StarCraft 2 Announced

Following IGN’s World Wide Invitational blog for the final 20 minute countdown to the announcement was suspenseful to say the least. Most people who know my gaming habits know that I hold StarCraft above all other games (from any genre) so that has me very pleased.

As the blog continues to describe the gameplay with new and old units, it certainly sounds like they’re mixing a fair bit of traditional stuff with new ideas. Should be great, and I can’t wait to get my hands on some real media. As I write this, Blizzard’s site hasn’t even been updated for the announcement yet.

I should also mention that no 4th race has been revealed yet. I get the feeling that they may do a CnC3-style release, where they let everyone know all about the well known factions and then introduce the new one some time later.

I’ll just post this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4JWwaAe7w&watch_response

Although I’ll also say this: where’s Starcraft:Ghost? I know they cancelled it but it was looking really promising and I’d rather play something like that than another RTS. As much as I enjoyed the original StarCraft I just can’t get excited about the RTS genre anymore. The Starcraft universe was great so another view on it would have been preferred in much the same way that World of Warcraft allowed a different “up close and personal” view of the Warcraft universe.

Oh, and this screenshot implies that my laptop will be brought to its knees by this game. Zerg rushes in 2D were no problem but there’s a heck of a lot of 3D Zerglings in that shot that I’m sure will leave my hardware weeping. Nice screenshots in the set and the models themselves look great but it definitely looks like StarCraft with 3D graphics and some new units. For most of the screenshots the perspective is also faithful to the old game but some of the latter ones change implying that the camera can at least be tilted - I don’t notice any panning although zooming can been seen in one or two shots.

Those graphics were pretty amazing. Much like I thought with Warcraft 3 and then again with WOW it’s amazing how much they made a 3d game look just like a 2d game.

Well, reading info about the Q&A session which was held shortly after the show, it appears there won’t actually be a fourth faction. Kinda disappointing, given that even WarCraft 3 had four.

That said, I recall WarCraft 3 ended up with many, many patches containing lots of balancing tweaks, so it seems four races was a bit much for the team to smooth over for fair competitive multiplayer matches - something which wouldn’t be acceptable for StarCraft, I suppose.

Which has me a bit worried. Given that the time difference between WarCraft 2 and 3 was seven years, the changes were absolutely groundbreaking if you compare the two games. By comparison, StarCraft and its sequel will be about 10 years apart, and it looks like they’re not changing nearly as much. Maybe that’s a good thing for some (ie: the tournament players) but I am not sure if it’s going to have as much replay value, for me, if the gameplay is too much the same. I just really hope that Blizzard isn’t just bowing to the desires of the hardcore competitive players.

Given that, I am wondering what Blizzard is going to do with widescreen support. The gameplay videos I have seen are all in widescreen format, though given the competitive advantage, would it be disabled for ladder matches? Blizzard were always anal about that sort of thing in the past - not allowing StarCraft to be played in anything over 640×480, and even in Diablo 2 they waited for the expansion to add 800×600 support.

Overall I have to say, it looks promising but I was expecting more changes. Except of course in the way of the Protoss unit design… I was expecting less change there. The mothership and colossus look whacked.

My first reaction was a heavy spoonful of disappointment. It looked a whole lot like StarCraft on the WarCraft 3 engine. All the recent (and not even recent) development in the RTS genre didn’t seem to have any influence. I’d love to see more intricate unit interactions like Dawn of War (StarCraft units are just begging for some personally animated destruction). Or destructible terrain (CoH) or scale (SupCom). To see the almost bulbousy battlecruiser still be about the size of a car to a Protoss Zealot isn’t exactly what I was looking for.

The more I look at this stuff the more it feels like this game is being created for Korea. Cyrris pointed out in private conversation that most of the time the game is mentioned it speaks of “competitive RTS” like that is its genre. The CG trailer did nothing to further the fiction of the game which was actually the reason I was looking forward to the announcement. RTS, FPS, MMO or whatever, I really wanted to learn more about the StarCraft universe.

If it was any other company my hopes would have been dashed. This is Blizzard though, there has to be some refinement hidden within the game that videos and screenshots cannot show. Hell all we’ve seen is the floating platform tileset too. If you’d have watched WarCraft 3 videos prior to knowing how heroes influenced the game it probably would not have been too telling. I await more info anxiously.

