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StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void

I find it somewhat baffling that a ball of pure psychic force might need to commit suicide in order to kill a giant space elephant, but I dunno, I hear the Zerg have been on steroids recently.
 
Ford Prefect said:
I find it somewhat baffling that a ball of pure psychic force might need to commit suicide in order to kill a giant space elephant, but I dunno, I hear the Zerg have been on steroids recently.
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It's just like how the Tyranids really shouldn't be a threat to most worlds in 40k, yet are. Biological based Tech is just awesome in most Science fiction.
 
C.o.S.a.R said:
It's just like how the Tyranids really shouldn't be a threat to most worlds in 40k, yet are. Biological based Tech is just awesome in most Science fiction.
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Well, I don't really have much issue with giant monsters being strong and capable, but an Archon is like... when I was a kid I read the StarCraft manual and the Archon was described as basically being a ball of focused rage that could bend the fabric of reality. It feels like the kind of thing that would need at least two or three ultras to take down.
 
Ford Prefect said:
Well, I don't really have much issue with giant monsters being strong and capable, but an Archon is like... when I was a kid I read the StarCraft manual and the Archon was described as basically being a ball of focused rage that could bend the fabric of reality. It feels like the kind of thing that would need at least two or three ultras to take down.
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I think you're forgetting how ridonculously durable the zerg actually are in real world terms.

Marines use Gauss rifles that fire spikes at supersonic speeds in three round bursts. Unupgraded, it takes one Gauss rifle 4 or 5 bursts to kill a Zergling. Even assuming that the Marine misses two out of every three shots (i.e. only 4 or 5 spikes are required to kill the Zergling) that kind of durability is ridiculous. The Ultralisk has 20 times the health of a zergling and has actual inbuilt armour.
 
Interesting perspectives on things from both Artanis and Khaldalis (probably spelling this wrong). The past and the future, the warrior and commander, and both trying to understand how the other could possibly think the way the other does.

It's also a bit odd hearing the classic "my life for aiur" spoken so somberly by a zealot, at least to me. For all his willingness to be among the first wave, Khaldalis seems to know for certain that he's going to die when he goes down there.
 
So basically, since there's a LotV opening event held at COEX on the 7th of November here in South Korea, and they are taking questions regarding the lore and the story either through the very Korean SC2 site's blog page comments or the facebook page, in which they'll pick a few and answer them there. The question has to be asked between 10/27~10/30, basically until this Friday for Korea(so this Thursday for most parts of the US).

So if you guys have any questions regarding the lore, you can ask me some. I'll pick the ones I'm also interested in it, along with one of my own, and post a comment(in Korean, since apparently they only seem to be accepting questions from Korean fans). Who knows? It might get picked.
 
Guderian2nd said:
So basically, since there's a LotV opening event held at COEX on the 7th of November here in South Korea, and they are taking questions regarding the lore and the story either through the very Korean SC2 site's blog page comments or the facebook page, in which they'll pick a few and answer them there. The question has to be asked between 10/27~10/30, basically until this Friday for Korea(so this Thursday for most parts of the US).

So if you guys have any questions regarding the lore, you can ask me some. I'll pick the ones I'm also interested in it, along with one of my own, and post a comment(in Korean, since apparently they only seem to be accepting questions from Korean fans). Who knows? It might get picked.
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Has that whole energy beings from Xel'naga temples plot from the books been dropped or will it appear in Legacy of the Void?
 
Ford Prefect said:
I find it somewhat baffling that a ball of pure psychic force might need to commit suicide in order to kill a giant space elephant, but I dunno, I hear the Zerg have been on steroids recently.
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Bit old but no one pointed it out:
according to lore it is said that Archons are "created" only for a short while as they actually run on hit points of both high templer- so unlike in actual game play Archons don't live for too long even if there is no enemy shooting at them.
 
hellgodsrus said:
I think you're forgetting how ridonculously durable the zerg actually are in real world terms.

