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This may come across as a bit of an odd comparison, but both are games by one of the best developers in the gaming industry: Blizzard Entertainment. I'm doing this write-up mainly because I feel that Diablo 3 is missing something. I will try to avoid wearing the proverbial rose-tinted glasses as much as I can.
If I read correctly, both Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 have been in development for about six years, which, for a video game, is a really long time. Now, what bothers me is that Diablo 3 kind of lacks content. Starcraft 2 gave us a really long and enjoyable campaign, highly competitive multiplayer and a very powerful map editor. Diablo 3 gave us a campaign of about 15 hours, 5 characters to choose from and an auction house.
Content-wise, Starcraft 2 is the huge winner here. The single player campaign is enormous and varied. Length-wise it's about the same as Dawn of War 2, but the missions themselves are a lot more creative. The multiplayer is practically endless and very adictive, no matter which skill level you are at. What adds most value, though, is the number of user created maps and mods. Blizzard have apparently noticed as well, since the new 1.5 patch is all about user-created content, basically dividing the game into "Starcraft" and "Arcade".
This is where Diablo falls a bit short. If you want to bring a character to lv60, you basically have to play through the game three times. If you want five lv60 characters, you've got to play through the game no less than 15 times. That's a bit much. Your play style will differ each time, but essentially you'll be roaming the same environments and killing the same enemies over and over again. The fact that the campaign isn't overly long doesn't help.
I've been giving that some though, and I concluded that, some time during the Diablo 3 development process, they had to speed things up considerably. I can't help but notice how more crude and unfinished Act 3 and Act 4 feel compared to the first two acts. During the first two acts you're actually still discovering new things. Act three is basically you killing scores of monsters to get to Azmodan, and Act 4 is doing the same, but even faster, to get to Diablo. Even in terms of art design, Act 1 and 2 feel a lot more finished than 3 and 4. On a more personal note, I'm not too fond of the champion packs, and the focus on them. It feels forced to have three or four of them in each area, and they are ridiculously strong compared to their Diablo 2 counterparts (which were a little stronger than usual but seldomly required the player to kite them around the map for about five minutes to kill them).
Starcraft 2, on the other hand, never felt rushed throughout the campaign. Multiplayer was balanced over the course of a five month beta, and still receives balance patches two years later. Starcraft 2 just felt like a very complete package. I feel like Diablo 3 was a game they were losing control over (they've actually completely overhauled their rune system during beta, which says a lot) and wanted released as soon as they could.
Both Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 are great games, and raised the bar of the genre they represent, but still, the latter felt somewhat incomplete.
  
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People complained that the SC2 storyline sucked because there's too much irrelevant things going on (Raynor's love affair lol). Most people play SC2 for the multiplayer aspect, which you completely glossed over.
Welcome to D3. Did you expect something else besides a hack-n-slash?
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For a lot of people SC2 felt incomplete at the beginning aswell. The UI was (is) subpar. The game wasn't balanced at all (reapers?), but that is ok considering the difficulty of balancing an rts pre-release. Most people complained, that terran felt like the only complete race.
So i think it's obvious today, that Blizzards philosophy is to finish a product upon feedback of their customers. I think D3 isn't finished at all and in maybe 2 years we will see what D3 could have been at release. Up to this point, i rather keep on kiting with marines than against an op champion mob.
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Wow, Diablo 3 must be pretty bad if this guy is using the Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty campaign as an example to be followed...
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I thought the reason why D3 is so fun is because you get to play with your friends. Killing stuff and trying to level together with other people is the reason why I feel D3's campaign is better than SC2's campaign.
But if you're gonna compare the whole game, I don't think D3 can compete with SC2.
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On June 09 2012 01:13 Heh_ wrote:
People complained that the SC2 storyline sucked because there's too much irrelevant things going on (Raynor's love affair lol). Most people play SC2 for the multiplayer aspect, which you completely glossed over.
Welcome to D3. Did you expect something else besides a hack-n-slash?
Totally not. Played a lot of D2 back when I was a teenager. It just feels like something's missing but I can't quite put my finger on it.
@Nucnac: in terms of gameplay and variation, SC2's campaign is by far the best out of any RTS I've ever played. You should at least give them props for trying to be creative with the mission design.
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Just look for posts from May 15-20. You should be able to find every single kind of complaint there.
In summary: I thought we were over the complaining phase. Those who are still complaining about D3 have quit the game a long time ago.
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On June 09 2012 01:13 Heh_ wrote:
People complained that the SC2 storyline sucked because there's too much irrelevant things going on (Raynor's love affair lol). Most people play SC2 for the multiplayer aspect, which you completely glossed over.
Welcome to D3. Did you expect something else besides a hack-n-slash?
No, most people complained that the SC2 storyline was full of shit, e.g. Tassadar coming back to life, which completely cheapens his SC and BW storylines. Blizzard also relied heavily on deus ex machina and made shit up when they had to move from A to B in the storyline but lacked a logical path of doing so.
SC and BW's campaigns were two of the best singleplayer video experiences ever. The beauty of BW is that such a brilliant singleplayer game, designed 99% for singleplayer, became such a balanced and deep multiplayer game as well. SC2 was designed from the ground up as an "ESPORT" and Blizzard still managed to misunderstand its multiplayer audience (remember Dustin Browder changing the Phoenix to allow more "micro" when in fact he reduced its micro to being moved around; or what about fungals and forcefields, which remove micro options from the opposing player). SC2's story is shit because its badly written in many aspects, not just Raynor's illogical love affair (at the end of BW, Raynor swore revenge for Fenix and to kill Kerrigan).
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On June 09 2012 02:08 1ntrigue wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2012 01:13 Heh_ wrote:
People complained that the SC2 storyline sucked because there's too much irrelevant things going on (Raynor's love affair lol). Most people play SC2 for the multiplayer aspect, which you completely glossed over.
Welcome to D3. Did you expect something else besides a hack-n-slash? No, most people complained that the SC2 storyline was full of shit, e.g. Tassadar coming back to life, which completely cheapens his SC and BW storylines. Blizzard also relied heavily on deus ex machina and made shit up when they had to move from A to B in the storyline but lacked a logical path of doing so. SC and BW's campaigns were two of the best singleplayer video experiences ever. The beauty of BW is that such a brilliant singleplayer game, designed 99% for singleplayer, became such a balanced and deep multiplayer game as well. SC2 was designed from the ground up as an "ESPORT" and Blizzard still managed to misunderstand its multiplayer audience (remember Dustin Browder changing the Phoenix to allow more "micro" when in fact he reduced its micro to being moved around; or what about fungals and forcefields, which remove micro options from the opposing player). SC2's story is shit because its badly written in many aspects, not just Raynor's illogical love affair (at the end of BW, Raynor swore revenge for Fenix and to kill Kerrigan).
I agree the story in sc2 was shit but the mission design in sc2 was waaay better than for sc and BW. Bw was just build a base mass 1 unit and roll the enemy. Sc2 has a lot of variation in how to win and the way missions play out.
It's not like BW's story was actually good either though not as bad as sc2's.
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SC2 stomps on D3, end of story. This comparison was not meant to be fair, I don't care if they aren't in the same genre or the fact that they were made by the same company. SC2 vs D3, SC2 wins in a Bo7 4 - 0, ez pz. Muahahaha!!
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EPT
