Decided to hold off til after Tomb Raider.

Any early impressions of the campaign missions and story?

First mission was pretty cool, as far as intros go.

Fuck the multiplayer cause after a year of playing WoL I don't have it in me anymore. It was destroying my body and soul. But I can't wait to get home and dig into the campaign. I love me a blizzard RTS campaign.

I feel like this ends with me playing through Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne again.

Loving the campaign, the units designed specifically for it are pretty awesome too. So if you want to get your dragoons on, you got your wish (too bad they're kinda sucky, imo). Not sure if I am a fan of the spear of adun energy allocation so far, tho I have not unlocked the second part of it yet. Mission design is still top notch and best in class.

Holy shit that second mission cut scene. "My life for Aiur" indeed, am I right guys, fuuuck.

Got it to play now in case fallout 4 needed major patches the first days of release; i'm a single player only. I replayed the first two campaigns a few months back since my memories were all scattered, now i should be up to date with the story

@mentaldisruption: It's definitely permanent, just only applies to one building at a time. If you never touch it then you automatically have an always chrono boosted Nexus (which is probably the best use for it until you get robo facilities).

They really went nuts with the "Defend your Base while attacking this stuff" mission set this time, which is fine except they like having a huge number of units on screen and my comp is pretty old at this point so while it ran HotS and WoL fine it's struggling with LotV.

Zealots with aoe stuns! DTs that infinitely respawn! Dragoons that are Dragoons! So silly.

@tennmuerti: All of the intro missions and cutscenes until you get the Spear are fucking fantastic. I'm only one mission past that (I chose a planet and did one mission before having to go to sleep) but I'm really looking forward to continuing it later tonight.

Some serious shit happens with those first few missions.

I think I pre-ordered it actually. I won't play it for a little while because of Fallout 4 and some other games.

@capum15: Man there are like a LOT of cut-scenes in this one, pretty much every subset of missions has one so far (i just finished 3rd set out of 7) and then some. And a lot of shit happens indeed.

Hah!, mr. F has some interesting stories to tell of his exploits, you should click on him a few times when he has no proper dialogue prompt, took me a few to realize what his stories were about :P

@fredchuckdave: Didn't say it wasn't permanent. Just that overall it doesn't boost as much as it used to, so it being permanent isn't that crazy.

Agreed with everything here. Been too long since I went through FT.

I have to say that the music is Blizzard-style as fuuuuck :D like, totally bringing me back to vanilla WoW Blizzard

Dammit, I just put the collector's edition in my Amazon cart.

Dammit.

@cagliostro88: If you haven't heard this already this might blow your mind. In the sound options you can select the BW soundtrack! All the BW music was so memorable, the terran themes catchy as hell, the protoss music stately, majestic but also very listen-able, and the zerg themes creepy but have a sick beat here or there.

Anyone who's far enough in the campaign, is the story the same generic garbage as WoL/HotS/D3 again?

I went back and played a mission on normal for funsies and apparently on normal you get 3x Warp-ins from one Gateway, which is just so hilariously overpowered. 6 Gateways = 18 Gateways! Infinite DTs doing work in practically every mission, and I fucking love DTs so can't really make me more happy than that.

@belegorm: The characters are way better than HotS, the story seems headed in the general direction of genericness but some cool stuff happened already (8 missions in, taking a few hours off) and I guess technically they have to find some sort of ending. 5 out of 8 missions were "Defend X while killing Y" so far.

@belegorm: i had no idea, thanks for the tip! :)

I'm 7 missions in and the story it's along the expected lines, tho contrary to @fredchuckdave I'm preferring HotS characterization to LotV (so far), especially because the characters sometimes deliver some of the cheesiest/terrible lines i've heard in a while. [Spoiler: after the first 3 planets completed]:

