Koki on 7/5/2011 at 17:10

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Starcraft 2 was the biggest gaming disappointment since STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. And while you might make excuses for GSC because they're occupying a shack in the middle of Siberia, because SoC was their second FPS game ever, because it was incredibly ambitious with huge, open world and advanced AI and because they set themselves a goal of recreating the position of every single brick in the Zone - Starcraft 2 was made by a company in sunny California, with infinite budget, no deadline and which has been making RTS games through most of its existence. And it wasn't supposed to be innovative, huge or ambitious - from the beginnig it was clear it was just going to be Starcraft in 3D.

So how could they screw it up so badly? It's like screwing up a pizza. 1. You pick up a phone. 2. You call for fucking pizza. Just about everything in Wings of Liberty makes no sense at all, and more often than not elements in the game work against each other rather than compliment each other. So it's hard to describe how much of a mess it all is since all the failures are interconnected. But I'll try.

First of all the story. So what is WoL's really about? What story does it tell? Is it Raynor fighting against Mengsk? Because he doesn't really do anything against Mengsk - he's more focused on helping colonists, getting money and the artifacts. The entire revolution sub-plot, with the adjutant and all, is just four missions long(five if you count Wasteland - part of the tutorial) in the twenty-two Terran total - and completely optional to boot. So maybe it was all about Kerrigan? But the chance to turn her back human doesn't even appear until the very end of the game. There is not a single clue that the artifact, once complete, could turn her back human until Valerian tells you so explicitly, and that triggers another short sub-plot about saving Kerrigan which puts the game on rails should you start it.

The reason for this incoherency is, of course, the non-linear campaign structure. Gaming and stories don't get along, a fact well known to anyone who knows something about videogames(i.e. not gaming journalists). To put a story, which is inherently linear, in a game, which is inherently non-linear, you either have to chop off bits of former or latter. In Starcraft it was the latter. The missions in SC form a very long line along which you can advance in only one direction. If you lose a mission, even the first one, that's it. No returning to overlay map, no counterattack, no second chance, you're banned from the game for life. Why? Because the story required you to win. To simplify, the more linear the story the stronger it is(or at least could be) because the more control the writers have of the pacing, arc(s) and characters. Non-linearity ruins all that as you can't predict where the player will move next. The fact that Blizzard tried to put so much story into WoL despite moving towards nonlinearity proves that they're either incredibly ambitious or know jack shit about making videogames.

And considering the fact that they utterly failed to take any advantage from the nonlinearity they introduced I'm more inclined to think the latter.

While it's true that you're presented with various missions to choose from at any given time, the order in which you do them doesn't matter at all, and the choice of picking one mission over the other doesn't exist. The missions will just hang out on the Star Map until you decide to do them, no matter how much time has passed and what other missions you've done, which is especially irking in missions which should be on a timer like The Moebius Factor. If the entire planet is being overrun by Zerg, I shouldn't be able to just hang out and do other stuff in the meantime. The very first choice of missions in the game is between The Evacuation, where you save some innocent colonists from a Zerg invasion and Smash and Grab, which is another artifact-hunting mission for Tychus. The contrast between the two is obvious: be a good guy or be a rich guy and when I played the game I thought it was a "hard" choice - once I pick one, the other will disappear. But after saving the colonists(Being a good guy in a videogame always pays off better in the end) and going back to the Star Map I realized that not only Tychus' mission is still there - so there was no moral choice to it at all - it pays barely 10% more than The Evacuation which means that there is hardly any monetary choice to it as well. In fact almost all missions in the campaign pay exactly the same - not counting The Outlaws and Zero Hour which are part of the tutorial, the difference between lowest and highest paying mission in the game is 25%(100 000 lowest, 125 000 highest). Which begs the question, where do these credits come from? Sometimes you can justify it - Tosh pays you for springing out his buddies for example - but what about, say, Heaven's Fall? Who pays James Raynor for killing infected colonists? Is he just on a monthly payroll from the Moebius Foundation?

