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cool LP OP, keep it up! I would like to suggest that it's not just Zeratul but all protoss that are boring plot-bots in SC2, and that's because that's what they were in SC1, because protoss are narratively inert - they don't act to get what they want, they react to stop other people (zergs) from getting what they want
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Jul 29, 2023 18:12
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no, it was pretty obviously xel'naga Duran was referencing. it was always gonna be the xel'naga returning
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Jul 29, 2023 21:01
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Koorisch posted:That makes me wonder about a storyline about Duran and the return of all the rear end in a top hat Xel'nagas and them getting their asses kicked for the last time by an united front of all the races tired of their poo poo would have fared instead of what we got in this trilogy. big ol' spoilers for all SC2 campaigns: that is what happens
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Jul 30, 2023 13:44
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in fairness there have been over 120 campaign missions across the games. the well has to run dry sooner or later
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Jul 31, 2023 19:25
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that's kind of a lot for one mission as I recall at the time of release people did find the constant respawning intimidating/stressful, especially on Brutal. not surprising we utterly trounce this mission now e: it's the torrasque guys. it's the torrasque from Brood War. c'mon Lt. Danger fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Aug 6, 2023 |
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Aug 6, 2023 02:25
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the choice lets you as player decide the tone of the subplot and campaign - is this a story where the good guys always win in the end and everything's very simple and clean, or is it a moodier story where results are more mixed and utopia is always another step over the horizon
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Aug 8, 2023 18:18
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JohnKilltrane posted:But in an RTS there is no power creep like that. Jimmy's just some guy. So are his crew members. So is nearly everyone in the setting. There's no need for something to be worse than the Overmind or even as bad as the Overmind in order to pose a believable threat to these characters. well, there kind of does - narrative stakes still need to increase because otherwise when yet another bad guy threatens the galaxy the audience will say "didn't we do this already". Starcraft's already got form for this: first we had the Overmind, then we had the UED with an enslaved Overmind, and the teaser was a returned xel'naga with terran science creating zerg-protoss hybrids e: consider also Warcraft which also escalates from a nation being invaded to interplanetary conflict to demonic invasion Lt. Danger fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 14:37
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this is only really a problem for Warcraft/WoW, which is constantly iterating on world-ending threats. Starcraft strictly speaking only has the three conflicts to escalate, then de-escalates with the Nova mission pack and its mere political crisis, then the franchise ends
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Aug 14, 2023 18:45
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GunnerJ posted:This line, and a related one in HotS, always really annoyed me. Like buddy, who were you, President Overmind of the Zerg Republic? You literally made a bunch of little guys whose job was to be kamikaze bombers. the Overmind is the collective consciousness of all zergs disposablewords posted:It's running into a stakes and scale issue again, too. It came up earlier on how between games the Terran Dominion in particular and the Koprulu Sector in general seem to have massively inflated in numbers. Everyone acting like there's at least an order of magnitude more settled planets and people than just four years ago. And also, we're now conflating this chunk of the galaxy with not just the entirety of the galaxy but suggestions of it being the entirety of the universe. Things has ramped up from the Zerg being a terrifying but basically local problem that could snowball into something greater to "no it's about literally everything now." The most important thing possible is happening here and it never manages to feel earned to me. you should probably ignore what Starcraft 1 says about the terran worlds: per the manual, all the terran planets including Tarsonis, Moria and Umoja are in the same system; there are either ten or thirteen terran worlds total; only four (out of thirteen) survive the zerg invasion if Blizzard doesn't retcon the size of the Dominion then SC2 is a very short game
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Aug 19, 2023 23:11
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disposablewords posted:Well, except how it pretty much has to be a separate entity given how it's written about and the consequences of destroying it. Everything treats it as a top-down master instead of an emergent property of the swarm, including how it can be personally slain and a new collective gestalt does not naturally reemerge but is instead depicted as something that has to be deliberately created and imposed. that too is a quote from the manual
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Aug 19, 2023 23:23
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disposablewords posted:The... manual you said to disregard? sure, why not. I'm happy to accept Starcraft 2's story on its own terms
