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