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I think Starcraft 1 has probably aged the best of Blizzard's classic properties, and the remaster didn't gently caress things up like the Warcraft 3 remaster did. I say name the magistrate Matthew Horner. Continuity so obvious that only Blizzard would say no that's actually not it.
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Apr 22, 2021 01:10
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Mostly looks fine to me, only thing I'd suggest would be making all the portraits the same size - Horner's is smaller than everyone else's.
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Apr 22, 2021 18:22
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One part of this game that I think didn't age well is the Confederacy. Humans as space rednecks and hillbillies with machine guns sounds funny, but these days my eye starts reflexively twitching every time I see the Confederate flag - yeah, for those who haven't picked up on it, the Terran Confederacy in this game is themed after that Confederacy.
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Apr 23, 2021 14:22
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If Blizzard's leadership wasn't a bunch of right-wing hacks, you could have some fun with the idea that a society of political prisoners would create a new Confederacy, saying implicitly some very interesting things about why they were political prisoners and what the government that imprisoned them must be like. But this is Blizzard so the only thought that went into it was "This sounds cool to us!"
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Apr 26, 2021 18:11
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In theory, Firebats are meant to be a front line for Terran infantry blobs. They're tougher than Marines, shorter-ranged, and are very effective against most of the game's melee units - like zerglings. In practice, they're more expensive than Marines, IIRC they require more tech to build, and are simply not as useful. Starcraft doesn't have many stinkers in the lineup, but imo firebats are one of them.
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Apr 26, 2021 20:30
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Trivia: early in Starcraft's development the Marines were known as Marauders as a homage to Starship Troopers, which called the powered armor worn by heavy combat infantry as marauder suits. The earliest visions of Brood War also had a unit called the Marauder in similar homage, but it took until Starcraft 2 to finally add a powered armor infantry unit with the Marauder name.
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Apr 27, 2021 23:59
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JohnKilltrane posted:That being said, Mass Recall is a lot of fun, and it's recommended if you like the idea of playing along but don't like the idea of being limited to selecting 12 units at a time or dealing with the game's pathfinding (things they had to preserve in the Remastered because believe it or not they're integral to the balance of Brood War, but that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be everyone's cup of tea). I've started Mass Recall, and... is it weird that I honestly prefer the more straightforward campaign maps of SC1? I hate the feeling of being under a time limit, and almost every single campaign map throughout SC2 puts some kind of time pressure on you. It makes for more interesting missions in a vacuum, yes, but I'm one of those people who loves to turtle, tech, and build up a deathball in RTS games and then stomp all over the map.
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Apr 29, 2021 20:44
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Another tidbit about Marines: there are in fact women Marines in the fluff. You never see any of them, no, in true Blizzard fashion there's almost no women in Starcraft at all, but they are mentioned in the second game.
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Apr 30, 2021 14:58
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JohnKilltrane posted:Huh, that's actually kinda worse. See, in my head I'd just assumed that the Marines were all male because space fascism is inherently sexist. It's weird for them to say "No the Koprulu Terrans are totally cool with women Marines we just don't show any." That's less "Our setting is sexist" and more "We're sexist." blizzard.txt Seriously, that's Blizzard. They love stating "Oh women/gays/black people are totally common and accepted in the setting, our games just focus overwhelmingly on straight white men because reasons."
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Apr 30, 2021 16:04
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One thing about the Terran campaigns in both Starcraft games (not counting Brood War) that I like is that with both campaigns being about a small, rag-tag force steadily growing into something new, there's a good sense of progression and where you're getting your new units and forces from. So far in this campaign, we have Marines and Firebats, the basic Terran infantry, suggesting that these are the forces a backwater colony's militia has on hand. They're simple and require little resources to support, they don't need advanced manufacturing facilities to equip, just a barracks and, for the Firebats, some field research. We also have Raynor and his hover-bike, suggesting that these bikes are common enough to be seen in the hands of paramilitary law enforcement. And it's been sinking in to me in Mass Recall that while it's never explicit that you're recruiting new soldiers into your standing army and gaining access to more advanced weaponry, there's a very reasonable explanation for each new unit arriving if you think about what's happening in the story. It's a nice touch of storytelling by game design, something Blizzard used to be really good at.
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May 1, 2021 19:48
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The campaign never really puts you on the defensive enough to make you realize how powerful spider mines can be. Even in designated defense missions, they're not necessary - Terrans can more than adequately cover their defensive needs in the campaign with bunkers, missile turrets, and a unit we'll meet later. SC2 tries to make Vultures more appealing for the campaign by adding an upgrade to let you refill their mine magazine, but they remain a fiddly, micro-heavy unit that just isn't called for by the campaign. I don't mind how easy this mission is, personally. It's the third mission out of 30 (32 if you're using the 'secret' missions), and Blizzard's still easing the player into things. This mission explicitly teaches you about repairing, about static defenses, adds a new production facility, and the enemy bases on this map are fully equipped for the first time in the campaign.
