This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.Yikes. SC2 is aging and running out of ideas, so they brought their scrapped heroine from the depths of a forgotten project and gave her her-own story. The idea has so much potential, but YEESH this was disappointing. It's not dreadful, just disappointing. Start with the good: SCCO gameplay is alright, but very, very little has changed from the usual SC2 formula you've played for some time now. The missions bring decent variety, and you're rewarded for hunting down bonus objectives with new gear for Nova and her army which can be selected in an equipment menu. However, the gear you get is highly limited in multiple ways.
1) you can only equip ONE item per unit, and now it's 'occupied', so you can't give the same item to multiple units (ie you can't give cloak to everyone.) 2) not all units are compatible with every item. 3) they range from OP (stimpack) to useless ('SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCES BUILD TIME'.15%ish is NOT significant). The length of the game is commendable, however. Each 'pack' has about 10 missions on it, so that is technically a lot of content; it's just not exciting, and has no replay value.
Oh, harder difficulties? You can play it again, but now you die faster!
Everything you need to know about Starcraft II: Nova Covert Ops - Mission Pack 3. Everything you need to know about Starcraft II: Nova Covert Ops - Mission Pack 3. Wage war across the galaxy with three unique and powerful races. StarCraft II is a real-time strategy game from Blizzard Entertainment for the PC and Mac.
Bliz didn't listen to the community's cries on Heart of Swarm because EVERY mission is a 'race' except 1-2. There's even a mission where a battlecruiser swoops in to escort you to your objective. Between such limited equipment, timelimits, and other timed things like that battlecruiser escort, the player has little freedom as to how to play. They can only play the way the devs tell them they can, when they can, if they can.
If it's going to be THAT on-rails, why not just make it a cutscene?.Cringes. OoOooOo speaking of cutscenes, this games plot is garbage.
It has a neat twist or 2, but the story telling is slow, all the characters are forgettable, and the protagonist actively wants you do dislike her. Nova's personality resembles an angsty 14yr old. How can you make a ruthless spec ops sniper have such a childish, pouty demeanor?
You know, the same personality of Kerrigan in HoS.or you know, EVERY F%.^ING CHARACTER. What is this s., Hit-Girl In Space?? Why does every writer default to making this same, cringy, premadonna, adolescent, tryhard, SICK-BURN, YO, bull.#@ that we literally see in every. Movie/video game. Oh, and the token black man!
END PERSONALITY DESCRIPTION. NONE of the characters see any development whatsoever; not to the plot, not to each other, not to past events, not even to the villain!
Everyone is a 1D, predictable, cardboard cutout. The villain speech is so direct and non-flamboyant, she should just stick her face into the camera and slowly scream 'III.AAAAAAMM.DDAAAA.BAAAAD.GUUYYYY' Her motivation isn't revealed, she doesn't tie into the main plot (but she does bring her Jimmy Stewart charisma to COOP mode's Part & Parcel, which is unbearable too), and at the end, she dies in the most anticlimactic way possible.
Was it an epic duel? Was Nova ambushed and had to be saved by her old friends deus ex machina?? Nova flies away GG.
Was bliz intending to tell this story to retards? 'IN DA FUTUR DERS A BAAAAD GUYYY AND A GOOOD GUYY. DA BAD GUY SAY 'IMA BE BAAADD' BUT DA GOOD GUY SAY 'UNLESS I.sunglasses.KILL YOU' OOOH SICK BURN!11 DA GOOD GUY SHOOTED DA BAD GUY BC BAD GUY WAS BAAAAD, BUT GOOD GUY WAS TOLD 'NO DONT KILL!11!' BUT GOOD GUY DO IT ANYWAY.BC SHE A LOOSE CANNON COP THAT DUDENT PLAY BY DA RUUUULES.
Hey, a black man! DUUUH EEEEND!
What's really sad is how people keep gobbling this s. up! The perfect metaphor for our media today is an assembly line. No inspiration, no lovable characters, no memorable moments.
Mass production for mass consumption. Everything devolves into Hit-Girl with her diversity sidekick and saturating it in CGI to mask the paper-thin plot with a little political correctness or a 'LOL TRUMP STUPID' joke. All that's missing is the villain wasn't a Trump parody with a mission where you blow up a wall he built to keep the Protoss out, and this checks every box of a MOAR MUNNY production. Skip it or wait for a sale if you're a die-hard SC fan.
Many StarCraft II players are still busy getting through Legacy of the Void. But developer Blizzard Entertainment is already looking toward the future.(out now on PC and Mac) wraps up a story that began in 1998 with the release of the original StarCraft. But that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the long-running real-time strategy series. At last week’s BlizzCon fan convention, Blizzard revealed that the sci-fi story would live on in, which will have levels and objectives based around different StarCraft characters.The first Mission Pack, Nova Covert Ops, comes out next spring.
