Preview: Atomic jumps into the Starcraft 2 beta for a not-quite-incredible time.
Starcraft is one of those games that has been played half to death, and in its 12-year lifespan has sold millions of copies - while piracy at LANs and online have probably reached at least half that number. For Starcraft 2 however, Blizzard have thrown down the gauntlets of a new philosophy, and a new way of dealing with the piratey scourge.
We're no newbies to the Starcraft 2 experience, and late last year we got a chance to have a go at the singleplayer Wings of Liberty campaign, as well as some (very limited) multiplayer. Unit balance was admittedly pretty terrible, with some units massively overpowered for a price just a hair over free and others as effective as a peashooter against a concrete wall. Have Blizzard fixed Starcraft 2's balance in these short months?
When the beta key announcement arrived in our mailbox, indicating that our Battle.net account been included in the beta, we downloaded a small file that began the downloading of the beta itself. At roughly 1.64GB it's quite large, and came down at a decent 500kb/s speed - not quite what we'd expect from the likes of Steam, but better than average for a beta. Once installed it was easy to launch straight into the game. After a quick prompt for Battle.net signin (and a strange moment when it insisted we didn't have internet), we were presented with the Home page of the new Battle.net service.
From there we were able to customise our profile, choosing a new profile pic from a collection of roughly 35 pictures. The full version of the game should track performance and achievements in the singleplayer campaign as well as multiplayer; but the beta had those elements disabled. With only multiplayer available, the choice was easy, and we clicked the big button at the top-left of the screen - prompting us with a skill window. We chose experienced, and dived into the game.
Our settings chosen, we waded into the ocean of the internet.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012