The fact this man can speedrun the entirety of WoL in less time than it takes him to "briefly" summarize it is hilarious to me. Please, never change Grant, you glorious goof.
@@govt.knives4534 Oh aye it is, my favorite gentleman scientist. If I recall properly, this was a fan art spoof of him taking after Maxwell in the most literal way, black magic and a spiffing suit too.
The end with Tychus always gets me, in particular is the trigger control. Tychus, shoot first ask questions never, choreographed it all, gave Jim warning by talking to Arcturus and laser aimed at her forehead, then slowly squeezing the trigger to fire one, solitary shot. He wasn't the character to talk about such things, but he wanted his friend to be happy. So, on the cusp of his freedom which he'd sought and fought for the whole story, he gave his life to save hers, for his best friend.
Also Jim's revolver only has 1 bullet, and it is intended to kill Mengsk only (the Buccephalus boarding cinematic did a great job on this). It is not only the bullet that saves Kerrigan, but also the one that frees Tychus from Mengsk's death grip on him.
Another note about Tychus's character, there's an interpretation of the cantina fight scene that I read a few years ago and have subscribed to since: Tychus wasn't being drunk and angry, he was trying to do a good thing. He doesn't want to kill Kerrigan, but if he doesn't work toward that goal, he dies. So instead, he tries his absolute hardest to get disqualified from being allowed to go to Char without it looking suspicious. It's perfectly in character for him to start a drunken bar fight, and if he isn't allowed to go to Char, he's able to tell Mengsk that he tried his best and Mengsk has no reason to doubt him.
My interpretation is that that was his last attempt to convince himself. He tells the crew Raynor will just use them and abandon them, refering to the fact that Tychus took the fall for Raynor and Raynor never busted him out of jail or something. He just doesn't believe it enough. What I do think was him trying to sabotage the mission were the parts where he claims he's scared of Kerrigan. He goes from 'let's kill her and get rewarded' to 'she's too scary let's stay away'. That doesn't sound like Tychus at all. Though you could interpret that as him being afraid of her mind reading powers "she's trying to get in our heads" and fear of her blowing his cover.
Either may have been Tychus’ plan, but I doubt Mengsk would have spared him because "he did his best but oh well". Unless he gets a better idea to make use of his pet marine, Mengsk would be better off with him dead.
@@gregoirebasseville4797 Oh, no doubt about it. I'm sure in either case Tychus is VERY aware of that. It's not a good plan, but the alternatives suck even more, so.
I just replayed and found out goofing around that on Sudden Strike, Nova Covert Op's second mission, if you scanner sweep behind the zerg base, there's a bunch of cloaked ghosts and a Psi Emitter, hinting at the overarching plot of the ghosts (like Nova) causing zerg attacks. You can never see this angle unless you waste a scan sweep (was playing an Archepelago run, so was a bit OP at the time and scanning at random). Not terribly related, but just wanted to chorus some fun notes about environmental storytelling, that 10 years down the line, I'm still finding out about things in the games.
Most of the Nova campaign was pretty good, the ending kinda pissed me off though, since I was -SPOILER WARNING BELOW- intent on following Emperor Valerian's orders, to capture and not kill the rogue general Davis. Having the kill be forced kinda felt a little wierd.
What I love about Supernova is when you make an attempt and realize you aren't prepared for it yet (like you want to use Vikings but you haven't done Haven yet for whatever reason). So the star politely cools off again and waits for you to come back, before it goes nova again just as it did before.
lol I guess I never had that interpretation bc I never thought of aborted missions as 'leaving,' I always thought of it as simply a cut off timeline and 'returning' would be continuing your correct timeline.
Or the dominion postponing sending out the trains, or colonel Orlean so politely waiting for you to come back before proceeding to collect the minerals.
To be fair, it's a common video game cliché, where they game will give you a super urgent quest and then if you chose to do a bunch of side quests before everyone will wait for the player. Then, the players shows up just in time, as they would have if they went immediately. This goes for the colonist missions and tyrador in WoL. It will claim to be a real, living, breathing world but in reality just a theatre play for the player to enjoy. Most of us probably like it better that way.
