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The thing is that whatever the flaws of HotS, they don't include anything (as far as I can recall) to justify this kind of corruption/suppressed personality revelation.
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Dec 9, 2023 16:44
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GunnerJ posted:The thing is that whatever the flaws of HotS, they don't include anything (as far as I can recall) to justify this kind of corruption/suppressed personality revelation. Sure they do. They wanted to do Dances With Zerglings as a story, and that's all the justification they needed.
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Dec 9, 2023 16:46
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Nah, freshly hatched Kerrigan was still under the control of the Overmind for the duration of the original campaign. Obviously whatever humanity she had would rebel against that, but she was fully herself at the end of the Protoss campaign. Brood War was the story of how she leveraged her newfound independence to become Queen Bitch, and having that just be a third entity overriding her agency does nothing but cheapen the character.
Zulily Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Dec 9, 2023 |
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Dec 9, 2023 16:46
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:Nah, freshly hatched Kerrigan was still under the control of the Overmind for the duration of the original campaign. Obviously whatever humanity she had would rebel against that, but she was fully herself at the end of the Protoss campaign. Brood War was the story of how she leveraged her newfound independence to become Queen Bitch, and having that just be a third entity overriding her agency does nothing but cheapen the character. Like I said before, I choose to interpret it not as her agency being overridden, but the influence of that third entity simply putting certain "filters" onto her personality and motivations. She's still making her own decisions, but her personality and goals and motives have been distorted. Not overridden, merely distorted and warped. Like, if someone's on a really bad drug trip, the drugs aren't making the decisions for the person. But they're definitely not acting like they would be without the drugs' influence.
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Dec 9, 2023 16:57
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Felinoid posted:Yup. Fantastic way to just drain away all of the goodwill this fantastically frantic ending mission was building up. Leaving you sour and ready to be disappointed by the final cutscene regardless of its actual quality. You just automatically know, going into it, that it is already bad. I never played SC1. So I really liked it when I got that line on Brutal. Like I have literally 0 attachment to SC1 so I basically took this to mean all my effort for the campaign wasn't entirely pointless.
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Dec 9, 2023 16:59
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maybe it isn't kerrigan at all and it's just crazy alcoholic jimmy finally going insane at the end of this long journey he's had
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Dec 9, 2023 17:25
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Dumb as gently caress story decisions aside, this is one of the most fun RTS stages in the genre on Brutal. How utterly batshit this stage got by the end in the Moebius mod is one of my fondest memories of SC2
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Dec 9, 2023 17:29
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Natural 20 posted:I never played SC1. Fair enough. I guess ignorance really is bliss. ilmucche posted:maybe it isn't kerrigan at all and it's just crazy alcoholic jimmy finally going insane at the end of this long journey he's had If HotS chooses to just ignore this moment, I will gladly believe in this version.
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Dec 9, 2023 17:34
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Phelddagrif posted:This mission is insane on Brutal. Like, the rest of the campaign is manageable, there isn't a huge challenge if you know what you're doing. But for some reason the last mission has a huge difficulty spike compared to the ones right before it. you could say that this is the game difficulty going all in
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Dec 9, 2023 17:39
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Natural 20 posted:I never played SC1. In itself, solely within the context of Wings of Liberty, it's fine. As you say, it plays very well in to Raynor's motivations. Makes his decisions to make sacrifices for the sake of saving the damsel meaningful. It undercuts the first game, but you might not care about that. Worse that it is itself undercut by the next campaign, really, but we haven't got there yet to see how.
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Dec 9, 2023 18:13
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Cythereal posted:Sure they do. They wanted to do Dances With Zerglings as a story, and that's all the justification they needed. "Justify" wasn't really the best word, I mean that there's just nothing I can recall that's even relevant to this revelation. I don't remember Kerrigan ever acting as if she's finally free if some malign external influence or talking about what that influence was like, for example. Maybe I forgot!
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Dec 9, 2023 18:30
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GunnerJ posted:"Justify" wasn't really the best word, I mean that there's just nothing I can recall that's even relevant to this revelation. I don't remember Kerrigan ever acting as if she's finally free if some malign external influence or talking about what that influence was like, for example. Maybe I forgot! You're thinking about this harder than Blizzard did.
