Preemptive call for everyone to calm your titties, we can argue against someones lack of information when posting in a better manner. Lest you want mods to lock it like other threads that went down this road eventually were.
Blizzard has outright stated that their Warcraft franchise was inspired by Warhammer so it's no great leap of logic to come to the conclusion that their other RTS, Starcraft, was inspired by Warhammer 40k. Who was first is pretty irrelevant, everyone borrows ideas from everyone in the entertainment industry. For example, Warhammer "borrowed" a lot of inspiration from Tolkien and other contemporary fantasy sources. In fact, most of the Warhammer franchise is derivative of other stuff so it's really pointless to start arguing about "who was first" because it just does not matter.
A game with "space" Marines in powered armor fighting against an alien race whose weapons are entirely organic and the whole races is controlled by a hive mind and the similarities aren't immediately obvious? This isn't a "myth". But neither will there be a source. What, is Blizzard going to admit "Yeah, we pretty much copied the Zerg from the Tyranids, here Games Workshop, have some of our Starcraft monies for IP infringement"? The Zerg aren't an exact copy. Neither does the Zerg being derivative of the Tyranids make Starcraft a bad game or take anything away from Blizzard really. Warhammer 40K is immensely derivative with tons of borrowed ideas from other science fiction and fantasy sources too. Let's just be realistic about where the ideas are borrowed, and from whom they are borrowed. Blizzard borrowed from the Tyranids, and they did so fairly blatantly. Though, because fair is fair, Games Workshop borrowed right back from Starcraft when they created their burrowing Tyranids like the Ravener which didn't exist until after Starcraft did.
You're right. That does sound suspiciously like Starship Troopers. The Zerg don't begin to resemble Tyranids until 2001, when the third edition Tryanids are released, well after SC. Before then they both fall under 'generic, highly adaptive aliens.'
Except that the Bugs in the Starship Troopers novel used technology and had allies and built spacecraft. The movie version of Starship Troopers where they had bugs with biological based weapons (well, they had one bug with a biological weapon) didn't come out until 1997, well into the Starcraft development process which began in 1995. You're trying too hard to reach here and find a way to be right. The Tyranids borrowed from Starship Troopers obviously (among other things). The Zerg borrowed from both. Like I said, it's not a direct copy. That would be illegal. But it's very easy to acknowledge the obvious influences. You should start. Well except for this being entirely false, maybe, sure, lol. What exactly about 3rd Edition Tyranids is fundamentally different from 2nd Edition Tyranids? The 3rd Edition codex only introduced one new unit, and introduced no new fluff because the bulk of the 3rd Edition codexes were rush jobs to bring all the armies up to speed with the new edition of the game (which was incompatible with 2nd Edition). Again, you're trying too hard to be right.
On the topic of Starship troopers... that's sorta how I want a Tyranid invasion to be. Lots o' bugs, lots o' guns, lots o' death. Awww yisssss.
Just read through the 2nd book in the Ultramarines trilogy, and just the scale of the Tyranids is unbelievable. The giant bio swarm that is the Tyranids is no freakin' joke.
BACK ON TOPIC No. Just no. Stop. Why do we need this? We have four factions already. If one factions starts to gain way too much territory we have 3 pissed-off factions with concentrated populations attacking a spread-out army thats outnumbered in all of its battles. The idea of having a NPC faction actively attacking all factions and stealing territory is cool. Much cooler than having PvE purely instanced.But having it only attack a single faction or concentrating it's attacks is unfair for the winning faction. There's also alot of unfortunate implications here. Why are the populations/factions going to be so unbalanced that an npc faction is required to balance them out? Statistically speaking all factions should have similar populations if all are equally interesting and receive the same love from the devs. Are the devs already assuming that some factions are going to be less interesting than others? Do we really want the devs to design factions with that mindset rather than trying to make every single faction as interesting as posible? Or even worse, have the devs already decided that some factions are gonna get more dev-love (weapons, expansions, content, etc.) than others? Thoughts, opinions?
