Feedback on StarCraft II from the DreamHack LAN

Gosugamers Lord_of_Chaos has reported back from the DreamHack LAN in Jönköping, Sweden.

In addition to photos from the event, Chaos has written up a long and in depth article about the state of the game.

Here's a snippet:


Overall impressions
It took my about 5 minutes to get used to the graphics, before that it was hard to even distinguish the drones around my hatchery. But after those 5 minutes, I could start to take it in. My first impression was that this was above my expectations (and believe me they were high!) and that this was impressive. An old Brood War player will feel pretty at home, as long as he enters with an open mind and realises that this is a new game.

Gameplay was fast paced and seemed to give you lots of alternative routes, and lots of things to do. SC II is not WarCraft III in space, this is StarCraft II in its own right, and it does indeed feel like a natural sequel to StarCraft: Brood War. There were still things that annoyed me (and I will take them up later), but nothing that in any way destroyed the feeling of the game. Some of them I am hopeful that Blizzard will adress, some I don't think so. But overall, it doesn't really matter to overall gameplay.


photos via gosugamers

Cometitive play
Competitive play and strategic depth. From the little I could see from 11 games it was really good. Almost all my games ended early though, due to me not knowing what I was doing or my opponents not knowing what they were doing. Or just me being gosu and owning them. We all lacked solid standard builds, which made us all open to attacks at several points, and when both players are playing to win it makes the games pretty short. Perhaps I should have tried a classic 20min no rush plz! for old times and sake to be able to explore the tech tree some.

However I really got the feeling that this was on par with Brood War in all aspects of competition. I only scratched the surface, sure, but it FELT deep. It was quick, fast paced. Once I got rushed and killed, once I made a big micro mistake in the middle of the map and lost half my army in an instand, once I got hopelessly medivac harassed do death (medivac works like drop ships for Terran). It's quick, brutal, mobile and effective. It actually felt like a more mobile and fast paced game than Brood War, and this coupled together with the macro that will make you try to expand earlier or go for more aggression, it will make things interesting.

Of course, we will not know how the meta game will develop and how deep this game REALLY is until it's been played for years. If it still, 8 years after release, produces new strategies then it's as good as Brood War. Until then we won't know. But it felt that good!

Check out the full article here:
http://www.gosugamers.net/starcraft/thread/323816


GosuGamers also had staff take a lot of great photos during the entire event, too bad not much of StarCraft II in action:

The opening ceremony


Europeans sure know how to party






The rest of the photos here:
http://www.gosugamers.net/warcraft/features/2446