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I think Isza points out one of my bigger issues with this story: it's not about the Zerg, all the Zerg characters are minor and in the background. This is a Terran game played with Zerg units.
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Apr 28, 2024 10:55
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Something like that is also applicable for WoL, in which you go and use a mystical artifact to redeem a fallen hero according to a prophecy, that's a Protoss as fantasy religious warrior psychics plot, here we have a jailbreak and vengeance plot for our hyperevolutive bioweapons hivemind faction, that's a Terran as backwater cowboys plot, which leaves our Zerg flavor plot for the Protoss campaign, it's likely gonna go hunting for more essence to make the Perfect Organism. And since they'll overcorrect from here, the Perfect Organism is going to be strictly inferior to fielding ten carriers isn't she?
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Apr 28, 2024 12:20
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SIGSEGV posted:Something like that is also applicable for WoL, in which you go and use a mystical artifact to redeem a fallen hero according to a prophecy, that's a Protoss as fantasy religious warrior psychics plot, here we have a jailbreak and vengeance plot for our hyperevolutive bioweapons hivemind faction, that's a Terran as backwater cowboys plot, which leaves our Zerg flavor plot for the Protoss campaign, it's likely gonna go hunting for more essence to make the Perfect Organism.
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Apr 28, 2024 13:08
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SIGSEGV posted:Something like that is also applicable for WoL, in which you go and use a mystical artifact to redeem a fallen hero according to a prophecy, that's a Protoss as fantasy religious warrior psychics plot, here we have a jailbreak and vengeance plot for our hyperevolutive bioweapons hivemind faction, that's a Terran as backwater cowboys plot, which leaves our Zerg flavor plot for the Protoss campaign, it's likely gonna go hunting for more essence to make the Perfect Organism. Oh sweet summer child, if only it were so...
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Apr 28, 2024 13:49
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anilEhilated posted:I think Isza points out one of my bigger issues with this story: it's not about the Zerg, all the Zerg characters are minor and in the background. This is a Terran game played with Zerg units. Yeah, although I kind of get it - hive minds as a concept are fixed to having essentially one perspective, and it's very difficult to write a story about only one character. You'd either have to introduce non hive mind zerg (like Stukov, and the Primals, which have both made the thread very angry by their mere existence), or you're left with subordinate cerebrates/queens who can quip and chatter but the premise requires them to either have no real agency or to get stomped on immediately. I think the best solution might have been to have Kerrigan run into more resistance re-uniting the swarm - perhaps in her weakened state she's not capable of dominating in the same way and needs to force smaller groups to join up, although that might get repetitive if you make too much of the game about it. Either way, I think ultimately the source of conflict and progression for a hive mind is going to come from their engagement with wider regional events and characters. Otherwise you're not writing a story, you're just writing lore codex entries. Like, look at a story summary of SC1/BW and tell me that the zerg sections aren't still mostly about the Overmind/Kerrigan dealing with what the Protoss and Terrans are doing. Same reason that despite churning out fifty billionty books by a range of often very questionably talented writers, Black Library still hasn't really managed to do anything with the tyranids.
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Apr 28, 2024 15:32
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Huh, looks like I should've stuck with my original guess on the essence count, I've kind of just forgotten how little content there was in this game, I'd mentally filed it as being the same as the other games in the series, just more boring.
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Apr 28, 2024 15:37
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You could make the Zerg story about a few different aspects of Kerrigan viciously infighting inside her head over which are the best plans to achieve the objectives of their sum, having scrap fights with other hiveminds, possibly discover that there are more loose cerebrates that the Overmind left behind to hold and secure other Zerg sectors, having echoes of eaten souls swimming around talking and dreaming and so on. Eat Dugalle's corpse and consult his ghost on attacking something, compare swarm composition against another Kerrigan and pause and take notes, beat down the brain that set up a fall back point and support and marshaling point a thousand light years away to squeeze its archeology notes out of it. You're dealing with an all devouring psychic species, you can get weird, it's part of the package.