Marines use Gauss rifles that fire spikes at supersonic speeds in three round bursts. Unupgraded, it takes one Gauss rifle 4 or 5 bursts to kill a Zergling. Even assuming that the Marine misses two out of every three shots (i.e. only 4 or 5 spikes are required to kill the Zergling) that kind of durability is ridiculous. The Ultralisk has 20 times the health of a zergling and has actual inbuilt armour.
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Ehhh....Starcraft has some of the most ridiculous ludonarrative dissonance of any game ever.

According to the lore, a mothership can glass planets and hold off multiple Terran capital ships. Ingame, a single battlecruiser can easily take one out, as can six or seven stimpacked marines.

According to the lore, high templars are elite veteran zealots who master psychic powers an top of their combat experience. Ingame, they're slow moving, squishy wizards who can't defend themselves whatsoever.

Hell, in the cinematics we've seen zerglings go down to just one or two shots.
 
There's a lot of stiff competition in releases lately.

Fallout 4, Tomb Raider, Need For Speed, Call of Duty Black Ops 3, Halo 5, Star Wars Battlefront
Batman Arkham Knight, Assassin's Creed Syndicate from the same company and with similar mechanics in ways.
And some scheduled first party Wii U and 3DS games, and third party ones even too.
As well as indie and F2P microtransaction or cheap advertisement releases

Starcraft does have an advantage in that there isn't another in its genre, a big budget, highly marketed RTS strategy title. Though its audience may overlap with releases like Fallout 4.
And its got its fanbase and somewhat of a reputation. I wonder what it's first month sales will be, might be surprising.
 
I love how there's basically zero buzz for the game. Basically not even any reviews out for the final installment of the biggest RTS franchise ever, lol. Blizzard really sent this out to die.

But in this huge storm of releases, I'm playing it! It's been a while since I've played the game, and I've gotta say that I'm, eh, enjoying myself. Technically. The story is an absolute trainwreck from what I've played so far, and while that's not surprising given the disaster that Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm was in this regard, it's still pretty disappointing. Conversational dialogue took a step forward from the days of Wings of Liberty, but I'm not sure how much of that is an actual improvement and how much of that is me being used to Protoss sounding like they've entered their own asses. Everything else is... uh, bad.

Really can't exaggerate how much of the story is just a complete mess, though. For all the talk of 'retaking Aiur' in the marketing of this game, you spend three missions there, and one and a half in which your task seems vaguely related to 'retaking' it. No sooner than you arrive on the planet with what is apparently the entire Protoss military, Amon, Blizzard's shittiest generic unambiguous super-evil guy, suddenly straight up mindjacks everyone somehow (like, it just... happens) including Artanis. And then Zeratul gets killed by him (but not before heroically severing Amon's mindjack). This is mission two. Immediately afterwards, Artanis is like 'welp, time to leave Aiur'.

I just can't stress how poorly so much of this is presented. How close everything is to each other and how little context there is. Not a minute after Artanis promises to get ready for Amon, and Zeratul prepares to leave (conveniently and without explanation, his ship broke) and Selendis, who like fifteen minutes ago called him a traitor for some reason, pages him to say Artanis disappeared from the Khala and to rescue him. Like holy shit, Artanis, you had a single job.

So then after all this transpires, with Zeratul being appropriately way too vague about important information, since all the years alone have done a number on his ability to communicate non-mysteriously, he poofs out of existence. And this whole business about retaking their homeworld that he has apparently committed his entire force to, Artanis just completely throws under the bus, because off camera apparently all his other ships just got dunked by Amon and now he's gotta dig out an ancient super-ship they were hiding on the planet.

And not to nitpick, but I, uh... don't know why such a ship wasn't activated when Aiur was in the process of being invaded, personally. Or why it'd never come up until this specific instance. It probably would have been helpful when the invasion was in progress rather than years later, but uh... sure. Okay.

I'm just deeply confused by this because this story is trying to serve a bunch of different masters and failing spectacularly at like... all of them. It clearly wanted to go for that Mass Effect 3-style 'our homeworld or bust' thing but ditches that because it also wants to be the conclusion of StarCraft 2's incredibly dumb DARK ANCIENT EVIL space opera plot, and makes like a vague motion about Artanis trying to balance two sides of his people, and none of it is good. None of it. It is all bad. Not as offensive to watch unfold like Heart of the Swarm was because Artanis as a key character is less of a character assassination in progress than he is just incredibly milquetoast, but it's... ugh. Ugh. The fact that this is the sequel I was waiting for after my first time finishing and absolutely falling in love with Brood War sits in my gut.