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Aug 20, 2023 01:20
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you people are overthinking it. it doesn't have to be some major thematic writing moment. sometimes it's fun to have choices in a game
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Aug 21, 2023 17:40
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Legacy of the Void had a prologue microcampaign separate to the campaign proper - possibly that? the LotV campaign proper starts with Artanis on Aiur
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Aug 22, 2023 13:42
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bladededge posted:There's more going on beneath the surface there. SC2 of course dropped that like every other interesting plot ball. how can you blame SC2 for something SC1 and Brood War failed to do
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Aug 26, 2023 17:48
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Starcraft has never been concerned with the particulars of its politics: the abrupt transition from liberal democracy to monarchy with a former terrorist at the head (why not a planetary leader or senator with some existing legitimacy and cross-appeal? why not Duke?); the equally abrupt and absolute occupation of the same state by the UED (Mengsk and Duke are in exile, so who is operating the quisling government?); who exactly the "special interests groups" Mengsk recruits to attack Kerrigan are etc. etc. it's always been very broad strokes clash-of-heroes stuff, where interpersonal conflict between two characters is a cipher for astropolitical relationsCalax posted:The Protoss as a whole are effectively a non entity beyond Zeratuul and the insane cultists you happen to run into on occasion. this is a larger problem across the entire series: the protoss don't actually want anything except to be left alone. their participation in SC1/Brood War happens only because they are directly attacked by the Overmind/renegade broods/Kerrigan, and whenever they are not being attacked they spend all their time on Aiur/Shakuras doing nothing. every protoss action in the series has to be dragged out of them except perhaps their goal at the start of Legacy of the Void which is immediately derailed when they are attacked regarding your larger point, Wings of Liberty functionally has the same purpose as Terran Act 1 from the original: a minor conflict as prelude to the much larger war with much greater stakes Regalingualius posted:Calling in every favor, taking out every loan, etc. from everyone he could and still coming up short should have essentially ended any aspirations for him being emperor of anything more than a planet, and yet... it just never really gets brought up in SC2. this is kinda on Brood War, which states he goes back to Korhal and reconstructs the Dominion in the text slides
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Sep 18, 2023 19:11
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Warmachine posted:Killing Raynor just straight up isn't his problem, and Mengsk isn't expecting him to. Was this a smart plan by Mengsk? Maybe the Blizz writing team thought it was but... uh... Starcraft does a bad job of selling Mengsk as the master strategist. I don't think Mengsk is the master strategist behind this particular plan
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Sep 25, 2023 22:28
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the simpler answer is that Mengsk has a boss who won't let him burn the asset to stop a fairly ineffectual operation. Blizzard were correct that evidence-based politics matters less than we think
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Sep 30, 2023 17:36
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I dunno, we all hated it when we kept killing Maar over and over, now we hate it when we can't fight Kerrigan directly...
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Oct 14, 2023 09:05
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I think they put it in because it's cool
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Oct 23, 2023 19:19
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you don't need multilock targeting on goliaths until you're playing Brutal, which you don't need to do at lower levels. same goes for other commanders' power spikes it's a design trade-off, sure, but it doesn't make them unplayable
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Oct 27, 2023 18:59
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multilock isn't even Swann's best upgrade. vespene harvesters, tech reactors, pulse cannon, multi-SCV construction... but it's the goliath upgrade that makes him noticeably weaker in a way that reduces fun?
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Oct 27, 2023 20:22
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Tenebrais posted:You could still do it, even if it's just a number equivalent to your available credits. Have someone comment after missions that this and that world are supplying you now. Maybe add some props into the space backgrounds to show more ships in your fleet, or bigger crowds in the Cantina. You wouldn't have to make big reactive changes to cutscenes or anything to still offer a sense of growth. I mean kinda the point of the most recent plot development is that Raynor's revolution has been explicitly co-opted by Valerian and furthermore secretly had been all along there was never gonna be a popular revolution
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Nov 1, 2023 20:05
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does Starcraft itself give out any numbers? isn't this all from some low-quality tie-in book only the very saddest of nerds care about?
