Why Heart of the Swarm might suck

Nobody wants to be the one that brings up the possibility of a game sucking. Partly due to the fact that fanboys will rip your throat out and feed you to the hounds, address you in an intelligent way and politely disagree on your opinions. So that's why I'm here! Yes I'll be your "but wait" man of the hour, the man who isn't afraid to receive the death threats and bile that comes with being someone who hates something game related on the internet who isn't Yahtzee. And to begin, I will show how fair and balanced I really am, by tackling a game I preordered and am looking forward to.

Picture of game because I don't want to get sued over fair use.

Yes, Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, why it might suck.

Reason #1: Blizzard's focus on online

One of the reasons that being a fan of Blizzard, the company that makes Starcraft, is becoming difficult is that they are slowly becoming kind of evil. One thing that had tipped my already waning opinion of Ubisoft into the reds was their UPlay system. I just don't like systems that force, or forcefully encourage, you to play online. No matter what the imbeciles of the industry might say, single-player is still important. Hence why I don't like having to be online for a single-player experience. 

One example of this from Blizzard was Diablo 3, which forced you to play online, even if you didn't want to. This can lead to latency issues, drop-out, and numerous other issues that come from your connection. I live in a household of 4-5 people, all of whom are steeped in online culture. I can barely get a 4 minute YouTube video to load and play at the speed I want, let alone Diablo 3. 

The other big problem is one directly related to Starcraft 2. Recently Blizzard changed how free games in Starcraft 2 worked. Free games are my little term for playing against a computer opponent, not a storyline game, not online. These are important to learning to play Starcraft 2 well, because it allows you to test different build strategies without other better players killing you immediately. But now it has to be done on Battlenet, their online service.

Reason #2: Storyline

One of the most unexpectedly good aspects of Starcraft 2 was it's story. The overall story that would be told by all three games was simplistic, but still it's strangely compelling. And the more personal story, Jim Raynor's quest to bring down the series bad guy Arcturus Mengsk, and eventually him leading a force to the Zerg home planet of Char to beat the Zerg back, proving himself a real hero to both himself and the rest of the human race. This may sound trite and boring, but it was well done because of how detailed the characters and the setting were. Even a simple story can be really interesting when told in an interesting universe.

This isn't to say that the story of Heart of the Swarm doesn't have a good baseline to work with. The story will follow Sarah Kerrigan, former human turned Zerg leader known as the Queen of Blades, who was turned back into a human at the end of the first Starcraft 2. Now, in order to kill Mengsk, who she has a personal grudge against, and stop the reemergence of the Xel'Naga, hinted at in the previous game, she must become a Zerg again. But the first time she became the Queen it was against her will. She was left in the midst of a Zerg ambush by Mengsk, so this time she must become a Zerg again, willfully. And there were also rumors that the game's story would include the Zerg having undergone a Civil War since her absence. As now that the Overlord, the Brood Leaders, and the Queen are all gone they have no one to follow. But this may sound familiar to some people. It sounds a lot like...

This.

Yes the plot seems quite a lot like Brood Wars. The central theme of the game seems to be Kerrigan obtaining independence, in Brood it was from the Broods, forming all of the Zerg under her command, in Heart it's from her humanity so that she can kill Mengsk as she wishes with no regrets. Yes it probably contains a subplot of another Zerg civil war. But that isn't my big problem with the story.

Reason #2.5: It's the middle entry

With the exception of Mass Effect 2 when a trilogy is planned from the beginning to tell one story, the middle usually suffers. The reason for this, in most cases, is that it being the middle there isn't really a beginning and no real ending. But in this case I think its more complicated than that. You see Heart isn't JUST about Kerrigan's story. It's also about the Xel'Naga. This game has to bring us through Kerrigan's story, hopefully to it's conclusion where we'll finally be able to kill Mengsk, and bring the Xel'Naga subplot from the first game into the main story. Any game would have trouble fleshing that out, let alone an RTS, very rarely known for their great storytelling tradition, Command and Conquer 3 and it's sequel/expansion being the rare exception. But of course that's not what most people who are still playing their copy of Starcraft 2 are thinking about. No, they are thinking about...

Reason #3: Massive changes to Units/Build Strategies

Whenever you have a game franchise designed around a multiplayer component you have to keep things balanced, and for the most part this is something that Blizzard does really well. There are constant updates that change minor things about the various units in the game. Slight changes in damage output and build time help to balance the gameplay, and the changes are so small that you won't really notice them. But with a full-fledged sequel/expansion you need to change things up significantly. Adding new units and unit abilities is the primary method of doing so, but then that obviously will unbalance everything again if left unchecked. So you have two options. One, you can simply add new units and fix everything as time goes on, or...

Change All That You Can.

Now obviously I'm not going to post all of the changes that they've made, but needless to say that a few of them strike me as odd to say the least. Though I will bitch about some of the more glaring oddities, to demonstrate my point. Both Protoss and Zerg have gained units that seem like they are just there to make games easier for the obsessives while making it harder to make new players want to play the game. Vipers, a Zerg unit, have the ability to spawn a cloud that reduces all enemy attack ranges within it to one. Basically meaning that the unit needs to be right in front of the enemy to attack them. Now obviously this is rarely going to mean that an enemy CAN'T attack back, but it can be used differently. If, for example, you were an obsessive than reasonably you could try and create a mostly long-range force, wait for your enemies attack to start, and then hit them with the cloud. This essentially gives you a two more precious seconds with which to get free shots in. 

The Oracle is the one that really gets me though. In Starcraft 2 you use workers to get materials to build units. So one option is of course, attack your opponents workers. The issues with this are that the workers are often in the farthest back of the base, and two, if you are playing anyone but Terran, you don't have the splash damage to attack all or even most of them at once, making it more difficult. But the Oracle is apparently a unit designed for destroying workers, how this will impact things I don't know, but it don't sound good. 

Closing

This isn't meant to piss people off, mostly. I'm not trying to bring anyone down, nor am I trying to hurt anyone's feelings. What I want is to steer, forcefully if necessary, discussions about certain games in a different direction. If it's something that has only had bad press, and no one wants to talk about the good, or whether it only gets good press lavishing praise on it without a shred of critical thought. Whatever it may be, that's what I'm here for, I'm "the other guy".

I'm The Devil's Gamer, stay Chaotic Neutral my friends.