Yeah, good old Mark Hamil making the death star run all over again.
Yeah, what a coincidence!
I don't know if it is just the translation, but when I heard Paladin's description of the Temblor Bomb in my german version of WC3 I instantly thought "Star Wars", because even the sentence in which Paladin describes how the bomb works is very close to the (also german) mission briefing for Luke against the Death Star in Star Wars IV.
I think that was the point of the ending. To make people think. When you're put in the situation where it is literally them or you, what would you do?
If you knew that if you didn't destroy the Kilrathi Homeworld that the Kilrathi would over-run and destroy Earth and all of her people, as well as the rest of the Terran Confederation (especially with the advent of the biological weapons), would you be willing to end the war by destroying their homeworld?
This wasn't a Hiroshima, where the detonation saved many lives, but was not instrumental to the survival of the species (The U.S. was getting close to Japan herself, and I remember seeing projections that the U.S. would have won the war regardless of the A-bomb drops). This was literally done for the survival of the species, and it raises a lot of ethical questions in the player.
I don't know for sure, but if I were in Blair's place, I think I would go through with it (although be very conflicted the entire way.
That was my thoughts exactly. It may not be nice to destroy a planet, and one should avoid it whenever possible, because it is.... just wrong.
But It was made clear in one mission briefing why it was neccessary. Still the conflict for the confederation existed, and maybe it is one of the reasons Blair quit.
It is indeed hard: Destroying the homeworld of a species, killing not thousands or ten thousands but billions of sentient beings with one attack, most of them civilians (although if you asked Cobra she wouldn't agree with "sentient" for the Kilrathi, and maybe insist that there isn't such thing as "civilians" when speaking of the Kilrathi)
In many ways I thought it wasn't a happy ending. A race of warriors, in many ways noble and proud, losing their homeworld, the center of their universe, the place where their ancestors came from. A race shattered over many planets, but without a home and too weak to stand against the humans. Losing their identity and their proud.
I felt really sorry for Melek when he finally surrendered.
A little OT:
What happened then, anyway?
I'm thinking of the end of WW2. Where the Kilrathi forced to destroy all their weapons? Did all Kilrathi follow Melek and surrender? Even those who (secretly) stood against the emperor all the time (perhaps the less centralistic ones)? Where there human occupation troops on the Kilrathi planets? And how did they treat the Kilrathi?
And when you think of WW1: In germany there was something called the "stab-in-the-back legend" (Some people insisted that there had still been a chance to win the war, and the politicians who surrendered where traitors), and I can imagine that Melek (and probably his clan, too) was outcast because he had surrendered to the terrans. Do we know anything about that? And if not: What do you guess?
Many questions. Let's find answers.