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Apr 28, 2024 15:55
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In relation to that ending with Abathur, supposedly this is very different to the original plan. From what I have heard, the original storyline with him was Kerrigan kept coming by to him and giving him specific tasks/things to iterate and evolve for, but she used her Swarm connection to keep wiping his mind after each success/blocked him from recalling what it was exactly that she had him make. At the very end she would reveal a new unique Swarm creature, the Changeling, able to examine genetic data/essence, spin up new sequences, and overall improve the swarm. If this sounds like Abathur, you are correct, she made him create his own replacement, without letting him know that she was doing it. She then proceeds to kill him for his part in forging her into the Queen of Blades for the Overmind. Revenge complete.
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Apr 28, 2024 16:15
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Deformed Church posted:Yeah, although I kind of get it - hive minds as a concept are fixed to having essentially one perspective, and it's very difficult to write a story about only one character. You'd either have to introduce non hive mind zerg (like Stukov, and the Primals, which have both made the thread very angry by their mere existence), or you're left with subordinate cerebrates/queens who can quip and chatter but the premise requires them to either have no real agency or to get stomped on immediately.
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Apr 28, 2024 16:38
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Chaosbrain posted:In relation to that ending with Abathur, supposedly this is very different to the original plan. From what I have heard, the original storyline with him was Kerrigan kept coming by to him and giving him specific tasks/things to iterate and evolve for, but she used her Swarm connection to keep wiping his mind after each success/blocked him from recalling what it was exactly that she had him make. God could you imagine if we got that and they killed one of the few cool characters we've seen here. Guy just wants to mess with evolution, let him cook.
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Apr 28, 2024 16:48
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Deformed Church posted:I think the best solution might have been to have Kerrigan run into more resistance re-uniting the swarm - perhaps in her weakened state she's not capable of dominating in the same way and needs to force smaller groups to join up, although that might get repetitive if you make too much of the game about it. I had a thought related to this, which is that the Zerg are hoovering up DNA to improve the swarm, but SC2 boils it down very much to just "Essence." You pick out the Big Arms and Big Dragon essences from somewhere, combine them, you get Trogdor, a Big Dragon with Big Muscly Arms. When in truth a creature is made up of tons of interconnected, sometimes junk, strands of DNA. You might just want the genes for red hair but whoops that also comes with the gene for a rare heart defect or something because you didn't ALSO pick up the gene for bigger knees or whatever. Which is where a creature like Abathur or the Cerebrates come in, they're kept busy trimming "junk" DNA so some Zergling doesn't just drop a snail into the spawning pool vats and suddenly all the Zerglings are herbivores that move at five miles a day, but instead they get a nice hard shell out of it. So for the "wild" swarms, without that sort of control, it would have made sense for them to have all sorts of strange mutant creatures, some useful, some junk, some very dangerous, some solitary, some eusocial, etc. which could have given you the whole "ah here are some independent minds for the Leviathan Bridge" while also "ah here are some creatures without strict hive mind that could penetrate Mengsk's new psi disruptor field" in what I could consider a less wasteful way(in terms of story time) that would also add some depth to the Swarm as a thing. It could've also let you build evolution missions into the existing missions "hey boss lady, we just stomped these Zerg that katamaried their way across this world like idiots picking up a ton of junk DNA, but I can see a few things we can salvage. There's either this one that puts a spoiler on Zerglings so they move faster or this other one that puts spikes on them so they hit harder. Which one do we want?" And it would have given a way to skip the whole Zerus arc because really all Zerus gave us was Dehaka who sat around twiddling his thumbs until this very last bit.
