Review: Heart of the Swarm a big step in StarCraft II's evolution

Just as the Zerg are always evolving, so too is Blizzard’s iconic real-time strategy series. StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm doesn’t just upgrade and expand the exceptional StarCraft formula—it also hacks, cuts, and refines the core gameplay. The good news: With series antihero Sarah Kerrigan as its star, this expansion pack to 2010’s Wings of Liberty makes the original game better, improves the multiplayer, and progresses the story in new and interesting ways.

Still, there are sure to be a few people disappointed by Heart of the Swarm. Building on 15 years of success creates a unique challenge for Blizzard: How do you improve a well-balanced game with three iconic races and a dedicated, fervent community that scrutinizes every update? Blizzard struggles to answer the question in Heart of the Swarm, which is uneven and at times maddening, but still manages to raise the standard for real-time strategy games. As the middle story in an expected three part arc, Heart of Swarm has an intimate, troubled, and hammy narrative, but still manages to possess its own strange beauty.

Wings of Liberty was a Western-influenced space opera with the cast-based feel of The Dirty Dozen or Firefly. Heart of the Swarm is a revenge story focused on Kerrigan’s journey and the extremes she’ll reach to achieve her goals. The narrative picks up shortly after the events of Wings of Liberty, with Jim Raynor and his allies having smuggled the mostly-cured Kerrigan (once the queen of the Zerg) to a remote research facility. As the story progresses, Kerrigan unites and evolves the Zerg swarm, once again taking up her mantle as Queen of Blades in her quest to kill Emperor Mengsk.

As Kerrigan unites the Zerg swarm factions, her abilities and army are upgraded. Every major unit type has an upgrade that can be changed in the Evolution Pit, the Zerg version of an armory. Standard units like Zerglings become deadly cliff-hopping grasshoppers of death, or Hydralisks transform into long-range attackers. Meanwhile, Kerrigan accesses new healing and attack powers, as well as passive abilities like automated Vespene Gas gathering. This makes for a single player campaign filled with units and abilities that surprise and amuse even the most seasoned StarCraft player.

While Wings of Liberty’s missions focused on management and careful deployment of large forces, Blizzard took a cue from WarCraft III (or heck, Defense of the Ancients) and made the Heart of the Swarm's 20-something missions almost entirely focused tactically on the (anti)hero, Kerrigan. Base and army management are largely secondary. As it turns out, Kerrigan is simply too powerful and many missions are just a matter of moving her towards the goal and killing/destroying everything in the way. Blizzard deserves credit for providing a range of mission goals, but the single player campaign is tactically more single-unit focused than what’s expected.

As a result, you’ll employ a fairly limited range of tactics to solve a puzzle or defeat an enemy. Everything is timed just right, from holding out against an enemy invasion to navigating a hostile area. Venturing through nooks and hidden pathways on your own isn’t encouraged, so the game feels a bit funneled and overly designed.

That doesn’t mean the level design is predictable. You’ll guide a parasitic unit through a Protoss ship and slowly take the ship over—an interesting twist on the Alien formula. You’ll find yourself in a jungle boss fight that is something out of an action game rather than a sci-fi war strategy title. A Terran mission in the middle of the game takes place entirely in an asteroid field, giving StarCraft its first true space battle mission—capital ships firing, space stations launching fighters, and mines exploding everywhere—and it’s fantastic. I want more missions like this—and where the heck have they’ve been all series?

The “evolution” side missions, where you test drive new Zerg units (and ultimately choose which ones to keep) are the only clear misstep. These missions put a brake on the narrative momentum and felt like chores.

While Kerrigan is a seemingly complex character who struggles to balance her humanity and her alien side, Blizzard’s biggest misstep with the single player campaign is its writing. Kerrigan’s internal conflict is mostly smothered by her predictable, the-ends-justify-the-means quest for revenge. The dialogue, while interesting from a StarCraft lore sense, is nothing more than clunky, hammy exposition. The characters Kerrigan interacts with aren’t boring because they’re vaguely sinister insectoid aliens, they’re boring because they’re characteristically flat. I can’t decide if Kerrigan’s science officer is a talking beanstalk or an alien sexual organ with arms—either way, it’s hard to take what he says seriously.

