They might realize it, but it's very possible that the cliche-riddled plots and one-dimensional characters of their more recent games have a broader appeal. It's sad, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if that was what they determined via focus testing or just plain sales-based assumptions.
Playing Starcraft Brood War campaign again makes me sad about how bad, cheesy and embarassing SCII's story was. Can't believe how bad Blizzard managed to fuck up the way they did. How they managed to ruin Kerrigan character is simply unbelievable. Samir Duran, one the most mischievous characters from Brood War, and one of the biggest prospects plots for SCII's story barely had any appearence in the final run, and when it did, barely ressembled the Brood War personality at all. What annoyed me is how much importance Mengsk got in SCII's plot, after how bad his ass got kicked in Brood War. One time by UED, twice by Kerrigan. He was already a dead meat. But Blizzard treat him like the foe to be dealt with... in two games. He was the enemy in both Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm. Brood War set of events made clear that Kerrigan and the Hybrids bred by Duran were the enemies in SCII, not Mengsk. Well, Amon and the Hybrids actually were the real enemies in the overall plot, but only in Legacy of the Void they got that treatment.
Starcraft story is one where humans end up in a middle of an ancient and epic scale conflict. By accident.
Starcraft 2 has motiveless wars fought for unclear reasons, and there's a random space-god.
Kerrigan is a creation of the first point actually. Blizzard wanted a human viewpoint for the Zerg campaign. And this is visible in the story, as the Overmind claims Kerrigan is a key to the Zerg victory yet nothing in the campaign really indicates this is the case. The only thing she does is to chase Protoss on Char, yet her powers do not actually contribute to the war against the Protoss. I have vague recollection that Kerrigan was somewhat late addition to the game, explaining this issue. Still, she does make a superb villain in Brood War so it all worked out well.
---
Some thoughts on hybrids.
The Overmind's goal is to assimilate the Protoss into the Swarm to create something perfect. Evidently he/it/they think that because Xel'Naga created both species. Functionally, this would be a hybrid. And this is naturally unthinkable to the Protoss.
Funny enough, Duran has the same goal. Only, he apparently does it with technological means, but really, there is little difference to the end result. Zeratul is not amused.
The real mystery here is why Duran wants this. And there's the bit of weirdness how he describes Kerrigan's existence being helpful. The most logical one is the control of the Swarm: elimination of Overmind, perhaps the hybrid would've been subject to the Overmind otherwise. (Ironically SC2 kinda inverted this, somehow, weirdly.)
(And i'm cutting stuff off here because this has been sitting for a long time like as is without me figuring out how to continue. Maybe later.)
Starcraft II's story is indeed awful, and a borderline travesty compared to the solid sci-fi plot of the original, that's all true. It completely wastes SC's sequel-hook setup at the end in favor of unrelated, poorly written junk.
However, how surprising is that really, when Blizz's writing skills seemed to decline so rapidly after the '90s? From Warcraft I to Diablo 2 Blizzard's writing was above average to good. Sure, none of their games had the best stories ever, but they were good and more than did the job. But Warcraft III... as much as I love the game, and I really do, I've never thought much of its story. It had some good ideas and some interesting plot points, but at the time I found WCIII's story pretty disappointing. It felt like one part inferior Starcraft rehash, and one part other new cliche stuff. As much as I love the game (in multiplayer) I never cared enough about the story to finish the expansion, or even all four of the original campaigns (I beat three, but not the Orc one because I didn't like the no-base-building thing much.).
I mean seriously...
Arthas is kind of like a more evil modified Kerrigan, for example.
The story felt lazy and only average, a disappointment by the standards I was expecting from a Blizzard game plot. It's still my second favorite game after SC because of the amazing gameplay, but that's a different issue.
And then after that came WoW, which from everything I have heard has over time totally ruined everything about the Warcraft series' story. So yeah, when SCII came out and its story was no better, and managed to make WCIII's disappointment look good? Sadly I was not surprised... it's a terrible followup to Starcraft storyline-wise, but from modern Blizzard I wasn't expecting better.
That's no excuse though, SC2 should have been so much more than it was.
Seriously how could they not follow up competently on the Duran / Hybrids plotline...
Fortunately though the original Starcraft is still the best game ever, and I'm loving Remastered; it's awesome to get back to this game, after a long time away. I'm terrible at the game as I always was, but at least I've managed to win a couple of times in Ranked... that's nice. And it's fun either way.
