Heart of the Swarm

Moderator

I finished it today

General stuff
The missions continued to be diverse and unique

Spoiler:

The whole thing with how larva just spawned on its own was weird, i expected to have to micro the queen but they simplified it by just having the hatchery produce more larva on its own
Some of the hero abilities you get are overpowered, it doesnt really matter since its singleplayer, but it made it a lot easier, i only played on normal though, but comparing it to wol (which i also only played on normal) it felt much easier (ill play brutal when i buy hots at some point, i intend to play brutal in wol soon)

Spoiler:

The story

Spoiler:

Pat1487 wrote:: From it you can infer raynor dies, valerian mengsk dies, and what bacon said in his spoiler

Kerrigan believes raynor is dead, and they tell the player that hes dead until you find out later that hes not, so i was half right about that
When we saw the news cast i knew he couldnt really be dead, i didnt think they would just have raynor die off screen like that, if he really had died and they presented it like that i would be pissed
I wish we couldve seen (or played) raynors part of the story, the part after he gets left behind and before we hear of his execution

I was wrong about Valerian dieing, i thought for sure he would be killed, theres a scene in the trailer that lasts like a fraction of a second at 1:30 that makes it look like hes about to die
Plus i didnt see where they could take his character
I guess replacing his father makes sense, but that seemed to obvious

Pat1487 wrote:: But it seems like shes going back because it puts her in a better position to do what she wants, stop the zerg or take out mengsk and not because she wants to use the zerg to destroy everything

I was right on this, they did it better than i thought though by having her think raynor was dead

Pat1487 wrote:: The building is similar to the one in the prototype, but the mutalisk laser thing isnt really
I watched the prototype again and it might be real, mengsk says vengeance in it and the trailer is called vengeance, and it takes place in the same area that a lot of the trailer is in

Yeah it was real, i cant beleive they let that leak like that wow

Pat1487 wrote:: The ending is probably different now though
If it is real i will be disappointed especially if it ends exactly like what it showed, id rather have raynor die than have that ending

The ending is pretty much the same as the prototype, but with 1 key difference
In the prototype kerrigan says a line like "the zerg are free now" and in the actual ending she doesnt say that
That was the part i disliked about the prototype ending
The way they did it in the actual game was much better

The zerg homeworld was good, i was expecting the primal zerg to be savage animals, and they sortve are but they could speak which was kindve weird
It makes sense if it was a telepathic thing but it wasnt so how were they able to speak
And the whole absorbing essence thing doesnt really make sense to me, they call it genetic strands sometimes but other times its essence, like when you kill stuff to evolve your units their are certain things that conflict with eachother, and you need abathur to spin the strands to actually use it
Yet kerrigan (and primal zerg) can just go around absorbing essence with none of that
Can modern zerg just not absorb essence in the same way, or have primal zerg just made the process really efficient

Zagara never betrays kerrigan, i thought for sure she would
For awhile in every mission i was preparing for zagara to come in and screw me over
She says something that comes across as "I wont betray you for now" and i was just thinking, yeah im probably going to have to deal with your betrayal at some point, especially after she was given more intelligence
Normally i would like that kind of thing, since i expected it to happen, and yet it didnt happen, but zagara seems like the type that would betray her allies to get on top so to me
I dont want to say i didnt like that she didnt betray kerrigan since it does make sense that she didnt, but i wouldve liked to see it

Alexi Stukov is back, when he was introduced, in shadow, i heard his voice and immediately remembered it from bw
I dont know how i feel about him coming back, i like it, but he was definitely dead in bw, i looked into it and there was a mission in starcraft 64 (which i hated) where you resurrect him, so it does work in the story but he did very little in the story, zeratul couldve told kerrigan about narud so he was just a cameo for no real reason
I guess having him there to sort of take revenge on narud for killing him is cool but still, i just wish they did more with him is all

I was a bit disappointed with narud, in bw he pretty much made kerrigan the queen of blades so he and her had history
And yet that didnt get brought up during the battle, i wanted narud to shift into durans form (after kerrigan realized he wasnt raynor) and use their history together to get to her since his character is manipulative
I mean it was fine the way it was, but i think that way wouldve been better

Overall it was great

Corporal

Beat it yesterday.. was definitely a good campaign.. but I agree that it seems easier than WoL

Moderator

so i was bored and graduated and decided i should buy it and i did. i just finished it anddd

Spoiler:

Commander

I thought the HotS single player was very enjoyable, and a lot better than WoL.
although now i wish i had played it on 'hard' or 'brutal' because it was much easier than WoL like you guys mentioned.

Spoiler:

Moderator

Spoiler:

Achilles.42 wrote:: the opening cinematics where her and rayner are talking seemed completely nonsensical to me. i even watched them twice at the time:

Raynor's talking about how they're gonna live happily ever after and Karrigan says
"there cant be a YOU and ME untill Mengsk pays"
and Raynor's like "you cant throw us away for petty revenge"
Ok one: thats basically the least tactful way of doing anything ever. there's no reason she shouldn't have tried to get him to be supportive/helpful.

And then raynor freaks out cuz his girlfriend's not very smart.
and is all like "blah blah not for revenge"
but wait a second. a few weeks ago Raynor invading dominion space, and spreading video to destabalize his rule, on the OFF CHANCE that it saved karrigan.
But common, Mengsk was the one that threw her to the Zerg, and Raynor wants to pretend like he everything he did was for noble reasons? no, he was out for revenge too. but now that Karrigan has the exact same motivations that he did, he decides to be a little girl about it.

Raynor was trying to overthrow Mengsk, a tyrant, in as peaceful a way as the situation would allow
Kerrigan didnt care what she had to do, she wanted him dead at any and all costs for her own selfish reasons
It was selfish with Raynor too, but he saw the importance of the bigger picture, where as Kerrigan didnt care about the bigger picture
Raynor knew she would stop at nothing (especially since she said they couldnt be together until he was dead) and was afraid of what she would do

I agree that it couldve been written better

Achilles.42 wrote:: also the ending seemed silly to me.
there were tons of ways for Mengsk to die that didn't involve raynor.
and if mengsk didn't even have a single guard left that was capable of stopping a marine from breaking through, then he was dead no matter what.
But, even if he raynor hadn't come through the door, at some point karrigan contacts the swarm and orders:
swarms of muta's/corrupters attacking from a distance.
the primal zerg to attack since the artifact wont effect them
suiciding a leviathan on top of mengsk

it made karrigan look rurl, rurl, dumb to jump in there and just be like "zomg i guess i lose--he has a magic red button"

i could have seen that sequence making sense if that had done it at an earlier point in the story, but not for the ending.
cuz 5 seconds later she's like "time to take on Amond, even though stupid-humon-with-the-magic stone was owning me and i needed my bf to come save me"

I think she wanted to kill him with her own hands so much so that she didnt think about anything else

Achilles.42 wrote:: Also, i agree pat, the essence thing didn't make any sense to me either.
especially since a lot of the missions revolving around essence you had to 'kill' them to 'collect' the essence, and your enemy was also trying to 'kill' them to prevent you from collecting their 'essence'
its like, does killing them help obtain essence or destroy essence? how can it be both :/

I assumed that they need to extract a sample from a living thing, and the extraction process kills it
So killing it without taking a sample means that the essence is lost
I dont know why it would need to be alive though, essence is pretty vague

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