23:30 Grant, that science man has an open bag of cheetos in his lab coat pocket and most of his research notes boil down to "I poked the Zerg sample with a cool stick I found and it spat acid at me. While I was holding a funeral for Sticky XIV I realised it's probably pretty important that our marines not get melted by acid. Getting poked by sticks, also pretty bad" And then the game makes you pick between your Barracks units taking less AOE damage or getting an extra point of armour at the start of a mission. Stetmann is many things, but a rigorous professional scientist with extensive resources is not one of them.
And at the same time the actual "research facilities" seem to be essentially useless, all the benefits we do gain are rooted in stetboi's ...excentric... genius where putting anyone else there (or just being slightly more realistic) would leave Hanson's assessment entirely correct. Heck, Moebius presumably had Narud's help in researching protoss tech and they _barely_ made functioning warp tech with stolen pylons in the LotV Prologue, yet we get it working for autogas while on the run. (Admittedly SC1 terrans had independently developed teleporter tech in structures, but the WoL research explicitly references the protoss version instead)
@@Photoloss It's a mix of Stetmann being a Certified Freak of Nature and the Protoss Crystal doing everything in it's little diamond heart to help the Hyperion in increasingly obvious ways
Ideally, before the Haven missions unlocked, there should have been a scene where Hanson realized that Stetman's bizarre approach is coming up with results that a more proper lab would never have gotten to, and that plus the proximity of the strange artifacts were helping her come up with ways to combat the infestation that they'd seen. Something to pay off her earlier dismissiveness on the subject, while also building up the potential cure that she would eventually be able to create.
I mean, wasn't there that lore bit where Stetman joined the raiders cause he had developed a Terran-made Shielding system that was better than the Protoss's, but realized he can't let it get into anyone's hands? Then again, it's been years. I could be remember parts or all of this wrong.
Regarding the end of WoL, in my opinion it's the best ending to a story I've seen. Those 10 seconds between "You have your orders, mister Findlay" and the final shot have so much packed into them. Tychus was THE man for the job. "Just fucking shoot her", you might say. But yeah, he got softer throughout the campaign, and I think finding out what happened on Tarsonis, what Mengsk did to Kerrigan... he realised his choice was fake. He refuses to kill Raynor and Sara, he dies. He does kill them, Mengsk will kill him anyways because he'd be a lose end and Big M is not going to make the same mistake again. But when shit went down, he saw a 3rd option. Show Jim what is going on. Take the moment of hesitation. Don't shoot the weapon that can punch through a tank on full auto, but take a one stray and well telegraphed shot. Have Jim be his executioner. "We are who we chose to be", and Tychus at that moment chose to be free.
I really like the theory that Tychus decided to go out by his friends hand, instead of Mengsk. Wishful thinking? Maybe. But I like to think of Tychus getting as happy of an ending as he could.
The comment from Donny about the Zerg watching the UNN broadcasts is a nice nod to the novel, Liberty's Crusade, in which it ends with the reveal that the Zerg, or at least Kerrigan, do in fact, watch Terran news broadcasts. So Donny was actually right, he does know they watch.
i mean, they also infest hundreds of terrans who watch the news every single day. so even if they ont actively watch, they know whats in the news all the time
Kerrigan's inclusion in All In is the thing that makes it a masterpiece. From a narrative perspective including her as a final boss just fits perfectly. But from a gameplay perspective, I think she fits a very important role. Hold out missions are the hardest type of mission to balance in RTS. If you've ever mastered Last Stand in LOTV, you know that once you get the right defense up, the mission practically plays itself. But if you ramp up the attacks too much, then it can become unfair how easily the attacks overwhelm the player. Kerrigan's role in all in is to be a disruptor. It takes a bit, but once you get the defense set up and the economy going, the attack waves on all in aren't too tough to deal with. Kerrigan's job is to make sure you don't get too comfortable. She comes to throws a wrench in your plan. She puts a crack in your defenses and give the attack wave an opening. Forcing you to scramble to plug the hole. It's genius. As this occasional attacker, she ensures that passive defense isn't an option while not over tuning the main attack waves.
...except for the fact that her undisclosed bullshit mechanics all perfectly align to be hardcountered by mass marines. The basic, spammable, already stupidly overpowered unit which you're probably only shying away from because they've steamrolled every other challenge at this point (alongside tanks, and not counting Maw's ripfields ofc).
