The story presentation overall was, of course, excellent, but I think the story itself wasn't very cohesive. Raynor suddenly goes from Mar Sara to Hyperion without any real explanation. You never get a feeling for the grand scheme of what is going on, except from the news updates. The zerg seem to be attacking, but there's no clear indication as to why or what Kerrigan wants. In fact Kerrigan is barely even in it, and when she does show up she doesn't say anything useful at all - in the artifact / datacore level she could've said what she planned to do with the artifacts for example, but as it stands she could've been replaced with any other destructive force and the level outcome would've been exactly the same.
Obviously there are 5 parallel storylines going on, with Dr Hanson, Matt Horner, Tosh, Zeratul and Findley. But of these storylines only Dr Hansons and Horner's really seemed well-rounded and fleshed out. Findley's levels were disturbing in the way that there was never any problem with going around desecrating ancient shrines, or any kind of negotiation with the protoss at all. Zeratul's levels of course are a separate storyline, but didn't really tell us anything particularly interesting. Tosh's levels were clearly the filler in the whole thing, and I didn't even end up building any ghosts in single player at all (I played the whole thing on Normal, which was really too easy).
There really wasn't much characterisation of the enemies in SC2 at all. All you really hear from Mengsk and Kerrigan are taunts, not actual conversations about motives, what they plan to do next etc. There were also very few levels where you got to control hero units, which was a pity, and no real Installation tileset-type levels from the SC1 campaign - the Zeratul and Tosh ones come close of course, but not really the same as getting a small squid of units with a hero to lead them. The amount of actual story in general doesn't seem to be as much as in SC or BW - read the quickstart manual that comes with the game as it has a background history of everything that happened in SC and BW. I think if you were to write a similar summary of SC2's storyline, the actual relevant parts, it might be 3 or 4 of those small pages at best. There also weren't any real twists or surprises in SC2, compared to Kerrigan's metamorphose in SC, Tassadar teaming up with Zeratul or Kerrigan's infestation of Razsagal, Duran's double-cross on both the UED and Kerrigan and Zeratul's discovery of the Hybrids.
There were conspicuously no mentions of the UED at all, or of Duran. There is a secret level unlocked from Media Blitz (destroy the science facility on SE corner) which I am guessing is something to do with UED, but otherwise this is a bit strange.
Over all I'm left feeling a little dissatisfied, and get the impression that the whole thing was just a set up for Heart of the Swarm, where presumably some real storyline progression is going to take place.
Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jul 29 2010, 12:34 am by Lanthanide.
None.
