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GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?

JohnKilltrane posted:

Also, I wonder if maybe the word we're looking for to describe SC1 is "pulp-y."

I rewatched Pitch Black recently and I kinda feel like the Terran campaign, in a game that came out two years before that movie, was drinking from the same well as it, and maybe a bunch of other scifi release in that general timeframe: a kind of grungy pulp inspired by, like, Aliens more than anything.

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Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



bladededge posted:

I never thought about it in those words, but I think this is accurate. SC1's dialogue for the most part is played completely straight in those between-mission cutscenes and rare in-mission messages, while SC2 frequently sounds like it was written specifically for movie clip collections. Product of the time, maybe? Wings of Liberty was developed and released smack in the middle of Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase One. I was as swept up in the quippiness as anyone else back then.

I say SC1's dialogue is played straight 'for the most part' because, well, the Zerg.

My original take was going to take about each race specifically before I realized that the Overmind, Fenix, and Tassadar are picking gypsum out of their teeth for how much scenery they chew every time they talk. Comparatively speaking, the Terrans are outright somber. That said those are also the alien races, and one way to make the aliens aliens is making them all bombastic actors. Dunno if it's the best choice, but it does differentiate them from the Terrans in those games.

GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?
The Overmind has a whole Old Testament God thing going on that the bombast just nails.

JohnKilltrane
Dec 30, 2020

I wonder if there's something in there about earlier games with more abstract visuals going for a more theatrical voice acting style to emphasize character and emotions whereas more recent games having the technology to show personality and emotions through things like facial expressions and camera angles and so they go for a less over-the-top, more cinematic voice acting style.

N.B. I haven't played nearly enough games, especially more recent ones, to be able to say anything substantial about it, it's more just an idle thought.

That being said, I think they still went for it in SC2, especially with the aliens, it just doesn't work for me as well. I can't pin down exactly why the Overmind chewing the scenery grabs me in a way that, say, Zagara chewing the scenery doesn't. And I'm sure to an extent it is just nostalgia, I'll cop to that. I don't know that it's just nostalgia, but if it isn't, I can't really express yet what the difference is.

Maybe quantity? I think there's a lot of characters and ideas from SC2 that would work much better in SC1's "brief interjection every other mission or so" approach, and a lot of characters and ideas from SC1 that wouldn't really work in SC2's "Multiple quips per mission, potentially lengthy exchanges between missions" approach.

Like I enjoy the righteous fury of the "I'm the man who's gonna kill you someday" speech as much as the next 90s RTS dork, but boy would I not be interested in having a cutscene about it and then going around and talking to all the other characters about it.

But I guess a lot of that's my fault, too? I've played these campaigns over and over again, I know what the dialogue will be, I know a good chunk of it doesn't work for me, and yet I still have this overriding compulsion to exhaust every single optional bit of dialogue in the game. So I do this to myself.

Anyway, I hope people don't take my grousing as slamming the game. I absolutely love SC2 and I'm very thankful for wonderful job Bisby is doing with the immense task of SSLPing it. It's just fun to complain about the writing, but if it's getting to be too much or dampening other people's enthusiasm for it, I certainly don't mind easing off a bit.

Aces High
Mar 26, 2010

Nah! A little chocolate will do




Personally, I think all games should approach their voice acting like Legacy of Kain did

Gun Jam
Apr 11, 2015

Aces High posted:

Personally, I think all games should approach their voice acting like Legacy of Kain did

How did that series approached their voice acting?
Edit: also, in addition to the orb pondering be bad writing, the two other "okay, this is stupid" plot points in SC2 are (IMHO) the choices you get - Haven could be fine, if reality didn't rewrite itself to make you right; and in Tosh/Nova case, you shouldn't put a totally new character who works for your enemy against a trusty ally (you could salvage that by meeting Nova earlier, her being a friend who we owe a solid to, and we know she got her own agenda, and isn't loyal to the dominion)

Gun Jam fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Nov 17, 2023

Hwurmp
May 20, 2005

Tychus but it's Tony Jay

Aces High
Mar 26, 2010

Nah! A little chocolate will do




Gun Jam posted:

How did that series approached their voice acting?

