BECAUSE HE FREAKING LIVES THERE AND THEYRE GOING TO SUBJUGATE EVERYBODY.
If your assumptions lead to the story not making sense, you need to make better assumptions, not yell at the story for being wrong.
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“Subjugate” and yet UED combat was against the Dominion (which Raynor already hated) and the Zerg (dont hurt the poor brood lords!!!111). Face it raynor has no excuse for overthrowing the only real moment of security humanity ever had. Besides a news report at the end we don’t even get a glimpse of how UED forces treat civilians in normal life so anything you assume is just that - assumption. Going off the game alone the UED can hardly even be classified as authoritarian, never mind fascist.
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You mean besides the fact that, again, theyre fascists who want to enslave the populace. Like, this isn’t hard. THEYRE BAD GUYS. Of course Raynor is fighting them. “Theyre siding with the evil they know over the evil they don’t.”
The terrans in the koprulu sector are literally the result of a massive genetic purification program against people the UPL (the UED before they rebranded) didn’t like. The Koprulu terrans know this. Earth = Bad.
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None of that is mentioned in-game or even suggested or implied by UED briefings or personal conversations between UED figures in command. If genetic purification was really on the table the UED victory report would have mentioned it as a propaganda highlight. I guess this can be counted as a failure of the writing as well because nothing the UED does in-game comes off as sinister or ill intentioned.
Of course not. Theyre military, not civilian government. Their job is to conquer the sector. The politicians will move in afterwards to manage the sector. And the propaganda piece is about their success over the zerg. Theyre not going to conveniently go “bwa ha ha, now we can kill all the undesirables!” You need to actually use your brain to understand theyre bad.
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Well technically, neither Kerrigan nor Raynor should know about the UED being xenophobic since Earth was not aware of the existence of Alien forces prior to Chau Sara and therefore could not be xenophobic against something they didn’t knew existed 
That requires an overly literal reading of “xenophobic” to mean “afraid of species that evolved on planets other than earth.” rather than “afraid of anything different.”
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Anyone else think this is one of Tricky’s alt accounts? 
God forbid our war stories have “grim-dark” elements like death, pain & suffering. How ridiculous. War doesn’t have any of that crap!
I didn’t want SC2 to be dark because it needed to be just like StarCraft 1 (I mean, some consistency between games would have helped, but still). I wanted it to be darker because war stories are dark.
It’s funny you say that because I was just about to release my peer-reviewed statistical modeling analysis of collected SC2 reviews that compares it to other games and displays the results on highly-detailed scatter graphs… Because I have nothing better to do.
That phenomenon is not what I’m talking about. I’m not saying there weren’t people that didn’t like it, just that there were no actual critical reviews praising the story, at least from what I had read.
I think the saying is “the plural of anecdotes isn’t data”.
Yes…I’m posting anecdotes on a forum. No crap. Thanks for the observation.
However, I’ve read a lot of reviews and all the reviews I read would generally fall into only 3 categories:
- Those praising the gameplay, cinematics, art, editor, yet say almost nothing about the story.
- Same as above but that talk about the story for 3 to 5 sentences and say it’s good, but have had zero level of critical thought put into it. It was just passable enough for video games and gave you a reason to go from x to y. Completely mindless as far as reviews go. The equivalent of “hurr durr, i enjoyed killing things in the game therefore the story is good”.
- Those that attempted to analyze the story more in-depth almost never had anything good to say about it.
I challenge you to go out and find a professional review that has actual good things to say about the Kerrigan, Amon and Mengsk shlock where the reviewer actually devotes more than 2 paragraphs to it and has played the previous games. I never found any.
That seems like an awful lot of effort to go through to crap on a video game. It also doesn’t match his “this had so much potential” style.
That’s not particularly accurate. Star Wars isn’t especially dark, just as an example. Sure it gets darker in some places, but overall its a fairly optimistic story, even though the main protagonist has a bigger body count by the end of the first movie than some countries can pull off. War stories are fertile grounds for darker narratives, but that isn’t all they can be.
Given the quarantine, I highly doubt you do have anything better to do. Having said that, I don’t necessarily expect you to go around and gather all the data, just find somebody else who has done it.
Both are used.
Ultimately, its a video game. The reason you find those categories are because A: its harder to spend time talking about how something works than how something doesn’t work, and B: the story isn’t really the point, so of course they aren’t going to spend much time talking about it compared to the gameplay unless they were legitimately distracted by it in some way, or otherwise put off.
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Do we know what James Phinney’s actual role in the lore was? I mean in detail, what parts he actually worked on and developed over Metzen? In the manual, he’s credited for Story and Script after Metzen.
It’s actually quite common, and in my opinion, oft overblown.
- Anything by Blizzard Entertainment
- Mass Effect
- Mortal Kombat
These are all franchises, just off the top of my head, who’s story is constantly mocked by it’s own fan base.
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Of late, Borderlands as well. Basically anything where the story is more than a complete afterthought gets it these days.
Honestly, a lot of it seems like clickbait to me. I saw one article recently that tried to convince everybody having fun with the new Animal Crossing that they were having badwrongfun if they were enjoying it.
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*laughs in youngling
I think most of the manual was his. Don’t know where I heard that from.
Mass Effect has amazing reviews and is critically acclaimed. Plus, the story is the point of the game unlike with SC2. The people that hated the ending the most did so because they loved the rest of the franchise so much. Kind of a game of thrones situation there, but not really because the extended cut fixed most of the problems with the ending. Other than that, virtually everyone agrees that it’s solid. I see no evidence of the same level of mockery that SC2 has.
*laughs in the literal charred bodies of Owen and Beru being shown on screen and just glossed over.
Dark things happen sometimes. But that doesn’t make Star Wars particularly dark.
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The UED are explicitly supposed to be next level terrible. I know there is some narrative disconnect there because Dugaulle and Stukov are outwardly pretty agreeable people and the UED doesn’t do anything exceptionally evil in its campaign, but the background lore makes it pretty clear they are the absolute worst, which is why Fenix And Raynor feel like they have to work with Mengsk and Kerrigan.
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This a double post but I just gotta say. “Video game story.” Is just a massive cop out. Games like the last of us, Witcher, Fallen Order (and I gotta plug this because it’s just so damn good.) FFVIIR are all lauded for their storytelling. The medium shouldn’t be a cover for bad writing, it’s not the mediums fault.
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Well, in some cases it is. The PC definitionally needs to be central to the story at all times, and you obviously cant jump around genres without screwing the actual game, so you frequently end up with games like Skyrim or Borderlands, where everybody besides the player is useless, or like StarCraft where the need to give the player something to actually do supersedes the concerns of what would make a better story.
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Just finished Wild Hunt in Witcher 3. Can’t wait to tackle the expansions. I literally want to go and talk to every random villager in each of their huts.
That excuse just starts to sound so hollow when you play custom campaigns that literally don’t suffer from this at all because the author planned the story with a shred of foresight.
I have literally never played a custom campaign that could not have been improved dramatically by removing the need for the character’s decisions to result in more missions.
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That’s one of the greatest things about that game. The sidequests and Witcher contracts are all so lovingly crafted and really immerse you in the game world.
A perfect example of my above point, CDPR didn’t throw up their arms and go “RPG side quests always suck.”. They found a way to make side quests awesome.
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