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Also, this game goes out of its way to avoid confirming that any of the specific events of Brood War actually happened. There was an event called the Brood War, and Kerrigan killed a lot of people in it, but the UED, the Matriarch, the second Overmind, the deaths of Duke and Fenix, Samir Duran - we’re just not gonna talk about those, even when by all logic the characters absolutely would bring it up. e: By “this game” I mean WoL specifically. Some elements do crop up in HotS and LotV. e2: Safe Haven is a perfect example of a big problem with this game, and this BW thing is a big part of it - it’s just so bloodless. These characters have specific, deeply personal grievances against each other (or reasons to trust each other). They should have very strong emotions about what’s going on, and they have clear, understandable reasons for those emotions pre-written from the previous games. Raynor watched his own planet get infested by the Zerg and purged by the Protoss in front of his eyes and he doesn’t even mention it here! Instead, everyone just gives vague “you’re bad, I’m gonna get you” speeches to villains who are all off-screen doing nothing in particular, and the Raynor crew act like they’re on a vacation cruise picking up souvenirs and making money on fun heists. megane fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Nov 11, 2023 |
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Nov 11, 2023 16:20
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protoss carriers only have one dude on them anywaymegane posted:Raynor watched his own planet get infested by the Zerg and purged by the Protoss in front of his eyes and he doesn’t even mention it here! Raynor becomes friends with the protoss in SC1. this is a SC1/Brood War "failure"
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Nov 11, 2023 16:55
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megane posted:e2: Safe Haven is a perfect example of a big problem with this game, and this BW thing is a big part of it - it’s just so bloodless. These characters have specific, deeply personal grievances against each other (or reasons to trust each other). They should have very strong emotions about what’s going on, and they have clear, understandable reasons for those emotions pre-written from the previous games. Raynor watched his own planet get infested by the Zerg and purged by the Protoss in front of his eyes and he doesn’t even mention it here! Instead, everyone just gives vague “you’re bad, I’m gonna get you” speeches to villains who are all off-screen doing nothing in particular, and the Raynor crew act like they’re on a vacation cruise picking up souvenirs and making money on fun heists. hey, you saw the prophecy--it doesn't actually matter if anyone dies except for Kerrigan
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Nov 11, 2023 17:02
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habeasdorkus posted:I'm generally much more forgiving about the writing faults in these games than most here, with the caveat that I never got around to playing HoTS or whatever the third part was titled, HoTS and Legacy of the Void are annoying as hell (IMO) because basically every mission is timed. Please, let me build an army and play with it.
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Nov 11, 2023 18:19
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ulmont posted:HoTS and Legacy of the Void are annoying as hell (IMO) because basically every mission is timed. Please, let me build an army and play with it. One thing that tends to annoy me in games is when you only get access to the Good Stuff (in whatever form that takes) by the time it's almost over. Like, I worked hard to get these. At least let me play with them for a bit!
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Nov 11, 2023 18:36
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Lt. Danger posted:Raynor becomes friends with the protoss in SC1. this is a SC1/Brood War "failure" This is the difference between good and bad writing - while this doesn't initially make sense, it feels earned in SCBW. The alliance doesn't happen instantly out of nowhere, and it's not without asterisks. It'd be a lot more accurate to say that Raynor becomes friends with Fenix, Zeratul & Co.; Aldaris thinks he's trash, and Raynor says, "I won't be talked down to by anyone, not even a Protoss."
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Nov 11, 2023 22:42
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Jim's sightings before that were at the end of the Terran campaign where he fled Mengsk after the latter fed Kerrigan to the Zergs and during the Zerg campaign when Kerrigan got out of the chrysalis, wiped his base then let him go. That Raynor gets in visceral terms how bad the Zerg are, so he'd be more willing to understand the Protoss "burn them all and let the Khala sort it out" stance on Zerg infestation. Add that Tassadar is clearly changing his outlook when we find him in the Protoss campaign and I can honestly see an offscreen series of missions where the two come to a genuine understanding.
