Could the next game destroy the current governments please?

Starcraft 1 systematically destroyed the terran, zerg, and protoss governments at the time. Respectively, the Confederacy, Overmind, and Conclave. Then replaced them.

Can we see the same thing happen to the current governments and their leaders? Kill Valerian, Artanis, and Zagara. Destroy the Dominion, Daelaam, and Swarm. Replace them with new different governments and new rulers.

Thoughts?

Maybe after we get Warcraft 4 we can talk about an SC3.

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It doesn’t have to be a literal SC3. It could be a new campaign/expansion for SC2.

What do you suppose the plot of WC4 would be? A sequel to WoW or a sequel to WC3 that ignores WoW?

I’m actually pretty happy with the current governments, tbh. The terrans, the protoss, and even the zerg ended up in a decent state. There’s more or less a semi-peace between the main powers of the races. The conflicts now come from offshoots. But the primary leadership seems genuinely interested in maintaining some level of treaty. And we’ve never seen this status quo in Starcraft before. I kind of want to see how it goes and how it could develop into new plotlines.

Maybe we can keep this budding alliance going into future games, pitting it against threats outside of the Koprulu Sector. Imagine a full game where the zerg, terrans, and protoss are allies throughout. It’s new ground.

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Personally I don’t think we need the local governments to be totally destroyed and rebuilt every game. New political powers should come as society demands, not to “keep things interesting.”

The Dominion was bad, but the Confederacy was worse and under Valerian the Dimminion has shifted to being a force for good.

There was a legitimate problem with the old government and it was resolved.

The Conclave was xenophobic, clasist, and self important. The Daelaam is much better at seeing and resolving the problems of its people.

There was a legitimate problem with the old government and it was resolved.

The current governments of each group are good for their own citizens and the galaxy at large. I see no need to revise them.

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I think you are overly sentimental and attached to this particular transient status quo. (I feel the same about the status quo at the start of SC1.) Blizzard will probably kill them all off or turn them evil in order to force a conflict. They do stuff like that all the time. Just look at Warcraft: the Alliance/Horde conflict stopped making sense in WC3 near twenty years ago but Blizzard keeps reviving it. The only reason Starcraft has not suffered the same treatment (yet again), tossing peace aside and forcing them back into three-way war, is because the IP is not as profitable so it does not receive as much story expansion. If Galaxy of Starcraft existed, then the status quo would be the three races fighting forever.

The overmind was forced by Amon to attack everyone and was replaced by an Amon free Kerri. This... resolved.

How can I feel sentimental about a status quo that resulted from one of my least favorite plot points and for which I have no nostalgia? :thinking:

More like I’m just not interested in trying to recapture lightning when we have the perfect opportunity right now to expand beyond the same old song and dance.

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What lightning? I think the “same old song and dance” was never adequately explored. Blizzard just breezed through it while focusing almost entirely on Raynor and Kerry at the expense of the setting.

The SC1 manual setup an interesting complicated multilayered conflict that might last many years. The games breezed through those plot points without ever really examining them.

The Umoja and Moria resentment toward Confederacy? Never explored.

The Ara and Akilae arguing over whether to genocide the terrans? Never brought up.

The zerg hunting humanity for the determinant? All that importance moved to Kerry.

The complex cultures teased for the terran squadrons, zerg broods and protoss tribes? Never explored, and the zerg leaders were killed off screen.

The schism between the khalai and nerazim? Breezes through in a handful of missions with a couple paragraphs of dialogue at most.

The terrans fighting back against the protoss in vengeance for the protoss glassing inhabited world and killing countless innocents? Never mentioned once in the series, despite genocide being hugely important in reality.

The SC1 premise could easily have fueled many many years worth of stories, perhaps forever. Blizzard squandered it from the onset and nothing they did since has ever approached a fraction of the potential they squandered.

The three races teaming up against an endless stream of one-note villains coming out of the woodwork will get stale fast. Team up to destroy Earth, hooray! Then Amon’s ex-girlfriend, then Ouros’ mom, then some new terran/zerg/protoss faction that always existed but was never mentioned until now, then a race that created the xel’naga, then Kerry’s evil twin, etc.

At least if the Overmind was the status quo you could actually play as the villains trying to eat humanity. But apparently the coddled modern generation can’t handle playing morally ambiguous characters, much outright villains with literally alien motives. Even if you’re playing space bugs whose purity of essence makes them horrific monsters by definition, the developers shoehorn you into an unambiguous heroic role for the sake if your fragile moral compass.

One can only hope that the constant writer turnover in the company means that we’ll get a halfway decent story at some point, even if that takes another twenty years and forty more war chests with thirty new protoss tribes, thirty new zerg broods, and thirty new terran factions pulled out of the woodwork.

So one thing I wouldn’t mind seeing explored is actually the Dominion.

Valerian, by all accounts is a decent person and a good ruler, but at the end of the day he’s still an autocrat. Maybe we could see some of his allies (Horner) becoming disillusioned that dispite everything they’ve done, the underlying political structure remains the same.

IDK, might just be an incredibly niche story that only I would enjoy. They should still do it though.

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I agree in principle that political thrillers would have been neat stories. The entire forgotten/rushed Umojan/SoK subplot had a lot of room for exploration in the games. (Along with all the other plot hooks teased in the SC1 manual and other supplemental materials.)

