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Man. After the SC1 LP came back briefly I got on a bit of Starcraft kick, started replaying both games. There's something about the setting that does manage to grab me very well, even in the quagmire of bullshit that is this game. I have so many ideas about how Starcraft 2 could have been written better. Setting this game twenty years after the first would be a start, with the Dominion making an active effort to (re)colonise more of the sector now that every other faction is either weakened or destroyed. I wouldn't even have Raynor be the protagonist. Let him and his crew have settled among the Protoss worlds while Mengsk uses the idea of them as a boogeyman to justify his authoritarianism. But I don't want to get ahead of myself about all the problems we're going to see. The gameplay really is great, though. And you can really see the efforts they went to to redesign the factions around how they ended up getting played in Starcraft 1. All three armies manage to feel significantly more powerful while still being more or less balanced, which is always good. Hell, as far as I can tell pro Starcraft 2 is thriving better these days than the original, now that it's been long enough that you can't chalk that up to recency bias. The main downside, at least when it comes to the e-sport, is that the control and pathfinding improvements mean the optimal strategy most of the time is to gather your army into a deathball and smash it into the enemy rather than fighting for territorial control over many fronts. Both games are very much worth watching if you're into that kind of thing.
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May 31, 2023 23:35
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painedforever posted:Was he even broken up about her getting killed in SC1? Where is that post... He was definitely angry at Mengsk for abandoning her on Tarsonis, and there's a line in the Protoss campaign where Tassadar (or was it Zeratul?) comments on his feelings for her on Char. They definitely had a bond when they were fighting together in the Sons of Korhal. But then all of Brood War is supposed to have happened, and by the end of it Raynor had sworn bloody vengeance on her for killing someone he'd developed a stronger (if less flirty) bond with. Blizzard seemed really determined to ignore everything that happened in Brood War besides the character deaths.
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Jun 1, 2023 00:05
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PurpleXVI posted:I confess, as I remember Kerrigan in SC1, wasn't she also red-haired and pale-skinned then? I don't recall ever having anything to go on beyond her unit, uh, face thing on the status bar that would indicate otherwise. The only real design difference I notice is that they removed her dreads. She had red hair, but it was crimson red rather than ginger. And her skin colour was white-ish but more ambiguous. She might well have been intended to be white (or at least, considering the developers and era, not intended to not be white) but it wasn't that obvious.
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Jun 1, 2023 00:51
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Szarrukin posted:Also opening cinematics for Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void are loving awesome. Honestly, the opening for this one is too! Less bombastic, but really good at building up that feeling of hype. As the original announcement trailer it was genuinely awesome. Although in retrospect Tychus there having trousers on when he gets sealed permanently into his armour seems like it's really going to start causing problems in a few hours' and a few drinks' time.
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Jun 1, 2023 08:57
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PurpleXVI posted:But do we ever get the answer to the most important question? ARE our children using Stimpaks?! It's just to help focus for the exams, they can stop any time they like Yeah, the news segments are a bit too much "repeating the same gag every mission". Going for that joke every time rather undercuts the vibe you're supposed to be getting from Mengsk's totalitarian rule if the news is constantly cutting off their own reporters in the middle of questioning it. Surely at some point you'd just start pre-recording the reports. Like most of the writing in Starcraft 2, the news reports could have been good setting fluff, they just chose not to be. Tenebrais fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Jun 3, 2023 |
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Jun 3, 2023 11:49
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Maybe, but Brood War ends with every faction except Kerrigan's zerg either wiped out or at least badly beaten and licking their wounds, and most of their named characters dead. If anything they were in an ideal position to set up a clean slate. I don't think it's particularly unreasonable for Kerrigan to have not gone and wiped out the sector even if she could - nothing could meaningfully threaten her, she could just settle in on the worlds the zerg controlled and get to reconfiguring the Swarm to suit her tastes (which is what canonically she did), leaving the terrans and protoss to set up any way the story writers might have liked. ...at least if there was a larger time skip in which to do that. Mengsk reasserting control with the Dominion is honestly fine, if he'd had time for it. It fits his character and capabilities. I do think it's worth making a distinction between writing problems relative to Brood War and writing problems within Starcraft 2 itself. The initial state in WoL is weird after the way Brood War ended, but if this had been the start of a series it wouldn't be a problem for Raynor to be a rebel against the evil empire pining over his lost love, even if that last bit is a bit pat. There'll be plenty of that second kind of writing problems later on but most of Wings is the first kind. The news reporter bit could have worked really well if the next news segment had a different reporter and this one was never heard from again. Tenebrais fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Jun 4, 2023 |
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Jun 4, 2023 00:12
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I wonder if the spine crawlers looking like they are is going off an early sunken colony concept that they didn't have the tech to animate at the time, or if they changed it because the sunken colony design doesn't fit with the new way crawlers operate. It'd look better if the big spine was slamming down to hit enemies in a line rather than hunting and pecking. I can't imagine it'd be that hard to balance, it's no worse than putting a firebat in a bunker (admittedly, not something you can do in SC2's multiplayer).