I was going to post some of the behind the scenes stuff they did for later games in the series, but I think this intro communicates the vibe I'm referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DOKzTHaPfM

Felinoid
Mar 8, 2009

Marginally better than Shepard's dancing. 2/10
Frankly one of the big advantages SC1 had was that it was new. The Confederacy was not a thing yet. The Zerg were not a thing yet. The Protoss were not a thing yet. Nothing was established, so they could create whatever the hell they wanted and people would accept it, because they're creating a new universe from scratch. There was nothing prior to SC1 to make people go "wait, Raynor shouldn't be having thoughts about Kerrigan, he's gay" or anything like that. ("The Zerg are a virus now? What happened to the worms?")

On top of that, first entries in a series tend to have a bit more time in the oven. When you're making a sequel in a popular series, PR will chomp at the bit to announce it immediately for a hype infusion. But there's only so much hype you can get from "here's something entirely new that you may or may not like from people who have maybe made things you liked previously???", so they'll let that sit long enough for you to have something to show first for proper hype, letting you get farther along before the leash starts getting yanked. After all, sometimes those new ideas turn out to be unfeasible in some way, and not every company has a Molyneux (or Todd Howard lately?) promising the world to the public, so they can just be quietly shelved until things are figured out, if they ever are.

And then there's the idea that Starcraft should be revolutionary gameplay-wise. While I'm sure other games probably beat it to the punch, Starcraft was some players' introduction to asymmetric-yet-balanced factions in an RTS. Nevermind that it basically originated e-sports as far as I'm aware. So Blizzard had to reinvent the wheel again with SC2 WoL, and...they tried. It's a great fun game and all, but given the limited things available in multiplayer compared to single player, I think it's fair to say that even Blizzard knows there's a lot of unnecessary chaff. Their attempts to incentivize running firefights with things like Reapers and Diamondbacks fell flat (though at least Reapers managed to survive in a niche of early harassment). The idea of drop play with Medivacs and Marines had to be enforced by excising Medics. The Firebat redesign and the new Hellion failed so hard they had to frankenstein them together to make a decent unit. Tons of great quality of life upgrades, like more-automated workers and queues in upgrade buildings, but a shining path forward for the genre it was not. The same reason why some people nowadays are saying Valve was smart never to make a Half-Life 3; the expectations are just too high, and the chances of meeting them slim.


On a completely different topic, building a campaign save where the artifact missions are left as long as possible is a special kind of torture. Not only is the absence of Marauders and Siege Tanks keenly felt, but because they're the main Protoss research missions and all the orb research is gated behind The Dig, Science Vessels are absent basically forever too. So very very many dead marines.

E: Good point.

Felinoid fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Nov 17, 2023

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

When discussing SC2 it's probably important to specify if you mean the whole of SC2 with Wings, Heartburn Swarm, Prologue, Legassery Void, Epilogue and Covert Oops or just the Wings that we have seen so far. Heck I've gotten that wrong halfway through a single post myself.

mr_stibbons
Aug 18, 2019

Felinoid posted:

Frankly one of the big advantages SC1 had was that it was new. The Confederacy was not a thing yet. The Zerg were not a thing yet. The Protoss were not a thing yet. Nothing was established, so they could create whatever the hell they wanted and people would accept it, because they're creating a new universe from scratch. There was nothing prior to SC1 to make people go "wait, Raynor shouldn't be having thoughts about Kerrigan, he's gay" or anything like that. ("The Zerg are a virus now? What happened to the worms?")

On top of that, first entries in a series tend to have a bit more time in the oven. When you're making a sequel in a popular series, PR will chomp at the bit to announce it immediately for a hype infusion. But there's only so much hype you can get from "here's something entirely new that you may or may not like from people who have maybe made things you liked previously???", so they'll let that sit long enough for you to have something to show first for proper hype, letting you get farther along before the leash starts getting yanked. After all, sometimes those new ideas turn out to be unfeasible in some way, and not every company has a Molyneux (or Todd Howard lately?) promising the world to the public, so they can just be quietly shelved until things are figured out, if they ever are.

