StarCraft II Creative Development Q&A - Part 4
In part four of our continuing series, Brian Kindregan, co-lead writer of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty and lead writer of Heart of the Swarm, answers more of the community’s most burning lore questions.
Question: Raynor's attitude in StarCraft II was surprising, considering where we left off in Brood War. After Kerrigan backstabbed him and killed Fenix, Raynor gave up on her and was hell-bent on getting rid of her. He explicitly promised he would kill her. What led him to change his mind, killing Tychus so he could save her?
Answer: I answered most of this question previously, but I want to follow up with this one for two reasons, which I'll take in reverse order.
About Tychus: By the time Jim and Tychus are in the cave with Kerrigan, I think Jim is all-in. He's made his choice. There's no going back, and no shrinking from what has to be done.
The bigger reason I wanted to address this issue was your good point that Jim's attitudes and actions at the beginning of Wings are surprising. I want to have a discussion with the community about this, and hear your thoughts. At the start of Wings of Liberty, it had been four years since Brood War, and Jim had been through a lot. He'd had time to reflect on the past—perhaps too much time. Additionally, the Queen of Blades was in seclusion for most of that time, so she was not continually stoking his hatred. If Jim felt the same exact emotions at that point, if his thoughts had not evolved at all, that would be very strange. It would be as if the intervening four years hadn't happened, and he was just a two dimensional automaton sitting in purgatory, waiting for the story to resume. So Jim slipped into an alcoholic haze, and focused on the things he'd lost—including the red-headed ghost, Sarah Kerrigan.
That's the reasoning for Jim's surprising actions. Now, the counterargument would be, players didn't go through those four years with Jim. They didn't experience that—so they experienced a disconnect. Jim went from one attitude straight into another. This is a completely valid argument.
So I'd ask the community—what do you think? Should Jim have been in the same spot emotionally that he'd been in four years earlier? Or was the evolution a good idea, but poorly executed? Or was it a good idea and it worked fine for most of us? Or should it have been a whole different idea?
Question: How did the Dominion fleet manage to break Char when Artanis, the Dominion, and the UED couldn't do that during the Brood War? How could the Dominion build a ridiculously over-bloated fleet to take Char after that devastating loss years before?
Answer: There are a number of factors. The fleets of the UED, Mengsk, and Artanis had already suffered attrition during the Brood War. The Dominion and the UED had also recently clashed on Korhal, further depleting both of their forces. Stukov and Duke had been lost to their respective armies as well.
Four years later, the Dominion had time to build several large fleets with much more advanced technology, and the Terrans had learned a great deal about how to fight Zerg. Even more importantly, when the Dominion fleet attacked, most of the Swarm was away from Char; the Queen of Blades had sent Zerg off to find the pieces of the artifact. She recalled them when the Dominion fleet appeared, but only the nearest broods would have been able to get back in time for the battle. The rest were en route when the fighting started. It was a calculated risk for the Queen of Blades, but she judged the artifact to be more dangerous to her than the threat of invasion. And I'd say she was right—after all, the invasion actually failed. It was only Raynor's use of the artifact that won the day.
Question: What specific lore problems does Blizzard think Wings of Liberty introduced?
Answer: I often agree with criticisms leveled at us, in the sense that we didn’t do the best job in communicating what we were trying to say. However, we haven't introduced anything that damaged the lore; we just haven’t always executed as well as we could have.
A practical example: the Overmind. We revealed some of its backstory, but we made mistakes in our presentation. We were giving an incomplete picture of the backstory. These were events that happened long ago, and we're only hearing the view from one of the entities involved. Other characters would have different views of what happened. And this is only the first chapter of a longer story. And not even the chapter focusing on the zerg. So we thought the Overmind revelations would raise questions rather than answer them. We were very wrong—we did not make it clear that this was an incomplete picture, and so many saw it as a definitive statement of what had happened, and were understandably upset.
We also thought that we could have Tassadar compliment the Overmind's courage without seeming to imply that they were BFFs. In other words, one can admire an enemy's courage, but still hate him. But that was a mistake—given how few words Tassadar gets to utter in the entire game, he should not have wasted any of them on a compliment to an enemy. It sent the wrong message.
Finally, we did not foresee, at all, that people would compare StarCraft to Warcraft III, and then make assumptions about what we were saying based on that comparison. "Brown orcs, green orcs. The Overmind is good!" We never said the Overmind was "good” anywhere in the game, but we should have been clearer about what we were saying. (E.g., spelled out that the zerg are not "good," nor were they ever "good" in the past.) Since we did not define what we were saying, the community, correctly, turned to other examples from Blizzard's body of work.