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Jun 10, 2023 15:58
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I think the SC1 Protoss executor was supposed to be Artanis? He only appears as a unit in the expansion while Fenix is alongside you the whole way. The Brood War executor is a character that'll cameo in this campaign. That said, I don't actually know where I heard this from, so I don't know if it's official.
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Jun 11, 2023 13:31
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ilmucche posted:I thought for a while that marines couldn't get out of their suits because most marines are dead after like 60 seconds on a battlefield so why would they ever need to worry about how to get out? This is probably the idea behind the convict marines sealed in. I doubt they need any more encouragement to stay in there than the fact they're welded in, since they'd have to go AWOL, escape whatever base they're stationed at, and get to whoever might be capable of taking it off. And those units would just be deployed directly into a zerg hive or what have you. None of that applies to Tychus, of course. Maybe whatever is in it for him is just worth sticking to the terms of the deal.
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Jun 12, 2023 12:30
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I don't think Wings ever sets up missions where you're forced to use the new unit, other than ones where you don't have a base. Sure, most missions are designed to make good use of them, and will give you a couple to try them out, but if you think you can do better with a different composition you're always allowed to. You don't have to use Marauders here, it's just set up a situation that shows off where they're at their best. On a different note, the Tal'darim! It is really transparent that they were just invented as a reason for the Terrans to fight the Protoss despite Raynor being on great terms with all of the surviving Protoss after Brood War, by introducing this previously unheard-of faction that never got involved before. Once the Protoss campaign comes around they'll have actually come up with a proper identity for them but they clearly don't have it in mind yet. They don't even use the same faction colour in Legacy.
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Jun 17, 2023 19:54
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Matt saying that "apparently" Kerrigan was different before the Zerg took her is a weird line. Even in the actual canon behind him (and not him being an obvious stand-in for the magistrate) he was in the Sons of Korhal before Raynor was, surely he must have at least known about Mengsk's most elite operative.
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Jun 18, 2023 12:52
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Szarrukin posted:Ah yes, Firebats. Two games, one expansion, multiple mods and nobody managed to make them useful. Amazing. Heart of the Swarm did at least introduce a unit very like firebats, the Hellbat, that actually does see some use in competitive play nowadays. They have a wide splash arc and do a lot of damage, so they're actually built to be the melee units they are.
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Jun 24, 2023 10:53
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I mean, Stetmann was concerned that the protoss crystal might start eating the ship too. Why not marry safe science if you love it so much
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Jun 25, 2023 11:08
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It's not so much that SC2 discourages exploring and going off-script as that it makes demands of you to do so. Going out, finding the collectables, and especially taking out enemy bases that aren't objectives require a higher level of both micro and macro skills than the core mission objectives do, but if they had wanted to not let you do it at all they could have prevented it. There's really nothing stopping them from just making the enemy core base invincible or cheating in an unending stream of enemies to defend it if they'd chosen to. The game in general is set up to encourage you to think on your feet and act fast rather than simply turtling until you've built an unstoppable army, big enough to work with whatever unit composition you like, at your own pace. There's missions where you can do that, but it was an extremely reliable strategy in past games and they've noticeably taken efforts to make sure you can't just take this same approach every mission. More often than not you have to work to the mission's pace rather than make it wait for you. At the same time, especially at low difficulties, the demands aren't tight enough to make you really feel punished if that's not your forté. Just building a second barracks(/hatchery/gateway) is usually enough to comfortably meet the production demands of the mission.
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Jun 30, 2023 17:28
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Honestly the weird thing to me is that it's a zerg virus. That's not a strategy they've ever used before or ever will again, infestation to them has always been more direct. There's nothing wrong with the zerg developing new strategies, of course, but it would probably have helped the writing to highlight that fact and make this storyline a bit more focused on containing and/or curing it.
