Starcraft reboot ideas discussion thread

[ragnarok]

Speak for yourself in the whole WoL being a whole steaming pile. It's exactly this reason why I find it difficult to understand what drew you into the SC universe in the first place. Now, returning to your part of knocking off the Overmind for Amon, that's obvious since he's the one who gave the Overmind those orders in the first place. He just didn't give the Overmind the specific details, hence why the Overmind did what he did back in SC1. It's a shame they didn't explain better on Amon's part instead of just filling it with hybrids. If nothing else I had wanted some flashbacks regarding Amon's past to have a better idea of his agenda.

And don't bother just skipping to the whole "Oh he had no agenda, he was just some drunken hobo who had no clue what he was doing anyway." This is why I said I had wished they had given us some flashbacks to explain it better.

As for other forums you've tried that haven't been any better, maybe because you've stated so many times how crappy the SC2 storyline is, along with BW's storyline. Back on the battlenet forums some of those I talked to didn't hate it to the point you're hating it.

Hence why your ideas just come across them as nothing more than the nuke option, just tear EVERYTHING down and start the whole thing over from the ground up, and something tells me that wasn't what they were thinking. As for myself, going back to what I discussed with Stratos some whiles back, he felt even if I refuse to accept the flaws in the SC2 storyline, at least I made a better effort to connect the dots (despite the contradictions) than Blizzard ever did.

Returning to Amon, it's obvious Blizzard wanted all 3 races to unite together, but things happened too quickly for that. They should have stretched things out way more, not just crammed it all into LotV and its epilogue. It should have been spread over into at least another game or something.

I'm actually surprised you got such applause for the GoT universe. Then again, I never bothered with the GoT lore or anything, so I wouldn't know where you went with it all.

[sandwich_bird]

All of this civil war is a godsend to the zerg. Far from the space bugs the Confederacy thought they were, they are an intelligent civilization that has spent millions of years preparing for a galactic war with the vastly superior protoss. The final piece that they need, the fabled "determinant," is psychic power comparable to that of the protoss. Which they found scattered in the gene pool of terran psychic mutants. They're in the sector to harvest humanity to create weapons. It's a double-edged sword, as the terrans are also weaponizing psychic powers. An example of how things could go disastrously wrong is when the Incubus brood went rogue after infesting the deranged ghost Atticus Carpenter; his madness spread to the brood and it no longer recognized the greater swarms as its kindred. That wasn't even intentional psychic warfare, as Carpenter was a member of the Fist of Redemption cult of zerg-worshipers spreading across the sector.

I don't like that the zerg spent millions of years to figure out a way to conquer the protoss for that way to be a dumb psychic gene. If they spent millions of years to study the protoss, they'd have all matters of viruses and etc designed to quickly kill the protoss or they would have adapted to use their technology and use it against them, etc etc etc. It's far fetched that the only thing that they could come up with was "well maybe there's this fabled gene that would give us psychic powers". At worst, they would have just abducted a protoss and be done with it. I'd make their first contact more recent. And anyways, psychic powers won't save you from ships that can glass a planet unless you want to make your space magic DBZ level instead of a bit more grounded. With that said, why don't the zerg just attack the Terrans because they're in the way and the zerg consumes all? They can still want the psychic genes to keep these cool plot ideas you have but it doesn't have to be any kind of game changing event.

But with all that said, you still need a way to level the playing field against the Protoss other than the psychic powers. The Protoss civil war is a good idea to limit their logistic but it remains that they have ridiculous weapons. Make their technology have a fatal flaw or something imo.

[ragnarok]

But with all that said, you still need a way to level the playing field against the Protoss other than the psychic powers. The Protoss civil war is a good idea to limit their logistic but it remains that they have ridiculous weapons. Make their technology have a fatal flaw or something imo.

No matter how powerful the weapon is, it'll always have a weakness in the person using it. Remember, when it comes to war, the battle's outcome depends on a combination of logistics and a commander's tactics. The Conclave botched that because they continued to believe their methods would win the war against the zerg, and by the time Zeratul proved them wrong it was too late to save Aiur.

[Turalyon]

I second the bird, especially the bit about the Protoss' real might being their technology and that Zerg don't use technology (since I've sort've touched on this before). The psionics thing alone isn't what makes the Protoss powerful nor the thing that will make the Zerg equal to them if they did obtain it. The "determinant" plot device is really just a lazy mechanic to allow ZvT to occur. To emphasise the objective importance of the Zerg having to get this MacGuffin restricts and devalues the Zerg. I, for one, think the "determinant" serves a greater and more important subjective value by fleshing out the mindset of the Overmind than it does for it's overtly objective value of being an "equalising power boost".

