Im not sure what you mean by this. Rebel Yell is the story of Mengsk’s descent into tyranny. To that end, you the player can either be one of his rebels or a confederate, and being a confederate means losing. Its up in the air weather Mengsk was always that awful or just lacked the means to express it until then, but there is very much a transition from the basically human person who volunteers to evacuate Mar Sara, and the soon-to-be dictator who kills a planet out of spite. Rebel Yell is very much the story of Mengsk as witnessed by Jim Raynor and the Magistrate.
The game spells it out a bit, but the zerg are indeed inherently attracted to the psychic emanations of ghosts. What isn’t known is if this is at an individual level or at a command level, although the available information heavily suggests the former.
I mean, they do harvest population centers. They infest cities en masse whenever the terrans don’t pull their populations out in time. But zerg infestation destroys most psionic potential in its subjects out of hand as a side effect of crushing their minds and connecting them to the hive mind. Its just an unavoidable consequence, and one that took them years of experimentation to really resolve with any consistency. Beyond that, the protoss habitually incinerate such gatherings of zerg, which is why we don’t see a massive buildup of infested terrans anywhere, and indeed they don’t successfully infest a psychic in the way they desire until after Tassadar stops nuking the infested terran planets.
As for why they don’t evolve a resistance, that sort of directed evolution requires controlled circumstances, and the zerg cant create or deploy emitters on their own. Furthermore, it takes time, and Rebel Yell only takes place over a course of months.
Then you’d have stagnation and a plot that goes nowhere. You shouldn’t be able to cut out entire campaigns in a story recap because nothing important happened. This is why people dislike the Tosh, Hanson and rebellion arcs in WoL.
I personally wouldn’t mind tiny vignettes in a much larger universe but you have to change up the status quo at some point or else your campaigns start to feel like pointless filler.
StarCraft shows it very well how people work. You have your idealist colonial Marshal who wants to do the right thing, your cold-blooded general and hidden agenda-driven freedom fighter who becomes the thing he fought.
I find it interesting when non-Terrans show more humanity than Terrans because it gives me space to ponder upon all the very unimportant philosophical questions of life.
The Confederacy was in my opinion important to the story. You see how characters like Duke just change sides when it becomes necessary for survival, you see Mengsk going forward like an avalanche not stopping at anything… Again, this is ultimately a story of and about people.
From a Watsonian POV, the manual spent a ton of backstory establishing the Confederacy as a seemingly fixed facet of the setting with tons of plot hooks, then the game throws all that away for the sake of cheap drama. What was the point of all that? You didn’t need to do any of that. From a Doylist POV, it staggers beliefs that a Trump-esque figure like Mengsk could become the dictator of an interstellar Confederacy encompassing an arbitrarily high number of worlds and an arbitrarily high population of people just by destroying one major city.
No it doesn’t. It states what the terrans think to be the case. (Misinformation and misdirection is an established storytelling tool btw.) The manual clearly states that the zerg were deliberately targeting humanity for psychic potential.
But in any case, this is Doylist. It’s entirely arbitrary at the whim of the writer. Given Blizzard is nothing if not horribly inconsistent with their writing, we can’t say anything for certain since it will undoubtedly change by retcon.
The story doesn’t do a good job of showing that. “Show, don’t tell” is a writing guideline for a good reason.
A better writer than Metzen would have made harvesting population centers for psychics part of the zerg missions. Making the zerg steamroll all opposition with ease is boring and a complete waste of the zerg campaign btw. But I digress.
No, that’s an explanation Metzen contrived in a short story that was never referenced before or after that short story again. As a Doylist explanation, it is ultimately writer fiat.
Saying “zerg can’t infest psychics because of a reason the writer made up” isn’t a valid justification. From a Watsonian POV, Don’t make their quest assimilating human psychics in the first place if you never actually intend to explore it.
From a Watsonian POV, Metzen based Kerry on his junkie ex-girlfriend and wanted to make her a special snowflake mary sue.
Again, this isn’t shown well in the story if at all. The zerg apparently defeated the protoss off-screen but that’s just told to us without showing how.
Again, you’re just making up an excuse. This is fiction and is entirely under the control of the writer. The writer’s choices aren’t interesting or well-thought uses of the premise. The emitter only ever works when it’s convenient to the plot.