The name of the game is still build-order—construct buildings, train troops, and purchase upgrades. Even with shiny new units and welcomed gameplay tweaks, the battle against human opponents for online supremacy comes down to juggling the demanding (and at times overwhelming) ways to control your army.

Blizzard tries to bridge the gap between experienced multiplayer gods and noobs with a tutorial and experience system. The tutorial walks through the basics of base setup, but it doesn’t explain how to counter a Zerg rush or a Protoss Air Armada or a group of Siege Tanks and Vikings. The whole spectrum of strategies to exploit (and how to counter them) is still left up to you and how willing you are to watch YouTube replay videos of pro gamers.

Still, for those of us who can’t manage hundreds of actions per minute (APM), there are some basic fixes and tweaks to enjoy. You can now see how many workers you have working in a particular base, which is exceptionally useful. And if you’re a Zerg commander, you can now summon your whole swarm with a click of a button.

StarCraft II's three races all get upgrades here, though how they’ll be exploited online remains to be seen. Some highlights: Terrans get widow mines, powerful hidden explosives that can target both air and land units; Protoss get a duo of new ships for their already formidable fleet and the Mothership Core that augments their abilities to teleport across the map; I’m a big fan of the Zerg Swarm Host, a turtle-looking land unit that spawns little fighting buggers. (It’s a rare defensive unit for the Zerg, who are more commonly used as fast attackers.) It’ll be interesting to see how the upgrades are used in games as the online community evolves.

Blizzard already has numerous custom maps and scenarios in the Arcade tab of the game. If you’re tired of multiplayer strategy sessions or the Kerrigan-focused single-player campaign, you can always hop over to the community and play all kinds of crazy creations.

Heart of the Swarm does what any good expansion should: it renews interest in a series, hones the rough edges of the original, and expands the scope of the narrative. Story-wise, the single player probably doesn’t stack up to Wings of Liberty, though many players will enjoy the RPG-focus of the core missions and exceptionally well-engineered level design. The new units, maps, and gameplay tweaks will help satisfy multiplayer fans, but the core gameplay remains largely unchanged.

An overarching theme in Heart of the Swarm is the Zerg’s evolution, and how they must always change to survive. Many fans will want more units, mechanics, and tweaks to the StarCraft formula. But remember, evolution takes time...and apparently more than three years.

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How to Move a Data Center Without Having a Heart Attack

As the dust settles in the aftermath of a successful physical data center move, I'm nursing my bruised and cut hands, kicking back with a Scotch, and reflecting on what went right. I said "successful," but actually there's no such thing as a failed data center move: If something's going wrong, there's nothing you can do except keep working until everything's up and running.

But a successful data center move is no accident. Whether it's a data center relocation or new data center build-outs, detailed plans must be made months or even years in advance.

[ Also on InfoWOrld: See Paul Venezia's guide to "Killer open source monitoring tools." | Stay current with "What IT should know about AC power." | And when you're ready to kick back, try "InfoWorld's Linux IQ test." ]

There are a number of ways to move a data center. If budgets and skill sets allow, the easiest method is to build a brand-new data center in the new location, drop high-bandwidth links between the two, and use virtualization tools to migrate all the virtual machines from one site to the other -- live.

This assumes a fully virtualized infrastructure and a massive budget since you're duplicating the whole thing at the new site. And although very expensive, this method offers low-to-zero downtime and a brand-new computing environment with new servers, storage, and core networking at the new site. Plus, time and scheduling considerations are far less stringent. However, it's also out of the budgetary ballpark for most organizations.

Then there's the hybrid method, where some portion of the new data center is built out before the relocation, such as racks and core networking. When the time comes to relocate, the old data center is shut down and the servers and storage are physically moved to the new location, reracked, recabled, and then brought back online.

This offers a far lower cost than the duplication method, but involves at least a day of downtime and the threat of data and service loss. It's also performed under the gun, as critical services and applications are down for the duration, and when a storage array stubbornly refuses to come up properly, that downtime grows as the new problem is dealt with.

Next there's the "kitchen sink" approach, where the new data center is provided with power and cooling only and everything is moved from one site to the other: racks, servers, network, storage, the whole shebang. This is the cheapest method, but is also necessarily the hardest and longest process of all.

