Nazulu said:
Devoting more attention to just one side doesn't automatically mean the story will be more interesting. In fact, I hate the new Terran story line since it's so cliche' it hurts.
Cliches are not automatically bad. Hell Starcraft 1's story was incredibly cliche; the revolutionary becomes the dictator, the bad guys are in the strongest position at the end of the second part, the exiles teach the main society the error of their ways, etc. etc.
I haven't played all those games you mentioned but I'm pretty sure they had more than one race campaign, didn't they?
Dawn of War: Space Marine Campaign, nothing else.
Red Alert 2 - Yuri's Revenge: Allied and Soviet, just like in the base game. No Yuri campaign.
Halo Wars: UNSC campaign, no chance to play as the Covenant besides multiplayer.
If I'm going to spend $100 on a fucking RTS game then I would like a sample of all races in the campaign. It's not difficult at all, if they want to fit in more story then put in more missions or make them bigger, or you could just continue it in a bloody expansion.
They already fit a Protoss mini-campaign into WoL. And considering their approach it would have been very-fucking-difficult. They already put the upgrade and research features into the Terran Campaign, and now you're asking them to throw in the Zerg's RPG-style system too?
Blizzard decided "Hey, instead of just cutting most of the content out let's really pull out all the stops here, and make each campaign unique and different." And believe it or not that takes a lot of time and effort. A standard RTS has thirty missions, so that means each race only gets 10 missions each. So at most you'd get maybe 3 research choices, 6 upgrades for units, and maybe 2 mercs. Kerrigan's leveling up in Heart of the Swarm would be pathetic; it wouldn't make any real difference so why put it in if you don't have the time to really make the choices matter. And Legacy of the Void's diplomatic feature....well you'd need at least 3 missions at the end to wrap the story up, and two to introduce everything at the start. So that leaves five missions to handle diplomacy. Considering that in order to make it mean something some choices will lock you out of others, basically you'd only get three real choices.
Now your solution was to add in more missions, at which point I have to ask you what the fuck you think a full game is? Because WoL already had 45 minutes of pre-and-ingame rendered cutscenes, full voice overs, detailed models for the inbetween mission segments, branching mission tree, and 29 missions. Believe it or not it actually takes a lot of work to create all those things even after you've created the engine and finalised the multiplayer component; you have to create a script, go through several drafts, sketch designs for single-player exclusive elements, work on level design, decide what you want to do with the level, design and create it, test it to see if it does what you want, take it back to the design phase and make alterations to it, take it back to the testing phase, spend hours looking for things that slipped through the design phase, fix them, take it back to testing to make sure it's fun to play, modify it, then complete it. And that's just one level. In the grand scheme of things you also have to make sure that no one segment of the game greatly overshadows the rest of it.
So making a good campaign takes a lot of time and effort that you don't seem to realise or appreciate. It took them years to make just one campaign of 29 missions connected by a system of buying upgrades, mercs and using research points to develop new technology while being able to talk to major characters inbetween missions with full voice over work as well as a mini-protoss campaign. The only way they could have put the other two races campaigns in as well would be to either drastically reduce the Terran campaign and cut a lot of the extra units and features for it as well as what they were planning for hte Zerg and Protoss, or to give the Zerg their full 30 missions and the Protoss their full 30 missions, bringing the total count of missions for hte game to 89 fucking missions. In case this hasn't been drilled into your skull, that would be three times the effort put into one game then any other RTS company puts into their campaigns.
Is any of this getting through to you? You either cut out features or you ask Blizzard to do three times the work of their compiters just to please you.
