Re: Blizzard used to be good
Ok, I'll bite. The original Starcraft had 30 missions in it. Ten with each race if I remember correctly. Starcraft 2 has 29 different missions (with 26 playable on a given walkthrough). Four of the missions involve the Protoss, but the rest are Terran. The 2 games essentially have the same number of missions.
Because the early missions on a given race are really tutorial missions, the missions don't really get good until 4 or 5 missions into a given race. With the Protoss missions in Wings of Liberty, Blizzard were very clever in ramping up the complexity much earlier by doing things like giving you pre-built bases so you can just concentrate on unit control. Overall, I would say about 25 missions on Wings of Liberty are interesting and replayable; compared to about 15-18 missions on the original Starcraft. This means that in all the years I've had Starcraft I've played through the single player missions 2 or 3 times. With Starcraft 2 I've played through the entire mission set at least 10 times, twice on Brutal, and once (on Normal) with no upgrades being used at all.
I, for one, find the fact that blizzard released one race at a time a huge uptick. And I've been looking forward to Heart of the Swarm for an ago. I'll be switching to Diablo 3 on release day though.