On July 24 2023 20:56 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On July 24 2023 11:00 KrillinFromwales wrote:
I think Warcraft is great. I like Undead. The heroes and the emphasis on micro and strategic brilliance over large scale conflict is nice but doesn't anticipate the difficulty in microing that some species have. Other species in Starcraft have problems too but they're not basically divine. In Warcraft everything is divine, even the World Tree. It reminds me of how certain conflicts could be amplified.
Destroying the Overmind isn't really "The End."
Nice blog, need my occasional reminder of that ‘fuck yeah’ moment I had as a kid when Tassadar blew up that pesky brain. Yeah I think WC does a great job giving various factions a pretty defined identity. I’m unsure how they picked up this ball in WoW but Nelves were insular, suspicious, informed by millennia of existence, struggling to trust outsiders even in the face of greater threats. Burning Legion are stock evil, and Orcs now have a noble spirit struggling to overcome their innate brutality. The Undead fill both the mindless horde role, but later when control is shattered they’re a collective of many previous lives struggling to carve out a new identity and place in the world.
Generally more of a sci-fi guy myself but I think WC3 probably does have the best overall narrative and presentation of Blizz’s RTS games
Show nested quote +On July 24 2023 07:23 Archeon wrote:
It's so weird and wrong to me that they rewrote that as something the Overminded intended in Sc2. Like it's so out there what Tassadar did and barely understandable, it's just weird that the Overmind supposedly predicted and guided that.
Then again I'm not a fan of the whole Amon plotline, I think cosmic horror (and wonder) works better without creator gods ordering the galaxy and imo Kerrigan's parts were the weakest in the Sc2 plotline. They work on an emotional level, but really not on a logical one. But I didn't like how they rewrote the Orcs in Wc3 either, imo evil bloodthirsty races can just be evil and there's nothing wrong with that.
It absolutely lessens tons of the events of the first game when prophecies start coming into it. There are few exceptions I don’t hate prophecy arcs, and they’re almost exclusively ones where the prophecy isn’t actually true in universe and thus gets subverted.
I didn’t mind the Orcs in WC3 but I’d started Blizz RTS with SC not WC so it was just how I always knew them. I don’t think Blizzard does complex greyness all that well in general, especially when they try to soft retcon previous narrative points. Least from my experiences with other Blizz games.
Tassadar sacrifices himself to take out the big evil dude. Big evil’s new human avatar may actually be more evil, given she’s not solely motivated by the swarm consuming species and growing, but human hatred and malevolence, the swarm kinda shifts from neutral evil to something worse. Jimothy Raynor makes a solemn vow to kill Kerrigan. Such is the state of play end of BW
Come SC2 Tassadar appears for a bit, revealing that after he killed it with his gambit he psychically discovered the Overmind wasn’t as bad a dude/dudette as we’d thought actually, also was actually kinda cool being killed. Also Kerrigan is some kind of prophesied chosen one now, also Raynor is now hell-bent on saving Kerrigan, probably the most dangerous single individual in the Koprulu sector with zero evidence it can even be done
The campaign is very good from a gameplay perspective but I think every change they made in tweaking the understood state of play from BW’s end to SC2 wasn’t a good one
Good stuff for me, Tychus is fun. Zeratul doing Zeratul things and journeying out the stars on a Maguffin hunt is absolutely a Zeratul thing to do. I liked the various Protoss factions and the politics, especially when Alarak gets involved. Having some other Zerg characters especially Abarthur who still have personality but are resolutely Zerg. Some of the Amon stuff, the lead-in is pretty good but as you said if you’re channelling cosmic horror you can’t really show your hand without it being a let-down
You could have kept Kerrigan as Queen Bitch of the UniverseTM and still hit most of the plot points. The showdown with Amon just becomes a purely transactional thing, enemy of my enemy instead of ‘I’m sorta noble now and I’m also gonna go Super Saiyan’
End SC2 with a Tychus style short clip, only with Kerrigan walking into a darkened room ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you…’
You may never actually make SC3 but you’ve set it up somewhat at least. Other than some even more contrived new super-species appearing the only conceivable big bad in the setting that could bring all factions into conflict is Kerrigan and you spent the whole sequel giving her a redemption arc.
EPT
