|
Caught up with the thread; it's been a fun read. You can add me to the list of goons who were disappointed with WoL; I got to the final mission when I played so very long ago and just gave up because the narrative had me di disinterested, even though some of the missions were inventive. I've never heard good things about the sequels, either. This confirms that the canon choice SA makes is supporting Tosh. You chose well, everyone.
|
#
¿
Sep 5, 2023 09:28
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 10:14 |
|
|
Redeye Flight posted:Get those drat bikes back. Horner's questline rules, this cannot be debated, and it needs to be seen, but I have WORDS about the Vulture in SC2's campaign. Hell, about its representation in SC2 in general, which is basically the same thing because the iconic Vulture is another one of the units restricted to campaign and co-op. But we can't cover my big words about the Vulture until we actually see it. I take umbrage at the slander to the Vulture's good name. I agree that it got done dirty in SC2, and certainly the Hellion is a really uninspiring design, especially compared to the Vulture, but the Vulture was absolutely not useless as you teched up as Terran. With proper stop/patrol micro one vulture kills an infinite number of zerglings given enough time; realistically you can't devote that much time, but if you have a handful of Vultures the zerg player absolutely has to respect you and build mutas or hydras, or else you will dunk on his entire army with no losses. Spider mines are also crazy value, and once you have them researched Vultures become a fantastic value proposition even if they never shoot at anything but you get three mines down. For 25 minerals per mine you can kill units which are much, much scarier and costlier, and slow your opponent into requiring detectors to go with his push. It also gives you an answer to lurkers dark templar, you don't need detectors, as long as you know roughly where the enemy is you can one-shot his much more expensive units with your mines. Vultures were pretty niche in pro TvP but in TvT and TvZ they could really shine.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2023 08:14
|
|
|
Phelddagrif posted:I don't think it got brought up yet, but the nuke that Orlan drops on your troops? There's a cloaked Ghost in his base calling it down. It's been so long since I've played the SC2 campaign I can't remember precisely how the mines work anymore - can you still push up and plant spider mines next to cloaked ghosts to kill them before the nuke can go off? You could definitely do this in BW.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2023 07:14
|
|
|
Even if it has an authentication code, laypeople won't know how that poo poo works. Then you'd have a criminal outlaw organization saying "yeah this is totally authentic" and the government saying "nuh uh, that key is made up" and who'd going to be able to verify that? If people don't have the tools on their own, they'd be relying on an independent news organization to do so, for example, which doesn't really work in authoritarian governments.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2023 23:33
|
|
|
the Orb of Zot posted:Also a reminder that Wraiths always sucked. People remember them as good only because Protoss Scouts were even worse than Wraiths (so they took second place instead of third by default) and because they could melt other fliers while cloaked if detectors weren’t present. Too bad Valkyries, Goliaths, and Missile Turrets do that job better. They had a niche in multiplayer - the Korean pro scene called them "paper planes" because they were fragile, but very microable. Most memorably in TvT they were sometimes used for worker harassment, or to shift the balance of power on the front line of siege tank/vulture mechanized trench warfare. If you built a couple wraiths you could dictate the engagements, and ideally make your opponent invest more into missile turrets than you invest into the wraith + starport.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2023 21:58
|
|
|
You can see a few things like that in the intro cutscene as well. I believe that the texture is mirrored across the model to optimize.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2023 06:40
|
|
|
Warmachine posted:Almost certainly, but blind mirroring would also probably result in the 435 being backwards as well. No one caught the small text decal though. Or they figured no one would notice/it was too small to bother with. I think it's also part of Blizzard's obsession with optimizing, too. I haven't played a Blizzard game since... well, since Wings of Liberty actually, but goddamn could those old games run on terrible PCs. When I was a kid, my best friend & dumpster dived some old office PCs and set them up; they were terrible but the one thing they could run was Brood War so we called the ones we built Starcraft computers. SC2 was similarly well-optimized, and it's the insane/anal attention to detail on things like UV maps optimizing for video memory that does it.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2023 09:26
|
|
|
Secret mission!
