More then likely not but during beta (smaller pool and I would guess a more difficult pool) I had a buddy lose his first 8 matches, he's pretty bad though. My only point was that if that is the case and you really are that bad don't give up. The match making system will find a good level of play for you.ark123 said:
Review: StarCraft II
- Thread starter Greg Tito
- Start date
"Playing all of StarCraft II after paying only 60 bucks feels like you are wearing a ski-mask and ripping off Blizzard at gunpoint. It's that good."
But it's not all of Starcraft II....I'm confused. Did Blizzard package all three stories at the last minute?
But it's not all of Starcraft II....I'm confused. Did Blizzard package all three stories at the last minute?
I didn't think the story was very good. I'll explain
1) It's LOADED with tropes.
From your standards "Why won't you die!" to "You haven't seen the last of me!" type bullshit lines we hear over and over and over.
2) It's got a lot of fluff
In the review he mentions how the missions work, one person gives you a mission and it's all sort of related to their story arc. The thing is, I don't fucking care about Tosh or my science officer. They're poorly developed I have little reason to feel emotion for them. Not to mention, their missions simply culminate to "Uh... Let's do this now!" There is little relation to their past missions storywise and while I found the MAIN story arc to be good, the side characters take up like 4/5ths of the game. That's WAY too much.
3) The story is just glued together
To me it just feels like a mission select screen with a bunch of cut scenes in between. The cut scenes often have little relation to what happened in the previous mission, and often just seem like they're there because they can be. There is no flow to the story. The narrative is jerky and seems entirely patched together. If I could summarize SC2 very briefly I would just say it's "Stuff happening".
That's about all I can summarize it as. Oh this character wants me to do this now for some random and contrived reason, alright.
4) Where am I?
What are the zerg and protoss doing while I'm just floating around in my ship? Why is Raynor so happy to just fuck around on various planets while the zerg gain ground every minute and Mengsk destroys earth? And lastly - this is a problem I find with a lot of anime as well - I want a sense of space.
Where the fuck am I? Where are the planets I'm going to? How long does it take to get there? What am I orbiting? How close are the Zerg and Protoss? What are they doing right now? What is mengsk up to? When I'm on a mission, why does it appear NOTHING else happens? The Zerg do not move, the Protoss do not give a shit and Mengsk is just chilling out.
IMO the story could be told WAY better.
1) It's LOADED with tropes.
From your standards "Why won't you die!" to "You haven't seen the last of me!" type bullshit lines we hear over and over and over.
2) It's got a lot of fluff
In the review he mentions how the missions work, one person gives you a mission and it's all sort of related to their story arc. The thing is, I don't fucking care about Tosh or my science officer. They're poorly developed I have little reason to feel emotion for them. Not to mention, their missions simply culminate to "Uh... Let's do this now!" There is little relation to their past missions storywise and while I found the MAIN story arc to be good, the side characters take up like 4/5ths of the game. That's WAY too much.
3) The story is just glued together
To me it just feels like a mission select screen with a bunch of cut scenes in between. The cut scenes often have little relation to what happened in the previous mission, and often just seem like they're there because they can be. There is no flow to the story. The narrative is jerky and seems entirely patched together. If I could summarize SC2 very briefly I would just say it's "Stuff happening".
That's about all I can summarize it as. Oh this character wants me to do this now for some random and contrived reason, alright.
4) Where am I?
What are the zerg and protoss doing while I'm just floating around in my ship? Why is Raynor so happy to just fuck around on various planets while the zerg gain ground every minute and Mengsk destroys earth? And lastly - this is a problem I find with a lot of anime as well - I want a sense of space.
Where the fuck am I? Where are the planets I'm going to? How long does it take to get there? What am I orbiting? How close are the Zerg and Protoss? What are they doing right now? What is mengsk up to? When I'm on a mission, why does it appear NOTHING else happens? The Zerg do not move, the Protoss do not give a shit and Mengsk is just chilling out.
IMO the story could be told WAY better.
Yes, yessity yes. I've been working on grabbing up achievements and playing it on hard mode for a couple of days now. As much as I enjoyed being able to take my time and build up bigger forces on Normal mode, Hard mode is much more of a challenge, and is very rewarding.Eruanno said:
As for Heart of the Swarm, I hope they post a release date at BlizzCon.
