Warcraft III: Reforged - now with lowest user metacritic score of all time

[Preben]

Wings of Liberty was hilarious in how bad the story was

Yes. It was absolutely awful. But the gameplay was super good. I revisited starcraft and warcraft 3 last year however and I have to say that while they were clearly better, they're not exactly great stories either. I don't think blizzard writing holds up in general (I have not revisited anything earlier than starcraft though or D2, so ymmv).

SC1 original storyline was pretty good. It went downhill with Brood Wars.

 

[Storyfag]

Wings of Liberty was hilarious in how bad the story was

Yes. It was absolutely awful. But the gameplay was super good. I revisited starcraft and warcraft 3 last year however and I have to say that while they were clearly better, they're not exactly great stories either. I don't think blizzard writing holds up in general (I have not revisited anything earlier than starcraft though or D2, so ymmv).

SC1 original storyline was pretty good. It went downhill with Brood Wars.

Eh, Brood War gave us UED, for the betterment of Mankind. I'm willing to forgive them the low points of the story.

 

[Preben]

Wings of Liberty was hilarious in how bad the story was

Yes. It was absolutely awful. But the gameplay was super good. I revisited starcraft and warcraft 3 last year however and I have to say that while they were clearly better, they're not exactly great stories either. I don't think blizzard writing holds up in general (I have not revisited anything earlier than starcraft though or D2, so ymmv).

SC1 original storyline was pretty good. It went downhill with Brood Wars.

Eh, Brood War gave us UED, for the betterment of Mankind. I'm willing to forgive them the low points of the story.

UED arc was extremely stupid. They appeared out of nowhere like some sort of Deus Ex Machina without any hint or foreshadowing. For some reason they used (almost) the same technology as their wayward bumpkin colonies despite decades of separation. Finally, they conveniently disappeared and never bothered anyone anymore. If they were watching the Koprulu colonies so closely, shouldn't they react in some way to the fact that they were attacked by a race of Ctulhus from another dimension?

 

[Olinser]

Does anybody even care about Blizzard anymore? They squandered all the good will they had a while now.

I remember talking about it with my cousin in the early 2000s. To us, Blizzard delivered perfect games with incredible production value and could do no wrong.

Today: pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.

Its just another brand name now.

Blizzard is gone, and has been for a long time. Literally everything that made them one of the best game developers ever is gone.

It's Activision Blizzard now.

 

[Average Manatee]

UED arc was extremely stupid. They appeared out of nowhere like some sort of Deus Ex Machina without any hint or foreshadowing. For some reason they used (almost) the same technology as their wayward bumpkin colonies despite decades of separation. Finally, they conveniently disappeared and never bothered anyone anymore. If they were watching the Koprulu colonies so closely, shouldn't they react in some way to the fact that they were attacked by a race of Ctulhus from another dimension?

According to the timeline it was hundreds of years since the separation between the Terran colonization force and the UED, along with the fact that much of the Terran tech and units are described as improvised, so yeah that's a big problem. But the UED not returning is probably because of the travel time, it'd take decades for a new force to arrive and the entire SC1/2 timeline has to be squished into like 5 years because Blizzard wants to keep all the same characters around looking and acting pretty much the same.

The UED is in kind of an odd place though. The Terrans were just a small colonization sent out made up of convicts (ala Australia) 250 years ago with no further support. And despite this not-Australia being constantly dividing and in civil war with itself it manages to stand up to the fully powerful zerg and protoss forces. You'd expect the united force of earth and its normal colonies (not the one-off convict colonization mission involving a few thousand people sent across the galaxy basically done as a vault-tec level prank/social experiment) to be monstrously powerful and be able to roll in and swat the protoss and zerg like a fly. Granted they already almost did that with the UED fleet (and were doing it until basically everyone decided to help Kerrigan), but there's no indication that they couldn't be sending a much bigger one next.

It's also kind of funny that the Protoss and Zerg are just contained within a small sector of space while as far as we know the UED is the actual galaxy-spanning civilization that could be fighting any number of other races completely unmentioned in Starcraft.