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Nov 11, 2023 23:04
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I mean, it's worth remembering that Tassadar got exiled in part because Aldaris and the Conclave blamed the ascendant Zerg on Tassadar refusing to continue genociding Terrans. There's also a cut mission in the first terrain campaign where Jim and Duke go to save a colony about to get wiped by the Zerg, and Tassadar arrives to provide reinforcements, which seems to be the (probably non-canon) point where Tassadar decides the Terrans don't deserve to be collateral damage in the defense of Aiur. So, Jim being a friend of the Protoss does make sense in BW, he was trusted by Tassadar, who promptly got sainted for nuking the Overmind, and then stayed behind with Fenix to do a suicide mission to save the Protoss refugees on Aiur, only apparently surviving that on virtue of joining Kerrigan in the anti-UED conspiracy. I'm inclined to agree with Lt. Danger that we look at SC1's writing with rose-tinted glasses and that we fill in a lot of the gaps to make sense of it, but I think this mission feels weird in light of Jim's history, but also the Protoss'. Selendis might not be the BW executor, but she's still in on the whole Saint Tassadar, Dark Templar-aligned new ideology of the Protoss. Cooking Terran worlds seems like a betrayal of Tassadar's ideals unless it really is a situation as bleak as Haven's Fall. Jim, unless he's really fallen from the person he was in SC1 -cut drunkard plot and all- seems like under almost any circumstance, he would never allow for civilians to simply get caught in the crossfire. In both cases, this feels like it ought to lead to a Jim-Selendis alliance where they go dirtside and gently caress up the Zerg together while evacuating the uninfected, not unlike the first mission in the chain. But the weird "they were secretly infected the whole time" implications and Hanson's insistence of treating infestation like the plague instead of Warhammer 40k chaos corruption kinda puts everything in a weird space.
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Nov 11, 2023 23:42
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aniviron posted:This is the difference between good and bad writing - while this doesn't initially make sense, it feels earned in SCBW. The alliance doesn't happen instantly out of nowhere, and it's not without asterisks. not to belabour the point, but, uh, it kinda does. Raynor just shows up with Tassadar in Prot04 having made friends off-screen. we're not sure how the "you glassed my planet/you used zerg as a WMD" conversation went but they seem to have sorted it out by the time the player arrives. Raynor proceeds to follow Tassadar into an alien civil war and then an apocalyptic battle against the zerg unconditionally, on the basis that he has nothing else better to do which is, y'know, fine, whatever - gotta get Metzen's insert to the big finish, right? the human tagalong's not really important at that stage. but SC1/BW is not actually that grounded in its characters, emotionally or materially. Raynor never did care that much about his home planet getting glassed or infested - why should he start caring now?
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Nov 12, 2023 00:03
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I definitely feel like SC1 and Brood War benefit immensely from a "less is more" principle: there's just a lot less writing, not so much that the writing itself is significantly better. This allows us to fill the gaps, yes, which is better than anything Blizzard would have put in the gaps. However, I do think some of the writing that *is* there in those games works a bit better, because it's not overreaching and, importantly, the campaigns are all linear, so poo poo that happens in them actually loving matters. So much of what happens in Wings of Liberty just doesn't have any stakes because they can't be sure you'll even actually do it.
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Nov 12, 2023 04:18
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Intermission 23 Cinematic: Good Man       Where Tosh stayed on the Hyperion if you sided with him, Hanson leaves no matter what side you pick.  And while the Tosh/Nova split at least gets a few nods later, what happens on Haven gets nothing.  As far as the overall narrative of SC2 goes, Dr. Hanson and Haven will cease to exist the second we're out of this cutscene.         Awww, how cute! Shame Jim already has one love interest.        There's a different thing on the wall on this side, but either way there's a suspiciously blank space on the bottom left corner. We got something from the Mar Sara, Covert, Rebellion, and Colonist chains, so I wonder if a trophy from the Artifact chain was planned at one point. >Examine Colonizer.  >Watch news.    If Media Blitz is uncompleted posted:
 Well Donny, they mostly seem like regular folks who are scared about the current crisis — and angry that the Dominion didn't do more to save them. Some of them have praised Jim Ray— If Media Blitz is uncompleted posted:
  >Talk to Tychus.    Huh. Couple of badasses like us ain't cut out for the quiet life anyway. Yes sir, destiny's got us pegged for something way bigger. >Talk to Swann.    Listen - they deserved it, and you did the right thing. Friends don't let friends massacre civilians, Jim. I'm proud of you for standing up to 'em.You wouldn't be saying that if we had the Haven's Fall version of the colony.  Stetmann has nothing to say about the departure of his temporary coworker, as expected.  That's it for our second trip to the Non-Canon Zone.  And now...  ...Char.
