I do not like the plot of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. I think it completely squanders all the plot developments from Brood War, and not only that, the bulk of it is taken up with four sub-plots that have barely anything to do with what turns out to be its main story. Wings of Liberty is about defeating and deinfesting Sarah Kerrigan, who, last time we saw her, was the queen of the Zerg and the dominant power in the Koprulu Sector where the games take place, if not the entire galaxy, seeing as she just wrekced a fleet sent by the United Earth Directorate. Kerrigan won that battle by the skin of her pointy teeth, but everyone else was left in even worse shape in the aftermath, and while it’s not explicitly stated, the Zerg sure seem like they’d be a lot better at rapidly rebuilding.
Wings of Liberty’s opening is pretty much perfect, no notes. Mechanically, it’s basically a remake of the first three Terran missions from StarCraft, with a movement tutorial, a base-building tutorial, and then a mission where you hold out against the Zerg until evacuation arrives. StarCraft II’s version is much better, though. This is especially noticeable in SC1’s Terran 3 vs. SC2’s Zero Hour, where SC1’s version had the Zerg so inactive that even twelve-year old Chamomile got bored defending and started sending out marine squads to try and crack the Zerg base, in SC2 the Zerg keep up a fair amount of pressure even on Normal difficulty and because Hard difficulty exists, you can play that and be genuinely besieged by the Zerg even as a veteran player (granted, I was also transitioning from SC1 mechanics to SC2 mechanics, and there are some significant differences there, but most of those differences are quality of life improvements).
By the time we get to the end of the Mar Sara arc, we’ve established that Jim Raynor is fighting a resistance movement against Arcturus Mengsk, that he and Kerrigan used to be lovers before Kerrigan was infested, that Kerrigan is on the march once more with the Zerg, we’ve introduced new characters Tychus and Captain Horner, and we’ve introduced the Xel’Naga artifact that will be the subject of one of our sub-plots. That’s all great.
I am going to throw an edit in pretty much immediately afterwards, though. In the cinematic following the Mar Sara missions, Zeratul does not return after four years to tell Jim Raynor of some dumb prophecy that only Kerrigan can save the universe from the Turbo-Overmind. Instead, Zeratul is just on the Hyperion for his sub-plot (discussed below), and when Kerrigan begins her renewed offensive, Zeratul’s reaction is that now is the time to avenge the death of the dark templar matriarch Raszagal. I mean, technically Zeratul killed her, not Kerrigan, but she was being mind controlled by Kerrigan, so Zeratul holds Kerrigan responsible. Zeratul spends decades at a time away from Shakuras defending the interests of the dark templar abroad, so it’s not weird that he’d leave for a while to go hand out on Jim’s ship. The only reason I’m having his presence be a recent thing is because the Brood War epilogue says they went their separate ways and I don’t want to retcon that if I can get the same result without doing so, which, it turns out, I can.
Mengsk hasn’t been downplaying the importance of the Zerg, but using them as the unifying threat for the Terran Dominion. Everyone knew this was coming, and the reason why the Dominion aren’t faring well in the opening volley isn’t because Mengsk is an idiot, it’s because Kerrigan has a considerable material advantage after the events of Brood War.
In the game as it is, this leads to four sub-plots. First, the sub-plot to recover pieces of a Xel’Naga artifact that the Dominion was trying to recover on Mar Sara. Second, the sub-plot to help some colonists who get attacked by the Zerg to resettle on another planet. Third, the sub-plot with Tosh, the spectre, a next-generation psychic spec ops whose program was cancelled because it turns out they’re all criminally insane. Fourth, the sub-plot where you reveal to the public that Emperor Mengsk was responsible for the Zerg attack on the densely populated planet of Tarsonis.
