Anybody know Starcraft?

[VelvetViolet]

I first played it back in the early 2000s and found it pretty fun.

When I came back many years later and read the official plot synopsis... Well, at least the gameplay is good, right?

 

[Istbor]

A decent enough story. Especially when you realize how they had to tack that bit on more after-the-fact. Once they lost their license to make a dawn of war game for Warhammer 40k. Can't waste all of those assets.

And in the end it became a gamer cultural pillar.

 

[VelvetViolet]

A decent enough story.

Really? Every story review I was ever able to find said otherwise.

 

[Istbor]

Really? Every story review I was ever able to find said otherwise.

I mean I am not talking award winning here. It is a video game from 1998. Whose original intent was to be Dawn of War, with Space Marines, Tyranid, and Eldar.

And what they changed it to is by no means a 'new' story. Creator aliens try to perfect life in some never-ending cycle. Someone disagrees that there should be a cycle. All powerful creator aliens get wrecked. Stuff happens, children races grow up and fight one another. Some are bigger picture than others, one is actually enslaved by the big bad and needs to get liberated to help save the universe. Big bad dies to the 'chosen' one.

Honestly, a lot of this was probably derived from Warhammer lore, and painted differently to avoid legal issues.

It needed to be simple enough for children to be able to get what was going on. When they made the latest installments that are in an age where storytelling in games is (usually) much improved, they did what they could. You can't really destroy the old story without alienating your hardcore fans who grew up on it and now had oodles of disposable income. You gotta lean into it and make the best of what story there was.

So yeah. Decent enough to make millions upon millions of dollars. Not something I would call bad at any rate. Certainly not amazing either.

 

[VelvetViolet]

I mean I am not talking award winning here. It is a video game from 1998. Whose original intent was to be Dawn of War, with Space Marines, Tyranid, and Eldar.

And what they changed it to is by no means a 'new' story. Creator aliens try to perfect life in some never-ending cycle. Someone disagrees that there should be a cycle. All powerful creator aliens get wrecked. Stuff happens, children races grow up and fight one another. Some are bigger picture than others, one is actually enslaved by the big bad and needs to get liberated to help save the universe. Big bad dies to the 'chosen' one.

Honestly, a lot of this was probably derived from Warhammer lore, and painted differently to avoid legal issues.

It needed to be simple enough for children to be able to get what was going on. When they made the latest installments that are in an age where storytelling in games is (usually) much improved, they did what they could. You can't really destroy the old story without alienating your hardcore fans who grew up on it and now had oodles of disposable income. You gotta lean into it and make the best of what story there was.

So yeah. Decent enough to make millions upon millions of dollars. Not something I would call bad at any rate. Certainly not amazing either.

I can’t enjoy the story as an adult. It’s absolutely a mess. I can’t engage constructively with the fans either, since everybody who disliked the story left and those remaining don’t share any of the same tastes that I do.

It really sucks for me personally because I think Starcraft has all the tools to tell basically competent military scifi stories, but instead it will forever be stuck in the rut of space cowboy and his bug girl waifu.

There’s no other game in existence that suits my tastes. I checked for years. Warhammer 40k is a no go for me because the tyranids are hella boring compared to the zerg Overmind and co’s personalities.

I don’t have millions of dollars lying around to fund my own game project either.

 

[dragoner]

I first played it back in the early 2000s and found it pretty fun.

When I came back many years later and read the official plot synopsis... Well, at least the gameplay is good, right?

I played it a long ago time too, I thought the Kerrigan "Queen of Blades" art was cool, but that's about the end of playing it, I might have played Brood War, 20 years later, I don't have a lot of strong memories. We used to use the slang to zerg something was to rush it with a lot of cheap units. In the 90's I played Command and Conquer, so Starcraft was sort of a natural progression.

 

[FrogReaver]

I first played it back in the early 2000s and found it pretty fun.

When I came back many years later and read the official plot synopsis... Well, at least the gameplay is good, right?

Love Starcraft. No idea about the story. I never played through the campaign.

 

[ccs]

?? You're playing Starcraft for the story & not just to blow sh*** up?

Weird.

 

[VelvetViolet]

?? You're playing Starcraft for the story & not just to blow sh*** up?

Weird.

I’m the sort of person who plays RTS games for the single player experience. I like blowing stuff up as much as the next guy, but sometimes I also like to have reasons explained to me for why I am working demolition.

Starcraft’s official site originally advertised it (circa 2001 or so?) with this blurb:

A Galaxy in Chaos...
In the distant future, a small group of human exiles have been doomed to fight for survival on the edge of the galaxy. Through military strength, espionage, and deceit, a unified Terran government has maintained an uneasy peace, but as resources and fuel run short the Confederate nations find themselves looking towards the rich worlds of their alien neighbors, the enigmatic Protoss. To further complicate matters, it seems that a previously unknown species-- the Zerg-- have entered Protoss space and are destroying everything in their path. The time for war has come.

I was expecting something like Command & Conquer. Not a great story, but serviceable enough military scifi. Resource wars. Humans defending themselves from alien aggression. Aliens invading for reasons. 40k lite. Basic stuff that should be easy to write.

Instead I got nonsensical soap operas about shallow, unlikeable and inconsistent characters. We have an entire “galaxy in chaos” and that’s the best that the writers could do?

Pretty much the only character I remember actually liking was the Overmind, but it only had a few paragraphs of chewing the scenery before it got killed off. After that, the story was an endless stream of “Raynor this, Kerry that, space magic everywhere.”

How difficult is it to write Starship Troopers with space robot elves added as a third side? This should be easy peasy even by the already low standards of video game stories.

 

[Istbor]

Then you are in luck. They are working on a Starship Troopers RTS.