I bought WoL for 40€ and it was 60€ at Blizzard's store. Maybe the price will drop again, if you buy it at amazon or on release in some shops.
As I belong to the most knowledgeable modmakers atm, I pretty much need to buy it.
If you only enjoy the ladder and don't want to use new units and strategies, you don't need to buy it. If you get it, you will receive:
- a few multiplayer additions that hopefully add to the variety of strategies in the game (instead of adding a ton of crap units that are OP or never ever used)
- a campaign with approx 20 missions containing better ingame cutscenes than WoL (they added something new to the editor to make it easier to create better cutscenes).
- new art assets for maps -> more variety in ladder maps, much much more variety in custom melee/arcade maps
Also, 40€ is the default expansion price.
WoL & HotS will cost max 60€.
Things that are most likely added to all versions:
- multiplayer replay watching and using replay states to continue playing from the replay
- new battle.net UI
- stats (performance with race vs race; your winrate per map)
- groups and clans
- global play
- unranked matchmaking
- improvements to the game engine & editor
- some xp system to help more people play on ladder (better than achievement system)
Some time around/after HotS release:
- Blizzard Allstars (their dota game)
- official plugin for 3DSmax which should lead to more and bugfree custom models in the game
Also, they might add official mods for WC3 things. HotS beta has traces for that and a developer asked us modders what we would think of having assets of Blizzard's other game available in sc2. This doesn't mean that it's going to happen, but they thought about it.
40$ for an expansion????
I have HotS on a battle.net account which doesn't have a WoL account attached to it.
hots requires wol.
Source: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/game/heart-of-the-swarm-preview/faq
As I belong to the most knowledgeable modmakers atm, I pretty much need to buy it.
If you only enjoy the ladder and don't want to use new units and strategies, you don't need to buy it. If you get it, you will receive:
- a few multiplayer additions that hopefully add to the variety of strategies in the game (instead of adding a ton of crap units that are OP or never ever used)
- a campaign with approx 20 missions containing better ingame cutscenes than WoL (they added something new to the editor to make it easier to create better cutscenes).
- new art assets for maps -> more variety in ladder maps, much much more variety in custom melee/arcade maps
Also, 40€ is the default expansion price.
WoL & HotS will cost max 60€.
Things that are most likely added to all versions:
- multiplayer replay watching and using replay states to continue playing from the replay
- new battle.net UI
- stats (performance with race vs race; your winrate per map)
- groups and clans
- global play
- unranked matchmaking
- improvements to the game engine & editor
- some xp system to help more people play on ladder (better than achievement system)
Some time around/after HotS release:
- Blizzard Allstars (their dota game)
- official plugin for 3DSmax which should lead to more and bugfree custom models in the game
Also, they might add official mods for WC3 things. HotS beta has traces for that and a developer asked us modders what we would think of having assets of Blizzard's other game available in sc2. This doesn't mean that it's going to happen, but they thought about it.
huheuhehuhe