Criticism of RTS Storytelling

The elephant in the room RTS is not a genre famous for its storytelling. The quality of campaigns’ stories ranges from functional to… uh, “what was the writer smoking when he wrote this?” If you are familiar with RTS, then you may find this a strange assertion. “What about Blizzard’s campaigns?” you might ask. If you did ask this, then I want you to stop and think for a second. You are probably aware of the iconic RTS characters like Kane, Kerrigan, and Arthas from the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Those three are probably the most famous in the genre. How many other equally iconic RTS characters are there  and  how many of them date from games released after 2005? 2010? 2015? You probably cannot name many others besides, off the top of my head, Tim Curry’s Cherdenko and Tychus Findlay.  You probably have fond memories of RTS campaigns from the 90s and 2000s “golden age of RTS”. You probably noticed that the number of memorable campaigns has dramatically declined s...

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...