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The bad family of RTS's won and so here we are, stuck in the failure time line. I remember hearing a few times that SC1 was partially written by outside contractors, which may help explain the cohesion gap between SC1 and BW that works just fine, even now, and SC2 that, well, really doesn't all that much.
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Jun 3, 2023 19:43
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UED only, which evidently doesn't appear in this game. I'm pretty sure I've seen the annotated text framing device in positively ancient epistolary novels which in practice probably means from the 18th or 19th century. I'm not knocking on it, it's a good trick.
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Jun 28, 2023 17:25
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Cythereal posted:That woman needs to see a medic herself, something is seriously wrong with her hips. Her legs appear to be growing out of the sides of her waist, and that can't be healthy. The three problems of power armor are the power source, the control of the actuators to not crush the user and actually do what they want, and the genetic and body modification technology to make joints be able to disconnect the regular joint and extend thanks to a hydrostatic muscle, in order to fit in the armor.
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Jun 28, 2023 23:49
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I'm trying to imagine the funniest (as a pejorative) ways the plot could resolve the good doctor looking into curing the Zerg infection, I can't wait to see how Blizz does it.
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Jul 2, 2023 03:42
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PurpleXVI posted:Weren't the Ghosts in general implied or outright stated to be psionic? Though I think that's all we ever really see of it in Starcraft. Its also probably common among the Terrans in Starcraft because the Terrans are ancestors of the mutants and criminals launched out from Earth in colony ships, meaning they probably had a statistically larger number of psionically capable people among them from the get go. Every Ghost is psionic, the various governments try to track down and grab all psionics and make them Ghosts or possibly other stuff but there must be some leakage and such.
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Jul 4, 2023 01:06
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JohnKilltrane posted:The other thing that's interesting is I realized that I've played this game I don't know how many times, and I don't actually have any idea what's happening in the first mission. Did Raynor just say to his crew "Kiss my rear end, I'll be at JoeyRay's" and sit around drinking until he got angry and/or sloshed enough to launch open rebellion? They wanted the cool moment and didn't put in any setup because that's effort. He could have been setting up a prison break or heist or raid, but he was just chilling and shooting TVs for effect.
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Jul 14, 2023 17:19
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Pieces of Peace posted:WoL's very thin amount of menace applied to Tosh made the eventual requirement to choose between him and Nova have a very unpleasant "sinister criminal black man versus attractive 'noble' white woman" element, especially farcical when they're both former dominion assassins turned against it. The real reason he's suspicious is because voodoo dolls are not actually related to voodoo and that's how you know he's an infiltrator or other less than recommendable personage. Also because it's always a treat to see the game twist itself into making each and every of Jim's poorly thought out decisions right, retroactively if necessary. Also, and furthermore, vanadium already exists and isn't an alloy, mister science guy, who I must now suspect of being another infiltrator.
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Jul 16, 2023 20:32
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Psychic spies are fun, it's just that Blizz can't write anything for poo poo, psychic spies included.
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Jul 31, 2023 16:07
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Also you probably die as extra motivation.
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Aug 2, 2023 09:49
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There is such a thing as a long and lingering death, or condition, poor great abbot, a great teacher, he died of a sword to the face but before he suffered fifty years of reticulating face eating bacteria and renal calculi.
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Aug 2, 2023 10:33
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We should stab Tosh in the back because I want to see how the game justifies stabbing him in the back, which is going to be infinitely more instructive in the bad writing department than merely playing nice.
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Aug 6, 2023 21:46
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Qwertycoatl posted:I've not played it but I gather from internet osmosis that Dragonflight is a de-escalation and that the expansion has been favourable received. So they can do it if they want.  Qwertycoatl posted:Power levels are fake anyway, if a game increases the level cap every expansion it won't be long before random overworld wildlife in the newest expansion is "objectively" stronger than the final boss of the base game even though that makes no narrative sense, and I think that just ends up as "lol videogames" rather than an actual problem
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Aug 15, 2023 08:59
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I once heard that SC1 walling is why the AoE2 TC, the one combo civilian building and tower before the costly (especially in stone which is not that used) castles, has 3/4 of its surface walkable to all units of all sides.
