Keep in mind, Starcraft was written and released long before e-sports existed.
As I recall, the game is generally credited as the first e-sports title in South Korea.
Oh, back in the Golden Age.
Funnily enough, I actually do consider the late '90’s to the early 2000’s to be the Golden Age of gaming.
Same. I think e-sports was another big nail in the coffin for casual gaming.
I think it’s more than just e-sports, but yes, that e-sports are a part of the problem.
Basically for me, I find that back in the later '90’s and early 2000’s, games were really innovating in ways they’ve never done before. Gameplay was fantastic, storytelling was reaching new heights, multiplayer and internet gaming was taking off in fantastic ways, and products had strong communities and life cycles.
Basically you bought your game, and maybe an expansion set a year later, and you had a fantastic experience. Services like Battle net also ran pay-to-play services into the ground.
Then things started to change. MMO’s brought about a resurgence of pay-to-play, and Xbox LIVE took that subscription concept and brought it back into standard multiplayer gaming. We started to see “map packs” and add-on content, now called “DLC,” that was at premium costs when before it was free.
The costs of games began to rise, but the content included in the games began to drop.
Things just declined further from there, in my opinion.
I personally find modern gaming is not for me, I’m not the target customer base since I prefer the old ways. I mostly play older games and remasters these days, with the Mortal Kombat franchise being the exception.
One of the other reasons is the fall of digital copies and the rise of online downloads. Developers became less and less careful. The fact that the market has been split between platforms is also bad and now even PC turned into a launcher turf war.
Can you elaborate more on what you mean here, as I think I’m misunderstanding and want to clarify.
I think developers generally pushed to create a more refined and full experience back when you had to get it on CD. Now they’re just say duck it, we’ll release a day one patch if the peasants rumble.
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I do enjoy esports in Starcraft and MOBAs but that’s because I can play them with a modicum of competence.
Shooters, as I’ve stated before, I’m garbage at. Doesn’t really matter when you are messing around in halos forge with your buddies or beating up on bots in the original SW Battlefront. But when the only way to play is be forced into an online match with real people and going like 1-15 every. Single. Game. It gets old real fast. Don’t know if it’s really esports fault or just the “always online” nature of society these days.
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It’s not even just society. You see how popular single player or mostly single player titles get yet most big companies try to push for the online market because it has a better yield when it comes to money.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is very popular, the Online part is significantly less played than the single player part, yet the developers only put effort into RDO because they think they can score another GTA Online hit.
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Interestingly, the first Day 1 patch I ever encountered was for Stacraft back in 1998.
Speaking of Halo, is anyone picking up Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC?
For clarification, when I say “dialog calling out Kerrigan”, I’m not saying get in her face and make her mad. I’m talking about something like this:
Fenix
Now that the Psi Disrupter has been destroyed and Kerrigan has regained control of her minions, I fear that she will forget our pact and turn on us.
Jim Raynor
I know what you mean, Fenix. I’d love to believe that she’s on the level, but there’s a part of me that just knows better. However, I do believe that she’s serious about taking out the UED. The only real question left is what happens to us when she wins.
Arcturus Mengsk
If you ask me, she’s completely untrustworthy. But, so long as she’ll help me retake Korhal, I’ll work with her.
Would that have been so freaking hard? Nothing like this ever happens in HotS. It’s just weird.
Tbf, HotS had Kerrigan as the central protagonist, the design of the campaign was too restricting to show other characters outside of their interaction with Kerrigan.
The best occasion I could see was during With Friends like These, possibly, and I don’t think Matt would be quite available to discuss Kerrigan while he’s busy piloting the Hyperion in an asteroid field against Mira…
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This was in a campaign where Kerrigan was the protagonist too. But now it’s 2019. We have the technology. If they wanted to show dialog where Kerrigan isn’t present, they could have.
Or even during Legacy of the Void. Artanis could have at least said something when he turned the monitor off after talking to Kerrigan. Nothing like what I quoted ever happens despite the writers having the opportunity. Instead, Kerrigan gets the anti-hero treatment when she’s really a villain.
Not much of the anti part either. Lamenting on how much of a naughty girl you are for all the bloodshed you did ain’t exactly anti-hero stuff neither.
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So you literally just want people whining about how Kerrigan still exists? And you want to pretend that this would somehow be better writing?
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I want it to be consistent and realistic instead of people being casual about mass murder.
It already is consistent then. Nobody ever goes “Man, I hate having to work with these mass murdering protoss who killed my home planet.”
For that matter, nobody in BW is that morally upset about working with Kerrigan either. Their concerns are all about her sudden yet inevitable betrayal, not matters of principle. The closest we get is Fenix musing about how whimsical fortune has been of late, and Raynor outright laughs at that.
(on that note, Fenix calling Kerrigan his “greatest enemy” seems somewhat out of place, given that they’ve literally never met before BW and have not, to my knowledge, actually ever fought each other.)
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Nobody works with protoss though until after Tassadar and Raynor established a relationship with each other trying to both survive against the zerg on Char. Tassadar probably rescued him. And none of that was shown.
The dialog in SC1 is actually minimal. Nobody else on the Raiders is given dialog, unlike the bloated corpse that is SC2 that has characters that should have actually said something.
That’s pretty disingenuous; they’re clearly stating that she’s of foul character. Plus at that point she hasn’t really wiped out planets like HotS Kerrigan.
Zeratul upon seeing her:
“You are the enemy of all who live Kerrigan. What makes you think we would have anything to do with you?”