Cause some comments ought to be addressed out of sequence, I'll split this up into parts, out of order...
I'm familiar with the SC lore, played the original game and BW, and to be fair, SC2 single player is a disappointment in almost every way. The level design itself is great, with every mission having a different gimmick to it, and the achievement system is a real drug.
That's EXACTLY what made them great. I never said Blizzard's writing was spectacular (in a recent Game Grumps of WC3:ROC, everyone was laughing at Ross's explanations of the WC lore because they thought he was bullshitting them, because it all sounded so ridiculous) I said their best is their single player experiences. Being able to choose between siding with the Protoss and cleansing an infested world or fighting back against the Protoss to try to save that world resulting in two vastly different missions to play, each challenging and distinct on their own, separate designs, was really great! But... on the story side, if you helped the Protoss cleanse the infested world, the character on your ship ends up tragically infested as well and Raynor needs to put her down with a heavy heart... yet if you fought the Protoss to protect the infested world and save as many Terrans as you can, the same character was always fine, and they even have a sappy ending to their character arc where she gives him a peck on the cheek, and all is well. The story goes for mutually-exclusive tales whenever the game diverges, and that hurts the story. But the gameplay ITSELF is still superb.
It's not representative of what you can expect in multiplayer, because the tech trees are COMPLETELY customized in the campaign with units never meant to be played online. It's a mash-up of both linear and nonlinear and it both works and hurts itself because of the different circumstances that brings about. It lacks some integrity because you determine the story through your mission choices rather than the story having been decided and you would only learn as much as you sought out. These are all definitive issues with the campaign, but they didn't make the experience of the campaign poorer, per se. They were problems on their own.
However, the story and the writing sucked hard. Storywise, it was obvious what would happen even from the fucking trailer. Zero twists, zero excitement. Characters were bland as cardboard. Sure, voice acting was great, but horribly written dialogues ruined it. Besides, SC1 characters, despite being far less prominent, were more in the line of different shades of grey. In WoL, not so much.
Yes and no. Yes in that, as a whole, the writing was bad. But no in the minor details. There were twists, they just weren't very clever ones. The characters had some depth, just nothing particularly special. The "unsuspected" elements were ridiculous and poorly thought out, and they were just there because it made convenience for the story. For example, Findley's "deal with the devil" which would have made zero sense, if you were in either Findley's or Mengsk's shoes. You take a con from prison, just because he has some history with one of your greatest adversaries, to infiltrate said adversary under the condition that he wins his freedom if he... a lowly human ...kills the greatest threat to the galaxy, who by the way is immortal. WHY is that supposed to make sense? The campaign develops some conveniences and makes it possible for a moment at the end of the story for Findley to aim a gun at Kerrigan's head and for that moment to have SOME level of tension, but by NO means should this have been something a dictator could have conceivably PLANNED. That's a fine example of poor writing, and it wasn't the only one. Worse was what they did to Kerrigan's character, but I'll get more into that below.....
However, I'm not sure about multiplayer being bad. In fact, I think it's great. Especially with HotS. Some new additions such as the XP system are making it even more addictive. Matchmaking is fine and ranked play is great. Of course, it requires skill and naturally, higher leagues are dominated by pros whom you stand little to no chance against, but such is life. It's still fun to play, both casual and otherwise. There are some balancing issues here and there, but patches are applied often, so it's nice to know that Blizzard is doing their job on that one...or are at least trying.
Trying doesn't makes the efforts automatically successful. For instance, during the WOL days, Terran were WOEFULLY overpowered. Like, ridiculously so. At its worst, the Zerg in SC1 days were NEVER as abusive and OP as WOL Terran were. The Terran Ball was widely and infamously reputed for being an excessively unstoppable "strategy", with the best players in the world at Zerg and Protoss getting regularly crushed by far less skilled players simply utilizing the Terran Ball. Those days were Hell. Blizzard didn't so much "address" that as much as they waited for HOTS to make any changes to fix the problem. Back in the 90s they didn't wait for an expansion to fix problems, they patched them then and there. They applied TONS of balance fixes that actually resolved many issues, whereas they basically left the Terran Ball be for all the years leading up to HOTS. It was only with the units they introduced in HOTS that made particular abusive strategies harder to pull off. Hell, even in the WCIII days, they didn't wait too long to apply fixes to the "mass x" strategies running rampant. They even invented a new armor type JUST to engineer a solution to players massive Huntresses and Shaman.
