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When playing on my own I remember going straight through the Protoss as well. Its just… right there! The other mission lines require you do something else before the next step, but the orb is always available for another ponder. And you get loads of research points which progress the interesting science poo poo of the room you’re in. Like, if Tosh met you in the engineering bay, always had a mission for you, and had a posse of specters behind him steadily getting more hench after every step, everyone would probably mainline those too. And for first time players and series fans, you just want to see where all this prophecy is going. Not because it’s any good, but just to see what ridiculous lengths the writing team went in making the Queen Bitch of the universe it’s prophecies savior.
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Aug 13, 2023 14:27
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They've done it in WoW several times, including the main plot of the previous expansion pack. It's also part of the main plot of Diablo II (retconning the original Diablo plot). "Killing the bad guy who is doing bad things is a terrible idea because something even worse will happen when you do" is, for some reason, a plot that Blizzard's writers just return to again and again. It's right up there with CORRUPTION.
idonotlikepeas fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Aug 13, 2023 |
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Aug 13, 2023 14:31
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There's another big argument for cellular reactors over bioregenative steel: look over at the next options for the protoss tree. One of those units heals mech. With energy. At a rate substantially higher than 0.6 hp/s. Yes, that's right: cellular reactor outheals bio regenative steel. Also, I can't ever see that last mission without thinking of all of those race swapped campaign mods that led to this little bit of tomfoolery. https://m.twitch.tv/giantgrantgames/clip/HyperBrainyLyrebirdKlappa
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Aug 13, 2023 14:45
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Hwurmp posted:*Braynor To prove their wherewithal, They'll overthrow Korhal They're corny They're Horny and the Brayn, Brayn, Brayn, Brayn, Brayn, Brayn, Brayn, Brayn, CONVICT
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Aug 13, 2023 14:47
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JohnKilltrane posted:So my theory about the crime against humanity that is the "twist" revealed at the end of the mission is that it was salvaged from Warcraft. Take what is said but replace "Overmind" with "Lich King," "Kerrigan" with "Arthas," and "mysterious darkness imposing its power on the Overmind" with "Demons" or "Dreadlords" and you get something that actually makes sense based on the trajectory of Warcraft 3. So I'm guessing it was meant to be the big twist of Warcraft 4 but then WoW happened and it became unfeasible but they just really liked the idea of "What if the evil monster was the only hope for salvation" so they tried to just import it wholesale into StarCraft and man does it not work at all. I'm afraid not. Warcraft 4 definitely was not a serious idea at the time of Starcraft 2's writing. However, there's a very good argument that the success of Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft absolutely poisoned Metzen's brain into trying to recapture the magic and tell the same stories over again. There's an upcoming mission that's particularly blatant about it.
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Aug 13, 2023 15:07
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FoolyCharged posted:There's another big argument for cellular reactors over bioregenative steel: look over at the next options for the protoss tree. One of those units heals mech. With energy. At a rate substantially higher than 0.6 hp/s. Frankly, cellular reactors would be hard to beat even if you buffed bio-regen. +100 starting energy is a huge buff to letting newly produced casters being immediately combat-ready...well, once we do missions to get them anyways.
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Aug 13, 2023 15:10
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MagusofStars posted:Alternatively, you can just bring along a SCV (walking behind your main force a little or safely tucked away in a dropship) and let that handle your between-combat repairs. Unless the regeneration rate of biosteel was high enough to actually save units mid-fight, it's just hard to argue for that much of a use case for "slowly heal back up between fights" when you've already got a much faster way to do it. b-but SCV repairs cost MONEY!!!  Actually, I wonder. Do Cellular Reactors work with Hive Mind Emulators? If so, that's pretty drat bonkers. Kith fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Aug 13, 2023 |
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Aug 13, 2023 15:17
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Aug 13, 2023 16:28
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The mech healing only came in handy for me on one mission that I did the slowest way possible, but yeah, it's entirely unnecessary. More mana is way better.
