Exterminas said:
Could somebody please provide some actual arguments as to how the Starcraft Story is "bad"? I just see people waving the statement that it is, with no arguments at all.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I thought the story was your average revenge-vs-love-thing. Sort of like the count of Monte Christo, just with more chitin. But that didn't really make it bad for me.
What's this? "Sperg on about dumb shit that has been talked to about too much already?" Damn man, is it my birthday?
One frequent point of contention is the overall tone. Both SC1 and SC2 mixed a lot of goofy Space Redneck stuff with a more serious "the future is bleak and terrible" type story. This was something a lot of people liked about the original and hated in the second, and I think there's one big difference: SC1 knew when to be silly and when to be serious. It put its humour in one-off cutscene characters, hidden unit quotations, and the like. When the actual plot was moving and major characters were on screen, things got fairly serious (to the extent that interstellar Robert E. Lee threatening aliens can be serious). SC2 mixed it
everywhere. Everyone had a quip and a wise-crack about
everything, southern rock playing in the background. The game tried to jump between dumb jokes, SRS GUYS WE'RE BEING SRS NOW bullshit, and stuff that would have actually
been funny and goofy if it wasn't actually meant to be taken seriously. I mean shit, was that big end-game speech by Raynor supposed to be a rousing and epic moment, or is it supposed to be a parody of big end-game speeches that try and fail to be rousing and epic?
The newscasts were a particularly low point in that regard. The game tries to make a big deal about Mengsk's control of the media, yet virtually every single time you look at a television, you see a reporter shitting on Mengsk. Why? So we could laugh at her impotent colleague getting flustered? Rather than giving you insight into the game universe or pushing the "Mengsk is a totalitarian dictator" from the realm of "tell" to "show", we got a shitty joke. We didn't need that joke, and we definitely didn't need that joke repeated twenty fucking times over the course of the game.
Then there's the fucking "choice" stuff; the great marketing word (often paired with "& consequence") of our age. Of course, the ability to do missions out of order wrecked any semblance of pacing. One moment Raynor is bright-eyed and coming out of his years-long funk, the next he's a drunken wreck pitied by all. One moment you're teaming up with part of the Dominion, the next you're fighting them, and then back to being their allies again a moment later. And when the game actually gives you a, "No, you can only do
one of these!" missions, the story literally warps itself to ensure that you always made the right, moral choice.
One of Blizzard's best-known story problems is that they're not good at giving motivation to their villains. Rather than actually wanting something, they're always just "corrupted". Diablo, Starcraft, or Warcraft: whoever the enemy is, they're only the enemy because some outside force is overriding their will (Bioware, incidentally, seems to have gone heavily into this particular gimmick of late, and they don't use it much better). Above all else, the thing I applaud Brood War for was breaking this tradition with regards to Kerrigan. She wasn't a thrall of an ineffable evil; she was what she
wanted to be. You couldn't just remove the source of corruption and make her good again. Except Wings totally forgot Brood War happened, so that's exactly what happened. See, she was really just a corrupted good-guy after all!
Nor were your other enemies any better. SC1's Overmind was infamously demoted to the role of "corrupted pawn". The Tal'darim were brought in so that you could have evil Protoss to beat up on without feeling bad (though one optional mission does let you fight regular Protoss, but they seemed totally cool about you slaughtering their warriors and destroying their ships). But what was so bad about them? Were they evil? All they ever did was hang out in their bit of space, waiting around for you to kill them. The game suggests in one mission that they hate Dark Templar, yet they use DT units whenever you see them. Mengsk, as mentioned earlier, was basically the worst tyrant ever: for all that he was supposed to have complete control over the Dominion, he couldn't even stop the inexplicably free media from shitting on him at every possible opportunity.
Also, "... Prophecy!", fucking Stettman, the nonsensical Tychus plotline, etc.
I don't want anyone to think that SC1 was some paragon of writing. It relied heavily on "find the scattered magic items" bullshit (which we saw again in Wings, to the surprise of none), the plot was completely at the mercy of the "we must find ways to get you to fight all three races" gameplay, the UED made no sense whatsoever... but it was serviceable. It had some really cool, memorable characters. Brood War had a really satisfying conclusion. And then they pretended it didn't happen.
"... but what about Heart of the Swarm? That's all Wings and Brood War shit." Well, yeah. Someone who's Not Me can talk about HotS. I spent too many words on one silly space shooting mans story already, especially given how many people have already said the same thing already in a hundred different places.
