So I've seen a lot of discussion in the past about how SC2 has a terrible story, but how is the SC1/BW story?
I first played SC1/BW back in the early 2000s and I simply consumed the story without critical thought since I was young and lacking in critical thinking skills. Years later I came back, when my tastes had matured and I was consuming fiction like Game of Thrones and The Expanse. Considering how much people compare the SC1/BW story favorably against SC2, I'm astonished by that fact that it isn't actually all that good.
Most of the world building is in the manual, which most people didn't actually read. I was lucky that I knew there was a manual, but without it a lot of the events in the game can easily seem incomprehensible.
Anyway, the plot feels very disjointed and haphazard because the level design is trying to fit studio mandates about tilesets and versus battles. According to interviews, the cinematics were made separately from the game levels so they don't always mesh well with the story.
What plot there is also feels shallow, lazy, and in some cases outright ridiculous. It feels to me like the writer started with a pre-determined set of highlights to hit, but couldn't actually write a series of events that felt believable.
The Confederacy are cartoonish villains whose behavior doesn't make a lot of sense, at least not when you compare them with historical authoritarian regimes. The Korhal rebellion, genocide, and takeover doesn't feel very believable: the closest comparison I can think of would be to the USA nuking Puerto Rico for wanting to secede, somehow without causing a civil war due to the mass murder, then the surviving Puerto Ricans nuking Washington D.C. and taking over the USA without complaint... and this takeover occurred after China and Russia spontaneously attacked the USA then left after destroying most of the infrastructure. The interstellar politics don't feel believable.
I didn't think it was a good use of time for the terran campaign to focus on rebellion and neglect the alien invasion part. The aliens are treated mostly as a plot device and later plot convenience when the zerg conveniently destroy Tarsonis for Mengsk's benefit. When the aliens then leave rather than continuing their attack because it would be inconvenient for Mengsk if they stayed, then I totally lost my suspension of disbelief.
The zerg campaign didn't feel well put together. The zerg have consumed countless worlds and species, yet they went on a wild goose chase to capture one girl and praise her as a messiah? This feels really silly and incongruous. Most of plot is about her and her highly questionable contributions to the zerg, then in the last two missions she disappears from the plot even though she was originally intended to fight that conflict and not the one she finally ended up in. Again, the plot doesn't feel organic and the plot threads do not line up in a satisfactory manner. I think it would have made much more sense if their campaign was about the invasion of human worlds and processing the population for psychic mutations.
At this point I'm too tired to keep trying to find problems, but I'll try. The protoss campaign didn't feel well constructed either. The dark and light protoss schism isn't well explained or resolved in a satisfactory manner, they just get forced to fight together because it's the apocalypse. At one point a protoss leader surrenders to halt the bloodshed, then when you rescue him by fighting another bloody he's very cheerful and not at all concerned about the soldiers you killed to rescue him. The story tries really hard to make the light protoss look like the bad guys, but reading the manual it seems like their actions are justified since the dark protoss nearly caused an apocalypse in their own past. The story never gives a satisfactory reason for the two to reconcile beyond an alliance of convenience.
There are some terrans there too, but their presence in the story doesn't feel genuine but a result of studio mandate due to the prior trajectory of the story. I think it would have made more sense for the protoss campaign to focus on their invasion of terran space, which would make the presence of terrans and any alliance with terrans feel much more organic.
The ending includes an obligatory sequel hook, but it feels really forced since the campaigns all ended with every side being devastated by apocalyptic conditions. (Don't get me started on the plot of the following BW campaigns.)
Overall, the story of the first three campaigns feel mediocre to me. Whatever story they tried to tell was hamstrung by a combination of studio mandates and the writer making highly questionable decisions.
I don't blame it for being bad, considering the technical limitations and budgets and tons of other factors. Most video game stories aren't very good, since they're games first and foremost.
What really confuses me is that fans of the story still praise it 22 years later, even though it really isn't very good. I've found myself in more than a few arguments where my opponents think the story is perfect, which confuses me to no end.
I think that you have six posts on this site almost all, if not all, bashing the SP story of SC1/BW. It is at least the second "bait" from you that I see, the original ones being on the BW general discussion, most of which ignored as people quickly realised your plot (yup pun intended).
People on TL are here mostly for the multiplayer part of the game, not SP. Go bait somewhere else.
Despite the above, I'll leave you with this food for thought: not agreeing with you but still believing the story isn't some masterpiece is also a perfectly reasonable position. There is a wide gap between trash story and "perfect" as you describe it. There is acceptable in the middle somewhere, maybe that is why you feel confused when you have those debates.
SC1’s story isn’t a masterpiece. It’s pretty solid fare for a game from the late 90s. Does the job.
I don’t even think your reading of the story is particularly correct. The Dark Templar didn’t cause the Aeon of Strife, which was the near-apocalyptic event in the past of the Protoss. They just disagreed with linking into the Khala as a solution to prevent further problems and were exiled for this.
Eschewing the rigid hierarchy of Protoss society, what we see of the inflexibility of the system via Aldaris, and Tassadar’ role in seeking out the Dark Templar are all perfectly consistent in-universe. Tassadar dealing with humans, in stark contrast with Aldaris disliking it etc.
The Zerg don’t seek Kerrigan out. They’re delivered her by Mengsk ordering you to abandon that world. They subsequently discover she is a being with insane psionic potential and they assimilate her, and are subsequently rather protective of their new asset.
SC2’s story to me is a mess because character motivations make no fucking sense. Jim Raynor who vowed to kill Kerrigan now just, forgetting that entirely being the worst offender. SC1 doesn’t have as much jarring stuff, although it’s not exactly quality novel potential.
On August 12 2020 09:24 BigFan wrote: The story is perfection at its finest. Truly a masterpiece that few, if any games live up to. I'm glad that I was born to experience it.
Not sure why I typed about 7.8x the words to say that.
from a youtube comment, this sums up pretty much what i think about it:
"You know, these days people always talk about how "primitive" game stories were before 2005, but from where I'm standing, it seems to be the other way around. People who wrote games back then were nerds who had an appreciation for old school sci-fi, fantasy and literature. Now it seems to be written by hollywood dropouts, jampacked with every cliche in the book."
and here is the cinematics related to that comment, after you finish the first Terrain campaign:
yes of course videogame stories are sometimes limited and conditioned by the game-play. still, your advocating that the story is "bad" confuses me. Case if you listen to the speech and the video i posted, and you call it "bad" , i can' t really relate to what your taste is.
On August 12 2020 09:45 pebble444 wrote: from a youtube comment, this sums up pretty much what i think about it:
"You know, these days people always talk about how "primitive" game stories were before 2005, but from where I'm standing, it seems to be the other way around. People who wrote games back then were nerds who had an appreciation for old school sci-fi, fantasy and literature. Now it seems to be written by hollywood dropouts, jampacked with every cliche in the book."
yes of course videogame stories are sometimes limited and conditioned by the game-play. still, your advocating that the story is "bad" confuses me. Case if you listen to the speech and the video i posted, and you call it "bad" , i can' t really relate to what your taste is.
Agreed really. Old game stories were like A-B tier sci-fi stories back in the day. Now they’re C-grade Hollywood fare
My favourite game story ever, in the Marathon trilogy, Bungie’s Mac-centric FPS trilogy reads more like an obscure sci-fi novel than any Hollywood movie. One can play it for free nowadays and I can’t recommend it enough
SC1 in its entirety feels more like a sci-fi novel, maybe not an A-tier one, but certainly more that than a sci-fi movie. SC2 feels like a really bad sci-fi movie
OP's ridiculous iconoclasm borders on blasphemy. The tragedy of Reynor and Kerrigan is drama of Shakesperean magnitude and the game's sociopolitical commentary is so deep you can drown in it. Also the graphics in the cutscenes are really good, unlike games today.
What do you think the priority was for the storyline during production? Gameplay/graphics/balance/music/voice acting/cinematics may have all come before (budgetwise) storyline...or maybe it was quickly put together and everything else came after, refining the rest. At that point in video games (CD rom coming out) makes me think they'd focus on media. Either way it's a fine story that ties the room together nicely
i enjoyed the story, especially the BW zerg campaign. I also think that they didn't have enough time to flesh out the background and show more, but that is also a testament to the story being pretty good.
I think Blizzard lore and dialogue tend to be pretty shallow. While BW didn't have the best story, I think it was much better than many later Blizzard products including WoL. I imagine a lot of people hype up old Blizzard story-lines partly due to nostalgia but also because compared to a lot of their more recent work, they are honestly a lot better (and were also created back when some of the typical fantasy/sci-fi tropes were a little more 'fresh'). BW is not peak game writing but compared to some other Blizzard games, it might seem that way.
On August 12 2020 08:00 Wombat_NI wrote: SC1’s story isn’t a masterpiece. It’s pretty solid fare for a game from the late 90s. Does the job.
