The Story of Starcraft Part 4: Characters in RTS Games

There’s a problem with trying to put characters into an RTS game.

Scratch that - there are several.

Firstly, the gameplay means you take a distant, disembodied view of the world. In older games, your units are tiny sprites. In newer ones, they’re tiny 3d models. Either way, they’re done there while you literally look down your nose from on up high.

How are you supposed to relate to those generic, identical smudges of pixels?

Secondly, RTS units die. A lot. If you relate too much to them, it stops you from playing the game at your best. That marine down there doesn’t have a family back home*. He barely has a face. Don’t worry too much about sending him to scout for you, even though it’s a suicide mission.

* His family are his identical siblings, all on the battlefield with him.

So they are tiny, interchangeable and fleeting - hardly the best fodder for vivid characters.

Even so, game designers know a few tricks.

Grab your popcorn

There’s the original Command & Conquer approach of having your characters only appear in the mission briefings. They’re not small - their faces fill your screen. They’re not interchangeable - each has their own style and voice.

As for fleeting, they have the ultimate in plot armour: never showing up on the battlefield. If they don’t appear with your units, you can’t accidentally march them into the enemy’s defences because their voice annoys you.

This works well enough, except the ‘tween mission cut scenes might be two minutes long and each mission might go for an hour. Is that a great way to tell a story - a bite-sized blast of character development, followed by a long stretch of violence for violence’s sake?

If there’s no integration between the two, it feels like two different movies sometimes. You’re talking with your mate, then you fire gun at enemies for a while, then you come back inside with a “Where were we…?”

The worst heroes in the war

Another approach is the tried and true* hero unit system. Take a standard unit, boost their stats, given them a unique model - or, at least, a unique paint job - and plonk them in your campaign.

* Tired and torturous?

This integrates the story and the gameplay. Look, the named character is right there!

This also holds the gameplay hostage to the story. According to the plot, that character is a selfless hero who survives this mission. According to your playthrough, they bumble around for a bit, get caught on the furniture and die.

Hero units are… well… if they’re suped-up versions of regular units, they’re not very good. Look, Prota Gonist is the best gunship pilot in the universe. You know this because they have double the health of a normal gunship. It’s a shame that two mook pilots, fresh out of the Academy and soiling themselves in terror, can take him down.

Remember that scene in A New Hope where a random Stormtrooper shoots Han Solo dead? No? That’s because it’s a narrative rule that mooks aren’t allowed to kill heroes. Only named and hated villains have that power.

That’s an easy fix in an RTS, though. If the hero unit dies, just fail the mission and make them load a save. There, now the hero always canonically lives!

But the objective was to end the mission with them alive, not for them to be… you know, a hero. I’ll stick Sarah Kerrigan in a bunker far from the front lines because, hey, if she’s in the fight, I’m a few unlucky shots away from having to start over.

Heroes should be heroic. They should arrive to the battle like a force of nature, tearing through enemies in glorious battle. Their arrival should be exciting.

In many early RTS games - Starcraft 1 included - they didn’t create that reaction. Instead, there was a groan. “Great, more babysitting and more DIAS gameplay. Where’s the safest place I can hide them and hope they don’t die?”

Imagine fighting a war where you win if one specific enemy soldier dies. That soldier is a liability to their side, not an asset.

One alternative is to make your hero unit incredibly powerful. Blizzard did that in Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm. It certainly solved the babysitting problem, while changing the genre from RTS to a top-down roleplaying game. Why build an army when your hero unit is stronger than one?

I guess that beats the alternative.

It gets worse. A heroic unit still isn’t much of a character. Okay, a marine that has a unique gun and extra HP - sure, that tells you something. It’s not enough to write a short story about, though, and an RTS ain’t no short story.

A character needs to experience things, express opinions, have conflicts* and enjoy some character growth**. That means your heroic character needs to say stuff during the mission, otherwise why are they there?

* Of the interpersonal sort, not just the pew pew variety

** A joke about XP here is too obvious for me to make. Character growth as in their values change or they learn something about themselves - in other words, the boring type. (Kidding!)

The Starcraft 1 approach to characters

Part of Starcraft’s success is that the story slaps. The story doesn’t get all the credit - it’s a fun, beautiful game with a nice skill curve to it. Still, Kerrigan is one of the all-time iconic characters from fiction, period.

How did Blizzard pull this off?

Their winning formula was hardly revolutionary. They simply combined both approaches above.

In each mission briefing, characters would talk about what was coming up. At the start, these were narratively simple - your “boss” tells you to go here and shoot people, so you do.

As the missions progress, these briefings become more narratively complex. Still dirt-simple, sure, but they add on drama. Characters argue about what to do and what the best course of action is.

Some hesitate at the necessary evils of war.

Some prefer caution over aggression.

By the time you learn the specific objectives for the mission, you know not everyone agrees with them. Still, as a good soldier, you hop to it.

Then, throughout the missions, these characters keep talking.

They might be heroic units you have to annoyingly coddle. They might be like you - disembodied and watching the action from a distance. Either way, they react, they argue, they cheer, they complain…

Not every mission does it and not every interruption is worth it. In Starcraft 1, it often pauses the battle while two characters bicker about whatever.

It wasn’t  perfect, but that’s fine. The writing is solid enough and often enough that you get a sense of these characters and who they are, all as they watch what you’ve watched too.

It ties them into your gameplay. They tell you what to do, then (on some missions) they react to it.

Archimedes said if you gave him a lever he could move the world. The unspoken part of that is it has to be a great lever in the right place. It’s the same here - we’re not talking about a lot of dialogue here. Many of these discussions were two disembodied voices arguing over your frozen battle screen.

Still, the right dialogue in the right places can build worlds. There doesn’t need to be a lot of it to pull that off.

With all this in mind, we’ll talk about some of the Starcraft 1 Terran campaign characters soon.