GamersCircle

Eurogamer has posted a hands-on preview of Blizzard Entertainment’s highly anticipated real-time strategy game, StarCraft II.

What’s blindingly apparent is that while this game is going to be fantastic for high level competition, exactly the same attention to detail and obsession with balance is also going to make it fantastic for us normal humans as well. Each strategy has a counter-strategy, each action has an effective response – it’s just down to you to learn them and, more importantly, to recognize when to apply them. The pro players will do that at breakneck speed, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be fun for the rest of us to do the same things at a more sedate pace.

This is the beauty of what Blizzard is doing with StarCraft II. It knows that the game doesn’t need to be dumbed down for the rest of us – it just needs to avoid pandering to the ultra-hardcore mentality. Their labors over the past six years have focused on building something that’s accessible and deceptively simple, yet full of hidden depth. Another comment from Pardo is revealing. "It gets to that level where, hopefully, the game is as deep and strategic as something like chess, where there isn’t a dominant strategy," he told us. Like Chess, or Go, the rules of StarCraft II are simple – the games which result from those rules, however, are beautifully complex and nuanced.

Related posts:

1. Blizzard Wants StarCraft 2 to be Mom Friendly
2. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Preview
3. StarCraft 2 All but Announced
4. StarCraft Ghost at E3?
5. StarCraft II Delayed to 2010