There are two main problems with these. First, the Zerg seem like an incidental threat throughout all of them. Certainly the colonist sub-plot features the Zerg overrunning two planets, but the first planet we evacuate and then the second planet was taken out from within by colonists who’d unknowingly been infested which leads to a zombie plague scenario. At no point do we really blunt the impact of the Zerg attack, and with the Dominion being the primary antagonist of the Tosh and Mengsk sub-plots while the Tal’darim Protoss are the primary antagonist of the artifact sub-plot, the Zerg come across as a pretty unexceptional threat. They’re overshadowed by the Dominion and barely seem more relevant than the Tal’darim. It doesn’t really feel like they’re a big deal at any point between their attack on Mar Sara and the end when we’re attacking them on Char.
And second, the Tosh and Mengsk sub-plots don’t really go anywhere or have anything to do with the climax of the game. Having some side stories would be fine, but this compounds with the first problem where our main villain has pretty insignificant buildup.
There’s also a fifth sub-plot. This sub-plot is a series of flashbacks where you play as Zeratul discovering the dumb prophecy about Kerrigan saving the galaxy from Zerg/Protoss hybrid super-monsters. This sub-plot takes up a bunch of valuable space that could be used on other, more important things, and it doesn’t do anything except setup the Zerg endgame of assimilating Protoss into the swarm to become unstoppable. This plot point does not come up in Wings of Liberty, so we don’t really need to set it up until Legacy of the Void, two full games from now. Plus, it’s already been set up twice in the original game, first in the Zerg campaign when the Overmind is very explicit about assimilating the Protoss into the swarm being its ultimate goal which will make the swarm unstoppable, and second in the secret mission in Brood War where we find a secret science lab trying to do the same thing. We do need to bring that up again at some point for Legacy of the Void, but we don’t need to spend so much time on it here in Wings of Liberty when there’s already another secret mission with basically the same premise as the one from Brood War.
And cutting the four Zeratul missions allows us to instead have a fifth sub-plot for Raynor’s Raiders about fighting off the Zerg, allowing us to draw attention to the Zerg as the main threat the Koprulu Sector faces right now despite how much time we spend dicking around with the Tal’darim and the Dominion.
The Colonist sub-plot is mostly unchanged: Raynor saves colonists from a Zerg attack on Agria, takes them to Meinhoff where refugees from several Zerg attacks are gathering, and discovers that colonists who were unknowingly infested destroyed Meinhoff from the inside out, and now Raynor has to burn the whole place down to prevent it from spreading. Hanson and her colonists then resettle on Haven, a world on the edge of Protoss space. The Protoss show up to purify the colonists because some of them are infested in the incubation stage, but Hanson thinks she can cure the infestation. Raynor can choose whether to fight off the Protoss or help them destroy the infestation. The major difference here is that Hanson and Stedman need to have some dialogue about curing the infestation, where Stedman comes out and says “hey, if this works, it should work on any stage of the infestation, even Kerrigan” and Raynor responds that he’s going to be the one who kills Sarah Kerrigan, after everything she’s done they are way past the point of a deinfestation fairy tale ending. At this point, Hanson takes over to plead with Raynor to help her pursue deinfestation for the sake of the colonists.
The Mengsk sub-plot drops the plotline that broadcasting Mengsk’s crimes will erode his power base somehow. These missions are loosely related missions to undermine Mengsk’s rule – you rob some of Mengsk’s trains because they are Mengsk’s trains, you steal Mengsk’s giant robot because you want it, and you raid Korhal because fuck Korhal. Cutthroat isn’t even a Mengsk mission in this version, we’re shuffling that premise over to Tosh, who we’ll get to in a minute. The unifying theme of these missions is that Mengsk gets on comms to talk shit with Raynor directly. We start on Tarsonis, the site of Mengsk’s betrayal of Kerrigan that led to her being captured by the Zerg, so that’s a good excuse to bring it up, and in the Korhal raid when Raynor and Mengsk spend the most time yelling at each other, it comes out that Raynor and Mengsk are both still having psychic nightmares about Kerrigan calling out to them to come and save her from the Zerg.
