He isn’t Church of Mengsk though.
Who? And why’s that important?
JP.
And I was just poking fun at your and Spirit’s different use of the word brother.
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Oh yeah, Spirit uses it as an in-cult way of referring to each other. I like it though.
@Everyone
I see, thanks. I guess I have been trying to justify the plot point from Watsonian perspective all the time that I forgot to the Doylist. Beside when it come to Doylist I just accept that gameplay and author personality will influence the work and there is nothing that we can do about it.
It can be hella annoying though.
I confused Doylist and Watsonian in some posts. I apologize for the confusion.
This is what I meant when I said typing on my phone limits my articulation immensely. I often get emotional and that impedes my judgment.
I don’t know how else to put it succinctly, but the problem with SC’s story is that it focuses on a very tiny cast and bends the universe to serve their personal arcs regardless of whether that is fair to the rest of the world building. It’s myopic in the extreme. That’s why military scifi buffs have no interest in it: it’s simply unbelievable and uninteresting.
The psi-emitter, Confederacy, zerg, protoss, etc are reduced to plot devices in service to Raynor and Mengsk’s arc. They are not given their own agency, motives, logistics, etc outside what serves Raynor/Mengsk. Defending this with in-universe justifications doesn’t make it any less arbitrary and myopic.
I propose that a more interesting story would have given the same attention to the other POVs rather than arbitrary privileging Mengsk and bending the universe around him. This story would focus on deeper and believable politics and logistics.
Instead of personally betraying Kerry/Raynor, Mengsk is part of a faction in the SoK that wants to dispose of other inconvenient overly moralistic factions who oppose outright terrorism. Accidents, Assassinations, and purges happen here just as in real revolutionary movements.
Instead of the zerg magically steamrolling all opposition, they don’t. Instead, they operate from a position of relative weakness to make their plots more engaging. They launch calculated assaults on Confederate government installations to divert attention from their harvesting operations. Perhaps the zerg use espionage to trick the SoK into thinking they’re following psi-emitters to conceal their intelligence, or maybe the emitters only work on feral zerg left behind in the chaos of the war. The SoK take advantage of Confederate losses to claim power in the Tarsonian sub-sector.
Instead of collapsing, the rest of the Confederacy outside the Tarsonian cluster isn’t affected. SC2 retconned Koprulu as having arbitrarily high number of worlds so if we take that into consideration the Confederacy is simply too big for Mengsk to conquer in one fell swoop.
If we take the UED retcon into consideration, then may we can rewrite the history so that the UED is involved in the first contact war. Initially they were trying to halt Confederate aggression that threatened their own interests, then aliens invaded. This would also help to explain the arbitrarily high Koprulu population through emigration from the other terran sectors.
The protoss likewise have their own complex politics in this conflict.
Basically, the question I ask myself is “what would make for an interesting military scifi story?” If the inconsistent lore gets in the way, then I ignore it and rewrite it. You can read my AU proposal on google docs if you want heavy details.
I guess we should go tell George Lucas that the original Star Wars had no business being successful, or J. Michael Straczynski that Babylon 5 wasn’t actually that good. Or Lord of the Rings, for that matter.
StarCraft is a character driven story, about characters doing things. If youre looking at it as an examination of military tactics, youre fundamentally cheating yourself.
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This is exactly what I mean when I say you keep dismissing my concerns. It’s pointless to argue with you because you seem to think Starcraft is perfect, you don’t care one iota about understanding my POV, and you clearly have no idea what military scifi is.
If im dismissing them, its because you have utterly failed to establish them as having any basis in reality. You speak with an authority you don’t possess, and then, when asked to actually point to something in the story that you don’t like, it turns that the aspect you are criticizing, isn’t even there (or, as in the last case, something you were criticizing for not being there, was in fact there). At this point, I have every reason to believe that you aren’t even interested in looking at the story, but rather in making up something to whine about. The fact that I am even making an effort to engage you here is an act of incredible patience on my part, because every time I try and reach my hand out to try and see where youre coming from, you throw a turd in it and then complain when the hand goes away.
Case in point. I don’t give one iota of a crap about your No True Scotsman fallacy. Get out of here with that. Bring a real argument to the table.
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Ditto.
Answer me straight: how experienced are you as a reader? How familiar are you with criticism? what genre do you think starcraft is? what do you think of the story? Can you critically analyze it? Do you think it can be improved and how?