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Nov 1, 2023 22:48
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Redeye Flight posted:They don't give out that crew number, but we've heard some in the campaign already and every one has been bad. Four years since Brood War. Casualties in the billions. Giving the specific number of eight billion people killed by Kerrigan. All of those would have been improved by being more vague -- just saying it's been "years", or calling the casualties "uncountable", would have solved every problem both of those statements created -- particularly the Kerrigan-related ones given that the plot is insisting on redeeming her. I don't think those particular numbers are a problem - SC1 was kinda shakily written, so SC2 just quietly corrects it and pretends the Koprulu sector was never originally ten planets in one solar system
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Nov 2, 2023 09:00
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Omobono posted:Mass Effect 3 was almost pulling it off, before Marauder Shields and ME3 is pretty much the opposite of SC2 and what Warmachine was describing as the "coward's approach" - it goes hard on an ending that deliberately evokes dissonant feelings in the audience (literally the meaning of "lots of speculation") and caught a lot of stick for it. Final Fantasy VII all over again with regard to SC2, it's just author-stance as opposed to actor-stance. SC2 isn't asking "do you think these colonists are infested or not" or "is Tosh on the level" - utterly impossible to determine - but "what kind of story are you looking to tell" speaking more generally, to be honest it's weird to get upset over this like Blizzard betrayed us or the choices ruin the story. it's just an alternate ending for a three-mission sidestory for a subplot that isn't that important. the whole thing is potentially skippable. I would argue Wings of Liberty was more than just the next chapter of the Starcraft story (lmao) but also a commercial product, a showcase for the engine and for Blizzard as developers. as such there are gonna be aspects that aren't about the deep characters and themes of Starcraft: Orcs in Space (christ), but instead show off features of the editor, stretch the boundaries of the genre or make splashy talking points for previews and reviews the lesson Blizzard actually learns is to drop the subplots altogether and have shorter, leaner, more plot-focused campaigns
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Nov 7, 2023 00:00
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made everything go to poo poo.
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bladededge posted:Counterpoints: the specific argument is that Haven/Tosh choices aren't significant enough to the story to make criticism important or meaningful. per point 1, we are pedant-academicians competing to be the first to spot a mistake and earn kudos - hence the overemphasis on throwaway details and irrelevant questions SC1 was quite poorly written but you will find few willing to pick that darling apart
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Nov 7, 2023 18:32
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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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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 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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in terms of honest-to-god narrative contradictions SC2 is a lot better than SC1/BW
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Nov 13, 2023 22:29
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Shastahanshah posted:SC1 doesn't seem to have any, though the LP hasn't gotten to the expansion yet. Raynor just appearing and being friends with Tassadar is weird, but not a contradiction per se or anything. no, of course, I wouldn't count that as a contradiction. a rough list:
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Nov 14, 2023 19:11
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Duran disappears late in BW - in the briefing for the last mission, Kerrigan complains that she cannot find him (e: beaten) the question with Duran is how does he insert himself into Kerrigan's organisation? does he just pretend like the Overmind made a second infested human and he was there all along? if Kerrigan infested him, how could she not know he was xel'naga? again, none of these questions are insoluble, for both SC1 and SC2 - but one gets defended and the other doesn't. they're both badly written! Felinoid posted:I haven't played Brood War in at least 20 years, so I'm not really in a position to confirm or refute why would you write several hundred words defending the writing quality of a game you don't really remember that well tho I checked the game script and you can scrub point 2 - the post-terran campaign epilogue says "nine of the thirteen Terran worlds", not ten, my error - ten is the total number of colonies founded in the original star system including Tarsonis, Moria and Umoja. the manual later says the Confederacy "consists of nearly a dozen planets". none of these numbers add up, even if you charitably add extra unmentioned colonies, because by the end of SC1 act 1 the total number is thirteen the manual says the Overmind's specific interest in humanity is their psionic potential which will let it "combat the protoss on its own terms". in the game, this is never actually necessary or even mentioned, and the only obstacle is the location of Aiur I will say most of the SC1 nitpicks are problems with the manual - BW is worse on its own terms
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Nov 14, 2023 23:12