It also gives a chance to reintroduce an important (though not necessarily intentional on the writers’ part, but I’ll use it either way) contradiction in how Kerrigan presents herself in the original StarCraft. Soon after hatching from her infestation chrysalis, she confronts Jim, tells him that being Zerg is amazing, and tells him to leave and never oppose the Zerg again. But when she confronts Arcturus Mengsk in Brood War, she calls him “directly responsible for the Hell I’ve been through.” Kerrigan lies pretty freely, but narratively the Brood War mission is supposed to be when she reveals her true intentions. It’s even called “True Colors.”
So for my version of SC2, my assumption is that Kerrigan was only partly honest to Raynor in the Zerg campaign. Being infested really did feel incredible, but the process of infestation was horrifically painful and despite the high of massively boosted psychic power, Kerrigan’s life has been lonely and paranoid, surrounded by cerebrates who despised her for the favored position the Overmind gave her, an Overmind who viewed her as a favored tool valuable only insofar as she was continuously successful, Protoss and Terrans who wanted to kill her on sight, and the closest thing to actual friends were the infested, psionically dominated slaves she made of Duran and Raszagal. The rush of power made her optimistic and stupid early on, but she changed her attitude by Brood War, both more cunning (as she notes to Fenix, she learned from the lesson Tassadar taught her on Char) but also more lonely. Her constant goal throughout Brood War is to remove threats. She doesn’t actually want to achieve anything, like, she isn’t trying to follow up on the Overmind’s plot to assimilate the Protoss into the swarm and achieve unlimited power, she doesn’t have any designs on infesting all life, she doesn’t even bother holding onto Korhal after capturing it and in SC2 we learn that she didn’t hold onto Tarsonis, either.
We don’t need a complete overview of Kerrigan’s history to come out in the Korhal raid, but Jim and Mengsk confronting each other over comms can argue over Kerrigan, prompted by Jim pointing out that Mengsk’s Dominion needs his help just to keep her first wave at bay, and it can come out in the following bickering that Kerrigan gave Mengsk a very different story about what it’s like to be infested compared to what she told Jim.
The Zerg sub-plot we’re using instead of Zeratul’s missions serves two narrative functions. First, it escalates the threat of the Zerg from some probing attacks against Dominion fringe worlds to major assaults at the heart of Dominion space. Second, it introduces the Dominion ghost Nova in such a way that we might remotely trust her by the end of the Tosh sub-plot when she asks us to betray an ally on her accusation. Nova is Raynor’s point of contact within the Dominion to coordinate the defense of various major Dominion worlds and strongholds against the Zerg onslaught. In the first mission she makes contact and asks for Jim Raynor’s help in defending a major urban center from an attack by one of the hive tendrils. This mission can do two things: First, lets us fight Kerrigan’s swarm for control of a major city to make it clear that she is on the offensive, and second, use dialogue to establish that this isn’t even her main attack, so that her threat isn’t completely defused when Raynor and Nova are able to deflect the attack successfully. The Dominion is getting pummeled and there’s more Zerg where that came from, but thanks to Jim, the line was held for now. The next two missions can make it clear that Nova has a powerful benefactor within the Dominion, which can lead to a meeting with Valerian Mengsk that’s way the Hell less stupid then the one where he allows Jim Raynor to board his flagship so they can chat (there were like a billion ways that could’ve gone wrong, starting with Jim Raynor shooting Valerian on sight rather than stopping to chat).
Valerian gets introduced at the end of the third mission in the Nova sub-plot, so that it’s out of the way for the fourth, when Nova says she’s not interested in dating Jim, especially given that it’s not clear if they’ll end up on the same side after the Zerg are pushed back. Jim responds “what? I didn’t…say anything.” Nova, being telepathic, knows that working with a hot psychic commando sniper again has had a very specific effect on Jim, that every time Jim looks at Nova, he sees Sarah. Nova says that she doesn’t blame Jim for his scars, but she wants to be clear: Nothing will ever come of that. She isn’t Sarah, she isn’t interested in pretending, and Jim agrees that the last time he dated a ghost it didn’t end great and he’s not going back to that well.