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Apr 28, 2024 17:57
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Chaosbrain posted:In relation to that ending with Abathur, supposedly this is very different to the original plan. From what I have heard, the original storyline with him was Kerrigan kept coming by to him and giving him specific tasks/things to iterate and evolve for, but she used her Swarm connection to keep wiping his mind after each success/blocked him from recalling what it was exactly that she had him make. Wow. This must have gone WAY worse than a lead balloon in focus group testing or whatever equivalent they use. This is the same  that gave us Xerah the RaHoWa windchime in WoW, and to this day I'm convinced Illidan exploding her was a last minute emergency change from the sheer rejection the player base at large had.
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Apr 28, 2024 18:17
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PurpleXVI posted:And it would have given a way to skip the whole Zerus arc because really all Zerus gave us was Dehaka who sat around twiddling his thumbs until this very last bit. yeah but the whole point of a filler training arc is to waste your time, for minimal effort to pad out the runtime
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Apr 28, 2024 18:40
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BisbyWorl posted:God could you imagine if we got that and they killed one of the few cool characters we've seen here. I can't see how it'd have worked without major edits, either. Abathur doesn't have free will, it's not that they're "just following orders" - Abathur was made so that they couldn't do anything but follow orders. It makes Kerrigan more of a monster when you're trying so hard to soften her edges. I think going full edgelord with an anti-hero Kerrigan would have had it's own massive pitfalls for the quality of writing Blizzard was capable of and the fact that this was a standalone release, but it really doesn't work if you're trying to redeem her as a hero.
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Apr 28, 2024 19:01
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What I think gets me having caught up on the thread now, is that the zerg are like, people. They communicate verbally, and have desires, and feelings and so on. I thought they were an endless swarm of insectlike mindless evolution and predation. But instead you have bickering factions and so on. How is that zerglike in the least?
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Apr 28, 2024 19:09
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Fuzzy Mammal posted:What I think gets me having caught up on the thread now, is that the zerg are like, people. They communicate verbally, and have desires, and feelings and so on. I thought they were an endless swarm of insectlike mindless evolution and predation. But instead you have bickering factions and so on. How is that zerglike in the least? It's pretty in-line with how they were in Starcraft 1, for the most part. There's the distinction there that it is specifically Cerebrates who get to have characters and personality traits while in Starcraft 2 that's spread between ex-Terrans, Brood Mothers and the Primals. But they've all got a decent reason to be that way, at least - Brood Mothers are the replacement for Cerebrates and the others weren't born into the hivemind in the first place. Iszsha gets lines, but doesn't have anything in the way of personality or drives, she's basically just a biological chatbot. Abathur's the biggest crime in this regard, especially since he is described as existing in the old Swarm too as a unique entity. Even then, he doesn't have any motivations beyond fulfilling the purpose he was created for.
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Apr 28, 2024 19:27
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Omobono posted:Wow. This must have gone WAY worse than a lead balloon in focus group testing or whatever equivalent they use. Xe'ra has to have been a last minute swerve, it doesn't make much sense otherwise.
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Apr 28, 2024 19:28
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SIGSEGV posted:You could make the Zerg story about a few different aspects of Kerrigan viciously infighting inside her head over which are the best plans to achieve the objectives of their sum, having scrap fights with other hiveminds, possibly discover that there are more loose cerebrates that the Overmind left behind to hold and secure other Zerg sectors, having echoes of eaten souls swimming around talking and dreaming and so on. Eat Dugalle's corpse and consult his ghost on attacking something, compare swarm composition against another Kerrigan and pause and take notes, beat down the brain that set up a fall back point and support and marshaling point a thousand light years away to squeeze its archeology notes out of it. You're dealing with an all devouring psychic species, you can get weird, it's part of the package. Not part of the Blizzard Epic StoryTM Package. We're here for giant sweeping Acts of Cool and ever present escalation of numbers and stakes. PurpleXVI posted:And it would have given a way to skip the whole Zerus arc because really all Zerus gave us was Dehaka who sat around twiddling his thumbs until this very last bit. No, Zerus is vitally important to the story, it really ties it all together.
