Singleplayer Expectations: Before Release

[0mar]

IMO, the campaign is going to be about average. First off, it's an RTS single player game. It's tough to maintain a connection to what amounts to faceless grunts. Your job is to throw enough faceless grunts at the enemy until their faceless grunts are dead. Hero units never work out well in these types of games because either they die and you lose or they die and cost you massive amounts of resources to resurrect.

Secondly, I know Blizzard wanted to change up how SP RTS games are played, but I'm not really convinced they are the right company to do so. Innovation has never been a strong point of Blizzard; they are the company who take the best ideas and concepts from the industry and polish them into a diamond shine. Relic has already tried to change up the SP RTS game with DoWII's campaign and most people agree that it failed miserably. It's not even an RTS at this point, it's more like a group RPG; you have your super space marines gaining XP killing things and then you can use that XP to buy better weapons/abilities/armor etc etc. I have a feeling SC2's SP will end up like this. You'll have your squad, kill some zerg, earn some money and then buy bigger and better upgrades to deal with upgraded swarms. It'll be more like Diablo II than SC.

Finally, Blizzard's story telling has really taken a dive since Diablo II. Diablo II's story was just an excuse to kill shit in the forest, the desert, the jungle, the mountains and hell. It had an acceptable story for the most part but the game didn't really shock you or anything. With the expansion pack, Blizzard basically made it up as they went along. Tyrael's final speech is basically a primer for Diablo III. Similarly, WarCraft III's story was just StarCraft on Azeroth, with shittier characters. I really had to push myself through that game and I believe the consensus was that WC3's story shat on the canon established in WC and WC II. WC3's expansion was basically a setup for WoW, since the ending of that game establishes the WoW universe, which again, has shit on all the canon established beforehand. I don't have high hopes for what happens in SC2.

[ch_bing]

^ speaking of Warcraft universe, what canon was there for WCIII to take a dump on in the first place?

[Mrjiggles]

Im sure i will be blown away

[ZealotPowerade]

I've seen all the cinematics in the game now (both pre rendered and in game) and solely basing my opinions off those, I think I'll find the plot to be satisfying, but not blow me away good. The action in the pre rendered and in game scenes is also something that leaves me content, but it's not blow me away good either IMO. As for the gameplay, assets, and etc, I hope that will blow me away.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, the action in the prerendered scenes is EPIC... Zeratul slicing up hydras... O.o That was a beautifully done sequence. Although I have to say I hunger for more of this quality stuff. :P

[deadlyhazard]

IMO, the campaign is going to be about average. First off, it's an RTS single player game. It's tough to maintain a connection to what amounts to faceless grunts. Your job is to throw enough faceless grunts at the enemy until their faceless grunts are dead. Hero units never work out well in these types of games because either they die and you lose or they die and cost you massive amounts of resources to resurrect.

Secondly, I know Blizzard wanted to change up how SP RTS games are played, but I'm not really convinced they are the right company to do so. Innovation has never been a strong point of Blizzard; they are the company who take the best ideas and concepts from the industry and polish them into a diamond shine. Relic has already tried to change up the SP RTS game with DoWII's campaign and most people agree that it failed miserably. It's not even an RTS at this point, it's more like a group RPG; you have your super space marines gaining XP killing things and then you can use that XP to buy better weapons/abilities/armor etc etc. I have a feeling SC2's SP will end up like this. You'll have your squad, kill some zerg, earn some money and then buy bigger and better upgrades to deal with upgraded swarms. It'll be more like Diablo II than SC.

Finally, Blizzard's story telling has really taken a dive since Diablo II. Diablo II's story was just an excuse to kill shit in the forest, the desert, the jungle, the mountains and hell. It had an acceptable story for the most part but the game didn't really shock you or anything. With the expansion pack, Blizzard basically made it up as they went along. Tyrael's final speech is basically a primer for Diablo III. Similarly, WarCraft III's story was just StarCraft on Azeroth, with shittier characters. I really had to push myself through that game and I believe the consensus was that WC3's story shat on the canon established in WC and WC II. WC3's expansion was basically a setup for WoW, since the ending of that game establishes the WoW universe, which again, has shit on all the canon established beforehand. I don't have high hopes for what happens in SC2.

