Starcraft lore thread

>Starcraft 2 shat on all of this
A good chunk of what you typed included the SC2 retcons to the lore.

I pored over the SC1 manual again and again back in the day. The original lore before and during the game goes more like:
>Terrans the humans that the Earth government wanted to get rid of. Mutants, people with too many cybernetics, religious zealots, gays, political activists, etc.
>The Zerg were non-hivemind, tiny parasitic worms before the Xel-Naga came to town, like the Ceti Eels in Star Trek 2. The Overmind most certainly was a post Xel-Naga entity.
>The Protoss were reptilian predatory creatures before the Xel Naga tweaked them.
>The Overmind ate the Xel Naga's brains, learned about the Protoss, and figured that it could become perfect if it infested them.
>The Overmind infested Kerrigan to gain a psionic agent because that somehow helps in infesting Protoss.
>The Overmind's assault on Aiur was actually and unironically a huge fuckup.
>The Terran forces effectively split in half and went to war over a violation of the bro code.

Wasnt it the xelnaga that gave the protoss a racewide psionic link that resulted in their civilization going haywire until the dark templars broke it, overall saving the protoss but resulting in their exile because they basically turned a semi hivemind race into
individuals?

Or is that lore unrelated to xelnaga?
also can we talk about how dark templars are literally the biggest bros in the koprulu sector except probably fenix

The overmind never attempted to infest protoss though, only Duran and Kerrigan ever infested protoss, in the latter case it was more mind control than true infestation anyway

It never succeeded, bu the entire point of attacking Aiur, according to both the Overmind's dialogue and the manual, was to find a way to infest the Protoss.

I seriously wish my cat never pissed all over my SC1 manual...

Here's the thing: Anything from WoL onwards is garbage.
Portrayal of Raynor? Garbage.
Romance with Kerrigan after swearing to kill her over Fenix' death? Garbage.
Making Mengsk a cartoon villain? Garbage.
Noble savage primal zerg? Garbage.
Pointless de-zergification? Garbage.
Doing away with the player personifications? Garbage.
Amon? Pure garbage.
THIS? Pure fucking garbage.
I could go on, but the lore is so fucked at this point there is nothing to talk about except how stupid this shit is.

The real cracks started with Duran and the hybrids in Brood War.

>Noble savage primal zerg
The rest of this is bad shit too, don't get me wrong, but Whole-E-Fuck this was the dumbest thing.

>The real cracks started with Duran and the hybrids in Brood War.
Except it was both hidden, and vague. It was a teaser of what may yet come, but turned into this whole big thing. We knew Duran was playing both sides for his own benefit, but what that benefit or faction actually was is vague.

It was creepy, and the entire mission was atmospheric, it came off more Eldritch Horror than sci-fi DBZ.

At the time I thought that was the dopest shit, but in retrospect I agree.

Yoshi...sorry, I mean Dahaka, is at least fun in co op.

Much of the Overmind's dialogue from the original SC that I remember is basically 'muh protoss'. He really wanted them, something about the perfect Xel'Naga descendant race I think.
Also, originally, didn't the Xel'Naga actually design it so that the result of protoss-zerg mixing actually WOULD produce a descendant race or something they could transfer into because that's how they avoided extinction up until that point? My memory is hazy.

Can't have a Blizz game without the orcs-did-nothing-wrong analogue.

Yeah, this. Starcraft 2 was such a terrible disappointment lorewise. It's clear to me that blizzard has lost all aspects of whatever it used to be back before WoW and is now just a lifeless corporation

>Also, originally, didn't the Xel'Naga actually design it so that the result of protoss-zerg mixing actually WOULD produce a descendant race or something they could transfer into because that's how they avoided extinction up until that point? My memory is hazy.
Nah, that's from 2. A rare example of 2's lore making more sense than 1's, because in 1 the XN just meddled with genetics for the lulz. They turned the pre-Protoss lizards into physically "perfect" creatures, and when the Protoss chimped out on them they said, "Hey, what if we make a species that can have ANY kind of body, but has one perfect mind?" And thus the Zerg.

>because in 1 the XN just meddled with genetics for the lulz
but that's fine though, better then MUH CYCLES

Better, yes. Just less sensical.

>Except it was both hidden, and vague.
he almost literally says he's working for an ancient evil

Brood war is still great, but duran not actually being some kind of infested (along the lines of what happened to Raszagal) is far and away the weakest part of it.

The protoss had the psionic link already. At least, they had the capacity for it.

