Starcraft 2 might still be a long way off, but you wouldn’t know it with the amount of hype out there.  Being a hardcore Starcraft player, I played for about 3 yrs total over a 6 yr span and at one point I was even ranked in the top 50 on the Battlenet ladder.  So why am I being down about the very long awaited sequel?  We’ll to me RTS games are not what they were at the time of the original Starcraft.  Think back to 1998 we it was originally released.  The only other decently popular RTS games were Warcraft I & II, also made by Blizzard, and Command and Conquest.  Starcraft seemed to come out just as gamers were getting an appetite for the RTS genre.

Having played both Warcrafts and C&C prior to Starcraft, there was something definitely missing.  The variety between playable races was very minimum and online play was almost non-existant.  So when Starcraft come out with 3 different races with very different playing styles, combined with Battlenet for extremely easy online play, the game just blew up.

I was a freshman in college at the time and everyone of my friends had the game.  It was just so different to anyone that had never played a RTS game before and for people like me who had, it was just a monster jump forward in the genre.

Fast forward to 2009 when Starcraft 2 will be released and the RTS genre has sorta plateaued.  In the 10 years since, there have been 100’s of RTS games that seem to have covered just about every play style possible.  The “magic” of a fairly new genre has warn off and what’s left are only hardcore RTS gamers.  The jump between todays RTS games and SC2 isn’t anywhere near the leap that the original took and while I have absolutely no doubt that SC2 will be a great game, I do think that it will disappoint many games looking for that next big revolutionary jump in the genre.