The Queen of Blades is pushed back and back and back… and has to retreat further and further into less charted regions of space.
They took a beating, and the Dominion has pushed them continuously since then. Fart of the SwarmĪccording to Wings of Liberty, the zerg had been quiescent since the ending of Brood War. (Scream! How can you possibly start with the least relatable faction? The audience will never stand for it!) Hoo rah. On the other hand, isn’t the joy of playing zerg getting to be the bad guy just for a bit? Forgetting all the diplomacy and adventure and just murdering and eating everything in your path?Īnyway, I’m going to begin my rewrite with a bold move - you’d play zerg first. The zerg cannot be reasoned with, so, yes, Kerrigan had to be made reasonable to give them a hope in hell of being useful in moving the universe forward. The zerg simply don’t make for good meta-plot carriers - while you have the terrans and the protoss getting all chummy because, well, neither of them desire to assimilate all life in the universe. The more I think about SC2, the more I think they’d written themselves into a corner years ago. Abathur, NO! We can’t withstand pseudoscientific mangling of that magnitude! Either have the confidence to carry de-zerged Kerrigan all the way or find some other method to “save” her. I’ve made this point in a thousand places before - if you’re going to do something and reverse it, just don’t do it at all.
I feel like there’s a whole heap of The Fear in here - I’m not the biggest Starcraft fan but I’ll concede that the Queen of Blades has an iconic silhouette (zerg-heels aside), so I get the impression the campaign simply had to get her back in shape to satisfy the die-hards. Or rather, what annoys me is that within about five missions of Heart of the Swarm it has been undone (well, with some extra purple glowing bits). The de-zergification of Kerrigan is another thing that annoys me. Things really broke down for me when the broadcast of proof of Mengsk’s villainy didn’t actually affect the plot - it’s crudely relegated to a side quest despite how it is appears to rock the foundations of the Dominion in some cinematics.
The funny thing is that you don’t need a single bit of the Dark Voice meta-plot to make a satisfying campaign out of this - drop Zeratul’s cute bonus micro-campaign and replace the de-zergification of Kerrigan with a climax of storming Mengsk’s citadel with a riled-up populace behind you and you’re golden. Raynor’s rebellion against the tyrannical Mengsk is a clean motivation, easy to follow and get behind. I’m going to start by saying that, overall, the terran campaign, Wings of Liberty, is actually pretty solid. Having said that, I think there are some good stories in the mix here, so maybe it’s time to do some reworking… Like, Blizzard, you got away with that in Warcraft III because Archimonde was a literal demon - you can’t pull the same trick twice, and definitely not in such a different setting (at least not without groundwork that simply isn’t present). The things is… the meta-plot, of the Dark Voice returning to obliterate all life in the Koprulu Sector (The galaxy? The universe? It’s actually never really made clear that his ambitions are more than localised) is a bit of a mess. I’ve never had any concern over eSports or online multiplayer, but I have huge respect for what SC2 did with its singleplayer campaigns - tossing the hyper-balanced melee factions out the window and expanding them with bonus units, configuration options and special abilities. Ahhh, Starcraft II is an interesting beast.
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