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Dec 9, 2023 18:31
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I've played WoL through twice and I had never seen that Kerrigan line, that really is dumb. I don't even mind the campaign basically being about Raynor wanting to get his ex-girlfriend back, but even if you buy into that, it's still bad.
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Dec 9, 2023 18:41
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And, despite all that, it's still less atrocious of two "Blizzard makes Morally Gray Character -> it sucks -> turns out she was corrupted all the time! -> redemption arc" cases. Does Diablo franchise has its own Corrupted Female Character?
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Dec 9, 2023 21:14
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Szarrukin posted:Does Diablo franchise has its own Corrupted Female Character? Blood Raven in Diablo 2 is the fallen rogue from Diablo, so kinda yeah. The male sorceror and warrior were also corrupted into the Summoner and Diablo so it's not a uniquely female thing though.
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Dec 9, 2023 21:21
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Warcraft has its share of Corrupted Male Characters too, as for Starcraft I think Stukov is the only one. Still, none of them (except Arthas, I guess?) has such significance to lore and story as Kerrigan and Sylvanas.
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Dec 9, 2023 21:31
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Szarrukin posted:Does Diablo franchise has its own Corrupted Female Character? They had one girl get possessed and then torn apart from the inside because her mom hosed Diablo, but I don't think either of them were specifically corrupted at any point. One was just evil and the other got possessed.
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Dec 9, 2023 21:34
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D4 has a woman who gets corrupted but then feels bad after you kill her, if that counts.
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Dec 9, 2023 23:05
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Felinoid posted:Unfortunately I've replayed SC1 a lot more recently than BW (even doing another run at present to quench the RTS itch while we get into bits of SC2 that aren't free), and the zerg mission where Kerrigan hatches has a big fuckin' plot point about her having sent psi dreams from her cocoon to Raynor and Mengsk to come save her. Naturally when she does hatch and confronts Raynor (Mengsk sent Duke, who doesn't bother to talk during the mission), she is just pleased as punch about her new power and sends Raynor packing, minus most of his men's organs. By itself, there are multiple reasons she might have gone that way, including her simply changing mentally as well as physically. But when you put another thing of her reaching out, while the Queen of Blades is still active, it puts the initial calling out into a different perspective. This is now definitely someone who's always been there, but maybe suppressed by a new dominant personality or something. I appreciate the thinking behind this, but I just don't buy it. Kerrigan shows her humanity through the facade of The Queen of Blades several times in SC1 and Brood War in spite of herself. In that first mission when she confronts Raynor, she keeps calling him "Jim," and when she's making excuses about how he's not worth killing, she tells him to be "be smart," in taking her offer to walk away. I think she's telling him the truth that she likes what she is now, that she feels powerful and free as part of the swarm and doesn't need to be rescued despite her psychic calls from within the chrysalis, but those subtleties in the dialogue don't allow me to buy that she's threatening him earnestly. Similar undercurrents pepper her actions in Brood War from time to time. I don't doubt that the process of being infested with zerg biology and linked to the Overmind changed her personality, just like being betrayed by Arcturus changed her, but I can't accept this idea that there was a split personality or the "real" Kerrigan was suppressed under some kind of psychic overlay. The theory that this is a very recent thing that's happened only in this game makes a little more sense. Kerrigan's actions are extremely erratic in WoL. She starts an invasion of the Dominion looking for Xel'Naga information and technology as if she wants it to avert whatever is coming at the same time she tells Zeratul that the situation is hopeless and they're all doomed. If the answer is that THE DARK ONE's control through her Zerg biology is in a struggle against the independent human core she's had since she first hatched, THAT would make sense. Sadly, as far as I can see/remember, the text never explains anything like that and we're just guessing.
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Dec 9, 2023 23:40
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To be fair, I am mostly assuming the worst, in line with Blizzard plots from like 2008 until today (well, like six weeks ago when I played the mission), and it's entirely possible they hadn't sunk so low just yet in 2010. Eagerly awaiting HotS to see how it's bad and/or how it's good.
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Dec 10, 2023 01:23
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Felinoid posted:To be fair, I am mostly assuming the worst, in line with Blizzard plots from like 2008 until today (well, like six weeks ago when I played the mission), and it's entirely possible they hadn't sunk so low just yet in 2010. Boy, we're in for a ride with HotS.