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Aug 13, 2023 16:36
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Aug 13, 2023 17:30
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Felinoid posted:it still smacks of being obsessed with an idea and using it over and over again, rather than "oooh, we couldn't use this idea so we'll stuff it somewhere else." So much of this. Metzen seemed to really love the idea of "the all-destroying horde of evil was actually a community good (or at least morally neutral) people that got subverted by a greater dark force that is the actual evil." Overwatch had it too, with the Omnics being implied to have gone haywire due to some greater evil's influence during Sombra's introduction. Also, hey, that game had a sniper woman who got captured by the bad guys and transformed into a bitter and gritty version of herself with weird-coloured skin. Blizzard's writing of this era was super hacky and repetitive, is what I'm saying. Gonna get even more clear as we learn more about this force of darkness in the later campaigns.
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Aug 13, 2023 17:40
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VostokProgram posted:are you pondering what I'm pondering? That we have to end this the sooner? YES.
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Aug 13, 2023 19:10
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JohnKilltrane posted:So my theory about the crime against humanity that is the "twist" revealed at the end of the mission is that it was salvaged from Warcraft. Take what is said but replace "Overmind" with "Lich King," "Kerrigan" with "Arthas," and "mysterious darkness imposing its power on the Overmind" with "Demons" or "Dreadlords" and you get something that actually makes sense based on the trajectory of Warcraft 3. So I'm guessing it was meant to be the big twist of Warcraft 4 but then WoW happened and it became unfeasible but they just really liked the idea of "What if the evil monster was the only hope for salvation" so they tried to just import it wholesale into StarCraft and man does it not work at all. They actually did wind up doing that with WoW’s Shadowlands expansion, except the “man behind the man” for the Lich King was Thanos on a shoestring budget and something like a dozen lines total… and in his last moments, he warned that there was an even greater threat to the cosmos.
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Aug 13, 2023 21:00
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you could make a really funny story where each villain points to an even bigger threat over and over until the characters begin to think it's turtles all the way up
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Aug 13, 2023 21:04
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So I played ahead of the LP and hoo boy, the writing keeps getting stupider and I haven't even started the final mission set.
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Aug 13, 2023 22:35
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FoolyCharged posted:
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Aug 13, 2023 22:41
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Xarn posted:the writing keeps getting stupider good thread title tbh
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Aug 13, 2023 22:42
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VostokProgram posted:you could make a really funny story where each villain points to an even bigger threat over and over until the characters begin to think it's turtles all the way up Procedurally generated villains? "Summon Bigger Fish"?
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Aug 13, 2023 23:35
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This is from Cythereal's LP, to summarise the Bigger Fish of Warcraft at the moment:
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Aug 13, 2023 23:44
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I'm surprised they didn't went with "Mengsk was corrupted by Amon. And UED too. And Aldaris."
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Aug 14, 2023 00:01
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Tenebrais posted:This is from Cythereal's LP, to summarise the Bigger Fish of Warcraft at the moment: And half of that is the result of a single expansion.
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Aug 14, 2023 00:03
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Szarrukin posted:I'm surprised they didn't went with "Mengsk was corrupted by Amon. And UED too. And Aldaris." Aldaris was corrupted… by being overly dramatic and taking too long to get to his point. 
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Aug 14, 2023 00:19
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Cythereal posted:And half of that is the result of a single expansion. But at least with WoW I get it. Every expansion you're dealing with higher level content, your players' avatars are getting stronger and stronger, you want each new villain to be raising the stakes in terms of power in order to be a believable threat to the players. I get it. I don't like it, I think it's bad writing and the whole "bigger fish" thing is a super clumsy way of doing it, but I get it. But in an RTS there is no power creep like that. Jimmy's just some guy. So are his crew members. So is nearly everyone in the setting. There's no need for something to be worse than the Overmind or even as bad as the Overmind in order to pose a believable threat to these characters. They just really seem to think that the best way to raise the stakes is by saying "Okay, dude, you know the deadly threat to existence? What if... What if it was just the tool of an even deadlier threat to existence?" and it makes for some truly awful writing. In any context. The only way you can possibly get away with that sort of "twist" is if it's been planned all along and you've been sprinking seeds along the way and the player/reader/viewer can go back and say "Oh wow yeah" and even then it's still probably going to be at least a little lame.
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Aug 14, 2023 13:05
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JohnKilltrane posted:But at least with WoW I get it. Every expansion you're dealing with higher level content, your players' avatars are getting stronger and stronger, you want each new villain to be raising the stakes in terms of power in order to be a believable threat to the players. But does it really have to work that way? The game already has defias bandit level 1 and defias bandit level 20 depending on what zone you're in. And with level scaling everywhere now, you've got a treadmill that keeps you in place relative to the enemies. There's no reason they had to keep upping the ante until it became ludicrous, not only did people already show they were perfectly happy suspending that disbelief, but Blizzard literally made it mechanically moot about the the same time they went really ridiculous with it.