 

[Storyfag]

UED arc was extremely stupid. They appeared out of nowhere like some sort of Deus Ex Machina without any hint or foreshadowing. For some reason they used (almost) the same technology as their wayward bumpkin colonies despite decades of separation. Finally, they conveniently disappeared and never bothered anyone anymore. If they were watching the Koprulu colonies so closely, shouldn't they react in some way to the fact that they were attacked by a race of Ctulhus from another dimension?

According to the timeline it was hundreds of years since the separation between the Terran colonization force and the UED, along with the fact that much of the Terran tech and units are described as improvised, so yeah that's a big problem. But the UED not returning is probably because of the travel time, it'd take decades for a new force to arrive and the entire SC1/2 timeline has to be squished into like 5 years because Blizzard wants to keep all the same characters around looking and acting pretty much the same.

The UED is in kind of an odd place though. The Terrans were just a small colonization sent out made up of convicts (ala Australia) 250 years ago with no further support. And despite this not-Australia being constantly dividing and in civil war with itself it manages to stand up to the fully powerful zerg and protoss forces. You'd expect the united force of earth and its normal colonies (not the one-off convict colonization mission involving a few thousand people sent across the galaxy basically done as a vault-tec level prank/social experiment) to be monstrously powerful and be able to roll in and swat the protoss and zerg like a fly. Granted they already almost did that with the UED fleet (and were doing it until basically everyone decided to help Kerrigan), but there's no indication that they couldn't be sending a much bigger one next.

It's also kind of funny that the Protoss and Zerg are just contained within a small sector of space while as far as we know the UED is the actual galaxy-spanning civilization that could be fighting any number of other races completely unmentioned in Starcraft.

As far as the tech is concerned, real life reason is budget cuts at Blizzard. The UED were originally intended to be a full fourth faction. The in-universe explanation, clunky though it is, is that the a signicifant portion of the UEDs forces were actually enthusiastically allied anti-Dominion insurgent forces a'la Duran's militia, or press-ganged former Dominion forces a'la the garrison of the Dylarian shipyards. Further, a large portion of the UEDs naval presence were battlecruisers captured in the same shipyards. All local tech.

As for sending a second fleet, yeah, time. The original fleet personnel had to use cryo-sleep to get to Koprulu.

 

[Jaedar]

According to the timeline it was hundreds of years since the separation between the Terran colonization force and the UED, along with the fact that much of the Terran tech and units are described as improvised, so yeah that's a big problem. But the UED not returning is probably because of the travel time, it'd take decades for a new force to arrive and the entire SC1/2 timeline has to be squished into like 5 years because Blizzard wants to keep all the same characters around looking and acting pretty much the same.

As for sending a second fleet, yeah, time. The original fleet personnel had to use cryo-sleep to get to Koprulu.

I don't really but the travel time argument. The zerg only become known to humanity with the events of SC1 afaik, and the UED's mission in the korprulu sector is mostly to nip that threat in the bud. And the timeskip between sc1 and bw is really short. And yeah, UED not showing up at any point in sc2 is pretty weird too, but if you are expecting canonical consistency from blizzard you're never going to avoid disappointment.

 

[Preben]

According to the timeline it was hundreds of years since the separation between the Terran colonization force and the UED, along with the fact that much of the Terran tech and units are described as improvised, so yeah that's a big problem. But the UED not returning is probably because of the travel time, it'd take decades for a new force to arrive and the entire SC1/2 timeline has to be squished into like 5 years because Blizzard wants to keep all the same characters around looking and acting pretty much the same.

As for sending a second fleet, yeah, time. The original fleet personnel had to use cryo-sleep to get to Koprulu.

I don't really but the travel time argument. The zerg only become known to humanity with the events of SC1 afaik, and the UED's mission in the korprulu sector is mostly to nip that threat in the bud. And the timeskip between sc1 and bw is really short. And yeah, UED not showing up at any point in sc2 is pretty weird too, but if you are expecting canonical consistency from blizzard you're never going to avoid disappointment.

In one dialogue Mengsk claims to have seen some Zerg a year before the events of the first campaign, which may or may not be a lie. However, humans in Koprulu became aware of a massive invasion only at the time of the original Terran campaign. This rules out a long delay between the UED sending their fleet and its arrival in the sector. At best, the "long cold sleep" mentioned by the adjutant in the first briefing in the Brood War Terran campaign was no longer than a few months.

