Starcraft 2 Q&A Batch 55 Is up!! The next batch of Question's and Answers about Starcraft 2 has been released! ---StarCraft II Q&A Batch 55--- 1. Not all potential players of StarCraft II have played the original StarCraft before, thus they might encounter problems with the understanding of the story. Is it possible to play the campaign of StarCraft II without knowing anything? Will you come up with some things that happened in the original StarCraft and Brood War again – just so that people not familiar to the story get more information? We plan on having story elements that will bring players up to speed on the most recent plot developments and prepare them for the StarCraft II storyline. We also plan on having a plot summary of what transpired in the original StarCraft and Brood War during the installation process. However we feel that regardless of your familiarity with the original story, all players will be able to enjoy the story developments in StarCraft II. 2. You have already announced that you are going to record various stats when playing StarCraft II with the new Battle.net 2.0 – but how detailed will those statistics be? Will one be able to see how many units of a certain kind (for example Marines) one have build or even killed so far? We will be recording a large amount of stats for StarCraft II, but we are still in discussion as to which stats will ultimately be tracked. We will determine how detailed the stat-tracking will be based on what information we think will benefit our players the most to help improve their game. 3. You have already stated that you will support DirectX 10, but what about DirectX 11? We currently do not have any plans on supporting DirectX11-specific features, but the game will be compatible with DirectX11. 4. How many stats will a Hero unit be able to take? Three like in Warcraft 3 or is there even a limit? If you create a user-amp with heroes, you can outfit them with a large number of stats. However, currently only three stats will be able to be displayed on the UI due to limited space. 5. In lore Protoss warp in their units and buildings from some far planet. Will there be any mechanic that reflects this such as a "warp out" that could act as a refund? We do not have any plans to include a “warp out” game mechanic. We have discussed the possibility of this in the past, but it felt too similar to the Terran mechanics of being able to salvage the structures. 6. Will there be a converter to convert our favorite original StarCraft maps to StarCraft II maps? I don’t want to lose all of my favorite maps from the original StarCraft when I get StarCraft II. There will not be a map converter for StarCraft II. Map-makers will have to manually rebuild any of their maps using the new StarCraft II map editor. 7. I'm just going to assume that you will have some sort of window mode in StarCraft II. But I was wondering if you're going to implement a windowed mode like the one that World of Warcraft has? You know where you can maximize the window, removing the borders and enabling fullscreen mode yet providing easy access to the desktop. You will be able to select both windowed and full-screen windowed modes from the options menu. ---End of Transmission--- Source Enjoy! -Seradin
Though I'm not into the hero and RPG things, I don't know what they meant with #4. Every screenshot that I've seen shows that regular units use about a quarter of the part of the hud reserved for the selected unit(s). There is still massive space to display an awful lot of stats.
People will be able to create a custom ui anyway. So it really doesn't matter whether the original ui can show a lot of statistics or not. Thanks for posting, Seradin.
@ question 1, I'm pretty sure they will have a cinematicsuch as the one in halflife 2: ep.2 to reflect back on some things taht have happened in the game.
I am satisfied by questions 1 & 7. Question 3 about DirectX 11 : if we finally need this version of DirectX, does that mean that we'll have to set Windows 7 up or will we be able to set it up on windows XP and Vista ?
It's not supported at all. Also, this Q&A Batch is as pointless as always Where's some damn screenshots, Blizzard? @SOGEKING: You won't need Direct X 11. Even if Blizzard specifically wanted to add a full feature set, there would be nothing to help them that much because only things like tessellation and ray tracing are added. StarCraft 2 will be Direct X 9 which means that it'll be supported on Direct X 10 and Direct X 11 cards because those cards are backwards compatible.