[ragnarok]

It would have been easier if the Overmind actually took the time to study the protoss in more vivid detail, then we could have skipped over this need for psionics and everything. Ironically enough in HotS they actually did try to touch on that, where Izsha was telling Kerrigan on Kaldir about Abathur's intent on protoss dissection.

[Mislagnissa]

Speak for yourself in the whole WoL being a whole steaming pile. It's exactly this reason why I find it difficult to understand what drew you into the SC universe in the first place. Now, returning to your part of knocking off the Overmind for Amon, that's obvious since he's the one who gave the Overmind those orders in the first place. He just didn't give the Overmind the specific details, hence why the Overmind did what he did back in SC1. It's a shame they didn't explain better on Amon's part instead of just filling it with hybrids. If nothing else I had wanted some flashbacks regarding Amon's past to have a better idea of his agenda.

And don't bother just skipping to the whole "Oh he had no agenda, he was just some drunken hobo who had no clue what he was doing anyway." This is why I said I had wished they had given us some flashbacks to explain it better.

As for other forums you've tried that haven't been any better, maybe because you've stated so many times how crappy the SC2 storyline is, along with BW's storyline. Back on the battlenet forums some of those I talked to didn't hate it to the point you're hating it.

Hence why your ideas just come across them as nothing more than the nuke option, just tear EVERYTHING down and start the whole thing over from the ground up, and something tells me that wasn't what they were thinking. As for myself, going back to what I discussed with Stratos some whiles back, he felt even if I refuse to accept the flaws in the SC2 storyline, at least I made a better effort to connect the dots (despite the contradictions) than Blizzard ever did.

Returning to Amon, it's obvious Blizzard wanted all 3 races to unite together, but things happened too quickly for that. They should have stretched things out way more, not just crammed it all into LotV and its epilogue. It should have been spread over into at least another game or something.

I'm actually surprised you got such applause for the GoT universe. Then again, I never bothered with the GoT lore or anything, so I wouldn't know where you went with it all.

I was attracted to the premise of Starcraft from the 1998 manual, but now it's unrecognizable as the same thing. I'm attracted to Starcraft, you're attracted to the other setting that copied its name.

We aren't going to accomplish anything in our discussions until we realize that we want fundamentally different things.

I'm also more familiar with fandoms where people are much more willing to entertain wildly different AUs, so the puritanical nature of Starcraft fandom throws me off.

I don't like that the zerg spent millions of years to figure out a way to conquer the protoss for that way to be a dumb psychic gene. If they spent millions of years to study the protoss, they'd have all matters of viruses and etc designed to quickly kill the protoss or they would have adapted to use their technology and use it against them, etc etc etc. It's far fetched that the only thing that they could come up with was "well maybe there's this fabled gene that would give us psychic powers". At worst, they would have just abducted a protoss and be done with it. I'd make their first contact more recent. And anyways, psychic powers won't save you from ships that can glass a planet unless you want to make your space magic DBZ level instead of a bit more grounded. With that said, why don't the zerg just attack the Terrans because they're in the way and the zerg consumes all? They can still want the psychic genes to keep these cool plot ideas you have but it doesn't have to be any kind of game changing event.

But with all that said, you still need a way to level the playing field against the Protoss other than the psychic powers. The Protoss civil war is a good idea to limit their logistic but it remains that they have ridiculous weapons. Make their technology have a fatal flaw or something imo.

Those are all fair criticisms. I spent a fair amount of time trying to make sense of them. I don't remember if I mentioned it before but I'll just provide a brief summary now.

The protoss have incredible reality warping powers as part of their physiology. Their technology enhances their capabilities, but it doesn't replace their innate capabilities. A carrier can glass a planetary surface, but a few protoss could do the same by exploding into psionic storms.

A handful of zealots, according to the classic.battle.net zealot page, can garrison an entire planet of less advanced species. While their armor and plasma blades help, this is in great part due to their inherent psychic power boosting their physical capabilities to at least space marine levels. That's what purity of form is. Physical perfection. No exaggeration, the protoss are physical gods.

Yes, the statement about zerg spending millions of years is ridiculous and I would dismiss it as Blizzard inflating the numbers later on.

I agree about the determinant being blown out of proportion. I fully acknowledge that it is a blatant macguffin to justify humanity's presence, but I still think that's a way more interesting explanation that humanity just being in their path. It fits will the three race archetype I mentioned a while ago. Although humanity might not have as much raw power now as either the protoss or zerg in totality, they do have untapped power.

Honestly, I don't understand the dislike for the determinant when this is a universe where creatures can evolve psychic powers and biological FTL drives. Again: biological FTL drives. While a macguffin can certainly have terrible execution, it isn't an inherently bad idea.

So I have rationalizations and better execution. While it does enable the zerg to finally make up for the purity of form disparity, I imagine they had countless theoretical models already in place and simply needed humanity's purity of form in order to put those models into practice. When do perform R&D, it's a long and horrifying process that involves experimenting on billions of captured people and warping them into abominations to see which models are viable.

