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There are very poorly written stories that still convey an interesting world or concept. Many YA novels do this. I, too, have enjoyed a certain familiarity with Warcraft that prompted me to read the plot, good or not, usually through a wiki or something and even dip my toe into the game. It sucks having them gently caress up an old character you liked though. WC3 was the fun, dumb Star Wars while modern WoW feels like the bad EU poo poo where actually Leia was a Jedi and they use her to frame a whole thing where she completely abandons any of her original character and was a part of some completely unheard of prophecy that amounts to a Chosen One defeating a Great Evil and she does so by enslaving and genociding entire worlds, but is undone by Han Solo who is now a cop and is also a Jedi. Like, it just destroys every reason you were originally into the setting/characters. Also they sometimes do things really well then just nuke the poo poo out of the potentially great thing in the story. Yrel, for example. Warcraft 3 was really just a very good time. The setting, the gameplay, the plot, the pacing, even the Easter eggs were great. There’s a reason they still lean on WC3 poo poo to hook players for expansions and poo poo. Plot and story and writing are critical and WC3 was such a Home run compared to whatever the gently caress is going on nowadays.
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Aug 18, 2020 08:00
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Funnily enough, I don't think WoW has ever leaned heavily into prophecy/Chosen One stuff. The one time it has, the Chosen One rejected his title and eye-laser'd a demigod to death.
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Aug 18, 2020 08:05
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Well, there’s only been one Great Evil, otherwise there was only expansion villains that amount to basically enemy nations. Sargeras was the big bad guy from before WoW until BFA and Illidan already had beef with the guy that had been presumably summed up in TBC by saying “Illidan failed and died because of it— don’t gently caress with demons!”. The Old Gods are more of a force of nature. poo poo, even the Lich King/Undead were a Burning Legion thing. jokes fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Aug 18, 2020 |
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Aug 18, 2020 08:09
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BlazetheInferno posted:I'm one of those people who, if I like a story, I get immersed in it, and all thoughts of "is this good writing? Does this make sense?" go flying out the window unless something astoundingly stupid happens that even the story's logic just cannot explain, and those moments are *exceedingly* rare; Reforged's Grom->Hellscream badly-spliced audio fuckery is the only thing I can think of off-hand in either series that's actually done this to me, and that wasn't about the plot/writing. Yeah, sure, but its still worth pointing out that while SC1 isn't winning a Hugo award or anything, its leaaaaaaps and bounds ahead of SC2. You can go "I don't care about story" and that's fine and doesn't change any of that conversation. Like, cool for you, but some of us DO care about story. And again, the bar is not set very high. SC1 is not amazing, but it does fine. It does very well. But SC2 is just dogshit by comparison. I don't need my RTS story to blow my mind with something I've never read before. It just needs to be a decent sci-fi story of its own, it can even be highly derivative (like SC1) it doesn't need to be groundbreaking. But SC2 isn't even that. SC1 is like, a little bit better than anything I could write. SC2 is like, the worst crap I wrote as a teenager. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Aug 18, 2020 |
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Aug 18, 2020 08:31
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Doing Kerrigan dirty and removing all her agency was the worst part the infest/de-infest/re-infest poo poo is extremely bad
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Aug 18, 2020 11:06
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lmao SC1 is thoroughly on a par with SC2, WC3 and anything else Blizzard has put out. they're all genre trash (which is fine, low art is great)
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Aug 18, 2020 11:20
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I was pretty naive to hope that video game SMG wouldn't hop into this discussion and be wrong once again wasn't I.
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Aug 18, 2020 13:48
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1stGear posted:Funnily enough, I don't think WoW has ever leaned heavily into prophecy/Chosen One stuff. The one time it has, the Chosen One rejected his title and eye-laser'd a demigod to death. He rejected the title of the Chosen One, but oddly the entire expansion was about him and after he eye-lasered said demigod to death he was still the functional leader and focal point of the entire thing.
