Inevitably, a status quo war between the Conclave, the Overmind, and the Confederacy, without one side gaining a particular upper hand, would get just as boring. It would easily justify skirmish matches/(un)ranked matches, and may be suitable for a game without a story/campaign that gets to have the nuances of an actual conflict. You seem to be ignoring the reason why there is a peace time- all of the factions were just in a fairly costly war, and none of them have any real reason to fight each other yet.
Youâre beginning to remind me of Abathur during SC:Evolution.
Edit: When I say ânuances of an actual conflictâ I donât actually mean SC; itâs not a great example of it compared to other games.
I donât pretend otherwise. Iâm of the opinion that Blizzard sabotaged SC1 by writing it as a self-contained story rather than planning for the future. A ton of interesting plot hooks are introduced but get destroyed before they ever go anywhere.
Remember how people got upset when World of Warcraft killed off beloved characters like Illidan and Arthas? I have the same feelings toward the Confederacy, Conclave, and Overmind. Itâs worse for me because nobody else cares and I have nobody empathetic to talk and listen to.
How do you know that if we never got a chance to explore it? It might not work for a galaxy-trotting campaign that upends the status, but you could easily write countless campaigns focusing on small conflicts.
Why do you Warhammer 40k has vastly more lore fans than Starcraft ever did? Because it focuses on small scale stories and gives every fan a blank check to write stories about their personal armies going on adventures.
The same format would work just fine for Starcraft.
A conflict doesnât need to be a universal war that overturns the universal status quo to quality as an âactualâ conflict. Small scale conflicts are actually easier to believe, understand and emphasize with. Any larger and you trivialize the scales, as Starcraft did.
I take that as a complement. Iâm trying to balance a desire for good writing with the capitalist quota to keep pumping out games.
Imagine that StarCraft 1 had been made today with all the bells and whistles of SC2. Each campaign is its own expansion with thirty missions, research side quests, a bazillion highly detailed units and characters, etc. We get tons of detail and characterization sufficient to make us actually care about the Confederacy, Conclave, Overmind and all their associated baggage.
Would you still be happy to see them all get casually killed off and replaced with an entirely new cast of governors who are given plot armor against similar deaths?
You get four portraits per briefing and a limited amount of time. Duke and Aldaris served the function of representing the conclave and Confederacy to the player, adding a million different characters and half hour exposition dumps during the briefings and gameplay was simply never going to happen. With the limitations they had at the time they did a darn good job of getting across what they needed to for the story they wanted to tell.
Different tastes, I suppose. If you want to explore more campaigns, there are hundreds of custom campaigns set in-universe that handle things way better. You may be interested in picking up SC 1.16.1 so you can play some of the modded campaigns like Legacy of the Confederation.
The same format wouldnât necessarily work for an RTS, anyway. There isnât a real way to do a sandbox the same way as in tabletop. Blizzard made their universe for you to live in through their characters, GW made a universe you could live in, with associated freedoms (as free as their figures, books, and the constraints of the rulebooks, at least).
Also, donât tell me that Warhammer is your idea of scale. While it has focus on smaller scale conflicts, it could not possibly be more grandiose.
In a sense, I guess? More that you apparently want the Overmind back and the Koprulu to be driven into conflict.
Yes? The Conclave and Confederacy are deeply flawed by design, and are undone by their flaws. The confederacyâs tactics and methods created the entity that brought them down in a very real way, and the conclave was all but actively self destructive in its adherence to tradition and dogma over good sense. Zeratul even admonishes Aldaris about just that, in one of his better roasts before he went senile. We donât need to sit in on an Old Families meeting to understand what the Confederacy is and why it needs to end, we actively fall victim to them valuing their reputation and power over the lives of their people. Ditto with the conclave.
The writing of those can vary immensely and there arenât many reviews I could find.
40k has planets routinely forgotten or accidentally destroyed due to rounding errors in bureaucratic paperwork. It is a satire of grandiose scales.
If Amon tried to pull off his plan in 40k, then nobody would notice and he would ultimately get killed in a minor skirmish. His âEnd Warâ gets maybe one line in a logbook listing trillions of similar wars fought by the Imperium in the last month or two.
That isnât a fair comparison.
Did you read WarCraft Chronicle? They fought a dozen global wars in the last couple years in-universe. That is no exaggeration.
And you are sure this is because the concept is inherently bad or because Blizzard is in charge? I donât expect Blizzard to change, but a fandom still has the power to write fanfiction.
You could argue the same about the current governments. The Conclave and Confederacy were never given a chance to look good, unlike the UED. The UED are supposedly hardcore racists but their characterization attracted fans.
Check SENetwork or CampaignCreations. Although many of the sites that once hosted SC mapping/modding are now defunct, those 2 are the best places to find good ones.
