A ton of updates were released this week for Blizzard’s hot upcoming sequel, ‘Starcraft 2’. A Korean gamers first impressions, screenshots, China’s Blizzard fansite summit and some really interesting details.

To kick things off, the Korean website GameMeca had the chance to test out the latest StarCraft II build and received screenshots from the event. In addition, they also have a StarCraft II impressions article which has been translated by SCLegacy. Nothing too drastic or new but here’s a quick summary below:

First off, the article talked about the loading time for SC2.

Firstly, the demonstration version allowed multiplay through the method of IP connection, but like its predecessor ‘StarCraft’, after the map was selected and the room was made, you could wait until other players came or added computers, and after the conditions were made you could start the game immediately. The amazing truth is that there was no loading time. Like eating rice after putting it in water (a common way for Koreans to cool down rice instantly while not altering the flavor) the loading time was over almost instantly, and because of this there was no time to enjoy the starting of the glorious first game, or for stretching, or for straightening your back there was the direct greeting that became a slight abuse.

This is great news for gamers who are frustrated over online games with long loading times and forcing you to wait for other players to finish loading their end of the game. It seems Blizzard is using the game room to let players preload the map data, graphics, and engine before the start of the game. Therefore, players can start the game immediately instead of waiting for everybody to load.

So if the loading time is faster, how about the game play itself? Since the game is going from 2d to 3d it must be slower then the predecessor.

From the speed of Probes mining minerals to the movement and attack speeds of the Zealots and Zerglings, and also the rate at which units killed and died in the middle of a battle. The speed was approximately 1.5 times faster than the current ‘Star’. Thanks to this, in the small time I was fiddling with the game I found difficulty in using all my accumulated minerals, and found many cases where the battle started and ended with no time to look away.

Well there you go, since all the movements and attack speed of units are sped up then it will definitely make the game feel like it is going at a much faster rate. Battles with opponents will probably have results immediately on who lost more units in the fight. However, even though the game is in a much faster pace will this cause veterans to dislike the game play? Most likely gamers will need to come up with new strategy as well as adjusting their gameplays and styles.

Finally, we move on to the controls of the game.

…when multiple workers were selected and one mineral was clicked, instead of rushing all to that one mineral they all spread out, going in different directions like the good friends they are. Next is the ability to hotkey multiple selections and squads. The original selection cap of only 12 multiple selections has increased to 24, and when selecting squads with hotkeys it was possible to go above the 24 limit. If 25 Zealots were set to hotkey number 1, the space that showed unit details said 24 units were set to hotkey 1 and the leftover one unit was set to hotkey 2. Each number hotkey had an icon on the screen, and when you clicked the icon the corresponding units were selected easily. You could select 10 Gateways and set them to hotkey 1. Catch was, when multiple buildings were selected it was necessary to press the unit production button as many times as the number of buildings. It was because if you pressed the button once, the first of the selected buildings started producing, and if you pressed another time the second building produced and so on.

This is great news for gamers who like myself was annoyed with all the workers grouping together on one mineral and then you have to select each worker to separate minerals. The ability to mass units will be a fascination to me considering how much I love Zergs. I tend to leave out units everywhere on the map due to my lazy hot keying action. So now you can actually drag and set the hot key and not worry about the extra units, since they will be carried over to the next hot key. Also, the detail feature is a nice add-on by Blizzard. This might be annoying at first, but it actually let you control how many units you want to produce whether you have 10 buildings set to a hot key. This is great for producing different units in a short amount of time and also less mistake in your unit production.

Continue onto page 2 for the Fansite Summit details and more screens of SC2.