Speaking of Safe Heaven/Heaven's Fall, it is one of the two missions in the game where you're actually given a "hard" moral choice. But guess what? Your choice doesn't matter here as well; whatever you pick, you'll be right. If you side with Protoss, the colonists and Ariel herself will be infected; if you side with Ariel, apparently the Protoss were somehow completely wrong and there was no infection at all. Same deal with Tosh, though less blatant as he's an anti-hero. Not only are these choices without almost any consequences(and thus meaningless), they also feel forced. In Heaven's Fall/Safe Heaven, the choice is between fighting your old buddies, the Protoss, just to give Ariel a few more hours to try and find a cure for a virus she herself said has no cure. The Protoss apparently don't mind having a bit of fucking dying with their BFF Raynor. Well that's convenient! In Ghost of a Chance/Breakout you can either bust open a political prison, freeing thousands of political prisoners, most of whom are against Mengsk - you know, one of the main bad guys in the game - or... help lock it down again. Excuse me but WHUT.

You could say that the choice of mission matters because you can get Siege Tanks two missions earlier than your buddy but not really. Every mission introduces a new unit, and is built around using that unit to win. Sure, there are some missions which will be slightly easier if you get a certain unit earlier but all in all, it has little effect on the gameplay.

So the order in which you pick the missions is mostly irrelevant gameplay-wise and the moral choice of picking missions is nonexistent. While Blizzard suffered all the consequences of making a non-linear campaign they failed to utilize any of its strengths. Even more so; despite putting different parts of the story into bubble sub-plots they couldn't make them work together at all. For example the Revolution sub-plot - whether you do it or not, Raynor will need to confront the Hyperion crew about striking a deal with Valerian. You'd think that if he spread the word all over Dominion about Arcturus' crimes just before siding with a Mangsk, the crew would have more faith in him. But it plays out the same no matter whether you dealt a serious blow to Arcturus' reputation or not.

The bottom line is, ultimately there is no reason for the the campaign to be non-linear. If it was linear just like in Starcraft it would flow and work much better and the impact on the actual gameplay would be minimal. All it really does is hurt the story - which is actually pretty damn bad even without being chopped into fragments. So yeah, we're not hitting the rock bottom quite yet. We only just reached the terminal velocity.

The problem with story, characters, writing and presentation is that it's all straight from a B-class Hollywood movie. You get a pretty good taste of it the moment you start a new game - Raynor drinking alone in a bar, melancholically staring at the photo of his ex, camera zooms on his eyes, he shoots the TV because he doesn't like the guy on the TV and then says "It's about time we kicked this revolution into overdrive". Sorry Blizzard, but I've seen better directed and more subtle scenes in anime and that's about as damning claim as it gets. And it gets worse. "We got so far because we were leaning on each other"... I literally facepalmed during the entire pep talk in Fire and Fury cinematic, and normally I'm a huge sucker for heroic stuff. Who the hell wrote that? How does it even relate to the rest of the game? At which point anyone was leaning on anyone else?

As if cheesy, badly directed cutscenes weren't enough we are presented a full array of two-dimensional characters which are so archetypical they border on caricatures. Matt Horner is the young, handsome idealist; Stetmann is a "standard nerd"; Findlay is the macho tough guy; Tosh is a black rastaman complete with dreadlocks. A lot of work was done to import the old characters into this new black and white setting as well: Raynor, once a pretty simple and honest young chap who got caught into something much bigger than his little revolution but he just did what he believed was right is now a dirty, old, tired, drinking veteran mercenary type straight out of Gears of War, complete with stained shirt and shotgun shells(even though he never fires a shotgun in the entire game) and what look like rifle grenades(he never uses these either). Despite the fact that he seemed to give up on Kerrigan in Starcraft and he even swore to kill her for what she's done in Brood War, he now apparently wants nothing but to have her back. I guess that's what four years of drinking will do to you. Alcohol is bad, mmmkay. Ultimately he has an excuse because she's now instrumental to SAVING TEH WORLD but he spends so much time with her picture before Zeratul even shows up that it's obvious he wubs her so vewy much. Besides, if you don't do the Protoss mini-campaign you won't know that she needs to live(yep, that's the non-linearity coming back to bite the story in the ass once again).

Kerrigan herself is not much better. In the first mission she comes under the player's control in Starcraft she quite clearly states she "likes what she is". She displays insane ambition as well as cunning, double, triple and quadruple crossing just about every other character in Starcraft and Brood War and emerges victorious, the self-proclaimed "Queen Bitch of the Universe". Then, when there is no one left to oppose her... she retreats back to Char and keeps sitting there quietly for four years? When she comes back out in SC2, she's all emo and then in All-In it is even revealed that she actually retains most of her humanity and doesn't really want to be a Zerg no more. Much like Raynor she got her image changed, but it was mostly a paheal treatment - high heels, botox and DAT ASS. Hey remember what Overmind said about the Zerg? That they were "the purity of essence"? I guess when you're main female character in the game it's essential to be as sexy as possible.

