There’s a lets play thread on spacebattles by “Unhappy Anchovy” that goes over the problems with BW’s writing as they review the missions. Pretty much everybody agreed there were massive problems.
There are way too many to list in the short time I have, but some in the first campaign include:
The convenient temple on Shakuras that destroys zerg without affecting everyone else. The gist is that you hunt down two macguffins to power a deus ex machina.
The zerg already occupying the temple by the time you arrive, even though they came through the same warp gate after you.
Kerry already brainwashing Raszagal despite having no opportunity to do so.
Aldaris never telling anyone his suspicions and convincing his followers to wage civil war without telling them why.
The protoss letting Kerry go free after she murders a head of state in a direct challenge to their sovereignty. This would be considered an act of war by sane people.
Fanboys tell me all of this can be rationalized. Yeah, sure it can with nostalgia goggles maybe. It isn’t our responsibility to rationalize Metzen’s blatantly sloppy and absurd writing. This is why I believe Metzen’s writing was always bad and SC2 just made it more obvious. It might also have something to do with kids who played SC1 having reached adulthood and gained ability to critique. I sure didn’t notice BW’s plot holes until I looked back on it as an adult. Man I had no taste back then.
It’s neither a plot hole nor a retcon, and it isn’t a DEM since we’re told in Mission 3 how it works and we make it work in Mission 8. It’s a convenient Mcguffin sure tho.
How it works? We receive only an extremely vague statement about channeling the magic of a negative space wedgie to do whatever the protoss need it to do. “Convenient” is putting it mildly.
You know how I would have explained it in a serious believable way? If the device was a terraforming machine that could be calibrated to recreate life after an extinction event, like the Dakara super weapon in Stargate SG-1. That places actual limits on its capabilities. Furthermore, since in reality there are these weird exotic things called “arms races”… I’d have the zerg evolve resistance. You’d have to recalibrate the machine again whenever that happened.
That’s not a plot hole, that’s just the plot. Its not especially imaginative, but its not a problem.
Also not a plot hole. The zerg had significantly greater forces than the protoss, were continually trading control of the gate, and expand over planets quickly anyway. Its kind of their defining feature.
There are months between Tassadar’s death and the evacuation of Aiur. While it is poorly explained, its still not a plot hole.
Aldaris believes that Zeratul, Artanis and the Executor are either Kerrigan’s minions like Raszagal or sufficiently under Raszagal’s sway that they wont believe him. Its wrong, but a character making a bad decision is not a plot hole.
The protoss aren’t interested in a war with Kerrigan. They have a society to rebuild, they aren’t looking to pick more fights. They simply aren’t in a position to go to war.
Its still not a plot hole. These aren’t “rationalizations” theyre just part of the story.
The closest thing to an actual plothole in SC/BW is the Khalis Crystal retrieval mission. No matter how people try to spin it, the “weakening the New Overmind” objective doesn’t make a lick of sense when the player has Dark Templar in their army. However, there is an out given the multiple win conditions, which is to just make canon path simply retrieving the crystal.
I’d also point out that the UED being able to kill Cerebrates in the final level is kinda iffy, but almost everyone will tell ya that it’s common sense that the Psi Disruptor is messing with the Overmind/Cerebrate connection, even if the game doesn’t blatantly tell ya that.
My headcanons for those two missions are that the protoss assume if they off the second Overmind, the cerebrates will just make another new one, and they aren’t in a position to fight off the swarm Ad-nauseum to make it stick. And for the latter, they aren’t permanently killing the cerebrates (which would defeat the point of taking control of the Overmind in the first place), just keeping them neutralized long enough to capture the Overmind, at which point the cerebrates aren’t a problem.
You do realize that the Mcguffin was fired only once, right? How exactly is the Zerg going to evolve a resistance to it? Also, you do realize that despite their ability to evolve rapidly, they still died to bullet, plasma, lava and all that? How about they evolve resistance to that, first?
They do. Their enemies make stronger weapons to compensate. That is the definition of an arms race. It is the foundation of both real military science and real evolution.
Through the scientific method, as real military science does. Observation, hypothesis, experiment, etc.
What? Do you know how evolution work exactly? You do realize that even a single cell organism is capable of doing that, right?
Also, do you understand my question? I meant that the Zerg had never encountered that kind of attack before; how are the Zerg going to evolve in anticipation of a whole new type of attack that it had no experience with whatsoever.
By making a stronger carapace. That’s only work with the bullet, though. What about lava? Can any Zerg swim through it, yet?
The term you are looking for is Expeditionary Force.
It’s more like they want a buffer zone against Zerg and Protoss forces (as seen in BW)
Yes, that has been a given since BW.
You forgot the UEDEF limited themselves to local technology (marines, siege tanks, firebats, wraiths, etc), only bringing a sample of their tech to bear (medics with optical flares, upgraded Goliaths, Valkyries). In other words, they can be considered a separate faction in their own right, if they ever go serious mode.
Yeah, each major faction seems to be bad in some way: Confederacy was oppressive and was lead by nepotism, Dominion was a dictator offshoot of this, Umoja is isolationist and distrustful of everyone, the KMC is greedy as heck and just big business. And that’s only the Terrans.
In lore, UED starves resources and desperate seek for colonies. I will not be surprised if the UED turn out to be weaker than the Dominion. Just look at our own real life Solar System, how many planets are truly habitable? Not to mention the Dominion breed like Zerg, somehow in 300 years 40,000 people grow into tens of billions. What kind of growth rate is that?