Category: Video Games

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.

In the Terran campaign of StarCraft 1, we start out as Jim Raynor’s blue Mar Sara militia of Terrans (characters occasionally talk to the player character as though they’re a real person, but you also usually have one protagonist character whose perspective you follow for the entire campaign, and for the Terrans it’s Jim) fending off the orange Garm Brood of Zerg. This campaign is spent almost entirely fighting other Terran factions and the plot keeps good track of who is where. After joining the Sons of Korhal to escape the Garm Brood, our units turn red, we recruit the purple Antiga militia to the cause and fight the white Alpha Squadron before recruiting them, too.

We convince Alpha Squadron to defect by saving them from the Garm Brood and the new blue Surtur Brood, but having no insight into how different Zerg broods even work, that’s no surprise, we can assume there is a second Zerg brood around for any number of reasons. In the next few missions we fight the orange Delta Squadron and brown Omega Squadron, still loyal to the Confederacy, before the ninth mission where we use the Confederates’ own tech against their capital world to summon the purple Zerg Jormungand brood to attack them, then have to protect Jormungand from the blue Protoss Sargas Tribe.

The Korhal officer in charge of the mission, Lieutenant Sarah Kerrigan, is abandoned after the Sargas Tribe are defeated and the Jormungand Brood begins an overwhelming attack, which convinces Jim Raynor to defect, turning back to blue Mar Sara militia and fighting against both the red Sons of Korhal and the white Alpha Squadron on the way out.

If any of that seems confusing, I promise it’s because I recapped ten missions in three paragraphs with an emphasis on proper nouns because they’ll be important later. It’s all very straightforward in play.

But then the Zerg campaign starts, and now we’re playing as the Jormungand Brood from the moment of its creation. The premise of the first mission briefing is that you are a freshly spawned cerebrate just now coming to exist and command the Jormungand Brood. You’re on Tarsonis, the Confederate capital that was getting wrecked in Terran mission 9, so you might think this mission takes place between Terran 8, when the Zerg are summoned, and Terran 9, when the Jormungand Brood has a fully developed base that Kerrigan is tasked with defending from the Sargas Tribe. But, no, you’ve already got the chrysalis that will eventually hatch into infested Kerrigan – you and your brood were created specifically to protect her while she’s being infested. Maybe the old purple Zerg got destroyed in the assault and now you’re being created to replace them? But destroying a cerebrate requires a dark templar, that’s a whole plot point later on. So are the dark templar on Tarsonis? That would actually make a certain amount of sense, since the Sargas Tribe met them at some point between now and Zerg 8, but in Zerg 7, everyone is super freaked out that a cerebrate has been killed. If it had happened on Tarsonis, you’d think they’d bring it up.

And the only reason any of this gets brought up is because Terran 9, a mission with 3 teams, used purple for the Zerg brood. There are 8 team colors in StarCraft, so even with the player locked into red and the Protoss being locked into blue, there were six options for what to do with the Zerg. The orange Garm Brood seems to be the main ones in charge of wrecking Terran space, since they show up on both Mar Sara and Antiga Prime. The brown Grendel Brood, white Baelrog Brood, and yellow Leviathan Brood are totally unaccounted for. The timing of the Baelrog Brood’s appearance as an enemy does suggest they were created specifically for the attack on Aiur much later, but even that is speculative, they might’ve just been doing something else before the swarm was assembled for the attack. The purple Jormungand Brood is the only Zerg brood that we know can’t be here.

Continue reading “StarCraft Can’t Keep Team Colors Straight For Protoss Or Zerg” →

StarCraft II’s plot is trying as hard as it can to pretend Brood War never happened, short of actually making any retcons.

In Brood War, a new Terran faction is introduced, the United Earth Directorate, so powerful that they force all the other factions (including Zerg and Protoss) to band together to defeat them. They succeed in this, so it makes sense that the UED is no longer the overwhelming force they were in Brood War, but they’re a total non-entity in StarCraft II and Arcturus Mengsk’s Terran Dominion is again the dominant Terran faction in the sector, just like it was at the end of the core game.

In Brood War, Fenix is killed by Kerrigan during her second betrayal. In StarCraft II, they reverse this to make Fenix alive again, again. It’s not even the first time he came back to life, so it’s not like this is some unprecedented break in the lore (and Edmund Duke, killed in the same betrayal, gets to pound sand in Hell), it’s just the reversal of another one of Brood War’s plot points.

