Starcraft 2 HotS

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Teaos
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

Post by Teaos »

Hacked?

And to be fair, all I really expected was nicer graphics and some cool new units. If they changed to much of the game play I would be annoyed it wasnt starcraft anymore.
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

Post by Tyyr »

No, not hacked, just old. After I finished the single player campaign I just left it. Much like Diablo 3. Stupidly I put an authenticator on the account because I guess I had delusions about D3 being better than it turned out to be. I didn't think anything of it when I reset my phone and put Cyanogen mod on it. However that wiped out the authenticator too.

They can evolve the gameplay and it still be Starcraft. My problem is that it is a straight up reskin of the gameplay of Starcraft. Even from something I just wanted more of, Sim City, I still expected something new to be added besides the graphics.
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

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Ah I never got authenticators, I figure if someone really wants to hack my account go for it. The risk is pretty low and my account was never that flash.
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

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Tyyr wrote: They can evolve the gameplay and it still be Starcraft. My problem is that it is a straight up reskin of the gameplay of Starcraft. Even from something I just wanted more of, Sim City, I still expected something new to be added besides the graphics.
To be fair that didn't bother me much. (Only speaking singleplayer WoL here, not yet played the second). It had enough new units and scripted missions to keep it interesting while still being Starcraft. When I buy starcraft I expect starcraft so no problem here. The gameplay works beautifully, no need to change it dramatically imho.


My main problems were that they turned an epic battle between empires and factions into.....a bloody soap opera. "At the heart it is a story about a boy and a girl!" quote storyguy from blizzard. Come again please? Prior to WoL Raynor and Kerrigan didn't have anything going so where does THAT come from?

What happened to the Magistrate, the cerebrate and the Executor? You know they guys you have been playing the whole bloody first game? Oh well, they were inconvenient so we just retconned them out of the storyline.....What?

In Starcraft 1 it was all about backstabing, political maneuvering and everyone fighting for survival......WoL: "I am fighting against Mengsk...but don't know really why....but that's okay because I am just a bloody mercenary raining death and destruction upon random targets like a bloody terrorist because in the end....all I really want is my girl back. You know...the girl I once shared a telepathic flirteaous pun with but with whom nothing else happened much. Yeah...she definitely is digging the Raynor for some reason....or another.....is she even single? Game wasn't to clear about her marital status.

(Mind you, that would have been hilarious....Raynor freeing Kerrigan from the Zerg, walking with her into the sunset....only for Random Space Marine #452334 to walk by and be all "Oh how I missed you darling. Welcome back! :twisted: )
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

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At the heart it is a story about a boy and a girl!
No, it's the story of how lives and progress are crushed by the powerplay of egotistical people. It's about how a society, burdened with a long history of dogma and bigotry destroys itself rather than face challenges to its traditions.

The Zerg are a tool through which Stacraft examines the cultural failings of the Terrans and the Protoss. The Overmind had only one way to act, by the way it had been engineered by the Xel'Naga it had to kill them, and it had to go after the Protoss. Zergified Kerrigan is just on a rampage to satisfy her sense of betrayal and injustice, but to borrow a phrase, she wouldn't know what to do with the galaxy after she got it.
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

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I agree, the line was from Metzen I think. A definite face-palm moment for me! Sometimes I have a hard time believing that this are really the same guys who wrote the first one, the drop in quality is that huge.

Regardless, the dumbing down of the franchise is most obvious if one just looks at the briefings. The briefings in Starcraft were incredibly long with a huge amount of text. To be fair that was mostly because the briefings were also needed for the story progression since scripted missions were not as prominent, nevertheless, detailed dialogues and well thought out narritive got replaced by cliché one liners.

Honestly I don't get it. Starcraft 1 was real quality and hugely successful. Why dumb it down so much? Just to cater more to 3-8 year olds? Seems to me writing a bit of quality narrative is rather cheap to do, so even if most people skip the dialogues etc. you do not loose overly much?

