Campaign Creations

IskatuMesk wrote:They were boring because the world and setting are boring. Blizzard just needs to hire actual writers and many of their problems will evaporate.

But again, stuff being too easy lets your mind wander.

Agreed. With the 100 million Blizzard spent on propaganda (primarily and ALONE, I believe), you could solve a lot of problems.

Sure!

Just read any given sci-fi novel and you'll be set. Even Halo's novels were better written and made more sense.


Pesonally I'd have ditched the whole OMG PRISON SHIPS MAKE 10 BILLION DUDES IN 300 years and just left Humans as Earth-bred 'umie's (We can throw in some expansion-related governmental collapse to bring in the Confeds and keep our little GOTTA BRING THE BIG MAN DOWN scheme for introducing players to the killah campayne). Kerrigan would never exist, the Protoss would never "ally" with the Terrans (lolol like we need you guys, we control WORMHOLES and you do what????), the Overmind would still be the big bad and Xel`Naga would only exist in Protoss lore.

If I was going to add in a BIG SECRET BAD he would NOT be Xel`Naga or even related.

Oh yeah, and BATTLE MOONS FUCK YEAH

I found some unused dialogue in the editor. Apparently there was going to be an interactive scene on the Belsephalus observatory; you could interact with the portrait that looks like Arcturus on the wall, but Varian will correct Raynor and say it's actually Angus Mengsk. Raynor will then warn Valerian that his grandfather was assassinated and his father became a monster in his quest of vengeance, and then Valerian will say he doesn't follow in any man's footsteps.

IskatuMesk wrote:the Protoss would never "ally" with the Terrans (lolol like we need you guys, we control WORMHOLES and you do what????)

The direction SC2 seems to take is that the Protoss are so bound up in superstition that their innovation has been crippled. Like, there's the refinery that you can unlock where you don't need SCVs, right? The explanation: We (the terrans) used protoss technology in a way that the Protoss do not... because, apparently the protoss never thought of it.

I can't say that I really like that sort of rationalization... but on the other hand, I suppose the universe needs *something* to make it so the Protoss aren't just gods (and godly) all the time.

Anything I thought was hard on brutal after failing miserably over several attempts pretty much fell down to me being awful at macro. Engine of Destruction I tried to do so many different ways and then I just realized i'm terrible at this game and ended it with Loki dead and 30+ wraiths.

Then we get the Prophecy missions and its like hey lets throw fucktons of hallucinated units everywhere when you don't have observers that turned into kiting shit into a wall of cannons and then doing this to win it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1t42-rMtnc (why the audio is popping I have no idea.)

Afterwards they are entirely trivial, In Utter Darkness got finished by just running around with a giant death ball of DT's/Carriers/Void Rays/Colossi and maybe some Immortals after trying not to cheese the crap out of them being detectionless and I even got the archive done by accident.

It also made me wonder what the hell purpose the archive is going to serve when the hybrids have already ANNIHILATED THE UNIVERSE.

Voice acting was pretty damn awful for the most part especially when they can't even remake the Protoss voices of all things and yeah the Overmind sounds nothing like he did, maybe you need less terrible speakers/headphones to notice it. This is after playing SC/BW less than a week or 2 ago.

There was even one mission (Supernova maybe) in the cinematics before it where Raynor and Tychus' mouths are moving but everything else is completely still just mangling any form of immersion.

@ Krazy

Maybe they just like their probes? Protoss don't have any mouths after all, so that eliminates one of their more ideal tools.

This is what I think about when I think about how Starcraft 2 played out:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjC1gMfbqGA[/youtube]

Hmm, I think I get everyone's beef with the campaign. I can't think of anything in the campaign with the epicness or character of that cutscene.

I have finally finished playing. Thanks to the delays from the 8800GT errors, I couldn't finish during my vacation.

I agree with those of you disappointed with the random-as-hell ending. I liked the idea of initially taking up random-as-hell missions as you were basically a rag-tag group of people, but slowly it just became a rushed feeling to do everything, and I especially thing the final mission was an utter joke in comparison to even the two prior.

I was disappointed in there being only about one mission where you don't control your base, I'm all for the "RPG" every few maps, but this got old sitting in one spot massing then sending out all your units to obliterate the map.

RazorclawX wrote:This is what I think about when I think about how Starcraft 2 played out:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjC1gMfbqGA[/youtube]

What do you mean?

Lavarinth wrote: I was disappointed in there being only about one mission where you don't control your base, I'm all for the "RPG" every few maps, but this got old sitting in one spot massing then sending out all your units to obliterate the map.

Try Brutal. One-basing doesn't give you nearly enough money to "mass" and obliterate the map, unfortunately. I could only really effectively do that on the air platform.

Anything I thought was hard on brutal after failing miserably over several attempts pretty much fell down to me being awful at macro. Engine of Destruction I tried to do so many different ways and then I just realized i'm terrible at this game and ended it with Loki dead and 30+ wraiths.

Just get viking/banshee mercs/regulars and sci vesses (that means do supernova before this, as for that mission - banshee/MM spam, then do some prophecy ones to get the research for the sci) and that mission is a piece of cake.
The loki is just a flyby with that kind of composition And really - no detection on the hybrid missions? O,o

About the toss in SC2 - in the "Liberty's Crusade" novel it was mentioned that the only reason terran war tech is on par with the protoss/zerg one is because, well... read the quote:

We had been fighting among ourselves for as long as we’ve been in the sector, and we had honed our battle technologies to the point that they were equal in many ways.

As for the cutscene - personally it makes me rage at blizzard for not keeping the artstyle T_T (altho I must admit that the cinematics art differs vastly from the in-game one, I still prefer the old one ^_^).