And then there's the idea that Starcraft should be revolutionary gameplay-wise. While I'm sure other games probably beat it to the punch, Starcraft was some players' introduction to asymmetric-yet-balanced factions in an RTS. Nevermind that it basically originated e-sports as far as I'm aware. So Blizzard had to reinvent the wheel again with SC2 WoL, and...they tried. It's a great fun game and all, but given the limited things available in multiplayer compared to single player, I think it's fair to say that even Blizzard knows there's a lot of unnecessary chaff. Their attempts to incentivize running firefights with things like Reapers and Diamondbacks fell flat (though at least Reapers managed to survive in a niche of early harassment). The idea of drop play with Medivacs and Marines had to be enforced by excising Medics. The Firebat redesign and the new Hellion failed so hard they had to frankenstein them together to make a decent unit. Tons of great quality of life upgrades, like more-automated workers and queues in upgrade buildings, but a shining path forward for the genre it was not. The same reason why some people nowadays are saying Valve was smart never to make a Half-Life 3; the expectations are just too high, and the chances of meeting them slim.
I think in the context of starcraft 2, a sequel to a universally praised game a decade later, there was a heavy pressure from marketing to play the hits and avoid rocking the boat. The races can't change too much from their original designs and styles, every noticeable character who survived the bloodbath of the first game (and some who didn't) has to be a major player in this one, no real curveballs allowed. It still has to be "starcraft" and keeps the economy and a lot of "old school" rts conventions that were out of style at the time of release. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason every single terran unit from the first game is playable in the WoL campaign was because of pressure to at least try to include them in multiplayer.

But, the idea that SC2 was lacking time in the oven is a little unbelievable. There was a solid 3 years between announcement and release, and a fair amount changed between even the inital previews and the final game.

painedforever
Sep 12, 2017

Quem Deus Vult Perdere, Prius Dementat.

Aces High posted:

Personally, I think all games should approach their voice acting like Legacy of Kain did

1. Professional voice actors. Tony Jay, yes, but Simon Templeman. Michael Bell. Richard Doyle. Rene Auberjonois.
2. Amy Hennig wrote and directed it, but they also got a comic book writer to refine the script.
3. The themes and tones of the game were consistent.
4. They paced and directed it like it was a movie.

It's one of those games that I would rather watch than play. Which, y'know, upsides and downsides. It's a lot more memorable, I'll say that much.

Hwurmp
May 20, 2005

the gameplay was kinda mid, but otoh VAE VICTIS :drac:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ--mfyyQLI

Zulily Zoetrope
Jun 1, 2011

Muldoon

painedforever posted:

1. Professional voice actors. Tony Jay, yes, but Simon Templeman. Michael Bell. Richard Doyle. Rene Auberjonois.
2. Amy Hennig wrote and directed it, but they also got a comic book writer to refine the script.
3. The themes and tones of the game were consistent.
4. They paced and directed it like it was a movie.

It's one of those games that I would rather watch than play. Which, y'know, upsides and downsides. It's a lot more memorable, I'll say that much.

The intro movie posted earlier does a good job of setting the tone, but I just want to clarify that the every scene is like that. Here is the following cutscene where tutorial voice Tony Jay introduces protagonist Michael Bell to the setting and mechanics, and it has the same theatrical bombast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlyDTEn32Fs

Calax
Oct 5, 2011

mr_stibbons posted:

I think in the context of starcraft 2, a sequel to a universally praised game a decade later, there was a heavy pressure from marketing to play the hits and avoid rocking the boat. The races can't change too much from their original designs and styles, every noticeable character who survived the bloodbath of the first game (and some who didn't) has to be a major player in this one, no real curveballs allowed. It still has to be "starcraft" and keeps the economy and a lot of "old school" rts conventions that were out of style at the time of release. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason every single terran unit from the first game is playable in the WoL campaign was because of pressure to at least try to include them in multiplayer.

But, the idea that SC2 was lacking time in the oven is a little unbelievable. There was a solid 3 years between announcement and release, and a fair amount changed between even the inital previews and the final game.

The other thing to remember between SC1 and 2 is the factor of how development teams and timelines have BALOONED between the two releases. SC1 was basically sprites with a cool CGI every few missions (even although the faces looked... horrid) and storytelling done almost entirely through portraits and voice acting.

SC2 you have full 3d models and a cutscene after every mission that has to be built, and acted. Which makes it much harder to adjust the story when you realize that you're not gonna hit the scope you wanted.

BisbyWorl
Jan 12, 2019

Knowledge is pain plus observation.


