For a few years I followed SC2's e-sports scene, but my interest slowly died out. With this new release, just imagining all the possibilities is getting me really hyped. I'm gonna call it now and say that it's a given that we'll get a few tournaments with all the big StarCraft names.
And it'll be a blast to re-play a bunch of those older UMS (Use Map Settings) games. I remember spending countless hours playing custom games. It was my first introduction to tower defense games, stacking hundreds of cannons and hoping you'd make it past one more level. And the countless challenge survival maps which required you to pull off exploits and glitches to reach the next part. Probably a bit silly, but one of the maps I remember best is Dragon Ball Z RPG. Even if they don't quite stand the test of time, getting to replay them just for nostalgia will be fun.
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Main_Page
The game has aged beautifully, thanks to great continuous patching by Blizz, keeping the game running on modern OS's without finicky behaviour. This 4K remaster in my opinion is purely icing on the BW cake rather than a burning desire of the community. From a business perspective, I think Blizzard is hoping the BW eSports scene can become more international , vibrant, and bring in some active revenue for being a much-loved game.
if it's any consolation your interest died with the game. :(
still one of the greatest games of all time. just always had a hard time finding traction in the west where players and fans seem to prefer games like Dota/CS. i'm not sure why exactly.
I've uploaded my old custom map folder left dormant for years, that includes all the maps you mention. Tower defense, glitch maps (I hope the old glitches will still work!), and dragon ball Z maps. Here: https://mega.nz/#!yE9jTZYS!EegEFOhl0uycGxChVwwlJS-zrAXcAGBmC...
So I guess it will be always online, no lan, Blizzard blessed servers only just like sc2...
Just take SC2 for a spin and look at how your army compresses to pass a bottleneck, then expands again once it is past. A thing of beauty.
> ... the gameplay and balance have been precisely preserved, for an experience that will feel identical to veteran players.
I love how they brought iPad compatibility as well!
...and The Lost Admiral, and The Perfect General...
The two new add-ons are nice, though.
Terrans had 75 minerals missile turrets, 75 minerals vultures that come with 3 mines, far reaching siege tanks, comsat, flying buildings for vision, medics that could heal each other, medics could blind detectors, ghosts could take away energy and protoss shield with EMP, and the science vessel could be very abusive as well (irradiate ability)...
A lot of those things got balanced for StarCraft II: medics were replaced by medivacs that cannot heal each other, EMP only takes 100 shield rather than all and area is smaller, turrets are more expensive. Some tricks got replaced by new ones, like using seeker missile on friendly units which seems like a bug to me.
The fact that you cannot lower supply depots will be particularly annoying to people that got used to StarCraft II supply depots.
If you're curious: Turrets struggle against small units due to their attack type, leaving Terran highly vulnerable against small, mobile Mutalisks in the mid-game. Siege tanks are gas-intensive and immobile in siege mode. Flying buildings' advantage is negligible (Zerg have flying supply depots for that matter). Medics play a very limited role in competitive play: Medic/Marine is sub-optimal against Protoss and Terran, and lately we've found that it doesn't scale well late-game against Zerg too (I find it fascinating that the meta changes dramatically even to this day)! Their blind skill has been used in professional play maybe twice in 15 years. I assume you mean Science Vessels, not Ghosts, can EMP - SVs are gas-intensive, slow, and squishy, but unfortunately are Terran's only effective high-tech unit (Ghosts are expensive and difficult to use well, Battlecruisers are expensive and slow and only see limited use in mirror matchups).
On the other hand, SC2 has struggled with balance issues (perhaps still does? I don't follow it any longer). Anyway the point of this isn't to call you out on lack of BW knowledge (very few people like me care about these details anyway), but I wanted to point out potential confirmation bias: SC2 appearing to nerf or remove these problematic units is not an indication that they are problems in Brood War. Merely a coincidence, if I had to guess! :)
With almost two decades since release, and people are still playing it competitively, it's probably the most balanced game in history so far.
Mutalisks can be countered with Science vessels's irradiate ability since they're low HP.
Sorry, got confused since EMP got moved from Science Vessel to Ghost in SC 2.
Personally, I think Starcraft (like many games) is the most fun and interesting when you get together a bunch of inexperienced players. People aren't just trying to implement the same cookie cutter strategies, they're experimenting with the game and trying out different strategies.
Skilled usage of goliaths with missile upgrade can counter carriers.
Carrier is the last unit in the tech tree, it's hard to call it a rush. Terrans can find about your carriers using comsat scans, especially because in Starcraft 1 comsats can only scan.
And yet, no single race dominated over all of history. There were times when Terran we're most dominant. Then came Savior and rest of zergs who were suddenly winning everything. Until Bisu's revolution that is...
