The individual missions are great, it's just the big picture they suck at.

Just like in Wow. Individual quests are fine, but they don't tie together well.

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A dead leader's often better than a live one, a dead leader's idealized, he can't do something stupid and make people hate him.

To be fair, we haven't seen the whole big picture yet. Hopefully we'll see more of it with HotS.

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I've seen enough.

I still don't believe that Arcturus Mengsk would have been so easily cowed by what were obviously fabricated audio files.

And does anyone remember when characters were interesting and detailed, rather than the action-hero cut-outs they are in SCII?

I enjoyed the entire story until the end honestly....

And the game itself is extremely fun ranked or not especially in comparison to the current age of games.

They do use the Marauder model for the Blizzard Dota Muradin unit base.

To me it looks like a Hunter from Halo because of the shield arms.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Fojar Leviathon you're seriously the worst mod.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sarahmoo Go back to being the worst mod in the universe.

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Originally Posted by Anansi Scrolls of Lore Rule #61: Leviathon is the worst Mod.

No I mean the campaign itself is too unstructured.

You can do the mission paths in any order you like... so you can fight Thors and other units before you should logically see them, and you'll have Tosh or lose Doc Hanson causing bits and pieces to feel weird as you play through.

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A dead leader's often better than a live one, a dead leader's idealized, he can't do something stupid and make people hate him.

Maybe. I mean, I suppose it could theoretically be that since they serve as virtual living, sentient assistants trusted to function in a military capacity, Adjutants might be loaded down with failsafes to prevent them from being used to manufacture false data, and thus their records might be certified as incontrovertible.

Just a theory. Unfortunately, that whole plot's payoff kind of gets sidelined in WoL right when it starts to get interesting and to present consequences to the events leading up to it. Playing through the invasion of Char, one would never know any of the civil unrest weakening the Dominion from within even happened at all.

A drawback to such a free-and-loose campaign structure is that in an attempt to simplify the execution, entire central plots are caused to only marginally influence each other, when they do at all, because otherwise every mission would need to have several grossly different versions in-game to represent what was changed by doing certain missions before doing others.

The Thors in particular are weird. The Dominion probably shouldn't even have them at all, since they were Swann's own invention based on the Odin rather than a standard weapon in the Terran arsenal.

I imagine when HoTS comes out we'll have plenty of stuff to theorycraft for the next 10 years about.

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Official Prince Kael'thas Sunstrider Harem member #42

You may call me G.P.A, Great Programmer Alice

Uh... what? They weren't fabricated.

And if you mean Arcturus could have claimed they were fabricated... how? You're criticizing something for a total assumption on your part.

No, but I remember when the characters weren't pretentious jackasses who spent all their time talking and preaching to people.

Seriously, nobody in the game is an action-hero cut out. Maybe Tychus, I guess. But I like Tychus, he's fun. In fact, I think him and Warfield were the only characters in the game who felt like real people to me. Though his story arch made noooo sense at all.

But uh, regardless. I took more issue with ALL THE TALKING and philosophizing and staring at their navels pondering the universe, and the doomsday prophecy. Seriously, if the story had a problem it was almost TOO MUCH detail, not a lack of it. They tried to do way too much with too little time. And so there wasn't time to properly develop the Mengsk plotline, or anything to do with Mengsk really, no time for properly introducing Kerrigan or what she wanted. No time for a lot of things.

Though I truthfully didn't find anybody all that well developed or interesting.

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My father was killed by a coward's poison and the wrath of Hellscream...! WHAT CHANCE HAVE YOU!!?

Yes, I know that they were not fabricated, but if we have the technology to synthesize or manipulate audio files even today, it makes no sense to me that one incriminating recording should spell Mengsk's downfall.

Steinman's research notes actually made me like him alot more as a character, I think it was clever, what they did with making him seem like this goober in between missions, and then all these complicated deep meaningful notes on the Zerg and Protoss tanks.

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A dead leader's often better than a live one, a dead leader's idealized, he can't do something stupid and make people hate him.

One, this is not real life, it's science fiction and thus follows it's own rules of technology. They don't use the same technologies and most of the technologies they do utilize were reverse engineered from the spacecraft they landed on generations ago. The only things that use synthesized voices are the Adjutants, which have an obvious robotic quality, meaning even that is not perfect enough to fool people. If they had on the fly voice alteration software, you would think we would see it used all the time in espionage or propaganda, for instance Mengsk would be using it all the time to discredit dissenters like Michael Liberty or James Raynor. The reason we don't see that is because they likely don't have that type of technology, or Blizzard does not want to utilize it as a plot point, which is more likely.