Char 1: The Gates of Hell

Cinematic: Dangerous Game + Video: The Gates of Hell




The game makes sure that you're prepared to head out.





























God, Valerian is such a smug prick.























Reminder that the Rebellion mission line is optional.



Meaning this can be the only time in the entire game that Jim and Mengsk are face to face. Even Kerrigan had a few appearances during the Artifact missions!













God, Valerian is such a smug prick.





*alarms blaring*



































Oh look, everything's already going to hell.









Oh poo poo, it's the ex.







Tychus is noticably straining when he says this, so I think he's being literal here.













The mission starts off with a bunch of initial units, plus automatic max supply like in Supernova.



The first part of this mission requires me to hit 100 supply.



If we can reach enough of them before the zerg, we might just have a chance of fighting our way through this.



The zerg are extremely aggressive here, so those starting tanks are a godsend.







Like Zero Hour back in the day, the bonus objective here is to rescue squads of units to bolster my own forces, which will be swarmed by the zerg if I take too long. They'll give a nice shot in the arm to my supply count to kick off the second half of the mission, but I can still make an army by hand if I end up losing them all.



There's a hard limit on how many drop pods land before I'm on my own.



I'm assuming command, here! You men fall in with us and we'll see to finding your General!

But the first group is easy to rescue.





A second Bunker is pretty much mandatory at each entrance. There's a lot of ground the starting Bunkers can't cover.



The second pod has landed, with the path blocked by a bunch of Zerglings.



Dragging them into range of my Tank does the trick.



Two Marines and three Marauders.



For Haven's Fall I went pure air, so this time I'll go for mostly ground mechanical.



Although I'll still need some Science Vessels.

Which highlights a major factor in this mission: your starting base is tiny. Filling out the tech tree makes everything really cramped.

Of course, this only matters if you aren't going pure infantry, in which case you just need an Engineering Bay and, like, two Barracks.



The third group is much better defended.



To the point where I decide not to bother.



It only has three Vultures and a free Factory, after all.

While this does mean I could have grabbed this group and saved money on making a Factory myself, doing so would slow down the rest of my tech by a lot as I wouldn't be able to get my Starport and Armory up until now.



So I do a MULE drop to grab the nearby caches.



Then tag the group for fun.





Another group.



Eh, I don't mind if I lose this one.



Attack waves really ramp up here. Nothing I can't handle.



This time there's a free Starport.



All I want is the Raven, the rest I don't care about.



Although the Medivac is kind enough to reveal a few caches while getting poked to death by a Corrupter.



The army is almost ready.

Yeah, I could have been finished by now if I actually saved those drop pods, but this lets me fine tune my army comp.



Which is really shaping up!



I finally notice those green dots on their own, and find that those two Vultures are still alive. I kill them both to keep me under 100 for a bit longer.



Another one.



Although by this point you have to fight through a sizable force to reach them, and this group instantly gets attacked so there's less to save even if you do get there, so I ignore them.



They do reveal this renamed virophageSpore Cannon, however. All it does is act as a completely harmless Detector to stop you from going to town with cloaked units, but it drops a gas pickup on death.



The last few pods make you pick and choose.



Dammit! We'll rescue as many as we can. But I don't think everyone's gonna live through this.

They'll come in at the same time at opposite points of the map, and sending your army to one means the other will get swarmed.

There is an achievement for grabbing every drop pod, but that can easily be cheesed with MULE drops.



I head to the bottom for some free anti-air.



And that pushes me over my quota.











Oh no, Mr. Hydralisk get out of the way!



:rip:





We're on our way General! Just hold on...drat, he can't even hear us.





Kerrigan is loving this poo poo.





And now the second half of the mission starts: Saving Warfield.





You're sure talkin' a lot, Kerrigan. Maybe the fear you smell is your own.

Now, this is obviously a callback to having to save Duke from the zerg back in SC1. There's just a few problems.



In SC1, the direct path to Duke was covered in Spore Colonies, making it impossible to try and sneak a few Dropships through for an early win. Here, there's nothing stopping me from just flying a few guys over and sniping the Nydus Worms.

More importantly is that the objective is to kill the Nydus Worms, not save Warfield. This makes Gates of Hell the perfect example for Orbital Strike cheese. See that huge mess of purple on the bottom right? Just skip it all and drop guys directly on top of the Worms!