 

[trais]

According to the timeline it was hundreds of years since the separation between the Terran colonization force and the UED, along with the fact that much of the Terran tech and units are described as improvised, so yeah that's a big problem. But the UED not returning is probably because of the travel time, it'd take decades for a new force to arrive and the entire SC1/2 timeline has to be squished into like 5 years because Blizzard wants to keep all the same characters around looking and acting pretty much the same.

As for sending a second fleet, yeah, time. The original fleet personnel had to use cryo-sleep to get to Koprulu.

I don't really but the travel time argument. The zerg only become known to humanity with the events of SC1 afaik, and the UED's mission in the korprulu sector is mostly to nip that threat in the bud. And the timeskip between sc1 and bw is really short. And yeah, UED not showing up at any point in sc2 is pretty weird too, but if you are expecting canonical consistency from blizzard you're never going to avoid disappointment.

In one dialogue Mengsk claims to have seen some Zerg a year before the events of the first campaign, which may or may not be a lie. However, humans in Koprulu became aware of a massive invasion only at the time of the original Terran campaign. This rules out a long delay between the UED sending their fleet and its arrival in the sector. At best, the "long cold sleep" mentioned by the adjutant in the first briefing in the Brood War Terran campaign was no longer than a few months.

Zerg main objetive was Protoss' homeworld, not Koprulu sector. Humans only became a side project for Overmind because of Ghost project and them starting to dabble into psi tech. And not even important side project, because once Overmind stumbled upon knowledge of Auir's location, it immediately moved most of his race to capture it, leaving zergified Kerrigan behind.
So while, Terrans and Zerg definitely had made contact before the timeline of the game, Zerg had no interest in wiping Terrans out, because they were focused on Protoss and didn't really care.

As of UED, the in game explanation why they have the same units was that UED acted like conquistadors in South America - they were but a small initial force which allowed them to exploit local divisions and assume leadership, but brunt of actual fighting was done by locals (rebels) vs locals (Dominion).

 

[trais]

Overall, Starcraft's writing was genius, not because the story itself was a particularly great work of art, but because it was consistently compelling enough to hold your interest throughout all of its campaigns, managed to avoid major plot holes, and was flexible enough to explain away in plausible fashion what would be otherwise unusual matchups, like ZvZ or PvP. So it fulfills all of its requirements and does so in relatively good fashion.

As a novel, it would be "meh" at best, but as a game script it's absolutely brilliant.

 

[Nahel]

Agreed. Same with WC3 which just worked and had a fun antagonist and fall from grace story.

Now WoW current lore and SC2 show the state of blizzard. But this decline is kind of general. No more creativity, just michael bay shit

 

[[UCHIHA]XxDarkSasuke420xX]

Blizzard bad
giv brofist

 

[Average Manatee]

Zerg main objetive was Protoss' homeworld, not Koprulu sector. Humans only became a side project for Overmind because of Ghost project and them starting to dabble into psi tech. And not even important side project, because once Overmind stumbled upon knowledge of Auir's location, it immediately moved most of his race to capture it, leaving zergified Kerrigan behind.
So while, Terrans and Zerg definitely had made contact before the timeline of the game, Zerg had no interest in wiping Terrans out, because they were focused on Protoss and didn't really care.

As of UED, the in game explanation why they have the same units was that UED acted like conquistadors in South America - they were but a small initial force which allowed them to exploit local divisions and assume leadership, but brunt of actual fighting was done by locals (rebels) vs locals (Dominion).

Aiur is in the Koprulu sector according to the wiki. It's weird but according to lore basically the entire strength of the Protoss and Zerg race is contained in a relatively small section of the galaxy fighting a small fringe element of humanity on the other side of the galaxy from Earth. At least according to lore the high protoss were always around Aiur and the majority of the Zerg swarm were concentrated to invade Aiur. At most the forces of Protoss and Zerg significantly outside the Koprulu sector amount to some Dark Templar and some scattered Cerebrates who broke free from the Overmind.