Two, it didn't cause his downfall. It caused a bunch of citizens that already disliked him to stand-up and fight his power, rioting in cities. Do you really think the game is going to show us all the people that SUPPORT Mengsk in the citizenry? Fact is he still sits in power, so that means he still has power even if a lot of people are pissed at him. His downfall will likely come when Kerrigan gets her revenge in HOTS.

Also, I liked StarCraft 2. The story was disjointed, yes, but I still felt satisfied at the end. I am excited for HOTS because I want to see it continue and, this time around, possibly get a bit more linear in narrative.

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Am I the only one LIVID over that leaked bit from HoTS awhile back, where Mengsk used the ghost implants Kerrigan had a mission dedicated to neutralizing, to incapacitate her?

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A dead leader's often better than a live one, a dead leader's idealized, he can't do something stupid and make people hate him.

We have no idea if that will even be the real ending, even more so now that it leaked. Blizzard has a lot of time to alter it by this point.

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Well it depends how far along in development it was. And if they're going to change an ending because it leaked then... how strongly do they feel about their ending if it NEEDS to be a surprise? Sheesh.

Granted, I thought it looked pretty stupid, but what do I know.

As far as I know we DON'T have that type of technology today. (At least not at any sort of convincing level.) And I'm sure that if that type of technology DOES exist they have ways of verifying it's authenticity.

And there has been NO mention in the game of artificial voice creation or whatever, so I don't see how you can see that as a flaw.

I thought it was pretty clever the way they did that, I just wish they'd followed up on it a little more than they did, like ARM said. It obviously didn't bring Mengsk down (he still rules the Dominion) but it made him lose his popular support from the people.

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My father was killed by a coward's poison and the wrath of Hellscream...! WHAT CHANCE HAVE YOU!!?

Alright, alright!

I'll back down on this issue.

Next up, the REAL zerg unit:

Looks like some sort of mobile artillery bug.

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A dead leader's often better than a live one, a dead leader's idealized, he can't do something stupid and make people hate him.

I want lurkers dammit not some bug that looks like it's from Starship Troopers!

I swear I saw art of a biotank by a fan somewhere some time ago, and this is identical. It was basically a zerg version of the Starship Troopers cockroach cannon.

Same here, I hope they add more than just one unti to each race, and Lurker is around, too .

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Metzen: They are one of the ancient races of Northrend that we haven't spoken of before... because we hadn't made them up before. (laughter)

~Main: Expansion theorycrafting, Expansions list, The Age of Nightmare, Empire of the Tides (coming soon)~
~Fan ficton: Anachronos Journey: The Timeless Heir~ ~Geography of continents series: Old Kalimdor (original), Pandaria~
~Locations as zones series: Azjol-Nerub, Barrow Deeps, Zul'Aman, Demon Hunter zone, Caverns of Time~

They wouldn't show off the Lurker as a 'new unit' for Heart of the Swarm... especially since these are probably campaign units. (I HOPE they're campaign units.)

I think both silhouettes look really stupid... bleh.

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My father was killed by a coward's poison and the wrath of Hellscream...! WHAT CHANCE HAVE YOU!!?

Am I the only person who thinks this kind of 'teaser' is the stupidest thing since sliced stupid?

Of note on the zerg anti-air-Starship-Troopers unit is that in an interview with Dustin Browder, he said he wasn't impressed with Corruptors, who didn't turn out the way they imagined they would, as it basically boils down to:

1) Did enemy build colossus?
2) Then I build corruptors!

So that unit may change, and this unit may be its replacement. Others have theorized it is some sort of evolved Hydralisk given a somewhat similar head structure or the Roach given a similar leg and body structure.

The terran unit is interesting. The top middle of the silhouette shows either some kind of laser guidance system or some sort of engineering or weapon laser. It seems like something to add to siege tanks for support either way.

Interesting, it will be cool to see what they look and act like.

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Keep in mind these aren't necessarily melee units.

And I doubt they'd replace the Corruptor with a ground unit. (I also find Dustin's reasons for disliking the corruptor kind of silly... )

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My father was killed by a coward's poison and the wrath of Hellscream...! WHAT CHANCE HAVE YOU!!?