Like said, the Xel naga uplifted them. Not because they went to a planet with lizards and thought it a good idea to just boost them. They were the best species for the task, and its proven that other species are capable of it: see humans.

Protoss had even tribalistic society before the Xel'Naga. The Xel'Naga merely taught them, and true evolved them from some state, to use this and truly grasp their abilities. But the Protoss turned on them from their own arrogance and well shit hit the fan so hard that a space-faring civilization went back to the Stone Age.

So no they aren't space elves at all, they bear no resemblance to any fantastical elves I know of. In appearance, culture, or history. What I truly like about the Protoss is that they achieved their true potential outside of the Xel'Naga, and the Khala was a genuinely good dogma.

But muh blizzard ruined any dynamic of this and forced the Khalai to work with the Dark Templar even though they had a giant galaxy-spanning Empire that really shouldn't have been listed to just one sector of space.. Its amazing how little of a role Humans play in this series.

The Protoss and Zerg should have been familiar with each other, and have been fighting for centuries, with the humans entering the scene and being the wildcard, at first being a pawn by the Overmind to distract the Protoss so he could launch an all-out assault on Aiur and take the Protoss completely by 'storm', but then be the catalyst for his destruction.

Instead there is some prophecy bullshit and a zerg-infested human takes over as the zerg's main character, while being completely antithetical to them and not natively zerg, and is supposed to fuse with a Protoss but jk the human part of her lets her do it all alone.

WAIT WHAT

Primarily because it's painfully derivative.

>Romance with Kerrigan after swearing to kill her over Fenix' death? Garbage.

He killed the Queen of Blades already with that artifact. He was more shocked that she is going the same route that he gave up to deinfest her. He gave up his opportunity to kill Mengsk jjst so she can be deinfested. And yet in the end they both got wanted after four years, Raynor to got watch mengsk die and Kerrigan gets to personally kill the man who left her to die

>Making Mengsk a cartoon villain? Garbage.

At that point Mengsk "won". His political enemies are all dead or discredited and Raynor for all his ability to stand up to him has the whole Empire against him with only a couple of intentional leaky valves that Mengsk knows its leaky to maintain the need of an overwhelming military force.

When Nova came in to take care of raynor he barely stood a chance and was whisked to the Moros.

>MUH CYCLES
Jesus christ I hate this shit so much. I dont even know what to call it. A trope? Its dumb, its stale and its fucking retarded and every writer who still incorporates it should be beaten to death with his own keyboard.

You had it that space sim with blue lesbian amazons.
Then it was the plot of fucking Freespace series.
Then it was in fucking Mass Effect.
And now we have it in Starcraft.

It does not up the stakes. It does not make the setting more interesting. It does not make it more epic. ANCIENT SPACE EVIL WAKES UP EVERY X YEARS TO FUCK-UP EVERYTHING THEN GOES TO SLEEP is even more fucking stale than the ancient evil awakening in fantasy.

And that first bit is not retarded ...how? Because, at the end of the day, Kerrigan is still responsible for the deaths of billions of humans and a significant number of protoss. Not the Overmind, not the cerebrates, just her. And he de-infested her purely because of his love for her, not out of some greater responsibility or some shit.

As for the other part, that sure paints Mengsk in a positive light for somebody who then behaves like fucking Robotnik.

Kerrigan *was* the Queen of Blades. There is no distinction between the two. After having been treated like shit for her entire life it's sorta undferstandable that a person that is suddenly handed absolute power would go and use that to get her revenge and shit, only to go nuts in the process.
Doing that away as a distinct personality cheapens the the entire thing.

The mystery is what made it more acceptable, and the tone emphasized that. It was still probably a bad move in the long run, but taken alone it was far and away better than what we got later

That's your interpretation of it, sure. Personally (and without defending the actual plot that came out of it), I don't think it's that unreasonable to make a distinction between "Kerrigan, the human who put her life on the line to defend the enemy's civillians" and "Kerrigan, the mutated abomination who betrays and murders everyone". It's not like with Arthas, where you could see him turning evil even before he picked up Frostmourne.

The original writers weren't there for 2, were they? Also since we're shitting on 2 in general, SC and BW's soundtracks were god tier. 2's is forgetable.

Starcraft 2 just picked up the worst aspects of Warcraft lore and then made them even shittier.

I don't know who the main loremaster over at Blizzard is, if it's Metzen or Knaak or WhoTheFuckEver, but they keep reinserting the same shit ideas into their games over and over again since Warcraft 3.