CC unfortunately exists only as a forum at this point, but in previous years when they had a site there was a page that included âmust-playsâ. I believe the list was:
Antioch Chronicles episodes 1 and 2
Aeon of the Hawk and Flame Knives
Vile Egression
Legacy of the Confederation
Ascension of Duran and Dark Intents
I think there were a couple more but those are the biggest ones I can remember. Of them, at least 5 of them (Vile Egression, Antioch 1/2, AotH and FK) are voice acted. LotC is an AU scenario that if Iâm not mistaken is one of the codifiers for modded SC1 campaign. I think itâs also the only strictly Terran campaign that was up there.
I have not read it yet, but paid enough attention to the lore around the time of its release. I heard it was great to but a lot of things down on paper, but I always (and still) get the impression that it messed some stuff up. Even then, most of those wars (assuming thatâs referring to AvH conflict in the games) were blatantly unnecessary, up to and including the current expansion.
I find it very hard to believe the zerg are capable of being peaceful indefinitely. When Abathur said the zergâs nature was conflict, he wasnât being hyperbolic.
Purity of essence itself is defined by causing an obsession with self-improvement. This manifested itself quite blatantly in the primals, the Overmind, and the xelânaga.
According to Stetmannâs research notes, all zerg exhibit conflict on a cellular. Every zerg has two cell types that fight to the death, forcing a constant state of evolution within every individual organism.
In the manga, we see the zergling âScarâ kill its own twin at birth. It wasnât feral either, it was inside the hive mind. This zergling was said to have strong genes and these were recycled in later generations.
In light of this, it seems really unlikely that the zerg would be capable of true peace. It goes against their basic biological and metaphysical nature.
The xelânaga had purity of essence and look how well that turned out for them. Theyâre hardly paragons of peaceful coexistence. The only times they ever interacted with other species were for arbitrary self-serving purposes.
The only one that I wish for them to genuinely move on from is the freaking Terran Dominion. Iâm so sick of them. Theyâve been beaten up so many times that their very existence just doesnât feel legit anymore.
The Zerg kind of are in a new structure now with the Queens leading the Swarm. Iâve never been a fan of the Zerg Queens, but I am somewhat interested in seeing what route they take the Zerg from here on out.
As for the Protoss, my issue if anything is that we didnât see enough of the Daelaam. During the WoL days, Iâm pretty sure I remember Bliz always hinting that the Protoss are still on Shakuras trying to rebuild, and are struggling to keep the peace between the Aiur protoss and Shakuras dark templar in tact, yet we saw none of it.
This is why I could care less what else they come up with or who they move on to. Youâve got a military sci fi where military defeats donât matter. Anything is possible and anything can get retconned.
Instead of using logic to extrapolate the future plot we might as well just roll some dice.
EDIT: This rant isnât aimed at you specifically, just fans of the queens in general. Sorry if it comes across as acidic, Iâm having tone problems at the moment.
I am not. They turned into funny looking humans, with human thought patterns and motivations. We already have the mecha zerg and cerberus zerg now for all your peaceful human-friendly zerg needs.
The real zerg are cooler when they are the villains starting all the conflict. Regardless of SC2 forcing them into the hero role, SC2âs own lore about purity of essence makes peace logically antithetical to the zergâs inherent nature. The same quality that gives them their capacity as bioweapons makes them unable to coexist with other species.
Purity of essence means the zerg âembody evolutionary potential.â Their fratricidal cell types, among other features, are a manifestation of that. Darwin supposedly deconverted from Christianity because he refused to believe a benevolent God would create evolution due to the inherently vicious and seemingly sadistic nature of natural selection. Similar concerns are echoed in Buddhism: the nature of life is suffering, therefore material existence is evil. Apply this to the zerg: the most basic and natural impulse of the zerg is maximizing suffering.
Rather than making logical predictions of what the zerg will do based on their inherently violent nature, you start from the arbitrary conclusion that they will always be peaceful and go from there. Making the zerg peaceful requires arbitrarily cherrypicking SC2âs lore and ignoring basic facts of reality itself. That is a logically incoherent position for any lore fan to take if they otherwise claim to speculate organic progressions from the current lore based on facts and logic.
Have I shredded your argument with facts and logic yet? Or are you going to shred my argument with facts and logic indicating the zerg are not inherently violent beings despite being literally defined by the most recent (and therefore correct) lore as the metaphysical embodiments of evolutionary change, a system that causes unimaginable suffering by its very nature?
Oh I donât want the Zerg to be heroic either. Thatâs why in a previous thread, my theory for a future Zerg conflict is going to be a civil war amongst the Queens. Those that follow Kerriganâs ideas, and those who donât.