The Great Overmind Roulette

[Turalyon]

It's bad news for the humans, like a swarm of locusts, but like the locusts the Zerg weren't inherently evil

You're right, the Zerg and the Overmind are not evil, they're just misunderstood apparently. Like the Zerg, locusts too are victims of their own innate directive to consume everything in their path. Like the Zerg, this innate directive was placed by some higher order 'being' (DV), people just tend to call it "Mother Nature".

[hack59]

You're right, the Zerg and the Overmind are not evil, they're just misunderstood apparently. Like the Zerg, locusts too are victims of their own innate directive to consume everything in their path. Like the Zerg, this innate directive was placed by some higher order 'being' (DV), people just tend to call it "Mother Nature".

Hm, not sure if I'm getting the joke, but I don't think there's any question about "(mis)understanding" or being "victims". Why can't it be that it simply doesn't occur to the Zerg that there are ethical implications to assimilating other species? The locust analogy stops here because locusts aren't sentient, while the Zerg are, but nonetheless there's no reason why they should have any sense of ethics. They're neither victims nor misunderstood, they're just very driven to doing things that harm humans, so the humans defend themselves. Most humans don't have a lot of ethical concerns about treating non-human life (maybe except puppies), and we don't call ourselves "victims of our own callousness". It's just not important.

I think if you were to draw a random sample from a large bag of intelligent life forms and throw them into the same part of space, this is a much more likely outcome than anyone happening to have an innate directive concerning the other parties.

[Turalyon]

It's debatable whether individual Zerg are truly sentient (or do you mean sapient?) or not. It also brings into question whether Zerg can really (or rather need) be metaphysically free. Even then, what the hell is going to be the difference between enslaved Zerg and free Zerg anyway? They're still both going to try to assimilate the strongest species they can find, unless their own origin/nature is going to retconned as well.

Anyways, the previous comment was more of a jab at the writing convention used in Sc2. They've distilled the plight of something which was definitively and originally alien into such blatant humanistic terms that it's hard not to think of the Overmind (and the Zerg overall) as being 'misunderstood' or 'victims'.

[hack59]

Anyways, the previous comment was more of a jab at the writing convention used in Sc2. They've distilled the plight of something which was definitively and originally alien into such blatant humanistic terms that it's hard not to think of the Overmind (and the Zerg overall) as being 'misunderstood' or 'victims'.

Oh, yes, for sure. Everything gets anthropomorphized and made relatable. I guess in part that's because they don't know any other way of making a 30-mission long Zerg campaign (to be fair, that's quite a challenge, ain't noone playing 30 missions of locust plague), but the cynic might argue that it's to pave the way to make the Zerg a viable character class in WOS :-)

[Turalyon]

Even with all this business of humanising the Zerg (which does not necessarily mean making them good) to potentially make their campaign more relatable, it's funny that the real human characters in the campaign we are supposed to relate to the most (ie: WoL) is made extremely difficult to do so when they are nothing more than caricatures. Go figure.

[FanaticTemplar]

True, but the difference now is that we have a Bigger Bad Villain behind the Big Bad Villain. Not only that, there is now some doubt that the original Big Bad Villain may not be so 'bad' in the first place. What next, an Even Bigger Bad Villain behind the Bigger Bad Villain (who may also be misunderstood as well) who is behind the Big Bad villain who also happens to incorporate all of the happenings of the villains underneath it into it's grand and ultimate plan?

One abomination at a time. I'm still too worried about the possible 'everyone unites against the Dark Voice' ending to Legacy of the Void to worry about the villain of StarCraft III.

Hmm.. Let's see. First off, I didn't really feel that the Zerg were a "bad villain". A "villain" is a cartoonish motif that writers introduce to set up a morally unambiguous conflict; it's someone who is definitely evil and who everyone agrees on as the enemy. It's generally a very simplistic thing to do and often results in a black-and-white kind of setup. Suffice to say that real life rarely has actual villains and is more complicated. Happily, I never thought of the Zerg as villains: They were just doing their thing. They had their own agenda of improving their gene pool, which drove them towards the Protoss via the humans. It's bad news for the humans, like a swarm of locusts, but like the locusts the Zerg weren't inherently evil, at least that's how I understood the situation. (Now of course they must have red glowing eyes so that babies know they is bad.) Mengsk himself was a kind of villain, in the sense that he was ruthless and ready to expend people when it served him, but he also was just working his agenda.

So if 'working your agenda' disqualifies you from being a villain, why do you call the Dark Voice a villain?

I mean, universal genocide of all sentient life seems pretty unambiguously evil to me.