The thing with StarCraft for me is that back when I played it, I was on the good old shared 56k connection so I never was able to play online. The singleplayer campaigns and custom maps were all I used. Blizzard has actually said that they aren’t releasing details on StarCraft 2’s story because it’s just not ready yet - they’ve concentrated on making the multiplayer and general game balance work first, and then they plan on finalizing and implementing the story. Competitive RTS indeed. This is almost like the SupCom approach - and if it wasn’t Blizzard, I’d be worried.

I’ve been closely looking at all the gameplay videos that have been released. In fact I just saw the mothership using all it’s different skills for the first time and I have to say that’s quite cool. I hope the presence of the mothership doesn’t mean the absence of the Protoss carrier though, I loved those things and would hate to see them gone. But then, as if a mothership + Warp Rays + Phase Prisms + Phoenixes wasn’t a devastating enough air force, throwing carriers in to the mix is sounding more and more unlikely.

And explosive Zerglings scare me. They’re like a land-based version of the old flying Scourges. And I hated those.

I hear a lot of this sentiment going around–well it it was someone other than Blizzard i’d be worried and I’m kind of feeling the same way. Sure it looks asthetically similar but I was listening to the PC gamer podcast who has an exclusive in their next issue about Starcraft 2 and they said Blizzard is planning a bunch more asymmetry into SC2 and have some special plans to really reimagine the zerg a bit. So that assuaged my fears a bit but the big factor in that was that hey when i first saw World of Warcraft my response was why do i want to play this when i could be playing Galaxies? And well I think we all know how that turned out. I spent very little time in that version of a Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away and far, far too much time in Azeroth.

All I want from StarCraft II is is StarCraft, but with more units, more story, and well…that’s pretty much it.

Sure, the RTS genre has grown by leaps and bounds since the original game was released. A quick look at the last two or three years reveals a number of fantastic, genre-expanding offerings including, but not limited to: Rise of Nations, Dawn of War + expansion packs, Company of Heroes, and Supreme Commander have all raised the bar in one area of the RTS or another.

However, I like StarCraft the way it is. The only thing that I would want changed is the number of units per command group. I hated having only twelve per group, especially playing as Zerg.

As for the rest of the game, I still play it, and I still love it. I play with my friends on a fairly regular basis and it is always a blast. I also really, really liked the story and the mythology surrounding the game. So long as that is expanded on with the core game-play similar, I’ll be very satisfied.

Also: ad nauseum, this is Blizzard. They would cancel this game over releasing a crappy game.

I’m not worried that StarCraft II will be an amazing game.

Dawn of War style squads rather than individual troopers would be useful. Since I’ve gotten used to that I’m damned if I want to micro-manage individuals anymore.

It doesn’t look like StarCraft II will feature squads, at least in the current gameplay trailers they select and teleport individual units. To be honest I don’t really mind, because both methods have their pros and cons.

As for the limited command groups in StarCraft - not so in SC2. You can select however many units you wish at any given moment. Blizzard already stated there won’t be a unit selection limit, hurray!

After seeing the 22 minute HD gameplay footage I’m really excited about this game. It’s exactly like you’d expect from a game set 4 years after the events of StarCraft: design is largely similar as are some units, but each side has clearly been pumping out new technologies at a rapid pace - resulting in radically different armies and abilities. It also sounds like they’re planning quite a bit of new features for Battle.Net - and as though each race will have individual ’special abilities’ aching to the Protoss’ teleportation ability (which they can exploit with their mobile power field generators - awesome stuff, definitely something different).

Will it be something groundbreaking like Ground Control, Dawn of War or Homeworld? No. But then, neither was WarCraft III (which was essentially a dumbed down version of Battle Realms with uglier graphics and better multiplayer support) - and look how that turned out: Game of the Year awards all over the place and millions of fans around the globe.

A game doesn’t need to be innovative to be good - heck, most great games aren’t very innovative at all… look at Deus Ex, Unreal Tournament, WarCraft III, Call of Duty or Battlefield 1942. None of them were very original, but all of them rank as classics for many people (not necessarily including myself). Heck, look at the #1 most overhyped and ridiculously loved console shooter Halo - nothing about it is even remotely innovative (or enjoyable) but millions of gamers across the globe rank it as one of the best games ever. So clearly: innovation is not the key to success.

