Connection is almost good here, if it holds one more day, I'll look at it over the weekend.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
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Connection is almost good here, if it holds one more day, I'll look at it over the weekend.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
I always thought this was implied in the fluff. Every cerebrate/brood had a directive which they specialized in. In 1999 the graphical differences were limited to color palettes. In 2017 the need for 3D models raises the barrier to entry unless you compromise your artistic vision to use existing models.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nolanstar
True, I do remember the manual blurbs about the functions of certain broods, actually hope we see more packs just for the lore tidbits. Issue is that most of the sc1 broods are probably assimilated/extinct.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
I still wish they would cover the extinction of the celebrates. It seems like too important a detail to leave out. Did Kerrigan hunt them down, or just allow them to wither away and die without the Overmind?
I guess you can infer from BW that most of them were destroyed and eventually became so ineffective as to become as good as extinct. Most of them became the neo-Overmind, which got destroyed in the end whilst a whole bunch of other cerebrates were killed throughout the BW campaign.Quote:
Originally Posted by Visions of Khas
Anyways, given that what we thought we once knew were indisputable facts in the Sc history ended up being retconned in SC2 anyway, I like that it's not too clear regarding cerebrates. It will make for their eventual return (if it were to happen) a bit more easily to swallow if you want to think of it that way.
It won't happen. The elimination of the cerebrates was an outgrowth of a deal Blizzard made with Games Workshop.Quote:
It will make for their eventual return (if it were to happen) a bit more easily to swallow if you want to think of it that way.
I don't fully buy that. If that were truly the case, the Zerg wouldn't have a hivemind (or Broodmothers fulfilling the very same role cerebrates do) either... Wait a minute! Ohhh, right, they don't really have that either too now. That's why they introduced the Primal Zerg maybe. Hm. :/Quote:
Originally Posted by Visions of Khas
Then you can ask Blizzard for more details about how the hivemind was really made by AmonQuote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
I don't buy that either, GW doesn't have the monopoly on brain bugs.
SST would fucking shit all over GW if they tried to litigate that shit.
The treatment of the Zerg has been atrocious. They never had interesting characters in any of their appearances, old school or new school. They lost all of their cultural uniqueness to become Kerrigan's personal weapon of mass destruction. Blizzard attempts to justify this using logic that would not hold up in court if GW tried to use it. The Zerg are about as different from the Tyranids as the new Necrons are from the old Necrons.
Blizzard is not going to fix that, so if you want some of that old school Zerg goodness back, you'll have to either make custom campaigns (which the crappy SC2 map editor makes all but impossible) or write fanfiction.
That's a retcon which renders the entire backstory of the Zerg nonsensical and makes them really boring compared to their awesome SC1 manual backstory.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
I'm an old school Zerg fan. The Overmind and his Cerebrates rule, while Zagara, Abathur, Stukov and all the rest gleefully obey.
The hivemind existed in the SC1 lore. Besides I take what was given from the SC2 lore and go from there, instead of just ignoring the whole thingQuote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
Playing devil's advocate, but how has it changed the zerg fundamentally? In the original lore, the Xel'Naga forged the Overmind to circumvent warring egos and bring them to heel. How is it changed to know that Amon, specifically, spearheaded that particular aspect of the zerg?Quote:
That's a retcon which renders the entire backstory of the Zerg nonsensical and makes them really boring compared to their awesome SC1 manual backstory.
I think the whole thing with Blizzard eliminating the Cerebrates is really dumb, too. Instead of cerebrates invoking the Tyranid Hivemind, now we have Queens mirroring Tyrand Norn Queens. It's fixed nothing, really.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...59ed630283.jpg
https://bnetcmsus-a.akamaihd.net/cms...3290202207.jpg
Nope. No similarities. At all.