I don’t even think your reading of the story is particularly correct. The Dark Templar didn’t cause the Aeon of Strife, which was the near-apocalyptic event in the past of the Protoss. They just disagreed with linking into the Khala as a solution to prevent further problems and were exiled for this.
Eschewing the rigid hierarchy of Protoss society, what we see of the inflexibility of the system via Aldaris, and Tassadar’ role in seeking out the Dark Templar are all perfectly consistent in-universe. Tassadar dealing with humans, in stark contrast with Aldaris disliking it etc.
The Zerg don’t seek Kerrigan out. They’re delivered her by Mengsk ordering you to abandon that world. They subsequently discover she is a being with insane psionic potential and they assimilate her, and are subsequently rather protective of their new asset.
SC2’s story to me is a mess because character motivations make no fucking sense. Jim Raynor who vowed to kill Kerrigan now just, forgetting that entirely being the worst offender. SC1 doesn’t have as much jarring stuff, although it’s not exactly quality novel potential.
You misunderstood me. The dark templar started an apocalypse after the eon war. The manual says that the dark templar were exiled because they lost of control of their powers and caused psychic storms that devastated the homeworld. So, the judicator’s distrust seems justified. The fact that the eon war happened because the protoss lost their psychic link is more evidence, as we get clear evidence that the protoss are warlike in the extreme without the link. How do the dark templar avoid war without the link? None of this is ever addressed in the game stories, which I don’t like because I’m the sort of person who can get fairly invested in lore like that.
The shtick of the zerg is that they eat species and mass produce armies of monsters. The excessive focus on Kerry as an individual feel deeply incongruous with their shtick. (Saying that she’s a super special snowflake mary sue with the most psychic power ever sounds like a cheap childish copout to me. It was already established that psychic genes were distributed throughout the population and the zerg eat whole species, so I would have expected them to abduct loads of people for experimentation.) It feels like the writer simply liked her more (as stated in an interview), regardless of how that affected the characterization of the zerg overall. I didn’t like it and felt it did the zerg a huge disservice.
I’m not saying the story is unbearably terrible, but it’s nowhere near as good as nostalgic fans say it is. I don’t think it deserves the amount of praise it gets. I think the writer made a number of bad decisions that weakened the story.
On August 12 2020 08:00 Wombat_NI wrote: SC1’s story isn’t a masterpiece. It’s pretty solid fare for a game from the late 90s. Does the job.
I don’t even think your reading of the story is particularly correct. The Dark Templar didn’t cause the Aeon of Strife, which was the near-apocalyptic event in the past of the Protoss. They just disagreed with linking into the Khala as a solution to prevent further problems and were exiled for this.
Eschewing the rigid hierarchy of Protoss society, what we see of the inflexibility of the system via Aldaris, and Tassadar’ role in seeking out the Dark Templar are all perfectly consistent in-universe. Tassadar dealing with humans, in stark contrast with Aldaris disliking it etc.
The Zerg don’t seek Kerrigan out. They’re delivered her by Mengsk ordering you to abandon that world. They subsequently discover she is a being with insane psionic potential and they assimilate her, and are subsequently rather protective of their new asset.
SC2’s story to me is a mess because character motivations make no fucking sense. Jim Raynor who vowed to kill Kerrigan now just, forgetting that entirely being the worst offender. SC1 doesn’t have as much jarring stuff, although it’s not exactly quality novel potential.
You misunderstood me. The dark templar started an apocalypse after the eon war. The manual says that the dark templar were exiled because they lost of control of their powers and caused psychic storms that devastated the homeworld. So, the judicator’s distrust seems justified. The fact that the eon war happened because the protoss lost their psychic link is more evidence, as we get clear evidence that the protoss are warlike in the extreme without the link. How do the dark templar avoid war without the link? None of this is ever addressed in the game stories, which I don’t like because I’m the sort of person who can get fairly invested in lore like that.
The shtick of the zerg is that they eat species and mass produce armies of monsters. The excessive focus on Kerry as an individual feel deeply incongruous with their shtick. (Saying that she’s a super special snowflake mary sue with the most psychic power ever sounds like a cheap childish copout to me. It was already established that psychic genes were distributed throughout the population and the zerg eat whole species, so I would have expected them to abduct loads of people for experimentation.) It feels like the writer simply liked her more (as stated in an interview), regardless of how that affected the characterization of the zerg overall. I didn’t like it and felt it did the zerg a huge disservice.
I’m not saying the story is unbearably terrible, but it’s nowhere near as good as nostalgic fans say it is. I don’t think it deserves the amount of praise it gets. I think the writer made a number of bad decisions that weakened the story.
If you want to make that argument for Zerg, then you are also saying that Orson Scott Card got it wrong in Ender's Game + Show Spoiler [book spoilers] +
where a similar alien race decided to focus all their attention on one being, Ender.
On August 12 2020 08:00 Wombat_NI wrote: SC1’s story isn’t a masterpiece. It’s pretty solid fare for a game from the late 90s. Does the job.
I don’t even think your reading of the story is particularly correct. The Dark Templar didn’t cause the Aeon of Strife, which was the near-apocalyptic event in the past of the Protoss. They just disagreed with linking into the Khala as a solution to prevent further problems and were exiled for this.
Eschewing the rigid hierarchy of Protoss society, what we see of the inflexibility of the system via Aldaris, and Tassadar’ role in seeking out the Dark Templar are all perfectly consistent in-universe. Tassadar dealing with humans, in stark contrast with Aldaris disliking it etc.
The Zerg don’t seek Kerrigan out. They’re delivered her by Mengsk ordering you to abandon that world. They subsequently discover she is a being with insane psionic potential and they assimilate her, and are subsequently rather protective of their new asset.
SC2’s story to me is a mess because character motivations make no fucking sense. Jim Raynor who vowed to kill Kerrigan now just, forgetting that entirely being the worst offender. SC1 doesn’t have as much jarring stuff, although it’s not exactly quality novel potential.
You misunderstood me. The dark templar started an apocalypse after the eon war. The manual says that the dark templar were exiled because they lost of control of their powers and caused psychic storms that devastated the homeworld. So, the judicator’s distrust seems justified. The fact that the eon war happened because the protoss lost their psychic link is more evidence, as we get clear evidence that the protoss are warlike in the extreme without the link. How do the dark templar avoid war without the link? None of this is ever addressed in the game stories, which I don’t like because I’m the sort of person who can get fairly invested in lore like that.
The shtick of the zerg is that they eat species and mass produce armies of monsters. The excessive focus on Kerry as an individual feel deeply incongruous with their shtick. (Saying that she’s a super special snowflake mary sue with the most psychic power ever sounds like a cheap childish copout to me. It was already established that psychic genes were distributed throughout the population and the zerg eat whole species, so I would have expected them to abduct loads of people for experimentation.) It feels like the writer simply liked her more (as stated in an interview), regardless of how that affected the characterization of the zerg overall. I didn’t like it and felt it did the zerg a huge disservice.
I’m not saying the story is unbearably terrible, but it’s nowhere near as good as nostalgic fans say it is. I don’t think it deserves the amount of praise it gets. I think the writer made a number of bad decisions that weakened the story.
If you want to make that argument for Zerg, then you are also saying that Orson Scott Card got it wrong in Ender's Game + Show Spoiler [book spoilers] +
where a similar alien race decided to focus all their attention on one being, Ender.
Sure. Ender’s Game has received negative critical reviews before: “ The New York Times writer Gerald Jonas asserts that the novel's plot summary resembles a "grade Z, made-for-television, science-fiction rip-off movie", ”
Even so, I think it’s a false equivalence because the context is completely different. A better comparison would be the tyranids, flood, xenomorphs, vang, arachnids, pandoravirus, bydo, or some other devouring swarm in scifi.
On August 12 2020 08:00 Wombat_NI wrote: SC1’s story isn’t a masterpiece. It’s pretty solid fare for a game from the late 90s. Does the job.
I don’t even think your reading of the story is particularly correct. The Dark Templar didn’t cause the Aeon of Strife, which was the near-apocalyptic event in the past of the Protoss. They just disagreed with linking into the Khala as a solution to prevent further problems and were exiled for this.
Eschewing the rigid hierarchy of Protoss society, what we see of the inflexibility of the system via Aldaris, and Tassadar’ role in seeking out the Dark Templar are all perfectly consistent in-universe. Tassadar dealing with humans, in stark contrast with Aldaris disliking it etc.
The Zerg don’t seek Kerrigan out. They’re delivered her by Mengsk ordering you to abandon that world. They subsequently discover she is a being with insane psionic potential and they assimilate her, and are subsequently rather protective of their new asset.
SC2’s story to me is a mess because character motivations make no fucking sense. Jim Raynor who vowed to kill Kerrigan now just, forgetting that entirely being the worst offender. SC1 doesn’t have as much jarring stuff, although it’s not exactly quality novel potential.