Finally, Arcturus Mengsk. While he certainly wasn't Obama in SC/BW, it's hard to say using the PSI Emitters on Tarsonis was not justified considering the nuclear holocaust of Korhal by Confederacy which prompted the creation of Sons of Korhal in the first place - that's just some good old fashioned revenge. In Wings of Liberty he was reduced to the role of Joseph Stalin, except much less bright. A ruthless dictator who kills everyone who questions his rule and spends "trillions" on hunting Raynor despite the fact he didn't even care about him all that much in Starcraft and Brood War. There is not much to say about Valerian, other than the fact his motivations are ridiculous - it's blindingly obvious that Arcturus is not a popular leader, so what kind of idiotic goal is proving yourself to the people? Hey, here's a way to prove yourself to the people: Don't be Arcturus Mengsk. But Valerian is obviously a weasel kind of character so I'll let that go on the grounds his real motivations will probably become clear later.

The gist of things is that Raynor is feeling responsible for having Kerrigan deliver the PSI Emitter on Tarsonis even though he had nothing to do with it and also feeling responsible for leaving her there even though there was nothing he could do and in fact urged her not to go. These lapses in logic made him bitter and a heavy drinker. Meanwhile Tychus who is on Mengsk's paycheck is ordered to do... something. I can't imagine what his deal with Arcturus would be. It seems that from the start his goal is to kill Kerrigan(as he digs about her in the archives and every time Raynor mentions her he urges him to put an end to her once and for all), and it's clear that Mengsk wanting Kerrigan dead is understandable, because... well... um... what is his problem with Kerrigan again? Seriously? She kicked his ass in Brood War, but is that really a reason to hate her so much more than Raynor? But anyway, back to Tychus and his secret mission of joining Raynor to kill Kerrigan. did Arcturus predict the new Zerg invasion? Did he predict that Raynor will go after the artifacts not even knowing what they do? Did he predict that he will succeed? Did he predict that his son will betray him and assault Char directly once the artifact is complete? Did he predict that Kerrigan will be back human again so Tychus will be there to kill her? You know what, I take back what I said about him. That guy's a fucking genius.

So about halfway through the game Zeratul appears literally out of nowhere and ruins the Starcraft universe forever by giving Raynor the mhm-mhm crystal in which he learns that Overmind had a vision of the future. Visions of the future are just like time travel: No matter how little of it you add to the story, it now officially sucks, is beyond repair and can only be treated as seriously as a YouTube vlog. I hope I don't need to explain the paradox of seeing the future being different than how it's going to be because now we know it might be different if x happens so obviously we will not allow it to happen so it would never have happaned in the first place so there should be no vision of the future happening as it happaned when Overmind saw it.

Right.

Now this whole mess might have been handled differently and just as well by simply stating that Overmind with his huge alien brain analyzed all possible outcomes like the computer in War Games and realized the only way to win against the Hybrid is by joining forces of all three races. But for the sake of cheap mysticism and saturday night doom prophecies we got the vision of the future which will never happen. By the way, a minor point: In The Propecy cinematic, Zeratul looks at the prophecy of Xel'Naga returning carved in stone. This includes carvings of Hydralisk and Ultralisk. But both Hydralisk and Ultralisk are not native Zerg organisms, they were evolved based on much more peaceful and docile animals Zerg encountered - Slothiens and Brontoliths. In other words, there were no Hydralisks and Ultralisks attacking the Xel'Naga, and the carvings can't really be newer than that, as otherwise who would make them. Now my head hurts.

There is another inconsistency in the Protoss campaign and that's the reason why Overmind created Kerrigan in the first place - as some kind of trick on its imperative goal to kill all Protoss. Except Overmind never wanted to kill all Protoss. As it states quite clearly in the last two missions of Zerg campaign in Starcraft, the goal was to achieve perfection as a species. For that it needed the Khaydarin Crystal, nothing else, and the entire invasion of Aiur was about getting said crystal and placing it in the ruins of the Xel'Naga temple so Overmind could manifest there. Of course after achieving perfection Overmind would most likely slaughter all the Protoss(and Terran) all the same, but it was never even suggested as one of its goals. But obviously they needed to make Kerrigan the Good Guy in Wings of Liberty as you'll be playing as her in Heart of the Swarm so it was retconned along with Tassadar's death. Tassadar is now "neither alive nor dead" which means he's a deus ex machina plot device to be used whenever the good guys run out of ideas. Mark my words, we'll be seeing more of him in the future.