I have no problem taking stuff from SC2 lore that doesn't contradict SC1 lore. However, I have a beef with the writing going back to SC1. Episode II is nowhere near as interesting or well plotted as Episodes I or III, which makes sense when you learn that the writers decide to revive Kerrigan and rewrote the Zerg campaign around her. By the time BW rolls around the writers are clearly making it up as they go along.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
As it stands, StarCraft simply doesn't have a solid story because the alien side is horribly mishandled.
SC2 retconned the entire backstory, not just that part. SC2 rewrote the series from military scifi to space fantasy romance.Quote:
Originally Posted by Visions of Khas
In SC1, the zerg were parasites who the xel'naga made slight modifications to to increase their survival and prevent internal strife. The Zerg flourished beyond expectations and developed capabilities the xel'naga never predicted, like infestation and assimilation. Ultimately the Zerg devoured their creators, gained their knowledge, and went on a galactic eating spree in search of a weapon against the Protoss who they would inevitably face. The Zerg elevated the previously arbitrary/subjective concepts of "purity of form" and "purity of essence" to religious importance and believed that by assimilating the Protoss' purity of form (which the xel'naga explicitly believed sullied and discarded in favor of purity of essence, because it was all a vanity project) they would become perfect.
In SC2, the zerg were reptile bug things which ate each other to acquire space magic which makes them randomly mutate and become stronger. Amon created the Overmind and enslaved the Zerg, then took them from Zerus and sent them on a mission to destroy the Protoss. Amon was an idiot who the Overmind didn't like for enslaving it, so the Overmind used its god-like ability to predict the future in order to mastermind Amon's embarrassing death through a variety of impossible circumstances and coincidences. The Zerg religion was expanded on and made into the factual creation myth of the universe and part of some space magic cosmic cycle thingy. The xel'naga are actually space gods who reproduce by creating two races to act as eggs and sperm to conceive a new race of xel'naga.
You know, I was never bothered by Kerrigan's usurpation of the Zerg and her using of them to her own ends in BW and that's saying a lot because the Zerg are my favourite (most Zerg fans actually despise Kerrigan's influence). It wasn't wholly without rhyme or reason on a conceptual level because she was billed in Sc1 as the most powerful agent of the Swarm, the Overmind left her with her own spirit/individuality and she had a chip on her shoulder from being controlled all her life up to that point. Now, with the Overmind dead, the original Zerg culture was literally ripped off them then and there already, so it was up for grabs as to which way the Zerg could turn out. It would have been better had we seen the other side of the Zerg more (that is, the remnant Cerebrate point of view) but having Kerrigan control them is definitely an interesting change to the Zerg following the Overmind's death, regardless of whether one deems it a "good" or "bad" change.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
The bigger crime in the treatment of the Zerg is wholly in Sc2. The Overmind stuff in WoL can at least be potentially ignored now because of the retcon in LotV of the retcon in WoL (it was a sham concocted by Ouros) but that fundamental change in the Overmind's origin and nature as exposited off-handedly by the ghost of another thought-to-be-dead character absolutely gutted me at the time. HotS compounds this in even more excruciating detail by not only saying the Overmind was not the Zerg, but the Zerg we know generally are not the real Zerg at all - the Primals are. I thought that I couldn't be more disgusted when they threw the Overmind under the boss and pinned all it's achievements on some non-descript villain, just to lazily and artificially bolster up his cred in WoL, but to undermine the Zerg further and so entirely in HotS by nonchalantly saying they're not really Zerg... I can't even find the words to describe it, but betrayal is close. I'm still deciding whether what the Zerg had to suffer was comparatively worse than what the revelations of the Protoss had to endure during LotV.
Sc2 should've treated the Zerg better by removing Kerrigan from them entirely and seeing them evolve beyond their limitation of not having the Overmind or being controlled by Kerrigan.