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May 3, 2021 00:57
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FoolyCharged posted:Yeah, the disclaimer on difficulty can't be reiterated enough. Especially the harder settings were designed by people who had been playing lots and lots of starcraft II. It is stupidly harder than sc1. One interesting note about that is that I've found spider mines actually pretty useful! I forget whether the game does this in the base/remastered game, but in Mass Recall, Raynor has spider mines when he's on his vulture, and I've found them handy for helping deal with attack waves that come in before you can build a more conventional defense.
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May 3, 2021 14:24
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Another warning to anyone thinking about trying Mass Recall: turns out that on hard difficulty, Mass Recall bans certain units on some missions, just for that extra little bit of artificial difficulty.
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May 4, 2021 00:26
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I should note that one very positive thing about Mass Recall that's standing out to me is the art direction. The map makers for Mass Recall are superb, and really get a lot of mileage out of the far more powerful and varied map engine in Starcraft 2. The urban maps and installation maps are particular standouts, doubly so in Brood War. Starcraft 1, even Remastered, just isn't built for showing convincing city maps and indoor environments, but Starcraft 2's engine is far better at those.
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May 5, 2021 20:57
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One area where I sometimes use vultures in the campaign is as zergling/zealot hunters. Vultures have a decently long range and they're fast, so if I'm not going with a marine-focused deathball I usually sprinkle a few vultures in for zergling/zealot duty, or in groups to gank a certain protoss infantry unit we haven't encountered yet.
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May 12, 2021 19:53
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JohnKilltrane posted:Interesting, I might give that a spin. It's also good for baiting out lockdowns if you're going with a factory/starport heavy strategy on one of the maps filled with the units that do that, and they have the benefit that if you keep an SCV near your lines vultures are immune to getting worn down by chip damage because they can be repaired. I mean, just spamming marines is probably objectively the best decision in most campaign maps, but vultures can be useful if you want to do something different. On a fluff note, I checked and SC2 does suggest that vultures in the SC1 era do get used by legitimate military forces as scout and escort units. A SC2 character mentions that Raynor used to repeatedly clash with Confederate outriders but none could ever keep up with him.
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May 12, 2021 22:03
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JohnKilltrane posted:You also might have noticed that there’s been a palette swap. Starcraft continues Warcraft 2’s practice of using different colours to differentiate factions within a race. Now that we’ve officially cast in our lots with Mengsk and his crew, we’ve gone from the blue of the Colonial Militia to the red of the Sons of Korhal. It’s a neat detail. This is also how Starcraft identifies hero units! Raynor, in both vulture and marine forms, isn't actually just colored teal. His model is the same as any other unit of the type, he's just created as part of the teal faction (not used for any large-scale faction) and put under player control. In skirmish vs the AI, each color is also identified with a specific faction - the campaign usually but not always lines up with these. Terran skirmish colors pre-Brood War: Blue: Mar Sara Red: Elite Guard Teal: Kel-Morian Combine Purple: Antiga Orange: Delta Squadron Brown: Omega Squadron White: Alpha Squadron Yellow: Epsilon Squadron
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May 16, 2021 23:34
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Surely there's more than one named female character in the game. Surely.
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May 17, 2021 00:28
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Acerbatus posted:Excluding brood war, not outside of the non-blizzard dlc. 
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May 17, 2021 01:23
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Something to pay attention to, part of something larger I noticed when I played through the series: note that we've spent four missions, almost half the Terran campaign, on just one planet.
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May 20, 2021 14:16
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FoolyCharged posted:At least it's better than warcraft 3 where you didn't even see one of the factions until you were well over halfway through the campaign. Imagine if you didn't get to see the protoss until you were nearly done with the next campaign and everything up to that was endless TvT and TvZ. I was bringing that up as a good thing, actually. SC1 has a pretty good sense of scale and scope. SC2, not so much.
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May 20, 2021 18:51
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JohnKilltrane posted:Let's close with some trivia: The Firebat was actually created from the Goliath - that Terran unit we saw in the last update. Originally (i.e. back in the... Alpha? Beta? I forget) the Goliath was also rocking a flamethrower, but the devs felt it was too many weapons on one unit, and so the flamethrower got split off and made into its own unit - the Firebat. I also believe that there was a point where the Firebat was going to be able to set the surrounding scenery on fire, Total Annihilation-style. An alternative explanation I've heard is that they couldn't get units to have multiple weapons targeting the same unit. The Goliath was supposed to have a flamethrower, autocannon, and missiles for use against ground targets, and only the missiles for air, but the game's code only supported one weapon against ground targets and one weapon against air targets.
