Mengsk is shaping up to be the main villain of HotS; bad move for the story?

[drakolobo]

If you watch the leaked ending, it may make more sense. You see the flashback with Kerrigan having something implanted in her... This might be something that happens in HOTS as a part of her revival process or perhaps after she was captured by Nova. After this it refuels her need for vengeance (or justice, as she calls it :/)

for me that's not a flashback, I think it was a clone of Kerrigan (see the barcode on the face) and when is attacked with drugs, that have a psychic effect on Kerrigan

[Alex06]

for me that's not a flashback, I think it was a clone of Kerrigan (see the barcode on the face) and when is attacked with drugs, that have a psychic effect on Kerrigan

IT IS A FLASHBACK. Case in point. The way the camera pans out and everything...Feels like a classic case of flashback.

It's NOT a clone. Clearly the bar code label on her face and the vats are because they're all ghosts part of the ghost program, and not clones. People always get it wrong when it comes to a main character in a vat alongside many others in vats. They always assume "clone", when they are wrong. Look at Kane in Tiberian Sun Firestorm, everyone used to think that that ending showed him being cloned or whatever, when in fact, those other tubes kept different people that were part of the AI "CABAL"'s core and served as its processing power. They weren't all Kane clones.

Same applies here. And there's no reason to believe that they would leave such a loose ending after HotS; If Arcturus gets killed, there's no "enemy" left to take over the Terran Dominion (and thus use the Kerrigan clones, plus why would they need to have Kerrigan clones to control the Swarm when they can use a device, or a Zerg, or a Hybrid, or The Dark Voice, and potentially not risk the new Kerrigan getting a mind of her own?), it would be only those with seemingly good intentions left; Warfield, Raynor, Valerian, Matt and just perhaps, Stukov. (Yes, we know that Valerian has good intentions, from the novels, it's just that he might be getting used by his father and the Mobius foundation)

[Kimera757]

TLDR (I have an excuse, I had horrid work hours today).

I think the campaign will shift from Mengsk to someone else as the campaign goes on. And I'm pretty sure it won't be all ZvZ either.

Wings of Liberty started the same way. You started by fighting Mengsk, but moved on to greater threats -- the artifact and the zerg.

[drakolobo]

IT IS A FLASHBACK. Case in point. The way the camera pans out and everything...Feels like a classic case of flashback

although it could be a flashback, I can explain why I think it's a clone (or try)
1 Arcturus did not have access to the formation of Kerrigan, to place an unknown device
2 Kerrigan remove the conditioning device in starcraft 1
3 as I remember the ghost preparation generates diminution of psychic abilities and behavior change, not a device of pain.
4 in the video is not the implantation of a device ,is a substance (although it may be nanomachines)
5 button acts in parallel with the Begin with the injection device of an unknown substance. and the pain reaction of Kerrigan in the tube was parallel to the reaction of the Kerrigan with Arcturus
6, the sequence is faster than a flaskback usually used to give the impression that the scene is far from previous events
7 ghosts were not tattooed, I remember the barcode tattooed was resocialized Marines, giving the implication that the clones have no value except for the purpose of killing Kerrigan

[Dalarsco]

agreed.... It seems like the writing team didn't even bother to research the sc1 story.. they're just starting up their own.

and about leaving Kerrigan behind... yeah. That sort of thing I'm sure happens all the time in the military. The good of the many over the good of the few. Good leaders have to make tough decisions like that all the time. I think He made the right decision too with what information he had. Of course if he knew the future he might have threw his entire fleet into the fray to save her

It wasn't what he did, it was the way he did it. He treated it like just another stepping stone to domination of the sector. IIRC, he even made a blatantly megalomaniacal speech right after. Had he said something along the line of "look, Jim, there's nothing any of us could have done there but die right alongside her. I know it's hard, and I'll miss her, but there are other battles to fight and a society to rebuild" then Raynor would have been pissed, but he wouldn't have started a revolution over it.

[Alex06]

although it could be a flashback, I can explain why I think it's a clone (or try)
1 Arcturus did not have access to the formation of Kerrigan, to place an unknown device
2 Kerrigan remove the conditioning device in starcraft 1
3 as I remember the ghost preparation generates diminution of psychic abilities and behavior change, not a device of pain.
4 in the video is not the implantation of a device ,is a substance (although it may be nanomachines)
5 button acts in parallel with the Begin with the injection device of an unknown substance. and the pain reaction of Kerrigan in the tube was parallel to the reaction of the Kerrigan with Arcturus
6, the sequence is faster than a flaskback usually used to give the impression that the scene is far from previous events
7 ghosts were not tattooed, I remember the barcode tattooed was resocialized Marines, giving the implication that the clones have no value except for the purpose of killing Kerrigan

Ghosts do not get tattooed? Where do you have such certainty on that? For all we know, the Confederacy's first trials had that, and then they removed the bar codes, and the Dominion's Ghost program is different.