Most jarringly of all, in Brood War, Kerrigan fakes a face turn, falsely claiming her evil Queen of Blades persona was a result of the Overmind’s control and ended when it was killed at the end of the core game, and then it turns out nope, she’s still evil, and she betrays the rest of the anti-UED coalition twice in order to come out of the titular Brood War as not only the ruler of all Zerg, but also the dominant power in the sector. After her second betrayal, her pre-infestation lover Jim Raynor swears that he will be the one who kills her. In StarCraft II, Kerrigan’s evil Queen of Blades persona turns out to be the result of the dark influence of Amon, a secret turbo-Overmind who was controlling the Overmind. Jim Raynor finds an ancient alien artifact that reverses Kerrigan’s infestation and makes her a good guy again, so, exactly the opposite of the direction the narrative went with her in Brood War.

This is the main plot of the Terran campaign of StarCraft II (which was released as a standalone game). The scene at the end of SCII where Jim Raynor carries Kerrigan’s deinfested body out of the hive cluster feels like an AU from Brood War. Like, yeah, Kerrigan has that line to Jim Raynor in the original game’s Zerg 4 about how she’s with the Zerg now, and coming as it is nowhere near the end of the game, that’s clearly setting up another beat. The obvious way to play it is that she is not, in fact, with the Zerg now, or at least not permanently, but Brood War’s payoff to that setup is that she fakes not being Zerg but then actually is Zerg. And also Kerrigan then has to be immediately reinfested so she can be the protagonist of the Zerg campaign.

The closest thing to a plot point from Brood War actually coming up in SC2 is when characters from Brood War make what amounts to cameo appearances. UED vice admiral Stukov is in Heart of the Swarm, but he got himself infested in the meantime so he’s basically just another infested Terran for Kerrigan to bounce off of and may as well be an original character. Kerrigan and Stukov were enemies last time either of them checked, which they have to clear out of the way before Stukov can take up his new position as Kerrigan’s sidekick. Duran, also introduced in Brood War, was Kerrigan’s previous infested sidekick, but is retconned as secretly being a psychic demi-god relevant to the plot of SC2, which has nothing to do with anything he did in Brood War. Duran may as well have been replaced with an original character for all he resembled his depiction in Brood War, and Stukov gets stuck playing Duran’s role for some reason.

It really seems like, when Blizzard finally got around to making SC2, they found they really didn’t like the setting they’d left themselves with at the end of Brood War and wanted to reset to just the core game being canon, but Brood War was really well received so they couldn’t actually do that and settled for completely ignoring every plot development.

Also, the final mission of Wings of Liberty, the Terran campaign of SC2, was a huge letdown. It’s a defense mission while a space artifact charges up to instakill the entire Zerg hive cluster. The Zerg forces are generated pretty arbitrarily, not coming in distinct attack waves the way a player actually harvesting resources and producing units would have to, but instead sending mobs of units almost continuously. The cut scene at the end of Jim Raynor and his marines retrieving the deinfested Kerrigan from the hives not only feels like an AU, it feels really unearned, since all I did was flip the switch on the Zerg-Kill-o-Matic. StarCraft 1 was almost entirely made of missions that were just a knock-down drag-out fight with a huge enemy base, and while StarCraft II’s reliance on alternative objectives was initially a breath of fresh air, there wasn’t really a single destroy-the-base mission in all of Wings of Liberty. And the final mission would’ve been the perfect place for it, a siege crawl across the surface of Char to reach Kerrigan’s citadel. A cut scene of marines walking through the tunnels in the aftermath would’ve been really satisfying coming on the heels of having just spent two hours cracking that base open with a fleet of vikings and banshees screening a company of siege tanks.

Through the machinations of rival supercomputers FATE and the Prometheus Circuit, Serge wound up DNA locked to the security system of high-tech future city Chronopolis. Lynx, an agent of FATE, swapped bodies with him so he could unlock the security system, but the enemies he made along the way are fighting tooth and claw to keep him from returning to Chronopolis, unlocking the security system, and once again giving FATE the power of the legendary artifact called the Frozen Flame. Cat!Serge, stuck in Lynx’s body, was cast into an alternate timeline, which isn’t even the first time this happened to him. After sorting out how to cross between timelines again, he has linked back up with the anti-FATE coalition and helped them rebound from Dark Serge’s attacks.