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May 25, 2021 15:28
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Oberndorf posted:That’s not the original Kerrigan unit profile, is it? I remember her being notably darker complected in the earlier version. It was added in Remastered, yeah. Kerrigan was distinctly darker skinned in the original Starcraft - 'Kerrigan' is an Arabic name. Then as of Starcraft 2 she became a pale-skinned redhead and that was that.
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Jul 5, 2021 19:47
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They also have one of those 'extremely cool in theory, really hard to actually use' big powers. stryth posted:Huh, I never realized Kerrigan had green eyes in the original, it looks like the only part of her appearance they kept in her SC2 redesign was the red hair. Gotta love Blizzard's habit of literally whitewashing characters.
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Jul 8, 2021 13:45
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The laser is also convenient because while the wraith's main job is air to air, it gives the wraith something to do when their main job isn't needed. I don't love overly specialized units.
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Jul 15, 2021 16:20
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Smiling Knight posted:I ran through all the 1 and 2 campaigns for the first time last year, and started keeping a running tally of "female characters with voiced lines who were not possessed/corrupted/infested at some point" and I think the total was like... three. The random news reporter who spars with Vermillion, Nova, and the second Dark Templar Matriarch. November Terra was kidnapped from her family by the Confederacy and brainwashed to become Nova, I say she counts.
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Jul 27, 2021 17:40
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My 'favorite' bit of Blizzard sexism in Starcraft comes from the visual redesign of one Protoss woman in SC2 between campaigns. Blizzard tried to make her look way more human and 'pretty.' https://twitter.com/kissy90530522/status/1288490518083665920
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Jul 27, 2021 19:13
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Fun cross-game trivia about the siege tank: it's been cited as one of the main visual inspirations for Halo's own tank, the Scorpion! The combination of four separate treads at the corners of the tank and tall turret sitting comfortably at the back is an unusual design as sci-fi tanks go, and in real life that kind of turret arrangement (the separate track pods do not happen in real life for a number of reasons that are irrelevant in most kinds of video games) is historically seen mainly in armored fighting vehicles intended as self-propelled artillery, rather than main battle tanks.
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Aug 10, 2021 20:26
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MagusofStars posted:Never played it myself, so but from what I've heard: WC3R also released with none of the quality of life features for multiplayer and mapmaking that Warcraft 3 fans were used to (because Blizzard wanted to make sure they owned the next DOTA), and it was incredibly poorly optimized due to some baffling mechanical decisions that lead to the game consuming huge amounts of RAM. And it forcibly updated all of that for anyone who happened to own regular Warcraft 3. Yes, it's also incredibly buggy. The entire project was poorly lead and managed. An in-depth video on the subject.
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Aug 12, 2021 00:46
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And in case you were wondering, the game never got the patch support Blizzard said it would. Last word from Blizzard about WC3R was promising adding ladders. They posted that in July 2020. Still no ladders. There were also interesting stories out of the studio Blizzard farmed out much of the work to. This is the same studio that did the highly acclaimed Command and Conquer remaster among other things, and their developers said that on that project they were in constant communication with EA and even prominent players from the C&C community to make sure everything looked, sounded, and played right. They said that Blizzard was almost completely silent, just "Make this" and "We've received it," no attempt to work with the studio at all.
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Aug 12, 2021 03:14
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Loxbourne posted:This may have been quite deliberate. You have to see it from an Activision-Blizzard executive's point of view. All these factors aren't going away, either. Diablo 2 Resurrected isn't allowing multiplayer mods or lan parties, either, for very similar reasons. Blizzard doesn't want a Big Thing to go unowned by them, and online play for that game will only be through official Blizzard servers, which store all online characters (because all characters in D2R are either offline only or online only) server-side. Starcraft 2 Remastered being so good and bullshit free is the aberration, not the norm for modern Blizzard.
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Aug 12, 2021 14:16
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Night10194 posted:Yeah, them being a bioweapon fits well enough with what his audience knows, and it gets him what he wants, so it's what he goes with. He's also still kind of right, given the existence of the Psi Emitters. Just, that's not remotely the whole story.
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Aug 12, 2021 21:46
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JeffRaze posted:I think my favorite nuke story is when I was playing against my brother. I was in the middle of destroying one of his bases with an army set up for overkill, when I heard the dreaded nuclear launch detected. I scrambled to mobilize my detection units all over my base when my army vanished. He nuked his own base, wiping out a very, very expensive group of my units. This is how I mostly use nukes in Starcraft 2. They're wonderful defensive tools if you can get the timing down.