There is no need for specific speeds in a flashback; It's not set. It could be slow or fast. When Mengsk activates the button, it appears that we enter Kerrigan's mind to see the flashback, and the button he pushes merely activates something that was put into her (a small nanochip?). I could see Mengsk building a kill-switch like this, attuned to the nanochips implanted by the Confederacy in their Ghosts, or perhaps simply it's a random communication device that fries any such contraption and hurts any Ghost in Mengsk's vicinity. There are other explanations possible.

You can't know if it's a substance, nanomachines or a nanochip. For all we know, that may just be aesthetics. It could be anything. Maybe it simply turned on some device, and didn't insert anything.

Kerrigan didn't remove the conditioning device, she merely removed the Ghosts' conditioning or disabled it...It was left to be pretty vague. So we don't know what she did; It looked like an excuse for us to waste another mission (Read: Filler mission) and get Kerrigan to gain her powers back so she wouldn't just start with them.

This could be a whole different thing, not even have anything to do with the conditioning device. Perhaps Mengsk implanted it into her sometime (Why would he not be able to do that?), or perhaps he stole the device from the Confederacy when he rescued Kerrigan. I don't know, but I don't really see the plot line of Ghost clones working. Why would it hurt her? Why not use something simpler, like a device? It just seems too far-fetched for me to have Kerrigan clones, and to use them to hurt Kerrigan. It's like a life-size voodoo doll; It just sounds odd and like they went too far when they could've done something easier and achieve the same effect.

[Turalyon]

So with the recent HotS information, it seems that the campaign will revolve around Kerrigan fighting to regain control over the swarm to kill Mengsk. Mengsk is deja vu. What about the Dark Voice? I believe it is bad for the story to not give more presence to the dark voice right now. I mean, he IS the big villain of the universe and yet we only heard of him for half a minute.

I think this is a very justified concern. The whole point of Sc2 is to tell a sweeping story over three installments. Based on WoL and the general outline of Hots (also the leaked ending), Mengsk feels like the overall villain of the entire SC2 saga. Even if it turns out Mengsk was mind-controlled or the Avatar of the DV, it won't shake the feeling that when LotV comes out, it will seem stand-alone from the rest of the SC2 installments because the DV would (you'd think) be presented as it naturally is - an alien. The DV atm appears to be a shoe-horned villain rather than a mastermind and seems like his "intruding" on the true Sc2 storyline of Mengsk. In the end, there is the distinct possibility that the SC2 will not come off as a true trilogy.

I'm pretty sure HotS will resolve the Mengsk thing in the first half (or earlier) of the campaign and then solidly concentrate on the DV in the last half. In fact, they have to do this to avoid the possible issue I described above.

One of the reasons why WoL's story didn't work was because there was no build up or any sense of relation from the majority of the campaign to the final event. If they spend most of the time in HotS dealing with Mengsk to only have a few missions near the end dealing specifically with the DV, I wouldn't be surprised to see more people crying foul about the story.

I think the 'problem' here is that SC1 and BW had characters with understandable motivations doing justifiable actions (yes, even the Overmind). This gave players the impression that the Starcraft universe had a somewhat amoral setting. However, with better insight thanks to supplementary material and better communication with the writers, it becomes increasingly clear that Blizzard has a more black-and-white perspective in their writing. Hence, the realignment of the setting's moral axis (in terms of of how we view the characters), is a jarring experience.

How true. It's a pity though. When you are first presented with something that has complexity initially, any stream-lining of it later on would always look like oversimplification and "dumbing down".

[Laurentian]

Yeah, the problem I'm having with SCII is that the storyline is looking to be rather disconnected, meandering and pointless. Seems they have at least three different main storylines (The fall of Arcturus, redemption of Kerrigan and the threat of the Hybrids) that are not congealing very well into a solid narrative. The hybrids should be the overall focus of the trilogy, especially if LOTV ends like pretty much everyone expects with Kerrigan, Raynor and Zeratul teaming up to defeat them. For the ostensible villains they don't appear to have much of a role. They were barely mentioned in WOL and nothing shown so far in HOTS shows that Raynor or Kerrigan even care about them.

