Your Own Campaign

[Turalyon]

How come? None of us would be here if it was impossible. Blizzard honestly does a great job at telling the story even if the writing is bad. It's hard to do but there are other good examples out there too.

I said "these days". There are barely any other high-profile RTS games in recent times let alone any with original or memorable stories.

Oh, and Blizz did a great job storytelling using bad writing? Huh, I never heard that defence before...

[Gradius]

So you'd G.R.R. Martin the shit out of that campaign.


I've been browsing through Mapster lately and I've been seeing a lot of projects seemingly fall into disuse. Even new projects are receiving next to no attention from the users. It makes me very sad to see fan-made material go unseen and uncared about. Which makes me question the use of creating something on par with CybrosX's maps. All that effort, and... where's the return? God I hope to see Antioch Chronicles 3 someday.

Yeah I did some of the voice acting for that one, it was a nifty project.

Werent they remaking LoTC with a huge budget? What happened to that?

[Visions of Khas]

What is that, Legacy of the Confederacy? I never played through the original. I remember seeing some very old custom cutscenes made for that or a similar campaign. I didn't think the remake went anywhere.

[sandwich_bird]

Oh, and Blizz did a great job storytelling using bad writing? Huh, I never heard that defence before...

The execution was good if you prefer. They really balance well gameplay and story telling. You have in-game cut-scenes, high def cinematics, intermission adventure mode, lore on all units and upgrades, etc. This is unprecedented in RTS. If only the story wasn't so stupid...

4) Amon campaign. Something SC2 sorely lacked.
5) A hybrid survivor of the end war takes over a brood and plots his revenge.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the hybrids for sure. Presumably they have identities as deep as any protoss but we barely see any of that.

[Mislagnissa]

I would be interested in a campaign where the Zerg assimilated Terrans and deployed armies of their new psychic warrior breeds against the Protoss on Aiur. This was promised in the SC1 manual but the campaign never delivered.

[ragnarok]

I said "these days". There are barely any other high-profile RTS games in recent times let alone any with original or memorable stories.

Oh, and Blizz did a great job storytelling using bad writing? Huh, I never heard that defence before...

It's exactly this that I feel the battlenet forum people do NOTHING but complain about how shitty the story is, and how Blizzard's only success in the SC2 storyline was they failed EVERYTHING

[Turalyon]

The execution was good if you prefer. They really balance well gameplay and story telling. You have in-game cut-scenes, high def cinematics, intermission adventure mode, lore on all units and upgrades, etc. This is unprecedented in RTS. If only the story wasn't so stupid...

I disagree. When it comes to narrative execution, WoL is the worst of the Sc2 trilogy since it's narrative path is an incoherent hodge podge of randomly occurring events. The cinematics are vignettes that don't tie into a single narrative and the missions have no narrative value beyond being a shopping list of things to get out of the way for the next vignette to show or exposition dump to occur. When cut down to the bare essential missions, WoL's story is about picking up plot coupons for the purpose of assisting to resolve a particular problem which may or may not truly succeed, only for that to be ultimately sidelined or tacitly deemed not possible to then suddenly have those plot coupons resolve another, even greater intractable problem quickly and conveniently.

In comparison, HotS and LotV have much more refined narrative execution and cohesion in that there's a logical route you can follow from start, middle to finish... it's just that the story being told in those was more observably mundane than WoL's was. WoL is only considered better (or memorable) because of all the affect and distractions away from the mundane core story it was telling.

[Mislagnissa]

It's exactly this that I feel the battlenet forum people do NOTHING but complain about how shitty the story is, and how Blizzard's only success in the SC2 storyline was they failed EVERYTHING

That includes people who were introduced to the franchise through SC2. The only memorable characters are Tychus, Alarak, Abathur and Dehaka. Unsurprisingly, they are also the only characters who act in believable fashion or even have beliefs and motives of their own independent of the overarching narrative. All the other characters are either bland or psychotic.

Raynor is a drunkard in love with a genocidal lunatic, who only gets off his ass after Tychus tells him to and rewards Tychus with a bullet to the face. Kerry is a bipolar, schizophrenic psychopath who butchers billions of innocent people just because she can. Artanis is just bland, demonstrates no depth beyond a generic proud warrior stereotype, and overturns a vaguely alluded religion that nobody cared about to begin with and only ever served as a plot device for mass demonic possession. Amon is a two-dimensional space demon that leads the sith lords and makes stupid speeches about logical fallacies before getting shanked like a bitch.

Rag, you aren't the only person here who was introduced through SC2. I played the original as a child when it first came out but I only got interested in SC again a couple years ago. So I was looking at it all with new eyes because I could barely remember my first experiences. I still came to the conclusion that SC2 had a crap storyline. Not only that, but the storyline of BW was crap. Indeed, the addition of QoB back in SC1 was crap. As a person who effectively became a fan only a couple years ago, I still think that the original manual's premise of the Zerg trying to assimilate Terrans to assimilate Protoss is the superior plot point and everything that came after was crap.

You are an outlier even among people who were introduced through SC2. I am pretty sure the awful story is most of the reason why mappers cannot muster the effort to make custom campaigns. Even if the editor was poorly supported, that did not stop the Warcraft 3 community from making hundreds of custom campaigns. People are still making Warcraft 3 custom campaigns long after release.

[sandwich_bird]

I disagree. When it comes to narrative execution, WoL is the worst of the Sc2 trilogy since it's narrative path is an incoherent hodge podge of randomly occurring events. The cinematics are vignettes that don't tie into a single narrative and the missions have no narrative value beyond being a shopping list of things to get out of the way for the next vignette to show or exposition dump to occur. When cut down to the bare essential missions, WoL's story is about picking up plot coupons for the purpose of assisting to resolve a particular problem which may or may not truly succeed, only for that to be ultimately sidelined or tacitly deemed not possible to then suddenly have those plot coupons resolve another, even greater intractable problem quickly and conveniently.

I agree with what you're saying but I don't think you're getting me here. To me those are all story problems, not execution issues. The mechanics of having side quests and etc are perfectly ok. It's not the mechanics fault if what they tell is disconnected non-sense. Same with the cinematics. Basically what I'm saying is that the book has a nice cover, good pictures, good use of the english language, good use of font, etc but what is written is garbage. Or, there's a guy telling you a story, he wears multiple nice costumes, a fog machine, he's really expressive and probably the best actor you've ever seen... but his story is garbage.

[Turalyon]

I agree with what you're saying but I don't think you're getting me here. To me those are all story problems, not execution issues. The mechanics of having side quests and etc are perfectly ok. It's not the mechanics fault if what they tell is disconnected non-sense. Same with the cinematics.

Eh, I dunno. I wouldn't consider a game having side-quests, cinematics, dialogue, lore etc to be "good execution" since all AAA games have this. You must therefore agree then that all AAA games must have "good execution"?

Basically what I'm saying is that the book has a nice cover, good pictures, good use of the english language, good use of font, etc but what is written is garbage. Or, there's a guy telling you a story, he wears multiple nice costumes, a fog machine, he's really expressive and probably the best actor you've ever seen... but his story is garbage.

Ah, I think the word you're looking for here is "specious". Yes, Sc2 is most definitely this.