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I've been reading JohnKiltrane's SC1 playthrough and this thread, and I've finally just caught up on both. Starcraft is in the top three of my favorite games of all time. Staying up until 3 am slamming down Bawls and doing LAN parties are golden memories. Used to get all the internet friends together around XMas every year to do 12 Days of Starcraft, the custom map where you get to hear all the unit VA's doing impressions of drunken singing. I even did decently at the ladder, in those ancient days pre-Youtube at the dawn of the modern internet. Built ridiculous fanfictiony UMS maps that I still somehow have in old backups. Fairly proud of one I built that was modeled after C&C's commando missions with a lot of custom edits. But the plot was the real reason I was there. I see repeated in both these threads fairly frequently the sentiment that the plot of Starcraft 1 is just okay. Hard disagree. Maybe if you just read a summary of events that might seem to be the case, but when you don't know what's going to happen next it comes off as an expertly-done sequence of reveals expanding what you thought you knew about the world. At the time Starcraft was new, the PC gaming space consisted of a lot of plot and atmosphere-heavy games like Baldur's Gate, Fallout and Thief, and Starcraft slotted in just fine next to them. Spoilers for JohnKiltrane's thread kind of: 1. You open the plot with space rednecks fighting the good fight against both a corrupt government and mysterious alien invaders. You join up with an incredibly smooth-talking, charismatic rebel leader, get that sinking feeling as you gradually figure out he's a very different man from what he portrays himself as, and then the gutpunch at the end of the campaign. 2. You open the Zerg campaign, and holy crap these weird mindless animals are way, way more complicated than they seemed before. There's some kind of alien god proclaiming in biblical tones at you, there's actual intelligent generals bickering and advising and generally putting motivation to what the weird animals are up to, and things just ramp up nonstop as the Protoss try and then fail to outmaneuver you ending in the scale of the world expanding dramatically as you attack their homeworld. Everything you thought you knew about them from their glimpse in the other campaigns is turned on its head. 3. You open the Protoss campaign, and holy crap these hyper-advanced, mindgame-playing alien psychic ninja masterminds who seem like they should have easily crushed everyone else turn out to be incredibly, incredibly dysfunctional, their own worst enemies, and the one (young, smart, slightly awkward but very determined) leader who might have a chance to turn things around is busy spending all of his time fighting against the gross old boomers. Everything you thought you knew about them from their glimpse in the other campaigns is turned on its head. Not only is the writing well-done in both the larger and the subtle points, but Starcraft also has some absolutely top-notch S+ class acting to go with all of it. Everyone they cast is a professional at the top of their game, and it's unfortunate that a screenshot LP doesn't quite get that across. More than one person has pointed out some of the highlights. In SC1's Terran campaign, Raynor just has this laid-back biker dude vibe for most of the campaign, which he manages to somehow maintain a hold of right until mission 10. "Aw, to hell with you!". You can feel the man practically vibrating with frustration and anger. Mengsk's speech at the end of the campaign is chef's kiss uplifting propaganda. Mengsk in general is oily smooth, a believable demagogue. Tassadar is awkward, young and earnest. Zeratul is a cynical, slightly mocking, but responsible leader and his lines come across that way. You believe Kerrigan when she declares herself "pretty much Queen %&$#( of the Universe". Aldaris is living smug self-assurance. There are no bad actors in the entire cast list. I can still remember most of these lines in my head exactly as they were spoken twenty five years ago. Then we come to Starcraft 2. I remember nonstop praise for the campaign back in the day (was it really thirteen years ago? Wow. I don't like being old.), and I'm glad to see that I'm not crazy after all here and everyone else acknowledges just how godawful everything about SC2's campaign plot is. Wings of Liberty starts by just ignoring everything that happened in the final Brood War mission - Jimmy is pining for someone who was never actually his girlfriend and who murdered his best friend, we're on Mar Sara despite it getting glassed way back at the end of Rebel Yell, Mengsk is an uncharismatic buffoon who couldn't convince a fish to breathe water. We're supposed to believe that after Kerrigan wiped out the entirety of the Dominion, UED and Protoss militaries they rebuilt this much in a couple years. Zeratul is a generic Mysterious Mystical Warrior Man who chases prophecies and speaks in faux-Important. It's a steep downhill slope from here, and gets even steeper right before the end of WoL and never recovers. Point I'm getting at is that making Raynor an alcoholic couldn't be character assassination, they assassinated the characters of everyone from the first game already with this dialogue and this lazy plot. The upcoming Zeratul missions are probably the worst example of this in WoL. If this ever gets on the LP archive I hope some of the lore posts expanding on *why* they picked up a good ball and fumbled it so bad wind up included. bladededge fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jul 24, 2023 |
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Jul 24, 2023 17:41
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Kith posted:Oh, they're loving furious about it. Speaking as someone who spent a lot of time in the sc1 and war3 editors, and gave up on the sc2 editor almost immediately between the complete lack of any kind of helpfile and a EULA which read basically as "anything you make with this is Activision's property, not yours", I would be interested in this essay.
