As most of the people who follow the RTS-genre know, and maybe some who don’t, Blizzard’s long-awaited Starcraft 2 has appeared on several events. For example, at the annual blizzcon, Starcraft 2 was playable for the general public, and even some games were played on stage. Furthermore, the developers of the game have elaborated on changed game concepts. But will these changes affect the game in a positive way?

The original StarCraft was released 10 years ago, and its expansion, Brood War, soon followed. Compared to a game like Age of Empires II, which was released a year later, StarCraft was quite basic. While Age of Empires II used 4 different kinds of resources, StarCraft only used 2: Minerals and Vespene gas. And while Age of Empires II had over 10, players could only choose one of three races or factions in StarCraft.

One of the biggest difference between StarCraft and other Real Time Strategy games, is that the game engine hardly helps the player: There is very limited automatic resource gathering, the path finding is simply atrocious, there is no way to automatically form formations, it’s impossible to queue the building of structures for Terrans, and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

But StarCraft was blessed with one thing: Almost complete control over your units. While in other games the AI might work against you while you’re manually handling your units, StarCraft just lets you do as you please. So while there is no way to automatically form formations, you can do it manually. While the AI is terrible at targeting, you can do it manually. While the AI is terrible at path finding, you can do it manually.

And this also had big influences on the skill gap between new and skill players. While the new player has his hands full with ordering his army around, the skilled player will micro his units to perfect his control over his army. This way, unless the new player gains a huge advantage by controlling the game with his economy (or rushes the skilled player), the skilled player will always win. The bareness of the game is one of its defining factors.

But of course, no developer likes to have a game with terrible path finding or AI. So naturally, Blizzard has fixed this in StarCraft 2. However, this means adjustments have to be made. For example, workers gather minerals so fast with the increased path finding, Blizzard was forced to adjust their mineral capacity from 8 to 5. But the big question is: Will these improvements actually improve the game or not?

Of course, at this point, we can do nothing but speculate. And of course, we can expect changes in the game play (otherwise it couldn’t be called a new game). My guess is that it will have a negative effect on the game.

We can draw parallels with other games. For example, let us take the Super smash bros. games. Super Smash bros Melee (SSBM) was a popular game for tournament players. It was heavily based on so-called ‘advanced techniques’, that abused bugs in the game engine to give the user an edge. Then came Super smash bros Brawl (SSBB), its sequel on Nintendo Wii. While SSBB was certainly an improvement over SSBM, with a big roster upgrade and an improved game engine, there was something lacking. The depth these ‘advanced techniques’ created, lacked in SSBB. Therefore the game felt shallow.

The situation StarCraft is in is very similar. The importance of micro defines parts of the game, just like in SSBM. StarCraft is also played a lot in tournaments. And StarCraft 2 is, just like SSBB, very pretty compared to its predecessor. Can we accurately predict the future? No, we can’t. But we can hope for Blizzard to make sure the game does not lose its depth.