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The story of the Protoss mini-campaign is so bad that it’s a crime, too.
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Jul 30, 2023 20:54
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Well, the “victim” in one is a dead empire that couldn’t possibly prosecute you any more… though on the other hand, you’re also potentially loving with the money of the current empire, so who can really say which is worse?
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Jul 30, 2023 21:57
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Szarrukin posted:I wonder what's worse - SC2 writing or Shadowlands writing. Yes.
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Jul 31, 2023 02:57
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And there's also the "poo poo story, but the gameplay's pretty good" factor as well. I managed to get my way through to the end of SC2 even if literally everything about the epilogue permanently soured me on the series, but Shadowlands was just so aggressively "gently caress you and your time/investment into this" that I was already preparing to quit by the time everything about  's culture came out.
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Jul 31, 2023 03:37
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There has been some book stuff that’s set after the epilogue to SC2 that attempted to plant some sequel hooks (of the “planting the seeds for future conflicts” variety), but otherwise, the series seems to have withered away.
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Jul 31, 2023 16:14
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PurpleXVI posted:I wonder if there was ever a World of Starcraft in the works. Ehh, I honestly doubt that they ever did anything serious. They were already in the middle of trying to kluge together Titan at the same time that SC2 was developed and released, and even then, one of their biggest concerns was that they would be shooting themselves in the foot with two big-name MMOs.
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Jul 31, 2023 19:55
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I’m surprised brutal didn’t escalate it to also facing clones of Maar that are staggered out so that you’re always facing a base attack from one of them for the entire mission.
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Aug 5, 2023 17:38
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Funnily enough, it was the next mission in this chain that I completely forgot about, even though it’s the point where SC2’s overall story hits the nosedive of no return.
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Aug 5, 2023 20:58
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And the thing is, they should be way more existentially terrifying in-story. Zerg and Protoss are supposed to be fundamentally incompatible with each other (hence why Zerg never had any Infested Protoss units), so the hybrids are supposed to be physically impossible. really kind of killed the tension by having lots of people’s first exposure to them be so… hammy.
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Aug 5, 2023 23:39
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Is the Predator even all that exceptional at what it does, considering you’ve almost definitely got at least a couple of units/defense structures that already fill the “slaughter zerglings” niche by this point in the campaign?
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Aug 6, 2023 04:20
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IIRC (Tosh stuff) siding with him is the unambiguous correct choice; if you talk to Hansen after doing the Nova version, she tells you that, surprise, Nova was lying to you about the extent of the instability of the Spectres
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Aug 8, 2023 17:24
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FoolyCharged posted:What's the downside to blasting a bunch of zerg mutants and getting the weird, quasi romance doctor lady off your ship? Having to pay the janitor overtime to clean out the lab afterwards 
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Aug 8, 2023 17:59
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And here it is: the exact moment the rest of the series takes a sharp nosedive into Shitsville.
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Aug 12, 2023 06:05
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Felinoid posted:loving hell, so it's going to be the end of Reign of Chaos all over again, but indefinite? Basically, except there isn’t some boss monster that eventually comes in to stomp all over your sandcastle, it’s just a ramping up of enemy forces until it’s effectively an endless tide of them.
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Aug 12, 2023 18:45
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JohnKilltrane posted:So my theory about the crime against humanity that is the "twist" revealed at the end of the mission is that it was salvaged from Warcraft. Take what is said but replace "Overmind" with "Lich King," "Kerrigan" with "Arthas," and "mysterious darkness imposing its power on the Overmind" with "Demons" or "Dreadlords" and you get something that actually makes sense based on the trajectory of Warcraft 3. So I'm guessing it was meant to be the big twist of Warcraft 4 but then WoW happened and it became unfeasible but they just really liked the idea of "What if the evil monster was the only hope for salvation" so they tried to just import it wholesale into StarCraft and man does it not work at all. They actually did wind up doing that with WoW’s Shadowlands expansion, except the “man behind the man” for the Lich King was Thanos on a shoestring budget and something like a dozen lines total… and in his last moments, he warned that there was an even greater threat to the cosmos.
