Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[MembersSchoolPizza]

WoW killed the Warcraft franchise as a whole. No longer were we going to get a real follow-up to Warcraft 3 and Frozen Throne because WoW was so successful. And so they padded out the story with expansions to WoW that were more like bad capeshit that makes no sense and never ends. So the Horde and Alliance are back at war, they're not even caring about the fact that the Burning Legion is stronger than both of them and can invade them all again, and we're supposed to care more about this eternal slapfight between Orcs and Humans when WC3 hammered home how pointless that was. It's the same bullshit that later fucked over SWTOR's expansions where it's back to Empire vs. Republic cock-fighting even though by that point, both sides should be so exhausted they should've signed another peace treaty so they could recover.

But, they have to keep the factions fighting just to justify the PVP crap between them. Both WoW and SWTOR are guilty in that regard, of making the story stupid just to justify PVP warfare.

The only part of this I'll argue with is the first sentence.

What killed the Warcraft franchise, and nearly RTSes as a whole, was Warcraft 3, and the DOTA mod.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Going off what I said before about DnD fanatics and RPG games, part of why they hate modern RPGs is because they're angry they could no longer ''role-play'', which they see as the key feature of the genre. They're angry that they could no longer create a role by choosing a class and get absorbed by that role while playing a game. While there is a point in that RPGs have moved away from assigning class roles to player characters and instead focused on allowing a player to become everything, it's actually kind of funny considering some of the best RPGs like Fallout New Vegas don't have class systems and just let you level up any skill you want.

The DnD fanatics state that role-playing is a core feature of what makes an RPG, but in reality, the real reason why DnD even had different classes and roles to begin with was to make a tactical wargame where different players with different specialties worked together to accomplish a common goal; it was a lot less about ''roleplaying'' or playing pretend like you're some costumed weeaboo at an anime convention, and more about working together in a strategic board game to win against a common foe. DnD isn't some game where you focus on playing pretend; it's a tactical board game where you're supposed to be focusing on what strategy you should use to accomplish victory.

There were times when I'd plan out my characters' gear and attack patterns in KOTOR the same way I'd plan my army's attack in games like Starcraft, Galactic Battlegrounds, and Empire at War. I'd level up my skills in games like Oblivion and New Vegas based on what I specialized on and what skills I think I'll be using the most for the next 20-something hours. It has a lot less to do with pretending you're a thief or a paladin and getting into that role, and more along the lines of planning what your team will do, kind of like what a team coach or captain for a sports team would be doing for a ball game.

And the funny thing is, you could still role-play with games like Skyrim, if you so choose. You can pretend that your character is a thief who's not that good at fighting and must rely on stealth. You can pretend that your character is a paladin who mostly relies on melee and isn't that good at magic or ranged combat. You can pretend that your character is a mage who primarily does their fighting with magic. Role-playing doesn't need a class system to make it work; all it needs is imagination and playing pretend, and you're good to go.

Hell, when it comes to games with class systems, most players don't use those class systems for role-playing; they just try to figure out how to break the game utterly so they can fuck over everyone they meet. Like say, a KOTOR player who levels up as a soldier so they can have strong melee attacks, then they choose the Jedi Consular class when they meet the Jedi Council, so they can have OP Force powers, so they can have a Jedi who's powerful at both melee and the Force. Normally a Consular doesn't have strong melee attacks and plays the role of a squishy wizard more reliant on Force powers, but since the player was formerly a soldier, they have all the feats and skills for close-range combat already, so now they can go and be a Consular so they can get the best Force power suite and utterly dominate the game as a Jedi who can crush the enemy up close or from afar.

The only part of this I'll argue with is the first sentence.

What killed the Warcraft franchise, and nearly RTSes as a whole, was Warcraft 3, and the DOTA mod.

People still bought and played Starcraft 2 and its expansions in droves despite DOTA being there for years. So I'd respectfully disagree.

 

[Thiletonomics]

I personally hate how the general meta is:

• Bunch of gamers complete a game dozens of times
• Said gamers become so knowledgeable about the mechanics that they can breeze past even the hardest challenge
• There's suddenly a market for a mod that makes things harder so they can replay the game 'just like they did at the start'
• Said mod nerfs practically all fun and requires autistic grinding and/or insane knowledge of every system in the game
• As the mod is endorsed by the most hardcore of hardcore fans, it becomes heavily advertised and even considered the 'base' game
• New players pick up the game, hear that the definitive version of the game is this ultra hard mode and downloads it
• New players drop it because it's unfun and frustrating
• Said new players are called babies for not 'gitting gud'
• The game gradually loses its fanbase until only the most autistic folk are playing it.