Then there's the case of recovered adjutant and its intercepted message of Arcturus ordering placing of PSI Emitters on Korhal. Raynor is a widely known criminal and a terrorist, and yet it takes but one audio log by said criminal and terrorist for everyone to believe Mengsk killed six billion people? Now you could say that Arcturus was so widely hated already that all it took was one audio log to spark the rebellion, but his reaction(and reaction of the press present on the conference) makes no sense at all. In the Hearts and Minds cinematic he's seen calmly stating that the message is fabricated, then Kate Lockwell plays the recording and this sends him into a rage and act in the most conspicious way possible. What the hell? Just deny it! You denied it ten seconds ago! Deny it again! Just say again that it's a fake! Is this the same man who was smart enough to predict defeat of Kerrigan? Speaking of Kate, she spends the entire game reporting about successes of Raynor's Raiders and speaking against Dominion and not once she gets killed, murdered, arrested, beaten up, locked up in prison without a trial or even censored. I know the whole News thing is supposed to be kind of a comic relief but it's hard to believe the vision of a totalitarian empire when you can badmouth it constantly on national television with no consequences.

After gathering all the pieces of the artifact we get another story piece dumbed down for no reason other than giving the animators something to do, which is assault on the Bucephalus. This is one of the most ridiculous moments in the game and yes, I get it, you want to have a dramatic entry for Valerian, but there are limits of how much can you sacrifice in the name of flashy bangs. Okay so the Dominion ships arrive and even though they outnumber Raynor's Raiders at least three to one he decides to assault the flagship himself, personally, since "their shields are still down". Now you might think that Valerian purposefully left the shields down because he wanted Raynor to board the ship, but I know the real reason why they're down: It's because BATTLECRUISERS DON'T HAVE FUCKING SHIELDS. And why the hell is Raynor even boarding the Bucephalus? Just shoot at it! Shoot it! Shoot it with lasers! If the nonexistant shields are down you'll blow it up in no time! And if Arcturus is on board he will die if you blow up his ship! But since Jim is such a drama queen he simply must risk his life and lives of all the Raynor's Raiders just to have a chance to kill Arcturus personally with his handgun. Even though it wouldn't work as he loaded it wrong(he loads the single bullet in topmost chamber; his revolver has barrel at the bottom). Valerian, since he's of the Mengsk bloodline, predicted that not only Raynor will board the ship, but he also predicted that he will survive fighting through dozens of what I assume are elite Dominion Marines and also predicted he won't simply shoot him in the head as soon as he opens the door. Even so, letting all of his men die for nothing since he and Jim become allies five minutes later is a pretty asshole thing to do. And while Raynor and Tychus are defeating elite Dominion Marines with nothing but flash grenades, what is going on in space? Are the ships shooting at each other? Or are they just hanging out there, chilling? Because if they are, someone could call Raynor and tell him these are Dominion good guys. Maybe they don't have his number I dunno.

Finally, I have one last complaint about this whole sequence. Why the hell this is not a playable mission? It simply begs for an installation crawl. Even the cinematic looks like it's split in two. As soon as Raynor and Findlay leave the bridge, loading screen, you play the mission, then the second part plays, with the idiotic flash grenade sequence. Maybe they ran out of time to make the mission. They only had five years to make the game after all.

And at last we come to the biggest turd of the storyline: The ending cinematic. At this point in the game it's nothing surprising; it's more of a recap of all the problems with the story outlined so far. One thing that stands out is that Findlay is talking directly to Arcturus and it's suggested that Arcturus sees what he sees, probably with a cam like on livejasmin.com. Which begs the question, if Arcturus knew where Findlay is the whole time - I imagine finding a source of a radio signal strong enough to reach from Char to Korhal with no noticeable delay isn't very hard, and even if it's somehow impossible, Findlay could just look at the Star Map with Hyperion's position highlighted on it or something - if all this time Arcturus knew the precise position of the Hyperion, why didn't he simply assault it with half the fleet and turn it into space dust with lasers? The story wants us to believe that he simply hates Kerrigan much more than Raynor. Why? I have no idea, but I wrote about that already. James, the man who swore he will kill Kerrigan, prefers to kill one of his best buddies instead, but I wrote about that too. And then the very thing everyone dreaded happens and we get a happy end with Kerrigan in Raynor's arms. And a sunset. Or dawn, whatever.