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Aug 18, 2020 15:51
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Lt. Danger posted:lmao SC1 is thoroughly on a par with SC2, WC3 and anything else Blizzard has put out. they're all genre trash (which is fine, low art is great) Next you're going to say FS1 is on par with FS2 
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Aug 18, 2020 16:54
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an early, rougher, more straightforward game with strong voice/soundwork and some sharp writing, and a second, more polished, more heavily produced game that offers more content overall but lacks the punch of the first? nah, just kidding - SC2 resolves all its subplots
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Aug 18, 2020 17:38
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General Battuta posted:Next you're going to say FS1 is on par with FS2 I’m playing these games now in the new Knossos launcher, and to me, FS1, ST, and FS2 are all one game/narrative. I don’t separate them in the same way I don’t separate the Mass Effect games, or Baldur’s Gate.
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Aug 18, 2020 18:22
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Those are three very weird opinions, I think each series you mentioned has major writing changes that clearly divide it.Lt. Danger posted:an early, rougher, more straightforward game with strong voice/soundwork and some sharp writing, and a second, more polished, more heavily produced game that offers more content overall but lacks the punch of the first? Madness. Madness!
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Aug 18, 2020 18:24
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There’s writing changes sure, but they still tell one big story so I play through them all back to back when I play. Same for all three Witcher games.
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Aug 18, 2020 19:13
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FreeSpace 2 loving rules and only an insane person would act as if SC2 could even sniff its jock.
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Aug 18, 2020 19:19
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chaosapiant posted:There’s writing changes sure, but they still tell one big story so I play through them all back to back when I play. Same for all three Witcher games. I think Mass Effect 2 (while a great game) is barely a sequel to Mass Effect 1, and Baldur's Gate 2 takes a huge turn away from the first game's pseudo-open-world simulationism into a more narrative and linear story that's a big step towards modern BioWare. Meanwhile FreeSpace 1 is this kind of vestigial Independence Day rip off with laughably poor line-level writing that imo serves only to offer backstory for the insanely superior sequel.
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Aug 18, 2020 19:22
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Another great series for narrative disjoint is Halo, where the rule of the series is that no Halo game is a satisfying sequel to its antecedent and each one basically starts a new story which will never be properly concluded.
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Aug 18, 2020 19:23
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Aken Bosch is better written than every Blizzard character combined.
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Aug 18, 2020 19:25
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Sorry to derail but does anyone know if reporting does anything on Battle.net? I'm kind of tired of pepes dropping the n-word and RAHOWA poo poo every other match
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Aug 18, 2020 20:33
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General Battuta posted:Meanwhile FreeSpace 1 is this kind of vestigial Independence Day rip off with laughably poor line-level writing that imo serves only to offer backstory for the insanely superior sequel. the command briefings may be almost as incoherent as SC1 but the Ancient monologues (and the intro and epilogue cutscenes) punch far above their weight and the game overall deserves some credit for a basic life-in-death recursion - a step above Independence Day, perhaps personally I found Aken Bosch and the Colossus subplots to be overwritten and a little sententious. the Mosaic reading impressed me but by its nature is inherently incomplete, leaving the audience-as-Pharaoh in the dark. FS1 at least is a complete unit! I will suggest Warcraft 3/Frozen Throne as a worthy middle ground between the unedited, unpolished but sometimes vibrant Starcraft 1 and the more coherent but often laborious Starcraft 2
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Aug 19, 2020 00:24
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I will say that WC3/TFT does one genuinely impressive thing with the writing: It's a story where the bad guy wins in the end. this is of course undercut by World of Warcraft
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Aug 19, 2020 00:28
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SirSamVimes posted:I will say that WC3/TFT does one genuinely impressive thing with the writing: It's a story where the bad guy wins in the end. They already pulled that one in brood war, though.
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Aug 19, 2020 00:53
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Oh right I forgot about that
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Aug 19, 2020 01:06
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Yeah but this time the bad guy is bad because of the evil voices in his head corrupting him
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Aug 19, 2020 04:10
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They pulled that off in Warcraft Orcs and Humans.
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Aug 19, 2020 06:43
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And in Diablo, but that was sort of the point.
