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On March 23 2013 20:09 DaveVAH wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2013 19:33 Holy_AT wrote:On March 23 2013 19:03 DaveVAH wrote:On March 20 2013 21:58 wo1fwood wrote:
I'd also just like to quickly note that now that I have finished with my thoughts and whatnot, that it is unlikely I will write a review on a Blizzard title again. I can only handle so much critical analysis and especially in this instance, somewhat disenfranchising thoughts, and I know you probably have similar feelings regarding this. So I should apologize for what I had to do here as I felt it necessary to explain how unacceptable I've felt this kind of writing/execution is from a company that supposedly is one of the "best" in the business (they do so many things right, why not this).
Also this was intended to go in the Campaign forum, so I would request that it be moved there when that subforum goes up. Hell no I dont. Take your elitist bullshit elsewhere. I personally very much enjoyed the story and thought it was a big step up from wol. I say goodbye and goodriddance if you are moving on from reviewing anymore of these games, you are just not that good at it. i think the fact that you were already disjointed at blizzard for their latest releases has seriously hindered your ability to enjoy what they have released here (i could be wrong)
Yeb. I see so many of these critics of HOTS that when you dig deep enough with them on argiments start talking about the evils of activition and how D3 has ruined the good reputation of blizzard. They don't know or seem not to care that there are almost completely different teams working on these projects and chris metzen who made this story was also the story writer for sc1. It is not some evil activision dude in suite trying to milk peoples money with bad stories. Not in this case anyway. I really dont like postings such as this. Calling the OP Elitist who spreads bullshit after writing a carefully thought out thread with good formating pictures wordings and arguments is just outrageous. If you disagree with him, then formulate your points and explain them and provide facts why you disagree with him and why you think the story of hots is a good one. I think that for responds of this kind you should receive a warning. I do not mind if you disagree with the OP but I do mind the way you are doing it. You are not argumenting you are just talking down on him without providing any argument facts or real content. its 3 AM here and I cant ever hope to top a 10 page argument in kind. And it is wasted in team liquid since most seem to hate the story for some reason or another but you guys are very much a minority. Battle net forums, reddit, Amazon and metacritics all have high praises for HOTS so the story/campaign stands very well on its own without my arguments. OP's writing just reeks of elitism in my opinion and the fact that he went ahead and said "I know you will all agree with me here" really just tops that. He is preaching to the choir here and he knows it. Edit: it looks like even in TL you must have very strong dissenters to the idea that the story was bad so guys like this (quote below) are fretting openly about it. It is a highlight of a great story when it has strong and passionate defenders even in a very hostile environment.
There are a LOT of posts on any forum talking about HotS that bash the single player story for being shit. Also, show me one review that actually praises the story please.
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This thread blows my mind. But then, gaming standards are at an all time low these days. There is hope in the future however thanks to games that are being funded through kickstarter, let's hope companies like Blizzard eventually crash and burn. Worst of all is that people are defending what companies like Blizzard are doing by saying shit like "what do you expect? It's a game, you have too high standards." This kind of mentality makes me really sad. Are all gamers today too young to have been gamers during the glory days? Or have most people forgotten? We should always have high standards, how else can gaming companies be forced to put more work into their games? We shouldn't just be happy with the turds that they shit out. If you like cheesy stories, that's fine, but don't tell me that games have to be like that.
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On March 23 2013 22:54 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2013 20:09 DaveVAH wrote:On March 23 2013 19:33 Holy_AT wrote:On March 23 2013 19:03 DaveVAH wrote:On March 20 2013 21:58 wo1fwood wrote:
I'd also just like to quickly note that now that I have finished with my thoughts and whatnot, that it is unlikely I will write a review on a Blizzard title again. I can only handle so much critical analysis and especially in this instance, somewhat disenfranchising thoughts, and I know you probably have similar feelings regarding this. So I should apologize for what I had to do here as I felt it necessary to explain how unacceptable I've felt this kind of writing/execution is from a company that supposedly is one of the "best" in the business (they do so many things right, why not this).