Warcraft 3 is cliche but i don't mind that, for i think its presentation is great, and the cast of characters is strong. Delivery matters.
A cliche setting/plot/whatever works, if it is done well.
Starcraft 2 lacks all that. It does have reasonably high production values but... i don't know, the characters just don't quite work and the overall plot is not coherent enough.
Warcraft 3 has multiple plot lines going on at once, but they interact believably and form a coherent whole. And they're character-driven. SC2 has events driving the characters, which is bad storytelling.
Just played through the Brood War Protoss campaign for the story using a ton of cheats. I get that Starcraft 2's story isn't good, but Starcraft 1 isn't perfection like some act like it is. There's some of the cheesiness in there that Starcraft 2 is known for, and while it's written much better than Starcraft 2, I'm not a big fan of the line delivery. It feels too slow, like they're trying to add emphasis to every word (that's not just Protoss either as it's common through all of the original campaigns as well). The ending cinematic of the Brood War Protoss campaign also aged horribly, although I don't think it looked great to begin with. Artanis and Zeratul look like something from Abe's Odyssey.
Side note but I have to mention it. I give a ton of credit of my typing skills to Runescape from trying to spam chat in world 3 so hard to sell stuff. Playing Starcraft 1 reminded me that this came before it. For my 9th or 10th birthday, I had a party at the Boys & Girls Club. Somewhere there gave me Starcraft for my birthday (I still have the massive box it came in) and installed it on every single computer there and made it so you didn't need the disc to play. We had a big lan party, and it's basically what got me into PC gaming. Inserting all the cheats again now made me realize that that was where my typing skills started improving. As soon as a map loaded, my first goal was to insert almost every cheat I knew as fast as possible
because I sucked at the game
, and doing that now reminded me of it. So Starcraft got me into PC gaming, was my first ever online game AND kickstarted my way to becoming a good typer.
Just played through the Brood War Protoss campaign for the story using a ton of cheats. I get that Starcraft 2's story isn't good, but Starcraft 1 isn't perfection like some act like it is.
Of course it is not perfect. But it is so much more than what we've gotten since...
One flaw for example: One major issue with Brood War is that characters hold a bit too much idiot ball and "poor communication kills" trope is in full effect. But all in all, the story is pretty good.
Kerrigan is, IMO, rather strong villain, malicious AND effective. And arguably tragic, for she became what she is due to a betrayal.
One thing that makes Starcraft so good, IMO, is the well woven illusion of depth. And it is an illusion, story-telling is very much smoke and mirrors nearly always. Hint just so, and your listeners/watchers/readers minds fill in the rest. This maybe where Starcraft 2 fails at times, too much info, wrong kind of info, which shatters the illusion and/or doesn't leave space for imagination.
Of course it is not perfect. But it is so much more than what we've gotten since...
One flaw for example: One major issue with Brood War is that characters hold a bit too much idiot ball and "poor communication kills" trope is in full effect. But all in all, the story is pretty good.
Kerrigan is, IMO, rather strong villain, malicious AND effective. And arguably tragic, for she became what she is due to a betrayal.
One thing that makes Starcraft so good, IMO, is the well woven illusion of depth. And it is an illusion, story-telling is very much smoke and mirrors nearly always. Hint just so, and your listeners/watchers/readers minds fill in the rest. This maybe where Starcraft 2 fails at times, too much info, wrong kind of info, which shatters the illusion and/or doesn't leave space for imagination.
I almost got myself a laptop today! It's from 2014 but still it might have been able to play it. 250 dollars too! But then I checked my account and remembered the hospital bills.
Weird, i think the patch did something to the Real Time Lighting. It is better now. Projectiles and stuff create lights. Don't think that happened before. (Or i had a corrupted installation that got fixed with the patch, who knows...)
1.20.2 has arrived. As Pete mentioned in the 1.20.1 patch notes; we are continuing to address server stability and web interface bugs/improvements e.g. Leaderboards & Profiles in parallel.
