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Getting up to Speed with Starcraft 2

There’s way too much to cover in one shot so consider this the first in a possible series of posts. I’ll do my best to tack on more information later on but please consider the massive expanse that is the Starcraft universe. Let’s just cover the fallout of the events in Starcraft: Brood War and lead up to Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.

I’m writing this under the assumption readers have played through the original Starcraft and Starcraft Brood War expansion pack’s single player campaigns. There also might be major spoilers involved as a lot of this information was gleamed by me during Blizzcon 2009.

We begin with the Zerg. What’s become of the zerg and more importantly, Kerrigan. All of her enemies lay beaten and broken beneath her feet, the zerg Queen of Blades was the undisputed ruler of the Korpulu Sector.

The Queen of Blades did not become complacent in the wake of her victory. She kept watch over the Swarm from her core hive on Char. The Brood War left her the dominant force in Koprulu sector. The initial explosive expansion of the zerg has been replaced with a foreboding silence for four years, but no scouting expeditions to Swarm-controlled worlds have lived to tell what they saw there.

Thus, outsiders can only speculate about what she has been doing–or what she has been seeking–these past four years. Many believe that the zerg are building their strength and engineering new organisms before going on the offensive again. Some contend that Kerrigan is staying her hand due to some small shred of humanity buried deep inside the creature she has become. Those who have encountered her savage fury know this to be merely wishful thinking.

The zerg has pretty much not invaded anything recently. You don’t see them unless you go looking for them is the status quo and those few folk that do encounter the zerg don’t live long enough to lift the shroud Kerrigan has so totally secured. Kerrigan is essentially looking for Xel’naga temples and other artifacts because within them she hopes to harness power unimaginable.

Mengsk and his forces have regrouped on Korhal IV. His first order of business was to rebuild the Terran Dominion. In Kerrigan he had found a new target for revenge, and he’d always been happier with a goal to work toward anyway. The Dominion has since become the most powerful force among the terran factions, having taken over many of the original Confederate worlds.

The Kel-Morian Combine and the Umojan Protectorate have been preparing for the inevitable war with either the zerg or Mengsk. The UED task force was almost completely destroyed in Brood War; only a few isolated pockets of survivors remain hidden in the Koprulu sector.

Jim Raynor has led a resistance movement against the Dominion, but that has been a losing battle. Arcturus Mengsk has used his greatest weapons–the media and propaganda–to marginalize Jim’s efforts. Raynor seems to be losing faith, drinking heavily and haunted by the ghosts of his past. He has never forgiven himself for letting Kerrigan be taken by the zerg.

So the Terrans. Well, Mengsk pretty much owns everything, his own son included who isn’t very fond of dear old dad as is knowing full well the depth of Arcturus’ psychosis. On the flipside is Raynor, god I love Raynor but the poor bastard really is in a bad way these days. He too is eventually going to start hunting down the Protoss artifacts for resale or other more honorable purposes. The deaths of Fenix, Tassadar, the destruction of Auir, the betrayal and subsequent madness of Mengsk, and of course the loss and corruption of Kerrigan would be enough to drive any man to suicide at the brink of the void. Luckily Raynor isn’t just any man. At the start of Starcraft 2 Raynor’s ultimate goal is to free the sector of Mengsk’s grasp.

At last we observe the Protoss who have had the very core of their society torn more than a few times during the events leading to Starcraft 2.

The protoss evacuees from Aiur have been struggling to recover from the loss of their home planet while finding ways to mesh their society with that of the dark templar who call Shakuras home. The transition has been difficult for both sides, and the name of Raszagal has been invoked more than once to keep the peace.

The old Conclave has been swept away, and in its absence many protoss have begun looking to their ancient tribal affiliations for leadership and a sense of identity. With the protoss people working together as they did in ancient times and studying the xel’naga technology on Shakuras, the protoss have made many technological developments for continuing the war with the zerg.

