The campaign has been crap so far. I originally selected "normal" difficulty, and everything was so ridiculously easy that it wasn't even fun. I then changed to "hard" and it was way beyond my ability to the point of being frustrating and tedious. I also can't stand the fact that you can select the difficulty of each mission (and have always been against this in all games): it totally devalues your progress through the campaign.

The characters are so corny its cringe-worthing, and the game runs extremely poorly on the final missions, no matter how powerful your PC is.

Worst of all, the game brings nothing new to the genre apart from a guarantee for extremely well balanced multiplayer. But considering that they've abandoned all the huge strides they made in gameplay with Wc3 (I don't care what you say, having to spend most of your time managing macro is mind-numbingly boring and tedious) I don't think I'm going to bother getting into the multiplayer.

The only reason why my expectations for Diablo 3 are still high is the fact that they it has been developed by totally independent Blizzard teams.

That's very much a personal opinion. Some of us find the micro-managing click-fest to be mind-numbingly boring and tedious.

But a good RTS should balance macro- and micro- management. This has always been my biggest problem with the original SC, it doesn't matter how well you can macro-manage^[1], if you can't micro very well, you get your ass handed to you.

My roommate got it; the dialogue is terrible and the cinema animations made him go into the Options menu and make sure his graphics settings weren't all at Low (they were all at Ultra ... wtf). Actual gameplay is nice though. When do the Zerg and Protoss campaigns come out?

Ouch. That's a lot longer than I imagined.

Don't much care for that either ...

Oh great God, are the players actually buying this bullshit? I wonder how much will those "datadisks" or "episodes", as they like to call it these days, cost. If I'm not mistaken HL2 episodes didn't cost a full price of the HL2 game. Way to make money Blizzard...^[1]

I like playing 2 and 3 player verses AI so far. Strategies that worked with Starcraft:BW still pan out here. I survive the first rush and by then I'm already working on siege and by then, one of us is working on battle cruisers.

I like that everyone has something more resembling a "main battle unit", whereas in the original, it felt like every race was intentionally crippled and overly dependent on having a mixed fleet.

Also, they have a lot of interface improvements over the original. Shift clicking does exactly what you feel it should do, and queing up construction sites leave placeholders so you can stack them better. Grouping units doesn't have size limits (ABOUT TIME.).

They simplified the tech tree and made it more straight-forward. I never had problems with it, but it's still much less hassle (no more "build a science building just to get level 2 armor" junk). And you can query technology upgrades. You can group select flying buildings. You can easily set rally points for produced units to any task (namely mining, but also repairing bunkers). SCV's AUTO REPAIR (about freaking time!). Siege Tanks have two different keys to deploy and un-deploy so you don't accidentally do the wrong one. The keys are always available even when other non-siege units are in your group. You can deploy (by accident) and hit un-deploy while they're still changing, they'll start to un-deploy as soon as they finish. There is resource trading, however chatting is an extremely slow, unresponsive, and delayed process that becomes impossible if there are tons of units on the screen--which is exactly when you'd need to warn your friends. But voice communication is essential these days, anyway.

It runs like complete piss on my computer, however. My processor is more than enough, however, I'm left with an onboard GeForce. So once the polygons fly, the framerate crawls. They also did a poor job of offering low polygon models for budget computers because even with completely washed-out textures it still barely runs 10 frames per second. So I would imagine it's a polygon count issue.

I'm going to post some interesting comments from today's Penny Arcade, which may constitute flamebait but let's see who agrees and disagrees. Safe to say I basically agree, at least now that I've seen the whole game. I won't be buying Wings of Liberty; still hoping Heart of the Swarm is worth my money.

In related news, my WoW account ends this week. All those epics, gone.

Oh, they aren't gone. After your account ends it goes into 'stasis' where your characters and epics are still there, just inaccessible. That way you can pick up a gamecard (or plunk down your credit card) six months down the road, log in and your toon and all your epics will be there...

I don't have to micro well. I'm only in gold. People in our division don't focus as much on that. And of course, thanks to the wonderful matching system, I still win half my games, which is perfect.

When I want to rank higher, I think I'll learn a little bit more about micro-ing, like blinking out weak Stalkers, which is actually kind of fun for me. I just don't research Blink often enough.

If they did that it wouldn't be the same game. A person could play competently by just copy-pasting some macros from www.starcraftbotsftw.com or something. If you want a game like that, find one with robots that you can fully customize their physical and mental construction and pit against other robots (or armies of robots) with custom bodies, attacks, and behavior.

I personally don't get why people get up in arms about the zerg and protoss campaigns being released as expansions. The SC1 had 30 single player missions and SC2 has 29. It's not as if they divided the game in three; they made it three times bigger.

It would be if one of those players was me.

My gf and I sometimes play SC against each other over our network. Doing do via bnet would be impossible.