Also this was intended to go in the Campaign forum, so I would request that it be moved there when that subforum goes up. Hell no I dont. Take your elitist bullshit elsewhere. I personally very much enjoyed the story and thought it was a big step up from wol. I say goodbye and goodriddance if you are moving on from reviewing anymore of these games, you are just not that good at it. i think the fact that you were already disjointed at blizzard for their latest releases has seriously hindered your ability to enjoy what they have released here (i could be wrong)
Yeb. I see so many of these critics of HOTS that when you dig deep enough with them on argiments start talking about the evils of activition and how D3 has ruined the good reputation of blizzard. They don't know or seem not to care that there are almost completely different teams working on these projects and chris metzen who made this story was also the story writer for sc1. It is not some evil activision dude in suite trying to milk peoples money with bad stories. Not in this case anyway. I really dont like postings such as this. Calling the OP Elitist who spreads bullshit after writing a carefully thought out thread with good formating pictures wordings and arguments is just outrageous. If you disagree with him, then formulate your points and explain them and provide facts why you disagree with him and why you think the story of hots is a good one. I think that for responds of this kind you should receive a warning. I do not mind if you disagree with the OP but I do mind the way you are doing it. You are not argumenting you are just talking down on him without providing any argument facts or real content. its 3 AM here and I cant ever hope to top a 10 page argument in kind. And it is wasted in team liquid since most seem to hate the story for some reason or another but you guys are very much a minority. Battle net forums, reddit, Amazon and metacritics all have high praises for HOTS so the story/campaign stands very well on its own without my arguments. OP's writing just reeks of elitism in my opinion and the fact that he went ahead and said "I know you will all agree with me here" really just tops that. He is preaching to the choir here and he knows it. Edit: it looks like even in TL you must have very strong dissenters to the idea that the story was bad so guys like this (quote below) are fretting openly about it. It is a highlight of a great story when it has strong and passionate defenders even in a very hostile environment. There are a LOT of posts on any forum talking about HotS that bash the single player story for being shit. Also, show me one review that actually praises the story please.
I can show you lost of posts and reviews that praise the story, however you will probably call into question the sanity and intelligence level behind the person so easily amused by horrible incongruous storytelling and kindergarten-level plot development in order to hand-hold the common moron.
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Beautiful review of the story, if i had thought it worth the time i might have written something similar.
The only thing i missed was a reference to WoL when the Taldarim came up.
Because Raynor going all imperialistic and blowing them up so he can claim their religious artifacts was another thing that realy bugged me ... and doesnt fit with the persona described in BW at all.
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I have never taken the campaign seriously because it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. I feel the same about most of what Blizzard has done, atleast recently. It feels like they have taken all the cheese that has ever happened on the ladder and poured it all over the already lacking campaign and then polished it with their technical knowledge.
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True and a very comprehensive writing indeed.
A lot of reviewers have been saying the same thing.
Terrible story writing.
I cringed especially at the relationship between Kerrigan and Jim.
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On March 23 2013 23:25 sCCrooked wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2013 22:54 Stratos_speAr wrote:On March 23 2013 20:09 DaveVAH wrote:On March 23 2013 19:33 Holy_AT wrote:On March 23 2013 19:03 DaveVAH wrote:On March 20 2013 21:58 wo1fwood wrote:
I'd also just like to quickly note that now that I have finished with my thoughts and whatnot, that it is unlikely I will write a review on a Blizzard title again. I can only handle so much critical analysis and especially in this instance, somewhat disenfranchising thoughts, and I know you probably have similar feelings regarding this. So I should apologize for what I had to do here as I felt it necessary to explain how unacceptable I've felt this kind of writing/execution is from a company that supposedly is one of the "best" in the business (they do so many things right, why not this).