In one dialogue Mengsk claims to have seen some Zerg a year before the events of the first campaign, which may or may not be a lie. However, humans in Koprulu became aware of a massive invasion only at the time of the original Terran campaign. This rules out a long delay between the UED sending their fleet and its arrival in the sector. At best, the "long cold sleep" mentioned by the adjutant in the first briefing in the Brood War Terran campaign was no longer than a few months.

According to the timeline the Confederacy knew of the Zerg 14 years before the events of SC1. The UED is mentioned as having monitored the situation in the sector from the start of the colonization. It's possible they had spies or collaborators in the Confederacy.

Months wouldn't really make sense in the lore since if the UED could get to Koprulu in months then all the planets in the sector would be reachable from one another in a matter of hours, and this would be at odds with how major invasions are described as requiring time and planning to coordinate. If everyone could just zip around from place to place within a day then a lot of stuff doesn't make much sense.

 

[trais]

Aiur is in the Koprulu sector according to the wiki. It's weird but according to lore basically the entire strength of the Protoss and Zerg race is contained in a relatively small section of the galaxy fighting a small fringe element of humanity on the other side of the galaxy from Earth. At least according to lore the high protoss were always around Aiur and the majority of the Zerg swarm were concentrated to invade Aiur. At most the forces of Protoss and Zerg significantly outside the Koprulu sector amount to some Dark Templar and some scattered Cerebrates who broke free from the Overmind.

It very well might be, but that just indicate that Koprulu Sector is a rather huge swath of space, if Zerg weren't able to find Auir despied looking for it for how long exactly? Millenia? But it also in no way contradicts the fact that Overmind wasn't interested in expansion in Koprulu for the sake of expansion itself, but rather singularly focused on planting its spiky butt on Aiur. Because Xel'naga or something, something.

I can also buy that Humanity as a whole is way bigger and more powerful than Protoss and Zerg combined. After all, Khalai Protoss are the old, stagnant isolationist empire with no natural rivals to challenge them and spur them into action. Other than the Zerg of course, but they managed to keep them in check up until events of the game. Or at least they were convinced they were keeping them in check. E.g. Those walls of text between missions in Terran SC campaign, were describing how protoss fleet was cruising around Terran colonies, glassing every planet that got infested with the Zerg. Which could explain why Zerg wasn't overrunning the whole sector either, with possibility of Overmind simply wanting to keep Zerg real strength and numbers as a surprise.
And with Protoss being high tech race with advanced AI and robotic constructs doing any heavy lifting for them, I can see how they might had, at some point in the past, decided not to bother anymore with all this "colonizing other planets" nonsense, which Terrans are so universally fond of.

 

[Average Manatee]

The Zerg haven't been in the Koprulu sector their entire existence. They originated near the center of the galaxy whereas the Koprulu sector has to be near the edge (since it's 60,000 lightyears from earth). They've been searching a long time and assimilating new races the whole time while searching. I'm not exactly sure what happened in between their original creation and finding Aiur and reading the wiki brings up a lot of bullshit that SC2 rewrote that I'd rather pretend didn't exist.

 

[Jaedar]

The Zerg haven't been in the Koprulu sector their entire existence. They originated near the center of the galaxy whereas the Koprulu sector has to be near the edge (since it's 60,000 lightyears from earth). They've been searching a long time and assimilating new races the whole time while searching. I'm not exactly sure what happened in between their original creation and finding Aiur and reading the wiki brings up a lot of bullshit that SC2 rewrote that I'd rather pretend didn't exist.

Yeah, I got the feeling in the first game that the zerg had been looking for a long time, and weren't from too close (they're inspired by the tyranids after all). In sc2: heart of the swarm they retconned it so that the overmind was a chump and that the zerg basically existed as is on their original homeworld, no tinkering or assimilation needed. Which is very dumb.

And on the topic of sc1 lore, I got the feeling that the UED invasion fleet actually was a pretty significant part of the UED's total forces and not just a handful of battlecruisers and the schematics for nano-sutures (or whatever it is medics use) and valkyries. And that using local rebels and material was more out of expediency and a desire to limit "important" casualties. I also got the impression that they were at least somewhat concerned the zerg might be or become a threat to them, which kinda limits the size of the directorate to not that big.