Even moreso when devs endorse the difficulty, and cater to it.

On one hand, I do agree that some games go too far with trying to keep the skill floor of a game too high for most people to enjoy. On the other hand, there have been numerous game series that go the opposite direction, and lower the skill floor too much, to the point that it kills the gatekeeping aspect of it that keeps degenerates out, and ruins the game in the long-run. Blizzard games and Magic: The Gathering, are two examples of what happens to a game, when you decide to stop gatekeeping.

People still bought and played Starcraft 2 and its expansions in droves despite DOTA being there for years. So I'd respectfully disagree.

I remembered reading an article, where Blizzard said that they sold more Celestial Steeds (a microtransaction mount for WoW), than copies of SC2 Wings of Liberty, back when SC2 was a Pay-to-play game.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

People still bought and played Starcraft 2 and its expansions in droves despite DOTA being there for years. So I'd respectfully disagree.

And SC2 was the other shoe dropping of Blizzard nearly killing off RTS games as a genre. Yeah, a lot of people bought it... at least the base game... because it's Starcraft, of course they would. Not a lot of people played it, though, in the long tail of it's life. People who still played Starcraft up until SC2 released, some of them.

The complaints varied. The story was criticized, of course, but the gameplay changes turned many off. "It's not really an RTS anymore" is a complaint I heard a lot. Hyperbolic, but it was how a lot of people felt. It focused so much on very specific build orders, encouraged all-ins, and was highly APM-focused.

At the end of the day, it doesn't even matter if it was a "good" game, or even if the player complaints were valid - some were, some weren't. It clearly wasn't what a lot of people wanted.

It wasn't WoW that killed RTS games.

 

[Calandrino]

Going off what I said before about DnD fanatics and RPG games, part of why they hate modern RPGs is because they're angry they could no longer ''role-play'', which they see as the key feature of the genre.

They're called role-playing games because you role dice to play them. If outcomes aren't randomly determined, it's not a true RPG.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

And SC2 was the other shoe dropping of Blizzard nearly killing off RTS games as a genre. Yeah, a lot of people bought it... at least the base game... because it's Starcraft, of course they would. Not a lot of people played it, though, in the long tail of it's life. People who still played Starcraft up until SC2 released, some of them.

The complaints varied. The story was criticized, of course, but the gameplay changes turned many off. "It's not really an RTS anymore" is a complaint I heard a lot. Hyperbolic, but it was how a lot of people felt. It focused so much on very specific build orders, encouraged all-ins, and was highly APM-focused.

It was still an RTS, but it wasn't as tightly balanced and fun as the original Starcraft. More like a generic modern game with Starcraft characters slapped on top. Brood War's balance was so precise that it became the RTS equivalent of chess; Blizzard fucked with it to make a more generic game and what we got was SC2 as a result. And they made it focused on build orders, all-ins, and APM because that's what happened to Brood War, but all that shit happened to Brood War naturally, not artificially. Artificially encouraging build-orders and focusing on APM by making the game focus on those things just made the multiplayer unplayable for people who don't play like Korean Brood War players.

At the end of the day, it doesn't even matter if it was a "good" game, or even if the player complaints were valid - some were, some weren't. It clearly wasn't what a lot of people wanted.

It wasn't WoW that killed RTS games.

WoW killed Warcraft as an RTS game. Warcraft could've gotten a sequel a la SC2, but never did, because WoW made so much money and made Warcraft's story into such a mess that no game was going to fix that and give a satisfying ending. All Warcraft is now is just an endless procession of expansions that keep extending a story permanently stuck in the second act just to make more money, which is basically the same as bad capeshit stories where evil is never truly vanquished because they need more stories.