The Tosh sub-plot is almost completely self-contained in the game as it is, which makes it basically filler. We’re rewriting it so that Cutthroat (the one where you have to mine enough minerals to hire a mercenary before some pirate beats you to it), originally a filler episode in the Mengsk plotline, goes in between the Devil’s Playground (the one where you have to mine minerals in the lava-soaked lowlands) and Welcome to the Jungle (the one where you have to harvest terrazine gas before some Tal’darei Protoss can seal all the vents up).
Devil’s Playground introduces Tosh and could probably be cut but it’s mechanically an interesting mission so what the Hell, we’ll keep it, it gives us a chance to establish that Tosh and Tychus met each other in prison. Cutthroat is mechanically the same, but the setup now is that Orlan was released from prison by Mengsk, but all of his mates are still locked up, with the promise that they’ll be released if Orlan kills Kerrigan. Orlan is trying to hire a mercenary to bolster his numbers to replace all the guys still locked up, you need those mercs for your own reasons, a mission ensues. In Welcome to the Jungle, we learn that Tosh is a spectre and that his mates are locked up by Mengsk. In the final mission, where you choose between helping Tosh break his buddies out or help Dominion ghost Nova do some other thing, I wouldn’t know because a jailbreak sounded way more fun and as much as narrative framing made it clear that Tosh is indeed a criminal psychopath, I didn’t really feel like there was any significant evidence for that, he’s just a scary black man while Nova is a hot blonde woman.
In our version, Tychus, Zeratul, and Stedman are a lot more talkative. Jim Raynor puzzles out that Tychus and Tosh have gotten the same offer Orlan did: Kill Kerrigan, get their mates released. Tosh admits that yeah, that’s why he’s here, but he has no long term loyalty to Mengsk and isn’t even particularly confident that Mengsk will keep his end of the bargain, but, like, the goal is to kill Kerrigan either way, right? May as well take the chance that Mengsk will keep his end of the bargain. Anyway, spectres were designed to kill Kerrigan and Tosh feels the need to put her down just to prove that they can get the job done. Tychus says no, Mengsk just offered him a bunch of money to do it. Stedman points out that this puts Tosh and Tychus at odds with any attempt to deinfest Kerrigan, while Zeratul insists that Kerrigan needs to die for her crimes.
At some point in all this, Nova calls in to ask for Jim Raynor’s help to kill all of Tosh’s spectre buddies on behalf of her benefactor within the Dominion, who does not approve of keeping criminal psychopaths with psychic superpowers around. Tosh counteroffers to help break them out to remove Mengsk’s leverage over him. Siding with Nova earns Tosh’s ire, obviously, but Tychus is also very not okay with this. He doensn’t leave immediately, but it puts Raynor and Tychus on a clear collision course.
The Artifact sub-plot is the only one that’s relevant to deinfesting Kerrigan and it’s not even clear that it does that until near the very end. Kerrigan does actually show up in it a couple of times, but the heavy lifting of making Kerrigan seem like a real threat is being off-loaded to our new Zerg/Nova missions, where, rather than being a rival archaeologist trying to beat you to artifact shards, she is consuming worlds. That means the Artifact sub-plot’s only role left to play is to set up the artifact itself, the Tal’darim, and the Moebius Foundation. We’re still going to have to rewrite that, because the way the Tal’darim are handled is bad.
The Tal’darim are a third faction of Protoss (in addition to the dark templar and the Conclave) who follow the secret turbo-Overmind. The Moebius Foundation is secretly controlled by a disguised agent of the turbo-Overmind. The Artifact sub-plot is about the Moebius Foundation fighting the Tal’darim for control of fragments of the Xel’Naga artifact. These two guys are on the same side, and sure, it’s possible that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, but there’s no point in making things this narratively garbled when we could let Zeratul carry the Artifact sub-plot instead.
