Heath C. Ice

Starcraft II looks beautiful with all graphics settings at high, but many people have computers that are a few years old and cannot handle these higher graphics settings. While I was messing around earlier today I decided to get a screenshot of the same scene with high graphics settings and then low graphics settings.

Starcraft II with High Graphics Settings

Starcraft II with Low Graphics Settings

Even at the lowest graphics settings, the games was easily playable. In some ways, the lower settings were easier use because everything was very basic and it was easier to see many of the units against the background. At times, I have found myself distracted by all of the extra details and colors in both the background and the units of Starcraft II. I plan to play with my settings until I find those which give me the best gameplay.

A friend has been successful in playing Starcraft II on Windows XP with just a 2GHz AMD Athlon processor. His computer does meet the bare minimum for video card and RAM. I do not know his exact graphics settings, but they were a mixture of low and medium. According to him, the gameplay was smooth and he had no issues. So, if you have a computer that is close to, but not quite, the stated “minimum requirements,” you may be surprised at just how playable the game is without having to shell out $100s for a new computer right now!

As a final note, to those that look at the difference between high settings and low settings and think, “the low settings look horrible,” how many times did you play (and possible recently played) using the graphics settings shown below?

Screenshot from Original Starcraft

Blizzard, you almost had your Downloader for Starcraft II correct. Fortunately, you are one of the companies smart enough to use bittorrent to distribute your installers and patches. This is a fact that I love as it typically leads to faster downloads and I am more than happy to contribute most of my upload bandwidth towards allowing others to download from me, which eases to burden on your servers and allows more people to gain access at one time. Please note, though, that I said SOME of my upload bandwidth. For a reason that I cannot fathom, other than laziness on your part, you have failed to include explicit upload/download rate controls in your Starcraft II Downloader. After 3 hours of downloading and having issues with websurfing (due to your program saturating my upload bandwidth), I finally had to disable peer-to-peer downloading and instead burden your server with the full download of Starcraft II. I may decide to turn on peer-to -peer connections when I go to bed in a few hours, but seeing as my download is progressing at the exact same speed either way, I really don’t care. Please, for the love of god and all that is holy, IMPLEMENT throttling in your downloaders from now on! Every bittorrent client I have ever used has this ability, except for yours!

As a sidenote while I am at it, Apple, IMPLEMENT TORRENTING SUPPORT AND THROTTLING IN ITUNES!!! I am sick of large podcast downloads making my internet unusable for half an hour or more at a time!