Specific Changes & Improvements
Observer UI – F6 will now return you to a default zoom state
Bug Fixes
Stability fixes, including top exceptions
All HD Zerg portraits have been corrected to not overlay on the UI
Saving games with the same name should now work correctly
Cancelling a ranked game queue will now properly update your Battle.Net presence
Preorder building skins will now properly scale to the selected graphics settings
Game music will no longer linger, if it was turned off in the settings
The cancel option in the confirmation window when attempting to remove a player from a game lobby now works as it should
Known Issues
Options Being Reverted to Default (This is now deployed edit 8/22/17 6:33pm)
I would love to buy and play this remastered version but in my country, blizzard chose to use a third party company that's shady as all hell. Even as my card is international, I have to buy it using this other payment method. Oh well... It sucks!
I would love to buy and play this remastered version but in my country, blizzard chose to use a third party company that's shady as all hell. Even as my card is international, I have to buy it using this other payment method. Oh well... It sucks!
I don't agree with either of these at all. You call it less mechanical but I view it as less dated. The skill cap for competitive is much higher in SC1 but that doesn't automatically mean it's better. The movement in SC1 is atrocious compared to SC2 and just because it requires more micro doesn't make it better. As far as strategic, I don't really agree with it either. I haven't watched a ton of competitive SC1, but of what I have there's not a huge variance builds. Protoss always open Corsairs against Zerg and Terran always goes Mech against Protoss. There's some neat strategies not in SC2 like forming Lurkers on ramps and mine dragging with Vultures but there's many in SC2 too. Currently in LotV TvT and ZvZ are really lacking in variation but other matchups have just as much (if more) potential army variations as SC1.
As far as the art style, what do you mean by "Fisher-Price" looking? Do you mean it has a much more interesting color pallete than SC1? Are character models too big for you? Unit models in SC2 would never look completely identical to SC1. They were extremely low res in SC1 and Blizzard straight admitted they couldn't just make every sprite HD and had to make some design changes in the remaster. Every unit could only move in 8 directions in SC1 and unless they wanted to keep that in SC2 (which would have been stupid), they needed 3D models. Moving from 2D to 3D meant they had to add lots of extra details to every unit. If you want to complain that some units got more drastic redesigns like Ultralisks, I get that and I won't argue against it. Things like Marines, Zealots and Zerglings though got natural transitions to 3D. I understand liking SC1's art style more but calling SC2's Fisher-Price looking and an insult to SC1 is ridiculous.
I can see where hes coming from with the fisher price comparison. Specifically when it comes to the Terran. The Terran buildings in SC2 have a big round and blocky look, not so different than the fisher price style. Add the vibrant colors in contrast to SC1 and the comparison definitely isnt a reach I'd say.
Protoss and Zerg buildings dont suffer nearly as much as the Terran do from that aspect, but even then they still carry some of that style.
Like Street Fighter 4 before it, it's a style that definitely took some getting used to.
I'm sure they do, and also I'm sure they know it's more marketable. The stories they do is not from a bunch of passionate nerds wanting to tell a cool story anymore, it's all about reaching the widest audience possible.
I've only had time for the first two missions but everything looks and sounds great. I was happy to see the original music not replaced. This gives me high hopes for WC3 and D2.
Yeah that IGN quote is great. The game borrowed extremely heavy from sci movies of that time: The mundane from the first alien film and the TV clips from starship troopers etc. But somehow they made it all work together extremely well.
It's through the app. They outsourced the payment method for LATAM. I was able to buy there with an international card in the past, but now I can't. Has to be through PayU, and I don't trust them. There's lots of stories about them being shady or the transaction not working at all. Not worth the hassle.
I'm gonna try to buy those prepaid blizzard cards, if they make them. Not sure if they do.
It's through the app. They outsourced the payment method for LATAM. I was able to buy there with an international card in the past, but now I can't. Has to be through PayU, and I don't trust them. There's lots of stories about them being shady or the transaction not working at all. Not worth the hassle.
I'm gonna try to buy those prepaid blizzard cards, if they make them. Not sure if they do.
What the hell. Was playing through some campaign missions and randomly, music would start up and it sounded like a bunch of Terran were fighting. I thought my game was glitched or something because it was happening on multiple maps. Turned out to be an ad running on GAF with sound going.
So after a few days of testing, I think I've finally figured out why certain maps aren't hostable on Bnet in Remastered. It happens when special characters (which are represented as multiple text characters in the lobby view) cause the map name to be truncated due to it surpassing the character limit for that field in the SQL backend that governs the lobby lists and their creation.
