Comments on: Thoughts: Heart of the Swarm.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:28:20 +0000

I have played maybe four games of Starcraft multiplayer ever, and I found them so emotionally draining that it killed my desire to continue. Still, I’ve been playing Dota for six months now. Maybe I should go back.

(Short answer: no, although I might.)

By: innokenti

innokenti — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:03:19 +0000

It’s a process failure. The right people need to be in the right position and given the freedom to do what they need to do. It becomes easier as a big company to get the right people… but there also need to be the realisation that you need them. And of course letting them do their thing without interference becomes much harder.

By: Everblue

Everblue — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:01:42 +0000

Have you played the multiplayer at all?

By: Gap Gen

Gap Gen — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:32:23 +0000

It does impress me how the more money a company has, the worse its ability to design a coherent narrative. I guess this is the effect of committee design – you end up with the plot being written by a bunch of programmers-by-training, or else you design a bunch of missions and then treat the story as something to string them together after the fact.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:27:43 +0000

We’ll have to agree to disagree, I think; I thought WoL was well-designed in terms of emphasising what Starcraft is about. You have to be aggressive or you die, but the rewards for being aggressive are potentially very great — there’s relatively few plot shields for the enemy bases in Wings of Liberty, and most of the time if you can take out their base quickly you win. I was also a big fan of its difficulty scaling, which added in extra units of more lethal types as you scaled the levels and made completing the objective harder in a more intelligent way than just giving the computer a massive resource bonus. A legitimate complaint is that they tell you the plot during cutscenes instead of letting you discover it for yourself during missions — which means there’s sod-all hero missions until the very end, not to mention giving the campaign missions themselves a very disparate, disconnected feel — but that’s just Blizzard these days. Individually the missions were excellent.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:20:11 +0000

Well that’s just the thing: Heart of the Swarm *was* their opportunity to experiment by completely changing the genre of the game. My memory is a bit hazy, but I seem to recall a great deal being made of the flexibility of Starcraft II’s mission editor back in the day, with the shoot ‘em up game you could play in the Hyperion bar being an example of what was possible. The Hyperion mission itself in this game is the sort of playful departure from the norm I was expecting throughout HotS. It is possible if you inject just a little bit of imagination and effort. It’s just that for whatever reason not only did they not do it, but they consciously aped what they’d already done.

(Admittedly if they had turned the Zerg campaign into an RPG-lite they probably would have been lynched by Starcraft fans, but even if you stick to the relatively narrow scope of Zerg swarms there’s still an awful lot of ground that remains resolutely uncovered.)

By: Darren

Darren — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:07:22 +0000

I agree that WoL had a pretty solid campaign, but RTS games had been moving in that general direction for some time. Company of Heroes (especially the last expansion, which features a batshit crazy panzer campaign), Dawn of War II, Rise of Legends, and even barely-played mediocrities like Grand Ages: Rome (which I actually quite liked) all had campaigns that veered away from the standard, even to the point of arguably crossing into new genres.

I think the bigger problem is that RTS are so few and far between these days that the shift isn’t as noticeable as it would be for a more prominent genre.

Also, at the risk of defending Blizzard, how many mission types can you have in a build-and-destroy game like Starcraft? I’m not convinced I could think up a ton of different missions without completely changing the genre of the game (a la Dawn of War II). You have to have some base-building, you have to have some troop recruitment, and there’s only so many ways to make the different game systems interact without significant changes. If those significant changes had been made, there would have been people–perhaps you yourself!–who would’ve complained that the campaign wasn’t much like actually playing Starcraft. Furthermore, with the way they’ve hamstrung themselves with the division of the races, they can’t afford to have wacky divergences like the Orc campaign in Frozen Throne.

By: innokenti

innokenti — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:59:50 +0000

I don’t think they have an agenda, but they are carelessly sexist. It’s not a blanket thing but… yeah.

By: Another Joe

Another Joe — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:25:12 +0000

I usually agree with your assessment of games, and admittedly did not read past the first few paragraphs here to read about the expansion, but I have to say I could not agree less with your opinion on Wings of Liberty. Putting aside the terrible storytelling aspects and focusing purely on the gameplay itself does nothing to remedy my hatred for its terribly done campaign.

In the original StarCraft the missions were varied and interesting and most importantly there was a sense of pacing and strategy. In SC2 it’s as if they throw all of that out the window. Each mission has the same objective: “Do the thing in 30 minutes before the universe explodes! Hurry up! No don’t think or strategize, just go go go!”

Maybe that appeals in some way I don’t quite get, but I was a huge fan of SC and was hoping for more of the same type of gameplay.

By: Gap Gen

Gap Gen — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:45:08 +0000

Yeah, given that Wings of Liberty’s writing and storyline was tremendously insulting on every level, I didn’t hold out any hopes of this being any different. It’s a shame; Starcraft and Brood War had (to my 16-year-old mind) fairly decent writing, capturing some sense of brutal, zero-sum game politicking, while Kerrigan was a pretty good antihero. I retract in part my claim that Blizzard’s treatment of her character in SC2 is overtly sexist (people in the RPS comments got angry when I said misogynistic). They probably don’t have the wherewithal to consciously promote an anti-liberal agenda, or if they do, it’s hidden under a morass of other insulting stereotypes.