Starcraft reboot ideas discussion thread

[TheEconomist]

That's misleading.

1) Diablo 3 has been released on just about every damn console there is, Diablo 2 was just on PC. Many fans ought multiple copies.
2) Reaper of Souls was a steep drop from Diablo 3. and that number includes probably includes Reaper of Souls expansion copies. Using that metric, Diablo II sold 34 million.
3) Diablo II sold something like 17.5 million copies accoding to VGSales wiki (http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Best_s...Blizzard_games)
4) Diablo II's sales were box copy, Diablo III were digital which alters and inflates exactly what is being measured
5) 'Botting' was a huge thing in Diablo III and China fora period of time, you had to own a copy for each bot, unlike in Diablo II, that inflates further.
6) No one plays Diablo III anyore. The Necromancer pack has been the only thing buyable since Reaper of Souls. If there were people playing they'd be selling things to them. Even StarCarft II has all kinds of DLC, and it's not exactly booming right now.

Initial sales are a small fraction of profit these days. Diablo III did not reach its potential financial success either, no one is playing. No one is buying. So it's not even a case of being outnumbered in the market, it's just that a lot of people bought Diablo III because of Diablo II, that only works once. Otherwise, they'd be releasing more shit. Diablo III was a failure, even financially (in terms of possibilities) and Blizzard's actions prove this beyond a reasonable doubt.

Furthermore, Diablo sold something like 2.5 million.

[Mislagnissa]

No. Most Definitely no.

Okay, what would you guys be interested in?

If you guys are still sore over SC2 retconning BW, there are already several custom campaigns which continue from BW without those retcons. Are none of those satisfactory simply because they lack the official seal of approval?

HunCraft was an unofficial expansion which continued the story from BW. It ended with Duran, Kerry and Raynor all dead. And there's loads more continuations where that came from.

BW was never going to get a good continuation. That ship sailed the moment that Blizzard accepted such a terrible script. They had nowhere to go but down.

---

I don't understand the appeal of continuing from BW. In my opinion it was a massive case of sequelitis. SC1 was a dead end because it severed every plot thread it introduced due to what I can only assume was tumultuous development.

I am dissatisfied that Blizzard killed off the Confederacy, Conclave and Overmind. With those at the helm the Koprulu war could have waged forever and given countless campaign stories. The zerg and protoss were originally introduced as galactic powers that could have told so many stories but Blizzard tossed all that potential aside.

The way the official campaigns focused solely on a handful of legacy characters strangled the story in my opinion. We have an entire sector that could have told so many more stories than absurdities like a psychotic ex-girlfriend taking over all zerg everywhere because of writer fiat.

Of course you guys aren't interesting in discussing alternate universes for whatever reason. I seriously can't imagine why. Why do you guys prefer to complain rather than do anything constructive? Wouldn't it be more fun to write your own Starcraft/Warcraft/whatever story with blackjack and hookers?

[Turalyon]

^ If anyone's complaining, it's about the current state of Blizzard and their business decisions based on the Diablo Immortal announcement. No one's complaining about Sc here recently... except you. As you can gather, no-one's even talking about Sc generally because the feels for the lore is just dead which is kinda sad I suppose. The only people who are still talking about Sc here (myself) are those who are just appreciating what they had in Sc1 or waxing nostalgic about how things could've been.

[Gradius]

Are none of those satisfactory simply because they lack the official seal of approval?

Pretty much. As much as I'd love to spend time playing an unofficial non-voiced fan campaign like I did when I was a kid that will never be canon or hold a candle to the actual games in terms of production quality, I'm an adult now and have shit to do. In the event I do decide to spend some leisure time on games, I'm probably going to play an actual AAA title, or SC2 co-op.

I post on the forums because of nostalgia, habit, and the lack of time and mental investment compared to reading a giant fan-fiction manuscript or starting a fan-campaign. I'm more here for the community than a desire to invest in lore that even Blizzard doesn't care about.

[Nissa]

And I certainly don't wish to discuss lore with someone who hates nearly everything about canon. I'd far rather talk about it with someone who appreciates it.

Which is increasingly rare nowadays with the fanbase dying out.

[Mislagnissa]

And I certainly don't wish to discuss lore with someone who hates nearly everything about canon. I'd far rather talk about it with someone who appreciates it.

Which is increasingly rare nowadays with the fanbase dying out.

I don't hate canon. I recognize that it's poorly written and shouldn't be placed on a pedestal. I strongly suspect the reason why the fanbase has been dying out is due in part to the terrible storytelling, and not just the general decline of traditional RTS. Otherwise, Blizzard wouldn't be currently investing so much money in remastering WC3 if they didn't think they would recoup their investment from a dying market.