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Dec 10, 2023 01:51
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Wow, I've beaten WoL like 4 times and never seen that dialog at all.
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Dec 10, 2023 02:07
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Gameplay wise HotS is fun! Story is.. Worst of the primary trilogy (I may be alone in thinking this as I found the third game's milquetoast rather than agonizing). But, really do agree that in general for all this game made Kerrigan and Mengst to be the big bads, you.. Never interact with them. Kerrigan sort of wanders around in the background in two missions and occasionally taunts you. Mengst.. Does diddly beyond news broadcasts. You never interact with him, speak to him... Well, there's the few seconds where Raynor's with Junior while he chats with dad but there's never any interaction beyond that. The main bad guys seem like they're non-entities in a game that's entirely about them as the antagonists. A big point is that Mengsk is spending tons of resources going after Raynor, yet we.. Never really see this. There are skirmishes at places Raynor is raiding, but there's no sense of onrushing doom from Mengst. No huge batallions chasing after Raynor's every move, no feeling the pressure, like he's always on your tail.. Even as a framing device, there's no sense of him being the adversary beyond raiding some things for propaganda purposes. No separate bad guy cutscenes of Mengkst ranting about how he's going to get Raynor. Our only time with him is always in third person (hear him talking on the news, the general broadcasts, etc). It feels so impersonal. For the bad guy driving the narrative we never /see/ htings from his perspective. The big bad needs some level of showcase. Show his brutality, show his plans, show why it's personal/he's a monster. Have him ranting. Heck, just give him a cutscene when you finish one of the mission 'arcs'. Keep it generic - raving about revenge, how he'll get Raynor, how this doesn't mess up his scenes.. Such a simple thing to do. For the guy driving the narrative, Arcturus seems very unimportant.
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Dec 10, 2023 02:12
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wedgekree posted:Gameplay wise HotS is fun! I actually prefer both Wings of Liberty and Legacy of the Void to Heart of the Swarm. I don't like so many missions with timers or other weird victory conditions although I understand why they did that.
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Dec 10, 2023 03:21
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the gameplay of hots ruled because you could win the entire campaign w/ nothing but banelings
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Dec 10, 2023 03:32
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wedgekree posted:For the guy driving the narrative, Arcturus seems very unimportant. It's tough to say what the right move here is. Wings of Liberty is, at its core, a Western. The genre carries an expectation of spending most of your time on the frontiers and fringes, and the story takes place against the backdrop of an unexplained Zerg offensive against the core worlds. The Tychus and Colonist storylines are very much in-line, as are the Train Robbery and the followup to decrypt the data hidden on the robot. I think Mengsk being mostly absent from the early part of the story makes sense, especially since we have the dramatic irony of Tychus being some kind of plan on the villain's part looming over everything. On the other hand, the parts of the campaign with the Protoss Crystal, meeting Valerian and going to Char are largely about Jim finding the motivation to leave his fruitless, self-indulgent grudge against Arcturus to one side and return to being the hero he was in Brood War, the guy out there saving the universe rather than dealing with politics and personal vendettas. So it makes sense for Arcturus to not appear THERE either. The only part of the story where more direct interaction with Mengsk makes sense in the last three quests of Horner's questline, and possibly the Nova/Tosh storyline. But at the same time, as we're about to see Mengsk's plan with Tychus was never about Raynor at all. Raynor was nothing to him. He only wanted Kerrigan dead. So what would have been accomplished by more direct antagonism with him during that part in a macronarrative sense? Part of the problem is the a la carte nature of the story. By letting you do the missions in whatever order you want, any definitive character arc for Raynor ends up haphazard and diluted. The other part of the problem is the bit I put in the spoiler text. When the big reveal is that your hero's struggle against the villain never mattered to him, how do you make their conflict more personal? I think it was a solvable problem with some script revisions, but it IS a problem.
