Time played: 5 hours
Mode played: Campaign (Normal)
Story point: finished primal planet
This post is basically a stream of consciousness as I think about what I liked and didn't from last night's HOTS time. Not a lot of structure and I'm not really looking to polish it up, but I figured I could throw this out there and you may find it interesting.
I'm already seeing a bit of what was making people nervous about HOTS from the get go. The harvesters no longer needing to be split, the count of workers, etc. Those things are considered ways to raise the skill floor and encourage people to focus on more "fun" mechanics like fighting. I'm cautiously optimistic about this one. I think taking away some of the mechanics to drive the game to the fun parts is helpful. Why? Because I will never be on stage at MLG playing StarCraft... or anything for that matter, so it just does not concern me what happens at the pro level. Those guys have ZERO problems splitting workers or saturating bases, so what difference does it make?
Don't answer that.
The look of the game is... different. It's all basically the same thing, but something feels off. The art direction has a different... flavor to it. I guess anything that makes me feel uncomfortable about the art design could 100% be attributed to Wings of Liberty's art direction being focused on the high tech human military style of the Terran and HOTS on the living nightmare that is the Zerg. The only problem with that assumption is that there are a ton of pastels and what appear to be chalk artwork during loading sequences. That makes me feel like they are almost going from slimy gross monsters to something along the lines of flowers. Sure, these flowers will still kill you, but the colors are just throwing me off.
The speech bubbles and extensive use of zoomed in game engine cut scenes is odd and feels somewhat out of place. I'll probably have to go through the WoL campaign again to see if I'm remembering this incorrectly.
The missions have been interesting. Blizzard did a good job taking what makes Zerg interesting and expanding on it. I was never a big fan of the hero soldier type missions from WoL and these are only slightly more tolerable. I'm really hoping for a lot of big battle type missions going forward. I'm still in the "here's a new unit" phase... so we'll see.
I find myself way more interested than I thought I'd be in the story. No spoilers, but Kerrigan gets herself into quite a pickle with the decisions she's made. Spoilers: The fact that she gets news from the goofy news team from WoL is insane if you ask me... but I guess she could play it off as she was the Queen of Blades while they were off lying to everyone... but anyways... Spoilers off. The guys in the chat and I have new favorite characters and things have been fun, story wise. The writing feels a little inconsistent. Some characters and dialogue sequences are fantastic while others are flat. Still shows moments of amazing greatness, but others are like "seriously?"
This campaign seems to have the underlying theme of evolution. There are some amazing abilities you can add to your swarm that I didn't see coming. Also, the ability to move your research points around as you see fit whenever you are out of a mission is fantastic. I never really understood what I was doing with WoL's skill point system and figured it wasn't worth messing around with. Just picked what was obviously useful and forgot about the rest. In HOTS I'm swapping them in and out in order to see what combinations are the most fun/usefull.
A cut scene crashed on me and I couldn't see it again without restarting the mission. That was disappointing to say the least. I expect Blizzard IPs to be polished to a fine sheen... not crashing in a cut scene. The other thing I find... troubling... is that every loading screen has a "streaming content 23mb/30mb" type counter on the bottom right. I downloaded the game to 100% before starting to play. I don't like the idea that I can't play offline. I know you could play the campaign of WoL offline, but I haven't tried HOTS as I just played some campaign in one sitting.
Final thoughts:
Fun so far, but just doesn't feel right yet. I don't know if this will go away or not, but I will sure as anything finish this campaign. Will this lead me back online to ladder like I used to? Probably not. I'm having too much fun with Dark Souls et al. Am I glad I bought it? Sure... I'm just not super excited about getting knuckle deep in StarCraft II at this point. Only time will tell.
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