Zeratul has been researching the Xel’Naga, the ancient precursors who created both the Zerg and Protoss, for ways to fight the Protoss. When Jim Raynor recovers a part of the artifact from the Dominion on Mar Sara, Zeratul examines it with Stetman and discovers that the artifact is an ancient anti-Zerg weapon created by the Xel’Naga as a failsafe in case they ever needed to kill them all. The Tal’darim split the artifact up to keep it from being used to destroy the Zerg because the Zerg are creations of the Xel’Naga and therefore their continued existence is sacred, the necessary adversary and counterbalance to the Protoss, a pure darkness to keep the Protoss committed to pure light. This doesn’t need to actually be true or make sense, it’s just a thing the Tal’darim believe, which motivates them to try and prevent Raynor from retrieving the artifact pieces. There is no Moebius Foundation, and Duran is not secretly an agent of the turbo-Overmind.
The final missions on Char are only slightly different. General Warfield is a decent enough character and makes more sense as the leader of a major assault than Nova, so he can stay. Nova needs a few stray lines of dialogue so that we know she’s here, too, but not more than that. Gates of Hell can be pretty much identical, but Belly of the Beast and Shatter the Sky are cut in favor of going straight to All-In. Naturally, this means that either one version of All-In needs to become the only version, or else both need to be combined in some kind of balanced way.
We also need some mechanical differences and some changes to the opening dialogue to make those differences clear. First, it is not required to keep the artifact alive. Instead, the mission objective is to destroy Kerrigan’s primary hive cluster, and allowing the artifact to charge to maximum does this automatically. So at the beginning, we need a line from Valerian or Warfield about how, without the artifact, the only choice is to destroy the hive cluster through conventional means, and Tychus can chime in that a conventional assault on the hive cluster would be a suicide mission. Tychus is the one to say this because he says the same thing about a straight fight with the Zerg in Smash and Grab and he’s wrong. Even on Brutal difficulty, it is possible to wipe both the Zerg and Tal’darim Protoss in that mission, and on Normal difficulty it isn’t even particularly hard.
Rather than a few generic supervillain taunts whenever she spawns, Kerrigan and Raynor are actually going to resolve their fucking character arc here with dialogues trickled out over the course of the Zerg attack waves.
This is the last time we’re going to have an evil Kerrigan around, so Zeratul also needs to resolve his grievances with her, although there’s a lot less to unpack here. He swears revenge for the death of Raszagal and all of Kerrigan’s treachery. For a moment on Shakuras, Zeratul almost trusted her. That, Kerrigan says, was Zeratul’s first and last mistake. Kerrigan can probably also dig some barbs in about how the fall of Aiur is Zeratul’s fault, something the games otherwise never seem to notice. He gave the location of Aiur away to the Overmind when he killed the Garm Brood, which was getting its ass continuously kicked by Tassadar across Chau Sara and Mar Sara and didn’t seem to be doing particularly well against the Sons of Korhal on Antiga Prime. Trading Garm for the location of Aiur was a massive windfall for the Overmind and Tassadar has to sacrifice himself to reverse that mistake. Plus, Zeratul killed Raszagal for basically no reason? Like, Protoss live for centuries, there was plenty of time to steal her back from Kerrigan, who did not particularly benefit from holding onto her any longer besides the fact that Kerrigan seems to enjoy building a fan club of psionically enslaved minions. The worst thing Kerrigan could do with Raszagal at that point was kill her, and then Zeratul did that anyway.
And that dialogue can segue nicely into how inept Jim Raynor is without Mengsk, Tassadar, or Kerrigan herself to hold his hand. He lost Mar Sara to the Zerg – luckily Tassadar was there to clean up his mess – and then ran with the Sons of Korhal for a while, and even managed to give Mengsk and Duke a black eye on his way out after breaking with them, but then he failed to rescue Kerrigan from the Zerg, failed to rescue Tassadar or Zeratul from the Zerg (Artanis had to come and bail them out), failed to hold the warp gate rearguard on Aiur after Tassadar died, failed to defeat Kerrigan on Korhal even with Fenix and Duke helping him, and failed to do any meaningful damage to Mengsk in the four years since.