I can’t agree that innovation is not the key to success. The industry is built and survives on innovation. Every single title you mentioned had innovative features critical to the fundamental game mechanic. Just what seems to happen is if its not completely out of left field people don’t seem to mark it as innovative. The best games innovate in a subtle and controlled way. They seed in the innovation with other proven gameplay concepts so that it compliments the entire experience rather than being a gimmicky focus.

Deus Ex was insanely innovative with its open mission structure, branching storylines and RPG elements all injected into a solid and familiar FPS construct. A player could pick it up and understand how to play easily and get direct enjoyment out of the shooting/sneaking/exploring. Then as the experience progressed all the nuance and depth of the world, character building, and freedom sank in.

Unreal Tournament is innovative in its tremendous and painstakingly deep competitive play. No one does an online skill based competitive shooter better. Sure it looks immediately “deathmatch, woo”. But really sit down with the game or have someone who really understands it walk you through a level and you’ll see it in a whole new light. The real meat of UT is sadly unexperienced by a vast majority of its players. Plus the node system for Onslaught, genius. Also to differentiate UT from Quake (the foundation of deathmatch) you really have to look at the weapons in UT. Just because other games have weapons doesn’t mean you can’t innovate through complimentary firing modes and even guns you use on your friends to bolster their firepower. Quake is deathmatch in the raw, UT is deathmatch for the thinking man.

Call of Duty turned FPSs on their heads by removing the “hero” player and making him a solider. You never fought alone, scripting was taken to a whole new level and you really felt like a part of a far greater experience. They weaved that into an extremely solid shooter base with some incredible set-pieces.

Battlefield 1942 did what many people didn’t think was possible at the time with current technology. Huge singleplayer quality battles with a full assortment of vehicles in a multiplayer setting. For a freshmen outing DICE moved mountains.

I remember Battle Realms but the “dumbing down” of WarCraft III was actually why it was so successful. BR pushed its innovation into isolation and lost sight of its RTS roots. Once units engaged you just kind of let go, the strategy was gone. WarCraft III added its hero units and made them essential to the game, but it did not forget the rest of the RTS behind it. By rebalancing the whole game to respond to the hero units they crafted an incredibly solid experience that had depth and grounding to it.

And even Halo. While I am a PC gamer at heart I’ve been recently playing the entire Halo series on the my 360 (article forthcoming). This is the first time i’ll play through it all. I got decently far into the first one about a year or two after it came out, haven’t touched the 2nd though.

Halo’s innovation, and I am surprised people don’t mention this more often, is a very subtle one. I’ve been scratching my head trying to think of a game previous to it that pulls off what it does so well (and effortlessly). But Halo brings the unpredictability and “intelligence” of a multiplayer shooter into the singleplayer realm, with solid mechanics and unbelieveable polish/production values.

I say intelligence in quotes because Halo’s enemies display behavior beyond ’smart and challenging’, you can also get the best of them. And when you do it doesn’t feel planned out for you. You know how in any generic shooter there is the part where all the enemies just happened to be facing away from you for a part of a level allowing you to sneak up on them (probably after some blatantly obvious cutscene telling you to do so). You can approach the majority of Halo’s conflicts in a lot of ways. Similar to a Deus Ex feel but the shooting/moving is far superior. Halo makes no apologies that it is out and out a shooter.

I’ve heard the term brought up more recently with the Halo 3 beta but it really is a “sandbox shooter”. You get mini-sandboxes formed around every conflict. Bungine puts the pieces in place (often they just fall into place) and throws the player into it. Stickly speaking of combat, Halo does to conflict what GTA did to action/adventure. It really opens up what the player can (or cannot) do in combat. All of its elements (the personal shield, non-essential but useful vehicles, 2 weapon limit, grenade system, enemies with shields, solid physics, enemy ‘pecking order’, squad interaction, terrain, pacing) compliment a very fun, “I want to try that again” experience.

I can’t say other games really had that. Not until recently with FEAR and STALKER have I seen such things. Gears of War definitely has elements of it too.

All of the titles above have depth as a stand-out feature that separates a good idea from a good idea well executed. Everyone has great and “innovative” ideas, but if you can’t execute it properly is it really innovating? I thought Battle Realms was amazing for the first 2 hours or so I played it, but then the game broke down, as did Joint Ops.