It may be a long time coming. Blizzard's publishing system and popularity engine are likely to keep the same 50 "kill the other player" arena marches up for years. Unless you plan on 'parties' with friends to play custom maps you aren't going to be enjoying any creative content for a while.Virgil said:
The issue is Blizzard has decided to control everything this round, and what made the original live so long in custom content was the very fact that so little was controlled. Personally I am going to play through my friends single player campaign at her house then wait for the necessary changes to BNet 2.0 / Blizzard philosophy to take place before I make a purchase.
LAN support isn't a must (to me but it is to others, anyway) but it is a good example of their totalitarian approach with the sequel and how it is hurting the long-term success of the game.
I love how people are complaining about no lan and having only part 1 of 3 for the story.
Would you have enjoyed the story more if it was 26 missions split between all 3 races? I sure wouldn't and I still enjoy the original game/expac. I loved getting all of the terrans story for this game, it felt very well done. Even if there was some cliche, it was very familiar and still different with a new spin on the game.
No Lan is such a laughable argument. Why do you want a feature that was available because internet was garbage 12 years ago? That is the only reason there was lan. You have BNET now. I had 5 people over at my house with a 3mbit internet service and no one lagged at all (4vsAI, one played league)
I love stories in games. Before this I played DoW2 and Chaos rising, I love the story there. The idea you can upgrade and load out different squads. This game is pretty close to that idea. The idea you get monies and spend monies on upgrades.
Would you have enjoyed the story more if it was 26 missions split between all 3 races? I sure wouldn't and I still enjoy the original game/expac. I loved getting all of the terrans story for this game, it felt very well done. Even if there was some cliche, it was very familiar and still different with a new spin on the game.
No Lan is such a laughable argument. Why do you want a feature that was available because internet was garbage 12 years ago? That is the only reason there was lan. You have BNET now. I had 5 people over at my house with a 3mbit internet service and no one lagged at all (4vsAI, one played league)
I love stories in games. Before this I played DoW2 and Chaos rising, I love the story there. The idea you can upgrade and load out different squads. This game is pretty close to that idea. The idea you get monies and spend monies on upgrades.
Then what are we to do for the 500 man tournaments which take place in rented out arenas where there is no internet connection without LAN?robinhood36 said:
Sure you and a handful of friends can play on B-Net, but for the tournament scene no LAN is a death sentence.
Move the locale, get your internets from somewhere. The tourney needs to evolve just as the game has now.AC10 said:
Even though it is only half way through the year, would you say that this is going to be one of your "top five of the year" when that time comes?Greg Tito said:
Oh please. Yes, there are *limited* applications for LAN support, but everyone's just being pissy because they can't pirate the game. That's pretty much why Battle.net is getting so much flak as well. It's no different than Steam, and I don't see people up at arms about them...paketep said:
I love B-Movies as well, but I watch those for a laugh and some cheesy fun. SC2 presents itself as DEAD. FUCKING. SERIOUS. It want's you to bask in the glow of it's story and character development, it WANTS you to invest in the story.Captain Placeholder said:I think John Funk stated it quite planely on Page 2. The entire story is a basic B-movie type stuff. And quite frankly I do not care. I love playing/watching a B-movie every now and again! If I wanted a game with story I would go play Dragon Age or Mass Effect. Also to me Gameplay > Story. I mean the game could have a shit story yet awesome gameplay. A great example of this is Bayonetta, excellent gameplay yet the story was confusing, stupid and just shitty IMO. I am sure people will dispute that, but still I am just trying to make a point.
StarCrafts story has always been a B-Movie, just enjoy it and do not pick at it
There are volumes of starcraft novels out there, there is a comic book planned, this is beyond "it's kind of corny and I can forgive it" because it's not supposed to BE like that. I wouldn't even call it B-Movie fare, the production value of this game is through the roof and it obviously uses A-List voice actors.
I can't treat SC2 like a B-movie and I can't forgive it for it's faults.
Yes i would. I felt the campaign was too long and only reason to draw it so much is so it added 1 unit / mission. Most of them had no actual relevance and could be compressed into much shorter story, up-keeping the integrity and actual dynamics.robinhood36 said:
I felt the campaign was a bit too much of a stretch and the plot was so ridiculous that i forced myself to finish it.