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Apr 28, 2024 19:28
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Omobono posted:Wow. This must have gone WAY worse than a lead balloon in focus group testing or whatever equivalent they use. Xe’ra’s downfall was calling out the player in the dumbest way possible. Did you kill Illidan? You monster, killing the man who enslaved half a world and didn’t do even the barest minimum to explain himself! Had nothing to do with it? You lazy rear end in a top hat, you could have stopped them from killing him!
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Apr 28, 2024 19:31
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Realistically I don't think skipping Zerus would ever have been on the table. It's the one notable location in the original Starcraft lore to never get visited, of course we were going to go there in the sequel. The writers' hands weren't tied or anything, even if they were committed to this plot. Not that that justifies anything they did with it, of course. But there are plenty of ways it could have been played out and been fine.
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Apr 28, 2024 19:32
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Is Kerrigan's problem with Mengsk that he sacrificed her to the Zerg, and she's justifying her roaring rampage by building him up as a monster? Or is Mengsk actually that terrible? I mean, I know he's a bad guy, but what has he actually done that's been worse than just being an autocrat and a tyant?
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Apr 28, 2024 20:37
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painedforever posted:Is Kerrigan's problem with Mengsk that he sacrificed her to the Zerg, and she's justifying her roaring rampage by building him up as a monster? Or is Mengsk actually that terrible? I mean, I know he's a bad guy, but what has he actually done that's been worse than just being an autocrat and a tyant? Tricked her into thinking he killed her boyfriend.
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Apr 28, 2024 20:38
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Chaosbrain posted:In relation to that ending with Abathur, supposedly this is very different to the original plan. From what I have heard, the original storyline with him was Kerrigan kept coming by to him and giving him specific tasks/things to iterate and evolve for, but she used her Swarm connection to keep wiping his mind after each success/blocked him from recalling what it was exactly that she had him make. The sheer stupidity of this idea makes me surprised that it isn't in the game, because that just Blizzard writing levels of stupid.
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Apr 28, 2024 21:01
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habeasdorkus posted:I can't see how it'd have worked without major edits, either. Abathur doesn't have free will, it's not that they're "just following orders" - Abathur was made so that they couldn't do anything but follow orders. It makes Kerrigan more of a monster when you're trying so hard to soften her edges. I think going full edgelord with an anti-hero Kerrigan would have had it's own massive pitfalls for the quality of writing Blizzard was capable of and the fact that this was a standalone release, but it really doesn't work if you're trying to redeem her as a hero. You don't understand, she's REALLY pissed at this wrench someone hit her with.
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Apr 28, 2024 21:47
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Sometimes I find myself elucubrating about this fire dupster of a story. Could have thing be better with Kerrigan discovering that the artifact has in the end separated her from the Queen of Blades, her Zerg part, and finding herself tryng to netralize her doppleganger before a new zerg horde is released? With her as a more powerful Ghost but not so overwhelming as she ended to be, learnng to capturing units fron the enemies and using them?
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Apr 28, 2024 22:14
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My issue with the psi destroyer """superweapon""" isn't that it is revealed last minute when Kerrigan attacks Korhal. After all, the best time to reveal a superweapon, is when the enemy is committed and you can do the most damage. My issue is that it is treated as a superweapon, rather than a very temporary block. Just in 5 minutes the obvious solutions for Kerrigan are * Call up Mira Han and other mercs, offer them all the minerals the swarm can strip mine from couple of planets. (That's a lotta minerals) * Call up Raiders, offer them that she will keep the swarm on tight leash to avoid more civilian casualties. * Call up Valerian, same offer. * Just destroy it herself. The zerg have spore cannons that can fire acid goop from planet's surface into space, so they can build a few in space and do a little orbital gooping of the generator. Or she can toss couple space rocks onto it using all the loving leviathans. Or just kamikaze a leviathan, yes it will die but it is still an absurd of weight at good speed, so lot of damage. Or use her super psionic powers that are beyond anything and everything to do ???.
