And so this curious and probably irreversible trend for throwing the opening cinematics of games out of the nest without a game to back them up continues. Sometime in March, we’ll boot up Heart of the Swarm for the first time and go, “Oh yeah. I remember this one.”
Silliness aside, Blizzard have a track record when it comes to shellshocked, foreground-heavy animation, and I think they’ve succeeded in capturing at least a smidgen of HotS’s Zerg-infused essence. Check out their efforts below.
There’s the expected bombs and bluster, but it looks like Blizz have also gone out of their way to capture some of the advanced rock, paper, scissors that goes on in high-level SC2.
In March, marines will be crushed by bugs, like bugs. And there’s that twist, of course. What’s more StarCraft than a list-minute turnaround?
Heart of the Swarm promises, among many other improvements of one kind or another, to make competitive StarCraft more beginner-friendly:
“We want to make the game more accessible to players that aren’t necessarily ready to jump into a highly competitive scene,” Blizzard head Mike Morhaime told us at IPL5. “A lot of people do feel intimidated, at least at first, in playing in ranked play. Unranked matches are a big step in that direction. But, even before that, a lot of players never make the transition from the campaign to matchmaking – to playing against people they don’t know.”
There’s a really nice feature we’re adding in Heart of the Swarm which is a training area where you can basically play against the computer and the computer gives you tips on what you should be doing. It gradually gets harder. When you have completed the training program, you get unranked matched against the AI.”
Thanks, Kotaku.