What you need to understand is that video game stories have very different needs from book stories. Starcraft’s story is glorified advertising for the esports. Therefore, there’s no point to changing the status quo in any meaningful way because that could negatively affect the esports. If all the zerg got exterminated, then you can’t use them in sequels. Not only that, but for nerd properties the fans hate it if you change the status quo. They’ll send you death threats!
Just look at Command & Conquer series for an example of what I mean. The status quo never meaningfully changes. Every single game still features the same sides with the same beliefs, sometimes introducing new ones for variety. The difference from Starcraft is that C&C is not character driven in the same way. The setting doesn’t revolve around a particular set of characters, but around faction conflict.
So while the status quo in C&C seems to change, it is just a new coat of paint every time because the basic premise doesn’t change.
In Starcraft, any apparent status quo change has consistently resulted in the world building becoming progressively stupider. The zerg are demoted from a galactic space monster to Kerry’s pets. The terrans become toys in Raynor and Mengsk’s soap opera. The protoss are reduced to worthlessness.
That doesn’t work with the military scifi genre. While you have to tell a conventional story through the POV of characters, where Starcraft goes wrong is that it treats its tiny cast like Greek gods. They run around the galaxy wreaking havoc and nobody can stop them from doing whatever they want.
For example, Duke takes the entirety of Alpha squadron when he defects. That’s an entire branch of the Confederate Arms Forces! That’s equivalent to all the USA Marines defecting to ISIS! That’s completely unbelievable and could never happen outside of Metzen’s imagination.
Metzen’s writing makes Tom Kratman look like a genius.
Well, says you. Just because you proclaim it it won’t be true.
That’s a Squadron, not the entire Marine Corps. It is also historically accurate, soldiers and entire bands, squadrons and armies switched sides throughout history. It just shows that the AS was more loyal to Duke and their lives than their honor and the Confederacy.
ISIS and the Sons of Korhal are also quite different. Mengsk was running around saving colonies from the Zerg and as far as I know did not attack any civilians (until he got hold of the PSI Emitters).
How much military scifi lit have you read? Enough to make you an expert on writing it? Please, tell me how many bestsellers and/or critiques you published. I’m all ears.
You’re getting the terminology confused. The Confederacy only has like eight or nine squadrons that we know of. One defecting was supposed to be a huge deal, not a footnote in their defense budget. Unless that’s been retconned again, like everything else.
Furthermore, a defection of that magnitude is no longer feasible in modern times with modern tech. Much less the cyberpunk space scifi tech available to the Confederacy, which includes things like mass brainwashing, cybernetic augmentation, sentient robots, mass cloning, synthetic people, accidental planet busters, and countless other technologies mentioned in throwaway lines throughout the lore. Believe me, it gets crazy.
As you just said, You have zero evidence of this actually being the case. We saw Mengsk offer assistance to the Magistrate, but only if the Magistrate survived long enough. We know nothing of the SoK’s actions other than the heavily biased account offered by the game. While the Confederacy appears incompetent, the evidence Mengsk presented to justify overthrowing it was unconvincing. That’s like saying the USA should nuke Washington because Trump suggested building an alligator-filled moat along the Mexican border.
The Confederacy is an interstellar polity populated by billions maybe trillions of people, not a banana republic. The logistics are so completely different as to be incomparable.
I love good literature. Shakespeare, Tolkien, Martin, Heinlein, Asimov, Zhao, etc.
Have you read the Liberty’s Crusade or Queen of Blades novels? Calling them “embarrassingly bad” is putting it mildly. It’s no surprise we never got further novelizations of the campaigns.
Who hurt you?
I stand by my point, saying “it dun werk coz” is not a valid claim. Humor me.
Not much between them though. I would say if I wasn’t afraid of getting banned for mockery. Again.
I’m willing to believe you though the lack of information about more ‘bands’ doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It don’t mean they do either.
Could be the case, they just can’t stop “fixing” the story.
I disagree with your conclusion. The way the Confederacy’s power structure is built with how local militias, etc. work I’d wager it’s easier to defect. Not to mention the technologies you listed aren’t only available to the Confederacy. There are other power players in the Terran fold, Umoja, the Combine and the Sons of Korhal - at that time. Also the general moral, greed and rampant corruption. It is hard to judge because of StarCraft’s retrofuturistic design.