EDIT: Not only that, but terran psychic powers are not made the same. There are countless different psychic mutations that offer different powers. So the zerg have their work cut out for them.

As for fighting the protoss advantage in practice... I take a lot of pointers from Enumerate since it covered similar ground years ago. Anyway, one of the methods mentioned for how the zerg deal with the superior protoss military is through electronic warfare, similar to how terran science vessels use EMP to interfere with protoss tech.

Essentially, the zerg hack the psionic matrix in order to halt protoss empire logistics and use the warp gates for their own forces. This isn't foolproof, of course, but it helps.

Oh, and I imagine the zerg have grown creatures the size of moons and planets because the protoss are just that powerful.

The way I imagine the protoss/zerg war is way cooler than the canon.

But that's besides the point. Once you go into the protoss/zerg war, humanity becomes irrelevant. That's why I prefer to focus on the terran sector and ignore the rest.

No matter how powerful the weapon is, it'll always have a weakness in the person using it. Remember, when it comes to war, the battle's outcome depends on a combination of logistics and a commander's tactics. The Conclave botched that because they continued to believe their methods would win the war against the zerg, and by the time Zeratul proved them wrong it was too late to save Aiur.

Metzen used author fiat to force their methods to be wrong. By the old lore's logic, the protoss could mop the floor with the zerg no sweat.

Conventional, that is, conventional human tactics don't work against the zerg because their tactics typically consist of sending waves of disposable warrior beasts and they aren't impacted by morale like humans are. It seems more effective to use nukes over soldiers on the field.

However, the zerg have a huge weakness in the form of synapse creatures like overlords, queens, cerebrates, etc. Kill those and their forces will lose cohesion, giving time for the enemy to take advantage.

Cerebrate immortality is an absurd plot device that isn't necessary except for Metzen's author fiat, but even so this could easily be defeated by dropping a big ton of rocks on them so their innards will constantly explode while trying fruitlessly to regenerate. What are even the limits on their immortality anyway? Can they regenerate from a pile of ash? If they have that capability, then why are they not using it for all of their minions?

But the existence of zerg broods specialized in tasks like blitzkrieg and terrorism indicate that swarming tactics don't work all the time. The zerg have encountered intelligent enemies before who weren't defeated by simple swarming and thus they had to develop new tactics. So the zerg aren't invincible in the least. They need to specialize in different strategies and tactics because for whatever reason, swarming doesn't steamroll all enemies without resistance. (I heard Gradius' Origins campaign was even going to address this before it was cancelled.)

And that's not even getting into logistics like resource lines, communication lines, etc. That's way more important than tactics and strategy.

I second the bird, especially the bit about the Protoss' real might being their technology and that Zerg don't use technology (since I've sort've touched on this before). The psionics thing alone isn't what makes the Protoss powerful nor the thing that will make the Zerg equal to them if they did obtain it. The "determinant" plot device is really just a lazy mechanic to allow ZvT to occur. To emphasise the objective importance of the Zerg having to get this MacGuffin restricts and devalues the Zerg. I, for one, think the "determinant" serves a greater and more important subjective value by fleshing out the mindset of the Overmind than it does for it's overtly objective value of being an "equalising power boost".

Again, I recognize this and I politely disagree with some of your argument. See my rationalizations and postulations above.

It would have been easier if the Overmind actually took the time to study the protoss in more vivid detail, then we could have skipped over this need for psionics and everything. Ironically enough in HotS they actually did try to touch on that, where Izsha was telling Kerrigan on Kaldir about Abathur's intent on protoss dissection.

Abathur said that the protoss are inferior. They can't be infested or assimilated because magic, and even if they could their genes are too worthless to offer any advantage. The same is true for humanity. This is contradicted by the Kerry and hybrid plots, but Blizzard isn't known for consistency anyhow.

As for why the zerg don't just get purity of form from capturing and assimilating a single protoss...

Here's a short explanation: they did and failed.

Longer explanation: For whatever reason, their current level of advancement isn't sufficient to manipulate protoss genetic code. They can create parasites that can rapidly kill protoss or hijack their motor functions or whatever the game units do, but nothing that can read and write their genome.

I imagine this is because of the protoss' purity of form. In order to develop infestation compatible with the protoss, the zerg need purity of form from humanity in order to counter the protoss' purity of form and assault their genome.

We see in the manga that, for whatever reason, human psychics can tolerate protoss organ transplants without dying. And the protoss are advanced enough to create genetically-altered creep that can fuse with their nerve cords. Isn't it fortunate that the zerg never got a sample? Or maybe they did and that's how the infestor's neural parasites work.

Furthermore, there's such a thing as arms races. Whenever every race develops a new weapon or defense, the other races develop a countermeasure. This goes on forever until one side is defeated. For example, the Confederacy and Protoss both developed anti-zerg nanomachines to counter infestation.