I prefer if the Old Families were used as the autocrats, though. It simply feels more realistic as an oligarchy rather than one evil emperor. Even if you don’t want to reboot the franchise (the space western aesthetic worked so much better with the Confederacy), you could still retcon the Old Families as surviving off-world and defecting to Mengsk to save their own skins.

I didn’t count the Zerg because the Zerg don’t really have any government to speak of. They barely have half dozen sapient Zerg, there’s no one to govern.

Kerrigan assuming control of the swarm isn’t really a change in government, because there isn’t really a government at all.

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Queens are sapient to some extent, and every brood is ruled by a sapient broodmother, but it has become a lot closer to a government system with Zagara taking over as overqueen. She’s nowhere near as powerful as Kerrigan, so her rule in this power structure that places the strongest on top is a lot more tenuous even if it’s currently uncontested (aside from arguably Niadra, but she seems disinterested in challenging for a right to rule, for the moment).

I think we do see some interesting stories with the current governments beyond that, though. The dominion is reformed under valerian to something nicer but it’s still corrupt, and still effectively dictatorship. We see in stuff like Soldiers that despite his best attempts, corruption and rule bending, or breaking, is still a fundamental part of the dominion power structure that’s arguably even necessary for its continued function.

The daelaam is more unified than ever, but at the same time all it’s old problems aren’t just paved over. While overt prejudice seems to have died down, there’s still all the tension and centuries of bad blood. We see in the Golden Age movement even attempts from some of the khalai to integrate the nerazim into their cultural celebrations of the past comeback off as massively offensive, and require bribing unscrupulous individuals to pretend to participate.

The races are locked into an uneasy peace, but it’s far from a boring status quo

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I had a few ideas for new governments replacing the old. (If anybody wants to copy my ideas, then I am totally fine with that. These are just brainstorming, nothing very serious.)

Terran: A new government called the Empire, Republic, Federation or whatever takes control of Earth and Koprulu after their leaders are killed. They want revenge on all the filthy alien scum for their many many crimes against humanity and their continued threat to human existence.

Zerg: The Overmind secretly saved xel’naga essence and created a new generation of zerg’naga who have rebuilt the swarm and intend to conquer the universe because purity of essence. Unlike the evil brood moms and terrans, who treat the zerg as slaves, the zerg’naga treat the zerg as family and act in the interests of the zerg as a whole. They are not strictly evil, but by their nature they are hostile to all other life.

Protoss: During the Aeon of Strife a bunch of tribes were lost in a parallel universe. They built a new galactic empire with a telepathic empathy network to prevent further war and make communism feasible. They started investigating our universe after the End War reopened portals in xel’naga temples and got pulled into war, which isn’t hard considering their typical protoss arrogance and entitlement. Their warp gates warp troops from their home universe.

And that’s all I got for now.

Keep the Daelaam, Dominion and Zag-Swarm, but let us play as

Umoja/KMC/UED
Tal’Darim (unless we have a Vorazun-Selendis buddy cop adventure)
Stukov’s Infested/Rebellious Abathur/Primals

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I think it is arbitrary and unfair to say that Dominion, Daelaam and Overqueen should be permanent status quo. Why do they in particular deserve to become permanent fixtures of Starcraft until the copyright expires in a century?

Confederacy, Conclave, and Overmind got killed in their first appearances. We know nothing about them besides propaganda. You could argue they should be the status quo for similar or contrasting reasons.

It’s hardly arbitrary or unfair to say the current stable and generally uncontested governmental state isn’t likely to go away, or has no in-universe reason to be toppled from the inside.

I think something that’s been set for what, like, two years since Evolution came out and set the current “status quo” is hardly a “permanent fixture” anyway.

I don’t really get the idea that upending the government systems will do anything interesting for the story. Zagara’s swarm is interesting, and there’s a lot of stories that can and (in my opinion) should be told within it, same for Artanis’ current iteration of the Daelaam and Valerian’s dominion (although the latter has a pretty good foundation of stories told in it so far already, pretty much all of which are interesting and really explore what his reforms actually mean for society).

I’d hardly say we only know “propoganda” about the conclave, overmind and confederacy though? We have a pretty big swath of media set in and about all three of those governments, we see the consequences of their setup, and the leadup to their toppling because of their failings

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Besides there has been uprising against current Terran goverment in every freaking campaign. (I include remnants of Confederacy)

In NCO you at least fight for the goverment for a change.

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Not at all. They only make extremely brief appearances in SC1 before being killed. Plenty of single characters in SC2 have biographies longer that the histories of the Confederacy, Overmind and Conclave combined.

You could make an argument for the supplemental fiction giving some superficial detail on the Confederacy (not that anybody ever seems to care about it), but we know almost nothing about the politics of the protoss and zerg prior to and during the initial invasion of Koprulu. We know the Conclave and cerebrates existed, but we know almost nothing about them as characters.

It is extremely arbitrary and unfair to those characters that they were casually killed off in favor of devoting orders of magnitude more attention to the Daelaam and Overqueen. I find them boring precisely because they are contrived to be peaceful. Conflict is the soul of drama.

Sounds like you’re the one with a sentimental attachment here, bud.

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