Capital Ships vs Primal Kerrigan

Campaign Discussion
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The resurrection mechanic also begs the question of why there aren’t more Kerrigans running around doing things. Abathur created the original Queen of Blades, at least, basically from scratch, so if they are able to clone her to that degree, why don’t they have a bunch of disposable Queen of Blades minions running around with her powers too?

Being primal doesn’t actually provide any protection from infestation or psychic connection or anything like that. It means they don’t have the hive mind, not that they cant have it.

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Because the QoB wouldn’t want extra and possible competition?

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So give them a lobotomy so that they aren’t capable of higher strategizing. Or just bind them to her the way the cerebrates were bound to the Overmind.

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That kinda defeats her purpose, since her spirit was something the Overmind wanted to preserve, and this is what allowed her to beat Zagara and Warfield on Char.
Plus, it may affects their psi power depending on where the area for psi power is located in her brain.

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Kerrigan as a commander is dangerous because she is ruthless and capable of exceptional long term thinking and strategy. Kerrigan as an individual is dangerous because of her nigh-invulnerability and wide range of ways to kill anyone and anything. For minions, you only need the latter. Even if their psi power is weakened (say, to the level she was at pre-Amerigo) they would still be incredibly useful as shock troops.

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HotS campaign mod where everything is the same but you have 12 Kerrigans.

You wouldn’t even need to macro on Brutal.

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See? TBO gets it.

202020

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Then again, we don’t know how much affecting her personnality would affect her psi powers. Maybe reducing her conscience to basic Zerg level would leave her with as much psi power as any other infested terran.

Plus, we know Abathur did not remove her ghost conditioning and that they had to check how it was done to remove it. That imply that Abathur’s, and by extension the Swarm’s, knowledge of the Terran brain is limited, and trying to preserve the psionics while removing higher thinking is something that may be beyond his grasp.

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They don’t need to completely remove all her intelligence. Just her free will and higher abstract thinking.

The ghost conditioning was literal, physical machinery stuck in her brain that she needed to turn off. Theres nothing that would stop Abathur from creating a biological version of that if necessary, we know that he can take terran tech and make a zerg version of it, like the Valkyrie communication system used in Evolution.

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The cerebrates are already giant brains with super intelligence and reality warping psychic powers. Kerry only became a character because of author favoritism, not because it would make sense in-universe. Just transplant all her remotely interesting character traits onto the cerebrates or whatever the equivalent is after retcons.

Otherwise, there’s been so much retconning that it’s difficult to determine whether the zerg’s hive mind can actually be controlled anymore. We see plenty of instances where “feral” zerg use tactics and strategy. Raises the question of why leader breeds exist at all.

Anyway, a clone army of Kerries is boring IMO. I’d prefer more body horror lore, different breeds with different roles created out of human test subjects. We already have that to a tiny degree with changelings and aberrations. I’m sure we could invent plenty more.

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Spirit’s Witch rant is the best thing about this thread, change my mind.

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I’ve been away from the board for about four days and wow, this thread really exploded.

A few of my comments:

In “Heart of the Swarm,” I’ve always seen Kerrigan “resurrecting” at the central Hatchery/Lair/Hive as the exact same gameplay mechanic as a Hero resurrecting at an Altar of Kings in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, though unlike that game’s Campaigns, they actually gave a story reasoning for it here: That she deep tunnels back to heal/regenerate. It’s a story reasoning that generally makes sense but won’t work in every situation because it’s a mechanic.

We’ve never seen Kerrigan reincarnate like a Cerebrate before in-game or in lore (to my knowledge) from her original infestation to the end of “Wings of Liberty,” and considering she’s reviving at a Hatchery while still (mostly) de-infested and far, far weaker than when she was the Queen of Blades, I’d find it completely implausible for her to be reincarnating now.

Naktul explains this mechanic in what is an early level of the game where the game is still guiding the player on how to, well, play the game, Naktul is Zerg herself and has a significantly better understanding of her species than a Terran, and Warfield has oft been criticized on this very board for being incompetent, so it seems to me Warfield, who was not first-hand present when he made his quote about killing her, is simply mistaken.

Having said all that, I find the idea of a Terran with a little Zerg DNA being able to burrow and deep tunnel silly as well.

In terms of the Overmind and Cerebrates resurrecting, as I recall, we’ve always seen, or read, about it happening near instantly on-the-spot, and I recall the Overmind stating Cerebrates are resurrected via it.

So when the Overmind was killed at the end of the Great War, Cerebrates were able to be killed conventionally again. After the Brood War, while the player Cerebrate’s actual means of death are not revealed, it is indeed possible that Kerrigan killed it or had it killed.

