EPTHeart of the Swarm: An Empire, or a Menace? - Page 2
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beamingrobot
United States685 Posts
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levelping
Singapore759 Posts
On March 20 2013 22:51 Champloo wrote: What a whiny review this is. Heart of the Swarm is a complete success in my book. The launch went well, no connection problems etc. The campaign was fun to play and the multiplayer games are so much more fun to play and watch. This has been by far the best release of Blizzard since Warcraft III The Frozen Throne. This so pretty rude. You are entitled to disagree but you can do so wwith a little more respect for someone that just typed out a well thought out essay. | ||
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Clove
United Kingdom5 Posts
1) Never had any idea of a love story throughout BW 2) The Zuran fight was poor. I *instantly* felt like I was doing the Belial boss fight. The RPG-ness was emphasised waaay too heavily. I bought SC2:HotS for a strategy game. Not a half-arsed singleplayer RPG. Where I spent most of the campaign using the hero units due to them making the game unbelievably easy. Brutal difficulty is supposed to be at least a slight km I wish they had made the campaign unit choices in a way similar to WoL, just with Zerg flavouring. Would have felt much nicer to me. And then you just proved all those thoughts I was having. | ||
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kYem
United Kingdom412 Posts
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Ctesias
4595 Posts
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Tuczniak
1561 Posts
I agree with 60% and disagree on 40% (mostly the subjective part & lore questioning). But very good. | ||
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zarepath
United States1626 Posts
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SChlafmann
France725 Posts
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Wildmoon
Thailand4189 Posts
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FrogOfWar
Germany1406 Posts
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osiris17
United States165 Posts
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Stratos_speAr
United States6959 Posts
On March 20 2013 22:51 Champloo wrote: What a whiny review this is. Heart of the Swarm is a complete success in my book. The launch went well, no connection problems etc. The campaign was fun to play and the multiplayer games are so much more fun to play and watch. This has been by far the best release of Blizzard since Warcraft III The Frozen Throne. You're not getting it. Basically everyone would agree that the gameplay was great (although entirely too easy). The problem is the story. By any objective critiquing standards, the writing is God-awful, and the OP puts this in one incredible and comprehensive post. This should be posted on the Battle.net forums. | ||
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Sherlock-Canada
Canada269 Posts
Obviously I do not feel this way. In my opinion, art can't be evaluated based on a cookie-cutter guide to what makes a good story, because you never know what you are going to find striking or what is going to make you feel something. (Vis a vis, Taxi Driver could not have been written by following the consensus on art and character motivation, but change one minute of it and you'll be up to yr ears in angry letters.$ And Heart of the Swarm was enjoyable and moved me. I shall admit that most of the poetry from this game for me comes from the multiplayer, like a well played game of chess or a rivalry in hockey. But the campaign presented many things I enjoyed as well, and they mostly related to gameplay. I'm not sure you should evaluate video games by analyzing their plot as if these were consistent characters behaving rationally because ultimately the trick that a good video game pulls off is making you believe you are those characters. We are talking about an interactive medium where we as players can make choices for characters that make no sense (make nothing but banelings on the final mission, ya?) but we can get lost in that interactivity. Suffice it to say, many here did not get lost in the game and did not enjoy playing it. But I did, so it is hard for me to see the constant justifications on the forum that the game is verifiably bad and that the plot is incoherently written and that Blizzard have sold out their souls by turning their favourite wargame into a romance. (We don't play any missions where this is relevant; we mostly play missions where we kill things!) I don't understand Mario's motivation. I don't appreciate Link's motivation. But sometimes, I find myself thinking their motivations are mine. | ||
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Random()
Kyrgyz Republic1462 Posts
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Xain
Canada94 Posts