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2023 07:04
|
|
|
I played Wings but haven't touched the other two; if there are follow-up LP threads for the other parts of SC2 I dread to see what happens to the writing.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2023 23:24
|
|
|
Gotta be Tyrador. We haven't come this far just to save the colonists in a timely manner now.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2023 05:08
|
|
|
SIGSEGV posted:One little thing about Vanadium Plating. This annoys me too; besides just being bad engineering, it's incredibly lazy writing. If you know your periodic table it sounds just as dumb as, "We have created a new lightweight alloy called aluminum. Aluminum diffuses weapon impacts much more effectively than traditional armor plating, and it better preserves the life of our units." Could you not have written something a little more interesting, or at least taken a second to come up with a name for a new alloy? Though I suppose it's not as bad as some of the other writing in that post. It's got some of the prime hallmarks of writers not thinking about their setting. The dig at the Protoss which gets called out is particularly funny. Yeah sure the Protoss are dumb for not teleporting their gas, but if Raynor or the Dominion get access to teleportation technology and don't do anything with it except teleport gas (and this is the case!) they're much dumber. It really speaks to the writers wanting to justify some kind of upgrade without sparing a single thought for how it should affect the broader setting. Same thing with the nanotech mentioned on the science vessel; if you have access to the kind of advanced processes which let you program a swarm of nanites that can repair a complicated mechanical structure in seconds, you are at the level of technology where it is indistinguishable from magic and the literal only limitation on what you can do is what you can imagine. Aside from being ridiculous, it also clashes terribly with the bulky Aliens-style futurism of Starcraft as set out in the original game.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2023 20:40
|
|
|
There's a reason that major plot-important characters only showed up in Brood War under the following conditions: 1: Under the player's control or allied. 2: In a cutscene at the beginning or end of a mission. 3: When they were going to die. Why? In situation number one, the character has to survive to win the mission, and the player gets to keep trying until that happens. In scenario 2, the player has limited or no control, which means that the plot-important character can overrun the player or warp out or whatever is required to keep the plot from going off the rails. In number three, they need to die anyway so it's not a problem if the player has the ability to fight them or lose the unit. It's a little contrived, but it works because it does a good job of straddling the line, preserving player agency within the confines of the mission while still letting important characters show up from time to time. Contrast that to SC2 - major characters rarely show up in missions, and when they do, they tend to play a larger role. In theory that's good because it gives the character a better feeling of impacting the world, but the problem is that it always runs facefirst into a wall of ludonarrative dissonance. Kerrigan is incompetent in the last mission because the plot requires her to be. She's not even targetable because two shots from an Arclite cannon would turn her into paste. This, in turn, makes the player feel like they have no agency - why is this idiot running around on the map wearing such blatant plot armor? Kerrigan isn't feared for her ability to not die to bullets, it's because she's a master manipulator, planner, and psychic. Hell, sometimes Brood War even played with this. Sometimes the protoss use their hallucination ability to make projections of themselves. That's cool! It works because you get to end the mission by destroying something which plays by the established rules of the game, and even if it's a hollow victory, it makes sense because it is not only lore established that the protoss do it, but the player themselves can use the hallucinate ability.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2023 09:59
|
|
|
Not only do I like the Banshee but we're not going to Haven until it can't be put off any longer.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2023 09:34
|
|
|
Gonna be a no from me on killing Tosh as well, seems pretty clear that Blizzard's writing team struggles with math as well as writing. I don't think it's meant to imply that Tosh is a creepy pedo, just that nobody has considered any of the dates.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2023 04:36
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:He turns out books on time and on budget. It has to be something like this; I didn't know he ever wrote any books except the truly terrible Dune prequels which he ghostwrote for Frank Herbert's son. Unfortunately after bladededge's comment I had to look him up and now know the terrible truth: He has written a lot of books.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2023 22:11
|
|
|
I think a lot of the Vulture nostalgia comes from how much character the pilot had.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2023 01:29
|
|
|