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Dec 10, 2023 03:59
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Sanguinia posted:It's tough to say what the right move here is. Wings of Liberty is, at its core, a Western. The genre carries an expectation of spending most of your time on the frontiers and fringes, and the story takes place against the backdrop of an unexplained Zerg offensive against the core worlds. The Tychus and Colonist storylines are very much in-line, as are the Train Robbery and the followup to decrypt the data hidden on the robot. I think Mengsk being mostly absent from the early part of the story makes sense, especially since we have the dramatic irony of Tychus being some kind of plan on the villain's part looming over everything. I can't prove it, but I feel like the theme of the spoilered bits is a leftover of the original narrative. A lot of it was Raynor wrestling with the idea that he was just a guy: as individually powerless as any other average human, and how all of these huge events left him in the dust. Mengsk got an empire, Kerrigan became the Queen of Blades, and Raynor got alcoholism and declared an enemy of the state. There's an outline of a story in Wings of Liberty about overcoming depression and despair and rebelling against "fate" and making a difference even if you're just one man, and that outline could have very easily been filled by the first script. Unfortunately, it wasn't, and all we have are the pieces that we can only guess at how they'd fit together. The themes of the original narrative come to a head with the final cutscene, which I'll discuss more when it happens.
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Dec 10, 2023 04:16
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Finale Cinematic: The Showdown + Credits  We cut to some Marines searching the inside of a hive.  They found something.  Someone.  Sarah Kerrigan.     Although despite the artifact being a de-zerging device, it wasn't perfect. Her hair still consists of zerg... quills? Spines? Bones?      And Mengsk finally plays his card. His goal all along was to hijack his son's plan and finish off Kerrigan. It's actually a fairly solid plan, really. Even if Tychus fails, Kerrigan's alive but no longer running the Swarm. Hell, if Jim ended up dying on Char in the process he'd have a easy time spinning it as the infamous outlaw James Raynor deciding to put aside his differences and band together with the Dominion against a common threat, kneecapping the odds of Jim becoming a martyr. Of course, it leaves a fairly serious question about what his plan was if Valerian's whole scheme failed and he got annihilated by the Swarm, in which case the Dominion is now down half its fleet and there'd be nothing stopping Kerrigan from strolling out and slaughtering the other half.    Now, Tychus clearly didn't need to use the obvious laser sight here, so the read here is that Tychus is going for a suicide-by-Jim rather than having Mengsk shut down all his organs.                     And so, Jim saved the girl.  All it cost was the lives of god knows how many soldiers and one ex-convict.  Also Mengsk knows Tychus failed, knows exactly where Kerrigan and Jim are right now, and still has half of the fleet on hand. But I'm sure that won't immediately bite Jim in the rear end.  But hey, that was Wings of Liberty!  A whole lot of mid, a few high points, and now we've hit the peak of the rollercoaster!  I'm not covering the entire drat credits here! They take like 18 minutes!  Like look at this! Watch the drat video if you want to see them that badly!  Although there is a Your Mom joke in the special thanks section!  Once the credits are over you get dumped back to campaign selection.  Hitting Continue just brings up the Archives. An important note about Wings is that the Archives snapshots your campaign progress at the moment you played the mission. If I wanted to, say, take Vikings literally anywhere else, I would have to start up an entirely new campaign (or reload a save) and play with a different mission order. Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void both have the Master Archives, which unlocks after beating the game and lets you replay a mission at the latest possible moment in their campaigns, but that's never been backported to Wings. The closest you can get is a player-made set of save games that have every other mission aside from the target one completed.  And the Challenge menu is just some small things to get you used to all the races before going into skirmish. But anyways, here ends part 1 of 4 (and a half) of this- 
BisbyWorl fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Dec 10, 2023 |
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Dec 10, 2023 04:19
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Well done to an excellent LP so far! To quote a different game, it only gets more fantastical, more incredible, more hosed up from here!
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Dec 10, 2023 04:28
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incredible timing So, yeah! The original Wings of Liberty narrative was about showing the strength of One Man's Choice. We know that Kerrigan's death leads to the Bad End, and her living leads to (the potential for) the Good End, and so the climax was all about the theme of Redemption vs Revenge and how that one simple difference could save the universe (even if you've spent the last four years pickling your liver because your ex broke up with you). I am now out of interesting behind-the-scenes first draft tidbits because the stories of Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void were both first drafts.
