Yeah, no idea. Remember how they originally recast Raynor too?

Actually that wiki page backs up what I said:
Emphasis mine. By posting about the wilhelm scream on wikipedia, the joke's humour is now clear to people outside of that particular social group, occupation or other community of common understanding.

I know why they went with Tricia Helfer specifically to do the voice work, but I'm not sure why Kerrigan was re-cast in the first place.

Don't leave us hanging, spill the beans!

I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say given NDAs and such, but I can probably say that it did have to do with her being on Battlestar Galactica. And boy oh boy is BSG easy to use as a temp mix.

Seems like a pretty silly reason, since it's just her voice, hidden behind a bunch of filter effects, so 98% of people won't have any idea (or care) who is voicing her anyway.

You signed NDA's with Blizzard, or another party?

Every time anyone goes to Blizzard's campus/whatever as a guest, you have to sign an NDA. I think they also have a rule against using cameras in any of the buildings because a lot of stuff is just out in the open. They're also very very strict about their own employee NDAs and crack down hard on anyone who says even the most minor spoiler. Come to think of it I didn't have to sign an NDA for the holiday party, but everyone was very hush-hush about details anyway. All my Blizzard friends are super paranoid and tight-lipped. I mean I guess it makes sense, they all say working there is like being in heaven so I'm sure none of them want to jeopardize that.

Intern heaven, maybe.

I cringed when kerrigan's voice came on. It was just so dumb.

ARMIES SHALL PERISH

WORLDS SHALL BURN

THIS GALAXY WILL BE MINE

AND SO WILL VENJENZE

That's fallacious since things which suffer in quality do so to different degrees.

At the very least, people were expecting features that were on par with the previous game which predated it by over a decade.


Overall there was someone in management that said, "Hey, we have a large, dedicated fan base that wants a sequel to their beloved game; let's do our best to exploit this untapped market, by making a game designed more for mass appeal and calling it the sequel to whatever game it is they like." Then a team of writers, developers, quality assurance, and all the other components that go into game development came together and followed the orders passed down to them so they could get a paycheck while doing what they love, even if it isn't they way they'd like to do it.

I think that's a lot more accurate.

As for the video, I'd buy the game if it was half as good as the cinematic. It's unfortunate that it isn't.

It's unreasonable to state that SC2 was a disappointment because it could have been better. I disagree that it suffered significantly in quality.

What features weren't on par with the previous game? A lot of mechanics have been improved upon (selecting units and assigning hotkeys are core features that were greatly improved, for example), and I'd argue that SC2 is superior in terms of features, stability, and functionality. (That doesn't determine if it's a good game, of course.)

As a game, I think it beats SC1 in all regards. As an artwork, I'd say I like the music in SC1 more, but that may be my nostalgic side talking. As a story, I thought it was good and I had less issues with it than I did with Brood War (seriously, that whole trust in Kerrigan... but I digress), though I recognize many people weren't as satisfied with it.

I'm excited for the expansion because I'm interested in the story and new elements it will introduce. I can understand if you were disappointed with the story if you don't want to get excited for the expansion, but you shouldn't blanket label it under another Blizzard disappointment for all.

There's a different way they wanted to do it? Most criticism I've heard revolves around the story of the campaign; were they forced to do the campaign they did when they had a completely different one in mind? I don't follow what you're saying here.

They're charging $60 for HotS here last time I saw (pre-order price)

Maybe local shops and amazon will sell it cheaper at release. I got Wings of Liberty for 39€ (51.93 $) while Blizzard sold it for 59€ (78.56 $) at release day.

Atm, it looks like I will pay 40€ for HotS. That's 53.25 $.

Oh, American prices should be at 40 $ I believe. Now that's cheap...
I wonder how much Australian have to pay. They always have super high prices for video games from what I've heard.

^
I'm not so sure if we should be so quick to blame the retailers. I highly doubt big game companies will let retailers set their own prices so freely


From their recent business practices,
I think it was more like "Hey, we have a large, dedicated fan base that wants a sequel to one of our games. Let's milk all the money out of them!"
I will Have to disagree with you if you think that Blizzard had our best interests in their product. Maybe SOME of them did, but the product did nothing to please its dedicated fan base. I know,I know.. probably over-critical.. when you become a fan of something, you become its biggest critic.. but still, the amount of problems in the game when it was released (remember, no chat channels!) is too hard to overlook.

From the executive level, I can almost guarantee that it started at a "Hey, what would be the most profitable product to start production on?"

And coming from a dev background, I will admit that my phrasing was misleading; I meant to say that it is very unlikely that those on the development team were in it to make a quick buck and disappoint the fans. But they typically don't get to set the deadlines, and their decisions have to run by the business. A lot of issues the developers get blamed for aren't in their control to prevent (e.g., cutting components to meet deadlines). So I'm going to step back on a lot of what I said and instead rephrase it to:

The developers delivered a solid product in the timeframe they were given; I think it's not so much poor developers as it is poor management. The cinematics team likely doesn't deal with the level of requirements changes and feature creep that developers are usually cursed with, so they're able to more consistently release something that is very well polished.

^
You are right, I agree. It's not really the developers' fault. They built the SC2 engine very well.
A lot of the problem is from the management.
This kinda makes me even more sad.

A lot of people call it cliché or hackneyed etc, which I don't really agree with. I mean, what isn't cliché these days when you're telling this sort of story?

My problem with it, was primarily around the wasted opportunities and apparent completely pointless characters like Tosh and Ariel. The branching storyline might be "fun" for players (really it's just annoying, 'cause you have to go back and replay it), but it really fucked up the storyline. Now Blizzard has to choose an 'authoritative' branch for what 'really happened', which presumably is that you kept Ariel alive and sided with Tosh. An example of a complete wasted opportunity, is the whole artifact thing at the end that magically transformed Kerrigan back to human, while it also killed all the other zerg. A way to tie all this together instead would have been to use the Terrazine that you harvested with Tosh in conjunction with Ariel's vaccine, + the artifact, to save Kerrigan. That would have tied the whole thing up neatly and made it feel like the earlier missions actually mattered; instead what we have is a storyline where only a handful of the missions have anything to do with anything.

Apparently HotS will be ditching this branching storyline in terms of linear storyline. So at least we won't have to worry about that.

This could be rose tinted glasses but I don't like any of the voice actors that were changed, Kerrigan, Zeratul, Tassadar. Oh, and Tyrael from Diablo 3. Whereas I was happy with Mengsk and Raynor.

I think the game designers don't realise that changing the voice actor of a series is pretty much equivalent to changing the actor of a character midway through a tv show. It just breaks immersion and you no longer relate with that character like you used to. You now have two characters basically, and Blizz just expects you to play along and pretend they are both the same.

Now yeh, Zeratul's voice actor DIED, but still. In those cases they should have focused on getting voice actors that are really good at imitation and sound-a-likes to be able to continue on.

The Zeratul voice actor they have now reminds me of a Brute from the HALO games. He sounds dull and stupid, and his dialogue isn't much better.


One look at the amount of uncompressed, unoptimised, and incomplete bits of the game's engine would tell you that Blizzard is wholly incompetent. I don't understand how people are still blind to this. If any other company had released a game with the amount of problems and the shitty engine/graphics/gameplay/plot that SCII has, that game would have fallen completely flat. Companies like Activision buys shills out the asshole to review their games (why do you think Conan has a 69 metascore? It deserves a 0). The rest of the game's supporters are merely casuals who bought in because of the logo and the flash.

Quality doesn't sell Blizzard's games. Blizzard's logo sells Blizzard's games.