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this is Goldilocks criticism. "this game is camp in the right way, but this game is camp in the wrong way. when Raynor swore bloody revenge on Kerrigan for betraying him and murdering his friend, it was funny and self-aware, but when Tychus Findlay took a poo poo break in the middle of a battle it was trying too hard to be serious". SC2 has voodoo slapstick, a Ron Burgundy parody-of-a-parody, all the silly unit quotes and tongue-in-cheek armoury/upgrade descriptions... maybe it was you guys who got hyped up for the return of Starcraft, only to discover it was merely adequate all along?Tenebrais posted:All those plot holes Lt Danger brought up are, in their own words, nitpicks - they're things that might bug you if you're already invested in the story and the game. No one's going to fail to get invested because the story wasn't totally clear on how many worlds the Terrans had settled. The difference is more fundamental, about whether the stuff being written is the cool kind of dumb rather than the boring kind. ah-ah-ah, not what I said. some of the SC1 contradictions are nitpicks with the sloppy manual - but the kindest reading leaves the zerg aimless and meandering, and BW is weak on its own merits. I don't think it's a huge issue if your manual and backstory is incoherent but I do think it should disqualify you from official "good writing" status SC1 is at best standard sci-fi fare carried by very strong voiceacting and sound design
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Nov 15, 2023 20:36
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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
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Nov 18, 2023 12:28
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it's a dry heat
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Nov 18, 2023 15:39
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there are lines in Heart of the Swarm about Kerrigan's perspective as a zerg that support the idea she was being partly influenced. to be honest it's not a big deal to have Kerrigan simply be in two minds about being a zerg Starcraft and RTS games in general have form for not having characters interact much: the Confederate leaders are nameless and faceless, the Overmind and Tassadar show up only in Act 2... furthermore, the game isn't about Mengsk and he's not the one calling the shots - Narud is. Mengsk is of course happy to go along with it but the overarching plan is the Dark Voice's
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Dec 10, 2023 13:34
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the opening cutscene is a prophetic flash-forward that will be recontextualised by the end of the campaign. it's the final missions, presented without context to misdirect you
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Dec 16, 2023 12:52
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Warmachine posted:I mean, if we're examining gender dynamics here, the optics of "man giving up revenge" and "woman giving up revenge" have very different social connotations. The first would be a kind of martyrdom when viewed through the lens of western masculine stereotypes. The second would be a return to the natural order by the same feminine stereotypes. a reading that isn't based on anything in the text but on what other texts might have said is a weak reading indeed it's not that complicated, thread. James Raynor leads a largely ineffectual rebellion which has just been co-opted by the state into a paramilitary action against a common enemy. for all his talk about kicking the revolution into overdrive, Raynor doesn't really care that much about political change - Horner's the liberal with ideological goals, but Raynor just does whatever seems right in the moment, and has always been like that since joining the Sons of Korhal in SC1. even his feud with Mengsk is largely directionless, based more on hating the man than on wanting to replace his regime with something different. Raynor, like dogs, just sort of does things arbitrarily I don't think this is necessarily a flaw. Raynor's character genuinely is that of a well-meaning idiot and always has been. so, you know, he's here, he's got his old gf back, zerg invasion is over, gently caress it let's go and leave it all behind Kerrigan is different because while she also doesn't have any particular ideology (like most SC characters), she at least likes winning. it might be worth waiting to see what the game actually says about this before working ourselves up making big judgements about sci-fi blockbuster treatments of "revenge"
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Dec 18, 2023 23:04
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not sure what the thread is asking for with regard to Izsha - a line in the script where Kerrigan says "oh, if it isn't Izsha, my adjutant, who I created with a human face to remind me of my humanity" you are allowed to make such inferences for yourself. there is nothing stopping you
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Jan 13, 2024 17:18
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GunnerJ posted:Kerrigan, bad news, there are whole Zerg strains that exist to be suicide bombers! do you mean like Archons I think a lot of people are misreading Kerrigan's line here. she literally says she justifies nothing - Kerrigan's intent is solely to puncture Lasarra's hypocrisy. she's not actually concerned about dead zergs (zergs are not concerned about dead zergs in general - as noted above by Mazerunner, zergs think in terms of preserving the species as a whole) whole lotta slave morality itt
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Jan 14, 2024 14:08
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