The canon story didn't do justice to the setting that it could have explored. Instead of featuring a sector-wide war in which the three races are fighting for domination, it chose to focus entirely on a few self-centered scumbags who claim to be heroes while actually caring for nothing more than their personal vendettas and magically dragging the sector down with them. The aliens are painfully bland and relegated to supporting characters.

To add insult to injury, all of the annoying arguments I've had with fanboys indicates that Blizzard has poisoned the well so thoroughly that everybody now thinks those scumbag characters are the be-all-end-all of the franchise. The moment I try to write fanfiction without them, fanboys cry heresy and tell me my fiction doesn't belong in their fandom.

The fanboys are full of it. The canon is a terrible foundation, as seen by how anemic and uncreative the fanfics are compared to more healthy and accepting fandoms. The overwhelming majority of fanfics are Kerry/Raynor romance, as though the rest of the setting doesn't exist except as a exotic playground for them to personally demolish.

---

I heard you like the character Aldaris. Did you know that I'm planning to write a book about him in which he is depicted as the hero? A competent and smart but still flawed and guilt-ridden hero, not the unrepentant moron he was in canon.

Like most of the canon characters he is flat as cardboard, so my work is cut out for me. Let's see here... He's religious, genocidal, paranoid, and generally a generic villain. I can work with that!

So...

Aldaris is still sore that the conservative faction lost their former power in recent centuries. especially after the embarrassment that was the Kalath Intercession. He sees the Koprulu conflict as a way to restore honor, so obviously he is quite upset when the progressive faction starts a civil war within the expedition fleets. Then he realizes that this is great a opportunity to gain honor by showing how dangerous and incompetent the progressives are.

So he selects Artanis, Tassadar's gay lover (because space Romans) while Artanis is still mourning his other gay lover Fenix's death at the hands of rebels under mysterious circumstances (which will totally come up again later with Ulrezaj being ultimately responsible), to lead an inquisition... using purifier robots animated by the souls of templars interred on a tomb planet. Aldaris selected Artanis specifically to set him up for failure, pitting his duty against his love for Tassadar, that would make the progressives look even worse.

This is a pretty twisted move on Aldaris' part, so how can we make him sympathetic to contrast that? We can give him a family with interracial background (because protoss tribes have different skin colors), make him spout Marxist propaganda that he genuinely believes (because the Khala means communism works for protoss), and reference how absolutely horrible the Aeon of Strife was (a bazillion planets were destroyed) to make his response to civil war seem acceptable or even subdued.


...

See that? I'm sure you might disagree with my choices, but that's obviously loads deeper than any canon character.

I could easily do the same for the canon characters, but obviously I would need to disregard the events of canon since their canon characterization is inconsistent.

[Turalyon]

I strongly suspect the reason why the fanbase has been dying out is due in part to the terrible storytelling, and not just the general decline of traditional RTS.

The only aspect of the fanbase that is dying out are those interested in the lore/fluff. Blizz games are generally still fun to play and people still do, so they're hardly dying out in that regard.

Otherwise, Blizzard wouldn't be currently investing so much money in remastering WC3 if they didn't think they would recoup their investment from a dying market.

Remasters are just another way for them to wring more money from the nostalgic (sequels being the more usual route). In some ways, they can be more effective (and more efficient/profitable for the maker) in doing that than a sequel - and even moreso, if a sequel that came before it wasn't what the nostalgics were looking for... *insert conspiracy theory here*

not the unrepentant moron he was in canon.

Don't lie. He repented in the Eye of the Storm.

Also, how was Aldaris "moronic" (or more moronic) compared to say, Tassadar's actions? Had Tassadar stuck to just burning worlds and fighting the Zerg at a distance, none of what befell the Protoss in Sc1 would've likely happened. In some regard, Aldaris is a more sensible person than Tassadar was; it just so happened that things didn't happen to go his way (which is hardly his fault) whereas it improbably did for Tass. Sure, Aldaris was an antagonist but he was never villainous.

[Mislagnissa]

Don't lie. He repented in the Eye of the Storm.

Also, how was Aldaris "moronic" (or more moronic) compared to say, Tassadar's actions? Had Tassadar stuck to just burning worlds and fighting the Zerg at a distance, none of what befell the Protoss in Sc1 would've likely happened. In some regard, Aldaris is a more sensible person than Tassadar was; it just so happened that things didn't happen to go his way (which is hardly his fault) whereas it improbably did for Tass. Sure, Aldaris was an antagonist but he was never villainous.

Episode 3 is easily the weakest story in Starcraft 1. Aldaris' apology didn't seem genuine to me and felt more like it was forced by the writer due to the campaign ending approaching.

Tassadar only looks like an idiot because the writer wasted perfectly good plot hooks. He was originally stated to be doing so out of compassion for humanity, but this never plays a role in the plot other than a forced alliance with Raynor because the writer decided to magically solve the first contact war in the first act.

