Ah, my mistake. Of course a rational universe would involve space cowboy humans, descendants of criminals shot into space, caught between one alien race that sees potential in human psionics and another alien race that wants to exterminate the first. Oh, and don’t let me forget that after this conflict “resolves”, we find out that the physical gods that created the two aliens are coming back.
Because everyone knows that in a rational universe, there’s gods and space aliens and redheads who more resemble angels than the resident angels in the company’s “angels vs demons” franchise.
Well then, I guess you must hate Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune, and any other sci-fi franchise that doesn’t strictly adhere to hard science in its worldbuilding. Heaven forbid that the writers take a few creative liberties to tell a larger-than-life story.
“Rational” is NOT equivalent to “hard scifi.” Magic can be rational.
My problem with Starcraft, as I said several times already, is that the plot happens because of lazy author fiat rather than because it could progress organically from the initial premise.
The SC1 manual, for example, sets an initial premise that I do not believe the game is a reasonably organic progression from. (Not to mention the various rewrites that happened later.)
Just because StarCraft has psychic brain aliens isn’t an excuse to skimp on the parts of the fiction you can control like verisimilitude, consistent worldbuilding, etc. Why are people always making excuses for bad writing on this forum?
The psi emitter thing isn’t some giant problem but who would it hurt if it’s depiction was more consistent?
Its depiction is consistent already. It takes zerg in area A and makes them want to go to point B. The criticisms here aren’t valid because they aren’t based on the actual story, but rather his imaginary version of it.
Yes but to be fair the manual heavily implied the psi emitters only worked because the Overmind was looking for ghosts. I’ve seen this explanation on the forums for years.
And then BW came in and told us that’s not how that works.
You’re assuming that it’s even possible for the Zerg to counteract the effects of the Psi Emitter. None of the Zerg have found a way to counter it after years of being subjected to the whims of Psi Emitters, so it’s safe to assume that they simply can’t.
And if the Overmind was looking for psychics, wouldn’t it be more efficient to harvest population centers?
The zerg are infamous for consuming whole worlds and species, so why would they focus so much effort on capturing one girl when there are millions of other psychics? Why stop at one ghost?
How do you know that? We never saw the emitters used to stop the zerg invasions when they started butchering billions all those times
The doyalist reason is because that would interrupt the plot. The watsonian reason is because it would require fundamentally rewiring the brains of all the zerg, and possibly messing with the hive mind itself, which is delicate and problematic work that adds complexity for relatively little benefit. The zerg aren’t getting killed by the Psi Emitters, its not seriously crippling them.
While theyre deliberately cagey on the zerg-side function of the emitters, we can make a few assumptions. Since it works on feral zerg, we know it affects the zerg individually, and we know ghost psi wavelengths are relatively close to the ones the zerg use, so it seems likely to me that its simply exploiting an existing sense the zerg have in a way that wasn’t anticipated, like using a dog whistle. The zerg are built to recognize those signals (which is presumably how the Overmind identified the psionic potential of terrans) and the terrans figured it out enough to broadcast something on that frequency that says “Something cool here!”
That is precisely the problem. Metzen’s plot requires forcing the characters to act against their own motives with a cheap plot device, rather than exploring the organic interaction of their motives
Because the Psi Emitters are, at best, a temporary solution. The Zerg go into a frenzy trying to reach the Psi Emitters, but once they actually reach it, they eventually move on.
Psi Emitters have only ever been used as a weapon. It’s safe to assume that if the Confederacy or the Dominion could use them as a way to permanantly stop the Zerg from attacking their worlds, they would.
Is this a trick question? Ending the plot is a bad thing.
The Overmind is a character, sort of, but the Zerg as a whole are not. In this case, the Psi Emitter is a forceful disruption of the control the Overmind normally has over its minions, and it is absolutely an organically generated device. You have a bunch of aliens you want to control that use a telepathic hive mind. How do you control them? Telepaths of course! But your telepaths have limited range, so what do you do? Build a device to extend it!
“The zerg kill everybody and take over the sector.” is technically a new direction yes, but its also the end. If the new direction is a dead end, it behooves you to avoid that.
Seriously, you have GOT to play the campaigns more, and pay better attention. Mengsk has an entire spiel about how the confederates specifically developed the Psi Emitters as an attempt to direct the zerg to where they wanted them to go, to use them as weapons.
Dropping the main plot to take it in a new direction and creating subplots that go nowhere is how you create a messy story like Kingdom Hearts. I dare you to even try and understand half of what’s going on in Kingdom Hearts 3.
Again, you assume that it’s possible for the Zerg to develop countermeasures. If the Zerg had a way to counteract Psi Emitters, then they’d do it.
You could take the story in that direction, having the Zerg find a way to counter the effects of Psi Emitters, but the writers chose not to. That doesn’t make it a bad story.
I did not believe there was a connection between hive mind emulators and psi emitters. I believed the emitters were merely beacons, not mind control devices.
It was you who claimed there was an explicit equivalence.
If that is a problem, then why not tweak the zerg so they cannot do that due to logistical constraints? Multiplayer play certainly has no problem with that.
How do you know that for sure? Have you tried writing fanfiction to see where it goes?
Maybe, I don’t know, Starcraft could be an anthology setting without a single main plot?
What kind of story would we get, do you think? Would you like to know?
There isn’t. The confederates were going to use the zerg on their other enemies, so they would wipe them out without being directly associated with it the way they were with Korhal. Then they would come in, clean up the zerg, and walk away heroes.
Because then the terrans and/or protoss can just fight them to a standstill, or even kill them if they react fast enough with the emitters. The zerg need to be unbeatable with conventional warfare.