Why was it so incredibly soulless?

Bad story and mediocre art style. Mechanically it's pretty fun.

E-sports first, the game is made for& balanced around people who play the game not for fun, but to make money. Game is too fast&tedious, so it is better to watch it on twitch.

Also relasing the game as a 3 parter with a fuckhuge campaign in each was a retarded idea. They should have chopped that to 9 campaigns, story would automatically ended up better. Waiting years in between and all the filler in campaigns soured people to the game.

1v1 is good.
Campaign is shit because:
>WoL: every mission gives you a new unit and capitalizes on mass producing it.
>HotS: retarded story, Hero unit, same thing as WoL, time limits
>LotV: pretty bad story, jerking off Amon all the time, same thing as WoL, hero units, powers

SC1 and WC3 also gave you a new unit per mission and usually designed the mission around using it.

I remember WC3 pretty fine - even tried reforged shit no so long ago. It's pretty true for about 2-3 missions and then you go back to basic sharpshooters, weavers or whatever.
I don't remember SC1 so good, but I'm sure I used mostly mutas, tanks/vultures/turrets and mass dragoons/carriers (and probably some arbiters later on).

>every mission gives you a new unit and capitalizes on mass producing it
Although it teaches poor strategy, it wouldn't be bad as a tutorial-ish thing if they were all units that you could actually use in multiplayer instead of half campaign-only.

Well you can just ignore the new unit, but you could also try that for SC2.

For example in SC1 the mission where you have to hold off zerg for 30 minutes they give up the academy and vultures. You can hold it just spamming bunkers, but getting marine range and using spider mines is intended. In one mission you get kerrigan for the first time youre supposed ot use her cloak to run into the CC and take it over, rather than moving your entire army through. And then you get access to wraiths and dropships and the enemy base is on an island. In the mission that gets you nukes the enemy has way bigger defenses than normal with no detection, and nukes help you bust it down.
I beat the final SC1 mission with a maxed out army of marines and zealots, but thats probably not how the designer intended it.

For SC2 you can do the same, in the one mission where you have to destroy convoys the best unit is the one that can shoot on the move that is given for that mission. But an army of stimmed marines can do just fine too

>the mission on Mar Sara
>me as a Kid "THIS IS SO HARD AND COOL"
>me as an adult "Time to build 5 billion Marines and get rid of the zerg"

made to be an esport instead of actually fun

I replay the campaign at least twice a year.

I agree to some point. I remembered that one mission when you get Nidus network and it's pretty hard to win that without capitalizing on it.
It's just that SC2 is capitalizing way to much, I believe. Like when you get Battlecruisers in SC1 you, well, just get Battlecruisers and the AI opponent have some serious air defenses on a remote island, iirc. And in SC2 not only that, but you also have this draining field that only units with a lot of HP can withstand and generators that are hard to get to by ground.
I'm not counting all those tactical missions with not base or hero units missions.

I really enjoyed it. The campaigns were a blast and more fun than SC/BW.

I outgrew RTS multiplayer so it being shit never really bothered me.

WoL should ve been Raynor vs Mengsk only, no prophecy bullshit.

>here is the new unit for you
>just mass produce it for the win
Nah.

>jim pining for sarah like a 18 year old boy rather than just someone who's bitter and looking for a moment to put her out of her misery
>mengsk being completely incompetent and fucking everything up, after being extremely resourceful in SC1
>kerrigan being good deep inside and held captive, even though broodwar was all about showing that kerrigan was irredeemable and needed to get murdered
>mengsk's son being able to command an army capable of busting char, when mengsk+UED+protoss together couldnt take down a weakened zerg stuck on a space platform
SC2 had a lot of problems outside of le prophesy of teh doom. But amon didnt help. Ironic how the biggest cliffhanger ended up fucking up the story the most. It wouldve been better if they just kept PvZvT going

Not only that: it sometimes teaches the player to use the unit in the wrong way. In HotS Swarm hosts are used to defend waves of units while the player has limited resources, but Swarm hosts are actually a siege unit that sends waves of locusts to push/harass the enemy base. In WoL there is that Helion mission that makes the player use them defensively or go far away to destroy defenseless (almost, I believe there were a spine or two) buildings.

because the editor is shit and they made custom maps and campaigns a chore to play to push their paid maps store. Fuck Blizzard.

It really doesn't help that IIRC they didn't update the campaign after revamping units in multiplayer.

>the editor is shit
This is a real shame, it was pretty powerful but horribly designed.

They absolutely did not. Like Reapers are building destroyers in WoL campaign.

It's just embarrassing with how "quality" Blizzard was supposed to have been. A game where the campaign teaches you things that are totally wrong for multiplayer, and not just because of how levels are structured, is ridiculous.

It still feels like yesterday when everyone thought SC2 was the new coming of WC3 but with better graphics and a higher capacity engine to handle more unique types of gameplay.

Editor being retardedly difficult to use aside, the terms and agreements that Activision Blizzard placed effectively killed custom mapmaking. Why make something if Blizzard's just gonna take it, monetize it, and claim they made it?

>Why make something if Blizzard's just gonna take it, monetize it, and claim they made it?
Wasn't that part new for the WC3 remake?

its a sad state of affairs when they have to change units completely, because they have no clue how to balance them

Meh, I'll let them get away with it. There's no amount of testing that can find every way the metagame will evolve and sometimes reworking a unit is a better choice than trying to tweak numbers until it's useless. Not that their balancing has been great, but it's hard to get right.

It's a 10yo game. Either you tweak stuff or you make a new one. And they are obviously incapable of that.

>And they are obviously incapable of that.
I'm not too upset. I don't want to see what they'd come up with at this point. 5 bucks says they'd bring the UED back and Kerrigan would somehow end up destroying Earth.

>Tailor made for e-sports instead going the Brood War way
>Story was horrible and Wings of Liberty was the only good thing about it
>Only saving graces are the campaign exclusive stuff and mechanics along with co-op commanders
Honestly? It's not fun and more of a click-fest. If co-op commanders were the default game mode, then it would've been a massive improvement.