But basically this leads to my final current thought which is 'holy shit that introduction cutscene literally doesn't matter at all why does it exist'. It's about the vanguard of a Protoss force jumping onto Aiur and fighting Zerg and getting fucked up until the main force arrives. No one who appears there matters. The conflict is overridden by the dumb Amon stuff assuming direct control over both sides, in ten minutes they'll all glow spooky hues of red because it needs to be really obvious that they're evil now. That fight might as well frame it as anywhere other than Aiur because the story gives it basically no context or relevance.

And while I'm around this train of thought, this game is incredibly poor at presenting scale. You get one mission with a sizable military force stomping a bunch of Zerg hives and basically no framing for this great big war for the homeworld. How much of the fighting is actually going on outside your little map-sized bubble, there's basically nothing that the game does to substantiate the seriousness of the conflict for all the bluster of the marketing. When Amon does assume direct control of what appears to be nearly the entire Protoss species, there's just no substance to any of it. It happens and the story just fails to impress upon you what actually happened and how serious it was.

But in spite of how bad the story is (and god I hate it), the game itself is really fun. I'd like to say it all sucks, but it doesn't. The game's legitimately the most fun I've had in an RTS since, uh, Heart of the Swarm. The missions are really cleverly designed and there's a lot of variety in objectives. Plus, it takes a much more lenient approach to enforcing limitations on the player than Wings of Liberty or HotS did. Very few hard time limits (unless you're shooting for achievements), but a lot of interesting things to build around and consider without feeling like it's putting too much pressure on you to do a mission in a specific way. They moved most of that to achievements, which works pretty well.

I think the part I like most is customizing your units, though. It's a really cool idea. Any time between missions you can pop over and choose between a Khala or Dark Templar variant of your units, like for example, a Dark Templar variant of the Zealot who stuns surrounding enemies and has a brief cloak on their charge (contrasted to a stronger Khala Zealot that deals splash damage to any enemy around it), or my favourite, the Stalker versus the Dragoon, because fuck yeah Dragoons.

I might jump into ranked sometime, but I expect I'm awful at the game now.
 
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Nyxistence said:
I love how there's basically zero buzz for the game. Basically not even any reviews out for the final installment of the biggest RTS franchise ever, lol. Blizzard really sent this out to die.

But in this huge storm of releases, I'm playing it! It's been a while since I've played the game, and I've gotta say that I'm, eh, enjoying myself. Technically. The story is an absolute trainwreck from what I've played so far, and while that's not surprising given the disaster that Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm was in this regard, it's still pretty disappointing. Conversational dialogue took a step forward from the days of Wings of Liberty, but I'm not sure how much of that is an actual improvement and how much of that is me being used to Protoss sounding like they've entered their own asses. Everything else is... uh, bad.

Really can't exaggerate how much of the story is just a complete mess, though. For all the talk of 'retaking Aiur' in the marketing of this game, you spend three missions there, and one and a half in which your task seems vaguely related to 'retaking' it. No sooner than you arrive on the planet with what is apparently the entire Protoss military, Amon, Blizzard's shittiest generic unambiguous super-evil guy, suddenly straight up mindjacks everyone somehow (like, it just... happens) including Artanis. And then Zeratul gets killed by him (but not before heroically severing Amon's mindjack). This is mission two. Immediately afterwards, Artanis is like 'welp, time to leave Aiur'.

I just can't stress how poorly so much of this is presented. How close everything is to each other and how little context there is. Not a minute after Artanis promises to get ready for Amon, and Zeratul prepares to leave (conveniently and without explanation, his ship broke) and Selendis, who like fifteen minutes ago called him a traitor for some reason, pages him to say Artanis disappeared from the Khala and to rescue him. Like holy shit, Artanis, you had a single job.

