StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Peter again.

I haven't had a chance to read the scripts that've just been posted (been hellaciously snowed under with other work here), but judging from the comments they weren't anything like the script I was working on before the lights went out. This was after Plaz left Relic (hey Plaz, if you're reading this, good to see you're alive. Where've you been hiding?); the storyline underwent yet another metamorphosis and turned into something that I, personally, thought kicked all kinds of ass.

In this iteration, S'jet's neural interface with the mothership's warp core had given the Hiigarans an edge in controlling the "Ring Road"--a series of massive jump gates that circumnavigated the galactic core and were essential to interstellar civilization. Basically, whoever controlled the Ring Road controlled the galaxy-- and by the time the story opens, a thousand years after the events of the original Homeworld, the Hiigarans are firmly in charge.

I noticed a few remarks about the potential deadweight of endless animatic cut-scenes. In fact, they were pretty brief. Here's the narration that opens the story:

***

A thousand years since Karan S'jet was first fused to an alien machine. A thousand years since the homecoming, and the founding of a dynasty in her name.

Eight centuries since she fled back into space, to die.

Three hundred years since the Vaygr first sought to wrest the Ring Road from Hiigaran control. Only forty since they were vanquished after centuries of bloodshed.

Four decades since the birth of the Emporer's heir. Almost that long his friendship with the orphaned Vaygr Durkarian, rescued in infancy from the wreckage of the Dust Wars.

Ten years since Durkarian returned to his people as the Hiigaran ambassador. Ten years, now, since two men closer than brothers have seen each other in the flesh.

Ten minutes before it all falls apart…

***

Things go south fast. Durkarian betrays his adopted family and the Vaygr stage a sneak attack during their reunion; the Hiigaran heir gets dumped into an unarmed pod and barely escapes the massacre. This is how the player begins: as a betrayed individual in a one-man spaceship, unarmed, lost, and with the Hiigaran Empire in jeopardy.

At about the halfway mark--just before S'jet and the original hyperspace core are discovered frozen in deep space-- there's a scenario in which a Vaygr fleet stalks the player's fleet through an ancient war zone. At this point, cruising amongst the charred aftermath of the Dust Wars, Durkarian broadcasts a message to his adopted brother:

***

I spared your life once, old friend.

You didn't know any better. Raised on the comforting lies of the victors, you learned early of Hiigara's divine right: to seize a stranglehold on technology you hadn't built, to cement your place in the center of all things. You never noticed the legacy in your own back yard-- the abandoned relocation camps, the scorched worlds, the once-vibrant places no one ever mentions any more.

I never noticed.

But now my people have given me back my sight. At last I know where the nightmares came from; they were not dreams after all. I was barely a child when my family was slaughtered. And though Hiigara took me in when they found me crawling among the bodies, I was just a lucky accident. You killed five billion others that day, with hardly a thought.

Now you talk of the "Dust Wars"-- neutral words, safe words, with no taint of atrocity. But we call them The Genocides, and we have not forgotten.

I spared your life once, old friend. But I cannot do it again.

***

They find S'jet. Wicked things happen. But S'jet, it turns out, left Hiigara for deep space because she could see what was coming. She left because she didn't want to be part of it. And at the very end of the game, when the whole core is in flames, Karan S'jet takes her hyperspace core through the gate at Balcorra and shuts down the Ring Road. This is what she broadcasts from the mothership as the lights go out and ten thousand solar systems fall back into isolation:

***

This is the last will and testament of Karan S'Jet. To my people and my world, I have already given all that I can. There is nothing left but to take some of it back.

I was not wise, to give you so much. Power and bitterness are a dangerous mix; the wounded find it so easy to go to extremes. And yet, we were cast into the pit for four thousand years. Was it so wrong, to swear that no one would do that to us again? So I gave you the means to defend yourselves, the strength to crush your enemies. I gave you the Ring Road.

Now, perhaps, you have come to resemble the Taiidan more than you know, and perhaps that is my fault.

So this is all I bequeath to you now: you will be neither oppressed nor oppressor. Your disputes may be civilised or barbaric, but they will be contained. If you ever again control an empire, it will be through your own efforts, and slowly. Next time, you will have earned it.

I give you back your frailty. I give you back your loneliness. I commend you to your darkness, as I descend into mine.

I love you. I will always love you.

This is Fleet Command, signing off.

***

Anyway, that's what I managed to salvage from my archives. Maybe it gives you a taste. There was a lot of cool player action in there: veils of fire, and ancient machinery firing at each other millions of years after its creators had gone extinct. Comets blown up at the edge of solar systems to provide cover and shrapnel during combat. Ship-to-ship combat amongst ruptured tankers, great shimmering blobs of fuel floating like incendiary mines throughout the battlefield. Leapfrog battles from gate to gate. It was all great, and maybe some of it survived (I still haven't got my copy of HW2 back from my friend), but at the heart of it all was a story and a substantive theme.

And in my own humble opinion, that wouldn't have slowed down the game at all.

Cheers,
P.

phongn wrote:This is Fleet Command, signing off.

White Haven wrote:Even that's a maybe. Being descended from people who committed atrocities in the course of a two and a half century war doesn't make people evil. If so, all of Japan would be just...fucked, and that wasn't a tenth the length of the Vaygr war described in the story. I love shades of grey.

phongn wrote:That proposed storyline would actually work for HW3.

weemadando wrote:I fucking hated HW2s story. It felt like a cheap bargain bin "RPG" - the magical hyperspace cores have been lost! As the local village/farm idiot, you need to go get them all.