I was on the Starcraft 2 beta test and some of my friends have bought the game. I'll buy it too at some point, i'm just taking my time. There's quite a few things that could have been done better for SC2, but the actual activation is kind of mild compared to other games.
You don't need to be always online to play. You just need to activate the game once after you install, just like with a new installation of windows. The only reason to be online is achievement tracking in single player and while i agree it's stupid to prevent it from working unless a user is logged in, it's by no means detrimental to how the single player works. So in summary you can play offline just fine, you just won't get the annoying pop-ups and the shiny badges while doing so.
SC2 is expensive and it comes in 3 installments that are probably all going to be full price games, but it's also a case of getting around 30 missions for the single player campaign in each episode (that's 3 times the amount of maps of the first game) and a game that will be played online for years, so the price is somewhat justified. Plus, because it's a game with a big competitive online scene there's none of that DLC nonsense, since it would unbalance things a lot in multiplayer if people could pick and choose between DLC units for their armies.
What was worrisome was the way they treat stuff like publishing of user created maps and how exactly will the next episodes function. Nobody knows if they will add new units for multiplayer with them and if for example, someone who wants a unit from episode 3 will have to buy episode 2 as well as a pre-requisite for the installation of episode 3, but this is still speculation pretty much.
The only annoying thing so far is that you can't have two people playing multiplayer on one installation with their stats being kept separate. I'm not the kind of guy who frets over stats and achievements but when the match-making system (and by consequence, getting matched with players of your skill level in multiplayer matches) is based on that, it's kind of stupid to tell me that me and a brother/sister/roommate have to buy the game two times just to be able to keep our stats separate.
You can still logoff and login with another account for multiplayer, but that account needs to be tied to a purchased game as well. It's strictly one nickname per account, which sucks, and one account per cd-key. If it was one account per cd-key but each account could have more than one nicknames, it would be just fine.
|