Alpha3KV posted:

The state of things at the end of Brood War pretty much all boils down to my main annoyance with its plot: The Zerg simply weren't allowed to have truly meaningful defeats. Protoss and Terrans were very much in shambles as a result of the events, but the writers seemingly declared nothing that ever happened against the Zerg really counted. Their strength was never really reduced in any way. They wrote themselves into a corner with apparent favoritism.

Tenebrais posted:

WoL in general has something that the other campaigns didn't continue with - optional missions. They're all over the campaign design. This one's the most obvious, being actively hidden (I didn't even know it existed!), but we've also seen a choice of two missions that you only play one of with the Nova/Tosh decision, and another one coming up later if we do eventually go there. And if is a key question too - you have to do a certain amount of missions before the end game, but not all of them, and only one chain of missions is actually required for it so any specific non-Tychus/Narud mission could be one you just never play in your game, and if you do it could be in almost any order.
That's not great for storytelling! Almost none of the events that transpire in missions can affect the broader plot, and any sort of escalating threat can only exist within a single mission chain because that's the only time you can reliably say these missions will be played in order.
It's not great for game design either since on top of making some awkward difficulty curves you're spending development time on more missions than a typical player is going to see.

Maybe Blizzard was hoping to give this campaign some replayability, since on release this was going to be the entire single-player game for however long it took HotS to come out. The way you're locked into your unit upgrades and research choices supports that idea. But I don't think it really helped that much to extend the campaign's lifespan, it's a pretty satisfying length as it is - and it made the game much weaker in the process.

Staltran posted:

I'd rather just... ignore all of that extra-game stuff. Aside from the creepiness it just doesn't make any sense. Nova certainly doesn't look like a teenager, or act like one, nor does her position in the Dominion make sense for one.

Arcanuse posted:

I find it hard to believe the colony suddenly needs purged now given how long Haven's been waiting already.
If the Protoss couldn't be bothered all this time, they can wait a bit longer to see if the cure works.

PurpleXVI posted:

The SC1 canon is that the Zerg are basically like the Annelids from System Shock 2. You've got a lil' worm parasite that climbs into the victim's spine and lives off their nutrients while also being able to mutate them and tell them what to do(the two latter were, I think, post-Xel'naga fuckery with the species). There's no virus or anything of the sort going on.

But uh, Heart of the Swarm will teach us some new things about the Zerg that will make everyone sad.

BisbyWorl posted:

SIGSEGV posted:

Sometimes it's good enough to give a third option that is significantly better, instead of tossing the bomb either in the room with the kittens or the room with the babies, you toss it outside or perhaps in the room with the trolley problem implementer villain, Deus Ex 3 did that at at least one point and it worked perfectly well.

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.

BisbyWorl posted:

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?

...

JackSplater posted:

This cutscene shows an interesting quirk of Blizzard's: They like making their special people left-handed. This is number 3 so far in the campaign. Tychus (minigun left-handed), Nova (canister rifle left-handed), and Warfield (gauss rifle left-handed). That's three out of what, ten-ish primary characters? Some of which who don't make it easy to tell. Left-handedness is present in about 10% of the population, so it's not unheard of, but it's not something you often see in video games at all without it being specifically pointed out. I think that the multiplayer Spec Ops ghost skin can have both left-handed and right-handed ghosts, but I don't think anything else in the game is left-handed.

Hwurmp posted:

holding up a U.S. President as a positive example of anything lol

aniviron posted:

The execution is gaudy, sure, but I like that it's a take on a real thing - there are definitely countries that have a special blinged-out version of their normal fatigues for the generals to wear, and normal marine armor with gold ornamentation on it is a good take on that.

Kith posted:

Fun Fact: The Killteam Marauders in this mission use a special texture for no apparent reason! There's also a Medic version, but I can never remember if it gets used or not.



Either way, neither of them appear outside of this mission.

BisbyWorl posted:

drkeiscool posted:

While I'm mulling over these games plots in my head again, I'm curious: other than the recording of Mengsk wanting to rule the sector or see it burnt to ashes, what's actually inspiring the people to want to rise against him? Like, don't get me wrong, that's pretty hosed up, but assuming he'd laughed it off at that press conference as a deepfake (like, it's hundreds of years in the future, you'd think they'd have the technology to do that by then) instead of freaking out about it, what would've happened? Other than gunning down a civvie in the first mission and having some generically dystopian loudspeakers and billboards, the Dominion as shown in game doesn't seem like a bad place to live. Before the Zerg showed up, he'd managed to begin recolonizing planets ravaged in the last war, the city maps show a pretty high level of technology, and instead of just having Kate Lockwell disappeared, he seems willing to tolerate dissent in the press to some extent. We know why Raynor wants to rebel, but what would lead to the other people of the Dominion rebelling as well?

drkeiscool posted:

I guess that’s a fair point… it just feels weird that the game subtitled “Wings of Liberty” isn’t more focused on fighting for liberty. While everything is at least tangentially related, the actual meat of the rebellion was the prologue and one mission tree. You’d think it would’ve been more prominent.