The depth is in the details. Making sticky grenades and AI interact in Halo, players fall faster than vehicles in UT (ever grab a raptor while sky diving?), have NPC move players out onto the map early in War3, jump, double jump, dodge and wall push combine for godlike aerial abilities in UT, Deus Ex is all details, on and on.

This post was going to be about StarCraft 2 you know, my thoughts have changed considerably after the full on 720p gameplay video. For the next comment!

Here we go! Of all that stuff I mentioned up there you can see how Blizzard’s games are so incredibly successful. Blizzard are the gods of controlled innovation. Not only that, but they make their game everything it can be on all fronts. They take a genre, polish and perfect it with sugerical precision, then add their touch of innovation or spin. With WarCraft III it was the heroes. With StarCraft 3 asymmetrical sides. World of Warcraft? Common sense applied to MMOs as well as a singleplayer RPG feel to the quest system.

So anyway. StarCraft 2 I want you. For some reason after my disappointment with the initial unveiling I couldn’t help but feast upon every screen/movie/article released on it. I was hungry for any shred of info. I read 20 articles from 20 different journalists all witnessing the same event hoping one of them might have remembered something another didn’t. The gameplay movies shown before the big one launched were kind of muddy wherever I found them. Also the protoss looked so incredibly overpowered

However, the full on 720p gameplay video with narration (thank you so much Blizzard) turned everything around. First off you could see the unit interaction so much better. In the big battle at the end I saw a Protoss Zealot run up to a marine and just do one slice then run to something else. “Damnit! I hate when the AI of the units can’t decide on proper targets” I thought, dismayed that old RTS bugs still remained. However, then the marine split into two pieces and each fell to the side. The zealot’s psionic (sp) blades are nice and sharp

The differentiation of the sides is looking to be really spectacular. The army of zealots “warped in” will make the protoss such an interesting race to play. I hope we get 2 more unveilings of this caliber, each focusing on one side as this one has toward the protoss.

It looks like the things they are doing with the unit abilities and asymmetry for the armies will shine. A time altering bubble for the mothership? And actual physical warheads launched from the missile silos? Holy crap. I less than three Blizzard.

I cannot agree with any of your points on the games mentioned, other than perhaps Deus Ex - which was a decent step up from System Shock (which was still clearly the foundation upon which Deus Ex was based - and a more true innovator).

So what about those other games? Battlefield 1942 was naught but a World War 2 remake of Tribes. Call of Duty was Medal of Honor all over again, but dumbed down & way shorter - oh yeah it was intense, but so was MoH:AA.

Unreal Tournament? I love it, but it’s really not much more than a souped up version of Unreal multiplayer. Yeah it added Domination and Assault - but look how popular that was (left out in the subsequent UT2003 release). Innovative? Hell no. The best damn multiplayer shooter ever made? Hell yes.

As for Battle Realms and WarCraft 3. I feel exactly opposite of you on these two games… WarCraft 3 pushed too much in the RPG direction, where Battle Realms was still clearly and very much so an RTS. Heroes weren’t overpowered center-of-the-universe beings like they were in WC3 & the level of tactical depth was enormous (and still is) in comparison. There were also loads of neat tactical gimmicks added, which further solidified it’s position as a great (but neglected) evolution of the RTS genre: troop movements through forests would send birds rallying to reveal your positions on the minimap, there was genuine incentive to attack & units were finally genuinely trained - rather than constructed out of thin air (and lumber).

As for your Halo comment - I can name a fair few games which did that kind of sandbox environment or the whole multiplayer intelligence thing not only earlier, but better. Try Dark Forces, Delta Force or Outcast please. Dark Forces compares the most directly to Halo - offering enemies that didn’t seem scripted while generally allowing you to take multiple approaches throughout levels… and all that in 1995.

As you probably know, Delta Force (1998 I believe) is far more of a sandbox game than Halo. Contrary to Halo, the early Delta Force games really allowed you to take any approach you desired - and enemies truly felt like random intelligent opponents which reacted to your actions.