You misunderstood me. The dark templar started an apocalypse after the eon war. The manual says that the dark templar were exiled because they lost of control of their powers and caused psychic storms that devastated the homeworld. So, the judicator’s distrust seems justified. The fact that the eon war happened because the protoss lost their psychic link is more evidence, as we get clear evidence that the protoss are warlike in the extreme without the link. How do the dark templar avoid war without the link? None of this is ever addressed in the game stories, which I don’t like because I’m the sort of person who can get fairly invested in lore like that.
The shtick of the zerg is that they eat species and mass produce armies of monsters. The excessive focus on Kerry as an individual feel deeply incongruous with their shtick. (Saying that she’s a super special snowflake mary sue with the most psychic power ever sounds like a cheap childish copout to me. It was already established that psychic genes were distributed throughout the population and the zerg eat whole species, so I would have expected them to abduct loads of people for experimentation.) It feels like the writer simply liked her more (as stated in an interview), regardless of how that affected the characterization of the zerg overall. I didn’t like it and felt it did the zerg a huge disservice.
I’m not saying the story is unbearably terrible, but it’s nowhere near as good as nostalgic fans say it is. I don’t think it deserves the amount of praise it gets. I think the writer made a number of bad decisions that weakened the story.
If you want to make that argument for Zerg, then you are also saying that Orson Scott Card got it wrong in Ender's Game + Show Spoiler [book spoilers] +
where a similar alien race decided to focus all their attention on one being, Ender.
Sure. Ender’s Game has received negative critical reviews before: “ The New York Times writer Gerald Jonas asserts that the novel's plot summary resembles a "grade Z, made-for-television, science-fiction rip-off movie", ”
Even so, I think it’s a false equivalence because the context is completely different. A better comparison would be the tyranids, flood, xenomorphs, vang, arachnids, pandoravirus, bydo, or some other devouring swarm in scifi.
The general consensus is that Ender's Game is a great book. You prove that there exist critical reviews despite it's positive reception that remains positive decades after it's creation. This is the very same thing happening here for your review of the Brood War story. You are critical of a story where decades later most still look on it positively, yet remain confused how that is possible. It's totally valid for you to feel the way you do about the story even if it is an unpopular opinion. To answer your OP, there should be nothing confusing about why we like it and you don't.
On August 12 2020 08:00 Wombat_NI wrote: SC1’s story isn’t a masterpiece. It’s pretty solid fare for a game from the late 90s. Does the job.
I don’t even think your reading of the story is particularly correct. The Dark Templar didn’t cause the Aeon of Strife, which was the near-apocalyptic event in the past of the Protoss. They just disagreed with linking into the Khala as a solution to prevent further problems and were exiled for this.
Eschewing the rigid hierarchy of Protoss society, what we see of the inflexibility of the system via Aldaris, and Tassadar’ role in seeking out the Dark Templar are all perfectly consistent in-universe. Tassadar dealing with humans, in stark contrast with Aldaris disliking it etc.
The Zerg don’t seek Kerrigan out. They’re delivered her by Mengsk ordering you to abandon that world. They subsequently discover she is a being with insane psionic potential and they assimilate her, and are subsequently rather protective of their new asset.
SC2’s story to me is a mess because character motivations make no fucking sense. Jim Raynor who vowed to kill Kerrigan now just, forgetting that entirely being the worst offender. SC1 doesn’t have as much jarring stuff, although it’s not exactly quality novel potential.
You misunderstood me. The dark templar started an apocalypse after the eon war. The manual says that the dark templar were exiled because they lost of control of their powers and caused psychic storms that devastated the homeworld. So, the judicator’s distrust seems justified. The fact that the eon war happened because the protoss lost their psychic link is more evidence, as we get clear evidence that the protoss are warlike in the extreme without the link. How do the dark templar avoid war without the link? None of this is ever addressed in the game stories, which I don’t like because I’m the sort of person who can get fairly invested in lore like that.
The shtick of the zerg is that they eat species and mass produce armies of monsters. The excessive focus on Kerry as an individual feel deeply incongruous with their shtick. (Saying that she’s a super special snowflake mary sue with the most psychic power ever sounds like a cheap childish copout to me. It was already established that psychic genes were distributed throughout the population and the zerg eat whole species, so I would have expected them to abduct loads of people for experimentation.) It feels like the writer simply liked her more (as stated in an interview), regardless of how that affected the characterization of the zerg overall. I didn’t like it and felt it did the zerg a huge disservice.
I’m not saying the story is unbearably terrible, but it’s nowhere near as good as nostalgic fans say it is. I don’t think it deserves the amount of praise it gets. I think the writer made a number of bad decisions that weakened the story.
Ok that was actually my mistake in forgetting about the psionic powers raging out of control.
My understanding is the Dark Templar use a combo of discipline and their pursuit of void energies to keep things in check. Aldaris is rather suspicious of this as the kind of embodiment of the Protoss establishment as it were (understandably), Tassadar is more receptive and open. They also don’t use regular psionic powers like the Templar do, which may also have something to do with them not descending into warfare.
The Dark Templar (in a rather limited cast of characters and units) seem rather temperamentally different too. Any time NPC Zealots or Dragoons show up for you and have lines it’s usually ‘let’s fuck this up’ or ‘glory to die in battle’ or something, the Dark Templar seem more circumspect and reserved. Contrast Zeratul with Fenix for example.
Sure it’s not perfect and it doesn’t fill every hole, I think it’s largely enough for game purposes.
Speaking of game purposes, if it were a novel your reading of the Zerg and Kerrigan would definitely work better for my tastes too. It is a game though. I’m sure if I was a bit older I would have maybe joined the dots, but at the time I was nursing this mysterious chrysalis thing, then it hatched. ‘Whoa wait Kerrigan is back?! She’s a bad guy now? Holy moley!’
I think this worked fine in Brood War because we’d just killed the Overmind, plus BW Kerry despite a few personal grudges was still quite Zergy - she still intended to use the swarm to consume and assimilate as they had always done. She’s much less Mary Sue in BW anyway, has to be rather sneaky in playing people off one another as the Zerg are regaining their Overmind era strength.
As for human psionic potential, if I recall correctly it’s still exceedingly rare and even the ghost program struggles to mould those into useful operatives, so I can sort of get down with the Zerg in their relatively recent forays into the Koprulu sector not having much success in assimilating.
My personal vague headcanon (that neatly covers Zerg not assimilating Protoss) is that the Overmind probably doesn’t want too many strong psionic beings in the chain of command. They might fuck with the hierarchy of Overmind > cerebrates > everything else in terms of controlling the swarm. Kerrigan could be assimilated as some kind of mobile avatar of the Overmind, of course this plan went tits up when Tassadar showed less than optimal piloting of his Carrier.
But yeah a lot of this stuff I suppose you have to glean from the manual too. I can give a 90s game a pass on that as most games threw quite a lot of lore out that way. I imagine a modern player playing for the first time would be rather underwhelmed without having read the manual flavour.
Op misses the most important twist: Starcraft multiplayer. An epic story about little monster of a terran who destroys all Zergs and Protosses rising as the new terran god
On August 12 2020 22:55 TaLIfy wrote: I don’t find your rationalizations convincing. If anything, they only highlight how silly the plot is.
How though? If you’re going to make a thread in this vein then surely a bit of actual back and forth on points and counter points is worth pursuing otherwise it’s just people making assertions as to their tastes.
Why wouldn’t the Confederacy nuke Korhal for example? It’s space man. Parallels to how nations on Earth would do things don’t necessarily apply when we’re talking about a bunch of ex cons zapped across space and operating on a limited time frame of development. So the one nascent unifying power nuking the first group to wholesale oppose them as a warning shot is ok with me.
If the worldbuilding was set that Koprulu had been colonised for thousands of years then yes, things would be more complex and there would be competing centres of power and the Confederacy being cartoonishly ruthless wouldn’t really fit.
The one actual weak point I think in the story (which I rate as functionally solid, not a masterwork) is the stuff with the UED which is rather muddled. The problem there is that it’s stated that they have been observing Koprulu from afar and are familiar with events. So they make a bunch of completely inexplicable errors with their approach to the alien races.
If they were a bunch of ignorant, arrogant upstarts arriving in the sector, or were competent with a decent plan based on their prior observations I’m kinda down with either direction for a new human faction. Just from my recollections the two kind of got muddled and didn’t make a huge amount of sense.
If you have played SC2, as per your points on Zerg and me largely agreeing, I think why Abathur is such a beloved character is because he/it actually talks and behaves in a way that one feels the Zerg should
I haven't play through the campaign since I was probably in my teens so definitely would look at the story with a bit of nostalgia, thinking back on it I'm not sure how great a story it is and I would like to play it again. I first played the precursor missions when I got them with a demo shortly before it was released when I was about 14 and loved that they led into the main Terran campaign. I think I would play through those first if I did play it again.
