Starcraft: Is it over rated?

It was a great game, but I think it was more to do with the balance and the three races than the graphics. It is still fun to throw on a skirmish map and play once in a while. That can't be said of a lot of other 9 year old games.

Saying all of that though, I still played Warcraft II more than Starcraft back then.

starcraft again was about the gameplay.. its the example of how gameplay and story can make a game good over fancy graphics...

How many other games from 1998 are still played today? very very very few.. to have survived for this long shows its a game worth making a sequal out of

I like SC, but haven't played it in years. I also, prefer Enemy Nations too.
The game is still around and its free too. I would like to see Windward Studios
make a remake of the game, it doesn't look like it's going to happen.

Just to repeat what everyone else is saying, it's the gameplay, not the graphics. Everyone would be still playing even if the game was displayed in an astounding 16 colours!

The ABSURDLY well balanced races, the wide variation in strategies, Battle.net, and the rich universe are all point in its favour.

True about the gameplay, but bad graphics can scare casual gamers off.

Also, It is lame that some people essentially worship the game.

C&C 3 has good gameplay, and great graphics too, though, and thats why its my favorite RTS

Up until I started this game I was still chugging away in MoO 1 (1992). So game play defiantly beats graphics in my mind. Too many of recent games have catered to the crowd of graphics. Give me Starcraft, Diablo 1 & 2, Lords of Magic or Baldurs Gate any day over the recent pile of goo (present company excluded).

I know the gameplay is good, but why are people so obsessed with starcraft? Plus, Blizzard is super snide when declaring a new game. They practically give out no details, and they act like they're better than everyone else.   Speaking of RTS, cant wait for Sins of a Solar empire

And C&C 3 is how many years newer than SC? Obviously a newer game will have better graphics...

As for me, I grew up with StarCraft, it's part of my childhood, I can't help it.   

I certainly wouldn't say I ever worshipped the game (My GC II addiction is closer to worship ). Most of that kind of dedication to it came from Korea, where since they don't buy Japanese consoles, they have a huge PC gaming community. With no Mascots like Mario, Sonic or even Master Chief, it kind of grew into a phenemenon(SP?). I did have a friend that played it long after I was through with it and still bugs me occasionally to play him online, but I haven't started it up in a long while.

Blizzard has pretty much proven that anything they put out is going to be a hit, and deservedly so in most cases. So they kind of like an air of mystery nowadays surrounding their releases. One of the smartest things they usually do is not to give a release date till it's close to completion. That's why they make good games that don't seem rushed. Have yet to be really disappointed by any of their games myself(Note: I discount WOW, never played it and never will.)

I have never played a game I considered "bad" created by Blizzard. In fact I think every single game they have put out has been damn good. That said where do you get off on calling them "snide"?? They don't want to give out details on things and give people certain expectations when things can very easily be cut. Would you rather they pull a "Fable" and hype their crap through the roof?
I first got Starcraft in 1998, when I was 8 years old. I've stopped playing a few times for a year interval here and there but I keep coming back to it. Why?
It is like chess. It is extremely well-balanced. It is "fun" and continues to be "fun" 10 years after it came out. Hell, its even just as fun for a lot of individuals to watch the pro-korean games. Graphics can blow me.

I really do like Starcraft, but people have to stop overstating its variety.

There are two strategies: Rush/Be Rushed or Survive the Rush and Turtle. If you choose the latter, then, yes, after the rush, there is variety to be had. Otherwise, no, there really isn't that much variety. Especially (but not only) if you play online.

The game was made in 1998 and the AI was/is very good. Unfortunately, the AI has no limits put on it--it can click things faster than the player can, and at the beginning it has very specific routines it follows. Routines which, in about 90 or 95% of the cases, revolve around rushing.

But.. but surely worshiping the Gods at Stardock isn't pathetic?

I loved that game. If they included the feature of being able to pause the game and make commands in pause during a single player game, I would still be playing it to this day. ( I only like to play RTS in SP).

It was a good game in its time, but its time is long past. Any RTS worth playing these days, IMO, has a map-based, non-linear campaign and more than three distinct factions.

Starcraft is still my fav RTS game to date, i do get bored after a couple games of it now but there were alot of good times... between SC2 and GC2 i wont have time to eat or sleep lol.

