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I wonder what's worse - SC2 writing or Shadowlands writing.
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Jul 31, 2023 02:06
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Szarrukin posted:I wonder what's worse - SC2 writing or Shadowlands writing. Yes.
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Jul 31, 2023 02:57
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Szarrukin posted:I wonder what's worse - SC2 writing or Shadowlands writing. Or to put it differently: SC2's writing was a mess, but it doesn't make me look back and retroactively think less of SC/BW's storylines; it feels more like a bad sequel where things went off the rails. Shadowlands' writing worked so hard to invalidate all the previous storylines that the storylines of previous games/expansions actively feel worse because I know that canonically, it was all basically pointless - and even the successes were meaningless due to the Jailer's long long long con planning for us to temporarily succeed to further his plan.
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Jul 31, 2023 03:06
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MagusofStars posted:YMMV, but for me, the answer is unquestionably Shadowlands writing and it's not even close. A lot of SC2's lovely writing feels more self-contained, whereas Shadowlands' bullshit rewrites the entirety of previous Warcraft lore, the previous triumphs and failures, etc and makes most of it feel irrelevant due to forcing in the Jailer as some genius pulling every single string ever. This is my feeling as well. SC2 mostly just ignores large parts of SC1's plot and characterization. Shadowlands actively relishes going "Nuh uh, this is what REALLY happened you guys!"
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Jul 31, 2023 03:24
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And there's also the "poo poo story, but the gameplay's pretty good" factor as well. I managed to get my way through to the end of SC2 even if literally everything about the epilogue permanently soured me on the series, but Shadowlands was just so aggressively "gently caress you and your time/investment into this" that I was already preparing to quit by the time everything about  's culture came out.
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Jul 31, 2023 03:37
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Cythereal posted:This is my feeling as well. There is a lot more WOW writing to mess up, and it's already a series of retcons, so the whole thing is a lot more rickety. But rampant and baseless speculation on my part, both have the fingerprints of Steve Danuser.
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Jul 31, 2023 04:16
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A lot of small stuff in SC2 is written well or at least decent, even if all the big stuff is godawful. I can't recall a single part of Shadowlands' writing that I thought was good.
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Jul 31, 2023 04:21
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Fajita Queen posted:I can't recall a single part of Shadowlands' writing that I thought was good.
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Jul 31, 2023 04:22
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I'd say that Shadowlands has greater overall badness, but SC2 drags it out so much longer. Wings came out in 2010, Legacy came out in 2015. That's five long, long years where you might hold some semblance of hope that the writers will manage to unfuck things, only to reach the end and realize that they've been on a downward spiral the entire time.
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Jul 31, 2023 06:41
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As it turns out, brain rot does not in fact stop but progress until there's only rot left.
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Jul 31, 2023 08:56
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MagusofStars posted:YMMV, but for me, the answer is unquestionably Shadowlands writing and it's not even close. A lot of SC2's lovely writing feels more self-contained, whereas Shadowlands' bullshit rewrites the entirety of previous Warcraft lore, the previous triumphs and failures, etc and makes most of it feel irrelevant due to forcing in the Jailer as some genius pulling every single string ever. I would argue that the damage to Starcraft as a setting is on-par with Shadowlands, if not greater. Most of the deeper lore was retconned out of existence, many of the characters were so thoroughly assassinated that they're basically separate people, and the tone of the setting was warped into something that completely diverges from the original series' feel. The Xel'Naga and Zerg got hit the hardest, having their history and motivation rewritten to the point where they only hold superficial resemblance to their original incarnations. For an example, there's an absolutely massive and almost impossibly stupid retcon that's coming up in the Protoss Thinkstone that I would say is the prototype to the Jailer's horseshit, and I will scream bloody murder when we get to it.
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Jul 31, 2023 09:21
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JohnKilltrane posted:Yeah one thing I really enjoy about the Xel'Naga in the SC1 backstory is that they're kinda pushovers. They get chased off by the Protoss and eradicated by the Zerg, and both those races are significantly weaker at that time than they'd end up being by the time the game happens. Like the Zerg hadn't even left their homeworld yet. They hadn't assimilated any of the strains that would end up making them so deadly. It kinda gives this idea that the Xel'Naga were real big on science but weren't necessarily the most gifted when it came to military applications of that science. Like they're in the wrong genre and are actually Civilization players trying to rush the Science Victory at the expense of their military. I felt like it was always more that they were... I want to say a bit naive? Blind to others' natures and their having agencies of their own, while also being very proud and confident in always getting things right. The Protoss wrecked the Xel'naga explicitly because the Xel'naga refused to fight back, because at that point they realized they had hosed up and caused the entire issue themselves. Even if the Protoss were just peasants with pitchforks, if you're refusing to use your Super Obliterator Beam X, then they're still going to poke your organs good. With the Zerg, it was more a sense of complete surprise. The Xel'naga thought they had a psychic link that kept them constantly informed of what the Zerg were doing, and they only realized that link was cut by the time the burgeoning Overmind was ready to attack and their ships got brutally overwhelmed. Considering that they thought they were dealing with animals, not even a civilization of any relevance, the Xel'naga likely didn't bother to deploy any weapons or prepare their engines for fleeing or anything of that sort.