EDIT:
About the one base mass - honestly I only got an expo on the xel'naga ship mission and the media blitz one - that's where I needed them (blitz I think can be done with one base, however it would take quite some time, as for the other one - haven't tried suicide yamato bombing so it might actually work). That on brutal.
Actually excluding the 2nd and 3rd toss missions (2nd one - just get several ninjas at the altar, 3rd one - haven't tried ninjaing zeratul but it might be possible so remove just the 2nd from that list).

There's no possible way to justify Terran tech vs Protoss tech in any shape or form. The whole fighting amongst each other is largely detrimental as well as it means resources are constantly split. Besides, the Protoss did that at one point too (Aeon of Strife). Additionally, as Protoss have that whole unified thought Khala thing, development for new technology would be ten times as fast as Terrans could ever hope to achieve unified in the first place.

Battlecruisers are slow as fuck (using the cinematics as a reference), and apparently instead of laser cannons the Behemoth classes largely relied on small kinetic guns. I dunno what the deal with that is, but in four years the Dominion is not updating an entire fleet that fast. Not to mention that as soon as you start the game, the news says something along the lines of "Instead of upgrading the fleet you've squandered trillions on..."

However, at one point near the end, Horner says something like "Their shields haven't come up yet". I stopped and thought, "Wait, what? Since when do terran ships have shields?"

In NOWHERE are Terrans ever depicted as having shields. In the battle for Char, no shields are present. Mutalisks just rip their asses open like tin cans. So, if Terrans were able to fight Protoss in a real logical fight, we'd have to know what kind of shields that they possess.

Protoss shield tech can't be that good, or they'd have Planetary shields over planets like Auir. Incidentally, in my rewrite of Starcraft tech the Protoss do have planetary shields and this lets them hold off the Zerg for a significantly longer period. Terrans also have Battle Moons and space platforms. Now, they could still have stuff like that in normal SC fluff, but we have no idea. We have no idea how the Odin was even developed in the first place. Technically if the Terrans can mass produce something as big as the Odin only then would they start getting close to Protoss tech.

Shields alone give Protoss a huge edge. Also, their energy and psionic weapons probably don't care how thick your armor is or what it's comprised of. A fleet of interceptors could fly past a BC and hit the engines just like that. Wraiths or Vikings or whatnot have to get through a Carrier's shields. There's Yamato cannon, which apparently not all BC's have (dunno about sc2 timeline), but I don't have any numbers on what kind of energy a Carrier's shields could withstand. As all battles and arguments for this would start and probably end in space, given the Protoss' ability to just glass planets with a few Carriers, that's what it would drum down to.

What about Scouts? They fire anti-matter missiles. When I was writing a huge fleet battle for TOA I looked up the power behind Anti-matter.

The reaction of 1 kg of antimatter with 1 kg of matter would produce 1.8×1017 J (180 petajoules) of energy (by the mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc²), or the rough equivalent of 43 megatons of TNT. For comparison, Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, reacted an estimated yield of 50 megatons, which required the use of hundreds of kilograms of fissile material (Uranium/Plutonium).

Oookay. So, in my world the Undead have these tiny fighters made out of elemental energy about 60 meters across. They are totally filled with Anti-matter, jump next to targets, and ram into them and explode. Now, the Protoss don't have suicide fighters carrying ludicrous amounts of anti-matter, but they apparently have outdated fighters called Scouts that liberally toss these around like candy. I don't think Blizzard did much research into the potential for power that anti-matter has in the hands of a fighter. The scout would be throwing mega nukes at everything it looked at. You'd be looking at basically a Yamato blast for every missile if not more. Again, in my world this is small fry, but to Terrans? I can't see a BC surviving a single hit (Referring to sc1 cinematic of a BC firing Yamato at another one which obliterates it instantly). Now, if they do in fact somehow have shields, that may be different.

But that's really all I have to base the power of Protoss energy weapons on, save the Carriers glassing planets. Obviously it wasn't enough to stop the Zerg who aren't even armored.

I don't really care what some washed up novel writer who isn't familiar with the universe or even the absolute basics of sci fi says, the Terrans can't fight the Protoss so long as they rely on basic kinetic weaponry. Their power output simply doesn't compare. Now, they do well against the Zerg because, well, Zerg tech kind of sucks too. All they really have is numbers. A fuckton of numbers. They aren't like Tyranids who fire beetles that eat through the segments in your armor and then your flesh in seconds, or consume entire planets in mere days. But there's still a shitton of them.

In short SC has no sense of realism or scale at all. T.T


One thing I'd LOVE to know, though, is how a Hydralisk can destroy a battlecruiser in orbit.

Protoss forgot to expand so every time Artanis clicks on the Research New Technology button there isn't enough Minerals and Vespene gas.

(How does any planet still have resources on it?)

About the shields - http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Force_f ... 8terran%29
They're just not in-game Although if you look at the references, most of it is novels again (btw I took the quote from liberty's crusade), with deception and a Q&A batch being the exceptions (mostly minor references there).
About the scout (stupid theory incoming) - maybe they manufacture the antimatter just before firing the missiles? That'd be quite a feat for any amount - probably a few grams (considering the particle accelerators that are used today). Yeah, that was stupid. But as you said, SC is kind-of lacking in the realism department ^_^
As for the hydra shooting the battlecruiser in orbit - in-game it probably is in the atmosphere (i.e. not that high but still I admit it's ridiculous). All right, gotta sleep.

And I still find it hard to believe that the battlecruisers in the cinematics are behemoths but oh well.. some things change.