Also this was intended to go in the Campaign forum, so I would request that it be moved there when that subforum goes up. Hell no I dont. Take your elitist bullshit elsewhere. I personally very much enjoyed the story and thought it was a big step up from wol. I say goodbye and goodriddance if you are moving on from reviewing anymore of these games, you are just not that good at it. i think the fact that you were already disjointed at blizzard for their latest releases has seriously hindered your ability to enjoy what they have released here (i could be wrong)
Yeb. I see so many of these critics of HOTS that when you dig deep enough with them on argiments start talking about the evils of activition and how D3 has ruined the good reputation of blizzard. They don't know or seem not to care that there are almost completely different teams working on these projects and chris metzen who made this story was also the story writer for sc1. It is not some evil activision dude in suite trying to milk peoples money with bad stories. Not in this case anyway. I really dont like postings such as this. Calling the OP Elitist who spreads bullshit after writing a carefully thought out thread with good formating pictures wordings and arguments is just outrageous. If you disagree with him, then formulate your points and explain them and provide facts why you disagree with him and why you think the story of hots is a good one. I think that for responds of this kind you should receive a warning. I do not mind if you disagree with the OP but I do mind the way you are doing it. You are not argumenting you are just talking down on him without providing any argument facts or real content. its 3 AM here and I cant ever hope to top a 10 page argument in kind. And it is wasted in team liquid since most seem to hate the story for some reason or another but you guys are very much a minority. Battle net forums, reddit, Amazon and metacritics all have high praises for HOTS so the story/campaign stands very well on its own without my arguments. OP's writing just reeks of elitism in my opinion and the fact that he went ahead and said "I know you will all agree with me here" really just tops that. He is preaching to the choir here and he knows it. Edit: it looks like even in TL you must have very strong dissenters to the idea that the story was bad so guys like this (quote below) are fretting openly about it. It is a highlight of a great story when it has strong and passionate defenders even in a very hostile environment. There are a LOT of posts on any forum talking about HotS that bash the single player story for being shit. Also, show me one review that actually praises the story please. I can show you lost of posts and reviews that praise the story, however you will probably call into question the sanity and intelligence level behind the person so easily amused by horrible incongruous storytelling and kindergarten-level plot development in order to hand-hold the common moron.
He asked for just one review (which is silly because of outliers). How about you show him since you are so confident?
Nevermind. I'll do it for both of you.
Giantbomb
There are worse video game stories out there, and it's a lot easier to forgive since the single-player game is so much fun, but at this point the overall plot arc of StarCraft II is a bit easier to enjoy if you don't take it too seriously.
They found certain things they genuinely liked but they still thought it was bad and only forgave it because the gameplay was actually good.
Strategy Informer
Heart of the Swarm now continues the guilty treat of Blizzard’s B-movie extravaganza. The lines can be cheesy, the plot bonkers, villains given plenty of moustache twirling – but it’s what makes you march your units to victory.
Guilty pleasures signify something so bad it's good. I don't actually accept that logic because it just means you found the whole experience to be funny. You can interrupt this however you want.
Insidegaming
The campaign’s story is satisfactory for a second act–one villain is dispatched while another, more serious one is introduced. Blizzard-familiar themes like revenge and corruption pop up, though the studio’s story charm is always in the telling rather than the plot. In that regard the story is pretty good.
There we go. A definitive positive review and I only had to search the first 3 out of the 50 on metacritic.
Can we go on and stop pretending there aren't people who looked at this story favorably? (looking at Stratos_speAr)
Can we stop pretending if we actually use our brain cells there are a bunch of elements in the story that pull you out whether or not you know about the previous games? (looks at sCCrooked )
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I rather enjoyed the HotS storyline more than that of thje WoL. And that by any measure is an improvement...Well done blizz! WEll written critique 
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Masterfully written. Hits on all the points that it should
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Legacy of the Void Last mission:-
+ Show Spoiler +
Kerrigan, Raynor and Zeratul unite their races to fight a common foe. They use this alliance to defend x xel'naga artifact from the army of hybrids for y seconds.
When y=0 the artifact destroys all the hybrids everyone lives happily ever after and Kerrigan is miraculously cured of the hyperevolutionary virus.
Kerrigan and Raynor get a nice little house on charr where they have pet zerglings etc, grow their own produce and grow old happily together in a life of harmony.
Zeratul falls in love with nova because she's hot and they have hybrid babies which leads to the plot for sc3.
