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Criticism of RTS Storytelling

A blog where I criticize various questionable writing decisions in the scripts of the first StarCraft game. Not the sequel StarCraft II, which has been criticized to death, but the prior installment that everyone waxes nostalgic over. Sadly, it is not as good as we remember it being.

SC script commentaries by Magic

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StarCraft Script Commentary: https://web.archive.org/web/20100613063028/http://samods.org/175

StarCraft: Brood War Script Commentary: https://web.archive.org/web/20100613063028/http://samods.org/195

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Raynor was always directionless

One of the common criticisms of SC2 is that it alternately removes Raynor’s agency by making reliant on Tychus to tell him what to do and makes his few independent decisions driven by idiotic sociopathic horniness for Kerry. Thing is, this is also true of his character in SC1 OG and BW. It’s not a new thing. Raynor is passive, reactive, callous, sociopathic, and lacking in coherent motives or values. He’s pulled along by the plot, rarely makes independent decisions when given a choice, and his few independent decisions are usually nonsensical to drive the plot forward. Despite this, the writers expect us to think he’s the hero of the story (nevermind that he appears inconsistently across campaigns). Examples: In Raynor’s first appearance, he makes the decision to help Magistrate clear out the zerg. He doesn’t really have a choice, given that it’s a genocidal alien invasion. But it establishes he’s willing to put his life on the line for the greater good. Later, Raynor is forced to...

Arthas, Sylvanas and the nature of self

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...

Aldaris did nothing wrong... except everything

The character Aldaris is more or less an idiot villain in the protoss campaigns whose sole purpose is to cause conflict to drive the missions. The frustrating part is that he is written horribly. He always has a good point, but the narrative either unfairly punishes him or gives him the idiot ball for it. During the protoss civil war, he was suspicious of the nerazim and his reasons for being suspicious are completely reasonable considering that the nerazim caused the apocalypse the last time they were on the planet. You would only know this from reading the manual, as it is never brought up in the game script so Aldaris gets framed as an ignorant bigot standing in the way of victory. Then he just forgives the nerazim and says he was wrong, without providing any explanation for why he thinks so beyond "the narrative says I should admit I was wrong." In the next campaign, he starts a terrorist uprising. His reasoning for this is that the nerazim matriarch has been compromised...