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Jul 27, 2023 04:33
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anilEhilated posted:Prophecies are almost always Bad Storytelling, at least when played straight. They're almost as much of a red flag for hack writing as Comic Book Deaths
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Jul 31, 2023 20:49
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JohnKilltrane posted:Also my big beef with prophecies is that they ruin characters. "I'm doing this because it's what the prophecy said to do" is the most boring possible motivation a character can have unless you're playing with it somehow. The prophecy kind of feels like they shoehorned it in because they couldn't think of any other way to get Raynor and Zeratul to set aside their differences with Kerrigan and try to work with her instead and like, really? You couldn't think of anything better? Frank Herbert and Dune did to prophecies as a plot device in the 1960's what Evangelion did to the accidental anime falling grope plot device in 1997. Anybody using these plot devices after they have been so thoroughly and brutally deconstructed cannot expect to be taken seriously.
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Aug 2, 2023 04:43
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Voted for Jailbreak, because I've changed my mind, you need a break for something fun before more The (Character) Assassination of Zeratul by the Coward Activision-Blizzard. It is a legit cool mission, I just wish it was longer. Voting for the siding with Tosh version, of course.
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Aug 7, 2023 14:33
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I think the thread is about five layers deep in Actuallys right now, can we get a sixth
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Aug 8, 2023 21:37
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Kith posted:The SuperNova Men's Club dancing hologram uses Nova's model, and it's implied that the SuperNova dancer is, in fact, Nova herself. There's also the Hologram Dancer unit that was added later and uses Nova's model and has some... animations. Chris Metzen got that big early-00's-internet obsessed with his OC vibe. Wonder if he was an SA lurker.
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Aug 11, 2023 16:06
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megane posted:Accurate and thorough overview of precisely how badly SC2 dunked SC1's writing into the gutter Did we start playing some old Yahtzee games at some point because It Hurts
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Aug 12, 2023 05:25
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So what our collection of distinguished media scholars has concluded is that the problem with Activision games is that they all have endlessly escalating threats forever which make any actual victory irrelevant. Or in other words, we're all reading Metzen's DBZ fanfic. 
bladededge fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 16:38
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A greenhorn defends their base with bunkers. A veteran defends their base with bunkers barricaded behind supply depots and supported by siege tanks. A master immediately lifts off and moves to an island or inaccessible mountain at the start of the game and techs straight to cloaked wraiths on offense while the opponent wastes time on things like scouting or building a ground army. /S kind of but I tried that more than once back in ye olde dayes and it worked a non-zero number of times.
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Aug 17, 2023 03:20
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I feel that in the hands of a better writing team, and as part of a different story, this mission would have been superb. Let's look at what's actually going on here. The entire rest of the universe is implied to have been literally consumed and eaten, a combination of the 'grey goo' and 'superpredator' apocalypses. Your army here is literally all that's left, and everyone is coming together not to fight their way out of it, because that ship's long sailed, but to put together some kind of archive of their civilization's existence in the hopes that billions of years from now when life in the galaxy has died out and then repopulated, one of them will find it and know that they lived. While doing this they all see with the benefit of hindsight exactly how they got to this point - their own actions, performed in ignorance of the wider picture of things. That is heavy stuff. That is good stuff. This is some actual science fiction ideas in our ridiculous 'THE CORRUPTION' fantasy story. Unfortunately, this is Starcraft 2, where absolutely nothing was leading up to this, the scenario makes no sense, they had to severely retcon or ignore an entire other developed story to shove this in, and the superpredator is throwing dumb cartoon villain lines at them somehow, as if they know they're a final boss in a video game.
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Aug 19, 2023 16:20
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Jailbreak. Call Down the Thunder. Reap the Whirlwind.
