Blizzard Entertainment explained the details of the first period Beta of StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void . Blizzard announced that the closed Beta of StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void begin on March 31 and said that the purpose of the Beta is opening title development community to create better together gaming experience possible.
Changes experience participants closed Beta StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void will be:
General Changes
Let’s talk first about the high-level gameplay changes you can look forward to seeing in the Legacy of the Void beta.
- Resource changes
- For the beta, we’re altering the number of resources at each base. Half the mineral patches have 1500 minerals, and the other half have 750. The main goal here was to make a change that would keep the feel of resourcing rates similar to Heart of the Swarm, while simultaneously encouraging players to take additional expansions more aggressively. So far, this change feels like a very solid way to achieve this and we’d love to try it out further during the beta. It clearly gives additional incentives for players to expand more, and from our internal testing, we feel like this change hits the mark on what we’re trying to do with the resource changes.
- Starting worker count
- You’ll also notice that the starting worker count has been increased to 12. This change is meant to reduce the downtime at the start of games, since the first few minutes of any game often grant little in the way of choices. So far, 12 feels like a good starting point for us, but we wonder if we can increase this even further without affecting early game choices too much.
- Unit Scan Range change
- We’ve improved the target acquisition of ranged ground units. Now, we’re just looking to see if any strange, unexpected behavior is caused by this change. We don’t currently know of anything unwanted that’s caused by this change, but we’d like to make sure that this is in fact the case during the beta. We’d really like to thank our community for locating this behavior, and we also agree with you all in that this could potentially be a really solid change to the game.
- Game speed altered to match that of real time
- If you use the game clock, you’ll notice it’s ticking much slower in the Legacy of the Void beta. We’ve changed the rate of time passage to match what you’d expect from a regular clock. We’re trying this out due to our community having asked for this feature, and also because it’s a bit confusing to not have the game display real time. We have a couple major concerns with this change, which we’d like to mention here.
- Game speed changing to real time also means all game values that are related to time also must change. Eg. When we say a cooldown of an ability is 5 seconds, we want that to mean 5 seconds.
- This means all attack speed values, movement speed values, cooldown times, research times, upgrade times, and unit build times will all need to be re-memorized. This is mostly applicable for hardcore players, and it seems that they are the ones requesting this change most fervently. We expect casual players will likely pay less mind to timers either way.
- Having made many changes to StarCraft II throughout the years, we know that sometimes changes that seem good in concept aren’t found to be preferable when implemented. We’d like you all to check this change out for yourselves to determine if this change is better for StarCraft II, or if you prefer the previous timer.
- We don’t want to have an option for this.
- Nothing could be more confusing than having two different versions of timers in the game. Not just when players are playing, but also because StarCraft II is an eSport. If different events start using different timers (whether intentionally or by accident), that would end up being extremely confusing for viewers.
- In making Legacy of the Void the best it can be, we know we want to avoid having a ‘time’ option, and we’re relying on your feedback to choose which game timer we will use in the future.
