I heard a *Wilhelm scream!

Adding video to channels (Wilhelm) - requested by ant.

Who lands a viking in front of an Ultralisk, honestly.

Actually, who builds Ultralisks? Oh nvm. Dream sequence.

This cinematic is amazing, technically, although it is sort of frustrating when you then have to go play the ACTUAL game and:
(1) Units are nearly the same size, there's not this epic scale difference between battlecruisers and marines.
(2) You have a pop limit of 200, so you probably don't have more than 60 or 70 office units charging in, not the thousands shown here.
(3) Ultralisks can't actually step on things and squish them
(4) Nydus canals can't actually pop up in battles and be useful, because they're made of wet tissue paper.
(5) Things aren't so amazingly beautiful.

I'm being nitpicky, but the cinematic is great and it kind of makes you think "wow, that WOULD be a cool game" and then you have to go and play SC2, which admittedly is still a very, very well designed game.

@rychan, so the CGI cinematic is not representative of actual gameplay? Well, that's a first!

Can you imagine trying to play starcraft if units were to scale?
From that video, an ultralisk is about the size of an aircraft carrier and a battle cruiser seems to be like a decent sized city. It'd be impossible to control.

Maybe it's in the "uncanny valley" of CGI trailers where it almost COULD be gameplay, thus it's more frustrating. The WoW trailers are so completely unrelated from the actual gameplay that it doesn't even make me think of the gameplay.

I'd like to think that some more dramatic scale variations are possible with mousewheel zoom. Heck, even if visual scale doesn't change so much, economic and gameplay scale COULD. What if a battlecruiser took 3000 minerals, 1500 gas, 30 pop, and had a corresponding level of ass kicking?

I'm not a very good sc player, but my gut feeling is that it'd be a nightmare to balance.

Given the exponential requirements for it, either terrans would turtle to hell and then build one OP cruiser to dominate the map (and given the investment required it'd need to utterly amazing to justify it, i.e. a DPS of over 300)

or

It would be used even less than it is now. You're describing a unit that costs the same as 60 marines. 60 marines would be a game winning army in a lot of cases and you'd have the advantage that they're faster and would be in play for ages before you'd saved enough to build your bc.

Well, at least Blizzard can still make proper cut-scenes, I sometimes think they should just drop the whole gaming thing and just start making movies.

If you have realistic unit scaling, then a Battlecruiser can easily be worth thousands of marines, and hundreds of tanks. Then an individual marine becomes meaningless, and you're now talking about commanding entire companies or battalions, which can easily become overhwhelming and tedious.

I've always thought of the battles in starcraft as abstract representations, and when you get treated to a CG movie, that's a brief glimpse of what "really" goes on during that battle.

Do any SC2 players actually care about the story?

the starcraft saga is one of the most interesting video game stories ever told, fucker

*raises hand*

More so than the multiplayer tbh.

I admit that a small part of me almost wants to pick up the game just to see how the story progressed from the original game, but then I come to my senses and remember that I suck at RTS games. Shit starts happening in half a dozen places at once and my brain implodes from informational overload, last RTS I tried playing was the WH40k Dawn of War series.

Probably the closest RTS games I can think of to this scale are things like the Total Annihilation series (loads of units) and the spiritual successors Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander 2 (loads of units and a large difference in scale between some of them).

There's nothing comparable to the Battle Cruiser in this clip, but there are units that are hugely different in size, like the Ultralisks shown here.

Don't worry, you'll get that in Planetary Annihilation. (At very least, planets will be blown up.)

Sorry to say... I am still going to have to wait until all three parts are out until I purchase even one of the SC2 games. They just aren't long enough.

Even I know not to land a Viking into the path of an Ultralisk. Maybe the general was supply capped and wanted to clear out some units!

All right, all right, I was only asking. No need to and call me names. In any case, I wasn't saying it didn't have a good story, it just seems to me (an outsider) that the story is irrelevant to how/why most players play the game.

You know that the SC2 Wings of Liberty campaign had the same amount of missions and is just as long as SC1 right?

I tend to agree. While the story isn't bad, the majority of starcraft players are in it for the competitive multiplayer.

I do know that. However I refuse to pay top dollar (59.99) for 12 hours of gameplay. I bought SC1 for 15 bucks. 1 hour per dollar spent is the benchmark I try to adhere to.

12 hours? Only if you blast through every mission on very easy, skip the entire story, and try to speed run your way through the campaign. Even then I doubt you'll make it on your first time.

If you actually play the game like a normal person, it'll easily take you 20 - 30 hours. Not to mention the high replay value due to mutually exclusive choices you have to make during the campaign, such as permanent unit upgrades, mercs you hire, and mutually exclusive missions.

So yeah, as a guy who rarely finishes games, and almost never replays, the WoL singleplayer alone got me a good ~60 hours of gameplay (once on hard, once on brutal), which is more than I can say about any single player game I've bought in the last decade other than Civ 4 and XCOM (and maybe Fallout NV).

And that's not counting the multiplayer.

When Wings of Liberty came out, I was sincerely excited for the reignition of a series that had given me so much joy with the first game. I held off of buying it on the first day to make sure that I wasn't getting a polished turd. As someone that rarely gets to play something more than once all the way through these days, I have to make sure that I am getting my money's worth. I watched many of my friends purchase SC2 and play through it within a disapointing amount of time. I can assure you that they did not "speed run" through it. That is all I am saying. I will wait for the trifecta, the triumvirate of all three elements. Marines, Zerg, and Protoss. The game will be so much better when I can get through the complete story line without having to wait 2 years for the next chapter.

The problem with this video is that T didn't set up in the choke.

Well, you sure have patience. At least even the shittiest computers can run SC2 on max when Legacy of the Void comes out in 2017.

Just pointing out though, 12 hours is bullshit. Yeah you can finish Skyrim in 12 hours too, but neither of these games are worth only 12 hours of gameplay.

...Let me know when the movie comes out. I'll go see it.

Is it just me, or does the Terran communications system sound just like the Puerto Pollo walk-thru speaker in Curse of the Monkey Island?