See the link below for example pics and further explanation:
If you guys can do whatever you can to bring this to Blizzard's attention I'd really appreciate it. This is the kind of thing that can easily go ignored, but as of right now tons of maps simply can't be hosted online due to this bug.
I did. No response from Blizzard and no replies from anyone else on the forum either.
I also posted about this on Reddit because I want to make people aware of the issue. I worry that something relatively obscure like this will never get fixed, but it flat-out prevents me from playing certain maps online. That's a huge problem in my eyes, and I've already done most of the work by deducing the likely cause of the problem.
Hopefully they can fix the text formatting change that occurs in the lobby screen in general when looking into this. I'd like for it to honor color characters in the map name like it did in 1.16 and like it does when viewing the map name on the Create Game screen. It continues to bother me that team names in lobby also ignore color characters, so those design decisions by the mapmakers are being ignored now. All team names are standard green.
I know this sounds like nitpicking, but it's broken or missing functionality that was fine for nearly 20 years before the recent revival patches.
Nah it's not just nitpicking, it's an issue they should fix. But with the other problems lingering it might get lost for now, I agree. I still can't count on reliable ranked results. One of these days I hope we can have the options menu working as intended lol. Maybe remind them of it in the individual patch stickies, people always use those to bring up unfixed stuff.
Finished all 6 campaigns just now. It was refreshing to play again and it reminded me why I liked the Starcraft universe before SC2's abhorrent narrative came in and nuked any taste for the universe that I had.
I remember playing some bonus missions in the original Broodwar with the hybrids / Xel Naga last time I played it many years ago - does anyone know if they're in the Remastered and how I unlock them?
Finished all 6 campaigns just now. It was refreshing to play again and it reminded me why I liked the Starcraft universe before SC2's abhorrent narrative came in and nuked any taste for the universe that I had.
I remember playing some bonus missions in the original Broodwar with the hybrids / Xel Naga last time I played it many years ago - does anyone know if they're in the Remastered and how I unlock them?
Just picked this up, two questions! Did they fix the save game issues people were having that was causing lost progress? And do cloud saves work? I saw a recent Bliz post saying that cloud saves have some issues, but it's not clear exactly what they are.
Another patch just went out, 1.20.3. Chipping away at the bugs.
1.20.3 has arrived. We are continuing to address server stability and web interface bugs/improvements e.g. Leaderboards & Profiles in parallel. Multiple deployments around these features are scheduled server side.
Bug Fixes
-Fixed a high frequency crash related invalid map data
-Hotkey fixes; including support for Ghost and Infested Terran alternative forms & Siege Tank Seige Mode.
-Games against AI should now be accurately recorded in the player profile history.
-Fix for players receiving a loss /drop in MMR after disconnecting from a Ranked Play game.
-Viewing profiles now works for folks on the same LAN
Just picked this up, two questions! Did they fix the save game issues people were having that was causing lost progress? And do cloud saves work? I saw a recent Bliz post saying that cloud saves have some issues, but it's not clear exactly what they are.
Well Metzen is gone so that might be a plus... Since it seems like a new Diablo is coming in the near future, maybe that will give us a look at whether Blizzard has learned some lessons.
Bah, I can't turn on realtime lighting because I've got a GTX 760 and it doesn't have 2.2GB of VRAM. I am disappoint. It looks like they are looking into optimizing it at least.
Anybody here a laptop expert? I'm thinking of getting one of three laptops but I know nothing about specs or which is best. Obviously it has to run StarCraft Remastered and II on great settings but I would also like it to play Skyrim Special Edition with mods.
Anybody here a laptop expert? I'm thinking of getting one of three laptops but I know nothing about specs or which is best. Obviously it has to run StarCraft Remastered and II on great settings but I would also like it to play Skyrim Special Edition with mods.
Yeah I posted there already. But I'm hoping for a quick answer since I need to go back to the hospital soon. Plus the three I'm looking at are limited timed.
So I finally started practicing the game against the AI to memorize some build orders and get used to the macro/micro and this game is so damn hard lol. Watching ASL videos of the pros doing it and then doing it yourself shows just how good these dudes are.
So I ended up getting affiliated on twitch thanks to this game. Been streaming it a lot. I'm stuck around 1700MMR because I keep losing to stupid stuff still, but I'm getting heaps better.
I nearly beat BratOK, BeastyQT and Arcneon on ladder too.
