Except our partners.
Since you ask…
I think Blizzard mishandled the protoss and zerg. They were introduced with their own alien cultures and psychologies. Bare bones and trope-y, sure, but open for exploration. We had zerg broods, protoss tribes, terran governments, etc. Then Blizz butchered all of that in order to manufacture what I consider cheap soap opera drama. A waste of perfectly serviceable world building.
And maybe an entire Zerg Swarm and a raidalcoholic with a purple booty addiction.
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Well they did lump literally all the different Zerg and Protoss subfactions and variations into just one big flustercuck. Meanwhile all the Terran subfactions just silently sit in the corner.
QoB’s design always struck me as vaguely sexist. She’s sexualized like a monster girl in a Japanese monster girl game, but it makes no sense the zerg would create anything like that unless it was one of Gorn’s terror tactics or something. The human body, much less silly additions like high heeled feet and bouncy boobs and random succubus wings and etc, is terrible for the sorts of things the zerg would require in their soldiers. I’d expected an assimilated terran to look like one of the collectors from Mass Effect, not a succubus.
Uh huh. The irony is that at least some of them are being fleshed out twenty years later. Who else was expecting the Cerberus callback?
I don’t know if it’s sexist but it is pointless I guess. The original Kerrigan (picture) looked like wearing armor and was green I think.
Infested Terrans, Stukov, Infested Hanson, Aberrations are all ducked up but not Kerrigan. Pretty funny.
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Supposedly, this is an artifact of the game scale. Her model had to have ridiculous balloonish features for them to be remotely visible from the top down game engine (as opposed to BW, where it didn’t matter anyway due to the sprites). I don’t know if i buy that explanation, but that is the one that was given.
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I never liked the QoB plot point, much less the design. I would have preferred if the PC cerebrate was testing a new breed of terran-derived monsters that would counter zealots or something. ToxicDefiler had a few ideas in his pitch including creep colonies made from mutilated psychics and other freaky stuff.
Theoretically, that was the idea in SC1, although not quite so directly. The QoB was able to track and counter some of Tassadar’s psionics once her powers were fully unlocked in a way that the other zerg could not, and it led directly to the devastation of his force and the revealing of Aiur’s location to the Overmind.
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Not sure people would trust a disgusting monster. Kerrigan being ‘good looking’ may actually have some reasons.
That doesn’t make sense with the whole RTS shtick. The zerg are characterized by their swarm. It doesn’t make sense for them to have hero units in the conventional sense. They should be deploying armies of infest kerries against the empire’s zealots. The epic fantasy tropes of personal combat and messianic figures do not fit with the military scifi aesthetic that the story maintained up until that point and for most of the story afterward.
This is an unnecessary plot point. It made more sense IMO when the zerg knew where Aiur was but couldn’t invade until their army had parity with the protoss, hence why they wanted to eat the terrans.
Shifting all the narrative weight from humanity to Kerry specifically feels silly. It’s like the genre changed midstream from military scifi to epic fantasy in space. Why even make a scifi setting if you just want to retell the plot of Warcraft? I didn’t like it.
It doesn’t make sense either for the zerg to engage in diplomacy. That waters down their whole shtick. There’s a reason why in Stellaris the zerg government is incapable of diplomacy: their whole shtick is genocidal gameplay. They eat everyone in their path. They never make peace. That’s their appeal.
Seriously. Would you try to be diplomatic with your livestock? The zerg are alien monsters and have zero reason to engage in diplomacy. Their entire history has consisted of eating every civilization they encounter. Clearly they never needed diplomacy when they ate those people.
It’s absurd that anybody trusts Kerry in BW when she tries diplomacy either. She’s given no indication that she’s trustworthy, the protoss never tried to telepathically test her intentions, and the UED is clearly a safer bet. Then again the writing in BW was probably phoned-in anyway.
While im sure the zerg would love to be able to create limitless waves of Queen of Blades to send against their enemies, that would require Kerrigan-level psychics to be far more common than they are, and doubly runs the problem that they would first have to be fighting these psychics. The whole point of infesting psychics was to allow the Swarm to counter those of the protoss. The terrans are good for this because most of them aren’t psychic, or aren’t psychic in the way the protoss are, but some still are in a way that is useful for their purposes.
