Protoss Archon Comparison

Note: Virtually all portions of this post have been modified from other sources that I have personally written. This is more of an adapted version for public viewing and use.

Portraits are some of the most intimate pieces of art in StarCraft. Especially in 1998, when both resources and time were extremely limited, developers only had three avenues to realistically express what a unit should look/feel like: Sound files, a pixelated model on screen, and a portrait. 

Myself and others I have talked to largely view the new remastered portraits as anatomically excellent, but not yet atmospherically so. What do we mean by that? The remastered portraits have all major physical features intact, but the mood, feeling, and identity of the unit is still a bit different, take the new archon model versus the old one. 

There’s no denying it. This new guy looks like an absolute badass (much like his real life counterpart!). All of the iconic physical features are there: purple eyes with flickers of lime, psi cloud background, etc It’s an anatomically phenomenal portrait, BUT there is one minor but nonetheless very interesting difference in the original.

In the original portrait, you can only see the outline of the face, with the eyes of the portrait obscured by purple smoke. You can only vaguely tell that the figure in the cloud is a humanoid alien. When you couple this with the heavy-metal voice modifier of the Archon you get something that's not only intense, but mysterious, enigmatic, and quite intimidating. 

When you tried to make an archon in SC1, the training bar didn't say morphing as it does in SC2, but instead, it said "summoning". For a better understanding of this kind of characterization, lets look at the Archon's description in the original StarCraft manual.

“These swirling, burning effigies of the Protoss spirit radiate incalculable power, and their devastating psionic storms can be unleashed against cowering enemy forces both in the air and on the ground….”

What’s odd about StarCraft is that for all it’s grittiness…sometimes you get straight up references to spirits! Case in point here, the nature of the Archon was so ambiguous that describing one as a deity was not out of place. That's a good demonstration (in my opinion) of how the Archon's aura on the player was one of unknowableness. In order to achieve that feeling with limited resources, the developers at the time opted to obscure the face and eyes, letting our imaginations do the work.

Compared again to the new Archon (with a different shot for variety) 

This guy, again, is very cool-looking, but he is also very visible. We can look directly into the irises of his eyes and have a connection with him (eyes are windows to the soul!). Whereas we can’t do that with the old model. Of course, many of these differences are a result of technical limitations, but the tricky thing about SC1 art is this just like how pathfinding helped make StarCraft 1 the E-sport it is today, technical limitations helped construct it’s look, feel, and atmosphere. To quote a good forum friend of mine:

“When developing StarCraft I, with their processing power and resources extremely limited, Blizzard artists were forced to think outside the box to push character and atmosphere. Today, many artists focus on minute details in texture and models -- because that's what people expect. But this leads them away from implementing the additional atmospheric details.” - Visions of Khas

There’s an enormous temptation in StarCraft Remastered to showcase all of the little details we missed the first pixelated-pass around, and to be clear, that is perfectly legitimate. However, it is also important to remember that one can’t just remaster the body of the models/portraits, one also must remaster their souls (woooah). In order to properly remaster SC1, the unit models/portraits must invoke the same feelings and not just the same physical features.

Of course, artistic liberties will happen without question in a remaster of any game, especially one in which the original source material is so damn pixelated. Differences will happen, but if one sticks to the original written source material, any disrepancies will follow the beloved image of the original. 

-Tarik