I'll wait for the last two pods before heading to Warfield.





And there they are now, forcing you to pick between heavy air and heavy ground.



One more MULE grabs this batch, although it instantly pisses off the guards and gets them killed.



While I get the Thor group myself.





Now to save Warfield.



The path is guarded by a bunch of infested, probably leftovers from all the other times the terrans have attacked Char.



There's an expansion down here, but considering the sheer aggression on this map having to split my defenses even further sounds like a bad idea.







Just think, I could have just... skipped all this.





There's no real finesse here, just a huge slugfest to the Worms.







One.



Two.



And three.



I honestly have no idea if Warfield can actually die here as a soft timer or if he'll hold out forever. It's been seven minutes since he crashed and his defenses are showing no sign of cracking.



And now we get a fade to black, but not for the UI.

Yes I know this has been an incredibly pedantic thing to focus on, but seriously, how hard can it be to unify something like this?



Band of Brothers - Rescue Warfield in the "Gates of Hell" mission while only training SCVs, Medics, Medivacs, Hercules, Ravens, Science Vessels, and Mercenaries on Normal difficulty.

BisbyWorl fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Feb 6, 2024

Numbus26
Jun 23, 2023
I don't think Warfield can actually die here, no. There's also some creative cheeses involving dropping infantry on those tiny pillars near the Nydus Worms with the orbital drop.

GodFish
Oct 10, 2012

We're your first, last, and only line of defense. We live in secret. We exist in shadow.

And we dress in black.
I believe Warfield can die (maybe not on that difficulty) but it doesn't make you lose the mission since the objective is just to kill the nydus worms.

disposablewords
Sep 12, 2021


BisbyWorl posted:



Kerrigan is loving this poo poo.

Honestly, so was I. This is one of SC2's good bits, where the action is picking up and it really feels like poo poo's happening. And the Queen Bitch is here to mock you over it. I even liked the mission, which yeah is a bit of a slog if you do it "right" but is... sort of the good kind of slog? What fighting the zerg should feel like, pressing into their horrible mass and cutting out every inch you take. At least, that's how I remember it.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



They make a bigger deal out of the split drops than they actually are. It's been a while since I did it on Brutal, but on Hard you can easily split your force between the two and snap them up, then a-move your whole kitchen sink army to Warfield.

SoundwaveAU
Apr 17, 2018


This was StarCraft 2's first major meme, by the way. In the pre-release battle reports cast by Dustin Browder, he would say "terrible, terrible damage" a lot, to the point it became a meme. Blizz recognised the meme and still had time to add this line into the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZlcgOzi_E

aniviron
Sep 11, 2014


GunnerJ posted:

I rewatched Pitch Black recently and I kinda feel like the Terran campaign, in a game that came out two years before that movie, was drinking from the same well as it, and maybe a bunch of other scifi release in that general timeframe: a kind of grungy pulp inspired by, like, Aliens more than anything.

Yeah, something tells me they were inspired by Aliens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUExpobw3tw

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
It kind of strikes me as odd that Kerrigan calls up Raynor on the Space Hologram Phone. You'd figure she'd do some spooky telepathy or a giant psionic illusion or something, or maybe send a letter via mutalisk pigeon or whatever the Zerg do for long distance calls.

I also have to repeat how bungled I feel Kerrigan's character is in WoL. If all she wanted was the ol' "gnar gnar Zerg eat all mmmm infest everyone"-bit, she could've curbstomped every species in the sector at the end of Brood War where she was the undisputed space champion of space fighting with all her major rivals dead or running. So it really feels like there's just some... missing character beats for her. Either a complete different motivation, or some reason for why she's been on hold for several years and now is back to "har har infest everyone lol"-mode.

The Overmind had its biological imperatives on behalf of the Swarm, SC1/BW Kerrigan had a whole lot of spite and scores to settle, SC2 Kerrigan has her scores largely settled and it feels has been established as being a different thinker than the Overmind, so where are her goddamn motivations, Blizzard?

Koorisch
Mar 29, 2009

PurpleXVI posted:

It kind of strikes me as odd that Kerrigan calls up Raynor on the Space Hologram Phone. You'd figure she'd do some spooky telepathy or a giant psionic illusion or something, or maybe send a letter via mutalisk pigeon or whatever the Zerg do for long distance calls.