Memories of Raszagal have plagued Zeratul, who was further disturbed by his encounter with Samir Duran and the zerg-protoss hybrid Duran had apparently been creating. Shortly after bidding Raynor farewell on Shakuras, Zeratul departed the planet, and he has not been heard from in years. To this day he seeks to understand what Duran and the hybrid he was creating might portend. Lately he has uncovered something that may be related to the xel’naga, creators of both protoss and zerg, and he seeks new clues to unravel the mystery

I’ll give you the story right here and now, the big secret, the big mystery that Zeratul was given. Here it is as detailed in the Dark Templar Saga trilogy written by the amazing Christie Golden. I won’t get into the deeper details of the Protoss and believe me when i say they are very relevant but this post can easily turn into a book in itself if I start. Here’s the deal with the Xel’naga. They created the zerg and the protoss for a very important reason as both races are connected to each other. The Xel’naga are not immortal heavenly beings like gods, and they do have a life cycle. The Xel’naga set out to create 2 races; one pure of form (protoss) and the other pure of essence (zerg). The Xel’naga would eventually return and merge the two races together into a single species and then inhabit/implant their souls/minds into them and thus being “reborn” only to begin the cycle again. This is as normal to them as breathing is to a terran or absorbing nutrients is to a protoss.

The Xel’naga are coming back and life as we know it in Starcraft will never be the same.

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Starcraft: Epic Protoss rush win (horror gating)

This has to be the most dick move I have ever seen played in Starcraft. This was filmed in 2007 during a televised event (Starcraft is kind of a big deal in Korea) and the expression on the losing player’s face is a thing of LEGEND.

For the uninitiated – red protoss player vs yellow protoss player. Red moves a probe across the entire field faster than all hell and starts building his base ON TOP of his enemy’s base. This disrupts the resource flow of the yellow protoss which is funny, then he starts warping in Gateways and then pumps out Zealots.

The look on Pokju’s (the yellow player) face is AWESOME. It’s like he’s in complete shock and panic, way out of his league and just plain ripped.

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Interview with Chris Metzen on Starcraft 2 Lore!

The folks over at Starcraft Legacy had the chance to sit down with Chris Metzen and ask a few questions regarding the lore and such of Starcraft 2. It’s kind of painful to listen to for a few reasons, none of which are content wise (lots of dead silence in between questions, low sound quality where I can hear people whispering louder than I can hear Chris answering, stuff like that). Lucky for us there’s a transcript!

Were there any other ending scenarios that were tossed around for the original StarCraft? i.e. Kerrigan is not abandoned.

Metzen – Actually no, it was funny, the Kerrigan thing wasn’t a foregone conclusion. The Aiur thing was – the Overmind invading Aiur, the fall of the Protoss, all that good stuff. Kerrigan actually came around the middle of development, we made her up, we made her kinda cool, we developed this relationship and I think the decision to have her abandoned by the [Terrans] and become the Queen of Blades was by me and a guy named James Finney. We co-wrote the campaign and we were like “Whoa, that’s got some pepper, we should go there”. It was sort of a surprising turn of events; it wasn’t mapped out from the start. My impression, and it’s been a few years, but my impression is that we pretty much went the way we conceived of it going. But this time around, with all these years of expectations and all this stuff we wanted to do with these characters, I think this one is shifted more in flight that the first game did. There were so many more voices and writers.

Did Kerrigan find out anything about Duran’s activities? When she talks with Raynor at the end of one of the missions we played she says “Time is running out … for all of us”. So it seems like she knows there’s something going on…?

Metzen – She’s found out quite a bit, I can’t tell you what that is. But she doesn’t know everything. Uhm. Yeah. … That’s a shitty answer but it’s true, I swear it!

One of our concerns from playing the little bit of the campaign is that we got two missions from Dr. Hanson, but at the end of that second one she’s talking about a “Paradise world” where we can “run away to”. I guess we were just making sure we weren’t treading on the toes of Battlestar Galactica type territory… In search of Kobol and so on.

Metzen - To address the concern… Sure, she’s looking for a nice clean place for her people to live. That was what Galactica was about whereas in StarCraft II it’s just one minor storyline. The fate of her people could take a number of shapes. But it’s not remotely as big a theme as it is in Galactica… it remains to be seen, had you continued that game experience whether they make it or not… The StarCraft universe has a way of roughing people up. But they might!

Can you tell us a little bit about the process you go through when you’re working on developing the lore behind a planet? How do you decide if it’s in shambles or if the inhabitants have a sudden change and where that history comes from?