I think though that, in general, people don't regard the original campaign as great but moreso the Brood War campaign. I think in particular the ending of Zerg campaign really left people wanted to know more, there was the hidden mission when you see what Duran was up to and then Kerrigan's treachery and Raynor's swearing of revenge. I think a big issue with the SC2 campaign was it really didn't live up to a satisfying conclusion to any of that. Instead it turned Mengsk into a cartoon villain and Kerrigan and Raynor some clichéd former lovers. In the original campaign it's just implied Raynor liked Kerrigan, as far as I remember they were never actually together or anything.
I’m sorry. I’m wasting your time. I wish there was some game story that did cater to my tastes in military scifi.
The tiberium games are the only ones that come close, but they don’t really have all that much to work with.
Starcraft did have ideas I liked, like the zerg hive mind, protoss psychic gestalt, the terrans being greedy miners, political drama, etc. But I don’t like the execution.
I’m really frustrated that there isn’t anywhere that suits my tastes.
On August 13 2020 01:58 TaLIfy wrote: I’m sorry. I’m wasting your time. I wish there was some game story that did cater to my tastes in military scifi.
The tiberium games are the only ones that come close, but they don’t really have all that much to work with.
Starcraft did have ideas I liked, like the zerg hive mind, protoss psychic gestalt, the terrans being greedy miners, political drama, etc. But I don’t like the execution.
I’m really frustrated that there isn’t anywhere that suits my tastes.
I wouldn’t say it’s a waste of time, any chance to reminisce about SC’s story and complain about the bits I don’t like is fine by me!
I can empathise a lot on a lack of things catering to one’s tastes. Feel that myself with many a game these days
On August 13 2020 02:53 iFU.pauline wrote: The story is pretty solid for an RTS game, compare it to command and conquer or red alert from back in the day then BW is like an Hitchcock movie.
CnC is gloriously, gloriously campy though, which I do enjoy. A big part of its charm even if yes. It is ridiculous.
On August 12 2020 22:55 TaLIfy wrote:The one actual weak point I think in the story (which I rate as functionally solid, not a masterwork) is the stuff with the UED which is rather muddled. The problem there is that it’s stated that they have been observing Koprulu from afar and are familiar with events. So they make a bunch of completely inexplicable errors with their approach to the alien races.
If they were a bunch of ignorant, arrogant upstarts arriving in the sector, or were competent with a decent plan based on their prior observations I’m kinda down with either direction for a new human faction. Just from my recollections the two kind of got muddled and didn’t make a huge amount of sense.
The real problem with the UED is that allegedly they arrived from the millenia old civilization of earth, bringing with them all the same rag-tag tech, developed and used all over the Koprulu sector (even that requires several handwaves to explain in the lore from the manual, like different sections stealing from and spying on each other…) – plus Medics, Valkyries – and their own variation of the Goliath, as seen in two of the cinematics, with rocked pods on the shoulders and a Gatling gun between the legs, which however does not get its own in-game-model. Gameplay clearly took supremacy over lore – and just plain common sense – there.
On August 13 2020 02:53 iFU.pauline wrote: The story is pretty solid for an RTS game, compare it to command and conquer or red alert from back in the day then BW is like an Hitchcock movie.
BW's plot has more interpersonal drama, sure, but I can't say that the story is better than C&C because it has numerous problems of its own. It suffers from poor plotting, retcons, bizarre character behavior, plot contrivances, and tonal inconsistencies among other issues.
For example, the plot of Episode 1 wants to be a rebel romance or whatever the proper jargon would be.
The plot is basically this: Mengsk launches a coup against the Confederacy using a convenient plot device that kills them for him. In the process, he betrays two of his subordinates who swear revenge.
The problem is that this plot is at complete odds with the premise as originally setup. While this is happening, terran space is being invaded and devastated by two alien races. It doesn't make sense for the aliens to behave as convenient to the rebel's plot, because they have their own agency and goals that should act counter to that.
The politics and socio-economic behind all this aren't touched upon at all. It's a very simplistic case of an evil dictator overthrowing a faceless evil government. Like Che Guevara's Cuba in space.
Episode 1 could have worked fine as a self-contained story of a third world revolution in space, but I don't think it works as THE story of Starcraft. The scaling isn't believable to me. It squanders the potential of the premise in my opinion.
I think Blizzard should have stuck with their original idea (as mentioned on the website circa 1997 or so) of the Confederacy being an actual confederation of many different nations who exist in an uneasy peace that degenerates into civil strife during the alien invasions. Many different campaigns could been told using that backdrop.
On August 12 2020 22:55 TaLIfy wrote:The one actual weak point I think in the story (which I rate as functionally solid, not a masterwork) is the stuff with the UED which is rather muddled. The problem there is that it’s stated that they have been observing Koprulu from afar and are familiar with events. So they make a bunch of completely inexplicable errors with their approach to the alien races.
If they were a bunch of ignorant, arrogant upstarts arriving in the sector, or were competent with a decent plan based on their prior observations I’m kinda down with either direction for a new human faction. Just from my recollections the two kind of got muddled and didn’t make a huge amount of sense.
The real problem with the UED is that allegedly they arrived from the millenia old civilization of earth, bringing with them all the same rag-tag tech, developed and used all over the Koprulu sector (even that requires several handwaves to explain in the lore from the manual, like different sections stealing from and spying on each other…) – plus Medics, Valkyries – and their own variation of the Goliath, as seen in two of the cinematics, with rocked pods on the shoulders and a Gatling gun between the legs, which however does not get its own in-game-model. Gameplay clearly took supremacy over lore – and just plain common sense – there.
The problem with the UED, like a lot of other things, is that the Starcraft lore has always been annoyingly vague and subject to constant rewrites during development.
Originally Koprulu was in loose contact with Earth according to the website circa 1997, then this was changed in the SC1 manual so that Koprulu was isolated from Earth. Then the BW manual retconned this to the UED secretly spying on Koprulu for centuries. Then Heroes of the Storm apparently retconned that so that they were always in public contact.
In fact, according to the BW website circa 2000 or so, the UED wasn't originally going to appear at all. The terran plot would have been a conspiracy within the Dominion to overthrow Mengsk. Obviously this was rewritten, which may have created plot holes.
On August 13 2020 06:43 razorsuKe wrote: OP: Asks for critical analysis of story
TL: Gives critical analysis of OP
This is usually what happens when I try to ask questions like these. Yet I keep trying anyway. What is wrong with me?
On August 13 2020 01:58 TaLIfy wrote: I’m sorry. I’m wasting your time. I wish there was some game story that did cater to my tastes in military scifi.
The tiberium games are the only ones that come close, but they don’t really have all that much to work with.
Starcraft did have ideas I liked, like the zerg hive mind, protoss psychic gestalt, the terrans being greedy miners, political drama, etc. But I don’t like the execution.
I’m really frustrated that there isn’t anywhere that suits my tastes.
I wouldn’t say it’s a waste of time, any chance to reminisce about SC’s story and complain about the bits I don’t like is fine by me!
I can empathise a lot on a lack of things catering to one’s tastes. Feel that myself with many a game these days
I think that Blizzard took the wrong approach to writing Starcraft's story. Rather than treating Starcraft's premise as a military scifi sandbox for many different kinds of campaigns that would provide different perspectives and gimmicks, they decided to tell a heroic fantasy in space about the same tiny cast of recurring characters repeating saving and/or damning teh universe.
This makes the setting feel very tiny and generally unbelievable to me.
On August 13 2020 10:46 reincremate wrote: Might come as a shock, but maybe vidya games aren't the best medium for storytelling.
That argument is much bigger than this one thread.
I think OP is looking for a LOTR-esque detailed universe, but starcraft is not that nor did it ever try to be. You mention Game of Thrones and The Expanse.. both television series based on series of novels, of course they are going to be more intricate. The starcraft campaign is more like a standalone novel or movie with 3 acts and should be judged as such.
On August 15 2020 06:47 Gak2 wrote: I think OP is looking for a LOTR-esque detailed universe, but starcraft is not that nor did it ever try to be. You mention Game of Thrones and The Expanse.. both television series based on series of novels, of course they are going to be more intricate. The starcraft campaign is more like a standalone novel or movie with 3 acts and should be judged as such.
The first and second acts got their own novels. Liberty’s Crusade and Queen of Blades. When judged on their own merits, they still have a lot of problems.
As I said, the plot of Liberty’s Crusade doesn’t make sense because it tries to smash at least two different kinds of stories together. It wants to be Che Guevara’s revolution in space, but breaks down under the addition of an interstellar confederation and two simultaneous alien invasions.
The plot of Queen of Blades... ugh. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
I recently played SC2 LotV campaign. It's annoying. I wanted to slap it.