Well, she has all these Infested Command Centers around so might as well use them?

PurpleXVI posted:

The Overmind had its biological imperatives on behalf of the Swarm, SC1/BW Kerrigan had a whole lot of spite and scores to settle, SC2 Kerrigan has her scores largely settled and it feels has been established as being a different thinker than the Overmind, so where are her goddamn motivations, Blizzard?

Probably in a side-mission/comic/book, like several of the other people we've seen so far.

Lt. Danger
Dec 22, 2006

jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

Kerrigan's exact motivations are brought up in Heart of the Swarm but in Wings of Liberty she is invading to secure and destroy the artifacts being uncovered by the Moebius Foundation. Valerian* is the instigator who started the war - Kerrigan is defending herself

Tenebrais
Sep 2, 2011

The Orb missions at least established that Kerrigan is very concerned about the coming of space satan, and she's established as wanting to get her hands on the relics. Her original invasion of the Dominion started right after the mission where you take over the Dominion operation to loot a relic from Mar Sara, so that's probably what her objective is - either not realising the Moebius Foundation was getting Raynor to collect them all, or just not caring to tell one Terran force from another, or maybe even going for Moebius specifically and the whole rest of the invasion was just to spread the Dominion thin and give her a chance. Who knows? No one ever tells us.

rastilin
Nov 6, 2010

PurpleXVI posted:

It kind of strikes me as odd that Kerrigan calls up Raynor on the Space Hologram Phone. You'd figure she'd do some spooky telepathy or a giant psionic illusion or something, or maybe send a letter via mutalisk pigeon or whatever the Zerg do for long distance calls.

I also have to repeat how bungled I feel Kerrigan's character is in WoL. If all she wanted was the ol' "gnar gnar Zerg eat all mmmm infest everyone"-bit, she could've curbstomped every species in the sector at the end of Brood War where she was the undisputed space champion of space fighting with all her major rivals dead or running. So it really feels like there's just some... missing character beats for her. Either a complete different motivation, or some reason for why she's been on hold for several years and now is back to "har har infest everyone lol"-mode.

The Overmind had its biological imperatives on behalf of the Swarm, SC1/BW Kerrigan had a whole lot of spite and scores to settle, SC2 Kerrigan has her scores largely settled and it feels has been established as being a different thinker than the Overmind, so where are her goddamn motivations, Blizzard?

Yesss, I keep wondering about that. The Zerg are into bio-horror but Kerrigan just always has a terminal around to call people with.. and so do all the Protoss that need to talk to Terrans. Like Selendris, apparently. Did they all upgrade their ancient tech patterns to interface with Terran equipment in the last three years, or do they pass around stolen / borrowed terminals? Does Kerrigan just always use the same terminal and everyone knows what it is? If not, does the command staff just let anyone crank call the capital ship's bridge, or does Kerrigan have to talk to a communications officer and persuade them it's not a crank call before they let her through?

It would have been awesome if Kerrigan communicated by chiseling what she wanted to say into the side of a cube of nacre or something else super-hard and then had some kind of Zerg catapult just yeet the thing into the Terran base. Extra points if she keeps using this method. "Stand by for incoming message... BOOM". This game really does have loads of missed opportunities.

EDIT: I just realized. The Terrans might want to reply. This means that you could have a scene where they carve their reply in the block and then have a trebuchet fire it back at the Zerg.

rastilin fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Nov 18, 2023

Zulily Zoetrope
Jun 1, 2011

Muldoon
Yeah I think the only hint of her motivations you are given in WoL is that one "I know what you're planning and who 'Dr. Narud' is" line.

On which you might fault her for never elaborating, but Jim never bothers to follow up on it and blindly signs on with Moebius and Mengsk Junior, so I wouldn't exactly blame her for not trusting him with sensitive information.

Tenebrais
Sep 2, 2011

rastilin posted:

Yesss, I keep wondering about that. The Zerg are into bio-horror but Kerrigan just always has a terminal around to call people with.. and so do all the Protoss that need to talk to Terrans. Like Selendris, apparently. Did they all upgrade their ancient tech patterns to interface with Terran equipment in the last three years, or do they pass around stolen / borrowed terminals? Does Kerrigan just always use the same terminal and everyone knows what it is? If not, does the command staff just let anyone crank call the capital ship's bridge, or does Kerrigan have to talk to a communications officer and persuade them it's not a crank call before they let her through?