You're welcome.
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This is actually funny to me.
Despite all the streamers of the single player being incredibly exicted about it.
Despite every single one of my friends being blown away.
Despite 6/12 reviews that I have found giving it a perfect score with the rest giving close to perfect.
Despite a poll on TL showing that the majority of the user base liked the campaign(and this is TL - the most critical place ever :p ).
There are still so many posts claiming that the story was just objectively bad.
I mean, share your opinion all you like, but don't act like your evaluation of the story is anything more than an opinion.
On another note, with all this in mind and my own experience of the story, it blows my mind that some people can be so negative about it - but this is just my opinion.
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^
by that logic Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1/2/3 are the best games ever made. Dang!
On March 24 2013 00:16 zbedlam wrote:Legacy of the Void Last mission:- + Show Spoiler +
Kerrigan, Raynor and Zeratul unite their races to fight a common foe. They use this alliance to defend x xel'naga artifact from the army of hybrids for y seconds.
When y=0 the artifact destroys all the hybrids everyone lives happily ever after and Kerrigan is miraculously cured of the hyperevolutionary virus.
Kerrigan and Raynor get a nice little house on charr where they have pet zerglings etc, grow their own produce and grow old happily together in a life of harmony.
Zeratul falls in love with nova because she's hot and they have hybrid babies which leads to the plot for sc3.
You're welcome.
sad truth is that there is a huge chance the first and the second and the third paragraph will actually happen...
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the story was bad, sure, but it was fun to play, the cinematics were pretty and it was funny if you looked at it in the right light. Don't take this shit so seriously, blizzard story lines are all about simplicity, cheese and pop-culture/gaming culture references, not about actual drama or compelling story lines.
also, to those saying that the story line was good because people liked it - http://www.statisticbrain.com/total-twilight-franchise-sales-revenue/
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On March 24 2013 00:19 fabiano wrote:^ by that logic Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1/2/3 are the best games ever made. Dang! Show nested quote +On March 24 2013 00:16 zbedlam wrote:Legacy of the Void Last mission:- + Show Spoiler +
Kerrigan, Raynor and Zeratul unite their races to fight a common foe. They use this alliance to defend x xel'naga artifact from the army of hybrids for y seconds.
When y=0 the artifact destroys all the hybrids everyone lives happily ever after and Kerrigan is miraculously cured of the hyperevolutionary virus.
Kerrigan and Raynor get a nice little house on charr where they have pet zerglings etc, grow their own produce and grow old happily together in a life of harmony.
Zeratul falls in love with nova because she's hot and they have hybrid babies which leads to the plot for sc3.
You're welcome.
sad truth is that there is a huge chance the first and the second and the third paragraph will actually happen...
What logic? The logic that evaluations of the story are opinions? Whaat?
On March 24 2013 00:27 Tayar wrote:the story was bad, sure, but it was fun to play, the cinematics were pretty and it was funny if you looked at it in the right light. Don't take this shit so seriously, blizzard story lines are all about simplicity, cheese and pop-culture/gaming culture references, not about actual drama or compelling story lines. also, to those saying that the story line was good because people liked it - http://www.statisticbrain.com/total-twilight-franchise-sales-revenue/
To be fair, the difference is though that the people disliking twillight is a massive group whereas the people disliking this is a much smaller group. On a side note this is great to make a point: I don't personally enjoy twillight too much, but I do feel that it suffers for people being too hateful towards it. It's just kind of law of nature that if something that some people didn't like gets too much praise and attention then they are more likely to hate it even more if it hadn't received the popularity in the first place. It's like a law of balance.
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On March 24 2013 00:18 Cereb wrote:
This is actually funny to me.
Despite all the streamers of the single player being incredibly exicted about it.
Despite every single one of my friends being blown away.
Despite 6/12 reviews that I have found giving it a perfect score with the rest giving close to perfect.
Despite a poll on TL showing that the majority of the user base liked the campaign(and this is TL - the most critical place ever :p ).
There are still so many posts claiming that the story was just objectively bad.