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Aug 20, 2023 06:49
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It is hilariously blatant that the only thing Nova has going for her argument here is "pretty girl is pretty'. Even if we were in the timeline where Raynor was an imcreasingly dysfunctional alcoholic I can't see him having poor enough judgement to believe a word she says. Tosh's version of the mission is way more fun, too, I kind of wish it was longer. JohnKilltrane posted:Also Bisbyworl, I hate to nitpick but you actually missed part of the intermission here - you cut out one of the lines. At one point Raynor says something like "By accepting this mission prior to the Great Train Robbery, any individual Let's Playing this game, hereafter referred to as "Party A," is hereby obligated to terminate at least one (1) train with nuclear weapons when the Great Train Robbery is finally undertaken." It's a weird line and I never really understood why it was in the game until this LP. Crazy. Clearly this was just so obvious that he thought it went without saying. What kind of villain would have THE THUNDER available for Great Train Robbery and forget to use it? A monstrous one, that's what kind. Nukes also trivialize the difficulty should we decide to handle things ourselves in Hansen's final mission bladededge fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Aug 21, 2023 |
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Aug 21, 2023 19:22
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Cradok posted:In fairness to Blizzard here, loving nobody gets this right. Solar systems, galaxies and the universe are all used randomly and interchangeably in so many works that take place in space. Some stuff even gets planets and moons wrong. It's not. That. Hard! to get right. It makes me cranky when something is described as spanning multiple galaxies, or the whole universe. It's dumb. So dumb... Douglas Adams posted:Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen... My wife and I just finished watching the original Captain Harlock show from the 70's, and let me tell you, as great a storyteller as Leiji Matsumoto was, he had absolutely zero concept of how distances work in outer space. bladededge fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Aug 22, 2023 |
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Aug 22, 2023 02:59
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Xarn posted:This is the big one. I think the prices on the campaigns themselves are fine, but lol at giving blizz money. My Rubicon on ever giving activision my money again was Blitzchung in 2019, personally. There's such a cheesecake factory-sized menu of options with this company, though.
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Aug 22, 2023 19:21
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I mean, if someone with talent wants to do a drawing of Nova Good Girl Art like on the cover of a 40's pulp I'm not going to object.
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Aug 24, 2023 18:52
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That's basically how I interpreted it from the description block in the SC1 manual. Ghosts are using their powers to just be better at everything. Aim, reaction time, stamina, durability. It's why they can carry a heavy personal cloaking device instead of wearing heavy armor. Some obviously have more spectacular powers too, as when Kerrigan demonstrated the ability to read Raynor's surface thoughts when they met. There's a plot point about 'limiters' that the Overmind needs to get off her before she can psi storm - this suggests the thing with Spectres is that they don't have those limiters stopping them from using MIND GRENADES and that's why Nova is freaked out by them. It's a little disappointing that this wasn't developed more. Kerrigan can read people's thoughts. Surely she suspected what Arcturus was up to, who he really was. She followed orders anyway. There's more going on beneath the surface there. SC2 of course dropped that like every other interesting plot ball.
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Aug 26, 2023 14:32
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Natural 20 posted:Complaining about getting dominated by a leggy blonde in a skintight suit, smh. Knowing they're actual fash kind of kills the fun. You know, it is completely on-brand for Nova to object to Tosh using mind control, while employing mind control.
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Sep 2, 2023 14:43
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Nuke the Trains Now we have THE THUNDER we can use it in the two missions it's most fun to use in. I'm mostly looking forward to the nitty gritty takes on the Diamondbacks, actually. It is a very weird example of a unit gimmick that seems perfectly fine and usable, but somehow those situations where it might be usable never actually happen.
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Sep 3, 2023 04:11
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Haven is, besides Great Train Robbery, the most fun mission in the game for nukes, so I'm cool with that any time now. It'd be funny to see just how long we can put it off though.
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Sep 4, 2023 19:18
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Having bad things really happen if you don't take warnings of impending disaster seriously, Deus Ex HR style, might have improved the campaign in several ways, forcing the player to make hard decisions about what to prioritize. The Pondering chain's egregious unbalancing of the campaign progression wouldn't be egregious at all if while staring at the crystal a bunch of colonies got snacked by Kerrigan in her pursuit of biomass or whatever she's supposed to be up to. (I'm not sure what her goals are. Does the zerg faction have any right now?) That would require a larger number of missions, though. Also, the designers being willing for players to not necessarily see everything in their game, or in the worst case for players being able to actually fail the campaign or make it significantly harder with enough bad decisions.
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Sep 5, 2023 02:25
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Voting for Reuniting Matt with the missus. Because it is increasingly funny to me to just keep putting off saving the Haven colony as long as possible. Too bad Hanson has no reaction dialogue for it. Donny there of course is wildly incorrect, as Mengsk did in fact rebel while humanity was facing a possibly extinction -level threat from two alien species as well. Writers are in the ballpark of good parody there.