It would have been awesome if Kerrigan communicated by chiseling what she wanted to say into the side of a cube of nacre or something else super-hard and then had some kind of Zerg catapult just yeet the thing into the Terran base. Extra points if she keeps using this method. "Stand by for incoming message... BOOM". This game really does have loads of missed opportunities.

Starcraft had some of this too. The Zerg were perfectly capable of reading Terrans' communications, although under the Overmind they never tried using it to talk back. I think Kerrigan called the UED a few times in the campaign. It's pretty reasonable to imagine she got some communication equipment from some old terran wrecks somewhere and knows how to use it. We also saw the Protoss and Terrans calling each other pretty freely through the campaigns. Kerrigan spoke to Protoss several times too but you can easily put that down to them just all being psychic if you want.

It's a soft sci-fi setting. Everyone's communications systems are just compatible, no need to think about it too much unless you can make your explanation cool.

Happy Litterbox
Jan 2, 2010
According to SC1 lore the Protoss and Confederacy had an uneasy neighborship where the latter tried to set up shop in Protoss space and got blown up for it. One can assume the Protoss figured out after a few incidents to set up a few drones blasting unencrypted messages that the Terrans should turn around if they don't wanna get vaporized. The Confederacy respected Protoss space and they have to know from somewhere where it starts!

For the Zerg, well I guess those Overlord feelers are not just for psionic communication you can probably send and receive radio by using them as living antenna! All this assumes that Terrans use early 20th century earth radio technology. But why wouldn't they.

HannibalBarca
Sep 11, 2016

History shows, again and again, how nature points out the folly of man.
so was Valerian just able to pass a persuade check to get the Dominion's most prominent military leader and half the fleet to bum-rush Char with him?

kaosdrachen
Aug 15, 2011

HannibalBarca posted:

so was Valerian just able to pass a persuade check to get the Dominion's most prominent military leader and half the fleet to bum-rush Char with him?

With the Zerg apparently mostly in dug-in mode with only the occasional local outbreak (as opposed to directed invasions) and up until recently fairly minor civil uprisings easily quashed with, again, local firepower, chances are that "most prominent military leader" has been pretty much sitting on his laurels for a long time, with a whole bunch of "glorious victories" played up in the media that barely count as minor mop-up actions.

For comparisons, look at the British Empire during its heyday in the Age of Sail. Their naval might had been unquestioned and unopposed for so long it became a paper tiger, with an officer corps roundly - and accurately - mocked by the songs in The Pirates of Penzance.

disposablewords
Sep 12, 2021


Tenebrais posted:

It's a soft sci-fi setting. Everyone's communications systems are just compatible, no need to think about it too much unless you can make your explanation cool.

The end of the novel Liberty's Crusade, about the SC1 Terran campaign from the perspective of an embedded reporter, has Kerrigan watching the reporter's big tell-all about Mengsk on some hosed-up meat-machine made from a half-dead human corpse somehow acting as the interface between Zerg bio-goo powering an old scavenged console. Which itself makes no drat sense if you think about it, but was definitely a cool explanation for how she gets on the phone.

ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

What did you say the strategy was?
I like that they specify the atmosphere will burn a man alive

but then tychus and jim are just hanging around watching tv with their visors open

Lt. Danger
Dec 22, 2006

jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

it's a dry heat

bladededge
Sep 17, 2017

im sorry every one. the throne of heroes ran out of new heroic spirits so the grail had to summon existing ones in swimsuits instead

Tenebrais posted:

It's a soft sci-fi setting. Everyone's communications systems are just compatible, no need to think about it too much unless you can make your explanation cool.

As a general rule in speculative fiction, fuzzy is good. If you're drawing attention to a thing, that invites the reader/viewer to critique the thing. If your explanation or your numbers have holes in them or you didn't really think that hard about it, the pedantic reader absolutely will and will call you on it.