---

Now can we take it for granted that the tactics, strategy and logistics work out? I want to focus on the the actual story rather than constantly justifying my decisions. We've done this a bazillion times already in other threads and it has gotten extremely grating to me.

[ragnarok]

I was attracted to the premise of Starcraft from the 1998 manual, but now it's unrecognizable as the same thing. I'm attracted to Starcraft, you're attracted to the other setting that copied its name.

We aren't going to accomplish anything in our discussions until we realize that we want fundamentally different things.

I'm also more familiar with fandoms where people are much more willing to entertain wildly different AUs, so the puritanical nature of Starcraft fandom throws me off.

When SC1 came out I had no interest in it, that didn't happen until almost 2000, but back then I wasn't as focused on the storyline. I really didn't start to look at it more seriously until almost 2005ish or something. Regardless I didn't take it as seriously as you did. As far as you're concerned even BW merely copied its name and everything, meaning EVERYTHING in terms of lore ever invented in the SC universe since BW was total BS and never should have existed better. I keep telling you, while plenty of people could do better, your version of being able to do better I just don't think will turn out the way you think it will.

[Turalyon]

The issue with the determinant is that the concept in and of itself is an overblown and overt plot device that is meant to steer the narrative into binary situations: it either gets it and the Zerg win/fight Protoss/ignore Terrans or it doesn't and the Zerg lose/can't fight Protoss/continue attacking Terrans. It's a mechanical crutch to the narrative that shouldn't have an overinflated relevance (eg: like that they need it to even fathom tackling the Protoss at all) and it's thematically inert as well. Afterall, the Zerg are supposed to rival the strength of the Protoss technology and development already because "their natural weaponry and armor is comparable to the most advanced gadgetry employed by any other species" (it doesn't make an exception for the Protoss).

The determinant in actuality only really serves well as character development for the Overmind: it fears the Protoss enough that it deludes itself into thinking that a preconceived magic bullet would help it - only for it to become overconfident when it thought it had got this magic bullet and being, subversively and ironically, the catalyst of it's eventual downfall rather than it's total victory.

[ragnarok]

The determinant in actuality only really serves well as character development for the Overmind: it fears the Protoss enough that it deludes itself into thinking that a preconceived magic bullet would help it - only for it to become overconfident when it thought it had got this magic bullet and being, subversively and ironically, the catalyst of it's eventual downfall rather than it's total victory.

It's overconfidence wasn't groundless, you know. It was clear after Zeratul killed Zasz that only the DT can harm him and the Cerebrates. Likely it took the info from his head that the DT aren't on Aiur anymore, so therefore there was no need for the whole looking for an army of really powerful psionics for the Aiur invasion.

Having said that it's curious to know if the Overmind simply proceeded on the assumption that all the protoss on Aiur would be like the DTs in the first place or something.

[Mislagnissa]

When SC1 came out I had no interest in it, that didn't happen until almost 2000, but back then I wasn't as focused on the storyline. I really didn't start to look at it more seriously until almost 2005ish or something. Regardless I didn't take it as seriously as you did. As far as you're concerned even BW merely copied its name and everything, meaning EVERYTHING in terms of lore ever invented in the SC universe since BW was total BS and never should have existed better. I keep telling you, while plenty of people could do better, your version of being able to do better I just don't think will turn out the way you think it will.

The issue with the determinant is that the concept in and of itself is an overblown and overt plot device that is meant to steer the narrative into binary situations: it either gets it and the Zerg win/fight Protoss/ignore Terrans or it doesn't and the Zerg lose/can't fight Protoss/continue attacking Terrans. It's a mechanical crutch to the narrative that shouldn't have an overinflated relevance (eg: like that they need it to even fathom tackling the Protoss at all) and it's thematically inert as well. Afterall, the Zerg are supposed to rival the strength of the Protoss technology and development already because "their natural weaponry and armor is comparable to the most advanced gadgetry employed by any other species" (it doesn't make an exception for the Protoss).

The determinant in actuality only really serves well as character development for the Overmind: it fears the Protoss enough that it deludes itself into thinking that a preconceived magic bullet would help it - only for it to become overconfident when it thought it had got this magic bullet and being, subversively and ironically, the catalyst of it's eventual downfall rather than it's total victory.

It's overconfidence wasn't groundless, you know. It was clear after Zeratul killed Zasz that only the DT can harm him and the Cerebrates. Likely it took the info from his head that the DT aren't on Aiur anymore, so therefore there was no need for the whole looking for an army of really powerful psionics for the Aiur invasion.

Having said that it's curious to know if the Overmind simply proceeded on the assumption that all the protoss on Aiur would be like the DTs in the first place or something.

I am adding you both to my ignore list now.