Pardon the Zerg Infestation

Before I got into CRPGs, before I ever logged into my first MUD, my first and favorite computer games were always RTS games. This has always continued to be the case, despite my annoyance at a growing emphasis on multiplayer combat to the detriment of story campaigns and character development.

For me, Story is Everything.  If the game doesn’t have a strong inherent story of its own, I have to be able to make my own story for my characters. Unfortunately, a lot of the RTS games these days have forgotten story completely and don’t exactly allow you the opportunity for much story creation on your own. If there is a single-player campaign, it’s half-assed and repetitive. If there’s any story at all, it’s the exact same two paragraphs of flavor text before every battle regardless of what race you’re playing. Some games don’t have single player options at all.

So naturally, I’m more than a little excited about the grand-daddy of RTS games launching its sequel tomorrow. Blizzard has always been good with story, to the point that I continue to replay the original StarCraft campaigns to this day, in spite of the fact that my PC technology has far and away outstripped it and the only way to make it look remotely right is to play it in a tiny little window on my huge monitor.

Aliens! With Armies! Yeeeah!

Blizzard’s never exactly been original with their stories or their games. The difference is that they take what has been done and, inevitably, find some way to do it better, even if it’s something as simple as making the interface more user friendly.  The Warcraft universe is almost a direct ripoff of Warhammer 40K with some elements of Tolkien and a strangely prominent amount of Lovecraft thrown in. Starcraft, well . . . let’s face it . . . Starcraft is Aliens with armies. And without Vasquez, which is a real pity. I love Vasquez.

But while not original stories, or even original looking characters, Blizzard’s stories and characters rarely feel like they are just paper-doll placeholders. The stories actually have a proper plot arc, the characters actually grow and change. Sometimes they change into bad things, but they aren’t just static “I’m important because I’m in charge” types.  Blizzard can always be counted on for a good campaign, even when good single-player campaigns are out of fashion.

I’ve been in the beta, playing skirmish matches against other players and co-op against the computer, and I have to say that I’m very pleased with what they’ve done with the gameplay, and the graphics are wonderfully pretty without being too much of a resource hog.  Apparently the single-player campaign gameplay has been balanced separately from the PvP combat, and I’m interested to check out how they’ve done that, and what sort of difference it will make to the singleplayer game.

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Video Games Blizzard Entertainment, Gaming, Real-time strategy, StarCraft, Warcraft