Hey remember the previous endings in Starcraft universe?

In Rebel Yell, the good guy turns out the bad guy and gets everything. The prize for winning the last mission is You're Not Dead Award.
In The Overmind, the bad guys win. The prize for winning the last mission is possibly dooming the entire sector. Possibly the entire galaxy.
In The Fall, The Overmind is defeated. Hovewer Aiur lies in ruins, Protoss civilization is at the brink of destruction and Kerrigan is ready to take over the Swarm.
In The Stand, all you achieve is secure a new homeworld for the Protoss.
In The Iron Fist, more bad guys arrive and win.
In Queen of Blades, old bad guys kill the new bad guys. But it doesn't make them any better.

What happens in SC2 ending? Good guys successfully assault the bad guys' homeworld. They get rid of the head bad guy. They most likely turn the head bad guy into a good guy. Zerg all over the sector fell into disarray, since there's no one to guide them anymore - the war is as good as won. The first step on defeating the looming threat of Hybrids is made. I've played jRPGs with less positive endings, and yes, that's as damning claim as it gets.


But enough about the story. This is a videogame, and despite what gaming journalismos like to claim(as it makes them look much more refined), video games are not all about the story. Video games are about the gameplay. So how's the gameplay in SC2? Well, in single player, it's not that good actually. The gist of the problem is that Blizzard tried to make missions a little bit too interesting, achieving what I like to call the Baldur's Gate 2 Effect. See, in Baldur's Gate - the first one - most of areas in the game were just generic fantasy plains, hills, forests, and so on. That wasn't generally very interesting, hovewer it meant that when you finally stumbled on some special location, it was truly unique - because it was surrounded by mediocrity. You never knew what awaited you in the next area. In Baldur's Gate 2, it's all drastically different; you start out in a secret hideout/lab of a powerful mage complete with portal to the Plane of Air and it gets even more extreme from here - labyrinths under ancient asylums, underwater cities, underdark, planar spheres, dragons... it's a rollercoaster, and that's why it never really delivers the same sense of adventure that Baldur's Gate did - you're simply bombarded with one unique location after another to the point where they lose their sense of uniqueness.

What was I talking about again?

Oh right. So see, they obviously wanted to make missions in SC2 as unique as possible, but that's the deal - something is unique if it's different from what you normally see. Since almost all missions in SC2 are trying to be unique, the're not really. You eventually find yourself wishing for normal, '90s era "here is your base, here is the massive enemy base, build up and destroy it" gameplay.

I guess it wouldn't be such a problem if the unique missions were actually a lot of fun. Because they're not. Many missions in Wings of Liberty are various variations on:

a) timed missions
b) escort missions

Now I analyzed the RTS market with a team of Cheerleaders. They came to one, unanimous conclusion: that if I let them go, they won't tell nobody... oh wait. Let's try that again. I analyzed the RTS market with the power of Internet all on my own in my small, dark, cold and damp basement and came to the following conclusion: that when it comes to RTS games, but also most of other games in general, the two things that a significant majority of players don't like are:

a) timed missions
b) escort missions

Oh...

But hey, maybe it's not so bad. How many timed and escort missions could there be in SC2, anyway?

Wasteland - Normal
Outlaws - Normal
Zero Hour - Normal

The Evacuation - timed, escort
Outbreak - double timed (is the night over yet? zzz)
Safe Haven - timed, escort / *Heaven's Fall - escort (I guess you could just let all the colonies get infested. But that's lame and could make the mission unwinnable on higher difficulties)

Smash and Grab - timed
The Dig - Normal
The Moebius Factor - timed
Supernova - timed
Maw of the Void - Normal

Devil's Playground - timed
Welcome to the Jungle - timed (Tal'Darim sealing altars)
Breakout - Normal / Ghost of a Chance - Normal

The Great Train Robbery - timed
Cutthroat - timed
Engine of Destruction - timed, escort
Media Blitz - Normal
Piercing the Shroud - Normal(first half)/timed(second half)

Whispers of Doom - Normal
A Sinister Turn - Normal
Echoes of the Future - Normal
In Utter Darkness - Normal

Gates of Hell - timed
Belly of the Beast - Normal / Shatter the Sky - Normal
All-In - technically Escort, but your base is more likely to fall before the artifact does, so Normal