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Jul 2, 2023 11:31
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Slaan posted:Or if they still wanted to, they could easily have her do the reports for Space Tucker 'straight' and then have a separate "real" report she texts over to Raynor or is on the space internet with a nome de plume. Just getting interrupted after 5 seconds of a report to show this is dumb. Oh that would have been neat. Have her play along with the Dominion narrative on their show then half of the broadcasts are instead her on some underground rebel network reporting the real news. Although that opens the question of how widespread the rebel movement really is. The game is very clear that basically everyone in the Dominion is a potential rebel that just needs a push to start rising up against their oppressors, while at the same time Raynor's Raiders themselves are a rag-tag bunch of freedom fighters reliant on mercenaries for muscle and shady business dealings for funding. Could have been some neat storytelling if the sector is actually full of rebel groups that are already rising up for themselves anywhere the Dominion doesn't have solid control, and you're interacting to support and/or make deals with them. That's pretty close to how it works for both the Hanson and Tosh storylines, just give them a bit more formality as their own factions that are working with you on their stuff.
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Jul 2, 2023 17:45
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painedforever posted:Having the doc working on a "cure" to the Zerg virus is a bit of a weird thing. It's like, "Didn't anyone think of that earlier?" I mean, yeah, okay, we're led to believe that the Terrans were all like, "Oooh, biological weapons," and the Protoss were all like, "Burn the unclean!", but you'd think someone would've also been all like, "Can we fight it?" This also makes me think that the "zerg virus" in this storyline is a different thing from their normal infestation. A new vector for it that you could potentially build some sort of immunisation against, or treat people that have been infected but proper assimilation into the Swarm hasn't begun yet. Not a cure for the basic concept of zerg infestation. They could definitely have afforded to make that clearer if that was the intention though.
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Jul 2, 2023 23:45
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painedforever posted:Actually, I thought the entire point of Kerrigan is that she is psionic which is why she got turned into the Queen of Blades. Non-psionic humans are only good for cannon-fodder in Zerg eyes. Kerrigan was an exceptional psionic, but not a unique one. Psionic power is a latent thing among Terrans in general and quite a few of them had the gift to use it. It's why the Zerg invaded them in the first place.
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Jul 3, 2023 23:20
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PurpleXVI posted:Huh! I completely forgot that one. But yeah I will say that is already well towards making her design horny, considering that her "chitin" coincidentally looks like a corset. That reads as the remnants of her ghost suit to me? It's definitely gone for an amount of sexy clothing damage though. Just that under it she's just a green lady. Which isn't a surprise, given Sylvanas and Widowmaker later on...
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Jul 4, 2023 15:44
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Ah, reapers! I never really make use of them in the campaign outside of this mission. In multiplayer they've got a firm niche of early-game harrassers, being able to jump into the enemy base from weird angles, make short work of workers and undefended buildings, and in MP even have passive regeneration so you hit, run, recover and go back without needing any other units for support. They scale extremely poorly though - they can't deal well with armoured units, can't deal at all with flying ones, and their survivability depends on being mobile enough to kite whatever's trying to kill them so you can't keep them alive once you have a whole army to pay attention to. Campaign missions don't really have an early game phase, the enemy is usually entrenched before the map starts. So their niche isn't really present.
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Jul 8, 2023 13:12
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Goliaths aren't in multiplayer, so it must do that in campaign if it happens at all.
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Jul 18, 2023 16:40
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Man, it's weird to imagine a version of this campaign that has an emotional core and character development arc. Something that might even approach good writing. I mean that wouldn't change some of the dumb plot beats later and especially the hot garbage of the later campaigns (that we get a nice preview of with these Zeratul missions!) but wow. Normally WoL's writing is only praised in contrast to the other two. Anyway, I can never resist the temptation of the supply depot calldown power. There's just something viscerally satisfying about being able to queue up five depots on the same SCV and they just appear there in a big flashy landing animation. Sure, it's not optimal compared to better gas harvesting, but it sure does feel good. Especially when you're at the level of play where you get distracted by battles and don't notice you've built up a resource bank because you forgot to build anything. Being able to immediately address your supply block is pretty handy for making up for that.
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Jul 23, 2023 13:01
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Huh, I don't think I've seen anyone say that Starcraft 1's plot is mid. It's said a lot about Wings of Liberty - if you ignore the connection to the first game then it's a not-amazing-but-not-terrible story that does its job of justifying the fun missions without being offensively bad most of the time. Its biggest crime is definitely ignoring the status quo of the first game's ending while specifying it's too soon after for things to have realistically changed that much.
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Jul 24, 2023 22:29
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anilEhilated posted:Prophecies are almost always Bad Storytelling, at least when played straight. Not just that, this one was done in the most boring way - there's a prophecy, but there's no prophet. There's no story behind where the prophecy came from, no agenda for whoever is passing it on, no question of its legitimacy. It's just A Prophecy That Exists so the story can foreshadow future events without having to come up with a way for the protagonists to actually find out about them. Zeratul might as well just be digging up the Legacy Of The Void script and reading it, it means exactly as much to the story. Also, as Cythereal said, this is all Zeratul is doing through the whole game. He has no personality any more, he's just here to tell the main characters what they're supposed to be doing next in the script.
