Your Reboot pitches?

Post and discuss your reboot pitches in this topic.

This is a toughie.

I’d much rather see the races split to factions, their power struggles forming the diplomatic landscape, betrayals and alliances, etc. I would also have the Xel’naga be a malevolent race of spacefarers. They see the Protoss and the Zerg as a threat to them and want to pitch them against each other so they can take them out when weakened.

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I’d focus the Terran campaign on Mengsk, really make him the hero of a Greek Tragedy. In current cannon he was just sort of always a dirtbag, he just was good at hiding it on occasion. I’d like it if he really started out as a decent guy with good intentions, trying to right the wrongs of the confederacy and helping the oppressed . But, we get to slowly see his decent as the game progresses, justifying more and more atrocities in the name his cause, before the revelation of the psi emitters completely breaks him, and he rushes with it to Tarsonis in the ultimate horrific act of vengeance.

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Yeah, I really wanted Umoja, KMC, protoss tribes, confederate squadrons, etc to have campaigns of their own.

I disagree with the 4th race concept in general, but I can see where you’re coming from. I think the 4th race would most likely be a rehash of one of the other three and lack sufficient aesthetic, biological, cultural, and philosophical distinction to make it stand out.

I can agree. I have my own tweaks too, like changing the zerg to not mindlessly follow psi-emitters but have Mengsk release Cerberus zerg instead and have him kill Kerry and her comrades either by sheer deranged callousness or deliberate politics (e.g. democrats can’t make the hard decisions he must make) and then building monuments of the dead “heroes” to cover it up.


My pitch would probably be several dozen pages long. The absolutely first thing I’d do is plan out the past, present, and future of the story. This would involve extensive removal of what I consider redundancies in the lore.

For example, I would reboot the xel’naga history like so:

The xel’naga are space aliens who reproduce through a weird infinite cycle. This dude named Amon was dissatisfied and joined a cult of like minded dudes. They decided to accelerate and alter the cycle for unclear reasons that don’t matter anymore.

The protoss were the first successful experiment. The cult tried to control them by cultivating their essence as the telepathic empathy network christened Khala, but this backfired and the protoss tried to kill them. Many cultists died, but the rest escaped and plotted again.

The second successful experiment was the zerg. This time, they cultivated the zerg’s essence as a swarm intelligence christened Overmind that was programmed to obey them. But something went wrong.

Amon was driven by a desire for perfection. He felt that the state of xel’naga was imperfect and believed it could be improved. He found kindred spirits in the zerg, who were also driven to perfect themselves by consuming the “strongest“ species they found. He liked them so much he allowed the nascent Overmind to consume his own essence.

The Overmind, the Amon-thing, the hive mind of the zerg essence, It defied the control protocols and consumed all of the xel’naga essence. Then they set their sights on the protoss.

The zerg consumed countless worlds and species as they burned a path to protoss space.

The zerg encountered two barriers to pursuing their fabled perfection: the protoss were simply too powerful to defeat with their current means, and the protoss’ essence was incompatible due to the acceleration experiments.

The solution was found in terrans. They had an untampered yet immature purity of form. It was compatible with the zerg, though it could not substitute for the protoss. It did, however, offer potential compatibility with the protoss and a potential weapon against their power.

Thus, three way war ensued.

The reason I did this was to simplify the needlessly convoluted lore. I also wasn’t interested in having the three races team up against a big bad evil guy, so I made the zerg the playable villains. That’s their whole shtick: they’re villains in the purest sense but they’re playable and have understandable though still alien motives.

I’d focus far more on the importance of the khala and overmind as integral to the definition of their respective species. These are not going to be funny looking humans.

I have so much more to say but I’m stopping here.

Daggoth being a complete waste after Episode 2 will always be one of my biggest peeves towards the original games. If I could shoehorn Daggoth into more of the Brood War storyline, I would. Killing the player Cerebrate from Episode 2 (extended lore) was also a waste. I’ll never understand why they couldn’t just make the Episodes 2 and 6 Cerebrates the same one. That way, you can keep the junior Cerebrate / senior Cerebrate dynamic between the player and Daggoth. Only this time around, they would be on opposing sides.

I have so much to say about brood war.

