[Liberator]

You are lying to yourself if you think Metzen is anything more than a figurehead at this point.  And it's been established that almost all of Blizz's "A Team" is currently, and has been for at least 3 years, working the "Titan".  MoP might be a shift back in the right direction, HotS may or may not suck, D3 very conceivably could suck giant, virus infused monkey balls, none of it will change the fact that it's still, by and large, better than the latest Battlefield clone or the schlock that Bioware has cranked out over the last few years.

Let's face it people, the glory of our youth is long departed and all that remains is a pale shadow that we treat as equal because of nostalgia and a heaping helping of rose colored lenses epoxied to our eyes.

[General Battuta]

Let's face it people, the glory of our youth is long departed and all that remains is a pale shadow that we treat as equal because of nostalgia and a heaping helping of rose colored lenses epoxied to our eyes.

what

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

nope

[TrashMan]

Nostalgia goggles?

[Mikes]

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

I will attempt to present a slightly more concise version.

First, the writing: execrable work. Watching Kerrigan and Zeratul throw down should not leave me asking what bad fantasy novel they have animated. I never thought I'd say this either, but losing the original voice of Kerrigan for the dulcet dark menace of Number Six was also a giant ****ing mistake because it made them think Kerrigan could be used just talking rather than acting. The pacing is exceptionally bad and the game never manages to summon a real sense of urgency.

The Protoss were said in the previous materials to have become less...spiritual, and more focused on the grim business of surviving and killing the **** out of Tyranids Zerg. This is a lie. The Protoss have stopped being treated as a clearly technological civilization making use of Clarke's Third Law and instead become your average fantasy elves. I would dearly love to be making this up but I'm not.

The Zerg? I don't even know how they're characterizing the Zerg in Wings of Liberty, because they're not ****ing characterized at all! SC1 and Brood War worked hard to build them up as the Great Devourer all-devouring tide of scuttling death and used many, many cutscenes to establish them as menacing and scary. Wings of Liberty doesn't bother. The Zerg are simply there and you will kill them in such numbers and with such contemptuous ease that their menace is utterly lost. Kerrigan, as Battman noted, does nothing of interest the whole game besides causing your adjutant to utter "Class Twelve Psionic booty Waveform Detetcted" a few times.

All problems in Wings of Liberty can be solved by the Triple M. In the campaign, this means Marines, Marauders, and Medics. In multi, that's Marines, Marauders, and Medivacs. Granted there are a few places where the Triple M is not an optimal solution, but of the many new units you will be introduced to over the course of the campaign, only the missions that introduce the Battlecruiser and the Viking are actually difficult to complete without the new unit (and in the case of the Viking, only if you give a **** about your secondary objectives).

And my Blizzard boycott can continue without a hint of regret.

Thank you both

[General Battuta]

Nostalgia goggles?

nope

[Col. Fishguts]

Sure sounds like pink-tinted nostalgia goggles though

Granted, SC1 had a coherent plot, but the writing from BW already suffered from the fact that they we're trying to find reasons to pit all 3 races against each other in any imaginable way. I stopped playing about halfway through, simply because I didn't find the story interesting anymore and the mission became repetitive.

[Commander Zane]

I enjoyed playing both Starcrafts. Simple as that.
Story be damned, SC2 was the first new (About three months after release) game that remotely caught my interest and actually thought was fun since '07.
And I don't play it for the Leagues either.

[General Battuta]

Granted, SC1 had a coherent plot, but the writing from BW already suffered from the fact that they we're trying to find reasons to pit all 3 races against each other in any imaginable way. I stopped playing about halfway through, simply because I didn't find the story interesting anymore and the mission became repetitive.

Yeah SC1 and Brood War were a pretty dry B-movie but this does not in any way prevent them from being fairly hygienic compared to the festering suppurating ****-packed wound that was wings of liburty

Sure sounds like pink-tinted nostalgia goggles though

I don't want to toot my own horn here but it may be possible that the published author is able to make assessments about writing without 'nostalgia goggles', at the sentence by sentence level writing is pretty objective in quality

Here is a good comparison for you: open up the Starcraft 1 Campaign 1 ending cutscene and compare it to anything Mengsk says in Starcraft 2

Or compare the direction of any SC1 cutscene with any of the Michael Bay offerings in SC2 (check out the personalized armor on the marines in SC1 as an example of the kind of TLC the story and its presentation got back then)

