Now that the dust has finally settled, what does Ganker think of Starcraft II?
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STARCRAFT II
Now that the dust has finally settled, what does Ganker think of Starcraft II?
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Great gameplay, absolutely butchered the story and characters.
Fpbp. It is also probably one of the most polished RTS games in existence. It runs buttery smooth with 120fps on my pc with everything to ultra. The multiplayer might not be as genius as broodwar, but it's good and has found an audience.
Shame about the lackster campaign, though. WoL kinda felt like a broodwar sequel, but they fricked up at the end, HotS was just an okay and predictable campaign and LotV was boring and cringe
My understanding was that SC2 performance is kinda ass because it's from before multicore and multithreading became standard.
My old ass laptop could run it on low back in 2010. I now have a relatively beefy desktop pc, so I cant really tell the resources it eats to run. Im kinda new to the pc building thing.
Not disingenuous at all. Sc2 campaign has numerous problems, but at least they have managed to be clear with Jim's feelings towards kerrigan and her betrayal.
Keep in mind that Sc2's events take place many years after the events of Broodwar, so Jim has gotten softer on his grudge he was holding and also softer as a terran solder. There are some moments in WoL where Jim mentions he wants to kill her. His tune changes after he meets Zeratul on his ship.
eh it had up and down and don't forget the wintrading in korea which killed the proscene and eventually the whole game. I'm just glad I was there when it was good and I'm glad it's dead. Frick blizzard.
Wintrading didn't kill the scene, David kim and his incompetent balance team did, the interest was already at an all time low with all the stalling matches caused by broodlord infestor, swarmhost, battlecrusier raven point defense drones, and all the other dumb strats that came about as a result of the balance teams poor decisions. Wintrading was just the excuse many needed to immediately drop sc2 esports.
Loved WoL & LotV (not the epilogue). Loved casual games and custom maps. I remember getting tired of ranked very quickly.
>I remember getting tired of ranked very quickly.
why do they deliberately make the ranked games for pro's when casuals are what prop the community up?
them esports viewers
The multiplayer balance team was awful they nerfed units just because pros used them once in a match(Thor and BC). Eventually they nerfed enough units into the ground that expansion units were just units made to replace the units that used to fill a role but were now to nerfed to fill it. Such as siege tanks becoming garbage so they gave terran widow mines, liberators, and eventually also adding in tankivacs. Which was such an obvious symptom of bad balance that people screamed at the balance team until they buffed it's damage so it could be a proper siege unit instead of the joke it had become.
The game never recovered from the devs balance changes. Pros are too afraid to have an interesting map since that is how fragile the balance is. While SCBW ASL purposefully selected a bunch of anti-terran maps and flash was still winning games.
>why do they deliberately make the ranked games for pro is
????
He means to say that they balance the game around the highest level of play even if 90% of the playerbase can't play at their level. Similar complaints to Overwatch and MOBAs.
they made it too cartoony for my taste. Maybe it was the original graphics but it always felt grittier and a bbit more believable than what they went with. Thatbeing said wiings of lib was pure kino, the campaigns for the other 2 fell totally flat for me. They shouldve infested the hyperion as the hub area for the second game
as much shit as that diablo II remasted game gets I think it's the only nu isometric game I've seen that actually sort of looks like what those 90s games would be in real 3d.
a lot of the units were made unaesthetically pleasing compared to it's predecessors
hellbats
garlic shaped protoss units
queens
just an all around fugly game with no story, split each campaign into it's own full time-gated game release, just an all around wretched experience
I mean Destiny streamed the game do we need more evidence of it being shit
campaign was great because you could choose different upgrade paths for your unitst hat yu stuck with for the campaign, it was fun to roleplay what kind of army you were making.
multiplayer wasnt great. Multiplayer got a little better with patches though.
Writing in the expansion campaign was atrocious. Don't care about multiplayer. WoL was pretty ok hand though.
>queens cost time & money and you don't start with them
>orbitals cost time & money and you don't start with them
>here's your free chrono lmao just make infinity probes
And thus began an endless balancing nightmare. And who could forget the flying warpgate: faster than a medivac, the only air unit to cost no gas, fast warps even when not in nexus range.
>Gameplay
Early Wings of Liberty was really fun. The game died for me when I watched a 45 minute ZvZ in Heart of the Swarm of Swarm Hosts vs Swarm Hosts.
>Story
Wings of Liberty wasn't bad. The only real crime of it is the Prophecy stuff.
Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void were shit.
Awful.
Story was absolutely terrible and very clearly a sign of what was to come from the blizzard staff. It started fine in WOL but the ending cutscene filled me with (not justified) dread.
Campaign was boring and filled with alot of time trials in the latter half. It was an interesting gimmick for like 2 missions in WOL but they completely saturated HOTS/LOTV with them. They also had a really just cruel tendency to bring back iconic SC1 units (in a usually nerfed state) and then give you an alternate choice of a brand new (and better) Donutsteel SC2 unit.