It's a big part of why Brood War has such an enduring pro scene; you can't (and shouldn't) make an RTS today which intentionally frustrates the player with terrible pathfinding, limited selection, no queued commands, and other frustrating arbitrary restrictions, but because Brood War is grandfathered in, it means the skill ceiling is absurdly high. I remember stuff like how the pros will never make a control group of dragoons greater than 10 because from 1-10 they will path mostly fine but in groups of 11-12 they will blunder into one another and take double the time to move. poo poo like that along with the other ten billion frustrating quirks of SCBW means the skill ceiling is impossibly high, and these stupid arbitrary things do separate the people who can put 10000 hours in from the kinds of casuals who only do 1000.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2023 01:30
|
|
|
Here's the thing though, I suspect that the reason you can only select 12 units at a time is because the pathfinding absolutely shits the bed when you try to move large groups of units all at once. So sure, you can technically make a Brood War that lets you select more than 12 units, but I assume that it's still down to technical limitations in a more roundabout way. Also for the Vulture haters have some high level gameplay where the Terran player puts on a clinic with vultures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE5z-d8POmg
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2023 09:38
|
|
|
In another way, they were too successful with WC3 - DOTA is the logical conclusion of focusing your RTS around a small number of units with a large number of abilities, and it killed the genre.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2023 10:38
|
|
|
bladededge posted:Serious question. How, exactly, did this happen? Given my experience with game dev, ??? is one of two things. Games tend to come together very slowly up until a certain point late in development; then it all comes together near the end. You have guys making art assets, some doing gameplay, some doing levels, some doing music, some doing UI/cutscenes/whatever/etc. All of these things affect the way that a story is told, so when you're writing it you kind of have this idea of how you think it's going to come together in your head. And when all the final game stuff comes together, or starts getting there, you might have a moment where you go "Oh poo poo, this story doesn't work with the rest of the game." And given how writing in games is viewed and how many person-hours it would take to redo most of the game vs changing the story, the story is usually what gets changed instead of the other things that took a lot longer to make. The other option is that Blizzard started showing it to focus testers and they hated playing as some alcoholic loser and the metrics showed that they needed to do a rewrite even though it was the 11th hour.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2023 05:52
|
|
|
The physics on the star are so wrong that it doesn't even bug me. It's so far detached from reality that the mission is indistinguishable from "A wizard did it." If the science is sorta right that always annoys me but this is the realm of pure fantasy and I don't mind that.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2023 04:44
|
|
|
The marine's quip in the Banshee field manual is weird to me. I was always fine with the gameplay contrivance that yes, as ranged units marines are allowed to shoot down spacecraft. By the game's rules, it makes total sense. But it's farcical outside of the context of the game. I don't care if you have a gauss rifle, aircraft are far away and they're fast, and it's not like the marines are using Stinger-type antiaircraft rockets. So it's weird to me, seeing a marine scrawl in fieldbook that, yes, they do in fact shoot at airplanes with their guns, and it works. Also the fact that hydralisks can spit planes (and spacecraft!) out of the sky is magical.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2023 22:25
|
|
|
Selendis knows what's up. The Protoss have the only cure, they're smart. Zergism (Zergishness? Zergery?) isn't even a virus or a bacterium, it's a whole concert of biology working together.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2023 06:05
|
|
|
If we asked real nice-like do you think Selendis would let us borrow a carrier?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2023 06:50
|
|
|
Kerrigan has a line on Fenix's death at the end of SCBW that went something to the effect of "He died gloriously in battle like every Protoss wants to, don't player hate on me for giving him what he wanted." Kerrigan may not be the most reliable narrator, but he was always pretty gung-ho about fights before that so it's a line that rings true. Might just be that most warrior Protoss have no issue throwing their lives away if it's a good fight.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2023 07:13
|
|
|
What was with 90s sci fi and worms that control hosts? We have the Zerg, the Many, the Yeerks, probably more I am forgetting.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2023 23:57
|
|
|
Yeah, sure, but why worms? Lots of things can do that. Babylon 5 did it with weird centipede things at least.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2023 05:15
|
|
|
100 gunnery specialists? That's a bananas number. I think someone forgot that this isn't 40k.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2023 03:52
|
|
|