Video games have awful writing and people who enjoy their stories are generally bad at understanding or appreciating storytelling but even within the cesspool of video games rent open and necrotized by the corrosive tension between player agency and traditional linear narrative there are degrees of quality

[Liberator]

Let's face it people, the glory of our youth is long departed and all that remains is a pale shadow that we treat as equal because of nostalgia and a heaping helping of rose colored lenses epoxied to our eyes.

what

What I was suggesting was that everyone seems to want stories that are the video game equivalent of Shakespeare or something.  That already happened with Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment and others and no one plays them any more because they're going on 15 years old.  The reason you don't get decent stories like you want is simple, the market doesn't see them because the suits that make the decisions about writers and such know that they're **** will sell just as well with filler and hackneyed plots as it will with a deep and rewarding storyline.

The mentality is this, "You want deep and rewarding?  Buy the books!"  Why bother making a 20 or 30 hour game when you can make a 5 hour one in half the time and cash it in.  Why bother with quality when you can use hype and a slick CG movie to build the hype to a fever pitch so that you sell a million copies on hype alone.  Who cares?  You got your money back and then some.

The games won't get better until WE stop accepting poor quality remakes and shelling out full price for 1/2 or 1/4 length grind fests.

[General Battuta]

The reason you don't get decent stories like you want is simple, the market doesn't see them because the suits that make the decisions about writers and such know that they're **** will sell just as well with filler and hackneyed plots as it will with a deep and rewarding storyline.

Some of the best storytelling in games (within the special parameter of game storytelling where the story must reside in the mechanics as well as the overt narrative) has been done in the past couple years so I'm not sure this holds

[TrashMan]

Nostalgia goggles?

nope

No, I mean - is that wat he meant. That nostalgia goggles blinds us to the awesome that is Blizzard.

[IceFire]

I like how they are taking some chances with the multiplayer line up and changing things up. Hopefully for the better. Protoss has a problem with masses of Mutas and I really like the idea of a new capital ship for the Protoss to replace the carrier. Risky with an iconic ship but it's true that it doesn't fit anymore. So... the new iteration of the Tempest sounds pretty appealing!

[Liberator]

The reason you don't get decent stories like you want is simple, the market doesn't see them because the suits that make the decisions about writers and such know that they're **** will sell just as well with filler and hackneyed plots as it will with a deep and rewarding storyline.

Some of the best storytelling in games (within the special parameter of game storytelling where the story must reside in the mechanics as well as the overt narrative) has been done in the past couple years so I'm not sure this holds

Titles and publish dates please.

[General Battuta]

The reason you don't get decent stories like you want is simple, the market doesn't see them because the suits that make the decisions about writers and such know that they're **** will sell just as well with filler and hackneyed plots as it will with a deep and rewarding storyline.

Some of the best storytelling in games (within the special parameter of game storytelling where the story must reside in the mechanics as well as the overt narrative) has been done in the past couple years so I'm not sure this holds

Titles and publish dates please.

No I am not that dumb. I can bring up any number of games in the context of a discussion here on the hard light productions forums dot com and you will talk about how ****ty they are because you want to win the argument (even if you haven't played them)

Go out and look for them, find them on your own, enjoy them. But here I will cite two great obvious examples and one you probably wouldn't think of: Braid, Bastion, DEFCON (the latter has not a single line of dialogue)

[mxlm]

Guys, look, all you have to do is look at Valve's output to know that, truly, the era of awesome writing is over.

Oh, wait.

[Firstdragon34]

That's because all the good ideas in science ficition has been taken. Its almost impossible to write something without its themes being repeated.

[Fury]

Braid, Bastion, DEFCON (the latter has not a single line of dialogue)

Curious, all three are indie games, not AAA titles.

[General Battuta]

Braid, Bastion, DEFCON (the latter has not a single line of dialogue)

Curious, all three are indie games, not AAA titles.

Sure, but when you look back at games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment, they were 'indie' by today's standards. Sometimes it just takes a certain small dedicated team to make a gem. 

[General Battuta]

That's because all the good ideas in science ficition has been taken. Its almost impossible to write something without its themes being repeated.

This is something people always say without really understanding, and usually that means they're wrong.

[Scotty]

Most themes have been repeated.  It really is hard to be original in base concept.

So be original in execution and quality.  That's not nearly as hard, despite what the flood of titles these days would have you believe.