Gameplay was fine I guess, but it felt kinda lame that they straightup gave you the answers in the sense that you had to learn what potentially countered what or performed poorly against them.
Graphics were cartoony and I felt they didn't do justice to the SC1 sprites and style. Zerg got hit the worst for that. I don't think there is a single Zerg unit that wasn't altered in some way, be it overall style or their attacks.
Custom games had hope because you could do far more interesting things than SC1 custom games, but they ended up completely lacking SOUL. Especially when people figured out they could make quasi-mmo shit inside the game with persistent saves for the custom game mode. Creators got more comfortable with terrible drop chances and painful grinding in their "MMO" where you could click the other side of the map and get there in under a minute with terrible enemy density to facilitate safer grinding.
Real Scale mod is pretty fun
shit story
okay game
shit online balancing because of 2 addons and blizzard trying to make it ESPORTS
shit support of UMS, because blizzard was butthurt over dota
Absolutely atrocious in every regard.
Reminder
REEEEEEEE (I didn't mind that, but her lazar beaming gaymon at the end was stupid.)
Raynor saw "Sarah Kerrigan" and "The Queen of Blades" as two separate individuals. It's not that hard to understand.
>I'll see you dead for the Kerrigan
Nice meme, bro. If you actually played SC2, you will know that Jim wanted to kill kerrigan up until zeratul told him that she now has plot armour and can't die because she is now part of the xel naga prophecy. Jim holding this pic shows that he is regretful for leaving human kerrigan to fall helpless to the zerg like this. He wanted to kill the zerg version of her and in HotS didnt like the fact that she wanted to become again the queen of zerg
Disingenuous response. One of the big reveals of BW is how Sarah remained a villain doing villainous things even after being freed from control. SC2 backslid on that faster than a politician on election promises.
That just makes Kerrigan in SC and BW seem inconsistent seeing how she let Raynor leave that one time.
The only explanation is that she was still not fully "corrupted", which in turn means that even when she was supposedly "free of control" she wasn't TRULY in control of herself, as she still acting mostly on her Zerg impulses. You can't have it both ways.
My problem wasn't really Jim getting soft at the last minute when she was saved via an asspull. It was more how they wrote the 180, made her go back to being infested, and now is also the savior of the universe.
>character says one thing but secretly harbors mixed feelings
>"HURR BAD WRITING DURR"
>universe literally concocts a prophecy to make it so not killing Kerrigan will save the universe
>when the series has NEVER relied on prophecies or chosen ones in the past
>but now it needs one because we want to be a glorified marvel movie
There were hints about a xel naga prophecy in Broodwar as well. Zeratul actually finds the hybrids in one of the missions in broodwar. Sc2 took it from there, but shat the bed with its cliche story development
When did "the universe" ever "concoct a prophecy"? I think by the end of the trilogy and epilogue it should have been obvious that pretty much all of it was just smoke and mirrors where two opposing sides of Xel Naga were leading a proxy war against each other. Among them (regardless of whether it's just Ouros or whether he secretly had some more buddies on his side that never got revealed) are those who are able to see possible futures, one of which must have enabled Zeratul to see a vision of the future if Kerrigan dies, that same Xel Naga could probably also see the future where Kerrigan lives, which is the one that became reality.
Don't forget Ouros himself also tried to hide is existence, as he impersonated the "ghost of Tassadar" when speaking to Zeratul. When that got revealed, you should have been able to put 2 and 2 together and realize that the so-called "prophecies" were probably just conveniently placed for our heroes to find them and act in a way that the Xel Naga wanted, just a bit more subtle and less direct than the opposing Xel Naga on Amon's side have been doing.
How did they get away with it?
If everybody didn't shit on them for this they would've done it with illidan
>I AM MY SCARS
Laziest and shittiest ending ever. I really hated how in the events of LotV, the 3 races decided to act all koombayah with no much of a fuss and piss between them to fight that dark god or whoever that forgettable villain was. I mean, come on, its ts starcraft, man. Its all about those 3 races which are perpetually in war with each other and have a different scope and agendas for whatever is happening in their universe.
The story should always reflect that. Im all in for small and uneasy alliances just like in brood war, but I couldn't stand that unanimous and peaceful alliance in SC2.
I guess this was blizzard when they had started to turn into the shitty company they are today
I think part of the problem is that the factions became to uniform by sc2 they lost of most of their personality and most of their internal conflicts.
Vikings were cool but it was a mistake to make them a long ranged air to air unit since they aren't affected by terrain which resulted in a lot of annoying balance decisions down the line.
