In case you haven't seen it yetFollow

And surely you have, because it's awesome. But whether you haven't seen it, or just want to watch it again (I certainly just did), I felt the need to post it here just in case.

SCII Extended Trailer - Ghosts of the Past

I'm not exactly sure what makes you say that, but you're entitled to your opinion :P.

Frankly, I found the custom maps in SC and WCIII to be so much more enjoyable than the regular gameplay. If you never played them, you missed out on what made battle.net so great.

Fair enough. I personally see it as them adding a bunch of new units, tweaking an already tested gameplay formula for some general balance improvements (which, granted, I couldn't tell you what all they are; the gameplay is definitely very similar), and providing a very improved map-making engine (perhaps what I'm most excited about). Not to mention the brand new campaigns, which I love because I often play games for the story. If they didn't update the graphics at all I would still play it just for the campaigns and the custom maps. ;)

Other than that, I'm not sure what you mean by gameplay similar to WC3. Other than heroes, WC3 seems like a pretty standard RTS. Again, though, I didn't do much on the actual RTS side of the game outside of the campaigns :P.

First, we are talking about a game made in 2002, and at that time the addition of a Hero, that leveled, and collected items in an RTS, was new and innovative at least on a mainstream level. Correct me if im wrong. And from that spawned a multiplayer game type that is still active to this day, and that in turn was, arguably, inspiration for games like CoH and DoW2 that forgo base building for combat strategy. WC3 is a game that changed the RTS genre (for the better IMO )

Now we have SC2, which at its core, is more or less an unchanged version of a 12 year old game. It isnt innovative, the director of design for SC2 himself said they never intended to be innovative.

With games under it's belt like Diablo, Warcraft and WoW, I guess I have come to expect genre changing experience with the release of titles, especially one that is rooted 12 years ago.