The six dragon gods of the region seem sympathetic to the anti-FATE coalition, but they’re reluctant to provide direct assistance for unclear reasons. They rescued cat!Serge when FATE collapsed the alternate timeline version of Chronopolis on top of him, but they haven’t been flying around torching Dark Serge’s ships or anything. For that matter, they won’t even pop a new body for cat!Serge out of Fort Dragonia, which cat!Serge needs in order to get access to Chronopolis before Dark Serge can. Cat!Serge already has (an alternate timeline version of) the Dragon Tear used for bodyswapping, all he needs is a body to swap into, and the dragons say they can provide it, but apparently he needs to first obtain their blessing by reaching and defeating each of the six of them in turn. Only then will Fort Dragonia create a new body for him which he can use the Dragon Tear to swap into (best not to think too much about what happens to the discarded cat body).

This is a lie. The Black Dragon created an army of monsters to control Marbule basically just as a fuck you to some imperialist colonizers who tried to invade it. Any one of the dragons can create a new body for Serge no problem. The real truth is that they were on the losing end of a war with Chronopolis 6,000 years ago, fought for control of the Frozen Flame, and that Chronopolis has been unstoppable since winning and getting control of the Frozen Flame. The storm that DNA locked Serge to the Frozen Flame’s security system, locking FATE out of it, was the first chance they’d had to meaningfully fight back against FATE in millennia. So long as Serge’s DNA, whether in Dark Serge or reincarnated Serge, is outside of Chronopolis, Team Dragon is still in the game. If either copy of Serge gets to Chronpolis, unlocks the Frozen Flame, and then does not hand it over to Team Dragon, the dragons are fucked. They need to be absolutely positive Serge has what it takes to crack Chronopolis open before he goes in there. If Serge isn’t going to succeed, they’d rather he die somewhere where one of them can immediately obliterate the corpse, and maintain plausible deniability about whether or not they’re in the anti-FATE coalition in case Dark Serge gets back into Chronopolis.

But they don’t want cat!Serge to know any of this, because it’s very important they maintain their mystique as vaguely benevolent nature gods of El Nido. Pretty much any one of FATE’s minions can theoretically sit down with cat!Serge right now and explain that the dragon gods are the nature deities of a third, radically different timeline where dinosaurs won the ancient war with cavemen (something which happened in this setting, it’s in Chrono Trigger) and an entirely different civilization developed. And their basic plan here is to kill all humans to recreate their old timeline in this one. The dragon gods have been lucky that FATE is so spectacularly bad at diplomacy that no one’s ever said that to cat!Serge and he probably wouldn’t believe them if they did, and if Team Dragon swaps the mystique of “dragon gods work in mysterious ways” for “we’re not confident you can defeat FATE’s robot army,” it might encourage cat!Serge to think of them as less incarnations of benevolence and more as conventional allies who might betray him after their common enemy is defeated. FATE has done most of the damage to a potential anti-dragon coalition all by itself, but the dragons don’t want to bungle it at the last second.

While running around gathering up the blessings of the six dragon gods, cat!Serge also runs into a few final allies.

Continue reading “Chrono Cross Character Quests: Endgame” →

The objective of the final mission of StarCraft is to reduce the HP of the Zerg Overmind’s outer shell to zero. Once this happens, regardless of how much of the Zerg base or forces you’ve destroyed, you go to a cut scene in which Tassadar sacrifices himself to ram the Overmind and kill it. According to his dialogue, this is necessary because your forces have been severely weakened in the process of cracking the outer shell. Naturally, how much sense this makes depends a lot on how the mission went. If you were running low on resources, you may have indeed pushed a carrier fleet through the perimeter and ignored incoming Zerg reinforcements to reduce the Overmind’s shell to 0 HP while being pretty much tapped out for any base-clearing operations.

On the other hand, if you’re neurotic about leaving survivors, you might have scrupulously killed everything before allowing your units to target the Overmind and end things, making Tassadar’s final dialogue pretty much exactly the opposite of true. I’ve got eighteen carriers, man! Not only is the entire Zerg base cleaned out, but I could go clean out another base of similar size right now without even producing any more units, to say nothing of the fact that I have three active resource-gathering bases.