Point being every style had a counter, you just had to make it work (with builds and pure skill).
Warcraft III Remastered - ?
I get that esports are serious business by now, but are we really at a point where we have to stay bug-compatible with old releases?
Within a gaming community, bugs can often become features.
Mutalisk Stacking is an important strategy for Zerg players, and requires the Magic Box to work. So... yeah. Unless you want to completely screw high-level Zerg players over... you have to recreate Mutalisk Stacking and Magic Boxing. Its part of the balance of high-level play.
EDIT: a word
Using that same logic though, I would have thought that making a Linux release would have also been pretty trivial for Blizzard to do, but given their history I suspect they have a policy of avoiding this.
once I got my head around the game I am addicted to it. https://wz2100.net/ They have many AI modes for the computer. Its very popular in the Linux world.
I had to mention it. I too would like there to be a Linux version available for the latest Starcraft. but until that happens I feel this is the best alternative.
I've been watching professional SC2 for quite a few years now. I can't speak to the size of the player base, the size of the rewards in tournaments or the number of spectators, because I know very little about those things and how they compare to other e-sports.
What I can say is: the game keeps getting better. Legacy of the Void and recent patches make the game itself the best it has ever been. The players themselves keep getting better, with the standard for top-tier play reaching ever-higher levels. There is never a shortage of top-tier professional games to watch -- I watch only a fraction of the games from even the best tournaments such as the GSL, SSL and WCS because I just don't have time to see them all, no matter how good they are.
I don't think Brood War "died" either, but it has seen a major resurgence recently with the introduction of the ASL. As someone who never played or watched Brood War in its heyday I find the games just as interesting to watch as SC2. I understand the level of play has similarly continued to improve, even as the game fell into relative obscurity, so a top-tier player who hadn't kept up would now find himself at a severe disadvantage against the best in the world.
I strongly suspect it is the success of the ASL in revitalizing interest that has prompted Blizzard to make the decision to remaster Brood War.
Blizzard itself is also a very successful company.
Now, in fairness, Blizzard itself could be more successful if they paid more attention to successful mods. Defense of the ancients started as a Warcraft III map played in Battle.net, and multiple standalone versions of it were developed before Blizzard decided to implement their own game (Heroes of the Storm).
Something like LoL, on the other hand, makes it pretty easy to pick up and just learn one champion, one lane, one build order and be an effective team member. It's like the difference between learning to be an offensive tackle vs learning to be head coach, offensive coordinator, and defensive coordinator all in one person.
OpenRA is an open source re-implementation with newer controls, so for an example you can use middle-click for dragging the camera, they also introduced a widescreen mode, and support for modern screen resolutions.
I then tried to play the original, and it felt really rough, almost unplayable.
Watch StarCraft Broodwar bots live on Twitch now (runs 24x7 showing newly uploaded bots, commentary on Sunday afternoons): https://www.twitch.tv/sscait
Follow these easy steps to code, run locally, then upload your own bot: http://sscaitournament.com/index.php?action=tutorial
Also of interest, the Deepmind/Blizzard announcement concerning plans for StarCraft II: https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-and-blizzard-release-star...
So much so that I think the 300-400 APM we see consistently being pumped out by the top players isn't the human limit, it's the actual game limit. In which case I would consider the game solved.
The protocol remains the same so both SC and SC:R are compatible but it seems to me that you would need to repurchase a new key to be able to use it.
[0]: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/520460-starcraft-v...
Makes sense to me - they've put a bit of time and money in to remastering it, so they'll want a return on that. And they know plenty of people will be willing to pay for it.
Primary reason - I liked the storyline of SC1 much better than of the sequel. SC1 story was pretty dark, and full of interplanetary political dramas. SC2 felt much more like fantasy in space, and focused mostly on individuals and their romantic relationships. I know I might be in minority here, but I strongly prefer stories about the world to stories about the people [0].
Secondary reason - graphical style. Again, SC1 had these dark and serious tones. In SC2, everything feels plastic and cartoonish.
--
[0] - I remember someone accusing many sci-fi writers of producing "flat" characters that lack depth. My response to that is that if I wanted to read about people and their interpersonal dramas, I'd pick up romantic novels instead.
And SC1 has some mechanics that are almost like fighting games, which are often basically subtle bug exploits. It is VERY difficult to physically pull off some of the motions required to compete at a high level.
I prefer SC2 but there are real reasons people prefer Brood War.
Is Iccup alive ?
This presumably means ranked matchmaking is to be expected for Western players as well. Whether that included iccup or not, I don't know.
The remastering will probably give a major rebirth to this epic game. So excited!
