It's baaaaack.
Not from us, but from the hordes that have massed behind the virtual wall of the Interweb, starting blankly at their Starcraft II client and wondering just why it won’t work.
After a one-month hiatus, Blizzard kicked it up a notch, and the servers began flowing with slippery Zerg juices once again. Beta testers will find a new patch, #16 if you’re keeping track, ready for download when they boot up the game. It will not only install a whack of new features – that’s bigger than “a few” but smaller than “a whole bunch”, for reference’s sake – but also clean up the installation folder by removing old patch info and cutting down the game’s footprint from 10gb to 3.5gb.
That’s a savings of over 6gb! Order now and receive a free, 11 day pass into Betaworld, the leading source of people playing Starcraft legitimately on the web. Wow! What a deal!
11 days, you say? 11 days, we do indeed. On July 19, the Beta will be shutting down forever as Blizz prepares for launch day July 27. This means that this week and a half will be fueled by frantic match-ups, stress tests, and n00b pwning as fans and “the company” alike seek to squeeze all they can out of the testing phase.
Probably, you should take a week off from work, buy one of those over-sized bags of chips from the MegaMart and hunker down. The Beta is a-callin’, and it’s best you accept the charges.
What can you expect from this new iteration of the Beta? Standard things such as the resetting of character names and rankings are included, along with the implementation of the RealID system across both the Starcraft and WoW worlds. We’ve spoken before about RealID and our lack of love for the system, but it will be interesting to see it function cross-game.
Patch 16 also comes with new sound effects for most units, new music, and reports that the highest level of graphical shading has been removed. Really, who needs to see all that much detail on the poor sap who’s going to be taking a Baneling acid splash to the face in the next five seconds anyway? Not us.
As well, the Ultralisk has received yet another buff, making it immune to stuns, mind control, and flashy infomercials promising “cash for minerals” or advertising the warm and oozing “Znuggie”.
The trend here seems to be to buff the crap out of the Ultralisk, leaving it not only with a clean colon, but turning into an unstoppable killing machine. Considering the resource cost, that seems fair, but we haven’t been all that pleased with the Terran or Protoss “ultimate units”, so we’ll see how this pans out.
Speaking of, Terran and Protoss – unit changes for them are absent with this patch, but Blizz did change the behavior of units in general, and in a way that had apparently been long desired. According to the screeches of protest on the Starcraft forums – soon to go the way of “no real name, no post” – there has been an issue with the rallying command for units that arrive fresh-faced and ready to fight out of production facilities.
Under the old mechanic, a unit given the rallying command would stop on its way to joining its fellows to attack anything in encountered, effectively making the rally command an attack/move. In cases of units emerging to find large groups of better-equipped enemies, as when a base is under siege, this was a problem.
Now, the rally command has been altered to simply be a move order. The unit will go where it is told unless told to do something different, hopefully keeping the number of non-hilarious random deaths down.
This change will not help you if you select your Barracks, scroll to the enemy base and then right click before selecting any units. In that case, great amusement will result as your bought-and-paid-for marines throw themselves into the very maw of death one by one.
Pay attention to where you click. Just sayin’.
We’re glad to have our Beta back, if only for a little while. We understand that it will demand our time and attention, gradually forcing out our ability to enjoy the company of other games, and getting jealous when we’re not around to help test it.
Sure, we’ll ignore all human contact for nine days, but how is that any different from a typical week and a half?
At least we’ll be entertained.
