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NewMars posted:On a similar note as regards scale, it was already happening in brood war and definitely got amped up in between SC1 and SC2, but in the original, the confederacy was 13 planets. And seven of those god mulched! The Dominion in this is implied to be dozens, likely well over a hundred. ChaosDragon posted:So Mar Sara was terraformed by Kel-Morian Combine which was a intact political organization? These two bits together really highlight something about SC2's writing that annoys me, aside from the really obvious issues it'll have. SC1's relative minimalism worked strongly to its advantage. We'd hear lots of names but little in actual detail, but used suggestively enough you were invited to imagine how to fill in the blanks on your own. The Confederacy was stretched thin, so the Sons of Korhal could operate. There were other human governments doing their own thing. The Koprulu Sector was still large and terrifying, with the zerg and protoss coming out of seemingly nowhere. Now it feels a lot more filled in, but in a way that's not informative. It makes me feel like I know less about the universe despite them saying more. It's just that they don't say much more that's useful to understanding.
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Jun 1, 2023 00:10
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The news network is put to some good use in just giving us an idea that there's actually a society out there where things Jim does are having an effect, and will have some good moments. They do overplay that one joke, though.
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Jun 3, 2023 17:06
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Szarrukin posted:I still wonder why Blizzard decided to ignore basically everything that happened in Brood War except hybrids. The spoilered bit is the most sequel-friendly part of Brood War, really. Its ending was... pretty brutally final for a lot of people and could be reasonably interpreted as not having much room to go forward for anyone but the Queen Bitch of the Universe.
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Jun 3, 2023 22:43
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Mostly I choose to believe that Kate Lockwell is related to someone Mengsk can't afford to piss off (yet) and she knows it.
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Jun 4, 2023 04:24
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Horner absolutely still thinks of himself as a disciplined military man, though. Hell, look how he dresses. No way he doesn't think of himself as a different brand of criminal than Tychus, a more respectable one who in a more just world wouldn't be a criminal - but Tychus still would be. People like Jim are also special exceptions.
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Jun 11, 2023 23:21
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We as viewers/players also know that Tychus's suit of power armor was made to be his "prison" carried with him wherever he goes, thanks to the opening cutscene. It's pretty safe to guess that he isn't being punished by being made permanently strong and sturdy, so something must be up about the suit itself other than being welded shut. Also I forgot to vote earlier. Firebats, because I feel bad leaving missions waiting that have some implication of mortal urgency (for someone, anyway) in the description, and it sounds like a lot of people are in danger there.
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Jun 12, 2023 02:36
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Sure, but even so that doesn't seem like meaningful enough for Mengsk to hold over Tychus's head like that while also letting him out of prison. It's not like nobody else anywhere in the sector could crack a suit open, if that's all that was going on.
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Jun 12, 2023 04:10
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Do they even mention Edmund Duke anywhere in the campaign? I cannot remember. I'm just assuming he got offed between games in some book, probably the same one that introduced Warfield.
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Jun 25, 2023 04:37
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Dang, I guess it's been just way too long since I last even glanced at Brood War. Well, rip in piss to a garbage dude, I guess I'm okay with throwing in Warfield.
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Jun 25, 2023 04:56
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Viruses being involved in infestation isn't that wild an idea, really. Some kind of retrovirus is probably their main means of twisting an infested lifeform to mutate zerg-y bits, even if it's delivered via parasites. But it's also never really explained in that way until this point, to my knowledge, so it feels like a bit of a leap. Plus the zerg just haven't done it this way before, and everyone's talking about it like it's known. Unless it was explained and presented in a book between the games, in which case, bleh, drat expanded universes.
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Jul 3, 2023 03:07
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BlazetheInferno posted:It really is nice of Tosh to not only point out where each and every Altar is on the map, but actively maintain vision of them for us, so we can see which one is being revealed. Hey, he clearly wants the jobs actually done and isn't pulling some bullshit "test" on us or whatever with them. He knows where things are, just doesn't have the means to take care of them, so it's a good deal he's offering.
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Jul 15, 2023 05:29
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Yeah, "artifact radiation" would read a little less dumb if someone was just like, "okay, this strange radiation these artifacts emit..." "artifact radiation, gotcha, get on with it."
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Jul 22, 2023 23:51
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painedforever posted:Why does Tosh put Raynor's name in quotes? It's a funny thing to emphasize. I'm guessing it's supposed to call back to how Zeratul spoke to him, but it sounds more like he's saying that isn't his real name. Yeah, it's just emphasizing that Zeratul is the only one who's called him that so far. Nobody else calls him by his full name. It's a formality that only the protoss engage in with him.