Thing is, it isn't just that Amon is revealed to be the Xel'Naga behind the uplifting, it's the retconning of the purpose behind it and the how and why of things that is added on to it. It's because of the idea now that the Overmind was really not the Overmind and by extension, not really representative of what it is to be Zerg. The Overmind/Zerg was just a tool/device (both literally and figuratively) for a bigger villain, not a third race with it's own agenda and stakes. Not only is the Overmind rendered into an unreliable narrator, the omniscient view of the history in the manual is also rendered into being an unreliable narrator. Everything becomes untethered as a resultQuote:
Originally Posted by Visions of Khas
They've always been "making it up all along". A technically "good" story is often when it successfully conveys the illusion that it was all fully formed from the get-go.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
It's debatable whether Kerrigan makes Episode II less interesting or poorly plotted because if you look at the missions without Kerrigan, the plotting is indeed more drab and pedestrian. The first missions of Episode II revolve around babysitting a McGuffin and the last missions are completely and can be easily disconnected from what came before since the Overmind's invasion of Aiur doesn't involve Kerrigan (which makes you wonder why two-thirds of the game is dedicated to her rebirth). Really, the inclusion of Kerrigan is what actually kicks the plot momentum of Episode II into gear such that even though Aiur's invasion is predicated on Zeratul being on Char, the presence of Kerrigan as a plot device handily explains why Zeratul is even there in the first place (the psychic call when she was in the chrysalis).
Limitation? The Overmind enabled the Zerg to become a galactic horde of locusts. Without that unity, they will only ever stagnate, degenerate, or become funny looking humans.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
The SC1 manual foreshadowed that the Zerg were going to create legions of psychic infested Terrans. That sounds loads more interesting to me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
That was more because with the Overmind gone and the new one too young to do anything, they didn't want the zerg to sit around and just wait until the new one matures. Kerrigan was right about that point when she told Artanis and Zeratul of the new Overmind.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
Overemphasized, that was the main problem. No one would have had any problems with their relationship in the 1st game because it wasn't the main point. All Blizzard had to do was continue that pathQuote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
You're acting like the Overmind ALONE was what kept the swarm from doing it. Even by the time of BW it was clear the Cerebrates could keep much of the swarm from going feral. It proved that you never really needed the Overmind to prevent such things, SC2 merely capitalized on that and introduced the hybrids for such control. Besides, as early as the Dark Origin mission people had speculated that the hybrid Duran showed Zeratul could be able to control the swarm.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
In many ways I felt the same. The whole point why the Overmind turned to humanity was because the Khala prevented infestation, so the swarm had to find another species in order to get psionic abilities. But the virus wasn't compatible with most terrans, hence why all the mindless drones.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
My point exactly. Maybe the Brood War could have been an actual Brood War where the Broods fight each other for supremacy. Without the Overmind to give a constructive direction, they end up being far more dangerous to the Terrans and Protoss.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
In some ways they did try to implement this in HotS. I didn't mind the whole revenge matter against Mengsk, I just felt that shouldn't have been the whole point of the campaign. If nothing else they should have explained more on the primal zerg at Zerus, as well as the prophecy at Skygeirr. I felt Phantoms of the Void mission alone wasn't enoughQuote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
SCI and the manual never actually touched on whether or not the Zerg could assimilate the protoss. The Overmind needed the terran psychic capacity in order to fight the protoss on even footing. After the Overmind gained its foothold on Aiur, it seemed absolutely intent on infesting the protoss without any hints of resistance -- from the khala or otherwise. The Khala and Void serving as barriers to infestation was lore developed later on.Quote:
The whole point why the Overmind turned to humanity was because the Khala prevented infestation, so the swarm had to find another species in order to get psionic abilities.