Which can segue us into Jim demanding to know why Kerrigan killed Fenix. Kerrigan tells him it’s because Fenix was in the way, standing between her and Mengsk. When Jim protests that Fenix never would’ve sided with Mengsk over her, Kerrigan asks what makes Jim so sure of that? Fenix hated the Zerg, and considered Kerrigan his greatest enemy despite their alliance of convenience. It was only a matter of time before Fenix betrayed her, Kerrigan just beat him to the punch. Worth noting here that Kerrigan was already planning to betray Fenix before he referred to her as his “greatest enemy” on Moria, so Kerrigan thinks that comment vindicated her existing assessment that Fenix was an ongoing threat who needed to be gotten rid of, it didn’t prompt her betrayal. The actual dialogue here doesn’t need to pick that nit, but since this is an outline not super concerned with line-by-line pacing, I thought I’d stop and note that I am aware that some of the details of the implication being made here are false, it’s just more important to draw attention to Kerrigan’s motivations (mostly undiscussed in Brood War) over the exact order of events.
Kerrigan’s last exchange with Jim before the climax is a promise to correct the mistake she made when she first emerged from her chrysalis in letting him go. Jim asks what the Hell she expected him to do, and her response is “I don’t know, Jim, find some worthless backwater to play cowboy on. You always said that being the marshal of Mar Sara was the only thing that made you happy. But you just can’t leave well enough alone. Fine, then, die here, die on Char where you should’ve died four years ago!”
Once the artifact is nearly charged, a dialogue with Warfield, Tychus, and Stettmann is needed to make two things clear: First, the last Zerg attack wave is Kerrigan throwing everything she’s got at the base. There won’t be any more continuous attacks afterwards. This also gives us a chance to have Kerrigan screaming vitriol at Jim as she’s pushed to the brink and terrified that the betrayal that finally kills her will be the one person she consistently chose not to kill after being infested, kicking herself for thinking Jim wouldn’t betray her the way Mengsk would when, in the end, as she should’ve guessed from the start, he just took a while to get around to it. But second, it gives Tychus and Warfield a chance to make it clear that they are going to activate the artifact the second it finishes charging, and here is where it is important to make it clear that the artifact is only one way to complete the mission: The player can choose to blow it up themselves to prevent it from going off.
If the player does this, Jim says he’s all-in (get it?!) on saving Kerrigan, and now you have to defeat Kerrigan’s hive clusters conventionally. Her endless assault waves are disabled, but she can still convert minerals and vespene gas into units and fling them at you like a regular StarCraft mission, of the sort we haven’t had even one of since the fucking build tutorial back on Mar Sara. One thing I really dislike about taking the plot in this direction is that this is an RTS, so unless Jim is being piloted by an expert player doing a challenge run, he’s going to sacrifice some double- if not triple-digit number of his troops to rescuing Kerrigan, who absolutely does not deserve the second/third chance he’s throwing her.
The jaws I’m caught between here are that Jim Raynor swears to kill Kerrigan at the de facto end of Brood War (the tactical situation continues unfolding for another four missions, but the only meaningful character development is that Zeratul is given a personal reason to absolutely hate Kerrigan), but Wings of Liberty dedicates itself to Kerrigan’s deinfestation and therefore doesn’t really give me any plot developments to work with to make a “Jim Raynor makes good on his promise to kill Kerrigan” story that’s anything other than Jim Raynor methodically working towards that goal with no meaningful character growth along the way. I can imagine the cut scene itself of Jim Raynor killing infested Kerrigan, finally laying to rest the hope that he could have the old Sarah back, but if I wanted to pursue that path, I would basically have to tear down Wings of Liberty completely to rewrite the whole game from scratch. That’s more than I’m willing to do for a free blog post, so, just don’t think about the the dozen-ish viking and banshee pilots who are going to die during the push against Kerrigan’s primary hive cluster because Jimmy blew up the instant-win button so he could get his girlfriend back.
There’s two toggles that determine how this will go. First, did you side with Tosh or Nova back at the end of Tosh’s sub-plot? If you went with Tosh, then he drops a bunch of Dominion nukes on Kerrigan’s hive cluster right after you finish cracking the base. Kerrigan is atomized before she can be captured. If you sided with Nova, then Tosh isn’t integrated with your forces, so even with Warfield and Valerian agreeing to help stab you in the back, Tosh just isn’t in a position to drop the ordinance directly on Kerrigan this way. Instead, he drops the nukes on an expansion base after you clear out the Zerg and Tychus and Warfield float some base buildings from off-screen to set up their own base there, and now you have to fight them and Kerrigan.
