John Funk said:
Hammeroj said:
lacktheknack said:
Why not? They've never put out anything short of excellent before.
On the front of story, Starcraft 2 is a short, padded piece of shit compared to their earlier endeavours. And it's disjointed to top it off thanks to the wonderful(-ly unnecessary) mission structure. I've gone over the exact points of it dozens of times, and I'm kind of tired of regurgitating the same points over and over. Do you want me to?
If StarCraft 2 is a "short, padded piece of shit," then what the hell does it make SC1? SC2 was longer with a mission design structure that beats the pants off of any other RTS mission design we've ever seen.
Yes, the story and writing were "meh," but Blizzard has *never* had good story and writing. FFS, they've had this problem since Warcraft 2 - I don't see why people are all of a sudden complaining now
Their credo is "gameplay first," and it shows. The games are fantastic, the stories are mediocre and always have been.
People complaining about the trilogy being a ripoff have absolutely no leg to stand on after SC2 came out and the campaign was easily as fleshed-out and long as SC1 and WC3 were. So it's getting two expansion packs, so what? Are we going to complain about Brood War and Frozen Throne, now? Are we going to yell at Peter Jackson for making THREE LotR movies when he could have just made the one?
There are few baseless complaints that get my goat as much as the "Wahhhh the game has two expansion packs, such a ripoff" one.
I was more comparing it to War3 and its expansion, considering it's not an archaic RTS that's a pain in the ass to play, as the original SC is. I'm still going to say, though, that a lot more happens in the original SC from my memories of it than in SC2, making it a whole lot less short and padded in the story aspect of it.
And I don't really care about mission design when talking about the story of the game, what I meant was the completely unnecessary ability of the player to choose which mission they want to do first, all which did was make the dialog aboard the Hyperion make no sense from time to time, as it's obviously tied to the mission you just came from.
Just because War2 had a mediocre story, especially being a game from their early years of development, does not pardon them from making mediocre or just plain bad stories now, when they're the most well funded developer out there, and when they have done much, much better.
And here's where your argument falls on its ass. SC2's story is not fleshed out. At all. There is almost no lore around Starcraft 2 and they don't even try for a second to create any, making this a pretty damn shallow universe by today's standards; there is either not enough dialogue in the game or it's used plain wrong, since not a single character besides Raynor himself is fleshed out in the slightest. Cardboard cut-outs at best, and non-characters at worst, all of them. One of the worst parts about it is the villains. Kerrigan is almost entirely limited to lines that are almost exactly this: "I'll get you next time, Raynor!" and Arcturus is even more pathetic. He's literally a joke through this entire game. Neither of them feel like a threat at any level. Do we really need to compare these to Archimonde and Arthas?
Severe plotholes and retcons to what was regarded the most important aspect to Jim and Kerrigan's relationship I won't even touch on besides mentioning.
Since you quoted me, am I to understand that I'm saying they're ripping us off by making a trilogy? Because I made no such statement. In fact, if they had a half decent writer in their staff, I think this would be the best thing they could do with reincarnating Starcraft. As it is now, the story is quite literally the length of one War3 campaign, padded out by missions that simply don't advance the story at all or do by very, very little. Either way, I haven't complained about the expansion yet, hell, it may even be better in the story department (because doing worse would be quite a feat). Maybe they've learned something. But make no mistake, this, in terms of story, is still a third of a game, and not a good one at that.