Mengsk did abandon Kerrigan, which created an opportunity for the Zerg to capture her, but it was an opportunity, nothing else. The Zerg didn't engineer a situation that would allow them to take a shot at her. It just happened. So Mengsk doesn't have that much to be "unaware of" -- sure, he didn't know that his decision to abandon Kerrigan would play into his adversary's hands, but he wasn't an unwitting part in a larger plan. Also note that the Zerg don't actually play the psionic Kerrigan card once they learn the location of Aiur from the Dark Templar. The Overmind's initial plan was to bolster its psionic potential by assimilating humans, but when it made contact with the Dark Templar, it must have concluded that a surprise attack on the Protoss would be feasible; the original psi plan wasn't so important at that stage.

Right, and the Overmind didn't engineer a situation where Raynor and Valerian would find a Xel'Naga artefact to deinfest Kerrigan either, so why bring it up?

So where in there do you see reliance on a single event? As far as I can tell, everyone was only doing things they thought would best serve their own agenda. In the end the Protoss overcome the threat from the Zerg, true, and that is indeed "one event", but it's the outcome of a struggle for survival, not the result of any sort of cunning plan. The Overmind takes his best shot, but it isn't quite good enough, and the Protoss throw in everything they have, and they lose most of their homeworld and barely make it out alive. Sounds plausible to me.

I thought you'd agreed that there wasn't a cunning plan to the Overmind's actions either? If there was, what was it?

[Hawki]

I doubt there'll be a "everyone against the Dark Voice" scenario, considering LotV is primarily about the protoss uniting rather than the galaxy as a whole.

[Turalyon]

I doubt there'll be a "everyone against the Dark Voice" scenario, considering LotV is primarily about the protoss uniting rather than the galaxy as a whole.

If you look at WoL, the primary concern of WoL was supposedly Raynor's battle against Mengsk, until we got the change of gears at the end with Kerrigan's 'rescue'.

LotV will most likely revolve around uniting the Protoss to get us to the 'end game' of defeating the DV and it's plans. Since Kerrigan and the Zerg have a stake in this greater conflict, too, it's going to be difficult to not think that there is going to be some sort of "uniting" going on even if the last campaign of the trilogy is supposed to be Protoss specific (originality and personal taste issues notwithstanding).

One abomination at a time. I'm still too worried about the possible 'everyone unites against the Dark Voice' ending to Legacy of the Void to worry about the villain of StarCraft III.

There's a lot more to worry than just that. I'm somewhat worried that they've introduced a big-bad-villain which they will not end up defeating after all that time waiting (it'll be another 2.5 years at least) and building it up. That'll be a very low blow...

I mean, universal genocide of all sentient life seems pretty unambiguously evil to me.

Not if said universal genocide is actually the better option of a fate worse than death. It could be revealed that the DV was actually doing us a favour by killing everything because the alternative is some other omnipotent guy who's just 'around the corner' who will mentally enslave every and all sapient entities by stripping them of free will of all kinds yet retaining there awareness. Gasp!! Cue the next Big Bad of Starcraft 3!!

[FanaticTemplar]

There's a lot more to worry than just that. I'm somewhat worried that they've introduced a big-bad-villain which they will not end up defeating after all that time waiting (it'll be another 2.5 years at least) and building it up. That'll be a very low blow...

Well, one thing at a time. I have worries about the lack of Zerg characters in Heart of the Swarm, more immediately, but the "ally vic?" ending to Legacy of the Void is the most plausible major concern of mine. I've played (and hated) the campaigns of WarCraft III after all.

Not if said universal genocide is actually the better option of a fate worse than death. It could be revealed that the DV was actually doing us a favour by killing everything because the alternative is some other omnipotent guy who's just 'around the corner' who will mentally enslave every and all sapient entities by stripping them of free will of all kinds yet retaining there awareness. Gasp!! Cue the next Big Bad of Starcraft 3!!

I was talking about the Overmind, actually :P. And to be honest, it was either death or a fate that would make death look like a blessing, so yeah. I think the Overmind is evil.

[Kimera757]

I doubt there'll be a "everyone against the Dark Voice" scenario, considering LotV is primarily about the protoss uniting rather than the galaxy as a whole.

The Dark Voice is Sargeras. Not literally (not a shared universe, except Easter eggs) but think about it.

The Titans were a peaceful organizing force that manipulated lesser races, and one of their member "fell", becoming evil and tried to destroy all life as we know it. (Why would the Dark Voice go out of its way to destroy the terrans otherwise?)

Instead of fighting against the zerg, it dominated them to defeat everyone. Obviously Kerrigan is the Dark Voice's enemy. I'd be more than a little surprised if the three races didn't all oppose the Dark Voice, even if it's not a giant Battle Royale with Cheese with one player commanding all three races at the end.

Warcraft III ended with various races teaming up to smash Archimonde, Sargeras' representative, as they all agreed he was "bad". I wonder if Diablo is in any way similar.