Every fucking map forces you to do some stupid checkpoints and shit, bonus missions, timed objectives, interrupting you, etc. Did I say it's annoying?
In BW in many maps you had the freedom to mostly go at your own pace, just defeat enemies, and wasn't bombarded with story elements and requirements every 30s.
In that sense, the BW campaign is much superior than the SC2 LotV campaign. I mean, if they wanted to interrupt and force my gameplay so much, they could have just made the campaign a set of in-game movies. I never got to play a real game in the whole campaign.
From what I know, the motives of all races and factions are thoroughly explained. Handwaving them away as "not making sense" seems like lazy argumentation in my eyes.
On August 16 2020 02:37 Magic Powers wrote: From what I know, the motives of all races and factions are thoroughly explained. Handwaving them away as "not making sense" seems like lazy argumentation in my eyes.
I didn’t say the motives didn’t make sense. I said the plot didn’t make sense because the motives don’t mesh with the setting or the events.
Mengsk is trying to be Che Guevara in space, but the setting (a massive interstellar confederation under invasion by two alien fleets) doesn’t believably mesh with that. The aliens should be hugely important given the invasion setting, but they’re reduced to a plot device and then leave once they‘re no longer convenient to the plot. The interstellar confederation with bazillions of inhabitants should realistically be far too big for any terrorist to take over just by killing one capital city.
The zerg invaded to consume humanity, like they do every species they encounter, yet they only capture one girl (because she has the highest midichlorian count in the universe, apparently) and then leave. Then they forget about her when they fight the war she was created to fight.
I don’t understand how any of this is difficult to understand. The story is not well constructed. It tries to smash too many wildly different concepts together. It doesn’t flow believably when you stop to actually think it through. It feels like the setting was written by one person and then the story was written by another.
While I do think that that BW story is not really that good, they at least have consistent characters and don't rewrite things when it gets inconvenient. For example, Aldaris character development was really good and interesting. He starts out as an old fashioned protoss, but later became a bit more open with Tassadar's influence. During BW, we were lead to believe that he went back to his old self, but later found out he actually had a legit reason to distrust the Dark Templars and Kerrigan.
While BW is far from a masterpiece, it at least had an entertaining story. In terms of scale, BW would be a 6/10 for me while SC2 would be a 2/10.
The problem with SC2 is that it retcons the story and character development that happened during BW. If you are writing a sequel, as a writer, you should at least read the prequel. They pretty much ruined Raynor and Kerrigan's character.
On August 17 2020 04:05 Nemesis wrote: While I do think that that BW story is not really that good, they at least have consistent characters and don't rewrite things when it gets inconvenient. For example, Aldaris character development was really good and interesting. He starts out as an old fashioned protoss, but later became a bit more open with Tassadar's influence. During BW, we were lead to believe that he went back to his old self, but later found out he actually had a legit reason to distrust the Dark Templars and Kerrigan.
While BW is far from a masterpiece, it at least had an entertaining story. In terms of scale, BW would be a 6/10 for me while SC2 would be a 2/10.
The problem with SC2 is that it retcons the story and character development that happened during BW. If you are writing a sequel, as a writer, you should at least read the prequel. They pretty much ruined Raynor and Kerrigan's character.
Consistent characters? I have to disagree. The characters behave as convenient for the plot, even if that means they have to perform actions that are inconsistent or outright idiotic.
Aldaris is a perfect example of this. His characterization, like most characters in SC1/BW, is actually fairly shallow (owing much to the limitations of the game format). He didn't actually become more open that I could see, he just stopped fighting Tassadar because the story needed a team-up at the climax. Tassadar or Zeratul don't ever say anything to explain why the dark templar should be accepted despite the history of bad blood between them (which is only explained in the manual that very few people actually read), except as an alliance of convenience against the contrived plot device powers of the zerg (which are a whole other can of worms). It should be simple for Zeratul to explain that the dark templar found an alternative path that allows them to avoid internal warfare and provide the empirical data to Aldaris (like that emotional suppression comparison somebody said upthread), even if that doesn't sway Aldaris initially but it would go a long way to making his softening seem believable. Zeratul does nothing like that, instead he mocks the Empire's accomplishments with space-goth poetry and lectures Aldaris for being a bigot despite said bigotry having a very good historical justification in the eon wars and the dark templar wars that the khala was created to prevent.
Speaking of which, Tassadar's characterization is pretty inconsistent too. He makes wild leaps of logic (like assuming that only dark templar can kill cerebrates despite having a grand total of two data points and not even knowing that cerebrates were capable of resurrection in the first place; the whole resurrection sub-plot is so clumsy that I suspect it was added by hasty rewrites during development because the writer couldn't think of a genuinely convincing way to have the protoss team-up), surrenders to his political enemies in order to halt bloodshed and then cheerfully accepts rescue that involves more bloodshed by his allies, and ultimately decides to crash his ship into the enemy leader even though his ship could bombard it from orbit with the same effect or some other dark templar could stab it without further loss of life. (Funny trivia: when asked some years later, the writer couldn't remember why he killed Tassadar in the first place. I'm wondering the same thing myself. His sacrifice seems to operate entirely on the rule of cool.)
Then in Episode 4 of BW, Aldaris starts another war because he discovered lady Raz was being mind-controlled by Kerry. What's nonsensical about this sub-plot is... well, everything. Kerry and Raz have never interacted long and secretly enough for Kerry to do this to her (a situation like that would immediately arouse suspicion in everyone, not just Aldaris; seriously, imagine if a former terrorist leader with known psychic powers asked to be alone with your president/prime minister for extended periods of time), the protoss are themselves psychic to a degree far above humans and therefore should have already interrogated Kerry to ensure she wasn't going to betray them (and not doing so is blatant idiocy, in fact the most sensible option is to rip all useful info from her mind and hold her prisoner), there's no possible way that Aldaris could know or even suspect Kerry was mind-controlling Raz without reading their minds or observing them interacting in a suspicious fashion (which should have also tipped off everyone in a similar position to see such manipulation), and there's no logical reason that the refugees would attack the dark templar without Aldaris telling them all his suspicions to justify doing so since they're linked by the khala.
The plot of Episode 3 could have made slightly more sense if the writer actually stopped to make an actual case for the dark templar, although that doesn't fix the other idiosyncrasies.
The plot of Episode 4 is not salvageable because it seemly operates on the assumption that everyone besides the characters with speaking parts are mindless zombies and that said main characters always act like idiots to further Kerry's evil plot. To say nothing of the plot devices that keep coming out of the woodwork, like the magic zerg-killing temple or Kerry suddenly being able to control zerg because her high midichlorian count lets her do whatever the plot requires.
Episodes 1-3 have key plot points that don't make sense without a ton more explanation (and often not even then), but Episodes 4-6 are a Swiss cheese of plot holes that can't possibly be filled without rewriting the story from scratch.
Episode 1 is the strongest and least silly plot in terms of character writing, but it doesn't fit with the interstellar scaling or the two alien invasions. It would have worked much better as a self-contained story that only took place on a single planet (or better yet a single country or city) and didn't involve the aliens at all.
Overall, the plot of Starcraft is very clumsily written. It definitely feels like it was rewritten several times without care taken to ensure details matched up. It doesn't feel like it was proofread at all, because this sloppiness would have been picked up by any competent editor.
I don't say all this because I dislike Starcraft. I adore the premise and the gameplay. I just don't feel Blizzard did a good job with the single-player campaigns.
Again, the plot doesn't feel organic and the plot threads do not line up in a satisfactory manner.
Please do an opinion piece on phantom menace.
Please do that on the entire sequel trilogy.
As for your tastes, wouldn't comment because your obviously entitled to your own opinion, but citing GoT for good storytelling is a rather bold claim.
ASOIAF is good in story telling, not amazing (paces issues, distances issues, A Dance With Dragon, ...), like, it's solid. World building is really great : wouldn't consider it LOTR level but pretty close, and it's still developping, so it has some time to expand.
GoT story telling, on the other hand, is more like F-... I mean, season 1-3, it kinda stick to the book plot (not minor details, but it's understandable considering it's a 10x50min TV show, not a 1.5k page book), so it's pretty good, but then you're spiralling into oblivion of crap after that.
I'm currently playing through the SP campaigns again (I just finished SC vanilla) and from what I can gather many of the motives you handwave away as "X simply decide(s) to to YZ without explanation" are actually explained. The Zerg for example were under heavy siege by the protoss, so they had to fend them off. Ultimately the Zerg lost the overmind, so their forces were scattered. Meanwhile Kerrigan's arc was sidelined due to the main story arc, she gets mentioned again at the end of the SC campaign. Likewise Aldaris didn't just stop pursuing Tassadar. As far as I understand it, he had sent Artanis after Tassadar, but Artanis ultimately switched sides and so Aldaris was out of options.
Again, the plot doesn't feel organic and the plot threads do not line up in a satisfactory manner.
