Although Blizzard made my most favorite favoritest bestest game of all time, Diablo 2...I never got in to Starcraft.

Even though I'm a huge 40k fan (before Starcraft was around) and a Sci-fi nut. So I figured what the hell and tried the beta of this game thinking, I like modern RTS right? Maybe this will be the thing for me.

Well. I felt the entire time that is was a throwback to the old days before RTS had developed any of the modern aspects that make a genre worth even playing. Like they completely ignored all the modern changes to the genre that have improved it since their first game came out. Primitive, absolute yawn fest with mediocre graphics (Blizzard after all is not renowned for their cutting edge...anything, but rather for their extremely long development cycles and polish of course.)

Anyway yeah. Count me as one person who was unimpressed. But it wasn't a 'let down' since I didn't expect anything. I just was surprised that this game felt like something from circa 2002, they completely ignored the 8 years in between in terms of potential of what RTS games can deliver. Can we loot the corpses? Can we equip items from our fallen foes? Can we build bottlenecks out of destroyed terrain aiming carefully our heavy bombardment to destroy that tower causing it to block a crucial road? Maybe, but only if scripted...can we take control of a single soldier and control him from 3rd person and snipe with him ala Men of War and Faces of War? Can we upgrade our team with item slots and relics dropped on the battlefield ala Dawn of War 2? Can we specialize our units outside of general upgrades to our bases and unit producing hubs? The laundry list of things that would be great but are not here is gigantic.

The gaping hole in "what could have been" that is left is even widened further when put under scrutiny that this game was in development for about a decade. 5 times longer than the average FPS. From a studio that is filthy rich to boot. Filthy stinking rich with no limit to their resources they can tap or no talent they couldn't acquire should they have the need. And this...this is what they deliver? I was at least expecting to be impressed somewhat as I'm very easily impressed! Nothing about this title other than the unit art impressed me and only then because I thought it was mostly "cute", but nothing that special honestly.

But, I'm assuming this is because they want to make this game for the fans of the franchise and those people don't really want anything new and fancy but probably will be overjoyed to just simply have "more" of their original game with sparklier graphics and maybe a few new tricks and probably made all of their design decisions based around that understanding.

I can actually dig that since for instance, if they were to simply repackage the original Diablo 2 with slightly upgraded graphics but with more content to explore, I would be pleased as can be just with that so I can totally understand. Just my coinage on this game. I'm busy all this coming weekend and probably won't read all the hatred that is forthcoming, but feel free to behead me etc...but I may not even have time to respond so it might fall on deaf ears!