 

[Ser Prize]

Western RPGs were at their best during the time when they had to compete with JRPGs, from the late 90s to the 2010s. You saw games like Diablo, Mass Effect 1-3, KOTOR 1 & 2, Oblivion, Skyrim, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, SWTOR, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, the greats. Then, when JRPGs declined and ceased to be a competitor, western RPGs got high on their own farts, and began to decline. Fallout 4 & 76, Mass Effect Andromeda, Dragon Age 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and now, Starfield. While there is still some good in the genre, no one can contest the fact that things were better in the old days.

The fact that WRPGs are now in decline is no longer a contested fact; Baldur's Gate 3 seems to be a last hurrah for the genre rather than a return to form, especially considering the fact that most of the people who made that game got fired. Western RPGs needed competitors to stay on their toes, and without that competition, they sank into the muck and became a laughingstock of the glory that they once had.


That's what happens when rabble-rousers promise everything under the sky then realize they need real money in order to deliver on the goods. They have to spread their legs to big daddy USA or USSR and be some country's bitch in order to pay for it all.

Fallout 4 is a better game than ME3. Otherwise I agree with you.

Am i too old now? I'm not enjoying the social aspect of Persona 5 like i remember enjoying 3 and 4's back then, even though they were pretty much the same.

Leaving aside the time managing factor, i just don't like how blatant a fantasy this is. Ive mentioned it before im sure, but come on... Every single interesting person you need to meet just throws themselves at you because you are you? The hot foreign student constantly looks for you and only you? The hot president of the student council constantly chases after you and only you? The hot goth doctor keeps sending you constant, totally not suggestive texts?

If there is one thing western game writers can do better than eastern ones (if they try that is) is writing characters and situations with some sort of realistic nuance, take Rockstar's Bully for another story taking place in high school;

-You play as an angry manlet with a bad reputation that gets dropped in a shitty school. No heroic misdemeanors here, you didnt steal from the rich to help the poor, you didnt hurt an untouchable politician that attempted to harass an innocent woman. You are a little shit and that's it.

-Nobody cares about you and the only rumors centered on you are all mocking your ass. You ain't the cool rebel that everyone gawks at, walk around the halls and even the fucking nerds are throwing shit at you

-The only people that want to be seen with you are the shy, quiet and forgettable dork, and a manipulating sociopath seeking to take advantage of you. Try interacting with anyone and they'll shut you down, insult you, or outright fight you. The female students (except the fat one) are repulsed if you try to approach them

So you start from the bottom, fight your way up, by the end of the game you take over the school and everyone loves you. Yeah, it's still a fantasy, but it feels more grounded and realistic. I'm probably part of a very small minority here, but i cant help it

I played Persona 4 and 5 in pretty rapid succession and I think the problem truly lies with P5's writing.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

On one hand, I do agree that some games go too far with trying to keep the skill floor of a game too high for most people to enjoy. On the other hand, there have been numerous game series that go the opposite direction, and lower the skill floor too much, to the point that it kills the gatekeeping aspect of it that keeps degenerates out, and ruins the game in the long-run. Blizzard games and Magic: The Gathering, are two examples of what happens to a game, when you decide to stop gatekeeping.

I was specifically reffering to games like Darkest Dungeons and Binding of Isaac, who balanced their games around having that one good run where you dominate everything.

And SC2 was the other shoe dropping of Blizzard nearly killing off RTS games as a genre. Yeah, a lot of people bought it... at least the base game... because it's Starcraft, of course they would. Not a lot of people played it, though, in the long tail of it's life. People who still played Starcraft up until SC2 released, some of them.

The complaints varied. The story was criticized, of course, but the gameplay changes turned many off. "It's not really an RTS anymore" is a complaint I heard a lot. Hyperbolic, but it was how a lot of people felt. It focused so much on very specific build orders, encouraged all-ins, and was highly APM-focused.

At the end of the day, it doesn't even matter if it was a "good" game, or even if the player complaints were valid - some were, some weren't. It clearly wasn't what a lot of people wanted.

It wasn't WoW that killed RTS games.

Yea APM oriented RTS suck. Oh wow you idled your production building half a second? Your opponent is 100 units ahead.

And the skill is no longer about strategy and tactics, and it's more about build order execution, lol.

That's why I liked LotR:BfME. There was no build order. You just placed the buildings and watched them worked. Same for Iron Harvest, albeit that was kind of a mediocre game.

Also LORD IMPERATOR it's sad that you think Bethesda RPGs are good RPGs or proper RPGs.

