Starcraft 2 Patch 1.4 PTR (Luke’s Thoughts)

First off, this is by far the best SC2 patch to date. It seems to address with little ambiguity some of the biggest concerns voiced by the SC2 community to do with balance issues and gameplay dynamics. It is a bold and daring patch, and Blizzard, in my opinion, should be commended for listening to the players, filtering reasoned criticism from the noise, and then patching the hell out of their precious RTS baby.

Nerfs and buffs a plenty!

Logistics

In this article, I’m going to cover a topic that most RTS games designs won’t touch, and this ‘fifth rail’ of strategy games actually has an immense amount of potential to improve the genre.  I am referring to logistics.

E-Sports?

Greetings! This is my response in a GPG forum thread discussing the upcoming Supreme Commander 2; regarding the fact that so far we’ve not yet been shown much about its supposed multiplayer features. Rather, they’ve focused PR heavily on showing us single-player and skirmish modes. It’s fairly obvious why, since SupCom1 gave us a relatively poor single-player experience.

Blabbing away…

I was chatting to a friend today after a game of TA, about some ideas concerning the future of RTS games (check out my messy notes if you haven’t already.) Anyway I actually started to openly blab on about some more ideas I have had recently and what I perceive to be flaws in current games like Starcraft, C&C, Supreme Commander and even TA.

I waffled on about balancing, UI concepts, features, multiplayer etc and came up with an interesting brainstorm which follows on from some of the multiplayer concepts proposed in my notes. I thought I’d just paste part of the chat log on this blog because I haven’t updated it recently.

So, go read the horribly edited Skype chat transcript here. If you dare!