That lore developed later on was to explain why initial infestation didn't work, hence why the Overmind needed the Khaydarin crystals. Remember, for all the killing on Aiur, the Overmind was still at work on the crystals. This was somewhat explained about at the beginning of Full Circle.Quote:
Originally Posted by Visions of Khas
Reading mis-comprehension on your part. I said "limitation of not having the Overmind" not "limitation of having the Overmind".Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
And yet none of this was even addressed in Episode II except only on an oblique level with the inclusion of Kerrigan.... and then she's forgotten about at the end of the Overmind campaign. So much for the Overmind wanting (or needing for that matter) to "create legions of psychic Terrans"...Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
Agree with the former but not the latter. The Zerg in BW seem to be just as powerful without the Overmind than they were with the Overmind in Sc1, if not more when it really shouldn't! In BW, the death of the Overmind had no real negligible effect since the supposed "feral" Zerg were still powerful enough to invade and almost defeat the Protoss on Shakuras (you know, the homeland for the only threat that troubled the Zerg in Sc1), when it really should have hindered them. Even the most powerful fighting force at the time, the UED, had to struggle to even get close the baby Overmind and only got that chance because of a plot device to weaken the Zerg (when they really shouldn't need further weakening with the Overmind being dead/immature). In a way, it kind of devalues Tassadar's sacrifice.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
I don't even know why this was even something to be doubted in the first place. The whole premise about the Zerg and the Overmind is its goal of finding the Protoss and assimilating them so there's a tacit understading/implication that this was always possible. If they weren't actually able to do it from the get go, that's something that should've been made clear from the start. To say that because we didn't see the Zerg assimilate the Protoss in the game is proof that the Zerg never could assimilate Protoss is horrendously fallacious (argument from ignorance).Quote:
Originally Posted by Visions of Khas
The Overmind's successful invasion of Aiur - without Kerrigan mind you - seems to disagree with this assessment.Quote:
Originally Posted by Visions of Khas
Tura, I was directly referring to the Zerg section of the manual The Determinant, which speaks to the Overmind's worries over fighting the protoss. This goes in hand with Misalgnissa's point that a lot of the content on the manual was excluded from the game.
Tell me something Tura: after getting Kerrigan into the swarm, what exactly did the Overmind make use of regarding her psionic abilities to the rest of the zerg?Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
So what about this? When Episode II starts, the Overmind has already found the very thing to stop its anxiety about fighting the Protoss. Sure, it could've been more overt and expository to show in the game that the Overmind was worried before the start of Episode II but it's hardly necessary (since that's what the manual is there for and had already detailed). The reveal later in the campaign that it actually had the psionically gifted Kerrigan in its possession fills in the gaps and connects to the background detailed in the manual. So, the reason why the Overmind was never worried from the start of Episode II and is supremely confident throughout the campaign was because it thought it had already won having in its possession at last, its "determinant" (albeit in Chrysalis form).Quote:
Originally Posted by Visions of Khas
It used her to fight the most dangerous Protoss it had met since it's arrival in the K sector.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
You know I'm still unsure if the Overmind actually saw the Nerazim as the most dangerous Protoss. Yes they can permanently kill Cerebrates, but I felt it would have thought they're still relatively few in number and therefore isn't THAT big of a threat.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
Of course, it depends on the degree of arrogance it had.