@@Photoloss Pretty sure her true hardcounter are Ghosts lol. Also mass marines? Does your Kerrigan not have Razor Swarm? On brutal it kills like 10-20 marines in one shot if I remember right, and sure I've seen techniques where you bait her out and micro hard, but why? Why even bother? I just get mass ghosts and sniper her till she's dead, far easier to do and more fun too. Or get mass BC. Just make sure you have a sacrificial lamb for the Implode and the BC mass Yamato will obliterate her in seconds.
@@Photoloss except for the fact that on all in marine-based defense effective against 4 whole units (Kerri included)and without 50 SCVs repairing wall will crumble before Kerri show up. And razor swarm
@@stankobarabata2406 Marines are dirt cheap and minerals aren't much of a constraint in All In to begin with. Basically just drop a hercules full of them in front of your bunker line, GO NOVA, and, if you're fancy, build some depots or turrets on the cliff to try and bait the first Razor Swarm. Or if you have drop pods just build like 4+ reactor rax and rally on top of her lol. Marines are easy, efficient, and don't constrain your options for tackling the rest of the mission nearly as much as investing a huge pile of gas into ghosts or BCs. But if you _happen to have_ ghosts or BCs, because you like them or perhaps because you're playing vs air without HMEs for some reason, then sure just using those probably is easier than making extra marines just to deal with Kerrigan.
@@Photoloss As I said, it's too much work. Building depos then microing marines sounds like a hassle. Also like you don't really use Gas that much in all in. You're literally building static defense for half of the mission which only costs minerals. I'd rather go for a gas heavy unit to offload the mineral strain on repairing bunkers/planetaries/turrets. Hence why I said Ghost/BC is practically the BiS choice for this misson. Also BC works wonders on ground All in as well. They're one of the best units next to the Banshee to send out to clear the Nyduses as they're well protected with their ability and have the yamato for when you need to be quick. And they're good vs Kerrigan overall. Same with a ton of Ghosts except you can't snipe the Nyduses I think. I tried using HME but honestly I prefer the disruptor myself, but the HME is really better for air. Even then for Air I just call in some Hel's angels and easily steamroll most broodlords without much issue.
I'm surprised that we didn't get a discussion of what I feel is the best bit of visual storytelling in the SC2 trilogy: the Mengsk bullet. When they go to meet Mobius and Mengsk's flagship shows up instead, Jim says nothing. Instead, we see him prop up his leg, and pull out an old revolver. He opens the chamber, and we see one bullet. He chambers that round, and that's it. We don't need someone to point out what this gun is for; we know *exactly* what that gun is for. This is reinforced when he breaks into Mengsk's room and explicitly draws that gun on Valerian, thinking it was Arcturus. And what happens with that gun? Well, when Jim is over Kerrigan's body, he's put his regular weapon down. So when Tychus confronts him, he only has the Mengsk bullet. Which he uses to kill Tychus. Wings of Liberty's story is fragmented and lacks coherence. But if there's a thing that the story is about, it's about revenge. And not taking revenge. And entirely though visual storytelling, we see that Jim gave up on his revenge. That where his character lands is that revenge at any cost is bad. Which is why it's such a damn shame that Heart of the Swarm's central thesis is that "Revenge is good, actually, even if you have to turn into a monster to get it."
I was just going to point out the same thing! That being said, I feel like there are different ways to interpret the Mengsk Bullet. To make it line up more with HotS, you could point out that if Raynor wasn't ready to take down Mengsk, he wouldn't have been able to protect Kerrigan. Likewise, Kerrigan killing Mengsk isn't just about revenge, it's about finishing the fight.
I thought the meaning behind heart of the swarm was realizing that with great power comes great responsibility. At the beginning of the game kerrigan wants nothing but revenge and recklessly puts the one thing she had left, Jim, in danger because of her actions. By the midpoint of the game she realizes that the Zerg she commands are not just tools, but are living breathing animals and that by changing back into the queen of blades she can save the Zerg. By the end of the game she's going out of her way to help new friends and old, ensuring the protection of civilians and her own race. I think the story started out about revenge at all costs but eventually she learned that for the Zerg to survive she had to sacrifice her freedom...and that it also involved killing mengsk was an added benefit
1:26:51 "We all know that Tosh is the better waifu" That is one thing I never expected to hear, but in hindsight absolutely do agree. Shame we never got Coop Tosh or Tosh's Terrazine Quest campaign...
