have ALL these "innovations"... I really resent SC2 because so much of the WC3 community will move to a game with such slight updates and that looks, to me at least, to be inferior in many ways.

Mazty (on 21 February 2010)

...Uhuh so basically Starcraft 2 is number 1 with updates made standard to RTS' 6 years ago?....

menhech (on 21 February 2010)

Most of these features were already developed in Warcraft 3. If you have never played that game, I suggest you go to Battle.net and buy/download it immediately.