Every cerebrate is basically a miniature version of the Overmind, so it isn't surprisingly they share capabilities in common. The Overmind, however, served a vital regulating role by preventing them from fighting a brood war against one another like the xel'naga feared they might do. The actual BW expansion forgot this and trivialized the demise of the Overmind and Tassadar's sacrifice. Even reclaiming feral zerg is actually a retcon, as there was no indication in SC1 that this was possible (at least not without replicating the drug- and tech-based enslavement practiced by Terrans).Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
This is a retcon. We didn't see more intelligent infested Terrans in the game due to development limitations and because Episode II was seemingly rewritten (and hastily so) to include QoB. It's unbelievable that QoB is the most powerful human psychic ever, more powerful than Protoss, uniquely compatible with infestation, present on Tarsonis when the Zerg invaded, etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
The Zerg were infesting Terran worlds for over a decade before the Great War started. This suggests that infesting and assimilating species may take a fair amount of time based on their physiology. If it took over a decade for the Zerg to infest and assimilate Terrans, then it stands to reason infesting and assimilating the Protoss would take even longer.Quote:
Originally Posted by Visions of Khas
The Overmind stated that the Protoss don't fully understand the applications of the crystals. Which makes sense, because the Zerg ate the xel'naga who created the crystals. What doesn't make sense is that the Zerg were not already churning out Khaydarin crystals for the war effort. The Zerg briefing screen does show a giant purple crystal surrounded by human skeletons, which seemingly plays a role in their communication, but the significance of this is never explained.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
That's what I've been saying. These are some of my many complaints about how the story was handled. There are inconsistencies which are never explained, previous plot points are dropped or contradicted, new antagonists appear out of left field, etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
Actually in the SC1 lore it was heavily implied, but never actually STATED, the Xel'Naga created the crystals. The Overmind did understand more, but it seemed like it needed to harness their power to assimilate the Protoss, which would merely be a way to get around the Khala.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
Then how would you explain why all the other infested terrans only turned out mindless drones? (If you were to use a lore reasoning)Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
You think after Zasz's brood went feral the only way to deal with it is to destroy it completely?Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
BW didn't forget the infighting as you claimed. The whole point of the swarm's function in the BW was because Kerrigan controlled half, and Daggoth's forces controlled the other half and neither wanted to share. Hell the whole point of Kaloth infesting Stukov probably reflected this too, because the Cerebrates wanted a way to deal with Kerrigan
This is the whole point of why people wanted a better ending when they began writing the storyline for SC2. BW's ending made it seem like everyone's sacrifice had been for nothing. And Duran's plans merely suffered a temporary setback due to the loss of the swarm to Kerrigan, and he simply went around that by using terran tech to breed the hybrid instead.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
That they are few in number but possess a power and capability not even legions of Protoss warriors and war machines could achieve would be more than enough to give the Overmind pause (which it did).Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
Also, it did assign it's most powerful agent to combat them rather than bringing her to the invasion of Aiur and it would rather rush head long onto the homeworld of the Protoss rather than stay put on Char until the Dark Templar were done with. Take that as you will.
Oh. I mistook what you said, "Without the Overmind to give a constructive direction, they end up being far more dangerous to the Terrans and Protoss", as being something you agreed with.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
One thing I always had as part of my headcanon was that the Overmind was using the Khaydarin Crystals to "hack" into the Khala and influence the Conclave. Would explain some of their completely bone-headed tactical moves during the war.
Post SC2 it makes even more sense to me as it would seem that the Khaydarin Crystals act as a form of backdoor into the Khala that allowed Amon easy access. If the Overmind has succeeded in implanting itself into the Khala with Amon steering its moves he would have likely created the Hybrid Form he desired right then and there and proceeded to destroy the universe with Hybrid, Zerg, and Protoss under his control.
Nice catch. I figured that attacking the Psi Matrix (which relayed the Khala, since Tassadar's ignorance of the inquisition suggests that it has limited range) was the intended goal. This would explain why Fenix's lightsabers failed in mid-combat, which makes a huge amount of tactical sense, whereas later sources (I don't know which) claim it was due to lack of maintenance.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
I wouldn't. I would write fanfiction where the Zerg successfully build armies of psychic infested Terrans after spending the decade before the Great War refining the process.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
That is what we saw in SC1. If it was possible for any sufficiently powerful or intelligent Zerg to reclaim feral Zerg, we would have seen it happen then. Instead the entire brood had to be exterminated, and it's ambiguous as to whether this was necessary before the Overmind woke up. If the brood had to be destroyed before the Overmind woke up, or doing so sped it waking up, that suggests some kind of psychic connection that transcends death.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
In fact, the intricacies of cerebrate death are never really explored. Initially the implication was that cerebrates were literally the brains of their brood, with the hive mind being their incorporeal nervous system or materialistic equivalent of a soul. When you kill someone's brain, you can't just perform a head transplant and expect them to be fine. In Brood War and SC2, Zerg became subservient to anything capable of transmitting the correct psychic waves as part of their overall decay of narrative agency.