​

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Fallout 4 is a better game than ME3. Otherwise I agree with you.

Depends. Fallout 4 is definitely more customizable, especially with your settlements. ME3 is more story-focused.

@Gender: Xenomorph

Also @LORD IMPERATOR it's sad that you think Bethesda RPGs are good RPGs or proper RPGs.

Apparently, I'm not the only one, if @Ser Prize thinks Fallout 4 is better than Mass Effect 3.

I'd actually say Bethesda didn't get good at RPGs until Oblivion. Everything prior to that was rather janky at best. Oblivion was their first good RPG, followed by Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Skyrim. Morrowind was rather forgettable back in the day; I remember fucking around with it for an hour before we dumped it and went back to KOTOR 1 and Paper Mario 2.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

It was still an RTS, but it wasn't as tightly balanced and fun as the original Starcraft. More like a generic modern game with Starcraft characters slapped on top. Brood War's balance was so precise that it became the RTS equivalent of chess; Blizzard fucked with it to make a more generic game and what we got was SC2 as a result. And they made it focused on build orders, all-ins, and APM because that's what happened to Brood War, but all that shit happened to Brood War naturally, not artificially. Artificially encouraging build-orders and focusing on APM by making the game focus on those things just made the multiplayer unplayable for people who don't play like Korean Brood War players.

In other words, like I said, Blizzard dropped the ball and it wasn't that good of a game or very well received. Yes.

WoW killed Warcraft as an RTS game. Warcraft could've gotten a sequel a la SC2, but never did, because WoW made so much money and made Warcraft's story into such a mess that no game was going to fix that and give a satisfying ending. All Warcraft is now is just an endless procession of expansions that keep extending a story permanently stuck in the second act just to make more money, which is basically the same as bad capeshit stories where evil is never truly vanquished because they need more stories.

Warcraft 3 was the "sequel a la SC2".

And SC2 apparently killed the Starcraft franchise all on it's own.

 

[TheHarbinger]

And SC2 apparently killed the Starcraft franchise all on it's own.

Starcraft 2 was like the perfect storm for killing a franchise. You had the cancellation of Starcraft: Ghost and the franchise floundering for years. Then you had complete abandonment of Starcraft: Brood War in the competitive scene because it was taking too much attention away from SC2. And the comparison between games always negatively reflected on SC2. So Blizzard decided to basically attack its most hardcore section of its SC fanbase, the ones who made SC2 even possible, essentially punishing them for loyalty.

And then on top of that the single player campaign had one of the worst written stories that defied even the lowest expectations from fans. It was like Blizzard had forgotten how to tell a story and just borrowed the most standard sci-fi and fantasy tropes from other stories and put Starcraft characters into them. And the campaigns were thematically different from SC and BW in that you no longer play as a nameless faction leader that is in control over an army or unit. You are written out of the story and are now just some observer and the characters talk to each other but never to the player. So you feel detached as well. In SC and BW the briefings are literally aimed at the player directly to immerse you in the story.

And the story itself was awful. Ancient aliens. Reapers from Mass Effect. Romance stories. Redeeming Kerrigan.

 

[The Ugly One]

Starcraft 2 is a great example a great example of why you don't listen to pro gamers and the top 0.1% of players. Your average RTS player does not want to have to wear a wrist brace and practice recording macros to be able to max out APM.

 

[Edgy But Dull]

The only people who "love" WoW have told me stories of waiting in line so they could roll the dice to get a rare drop, and how good it felt to finally get a unique purple codpiece after 2037 tries, and now they can stand around in a hub world or some shit and imagine that everyone is looking at their completed unique armor set and wishing they were that cool. nigger you are playing a game about waiting in line to get a pull on a slot machine

I used to enjoy WoW. And the South Park episode was dumb, and I love South Park usually.

I could say WoW used to have pretty good writing, and it did, I could say it had a fun world to explore, and it did, but honestly I just liked playing it with my friends. And hell, I made some friends in WoW that I still have to this day, outside of the game.