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Aug 16, 2023 20:25
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Felinoid posted:People been walling since Warcraft 1, not sure why they'd have a problem with it now. Lots of people think that aggression should be easier because aggression is fun and keep the game time down. A good numbers of gamedevs and RTS pros agree. Which is correct and fair, even if it sometimes gets a little exaggerated, I'm glad some devs go hard on "probe and evaluate and then bypass or commit" because it also makes for some interesting play and keeps some variety in the RTS space.
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Aug 17, 2023 10:02
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The writing makes a lot of good decisions so we should take some equally good decisions in return. So let's all help Nova.
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Aug 21, 2023 14:44
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I mean who are we to say that Nova actually lets us down, that mission gives us ghosts and we have to have gotten them from somewhere.
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Aug 21, 2023 18:09
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I hope we keep delaying the Haven mission as much as possible.
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Sep 4, 2023 19:13
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Oh there's plenty, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 for a start, and the game still wants you out there and loving about, Skyrim also, really it's the ones that don't do it that get interesting.
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Sep 5, 2023 04:58
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Personally I think if you're going to give side missions like these you should just set your plot up to not need time pressure, which really isn't that hard. Something like Highfleet does time pressure in a reasonable way, the fuzzyness of the gameplay means you have to make your own choice, in a campaign of this style it's just a calendar / time management game in which you sigh and refer to a guide to see what's possible because you don't have the metrics to act otherwise. So here, blizz did the right thing.
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Sep 5, 2023 13:55
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Colony Wars did the same until the third. Also the third Colony Wars was, ehh, not good.
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Sep 5, 2023 21:40
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Very early on, the revelation of the diamondback firing while moving as incredibly innovative and game changing, followed by the declaration that the carrier could autobuild its interceptors to capacity and that you could set unit production queues to repeat endlessly, if memory serves, was incredibly funny to, well, anyone, saying anything but "anyone" would be an insult, but it was funnier to anyone who had played an RTS, any RTS, in the last fifteen years. It could have been a bit of a warning, to be honest, but as it turned out the base gameplay of SC2 is pretty good, not my cup of tea but pretty good.GunnerJ posted:Seems like there's a really "fun" mod possibility out there: Every Weapon Can Fire While Moving Incidentally, since IIRC most melee units already have some form of charge / lunge, it should be mostly fine to adapt everything like that.
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Sep 12, 2023 16:08
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bladededge posted:That actually sounds like an amazing idea for RTS games, I'd love that in Company of Heroes or Supreme Commander. Did any games actually offer fine-grained audio mixing like that? I know that in SCFAF you could easily make a purely UI mod for that, so no conflicts with ladder and so on.
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Sep 17, 2023 00:15
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An ennui-stricken Kerrigan who starts doing Xel'Naga archeology to push away the encroaching cobwebs sounds entertaining, you have left behind nerve centers doing reflex twitching and ordering attacks with basic Zerg while she's away, Terrans in the sector have an incomplete unification after being shattered, the UED has sent a smaller task group to investigate because they don't have many to spare, the Protoss gloriously reunited and immediately broke along other lines as soon as the need to unite fell away and have enormous thought-shadow intrusive thoughts lurking in their shared consciousness deal, revanchism, paranoia, greed for power and resources, contempt and hatred and fear, dynamic civil war inside the shared soul of the connected. Everyone has had a good look at everyone else's stuff and integrated new tech according to their doctrine, meanwhile Xel'Naga archeology is inspiring and Kerrigan's personal experimental pack has things like hybrids reinforced with P and T tech and she's decided to give herself a few upgrades, those include looting a number of clothing shops (infinite cloaking is a handy thing), the high heels are actual shoes, she can take them off.
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Sep 18, 2023 22:35
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That's only because that's the only good stuff in SC2, if it had any good larger scale stuff, it might be possible to like it.
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Sep 19, 2023 12:33
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Entirely true, but also it would not be Blizz if it was the case.
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Sep 19, 2023 12:38
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There is a consistent thing across many RTSs of roughly 80% of players never playing multi and roughly 90% never ever touching ladder play, co-op play, scenarios, mods and custom maps are by and large more popular.