@@simplysmiley4670 exploding military facilities with entire civilian city blocks around not a bro move tho (and this is from reportage from Kate Lockwell, not Donni, so its not propaganda) also in real history, every time revolutionaries break open gates of the prisons, its civilians who immediately suffer the most (because most criminals don't want to die to get revenge on the government, but return to their criminal ways against fellow citizens)
Isn't there a fan Co-op Tosh Commander in Nexus Coop? From videos I have seen, it's VERY dope! You should defenetly try it, because our Tosh-waifu deserves better than this! Also, could you please scour the internet for custom Tosh factions beyond Nexus Coop? Some of us, primeraly me, want to see how many of and how different each Tosh-factions are!... ...Hmmm, Tosh and Waifu combined together... *Oh no... It's stuck in my head now!...* *...FEM-TOSH IS STUCK IN MY MIND NOW, ALONGSIDE THE CONCEPT OF REGULAR TOSH HAVING A SECRET SISTER TWIN, WHICH IS BASICLY AN "OC" OF HIM WITH DIFFERENT SPINS ON HIS CHARACTERISTICS AND TRAITS! I CAN'T UNTHINK IT NOW!...* A N D I D O N ' T W A N T T O , atleast with Tosh's Twin-sister concept. Just need to dive enough into lore of Tosh for confirmations and inspirations sometime later.
I agree that Tosh should've been a co-op commander. He was my favorite supporting character in the campaign. As of now the current character grid looks uneven with one side not being symmetrical with the other corners. 😅
watching this i finally realize why i enjoy these kinds of videos personally. its cause it feels like your listening to a friend that so lovingly hyperfixated on something they love that you can just let them talk and enjoy the thing they enjoy
One thing that always stuck out to me was how despite the Raiders' forces still being capable of deploying hundreds of mechs and small starship fleets, they managed to retain that sense of a ragtag, small-ish (at least in the grand scheme of things) group of rebels doing hit-and-run operations on much larger forces from the Swarm, Tal'Darim to the Dominion. It's especially apparent compared to HotS and LotV, which has you control an entire armada of Zerg/Protoss, and further reinforced by WoL's upgrades being restricted by the Raiders only having so many Credits to go around, while the sequels auto-unlock alternative options as you progress their campaigns, with the restriction being that you can only choose one upgrade for a single unit.
The HotS system doesn't really make sense though, both Evolution options already exist so Abathur could just archive both of them but still only allow 1 per mission because the DNA changes are mutually exclusive.
@@Photoloss Unchosen evolutions flawed, unsuited for mass production, prolonged survival incomparable with principles of evolution. Strands repurposed, reused, swarm growth at expected level, rate of diverse biomass, sustainable.
@@Photoloss If Abathur was the one who made the decision to remove the Defiler and Guardian strains from the swarm I'd strangle him myself. That remains one of the larger reasons I dislike the HotS campaign is you don't get to play with the older units like the Terran and Protoss campaign allow.
Not finished with the video yet but I just finished Grant's section talking about his match against iNcontrol and the segment aboutt the old internet and I just need to say, thank you for including these little memory segments, all your little personal annecdotes add so much to this retrospective and it genuinely would not be the same without them.
