Criticism of RTS Storytelling

The Ruin are a concept I developed as a result of my consistent frustration with the writing of space bug hordes in Halo, Starcraft, 40k, Starship Troopers, etc. The Ruin are an invasive sentient ecosystem that have consumed countless worlds and civilizations. They incorporate the biological, technological, and even cultural distinctiveness in themselves. Their infrastructure is alive and every member is a drone engineered to kill or maintain the war machine. They do this in the pursuit of perfection, seeking to consume the universe in order to become omnipotent.  Unlike other space bugs that are depicted as faceless forces of nature, the Ruin have characters in order to make their perspective interesting to a human audience. What makes these characters fundamentally different from humans is that they aren’t motivated by petty selfish desires like greed, vengeance, love, liberty or whatever other trivialities motivate humans. They have no internal strife because they share a single...

I’ve long since gotten tired of criticizing Blizzard’s writing. The original teams who made their games dissolved multiple times years ago. It’s impossible to convince certain diehard fans that the writing has flaws in its basic structure. So I’ve decided to work on my own original scifi universe inspired by Starcraft, Halo, 40k, etc while addressing their shortcomings. I’ve actually been doing this in fits and starts for years in private, but now I’m gonna be posting my ideas on this blog. One of my inspirations is this old article titled  “The Celestial, Terrestrial, and the Diabolic” . It lays out a common triad structure underlying many popular fantasy and scifi settings. The Celestial is inspired by the Roman Empire and represents an ideal, seen in Tolkien’s Elves, Babylon 5’s Vorlons, 40k’s Aeldari, Halo’s Covenant, Starcraft’s Protoss, etc. The Infernal is inspired by the popular (though inaccurate) stereotype of Mongol hordes and represents our fears and projections, seen i...