Metzen - It’s a lot of things. It’s not always just story up front, it could be from tilesets we’re building, what’s cool with them, the permutations of tilesets. It could be designers having an instinct for a mission i.e. “we really want to do this kind of mission” and we’re like “oh well that kinda fits in here”. There’s a number of conditions that go into these maps. For Hanson 01 where we show Agria where the Zerg increasingly show up and rough it up. We want to show that in its most idyllic form up front and then it sort of goes to hell. Sometimes the story demands that. Other times it’s kinda whimsy, or cool art or chasing clever hooks – any number of things. The story usually before the level design process is pretty broad and we’ll know generally “we want to finish up Hanson’s storyline in … 4.5 maps” whatever that means. So let’s look at the kind of missions that are appropriate for that arc and then let’s look at what each of those missions… there’s a lot of layers that go into it and no over-arching solution. Story is just yet another of the dials on the board where everything is relative to everything else. If you pull one thing up over here it goes way down over here – it’s a balancing act in terms of how it all comes across at the end of the day between art, sound and design.

Where do the Dark Templar books fit into the timeline of the StarCraft Universe?

Metzen - If you sat down and read all of those in one sitting… I think… God I’ve been reading them again too… If you can say it’s been four years since Brood War, the Dark Templar Trilogy happens in year four, so it’s many months if not a year before StarCraft II – so it’s relevant. The Zerg are popping back into the picture in that trilogy in very specific ways and places, like Aiur where they already were. But they’re not on the scene yet in terms of the Terran Dominion and UNN and whatever news services are covering general threats, but they’re still out there.

In the disabled Protoss bonus mission on the StarCraft CD where Fenix is reminiscing over his and Artanis’s conquests over the Tagal on Dannuth VII. Basically is there anything behind that?

Metzen – Off the top of my head, I tell ya, it’s just something I made up at the time. The universe you envision… Like yeah, there might be a lot of races and there’s loads of stuff going on that we just allude to. Like in a WarCraft way you can just drop names and chase them up later cause there’s a whole world out there to explore. The way StarCraft actually took shape… The problem about not referencing the Tagal all these years later is “Shit, is it real or is it just something I threw out all those years ago”… I haven’t heard that word since I wrote it all those years ago, so there’s nothing to tell. I’m sure there’s a lot of those little diddies that were just sort of sown in. Interesting thing about the Protoss is that they have this mission called the “Dae’Uhl” where they have to go out and police the universe and protect lesser lifeforms… Who? Where? There’s another part in the campaign where Fenix is yapping on about having fought on these battlefields like “Who are you talking about? The Zerg just showed up like three months ago…” in the original game. It is true the suggestion that in StarCraft there is a bigger universe out there, it isn’t just these three races. There’s creeps and critters all over the tilesets. There is aliens out there we just haven’t put a lot of thought into it – yet. Thanks for reminding me though, that seems like something we should do.

Are there any sentient races out there that are going to make an appearence, other than critters?

Metzen - They probably won’t make an appearance in Wings of Liberty. Candidly, yes, we probably should look into that kind of thing. I don’t know what we’ll do.

Stukov: will he be making an appearence somewhat or has he just totally disappeared since Resurrection IV?

Metzen - I’m gonna take the 5th on that one. It’s interesting but we’ll see. We haven’t had any plans for him in this first chapter. There’s some really interesting hooks with him and what happened to him but with everything else going on with the Zerg component of the story, we haven’t made any huge plans with him yet. Don’t wanna promise anything, it’s something interesting to be leveraged if we can figure out the right way to do it. There’s all sorts of ways to leverage characters meaningfully into things without derailing your whole story.

For people trying to create their own stories and campaigns, what inspires the hooks and decisions to have various important events happen?

Metzen - Again, it’s probably a lot of things. Especially this time around, the story telling process for StarCraft II has been a lot more team-based. For the first one it was me and a guy named James Finney, he was the lead designer and I was the writer. But we really cross-informed, just sat there every day and ground it out. This time around it’s so much more of a group process, like me and Andy Chambers, the other writer, we sit and jam like “well what do we do here”. The art directors, the lead designers, there’s a lot of stakeholders in story mode. And I just mean the single player in terms of the way the story comes off, the characters we show, what are these spaces, what are the broad themes we’re chasing.

