StarCraft II: Heart Of The Swarm Makes Replays Playable
The latest trailer for Blizzard's StarCraft II: Heart Of The Swarm focuses on eSports and multiplayer. eSports are like regular sports, except it's playing videogames in a chair, and not sports. Multiplayer is when other people spoil your game for you.
Obviously the eSports scene is absolutely massive for StarCraft. The new entry in the series allows groups to watch replays with others, which is apparently a thing people wanted. More interestingly, there's something called Take Command, which allows you to watch a replay, and then jump into the game whenever you want, including replays of other people's games. Which makes me think of when people explore a famous game of chess, to see if other eventualities were possible. But with Zergs hitting Terrans on the head, rather than bishops politely asking queens to stand aside.
A very nice feature is the Recover, which means if someone's network drops while playing, the game can be restored to the moment before it happened (via the same replay tech) so everyone can carry on from the point of the glitch.
People wanting to run replays as videos for others to watch can now also redesign the UI, to make them feel even more like ESPN. The whole thing is out on the 12th March.