/shrug. It was needed to give the zerg a reason to not just go crush Aiur as soon as the protoss start engaging them anyway.
StarCraft was never a “military sci-fi” in the way you seem to want it to be, and it never even pretended to be. Right in the beginning, its all about the characters, not the military.
In Brood War, Kerrigan retains her basic humanoid shape (and, oddly, her hostile environment suit), but is visibly less sexualized than in SC2. As far as retcons go, its one of the dumber ones IMO, but its not a plot point either, so whatever.
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@TrickyHunter
Hey, can I ask you something seriously? Seeing as how you ask for people credential so much; are you even like playing RTS game? I love playing RTS. However, due to my subpar skill, I don’t play competitively. I like playing the campaign mostly because I can save scum. I like playing Co-op because I like having an OPAF unit and stream roll A.I. and being carried. I play weekly mutation sometime to enjoy a bit of a challenge, but not so much that the possibilities of defeat is real. (So, not most mutation.) I enjoy the story since it helps me enjoy and give my game more context than just build a base and expand and build army and destroyed everything. Even though, researching weapon and armor upgrades at every new mission is ridiculous, I don’t care. The game is fun to play and I like to have the story as an icing on it. For that the story serves its purpose just fine. Overthink it with these guys is an extremely enjoyable thought exercise. That’s why I am here. That’s why I love this gam. That’s why I keep throwing my saving at it.
What about you? Why are you even here? Do you even like RTS game?
I’m thinking in terms of evolution mission gimmicks. Gameplay trumps lore.
Ghosts have their powers locked to keep them controlled (otherwise Elfen Lied-style gory massacres would be far more common), so the zerg don’t have to worry about them being protoss-level difficulty. An unlocked ghost would be a different unit in gameplay and might have dangerous psychological issues like Atticus Carpenter in Insurrection. Also, ghosts are not the only psychics and psychics aren’t all interchangeable. At least for our purposes because gameplay trumps lore.
We could have evolution missions where the zerg siege ghost academies, process populations in mass, target specific planets for specific mutations (as psychic powers are not created equal), evaluate the effectiveness of particular experiments, etc. It just needs creativity.
For example, maybe the zerg siege Maltair IV to acquire the “quiet voice” psychic mutation. This allows them to create changelings.
In terms of lore and justifying forever war we’ll say that the zerg can’t get everything useful from a single individual. The more prey they eat, the more research points they get. Hence why they eat whole planets when given the chance. Like the devouring swarm civic in Stellaris.
Typing on phone, not much time sorry
Yes. It was contrived to force forever war. For an RTS franchise that’s great.
I think you may be confused here. That’s not what military scifi is last I checked. It is still about character dynamics just like other fiction, it just has a better education of military dynamics. StarGate SG-1 is classic military scifi, and you’d be hardpressed to claim it isn’t character-driven. Any story that is about fighting in a scifi war is military scifi.
I’m typing on my phone so I can’t elaborate. Please lookup military scifi to learn more about the genre and its relevance to Starcraft.
I love RTS. I want to make my own someday.
Tell me about military sci-fi.
Same, me a friend are actually making one.
It’s exactly what it sounds like. Military dynamics in a scifi setting. Command & Conquer and StarCraft are both military scifi. Lots of famous scifi is military scifi.
It has nothing to do with a lack of characters. Fiction generally requires characters to be interesting and more than a dry exposition dump.
That was not a satisfying answer. Two out of five stars.
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I know im confused here now. In spite of the setting, the various Stargate shows have very little to do with any military anything. Of the main cast, only two are even in the military. The other is a rebel warrior, and the fourth is a civilian. The fact that its a military setting is pretty much restricted to set dressing back at the SGC most of the time.
I’m still unsure what military sci-fi is based on what I see and hear here.
Military sci-fi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_science_fiction
With StarCraft, it’s annoying because military defeats seem to have so little influence on the plot. The military aspect of it is neglected.
Tricky is right. StarGate is a military sci-fi where the military aspect gets a good treatment but the whole franchise is basically character driven.
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