For my part I love big overaching mythological cycles, like the dark sins of the past come back to haunt the present. I love that shit. I love broken people scrabbling for redemption – people like Raynor and Kerrigan, the two loneliest people in the universe, two beaten up people: can they pull themselves out of the mud they find themselves in and find redemption of some kind? I tend to chase things from that level, like the Kerrigan Raynor relationship to me is the heart of what StarCraft is, but my teammates are like “yeah whatever bro, it’s all about multiplayer”. I geek out on that, like how real can we make these characters feel and in the midst of this great galactic conflict and these ancient races battling for supremacy there’s just these two lonely people in the middle of it and the way their story will unfold affects everything else. That just seems worth chasing to me, so everything else just extends out of that for me in terms of walking into a design or story meeting.

But I think a lot of the stakeholders process their own favourite themes and chase the stories they dig. I mean, we watch all this stuff, like Galactica and all this sci-fi and fantasy – it all gives you new fuel to envision these campaigns or whatever. It’s informed by everything science fiction – I’m sure Buck Rogers has a part to play in the DNA of StarCraft II. It takes a lot of different shapes – inspiration is everything, the late night news, it all defines the story teller you are for all of us. As you come into a creative session or group session to build a campaign like this I think it all just informs. You gotta play with what pieces fit better than others like “I was watching pokemon the other day and like these little balls…” maybe not, it might not work as well. We have to figure that out at a tribal level now, what are our instincts as a crew, as opposed to ten years ago when it was just one or two guys. That’s definitely shifted in flight for the better, I think this story’s a lot more informed by more perspectives, a broader sense of what works for an audience.

Can Protoss get infested?

Metzen - I’m trying to think if there are specific fictional answers to that, I could have sworn we had a story or two like that in the manga recently. But I’m spacing out… I feel like I wanna take the 5th on that too. It’s a weird one. Off the top of your head you’d think “sure!”

I read something about them using their psionic ability to negate it?

Metzen - I’m not so sure about that. These days with so much being written I’m not so on top of it all – if you could say I ever was – all the little ins and outs. That question runs to the core of what the mythology is, it is a question that will haunt us for the next four years, it’s part of the DNA of what StarCraft really is. There isn’t a really satisfactory way of answering that at this time.

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Hi-def Starcraft 2 Zeratul/Kerrigan Cinematic

I remember when I first saw this on the massive screen at last year’s Blizzcon, and how it completely floored me. Blizzard’s always been really good with their cinematic production, it really shows now with the recently released HD version of that very same trailer. Granted it doesn’t have the screaming cheers and explosion that the 2008 Blizzcon footage has but hey, it’s Starcraft 2.

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Starcraft The Dark Templar Saga Part 1: Firstborn

I’ve never really done a book review before so I’ll give it my best shot. I’ll break it down for you guys, hopefully that will make it easier to keep up with my ranting. Here’s the back cover synopsis of the 1st book in the Dark Templar Saga trilogy:

Jake Ramsey – an unassuming, yet talented archeologist – has been given the chance of a lifetime. hired to investigate a recently unearthed Xel’Naga temple, he knows this latest assignment will open up whole new possibilities for his career. Yet, when Jake discovers the remains of a long-dead protoss mystic, his hopes and dreams are irrevocably drowned in a flood of alien memories. Bonded to the spirit of the dead protoss, Jake has become the sole inheritor of the protoss’s total history – every event, every though – every feeling.

Struggling to maintain his own fragile identity amidst the raging psychic storm in his mind, Jake soon realizes that he has stumbled upon a secret so cataclysmic in magnitude – that it will shake the very foundations of the universe.

Overall Opinion

I’ll go right ahead and say it, Christie Golden is most likely my favorite author of all time. Her Warcraft books were incredible and it seems her pure raw talent flows perfectly through to the Starcraft universe as well. The writing is superb. The pace in the book is strong and to the point, you only get sidetracked for a few moments at most when going into the background of a character or supporting role; and even then you only go deep enough to give a basic yet solid understanding of the type of person this character is so you can better see the main scene play out. There isn’t any convoluted pages of ranting text and there isn’t useless and needless distractions. Everywhere you are taken as you read has to do with the message trying to be communicated, everything in some way has to do with the main story and helping you really empathize and feel as if you’re in it.