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Jul 23, 2023 21:34
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Nostalgamus posted:SC1 Xel'Naga: This was, indeed, one of the saddest things to me. The Xel'Naga were depicted as very powerful but with a bit of a hubristic streak that was their downfall, at least in the SC1 manual, and the hints the game dropped of some still being around who had gotten pissed and determined to see the idiot project through was real promising to me. SC2, playing it dead straight: "Ah, a prophecy of the Xel'Naga!"
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Jul 29, 2023 15:02
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"Let's play god!"
"oh no"
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I know ships travel strictly at the speed of plot in Starcraft, but I figure Jim's got plenty of time in transit to other missions to stare at a rock for a day or two.
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Aug 1, 2023 15:39
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ilmucche posted:Ponder responsibly is the protoss mission yeah? That's what I figure, assuming the vote options are in the same order the missions are listed at the end of the update.
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Aug 13, 2023 03:42
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BisbyWorl posted:drat who could have seen this coming Zeratul, obviously. edit: haha bad snipe, poll results at the end of the previous page
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Aug 15, 2023 13:48
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It's running into a stakes and scale issue again, too. It came up earlier on how between games the Terran Dominion in particular and the Koprulu Sector in general seem to have massively inflated in numbers. Everyone acting like there's at least an order of magnitude more settled planets and people than just four years ago. And also, we're now conflating this chunk of the galaxy with not just the entirety of the galaxy but suggestions of it being the entirety of the universe. Things has ramped up from the Zerg being a terrifying but basically local problem that could snowball into something greater to "no it's about literally everything now." The most important thing possible is happening here and it never manages to feel earned to me.
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Aug 19, 2023 16:47
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Aces High posted:was this one of the first big AAA games to do this kind of stakes raising? The only earlier series I can think that had such high stakes was Mass Effect, but that was the baseline endgame scenario from the outset, and they were careful to keep it relegated to only the Milky Way galaxy I'd say "probably not" but I also can't really think of any particular examples in the AAA space that go for this specifically? But you just get it all the time in any narrative where the threat suddenly becomes one to the biggest world-unit the characters and setting are concerned with, be that the literal planet they live on or more. Threats that span the world, the galaxy, the planes, all humanity, whatever. Like Persona 4 going from "weird local murder mystery that touches an alternate magic realm" to "this fog will consume the world if you don't stop the bad guy," or the original Dune novels going from "stagnant empire that lasts millennia" to "humanity must spread and change to survive a vaguely-defined but more immediate Terrible Threat" by the end.
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Aug 19, 2023 17:07
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Lt. Danger posted:the Overmind is the collective consciousness of all zergs Well, except how it pretty much has to be a separate entity given how it's written about and the consequences of destroying it. Everything treats it as a top-down master instead of an emergent property of the swarm, including how it can be personally slain and a new collective gestalt does not naturally reemerge but is instead depicted as something that has to be deliberately created and imposed.
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Aug 19, 2023 23:20
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The... manual you said to disregard?
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Aug 20, 2023 00:56
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Kith posted:The sooner we do Hanson's missions, the sooner we can get rid of her teased romantic subplot and get back to the TRUE romantic focus of the story: Mr. Hill and his mercenary friends. Yeah. I always seem to go to wrap up Hanson's stuff first. They feel like an early mission chain for this story, dealing with the immediate fallout of the renewed Zerg invasion mentioned right at the start. Learning who we're fighting for (in the moral sense, not literal), before diving into the meat of the anti-Dominion action. Also I think they're firmly Okay but kind of underwhelming missions so I like getting them out of the way.
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Aug 20, 2023 18:23
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Someday I might do my own Bad Choices playthrough (even if... certain writing issues tend to try to neuter that), but for now we've got no reason not to help Tosh. "Oh no, he's spooky and weird," and that's... that's the extent of it. We're all terrorists according to the Dominion so anything Nova says must be taken with a battlecruiser's load of salt.
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Aug 21, 2023 17:33
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These are the "right kind" of convicts, Tychus isn't. Horner's basically being classist.
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Aug 28, 2023 00:27
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Warmachine posted:Ok. I'll say it. I really wish they'd called it something with a different acronym because I am perpetually confusing it with the SC2 Zerg campaign name, though.
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Sep 14, 2023 22:14
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SirSamVimes posted:Tychus' line reads in all of this mission are all great. Tychus is basically the only person having fun with anything at all in this campaign, and it shows.
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Sep 23, 2023 14:46
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The return of the UED, corrupted by another evil Xel'naga who was hiding from all the others. That, or it's now a RPG based off of the tabletop rules
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Sep 25, 2023 00:29
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GunnerJ posted:Starcraft with a Dawn of War: Dark Crusade style strategic map would be pretty amazing tbh. Just trying to Manifest this idea into the universe Having just recently replayed Rise of Legends which also had a Risk map for the campaign, gods yes. I still like RoL but it's slow and very... flawed. And I can only play Dark Crusade so many times. I need more Risk map RTSes that aren't DoW: Soulstorm.
