Starcraft: Ghost

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Starcraft: Ghost Preview Continued..

-- November 11, 2005 by: Chris Remo

The Mobile Conflict was a little less straightforward. This scenario had Terrans on each side, with the ability to choose any of the four units right off the bat. It contained four different vehicles as well, two of which will be familiar to Starcraft fans. First off is the Stinger, a small rugged jeep bearing a lot of similarity to Halo's Warthog, barring the Stinger's six wheels. It has a turret-mounted chaingun that can be operated by a separate gunner. The Vulture is a lightly armored hoverbike equipped with a grenade launcher. The Siege Tank is, of course, a large tank. It sports dual plasma cannon and, in a nice touch, the siege mode featured in Starcraft. Going into siege mode, which looks exactly like it should, gives the player a semi-transparent trajectory overlay that shows where the large mortar shell will land. The splash damage is, of course, huge. Finally, there's the Grizzly, a heavily armed gunship able to transport several units. The Grizzly has an impressive array of weaponry: the pilot operates a light gun, and separate gunners man a missile turret, two flak cannon, and concussion bombs.

The Grizzly features heavily in the Mobile Conflict scenario we played, since it is used to initially access the floating factory in the middle of the map. After one side has boarded the factory and reached its control room, a player can take control of the structure and pilot it back to the base. When I first managed to do this, I was pretty surprised. I expected it to be on a preset path or something, but no. You actually navigate the factory through a valley and dock it at your base. While this is happening, you can't see what's going in on the control room, since the camera is outside the factory. If the other team manages to get inside, you'll make an easy target, so your team must be standing guard as you pilot the building around. The control room is a hotly contested area that makes for some fun matchups. Infantry can set up turret guns and stationary Ghost-detectors, in case any of them try to sneak in undetected with their cloaking ability. To really pull off a clean factory capture, your team has to be well coordinated enough to hold onto this small room while the structure (whose slow speed is all the more painful under moments of duress) makes its way across the map. As long as the factory is docked, the controlling team gains seconds on a timer. The first team to reach a given total time wins.

All in all, the game was a pleasant surprise. This particular sort of team-based multiplayer isn't abundant on consoles, and with the very different races and multiple classes for each, there's a lot of promise. The team has done an excellent job recreating the Starcraft world on a more personal scale. The Zerg feel very much like how they should feel, with the single goal of rushing into the enemy and generally destroying things, while the Terran have that versatile feeling they're known for in Starcraft, with a variety of units and types of equipment. Though the Protoss were not playable, what was shown of their models was very attractive, and seeing a huge Protoss Nexus on a battlefield was pretty appealing. In fact, when developers zoomed out far enough, the game basically looked like a 3D version of Starcraft, and it made me pine for a true sequel. The artists apparently spent a good deal of time carefully inspecting the CGI movies from the Starcraft games in order to figure out where and how to add detail to the models in a way that's convincing when their scale is so drastically increased.

In terms of the visuals from a technological standpoint, they're coming quite nicely as well. Blizzard apparently developed a separate engine for each version of the game, rather than using a cross-platform solution, in an attempt to squeeze as much performance as possible out of what is becoming aging hardware. To this end, it is unlikely that the team will be implementing any high-definition support, as they need as much power as possible dedicated to the multitude of pixel shaders being used, but they did promise widescreen and progressive scan support.

The multiplayer game will be playable online, either through Xbox Live or through Blizzard's Battle.Net service for the PS2 version. The GameCube version of the game is no longer in development; the team explained that now that Ghost has such a strong multiplayer component as well as its original single-player focus, a lack of widespread online support for the Cube was the primary factor in canceling that version. The game features no AI bots, but all versions of the game will have split screen multiplayer. As for the company's PC releases, Blizzard plans to run ladder games and an online ranking system.

Despite all the good bits, there are a few things that definitely need some polish. There's the balance issue, which as mentioned seems to frequently put the Zerg at a bit of a disadvantage. Somewhat more frustratingly, the game simply feels stiff. For one thing, it's all from a third-person perspective whereas the fast and frantic action going on seems to lend itself more towards a first-person setting. On top of that, aiming is very difficult. Even when zooming in with the Ghost's sniper rifle (which puts the view in first-person mode) and trying various sensitivity settings, it was very difficult to track a target, despite my ability to do so in other console action games. The good news is that Blizzard heard this feedback quite a bit over the course of the convention, and the game's designer pledged to put a heavy focus on improving the game's feel. He also mentioned that the team is considering implementing an optional first-person mode for multiplayer, which to me would be a great improvement. It probably won't affect the Zerglings or Hydralisks, since their close combat focus is better suited to the wide peripheral vision of a third person perspective, or the Mutalisks, whose aerial movement demands an overall view, but for the Terran units and the Infected Marines, all of whom spend a great deal of time shooting at things, the game would benefit substantially from such a modification.

So, again, I was much happier with Ghost than I expected to be. The game definitely has some issues to take care of, but those are things that should be solvable given that the game still has a few months left. What is most promising is that the game's underlying design seems solid. What was shown of the single-player looked good, though it wasn't playable, and the multiplayer combines proven team-based gameplay with a great interpretation of the Starcraft universe in a way that seems like it should support a good online community for a while while we hope and pray for Starcraft 2.

Starcraft: Ghost, developed by the internal Blizzard team previously known as Swingin' Ape, is set for release on PS2 and Xbox some time in the first half of 2006.

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