Criticism of RTS Storytelling

WarCraft III ’s development was complicated and a lot of ideas were discarded or revised. Armies of Exigo is a clone of WarCraft III that was released two years later in 2004. From a mechanical perspective, it exhibits a number of innovations. From a story perspective, I think it has a number of improvements. I will focus on the latter here. As with WarCraft , each side in Exigo is actually a coalition of multiple races. Likewise, the new units are usually introduced in the story itself through side quests rather than just appearing in the build menu. The Empire is composed of conventional pretty humanoid fantasy races such as humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and so on. The Fallen are composed of giant insects, dark elves, and void aliens. The Beast is composed of generic beast men, goblins, ogres, lizardmen, kobolds, and other conventional ugly villainous fantasy races (but strangely orcs are NPC only). The Empire has more depth than the Alliance WarCraft III focuses on a small ca...

Despite its godawful map design and hilarious low budget voice acting, I think the actual plot of StarCraft: Insurrection is surprisingly good and in some ways superior to the original game. Bear with me… A key problem with the original game campaigns is their inconsistency. Characters will flip 180 between scenes in order to force the plot towards a particular direction, even though it makes no sense to behave this way. The world around them bends over backwards to enable them even if realistically they should not get away with any of this. For example, as I have complained about in other posts, Tassadar claims to be helping the terrans but in actuality incinerates inhabited planets rather than working towards a real solution. He constantly abandons his duty to do weird random acts to force the plot forward. He abandons the terrans to their fate in order to visit Char. He allies with Raynor despite having no reason to. He surrenders to the Conclave to halt the bloodshed, then congrat...

Credit to ARM3481 on the Scrolls of Lore discord for the following analysis: Admittedly in-universe it makes sense for the world to continue blaming Arthas, so from that context it's not hard to understand why some people just latch onto that incomplete view of things.  Especially depending upon their experience playing and familiarity with his pre-WoW development. But really from an informed "reader" PoV, you're correct that while it's Arthas' fault for things getting to the point that he picked up Frostmourne, after that choice he's basically no longer that Arthas any more.  The creature he became at that point was the worst of himself magnified by the influence of Frostmourne, which then became even further removed from his old self once he deliberately extracted whatever lingering vestiges of his humanity remained after his battle with Illidan. Arguably the Arthas that went to the Maw would be whatever was left by his death at the end of WotLK, which m...

In the opening cinematic of Warcraft 3, Medivh barges into King Terenas’ court, tells them to evacuate the continent, and then acts surprised when nobody takes him seriously. What was he expecting? This is a stereotypical cliché loony prophet trope. I know it’s meant to be mysterious for the audience’s benefit, but in-character it makes no sense. If he wants anyone to believe him, then he should be putting on a powerpoint presentation explaining the Legion’s plans and formulating a counterattack. But he doesn’t, because that would break the plot. This is just sloppy writing, and I’m not the first  to think so .

I know this blog was originally about Starcraft 1, but I've gotten bored of that and want to move on to other topics. Such as bad writing in Warcraft 3! (Terrible joke, I know). For example, Arthas' fall to darkness doesn't sit well with me. Ignoring all the hot takes about "he was a born sociopath" from Sylvanas stans, in the original game his arc is obviously intended to be a tragedy where a well-meaning hero is tortured and gaslit by the villains until he goes crazy and joins them. The problem is that key parts of this narrative undermine the emotional arc. When Arthas culls Stratholme, Uther and Jaina just leave rather than try and stop him. This goes against their personalities! But the writer forces them to act this way because it would break the plot. This is bad writing. (BTW, Stratholme was supposed to be an impossible situation. There was literally nothing Arthas could've done that would've made any difference. I have problem with how this makes ...

SC1 opens with a cinematic where the protoss incinerate Chau Sara. Throughout episode 1 the protoss pose an ever-present danger of planetary incineration. Several planets including Mar Sara and Antiga Prime are incinerated. After episode 1, however, the protoss seemed to forget they had planet glassing  lasers . They never use the lasers in later episodes where they would be convenient. Tassadar never tries to laser zerg positions on Char. The protoss never laser zerg positions on Aiur in the middle of an invasion. Tassadar kamikazes his carrier into Overmind rather than using the laser. They never explain why they cannot, either. Altho the lasers are used for destroying whole planets, we usually see this being done by dozens of carriers at a time. It is reasonable to deduce that the damage is proportional to the duration of the firing and the number of lasers used. So it could work as an orbital canon to strike strategically viable positions. The starcraft story was  develope...