[Scotty]

Still haven't played SCII (or even really the whole campaign of SC1, which irritates me greatly, now that I actually care beyond the ten year old mindset of WOO EXPLOSIONS), but it sounds like Duran is simultaneously the potentially most interesting plot artifact and the most successful Magnificent Bastard of the series.

Warning: the above opinion is waaay too uninformed.

[LordPomposity]

Still haven't played SCII (or even really the whole campaign of SC1, which irritates me greatly, now that I actually care beyond the ten year old mindset of WOO EXPLOSIONS), but it sounds like Duran is simultaneously the potentially most interesting plot artifact and the most successful Magnificent Bastard of the series.

Warning: the above opinion is waaay too uninformed.

Probably correct on both counts, if only because Duran doesn't have enough screen time in SC2 to come across as an utter imbecile.

[Nuke]

i tend to avoid expecting a literary masterpiece when i buy a game. the thing i really expect out of it is play time. how many hours of gaming do you get out of it before it goes on your shelf. starcraft 2 in particular has given me serious bang for my buck (same can be said about sc1 for its lan party value). as ****ty as the story is the game has exceeded my expectations and i still play custom games all the time.

[General Battuta]

i tend to avoid expecting a literary masterpiece when i buy a game.

Yeah me too but expecting the story to be at least as good as the game your studio made when it had one hundredth the money and far more pressure on it is pretty reasonable all in all

[Droid803]

Perhaps they don't want to write a story worth anything in terms of literature...
Whatever sells man, whatever sells...

and these days...its...

[Firstdragon34]

I liked the story of Starcraft II Wings of liberty, but that was my first Starcraft game, so what do I know? 

[G0atmaster]

I'm pretty sure you can get the first on Blizzard's website for like 5 bucks. Do it!

[Firstdragon34]

I'll think about. 

[Fury]

Not going to touch HotS with a ten-foot pole. I bought WoL when it came out, was so disappointed that I never finished it despite several attempts at doing so. I just couldn't bear the ****. Not interested in multi.

[Nuke]

I'll think about. 

**** just get the sc1->sc2 port. you can at least play the missions. not sure what the status of the protoss campaign is though. then watch the cut scenes on youtube. but seriously you can find sc1 in bargain bins everywhere for practically nothing.

[General Battuta]

I liked the story of Starcraft II Wings of liberty, but that was my first Starcraft game, so what do I know?

No offense but you're like eleven so it's okay

[Thaeris]

Who else is hoping Mengsk will finally die now? He really deserves whatever ass-kicking Kerrigan has in mind for him, if you ask me.

Leaked ending says Kerrigan kills Mengsk after an awful ****ty line.

Can anyone please elaborate on the horribleness of Wings of Liberty's story as mentioned by Battuta and NGTM-1R?

ugh where do I begin

Campaign is about 30 missions. The story starts at mission 25. In the 25 missions before that:

1. You do side quests
2. Your buddy Tychus helps you out
3. People constantly warn you that someone on the ship is working for the Dominion and Mengsk has a gun to his/her head
4. Your buddy Tychus was mysteriously released from prison and is locked inside his suit and his suit is receiving mysterious signals
5. Raynor is puzzled about who could possibly be working for the Dominion.

Okay, I lied, there's a bit of macroplot:

1. Kerrigan invades the Dominion. This kills billions of people, is seen entirely off-screen, causes no particular panic or alarm in the characters, and is never really mentioned
2. Raynor takes missions to grab a few Xel'naga artifacts. It turns out Kerrigan is after them too. She races you to catch them by doing devastatingly clever things like

searching apartment buildings one by one

saying 'I'll get you next time, Jimmy!'

In mission 25 Raynor teams up with Valerian Mengsk to assemble the artifacts and attack Char. It turns out the artifacts build a miraculous Xel'naga Kerrigan-deinfesting machine. With just one push of the button, it can reverse Kerrigan's arc from Brood War!