Most companies involved in an office or data center relocation will opt for some blend of the last two methods. The hugely expensive first method is essentially guaranteed to succeed and offers plenty of time to get everything just right. But the way to ensure that the other approaches go smoothly is with copious amounts of planning, such as anticipating the worst possible scenarios prior to the actual move.

As an example, let's look at the data circuits. The existing data center may have a few fiber connections from a T1 carrier that connect it to the Internet and a WAN. Without those circuits, the data center is functionally useless, so they get priority. However, you can count on the fact that the carrier will take forever to build out the circuits to the new space, SLA be damned.

It's best to assume that, even given four or five months' notice, those circuits won't be in place when the relocation date arrives. Hedge your bets with one or two business-class cable circuits. These are generally installed much faster than dedicated fiber links or T1/T3 circuits, and can get you by with them in a pinch. It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing when the carrier finally realizes it needs to run new fiber from the street to the new location, requiring city permits, traffic detours, and lengthy delays.

It's also a good idea to have plenty of hands available. While a few core admins will be responsible for actually bringing the site back online, a dozen or more people who can be trusted to securely transport and rack servers, storage, and network gear are invaluable. When the senior network admin is neck-deep in switching and routing reconfigurations, you don't want him distracted by quandaries like how the hell that blade chassis rail kit goes back together.

Also, draw up explicit plans specifying which servers and other gear will go where in the new site. Take this down to the rack-unit level, so there's no mistaking what system should reside in which rack. This will speed up the rebuild and make cabling much easier. Speaking of cabling, this might be time to take a good look at alternative solutions for rack access. If you've traditionally run copper to all racks from core switches, you might look for room in the budget for top-of-rack switching and bundled or 10G uplinks to the core.

Label everything: the servers, the switches, the KVM dongles, and all the rail kits as they come out of the racks. Few things are more frustrating than spending an hour searching for the other rail for a mission-critical database server while the project comes to a standstill. Also, take tons of pictures of the old data center in situ and the new data center before, during, and especially after the relocation.

Though it may not need to be said, make sure the folks transporting your gear are good drivers. Smaller relocations may find servers and other gear riding in SUVs and small trucks, while larger moves may leverage entire racks rolling from loading dock to box truck to the new loading dock. The hardware and data contained within those vehicles is more important than anything else in the company, and when it's rolling down the highway at 70 mph, the risks of losing some or all of it are extremely high. Putting an eager intern behind the wheel of a rented truck might be a bad idea.

Finally, once all that gear arrives and is racked up and before powering anything on, take time to inspect the data and power cabling, cable pathing, power loads on new PDUs -- and go even further by reseating blades in chassis, modules in modular switches, and hot-swap power supplies. With all the jostling and bouncing these systems have just experienced, you don't know what might be floating around.

Be very aware of temperature differences between the data center and outside. Rolling a recently shutdown core switch that came from a 75-degree data center with an internal temp still in the 90s to a 20-degree outside loading dock can result in catastrophic problems, because circuit boards can rapidly contract in the cold and crack.

Also, if the relocation involves a full office with hundreds or thousands of switchports, make sure you have an elegant method to assign those ports to the right VLANs. Some infrastructures use dynamic VLAN assignments according to login credentials, but others use fixed assignments. In the past, I've written custom code leveraging wildcard DNS and locked-down VLANs to facilitate self-service VLAN assignment. When users arrive at the new site, they plug in their PC to a data jack, open a Web browser, and are presented with a Web application that allows them to choose the appropriate VLAN for their system.

The back-end code of this Web app makes an SNMP call to the appropriate switch and reassigns the VLAN for that port. A few seconds later, the user is ready to go. This is also handy when dealing with printers and other network devices, because admins can log into the tool and assign ports to VLANs that normal users should never see. Tools like this can save massive amounts of time and aggravation.

Once everything's in place, fire everything up and watch your monitoring systems to make sure that everything comes up normally. This is only one reason why an exhaustive network and service monitoring implementation is absolutely necessary, being that it takes almost all the guesswork out of the situation. But when the new site is up and running and everything goes according to plan, the Scotch tastes even better and the scratches and scrapes don't matter so much. Trust me. I'm feeling pretty good right now.

This story, "How to move a data center without having a heart attack," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia's The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

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