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Apr 29, 2024 10:11
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Perhaps if it had been revealed at an earlier point in the story as the big thing preventing her from just rushing Korhal, and she had to go to Zerus to find some Zerg who weren't part of the hive mind, or... I mean, hell, Zeratul clearly believes she's important and must be aided. Couldn't she just DM him on Swarmcord and ask him to send over a few Dark Templars or something to stab it?
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Apr 29, 2024 10:17
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PurpleXVI posted:Perhaps if it had been revealed at an earlier point in the story as the big thing preventing her from just rushing Korhal, and she had to go to Zerus to find some Zerg who weren't part of the hive mind, or... I mean, hell, Zeratul clearly believes she's important and must be aided. Couldn't she just DM him on Swarmcord and ask him to send over a few Dark Templars or something to stab it?  DTurtle posted:So out of nowhere a new undefeatable super weapon is introduced and immediately destroyed.
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Apr 29, 2024 11:05
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A failed attack where the Psi-Destroyer crushes the Zerg invasion would have been very useful in some ways but would set Mengsk up to look like a dummy when he's invariably like "you know how this goes Kerrigan" and doesn't have any additional ideas once his previously successful tactic fails. OTOH, it foregrounds Mengsk as the villain and gives him more screentime/more reason for the player to hate him.
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Apr 29, 2024 11:34
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He is developing new kinds of nuclear weapons in one of the evolution missions already, so just say that was his plan once the destroyer stops working... except Kerrigan got there too fast.
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Apr 29, 2024 12:21
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I think it goes a long way to show that Mengsk is just kind of an idiot. He created one of the most powerful entities that has ever existed as a whoopsie because he's a petty rear end in a top hat, and then once he seized power of an empire, he... ignored her. Just fuckin' let the Queen of Blades do whatever she felt like for however many years. The biggest, most significant threat to Mengsk's safety was ultimately nothing more than short-sightedness.
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Apr 29, 2024 12:45
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habeasdorkus posted:A failed attack where the Psi-Destroyer crushes the Zerg invasion would have been very useful in some ways but would set Mengsk up to look like a dummy when he's invariably like "you know how this goes Kerrigan" and doesn't have any additional ideas once his previously successful tactic fails. Not really? Make the Psi-doohickeys heavily defended against non-Swarm interlopers and it's good; they're still working as exclusion zones for the Swarm at large while they're up and Mengsk does not have infinite resources to be able to protect against everything and anything. (E: full agreement on the part of the post I cut) As usual*, the problem is that Kerrigan learns nothing, earns almost nothing and wins by plot ex machina instead of out-cunning Arcturus or out-alliancing him or out-something. *actually the problem as other have stated is that this is not the Zerg campaign, it's the Kerrigan campaign featuring the Swarm as cheerleaders
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Apr 29, 2024 12:54
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Kith posted:and then once he seized power of an empire, he... ignored her. Just fuckin' let the Queen of Blades do whatever she felt like for however many years. There was this whole thing called 'Starcraft: Brood War' that explains this, but it's okay, Starcraft 2 generally tries pretty hard to forget the details of what happened during that time as well.