I don’t worship Kerry and I’d never make her a zerg leader because that ruins the zerg. So there’s no point to having brood war since it was only ever an excuse to worship Kerry. I despise her canon execution, but I can entertain scenarios that don’t just erase her from existence. You can still have her play a role similar to Seven of Nine or Ripley 8, an ex-zerg soldier with lingering but unwanted sympathy for the zerg.

Anyway… I mean sure, you could contrive some excuse for the cerebrates to fight a brood war in a world where infested terrans are never arbitrarily elevated to leadership positions because you actually respect the zerg. But why? Without infested terrans to shoehorn a human connection by cosplaying as zerg, You need to put effort into making the genuinely zerg characters memorable and worthwhile to the audience. That’s a tall order when their whole shtick is that they’re vicious alien monsters that invaded human space to eat us.

And that’s the thing. Why should we the audience care about these vicious alien monsters in the first place? Besides playing them and sublimating our destructive side? Blizzard interviews state outright they thought the zerg were so boring that the zerg needed humans shoehorned in. They never tried to make the zerg standout from humans. They still don’t.

How do we make vicious monsters bent on eating everyone compelling characters? Without taking the lazy path and either literally humanizing them (thereby defeating their whole purpose for existing as aliens) or crudely shoving them into an utterly unsuited hero role?

It’s a tall order. I’m not surprised Blizzard gave up.

I’m thinking a possible cheat might be giving the cerebrates over-the-top flamboyant personalities and other weird quirks to make them so memorable that nobody will want them replaced by a psychotic twenty-something girl. Like the Skeksis in Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. Those guys were a hit with the public. There must be hundreds of fanfics about SkekMal the Hunter now.

If video game stories have low standards to begin with, then we might as well turn that to our advantage by openly embracing schlock and awe rather than being pretentious soap boxes.

What do you guys think?

Retcon the UED out of the story.

The faction has been so misused and underdeveloped that it rely brings nothing but more confusion to the story. Their powerlevel always made little sense seeing the fact that they did nothing after their first expedition failed. And they are hell scared from the swarm by the look of things, which makes it even more doubtful of the far away superpower that could uber crush everyone.

Bringing earth into it is what I seriously consider a mistake on the writers part and they should keep things contained a bit more on the terran, zerg and protoss. Brood war could have very well been a chance to focus on an internal strife of the dominion, zerg and protoss developing all three groups which have just undergone cataclysmic events of their own making.

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I like the idea of the UED, but not the execution. The Earth should try to reinforce the Koprulu-Terrans (in the situation the game presents us with), establish them as partners, and as a buffer zone between the Earth and its colonies and the alien species. They are the power that should allow the Terrans to compete against the Protoss and the Zerg, combining their raw industrial power and technological advantage with the will to survive and ingenuity of the Koprulu-Terrans.

That leaves the question again of why they wouldn’t try to establish direct control of the dominion to ensure their colonies are kept as save as possible. I honestly like the idea of the terrans surviving out of a combination of their own merits and the fact that neither the zerg swarm nor the protoss can afford to send enough forces against the terrans to crush them without weakening themselves against the other.

Yhea part of them will want to crush the terrans but those will not have the support of the full faction who are much more concerned with their main opponent.

I totally understand where you’re coming from and I sympathize.

But to be fair, the status of Earth has flip-flopped constantly during development. Initially Earth would have been loosely involved in the events of SC1, then it was changed to isolated lost colonies, then Earth was retconned back in. Heroes of the Storm apparently retconned (at least in one timeline) that Earth was involved from that start and invaded Koprulu to put down rebellions.

According to the original BW website, that was apparently the initial pitch before it got rewritten at some point.

I’m rolling my eyes right now.

I don’t understand why the rebels and protoss didn’t immediately ally with Earth when the zerg present the greatest threat. Fear and paranoia is barely sufficient as an explanation. Allying with zerg makes zero sense.


I’d either cast Earth out of the picture forever, or have them involved from the start. In the latter case: Koprulu establishes contact with Earth and colonists flood in, resources flow back to Earth. The expedition would arrive to halt Confederate aggression. Then the aliens attack.

That is a good question. Maybe they don’t want to show themselves as the puppet masters behind the Confederacy and later the Dominion charade. But yeah, I’d change how it is done.