We will always struggle with the fact that we get only a few lines of dialogue in this fast-paced, dynamic game to explain concepts that could fill 50 pages in a novel (such as the Overmind's backstory, or the earlier discussion of free will). We'll never be able to explain things in as much detail as I'd like, and will instead have to rely on the player to consider what we've shown and to interpret it. Narrative games are not films, and they are not novels. However, in this case, we could have done a better job explaining our story point and anticipating all the ways it could be misinterpreted.
This is something we work on continually.
Click here for Part 3 -- Click here for Part 5
If you’re looking for more lore, here’s part 1 of our StarCraft II Creative Development Q&A, here’s part 2, and here’s part 3. We’ll have many more answers to your burning questions in the weeks to come.
PS yes i think the game needed more dialogue
The reason why I loved Brood War so much was because of the writing and dialogue. In WoL I felt there was no suspense or drama at all. I just kept clicking for the next mission, hopeing it would get better... but it didn't.
The point you make about Raynor's evolution I think was a great idea, but as you suggested, poorly executed. His feelings for "Kerrigan" would've been much more impactful if when he confronts Valerian in the middle of the campaign and Valerian drops this bombshell to Raynor and the audience, "there's a way to save Sarah Kerrigan," instead of constantly hinting that Raynor should'a, could'a saved her, so you just know he's going to "save her" sometime down the line.
I know you guys are trying to appeal to a broader audience, but as they say on NFL Countdown: "C'Mon Man!"
By the time they are in that cave, Raynor would have probably decided that keeping Kerrigan alive would give them a fighting chance. Even if the Swarm and Kerrigan still want to consume everyone.
But in all seriousness i hope they don't write him off because we hadn't seen any mention of cerebrates in WoL which kind of bothered me.
This is EXACTLY the way he felt in WoL, because NO MATTER THE CIRCUMSTANCES he was some detached, snarky, cheesy guy. When he yelled at Tycus and Matt about Kerrigan, it was SO INCREDIBLY OUT OF CHARACTER because it was the THE REST OF THE GAME he just passively shrugged it off with some stupidly concocted 1 liner.
The EPITOME of 2 dimensional. Matt seemed more characteristic, despite the writers blatant attempts to the contrary.
Why did you feel the need to CONSTANTLY shoehorn the "country western" gag in to the dialogue? He never talked like that in SC1. Its like he has 2 dialects, he talks like sc1 jim raynor most of the time, but then when doing some failed attempt at humor, he gets a southern accent and says things like "You did real gud out ther Tahkus. Luks lahk yore tahm in thu freezer din't dull yer edge nun."
What?. ... Why? It comes across forced, unnatural, and random. You don't become a hick after being an alcoholic for 4 years.
His behavior was irrational for a real life person, even an alcoholic in his position. And as a result he seemed COMPLETELY out of place in the story, with absolutely no emotion whatsoever until the offer to assault char.
Another example of how weak the immersion was due to lack of understanding (or communication) to the player of the GRAVITY of the situations the characters find themselves in.
NOTHING SEEMED REAL. Just because you SAY its a grave situation (they assault char and lots of people died) doesn't mean that the situation FEELS grave, based on the presentation.
The whole game feels like a poorly written episode of Thundercats, Scooby Doo or any other terrible Hannah Barbara cartoon because of the presentation.
The fate of the universe, war, death, very serious situations, and we were given very "after-school-special" dialogue and cheesiness and lent no weight to the gravity of the situations they were put in. Time and time again you hear ham-fisted, over acted, melted cheese filled jokes between characters. Absolutely NONE of these added to the characters or the story. Have ONE of these moments between characters might have added to the characters relationships, but not EVERY SINGLE TIME they interact. These are times you can add depth, relationship, story, emotion, attachment.... You were concerned with Raynor seeming false because he's mad about interplanetary destruction, but instead he seems false because all of his interactions feel like they're read from a script, and terrible 1 liner puns and jokes, which in my opinion ruined any attachment i have to the WOL campaign. The doctor seemed like the only genuine character.
THE ONLY TIME where my suspension of disbelief wasn't broken was when the doc turned infested. There was depth there, emotional depth, and shock as well, whereas the rest of the story seemed like some adventure cartoon straight out of the 80's...