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Sep 10, 2023 05:44
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Just getting Dark Templar out early enough caused more forfeits than anything else, in my experience. Straight-to-DT build orders worked way more frequently than they had any right to back in '99. To be fair it was almost always against the kind of people that asked for a no-rush time. Do casual players still do that?
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Sep 11, 2023 03:05
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The most correct and appropriate smack talk is when you send a fleet of science vessels in to irradiate the opponent's entire Overlord stack and type out FOR SCIENCE!!!!!! right as the attack goes off. The exactly six !s are essential, for reasons lost to history.
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Sep 12, 2023 03:30
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Warcraft III custom maps were a golden era, gone too soon, never to be repeated. I'm happy that at least I was there.
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Sep 14, 2023 14:25
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FirstnameLastname posted:the lack of individual audio cue mixing options is one of the only weak points of sc2 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?
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Sep 16, 2023 14:08
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Voted for GIANT ROBOTS. Because the amount of time we've spent delaying Haven has gone past absurd into meh and then right smack into Absurd, Theatre Of. The writing hurts. So bad. Who is this panicked buffoon wearing the clothes of a calm, in-control, hyper-aware and brutally crafty politician? That tv script reads like an Onion article. Also, this stands out much more to me now in 2023 than it did in 2010, but the idea that you can present clear evidence of a charismatic demagogue explicitly and openly lying to people and it will result in their loyal believers turning on them... Haha. Hah. Suddenly I feel so very tired.
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Sep 17, 2023 04:08
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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. The UED is positioned as a major threat in Brood War precisely because they absolutely chumped the Zerg faction. Are the Brood Wars of the title not referring to zerg infighting? Kerrigan was still figuring out how to actually manage her newfound power when these guys pop out of a long long trip, steal a local fleet + the plans for how to build local Terran military hardware, recover some Mad Science, and then figure out how to use it as a weapon against her. Kerrigan is absolutely on the ropes for the second half of the expansion campaign and only comes out of it victorious by playing her old boss, the Protoss, and that lost little puppy Jimmy against both the UED and each other until she doesn't need them any more.
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Sep 18, 2023 21:10
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If we're talking about missed opportunities for a Brood War sequel I'd like to point out that the designers excellently set the stage for three entire new armies in the plot, each a combination of one of the existing armies, in a way that me of twenty years ago was sure was deliberate. Combined Terran/Protoss faction, Raynor's Raiders. Something different from the dark/high combined templar army Artanis was leading. Raynor starts the story not as a viewpoint character but a background force acting on the environment and thwarting plans in his burning quest for vengeance that other factions need to work around or respond to. Combined Terran/Zerg faction, Alexi Stukov. Blizzard has this whole sidestory being set up for literally years across map-of-the-month web maps + the Starcraft 64 exclusive mission. Where were they going with it? We'll never know now, but a fleshed out infested terran faction creating a bunch of mini-Kerrigans would have given the writers some fun toys to play with. Combined Zerg/Protoss faction, Duran and the hybrids, of course. Which were done dirty by this low effort Dark Voice nonsense. Would have worked better if the Xel'Naga stayed dead and gone and something completely new using their old tech had shown up, preferably with plenty of body horror and horror movie tropes. A rival species with less lofty goals but a more pragmatic mindset? Space is very big and we've set precedent that there are lots of aliens out there, this one could have been really alien Aliens.
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Sep 19, 2023 18:45
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Fajita Queen posted:I believe you guys are thinking about it far more than the writers intended, or likely even thought about it themselves This is the objectively correct answer to any questions about SC2's plot, but we're nerds and speculating is fun. There you go, Bisby, the thread finally let you have something to build at your starports.
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Sep 23, 2023 16:00
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MiddleOne posted:It would be funny if Haven just kept getting progressively more difficult the longer the player ignored it. Some sort of difficulty increase or scaling in delayed missions would make the campaign more interesting because it means you can no longer completely chump some missions with units the map has no counters for. Nukes completely destroy the difficulty of missions like Haven's Fall because there's almost no detection on that map. Difficulty scaling in RTS games can be very tricky to do well, though. See: Homeworld 2. Bringing in giant robots and battlecruisers to fight a couple roaches and zerglings is its own sort of funny, though.
