The Story of Starcraft Part 3: Writing on the Game

How can an RTS tell a story?

The clumsy approach is to separate out the gameplay and the plot. Get all the characters to do the talky thing at each other between each mission, then get to the pew pew pew parts.

If that’s the only way you’re telling the story, you’re doing something wrong. Everything in a game feeds the narrative, whether the designers realise it or not.

Telling a story through speed and combat

If you begin the original Starcraft game, you have the choice to play a tutorial. The tutorial covers the basics of base building - you win when you harvest a small amount of resources.

The first mission of the Terran campaign is… also a tutorial. You win when you use your base to train a small group of marines* while a trivial number of enemies mostly ignore you.

* The basic military unit of the Terrans.

Nothing happens here.

Even so, it speaks volumes. You probably won’t notice it all consciously, but your brain picks up on it.

If I’m being generous, this double-tutorial opening accurately reflects how bureaucratic and incompetent the Confederacy* is. It’s a meta-tutorial, teaching the player and their character. More accurately, it was the ‘90s - they couldn’t assume typical players knew how bases in RTS games worked.

* The main Terran government, out here in these far-flung colonies. Your employers. Bad people.

Even without being generous, we see a lot of the Terran backstory in action here.

Heavily armoured, imposing and armed with a huge drill. These are the most delicate part of your base.

The macro gameplay is familiar to anyone with much experience in the genre. There’s a central building (“Command Center”) - that trains workers and acts as a resource drop-off point. Workers (“SCVs”) gather resources and build other buildings. Those other buildings train combat units, research upgrades and act as static defences.

Even in that, there’s a lot that mark this as uniquely Terran:

• The resources those SCVs gather? There are two types: giant, blue crystals and weird, green gas. You’ve never seen anything like these before. You’re not on Earth anymore, Magistrate.

• SCVs look big, bulky and awkward. They move slowly, taking a while* to accelerate to top speed. Their turning looks downright awkward.

• Units speak with military jargon, looking and sounding like Full Metal Jacket characters. The suits that marines wear look like awesome, scifi space suits with jet thrusters and everything. How do they speak? Over a choppy, static-laden radio**.

• Units die. A lot. Unless you’re aiming for a challenge run, you won’t so much as go to the space grocery store without needing to write condolence letters.

• The buildings are built for war in space. There are no porches, windows or French doors. They look scrappy and built to survive in a warzone.

* It’s probably less than a second but, from overhead, it feels slow. I don’t know.

** “Wow, gee, so there’s more radio interference IN SPACE than on Earth?” Sure, but it creates the feeling of more primitive tech, whether it makes sense or not. Also, this society has AI - they could easily have something that cleans up a radio signal. The cost would be justified - how many lives have been lost in war due to bad comms?

The Command Center clearly wasn’t designed by Apple

You learn other things in the early missions - like how Terran buildings burn down if they take too much damage*. Marines have an ability called a Stimpack - it increases fire rate and movement speed, but causes damage to themselves when they use it.

* The manual says this is because of hasty, patchwork and improvised engineering.

That has clear mechanical implications, trading durability for firepower.

What about the narrative ones? Giving performance-enhancing substances to your troops - nay, ordering them to take them, even though they’re addictive and have a list of side effects longer than this retrospective? What sort of army would do that?

So SCVs move slowly and awkwardly, while marines risk addiction and bleeding from the eyes for the ability to run and shoot faster.

That’s not even all that speed alone has to say here.

Skipping ahead a few years, Warcraft 3 battles are so. Slow. Going from Starcraft to Warcraft is almost physically painful. While I think the difference is too great, I respect the design decision here.

Warcraft is medieval(ish) high fantasy. Imagine two groups of swordmen charging at each other in a movie. Both blocks of soldiers hack at each other for ages, slowly whittling each other down.

Starcraft is space opera/grim/war scifi. Imagine a group of soldiers kicking down a door and opening fire. The battle is over in seconds.

You could argue about the realism of that. I hear real sword fights last a few swings at most. Whatever - these games are works of fiction, playing with the tropes of their genres. Slow battles in Warcraft feels right. If they had machine guns and took this long to clear a room, it would feel weird. With bows, it works.

In Starcraft, skirmishes usually end quickly. Terran marines fire quickly but also drop quickly. Same with most units from the other races. Combat is fast because it’s the future - everything is faster there.