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Dec 10, 2023 04:28
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BisbyWorl posted:Also Mengsk knows Tychus failed, knows exactly where Kerrigan and Jim are right now, and still has half of the fleet on hand. But I'm sure that won't immediately bite Jim in the rear end. See: the Starcraft novel "Flashpoint", which takes place directly between Wings of Liberty, and Heart of the Swarm.
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Dec 10, 2023 04:30
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BisbyWorl posted:
ovipositors 
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Dec 10, 2023 04:31
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Man, I'm gonna miss Tychus.
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Dec 10, 2023 04:33
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Jim didn't 
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Dec 10, 2023 04:33
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wedgekree posted:Gameplay wise HotS is fun! I agree with these criticisms, but I think they are fundamentally because the story doesn't care very much about Mengsk and a rebellion against the Dominion. We've talked recently in this thread about how little coverage there is of any popular resistance to the Dominion's authoritarian rule, and even Raynor's resistance to the Dominion is mostly an afterthought - that is, until it evaporates entirely because he starts working directly WITH the forces of the tyrannical Dominion instead of against them. Even the story hook that Kerrigan is prophesized to be important to saving the universe is ultimately barely mentioned in the final missions relative to Jim's generic "we gotta save her!" attitude. In the end, WoL is pretty much just a story of Jim Raynor trying (and succeeding) to save his ex-girlfriend who he failed to save in SC1. I also agree with those who say Heart of the Swarm has a worse story than Legacy of the Void. Legacy has a few really dumb story moments, unfortunately mostly in the epilogue that wraps it all up, but most of it is decent sci-fi schlock. Heart is just a total disaster. gohuskies fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Dec 10, 2023 |
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Dec 10, 2023 04:39
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You've all given some very good counterparts for my thoughts on the story and it's pacing, so thank you for the commentary!
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Dec 10, 2023 05:07
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The twist that Tychus was never after Raynor and that his mission was always to kill Kerrigan is one of my favorite things about WoL. It's such a small thing but it has a lot of implications about everything we've seen to this point, the kind of twist that changes almost nothing and yet changes everything about the relationship between the two lead characters. I also love two specific moments from the last cutscene. The first is that Tychus calls Mengsk to confirm he still wants the order carried out in light of Kerrigan's change, which illustrates that for all his macho bravado and the nasty words he had for Jim during that fight in the bar and his general scumminess, their friendship was real and he didn't want to go through with this betrayal. The second is that Jim lets him shoot. That line about choices wasn't an empty Cool Guy line. He was willing to wait until his friend made the decision. He was willing to take a bullet before he served one up because the friendship was just as real on his end. Its a well executed Western Finale. If I have one complaint, its that I am a tremendous lover of the Bullet With A Name On It trope, and even though they did do the job of setting it up with the boarding action and paying it off here with Tychus... its pretty badly undermined by the fact that the first thing we do is see Jim shoot the TV with the same gun. 
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Dec 10, 2023 05:27
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Yup, this is the high point. A great last mission, a genuinely good plot beat with Tychus, and a painfully cliched and unsatisfying “saved the princess” moment. I didn’t even trigger that terribly dumb non-sequitor line that invalidates everything that makes Kerrigan remotely interesting as a character! poo poo is only going to get dumber.
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Dec 10, 2023 06:02
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gohuskies posted:I agree with these criticisms, but I think they are fundamentally because the story doesn't care very much about Mengsk and a rebellion against the Dominion. We've talked recently in this thread about how little coverage there is of any popular resistance to the Dominion's authoritarian rule, and even Raynor's resistance to the Dominion is mostly an afterthought - that is, until it evaporates entirely because he starts working directly WITH the forces of the tyrannical Dominion instead of against them. Even the story hook that Kerrigan is prophesized to be important to saving the universe is ultimately barely mentioned in the final missions relative to Jim's generic "we gotta save her!" attitude. In the end, WoL is pretty much just a story of Jim Raynor trying (and succeeding) to save his ex-girlfriend who he failed to save in SC1. I agree with you that this is the substance of the plot, but I don't think it's what the writer wants to think it's about. The title is Wings of Liberty after all, not This One Weird Trick to Save Your Ex.
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Dec 10, 2023 06:34
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