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Nov 12, 2023 04:26
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Branding themselves as rebels.
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Interestingly, Tosh has basically nothing to say here. "We in it now, brother." In what? Is he hinting at the problems that siding with Hanson might potentially cause? It is just a vague general "Let's keep going, I'm with you" etc. affirmation? I have no idea. But we certainly don't get anything as philosophical from him as we do when siding against Hanson. Maybe the Haven infestation situation is worse than it looks in the Safe Haven version, and he just doesn't want to break our hearts after shooting down all those Protoss that could have been our friends? Who knows! Not us! Probably not Blizzard either!
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Nov 12, 2023 04:43
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I think I'm just fine with the Colonist line never being mentioned again. All the missions suck (Outbreak is okay the first time), and the hinting mystery of what the gently caress is wrong with Hansen and her group gets almost zero payoff (it's hard to tell whether bug-Hansen's lines about her "children" are clues or just zerg-like phrasing). To say nothing of the whole "zerg virus" thing.
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Nov 12, 2023 05:01
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I think sometimes things happen in stories not to contribute to a grand plot timeline, but to inform us more about the characters and setting that said ultimately Blizzard ended up agreeing and cut down drastically on subplots
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Nov 12, 2023 11:22
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"Hmmph. I ain't a man either." Sorry. I've always wanted to make that joke.
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Nov 12, 2023 19:27
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That's what the Protoss were trying to do though? Selendis didn't know that through the magic of plot, the colonists weren't as infested here as they were in the other timeline, but the intention was absolutely to use all that power against the Zerg. And Jim's like "it's stupid to be killing Protoss when we should be teaming up with them" as if it's the Protoss' fault, as if Jim didn't have an explicit "fight the Protoss or don't fight the Protoss" choice and he very intentionally chose "fight the Protoss". Maybe this is low-hanging fruit to dunk on but IDK.
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Nov 12, 2023 20:30
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gohuskies posted:That's what the Protoss were trying to do though? Selendis didn't know that through the magic of plot, the colonists weren't as infested here as they were in the other timeline, but the intention was absolutely to use all that power against the Zerg. And Jim's like "it's stupid to be killing Protoss when we should be teaming up with them" as if it's the Protoss' fault, as if Jim didn't have an explicit "fight the Protoss or don't fight the Protoss" choice and he very intentionally chose "fight the Protoss". Maybe this is low-hanging fruit to dunk on but IDK. I'll climb back on my choices soapbox because the reason it sucks is the player can see the "tabletop" answer of trying to convince Selendis to join us and help buy time to figure out a cure. Because I could see a group of players at a table making increasingly ludicrous persuasion checks to pull that off. This is another reason why 'choices matters' games fail. By definition, they can only give a limited number of discrete choices with discrete outcomes. You cannot accommodate every possible choice and outcome, no matter how big your budget is. Maybe at some point a large language model would be able to approximate it, but I have mixed feelings on that idea. But for those of us who live in the real world and not magic machine learning land (I refuse to call it AI), players will always be able to think of a solution the developers didn't account for.
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Nov 12, 2023 20:47
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Warmachine posted:You cannot accommodate every possible choice and outcome, no matter how big your budget is. Off-topic, but may I recommend a game called Dwarf Fortress.