So then after all this transpires, with Zeratul being appropriately way too vague about important information, since all the years alone have done a number on his ability to communicate non-mysteriously, he poofs out of existence. And this whole business about retaking their homeworld that he has apparently committed his entire force to, Artanis just completely throws under the bus, because off camera apparently all his other ships just got dunked by Amon and now he's gotta dig out an ancient super-ship they were hiding on the planet.

And not to nitpick, but I, uh... don't know why such a ship wasn't activated when Aiur was in the process of being invaded, personally. Or why it'd never come up until this specific instance. It probably would have been helpful when the invasion was in progress rather than years later, but uh... sure. Okay.

I'm just deeply confused by this because this story is trying to serve a bunch of different masters and failing spectacularly at like... all of them. It clearly wanted to go for that Mass Effect 3-style 'our homeworld or bust' thing but ditches that because it also wants to be the conclusion of StarCraft 2's incredibly dumb DARK ANCIENT EVIL space opera plot, and makes like a vague motion about Artanis trying to balance two sides of his people, and none of it is good. None of it. It is all bad. Not as offensive to watch unfold like Heart of the Swarm was because Artanis as a key character is less of a character assassination in progress than he is just incredibly milquetoast, but it's... ugh. Ugh. The fact that this is the sequel I was waiting for after my first time finishing and absolutely falling in love with Brood War sits in my gut.

But basically this leads to my final current thought which is 'holy shit that introduction cutscene literally doesn't matter at all why does it exist'. It's about the vanguard of a Protoss force jumping onto Aiur and fighting Zerg and getting fucked up until the main force arrives. No one who appears there matters. The conflict is overridden by the dumb Amon stuff assuming direct control over both sides, in ten minutes they'll all glow spooky hues of red because it needs to be really obvious that they're evil now. That fight might as well frame it as anywhere other than Aiur because the story gives it basically no context or relevance.

And while I'm around this train of thought, this game is incredibly poor at presenting scale. You get one mission with a sizable military force stomping a bunch of Zerg hives and basically no framing for this great big war for the homeworld. How much of the fighting is actually going on outside your little map-sized bubble, there's basically nothing that the game does to substantiate the seriousness of the conflict for all the bluster of the marketing. When Amon does assume direct control of what appears to be nearly the entire Protoss species, there's just no substance to any of it. It happens and the story just fails to impress upon you what actually happened and how serious it was.

But in spite of how bad the story is (and god I hate it), the game itself is really fun. I'd like to say it all sucks, but it doesn't. The game's legitimately the most fun I've had in an RTS since, uh, Heart of the Swarm. The missions are really cleverly designed and there's a lot of variety in objectives. Plus, it takes a much more lenient approach to enforcing limitations on the player than Wings of Liberty or HotS did. Very few hard time limits (unless you're shooting for achievements), but a lot of interesting things to build around and consider without feeling like it's putting too much pressure on you to do a mission in a specific way. They moved most of that to achievements, which works pretty well.

I think the part I like most is customizing your units, though. It's a really cool idea. Any time between missions you can pop over and choose between a Khala or Dark Templar variant of your units, like for example, a Dark Templar variant of the Zealot who stuns surrounding enemies and has a brief cloak on their charge (contrasted to a stronger Khala Zealot that deals splash damage to any enemy around it), or my favourite, the Stalker versus the Dragoon, because fuck yeah Dragoons.

I might jump into ranked sometime, but I expect I'm awful at the game now.
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so would you say game is worse than original starcraft and Brood War storywise?
 
MJ12 Commando said:
I think that's her point.
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I don't know... I don't think Amon is THAT awful of a villian. Also if Starcraft fan would take off nostalgia googles of "brood war was a masterpiece!" google off a bit. Let's be honest, broodwar wasn't THAT special! In a way it is WORSE than starcraft!
Like EVERY PROTOSS EXCEPT THAT ONE JACKASS GUY was an idiot! Why would they trust kerrigan when she gave no reason to trust them!
Also UND as WORST Villain EVER! They did NOTHING but create trouble! they were more generic than Amon ever was.