All of the cerebrates teamed up to fight Kerrigan, who inexplicably gained the ability to control billions of Zerg and to manage mutation all by herself. QoB is a textbook mary sue by this point, since her entire shtick is that the plot writes itself around her in defiance of previously established rules and character motivations. Cerebrates are gigantic brains, straight out of Starship Troopers, presumably because all that brain mass is necessary to manage the thousands to millions of Zerg which make up each brood. Kerrigan might be able to make heads explode like in Scanners (how she killed her parents), but that doesn't equate to being able to pursue a thousand simultaneous trains of thought.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
SC2 outright ignores most of the events of BW, particularly the damage done to the Dominion. WoL might as well have started immediately after Episode I for all the difference it makes.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
I say that because of strategic concerns. Previously the Zerg had very specific goals and pursued those goals to the exclusion of all else. For example, one could argue that the Protoss ultimately took more Terran lives than the Zerg did, since the Zerg were seeking out psychics rather than trying to kill everything (which, according to the SC1 manual, constitute less than 1% of the population, which the Zerg can sense with their innate psychic sensitivity). Without the Overmind to regulate them, the feral cerebrates (not to be confused with feral broods) would probably cause loads of needless collateral damage in their panic and scramble to survive.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
They're just the arms and legs of the Overmind to make control a bit easier. It's no different than what Kerrigan later did with the broodmothers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
No, that deals more with the whole hive mind matter, and that the corrupted zerg are largely mindless, as the primal zerg claimed much later on in HotS.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
I wasn't convinced how Mengsk could have rebuilt so much in 4 years. If it was just Korhal, it would have worked fine, but not ALL the planets. What they should have done in WoL was reveal that Duran offered Mengsk a deal to rebuild everything, and in return he must breed the hybrid from him. Given Mengsk's arrogance in thinking he could control it, it'd make sense he'd accept.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
This is a pretty neat theory that ties the two together. The only issue I have with it is that it leans too heavily into artifice/ plot device machinations and that it devalues the Protoss identity. It's annoyingenough to have the Conclave being dismissed as just being evil/stupid, let alone make that supposed evil/stupidity a result of some other plot device. Their motivations/concerns and actions were quite legitimate and are based on their racial history.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoar
I like to think that the explanation behind Fenix's psi blades failure is more to do with his characterisation than anything else. Since the blades are generated partially from their minds and require focus, their failure could've been a depiction of Fenix losing faith/becoming disheartened. Given the lack of facial gestures, I think this was the only way they could depict that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
This would imply that it would've been easy for the Overmind to be able to find an intact psychic Terran and one who wouldn't resist it. Clearly, it wasn't an easy task for the Overmind since it only succeeded out of pure luck when it came across Kerrigan at New Gettysburg.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
Keep in mind that the feral Zerg are not only dangerous to others, but more importantly, they are now just as dangerous to themselves without the Overmind (as The Culling showed on a smaller scale)... or were supposed to be. The ferals should also be less effective in tactical maneuvers/as a military force without the Overmind even if they weren't busy attacking themselves. Either way, the Zerg under the Overmind showed no compunction to killing others or mitigating its damage in it search for psychics since the game tells us expressly that the Zerg laid waste to 9 out of 13 of the Terrans worlds. Taken together, the Zerg with the Overmind are and should be more dangerous (if not, less manageable at the least) than Zerg without the Overmind.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
You were supposed to say the reason for this was because he didn't use duracell batteries, TuraQuote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
Every expansion and sequel has retconned how the zerg and the hive mind works. I am operating on the SC1 manual explanation that the Overmind and his cerebrates are functions of the swarm itself rather than external agents.Quote:
Originally Posted by ragnarok
There’s a disconnect between the Zerg backstory in the manual and the events of the game due to script rewrites.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
In the manual, it was stated that less than 1% of the human population is psychic. Since there are billions of humans across the Koprulu sector, this means that there are millions of psychics. All Zerg are inherently able to sense psychics, which is how the probes found humans in the first place. There were clearly enough human psychics present that the Zerg considered it economical to send the entirety of the swarms in the galaxy (or nearly enough) to that sector, a logistics nightmare which took 60 "years" (implied to be Earth units, as it isn't clear if the backstory is written in-character or out-of-character). When they arrived, they spent an unknown amount of time (later sources specify over a decade in Earth units) studying the Terrans (and being studied in turn) until the Protoss arrived and glassed Chau Sara.