Yeah, Arthas was a pretty horrible bastard even before the sword. Killing his own mercenaries in a betrayal of their trust and burning his boats because he didn't want his troops to have the opportunity to go home rather than follow his mad crusade.

Someone at Blizzard seems to really like the idea of space angels or vorlons or what the fuck ever existing at the crux of everything.

He de-infested her because Zeratul told him too. This was always a complaint I never understood after playing the games, Zeratul and the prophecy are stupid and lame, but it's clearly laid out that Raynor wants to kill her.

It seemed almost impossible for Blizzard to fuck up what they left hanging at the end of Broodwar. It should have been the Xel Naga that tried to destroy everything in starcraft 2 using the terran psionics as an ace-in-the-hole against their first children.

Could have had a real war with Raynor begrudingly allying with Kerrigan to deal properly with the Xel Naga threat. Have Arcturus be plotting to weaken both sides so that he can destroy the winner and some shenanigans with renegade zerg hosts and protoss takovers to give you the big space fighting soap opera. And given us more of the "co-op" missions that were at the tail end of LotV.

Instead we get a really garbage romance plot, arcturus as a Saturday morning cartoon villain, and whatever the fuck was the point of the protoss at all. What a joke. Why do they keep reinserting WoW garbage into EVERYTHING?

StarCon 2 did it better.

So you want it to be the exact plot of Forged Alliance.

Also, the Xel'Naga got eaten by the zerg before the events of SC1, so you're still retconning stuff to facilitate a mediocre plot.

i love how starcraft just picked up the style from the original rogue trader games for their marines.

>Also, the Xel'Naga got eaten by the zerg before the events of SC1
No they weren't. Duran is at least 1 surviving Xel' Naga. And Brood War made that abundantly clear. And powerful since he was able to dupe Kerrigan's formidable psionic powers into thinking he was properly "infested".

Why did Narud have exactly none of the charisma or gravitas Duran did?
Why were the Tal'Darim literally Sith?
Why did HotS give me Kingdom Hearts flashbacks?
Why didn't Artanis and Kerrigan do the fusion dance and become a giant space squid?
Why did the whole thing with the Khala seem to scream 'CULTURE AND TRADITION ARE BAD GUYS' while the second best Protoss died, the first best came back as a robot llama, and none of them did anything actually relevant to the plot?
Why did they make Firebats blow ass?

Eh, it's implied at most. Personally, I kinda like the idea of some unrelated faction stumbling across the Xel'Naga's works and thinking "Yeah... I can make this work for me."

What's really stupid is that Kerrigan became a waifu at the end of the Terran campaign.

She killed MILLIONS OF PEOPLE! The only 'cure' she needed was a bullet to the skull. Why not have Raynor kill her? The two were never that close, at any rate.

Duran knows how to use Xel Naga genetic technology as evidenced in the "bonus mission" in brood war. He also has extreme telepathic abilities that tricked Kerrigan, who is considered the most powerful psionic in the sector. He himself is also a bizarre fusion of at least Zerg and Terran DNA, if not protoss as well.

If he isn't Xel Naga then its a race awfully similar to the Xel Naga.

Did you play Zeratul's bonus missions? The last one is 'The Future In Which Tychus Killed Kerrigan: The Mission'.

The point SC2 clumsily tried to make was that Kerrigan was the best bet to fight the HURR DURR DARKNESS

A perfectly valid alternative could have been that Kerrigan is all that is left to control the zerg swarm and while she is an evil, murderous bitch her actions seem at least partly motivated by those that wronged her in the past - especially Arcturus. And the alternative would be billions of zerg just attacking anything and everything. A WoW plot point which is why its confusing Blizzard never used it.

i kind of like how the Protoss is diverse in LotV. Makes for RPG goodness.

Terrans are literally humans, they were banished from the UED because they were considered unwanted scum (radical political ideals, mutants, junkies ect.) and were used to colonize deep space but hybernated too long and were shot really far off.

This is evidenced because the UED still has shit like psionics and even a great technological advantage over the Terrans in Kuprulu (who still don't have the tech to make it back to earth but the UED can make the trip in a few months).

To be fair, it would have been interesting to see them try to grapple with the question of a deinfested Kerrigan and how much she is the same person and shares the guilt with Queen of Blades. Instead that is something they completely sidestep in HOTS over some bullshit Zerg redemption plan.