Even more so. After playing through Wings of Liberty i am not at all interested in playing the follow-ups. For me it's yet another game where Blizzard went too trigger happy on recreating the universe. Same thing happened with Warcraft when WC3 was so different from WC2 and WoW took the retconning of lore even further.
Apart from competitive multiplayer i find the game overly generic, the AI is very poor, the story is not intriguing, the gameplay is unchanged from SC1. For singleplayer experience i'd rather replay the original with expansion pack.
I want this so much. Unfortunately, my shitty computer couldn't run it.
So I guess I'll have to wait until I get a more powerful Laptop later in the year!
So I guess I'll have to wait until I get a more powerful Laptop later in the year!
I bought the special edition (Yeah!! Awesome stuff!!) and special or not that game is awesome I got addicted in 5 minutes!
As someone who got the game on release day and have been playing it every day since, I can say that this is one of the best games I've played in many years, and definitely the best RTS I've played in as long as I can remember.
The campaign is extremely well put together, the missions are varied, and everything about it is friendly to new players. If this was the first RTS you played it would be your best possible choice.
On the other hand, Blizzard have made several very strange choices for this game. (Unless all you want to do on battle.net is play melee) battle.net v2.0 is an enormous leap backwards. I don't even mean things like no LAN support or how you need to go online to get your achievements, etc
No, I mean things like how they have completely destroyed the custom maps community. Here is a very tiny representation of the dismay our european forums are currently in:
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/169348414
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/169348640
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/169528451
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/169346958
In addition, it lacks many features fundamental to an online game, like chat channels, and Blizzard's only response to this has been that they'll add it sometime in the future.
[SPOILER WARNING:]
On a more trivial note, with the game they have significantly retconned enormous amounts of Starcraft lore and changed the personalities and motivations of many characters, and the only real way to get any information on alot of what happens in the game is to read the books they've published. That wouldn't be too bad, if it wasn't for that several very important events in Wings of Liberty alone are utterly incomprehensible to someone who hasn't read said books. At some point Mengks's son just shows up and gives you half his father's fleet without any explanation beyond "i dont like my father lol" - and unless you watched practically every single one of the news broadcasts you wouldn't even know who the guy was at that point.
The focus of the narrative has also changed from space opera to an extremely clichè and uninteresting personal love/revenge story - lead by Jim Raynor, GENERIC WHITE MALE ACTION HERO NUMBER#9001.
These (in my mind) significant flaws aside, Starcraft 2 is one of the best games to have been released in a very long time.
The campaign is extremely well put together, the missions are varied, and everything about it is friendly to new players. If this was the first RTS you played it would be your best possible choice.
On the other hand, Blizzard have made several very strange choices for this game. (Unless all you want to do on battle.net is play melee) battle.net v2.0 is an enormous leap backwards. I don't even mean things like no LAN support or how you need to go online to get your achievements, etc
No, I mean things like how they have completely destroyed the custom maps community. Here is a very tiny representation of the dismay our european forums are currently in:
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/169348414
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/169348640
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/169528451
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/169346958
That's just a small example. This is truly bizzare since by far and large the main reason WC3 remaines popular to this day is because of its custom map system (and the user-friendly map editor).
In addition, it lacks many features fundamental to an online game, like chat channels, and Blizzard's only response to this has been that they'll add it sometime in the future.
[SPOILER WARNING:]
On a more trivial note, with the game they have significantly retconned enormous amounts of Starcraft lore and changed the personalities and motivations of many characters, and the only real way to get any information on alot of what happens in the game is to read the books they've published. That wouldn't be too bad, if it wasn't for that several very important events in Wings of Liberty alone are utterly incomprehensible to someone who hasn't read said books. At some point Mengks's son just shows up and gives you half his father's fleet without any explanation beyond "i dont like my father lol" - and unless you watched practically every single one of the news broadcasts you wouldn't even know who the guy was at that point.
The focus of the narrative has also changed from space opera to an extremely clichè and uninteresting personal love/revenge story - lead by Jim Raynor, GENERIC WHITE MALE ACTION HERO NUMBER#9001.
These (in my mind) significant flaws aside, Starcraft 2 is one of the best games to have been released in a very long time.