Starcraft has a lot more then two strategies. Watch some pro-korean games on youtube. This is just for easy finding, even between "average" players online there are many different strategies. When I say "average" I am referring to those that do not play on "$$maps" and mass battlecruisers. Turtling is something that really only Terrans do on a regular basis. Rushes are quite easy to counter if the player has enough skill to scout early with a worker.
Three distinct factions is better then a mass amount of generic factions where there is a lot of blurring between units and races making each of those races less distinct. Each race in Starcraft is very distinct and plays extremely different from the other.
I'd say Starcraft's "time" is not quite over yet, it still has a very active online community and continues to sell.
In my opinion Starcraft is a "better" game to those who put effort into playing it. To others this "effort" seems like "work", obviously this is not the game for them. That said to those that see starcraft as an extremely simple game lacking different strategies, these players have most likely failed to reach a skill level where more strategies come into play. This might be due to the fact that it requires "effort" to reach higher skill levels.
Nothing against those who feel it is a "chore" to each his own form of entertainment. Some individuals like very competitive fast paced games, others like very laid back and relaxing games; I like em both.

Oh no! I think i remember trying that game.... Is that the game where when you give commands, the unit voice effects sound like you just jiggled the dildo up his ass and made him very happy??

Wow. In one extremely biased sentence you just decried as "not worth playing" Supreme Commander, Command and Conquer 3 (Not to mention every previous C&C game), Battle for Middle Earth (sure, four factions, but only two distinct factions), Warcraft III (Linear campaign), Emperor: Battle for Dune, every RTS made before WarCraft III, StarCraft 2...

Supreme Commander is not worth playing?!? You, sir, fail.

"Map-based, non-linear campaign and more than three distinct factions" would also leave out Company of Heroes, which seems to be a very successful franchise... even if I didn't like it that much (too scripted for my taste).

Perception is a wonderful thing. Perception means variation in point of view. Starcraft isn't over-rated, its just that it got "old" for some people faster than others. For instance, I still play X-Com: UFO Defence / Terror from the Deep on occasions, how many others would? Some games, like Jagged Alliance 2 I'll happily play over and over, despite the lack of multiplay, and generic storyline.

The fact that it is still played suggests that it wasn't over-rated. An over-rated game to me is a game that was hyped up, failed to deliver, and led to disappointment, which clearly Starcraft hasn't to a majority of people that played it. Of course, over-rated may also mean something else entirely, again going back to the idea perception

One person at a games shop I overheard said that she normally sells one copy of Starcraft in a week. That was this year.

By the way, I personally could never get into Starcraft, I can't really reason as to why.

Starcarft was really the only classic "RTS" style game I ever enjoyed. I'm not really a fan of the genre...for me, most games that bill themselves as "RTS" have more to do with twitch and skill at interface manipulation, rather than actual strategy. But I really enjoyed Starcraft for the very well-concieved factions, balance, artistic design, story, and dialogue.

It is the oldest game I have that's still on my hardrive.

I wanted to buy supreme commander actually.... but they also decided to join in this new phenomenon of dissalowing LAN play with only 1 copy.

I like to buy games i can take home and play with my wife without having to buy the game twice!! needless to say, i have not bought any new games since Dungeonsiege 2 because of this problem. I can see i will be needing to switch to a console because pc game companies have all suddenly decided to become greedy on mass.

so in conclusion Supreme commander is NOT worth playing.

Yet not for the reasons you stated.

I'd love to play it, especially with the expansion out, but I remember something from the beta: you have to be willing to spend the time to get decent before it's really worth the investments, since the game is tough on newbies past that whole "HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THE SIZE OF MY ARMY" stage... resource management is a tricky affair.

Quite frankly, I don't have that time. Outside of second year Computer Science being a complete pain in the ass, there's Mass Effect in just over a week and Mario Galaxy is already out. On top of everything else I need to do, I just don't have the time to spend to really appreciate a multiplayer centric strategy game like that.

To be honest, Blizzard is possibly one of the best companies for creating RTS games. They seem to figure out the mistakes they made with each game as well as learning from the successes of other games. For that reason, I know that StarCraft 2 is likely to take the best elements of the RTS industry and improve upon them.

For example, their demonstration of the campaign for the game (I think you can find videos of it on Youtube). From details given in that demonstration, StarCraft 2 is going to be map-based, non-linear play with a very definite campaign. And, they're already making the three races even more distinct than they were in the original.

Also, someone brought up WoW earlier. I have played it. Remember the issues with Diablo 2 and class balance? Unfortunately, Blizzard hasn't learned from that mistake and they've repeated it.



I would recommend Dawn of War: Dark Crusade for you. You'll want the original Dawn of War and the expansion pack for it as well. You'll probably notice some similarities between some of the units in it and StarCraft. This is not a coincidence. It's pretty easy to identify the Warhammer 40k elements that were adapted to StarCraft. Isn't the first time that scifi items have been adapted for other uses, and it certainly won't be the last time either.

Supreme Commander is too spam focused for my tastes. At least in SC I had to use the individual units to my advantage.

That said, I generally prefer TBS games over RTS because there's more Strategy and less CLICK FASTER THAN THAT GUY.

Also, as a LONG TIME fan of the C&C series, since the very first game...

C&C3 was a pile of crap.