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Apr 29, 2024 12:59
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painedforever posted:Is Kerrigan's problem with Mengsk that he sacrificed her to the Zerg, and she's justifying her roaring rampage by building him up as a monster? Or is Mengsk actually that terrible? I mean, I know he's a bad guy, but what has he actually done that's been worse than just being an autocrat and a tyant? You're overthinking this. Mengsk is a name people recognise from the first game, so he has to be in. And he was a bad guy because he tried to kill her and also Jimmy's been rebelling against his autocratic tyranny that has been happening... mostly off screen but it's totally there. At this point she's so far above him power wise this is a farce, which means this whole thing is an unsatisfying second part of a trilogy, but technically speaking he serves as a secondary antagonist that the main characters can fight in the middle to keep them from having to fight the real big bad guy earlier. Blizzard likes things like that. Kith posted:I think it goes a long way to show that Mengsk is just kind of an idiot. He created one of the most powerful entities that has ever existed as a whoopsie because he's a petty rear end in a top hat, and then once he seized power of an empire, he... ignored her. Just fuckin' let the Queen of Blades do whatever she felt like for however many years. Mengsk has been categorically unable to scratch Kerrigan as the Queen of Blades since he took his shot and failed at the end of Brood War, and he's been consolidating an empire and trying to build weapons to protect himself while 'whatever she felt like' has been sitting around for 6-7 years. Jim dezerging her has been his best shot so far, and that was at the start of the campaign. By this point it's a last gasp: Mengsk is simply trying to keep himself alive against a pissed Kerrigan coming at him for revenge. He tried there was just nothing he really could have done. Hell, if Jimmy hadn't been IN TWUE WOVE and also given a prophecy that said 'hey killing Kerrigan ends up killing all three races because of some heretofore unannounced Big Bad Evil Man that has never been mentioned' by Zeratul, a third party that Megnsk has never actually met or interacted with (and could never have known about), Jim would have put a bullet in her head and Mengsk would never have to have lifted a finger. And then he sent Tychus, who did that just in case Raynor was, IDK, in his feelings about it and had decided not to, and that almost worked. Mengsk isn't stupid, he's small-time, because this is Activision-Blizzard, and the charismatic Empire Ruler who hosed you over is someone to kill for revenge, but not an actual threat. The weird part is that Karrigan cares about him at all at this point, because he's not a threat that matters.
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Apr 29, 2024 14:21
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I think it's been made pretty clear that Kerrigan cares about Mengsk because she too is a petty arsehole. There's basically no existential threat to Kerrigan at this point, she's just getting revenge on the guy who she holds responsible for all her misery. I mean, I guess it's not that petty to want revenge on the guy who abandoned you to the zerg, tried to kill you when you got rescued, tried that again later, kidnapped the person you loved, told you they were dead, causing you to have to go back to the version of you you hated, only to discover that that very act caused the person you love to hate you. I'd set the lings on Mengsk too.
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Apr 29, 2024 14:47
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The part the games don't mention is that what we see at the start of this campaign isn't the first shot Mengsk takes on Kerrigan post-de-infestation. Y'know how Valerian took half the fleet? Well, turns out the other half was waiting in the wings to strike immediately after the end of Wings. Raynor's bartender, Cooper, had turned spy for the Dominion at some point, and the group ended up sheltering with Mira Han briefly, and at the end of the whole affair, they ended up in Umoja. Ultimately unimportant to the overall plot, but it's a story that did happen in between the campaigns, and at most, it explains how they ended up in Umoja and where the rest of Valerian's half of the fleet went. There's a novel about it. But yeah, Kerrigan going bloodcrazy after Mengsk even before the raid on the Umojan facility isn't just "he caused all my misery and I want revenge", it's because he's literally already tried to kill her in the very short time since she was de-infested, and she recognizes that he isn't going to stop until either Kerrigan or Arcturus is dead.
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Apr 29, 2024 15:41
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That book was also where the inevitable “Narud is actually evil” “twist” finally happened.
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Apr 29, 2024 16:24
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I'm kind of surprised Mengsk hasn't gone "Hey, remember that time you and Jim saved me from execution by the UED? And then that time you let me live to rebuild the Dominion? Funny how you decided everything is suddenly all my fault now isn't it?"
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Apr 29, 2024 16:31
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What is funny is that if you go by that, and Mengsk being always awful and not being a viable bulwark against an outside threat because he is a hand of the outside threat, Kerrigan appears interested in reducing raw casualty counts and also being edgy and unpleasant and so should rightly have been written as the universe's most spectacularly awful grumpy cat.
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Apr 29, 2024 19:56
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