Lucas has big ideas, but he needs to be... channeled. This is typically accomplished with good editing (thanks Marcia) and directors.
Return of the Jedi showcases a lot of the problems Lucas was running into with telling his story. He desperately needed a big reveal on par with Empire Strikes Back, but making Luke and Leia siblings was... not the way I would've done it (it also makes some of the scenes in ESB and even ANH a lot weirder). Meanwhile, Lucas's foray into merchandising really, REALLY shows in ROTJ; as one person put it, consider that the word 'ewok' is never spoken in the film, yet everyone knows what an ewok is.
I will state in defense that Lucas had tapped an incredible gold mine and he'd have been an idiot not to mine it.
The tone of ROTJ tends to wildly skew back and forth. In some ways, it's very reminiscent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, but with less control.
So yeah, Lucas hit the motherlode, but that doesn't make him Spielberg.
I've noticed this with a number of other creators too. Incredibly creative, but in desperate need of editors to reign them in.
The plot of the StarCraft games suffers a similar, albeit perhaps opposite, problem: it sets itself up as essentially Warhammer 40,000 lite, but rather than exploring the military, political, and cultural aspects that would appeal to fans of military scifi it immediately deteriorates into a badly written soap opera where there's one hero of the universe who only fights the villains because of either personal vendetta or because the plot tells him to. Tons of backstory and plot hooks gets set up and then immediately bulldozed because the writer lost interest. Not to mention the many retcons, inconsistent characterization, etc.
It's arguably the worst military scifi ever written. No surprise it was the first the author ever wrote. Which is par the course for video game writing, but still. The author was clearly quite creative and the potential for a good story was there.
Keep in mind he was writing a story for an RTS.
That being said, the story could've definitely used some fine tuning for Starcraft 2.
There are plenty of RTS where the writers don’t sabotage themselves by bulldozing their own setting multiple times over. Command & Conquer, Star Trek Armada, Supreme Commander, etc. The writer of SC, Chris Metzen, is mentioned by a co-worker in a book (World of Warcraft Diary) as apparently having severe ADHD and memory problems. No shit.
StarCraft 1 was a mess of writer incompetence and studio inference. They killed all the potential villains, and civilizations, immediately after their introductions. The expansion had to introduce multiple new villains thru lazy retcons because the author shot himself in the foot multiple times.
The whole thing needed rebooting and a franchise bible to be written to keep it on track, not a sequel. That’s like saying that Twilight needed a sequel.
This isn’t rocket science. You have humans, space elves, and bugs, and they’re fighting each other for control of the galaxy because of politics, greed, and philosophy. That’s so effing simple and somehow Blizzard managed to fuck it up multiple times.
I’m not asking for a good plot. I know any plot is just an excuse to blow shit up. But I expect the writer to at least understand what genre he’s written for. Chris Metzen didn’t write an RTS plot, he wrote multiple bad soap operas with plot holes that you could drive a dozen trucks thru side by side. I have watched children’s shows with better writing.
But I could ignore all that if it wasn’t for the fandom being full of fucking morons who think this fanfiction-tier shit is actually good, because everybody with taste has long since left.
And the Starship Troopers game is based on the shitty Sony movies. So for fans of military scifi the video game scene sucks ass.