However, what I don't necessarily agree with is that the Starcraft 1/BW story was so much better. Maybe, because of the technology back then, it wasn't possible to tell a story in a Hollywoodish fashion so it was easier for Blizzard to not fall into the same narrative traps. I do feel though that many see the original's story with rose-tinted glassed (I would make a comparison to Star Wars here: yes the new ones were not particularly good, but the old ones are put on a pedestal they don't truly deserve, and come on Star Trek is just better anyway). Here I want to say something that is not specifically addressed at you and is more of a general comment/rant. People look at the form and judge the quality of the content based on it so much! A good example of it is with art/auteur movies. Yes in average they have a more thought-out narrative than the usual Michael Bay movie, but these movies have such a distinct look and feel that many people will think that a certain movie is supposed to be good just because it looks artsy or auteur-y. I study musical composition for orchestra at the university and you get to see so many pseudo-contemporary stuff that sounds like it's intellectually thought-out and special but really it's actually quite easy to get a piece to sound like Boulez and the rest. You tell these people to write a simple four-voice choral and it sounds like shit. Don't get me started on the electro-minimalism stuff, it's even worse, seriously people are you actually listening to.... hum well I think I'll just end my rant here before I get too far away from my initial point. Another problem I have is that RTS were never a really good medium for narration. Sure, there are some example of passable storytelling (the first Starcraft is an example I guess) but really how many RTS you remember for the story? Personally I remember my RTS for multiplayer and level design for the single player, and I think Blizzard did a brilliant job on these front. The thing with RTS is that gameplay and narration get so much in the way of each other that you have to often find strange reasons to justify the missions, and then the story usually is either awkwardly told during the mission, or in between missions, and then you end up with a disjointed story arc that only make sense if you played the game when you were young (and then nostalgia gets you and you're unable to judge the story on its own merit). If you want a narration comparable to movie, I would say only first/third-person games can do it (most don't), and RPGs (and even then RPG gameplay gets in the way of narration quite often). I would say that I prefer sometimes the games that don't try to be a movie and convey an atmosphere, suggest feelings, rather that spell out a story. Games like Closure, Limbo, Faster Than Light (holy shit this game is brilliant), Amnesia, Mario, Minecraft, etc. | ||
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MikeT
Canada35 Posts
Also, Brutal was a cakewalk :p, had the chance to go over 2 bases on ONE mission. Two mechanics that bothered me were the fact that almost every mission had some kind of timed element to it, and many had boss fights. Come on, RTS hello? Overall I really enjoyed it though aside from those few glaring complaints. I would actually love it if in future a few really creative campaign makers came together and rewrote the story to still follow a general layout of the same plot but closed all the plot holes, made the whole thing a little more consistent and definitely more challenging. I really wish they did more with the evolution missions, I thought they were really neat because of the mechanics, but virtually impossible to lose. There was a mission in BW you needed to kill Rhinadons to collect their genetic material for some purpose which was actually possible to lose. They should have been more like that. | ||
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labbe
Sweden1456 Posts
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KapsyL
Sweden704 Posts
great read though. thanks alot | ||
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Grumbels
Netherlands7031 Posts
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Meatloaf
Spain664 Posts
On March 20 2013 23:40 Sherlock-Canada wrote: I'm not sure you should evaluate video games by analyzing their plot as if these were consistent characters behaving rationally because ultimately the trick that a good video game pulls off is making you believe you are those characters. We are talking about an interactive medium where we as players can make choices for characters that make no sense (make nothing but banelings on the final mission, ya?) but we can get lost in that interactivity. Suffice it to say, many here did not get lost in the game and did not enjoy playing it. But I did, so it is hard for me to see the constant justifications on the forum that the game is verifiably bad and that the plot is incoherently written and that Blizzard have sold out their souls by turning their favourite wargame into a romance. (We don't play any missions where this is relevant; we mostly play missions where we kill things!) I don't understand Mario's motivation. I don't appreciate Link's motivation. But sometimes, I find myself thinking their motivations are mine. OP doesnt say anything about missions themselves being bad... the story and dialogues interlinking them are bland and sometimes you cannot justify to yourself coherently why kerrigan makes this or that decision. Link and Mario actually have coherent behavior in all of his videogames , they are heroes who save princesses and they act like it through all of the videogames in which they appear. the problem here is that were being sold a kerrigan that sometimes acts like a fierce killer in a quest for power to kill mengsk and then romantically sighs for jim raynor and tries to save civilians lives, even after being transformed (because of his desire for vengeance) again into the queen of blades. its confusing and made me enjoy less the story , its not the end of the world , but i appreciate good storylines especially when you try to drive a plot through main characters (like SC2 tries to do) , for example any game of CoD makes a MUCH better work of doing this , and their storylines are not what you would call brilliant. | ||
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