Pretty much. Blizzard has never had strong story telling IMO, I'm hoping SC2 might change that....but it'll probably have a cliffhanger ending.

[ZealotPowerade]

Pretty much. Blizzard has never had strong story telling IMO, I'm hoping SC2 might change that....but it'll probably have a cliffhanger ending.

cliffhanger's aren't a sign of bad storytelling though.

I would say that as much as I love the story of starcraft 1... the story of warcraft 3 turned out to be mediocre at best. As someone else said, the overall plot was pretty much starcraft on azeroth. So if we take that forumula :P look at how Wrath of the lich king ended and we have our ending for Kerrigan. :P

[pure.Wasted]

IMO, the campaign is going to be about average. First off, it's an RTS single player game. It's tough to maintain a connection to what amounts to faceless grunts. Your job is to throw enough faceless grunts at the enemy until their faceless grunts are dead. Hero units never work out well in these types of games because either they die and you lose or they die and cost you massive amounts of resources to resurrect.

[...]

Finally, Blizzard's story telling has really taken a dive since Diablo II. Diablo II's story was just an excuse to kill shit in the forest, the desert, the jungle, the mountains and hell. It had an acceptable story for the most part but the game didn't really shock you or anything. With the expansion pack, Blizzard basically made it up as they went along. Tyrael's final speech is basically a primer for Diablo III. Similarly, WarCraft III's story was just StarCraft on Azeroth, with shittier characters.

You seem to be contradicting yourself. On the one hand, you state that RTS by virtue of being RTS cannot have an above average campaign. On the other, you say that Diablo II was when Blizz's stories started to get progressively worse, and DII was "above-average" to begin with, meaning SC was still "the golden years." So does SC's story suck, or doesn't it?

I really had to push myself through that game and I believe the consensus was that WC3's story shat on the canon established in WC and WC II. WC3's expansion was basically a setup for WoW, since the ending of that game establishes the WoW universe, which again, has shit on all the canon established beforehand. I don't have high hopes for what happens in SC2.

That is not the consensus at all. It is not possible to "shit" on the canon of games that have a branching canon to begin with. What Blizzard did with WC3 -- cherry-picking what happened in previous games and what did not, at their convenience -- is no more or less what they did with WC2, which seems to fall into your idea of Blizz's golden years.

Secondly, I know Blizzard wanted to change up how SP RTS games are played, but I'm not really convinced they are the right company to do so. Innovation has never been a strong point of Blizzard; they are the company who take the best ideas and concepts from the industry and polish them into a diamond shine. Relic has already tried to change up the SP RTS game with DoWII's campaign and most people agree that it failed miserably. It's not even an RTS at this point, it's more like a group RPG; you have your super space marines gaining XP killing things and then you can use that XP to buy better weapons/abilities/armor etc etc. I have a feeling SC2's SP will end up like this. You'll have your squad, kill some zerg, earn some money and then buy bigger and better upgrades to deal with upgraded swarms. It'll be more like Diablo II than SC.

Two things:

First, playing traditional RTS against a computer isn't that fun, surprisingly enough. Or not surprisingly at all. If Blizzard is changing up the single player to focus more on squads and that means that a lot of cut-and-dried "build & conquer" missions get the ax, good riddance. Conventional single player RTS is a genre that (in MOST cases) perfectly well deserves dying off (or, rather, being refined and infused with elements of other genres, until it is actually comparable to other things in its own right).

Did you complain when the FPS genre started incorporating puzzles (especially physics-based ones) into their gameplay a la Half Life 2, I wonder? Or RPG elements, a la Bioshock? FPS is yet another genre that, as far as single-player goes, does not deserve to survive on its own.

Having said that, they are not removing the build-and-destroy aspect from the game in the slightest, and the fact that you don't know this suggests how little actual information your argument is based on. Of the first 6 missions, 5 include building a base and producing units, the old fashioned way. Hell, that's better than SC1's track record.

Your argument that the RPG elements are a waste of time/don't belong in an RTS game is a slippery slope -- I might just as easily contend that having mission briefings at ALL was a waste of time in the original game (plenty of other early RTSes did not include any), and that we should skip both in favor of pure unadulterated RTS gameplay!

[SinsWage]

I love lamp...

[Areoseph]

Sins....are you just looking at things in the room and saying you love them?