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Nov 12, 2023 21:32
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Warmachine posted:I'll climb back on my choices soapbox because the reason it sucks is the player can see the "tabletop" answer of trying to convince Selendis to join us and help buy time to figure out a cure. Because I could see a group of players at a table making increasingly ludicrous persuasion checks to pull that off. This is another reason why 'choices matters' games fail. By definition, they can only give a limited number of discrete choices with discrete outcomes. You cannot accommodate every possible choice and outcome, no matter how big your budget is. Maybe at some point a large language model would be able to approximate it, but I have mixed feelings on that idea. But for those of us who live in the real world and not magic machine learning land (I refuse to call it AI), players will always be able to think of a solution the developers didn't account for. -Selendis has heard of Raynor, but doesn't know him personally. And to the extent she knows of Raynor, she respects him as a warrior, resourceful leader, and battle commander - not as a scientist or intellectual genius. -Selendis' military training and life experience has drilled into her the idea that Zerg infestation is best solved by burning the poo poo out of stuff. -Neither Raynor nor Hanson has any actual evidence to support their suggestions of a cure. They don't even have any promising evidence to argue that a breakthrough is just around the corner, nor any real timeline. -Selendis presumably has other poo poo to do rather than just waiting around for some unknown period of time. I mean, there was even a scene right before the choice where Hanson suggested waiting for the cure and Selendis immediately responded "there is no cure except purification, you know this is true". The answer to your tabletop players trying to suggest waiting on the cure should be just a repetition of the exact answer she just gave to Hanson: No, there is only one solution here and we both know it. There's no sense in waiting for something that's impossible. Are you with me or against me?
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Nov 12, 2023 21:39
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Warmachine posted:I'll climb back on my choices soapbox because the reason it sucks is the player can see the "tabletop" answer of trying to convince Selendis to join us and help buy time to figure out a cure. Because I could see a group of players at a table making increasingly ludicrous persuasion checks to pull that off. This is another reason why 'choices matters' games fail. By definition, they can only give a limited number of discrete choices with discrete outcomes. You cannot accommodate every possible choice and outcome, no matter how big your budget is. Maybe at some point a large language model would be able to approximate it, but I have mixed feelings on that idea. But for those of us who live in the real world and not magic machine learning land (I refuse to call it AI), players will always be able to think of a solution the developers didn't account for. It's entirely possible to have believable choices in the game. Obviously you'll hit a few people who don't agree with any of the options given, but I think that with a modicum of effort you can find some binaries where 90% of people will find one of the two reasonable.
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Nov 12, 2023 21:45
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Warmachine posted:I'll climb back on my choices soapbox because the reason it sucks is the player can see the "tabletop" answer of trying to convince Selendis to join us and help buy time to figure out a cure. Because I could see a group of players at a table making increasingly ludicrous persuasion checks to pull that off. This is another reason why 'choices matters' games fail. By definition, they can only give a limited number of discrete choices with discrete outcomes. You cannot accommodate every possible choice and outcome, no matter how big your budget is. Maybe at some point a large language model would be able to approximate it, but I have mixed feelings on that idea. But for those of us who live in the real world and not magic machine learning land (I refuse to call it AI), players will always be able to think of a solution the developers didn't account for. Sometimes it's good enough to give a third option that is significantly better, instead of tossing the bomb either in the room with the kittens or the room with the babies, you toss it outside or perhaps in the room with the trolley problem implementer villain, Deus Ex 3 did that at at least one point and it worked perfectly well.
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Nov 13, 2023 02:37
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Yeah. As a comparison, I'm sad that Pillars of Eternity never let my character aspire to apotheosis but it didn't change the fact that there was rarely a point where I felt like I was stuck taking an option I really didn't want (at least, not when I'd earned my poor options by my previous choices).
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Nov 13, 2023 03:28
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SIGSEGV posted:Sometimes it's good enough to give a third option that is significantly better, instead of tossing the bomb either in the room with the kittens or the room with the babies, you toss it outside or perhaps in the room with the trolley problem implementer villain, Deus Ex 3 did that at at least one point and it worked perfectly well. Is that Human Revolution or Mankind Divided Deus Ex?
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Nov 13, 2023 04:20
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Human revolution, Deus Ex 2 is invisible war.