The game should have been rated M and the topics dealt with a little more seriously, on the writers parts, and on Jim Raynors part.
Very Simple Facts Kerrigan Dies All Human Life Dies.. Not Just His People or Just Jim. But Every one Every wear... Its Jim Choice He can KILL Every one or Break his Vow or Decide that the Lives of every Man Woman And Child in creation are more important that well Any Vow or Anything. Not Realy a Hard Millitary Choice. A hard personal one but realy no choice at all.
I have to say, I rather enjoyed the idea of Raynor hell bent on revenge. Though it is kind of cool that you took his story in a different direction than the usual "HE WENT CRAZY." I think you're appealing to the wrong audience with a love story, especially when his emotions still don't make a ton of sense there. I mean, he kind of does this thing where he trusts people too much and then they backstab him and he meets them with his wrath. We saw it with Mensk, and we were looking forward to it with Kerrigan.
If I had to say what I look forward to in your storyarches it's things like the Duran saga. That's BY FAR the best part of the Starcraft universe IMO. You PERFECTLY lured us into thinking we were seeing the exact same thing that happened with Kerrigan (and, lets face it, most of the characters in blizzard lore in terms of the good guy getting corrupted). A ghost goes in, wants to fight the swarm, gets infested, is now a super powerful infested ghost. But it's not. That's what is so great about Duran, just when you think you've got it all figured out it turns out that there is actually a much MUCH bigger picture. With WoL you kind of get the opposite. You remind us that there is a bigger picture, which is great... But for the most part we had already gathered that the Xel Naga were coming which is just a small part of the WoL campaign which ends up just being a quest for Kerrigan, which was kind of a let down considering all the stuff going on. WoL left us with just so many loose ends and really the only thing that was resolved is Raynor gets to really impress Kerrigan. Huzzah.
About Kerrigan - Raynor: Well, it's natural expect Raynor to reflect about what happened in BW and not being in the same place like 4 years ago, when BW happened. That's why it's ok for him to not be constantly in anger about that
Problem to me is: he can't still be in love and nostalgic for her! It is really clear for him that the Kerrigan he loved was no more. Just imagine your wife murders all your friends and almost an entire civilization and now she's out, wandering god knows when. It's sick for you to still being nostalgic with her. You may not be mad like when that happened, but at the very least you should feel a desire for justice. You don't care if she was infected by a zombie, or just mad about something. You just want justice. You want her in jail or dead, whatever.
That's what pissed me, not only the contradiction of the vow. It was really clear that with or without prophecy, impending universe doom, hybrids, or whatever, Raynor was going to save her anyways if he had the chance.
About the overmind: I agree that, for such a massive retcon, it was very bad communicated. But even well presented, the biggest issue for me was the retcon itself: how the very zerg essence was scrapped just to introduce a new character into the lore. For all the zerg fans, zerg is about consuming another races to evolve. We want to be perfect. Now, being good or not, we weren't. We are a race of enslaved monsters, which only reason to live is to follow our god directives in order to live. That could be ok if WoL was a new story, but for most of the zerg fans who played SC, this is really insulting. Now every zerg SC mission, from the protection of the newcomer until the invasion of Aiur was only made because we were forced to by our god. To me that is totally unacceptable. Was really worth it? You could have introduced the new character in another way (also, Tassadar as ghost was really uncreative to me. That belong to Warcraft universe, not here).
Again, thank you for your honest responses.
About the weakness of the storyline in general - sometimes I think they just make up the dates of stuff on the fly, haha.
The script in SC2 WoL: Weak compared to the briefings in SC1 and SCBW. The briefings were where all the characters really got to interact, and we seen sparks fly. Remember the phrase "Duran, you son of a !@#$%, what is the meaning of this?!" or "when it rains it poors. . ." or "I'm pretty much the Queen ^-*!@ of the universe . . .". It was pretty weak in SC2 WoL when Raynor said "This isn't science fiction, Tychus". Funny at the time, but it took away from the climactic feeling that we were getting before the last mission.
Tassadar as a ghost: Yeh, I would expect that in Warcraft, but not here.
I mean, StarCraft's story was okay, but BW was amazing. WarCraft 3 was okay, but TFT was amazing. WoL's story was kinda meh, but maybe HoTS will be amazing. WoL followed by D3 has me kinda jaded on story presentation by modern Blizzard (I'm of the opinion that on paper D3's story is fine, but as presented was really, really bad). But if you can pull it off, I'll be all the more impressed.