 

[Average Manatee]

Trying to figure out the UED's strength is hard. Everything suggests they should be massively powerful. They should have colonized a lot and had orders of magnitude more people than the Terrans. They are depicted as wholly united militaristic empire ala Starship Troopers. The know enough about psi-stuff to directly control the overmind and the swarm. You'd expect them to, if not win efficiently, be willing to exhaust massive amounts of forces to overrun the sector and put a stop to any eventual threat.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell it's not actually stated anywhere that the UED is anything other than Earth. So... the UED just sat there on Earth for ~250 years since the Terrans started colonizing the whole Koprulu sector, doing nothing?

 

[trais]

I also got the impression that they were at least somewhat concerned the zerg might be or become a threat to them, which kinda limits the size of the directorate to not that big.

My impression was that UED viewed Zerg exactly the same way Wayland-Yutani viewed xenomorphs.

 

[baud]

Trying to figure out the UED's strength is hard. Everything suggests they should be massively powerful. They should have colonized a lot and had orders of magnitude more people than the Terrans. They are depicted as wholly united militaristic empire ala Starship Troopers. The know enough about psi-stuff to directly control the overmind and the swarm. You'd expect them to, if not win efficiently, be willing to exhaust massive amounts of forces to overrun the sector and put a stop to any eventual threat.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell it's not actually stated anywhere that the UED is anything other than Earth. So... the UED just sat there on Earth for ~250 years since the Terrans started colonizing the whole Koprulu sector, doing nothing?

Maybe the UED were fighting wars either with humans or other aliens and then wanted to prevent whatever was brewing in the Koprulu to impact them; but then it's just speculation

 

[Storyfag]

On the other hand, as far as I can tell it's not actually stated anywhere that the UED is anything other than Earth.

I recall something about DuGalle and/or Stukov making a name by pacifying rebel colonies before. Something of the usually popular crowd, Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, etc, etc.

 

[Average Manatee]

On the other hand, as far as I can tell it's not actually stated anywhere that the UED is anything other than Earth.

I recall something about DuGalle and/or Stukov making a name by pacifying rebel colonies before. Something of the usually popular crowd, Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, etc, etc.

That reminds me, the opening cinematic of BW. The UED unleashed zerg on one of their own colonies. The UED must have had some kind of contact or control of the confederacy when they were hiding info about the zerg and experimenting on them.

 

[Caim]

So I've never actually played Warcraft 3, and recently I've had a hankering for a fantasy RTS with no bullshit that's just straightforward base building -> unit training -> chucking them at the enemy, but as I keep looking around for something to scratch that itch I keep coming back to Warcraft 3. But from what I can find you can't get the old version anymore, or it's shackled to the Reforged clusterfuck. Are there ways around this, or would this require alternate "purchasing" methods? Or should I just give Spellforce a try, even though that looks like it's a bit too much of an RPG to me?

 

[Malamert]

 

[InD_ImaginE]

So I've never actually played Warcraft 3, and recently I've had a hankering for a fantasy RTS with no bullshit that's just straightforward base building -> unit training -> chucking them at the enemy, but as I keep looking around for something to scratch that itch I keep coming back to Warcraft 3. But from what I can find you can't get the old version anymore, or it's shackled to the Reforged clusterfuck. Are there ways around this, or would this require alternate "purchasing" methods? Or should I just give Spellforce a try, even though that looks like it's a bit too much of an RPG to me?

Official bought version right now I think are all Reforged.

If you want you can find older/classic install on some sites and just use CD-keygen or if you had the official one use yours.

a certain russian torrent site pretty much has the latest version of pre-Reforged WC3

 

[Olinser]

So I've never actually played Warcraft 3, and recently I've had a hankering for a fantasy RTS with no bullshit that's just straightforward base building -> unit training -> chucking them at the enemy, but as I keep looking around for something to scratch that itch I keep coming back to Warcraft 3. But from what I can find you can't get the old version anymore, or it's shackled to the Reforged clusterfuck. Are there ways around this, or would this require alternate "purchasing" methods? Or should I just give Spellforce a try, even though that looks like it's a bit too much of an RPG to me?

Not possible to get at this point legitimately. Even if you have the original discs, you're stuck on 1.0, which had a lot of issues with it. There's no way to actually get the most updated WC3 build without it autoupdating to Reforged without engaging in high seas fuckery.