Second, did you side with the colonists or the Protoss at the end of the Hanson sub-plot? If you sided with the Protoss, then there’s not anything to do except kill Kerrigan at the end of the siege crawl. If you got here by destroying the artifact yourself, then, uh, that was dumb. If you sided with the colonists, then you can use medics to deinfest Terrans, including Kerrigan.
If you successfully deinfest Kerrigan, you get a third mission where Tychus, Zeratul, and Kerrigan’s former bootlick infested Duran are coming to kill/reinfest Kerrigan, capping off the campaign with a fight against all three factions. Zeratul’s opposition in particular raises the question of whether or not Jim is doing the right thing, here, but the original StarCraft was not about a galactic conflict of good vs. evil the way StarCraft II was. It was an interfactional free-for-all in which alliances formed and dissolved based on the astropolitical situation and the personal motivations of the leaders. Raynor turned on Mengsk not because Mengsk had been possessed by galactic Satan or something, but because Mengsk had sacrificed Kerrigan to his ambitions and Raynor wasn’t okay with that. That didn’t mean Mengsk joined a coalition of Supreme Evil with the Overmind, and instead we see three-way battles between Raynor, Mengsk’s General Duke, and the Overmind on Char, and later a three-way fight between Tassadar, the Conclave, and the Overmind on Aiur. Alliances shift rapidly in Brood War, with Artanis allying with Kerrigan against Dagoth, breaking the alliance when Kerrigan assassinates Aldaris, re-allying with Kerrigan when the UED becomes the dominant power in the sector, and then gets betrayed by Kerrigan after the UED is pushed on the back foot. Jim Raynor going to blows with Zeratul over giving Kerrigan a deeply unearned second chance is completely consistent with the style of storytelling StarCraft set up.
Heart of the Swarm posits Kerrigan pretty much immediately reinfesting herself, and while it takes her a while to go full Queen of Blades, she’s interacting exclusively with other Zerg for 80% of the game. This would suggest that Kerrigan being deinfested is the canon ending to this version of Wings of Liberty, and the others are basically non-standard game overs. Except actually this is a terrible premise for Heart of the Swarm. Heart of the Swarm needs to be something else. Maybe a prequel, de-emphasizing the accumulation of personal power (although the mechanics of leveling up Kerrigan to unlock new powers can stay – it’s not really clear why Jim had to re-unlock goliaths when last we played as him he was wiping Mengsk and Duke from an entire orbital platform with a fleet of battlecruisers, and no one cared about that) to instead be the story of Kerrigan making her move on Mengsk for her final revenge.
This also gives us an entire campaign to set up Kerrigan’s otherwise mostly-unstated motivations in Brood War for the sake of this Wings of Liberty rewrite, which can be used pretty much completely unaltered. Line-by-line dialogue will have to be edited to reflect the fact that the Dominion is firmly on the back foot, but we’re already trying to de-emphasize their narrative role as compared to that of Kerrigan’s swarm, since she is the ultimate villain. Rather than teaming up with the Dominion for an attack on Char that makes it seem like Kerrigan is at-best fighting a peer conflict and at-worst has bitten off way more than she can chew with the Dominion, capturing a few lightly guarded border worlds in exchange for an attack on her primary hive cluster that immediately does severe damage, this is instead the Dominion pulling its last remaining ships and troops together for a desperate gamble on Char after firmly losing the conventional war in Heart of the Swarm.