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Jul 31, 2023 09:26
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I always took the Xel'naga to be similar to the Ancients (or Lanteans) in Stargate, they advanced so far in science and technology that they, as a race, just kind of forgot how the world tends to work for the majority of sentient life (perhaps not helped by their societal stance of non-interference). Things like having instruction manuals for their tech, or putting safeguards in place (oh, the whoosh from establishing the wormhole in the gates vaporizes all matter it comes in contact with? well then don't stand in front of it, that's not hard). That, and just a general feeling of contempt towards every other race that is so far below them. Eventually another race will surpass them and they just weren't paying attention because hubris gets everyone at some point
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Jul 31, 2023 12:13
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I always wondered if the Zerg assimilated (or tried to assimilate) any of the Xel'naga, and what happened with that. Like, they would have at least tried, wouldn't they?
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Jul 31, 2023 12:24
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GunnerJ posted:I always wondered if the Zerg assimilated (or tried to assimilate) any of the Xel'naga, and what happened with that. Like, they would have at least tried, wouldn't they? I believe the manual for SC1 says they did, which is how they learned of the Protoss in the first place.
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Jul 31, 2023 13:02
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I kinda figured the Xel'Naga became the cerebrates, because they're corpulent, bickering endlessly, and constantly doing dumb things.
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Jul 31, 2023 13:07
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Felinoid posted:I kinda figured the Xel'Naga became the cerebrates, because they're corpulent, bickering endlessly, and constantly doing dumb things. The cerebrates were competent though.
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Jul 31, 2023 13:59
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It's entirely plausible that the Xel'naga just didn't have any physical qualities the Overmind thought was worth keeping. They wereren't particularly fighters, clearly. No wonder they were trying to engineer a much more powerful species under their control. Which is obviously exactly what their motivation is and we all know this, no need for any sequels to cover that ground again it's done
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Jul 31, 2023 14:03
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Omobono posted:The cerebrates were competent though. Eh. A couple of them maybe. Certainly the one you played as was. But I also remember the absolute idiocy of one cerebrate that tried to rebel; arguably just so you could have a zerg v. zerg fight, but still. Plus given their size, I imagine each cerebrate is like a hundred Xel'Naga mashed into one to increase their brainpower, and even that doesn't stop them from being petty assholes all the time, even when it works directly against their own goals.
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Jul 31, 2023 14:05
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Felinoid posted:Eh. A couple of them maybe. Certainly the one you played as was. But I also remember the absolute idiocy of one cerebrate that tried to rebel; arguably just so you could have a zerg v. zerg fight, but still. Plus given their size, I imagine each cerebrate is like a hundred Xel'Naga mashed into one to increase their brainpower, and even that doesn't stop them from being petty assholes all the time, even when it works directly against their own goals. The zvz wasn't a rebelling cerberate. It was zasz's brood running around with no one at the reigns after the dark Templar deep six'd him. And they were generally pretty good at working together and most of their bickering was with Kerrigan, who had... a bit more of a personality than they were used to talking to.
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Jul 31, 2023 14:08
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It has been a good while since I've played. Maybe I'm remembering wrong. Still, fat slugs that constantly bitch about things seems on point for coming from the Xel'Naga, especially if they secretly remember what they used to be.
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Jul 31, 2023 14:11
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There's no prospective follow-up to SC2, but WoW continues onwards. Wings of Liberty and Legacy of the Void more or less killed the series. I can't even think of where they would go next? Unless they bring in some other alien species, but the series is fundamentally about the interplay between the three races, so... And it's a damned shame, we could use more RTS games.
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Jul 31, 2023 14:38
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Torrannor posted:There's no prospective follow-up to SC2, but WoW continues onwards. Wings of Liberty and Legacy of the Void more or less killed the series. I can't even think of where they would go next? Unless they bring in some other alien species, but the series is fundamentally about the interplay between the three races, so... There was the Nova Covert Ops mini-sequel-campaign thing.