As I said...I don't get it. Sometimes I think it's just that I got older/smarter so new games often fall flat but then I go back to verify and most of the time the old stuff really IS just better, storywise, which is ironic since most of the games are from an era were videogames were not really viewed as a narrative device.
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

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This is Blizzard. The story services the game, if they feel like pretending there's a story this week. They've never been particularly good story tellers right to the point where right now This is Starcraft:Burning Legion.
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

Post by Tholian_Avenger »

I'll second that, the story was just an after thought to the multiplayer, imo.
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

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Frankly I've never been that into Starcraft's story but the fact that Blizzard is writing the same damn one over and over irritates me. No, what pisses me off is exactly one thing, fucking Raynor RESCUING Kerrigan. Sarah Kerrigan, queen bitch of the galaxy, ruler of the zerg, probably the single most powerful individual in the entire fucking galaxy, and some hick sherriff/terrorist has to come save her. It's like he's fucking kryptonite. When he's not in the cutscene she's kicking Zeratul through columns, riding zerg like Muadib, and killing heralds of Archemond... I mean Amon. When Jim shows up she's suddenly needy and wilting. She gets rescued. I mean... FUUUUUCK. The end of HotS and... GAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
Jim, fuck female empowerment, Raynor has to destroy Mensk's Psi thingy so that Sarah can kill him. The culmination of her entire character arc... and she can't even kill one regular human without Jim Raynor saving her, AGAIN (FUCK YOU WoL). Are. You. Fucking. Kidding me? I want to find whatever asshole decided to take the story this way and kick him right in his junk for it. I mean fucking seriously. All you have to do is have Mensk light the thing up then have Sarah grit her teeth and march towards him anyways. Labored, straining, teeth gritted, her skin blistering where the dampner is fighting her but she still keeps coming until *schlick* bone spear through the controller, emitter shuts down, and now she kills him. If you absolutely have to have him there have Raynor come in as Kerrigan is going all "Scanners" on Mensk. You can still force your love story on us but Sarah gets to have her revenge without having Jim let her take it.
You make one of the strongest female characters in gaming in Starcraft then when Starcraft 2 rolls around you make her need the big strong man for emotional support, validation, and physical protection. He's a fucking hick! He's a normal every day redneck from the backwoods and she's the fucking Queen of Blades, the beating heart of the Zerg swarm who controls it through shear force of will and the fact that she can kill any member of it who would challenge her and some asshole who'd be fucked if a hydralisk decided it didn't like him is rescuing HER?!!?!

That'll teach me to watch a Youtube cutscene rip. After seeing the conclusion I'm not sure I even want to play the fucking game now.

In a slightly less nerd-ragey moment I have to say that the reason Blizzard stories never draw me in that much is I have very little to do with them. In other games you either play the role of the protagonist or your created character is the protagonist. In Blizzard games you're just the muscle. While the protagonists have their cutscenes and glory you facilitate them getting there. You're an NPC. Add in Blizz's lack of originality and bleh. I got into Sarah Kerrigan as a character but everything else was just boring. Then SC2 seems intent on undoing Sarah's character and chickifying her again. It's like they realized they were about to have someone with a vagina take over the story and realized they needed someone with a cock to let her do her thing so that the order of things wouldn't be upset.
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

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To be fair I found the Warcraft story line rather deeply involved spanning a wide time frame and many characters. They also managed to hold it together through years and multiple games and books with only very minor retconning that only die hard nerds notice. Its only from Cataclysum onwards they are fucking it up.
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

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Teaos wrote:To be fair I found the Warcraft story line rather deeply involved spanning a wide time frame and many characters. They also managed to hold it together through years and multiple games and books with only very minor retconning that only die hard nerds notice. Its only from Cataclysum onwards they are fucking it up.
You mean besides the whole Burning Crusade tentacle monster fuckup? Where they just reused old concept art for demons and called it dranei which are really just eredar or whatever.....

I seriously cannot remember all the details, all I remember is that they had to bend over backwards and come up with a mountain of bullshit to explain their fuckup away.....that's when I pretty much lost interest. The warcraft story isn't that complex and if most customers just playing it can keep track of it I see no reason why the creaters cannot.
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

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I never said they're bad, it's just you as the player are the hired help of the real protagonists. In an interactive medium it's rather annoying to have no real agency in the story.
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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

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The Dranei were a bit of a stretch, that was the main piece of retconning they did, but it was more to do with back story told in books rather than in game so most didnt notice.

Frankly I think Burning Crusade sucked. It should have beeen the final expansion, because anything after hells army is just anti climatical.
What does defeat mean to you?