Absolutely nothing you’ve said so far has done anything to convince me that the story of SC1 is more than mediocre at best. Much less the disasters that are BW and SC2.
SC1 has a mediocre story. It’s amateurish and, if we’re being honest, par the course for video games. Nobody would use it as an example of how video game stories can be just as respectable as traditional lit.
Blizzard’s gross incompetence at writing? Their propensity for pitching truly interesting and novel ideas full of potential only to horribly botch the execution in every imaginable way and then some?
Let me tell you something that took me weeks to realize you can’t really argue with TrickyHunter, his experience with the sorry is vastly different from the rest of us.
He read the mAnUaL and many comic and novel, plus the Wiki. However, he barely play the campaign if at all. (I suspect that he didn’t really play it. Or play with a very closed mind that render the experience amount to nothing.) So for him the StarCraft is more about those literature than the video game. He think the campaign is supplement material to those novel and wiki. As such, a lot of his interpretation of the story is just… weird? Not sure how to classify it, but you’ll see that it’s off somehow.
@Gradius
Actually, a planet destroyer bug is believable for me. It might not happen on earth, but who knows if the evolution took a different turn, it could be a mindless bug that destroying our planet by overconsumption of flora and fungal instead of apes with pollutions.
@Brother Bifrost
Is it suspension of belief or disbelief?
@TrickyHunter
Regarding the Psi-Emitter, in addition to what our Probe Emperor typed, I don’t think your idea works. Why would you rather try your luck for a powerful psychic in a large population than follow the signal of a powerful psionic signature?
Also, the game shows heavily that the Zerg is a threat because they consume planet worth of people.
Lastly, it’s not just that Tansonis was destroyed. It’s that the Tansonis was overrun by the Zerg and there is this new leader who had been saving people from the Zerg. Moreover, in the Nova’s novel, it was Mengsk who alerted the populace to the Zerg. The confederacy knew about them prior, of course, but they kept it secret.
Sorry for the delay in responding. Turns out, work is a thing.
You mean by destroying a planet? Anyway, remember that Mengsk was for months presenting himself as a legitimate alternative to the confederate ruling council and had already persuaded many planets to his cause before attacking Tarsonis. We see this on Antiga in particular, where the local government joins the revolution outright.
In this case, the terrans are correct. The zerg have an innate attraction to terran psychics. Their behavior too consistently fits that pattern over any other alternatives. And you can gripe all you want, but it is consistent.
What do you mean? We spend two missions specifically fending off the zerg from attacking cities on Mar Sara, and see them attacking Antiga as well, which is otherwise largely barren.
You need to do some more reading. Kerrigan was a very late addition to the story added for the sake of the zerg campaign.
Only on Tarsonis. Otherwise we are either playing as the zerg or the protoss do not engage them at all.
The emitter always works. What are you talking about? Its just a very specific tool that doesn’t really have a lot of uses unless you already have a bunch of zerg, or want them to attack a planet for some insane reason.
It’s a reference to Sherlock Holmes. The books are written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but in a way it seems they are written by Dr. Watson, another character.
So a Watsonian perspective is happening in the story and can only note things that are in text. Somebody is telling the truth for example. You look at the text as a reality and you interpret things through it. A Doylist perspective is looking at the created story from outside, as a created thing. Things happen in it because the writer wants it, real life events have a sway on it etc.
I think. Anybody feel free to correct me y’hear? I personally think a mixture of both are required to look at a story.
Okay, but from Watsonian, it doesn’t matter how interesting or great the confederacy was, Mengsk can and must topple it in order to gain more authority. I don’t understand how from Watsonian PoV, the confederacy shouldn’t be destroyed.
Neither. The Confederacy is a plot device, a large force that needs to be defeated in order for other characters to reach their goals. It delivers Mengsk in a position of power and lets him sacrifice Kerrigan. It lets Raynor, the most morally white and just have a nice lil’ moment where he stands up against the new tyrant.
And strictly from their perspective the Confederacy had to go as well. It was either the confederates or them. It was a necessity.
Although you phase it much better, that’s exactly what I meant. Unless I missed something the fact that the confederacy was written with long and rich history has no bearing on whether it should be destroyed or not.
I’m not disputing TrickyHunter here. I’m just not sure if his argument fits the Watsonian concept.