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Jul 29, 2023 14:31
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SoundwaveAU posted:Zeratul in SC1: "You speak of knowledge, Judicator? You speak of experience? I have journeyed through the darkness between the most distant stars. I have beheld the births of negative-suns and borne witness to the entropy of entire realities... Unto my experience, Aldaris, all that you've built here on Aiur is but a fleeting dream. A dream from which your precious Conclave shall awaken, finding themselves drowned in a greater nightmare."  Something about this exchange really highlights what a step down the dialogue in this game is. That's saturday morning cartoon poo poo. And not even particularly good saturday morning cartoons.
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Jul 29, 2023 16:15
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It's entirely plausible that the Xel'naga just didn't have any physical qualities the Overmind thought was worth keeping. They wereren't particularly fighters, clearly. No wonder they were trying to engineer a much more powerful species under their control. Which is obviously exactly what their motivation is and we all know this, no need for any sequels to cover that ground again it's done
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Jul 31, 2023 14:03
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You know, I'd completely forgotten this mission exists. I remembered the first one, the next one on Aiur, and the final mission of this chain, but I'd always only remembered this as a three-mission series. Can't imagine why.
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Aug 5, 2023 14:10
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It's probably going to be more fun to discuss the choice once we have seen the choice. It's not against thread rules or anything but it's pretty pointless to talk about things we'll actually see later.
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Aug 8, 2023 18:28
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It's not just that this retcon shits on the entire plot of the celebrated first game. This wouldn't be a good setup even in an original one. The retcons to the Terrans are pretty galling but if you're not familiar with (or don't care about) how brood war ends it's setting up a serviceable space rebellion plot, at least of what we've seen so far. But "the horrifying all-devouring swarm is actually a good guy setting up to fight an apocalypse prophecy" is just plain bad. There's no satisfying way to spin that. You can make sympathetic zerg characters with good motivations, but don't try to retroactively justify everything they were before. Tassadar hinting at how this is not the time to talk about his condition makes me think they were originally planning to make him part of LotV, but dropped it after the force ghost thing went over so badly. Would fit with hiring a celebrity voice for him. The colossi appearing here don't bother me too much. I think even in Starcraft 1 it was hinted Aiur had stronger defences that the Conclave didn't care to activate because they didn't take the zerg seriously until it was too late. They'll be getting retconned in LotV anyway though.
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Aug 12, 2023 10:41
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Felinoid posted:it still smacks of being obsessed with an idea and using it over and over again, rather than "oooh, we couldn't use this idea so we'll stuff it somewhere else." So much of this. Metzen seemed to really love the idea of "the all-destroying horde of evil was actually a community good (or at least morally neutral) people that got subverted by a greater dark force that is the actual evil." Overwatch had it too, with the Omnics being implied to have gone haywire due to some greater evil's influence during Sombra's introduction. Also, hey, that game had a sniper woman who got captured by the bad guys and transformed into a bitter and gritty version of herself with weird-coloured skin. Blizzard's writing of this era was super hacky and repetitive, is what I'm saying. Gonna get even more clear as we learn more about this force of darkness in the later campaigns.