It is amazing to me how much the writing deteriorated over the course of SCII itself. The story of WOL was kind of stupid, but Raynor was still a tangible character. You could feel all the shit weighing down on him and how he was still trying despite having little faith in success or himself. He was three dimensional enough to care for despite everything. Fast forward two campaigns and Artanis displays absolutely zero identifiable emotions beyond an animesque righteousness. I don't think any of the Protoss characters do. It was really amazing to watch how every campaign was just that much worse than the last.

No one likes my Man Alarak?

Alarak might be the closest thing to an interesting character in all of LotV. Its just that the Taldarim are all tied to a fundamentally stupid villain.

I liked him better when he was talking Darth Vader into killing all the Jedi.

It did everything better. Music, alien design, writing. Combat could be a little clunky but it's manageable.

If Kerrigan is fire princess now, can we have Zerg sward back with big brain worms in charge?

The problems with SC2 are varied and numerous but I think it all stems from having this cliched idea of an 'ancient evil' returning to fuck everything up, rather than leaving the xel'naga mysterious like in SC1 and just focusing on the conflicts within the three main factions.
This is why I still think wings of liberty is kind of ok, though the ancient evil stuff was still heavily foreshaddowed it still focused on already established conflicts (though turning mengsk into a moustache twirling vilain was a definate no no).
Kerrigan was where it all went wrong though. I hated the fact that it was so heavily implied in brood war that Jim was going to have to kill her and then it turned into this kind of wierd redemption arc. I dont mind her dying for ultimately a good cause but jim still should have killed her.

The amount of times I have thought about how the story might have been salvaged whilst retaining the esential plot elements (as I have also done for FO4) are too many to count but I have still yet to come up with a decent substitute.

>built in stilletos

The did the same fucking thing to Diablo.

The only good thing in the entire LoTV, and the only interesting character. God, this campaign made me miss terrans.

I've never had a cat before.

Does the pre-SC2 lore ever go into what abilities the Xel'Naga had? Just 'cause they kept trying to create the perfect life form, doesn't mean they had any of those traits themselves. They might just have been good at genetics.

There's always StarCraft Remsatered guys

How come protoss are perfection of body when the zerg are far bigger, stronger, agiler and more adaptable
and how come the zerg are perfection of mind when they are brainless animals while the protoss are literally togas and crystals tier psionic sages

>BroCraft
>Space Bugs and Space Elves fighting grand battles over ancient gobbledygook which you ignore entirely because you're having lethal, explosive arguments with your former Space Bro.
I'd play it

It isn't purity of body and mind. It is purity of form and essence. Specifically, great psionic potential (form) and capable of great change (essence).

Screencapping for accurate this is

But half of that is SC2-retcons, and the other half is bollocks.

>other half is bollocks
[Citation needed]

Fucking this so much. Just waiting for Diablo did nothing wrong.

Just off the top of my head, protoss were sapient long before the Xel'Naga started tinkering with them, and humans are definitely still homo sapiens. And I have no idea what he's talking about when it comes to the protoss being useless, unless it's just faction wanking.

I will defend the redemption arc (talking WoL only here) because I think the story of Jim Raynor, a man with little hope or faith in humanity left, being given the chance to undo what he thinks is his biggest mistake and save a life he thought lost is a good one, and I think him jumping from killing her to saving was believable and natural.

HotS is really where their story falls apart, because that's where the "Kerrigan dindu nuffin" hits which ruins everything. Kerrigan should have been a wretched soul, incapable of reconciling what she is and what she was, but she is completely emotionally opaque and the game absolutely refuses to lay any sort of blame on her whatsoever.

I read HOTS as 'Heroes of the Storm' and got very confused.

SC2 felt like a great example in how something can be the originator of tropes and *still* feel like it's just ripping everyone else off.
The Norad exists before the Normandy, yet it feels like we're ripping off Mass Effect. (Doesn't help what Tosh's specific squad of Ghosts is called.)
StarCraft had Space Rednecks way before Firefly even existed, yet it feels like we're just jerking off Joss Whedon - which really pains me to say.
Add into that the tired Blizzard trope of 'We've all got to band together to fight the new stupid threat, even the faction that was objectively evil before that we're gonna somehow pretend wasn't.' Seriously, I can't wait to see what stupid threat shows up in Overwatch to get the mutated serial-killers who ruined everything let back into the clubhouse.

>Doing away with player personification
Dear Christ, I didn't realize how much I missed this until you just said it.
Though, that's something that they started dropping the ball on as far back as Warcraft 3.

Talon will soon have retroactively done nothing wrong.

Sort of

Eh, of all the things wrong with later Blizzard I feel like this is a pretty minor one.