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Aug 19, 2020 08:05
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1stGear posted:Funnily enough, I don't think WoW has ever leaned heavily into prophecy/Chosen One stuff. The one time it has, the Chosen One rejected his title and eye-laser'd a demigod to death. Yeah. Prophecy itself is very common in Warcraft (to the point that random furbolg villages have prophecies about heroes coming to save them) and there are also the time-travelling dragons but the characters themselves tend to be important for more mundane reasons.
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Aug 19, 2020 09:45
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The Wiggly Wizard posted:Sorry to derail but does anyone know if reporting does anything on Battle.net? I sure hope so.  All you can do is keep reporting.
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Aug 19, 2020 13:00
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FoolyCharged posted:They already pulled that one in brood war, though. Also, SC 1 the Zerg kinda won even if they didn't "win." Again, Blizzard does corrupt hero/bad guy wins a lot to the point where it gets a tad annoying.
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Aug 19, 2020 13:05
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Time-travelling dragons?
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Aug 19, 2020 14:04
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yr new gurlfrand! posted:Time-travelling dragons? The Bronze Dragonflight are associated with time and time travel. In the future the Bronze leader will turn evil after being shown his own death, which will lead to the creation of the Infinite Dragonflight.
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Aug 19, 2020 14:11
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Basically it's an excuse for throwback dungeons in WoW
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Aug 19, 2020 14:14
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FoolyCharged posted:Basically it's an excuse for throwback dungeons in WoW Yeah. Also gets used for an apocalyptic future at one point too.
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Aug 19, 2020 14:32
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FoolyCharged posted:They already pulled that one in brood war, though. Diablo 1 and 2. The twist at the end of 2 is probably the one time they've actually had a clever one.
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Aug 19, 2020 14:54
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It's been a while. What's the twist at the end of D2?
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Aug 19, 2020 16:31
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:It's been a while. What's the twist at the end of D2? specifically, d1/d2 ended on the 'you stopped what you thought was the problem but now there's a larger, unforseen threat that is the direct consequence of your actions' which resulted in you destroyed the worldstone and banished the prime evils except baal whose soulstone may or may not be destroyed to the void but by doing so you've opened the floodgates for demons, with no current leader, to pour into the world of sanctuary, tyrael is also likely banished for his defiance or even CORRUPTED and heaven may strike back. The ending was fairly open ended and left a lot to the player's imagination. and then blizzard took blizzard north's cliffnotes of important stuff for d3 and managed to hit all the should-be-amazing bullet points in the worst way possible. D1/D2 were not some storytelling master pieces, but they established a neat setting to play a game in and evolved the world as the game advanced in a way that felt detached from your own actions and like the world, or at least your understanding of it, was changing and you were just becoming aware of those changes instead of driving them. There was minimal story in d2 directly involving you the player. D3 is the total opposite. You're placed on rails and bombarded with heavy-handed saturday morning cartoons and now you are the one true hero nephalem who's driving the detached-from-world, check-off-the-plot-points story forward. Khorne fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Aug 19, 2020 |
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Aug 19, 2020 16:53
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:It's been a while. What's the twist at the end of D2? Poor marius has been talking to Tyrael And whoops turns out it's Baal and you gave him the Soulstone.
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Aug 19, 2020 17:01
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:It's been a while. What's the twist at the end of D2? The character Marius is an asylum after traveling with the player character from the first game (the Dark Wanderer canonically the Warrior) telling his story to Tyrael in his cell. He did all sorts of hosed up things that made things worse when he thought he was fixing them like freeing Baal and was sent by Tyrael on a mission to Hell to destroy the soulstone he pulled from Baal that freed him. He confesses to Tyrael that he was too much of a wimp to go to Hell and gives him the soulstone. It turns out he's not telling the story to Tyrael but to Baal. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Aug 19, 2020 |
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Aug 19, 2020 17:01
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Man it was such a good ending and the xpack really twisted the knife with “well shits hosed and now we have to destroy the worldstone”
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Aug 19, 2020 17:04
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D2 is good because it has dutch angles of skeletons. e: man I really love the lo fi 90s Blizz cutscenes, they're so much more interesting than the super turbo rendered modern CGI. I love you sarge
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Aug 19, 2020 18:17
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Thank god for cold fusion.
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Aug 19, 2020 18:32
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