This is an inevitability of RTS gameplay. Besides unsatisfying cheats like auto-respawning destroyed buildings or units in the core of the Zerg base so that it’s impossible to clear the base before taking down the Overmind (StarCraft II is more prone to doing this kind of thing to guarantee that the map resembles what it’s supposed to be in the story no matter how much effort you put into clearing it, and I hate it), you can’t prevent the player from overkilling the mission to the point where Tassadar’s sacrifice comes across like nonsense. For example, in the eighth Protoss mission of the Brood War expansion, you are supposed to capture and defend a temple long enough for some psychic ritual to kill all Zerg on the planet Shakuras. There are three Zerg AI, one in front of the temple and two behind it. The two behind the temple have considerably larger and more heavily defended bases. It’s certainly possible to wipe out the Zerg completely making the psychic ritual at the end seem kind of ceremonial, but the most straightforward way to complete the mission is to leave the largest, toughest hive clusters alone and focus on securing the temple.

But it’s not just possible to do this sort of thing in the last mission of StarCraft 1’s core campaign, I strongly suspect that it is the average player’s first experience of the mission. Sure, they probably don’t bother clearing the entire Zerg base before hitting the Overmind down to the last building, but they probably do clear out all the active defenses and only avoid destroying ultralisk caverns and defiler mounds because those are tech buildings, not unit producers, and they’re not necessary to the objective, so why bother? They still end up in a position where their army/fleet is completely stomping Jormungand Brood (and Tiamat Brood, if there’s anything left of it).

The only reason you’d end up doing the thing where you rush your attackers in to hit the Overmind without destroying the defending swarm and spore/sunken colonies is if you’re either speedrunning or you don’t have enough resources to plausibly take out the whole Zerg base, so you go straight for the objective and hope for the best. Nobody speedruns a game on their first try back in 1998 when you couldn’t stream a gimmick like “blind speedrun of [game],” and the mission has such a gargantuan amount of resources that you can’t really lose by running out. You either get your base overrun because you weren’t able to harvest and spend those resources quickly and effectively enough, or else you have everything you need to create 24 carriers and 24 battlecruisers and a dozen siege tanks and a dozen arbiters to cloak them all (you have both a Terran and a Protoss base and they have separate supply count, so the maximum size of your army is immense). That would take a long time and there’s not really any point when the Zerg base can be cracked with much less, but the resources for it are there. There’s six empty resource nodes on the map and one of them is a mineral patch big enough to overcome the Overmind’s defenses at least five times over. That one absurdly mega-huge resource patch could probably pay for the last three or four missions combined.

That’s not to say the mission is extremely easy, because you can still get overrun, but I find it pretty unlikely that the average player wasn’t in a position that ranged from slightly to extremely advantageous when Tassadar sacrifices himself on the grounds that their position is super precarious.

Also there’s a weird bug in the AI of both of the last two missions where the enemy just gives up once you’ve penetrated their base. Drones stop harvesting resources, reinforcements stop getting brought in. It’s like the Overmind saw my carrier fleet rip through the spore colony perimeter and said “well, can’t do anything to stop that, guess I’ll just die.” The StarCraft 1 AI isn’t smart enough to produce counters to enemy units it spots, so it’s kind of right – trickling in hydralisks and mutalisks stands no chance of defeating the fleet, what he really needs to do is amass lots of scourges and defilers (the Brood War AI does this) even then it’s questionable whether he can trade effectively with my infinity minerals. But it’s still weird to see the AI go afk.

Zeus: Master of Olympus is a city builder set in Greek mythology (and occasionally actual ancient Greek history). It has an expansion, Poseidon: Master of Atlantis, which introduces something strange but effective for a city-builder game: A second playable faction. Atlantean citizens have slightly different needs from Greeks, although in most cases it’s just a palette-swap. This also moves the action from Greek mythology to a blend of Greek mythology and Atlantean conspiracy theories. Atlantis is a pyramid-building civilization on a giant island in the Atlantic Ocean, and sail westward to the Mayans and eastward to the Egyptians, where their pyramid-building ways would influence both of these two civilizations to build pyramids of their own (because a lost trans-Atlantic civilization is required to explain how two completely different civilizations could’ve independently decided to tidy up the corners on a pile of stuff). Then twenty years later they released Hades, an isometric roguelike action game, which was a weird direction to take the series.

