Criticism of RTS Storytelling

 The UED were introduced via retcon in BW, and were not originally planned as part of the franchise. The BW website at the time of release made no mention of the UED, but only stated that "Terran Emperor Mengsk I...must now turn his attention to...a conspiracy deep within his own ranks."  In order to explain why the UED wasn't mentioned in the SC1 manual or OG campaigns, the BW manual states that  the UPL secretly spied on Koprulu for centuries and then reformed as the UED when they saw the protoss and zerg ravage Koprulu. There are several problems with this retcon. How did the UPL secretly spy on Koprulu for centuries and without being discovered? In order for this to work, they would need human agents to infiltrate the colonies and remain both loyal and undetected over multiple generations. This is simply unbelievable, but it gets even more unbelievable from there. The UPL decided not only to secretly spy on Koprulu, but to keep Earth's and Koprulu's existence...

Although Arcturus Mengsk is depicted as the generic Saturday morning cartoon villain of the franchise (aside from... all the others), his actual backstory is that of a sympathetic hero up until the actual events of the game. In the game he starts off as a heroic rebel leader, then becomes increasingly morally ambiguous until he becomes a villain at the climax by betraying his loyal subordinate Kerry. There's no logical reason for him to do this besides personally insulting the player by killing off a likable character, since none of his other criminal actions are sufficient to make him a villain apparently (which reflects really poorly on Kerry and Raynor... but I digress). The "official" in-universe reason is twofold: firstly, he was tired of her developing a conscience that would lead to her leaving him as she planned to, and secondly,  she murdered his family while brainwashed . Oh my. Yeah, Mengsk's backstory is super dark. He was the scion of a rich politician f...

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...

One of the frustrating aspects of SC1's scripts are how juvenile they are in places, especially compared to the somewhat more nuanced take in the manual and other supplemental materials. Hard to believe these were apparently written by the same writer. Anyway, in the protoss backstory the ancestors of the nerazim are explained as causing the apocalypse with the reckless use of their powers and provoking the khalai to fight back in self-defense. So it is entirely reasonable for the khalai to have a negative view of the nerazim.  In the scripts for Episodes 3 and 4, during the protoss civil war , none of this is ever brought up and the judicators are framed as irrational idiotic bigots being mean to the innocent nerazim who just want to help. The judicator's suspicion is completely reasonable: the nerazim caused the apocalypse in the past and now they came back claiming they only want to use their powers to help. How are the judicator supposed to know that the nerazim are tellin...