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Nov 13, 2023 04:36
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I'm trying to figure out if they're referring to the fact that, if you're quick enough, you can stun the hostage holder at the end of the first mission in Human Revolution. Good job, Adam, none of the hostages died and you didn't let the bad guy walk away
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Nov 13, 2023 04:55
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There's that and also disabling the gas chamber system in the offshore platform blacksite by finding it and shooting it instead of accepting the fake choice Burke gives. Now, how does it distribute to one location more than a kilometre lower than the other and the resultant pressure difference? It probably just has a hefty pump, but the pipe must be some entertaining engineering.
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Nov 13, 2023 06:00
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SIGSEGV posted:Sometimes it's good enough to give a third option that is significantly better, instead of tossing the bomb either in the room with the kittens or the room with the babies, you toss it outside or perhaps in the room with the trolley problem implementer villain, Deus Ex 3 did that at at least one point and it worked perfectly well. The third option could have been to convince Selendis not to burn the colony and now whoops, everything was in fact infested! Now it's the only outcome in which the player is explicitly wrong and you have to run a base defense mission (Terran with Selendis' carrier as a single special unit under your control) where Outbreak-style hordes of infested attack you with Hanson herself as a boss unit.
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Nov 13, 2023 06:28
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So does the writing get better/worse from here?
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Nov 13, 2023 06:37
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wedgekree posted:So does the writing get better/worse from here? It gets worse. Then it gets even more worse. Then it kinda levels out for a bit, nothing spectacular… and then sucker punches you by getting the worst it’s going to get.
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Nov 13, 2023 06:50
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wedgekree posted:So does the writing get better/worse from here? 
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Nov 13, 2023 07:32
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wedgekree posted:So does the writing get better/worse from here? In WoL I'd say it's kind of a relatively flat line with some bumps, then we get to HotS and it's just a straight drop with a few loop-the-loops before a ramp that sends us sailing right into the abyss.
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Nov 13, 2023 11:04
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Wings of Liberty is SC2's writing at its very best. Which is to say a good amount of it is pretty okay.
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Nov 13, 2023 11:07
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I've spent pretty much the entirety of Wings going 'man, I really can't wait to hit HotS.' I have such sights to show you.
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Nov 13, 2023 11:21
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gohuskies posted:The third option could have been to convince Selendis not to burn the colony and now whoops, everything was in fact infested! Now it's the only outcome in which the player is explicitly wrong and you have to run a base defense mission (Terran with Selendis' carrier as a single special unit under your control) where Outbreak-style hordes of infested attack you with Hanson herself as a boss unit. In my opinion that would have been even worse because it sounds like a "gotcha" choice. "You didn't eat this kitten so now this unrelated thing has happened". But if you eat the kitten then everything just somehow works out?
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Nov 13, 2023 11:39
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I still think the only way to not make it bullshit would be to have reality not change based on your choice, but still have benefits. Hanson and her fellas are always going to be infected, but it changes whether they're your infected or the Swarm's infected. Nova's always Mengsk's operative, but if you decide to work with her, some of her Ghosts jump ship because working with someone that has actual principles has awoken a desire in them to do the right thing. And so on. It's not really that hard to have there be no "mechanically correct" choice despite reality still being objective.
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Nov 13, 2023 11:43
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Eh, unless you make both options mechanically the same, you will always find people picking specific choice due to the mechanic benefits. And making them mechanically the same ends up being contrieved as gently caress. We already heaped lot of praise on Alpha Protocol, which did this fairly well, but the handler bonuses were asymmetrical and usually one side (hatred vs friendship) mechanically much stronger. It just wasn't a game that leads people to optimizing as much as an RTS does. Obsidian handled this much better later on in Tyranny, where friendship vs hatred in relationship isn't opposed, so you can build both at the same time (IIRC they call it Favour and Wrath), and the bonuses are thematic to the faction, but if want to optimize the game you will still need to make kinda fixed choices, because you can't build both reps freely.
