Those of you that for some reason (totally unknown to me, though) follow me on Twitter might have noticed already – yesterday I’ve received an email from Blizzard stating that my account was upgraded with a new beta key. After almost a day of waiting due to some kind of Battle.net website failure (fortunately I’ve had work to do, so I haven’t gone totally insane), I’ve finally managed to download and install the beta client.
Since it’s already quite late here, I’ve only played a short 1v1 game against the AI, but I have to say that I liked it, even though I’ve never really got into the original Starcraft. Maybe that’s just the feeling of something both new and familiar, however weird it might sound. But I’ll write more about that after a few more games.
One thing that I was afraid of was the graphics. I was wondering if Blizzard will keep the low requirements of WoW in a completely new game. As my laptop[1] isn’t exactly a gaming rig, will it still be able to run it? I was really surprised when I discovered that it will be good enough. Sure, I’ve had to set the graphic settings to “low”, but I don’t actually care about that, as long as I’m able to run the game smoothly. It looks kind of like the original Starcraft though, only with 3D units instead of sprites.
One new and awesomely cool feature is the replay system. It saves online matches and enables you to watch them again from any point of view, slow down, rewind, see what orders were issued, what was built, how many resources the player had, things like that. I have no doubt it will be a lot of help for a player like me, who’s definitely going to be absolutely smashed into the ground for the first two weeks or so. ;)
Oh, and I’m on the Europe side of the beta, so if anyone wants to add me there for some weird reason, you can send a friend invite towards Saithir.aervithar – apparently that’s my BN handle there.
FOOTNOTES
1. Acer 5610Z, with GF 7300 onboard and 2GB of RAM – must be some kind of a weird model though, as most of specs with this name have an even more crappy Intel video card.↑
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