What kind of retcons are we talking about here? [...]On the other hand though, StarCraft lore in general is a pretty bland one.
This is the big one...
For starters, SC2 (and WC3 and WOW, for that matter) was RIFE with retcons, and terrible and massive ones, at that. SC1 established that the Xel'Naga were the most advanced race in the universe that sought to create new races that would be an "ideal", and in their tampering with the Protoss and the Zerg, they ended up causing their own extinction. It firmly set that the Overmind was a cunning entity that saw through its creators' intentions and engineered their downfall, then set its hungry eyes on the Protoss to become "perfect". The backstory concerning the Protoss and the Zerg and the Xel'Naga was very rich and, SC2 tossed it to the wind. Suddenly the Overmind did everything not out of its insatiable thirst for perfection but out of a fear of its creators and that it was, the entire time, a slave to the Xel'Naga (even during the events of SC1). Suddenly the Xel'Naga didn't accidentally manufacture their own extinction but contrivingly and absurdly orchestrating the meticulously apocalyptic doom for the whole universe..... just because. Suddenly the Overmind's goals wasn't to embed itself in Aiur and something something "become complete" but rather it was ALWAYS to find the perfect entity to infest to create a method to combat the Xel'Naga, and that entity was conveniently Kerrigan, and Kerrigan was the key to everything, and killing Kerrigan would doom the universe to the Xel'Naga's planned apocalypse of everything. Suddenly Kerrigan was never a power-hungry omnicidal psychopath who murdered her way to the top of the food chain JUST because she could, and she had the power to do so, but now it turns out that was just the Zerg DNA creating a "different Kerrigan", and that somewhere buried deep inside her subconscious she's still a good-hearted person, cheering Raynor on to end her own tyranny.
There's more, but let's just stop with that for now. It's ridiculous! These things were all done to manufacture circumstances that would allow for the campaign Blizzard ended up making, and that's nothing new, as they've done that before with their previous works. But at least they did it WELL in previous decades. When WCII came out and they had to take a story divided between 2 campaigns that were mutually exclusive in the original game and find a way to decide which one was canon, they took the best ideas from BOTH and made them all canon. The Orc ending was the canonical ending, but events from the Human ending were also canonical. Likewise the
Beyond the Dark Portal expansion for WCII determined that the Alliance ending was canon, but kept details from the Horde campaign intact, such as Gul'Dan's betrayal and the invasion and destruction of Quel'Thalas. By stark contrast, WCIII UNDID many of the established lore to make way for the possibility of its campaign. Suddenly Medivh survived his slaying AND was purged of Sargeras's spirit so he could redeem his actions from the first game by saving Azeroth in the third. Suddenly it was Sargeras' INTENTION to lose to Aegwynn so he could infect her unborn child millennia later (again, just like the Findley plotholes, this was just ridiculously contrived) and so on and so forth. You get the idea, I hope.
The worst of SCII's retcons turned the Xel'Naga from a naive but well-meaning race of demi-godly aliens into a race of purely malevolent assholes for no apparent reason, and trurned the Zerg from an endlessly voracious and destructive race bent on consuming the galaxy into a misunderstood race led by a fearful arbiter trying to save the universe from destruction at the hands of its creators, and so on and so for. It WILDLY mutilated the established lore of the series that was very creatively and colorfully established back in
Starcraft, and more's the pity. The lore used to be rich, now all the details that made it so interested have been tossed to the winds to make way for new and silly ideas just to excuse an audacious series of campaigns. This is where Blizzard's really lost their touch. They've grown too large, they've lost their way with what made their games so great. Yeah, they patch pretty frequently, but pardon me if being spoiled by Icefrog has left me unimpressed with Blizzard's efforts. I've seen far better, far more meticulous, far more dedicated efforts, so while Blizzard certainly hasn't been brushing off issues, I just can't see them in the same complimentary light as I once had.
They aren't manufacturing failures as far as multiplayer experiences go. I was simply saying that that's not what they do well anyway. They make great cinematics and great single player campaigns. The rest of their creations are varying degrees of successes and failures, but the common thread they all share is that they don't hold a candle to the quality of the campaigns and cinematics. That's not a terrible thing, but it's neither a necessarily good thing, either. =|
Soon done tho so maybe i should try to remod it with somehting new when i'm done.