If I was writing Starcraft, I would keep the story focused entirely on the Terran sector and politics there. The terran politics are all over the place what with three major governments (that we know of!), a rebel alliance, and numerous independent colonies. The protoss expedition fleets have their schism between the genocidal faction and the compassionate faction (which I have referred to as conservative and progressive); the dark protoss are a complete wildcard. The zerg are trying to continue harvesting operations whilst fighting off enemies and psychic warfare that fractures broods.

You could build an entire multimedia franchise around that, with countless characters starring in their own campaigns, and people would probably continue to like it for years after it was published like they do for other healthy fandoms. Instead, the terrible storytelling strangled the fandom.

The most creative stories I ever see are in custom campaigns that ignore the canon, made by people who don't even seem to know that much about canon either. (Which is strange because there's an entire wiki about it that you can reference for context.)

Annihilation features a "psi-emitter" which produces sound waves that attract zerg and controls them with an engineered cyborg parasite. That's not how a psi-emitter works at all, but I can't exactly complain about it because it's just technobabble to explain how the villains are enslaving zerg. The bigger problem is that the heroes are purely reactionary, but the writing is still leagues better than Blizzard's because the characters are consistent and don't act like psychotic morons.

Ignos features an independent tribe of Daelaam who aren't associated with the other protoss and didn't lose the Khala. They're being invaded by zerg who want to eat them or something and when they visit other planets to find the macguffin that will turn the tide, they encounter primal zerg infesting the planet because that's apparently a thing now. The writing is paper thin and exists solely to tie the missions together, but it's still better than Blizzard's.

In the written fanfiction, there are few stories that aren't about Kerry and the few that do exist are either strangled by the canon or have absolutely no relation whatsoever (like the self-inserts). The setting just doesn't seem to interest most writers, probably because Blizzard didn't care about it either.

Meanwhile, even the Warcraft fandom is more creative despite how utterly absurd the lore has become. The most popular stories in the Warcraft category are wildly more creative with regard to the setting compared to the Starcraft category. This is probably because Blizzard clearly lavished magnitudes more care on World of Warcraft, and if they made a Starcraft MMO we would see a corresponding burst of creativity in that category.

Of course, there might be loads of great Korean fanfiction considering the games' popularity in South Korea which is inaccessible to me because I do not understand Korean. Is there anybody here who speaks Korean and could give a rough overview of the fanfiction in Korean?

By the way, I found a book on google called "Tempest of the Battlefield" originally from China which explicitly uses the word "zergs" to refer to alien bugs fought by humanity. It doesn't seem to be related to Starcraft at all beyond using that name. Go figure.

[Mislagnissa]

Some journalist just praised the story as being “immersive” and filled with “incredible characters”.

https://comicbook.com/gaming/2018/11...ve-first-look/

Did this guy even play the games? The setting isn’t remotely immersive and the characters are flat as cardboard. It’s mediocre and shlocky as hell. Even the fandom doesn’t care for the story, since pretty much all discussion has degenerated into criticizing Raynor and Kerry as psychopathic morons while exalting Mengsk for maintaining composure in the face of evil alien invasion.

Oh, and Blizzard is now falling apart according to employees. Better back up the website Q&A blogs and short stories and other promo materials before it goes offline, if you still care.

[Turalyon]

Episode 3 is easily the weakest story in Starcraft 1.

I thought you said Episode 2 was the weakest story (which I, too, have always felt the same as well... in spite of the Zerg being my favourite). This hyperbole makes it hard to treat your position seriously.

Tassadar only looks like an idiot because the writer wasted perfectly good plot hooks. He was originally stated to be doing so out of compassion for humanity, but this never plays a role in the plot other than a forced alliance with Raynor because the writer decided to magically solve the first contact war in the first act.

Tassadar had no specific compassion for humanity. He just felt guilty after killing a species that he felt he should be protecting, which in turn, was how he interpreted following the Dae-Uhl. Maybe that's why he got along with Raynor, since Raynor too participated in atrocities (even if it was just passively condoning the use of Psi Emitters/not doing anything like leaving before the Psi emitters were used, he's compromised ethically) before feeling guilty/having his conscience get to him (albeit for a selfishly specific reason in the form of losing a specific individual).

Also, I'm not here to say Tassadar's actions were "idiotic" as that is an unhelpful, hind-sight biased and reductionist way of observing things. It was a reasoned but compromised decision to not just burn Tarsonis at the time that just happen to also have far reaching and unexpectedly severe consequences he couldn't foresee. But, compared to Aldaris'/the Conclave's original orders of continuing to burn worlds (which was highly effective and had no known objective detriment), Tassadar's decision to not burn Tarsonis would be more unwise of the two options.