Please do an opinion piece on phantom menace.
Has anyone else written about the last jedi on a webzone such as this? I think it could lead to some very interesting discussions!
As to the OP. Brood War is simply a different style of writing or genre compared to SC2. One is more action oriented and blockbuster focused, (SC2,) and the other is more contemplative and has as slower, but bigger scale (SC1). + Show Spoiler +
On August 12 2020 09:45 pebble444 wrote: from a youtube comment, this sums up pretty much what i think about it:
"You know, these days people always talk about how "primitive" game stories were before 2005, but from where I'm standing, it seems to be the other way around. People who wrote games back then were nerds who had an appreciation for old school sci-fi, fantasy and literature. Now it seems to be written by hollywood dropouts, jampacked with every cliche in the book."
yes of course videogame stories are sometimes limited and conditioned by the game-play. still, your advocating that the story is "bad" confuses me. Case if you listen to the speech and the video i posted, and you call it "bad" , i can' t really relate to what your taste is.
I get a sense that the SC1 writers were fans of Gene Wolfe and Frank Herbert. Sure they might not have the workshop fine tuned literature writing skills as the greats, but they imitated them very well considering the medium and limitations.
As for Game of Thrones being the intellectual proof of maturity, I can only say that it has always been and always will be a very good soap opera, (albeit impeccably cast and produced). And there is nothing wrong with that. But it certainly isn't the be all end all fantasy series. HBO might have went more mainstream towards the end, but they did elevate Martin's writing in a lot of ways. I can't fault them for streamlining the later seasons, as the author has been kicking the can down the road since book 4.
On August 18 2020 06:58 Magic Powers wrote: I'm currently playing through the SP campaigns again (I just finished SC vanilla) and from what I can gather many of the motives you handwave away as "X simply decide(s) to to YZ without explanation" are actually explained. The Zerg for example were under heavy siege by the protoss, so they had to fend them off. Ultimately the Zerg lost the overmind, so their forces were scattered. Meanwhile Kerrigan's arc was sidelined due to the main story arc, she gets mentioned again at the end of the SC campaign. Likewise Aldaris didn't just stop pursuing Tassadar. As far as I understand it, he had sent Artanis after Tassadar, but Artanis ultimately switched sides and so Aldaris was out of options.
That doesn’t address any of my critique. My critique wasn’t that their motives weren’t explained, but that their actions were inconsistent with their motives and the setting in a way that was never explained.
Ignoring for a moment that Kerry’s inclusion contradicts the zerg’s mass-produced devouring swarm shtick, she was infested to fight on Aiur because the zerg presumably wouldn’t win without her. Then she is sent to fight elsewhere that is not Aiur, and the zerg don’t suffer negatively from her absence on Aiur. What was the point of infesting her and worshiping her as a messiah then? To force episode 2 to be a loose sequel to episode 1? To set her up as the future leader in the sequel hook?
I didn’t say Aldaris stopped pursuing Tassadar. I said he teamed up with the dark templar without the story making any real attempt to reconcile their philosophical differences. I went over this in detail a few posts above.
These aren’t even complex critiques. These are very simple, surface-level analyses of the plot. These should be obvious to most people who stop to think about the plot.
On August 12 2020 06:08 TaLIfy wrote: Years later I came back, when my tastes had matured and I was consuming fiction like Game of Thrones
Again, the plot doesn't feel organic and the plot threads do not line up in a satisfactory manner.
Please do an opinion piece on phantom menace.
Has anyone else written about the last jedi on a webzone such as this? I think it could lead to some very interesting discussions!
As to the OP. Brood War is simply a different style of writing or genre compared to SC2. One is more action oriented and blockbuster focused, (SC2,) and the other is more contemplative and has as slower, but bigger scale (SC1). + Show Spoiler +
On August 12 2020 09:45 pebble444 wrote: from a youtube comment, this sums up pretty much what i think about it:
"You know, these days people always talk about how "primitive" game stories were before 2005, but from where I'm standing, it seems to be the other way around. People who wrote games back then were nerds who had an appreciation for old school sci-fi, fantasy and literature. Now it seems to be written by hollywood dropouts, jampacked with every cliche in the book."
yes of course videogame stories are sometimes limited and conditioned by the game-play. still, your advocating that the story is "bad" confuses me. Case if you listen to the speech and the video i posted, and you call it "bad" , i can' t really relate to what your taste is.
I get a sense that the SC1 writers were fans of Gene Wolfe and Frank Herbert. Sure they might not have the workshop fine tuned literature writing skills as the greats, but they imitated them very well considering the medium and limitations.
As for Game of Thrones being the intellectual proof of maturity, I can only say that it has always been and always will be a very good soap opera, (albeit impeccably cast and produced). And there is nothing wrong with that. But it certainly isn't the be all end all fantasy series. HBO might have went more mainstream towards the end, but they did elevate Martin's writing in a lot of ways. I can't fault them for streamlining the later seasons, as the author has been kicking the can down the road since book 4.
I never got the impression that the writer (Chris Metzen) was a fan of Herbert or Wolfe. He was clearly trying to write a Star Wars style heroic fantasy. The plotting is very haphazard and doesn’t flow organically at all. It relies heavily on plot contrivances like emitters, temples, psychic dreams, resurrection, and such. Several times characters behave because it suits the plot rather than their motives or reasoning, like Kerry being a messiah to bug monsters or Tassadar being cheerful at being rescued rather than angry.
On August 12 2020 10:50 reincremate wrote: The tragedy of Reynor and Kerrigan is drama of Shakesperean magnitude and the game's sociopolitical commentary is so deep you can drown in it. Also the graphics in the cutscenes are really good, unlike games today.
This man incapsulated my thoughts exactly, Shakesperean!
On August 18 2020 06:58 Magic Powers wrote: I'm currently playing through the SP campaigns again (I just finished SC vanilla) and from what I can gather many of the motives you handwave away as "X simply decide(s) to to YZ without explanation" are actually explained. The Zerg for example were under heavy siege by the protoss, so they had to fend them off. Ultimately the Zerg lost the overmind, so their forces were scattered. Meanwhile Kerrigan's arc was sidelined due to the main story arc, she gets mentioned again at the end of the SC campaign. Likewise Aldaris didn't just stop pursuing Tassadar. As far as I understand it, he had sent Artanis after Tassadar, but Artanis ultimately switched sides and so Aldaris was out of options.
That doesn’t address any of my critique. My critique wasn’t that their motives weren’t explained, but that their actions were inconsistent with their motives and the setting in a way that was never explained.
Ignoring for a moment that Kerry’s inclusion contradicts the zerg’s mass-produced devouring swarm shtick, she was infested to fight on Aiur because the zerg presumably wouldn’t win without her. Then she is sent to fight elsewhere that is not Aiur, and the zerg don’t suffer negatively from her absence on Aiur. What was the point of infesting her and worshiping her as a messiah then? To force episode 2 to be a loose sequel to episode 1? To set her up as the future leader in the sequel hook?
I didn’t say Aldaris stopped pursuing Tassadar. I said he teamed up with the dark templar without the story making any real attempt to reconcile their philosophical differences. I went over this in detail a few posts above.
These aren’t even complex critiques. These are very simple, surface-level analyses of the plot. These should be obvious to most people who stop to think about the plot.
Infested Kerrigan made unexpected decisions that went against the Zerg cerebrate. In the campaigns it becomes obvious that she doesn't like being told what the right move is, and the cerebrate scolds her over it.
About Aldaris teaming up with the Dark Templar: does that happen in the BW campaigns? I still have to replay those.
Edit: I'm currently reading through the synopsis from Aldaris' biography in the SC Wiki and it gives a pretty clear explanation for why Aldaris would no longer oppose the Dark Templar.
The subsequent success of the rebels efforts against the zerg, vindicating Tassadar's beliefs, caused the Conclave to send Aldaris with an apology.[15] The Overmind was destroyed thanks to Tassadar's sacrifice, but the battle for Aiur was lost and the Conclave destroyed.
Unfortunately I don't have my SC & BW manuals anymore, so I don't know whether or not this is a retcon. I only know some of the plot points were partially skipped over in the campaigns and explained further in the books.
So far I just don't see the major plot contrivances or inconsistent world building that you see. Sure, it's not top tier writing, but I don't think there's anything majorly wrong with the plot or the world building.
On August 18 2020 06:58 Magic Powers wrote: I'm currently playing through the SP campaigns again (I just finished SC vanilla) and from what I can gather many of the motives you handwave away as "X simply decide(s) to to YZ without explanation" are actually explained. The Zerg for example were under heavy siege by the protoss, so they had to fend them off. Ultimately the Zerg lost the overmind, so their forces were scattered. Meanwhile Kerrigan's arc was sidelined due to the main story arc, she gets mentioned again at the end of the SC campaign. Likewise Aldaris didn't just stop pursuing Tassadar. As far as I understand it, he had sent Artanis after Tassadar, but Artanis ultimately switched sides and so Aldaris was out of options.