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Aug 13, 2023 17:40
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This is from Cythereal's LP, to summarise the Bigger Fish of Warcraft at the moment:
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Aug 13, 2023 23:44
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FoolyCharged posted:But does it really have to work that way? The game already has defias bandit level 1 and defias bandit level 20 depending on what zone you're in. And with level scaling everywhere now, you've got a treadmill that keeps you in place relative to the enemies. There's no reason they had to keep upping the ante until it became ludicrous, not only did people already show they were perfectly happy suspending that disbelief, but Blizzard literally made it mechanically moot about the the same time they went really ridiculous with it. Escalating stakes is a reliable way to keep tension up. Once you've proven you can beat a wizard, the next big enemy needs to be stronger than a wizard for them to feel like a credible threat. This is all normal for serial storytelling. Having the same enemy at different levels is fine for trash mobs where no one really believes you're threatened by them, but for the headline villains you need more tension than that. In most media, there's alternatives to just having every enemy be stronger than the last. The next villain could threaten the protagonists' personal relationships, or their political position in the world, or maybe they're not stronger but the protagonists have also been weakened in some way - they've lost their powers, they're in a new place without their normal resources, there's been a time skip and they all got out of the heroing game. None of this works for an MMO though, where the game mechanics are all about beating up stronger wizards and taking their shiniest baubles. WoW's problems aren't really the escalating series of threats, it's the way they keep invalidating the threat of what you've already beaten so you don't often get to feel like you got a proper victory. Whatever mysterious biggest fish Shadowlands was hinting at will probably make for a better villain by coming out of nowhere than the expansion's actual villain turning out to have been orchestrating the entire story up to that point for his own purposes. And Starcraft 2 isn't beholden to any of this. All of the factions are much weaker at the end of Brood War than they were at the start of the story, you don't need to have something stronger than the Overmind to be able to pose as much of a threat as it did. Tenebrais fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 14:30
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Cythereal posted:Look, it's a proven fact that Raynor's sense of judgment goes out the window when there's an attractive woman around. He's just got a thing for psychic snipers that work for Mengsk
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Aug 21, 2023 14:12
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I think I can see the original idea behind the choice. That the Spectres are dangerous terrorists, and that the choice is less "a Dominion agent talks Raynor into betraying his thus far ally" and more "Raynor begrudgingly works with the Dominion to destroy a monster of his own creation". That it's a question of trust, in that do you trust Tosh and his spectres to act within Raynor's moral standards and stay loyal to his cause. Trust, and whether Tosh deserves it, has certainly been a theme this mission chain has hammered you with. It's just that they... kinda... forgot to give you a reason not to trust Tosh. The mission chain needed to show a lot more of him being a bastard for this choice to actually work. As it is you just get one newsreel about how the spectres attacked a weapons plant that did collateral damage. It's hard to tell whether Blizzard expected a player's racism to be doing heavy lifting in that regard, or if it's just badly written. Like, what if instead of looting resources from the Zerg and the Tal'darim, his missions had you faced up against the frightened militias of Dominion colonies that had both just suffered major attacks from a mysterious assailant. It'd give you a reason to think these missions might have you working for the bad guy, and that sticking with Tosh might damage Raynor's reputation with the people he's trying to save. It'd all come down to this being a choice between helping or stopping Tosh, rather than helping Tosh or helping Nova.
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Aug 21, 2023 16:14
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Xarn posted:HotS has interesting gimmick in the evolutions and mutations if you are into that sort of thing. Yeah the army customisation is fun in HotS. I just wish it hadn't taken Blizzard until LotV to realise that making permanent choices about your army customisation is less fun than being able to change it and try other things. Hell, it makes more sense for the Zerg to be able to modify their army freely than either of the other races.
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Aug 23, 2023 11:36
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Compared to the other mission split that we'll probably be seeing soon, this one at least has its retroactive continuity set up so that both routes can be true and it's just a matter of which side you believe and how they react. It's entirely possible that Tosh is happily mind-wiping captives when you work with him - at least until Raynor commits him to not doing that - and that Nova is just using you to take out her personal targets when you side with her. You just don't get to see those sides of them unless you play the other. Whichever person you side with will come through on what they're offering. Honestly it's a better way to do the "whichever side you pick, you're right" thing than the other decision split. But we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
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Sep 2, 2023 13:03
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Honestly though it would be easier just to structure the campaign the same way the later two do - you choose to commit to a mission chain then just have to play it out all in a row. You can make it as urgent as you like since you have to do the next mission next anyway, until the specific problem is solved for good and you can move on to a new one. Actually thinking about it you could fold in the artifact thing and have each chain include unearthing one of the artifact pieces, so you build it up over the course of the campaign until you hit the final chain.
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Sep 5, 2023 13:55
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Felinoid posted:Personally I kinda prefer the old 'cover' mechanics (we're talking about high ground, right?) to the new ones. Being able to fight back, if poorly, I feel is better than "can't fight back at all unless something provides high vision, then you're fine". It feels very weird to have pulsing vision/no-vision when the dude in front gets killed and then everyone has to edge up, then the next dude gets killed and everyone edges up, etc. Eminently solvable on the player side, but after you notice it on your side, you start noticing it on the enemy side and the jerky movement is just really weird-looking. There were also trees in Starcraft 1 that units could stand under to have a dodge chance. On the platform maps they looked like solar panel/antennae sort of structures.
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Sep 9, 2023 18:40
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I'm assuming if they used Duke's original line they'd have had to pay Duke's original voice actor for appearing in the game.
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Sep 17, 2023 11:19
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Wings of Liberty came out in 2010. Deep-fake technology like we have now was still science fiction. Even if they're just planning to broadcast the audio to the masses, the adjutant itself is evidence of its veracity.
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Sep 17, 2023 22:34
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