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Aug 14, 2023 14:18
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JohnKilltrane posted:But at least with WoW I get it. Every expansion you're dealing with higher level content, your players' avatars are getting stronger and stronger, you want each new villain to be raising the stakes in terms of power in order to be a believable threat to the players. I get it. I don't like it, I think it's bad writing and the whole "bigger fish" thing is a super clumsy way of doing it, but I get it. I don't really forgive them for that writing. They could do an expansion where your problem is one of needing the extra power to finesse your way around a situation. Or just have the players solo a literal army. World ending stakes, time travel and multiple dimensions raise the stakes to such a contrived level that it's hard to take them seriously. Likewise, having a "genius" enemy that undoes everything the player does via plot robs all enjoyment from the game, where you realize it would have been better in the story, and more personally fulfilling, to have just spent the time playing something else. I don't think this has been mentioned before in the thread. But the TTRPG "Spirit of the Century" had some good advice for dungeon masters, namely that a player's victory has to be locked in and result in a permanent loss for the villain. The example they gave was that the villain shouldn't go "he laughs at he heroes while activating the teleporter and disappearing" but instead go "he desperately activates the sparking teleporter while backing away, and finally it triggers, leaving behind an arm and one of his legs". If your players defend New York in a campaign and win, then New York is now safe forever, at least presumably from that villain. I think a lot of writers would benefit from this advice.
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Aug 14, 2023 14:25
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FoolyCharged posted:But does it really have to work that way? The game already has defias bandit level 1 and defias bandit level 20 depending on what zone you're in. And with level scaling everywhere now, you've got a treadmill that keeps you in place relative to the enemies. There's no reason they had to keep upping the ante until it became ludicrous, not only did people already show they were perfectly happy suspending that disbelief, but Blizzard literally made it mechanically moot about the the same time they went really ridiculous with it. Escalating stakes is a reliable way to keep tension up. Once you've proven you can beat a wizard, the next big enemy needs to be stronger than a wizard for them to feel like a credible threat. This is all normal for serial storytelling. Having the same enemy at different levels is fine for trash mobs where no one really believes you're threatened by them, but for the headline villains you need more tension than that. In most media, there's alternatives to just having every enemy be stronger than the last. The next villain could threaten the protagonists' personal relationships, or their political position in the world, or maybe they're not stronger but the protagonists have also been weakened in some way - they've lost their powers, they're in a new place without their normal resources, there's been a time skip and they all got out of the heroing game. None of this works for an MMO though, where the game mechanics are all about beating up stronger wizards and taking their shiniest baubles. WoW's problems aren't really the escalating series of threats, it's the way they keep invalidating the threat of what you've already beaten so you don't often get to feel like you got a proper victory. Whatever mysterious biggest fish Shadowlands was hinting at will probably make for a better villain by coming out of nowhere than the expansion's actual villain turning out to have been orchestrating the entire story up to that point for his own purposes. And Starcraft 2 isn't beholden to any of this. All of the factions are much weaker at the end of Brood War than they were at the start of the story, you don't need to have something stronger than the Overmind to be able to pose as much of a threat as it did. Tenebrais fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 14:30
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JohnKilltrane posted:But in an RTS there is no power creep like that. Jimmy's just some guy. So are his crew members. So is nearly everyone in the setting. There's no need for something to be worse than the Overmind or even as bad as the Overmind in order to pose a believable threat to these characters. well, there kind of does - narrative stakes still need to increase because otherwise when yet another bad guy threatens the galaxy the audience will say "didn't we do this already". Starcraft's already got form for this: first we had the Overmind, then we had the UED with an enslaved Overmind, and the teaser was a returned xel'naga with terran science creating zerg-protoss hybrids e: consider also Warcraft which also escalates from a nation being invaded to interplanetary conflict to demonic invasion Lt. Danger fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 14:37
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Tenebrais posted:Escalating stakes is a reliable way to keep tension up. Once you've proven you can beat a wizard, the next big enemy needs to be stronger than a wizard for them to feel like a credible threat. This is all normal for serial storytelling. Having the same enemy at different levels is fine for trash mobs where no one really believes you're threatened by them, but for the headline villains you need more tension than that. In the short term sure, but in the long term we've seen where that leads. And it's not just a wow problem. Things getting stupid if things have to get bigger and badder constantly happens everywhere. The next wizard doesn't have to be bigger and badder, he doesn't even need to be strictly as strong. He just needs to be comparable. Most people go their entire real world lives without that comical ratcheting of the stakes that serial stories love to ruin themselves on. The problems don't have to get bigger and bigger to keep engagement.
