Starcraft 2 HOTS Replay System

That could prove very useful for designing mission maps.
Build everything you want for the enemy.
Save. Start recording.
Do things to make the mission interesting for like 20 minutes. Hand random things to AI control.
End replay.
Resume playing with sorian 10x omni vision max unlock AI (+asteroids).

I doubt they are copying as continuing is a pretty obvious feature. Fortunately that's a very small part of what we are doing with replays.

Some third party made similar program for SCII like half a year ago. You could continue at any point of replay and choose who would control what player. If anything, Blizzard took the idea from that.

They've been asked for game saving/LAN or some way to continue games ever since the beta because there's been problems with disconnects(some of them due to battlenet issues, some for something else) in major tournaments. That's what they came up with.

edit: The original: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmes ... _id=328785

I suppose that Sins of a Solar Empire has a similar feature in that you can play as anyone, even bots when you load up a save, and Sins came out 5 years ago. IDK if any other game has done that, though...

4X games have been doing this for years, but the situation might be diffrent for them.

Who got it first is not relevant in the slightest bit. It is a really useful feature, ergo every RTS with a replay system should have it.

Games are defined by gameplay not the auxiliary stuff, there's no need to make a fuzz about the latter except if there is illegal stuff going on like stealing the source code.

Though I doubt anyone cares, Achron has had the save/recovery feature forever, and the ability to edit replays. Doesn't have group viewing, though, but that would probably not be a huge jump.

Also, 4X games. Those games are way ahead in many ways.