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Jul 31, 2023 14:46
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GunnerJ posted:There was the Nova Covert Ops mini-sequel-campaign thing. It wasn't that well received iirc. And I don't know why the SC devs are so fascinated with the psychic spies, the fate of StarCraft: Ghost should have been a lesson to them.
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Jul 31, 2023 15:01
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Psychic spies are fun, it's just that Blizz can't write anything for poo poo, psychic spies included.
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Jul 31, 2023 16:07
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There has been some book stuff that’s set after the epilogue to SC2 that attempted to plant some sequel hooks (of the “planting the seeds for future conflicts” variety), but otherwise, the series seems to have withered away.
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Jul 31, 2023 16:14
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There's been numerous allegations that Blizzard's tried making Starcraft sequels or spin-offs, but none got very far in development. The most credible one I've heard, given the sources, is that Blizzard spent a while trying to make a Destiny clone set in Starcraft before that project got canned.
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Jul 31, 2023 16:17
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They could set the next Starcraft 40000 years later.
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Jul 31, 2023 16:35
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in fairness there have been over 120 campaign missions across the games. the well has to run dry sooner or later
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Jul 31, 2023 19:25
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Torrannor posted:There's no prospective follow-up to SC2, but WoW continues onwards.  The non-joke answer of course is the boring business reality: WoW continued because it's a subscription MMORPG which needs to pump out a game every 24 months to keep people subbed while SC is an RTS that people buy once.
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Jul 31, 2023 19:27
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I wonder if there was ever a World of Starcraft in the works.
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Jul 31, 2023 19:48
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PurpleXVI posted:I wonder if there was ever a World of Starcraft in the works. Ehh, I honestly doubt that they ever did anything serious. They were already in the middle of trying to kluge together Titan at the same time that SC2 was developed and released, and even then, one of their biggest concerns was that they would be shooting themselves in the foot with two big-name MMOs.
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Jul 31, 2023 19:55
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PurpleXVI posted:I wonder if there was ever a World of Starcraft in the works. There's been numerous allegations from relatively reliable sources that Blizzard tried to make a Destiny clone based on Starcraft, an MMO looter shooter, after SC2. Less reliable are claims that Blizzard tried to make a Battlefield type game with the property. If there was ever a traditional MMO envisioned for the Starcraft universe, I haven't heard about it beyond wild speculation.
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Jul 31, 2023 19:55
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Storld of Starcraft
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Jul 31, 2023 19:58
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A bunch of the zerg retcons seem like they were meant to take them from an interchangeable swarm to something that can have unique individual MMO players
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Jul 31, 2023 20:38
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anilEhilated posted:Prophecies are almost always Bad Storytelling, at least when played straight. They're almost as much of a red flag for hack writing as Comic Book Deaths
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Jul 31, 2023 20:49
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Cythereal posted:There's been numerous allegations from relatively reliable sources that Blizzard tried to make a Destiny clone based on Starcraft, an MMO looter shooter, after SC2. And based on what we know, there's no obvious point where it would have made sense for Blizzard to be secretly working on a World of Starcraft. When they were developing WoW as their first foray into the genre, the Starcraft IP was being developed for Ghost. Once WoW became wildly successful and they decided to build a successor to WoW, they instead chose to do Titan rather than using one of the existing IP. Then they canceled Titan rather than compete with their own still highly-successful product. So while I'm sure they had some meetings or internal discussions about the concept over the years, there's not much reason to think they actually did any real development.
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Jul 31, 2023 20:59
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Cythereal posted:If there was ever a traditional MMO envisioned for the Starcraft universe, I haven't heard about it beyond wild speculation. There was one in the works, but then StarCraft Universe happened and Blizzard was like "gently caress it, let them make it. If it's popular enough, we'll buy it off of them and turn it into a real product." It was not, and so they did not.
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Jul 31, 2023 22:46
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Cythereal posted:There's been numerous allegations that Blizzard's tried making Starcraft sequels or spin-offs, but none got very far in development. It didn't help that right as Esports began to take off, and popularity of Starcraft 2 was at it's absolute peak... a vast network of corruption was uncovered in the main (South Korean) scene that murdered it.
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Aug 1, 2023 03:59
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Calax posted:It didn't help that right as Esports began to take off, and popularity of Starcraft 2 was at it's absolute peak... a vast network of corruption was uncovered in the main (South Korean) scene that murdered it. Oh wow, i hadn't heard of that, what exactly happened?
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Aug 1, 2023 06:00
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