Anybody know Starcraft?

[ccs]

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:


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.”

Well, that IS 40k lite.....
I mean, you can have the lite version like this with the serial numbers filed off, or you can have the full on GW version. Either way your getting unlikable/non-memorable inconsistent characters, nonsense, & space magic everywhere....
The only difference is the quantity.

 

[Umbran]

How difficult is it to write Starship Troopers with space robot elves added as a third side?

Given that the original Starship Troopers was written by one of the most lauded authors of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi? It ain't easy.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Given that the original Starship Troopers was written by one of the most lauded authors of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi? It ain't easy.

I know that SST sets a high bar, but I don't think that's a good excuse.

There's this let's play that goes through the game's campaigns and analyzes everything from presentations to gameplay to storytelling, etc.

Lots of fans think SC2's story is a betrayal of everything SC1's story was. After watching that review, I can't understand how anybody could think so.

 

[dragoner]

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.

I played out the missions too, except unlike C&C, SC's forces were fairly unbalanced towards the Zerg, you could just keep zerging, zerging, zerging while building, where as Humans, even if you got the star cruiser, it was rather pointless. C&C sort of had that with the mobile artillery though, you could stand off and kill all their towers, then do a combined tank rush followed by infantry attack. There was also a ww2 one of these style games.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

It's a classic, a true icon among the videogames from its age, but now I don't play RTS, only Fortnite: Save the World.

 

[Sadras]

@BoxCrayonTales I agree with you. I was disappointed with the evolution of the story in SC2.

 

[VelvetViolet]

@BoxCrayonTales I agree with you. I was disappointed with the evolution of the story in SC2.

To be entirely fair to SC2, SC1 didn’t set a high bar nor a solid foundation. The playlist I plugged earlier goes into detail about that.

Here’s another very brief comparison:

Starcraft 2: Story Time - Twenty Sided

www.shamusyoung.com

Blizzard didn’t write a military science fiction story in the first place. They wrote an interpersonal drama dressed up as a war story. They had no idea what they were doing. The story was very slapdash too.

The story introduced interesting and seemingly deep political actors only to immediately kill them off, making the setting unstable and not something to invest in. Confederate nations, zerg swarm, protoss empire, UED... all got killed off in the same game that introduced them.

The story revolves around a handful a recurring characters and the rest of the universe just bends to their whims regardless of whether it makes any sense. Mengsk takes over the galactic empire because plot device, Kerry takes over the million year old alien swarm because plot device, and the protoss feel like an afterthought.

(That’s why all the fanfiction is about Raynor/Kerry romance. Blizzard simply didn’t care to invest in the setting outside of the interpersonal drama. Compare this with, say, the Warhammer 40k fanfiction that is vastly more diverse because Games Workshop writes whole books about every army.)

You see the same thing in Warcraft. It has “war” literally in its name, but the actual story is a soap opera.

Can you imagine if these stories were retold in military history textbooks?

“A twenty something woman took control of an alien swarm with her mary sue powers to get back at her ex-boyfriend.”

“The king of the living dead invaded a continent to gaslight a prince.”

Blizzard has never been able to write well. We give Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 a free pass because of nostalgia. If you stop to critically analyze the stories, then they fall apart.

Compare this to Command & Conquer. I’m not going to say it has great stories because they’re excuses to explain why you’re waging war. But they’re actually about the war and politics and stuff. That stuff doesn’t take a back seat to interpersonal drama.

 

[dragoner]

C&C had it's sort of ridiculous fan servicey stuff too:

 

[Gradine]

Wait, Blizzard games have story?

 

[VelvetViolet]

C&C had it's sort of ridiculous fan servicey stuff too:

Sure, but I wasn’t criticizing fan service.

“See that sexy bug girl on the cover? Her design is sexist as hell. She has high-heeled feet for goodness’ sake!” That’s criticizing fan service.

Wait, Blizzard games have story?

Yes, indeed they do. Guess why you don’t hear about them?