Outcast (1998) took things a step further, by featuring storytelling miles ahead of the Halo series and a genuinely open environment. You know that whole open-world feature of STALKER, allowing you to travel freely between regions, everyone is so crazy about? Outcast had that - in friggin’ 1998 - but it’s combat and storytelling were many times better. It was also a heck of a lot more innovative. Too bad it’s maximum resolution is in the 500 pixel region or I’d play it again right now. Halo is honestly outclassed in nearly every respect by this 9 year old free-roaming shooter, it only barely scores better in terms of graphics…

I do agree with the point you’re trying to make - in that pure innovation is not important for (and usually even detrimental to) success. It is the combination of good gameplay elements and seemingly innovative elements (but not always quite so) that makes a great and popular game. Even so it’s amazing how many incredibly well-polished and fun-to-play innovative games, such as Battle Realms, Messiah, Sacrifice & Outcast don’t sell well. There was genuinely nothing wrong with these four games, they all received amazing ratings - and surpassed similar games, such as WarCraft 3 or Prey - but none of them (other than Outcast) sold well.

Messiah was made by the same people who made Enter the Matrix. EtM was by all accounts not innovative and a horrible product, but it sold millions. Messiah was an almost bug free product with great gameplay and ratings, but sold miserably. Judging by this - clearly ‘proper execution’ is not something gamers take into account when buying games.

On a sidenote: I played Halo on both PC and Xbox and never found it to be innovative or enjoyable in any way. Yes, the singleplayer story is mildly entertaining, but both gameplay and graphics were well below average even back when it was released for Xbox. In comparison to PC shooters of then, it was already a mediocre, if not below average, game in all respects. The reason it sold well was purely and simply because it was a console FPS that was remotely playable… not one aspect of it was ‘properly executed’.

Holy crap. That was a lot to read.

Having not played many of those games mentioned, I will say that I have never really thought much of Halo. It never seemed to offer me anything in multiplayer that I couldn’t get in a much more enjoyable form elsewhere. I never much bothered with its singleplayer because SP FPS games just don’t do it for me, but just generally I found both Halo and Halo 2 to be really bland and unexciting. Sticky grenades are amusing but that’s really about it.

WarCraft 3 was always interesting, but I never really liked the change from StarCraft’s lots-of-units to WarCraft’s less-units + heroes. Truth be told, my WC3 games almost always ended up the same way:

- Going around with heroes to level them up by killing creeps
- building an army, maybe a new base or two
- taking on the enemy with these big wads of units just under my population limit, in one big catastrophic battle which is far too chaotic to keep tabs on any units, let alone do any real micromanagement.

I still play WC3… but only with user-made maps which make excellent use of the heroes system, like DotA and Enfo’s team survival. So, a bit of a catch-22 there.

Nevertheless, I think Holliday’s point stands strong - changes don’t have to be in the form of gimmicks (which I believe is now the catch word, since Blizzard used it on SupCom the other day) to be considered innovative. And I wouldn’t say “seemingly innovative” is really a good term - the point here is that real, solid innovation comes in more forms than just the obvious.

All that in no way brings me to my next point, which is where I also noticed the zealots fumbling around the marines in the gameplay video. Yeah, they didn’t do too badly, but then they also didn’t do too great. Still a lot of excessive walking around the place which just wastes time and hitpoints. I was really impressed when the colossus went and stood over the group of zealots later on, without any collision issues at all - I just hope that can be the case with more of the units. Few things in RTS games have annoyed me so much as your own units blocking each other from moving freely, and it’s hardly something that resembles real life action. Dawn of War seemed to do pretty well with its infantry in that regard.

Oh, and speaking of Dawn of War, my space marines could shoot while moving. Surely that is something that’s not unreasonable to ask for in StarCraft 2. All units, especially the damn space fighters, should be able to shoot while they’re moving. It’s just common sense, and it wasn’t evident in the gameplay vid.

I used “seemingly innovative” to refer to features which many gamers might think are innovative, but have been featured in previous games already. Such as WarCraft 3’s hero-mechanics or S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s free-form world travel.

As for this whole innovation discussion - the only reason I used innovation in the obvious sense of the word, was because previous commenters stated that StarCraft 2 ‘clearly’ wasn’t innovative. The kind of subtle innovation and polish you’re talking about are things you simply don’t notice from 2 minute youtube videos, but from extensive play sessions after release.