WOL was ostensibly about Raynor overthrowing Mengsk (who according to Blizz had his story "told") but that petered out in favour of Raynor deinfesting Kerrigan which was the only event of actual consequence that occured in the game (a theme in WOL according to Metzen, hell the only one that amounted to something). However there is a good chance that HOTS will be about Kerrigan being reinfested (seems that theme didn't end up meaning much) and then killing Arcturus (meaning that his story has not in fact been told) essentially rendering WOL pointless.

Kerrigan's character arc besides being prompted by a convenient magic rock doesn't seem to going much beyond being less of bitch than she was before. Not sure if she needed to be (mostly) human in order to accomplish that. I mean when didn't infested Kerrigan embrace her zerg side? And she has to fight to gain control of the zerg swarm, again. Raynor I guess is going to have to get over her being zerg for eternity or whatever and how she likes it and how it is her fate even though he was going to have to do that anyway and infact people complained that he hadn't!

Judging by that leaked ending they don't seem interested in setting up the DV or the Protoss for that matter which is what LOTV is presumably going to be about. Hell they don't seem that all interested in providing closure to the Kerrigan-Raynor relationship! Are they waiting for LOTV, SCIII or WOS?

I also fear that Narud is in fact Duran. Maybe it will work as a untwist but I doubt it.

I also fear that LOTV will only feature the hybrids in a major fashion near the end (since it is supposed to be about Zeratul uniting the Protoss tribes) or worse as a cliffhanger for SCIII!

[Triceron]

although it could be a flashback, I can explain why I think it's a clone (or try)
1 Arcturus did not have access to the formation of Kerrigan, to place an unknown device
2 Kerrigan remove the conditioning device in starcraft 1
3 as I remember the ghost preparation generates diminution of psychic abilities and behavior change, not a device of pain.
4 in the video is not the implantation of a device ,is a substance (although it may be nanomachines)
5 button acts in parallel with the Begin with the injection device of an unknown substance. and the pain reaction of Kerrigan in the tube was parallel to the reaction of the Kerrigan with Arcturus
6, the sequence is faster than a flaskback usually used to give the impression that the scene is far from previous events
7 ghosts were not tattooed, I remember the barcode tattooed was resocialized Marines, giving the implication that the clones have no value except for the purpose of killing Kerrigan

1. Yes he did. Kerrigan was a Confederate assassin sent to kill Acturus' family. Arcturus captured her and reprogrammed/brainwashed her to become his own loyal pawn. He freed her from Confederate restraints, and at the same time could have implanted a safeguard device.
2. And who removed it? Arcturus Mengsk.
3. Device of pain is something Arcturus would have put into Kerrigan specifically. She was highly trained so he used her like a puppet, but she was still the killer of his parents and I'm sure whether as a safeguard or as a sadistic tool, he had his reasons to implant it into her.
4. The button could trigger nanomachines. How they survive her Zergification process is another story, but I'm sure it will be one explained through the course of the game. She retains her Spec Op abilities after all.
5. This explains it better as a flashback sequence than a clone theory. You show the substance that is injected causes Kerrigan pain. Now you see real time Kerrigan in pain. Now viewer can plainly see why she is in pain when he presses a button. It wouldn't make sense if he just presses a button and she goes into pain without that scene.
6. As stated above, it's only meant to show how pressing a button equals Kerrigan screaming in pain.
7. We don't know what the barcode means. We're also talking about placeholder models, so it could have multiple unexplained reasons. Maybe Kerrigan was one of many ghosts who survived Mengsk's reprocessing, if this were true then Kerrigan would have been another faceless number to Mengsk. I dont think it's strong enough evidence to see a barcode and think clone, though.

I'm not discounting your claim that clones can exist though. Even in the HOTS preview we have the advisors say she seems different from the Queen of Blades. Whether this is simple straight forward observation or some foreshadowing to a hidden secret is left unknown.

However, clones aren't exactly used in the Starcraft universe, as there have been no previous examples of them in the past, and it makes little sense to introduce them now only to have them be used as puppets to psychicly affect the real Kerrigan. Even explaining it in text sounds convoluted. How do you even explain this to most of the audience? It's much easier to show that scene as a flashback. We can all grasp that simple concept much easier than a clone sending psychic waves of trauma.

[Zeraszana]

2. And who removed it? Arcturus Mengsk.

disagree - she removed all the crap when she was infested - Amerigo anyone? he only got her out of the facility that was doing experiments with her and the zerg