Squad goals

Units in Starcraft* respond quickly to your commands. When I said SCVs are clunky, I meant relative to other units. They still respond better than any RTS aiming for realism.

* And much, much more so in Starcraft 2

Units are big and brightly coloured, too. They stand out from the background and are easy to click. Tell them to move and they’re already there.

This fosters good micro play*, where skilled players can move threatened units to safety and back into the fight again. It’s a huge part of the series’ success as an eSport platform - the game is about as dynamic as you can be.

* Controlling units in battles. Contrast with macro play - building up your base, economy, research, etc

It also feeds into the narrative of futuristic warfare. Eighteenth century warfare is a large blob of riflemen marching in unison. Twenty-first century warfare is a small, elite squad, supported by drone coverage, signals intelligence and night vision goggles.

Starcraft feels like that only more so. It’s easy to imagine a Terran commander in front of - or hooked into - a display just like the one you’re seeing on your screen, looking down on your troops and seeing things from above.

You respond and so do they at the speed of computers.

What about the Zerg? You’ll later learn they function as a hive mind, so it’s a similar idea. Each unit feeds info to the others, responding in tandem to threats they can’t yet see with their own eyes.

As for the Protoss, they have both psionic abilities and advanced technology. They could take either approach or both.

For skilled players, Starcraft skirmishes have an element of chess to them. Angles, defences, lines of attack, these all matter. A group of six marines can slaughter a group of 12 marines, given a big enough skills gap between the players.   

The field of battle

Starcraft 1 campaign maps are often big and sparse. They lack enough doodads to keep it from feeling empty.

Even so, what they have isn’t bad.

Battles take place in all sorts of places, from asteroids to lava planets to space stations to cities. Some of the maps use these designs well, like space station maps that can cause both claustrophobia and vertigo, thanks to narrow walkways suspended over empty space.

There’s more to it than that, though. Most maps are covered in craters, indigenous creatures, solar/wind generators of some sort and abandoned civilian buildings. Later games* add even more doodads to the map.

* And modders

This corner of the galaxy is filled with danger and wonder, ancient artefacts and natural disasters, hope and despair.

It doesn’t take much to add that to the terrain. Other folks walked on these lands too and probably also suffered a grizzly fate.

Terrans are newcomers to an old part of the universe.

Zerg take this idea even further. The ground in Zerg bases is covered with a spongy, organic layer called “creep”. It serves a mechanical purpose - most Zerg buildings must be built on creep and, in later games, it offers benefits to Zerg units while standing on it.

Still, they gave this to the Zerg, adding to the idea that they’re a contamination spreading across worlds.

Mechanically, a patch of ground with no units, buildings, resources and obstacles is empty.

Narratively, it can tell a whole story - or at least set a mood.

This is everywhere

Every RTS tells its stories this way. Every unit has size, speed and durability of some sort.

Blizzard of old were especially good at this, given their world building and attention to detail.

What games do this badly? What games tell different stories with their design and their narratives?

I’d like to hear your thoughts. Here are two that come to mind.

The first is from... Blizzard of old. Though this is me being mean, making fun of them for a design choice from the early days of the genre.

In the Warcraft series, orcs are aggressive, muscular, lightly armoured and wielding axes. Humans are smaller, armoured and carrying swords.

In Warcraft 3, they play differently. In Warcraft 2, though, the front line soldiers for each faction are identical. Same health, same damage, same movement speed. It’s simpler but, visually, it makes no sense.

A more jarring example comes from, surprise surprise, EA.

One of the factions in Command & Conquer is the GLA – a group of terrorists who have the backing several countries and their militaries.

They can build an angry mob.

Now, it’s a formidable yet vulnerable unit, just as a group of civilians armed with Molotovs and pipes would be.

The idea of training them is funny enough. Are you recruiting them on social media? Teaching them to be angrier? What, exactly?

What’s weirder is how much control you have over them. You can tell this violent mob to patrol your base, protect your resources, selectively destroy buildings, pull into side streets to stealthily ambush enemies...

Pull back! Angrily lure them into our bases defences!

It never made sense to me. Surely an angry mob, once they get into battle, is impossible to control? I like the creativity shown here, but what the unit is and what it does tell different stories.