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Sep 28, 2023 15:42
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bladededge posted:Huh. That's very Supreme Commander, that would have been kind of cool. I think that ultimately they accepted that with such a gap between the old and new they could either try for new and gamble or just toss the old in the pan again and have a sure hit.
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Oct 1, 2023 17:32
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Let's go to Haven and let Kerrigan finish her archeology degree, she can polish her thesis a bit more.
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Oct 8, 2023 13:39
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One little thing about Vanadium Plating. Vanadium isn't an alloy, it's an already existing metal, but I guess calling it neo neo steel was too easy.
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Oct 10, 2023 16:04
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It's the same for Rob Liefeld, terrible drawing, terrible plot, terrible dialogue, terrible art, on the other hand, apparently, personally he's pleasant and polite and he's never phoned in to push back a deadline, the flip side is that in order to achieve that he phones in and starts drawing without a plan and just lets everything go where the scribbles lead.
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Oct 16, 2023 22:32
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The frankly gruesome limitations SC and SCBW imposed on its players via interface and controls limitations are even less excusable when you consider that Total Annihilation released a year earlier and had a UI and controls toolkit that remained unmatched until, let's see, Supreme Commander which released ten years later and mostly from the same minds. Admittedly those games don't have the same regard for spellcasting units, even TA:K didn't but let's not talk about that one. When I ended up playing SC and WC3 and so on, it was some time after they released and also after playing TA, a lot, and it left me with a bitter taste, as if a core design objective was task saturation of the player. And I ended up reading that actually task saturation of the player was an explicit goal for C&C1.
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Oct 20, 2023 09:29
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This action sequence should have been a phone call, that's entirely on people deciding they wanted a cool action sequence. Valerian has the potential to be interesting, of course, we all know what goes on at blizz when there's potential waiting to be realized.
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Oct 22, 2023 13:58
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A redemption arc in which we learn how to better fit in larger human society.
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Oct 22, 2023 18:29
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MatteusTheCorrupt posted:Out-of-engine Cutscenes being made early enough in development that the story around them changes seems to be incredibly common. Especially as many of them are used for advertisement and the like. In particular, this one is back to back trailer fodder. Of course they don't work when put back to back, which I guess is blizz magic.
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Oct 23, 2023 13:42
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They could have slapped it down in front of any number of no build base or lab raid mission and it would have been just fine. And then they'd give the medic flash grenade launcher ability to Tychus.
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Oct 23, 2023 18:46
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It's simple, they are all already infected and the virus only activates when it detects its trigger signal which has been carefully engineered by Kerrigan to be the presence of Raynor in the OPFOR.
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Nov 6, 2023 02:57
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It's not wonderful but it mostly works mechanically, which is enough to be excellent for a game.
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Nov 7, 2023 18:38
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Warmachine posted:I'll climb back on my choices soapbox because the reason it sucks is the player can see the "tabletop" answer of trying to convince Selendis to join us and help buy time to figure out a cure. Because I could see a group of players at a table making increasingly ludicrous persuasion checks to pull that off. This is another reason why 'choices matters' games fail. By definition, they can only give a limited number of discrete choices with discrete outcomes. You cannot accommodate every possible choice and outcome, no matter how big your budget is. Maybe at some point a large language model would be able to approximate it, but I have mixed feelings on that idea. But for those of us who live in the real world and not magic machine learning land (I refuse to call it AI), players will always be able to think of a solution the developers didn't account for. Sometimes it's good enough to give a third option that is significantly better, instead of tossing the bomb either in the room with the kittens or the room with the babies, you toss it outside or perhaps in the room with the trolley problem implementer villain, Deus Ex 3 did that at at least one point and it worked perfectly well.
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Nov 13, 2023 02:37
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Human revolution, Deus Ex 2 is invisible war.
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Nov 13, 2023 04:36
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There's that and also disabling the gas chamber system in the offshore platform blacksite by finding it and shooting it instead of accepting the fake choice Burke gives. Now, how does it distribute to one location more than a kilometre lower than the other and the resultant pressure difference? It probably just has a hefty pump, but the pipe must be some entertaining engineering.
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Nov 13, 2023 06:00
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