This last week’s not been a great one for finding a game I want to talk about, so fuck it I’m gonna talk about Nova Covert Ops. Who cares if it’s not actually fully released yet and can be accurately summarised “if you liked SC2 up to this point you’ll play this because it’s just more of the same”, at least I’ve played it all the way through which is a lot more than I can say for my recent Steam purchases. This is Teamliquid.net so I’m going to assume you’ve played NOC if not go do that now. It won't take you that long.
Although 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?
Literally finished this game 10 minutes ago before coming onto TL and stumbled across your post. I personally liked it just because its starcraft and starcraft is the only game I've clung onto over time. That being said, I'm a sucker for two things when it comes to games: romance and story. Hell I cried at the ending of hots when kerrigan flew into space. I had her bloody face as my wallpaper for a time (you know the one where she looks to her side and says 'Goodbye Jim' <3). I know a good story when I see it (pls dont doubt me) and in retrospect sc2's story is incredibly ridiculous, so its odd that I enjoy sc2's campaign so much in its entirety. I prioritise story as much as gameplay and my favorite games of all time are pretty linear-based story games so I think your criticism of the story, Nova & Alarak's character and the logic of the story as a whole is completely reasonable.
On August 05 2016 15:50 BEARDiaguz wrote: Which leads to my next point, that Blizzard still can’t write dialogue and characters for shit.
pro wrestling is the same way man.. i consider it part of the fun. the heart and soul of the company is 4 electrical engineers. electrical engineers are good at certain things and not so good at other things. i don't expect Blizzard story telling , dialogue, or character development to improve. I'm enjoying how crap it is any way.
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.
when i was 13 we played SC64 on the N64 so the names of many things were never pronounced. it was all just text. i had a year long debate going with my best friend about whether the science facility add-on was a "CoverTops" or a "Covert Ops".
Sounds like it's more of the same. Is the campaign long and good enough to justify the price?
I really hope Blizz gets their old writing team back. I know that they sell better with a hollywood cliché story, but still... I miss the days when Blizz' worlds were full of fear and betrayal and when heroism was something special. I still hope that diablo 4 is gonna be closer to diablo 2 than diablo 3 in story.
Btw Nova seems to be on the same drug as Kerrigan, sometimes she just forgets that she does evil stuff all the time.
On August 12 2016 17:18 Blackfeather wrote: Sounds like it's more of the same. Is the campaign long and good enough to justify the price?
I really hope Blizz gets their old writing team back. I know that they sell better with a hollywood cliché story, but still... I miss the days when Blizz' worlds were full of fear and betrayal and when heroism was something special. I still hope that diablo 4 is gonna be closer to diablo 2 than diablo 3 in story.
Btw Nova seems to be on the same drug as Kerrigan, sometimes she just forgets that she does evil stuff all the time.
On August 12 2016 17:18 Blackfeather wrote: Sounds like it's more of the same. Is the campaign long and good enough to justify the price?
I really hope Blizz gets their old writing team back. I know that they sell better with a hollywood cliché story, but still... I miss the days when Blizz' worlds were full of fear and betrayal and when heroism was something special. I still hope that diablo 4 is gonna be closer to diablo 2 than diablo 3 in story.
Btw Nova seems to be on the same drug as Kerrigan, sometimes she just forgets that she does evil stuff all the time.
Breast enhancements damaged their brains somehow.
They don't mean to be evil, it's all just a point of view kinda problem
On August 12 2016 17:18 Blackfeather wrote: Sounds like it's more of the same. Is the campaign long and good enough to justify the price?
I really hope Blizz gets their old writing team back. I know that they sell better with a hollywood cliché story, but still... I miss the days when Blizz' worlds were full of fear and betrayal and when heroism was something special. I still hope that diablo 4 is gonna be closer to diablo 2 than diablo 3 in story.
Btw Nova seems to be on the same drug as Kerrigan, sometimes she just forgets that she does evil stuff all the time.
Breast enhancements damaged their brains somehow.
They don't mean to be evil, it's all just a point of view kinda problem
Also <3 breasts
Tempting to meme about breasts and story, but the mods wouldn't like that.
Wish it was a point of view problem Kerrigan is suffering from DID in HotS.
She lets the survivors run because conscience, comes home, gets a report that tells her that "[her] Zerg have overrun another planet" with an animation of the entire planet getting creeped and tells her first officer with a straight face to continue with the good work. She's playing secret Hitler or something.
Also "shoot me Jimmy!".
Hope Nova isn't that bad. To be fair she probably isn't, LotV's writing was a lot better than HotS and they have a lot more freedom.
I'm wondering where this righteous justice streak is coming from as well. In WOL she was a ruthless dominion assassin. Perhaps it could be played off as a facade she was presenting to Raynor as they were technically enemies at the time.
EPT
Kerrigan is suffering from DID in HotS. 