>as far back as Warcraft 3
Much like starcraft's problems originate in brood war, warcraft started getting derailed by bullshit with beyond the dark portal.

Yeah, and it's fucking retarded.
You fight off wave after wave of creatures, as everyone shouts out 'Oh No! Why ever did we kill that person that we had every reason to kill? It was such a terrible mistake! Now there is Another Threat, and we don't have our Blizzard Standard-Issue Bad Guy That Actually Did Nothing Wrong to help!! Woe is us!'
I'd rather be waterboarded.

>even the cringey love story.
I hated this because the entire point of Jim's character arc in Brood War is Jim finally coming to the conclusion that Kerrigan isn't worth saving and he needs to kill her.

And then in StarCraft 2 they pull a complete about-face and never bother to explain why, aside from "muh prophecy".

Which is another thing. Prophecies weren't a thing in StarCraft, and in StarCraft II they're suddenly the single most important thing.

Oh, it's ridiculously minor.
But as little touches go, I miss the Provincial Governor, and the New Officer, and all that.
Oddly enough, WoW has been going back to this a bit, what with the Guild Halls and all that, though it doesn't quite pull it off.

No, the Overmind specifically wanted the Protoss' Purity of Form to combine with his own/the Zerg's Purity of Essence, to become perfect.

A lot of Warcraft 3's plot is also ported over wholesale from SC and Brood War, for better or for worse.

It's actually kind of fascinating how much every Blizzard game draws on and enhances the problems of the last.

>I hated this because the entire point of Jim's character arc in Brood War is Jim finally coming to the conclusion that Kerrigan isn't worth saving and he needs to kill her.
This. Brood War's Kerrigan was what she really was, once freed from Ghost conditioning and Overmind control, and the truth was that she was a shitty person, and Jim ended up realizing that. Then, SC2.

>and the truth was that she was a shitty person

I disagree she was a shitty person, she was someone that was always used, a slave of everyone that surrounded her. The confederacy used her for inhuman experiments and the closest thing she had to a father figure then used her as an assassin and operative only to throw her into the dumpster. Kerrigan was not a bad human, she had a hard life as a slave of other men's ambitions and she was freed when she became a Zerg, freedom and absolute power, for once in her life she was in control of EVERYTHING and she simply lashed out against a world that she probably always hated.

Kerrigan was weak and gained the freedom to express her weakness instead of being a human being and being shackled and molded by it.

>high elvs
>dark elves
>robot elves
>sith elves

>Duran is at least 1 surviving Xel' Naga.
That's from 2.

>And Brood War made that abundantly clear.
That's just it: it didn't. Brood War was beautifully mysterious. He could have been something entirely new.

>I'll see you dead for this, Kerrigan! For Fenix, and all the others who got caught between you and your mad quest for power!

>It may not be tomorow, darlin', it may not even happen with an army at my back. But rest assured; I'm the man who's gonna kill you one day. I'll be seeing you.

>though turning mengsk into a moustache twirling vilain was a definate no no
Also Kerrigan. We talk a lot about Mengsk, but Kerrigan is equally retarded and cliche spewing in WoL.

>Also [other big bad]. We talk a lot about [main big bad], but [other big bad] is equally retarded and cliche spewing in [every blizzard property ever].

>>You had it that space sim with blue lesbian amazons.

What game is this?

>Kerrigan is equally retarded and cliche spewing
except with about a tenth of the charisma

mengsk hamming it up at the end of heart of the swarm almost saved starcraft

Star Control 2?

The ur-quan and kor-ah never slumbered though, just tooled around the galaxy 24/7 enforcing their doctrines.

Mengsk ham is best ham.

I was a dumb kid when I played SC1 the first time, always used to being the unequivocal good guy working for the unequivocal good guys. So when Sarah and Jim started balking at Mengsk's orders, I just saw them as whiners. Mengsk was the boss, therefore he was right, duh.

And then he left Sarah to die, and I woke up.

And then I finished the campaign, and was all, "Wait, after betraying Sarah and us, he WON?!"

That fucking speech, man. I feel like I need a side of mashed potatoes and peas every time I hear it.

Yeah, I think what people are forgetting is that Star Control 2 didn't have the cycle; that was Star Control 3, which was, er.....way shittier.
I never want to completely give up on a trope, but I can't think of a single time that 'after x years, the evil race awakens and eats everything' didn't end up being stupid in sci-fi. Mass Effect, ironically, had a really good chance to break the cycle, but fucked it up in the end.

Shitheads are born, not made.