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Re: Starcraft 2 HotS

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Tyyr wrote:Frankly I've never been that into Starcraft's story but the fact that Blizzard is writing the same damn one over and over irritates me. No, what pisses me off is exactly one thing, fucking Raynor RESCUING Kerrigan. Sarah Kerrigan, queen bitch of the galaxy, ruler of the zerg, probably the single most powerful individual in the entire fucking galaxy, and some hick sherriff/terrorist has to come save her. It's like he's fucking kryptonite. When he's not in the cutscene she's kicking Zeratul through columns, riding zerg like Muadib, and killing heralds of Archemond... I mean Amon. When Jim shows up she's suddenly needy and wilting. She gets rescued. I mean... FUUUUUCK. The end of HotS and... GAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
Jim, fuck female empowerment, Raynor has to destroy Mensk's Psi thingy so that Sarah can kill him. The culmination of her entire character arc... and she can't even kill one regular human without Jim Raynor saving her, AGAIN (FUCK YOU WoL). Are. You. Fucking. Kidding me? I want to find whatever asshole decided to take the story this way and kick him right in his junk for it. I mean fucking seriously. All you have to do is have Mensk light the thing up then have Sarah grit her teeth and march towards him anyways. Labored, straining, teeth gritted, her skin blistering where the dampner is fighting her but she still keeps coming until *schlick* bone spear through the controller, emitter shuts down, and now she kills him. If you absolutely have to have him there have Raynor come in as Kerrigan is going all "Scanners" on Mensk. You can still force your love story on us but Sarah gets to have her revenge without having Jim let her take it.
Way to necro an old thread I know but I only recently played it and couldn't really comment on it.

What Tyr wrote is something which a lot of others also pointed out but I don't really see it that way. Does it really matter that she needs someone to have her back from time to time? She's obviously not omnipotent, makes mistakes, is highly illogical and emotional which leads to those instances were someone get's a drop on her. But at that point she has done so much badassery, smaking Zeratul arround, the fight against Narud/Duran etc. etc. so I find it forgivable, that Mengsk get's one last drop on her, evenmoreso since he is reduced to a comic-book villain in SC2. Would it matter if Mengsk would have been a female? Would it matter if Raynor was? Would we see it the same way if Kerrigan was a male? Personally I don't care and I don't quite understand why people are always so quick to point out race or gender. Seems a tad bit oversensitve to me.

The far bigger problem is that the writing is inconsistent as hell. If one goes by her actions she is the worst, in human form or as zerg. Seems the Zerg didn't do nearly as much to her as we are led to believe, she always was a murdering pyochopath obviously. But then Blizzard tries to sell her as...I don't know.....good hero? I mean having an identy crisis is one thing, being borderline schizophrenic quite another imho. (Best shown on Char, in the blink of an eye she kills a wounded human who is no threat to her out of spite while letting some others escape. Psychobitch much?)

The same inconsistency is true for her power-levels. At one time she is almost godlike, smacking Zeratul arround like a child, killing fucking Godzilla (aehm..ancient) on Zerus and Duran. At other times a simple bullet to the head seems to be enough to kill her.

The funny thing is, the artefact which almost brings her down was, originally, in the leaked ending video (which proved to be NOT a fake.....more the shame) a controll chip Mengsk had her implanted with without her knowing. Now obviously Blizzard figured out how stupid that was and changed it to the artefact, which creates a whole other set of problems (like nonsensical dialogue: "Do you really believe I'd have kept an animal like you close to me without kind of insurance policy?" Ah what? He just got the artefact like a few weeks ago, or that first the artifact makes her human again, now it kills. Does it came with different settings or what?....) and illustrates pretty much that they just don't know anymore what they are doing over there and stumble from one storyhole to the other.

Tyyr wrote: That'll teach me to watch a Youtube cutscene rip. After seeing the conclusion I'm not sure I even want to play the fucking game now.
Well the thing is....as stupid and anger-inducing the story is, if you stop for 1 minute and think about it - the game itself is pretty good, like all Blizzard games. Very polished, smooth gameplay (a bit heavy on scripted missions imho but that is down to taste) and very very entertaining, if you manage to deactivate brain as soon as cutscenes play and you just enjoy the ride without much reflecting on it.

I had next to no expactations storywise for HotS, after the huge disappointment that was WoL, and since I already expected the story to be written by and for retards I was able to enjoy the brillant game (still one of the best RTS imho) much much more this time round.
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