You fell in love with a game and it’s characters, sunk hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours into it. It became a comforting, immensely satisfying part of your daily life. Then you heard a sequel was coming and got really hyped but when it came out it was utter rubbish…
Which game(s) was that for you?
StarCraft and Brood War were amazing, but the writing quality took a nosedive in the sequel. StarCraft 2 felt like poorly written fanfiction that didn’t understand the existing characters or their motivations at all.
Completely agree. The whole tone and setting changed. SC:BW went for gritty realism. Obviously, there’s a suspension of disbelief when you’ve got psionic aliens, but it felt like three scrappy factions barely surviving in the endless dark of space.
SC2 went full Warcraft. Ancient gods, portals to other worlds, all the same kitschy fantasy elements that are fine in the campy context of WC but really clashed with the established character of the SC universe. I get that they wanted to raise the stakes in the sequel, but I really disagreed with how they went about it.
And Kerrigan should have stayed evil. That’s my “Han shot first” of the franchise.
Agreed 100%, how Kerrigan was handled was the worst of StarCraft 2’s many sins against prior characterization. They spent an entire expansion setting her up as an irredeemable monster and the new big bad of the setting alongside Mengsk and whatever Duran was up to, only to undo it all because NuBlizzard wanted their waifu.
And there is no way Jim Raynor as of the end of Brood War would ever ally with Kerrigan again after her betrayal, yet he goes from having sworn to get revenge for Fenix’s death to helping Kerrigan “redeem” herself with little more than a mention of past grievances.
Maybe Jim was just in a really good mood after all his hair spontaneously grew back. /s