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Aug 13, 2023 21:00
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Szarrukin posted:I'm surprised they didn't went with "Mengsk was corrupted by Amon. And UED too. And Aldaris." Aldaris was corrupted… by being overly dramatic and taking too long to get to his point.
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Aug 14, 2023 00:19
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There’s also the co-op stuff, though that also pretty quickly went into “definitely non-canon” territory.
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Aug 14, 2023 22:07
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RIP Pylo the Pylon
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Aug 19, 2023 00:37
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Nostalgamus posted:Nah, there are some fun side stories left in the Terran Campaign. This was also around the time when the whole maxim of “the main story’s middling/cliche as all hell at best, but the side stuff is usually pretty decent” with modern games in general first really started taking root, right?
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Aug 19, 2023 16:07
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Rhonne posted:I feel like in a different version of this game, you'd start the campaign playing as Nova for a few missions before she's abandoned to die by Mengsk the same way he did to Kerrigan, only for her to be saved by Raynor. Then the game follows Nova joining Raynor's Raiders to fight the Dominion and the zerg threat and Jim gets a chance to do right by Nova where he failed with Kerrigan. IIRC, the interquel comic/manga series that starred her even outright said that she’s the greatest Ghost since Kerrigan herself, so the parallels would be pretty fitting.
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Aug 21, 2023 20:41
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ulmont posted:Are the campaigns worth buying if I haven’t played them, and what’s up with the pricing? It looks like Wings of Liberty and the Protoss campaign are both free, I think, leaving it $15 for Heart of the Swarm and $10 for the Nova campaign, or…$40 for the collection which gets me in addition ??? Does the bundle mention anything about unlocking co-op commanders? That’s the only other paid thing I can think of
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Aug 22, 2023 13:27
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Yeah, I still watch a couple Hearthstone streamers (and this LP ), but otherwise I quit everything related cold turkey after the harassment suits
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Aug 22, 2023 19:28
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Torchlighter posted:Just... just hold on to that for about 2 and a half expansions. It'll come up. And it’ll be the dumbest loving thing when it finally does.
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Aug 27, 2023 00:14
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TRASH A
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Sep 3, 2023 15:34
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The thing that gets me is that they actually had the setup for some legitimately unnerving psychological horror elements with this version of the chain, but did nothing with it. I’m bringing this up because I vaguely remember that there was a short manga series (and a tie-in book?) released that served as Nova’s backstory after SC Ghost fell through, which featured her and a small class of fellow Ghosts, including a young Tosh. IIRC, they wound up having a brief romantic fling, HQ noticed, and decided to mind-wipe them both to keep them on-task… which was how Tosh found out that he had a resistance to it, and led to him defecting and starting up his Spectres, while Nova’s memory was successfully wiped.The really dark thought that just crossed my mind: assuming Nova snuck onto Tosh’s ship without the luxury of already having her own ready to pick her up immediately after… how long would she have spent waiting for her ride with only his corpse for company? How many hours or days could she have been on there with a nagging, inexplicable feeling of intimate familiarity with the man she just coldly killed, in the deepest subconscious parts of her mind that the memory wipe couldn’t scrub?
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Sep 3, 2023 20:51
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The only games that come to mind for me are Mass Effect 2 and 3, which had missions where the end results got worse the longer you put them off after they were made available, or outright failed offscreen (with significant consequences).
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Sep 5, 2023 04:54
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Qwertycoatl posted:It's the sort of thing that can work if it's what the game is about. You could have a "what kind of Jim Raynor are you?" thing where the game is much more character/story focused and nature of your rebellion depends on what you do, or you could have some depressing and stressful story about how you can't do everything. Imagine I was a smartass and put an image of Jim with the face of the Detective from Disco Elysium superimposed over his (or vice versa) here
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Sep 5, 2023 14:16
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Especially when the campaign AI’s usual tactics are typically “fight to the last man no matter how obvious a meat grinder it is” instead of making a fighting retreat when it’s clear that the skirmish is lost.
