I thought some of the lore tomes you find in the dungeon in D1 do a pretty good job. The intro to the halls of the blind in particular I still think is great. It’s a shame they dropped that entirely in D2 except for the introduction to the countess quest.
1 Like
That depends on the game and if it’s set up for true competitive play or not, and generally the mode your playing in.
I remember the Countess Quest. That one was fun.
Obviously if the game is meant to be chillax… it should be chillax.
Chillax, huh? Haven’t heard that in a long time!
Saw it somewhere. Couldn’t tell you where though if I had a gun at my head.
2 Likes
WOL has a lotta charm with how it handles characters, they’re all memorable and fun, the levels were less linear since you had choices and alternate paths you could take sometimes, and I love how picking upgrades feels vs the other campaigns. Every decision feels important, and you can’t just go back and forth and swap upgrades when you want, and it’s the most difficult campaign on brutal. Story wasn’t perfect but way better than the other campaigns (didnt play nova tho). LOTV is ok, and HOTS is absolutely awful. It’s the most brain-dead campaign difficulty wise and it feels like the devs didn’t put enough thought into how the upgrades would ruin the intended difficulty, the only time it gets hard is when you need to go vipers or broodlords to pick-off tanks, otherwise you just spam units and a-move until you win, no real strategy. It’s more linear, very VERY short campaign with no real replay value since you can just try near everything in a single playthrough.
The attempts to create legit “boss fights” were uh…an interesting experiment i guess but they are antithetical to how an RTS handles campaigns and plays usually. This is starcraft not league of legends or dota 2 where you’re messing around with hero units all day, and even warcraft 3 handled hero units better in its campaign. The story is so bad you can’t get into what’s happening and i think it fails in capturing the “ESSENCE” (hehe xd) of a zerg campaign compared to starcraft 1 or even brood war. Story wise it was just hollow, the entire thing is about killing mengsk and they barely even mention the hybrid thing, and kerrigan as a character is really no less a mass murderer than she was in the brood war, only this time she’s a jim raynor fangirl too. All the romantic moments felt so undeserved, it was never really developed and the game just expects you to buy into it like it’s a cheesy soap opera.
I am very biased as you will see and I honestly love all of the Campaigns:
1 - Heart of the Swarm
As a Zerg player I love this campaign. Kerrigan is my favorite character and I think her story is the most interesting.
I really enjoy all of the unique Zerg characters that they added. My only real negative was I wish there was more missions without Kerrigan on the field, to make it more difficult.
Favorite Mission - Infested
Least Favorite - Supreme
2 - Legacy of the Void
I thought the story was awesome from beginning to end. Really dug the idea of the End War and my biggest complaint was how short the Campaign was.
Favorite Mission - Templar’s Charge
Least Favorite - The Essence of Eternity
3 - Wings of Liberty
I am not very good with Terran and I found their storyline more of a slog to get through. Was not a fan of branched storylines. I still love it for being a return to the Starcraft Universe and Raynor is a fun character.
Favorite Mission - Shatter the Sky
Least Favorite - The Moebius Factor
2 Likes
If I liked playing Terran WoL would be hands down the best campaign, great variety of missions, large roster to pick from, lots of upgrades and perks for your units, lots of map variety, the hyperion looks nice.
Buuut I have a huge protoss bias so LotV comes out in front just cause I like playing Toss. Plus the power bar and unit variety is great fun, being able to switch out units and powers as you like as you progress is great.
As an aside HotS is the most tooting garbage campaign, just replayed it and I straight up hate it now lmao, it’s so disappointing you can’t do poop, no nydus, no drop pods (other than that poopy ultimate), everything’s about your one, dumb, overpowered hero unit who can solo the whole map… Traash.