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Aug 14, 2023 14:40
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JohnKilltrane posted:But at least with WoW I get it. Every expansion you're dealing with higher level content, your players' avatars are getting stronger and stronger, you want each new villain to be raising the stakes in terms of power in order to be a believable threat to the players. The solution to this problem is called "borrowed power". You don't actually have to constantly escalate threats in a narrative to maintain tension, you can just introduce different threats that all have their own unique solutions - maybe it's an Anti-Badguy Gizmo, or a Protective Ritual, or Clever Sabotage, or Allied Support, or whatever else. It's how Destiny has kept the player characters at a specific power level despite the narrative solution consistently being "tell the Guardian that The Problem drops new guns and it will get Solved": the Protagonists have to adapt to the situation and handle it differently every single time because the threat itself is never the same. WoW's problem is that the power is kept. It's like Dragon Ball Z where Goku just keeps getting more and more powerful so the threats have to become more and more dangerous, to the point where every single crisis faced by the protagonists is "delay until Goku gets there". When you let a character keep all of the power that they've gained, the only way that you can challenge them is by escalation, and that quickly becomes utterly ridiculous.
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Aug 14, 2023 14:45
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So what our collection of distinguished media scholars has concluded is that the problem with Activision games is that they all have endlessly escalating threats forever which make any actual victory irrelevant. Or in other words, we're all reading Metzen's DBZ fanfic. 
bladededge fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 16:38
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bladededge posted:So what our collection of distinguished media scholars has concluded is that the problem with Activision games is that they all have endlessly escalating threats forever which make any actual victory irrelevant. Or in other words, we're all reading Metzen's DBZ fanfic. That's an excellent summary of why it sucks, and I say that without irony. I'm glad everyone's weighing in since it makes it easier to put the constant feeling of "what-is-going-on" into words.
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Aug 14, 2023 16:43
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this is only really a problem for Warcraft/WoW, which is constantly iterating on world-ending threats. Starcraft strictly speaking only has the three conflicts to escalate, then de-escalates with the Nova mission pack and its mere political crisis, then the franchise ends
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Aug 14, 2023 18:45
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i think the LP is going to prove otherwise
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Aug 14, 2023 22:05
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There’s also the co-op stuff, though that also pretty quickly went into “definitely non-canon” territory.
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Aug 14, 2023 22:07
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I wonder if either of the Protoss or Zerg upgrade trees gave a possible upgrade for the Yamato on the Hyperion, you'd have to argue about whether the cannon was canon.
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Aug 14, 2023 23:11
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I've not played it but I gather from internet osmosis that Dragonflight is a de-escalation and that the expansion has been favourable received. So they can do it if they want. Power levels are fake anyway, if a game increases the level cap every expansion it won't be long before random overworld wildlife in the newest expansion is "objectively" stronger than the final boss of the base game even though that makes no narrative sense, and I think that just ends up as "lol videogames" rather than an actual problem Qwertycoatl fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 07:53
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Plus you actually get weaker in WoW when you out level an expansion cause your borrowed power got deactivated
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Aug 15, 2023 08:09
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Qwertycoatl posted:I've not played it but I gather from internet osmosis that Dragonflight is a de-escalation and that the expansion has been favourable received. So they can do it if they want.  Qwertycoatl posted:Power levels are fake anyway, if a game increases the level cap every expansion it won't be long before random overworld wildlife in the newest expansion is "objectively" stronger than the final boss of the base game even though that makes no narrative sense, and I think that just ends up as "lol videogames" rather than an actual problem
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Aug 15, 2023 08:59
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Sure but that's one yikes sidequest, thing is players aren't upset that they're not going to space and fighting whatever greater evil the jailer said is coming
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Aug 15, 2023 09:54
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 drat who could have seen this coming
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