[quote name='mrspicytacoman']To be honest,
I'm not sure what to make of your strenuous relationship with Starcraft.
You seem to love to hate it, and sometimes you love to love it.
I will say I thoroughly enjoy starcraft in all its glory.
I believe SC1 to be one of the best games of all time.
5
And I really don't get all the misgivings about SC2.
Did you really hate it that much?
Was it single-player and multi-player that was bad?
I played both, and besides a serious shift in the dark, creepy starcraft-vibe from the 90's I so whole-heartily loved, I found nothing to complain about.
"Accidently stumbled"?
I guess that means you don't like Blizzard at all huh lol
Well, I don't know. I'm pretty sure Blizzard is my favorite developer of all time.
Between Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft, I think I've spent what amounts to years of real time within the worlds they've crea5ted[/QUOTE]
Hell, that post reads like an invitation for me to rant with
s and shits and all those other words I like.
But I won't.
Instead I will say this:
Starcraft 1 - or more accurately, Starcraft Brood War - was
ing sweet-ass. Its campaign often boiled down to boring "turtle until suddenly carriers/BCs/guardians", the maps were pretty poorly made, the AI was spotty, it needed tons of patching, and it had a lot of turrible units like the infested terran and the scout. But it had an intriguing setting, some cool characters, some fantastic voice work, and incredible multiplayer, be it 1v1 or some bullshit UMS. The level of balance between the races is incredible (though the maps played on was a
huge part of that), and there were so many beautiful, subtle little things that worked so well that Blizzard never intended (see: Muta stacking).
But where I loved Brood War, I
like Starcraft 2. Its campaign gameplay is far more varied and interesting, but the dialogue and plot were among the worst I've seen in a videogame. Some of the new units, like the stalker, are really cool - but others, like the colossus, are godawful. Pathfinding has received
badly needed changes, but the ridiculous level of unit clumping is bad for both gameplay and spectating. I think the once-controversial multiple building selection is great, but I feel that the massive control groups and smartcasting have done as much harm as good. Their ladder system is A Really Good Thing, but everything else about "Battle.net 2.0" was worse than what you got with Brood War, Diablo 2, or Warcraft 3 (no/awful chat channels, no shared replays, clumsy custom game system, etc.).
Perhaps the biggest problem I
personally have with SC2 is a matter of "racial identity". For me, being a protoss meant armies of swordsmen charging through landmines eating tank shells with their faces while a giant
-off fleet loomed in the distance. It meant, "Hey, I have
a reaver, you better respect that shit". But in SC2, that all changed to "everyone hide behind the forcefield because if we actually fight the other army we're hosed air units what are air units". Protoss looks like protoss, but it doesn't
feel like protoss. Terran looks like terran, but it doesn't
feel like terran. And that might seem like the pettiest nitpick in all of petty nitpick-town, but that's an important thing for a sequel, and that's a
huge thing for
this sequel.
So Heart of the Swarm. I can and have complained about a
lot of things in SC2, and I've recognized for a long time that they are simply too
big to address in a mere patch. Warpgates, clumpy pathfinding, units dying too quickly, etc.: changing those would change
er'rything, so it's best we not deal with those until we have a chance to deal with er'rything. Like the chance that Heart of the Swarm gives.
But they've chosen not to touch those at all. Instead, they're throwing random things into the game and then taking things out whenever people point out how terrible they are. And through this process, it seems like they've come up with some legitimately cool things that I want to play with and against. And they've still got some really stupid things that my God why did they give huge buffs to mutas at the same time they weakened zerg anti-air what is wrong with them? But a lot of my core complaints remain.
As far as Blizzard in general? I've spent, like, two hours combined across the entire Warcraft franchise, so I don't really care about what's going on in World of Warcraft. I've spent quite a bit of time between Diablo 1 and 2, but haven't touched 3. I liked that series more as a "dive into a random dungeon where something horrible could be through any door so get exploring" sort of thing than the "c'mon man let's powerlevel your alt so we can start doing mephy runs don't forget to swap your MF gear in" thing it became. More "roguelike for casuals" than loot grind. I don't have a huge amount of faith in them these days, but they're alive and Ensemble Studios aren't, so what the
am I gonna do? It's not like they tried to murder the party-based WRPG or turn Xcom into an FPS, after all.