I mean, share your opinion all you like, but don't act like your evaluation of the story is anything more than an opinion.
On another note, with all this in mind and my own experience of the story, it blows my mind that some people can be so negative about it - but this is just my opinion.
Game reviews are really meaningless. For instance, how are you going to give a score to something like the multiplayer improvements? And if the single player is targeted towards people that are inexperienced with the game, then that would include most game reviewers (since they probably don't have a lot of time to play any one game), but it says nothing about whether it really stands up to someone that has played Starcraft before.
And there are some objectively negative things to say about the game. A lot of the missions are straight rip-offs of WoL or other games, the campaign was really short, even game reviewers picked up on the dialogue being cheesy and the story being generic. More experienced players, like you might find on TL, might have more in-depth criticism, which one could dismiss as cynicism, but there is still a real basis for the backlash.
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@OP: Sorry for being a pedantic little pos. It's quintessential (as in essence) and not "quintisential".
Great post btw.
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On March 24 2013 00:18 Cereb wrote:
This is actually funny to me.
Despite all the streamers of the single player being incredibly exicted about it.
Despite every single one of my friends being blown away.
Despite 6/12 reviews that I have found giving it a perfect score with the rest giving close to perfect.
Despite a poll on TL showing that the majority of the user base liked the campaign(and this is TL - the most critical place ever :p ).
There are still so many posts claiming that the story was just objectively bad.
I mean, share your opinion all you like, but don't act like your evaluation of the story is anything more than an opinion.
On another note, with all this in mind and my own experience of the story, it blows my mind that some people can be so negative about it - but this is just my opinion.
There is one instance where it isn't subjective. That is when the story contradicts itself.
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OK let me put of cynic hat and state what is *objectively* bad.
1) Retconning is bad. It's a clear sign of laziness or incompetence - you don't retcon unless you have a damn good reason to do that. "It doesn't fit with the story I want to tell" is not one of them.
2) Changing character's motivations and personalities to suit the plot is bad. Especially when a character shifts his traits from scene to scene. SC2 basically does this with ALL the characters.
3) Almost any plot relying on a "prophecy" is objectively bad. It becomes even more bad when your story has a character whose only purpose is to randomly pop up and deliver said prophecy.
4) Telling instead of showing is bad. Repeatedly telling is even worse. If your characters constantly feel the need to explain everything and constantly reiterate what they are doing and why... bad.
5) Having villains whose 90% of the dialogue boils down to taunting the protagonists - bad.
6) "Killing" main characters off-screen is bad. Unless you have the balls to actually kill them, which we know you don't. HotS does this twice. Bad.
7) Recycling the story already used in your previous game is bad.
8) Resurrecting characters only to have them nothing substantial to do - bad. Doubly so if this newly resurrected character could easily be exchanged with a completely different character without requiring almost any rewrites of the plot.
9) Making the entire plot blatantly obvious, so obvious that you don't lose nothing by revealing it in its entirety in the trailer - bad.
10) Inconsistencies. Bad.
Is any of these things "subjective"?
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9 and 10 is subjective but can be arguably objective given the context.
7 then is definitively subjective.
You're other seven points either coincide with my own thoughts or point out things I didn't take the time to think about.
7 is subjective because reusing story elements appeals to the audience you built up. Certain people may get bored with the recycling but that's a risk you take as a writer. If a person was trying to sell books and found a formula that works it isn't in their interest to deviate from that formula when it pays the bills and it still helps them retains a large portion of the fans they acquired or even expand on it.
9 is subjective because we do have stories that reveal a whole bunch of things at the beginning and then the story revolves around how reached that point. A story that sells itself with a trailer that spoils its plot is ultimately relying on the journey being more important than the resolution.
Of course the risk with that is that by revealing too much the emotional resonance can be undermined because you know to reach a certain plot point something else that is currently happening can't have certain outcomes.
10 can always be handwaved away with the limitations of what perspectives you are viewing the story from. Things could potentially happen offscreen or onsceen that is unstated.
Overall it is a good list on how criticisms can be objective.
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EPT
