User blog comment:Hawki/Nova Covert Ops, part 1 - Reflections/@comment-250398-20160524122929

Man I have no idea how you manage to juggle so many wikis when I have enough trouble just keeping up with this one.

Some observations, because for the most part I agree on your points. I think the thing that kneecapped NCO out the gate, and the reason for a lot of your points stem from the length and distribution model (three mission bursts). The three main expansion pack games took time at the beginning to establish characters and motivations, but with nine missions there hasn't really been time to do anything other then establish the state of the Dominion, Nova's memory situation and the DoM. It had to carry the weight of what would be gradually revealed through later cutscenes and between mission dialogue all up in the front.

The same really can be said for its weapon system, it felt like it wanted to establish how to use less intuitive items like the sword and jetpack and give missions focused on them. The problem is gameplaywise this means they just put out a glorified tutorial for the first mission pack. It doesn't help that with nine missions, that means we only have six missions to use the game's cool army upgrade system; less if we have more infiltration focused missions.

I will say for my gripes, I'm still hopeful for where it goes from here. Nova's reactionary nature went a bit with her situation at the beginning of Covert Ops: agents follow orders. But by the end she seems to have gotten her own army and some agency, so the story's direction may be more in her hands. Hopefully as the game goes into the nature of her serving DoM and her altered memories the story will take a more personal direction where it will feel like her story. But we'll have to see, I'll be disappointed if they keep her as a gun for Valerian to get rid of things with.

The sterileness of the cutscenes was most certainly felt (god I disliked the last one for multiple reasons), the introduction of Reigel started to give Nova some flavor during the missions, now that she had someone to play off. While his design was probably the most boring I've seen of an SC character so far, the banter the two had during the zerg garrison section started to make it feel like a Nova game. But again the three mission burst made it stop just as the ball started to get rolling.

I will say that the ending reveal was a massive letdown. "The DoM are doing bad things!" Even without the Radio Liberty ARG (which incidentally may have hyped things up a bit too much for me) that was something most people could assume just from the first mission. After they brought up how the mission packs would end on big cliffhanger reveals I was hoping we'd get more into the nature of their history or at least a hint of why Nova joined them.

Also I always thought that this occurred after the Dominion Golden Age. I have nothing to back that up mind you, except how ambiguous they left the current timeline (leaving me to write "After the End War" sixty trillion times). I've got my fingers crossed the DoM aren't canon doomed and actually will have some lasting impact on things, but time will tell.