MagusofStars posted:For all intents and purposes, the logistics of Starcraft are exactly as much space-magic handwave as the actual space magic of Medic Heal or Psionic Storm. The mechanics of "what the gently caress, how would that even work" are (correctly) ignored and glossed over in favor of making the game-play enjoyable. This is absolutely true, and I think most people ITT would agree. The problem arises when the writers themselves don't ignore it. I accidentally kicked off this tangent by saying I thought it was dumb that they called out that it took 100 people just to target the Yamato cannon, let alone all the support staff for maintaining it etc. Anyway, that's the point - in a well-written science magic/science fantasy setting, as in for example Brood War, you will notice that the writers never give you concrete numbers for things. How long is that battlecruiser? How many people are onboard? What's the power draw like? Is the jukebox that Tychus broke 120v or 240v? Once you start answering these questions with hard numbers, you destroy the fantasy. Now, instead of a Battlecruiser occupying a mental space where it comfortably is both a flying fortress that houses command staff and has orbital bombardment capabilities but simultaneously is about as expensive as 14 marines and can be shot down with a handgun, it instead occupies a defined mental space. Giving out the numbers as they did was some rookie-rear end amateur writing bullshit and I am calling Blizzard on it.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2023 22:12
|
|
|
I know part of the reason I always hated Vikings is because they feel so ridiculous. They're transformers? Really? This is somehow both more effective and/or easier to engineer than putting a Banshee missile pod on a Viking in the sky? It doesn't feel like it belongs to the same setting as most of the rest of the tech. Most of the rest of the SC2 units make sense, but that one bugs me.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2023 08:25
|
|
|
Good thing Hanson wasn't a BW-style infested terran, that would have made a mess of the Hyperion.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2023 06:24
|
|
|
No, that's Blizzard's writing team.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2023 21:43
|
|
|
Lt. Danger posted:Raynor becomes friends with the protoss in SC1. this is a SC1/Brood War "failure" 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. It'd be a lot more accurate to say that Raynor becomes friends with Fenix, Zeratul & Co.; Aldaris thinks he's trash, and Raynor says, "I won't be talked down to by anyone, not even a Protoss."
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2023 22:42
|
|
|
I also can't stress enough how important I think the surrounding art style and mood are to the writing, especially when it's spare, like RTS writing tends to be. The art style and mood changed pretty dramatically between games, and that is so crucial in how the writing gets internalized.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2023 00:53
|
|
|
You can mark me down as another person who immediately pondered the orb to completion. Not only does it give you an obvious huge power boost, but it really marks itself as being of plot importance.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2023 03:28
|
|
|
Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:it's a great example of
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2023 07:32
|
|
|
As bad as Kevin J. Anderson is I would still take him over SC2. Maybe that's too harsh but even if his work is popcorn-y and oblivious at least it's usually fun. You're absolutely on the money though that he can't hold a candle to a luminary like Frank Herbert; the contrast is embarrassing. I also agree that Duran being something new who was digging around in Xel'Naga toys would be a lot more interesting. Opens up a lot of possibilities to take the story new places, whereas constraining it to the past is limiting.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2023 05:28
|
|
|
Warmachine posted:I think the observation from this is that SC1 was serious, while SC2 is trying to be cool. Like someone who was just naturally charismatic and cool suddenly being made aware of this, and now they are trying to be cool and their actions take all the charm out of it. SC1 is very matter-of-fact in its dialogue and it comes across as natural, while SC2 comes across as artificial because everyone is overacting like they're in a Marvel movie. Which is probably provoking the negative response in the nostalgia-soaked neurons that don't remember this clearly but recall the vibes. You've put something I have been trying to pin down for a few pages rather nicely here. My time making other creative works has taught me that incidental detail matters, and in fact it often matters more than the "real" writing & plot. There are a lot of goons in this thread who can't really remember the specifics of the plots of these games or need to look stuff up, but the feeling created by the incidental dialogue, unrelated cutscenes, voice work, and art direction all stick around.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2023 09:21
|
|
|
GunnerJ posted:I rewatched Pitch Black recently and I kinda feel like the Terran campaign, in a game that came out two years before that movie, was drinking from the same well as it, and maybe a bunch of other scifi release in that general timeframe: a kind of grungy pulp inspired by, like, Aliens more than anything. Yeah, something tells me they were inspired by Aliens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUExpobw3tw
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2023 09:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 10:14 |
|
|
It's always so weird to me that the commanders are ground units in this game. This is an SC1 problem too, to be fair; though the severity varies. I did like that SC1 ramped up the ante with heroes - Raynor climbs the entire terran tech tree until he's important enough to be a battlecruiser. No such luck for Warfield, though he's cutscene-only. I sorta assumed he'd be more like Duke or Mengsk where he doesn't get his hands dirty at all or if he does it's in an overwhelming vehicle.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2023 08:42
|
|