PurpleXVI posted:

Thousands of people are fighting and dying just so Raynor can get laid.

Maybe they all know this and they think it's awesome that they're campaigning for their boss man's sex life.

BisbyWorl posted:

wedgekree posted:

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.

aniviron posted:

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.

BisbyWorl posted:

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

what are you talking about, that would absolutely rule

Natural 20 posted:

I mean okay, look, if the writing was completely incredible and we had another full campaign with Jim Raynor reckoning with this decision that he made to save someone who was utterly reprehensible, then yeah, I could see it working.

But if we assume the tone of what Wings of Liberty's writing wanted, which is essentially a Western, then that decision would be at massive odds with basically the entire tone of the game and would suck.

disposablewords posted:

I feel like the invasion dream is more about still being haunted by the things she thought and did and wanted as the Queen of Blades, more than any (at the moment) revenge desire so great as to murder a planet.

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

both of those points are true, though

I mean I'm pretty sure Blizzard wants us to sympathize with Jimmy, but his unearthly crusade to get back together with the girl he dated for a month, and his audacity to get loving pouty when she says she won't put her life on hold to, what, retire to a space homestead off the grid as two of the sector's most wanted criminals? It's not clear what he even thinks was going to happen, just that he feels it is incredibly unfair for Kerrigan to get a say in her own future.

I really don't like SC2 Raynor, is what I'm saying. Kerrigan is at least the victim of the plot being bugfuck stupid, rather than personally making all the worst choices possible.

Felinoid posted:

Frankly I'm starting to get a read between the two stories of people yearning for times past (or outright stuck in them) to a destructive degree. Combined with the time between SC1 and SC2, it feels like an almost-subtle push to put SC1 behind and have players focus on SC2. Hell, they even made it fewer years in-game than in real life.

And I have to admit, I'm kinda feeling it. I feel like replaying WoL over and over more than going back to SC1 (though part of that is just the simple annoyance that is Zerg 8). The quality of life changes are just...good. Micro-ing workers is boring. The 12 unit control groups make swarms of zerglings annoying, and as we saw at the end of this mission, they have great capacity to be cathartic instead. That 140+ swarm in the final minutes wouldn't have been nearly so controllable with even all 10 control groups in SC1 limiting you to 120 (plus manual grabbing). The permanent upgrade progression in each campaign is something I love, though obviously I can see others hating it. There's a lot of good things. Shame the story got chopped down to not be one of them.

quote:

Although extremely small, worm-like, and possessing no ability to manipulate their physical surroundings, the Zerg adapted to survive. They developed the ability to burrow into the flesh of the less vulnerable species indigenous to Zerus. Feeding off the nutrients contained within the spinal fluids of their hosts, the Zerg learned to parasitically merge with their host creatures. Once they became capable of controlling the metabolic and anatomical processes of their hosts, the Zerg used their new bodies to manipulate their surroundings.

BisbyWorl posted:

Tenebrais posted:

That's overselling it a bit. The zerg by SC1 clearly incorporated the DNA of their subsumed species, since they were able to hatch them from zerg eggs. Zerg have always had a big unstable-alien-DNA thing going on.
And the map powerup is just a gameplay visual for getting living tissue samples.
The concept of incorporating alien DNA has always been a core part of the Zerg.

Calling it essence all the time is a dumb coat of paint to make what the zerg does more like magic and less like science, at least from their own perspective. Along with tying DNA concretely to the whole "purity of form/purity of essence" thing the Xel'naga had going on, just in case you'd forgotten that the Zerg had Purity of Essence, and wanted the Protoss, who had Purity of Form, and it was very important that something had Purity of Form and Purity of Essence and the Zerg are the ones with the Essence. Essence.

It wouldn't grate so bad if they weren't saying the word every other sentence, good god.

Alpha3KV posted:

I distinctly remembered the Overmind explicitly talking about purity of form and essence at some point on Aiur in the first Zerg campaign. I scanned through the SC1 LP and found the quote I was looking for at the very end of its last mission:

Merging the "purities" of the two species was something very significant to it, even long after killing the Xel'naga who had been watching the Zerg. More than being something beneficial, it talks about it like a kind of divine fate.

RevolverDivider posted:

This mission rules to actually play even if the writing is hilariously bad

BisbyWorl posted:

No, you did. We wouldn't be anywhere near here if the writers didn't give you their notes.



You must let Zerus remake you, Kerrigan! The final war nears, and there is little time.

I don't have to do a drat thing. I will not be a pawn in your prophecies.

Kerrigan has zero interest in Zeratul's bullshit.

But you will do anything to have your revenge?

Unfortunately, he Knows The Plot, so he can get her to do it anyways.



Then that is enough.