Gaming Dispatch Resurgence - The last couple of months

Gaming Dispatch is finally back again, with a logo even. Today we shall take a look at some news that has been released over the last couple of months. Only the news that I find particularly interesting though as it would be impossible to look at everything that has been happening. So let's get to it!

Starcraft Remastered was announced, which I am really looking forward to as Starcraft 2 has been one of my favorite games for several years now. The remastered of the classic from 1998 was announced back on the 26th of March this year and is to be released some time during this summer, they haven’t said anything more specific than that yet. It’s actually thanks to this announcement that I got back into Starcraft II after almost a two year break. During the same announcement they also stated that the original version will be patched to 1.18 and then be available for free for anyone to download and play, which it indeed has been, something which also made me try out the original game, where I found out that I am absolutely terrible! It’s such a different experience compared to the second game, all the little things that happen automatically that you don’t really notice until you play the original, things like worker rally, max number of units or buildings on a hotkey, and not least the pathing. In Brood War the workers doesn’t automatically start mining resources but you have to tell each and everyone of them to start gathering. You can only have a maximum of twelve units in a control group, meaning that controlling a large army becomes excruciatingly hard. In addition you can only have one building per hotkey, so say goodbye the easy way of producing units from SC2. I also mentioned the pathing and the reason why is that it is quite awful. You might send your army to a different spot on the map, but as they clump together to go down for example a ramp they start bumping into each other, thereby blocking the path making other units try to take a completely different route as to what you wanted.

These are however all things that will not change in the remastered version, the reason being that each and everyone of these “annoyances” makes Brood War a very balanced game in the competitive scene. And yes, there is still a competitive scene going on, a scene that is once again growing, a scene with many of the old pros coming back such as Flash, Jaedong and Bisu. If one were to remove the maximum number of units per control group it would result in Zerg becoming completely overpowered as they can get a lot of units out early in the game. Improving the pathing could result in many of the glitches actively used in competitive play no longer to work, it would also result in the game becoming less apm intensive as the bad pathing can often be overridden by spam clicking.

The fact is that the remastered version is mainly made for the pros and for South Korea, a place that never gathered interest in the second iteration of Starcraft. The pros may have switched over to SC2 as that was where the money was, but the korean fans didn’t make the transition. And as mentioned, many of the pros has now gone back to Brood War, and guess what, the fans are still there. So that begs the question, what will happen to the pro Starcraft 2 scene when the remastered version is released? It’s not an easy question by any stretch of the imagination. It is highly unlikely that europeans and and americans will switch from SC2 to SC1 as it is a much harder game and it will be almost impossible to go up against people such as Flash who entered the pro scene nearly a decade ago. Or, it would be impossible unless your name was IdrA or White-Ra or something. I would therefore imagine that the release of Starcraft Remastered wouldn’t have to great of an impact on the competitive scene of Starcraft 2, at least not outside Korea. But I guess there is not anything else to do than just wait and see what will happen.

Another game that was announced which I am excited about is Life is Strange 2. I loved the first game, and I even wrote a review of it which you can read here. Dontnod Entertainment made the announcement on the 18th of May this year that the new game is officially in development, and that the work actually began shortly after the release of the first game.

I am really interested to see what the story will be in the new game, as the first one ended seemingly without any unanswered questions, and I am not sure where they will go from there. It’s definitely a game that is on my radar and one that I will continue to write about when any major news is announced. They did confirm that they will not be on E3 this year, which is in fact going on right now, so I don’t expect we’ll hear anything about the game in the near future at least. There is some issues that I had with the first one that I hope they will address though. First one being that the lip sync was not amazing, sometimes during the first couple of episodes it was quite horrible to be honest. In addition the movements of people and vehicles had some issues as well, looking quite unnatural at times. Even if this is not fixed in the upcoming game I am super excited for another surreal adventure with some surprisingly difficult choices to make.

Update: During E3 a trailer together with some gameplay for an upcoming standalone story was released, see the links below. The new standalone adventure, developed by Deck Nine Games, is essentially a prequel to the first title and is set three years before the original story and focusing on Chloe Price. The first episode out of three is set to release at the 31st of August this year, so that is definitely something to look forward to while we wait for the second game by Dontnod Entertainment!
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvwDNGjEp7A
Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7d75ntYy_M

E3 just started yesterday with the EA conference, and boy was that underwhelming! “You want to watch everything else than gameplay? Well you have come to the right place!” The conference, from what I watched of it, was trailer after trailer, mostly of sports games, and the occasional small snippet of gameplay that also didn’t look too interesting. They did show of a match of the multiplayer from the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront 2, which looks pretty much the same as the first one.

They also showed the upcoming Need for Speed game named Payback. They released a trailer that shows a game riddled with unnecessary cutscenes, cars that handles more like hovercrafts than, you know, a car. And it also showed that they continue to focus on some stupid narrative that nobody cares about, something that always has been the weakest and most unimportant part of the franchise, as far as I am concerned anyway. What comes to mind when I think about NFS customizing and tuning. Turning cheap everyday cars into full blown street racers. This is the reason as to why I consider the original Most Wanted (possibly also NFS: Carbon) to be the last actually good game in the franchise. During the presentation of Payback they did talk about how they have improved the customization and how you can tune your car to your liking, but what they showed was highly lackluster when compared to their older titles such as Underground 2. It boggles my mind how the series basically are moving backwards! How they seemingly can’t make customization even on par with a game that was released 13 years ago! At this point we don't know for certain though how the game will turn out, but I don’t have high hopes for it, not at all.

And with that this iteration of Gaming Dispatch is done. Not too many stories I guess but again I only want to write about what I actually care about and find interesting, as it is just more fun that way and I can’t imagine it would be enjoyable to read about something that the writer doesn’t care about. Until next week then, take care!

Sources:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/05/18/life-is-strange-2-development-has-begun
https://starcraft.com/en-us/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-5EdHZ0hBs