I kinda have hard time swallowing the argument that Starcraft 2 has worse story line then orginal starcraft when orginal starcraft had nothing special to begin with. It is all nostaglia talk
 
Doctor Akemi said:
Like EVERY PROTOSS EXCEPT THAT ONE JACKASS GUY was an idiot! Why would they trust kerrigan when she gave no reason to trust them!
Also UND as WORST Villain EVER! They did NOTHING but create trouble! they were more generic than Amon ever was.
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I was going to post a big massive thing about how you were wrong, but then I noticed you mentioned the UND, a terrible faction who doesn't exist. Since you couldn't even be bothered getting the UED right, I figure its not worth wasting the argument on you.
 
Sucal said:
I was going to post a big massive thing about how you were wrong, but then I noticed you mentioned the UND, a terrible faction who doesn't exist. Since you couldn't even be bothered getting the UED right, I figure its not worth wasting the argument on you.
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still I DO think that story in Starcraft 2 isn't really THAT bad. And I'd say it is almost equal to original Starcraft. Let's be honest. Original Starcraft wasn't a "masterpiece" in narrative. Is it a masterpiece in game play of RTS genre? YES but in narrative? Not really. I really don't get the narrative complaint when Blizzard used same trope and quality for almost all of its RTS games like Original Starcraft and Warcraft 3 series. So why do they complain now and not when original Starcraft was a thing and when Warcraft 3 was a thing.
 
The story in StarCraft 2 is emblematic of every single one of Metzen's failings as a writer, and assuming Metzen didn't literally go insane somewhere after (or maybe right at the end of) WarCraft 3, it is the triumph of better writers on the team and a strong editing team that SC1 was as good as it still is. So let's talk about it.

And you know what? You're right. Let's start all of this off by saying, you are absolutely correct: they're not a "masterpiece" in narrative. StarCraft 1 and even Brood War are hardly masterpieces. I would defend them as very well executed science fiction stories and a hallmark of storytelling in the RTS genre, but no, it's not a masterpiece. It just looks like one compared to StarCraft 2.

But let's not start here, let's start at your first post regarding the subject, since you apparently don't remember StarCraft 1 and Brood War very well?

I don't know... I don't think Amon is THAT awful of a villian.
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I mean, I guess it depends on how you quantify what you want in a villain. I mean, alright. Let's see. If you want a spooky guy with no apparent motivations besides the fact he's really angry all the time, and he wants to destroy the galaxy because he's just so angry, and... uh, is really evil. And bad. And wow, Amon does not have many distinguishing character traits. But okay, if you want a guy who spends most of his screen-time sounding ominous and angry, who looks like someone's edgy Protoss OC, who appears to have power for no other reason than convenience, then sure, Amon isn't that bad.

But personally, I like my villains with a little more substance; with goals that stretch beyond 'I want to kill anyone because I'm mad'. The Overmind had the excuse of being significantly more eloquent, and hey, there's something straightforward and understandable about 'I want to eat everyone, and these guys in particular'. I want someone who sounds like they want to be there. I want a character who arrived at being a villain, a character villanized with entirely heroic ambitions to their own perspective.

The guy who's only reason for being is that he's 'old and angry' is not what I'm looking for.

Also if Starcraft fan would take off nostalgia googles of "brood war was a masterpiece!" google off a bit. Let's be honest, broodwar wasn't THAT special! In a way it is WORSE than starcraft!
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You're right. Brood War overshadows StarCraft 1 in general conversation, and it's definitely the most memorable part of the franchise. But you are right. I think Rebel Yell (the SC1 Terran campaign) is absolutely immaculately paced - an organic escalation from small-time bug crushing, to outright rebellion, to the small compromises you make as a freedom fighter until you're burying your enemies and your friends under a tide of vicious allies in the name of power. There's a specific sort of grittiness very unique to Rebel Yell that nothing else in the story ever captures. On the whole, each campaign of StarCraft 1 was a story that focused on and related more to broader themes and ideas than the more character-driven Brood War. It's very cool, I agree.

Like EVERY PROTOSS EXCEPT THAT ONE JACKASS GUY was an idiot! Why would they trust kerrigan when she gave no reason to trust them!
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They didn't. Most of them didn't trust Kerrigan at all at first. Raszagal heard her out, but she had absolutely zero context for who Kerrigan was. She was just as alien as any other. More importantly, Kerrigan was the only Zerg capable of speaking words who wasn't an amorphous jello brain stuck to the floor. Her argument that she was controlled by the Overmind, and now that it was dead, she was free. Given every other Zerg on Aiur reverted to essentially wild animals with its' death, this was not a hard argument to buy. In fact, it was completely true. Kerrigan was free.