I have also always found it funny in the franchise that any Zerg unit that burrows into a space station, the metal “heals” after they unborrow. Burrowing is, again, a mechanic and the Zerg version of “cloaking,” and the story descriptions of it won’t always work out in real life.

@Kelthar I actually once thought Gradius was British as well, though apparently not.

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I think he’s in US, but he comes from Eastern Europe.

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I wouldn’t call it a rant.

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I’ll just address every main topic instead of replying to everyone:

Hive Mind: Human Kerrigan is connected to the hive mind because that’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked. Minions -> Overlords -> Main Controller.

Two protoss have to sacrifice their lives and drain all their shields to mind control one unit. For Kerrigan to do this to hundreds of minions as a human is kinda retarded. Plus I’m pretty sure zerg control has never worked that way, ever. Trying to shift burden of proof on me to prove that that’s still the case is kinda dishonest. That’s not my job.

Army of Kerrigans: Yo…this has been a problem since the character was created. That’s part of what I don’t like about her. She has DNA. Zerg manipulate and store DNA. Zerg should be able to create more Kerrigans. Her burrowing back to base doesn’t make it any less of an issue. You’ll have to fanon up whatever excuse for why the zerg don’t do this. There’s probably a reason they did this for only one SC1 Torrasque instead of making an army of them. My theory is an extra Kerrigan unit uses up too much supply. :man_shrugging:

Respawning on another planet: Per Browder’s Q&A, the respawn mechanic has a limited range. While the hive mind allows her to control minions from planets far away, there’s not enough bandwidth to transfer her entire consciousness back across lightyears.

Kerrigan is OP: Respawning doesn’t really change that. She can regenerate a severed wing. I don’t like it either.

Torrasque: The Torrasque is explicitly resurrected and there’s no evidence the term is being used improperly. That means its mind/body goes back to the Cerebrate and revives unless otherwise stated somewhere. Zerglings in HotS are reconstituted, not resurrected. Nice diversionary attempt though Spirit.

Respawning in Place: Again, not true of the Torrasque. Makes no sense that it would be a requirement for Cerebrates to respawn only in territory that the enemy just captured. The nature of the hive mind should allow them to spawn anywhere. But even if not, Kerrigan would use the Torrasque version. Problem solved.

Recap:

  • Warfield clearly stating that he destroyed her. Yet she revived.
  • The specific falling down animation they used even though they already had a burrowing animation for Kerrigan that they could have reused.
  • The Browder q&a literally telling us what happens.
  • Other units like the Cerebrates and SC1 Torrasque having the resurrection ability. No reason these can’t be extended to Kerrigan.
  • A human Kerrigan should not have zerg burrowing abilities/genetics. It belies disbelief. The only thing zerg about her is her hair.

Sign me up for the list of people who think it’d be cool too if she wasn’t functionally immortal. But I’m not the one who writes this crap. :man_shrugging:

In reality I think she burrows at times in addition to resurrecting.

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Kerrigan, at least human Kerrigan, isn’t a part of the hive mind, but she can still connect to it from the outside. A third Overmind coming out of nowhere wouldn’t be able to control human Kerrigan because she isn’t actually intrinsically linked to the hive mind. I doubt it could control the Primal QoB, but for different reasons.

Browder isn’t even on the writing team. He was a multiplayer designer. Taking his word as gospel is a mistake IMO.

The Torrasque is inconsistent between games (and missions), but based on Abathur’s comments and the one time we can actually control it, the reason why it reconstitutes at a cerebrate is because it is the cerebrate itself that is enacting the process rather than something intrinsic to the torrasque. In HotS, Abathur solves that problem by using the radioactive compound, so they can trigger the process directly at the Ultralisk’s location.

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That doesn’t really jive. If you connect to a hive mind you’re part of it.

He’s the lead designer. Normally when people give interviews they avoid giving answers on topics they’re ignorant about. Browder never had a history of making up random stuff for interviews…

That’s because the SC1 Torrasque has nothing to do with the SC2 Torrasque.

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More precisely, from Ukraine.

Which prompted JZW to make a joke about Chernobyl getting into Gradius’s brain.
That’s when you realize that nobody cares about mocking Eastern Europeans, not even SJW :smiley:

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Let me put it like this. If the hive mind is like the internet, we can still interface with things through it, send signals, control computers, etc… but we aren’t ourselves physically connected to it. And that matches with Kerrigan’s description of what its like pre and post primal transformation.

Im not aware that Browder has given many interviews on a topic which he didn’t have a direct hand in for you to make that statement.

Abathur describes them as the same strain.

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We are a mockery in and of ourselves.