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Sep 25, 2023 15:24
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anilEhilated posted:Even the prophecy, as lazy a device as it is, doesn't necessarily kill the story - you could always have Raynor go "screw it", kill Kerrigan (which would have the added bonus of him not going through a massive character retcon from SC1 to 2) and leave the galaxy left in a state of uncertainty that could build a proper atmosphere of a doomed battle against fate itself and a gradual discovery that prophecies can be misenterpreted or straight-up bullshit. Prophecies always kill stories unless your name is Frank Herbert. Hindsight yadda yadda but man. Even with the trashpile premises actiblizz started this story with, a competent writer still had many possible paths to salvage things, and none of them were taken. Kerrigan pulling off that sort of ridiculously convoluted plan would have been amazing. In-character, too.
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Sep 26, 2023 19:44
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Xarn posted:Just one? I can think of two massive differences between campaign zerg and skirmish zerg and I don't even play ladder. I assume you mean larva injection, but there is also the hero unit that can solo the whole loving campaign I am looking forward to the analysis of skirmish sc2 Zerg later in the thread, actually, because I never figured out how you're expected to play with those things thanks to Spoiler#1. It feels like a mechanic designed explicitly to stress people with attention issues by making your army inherently worse than the other two armies unless you have pro gamer levels of mental organization. Zerg was my main in BW, and looking back on it, I think it's because of the three they require the most high-level view and least constant attention to individuals. Zerg armies are about getting your economy into a state where you're just constantly throwing streams of green dots everywhere on the minimap. You don't need to pay attention to what the dots are doing a surprising amount of the time.
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Sep 28, 2023 00:02
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The Chad Jihad posted:This is why I think every RTS game needs a Stronghold "Crusader Trail" or Northgards "Conquest" mode. Series of themed skirmish matches of increasing difficulty, stuff like 2v2v2's, you with multiple weak allies, FFA but you're in the middle, standard 1v1 but the other guy has more resources, etc etc. In Northgard it's also coop-able and you've got upgrades that carry over to the next levels. You are describing Perfect Dark except an RTS instead of a console shooter. You are correct, it was lovely to have and would be great to see in more games with player v. player.
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Sep 28, 2023 18:47
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Getting Tychus and the Odin into the middle of Augustgrad isn't a plot hole, the nuclear-blasted desert planet Korhal being a big black and blue Trantor-type world city after only four years is a plot hole. Something that stands out about this mission is that I remember it as one of very few, possibly the only, missions in all of the SC2 trilogy which is a classic Blizz rts mission. The goal is to build a big army of your fightan mans and clear the board of all existing cpu structures. It's got the thing about towers and the Odin sneak attack but the core of mission is 'build base, attack-move all enemy bases'. I liked sometimes to intentionally let the Odin get destroyed just for a little added challenge, because like Bisby shows, if you prioritize targets during the sneak attack the mission can be very easy, even on Brutal.
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Sep 30, 2023 13:16
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You know what? I'm actually voting for Tyrador next. I think it's actually the most interesting of the three options for possible commentary.
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Oct 1, 2023 05:23
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Cythereal posted:Another cut ability from alpha. Originally, thors had to be build by SCVs and would leave behind wrecks that could be scavenged for minerals and gas by other players or rebuilt by Terrans. Huh. That's very Supreme Commander, that would have been kind of cool. Here I thought actiblizz's designers were deliberately ignoring what Relic and Gas Powered had been doing since Brood War's release. Imagining sc2 now with no queue limits and effectively infinite army waypoints.
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Oct 1, 2023 16:31
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Warmachine posted:Jim just needs to keep his opinions about acceptable losses to himself. So what if I'm treating marines like zerglings and sending them to their deaths in scores? "We lost a lot of good people there." Mind your business Jimmy. Starcraft makes a point of arguing that the typical Marine is not, in fact, a good person! So sending them carelessly to their deaths in droves is 👍 as far as we're supposed to be concerned.
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Oct 6, 2023 22:25
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aniviron posted: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. I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that eventually the game ends.
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Oct 7, 2023 01:12
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Kith posted:Fun Fact: Piercing the Shroud was originally not WoL's secret mission - all of the Pondering was. I vaguely remember from the time Actiblizz saying in an official way that the Zeratul mini campaign exists because otherwise it might have been quite a long time before you got to play as SC2 Protoss, due to the 'each campaign is a whole game with whole game production time' thing. Can't find my source. I figured it was Gamespot since they were my goto news site back then but it's not mentioned in their sc2 articles. Did I hallucinate it? Human memory is weird. I actually enjoy this mission, it's well thought out and has lots of interesting ways to tackle things in it. Too bad they couldn't use a psionic hybrid instead, though. Ultralisk with shields and psi-storm is right proper terror for an oldschool sc player. Also might have given some context to the chained ultras and the pygalisk. bladededge fucked around with this message at 13:19 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 13:06
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