The "game" was never the point of WoW, the gameplay was stupidly simple at max level with a lot of classes having 1 button rotations and a lot of raid bosses having at most 2-3 mechanics. The main fun of WoW was about exploring the world and meeting random weirdos. The world in vanilla WoW is still to this day an amazing creation and it serves as a mechanism for interactions with other people, hence the whole MMO in MMORPG. The fun in the game was the shared experiences with or against other people as it was a "proto-social media" as people built reputations on their server for their behavior. There's still reputations built in specific gaming communities today but WoW had it split into multiple micro-organisms. The "WoW community" all had the shared experience of consistent stuff like STV being AIDS with bullshit quests and people ganking there all the time. However people on a specific server would have a unique experience of that world, as they would remember a prolific ganker, a scammer, or a good Samaritan. Then it would be even further refined with guild experiences. What also made it different from online gaming communities of today was that you wouldn't just sit in some hub city and fast travel to some dungeon or some shit. You would have to go out into the world to do things and you'd stumble upon random people or familiar faces.

The crux of the issue with WoW is that "you can never go" holds true as the online gaming community is insanely different nowadays. WoW Classic came out and it was the same game world but gone are the days of random dudes chilling in an open world game. It's all now "META COMPS, SPEEDRUNS, PARSES, BUY GOLD". As with many parts of the internet, it really did suffer from a tragedy of the commons.

What's more, the statistics fall on my side. I think it was The Division where from a player base of almost a million, only 5000 attempted the raid and only a handful had beaten it, so they had to reduce the difficulty. Some of the ones in WoW have a completion rate of less than 1%. If raids and end content is all that matters, why do 99% of the player base not touch it, and 1% spend 99% of their time doing other things?

Yeah, people keep forgetting that the sweatlords are actually a minority. Season of Discovery came out at the end of November and the level cap for the first phase was level 25. After about two weeks, only 10% of the playerbase got to max level and only 2% cleared the raid.

I remembered reading an article, where Blizzard said that they sold more Celestial Steeds (a microtransaction mount for WoW), than copies of SC2 Wings of Liberty, back when SC2 was a Pay-to-play game.

Piratesoftware mentioned this

Starcraft 2 is a great example a great example of why you don't listen to pro gamers and the top 0.1% of players. Your average RTS player does not want to have to wear a wrist brace and practice recording macros to be able to max out APM.

Competitive niggers are the plague of gaming and will demand for all the fun removed from the game for "balance" that will never be truly achieved. People use to mock MLG pros back in the day and now people take them seriously.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

In other words, like I said, Blizzard dropped the ball and it wasn't that good of a game or very well received. Yes.

It was well-received with Wings of Liberty, because at least that was just you being a generic good guy, and Heart of the Swarm has some fans, but they really dropped the ball in Legacy of the Void, especially when they killed Zeratul and made the Khala evil, thereby killing the most important Protoss character AND the core of Protoss culture as a whole, which just made the Protoss into progressive humans without mouths. Gone is the mystique of this alien race that communed with each other through the Khala. They're all just mouthless humans now, not at all different from the people you played as in Wings of Liberty.

Imagine if in the next Warhammer 40K video game, the Emperor of Mankind dies, but the Imperium finds another Warp power source that replaces him easily, and that leads to them becoming progressives in the same vein as modern progressive leftists, all clamoring for unity and kindness and getting along, while casting away their gothic Medieval culture, traditions, and religion. That's what Legacy of the Void did. The Protoss went from bloodthirsty Templars of the Khala who'd glass a planet if they spotted a single Zergling on it, to space hippies who want to be in harmony with the rocks, trees, and birds, it's pathetic.

Warcraft 3 was the "sequel a la SC2".

Not really. WC3's story and gameplay made it great; it was basically the offspring of Brood War and Diablo 2, the most popular Blizzard games before it. It's not their fault that game became the base for DOTA, especially since DOTA was just some dude's custom map, not at all something made by Blizzard.

And SC2 apparently killed the Starcraft franchise all on it's own.

It was more of a slow death. The first two entries in SC2 were somewhat warmly-received even as the multiplayer was getting complaints up the ass. But the story was all building up to a grand finale, and LOTV didn't deliver. So people lost interest in SC as a franchise. At most the Nova expansion got some interest, but not as much as there was when WOL came out.

Starcraft 2 was like the perfect storm for killing a franchise. You had the cancellation of Starcraft: Ghost and the franchise floundering for years. Then you had complete abandonment of Starcraft: Brood War in the competitive scene because it was taking too much attention away from SC2. And the comparison between games always negatively reflected on SC2. So Blizzard decided to basically attack its most hardcore section of its SC fanbase, the ones who made SC2 even possible, essentially punishing them for loyalty.