There were simply bigger problems for the Protoss to worry about. Kerrigan's strengths in Brood War came from her ability to play sides against each other and leverage her position. This was the first major instance of it. The Zerg had followed them from Aiur, and inaction would turn their new home into the latest stomping ground for the Zerg. Kerrigan offered her assistance in full, and did essentially nothing to prove her interests were directly in conflict with the Protoss. Later, she'd kill Aldaris before he could reveal his dirt on her and got banished, sure, but the point is... he didn't get to. That's why she went and killed him. And so she got kicked out for the significantly less important crime of 'interfering in Protoss matters'.

Which would lead us toward why the Protoss trust her again. Which they don't. At all. The alliance that the Korprulu Sector at large makes makes no bones about being one of circumstance - the UED are, for one reason or another, totally antithetical to the way of life of the original denizens for one reason or another. Which neatly segues to here:

Also UND as WORST Villain EVER! They did NOTHING but create trouble! they were more generic than Amon ever was.
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The UED are one of the more clever story elements in Brood War, I found. An example of how well StarCraft utilized the ostensibly rigid 'order' you played the campaigns in. You really only get a glimpse of them in the Protoss campaign as you're tromping around for crystals to put in the thing to make the other things go away. Yeah, Blizzard has done that for a while. They show up completely out of left field with few explanations other than a purported desire to take over the entire sector. They seem pretty bad. But then they fade out, as the Protoss return to an exclusively Protoss matter (as they are wont to do).

But how it gets interesting is the fact that we jump right into the seat of the UED right afterwards, for a good look at the bigger picture. A clear explanation of the reason why they're in the sector at all. What they hope to achieve. How they hope to achieve it. StarCraft isn't a stranger to this sort of thing - the Zerg, similarly, sits smack dab between the Terran and the Protoss in the original campaign's order, but given the significantly less alien outlook of the UED we saw a much more nuanced perspective on things. DuGalle and Stukov aren't bad guys. They're leaders of a military sent to control a growing threat and take control of a bunch of outcast humans who got banished to Space Australia and never came back. They have a friendship, and we see that friendship distorted and turned against each other by one of my favourite actors in the narrative, Duran. We see a man in DuGalle weighed down by the sacrifices he's had to make to reach victory, and at the very end, when he's writing a letter to his wife with the scattered remains of his fleet, shortly before he puts a gun to his head, we see a man worthy of pity.

The UED are, fundamentally, not angels. The fascist allusions are not exactly unintended, and there's a reason the first time you the player ever see them is watching over a colony being overrun by Zerg just to see them at work. But their motivations, why they see themselves as the good guys in this war, are not difficult to understand. The Korprulu Sector is more than a little fucked. It's being eaten alive by a species of lizard-bugs, beset by weird high-tech psychics, and under the rule of a rogue (and tyrannical) government. Their mission is to contain the threat and control the sector, and assuming control of the Overmind is... actually quite an elegant solution.

And then it ends, with the Overmind under control and the Dominion totally outplaced by the UED. What you're left with when you finally start the Zerg campaign of Brood War is the mess you left in the triumph you'd just presided over.

But what's great about this is how it makes the UED everyone's new worst enemy, all for their own reasons. The UED steals half his fleet from under Mengsk, and unseats him to boot. Their plan to control the Overmind puts Kerrigan's newfound independence at risk, and their anti-alien militarism and control of the Zerg puts them into opposition of the Protoss as well. They're the new kids on the block with something to prove, and everyone wants them gone. The start of Brood War's Zerg campaign is a reaction to the direct fallout of what's just transpired. A picking up of the pieces, and for Kerrigan, an opportunity.

And overall, I don't know why you're condemning the UED for causing nothing but trouble (for their own very clearly defined goals and purposes) when I'm unaware of the significant quality of life improvements that people have when their minds are hijacked by an angry voice who wants to kill them all.