Youre the one trying to speak with authority. The one who needs to be establishing their credentials here is you. I can and have been critically analyzing it, far more objectively than you have been, and the threads are all there if you care to hunt for them, here and on the old forums (rip the post counts). BW took a sharp plunge in storytelling quality compared to the original, in part I think due to the substantial increase in simultaneously moving parts, but the original is about as good as its going to get within an RTS framework.
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I think the plot could be significantly improved, factoring in deeper politics and logistics and character dynamics, and there’s nothing inherent in the RTS format that prevents that. It requires creativity on the writer’s part.
I tried so hard and got so far…
This be a fine game, Imma chime in quicklike.
I have read books before and shall continue doing so.
I like giving it, and if I think it’s well-founded or reasonable I will listen to it and decide how to improve upon the criticized part. Except about my meat eating habits. Vegetables are practically grass and only my food eats grass.
Standard space fantasy with some reality to it. Doesn’t even compare to the great sci-fi books I’ve read from Lem or Asimov.
Currently playing through StarCraft 1 so I will hold on the judgement there. StarCraft 2 could have been a lot better without certain character redemptions, prophecies and evil gods.
I can criticize it (have done, am doing it and shall continue doing so) and I can analyze it (have done, am doing it and shall continue doing so) but can I blend the two together? As a rule of thumb I don’t cross streams.
Sure do.
I don’t negotiate with literature-fascists and won’t give out my trade secrets. More KMC sure would improve the story though.
Sure there is. Nobody is going to sit there watching Mengsk negotiate with the leadership of Antiga for an hour and a half about the exact terms of their joining the rebellion. That’s boring. The player needs to actually be doing something, and since the RTS engine can only handle them doing RTS things except in the most extremely superficial ways, that means youre going to be fighting something.
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Excuse me, I will quote myself.
Or your leader dying because of heart attack in the middle of the battle he had high blood pressure due to his love of eggs andsausages which resulted in high amount of low density lipoprotein (bad cholesterol in layman’s terms) and sodium levels in blood that led to the aforementioned high blood pressure.
No one.
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Great! Things we can agree on.
Starcraft wasn’t originally pitched as wacky space fantasy. That was added later on. I think it is detrimental to storytelling and should be excised. (Note that psychic powers are not inherently space fantasy. “Space fantasy“ is largely about aesthetics and themes and framing similar to epic fantasy, not how hard or soft the science is.)
I think the story should strive to be more like the greats, though truncated to fit the RTS format. More detailed explorations could be relegated to supplemental fiction rather than during gameplay. For example, text storytelling in the codex similar to the Souls games.
What do you think?
I never suggested that. We don’t need to know details that needlessly slow down the story. I think the story should do more to give a believable feel to the politics and logistics. The existing story is quite shallow and lacks important context for its events.
Would you please try playing devil’s advocate or steelmanning my argument? I’m sure that would help us both to get a better understanding of one another.
Jokes are not helping me. Would you please try playing devil’s advocate, steelmanning or something like that?
Whats “unbelievable” about it, exactly? The idea that a charismatic leader on the side of “don’t poison people with bad food or annihilate their planets with nuclear missiles” would have significant popular support? You cant just say “the politics are bad”, that’s not even worth engaging.
We aren’t interested in helping you. Youre the one trying to convince us of the legitimacy of your position. It needs to stand on its own merits, not on the pity of the other side. If you feel that nobody is understanding you, its almost certainly because youre just communicating badly.
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The politics are shallow. Is that worth engaging?
The Confederacy’s behavior is moronic and it staggers belief that their population hasn’t revolted long ago. It needs a ton more depth before it comes across as anything other than Metzen strawmanning the Confederacy to make the SoK look good.
Grey and grey morality is hip nowadays, so why not take that approach? Give more depth to both sides.
I said that multiple times already. That’s why I asked you to try playing devil’s advocate. I don’t really have the emotional energy right now to give a detailed analysis of anything.
To be honest, I’m afraid that no matter how detailed my analysis is, no matter how many dozens of pages I write, you’ll just shred the whole thing anyway with absolutely zero interest in even entertaining it as a serious proposition.
I shouldn’t even need to have this argument anyway. ToxicDefiler already wrote a reboot. I wrote a google doc myself. Would you please read things like that and get back to me with your thoughts?