I would probably lead the Protoss and the zerg clash with each other as well, strike at the Zerg when they are weakened, control them with the Psi Emitters to crush the Protoss and then destroy them with Psi technology. It is a sound plan, makes a lot of sense.

It’s a simple sound plan. It’s mind boggling why it wasn’t used in canon except for one mission in SC2 that you immediately found a way around with primals.

That’s precisely why I would remove the psi-emitter chasing weakness from the zerg in a reboot. It would work on ferals still I guess by spoofing zerg homing signals, but any swarms with sufficient intelligence would realize it’s a trap and not take the bait.

As I said above, I’d preserve Mengsk’s arc by him using Cerberus zerg.


Speaking of which, I would NOT have the zerg arbitrarily leave terran space after Tarsonis falls. They would keep attacking because their goal is to eat humanity.

That would make it a priority for Terrans to kill the leader of the Zerg, the intelligence, which makes a lot of sense anyway. Just wait until the Zerg and the Protoss are sufficiently entangled, than make a sudden rush towards the core intelligence behind the Zerg. Psi-Disruptors could be used to mess up communications (this would disable Psi-Emitters as well of course) for the Zerg, snipe the core, Psi-Emitter all Zerg against the Protoss and maybe throw in a fleet or two as well.

In any case, I think an absurdly convenient solution of that nature would result in a very brief story. Nowhere near enough to drive a franchise.

The zerg shouldn’t be so easy to deal with, anymore than magically hacking the khala should let you curbstomp the protoss. There’s no tension.

That’s why in general I dislike the zerg being written as a slave race since it results in ridiculously easy solutions to deal with them that the writers must squander because Blizzard needs to keep milking this franchise. So despite it being trivial to exterminate the zerg by luring them into a psi-destroyer field with a psi-emitter broadcast, that’s never going to be used again because it breaks the setting like a dry twig on fire.

If we’re going to pitch reboots, then IMO we should do so with the benefit of hindsight and cater to the unique needs of an RTS media franchise. Starcraft is a game first and foremost, the story is tacked on to make it artsy. We can’t actually change the premise in any meaningful way, any more that we can take a character-focused franchise like She-Ra or Voltron and replace the titular character with a time lord who reincarnates as a new person every season, and clumsily pretending to do so by periodically shanking the governments only to replace them with progressively duller knockoffs only highlights the artificiality of the setting.

There’s no functional difference between Zagara becoming a space hippie and the Overmind becoming a space hippie. If the Overmind hadn’t been shanked, that probably would have happened. Is the Overmind improved by changing from a galactic space monster to a space hippie? Does that serve the premise of the IP?

I expect that Zagara or Niadra or another character will eventually metamorphose into a new Overmind because Starcraft has shown before that Blizzard will pull stunts like that. WoL outright stated in Stetman’s notes that the Overmind’s genome is present in every larva and could potentially be cloned back to life. Does that serve the premise? Is it good storytelling?

I digress. Where you hit the nail on the head is that only satisfactory way the story could end is with an apocalypse that prevents further stories in the same vein. Terrans wipeout protoss and zerg, or zerg wipeout protoss and terrans, etc. The franchise can’t continue past that point.

As others have noted, it staggers belief that the three sides could wage war indefinitely. One or more have to die sometime. And that kills the franchise. Simple enough solution is to simply stay focused on the time period in which the premise is still viable. Unless you want to copy Warhammer 40,000 and have literal eternal war.

It really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish in the first place.

What do you think?

Instead of reboot, just move the story 200 years ahead with Terran characters dead.

You can justify gazillion changes by the relatively huge time span.

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Like? What do you propose to replace the established setting? Governments? Cultures? Motives? Reasons for war?

You can change basically anything you mentioned. It’s basically a fake reboot. And as with many fakes, it’s a lot less work.

You can call it let’s say Starcraft 2700, give it some cool vague background covering past 200 years and you are good to go.

Conflicts in Koprulu are game-changing, brutal and short. Half a dozen warswith “just” half the brutality of First Great War over this time span and you can justify anything.

Like what? I’m a logical thinker who doesn’t make retcons, so I’m incapable of imagining any good story in this continuity.

StarCraft 40K sounds promising, eh?

You don’t retcon. You just jump ahead.