Starcraft is Over-Rated

EricMesa

August 24, 2010 - 3 minutes read - 541 words

Starcraft 2 recently came out so, naturally, I just installed Starcraft for the first time. A few years ago, I decided to atone for that summer my brothers and I had played Warcraft III from an illicit copy by buying the Warcraft III Batlle Chest. It was a pretty awesome deal - for $20 I got the main game, the expansion, and strategy guides for both games. The following year I bought the equivalent bundle for Starcraft. I would have played it about six months ago when Dina’s boyfriend, a Starcraft (and Blizzard, in general) fan was over the house. But, a bug in Windows XP kept the game from installing. When I tried it again this weekend, it worked.

So I started a Terran (human) campaign so I could follow the story in order. So far, according to raptr, I’ve played 5 hours. I’ve gotten through the first six or so campaigns. I’m really not sure what the big deal is. Guess what? It’s a real time strategy game. I don’t see anything here that’s so amazing that people were so anxious for Starcraft 2 to finally show up. Maybe I’m just 12 years too late to the party, but what’s so special about this game? You build a base, you build units you attack others. There are different races or factions with different units. Seems just like Warcraft, Age of Empires, early Command and Conquer games. Maybe people just like space/aliens more than orcs/fantasy, historical, or speculative fiction units? I think the interface where they tell you what to do in the next mission is neat, but Command and Conquer had full videos with [poorly acting] humans years before.

Perhaps I just need to finish the game. Maybe the story is so amazing. Or maybe once I play at the different aliens it’ll be awesome. But, from what I’ve heard, I’ve probably lost a lot of the “awe factor” by playing Warcraft III which, my Blizzard-worshiping friends tell me, is just Starcraft with Warcraft skins. (And I can see that with the Zerg land compared with the Undead land) It’s also possible that I’m not into RTS games enough to understand the subtleties of how revolutionary Starcraft’s differing units were. Wikipedia says:

“Blizzard Entertainment’s use of three distinct races in StarCraft is widely credited with revolutionizing the real-time strategy genre. All units are unique to their respective races and while rough comparisons can be drawn between certain types of units in the technology tree, every unit performs differently and requires different tactics for a player to succeed.”

But Red Alert, released two years earlier had different units for the allies and axis. And I remember strategy being quite different for each faction. And Command and Conquer (vanilla), from the previous year, had GDI and NOD each with different units and defensive structures. The one series that was the worst at this differentiation was the Age of Empires series.

Anyway, I didn’t mean this as flame-bait or trolling. I just don’t understand all the hoopla over Starcraft 2 (other than the fact that people have had to wait this long because of the programmers being busy with WoW), but perhaps someone can clue me in.