Out of 26 missions in the game, 13 - half - are either timed or escort missions. The kind that nobody likes. Why, Blizzard? It's because Blizzard has a fundamental misunderstanding about what makes playing an RTS fun. In multiplayer it's the challenge. But in single player mode it's almost the opposite. People who play campaigns in RTSes usually don't do it for the challenge, but to get a story and because the mechanics are fun. They're usually phlegmatic kind of guys, who will replay it multiple times and proud themselves on discovering that if you position an artillery unit on that ledge over there in mission seventeen you will be able to destroy three energy generators in the enemy base - amazing, eh? These guys don't approach missions as a challenge of clicking fast and accurately, but as a puzzle to be solved. What is the best strategy in that mission? They will usually spend a lot of time just sitting in their base, waiting until everything is researched, building up defensive structures, then a large army and only then rolling out on the map in one slow push, systematically destroying everything. And as you can imagine, they don't really like missions which force them to act quickly. I know because I'm one of these guys.

What makes this more annoying is the fact that Blizzard themselves said that it's pointless to make the campaign a tutorial for the multiplayer, and yet that's exactly what they did. At least the campaign is much better preparation for MP than, say, Warcraft 3's. If it wasn't for SP-exclusive units, playing the campaign on higher difficulties would be a pretty good way to get started in multiplayer because you need to hurry play well. So I guess they might have wanted to make the SP part more SP but didn't have any idea what makes SP fun in the first place.

Another reason why timed/escort missions suck in Wings of Liberty is that there's a ton of units available with tons of upgrades, yet you're never really allowed to have fun with them. Theoretically you should be able to do so in remaining 13 "Normal" missions, but: three of these are tutorial missions where you can barely build anything anyway and four of these are Protoss missions. That leaves 6. Out of these, All-In and The Dig are defensive so you're not likely to attack anyone outside your base with anything, Piercing the Shroud is an installation crawl(and so is Belly of the Beast if you pick it), and in Maw of the Void you're pretty much forced to use Battlecruisers. In the end, at most there are two(!) missions in the game where you're allowed to have fun with all your shiny units with shiny upgrades you spent a fortune on: Media Blitz and Shatter the Sky. So that's two missions where you can finally check out if your Wraiths really do evade 20% attacks when cloaked. Lameness.

A minor note, but it's quite funny: Pretty much every unit which returns from SC/BW is better than its new counterpart in SC2. Goliaths and Wraiths are better than Vikings, Medics are better than Medivacs, Vultures are better than Hellions and so on.

Speaking of upgrades, it's disappointing that many of them are multiplayer upgrades you're forced to buy in the Armory instead of simply researching them in their respective research buildings. Was it really so hard to come up with two new additions to every unit? Some of units start fully upgraded and have two special Armory upgrades(like Reapers), some don't. I don't really understand the reasnoning behind that. And why Ghosts don't have the EMP, not even as an Armory upgrade? Considering that's their most useful skill aside from dropping nukes? And don't tell me that it's imba or something. Spectres get a three second long AoE stun without spending a single credit. Research upgrades are cooler and more unique, but some of them are silly or just useless(Shrike Turret and Predator for example). And I can't just put my finger on it, but I think the whole idea could have been handled better. Get points, every 5 points you unlock upgrades... that's okay, but it could be better.

Since we're on Hyperion, let's talk about it. What is it, mechanics-wise? Well, it's basically a giant turd on your way to play the game. Because every time you want to continue your progress, you need to first load the Hyperion... actually, wait. First you need to wait for the auto-patcher to contact the Blizzard server in case there's another patch out that will ruin all your single player saves. Once that's done, you need to wait for the dynamic menu to load. Then you click the continue campaign button, which means you now need to wait for Hyperion to load, and once that's loaded, you spend entire ten seconds there because that's how long it will take you to go to the Star Map, select a mission and click "Launch".

To put it into perspective, Brood War launches so fast on modern machines that you can't even see the Loading screen.

Eventually you learn to turn off the game before talking to anyone after a mission since then at least you have an excuse to load the 3D briefing menu that Hyperion is. But no, really. Can you name one thing about the Hyperion that couldn't be done with Starcraft-style 2D screen? Why is it even 3D in the first place? Just like the non-linear campaign, this is more taking of a feature and then failing to utilize any of its strong points. At the very least they could let you walk around the ship yourself, but no, you only click the buttons to move between 3D set pieces. In other words, there is no reason AT ALL for all this to be in 3D and take minutes to load. It could have been talking portraits just like in days of yore and it would have worked exactly the same...

