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The dilemma I’m having is not whether Starcraft 2 is a good game or not, I think it’s quite obvious that it’ll be a good game. I have no doubt that Blizzard knows how to make a good popular game that will be around for many many years. The question I have is whether Starcraft 2 brings anything new to the table? and that this is enough to justify the relatively high cost of the game.

So what is new? Well the most obvious thing is graphics and of course Blizzard doesn’t disappoint here, graphics are very good. However in my opinion graphics don’t make a game great and they don’t make a game worth buying necessarily but it’s certainly nice to have. Another new thing on the table is of course storyline, you get to play through the first part in a single player trilogy which is also nice and this may be the best thing about starcraft 2, if the story is good enough then I’d say a game is worth buying… or not. So… what else… battle.net integration with social networking elements, achievements and all that fluff. Yep, it’s there and from the looks of it, it’s very nicely implemented and is pretty much the standard now for big games developers and new games. battle.net, social.bioware.com and socialclub.rockstargames.com are just a few examples. The problem with battle.net integration is that this is not really what I’d consider part of the game, battle.net would exist without starcraft 2 as it’s something all new blizzard titles will use, which of course is not a bad thing. Would be nice if the older games could be integrated the same way aaaand thats it… sure there will be UI changes but there wasn’t anything wrong with the warcraft 3 UI so it’s probably not what I’d call an improvement. Maybe I’m wrong, time will tell…

Well from what I can see so far, from the games on youtube, the various reviews and opinions posted so far it really doesn’t seem like this is anything more than a re-skinned version of warcraft 3 in the starcraft universe. Or lets say, starcraft with better graphics. The multiplayer looks identical, which isn’t a bad thing really, warcraft 3 and starcraft multiplayer is very awesome so I can completely understand their hesitation for any radical changes. The problem they face however is that all the years of balancing the different factions is lost and this has to start from scratch which is a shame, so maybe it’ll be worth it in a few months, but now? I’m not so sure yet.

I still don’t know whether it’s worth buying, on one hand there is a nice new game with funky graphics and a new story to play through. But on the other hand this is a game with multi-player at the heart of it’s existence and I just can’t help thinking, whats wrong with Warcraft 3 multi-player? nothing, years of arguments and discussions about faction strengths and weaknesses have balanced the game out and it’s a very similar experience to what starcraft 2 offers.

Some links on the topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI7pm_zwvEE

http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/

http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/tech/2010/03/17/starcraft2.review.cnn.html