Artanis actually say basically "i am young leader, i do not know if i can bear the responsability" sorta randomly as an introduction of his character; ol' Jimmy going "even the zerg weren't so horrible!" as to characterize a bigger threat, well blizzy show me that instead of telling me, because from past games i would say zerg infestation was way worse than what the hybryds were doing to that city. Also the "poor dead boys"...Jimmy, you've seen milions of casualties (often by your hand) in years of war and now it's the time you decide to say that? That whole Khoral cutscene was terrible (ofc it's just my personal thought). Ah and let's not forget the delivery of the line "choose the mantle of...DARK TEMPLAR!" with subsequent cool guy walking away from explosion :D Altough i like the death of Zeratul because it came as a real surprise; and "Skippy" got a real laugh out of me :)

Edit: nevermind, i've just completed mission 10 and this is bad, like real bad. The "oh god our entire writing team left/was fired and now we have cobble things together somehow; fill the cutscene with action and let's pray people will be distracted by shiny blades" kind of bad. If you can play through that mission without constantly thinking only "what?how?eh?" you're my hero. I don't know what to think or expect from the rest of the game

I remember when Starcraft 2 first came out, Brad could hardly contain his excitement. Now, no QL or even a mention on the podcast. How times have changed...

Man the mission structure so far is really getting me down. "Survive until" or "defend this until you can destroy this" seems to be the go to for the expansion. If I wanted to do that I'd ladder. Give me something interesting and unique to do please.

@bobby_the_great: He seemed pretty excited once he launched it judging by his tweets.

Finished on Hard (I always do Hard first then Brutal immediately just for more replay value); I suspect there's only 2 particularly difficult missions on Brutal but we'll see; also my ancient comp will most likely prevent me from playing co-op reliably (might play at another location); took about 20 hours give or take, minus my inordinately long load times. The story is solid/predictable I think (though the character interplay is still relatively neat even if the characters are fairly stock), the epilogue missions are all fantastic (well one of them has a rather noticeable issue if you play it optimally). The ending was more or less what I expected, including the final final cutscene; which means there's really only one big surprise and that happens in the first few missions.

Some of the Mastery achievements are a bit puzzling this time around which is a nice change, even Aces High you pretty much know what to do it's just a matter of executing. The "last" mission in the main campaign is probably a little bit harder than All In on Brutal, though I think that's just because you're playing Protoss. Some of the mutations are OP and Adun's Spear is ridiculously OP but the Protoss themselves are fairly balanced on the campaign front (whereas the Zerg are extremely overpowered and the Terrans are still a bit more powerful than the Protoss (ignoring Adun's Spear).

I'm assuming there's a secret mission I missed somewhere, no idea how to get it (well a few ideas but done for today). Now to see if my comp can handle Brutal; if it performs badly enough I might actually do the 100%'ing in the future sometime which would be an odd change I suppose but hey more SC2 to look forward to.

Mission design/structure gets a bit better past the first 8-ish missions and I found almost every mission very fun to play. The exceptions were the Colossus mission which serves as a solid reminder that Colossus AI is still real dumb (they perform fine in other missions of course) and the push/pull mission which is a really cool idea but the map layout is just kind of fucked; wasn't hard but I wanted a bit more freedom of choice I suppose; I think if they tuned it better/designed the terrain better it would be great.

Will I be able to resist the urge to buy a new PC and/or upgrade an existing one? Only time will tell.

Will this thread be buried under a deluge of Fallout 4 threads? Of course.

@fredchuckdave: While ducking the spoiler tags its good to see it holds up about as well I as I expect.

And yes. This game is very niche (which is a sad thing for a once very popular series by one of the big companies). Fall Out 4 completely over-whelmed it. Though, perhaps its also that..has anyone from GB even mentioned this? Played a single minute of it? No complaint if so, yah know a lot of stuff's come out but eh, this community is often driven by what the main cast enjoys.

Dude's got a point.

Just finished the epilogue campaign...i'm so disappointed :(

If this is Blizzard's swan song for single player RTS campaings, it's a huge let down for me. The story and the vast majority of missions design feel so, i don't know, uninspired? It's hard for me to believe that this is what they had in mind when planning this trilogy...

enjoying the first bit i've played so far- maybe 7 or 8 missions in? good fun.

the story so far is par for 2015 blizzard- which is to say, pretty uninspired. i'm getting pretty bored with sci-fi that deals in "hey we all dislike each other but MAN we better unite to deal with this OVERWHELMING EVIL." to be fair, they did start this thing like, 5 years ago (when it was less stale). but there's no way they can deliver on it, and some of the impressions i've seen in this thread seem to confirm that.

but it IS super fun using some old-timey protoss units.