Poseidon is an expansion pack to an existing game, so its scope is pretty limited. It swaps out olive oil for orange juice, swaps out Greek culture buildings like theaters and philosopher podiums for Atlantean super-science buildings like observatories and laboratories, and it replaces the Greek stadium for the Olympic games with a hippodrome for chariot racing. The main draws of the expansion are filling in some holes in Greek mythology (in the original game’s twelve deities, for example, Olympian Hera is swapped out for Chthonic Hades – the expansion adds in Hera and Atlas, the latter mainly because a god of carrying things real good is actually very relevant to the game’s mechanics) and six new playable “adventures,” the game’s story campaign. The original game only had seven adventures, so six is a lot, and those are the main draw of Poseidon: There’s more Zeus. It’s an expansion pack, that’s what they were selling.

But the concept got me thinking about using Atlantis as the frame for a city builder game that spanned multiple different ancient civilizations. Sort of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate but for the Impressions city-builder series instead of Nintendo. The city-builder series also included Pharaoh, Caesar, and Emperor (the latter was for ancient and medieval China, which is casting a Hell of a wide net). Those three focused on history over mythology and I think they were weaker for it, so partly I’m just daydreaming about versions of those games that had mythology-based scenarios instead of sticking to a linear historical narrative and which are also accessible from the same menu. China and to a lesser extent Rome would be a bit out of place with the Atlantean frame story, but, you could have Mayan, Celtic, Norse, and Persian factions and it wouldn’t be any more anachronistic than the Athens adventure from Zeus setting the Persian Wars in the 9th century BC. You could rope in the Chinese (and the Indians, while we’re at it) if you went full Conan with it, having a world made of fictional expies for various civilizations that weren’t coterminous, because hey, who’s to say where the Po Dynasty and the Telleroi city-states are in relation to each other, I just made those up, I can put them wherever I want.

Mechanically, all these factions won’t be hard to design. Everyone’s food supply and resource extraction is going to be nearly identical, it’s only cultural buildings and exactly what goods people demand that will change the fundamental citybuilding. You also want some very different endgame projects with very different mechanics for each faction to help really set them apart from one another, even if it’s not super important for simulationist reasons if a Temple of Artemis and a Sphinx are basically the same. Making them have significantly different effects when built will make playing Greeks and Egyptians feel different, though.

There’s also some more fundamental resource differences, for example, Egyptians have more different types of farms and other things that are built on riverlands like clay pits, tying them very directly to the Nile, which means their cities tend to be packed around a narrow but continuous strip of useful land, while Greek maps have mountain meadows, ore deposits, and shorelines for piers to ship goods in and out all in different locations, and thus tend to focus more on connecting all these different resource nodes together – you need to ship food to your mines and trade piers to feed the workers living there, and ship bronze and silver from your mines to the trade piers to trade for whatever goods you can’t produce locally, and then ship those goods out to the meadows and mines to supply the workers, and then find some way to defend it all from enemy raiding parties.

Whereas an Egyptian city is surrounded by empty space that’s hard to find use for, which means both that you shove all your military buildings out there because they have way fewer continuous needs (you need to ship weapons and armor out there, but those aren’t consumed at a steady rate, so it’s fine if it takes a while), and that empty space also provides a defense: you have plenty of time to muster an army and meet an enemy in the field when they spawn at the edge of the map, Greek maps are full of sprawl and are more likely to build near the edges, so you need actual walls to slow an enemy down while your troops muster, especially since the least valuable space where you cram your military buildings in might be in the geographic heart of your city, a midpoint between the mountains, meadows, and piers.

But since that’s almost entirely in map design, we don’t need to build fundamental mechanics into the Greek and Egyptian factions to reflect that. We don’t need to ban Greeks from using clay pits and making pottery, just design maps where the clay deposits are usually made wet by seawater, so it’s not arable anyway, so of course you put your clay pits there, the land isn’t useful for anything else. If you put a Greek city on a Nile map, they would play much more similarly to the Egyptians, just with different endgame monuments and also it would be one of those maps where you have to import all your olive oil, but that happens even in Greece.

But while the mechanics for a game like this are quite manageable, the number of art assets would potentially be a much greater challenge. The Greek agora and the Egyptian market have basically the same mechanics, but you would still expect them to look different. The mechanics of Greek theaters and philosophy podiums might be basically identical to Egyptian jugglers and musicians, but that means it’s entirely on the appearance and sound of the buildings and walkers to distinguish the culture of the two. A lot of buildings are mechanically fully identical to one another, like a wheat farm or a maintenance post (used to prevent buildings from collapsing or catching fire), but the building still needs to look like it was built by Egyptians/Greeks and the people working it to show that it’s operational (as opposed to lacking resoruces, workers, etc. etc.) need to be dressed like Egyptians/Greeks.