Earlier in the thread we discussed how SC2 botched things like, for example, the exact size of battlecruisers, or gave an improbable hard number of years it's been since the end of the last game. The easy fix for this would have been "battle cruisers are the biggest capital ships" instead of "battlecruisers need a thousand guys", or "it's been many years" instead of "it's been four years".

Actiblizz absolutely loves to have their villains appear as faces on the screen throwing the worst Malibu Comics level taunts at you, which I find annoying, but not trying to explain how that works is absolutely the correct writing decision.

Also, this is absolutely one of the best missions in the game. They finally nail that feeling of being in open war, your mecha mans vs. the tiny alien mans. Building that enormous mixed army and just steamrolling across the map is incredibly satisfying.

gohuskies
Oct 23, 2010

I spend a lot of time making posts to justify why I'm not a self centered shithead that just wants to act like COVID isn't a thing.

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

Yeah I think the only hint of her motivations you are given in WoL is that one "I know what you're planning and who 'Dr. Narud' is" line.

On which you might fault her for never elaborating, but Jim never bothers to follow up on it and blindly signs on with Moebius and Mengsk Junior, so I wouldn't exactly blame her for not trusting him with sensitive information.

There's also cutscenes in the Pondering, where it's established she's very aware of the threat of some sort of Xel'Naga related end of the universe:


But has also given up on trying to do much of anything about it:

BisbyWorl posted:




A storm is coming that cannot be stopped.



...











Aaaaaand Kerrigan has gone from the cunning Queen Bitch of the Universe to just... waiting for the end of the universe, I guess?

...



So it's not exactly clear why she's this interested in the artifacts if she has basically given up on opposing the Xel'Naga, unless she knows they are intended to be used as a weapon against her. Given her well-established willingness to taunt the player, it would have maybe been nice to hear from her a little bit more.

Calax
Oct 5, 2011

gohuskies posted:

There's also cutscenes in the Pondering, where it's established she's very aware of the threat of some sort of Xel'Naga related end of the universe:

But has also given up on trying to do much of anything about it:

So it's not exactly clear why she's this interested in the artifacts if she has basically given up on opposing the Xel'Naga, unless she knows they are intended to be used as a weapon against her. Given her well-established willingness to taunt the player, it would have maybe been nice to hear from her a little bit more.

This something that they try to tackle in HotS. Not going to throw spoilers, but there's a very specific series of events that they run around with.

FoolyCharged
Oct 11, 2012

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!
Somebody call for an ant?

SoundwaveAU posted:

This was StarCraft 2's first major meme, by the way. In the pre-release battle reports cast by Dustin Browder, he would say "terrible, terrible damage" a lot, to the point it became a meme. Blizz recognised the meme and still had time to add this line into the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZlcgOzi_E

I still remember the first time I got this far in the game and heard that line. It completely destroyed the narrative tension, and yet I'm glad it exists anyway. I like how they at least rolled with the gag about their poor scripting of pre-release videos and embraced it.

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GrandTheftAutism
Dec 24, 2013

by Fluffdaddy

rastilin posted:

Yesss, I keep wondering about that. The Zerg are into bio-horror but Kerrigan just always has a terminal around to call people with.. and so do all the Protoss that need to talk to Terrans. Like Selendris, apparently. Did they all upgrade their ancient tech patterns to interface with Terran equipment in the last three years, or do they pass around stolen / borrowed terminals? Does Kerrigan just always use the same terminal and everyone knows what it is? If not, does the command staff just let anyone crank call the capital ship's bridge, or does Kerrigan have to talk to a communications officer and persuade them it's not a crank call before they let her through?

It would have been awesome if Kerrigan communicated by chiseling what she wanted to say into the side of a cube of nacre or something else super-hard and then had some kind of Zerg catapult just yeet the thing into the Terran base. Extra points if she keeps using this method. "Stand by for incoming message... BOOM". This game really does have loads of missed opportunities.

EDIT: I just realized. The Terrans might want to reply. This means that you could have a scene where they carve their reply in the block and then have a trebuchet fire it back at the Zerg.

Funny, but here are two possible explanations:

1. Comms equipment salvaged from Terran or Protoss wrecks and integrated into Zerg bioforms allowing Kerrigan to call people directly.

2. Kerrigan is a Class 12 psionic phenom; she could easily mix telepathy with hallucination and make it seem like she was on the comm.

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