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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 8045641" data-attributes="member: 6686357">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:[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=20150[/URL]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.</blockquote>

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