Now this is a fair warning. I'm starting to talk about graphics now. If you're still reading this for some reason, now it's your last chance to stop and do something productive with your life. No? Okay. Here we go.

...just like REST OF THE GAME. Now I know that making a 3D game today is almost obligatory, even if it's a strategy game like Civilization it must be 3D or no one will buy it. Though this is a game by a company with practically infinite money, with huge recognition and enough hype for a Call of Duty 11. As unlikely as it would be, they COULD make it 2D(or at least release some kind of ESPORTS MODE which would be 2D overlay) and it would still sell millions. But as I said, making 3D games today is an obligation so I won't dwell further on the issue. What I will dwell on, hovewer, is graphics style and audio.

It remains one of Internet's greatest ironies that while Diablo 3 was being jumped on by thousands of nerds who were calling it a WoW clone simply because Blizzard dared to introduce things like ambient light from torches, the shift to cartoon-ish graphics in Starcraft 2 went almost completely unnoticed. Now the shift itself is not entirely unexpected as the same thing happened to Warcraft 3. Hovewer there is a subtle difference between Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2: Warcraft 3 is a FANTASY game and follows a series of FANTASY games whose graphics were almost just as cartoony. Starcraft 2 on the other hand is SCIENCE FICTION and follows Starcraft and Brood War which were SCIENCE FICTION and only slightly cartoony(if at all) and even that was a result of the technical limitations more than deliberate design. Otherwise... well I wouldn't call them gritty, and some liberies were taken for the sake of gameplay(Battlecruisers and Carriers as buildable units barely bigger than a man) but it was a pretty solid science fiction.

Let's consider the Siege Tank as an example. In SC/BW, it's a tank with the siege mode added on. All siege mode does is extend the supports - quite reasonable - and basically turns the barrel(s) around to fire from the other end - not quite as reasonable but a pretty cool idea, certainly works in sci-fi. Now how exactly the same unit works in SC2? First of all, the turret was made comically huge. Then additional set of tracks was added on the sides, like these bikes for kids with support wheels. But the worst of all is the siege mode - changing the barrel geometry is not a big deal, though definitely less interesting than the original breech reversal. Hovewer the supports now extend from these silly little extra tracks, which retract inside the hull, while the main tracks extend to the sides and lift the entire tank up by around a meter or so. Now excuse me but this is retarded on so many levels that I need to spend a while talking about it. Just what the hell would lifting what is now artillery up by one meter achieve? Artillery, by definition, is an indirect fire weapon so elevation is almost completely irrelevant. Not to mention that after all that lifting nonsense you actually reduced the resting area. You did the complete opposite of what extending the supports was supposed to achieve, that is reduce the point ground pressure when firing the siege cannon. And what do you mean the side tracks retract INSIDE the vehicle? What, is there a bunch of empty space inside just for that? Where does that fat guy inside fits in then? You redesigned the entire unit and all you've achieved is turning it into a child's toy, a LEGO toy. Not even LEGO Technic toy, this is some Duplo shit. What about the Goliath? THAT is one of the most bad-ass units in Starcraft? It looks like an outhouse with legs. And who is that fatso inside? What used to be one of the most badass portraits and voices in Starcraft is now a middle-aged bald reaver? Look, just take the Starcraft unit and copy it verbatim to SC2. How the hell can you fuck up something so simple?

Protoss units aren't much better. The cybernetic theme is almost completely gone, instead Protoss now utilize flimsy, delicate elf-like design. Hey Blizzard, you know what was the defining feature of Protoss in SC? Strong, but more importantly, TOUGH units. Almost all Protoss units have tons of HP and at least 1 Armor. Zealot, most basic Protoss unit, has more HP than a fucking TANK. But I guess that's too non-standard for all the casuals you were aiming for with this game. They can't get anything more complicated than humans-bugs-elves. Good fucking job, Blizzard. Keep pissing in your own cornflakes. At least Zerg got away relatively undumbed, as it's hard to fuck up a race of alien bugs.

Units that are new are even worse. Now I don't want to hate on Blizzard too much for actually adding in new units, because some people bitch that "Starcraft 2 is just Starcraft in 3D" so I won't ask stupid questions like "If these Colossi were on Aiur all along, why didn't they help fighting against the Overmind" or "How the heck all three races managed to completely change most of their standing forces in just four years" and finally "If Protoss did change most of their units in just four years, how come they didn't change them ever again in hundreds of years before they took the last stand against the Hybrids". Making sequels is a bitch, you want to add new stuff but you have to find a way to explain why old stuff is now the new stuff which almost never works.