I kinda have hard time swallowing the argument that Starcraft 2 has worse story line then orginal starcraft when orginal starcraft had nothing special to begin with. It is all nostaglia talk
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I could talk about in few uncertain terms what SC1 and Brood War triumphed in and what SC2 both failed to do, and actively sought to diminish in its' predecessor. Very little of it has to do with warm, fuzzy feelings I have. StarCraft was a story about relationships and trust. It was a story about consequences, and it was never afraid to execute on them in full. It was a story full of character arcs, changing alliances, changing circumstances, changing people. I don't want to wax poetic over all this, because at some point it's important to step back and remember that StarCraft was, at the end of the day, a science fiction war drama, but there was certain little complexities to it, in the relationships characters had with each other and how it drifted from varying ends of the idealism vs pragmatism spectrum.

StarCraft 2 is about a story about good guys versus a bad guy.

At the end of the day, StarCraft was a story with the kind of ambition that SC2's fundamentally lacks.

The best argument I can ever make for the sheer gulf between SC2 and Brood War is simply seeing how Brood War ends, and seeing how Wings of Liberty begins. A denouement of Kerrigan's victory over her enemies in a feat of brilliant subversion, cornered by every soul in the sector who wanted her dead, and her amusement in letting them live for a bit longer. In the first cutscene of Wings of Liberty, we see Raynor peering sorrowfully at a crinkled photo of a once human Kerrigan, mourning the loss of his love.

Y'know.

The one he swore a little while ago he'd personally kill, for her betrayal and the death of his best friend Fenix. Mengsk goes from a charismatic, if rather embattled at the end of Brood War, leader to a joke on his own propaganda channel. Kerrigan is... well, Kerrigan is ruined at every angle. Robbed of her agency as a character - goes so far to retroactively deem her deeds in Brood War, not self-serving actions of a woman ambitious enough and intelligent enough to conquer a sector, but the unseen work of some guy behind a curtain. Reduced to a sad girl trapped in someone else's body, quietly begging her old squeeze to get her out at the end of it all. To a love interest with some emotional baggage. To the unending stream of garbage that was everything related to her character in Heart of the Swarm. Her renewed relationship with Raynor, her bizarre and genocidal hypocrisy, and yet still the narrative's insistence that she needs to be a hero, because It Must Be So. That she is, in fact, a key part of a prophecy - a narrative crutch, I might add, StarCraft 1 and Brood War did without.

This to the lady who brought us "Queen Bitch of the Universe".

The beauty, the power of Kerrigan's final and most dramatic betrayal and her ascent to unchallenged master of the sector wasn't just in the audacity of it. It was a testament to the character Kerrigan became. From her introduction as a plucky Terran Ghost faithful to a cause, to an unwilling pawn of a hive mind, to an agent of her own destiny taking what she felt she deserved. Kerrigan felt like the sum total of what she'd done and what she'd been through at the end of Brood War. It was, in all respects, an incredibly satisfying character arc.

All of this is thrown out the window in favour of the Kerrigan-shaped waif we're presented with in the sequel. That bothers me.

I'm not going to pretend that I don't have a specific connection to Kerrigan besides this. I was, yes, relatively young when I first finished Brood War, and Kerrigan was the first character who really taught me how cool and powerful a girl could be in a video game. But there's a reason I felt that way at all. To this day, Kerrigan and her impact on the story of Brood War was legitimately incredibly accomplished, especially for the time and the format that StarCraft's story was presented in.

Like, your argument of nostalgia just falls very flat on the whole. I'm not going to say it's not an important franchise to me. It might be the most important franchise to me as far as science fiction goes. I've written this many words about it, it'd be weird if it wasn't. But you're going nowhere with it, and I'm not sure where your argument was in the first place when it was essentially 'it wasn't that bad, it was actually only slightly more bad than this bad thing you like because you remember it fondly'.

There's no doubt that StarCraft 2 is fun. Arguably the best RTS in years, though unfortunately the genre's seen few stalwarts as of late. I expect I'll have more to say about it as I have more time to play it, though it certainly puts the original games to shame when it comes to mission design itself.

However, it's a really bad StarCraft. It's a rotten shame, too.
 
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