That doesn’t address any of my critique. My critique wasn’t that their motives weren’t explained, but that their actions were inconsistent with their motives and the setting in a way that was never explained.
Ignoring for a moment that Kerry’s inclusion contradicts the zerg’s mass-produced devouring swarm shtick, she was infested to fight on Aiur because the zerg presumably wouldn’t win without her. Then she is sent to fight elsewhere that is not Aiur, and the zerg don’t suffer negatively from her absence on Aiur. What was the point of infesting her and worshiping her as a messiah then? To force episode 2 to be a loose sequel to episode 1? To set her up as the future leader in the sequel hook?
I didn’t say Aldaris stopped pursuing Tassadar. I said he teamed up with the dark templar without the story making any real attempt to reconcile their philosophical differences. I went over this in detail a few posts above.
These aren’t even complex critiques. These are very simple, surface-level analyses of the plot. These should be obvious to most people who stop to think about the plot.
Infested Kerrigan made unexpected decisions that went against the Zerg cerebrate. In the campaigns it becomes obvious that she doesn't like being told what the right move is, and the cerebrate scolds her over it.
About Aldaris teaming up with the Dark Templar: does that happen in the BW campaigns? I still have to replay those.
Edit: I'm currently reading through the synopsis from Aldaris' biography in the SC Wiki and it gives a pretty clear explanation for why Aldaris would no longer oppose the Dark Templar.
The subsequent success of the rebels efforts against the zerg, vindicating Tassadar's beliefs, caused the Conclave to send Aldaris with an apology.[15] The Overmind was destroyed thanks to Tassadar's sacrifice, but the battle for Aiur was lost and the Conclave destroyed.
Unfortunately I don't have my SC & BW manuals anymore, so I don't know whether or not this is a retcon. I only know some of the plot points were partially skipped over in the campaigns and explained further in the books.
So far I just don't see the major plot contrivances or inconsistent world building that you see. Sure, it's not top tier writing, but I don't think there's anything majorly wrong with the plot or the world building.
I have gone over this multiple times. The plot is a haphazard mess written by a writer who is infamous for bad writing. It relies extensively on lazy plot contrivances like emitters, messiahs, psychic dreams, magic temples, character idiocy, etc. Plot threads do not line up, characters behave inconsistently to service the plot, information is given in a clunky manner, etc.
On August 18 2020 06:58 Magic Powers wrote: I'm currently playing through the SP campaigns again (I just finished SC vanilla) and from what I can gather many of the motives you handwave away as "X simply decide(s) to to YZ without explanation" are actually explained. The Zerg for example were under heavy siege by the protoss, so they had to fend them off. Ultimately the Zerg lost the overmind, so their forces were scattered. Meanwhile Kerrigan's arc was sidelined due to the main story arc, she gets mentioned again at the end of the SC campaign. Likewise Aldaris didn't just stop pursuing Tassadar. As far as I understand it, he had sent Artanis after Tassadar, but Artanis ultimately switched sides and so Aldaris was out of options.
That doesn’t address any of my critique. My critique wasn’t that their motives weren’t explained, but that their actions were inconsistent with their motives and the setting in a way that was never explained.
Ignoring for a moment that Kerry’s inclusion contradicts the zerg’s mass-produced devouring swarm shtick, she was infested to fight on Aiur because the zerg presumably wouldn’t win without her. Then she is sent to fight elsewhere that is not Aiur, and the zerg don’t suffer negatively from her absence on Aiur. What was the point of infesting her and worshiping her as a messiah then? To force episode 2 to be a loose sequel to episode 1? To set her up as the future leader in the sequel hook?
I didn’t say Aldaris stopped pursuing Tassadar. I said he teamed up with the dark templar without the story making any real attempt to reconcile their philosophical differences. I went over this in detail a few posts above.
These aren’t even complex critiques. These are very simple, surface-level analyses of the plot. These should be obvious to most people who stop to think about the plot.
Infested Kerrigan made unexpected decisions that went against the Zerg cerebrate. In the campaigns it becomes obvious that she doesn't like being told what the right move is, and the cerebrate scolds her over it.
About Aldaris teaming up with the Dark Templar: does that happen in the BW campaigns? I still have to replay those.
Edit: I'm currently reading through the synopsis from Aldaris' biography in the SC Wiki and it gives a pretty clear explanation for why Aldaris would no longer oppose the Dark Templar.
The subsequent success of the rebels efforts against the zerg, vindicating Tassadar's beliefs, caused the Conclave to send Aldaris with an apology.[15] The Overmind was destroyed thanks to Tassadar's sacrifice, but the battle for Aiur was lost and the Conclave destroyed.
Unfortunately I don't have my SC & BW manuals anymore, so I don't know whether or not this is a retcon. I only know some of the plot points were partially skipped over in the campaigns and explained further in the books.
So far I just don't see the major plot contrivances or inconsistent world building that you see. Sure, it's not top tier writing, but I don't think there's anything majorly wrong with the plot or the world building.
I have gone over this multiple times. The plot is a haphazard mess written by a writer who is infamous for bad writing. It relies extensively on lazy plot contrivances like emitters, messiahs, psychic dreams, magic temples, character idiocy, etc. Plot threads do not line up, characters behave inconsistently to service the plot, information is given in a clunky manner, etc.
It’s a video game from the late 90s, it’s doing ok against that backdrop.
I don’t really count any of those things as particularly contrived anyway, they all largely fit. The Xel’Naga shaped the Protoss, who were their favoured child in a sense (they seem more similar to them than Zerg anyway), makes perfect sense that Protoss could figure how to make use of abandoned Xel’Naga tech. Psychic dreams make sense when you have psychic characters. Emitters as tech kind of make sense as some potential weapon against rebellion inclined people.
There isn’t really a Messiah until SC2 where it does get genuinely awful in terms of general storytelling.
I mean I’ve enjoyed discussion in this thread but your real bone of contention with the story seems to be more that it isn’t another, differently focused story. Something more grounded and more focused on political intrigue, grounded military and tech capability and without mystical artefacts and the like.
Which is fine, those tend to be my tastes generally but for what they were going for it’s perfectly serviceable, most characters have consistent motivations, most things make sense in-universe etc.
SC2’s story on the other hand really is a complete shitshow...
I watched a bit of your videos, and really a lot of your points are that cutscenes don't match gameplay detail. That's not really a criticism in the plot, but more on the campaign missions. I view the plot as something different from the gameplay. You are complaining about the zergs and protoss being retarded in the actual gameplay and connecting to it to zergs and protoss being retarded in the story.
Gameplay doesn't reflect the story unless there were cutscenes in the gameplay that adds to the story. For example, in an RPG game fighting against random mobs doesn't mean anything in the story a lot of times when you are just grinding level.
The thing is a game will always have limited mechanics compared to a real story. Another example for sc in this case, billions of zergs in the cutscenes but there are only a couple dozen in the game. Well obviously, the game can't accommodate that many units in the game. Or hydralisk uses their scythes in cutscenes, but not in games. That one is probably more of a design decision as they would overlap roles with zergling and ultralisk which again is gameplay mechanics. Lorewise, most units probably have multiple weapons but no need for it gameplay wise. For example, ultralisk can probably kill units simply by stepping on them.
You will be writing a shitty book worse than sc2 if you try to include gameplay mechanics into the story. An example of that would be everyone would have unlimited ammos, and other things that just does not make sense.
Well I do agree the vanilla sc story is pretty bad, but it does a good enough job of introducing you to the universe and introduce you to interpersonal drama between the characters. It does have problems though with world building being vague. In general, I would say that the game was just not a good medium for storytelling.
I do have many criticisms of the plot myself especially in vanilla sc, but I still enjoyed the bits of story presented in the campaign especially the protoss ones.
Edit: Just to add your main criticisms about zerg seems to be about them not being some single organism like race which makes them "inconsistent". That's not inconsistent, that's just them going in a different direction from your idea. They are more of a hivelike insect race which follow their queen/leader. In the past, that was the overmind and the cerebrates, and later on Kerrigan.
While I do agree that your idea is more interesting, they're not being inconsistent.
For Protoss, your claim of them being "inconsistent" is about them being some kind of "enlightened" race. It's called a plot twist. While they seem wise, they are actually very religious and illogical "zealots(hence, the unit name)." You find that they also fight against each other though not as much as Humans. This is why they pursued Tassadar even though the Zerg was on their footstep on Aiur. Aldaris had his pride as a Protoss that they would not lose to the Zerg, and that capturing Tassadar who went against their religious code is more blasphemous. That's just the average zealot being illogical and happens all the time in Humans too. Again, that's not being inconsistent, they just went a different direction than what "YOU" expected.