It’s about the deadly sniper Nova, a fan-favorite, and her elite black ops team. These extra story campaigns are part of a new “micro-content” strategy Blizzard is using for StarCraft II. This plan also includes new multiplayer skins for individual battlefield units, new voice packs, and more missions for Legacy of the Void’s cooperative multiplayer mode.It’s safe to say that Blizzard is far from being done with the franchise.I met with lead producer Tim Morten at BlizzCon to find out more about the company’s commitment to expanding StarCraft II. According to Morten, the majority of people who play the game play it for the story campaigns, so it was only natural for the development team to continue working on that kind of content.“We feel like there’s so many potential stories to be told in the StarCraft universe,” he said.Here’s a detailed breakdown of what Blizzard has in store for both Nova Covert Ops and future Mission Packs.youtube going on with Nova, anyway?Nova Covert Ops takes place a few years after the ending from Legacy of the Void. During a BlizzCon panel about the future of StarCraft II, writer Valerie Watrous dropped a few details about what the universe is like in that time. The Dominion (the governing body of humankind, or Terrans in StarCraft parlance) consists of a war-torn people. Over the years, they’ve been through different battles, both against each other and against the bug-like Zergs.
They just want peace.Emperor Valerian Mengsk is a much more progressive ruler than his father Arcturus, who perished in Heart of the Swarm (the second StarCraft II expansion). He grants his people civil liberties (like freedom of the press) that they never had before. But this leaves him open to attacks in the media from his critics. Valerian worries that his outspoken enemies are forming secret alliances to try to oust him from power.One of those alliances is the Defenders of Man. On the surface, it vows to protect the world from future alien invasions, which makes the Defenders of Man popular among the people. But something weird is going on. In the teaser trailer for Nova Covert Ops that debuted last week, Nova wakes up in a mysterious place — this facility actually belongs to the alliance.She doesn’t know how she got there, but through the course of her adventure, she’ll find out what the Defenders of Man is really up to.
Like the main campaigns, Nova Covert Ops will have cutscenes that help tell the story. Image Credit: Giancarlo Valdes/GamesBeat Nova Covert Ops will come out in three chunksNova Covert Ops is a standalone story arc told over the course of nine different missions. But Blizzard isn’t going to release all of them at once. They’ll come out in three different sets, with each set containing three missions.
After Blizzard releases the first set, some time will pass, and then they’ll release the next one, and so on. It’s a different schedule from what the StarCraft team is used to.In the past, it made expansions that were two or more years apart from release. The first chapter of the StarCraft II trilogy, Wings of Liberty, came out in 2010, and Heart of the Swarm appeared on store shelves in 2013.“It’s sort of changing the way we approach releasing content,” said Morten. “The work that we’re doing is commensurate to what we would do when we make a full expansion like Legacy of the Void. But instead of waiting two years, we’re delivering work as we complete it.”I asked Morten if the staggered schedule has anything to do with the growing trend of episodic games (as popularized by Telltale Games’s work with licensed properties).“We definitely looked at that and we also looked just upstairs at the Heroes of the Storm team and the wonderful content cadence that they’ve accomplished in terms of releasing new heroes, new map content,” he said. “I think that audience responds so well to the continuity of it that we want to try to provide that for StarCraft.”Blizzard is still figuring out how it’ll price these Mission Packs, but Morten said they’re going to try to make them a “great value” for players. Image Credit: Giancarlo Valdes/GamesBeat Mission Packs could explore multiple timelines and charactersWhile Nova Covert Ops takes place after Legacy of the Void, Blizzard is open to exploring different timelines.
Starcraft 2 Nova Covert Ops Mission Pack 3
We might see flashbacks or tales that take place concurrently with the events from the StarCraft II trilogy. Just don’t count on seeing any of the major characters returning.“I think all options are on the table in the future, but we really have tried to resolve the story around Raynor, Kerrigan, and Artanis,” said Morten. “So there’s a reluctance on our part to open new plot lines for those characters. We don’t want to stray into that territory of making people feel like ‘to be continued’ should be at the end of Legacy of the Void. Legacy of the Void really is meant to tie up their story.”However, other characters that players are familiar with from the campaigns will show up in Nova Covert Ops. It’s these side characters that makes Blizzard so excited for the Mission Packs.
Morten said it feels like they have “so much fertile ground to explore.”“Characters we touched on lightly over the course of the campaign or characters we never met before — I think there’s a lot of opportunity to get creative with what we have post-launch,” he added. Image Credit: Giancarlo Valdes/GamesBeat Is StarCraft III still a possibility?Whether Blizzard continues making these one-off stories or begins working on another big entry in the franchise depends on how fans respond to the Mission Packs.“If the feedback is they’d like to see more of this type of content, we’re certainly excited to build it,” said Morten. “If the feedback we get is they want to see entire new games, than that’s something we’ll consider as well.”It’s a fascinating evolution for the 17 year-old series.
The micro-content plans puts StarCraft II more in line with other Blizzard games like Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm, both of which receive a steady stream of updates throughout the year.“You look back on StarCraft 1 — Brood War is really what everyone remembers about StarCraft 1, even though it was an expansion of the base product. I think Legacy of the Void is that to StarCraft II,” said Morten.
Starcraft 2 Nova Mission Pack 3
“Our hope is that this is the pinnacle of StarCraft II development from a feature and content perspective, and that players enjoy it so much that this is the memory that they carry forward with them about StarCraft II.”.