(remember that great moment in brood war when jimmy was all 'you're beyond redemption, kerrigan, next time, for fenix, i'm going to kill you?' yeah that doesn't matter any more)

A chunk of the Dominion fleet and Raynor's one battlecruiser attack Char.

Remember, this is Char, where the whole Swarm has been holed up, evolving, since the end of Brood War.

The end of Brood War where Kerrigan wiped out a coordinated attack by the Dominion, UED, and Protoss.

Naturally, a much smaller Terran-only force does perfectly fine, lands on Char, never faces any serious problems because Jimmy's here, don't worry, and de-infests Kerrigan.

Tychus' big secret turns out to have been that he was working with Mengsk and he's supposed to kill Kerrigan.

Wow, Mengsk, nice planning. You let Tychus run rampant and help out in missions that nearly brought down your government, you didn't use him to track Raynor or anything like that - you just counted on the contrived long odds that at some point he'd be in shooting range of a helpless Queen of Blades. Sure.

But Raynor kills Tychus, fin

****ty ****ty piece of ****, also i failed to describe how all the writing was terrible because IT'S TIME TO KICK THIS REVOLUTION

INTO OVERDRIVE

e: oh there's an even more ****awful part

In a series of side missions Zeratul gives you via a psychic dream crystal, you learn about THE PROPHECY and THE CHOSEN ONE who is the only one who can stop THE DARKNESS

Zeratul has learned that a mysterious force named THE FALLEN O

sorry I had to stop to puke

THE FALLEN ONE has been manipulating events for eons! He corrupted the Zerg into ravenous beasts focused on destroying the Protoss! Fortunately, the well-meaning, good-hearted Overmind (i'm serious, the overmind was just 'manipulated') created Kerrigan to lead the swarm against DIABL no wait SARGER no hang on THE FALLEN ONE and his evil army of Protoss-Zerg hybrids!

In a vision of the distant future we see the Protoss race being wiped out because Kerrigan was killed and couldn't fulfill her destiny and now THE FALLEN ONE will plunge the whole universe into utter darkness

oh and tassadar isn't dead, he struck himself down but became powerful than you can imagine, now he hangs out with the spirit of the brovermind

welp

This made my morning. Thank you, bromang.

[Nuke]

the only reason starcraft 2 exists at all is because of the koreans. for years they were televising sc1 matches without permission from blizzard. there was a fortune to be had and blizzard was shut out from it. sc2 was meant to tap into this market, and this is why it has good multi (and no lan support). i bet the single player aspects including the story were tacked on as a secondary marketing point. so theres not doubt in my mind that this plays a role in the lameness of the story.

[crizza]

I'll prorder it anyways...
And the plot...I don't think so bad of it as tutta, so I don't care.^^

[Turambar]

I won't be picking it up.  I don't want to know what happens anymore.

[MP-Ryan]

And they turned Zeratul into a whiny, emo *****, and introduced a group of Protoss that appear to have checked their collective intelligence at the door in favour of pigeon-holed obstinacy to conveniently allow you to fight Protoss in the Terran campaign.

I will say this though:  While the plot drove me NUTS, I thoroughly enjoyed the gameplay to the point where I played on Hard for the purpose of / actively attempting to gaining/gain all the mission-based achievements (except the Brutal completion).

And so I'll buy HotS.

[General Battuta]

I agree. It's doubly frustrating that the mission design is so good, there's just no writing to go with it.

[MP-Ryan]

I agree. It's doubly frustrating that the mission design is so good, there's just no writing to go with it.

Trouble is, after (like you said earlier) Warcraft 3, I really wasn't all that surprised.  Blizzard seems to have fired their writing staff after discovering with W3/WoW that it's possibly to make obscene amounts of money without them.

[crizza]

My guess is, that Chris Metzen became insane...since he is the lead storywrighter...he screwed WoW and now SC...
Next stop: Diablo 3^^

[Aardwolf]

Lol Battuta... compare episode 1 of the original StarCraft to the rest of the original StarCraft, is it not comparably lame?