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Sep 25, 2023 01:59
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It doesn't even really have to be a brilliant plan, so much as a lucky one among potentially many. Tychus is pretty much just an opportunistic shot at Kerrigan by assuming Raynor would be unable to keep from getting himself involved, which isn't a bad bet on Mengsk's part. Raynor's good at making stupid poo poo work and getting his rear end in and out of ugly situations. Resource-wise, it's a fairly light commitment compared to the main plan of Have Lots Of Guns.
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Sep 25, 2023 22:40
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Well that too, but you don't bother with even this minor effort unless you think something might actually come of it.
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Sep 25, 2023 23:24
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Regalingualius posted:I forget, was the Confederacy basically a democracy in name only (that was actually ruled by the oligarchs), or did they not even bother with the pretense? Because to the average Dominion citizen, all Mengsk really did was redistribute power almost solely to himself. According to the fan wiki, the former. Though extremely thinly-veiled. There was a senate of elected representatives from the planets of the Confederacy and a council which in theory cooperated with the senate but was not actually elected and thus not accountable to the people in any fashion. (Nothing on how the council members were appointed, though.) The council was apparently mostly an appendage to the "old families" of Tarsonis who originally ran the colony ships that shoved all the undesirables off to Koprulu. Council and senate were both seen as wildly corrupt and people generally knew all the power was in the oligarchs' hands. Then the Confederacy was decapitated at Tarsonis and Mengsk was the most prominent force on the spot. And during a crisis, people love a strongman.
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Sep 30, 2023 23:56
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bladededge posted: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 absolutely heard this justification as well, though of course it's been so long that I also can't recall exactly where. At the very least, it's a shared hallucination.
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Oct 7, 2023 14:45
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Protoss: "We already stress the warp network to its peak when setting up a base and deploying a force. The damage to subspace takes ages to heal and constant micro-warps would just make it worse, rendering the area dead to the warp network and causing catastrophic breakdowns in-" Terrans: "LOL superstitious idiots, we're not gonna be here still in five days even, let's turn reality to swiss cheese"
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Oct 10, 2023 20:59
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Alternatively, "Safe warp use requires psi-calibration that 98% of you don't even have senses for!" I don't know, I just like making up dumb excuses to patch such oddities sometimes.
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Oct 10, 2023 21:05
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BlazetheInferno posted:This is just another one of those situations where I'd love to take a character from the game, and sit them down in front of the game itself just to see how they'd react to it (and how they'd play). He just spends the whole time screaming about Space OSHA violations.
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Oct 10, 2023 21:19
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Ah yes, Mr. Raynor, you and your sterling career as a Marshal all those years ago... those four years ago. I know it's just harping on it at this point but even the little throwaway lines feel like they were written for a story where at absolute minimum the ~12 real years between game releases was also the time span that passed in-universe. And yeah this mission was a big nothing. Even without the Hercules, you just build a few extra Medivacs and do the same things.
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Oct 14, 2023 06:17
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It helps a bit that Jeff Grubb is, while not an amazing author, pretty good at taking disparate messes of lore and gameplay elements and disjointed stories, and drawing something relatively strong and consistent out of them. His Warcraft and Magic: the Gathering novels were also consistently among the best, even when he was working with stuff that didn't have a particularly coherent central plot in mind when originally devised. (Low bar, I know. But still.)
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Oct 16, 2023 17:02
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MagusofStars posted:I legitimately can't tell what the designers want us to think about Valerian. What portrayal are they even going for here? Valerian has powerful "smart idiot" energy. I actually like him as a character because of that, even if he comes with just an impossible number of plot holes. The comm exchange between him and Jim, the whole, "I can see why my father wants to kill you," bit is genuinely funny to me. Raynor gets to enjoy a moment of pettiness that feels so good and we get to see that while Valerian has an ego, it's one that can tolerate a little bit of bruising. One of those rare moments that's actually kind of well-done sandwiched between nonsense and cliche.
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Oct 22, 2023 07:16
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There's a LP of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified from rather a while ago where a QA guy from the company is on hand, and explains a lot how that poor game got chopped up and reassembled constantly through development. And one of the big, big issues the team had to work around later in development is that so much of the dialogue had already been recorded and they could not expect to get the actors back in to change anything despite massive rewrites after that point. So they had to use what they had and sometimes it got jammed in pretty awkwardly. The Bureau obviously had a more troubled development than a lot of games do, but it's a good insight into just how it can happen.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:31
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Poil posted:A XCOM shooter? Do your guns have stormtrooper accuracy? Your squadmates do when they're picking their own targets, and get better if you give them orders. I actually really like the game, it's hard to call it Good but I had a ton of fun. It needed more budget and more time in the oven without getting jerked around on what it's supposed to be doing.
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Oct 23, 2023 22:24
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