EPTAlthough it’s taken them 14 years Blizzard finally gave Nova her own Starcraft game and it’s come at an interesting time since Starcraft is basically finished. Blizzards normal shtick for making sequels is to introduce an outside threat that raises the stakes and have everyone put aside their differences to fight it but LotV decided to end with all the good guys travelling to Hell to destroy Satan and stop his plan to end all creation everywhere. You can’t raise the stakes any higher short of having the good guys team up to travel to Activision/Blizzard HQ and defend it from rabid Luddites so that they can finish Starcraft 3. Now’s a good time for them to practice making a simple and straightforward Starcraft adventure because focusing on characters and an interesting plot is all they can do for the Koprolu Sector, and perhaps some unique gameplay, perchance?
NOC certainly starts that way with some Metal Gear Solid-esque sneakery and a Vulture bike section which I interpret Blizzard trying to tell us “hey look at all the cool and weird things you can do with the surprisingly flexible Starcraft Map Editor”. But then you’re given a large ship and units with campaign unique upgrades and a tech expert with the inevitable mechanical arms and oh look we’re back to formula now. It’s a fine formula I’m hardly complaining but for a smaller project surely it’s ok to be a bit more experimental? Forgive me for believing that a game titled Covert Ops would be about covert operatives operating covertly and not about base building like all the more overt operations we’ve been used to the past six years.
The gameplay itself is what we’ve come to expect from Blizzard’s single player content: units that are viscerally fun to use, level design that encourages constant action and movement instead of just turtling til maxed like most RTS games, a reasonable hardest difficulty setting and more polish than Poland. If you liked SC2 up to this point you’ll play this because it’s just more of the same and by more of the same I mean they’ve reused some ideas too. A level where you harvest Terrazine from certain points before the Tal’Darim can shut them down? At least change the names up a bit there guys. Maybe instead of Terrazine it could be, I dunno, chocolate milk and the Tal’Darim are only after it because they’re fucking cartoon villains who hate fun. You wouldn’t even have to change their dialogue that much for it to work.
Which leads to my next point, that Blizzard still can’t write dialogue and characters for shit. Alarak shows up to help Nova and then immediately deploys an army against her for no reason. I understand Alarak’s a dickhead but surely he should only be a dickhead if it benefits him in some way, right? Otherwise it’s stupid. Nova herself suffers from a near complete lack of characterisation. Oh you’re good at violence and you’re a stoic fearless badarse all the time? Well so’s everyone else in this fucking universe, you're not special. The closest she gets to having an actual character trait is a sense of justice and a desire to help others which rings completely hollow considering her previous employer. She used to work for Arcturus Mengsk, a guy who picked his teeth with baby’s ribs, threw kittens into woodchippers and financed development of the Liberator. You can’t be a chief henchmen for a totalitarian fuckhead and then claim to be the champion of the commoners, that’s not how logic works.
I know it seems foolish and indulgent to get worked up on the details of a game’s narrative when the core gameplay is what’s important but I’m going to, partially to pad out this piece a bit but also because if it’s so unnecessary than Blizzard could cut a lot of it and then the mission packs would come out sooner. I thought the whole point of an episodic release structure was so you can release in small chunks spaced closely together but the intervals between releases is about 4 months. Surely if you cut the cinematic budget a bit you could shave some of that time off, or just wait until it’s all done and just drop it all in one go?
Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on Blizzard, after all WCS has financed an awful lot of my whiskies and ciders. It’s just that I’m trying to put something out every week and this is only thing I can stand to play for more than an hour, so consider that high praise Blizzard you literary frauds.
Oh yeah, how is Nova able to cloak her head when it’s the suit that does the actual cloaking?