IIRC, Kerrigan was supposed to have died on Tarsonis until the writers decided they liked her enough to bring her back in the Zerg campaign. They rewrite her as a completely different character (or tweak a Zerg character that existed in a previous draft), destroying whatever they originally liked about her and defeating the point of bringing her back. The other psychic zerg were written out of the story and QoB carried their entire narrative load, making her into a walking weapon of mass destruction. The last two missions of the Zerg campaign are probably the only parts of the pre-QoB drafts that were left unaltered.
In later sources, QoB is made into an even bigger Mary Sue who was gifted with numerous impossible properties. She was the most powerful psychic ever (out of human and protoss), she was the only psychic to be compatible with the Zerg, she took over the swarm with ease, she manipulated everyone (into doing what they were already going to do) with ease, she took over the sector with ease, etc.
I simply cannot take the canon events seriously.
No argument there.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
The sane zerg understood strategy and concentrated on targets of strategic importance like military installations. The leaderless cerebrates are likely engage in acts of panic or madness or vengeance or something that contradicts the directive to infest and assimilate, such as attacking targets of no strategic value or bombarding cities from orbit.
The feral zerg engage in indiscriminate slaughter and while they will certainly decimate themselves, natural selection pressures will ensure the survivors will be predisposed to attacking non-zerg. The command strains like queens and overlords may not be equipped to deal with the situation, but they retain their near- or above-human intelligence while feral as well as their command of receptive hives and minions (which isn’t a lot, but it’s still an advantage against the leaderless minions). The psychic strains created using human genetic material, assuming they exist in this scenario, might even be able to pull off QoB’s mind control shenanigans on a smaller scale to form warring guerilla broods.
The Protoss power base is already broken so they aren’t equipped to deal with a second planet-wide war, much less one with hundreds of new sides that breed armies in days.
Judging by the huge militaries and complacency seen in BW and SC2 despite three Zerg invasions that were each stated to have laid waste to numerous planets, the Zerg didn’t kill enough people to make any difference.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
On a more serious note, the Zerg detect and need psychics. In order to acquire the millions of psychics on each world, they would have to concentrate on areas with large numbers of psychics and would have to take steps to ensure their targets survive to be infested. I can see that leaving large numbers of people alive in less densely populated areas where it would be more difficult to find individual psychics. At that point in time they aren’t trying to exterminate the human race, so they may have strains dedicated specifically to abducting people en masse like the tripods in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.
I felt that was because they didn't want to dive deep into the zerg except to say they're basically mindless puppets. To a small degree I felt this was exactly how they did with the Xenomorph and how as the Alien series went on, we saw retcons of their function.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
Regardless, I chose to use what was given from HotS and go from there.
Wall-o-text, how I missed thee...
That there were "billions" of Terrans in the K sector as of the start of Sc1 is an overstatement. While technically possible to reach "billions" from a founding population of 32k over 200 years, it requires optimum and sustained conditions to be possible. Also, can it be said that all psychics are the same? Given the ability is somewhat latent in Terrans, some may have the potential but it may not be able to be translated across via assimilation.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
Whatever the case, even if the chances were 99% of finding a psychic the story still has it that the Overmind didn't find or assimilate this potential until New Gettysberg. The reason is not elucidated as to why but one can only surmise that whatever the reason, it was not so simple a task for the Overmind.