@csl316: Brad started playing it? There is a god!

If there is a QL now and it comes up on the bombcast for a brief week it'll be like all is fine with the world, in a world where brad is playing SC2 and not dota.

I'm trying to get back into the multiplayer like I was in WoL but so far I just can't :( The game seems even more punishing than it was before and it was already pretty punishing.

I'm enjoying the campaign much more now than I was before. The first few missions were really not that fun in my opinion, but it definitely picks up. Especially once you start to get the tech tree opened up. And the Spear of Adun powers are ridiculously broken in a fun way. Can't say that the story is all that original, but I'm still enjoying seeing all of my favorite characters struggle against this great evil. I'm not really expecting a great narrative at this point anyway.

Don't worry about it! Watch some old Newbie Tuesdays, and just focus on your own actions without worrying about winning or losing. Keep your builds simple so it's easier to tell what you did wrong, and have a laugh at the expense of all the salty people who claim you didn't win legitimately, or blame imbalance for their own blindness.

@ekajarmstro: Just avoid it like me and spend all your time in co-op missions instead.

@csl316: Some of the achievements are bugged and Master Archives is sketchy so guess it's Co-op missions for me as well. I'll still beat Brutal even if the game doesn't give me credit for it /shrug.

@ekajarmstro: I think the game is both a bit more complicated than before, and also the average skill level of the average player is higher than before, so it seems even more impenetrable to get into. However, if you just try to have fun and find people to play with (neither of which I'm particularly good at doing), then it becomes much easier

Watching Polt play multiplayer is mesmerizing.

Still have to play HotS first, I too was a scrubby bronze but the campaign in WoL was really well done so I might get it for that.

We should get Giant Bomb groups going for all regions, for easy access to friendly people who like Starcraft.

I really want Starcraft but I have no time to play it. I will hopefully get the special edition sometime later, that way I can get the heroes of the storm character with it.

@rujasu: That actually sounds like a neat idea, I haven't really had people to play with apart from just laddering (which is kinda soulless), since I started playing again. Somehow I don't think I'll ever relive the all-nighter BW lan parties again, but at least having a crew of people to play with would be better than going it alone.

We used to have a pretty active GiantBomb channel during the WoL days, enough for tournaments and such. Someone should make that!

Hell, one of our guys went pro with Vile, then Quantic. That was Domorin, this might be him.

It's probably for the best to make a new group for LotV, even if there's some old relic GB groups still around, to get a fresh start on things. If anyone feels like setting things up I'd be happy to ape the structure over on the EU side too.

Maybe with a new fancy name too, like Legacy of the Bomb or something.

@rujasu: doesn't necessarily have to be 2 separate groups, you can switch servers pretty much on the fly. I'm in eastern NA and I was pretty excited for LotV so since it launched earlier in EU I logged on there, obviously more lag than on NA but not super noticeable. IIRC I think it was Polt normally plays on KR from Atlanta.

@belegorm: The 300ms or so lag is still a lot for some people, and the time difference even moreso. I mean, I totally will join the US group if it gets made but it's nice to have a local variant for those who don't want to make the sacrifice of playability.

@starvinggamer I beat Last Stand on Brutal and it wasn't too bad, the 2.2 bil achievement seems a little more feasible now. Turns out Energizers (attack/move speed sentries) are pretty good when you have four automated assimilators in the first minute or so; super speedy army. Probably smooth sailing till the last mission now though again the achievements have been spotty for me.

@fredchuckdave: I just got the +2 range Sentries and those seem pretty boss-Toss, not sure why I never bothered with the attack speed ones. The death balls get pretty fucking stupid in the campaign. Spread-shot Voidrays are extra fucking dumb.