But the mechanics of the units themselves? Hooo boy.

The units are obviously designed for multiplayer. That means instead of creating three distinct races and then designing units based on the "personalities" of the races, they made a bunch of units based on what the race needs in multiplayer to be competetive at any stage in the game. Example. In Starcraft, Terran units were mostly based on what actually exists: Infantry with assault rifles. Medics. Infantry with flamethrowers. Tanks. Fighters. Dropships. At no point they started adding in stupid shit like jetpack-equipped dual-pistol-wielding infantry, because it would make no fucking sense. But because design in SC2 started with multiplayer, and they wanted terran to be able to harass from the early stages of the game using the new cliff mechanic, they designed this abortion of a unit which feels as if it's straight from some badly written fanfic. Viking, another example. Why would you make a mech that turns into a plane? Would you rather just have better mech and better plane separately? But for some match balance reasons I can't even begin to comprehend they decided it would be best to have an unit that only attacks ground when on the ground, and only attacks air when in the air, and thus Viking was born. Defying all common sense, but since when gameplay mechanics adhere to common sense? Nevermind that Starcraft became world's most popular competetive game while having reasonable units, that takes too much effort. Let's just go with whatever fits.

Many units vere designed specifically to make multiplayer easier. We'll use Colossus as an example here. Colossus is obviously a Shuttle Reaver, except as a single unit so it's much easier to pull off and some nerfs were done so it won't be so extremely damaging/unbeatable in the right hands. Early Shuttle Reaver harass was extremely dangerous and could easily win you the game - if you did it right. And it was really damn hard to do it right with siege tanks(which you had to know positions of and calculate the rotating speed of their turrets), mines you can't see(since you don't have observers yet) and Missile Turrets. Later in the game you kept your Reavers in the Shuttle against Zerg because they're so goddamn slow that's the only way to actually get them anywhere. Reavers raped Zerglings, Hydras and Ultras but it took only two Scourge and both your Shuttle and your Reavers are gone. Obviously Blizzard wanted to make Starcraft 2 more accessible so such dangerous extremes were removed from the game. There are many more examples of such removal, for example Spider Mines were completely removed since they required Protoss to regularly sweep the map getting rid of them; Immortals were put in as a means of dealing with Siege Tank lines; Queens were changed to make management of the Zerg's "third resource"(larva) easier. A lot of improvements were done to the interface, strong spells were removed from the game(they had to leave psionic storm since it's so iconic but they nerfed it hard), and the game even auto-micros for you to a certain extent. Result? Starcraft 2 will never be played as competetively as Brood War. It's simply too easy. Brood War was only truly mastered over a decade after it was released. Starcraft played on professional level is an extremely hard game BECAUSE the interface sucks, BECAUSE if you lose attention for a second your shuttle with reavers is dead, BECAUSE you need to know that the enemy scout proble entered your base five seconds later than usual so there's something fishy going on. And that's what makes it such a competetive hit, because there's always the next peak to climb. Game as user-friendly as Starcraft 2 will be mastered quickly, players will reach limits quickly and it will become overplayed quickly.

Koki on 7/5/2011 at 18:11

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It's a review, okay. A professional one.

Does TTLG have a Half Life 2 thread?

Yakoob on 7/5/2011 at 18:48

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Holy mother of tl;dr jesus christ

Nameless Voice on 7/5/2011 at 19:16

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Also, regarding the graphics: I think the main reason SC2 looks cartoony is the same reason that WC3 ended up looking so cartoony - Blizzard chose a really low polygon count for the units, often using things like 3-sided cylinders instead of cubes, which make the units look far thinner, stretched and cartoony. I understand that they wanted to keep the poly count down considering how many units could potentially be on-screen at once - consider that WC3 had such low unit caps for this exact reason - but at this stage it's ridiculous. My old 8800GT has no trouble playing SC2 with large armies on-screen (except for too many colossi, whose effects make my PC lag), so there's no reason there couldn't be an option for people with modern graphics cards to use proper bulk, high-poly models.

CCCToad on 8/5/2011 at 01:52

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Those are the reasons why I really don't play RTS games. For the most part, they have very little to do with actual strategy and just being the fastest to rush the enemy with the "best" combination of units. The fact that I suck at that kind of gameplay, and tend to rule at games that involve actual tactics(like the admittedly mediocre EndWar) might have something to do with it.