Feral zerg behavior is inconsistent

The behavior of feral zerg is inconsistent between different games, depending on the plot the writer is trying to tell at the time. There isn’t any way to reconcile these different depictions because the writers change the rules for each one.

In one Loomings mission, zerglings are smart and dexterous enough to hotwire security systems so that they attack Confederate marines sent to investigate. Presumably this was done to explain why the turret doodad was attacking, since there's no other plausible reason beyond hacking and only the zerg would be motivated to hack it. But it does imply that the seemingly feral zerg are much smarter than depicted in later entries, creating an inconsistency.

In StarCraft OG, if a cerebrate is killed then their brood goes into a killing frenzy and cannot be reclaimed. This is presumably to justify the ZvZ mission, since otherwise it would end immediately because the player character would just take control of the feral zerg. It does create a huge inconsistency with BW, however.

In Brood War, feral zerg default to the control of the nearest cerebrate (including Queen of Blades) even though they never previously demonstrated this ability when it would have been useful. This is presumably so that QoB is able to take control of them at all, otherwise her plans simply would never work. This further implies that cerebrates have limited range to control zerg, otherwise broods would never go feral in the first place (and conversely that zerg which travel too far away will go feral). In one mission feral zerg have to be lured into QoB's control range, altho in later missions no such limitation is mentioned as QoB immediately takes control of most zerg after Overmind is killed again.

Both in-game and supplemental sources are inconsistent on whether feral zerg can coordinate or not. Feral zerg are never shown attacking each other in the games, presumably due to technical limitations, but in supplemental lore they are stated to go into a berserk frenzy where they kill each other indiscriminately.  Meanwhile, some sources depict feral zerg organizing into "canny" packs on their own.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Raynor was always directionless

Arthas, Sylvanas and the nature of self

Aldaris did nothing wrong... except everything