One time when the author is showing how the ancient protoss are first discovering written language and developing these basic concepts I was smiling so wide and felt chills go down my spine. I thought to myself, “God if only I could be watching this in reality, how ancient mankind was first able to make the connection, that spark of genius that lead to the first ever written language of pictures. How fucking cool would that be to see that look of pure amazement and happiness when the first man learned that dragging a stick in the dirt could make images.” It sounds corny and really nerdy of me, but that spirit of discovery and adventure is like a drug to me; and this book delivers the thing on a silver platter.

Difficulty

The vocabulary in the book is good. It’s moderately advanced but nothing too crazy. You’re not going to fall asleep trying to read this book. Too many times I’ve been told “Hey Rick you NEED to read this book its so great and award winning and-” the list goes on for a while. I read the first two pages and feel dizzy because the author is so full of himself he’s going through the fucking thesaurus about 40 times a sentence. I hate that shit. Stories don’t need to be written like a Harvard level dissertation on 14th century literature to be good.

The imagery in the story is very clear and you would have to be simply not paying attention to miss the point. The only time I ever caught myself stumbling on words or rereading a sentence was when I came across names of certain protoss or words in the protoss language because, frankly, they were alien to me and I couldn’t identify it at first glance. Its easy to pick up though, and I found myself buying it and reading and completing it all in one day.

My kids were kind of shocked I was able to sit still for so many hours awake reading this book all day yesterday, took me about 8 hours.

Plot Summary

This is the first in a trilogy but no worries, I have all three books and will get started on the 2nd sometime this week. The story opens up with Jake being stuck on some ass of a planet with very little in the way of supplies, equipment, or comfort. He’s in the middle of some archeological dig with his team and the conditions are pretty crappy. He gets a message from the son of Emperor Arcturus Mengsk, Valerian Mengsk. Valerian has asked Jake to head an expidition into an at the moment unknown Xel’Naga temple and find out what’s inside. En route he meets RM Dahl (Rosemary) who has also been hired on as head of security and charged with protecting Valerian’s investment.

Jake eventually finds the way into the heart of the temple where there are hundreds of Khaydarian crystals (protoss stuff) and the body of a dead protss and her ship in some sort of time frozen state. Upon touching the corpse, Jake is assaulted by the not-so-dead protoss’ conscience and that massive psi-assault turns out not to be an attack after all. The dead protoss is a Preserver that has the entire history of the entire protoss race as well as their emotions, memories, and feelings inside her mind; the “assault” was her transfering herself into Jake’s mind as well as physically altering his mind so that a mere human was capable of taking it all in.

Rosemary, under orders of Valerian, betrays Jake and incarcerates Jake’s entire team (while Jake is in a coma dreaming about ancient protoss history). Her orders were basically to take Jake back to Valerian for questioning and “debriefing”. It gets a little muddled here but to quickly recap: Rosemary is nothing more than a hired merc, Jake has his own mind as well as the mind of Zamara (an ancient protoss) in his skull, on top of everything he has now inherited the archived complete collection of the Khala which is the protoss psychic collection of all their emotions and thoughts and memories. Think of it as a “hive mind” kind of thing, its explained so much better in the book, but this is a review/summary.

The marines arrive and place EVERYBODY “under arrest” including Rosemary and her team, and lock them in the battlecruiser’s brig while they head back to Valerian. All parties fear the worst as Jake comes to the realization that he’s probably going to become some experiment where his brain will be poked and prodded and then eventually he’ll be killed off like the others. With the forced help of Zamara, he removed the resoc (resocialization, treatment given to space marines since they used to be prison inmantes. Its like a lobotamy that represses all their old memories of the terrible things they did and makes them into obedient atomotons) of a marine and that marine frees Jake before going off on some mad revenge killing spree on the ship. Jake frees Rosemary because Zamara tells him too, they both escape the ship and the book comes to a close. I also want to mention that Zamara is trying to get Jake to realize something so that she can proceed with her mission, whatever that is, and the proccess of this is very fucking cool.

Jake constantly slips into sleep or some sort of catatonic state in which he is reliving the life of the most ancient protoss and following along. He pretty much is this old protoss named Temlarr, who happens to be the partner of the most important protoss in history who discovered the secrets of the makers and established the Khala which is the joint consciousness of the protoss race.

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