(Edited and reposted cause sweers r bad and hurt feefees so blizz removed 0/10 worst forums)
I haven’t played Covert Ops yet, but I’ve finished all the other campaings a few times over (on my EU account). I’d rank them this way:
- WoL
Hands down the best for me. Way back when I started playing SC 1, I was a huge Protoss fanboy and disliked Terran gameplay. But SC 2 redeemed the Terran campaign in my eyes. Despite the whole of SC 2 drifting towards being rather cheesy and cartoonish, WoL felt the closest to SC 1. Also, it was the most challenging in terms of difficulty, the most diverse in terms of mission types and arguably had the best supporting characters. Plus, I enjoy the concept of permanent research/upgrades as opposed to the opportunity to customize your army ahead of every mission. And finally, I think (despite the story being generally average) WoL had the best story. This may sound weird, considering it was the least linear campaign, which in turn could lead to terribly incoherent storytelling. However, after my first 2-3 re-runs I took my time and created a pretty thorough head-canon of how the mission order should be. Ever since I’ve been replaying WoL in this order and the story is actually surprisingly coherent (I’m too lazy to write the order down right now, but I’ll probably do it tomorrow in a separate post). All things considered, whenever I feel like playing campaign SC 2, somehow I always go back to WoL. So it ranks #1 for me.
- LotV
As I said, I was a huge Protoss fanboy back in the early 2000s. But LotV just felt kinda… bland and repetitive. Too many turtle missions, too many 1-dimensional characters, my boi Zeratul dying early on (although his character was massacred in SC 2 in general, so it may have been for the best). As a whole, both HotS and LotV had an awful story, but LotV at least had a few redeeming moments. The gameplay (aside from the aforementioned turtle missions) was actually OK, SOA had some fun abilities (even though I don’t like the infinite customisation options) and it was at times quite challenging (cough Essence of Eternity cough), although not as much as WoL.
- HotS
An abomination. Don’t even wanna talk about it.
It’s
-
NCO
-
Competition between WoL and LotV
LotV is more consistent, but WoL has higher highs and lower lows. In the end WoL wins because of Terran bias and because Epilogue is a thing. So WoL. -
LotV
-
HotS it’s weak, it’s not challenging and the story has next to no high moment.
1 Like
Hey, what happens to your playthrough? I thought you were going to replay the campaign and tell us about your experience.
I am playing Age of Empires 2 DE if anything. I am on a Blizzard break. I think right now I’d need a mission pack to return to properly playing.
4 Likes
Yeah, I got StarCraft-ed out, mostly.
I’ve been playing a lot of Killer Instinct, DOOM (2016), and Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
I’m also toying around with DOOM’s SnapMap and making a level.
1 Like
I like Wings of Liberty the best for a number of reasons.
But one of underrated reasons for me is as someone who likes playing protoss the best, I thought 4 protoss missions in WoL were actually some of the better protoss missions of the entire SC2 saga, gameplay wise.
Also Whispers of Doom and Piercing the Shroud are my two favorite micro maps of the saga. Whispers of Doom I feel does so well at creating a dark ominous atmosphere. Piercing the Shroud is probably my favorite micro map, game play wise.
Wings of Liberty between Piercing of the Shroud, and A Sinister Turn gives the hybrids an aura about them. Hybrids kills are a dime a dozen by the time LotV rolls around.
I also like how you can vary your mission orders the most in WoL, which adds some variety the feel of the story, and adds a bit more replay value in my opinion.
For me, the best is Wings of Liberty. A part of its magic comes from the fact that it was the first one. But I also loved the music, the story seemed quite easy to understand to me and I could identify myself with the characters.
The worst for me is Legacy of the Void - I didn’t enjoy the story, I don’t really like the way the characters “speak” (the sound effect). And as far as missions are concerned - it seemed to me like if in almost all the missions my goal was to destroy 3 or more power sources in order to either shut something down or activate something that was blocked by the power.
I also enjoyed more the options and overall system of buildings and structures customization in both WoL and HotS than in LotV.
1 Like
Even with Epilogue being considered part of LotV and not a separate thing, I can’t put it below HotS.
Outside of the trailer music HotS is completely forgettable. Soundtrack from LotV is on my Spotify.
Evo missions are good for a bit of lore, but other than that… low efort filler.
In terms of customization LotV wins in flexibility and pretty much is the best in that regard imho if we don’t talk about NCO.
2 Likes
as protoss this is offensive
2 Likes
WoL
NCO-LotV
HotS
I really wish they could make a mission pack with the whole Kerrigan/Mengsk/Amon plot a bad dream Zeratul had while sleeping in his Void Bed at Shakuras.
I’m actually stunned that so many people seem to be putting WoL as the best. The Tosh and Hanson arcs that go nowhere? Matt’s rebellion arc having no continuation? 5 freaking Artifact missions that rinse and repeat the same basic “grab fragment from enemy and leave” plotline? A majority of that campaign was nothing but pointless filler.
2 Likes