Maybe instead it’s about deinfested Kerrigan grappling with the fact that everyone except Jim Raynor hates her and expects her to betray them at any minute, and that this is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to feel and believe which makes it very hard for Kerrigan to defend herself. This premise means it’s a Terran/Zerg campaign where you have Terran workers at a Terran base making Terran units, but also you can take control of Zerg units and have hero powers that summon Zerg reinforcements (and get them much earlier than Heart of the Swarm as it is, which reserves them for Kerrigan’s final power), thus emphasizing that Kerrigan retains some control over the Zerg but is not herself a Zerg. At the absolute minimum, Kerrigan would be interacting with Terrans a lot, and those Terrans wouldn’t immediately accept that she’s on their side, to the point where early missions might involve controlling the Zerg exclusively because no Terran will help her (especially true if we retain the plot point that Jim Raynor has been captured by the Dominion, which I think is a good idea, since it leaves Kerrigan alone with people who would very much like to literally kill her and only aren’t because of how much they like and respect Raynor – this significantly increases the drama of Kerrigan using the Zerg compared to if she had Raynor around to literally hold her hand through the whole process). It would make sense for that to lead her to reinfesting herself completely, but that’s still narratively bad because it erases what we just did in Wings of Liberty.
Of course, this means the campaign is narratively dissonant with doing awesome Zerg shit like sneaking a single brood mother onto a Protoss ship and destroying it from within, or besieging Korhal with wave upon wave of organic orbital drop pods to overrun the defenses with whatever gets through alive. Heart of the Swarm is really good at making missions which are individually very good and feel very Zerg-y, they’re just completely out of place with being a sequel to a campaign where the whole point is deinfesting Kerrigan. This is why I lead with the idea that Heart of the Swarm should come chronologically first, since it lets you retain all the cool Zerg missions without immediately doubling back on the narrative of Wings of Liberty.
The basic structure of the campaign also works surprisingly well as a retelling of Kerrigan’s story starting immediately after being abandoned on Tarsonis, with early movement tutorials focusing on evading the Zerg on the surface only to be caught in the end, subconsciously controlling the Zerg as a chrysalis for the early building tutorials, and then going off to Char to fight Edmund Duke and get shittalked by other Zerg who don’t believe in the Overmind’s new pet, only for the Overmind to then die, leading to Zerus missions, which may or may not take place on Zerus but are certainly a literal war against other broods, the Kaldir missions, where you play out an abbreivated version of the Artanis plotline from Brood War from Kerrigan’s perspective, and then the Dominion Space and Skygeirr Station missions replace the UED with some foreshadowing of Amon (ditch Kerrigan being the prophecy girl, though, Amon is the villain of the Protoss campaign, he should be the Protoss’ problem), and have the emotional climax be the invasion of Korhal to kill General Duke followed by Kerrigan’s betrayal of her allies to kill Fenix.
People really liked Brood War and aren’t going to appreciate that this version isn’t just a retelling, but retcons the UED to be either completely absent or else completely the Terrans’ and Protoss’ problem with Kerrigan completely ignoring them. It is nice to put Kerrigan’s story, especially in Brood War, in a form playable by casual players that StarCraft II wants to accommodate, and you can make it clear that this retelling is not intended to retcon the other one, it’s just a compressed retelling for the sake of people who aren’t good enough to beat Brood War (which gets punishingly difficult pretty quickly).
That still means the entire campaign is going to be literally retreading ground from Kerrigan’s existing story, and while being upfront about that means it doesn’t make the ongoing StarCraft II narrative feel inconsequential, that anything which gets done might be immediately undone for the sake of a cool mission, it does have the problem that the plot doesn’t really advance at all for an entire campaign. Returning players who did beat Brood War might feel kind of cheated, so this is probably the worst idea of the three, but it’s something I noticed while playing Heart of the Swarm.
And while I’m tying things off, Legacy of the Void also doesn’t need a major rewrite except in that Kerrigan needs to be excised from it. The Protoss are the protagonists of LotV, they can defeat Amon by themselves, we don’t need her tagging along on Ulnar to set up an epilogue where she turns into psychic space Jesus. Admittedly, the last mission of the epilogue is pretty fucking sweet mechanically and you’d probably want to salvage that somehow, but it would be very easy to rewrite it into a Daelaam/Nerazim/Tal’darim team-up instead of a Zerg/Terran/Protoss team-up.