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Aug 17, 2021 18:32
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JustJeff88 posted:Are ghosts any better in SC2? I don't play competitively, but I did know that they are a useful gimmick versus the AI but not worth a poo poo in multiplayer. One would think that they would make a good anti-infantry sniping unit, and LockDown is a nice ability. The big things are that they're available a lot earlier, and the silos don't have the opportunity cost vs orbital scan. In the campaign especially, they're a highly viable way of dealing with attack waves if you can get the timing down. Both varieties in campaign are also pretty good for quickly deleting beefy biological targets like the zerg tend to throw at you with snipe/psi lash.
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Aug 17, 2021 20:32
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Mr. Peepers posted:The original origin is the IJN Yamato, a Japanese battleship that served in WW2. It still holds the record for carrying the largest guns ever put on a floating ship. And proved to historically be a net benefit to the Allies because it was useless in the campaigns and consumed massive amounts of supplies, particularly Japan's very limited supplies of oil, for absolutely nothing in return.  At the time, there was a superstition among some in the IJN that the Yamato and its sister ships were actually cursed. They'd been designed and built in violation of the Washington Naval Treaty that Japan had signed, so when the Yamato, Musashi, and Shinano all proved to be worthless in the war, some felt that this was fate saying "Serves you right for breaking your agreement, jackasses." JustJeff88 posted:How did it stack up against the KMS Bismarck and Tirpitz? Better in almost every way except that the Yamatos were giant fuel hogs.
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Aug 18, 2021 01:13
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And if anyone wants a really detailed comparison of the various heavyweight WW2 battleships by a professional naval historian, enjoy.
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Aug 18, 2021 01:42
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Really, if you want to look at 'the best battleship ever built,' look no further than the American Iowa class. Smaller guns and thinner armor than the Yamato, but better-designed all around: much faster, far more accurate guns (thanks to the advanced American radar systems), a much more sophisticated armor scheme built from better steel that only the US at the time could have afforded to armor an entire battleship in, and the USN's damage control practices were much more sophisticated and better equipped than the IJN's. Sorry if I'm sperging, naval military history is my jam. 
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Aug 18, 2021 01:53
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JustJeff88 posted:No, this is very interesting. I find the pre-carrier days of Naval combat very interesting, both anecdotally and in video games that model it. Once carriers showed up, the combat dynamics became far less interesting because naval combat became 'Air Force, but on water' where ships exist to either launch planes or protect the ships that launch planes. The days where there were battleships, cruisers, destroyers, subs etc and each one played a role in a sort of scissors-paper-stone arrangement were far more delightful. Funny thing is, the Iowas and their sisters in the USN were still useful in the war. Just, not for duking it out with other surface vessels. One of the big things the Iowas contributed as parts of a fleet was their simply enormous anti-aircraft suite. Late-war American ships were absolutely bristling in anti-aircraft weapons, and the Iowas were the biggest of the lot. They provided an enormous amount of valuable anti-aircraft firepower against Japanese air attack, particularly the kamikaze threat. Not only that, but the Iowas could and did shrug off kamikaze hits that would have crippled or sunk smaller ships. Another signature trick of the Iowas was that they often served as improvised tankers for the fleet. The Iowas had extremely efficient power plants and enormous fuel bunkers, allowing them to refuel other ships - particularly the perpetually fuel-hungry destroyers of the fleet - at sea, without risking a valuable and thin-skinned dedicated tanker. It's the story of the Pacific Theater, really. Japanese ships and weapons were often, at least on paper, better designed and superior at destroying enemy ships. The Americans on the other hand were typically faster, tougher, and enjoyed the benefits of much more advanced technology which often gave them capabilities their counterparts lacked. In a straight close-range slugging match, the Yamato probably would have sunk the Iowa. But the Iowa was much faster and had far more accurate and long-ranged guns, and was particularly well suited to night engagements. Being able to win a final destination match means nothing if your opponent has no reason to fight such a match and can destroy you probably with remarkable ease on their own terms and you have no ability to force them into your kind of engagement. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Aug 18, 2021 |
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Aug 18, 2021 02:27
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Aces High posted:The exact scenario that makes the Axis fleets viable in Navy Field Yeah, but like the wehraboos' beloved Big Cats, real life wasn't Final Destination. Actual military effectiveness relies much more on these four questions: Can you win a fight in circumstances most favorable to you? Can you win a fight in circumstances most favorable to your enemy? Can you force the enemy to fight in circumstances most favorable to you? Can the enemy force you to fight in circumstances most favorable to them? And that is why the Yamatos wound up being worthless: their answers were Yes, No, No, Yes. Edit: I'm sure this is somehow applicable to SC1 multiplayer!
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Aug 18, 2021 12:43
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One coda to Ghosts in the game: they were singled out by Blizzard at the start of Starcraft 2 releases as being the single Terran unit most in need of improvement. They, and the nukes, were iconic, but Blizzard knew that as far as the game's tightly honed competitive balance went the Ghost was something of a whiff.
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Aug 18, 2021 19:32
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