Most gamers use the word innovative to describe games entirely different from the norm such as Messiah or Outcast. “Subtle innovation” is not in the dictionary of the vast majority of online gamers - as such I deemed it a waste of time to touch on that topic. Additionally, when you talk about things like “subtle innovation” it blurs the lines a bit, because what is subtle innovation? A different implementation of heroes in an RTS game, or a new kind of weapon in a shooter, or maybe a new type of level design? In that regard most games are innovative, in spite of public opinion stating the contrary. Besides, one gamer’s gimmick is another gamer’s holy grail of innovation… I know plenty of people drooling over SupCom’s ‘gimmick’.

On SC2 - I do hope they’ll allow marines and other units to shoot while moving, it was one of the (many) great features present in Dawn of War. I don’t see them doing it for spaceships anytime soon though, because they’d need to be able to fly in 3D, which it doesn’t seem like they can in this engine. I’d have loved Empire at War-like space battles in Starcraft - although with better strategic overview - but the stand-still battles work too I guess.

Why is flying in 3D is necessary for phoenixes, battlecruisers and the like to be able to shoot while they move?

Few things in StarCraft were as annoying as following a pack of mutalisks with your wraiths, only to have your wraiths stop to shoot, realize that stopping has put them out of range, and then continuing on and doing it all over again. If an enemy is in firing range and no other targets have been acquired, ranged units should shoot, whether they’re stopped or not. Hell, it’d actually make siege tanks somewhat useful in non-siege-mode.

Because otherwise they would bump into each other? Most of these air units fire from the front solely (e.g.: Warp Rays, Battlecruisers, Hydralisks, etc.) so they have to be facing their enemy to fire - can you imagine the amount of suicidal collisions if this were to be done in 2D? O.o (rather than having ships fly and fire at slight angles - so they won’t kamikaze into one another and turn air combat into one giant rain of colliding debris over the battlefield)

Aside from that - 3D space combat just looks way cooler. Homeworld and Empire at War proved that - although EaW was horrid to control with ships flying all over the place, couldn’t really select anything in large firefights. Still looked awesome though. I suppose it (3D Air Combat) wouldn’t be necessary if they just changed the way the current air units fired to be more along the lines of the Protoss mothership (which can fire in pretty much all directions), but that would demand a redesign for many units.

Further on shooting while moving: this really should be in - and if they want to do both, then make shooting while moving a little less accurate. Regardless, nowadays shooting while moving is pretty much a genre standard for non-fantasy RTS games, simply because it’s so much more fun, not to mention logical. It’d be great if Blizzard could still implement this in StarCraft II - at the very least for ground units. Right now it just looks silly when the Immortals move towards the Siege Tanks in the gameplay trailer, but refuse to fire until they’ve stopped moving.

Yep. Particularly with that Immortals example, the player has to move all the Immortals to well within firing range so the ones at the back can reach the siege tanks. So the group doesn’t actually stop moving (and doesn’t actually start firing) until a good 3 seconds until after the siege tanks were in range of the first immortals. And 3 seconds is a long time in a situation like that.

Now that you mention why it’s not possible with the ships, it’s quite obvious. Duh. Though it wouldn’t have actually been a problem back in original StarCraft I suppose seeing as the sprites all had no issues overlapping each other. That said, this could create some annoying issues with just one’s own aircraft. I used to stack my carriers all together with my arbiter, and I can’t imagine being able to do that as easily in the 3D scene. Not that there are any carriers or arbiters anymore… guess we’ll see.

I’m sure there must be a clever way of working out the moving air combat though. If the game supports physics I’m sure it could support some clever vector calculations to make sure units don’t fly in to each other while engaging, and stop when required, or only allow it when the target is moving away from your craft.

Hooray! Looks like carriers will still be in the game, though now called “Tempests” (and they look smaller as well).

Once again YouTube proves it’s worth with an overview of more Protoss units: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30MBljXxg3M

Some crazy hover-board riding dudes are there, plus a new archon. They are all introduced formally, but if you look carefully in the very last battle scene in the middle you can see what looks like a new Reaver unit as well.

While I have reservations about posting what was a PC Gamer exclusive, if the video has half a million views on YouTube I’d say it’s well and truly public now.

Oh it’s definitely public, been posted across several news sites as well (e.g.: Firingsquad). They seem like a cool new take on the old units - looks promising. Now we just need that beta/demo/full version… although some Terran/Zerg info would be nice too

Truth to be told, this announcement practically made me wet my pants.