It does have problems though with the terran and zerg campaign feeling fragmented, and we don't really get a scale of how big each empires are and at what scale they operate.
On August 18 2020 06:58 Magic Powers wrote: I'm currently playing through the SP campaigns again (I just finished SC vanilla) and from what I can gather many of the motives you handwave away as "X simply decide(s) to to YZ without explanation" are actually explained. The Zerg for example were under heavy siege by the protoss, so they had to fend them off. Ultimately the Zerg lost the overmind, so their forces were scattered. Meanwhile Kerrigan's arc was sidelined due to the main story arc, she gets mentioned again at the end of the SC campaign. Likewise Aldaris didn't just stop pursuing Tassadar. As far as I understand it, he had sent Artanis after Tassadar, but Artanis ultimately switched sides and so Aldaris was out of options.
That doesn’t address any of my critique. My critique wasn’t that their motives weren’t explained, but that their actions were inconsistent with their motives and the setting in a way that was never explained.
Ignoring for a moment that Kerry’s inclusion contradicts the zerg’s mass-produced devouring swarm shtick, she was infested to fight on Aiur because the zerg presumably wouldn’t win without her. Then she is sent to fight elsewhere that is not Aiur, and the zerg don’t suffer negatively from her absence on Aiur. What was the point of infesting her and worshiping her as a messiah then? To force episode 2 to be a loose sequel to episode 1? To set her up as the future leader in the sequel hook?
I didn’t say Aldaris stopped pursuing Tassadar. I said he teamed up with the dark templar without the story making any real attempt to reconcile their philosophical differences. I went over this in detail a few posts above.
These aren’t even complex critiques. These are very simple, surface-level analyses of the plot. These should be obvious to most people who stop to think about the plot.
Infested Kerrigan made unexpected decisions that went against the Zerg cerebrate. In the campaigns it becomes obvious that she doesn't like being told what the right move is, and the cerebrate scolds her over it.
About Aldaris teaming up with the Dark Templar: does that happen in the BW campaigns? I still have to replay those.
Edit: I'm currently reading through the synopsis from Aldaris' biography in the SC Wiki and it gives a pretty clear explanation for why Aldaris would no longer oppose the Dark Templar.
The subsequent success of the rebels efforts against the zerg, vindicating Tassadar's beliefs, caused the Conclave to send Aldaris with an apology.[15] The Overmind was destroyed thanks to Tassadar's sacrifice, but the battle for Aiur was lost and the Conclave destroyed.
Unfortunately I don't have my SC & BW manuals anymore, so I don't know whether or not this is a retcon. I only know some of the plot points were partially skipped over in the campaigns and explained further in the books.
So far I just don't see the major plot contrivances or inconsistent world building that you see. Sure, it's not top tier writing, but I don't think there's anything majorly wrong with the plot or the world building.
I have gone over this multiple times. The plot is a haphazard mess written by a writer who is infamous for bad writing. It relies extensively on lazy plot contrivances like emitters, messiahs, psychic dreams, magic temples, character idiocy, etc. Plot threads do not line up, characters behave inconsistently to service the plot, information is given in a clunky manner, etc.
I disagree with all of that, and I'm seeing that you're not making much of an effort to support your claims. - Plot is a haphazard mess Ok, but what exactly? As I've been able to show in previous comments, the things you've pointed out previously can be explained. - Writer infamous for bad writing That doesn't seem like a valid argument to me, even if I accept it as true. - Plot relies extensively on lazy plot contrivances (emitters, messiah, psychic dreams, magic temples, character idiocy) The emitters are a valid plot device. Messiah? What messiah? Psychic dreams are a valid plot device. Magic temples are a valid plot device. Character idiocy is a valid plot device. So you're listing things you don't like, but at no point do you explain why you don't like them. You call them lazy, but I don't think they're lazy. They seem to be fitted perfectly to the scope of the SC campaigns. If you want to read a multi-part book series from some grand novelist, then GoT would be your pick. Just because the SC campaigns aren't on that level of intricacy doesn't make it "lazy". - Plot threads do not line up Which ones? - Characters behave inconsistently to service the plot Which ones and in what way? - Information is given in a clunky manner What do you mean by "clunky"?
Years ago, I tried to play through the original SC2 campaign with the sole purpose of following the story and the different plots. It was hopeless, weird psi-disuptor abuse, lure zerg to kill enemies, Mengsk abandoning Rainor and Kerrigan for no reason, Kerrigan turning Zerg for unknown reasons, and when they even introduced the hybrids and the Xel'naga as another master force at the end, I just gave up trying make sense of it. They could absolutely have done a much better job.
Playing the campaign was fun, though, and I came to peace with that the story is completely secondary to the gameplay: You NEED to play every matchup and every unit needs a proper introduction.
The WC3 stories were much cleaner imo, with the Orc campaign being absolutely awesome. Drink from a read fountain and all your units become "chaos orchs", how cool wasn't that?
yeah SC2 story seems terrible overall, or maybe just not very good or interesting idk WC3 is cool plus it has amazing musics and stuff too D2 super cool in that respect overall^^; maybe just LOD very end worldstone stuff isn't amazing conclusion but intro so cool
Xel Naga is actually an important part of the overall scenario described in the manual btw, which i think is really cool I'd give SC story a 9/10 maybe, BW closer to 8/10 i suppose there are a bunch of things that are weird about BW, like Protoss "trusting" kerrigan for little reason seeming too unwise for what they are presented to be before, Earth forces coming in and having the same technology and weapons as the confederates is quite weird and suddenly they're even able to overwhelm the Z.. mmh ok. Z easily getting to just spawn a new Overmind and P not having any expection of that seemed odd, but why not. Hard to get into more details i don't remember everything lul. Felt a bit weird for which reasons Protoss fight each other. How many years were supposed to have passed where confederacy had no contact with Earth? Or perhaps there was secret contact. Scenario isn't that bad and well presented, did enjoy playing through the campaign. The part with the hybrids at the end felt bit like filler open ender for sequel idk.
I didn't play the SC(original) campaign for a long time but I don't think there's anything I dislike about the story really liked it tbh
Cutscenes not explicitly showing story plot point is neither good nor bad inherently- it's just different way of doing things. I rather like them. They don't add to the plot points of the story, but they are excellent at building atmosphere. This is my all time favourite:
I don't think there's a single SC2 cinematic that nails this atmosphere. The intro to Diablo 1 does the same- it's dang impressive what they did with such limited computing power.
I think it builds out the universe- stuff is going down in different parts of the galaxy.
On August 23 2020 06:52 Slydie wrote: Years ago, I tried to play through the original SC2 campaign with the sole purpose of following the story and the different plots. It was hopeless, weird psi-disuptor abuse, lure zerg to kill enemies, Mengsk abandoning Rainor and Kerrigan for no reason, Kerrigan turning Zerg for unknown reasons, and when they even introduced the hybrids and the Xel'naga as another master force at the end, I just gave up trying make sense of it. They could absolutely have done a much better job.
Playing the campaign was fun, though, and I came to peace with that the story is completely secondary to the gameplay: You NEED to play every matchup and every unit needs a proper introduction.
The WC3 stories were much cleaner imo, with the Orc campaign being absolutely awesome. Drink from a read fountain and all your units become "chaos orchs", how cool wasn't that?
I played the campaign last time around 20 years ago, yet I still remember the "why's"; I don't think you were paying attention to what's said, given how simple the overall story is, or you are lacking the arguments to support your stance / trolling.
All the psi-stuff was there to show that Zerg were drawn to psionic/psychic powers (like that of a Terran ghost, which is how the Confederacy tried to weaponize the Zerg and why Mengsk wanted to stop it from happening).
Mengsk did not abandon Raynor, he left Kerrigan to die after her position was overrun by the zerg after she completed her objective (and why it happened was perfectly explained by both the mission objectives and the fact she has strong psionic powers, i.e. the Zerg are drawn to her). Raynor then left Mengsk and vowed revenge.
Kerrigan turning to Zerg was explained, too - again, she has strong psionic powers, Overmind/The Zerg are interested in that, saw her potential and decided to turn her. It wasn't her decision, she was to become a powerful tool for the Overmind.
They introduced hybrids only in a 'secret' mission in the BW campaign (since they were planning for it in the sequel), there was pretty much no focus on that in either SC1 or BW. The only other "hybrids" that were present in the campaign were the zergified versions of units/buildings, which is just zerg infestation and ties to one of the game mechanics.
The biggest problem with SC2 story is it's all flash over substance. It was told in a more hollywood-esque way, to its detriment, and all interesting themes were somehow made even more shallow than in the technologically limited prequel.
Just because the story itself is more verbose does not make it better, and just because SC1 and BW are lacking in that regard does not make them bad.
I think both SC1 and BW had good (not excellent), fun stories and more interesting, consistent characters having believable relationships precisely because not everything was spelled out for the player and acted out in front of him.