So basically, they told the most loyal part of the Starcraft fanbase to get fucked in the ass with a rusty chainsaw. Which predictably caused said fans to walk away.

And then on top of that the single player campaign had one of the worst written stories that defied even the lowest expectations from fans. It was like Blizzard had forgotten how to tell a story and just borrowed the most standard sci-fi and fantasy tropes from other stories and put Starcraft characters into them.

There's just something about a lot of sequels to franchises that feel rather generic. As if they were all borrowing from the same barrel of sci-fi tropes. Halo Spartan Ops. SC2. Mass Effect Andromeda. It's like they were all watching the SyFy channel nonstop and just borrowed story ideas from there.

And the campaigns were thematically different from SC and BW in that you no longer play as a nameless faction leader that is in control over an army or unit. You are written out of the story and are now just some observer and the characters talk to each other but never to the player. So you feel detached as well. In SC and BW the briefings are literally aimed at the player directly to immerse you in the story.

They basically made YOU into Raynor/Kerrigan/Artanis. Which killed the immersion aspect especially since those characters may or may not have similar opinions and attitudes as the player. The player is no longer a part of the cast, but rather, just someone who steers a single character within the cast into pre-programmed results.

And the story itself was awful. Ancient aliens. Reapers from Mass Effect. Romance stories. Redeeming Kerrigan.

Those plot points could've worked if they had competent writers. They didn't. Especially near the end.

Redeeming Kerrigan would've worked better if it was like how Luke redeemed Vader; imagine if Raynor had to fight the bitch and try to remind her that there's still good inside of her, and she keeps trying to deny it. If it was handled with taste instead of ''PRESS X TO TURN KERRIGAN GOOD AGAIN'', it might've accomplished something. Hell, if they wanted to turn her into a savior, instead of copying Marvel's Phoenix/Jean Grey, they could've had her use her psychic strength to purge the Khala of Amon's evil, thereby freeing the Protoss race from Amon in a single blow and making her the savior of the galaxy. No more Amon using the Golden Fleet to glass planets left and right, he's gone from the physical world, all because of Kerrigan.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

What killed the Warcraft franchise, and nearly RTSes as a whole, was Warcraft 3, and the DOTA mod.

I am gonna disagree again...because what killed RTSes..was RTSes never being able to find a balance between "Click per minute micromanagement complexity" and "Throwing units at the wall without much thought."

I've played quite a few Older RTSes over the past year because a friend likes to play them and invited me along cause they saw I owned them on Steam and holy shit Old RTS games are fucking boring trash.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

Imagine if in the next Warhammer 40K video game, the Emperor of Mankind dies, but the Imperium finds another Warp power source that replaces him easily, and that leads to them becoming progressives in the same vein as modern progressive leftists, all clamoring for unity and kindness and getting along, while casting away their gothic Medieval culture, traditions, and religion.

Shut your mouth. From your mouth to Games Workshop's ears. I could believe that happens in few years.

Not really. WC3's story and gameplay made it great; it was basically the offspring of Brood War and Diablo 2, the most popular Blizzard games before it. It's not their fault that game became the base for DOTA, especially since DOTA was just some dude's custom map, not at all something made by Blizzard.

Yeah, I'm not arguing with any of that, but it's still a sequel in the same way SC2 was a sequel. Hell, it was the third game in the series, that's usually as far as most games make it. And most of them seem to peak at 3 even if they keep going (as we discussed a few pages back).

Plus, well, you see what happened to Star Craft.

So, even if it had made it to a 4th game, which there isn't any guarantee of under the best of circumstances, are you sure you really would have wanted it to?

 

[Chuck McGill]

Wings of Liberty pretty decent. There was a noticeable dip in quality from Brood War's writing. It's hard not to notice when you have lines in Brood War like:

It may not be tomorrow, darlin', it may not even happen with an army at my back. But rest assured; I'm the man who's gonna kill you one day. I'll be seeing yah!

Then in WoL:

Time to kick this revolution into overdrive!

