• Poogona [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    15 hours ago

    I remember being enthralled playing through a copy of StarCraft 2 I “appropriated” from a friend’s house (yes I was that friend, we exist and we DID steal your copy of that game you thought you lost). The story was pretty damn good by the standards of videogames, especially at the time, and I basically ate slept and breathed that campaign for the week or so I was playing it. StarCraft 2 had so much hype and totally failed to live up to the quality of that campaign.

    It’s not even a matter of rose tinted glasses, Wings of Liberty was decent and was pretty well-produced but all its best moments were just callbacks to sc1 and brood war.

    (And JESUS CHRIST, nobody who gave two fucks about that storyline was asking for all the boring trite Kerrigan redemption plotline across sc2’s campaigns, brood war was sick because it specifically tossed aside the idea that she wanted to be redeemed, she was a great character and villain until they just made her sci-fi Sylvanas Windrunner. My theory is that all the now-obvious sexism at Blizzard is why they cannot conceive of a woman having a role in a story that isn’t ultimately concerned with her being fixed for the sake of a dude who wants their cool monster gf to become a blonde wife)

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      11 hours ago

      Every Blizzard game since WarCraft 3 (maybe even Diablo) has been: “THE PROPHECY IS COMING TRUE! Listen to this prophet who was seen as a bad guy in previous game, but is now Team Good Guys because the world will end!” Medivh, Zeratul, and Tyreal/Caine/Adria. You have to stop the Burning Legion/Amon/Prime Evils.

      I haven’t played Overwatch, but I bet it’s the same plot.

    • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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      14 hours ago

      It sucks about SC2’s story, I honestly don’t remember it at all aside from remembering being disappointed by it, but I will remember every single mission of SC and SCBW’s stories for the rest of my life.

      That said, I still feel like SC2’s campaign gameplay is the high water mark for RTSs, as sad as that sounds. In SC1 (and in most other RTSs that bother to have a campaign) most of the missions boil down to “build a big army and attack the enemy base” but SC2 has a lot of variety, units that don’t appear in the multiplayer, unexpected twists mid-level, etc.

      • Poogona [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        14 hours ago

        It’s true, the gameplay in 2 was pretty slick but let’s be honest, story disappointment stings like nothing else when it comes to games

    • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      14 hours ago

      oh and they skeleton crewed Wings of Liberty after launch to work on the game that got cancelled and scavenged into Overwatch

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      14 hours ago

      I was so very sick and tired of Blizzard’s “corruption” cliches and waifu characters getting “corrupted” but redeemed through some Dudebro McManPain wanting to fuck them (again) real, real bad and yet the dogmatists cheering on Wish Dot Com Cthulu cliches on top of that were part of what permanently drove me off from WoW and Blizzard games in general. The “Epic” storytelling wasn’t.

      • Poogona [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        14 hours ago

        Baseline warcraft stories were almost good, like if I squinted I could pretend they were doing a big and at times subtle plotline about stuff like imperialism and indigenous displacement/resistance but those days are long gone even if I was giving too much credit

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          13 hours ago

          This is a side question, but when I peeked at recent Diablo games (“do you guys not have phones?!” mobile grifting aside), I noticed yet another fucking corrupted feeeemale villain on the cover. Yeah yeah “Lilith” and all that, but probably just Kerrigan/Sylvannas. Again. Right?

          • Poogona [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            13 hours ago

            I haven’t played d4 since release but I’ll be honest the story actually wasn’t their worst and did not fall into that trap, you just fight Lilith at the end. Iirc she was just Mister Diablo’s daughter.

            • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              13 hours ago

              There could have been potential if the Blizzard hacks bothered to anything with the pre-Old Testament Lilith character, but that might take some writing ability. sans-shrug

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          13 hours ago

          When Blizzard’s “rock stars” decided to unravel their setting’s own complexity to have “Alliance good actually” and “Horde evil now actually” and then put Sylvanas in charge of it for extra Chaotic Stupid with generic “corrupted” waifu characteristics, I was done.