It teased a bunch of plot hooks and setting details that were never followed up in the games. It seems like it was written by a different person from the game script, since it feels like it is about an alternate universe.
Could have been a same time.
Lot of my past pitches were scratched Or changed over the years and I am a single person writing my stuff.
I know that the StarCraft story had changed a fair amount between previews in 1996 and release in 1998. The 1996 website suggested that there was a cold war between the terran and protoss galactic civilizations, which was disrupted when the zerg appeared out of nowhere to invade both. Then sometime in 1997/98 the terran backstory changed so that Koprulu was isolated, although this was quickly reversed in BW so it ended up being pointless. BW itself was apparently not originally going to feature the UED, instead having Mengsk deal with an internal faction conflict.
Iâm not sure why, but I find these pitches more inspiring than the story we got in the final game. Maybe because they sound more military scifi than epic fantasy.
Well, you know what they say: the grass is always greener on the other side. The writers had their reasons to discard those early drafts, and I doubt the story would have been better if they decided to keep one.
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I personally found the manual did an excellent job of setting up the gameâs story.
There are some changes, yes, but itâs not as drastic as you make it out to be.
Define âdrastic.â From my POV, the manual sets up wars that could last decades. The game recklessly breezes through all these plot hooks in a matter of weeks in-universe.
That depends on the execution, though I donât hold my breath for Blizzard anyway. As I said, the game feels like it breezes through the plot hooks in no time at all when they might be better served by taking places over many years or decades.
In general, when you start fighting with planet-destroying levels of force, you donât get wars that last decades, you get wars that last months. The protoss and zerg want to utterly annihilate each other. The terrans, the confederacy in particular, are absolutely willing to break you down to your constituent molecules if you become enough of a threat to them. If you look at a war where Mar Sara and Tarsonis are the norm, one side is going to win, very very quickly.
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Hence why we need to contrive explanations why that doesnât happen.
The manual apparently tried to, though it was overturned in the game.
You could justify the war being prolonged by having the protoss pull their punches (e.g. in real life we donât perform pest control with nukes) and have internal schisms, not write the zerg as arbitrarily overpowered, and boosting the terrans to hold their own against the aliens such as by having the UED show up at the start. Or something!
Iâm only saying this to contrive a scenario that supports an indefinite conflict because this is an RTS and hindsight is 20/20.
People actually generally donât care for indefinite conflict. Its one of the major criticisms of the World of Warcraft story that the two factions keep fighting each other even when theyre making no progress and have nothing to gain. Decades-long wars actually arenât that realistic unless one side is extremely firmly winning and just takes a while to actually finish the other guy off.
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Decades long all out war isnât realistic. Decades long wars were a thing in medieval ages, because the all-out aspect wasnât there, you had to control newly gained areas directly, supply lines havenât been booned by modern means of transportation and quite often both sides struggled to push further, because they had to leave garrisons behind.
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Right. You had long periods of inactivity while logistics happened. Even just marching across the countryside to the next castle or town could take a week.
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And if you solved that, you pretty much wrecked your opposition.
Like Mongols.
And since we got to this topic, I have to say they wouldnât succeed in Europe as much as people think they would, because of mountaineous terrain, castles everywhere and heavy cavalry actually being faster than light cavalry.
Games lie. Knightâs horses had superior speed and stamina compared to nomadic horses. Mongols solved it by having like 10 horses per warrior in certain campaigns.
Not to mention, longbows.
They also needed to use composite bows to match the Europeanâs equipment while on horseback, which requires more materials to construct and tend to degrade substantially in humid conditions. Time would not have been in their favor.
StarCraftâs idea of warfare comes from a mix of WWI and WWII, so thatâs where yâall need to look.
Well that kind of supports the point. Both wars were brutally bloody, but didnât really last very long compared to historical wars.
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Iâm just supplying the munitions here, but yeah. Those wars also had long âbattlesâ that ended with a great sweeping push.
Actually, I would! Those Mogul is an interesting empire. I just wish they did a better job at raising their successors or put on a better succession plan.
Anyway, one of the reason I really like Genghis Khan is his innovation. His ability and willingness to learn and adept. I guess if old age hadnât robbed him of his passion, he would have learned to conquer Europe.
I suspect had the germans, French/English and Italians all realized what was going on and gotten their act together, they could have put a halt to the Great Khan. Germany in particular would not have been kind to the mongols, depriving them of a lot of what they need.
It doesnât though, as @Kelthar already elaborated on. The Terran conflicts and perspective completely changed as well once two aggressive alien races came into the mix.
Even back in 2004, I eye-rolled over the Horde and Alliance fighting one another yet again. âReign of Chaosâ had them work together and set up some cool possibilities, and though I really like âThe Frozen Throneâ and itâs main story, I wasnât happy that the Bonus Campaign was basically setting up basic two faction conflicts again. I was also disappointed that the Forsaken were shoe-horned into joining the Horde.
In any case, the exact length of the conflict is not that high on my list of concerns (aside from Blizzard having no sense of scale in general) and I doubt the lot of us can calculate the logistics of a fictional space war very well in order to argue what is and is not ârealisticâ (insofar as realism applies to soft scifi). I never liked Blizzardâs execution. While I am sure most here can agree that writing problems start in BW and reach nadir in SC2, I feel that SC1 severely underutilized its premise. While you could argue that was a limitation of 1998, a lack of any future planning, and the absence of esports, we need not be similarly restricted here and now.
We are interested in this IP because we want to see terran, zerg and protoss fight. The lore reason why is window dressing at this point and trying to resolve the war does not help anything. The least we can do is provide a believable reason for war.
The Warcraft example makes sense. My only solution at present is simply to not advance the timeline. If the time spans do not make sense for any reason, then just keep the story restricted to that period where they do fight. If the war is resolved, then the franchise ends.
Uniting the Horde and Alliance, then introducing a new external threat in every expansion just reduces the plot to a problem of the week formula like a shonen anime. Pulling new villains out of the woodwork is no more realistic than before.
Let us share if our thoughts have changed by the time StarCraft IV comes out. That should be enlightening for all of us.
That has not stopped scifi writers from having wars last for decades, centuries, and millennia. That is a cliche at this point.
Then you misunderstood my point. I dislike Blizzardâs execution and there is nothing you can say to convince me otherwise. Read ToxicDefilerâs rewrite and see if that helps you understand my POV. Otherwise I have no idea what to say to you because you clearly will never understand my POV. I am exhausted from constantly trying and failing to explain this, to the point where my only motivation for making my own RTS is so I can leave this fandom and stop wasting my life on these pointless exhausting circular arguments.
I do not see what you mean either. If you compare the overall plots of the games, then you might notice they are rehashing the same formula with different window dressing. It is no stretch to view the four or so wars as a single conflict.
That is why I switched my interest to Warhammer. The setting is made to forever war between the armies of gods. It never pretends that peace is remotely an option.