And a lot of the missions were blatantly showcasing whichever unit was going to be introduced for that mission. You need to hold a position, so we're going to give you siege tanks. To add insult to injury a lot of the tutorials were for units that didn't even make it into multi-player, like the Diamondback or Vulture. Granted, the original Starcraft did this as well, but that was a little more forgivable since it was the first entry in the series, and you usually got a few missions towards the back-end that weren't just blatantly tutorial missions for the unit of the week. And they had the decency to release Brood War, which just ditched the unit of the week concept entirely and had some really creative levels.

But I overall liked Wings of Liberty, even if it was a step down from the original. I think the main problem is that they blew the Kerrigan redemption arc wad way way too early. That should have come in either at the end of Act 2 where she teams up with the Protoss and Terrans to take down Amon, or come towards the end of Act 3 ad a reward for all their hard work. I get the feeling they really wanted to cap off WoL with redeeming Kerrigan, but then they realized "oh fuck, now we have to do the Zerg campaign". Kerrigan's arc in Heart of the Swarm was just convoluted and confused, and they really had a hard time deciding whether or not Kerrigan was the Queen Bitch of the Universe or if she was an uwu innocent girl being brainwashed into being evil by the Swarm. I suspect the devs lost the balls to do a campaign where youbplay as the straight villians, but they needed a Zerg campaign so this is what we got. I was just done with the series by the end of HoTS, I figured I could probably predict all the major story beats from there, and nothing I've read of LoTV had really convinced me otherwise.

And my God, their insistence on melodrama and "destiny" just made SC2 way worse than the original. One thing I liked about SC1 is with the possible exception of Kerrigan and maybe Zeratul, it felt like the story could have proceeded forth if you'd lost any of the major characters. Now everyone is "teh chosen one" and the story's just so overdramatic. It's kind of ironic that in the first game, the units and artstyle were somewhat 'realistic' while the story wasn't taken all that seriously. Come the sequel, the artstyle looks like WoW in space and all the Terran units are retarded transformers that make no sense(fucking Vikings), but the story is this hammy overacted melodrama.

And yeah. Competitive players are the niggers of gaming. It's such a shame because a lot of the lore and story of SC1 is really interesting, but every 'fan' of that series is basically just a fan of MLG shit. It's such a fucking drag. Total Compfag Death.

 

[The Ugly One]

Imagine if in the next Warhammer 40K video game, the Emperor of Mankind dies, but the Imperium finds another Warp power source that replaces him easily, and that leads to them becoming progressives in the same vein as modern progressive leftists, all clamoring for unity and kindness and getting along, while casting away their gothic Medieval culture, traditions, and religion.

But enough about the plot of the upcoming Amazon Prime show.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

But enough about the plot of the upcoming Amazon Prime show.

They did it to LOTR, of course they'll do it to 40K.

Shut your mouth. From your mouth to Games Workshop's ears. I could believe that happens in few years.

Oh, it's happening, all right. Eventually they'll have to do it because the right-wing 40K fans piss them off so much, and no matter what the left-leaning writers do, the fans see the Imperium as justified in its actions due to the circumstances it's stuck in. So if they can't demonize the Imperium, they'll ''redeem'' it to make it more palatable to Leftist tastes. It's obviously the next logical step from a Leftist perspective.

Yeah, I'm not arguing with any of that, but it's still a sequel in the same way SC2 was a sequel. Hell, it was the third game in the series, that's usually as far as most games make it. And most of them seem to peak at 3 even if they keep going (as we discussed a few pages back).

It was more like Brood War, except 3D and with Diablo elements. Which again, was them marrying their best games together.

Plus, well, you see what happened to Star Craft.

So, even if it had made it to a 4th game, which there isn't any guarantee of under the best of circumstances, are you sure you really would have wanted it to?

It would've been better than just endless capeshit plots for WoW.

@Chuck McGill SC2 is what happens when you have all the resources in the world, but you lose your vision and sell out to make generic crap. They became too successful for their own good, and they got lazy, especially in the storytelling department, a flaw they share with western RPG writers who used to turn in great stories like KOTOR, Mass Effect 2, and New Vegas, but declined down the line and released mediocre slop like Outer Worlds and Mass Effect Andromeda.

 

[Fag Albert]

Now, Everquest - Everquest I have trauma bonding over. But WoW was only ever a game.

everquest gave me an unhealthy fear of obese iranians