Increasing units size and making maps a bit more tight instead of flat plains everywhere would probably help reduce death balls
I think the Cinematics/music/gameplay/mechanics/sound was fricking solid and was the last game Blizzard cared about or had any talent for it. Regardless the story had flaws but it didn't diminish or change compared to the first game. Compared with Diablo this was a true successor.
It's boring, I play Brood War instead
I played the Starcraft 2 campaigns last year and I really loved them. I played the campaigns on Hard mode and I feel like the game gave me a good challenge throughout the whole thing. I really liked the whole campaign upgrade thing and choosing a specific playstyle that works for you, it was nice.
That said, you could tell that Starcraft 2's theme definitely felt softer compared to Starcraft 1/Brood War. The writing also felt painfully bad at multiple points, like when Kerrigan actually fricking falls Narud's disguise. That part was particularly irritating because why would Queen b***h of the Universe fall for something like that? She literally knew beforehand that this xel'naga is a fricking shapeshifter. It felt so lame.
I figured the story was eventually going to have its Warcraft 3 moment where everyone works together, and I don't particularly mind that, but I wish some of the parts that led to the finale were written better.
The gameplay is super fun and all the races feel fun to play as. The story is just merely okay, and I didn't think it was THAT bad like others seem to think, I just have my own gripes with specific scenes. I also think the ending is fine as is. I normally don't care for ambiguous endings like that, but in this case it's fine because a modern day Blizzard Starcraft 3 sounds terrible. Overall, it's a good game.
I don't play the multiplayer, I just watch that one Finnish guy and the Koreans go at it endlessly.
The game speed was too fast for me so I didn't bother playing it for more than a few hours.
It's pure shit. None of my friends who put thousands of hours in SC1 could stomach it including myself.
Aesthetic wise, SC2 had alot going for it. The viking continues to be one of my favorite mech units in any game, and the concept and execution are something that really deserves fleshing out.
The gameplay is also something worth mentioning. If only they had a better way to discourge attack+move blobs, and bring about more tactical gameplay, it would also be top notch.
What really sunk it was the story. What a festering pile of crap. you could've just had us fight Kerrigan, have Kerrigan try and take over the world, have Duran/Narud make his evil hybrids, and just go from there. But no, you had to insert MUH PRO-FU-SEEE! tell us about how how Jedi Kerrigan will defeat the emperor with love and friendship. What a sordid wet fart to end the series on.
to this day I still can't believe a fricking westerner came up with the viking idea
such a cool fricking concept, goddamn
every multiplayer map is a honeycomb
why is every multiplayer map a honeycomb?
That map design is probably the result of 12 worker starts.
played it for 20 minutes the first time after several years.
>all these new units
>feels like a different game
>uninstall and play wow classic
GIVE US LAN PLAY AND LOCAL SERVERS
To everyone saying that Wings of Liberty's writing was okay, I still think it's inexcusable that Raynor starts the campaign off pining for Kerrigan when he had just sworn to kill her in the previous game. It makes zero sense that swathes of grown men would lay down their lives because Raynor began inexplicably simping for a monster that betrayed everyone and killed billions of humans. That being said, it is the strongest story of the three... which isn't saying much.
>What SHOULD have happened then?
WOL would end with Raynor killing Kerrigan, wetly punching her skull in. Yes, Raynor would feel intense regret, but it's part of him taking responsibility for his part in everything.
>What happens to the Zerg, then???
I don't fricking know, Blizzard can hire some real writers and figure that out. It was already ridiculous that Kerrigan could psionically control more Zergs than the Overmind, a being that was the size of a small city. Mengsk was good at using psi emitters, maybe he'd just wind up weaponizing them again.
Eh you could fix it by saying that Raynor is just thinking about old kerrigan and Zerg kerrigan as two different people, the problem is that they don't know know what to do with her do they went fully moronic in HosT
Click spam, the game
Very brainless game where masters think they are good gamurs
Protoss are draenei with a standarized race and they look soooo corny
>Click spam, the game
how stupid do you actually have to be to think this?
Literal trash.
-Custom maps never took off
-Awful story.
-It was marketed that by splitting the game into 3 each story would have the depth of the entire original campaign. Instead I found most of the missions to be pointless filler.
-Queen of Blades Kerrigan basically does nothing and has a very underwhelming death.
-Arcturus is basically a harmless cartoon villain.
-New Kerrigan voice sucks
-New Zeratul voice sucks
-New Zeratul writing especially sucks(TIDINGS OF DOOM)
A major part of the custom maps being a total disaster was that for a VERY long time, Blizzard refused to let players host publicly visible lobbies. When looking for a game to play, you could literally only see games ranked by popularity. I have no fricking idea how any new games were supposed to get traction if hosting it meant being at the rock bottom of a long ass list. This meant you were either gonna play Nexus Wars or some stupid shit for the millionth time or nothing at all.
WoL is the only one worth playing
also I fricking hate multiplayer for just being "learn build orders and win"