Originally, it's unclear whether the Zerg are innately able to sense/be attracted to psionics since it's inferred that such interest in psionics is due to the Overmind's motivation for wanting to assimilate psionic potential from humans. BW more or less clarifies that it was always innate however...Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
It was not an economic based decision on the Overmind's part but an emotional one because it feared the Protoss psionic power. The manual itself says the Overmind was "greatly disturbed" and "on the verge of despair" before finding psionic potential in humans.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
I've heard different things about this over the years. It's clear that her reintroduction in the Zerg campaign was due solely to author conceit, but not just because they liked the character but also because Metzen, at the time, felt that the Zerg needed a human lens to see the Zerg.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
Of course she's different (not just in the physical sense), she's gone through an experience like no-one else has before. Terran Kerrigan was a naive individual who learnt, too late and with harsh consequence, a bitter lesson that changed not only her physical shape but her outlook on things. I like to think of infested Kerrigan as being the true human Kerrigan (one who has embraced the inner darkness she always knew she had), not the naive and repressed Terran individual we see in Rebel Yell. Her development is quite continuous and not a random arbitrary change as you make it out to be.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
You're probably right about that and it's ultimately to the given story's detriment because the last two missions stick out as being far removed from the story the previous missions have built up. On a constructed narrative level, Kerrigan really needed to be involved in some capacity in those last two missions.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
This all started because of BW's depiction of Kerrigan. Sure, the narrative and the characters do tend to bend toward making Kerrigan (the Zerg are also similarly made to be OP despite having no Overmind) better than what she actually is but at least it's consistently doing that throughout BW.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
This natural evolution you speak of here would've been some interesting territory to explore in BW but it would've been too soon to implement after the Overmind's death. The Zerg needed to suffer a tangible consequence of losing the Overmind and whilst we didn't see it in the way you would expect, having them be dominated and used by some crazy, hybrid freak in Kerrigan for her own personal goals is a pretty good alternative option in retrospect. Hell, I would've liked to see this natural evolution occur in Sc2 as a response to Kerrigan's rule and that this natural evolution without guidance by a hivemind or overt control be the basis of the primal Zerg, not the shonky tacked on version we got in HotS.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
But it should've been on more even footing by the end of Sc1. Those hundreds of new sides are just as much of a threat to themselves than they are to others and given their close proximity, the Zerg would've been tearing at each other first. It's important to highlight this because one of the common themes in Starcraft is the strength found in unity. Given the Zerg had the ultimate version of this and was most successful with it, it needs to be shown that when they don't have it, that there's some bad shit to be in (just like the reverse of the Protoss progress in achieving unity)Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
Hah! Tell me about it. Raynor says billions were killed? Eh, peanuts really. :pQuote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
I would say the Overmind didn't really need psychics, just that it really wanted them badly. It could invade Aiur and it was seemingly doing well all without Kerrigan's direct help, afterall.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
Again, rewrites and sequels turned a previously sensible plot into a mess. If the Great War was as devastating as implied then Mengsk would have been ruling over a tiny fraction of what used to be the Confederacy. They would be quickly wiped out by a second Zerg invasion.Quote:
Originally Posted by Turalyon
StarCraft never handled scale very well. We have absurd levels of population growth and industry on the Terran side. We have conflicts devastating dozens of planets, killing many billions, yet lasting only a few months at a time. The numbers even change between games, to the point where SC2 makes the Confederacy responsible for wiping out a third of their own population when they bombard Korhal because a single politician got uppity.
I saw that more from the transition from SC1 to SC2, given the number of terrans killed in SC1. Hell, the WoL invasion alone killed 8 billion people, yet HotS made it seem like that was largely negligible.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mislagnissa
Its like they want to play with the same scale of destruction as WarHammer 40K, but the lighter tone doesn't mesh well with that kind of grim dark.