Part of the reason why I wish I could go back in time and tell Impressions to make this game in 2002 is because they had a bunch of assets right in front of them: Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor, and Caesar III all look pretty similar to each other, and it’s not jarring to go from one to another. A couple of assets might need a redesign to look good next to others, but even that shouldn’t be too common, because you don’t build two different cities of two different factions on the same map, so the only units from a civilization that will be seen in context of another are military units.

Foretales is a card game set in one of those anthropomorphic animal fantasy settings that indie games seem to like. It’s not small-child-scary-world industry-dominating phenomenon, but it crops up semi-regularly.

Foretales is a card game, you have a party of hopefully three characters, and you draw a hand of six cards in even proportion, so with three characters, that’s two cards from each deck. Once a deck runs out, your hand size goes down with it. If one of your three characters is out of cards, you only have four cards in your hand. Cards do different things when played on different location cards, so if you play the thief protagonist’s Nimble Hands card on a market place, he’ll steal some gold, but play it on a tavern and he’ll steal some food. If you run out of cards, you can no longer really interact with the game at all, so you’ve got to rest, which gets you back three cards for every party member but usually comes with some consequence, like increasing the number of enemies on scattered around different locations or, if you take too many rests, just slapping you with an immediate game over.

When you end up in a fight, you can use assorted resources to convince enemies not to bother fighting you. Fame, which you generally get for being nice, works especially well on guards, while grim, which you generally get for being mean, works especially well on bandits, but you can use either if you have enough of it. Gold works well on both of them, but not so well on cultists, who only respond to grim. Failing that, you can actually kill the bastards, and every foe killed gives you grim. If you reduce enemy morale low enough, whether by bribing or intimidating them or whatever or by violence, surviving enemies run away and you get fame for each one who runs.

That’s a bunch of weird mechanics attached to nifty little decks that help differentiate a cast of characters from one another. Is it fun? Eh. Fun enough that I didn’t mind playing through to the end of the game once to get a bad ending which then sent me back to the beginning for a new game+, but not fun enough that I felt the need to try and get a good ending. The game is all about getting dire visions of the future, and the new game+ starts right after you get the artifact that inflicts the visions, so the idea is that your failed runs are visions of doom from the artifact. I like it when games incorporate failure into the narrative instead of asking you to reload over and over again, slowly crafting a single canon run where the hero never fails out of a dozen or more non-canon failures, but Foretales doesn’t even do that entirely, since any time you get just plain old run out of HP or cards+rests you still just reload.

But more importantly, this setup demands you replay mostly the same game several times, and it’s not nearly enough fun for me to bother with that. Sure, I learned a lot about how to play during my first playthrough and could play much better my second time through, especially in the early quests where they’re quite easy, and there’s different routes through the game so (rough guess) only maybe a third of the quests would be repeats. Like, the cut scene of the bad ending I got ended with a pretty heavy-handed hint that I should immediately start hunting down the doom cult you confront in the final act of the game, ignoring all other concerns, whereas in my initial playthrough those other concerns had seemed sufficiently pressing (friend on death row, guards about to massacre a striking miners’ union) that I never got around to confronting an annoying aristocrat who later on turned out to be a cult leader. So, okay, ignore the other disasters and sprint straight for her.

But I know from the way the quest select screen is laid out that I’m definitely going to be replaying some of these quests because there just aren’t enough empty slots for my second playthrough to be wholly unique, and even if it were, the mechanics were already starting to lose my interest at the end of my first playthrough. It couldn’t be more clear that this game is meant to be played multiple times so this isn’t really complete, but that just means I’m putting it into regrets. I just don’t want to play anymore.

Back in the 90s and 00s, Impressions Games made historical citybuilder games. I mainly played two, that being the Egyptian themed Pharaoh and the Greek themed Zeus: Master of Olympus. Zeus is much better. Why, though? The only major difference between the two is their art assets. Other differences are numerous and non-trivial, but converting Pharaoh to Zeus’ mechanics would’ve been more the realm of an expansion pack that a sequel. And yet, these relatively minor mechanical differences add up to Zeus being a much better game, which makes me sad because sometimes I wanna build a cool desert city. So what are the differences that made Zeus better?

Continue reading “Why Is Zeus Better Than Pharaoh?” →