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Sep 9, 2023 06:54
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Off the top of my head, the only two units Diamondbacks seem like they could have been useful against were Stalkers… and Diamondbacks.
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Sep 9, 2023 17:28
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I just remember one of my very few multiplayer matches was playing PvT, spotting an incoming attack wave, and whipping up a few Dark Templars to try to quickly kill off their siege tanks while I scrambled my main forces… only for them to wind up killing the entire wave (and basically win me the match from there) because they couldn’t/didn’t think to use a satellite scan.
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Sep 10, 2023 23:57
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Hwurmp posted:explain Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
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Sep 12, 2023 16:07
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I remember playing a round of DOTA in the SC2 arcade where someone started raging when their team wasn’t overwhelmingly winning. …In a mode that didn’t have any sort of MMR, so the stakes could not have been any lower.
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Sep 13, 2023 00:46
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All HOTS did for me was convince me once and for all that MOBAs just aren’t ever gonna be my thing, considering it was touted as one of the most beginner friendly games of the genre.
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Sep 14, 2023 22:17
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I’d honestly forgotten about Matt’s next mission; I thought the entirety of it was just the prologue of the final one in his chain.
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Sep 17, 2023 06:55
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Yeah, it doesn't really get pointed out enough in the narrative: Mengsk should be stepping on eggshells and constantly watching his back after managing to gently caress up so colossally and spectacularly by the end of BW. 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.
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Sep 18, 2023 03:48
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To an extent, I get it if thought that having a singular overarching enemy would have had more mass market appeal and less confusion for newcomers than “there are hundreds of different Terran factions that are all variously opposed to/aligned with each other, and Jim really has it out for the husk of an empire that’s responsible for things getting this bad”. poo poo, I’d even accept something like the Dominion only very marginally remaining as the top dog via continuity of power after everything fractured around them. That could have even tied into the concerns mentioned early on that Mengsk is disproportionately devoting resources to hunting Raynor down, instead of reclaiming his former footholds or maintaining what little he still has.
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Sep 18, 2023 04:46
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Felinoid posted:E: A Xel'Naga resurgence admittedly seems like a no-brainer to up the stakes for a sequel, but it could have been done with far less melodrama, and wouldn't even necessarily require a member of their race to still be around for them to have an impact. The archaeological digs already at the center of the plot could easily have gone in a similar direction to the Halo rings: tech left behind that is massively dangerous, and who gets to control it, and tip the balance of power. And then the last game in the trilogy reveals that there are still some of them around, and you have to have read a trilogy of books to know what their deal even is? (Halo 4 was such a clusterfuck)
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Sep 18, 2023 13:59
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I could even see it working as a major swerve in-game: the first couple mission arcs are pretty much exclusively Raynor vs. the Dominion, and then in the middle of one of those missions, the Zerg abruptly reappear and scare both sides shitless after years of inactivity… which also starts drawing the battered Protoss back into the fray as well.
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Sep 18, 2023 15:43
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GunnerJ posted:The alternate Starcraft 2 story is now Substance Abuse Raynor and Ennui-Depressed Kerrigan, but what mental health problems should the Protoss have to deal with? The massive amount of self-culture shock that they’re collectively going through, between losing Aiur (and most of their leadership) and reuniting with the Dark Templar. This is the first time in millennia that they’ve had any kind of change to their status quo, let alone one as traumatic as that.
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Sep 18, 2023 17:25
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gohuskies posted:Kerrigan is arguably the main protagonist of Starcraft so I'm not surprised that BW ended with her victorious. That's usually how video game stories work and I wouldn't call that favoritism. Though even that was ultimately retconned into a Zerg victory thanks to the whole “I need to die so the Zerg gets a new leader without the Xel’naga baggage” business.
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Sep 18, 2023 21:08
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