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Nov 13, 2023 12:15
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Xarn posted:Eh, unless you make both options mechanically the same, you will always find people picking specific choice due to the mechanic benefits. And making them mechanically the same ends up being contrieved as gently caress. But even in terms of gameplay, I really don’t think it matters for most games. The majority of your players are playing the campaign exactly once, aren’t reading a guide beforehand, and are just picking whatever feels right in the moment. As long as both results are good enough to be viable, that really is good enough; one option being mechanically superior to the other doesn’t hold anything back.
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Nov 13, 2023 13:08
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MagusofStars posted:But even in terms of gameplay, I really don’t think it matters for most games. The majority of your players are playing the campaign exactly once, aren’t reading a guide beforehand, and are just picking whatever feels right in the moment. As long as both results are good enough to be viable, that really is good enough; one option being mechanically superior to the other doesn’t hold anything back. This is kind of my feeling, that the flexible story makes more sense when you consider who they're developing for. I'd bet that as well as not playing through multiple times, a large portion of WoL players either never played the original games (like me) or had them as distant memories - they were 12 years old and by that point, extremely janky and awkward to play. There is just way less context for what the zerg are and why the protoss are saying this. From that point of view, halfway through your unserious space adventure (because you've not delayed it as late as possible), some blue smartass has just popped up and insisted you betray your friend by doing a massacre. Equally, with all the additional context, the thread was pretty consistent in siding with the protoss. Railroading you one way or the other, or having the choice but having a bad ending, is going to alienate a whole bunch of people. Giving the player the option to pick the route that feels right to their understanding of Starcraft feels like a pretty elegant solution to getting stories that at least sort of work for fans of the old games and fans of the new one. Like, I don't think the writing itself is particularly good, but within that constraint I think this is a good solution to mop up a bit of tonal dissonance, assuming that we're not going to, say, gather in a large group of people on an internet forum and analyse each path objective by objective and line by line.
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Nov 13, 2023 20:17
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Warmachine posted:I'll climb back on my choices soapbox because the reason it sucks is the player can see the "tabletop" answer of trying to convince Selendis to join us and help buy time to figure out a cure. Because I could see a group of players at a table making increasingly ludicrous persuasion checks to pull that off. This is another reason why 'choices matters' games fail. By definition, they can only give a limited number of discrete choices with discrete outcomes. You cannot accommodate every possible choice and outcome, no matter how big your budget is. Maybe at some point a large language model would be able to approximate it, but I have mixed feelings on that idea. But for those of us who live in the real world and not magic machine learning land (I refuse to call it AI), players will always be able to think of a solution the developers didn't account for. I don't really buy that. Sure, you have infinite options in a scenario where you are the only actor, but that's the whole reason to have a framework and other characters to constrain you. Selendis offers you the choice of torching the planet yourself, and if you don't, she will. That's a perfectly reasonable framing for making the choice binary, because whatever you can think to do that does not involve sending in the troops right then and there will directly lead to her doing it for you. Technically there could be an option where you tell her to go ahead and just peace out, but here there's a constraint that you're playing as James Eugene Raynor, and while the writers don't always know what to do with him, he wouldn't do that. Plus you absolutely can do the exact thing you're suggesting! You can convince Selendis that the colonists don't deserve purging and that Hanson can fix them up, it's just that the way to demonstrate your conviction is by beating her rear end in glorious combat, after which she will cheerfully acquiesce. That's entirely consistent with her character, not a fault in the writing. pretty much everything else in this game is very much a fault of the writing, but I guess I'll stand up for this one specific interaction
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Nov 13, 2023 20:56
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Deformed Church posted:Giving the player the option to pick the route that feels right to their understanding of Starcraft feels like a pretty elegant solution to getting stories that at least sort of work for fans of the old games and fans of the new one. Like, I don't think the writing itself is particularly good, but within that constraint I think this is a good solution to mop up a bit of tonal dissonance, assuming that we're not going to, say, gather in a large group of people on an internet forum and analyse each path objective by objective and line by line. I do like this explanation. It doesn't detract from how bad the writing feels, but I'm always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt as to what their intentions were, and this makes sense to me.
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Nov 13, 2023 21:07
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