2011 sucked then, because that thing is almost physically painful at how generic it is.
There’s a difference between generic and complete fucking nonsense that falls apart upon cursory examination.
Blizzard’s writing is unbelievably bad. I cannot stress that enough. Like, the composition of every single individual scenes is blatantly nonsensical.
In Warcraft 3, the opening cinematic is Medivh barging in on a council meeting to rave like a loon. When they treat him like a loon as normal people would do, he acts offended and leaves. This makes him look like an idiot and an asshole. He could have shown them a powerpoint presentation explaining the legion and scourge plans, but instead he raves like a loon and then leaves. All the millions of dead villagers are on his hands.
Arthas did nothing wrong and Uther is an asshole without integrity who would rather let villagers die than place his prince under house arrest. The plot was so painfully railroaded that there was really nothing they could’ve done.
Why is Frostmourne guarded by revenants that warn Arthas it is evil and why does the plaque say it is evil, if in reality Nerzhul put it there for Arthas to find? Why go to all the effort to make it look like it was sealed away and guarded by good guys? Nerzhul never displays that sort of theatrical style before or after this.
In starcraft 1, kerry publicly murders the protoss president in the middle of a global televised meeting and suffers no consequences. They just let her leave rather than immediately killing or imprisoning her like sane people would do. Not only that, but she murdered him to keep him from revealing that… she was manipulating them! So she prevented them from learning she was their enemy by doing the exact thing that an enemy would do? Logic!
In starcraft 2, Raynor breaks into Valery’s ship, kills two innocent guards doing their jobs, then accepts Valery’s sudden offer of alliance. What? He just murdered two innocent dudes doing their jobs! Raynor and Valery are unlikable assholes who treat human lives as canon fodder. These are our heroes?
Ray later murders his best friend to rescue a genocidal psychopath who slaughtered billions of innocent people for fun. His friend has no logical reason to keep her alive, every reason to hate her, and has a nonsensical magical bomb inside him that will go off if he doesn’t kill her. There is so much fractal stupid here that my brain hurts.
Stormgate may be shallow style without substance, but it’s still far and above any of Blizzard’s past work.
If your interest is single player only I don't think there's any reason to follow this. It is obvious you cannot expect good story or atmosphere from it.
Yeah. Why is modern storytelling so bad? It wasn’t great to begin with for RTS games, since video game writing has never been a priority, but how has it gotten actively unbearable for the majority of RTS? Stories are painfully predictable, cliched, and attempts to write characters result in universally unlikable idiotic assholes with inconsistent motives.
The only RTS story written in the last decade that doesn’t make me want to strangle the writer is
Godsworn. It’s a breath of fresh air and we need RTS writers to learn from that.