Almost 14 years of this game I was a kid when I started StarCraft 1 in my Step-father´s PC Waited YEARS for the continuation and saw every small video about SC 2 that primitive TH-cam had to offer I could not play it when it came out cuz I did not have the PC or money or friends or any chance to do so.. Years later I finally played it on a cyber-cafe (those from Latin America will understand) I never had a computer of my own till 2020 When I finished All in, And after experiencing all the story basically like a novel and having James Raynor as my favorite Character because he is the perfect embodiment of what a leader means ... It just blew my mind , What an amazing epic game Grant, you did not only made a great video You spoke about all the feelings about what playing SC2 Wings of liberty meant for so many of us This was truly the ultimate love letter to those fans, be it casual or pros I couldn´t help but to cry a bit Thanks so much Grant, thanks so much Old Blizzard
My headcanon for Safe Heaven is that Hanson did find a cure for the infestation virus, but just specifically for the strain that infected Haven, and since the virus mutates incredibly quickly (which she comments on after the mission on Meinhoff) the cure is completely useless against the rest of the infestations around the sector. Still incredibly convoluted, sloppy storytelling on blizzard's side, but this is at least a thread of logic that somewhat explains what happens
Also Haven declares itself independent and the Dominion probably doesn't even officially _know_ about them, let alone any infestation research there, so really unless you for some bizarre reason believed Dr. Hanson could create an "anti-zerg grey goo" superweapon all of it will only really come into play during or after LotV. With Valerian at the helm, a time of relative peace to invest in large-scale biomedical industry and reclaiming lost planets from the zerg, and through that the resources and incentive to keep developing the cure to remain effective against different strains and future adaptations. Mind you the protoss _already had_ a cure, which to their knowledge worked perfectly. And not only should Selendis as one of their top leaders know about it, JIM WAS THERE TOO! Admittedly "our facility got destroyed, here's what we have left of our nanobot recipe, see if you and stetboi can make anything useful from it" wouldn't really make for a good mission.
Not as convoluted and sloppy as people make it out to be, because mutation into immunity is a thing that happens in diseases. It's just not as tragic or as hopeless as the other direction that the mission can go, and the timeline shifts slightly depending on which is chosen. Side with the doctor, and we show up earlier so that the infection hasn't taken hold. Side with the Protoss and we show up later after the infection _has_ taken hold.
@@leadpaintchips9461 From a writing perspective the issue there is that the timeline shifts retroactively when you make the decision. You can't define one cohesive state for the colony in the moment right before Jim makes his choice which allows both options as portrayed in the respective missions to be reasonable. The closest I've seen is the argument that the colonists openly collaborate in Safe Haven and resist in Haven's Fall thus causing a delay, but that implies the protoss were willing to let entire hives sprout up during this time period without deeming Jim's attempt a failure and launching their own purification as a result. Which is extremely unlikely when they were willing to torch the entire colony after spotting at most a handful of individual infested with no creep, structures, or zerg combat strains anywhere in sight.
Doesn't this already happen, in that they find a 'cure' for Stukov, but he the infestation just remutates around the cure and he ends up getting re-infested after a while?
@@maximilianv8813 We don't have any info on that because Stukov was in Narud's custody and actively experimented on while the cure failed. It certainly _could_ have been zerg adaptation on its own, I sure wouldn't expect the first-ever attempt to be 100% successful without any refinement or long-term maintenance. But it could also truly have been entirely successful and only brought to failure by Narud's experiments in an effort to improve the Hybrid, or even deliberate sabotage if you believe him to be that callous.
One thing to note about the Tosh story (assuming that I remember it correctly): If you have doctor Hansen with you, she'll comment on the final mission in a way which will always validate your choice. If you side with Tosh, she'll say that Nova lied and that there were no issues with the Spectres. However, if you aid Nova and kill him, she'll state something along the lines of "the jorium and terrazine were really dangerous, and so were the spectres!" Not something I particularly liked. The grittier choices (purifying Haven, siding with Tosh) were definitely the best storywise.
Yeah, WoL was intent on having player be the savior, no matter what choice you made in ANY mission you were always correct to make that choice. And somehow they managed to do even worse in the expansions. (It's funny that when WoL came out a lot of people were3 pretty disappointed with the story, and didn't like how the characters from SC1 got completely changed. But then the expansions were so much worse that no WoL is remembered as that time when SC2 writing was still great ^^) In Hots the opening missions starts with Nova confronting Jim about the choice between Nova and Tosh. Not only does your choice not matter and the same will happen no matter what you chose. They DARE to imply that your choice did matter. When I first played SC2 I sided with Nova, then re-played the game and sided with Tosh on the other run. So when I played Hots the game remembered me siding with Tosh. In Hots then Nova says - "Well if you sided with me things could have been different" - I got pissed off, had to go back to WoL, replay the missions for Hots to remember me as having sided with Nova - which was my first pick. And what does the game say? "Thank you for siding with me, but I have to follow orders" This is one of the biggest fuck you's in the hisroty of gaming. Even TellTale games don't mess up that badly on their non choices
Yeah having the 2 choices be 2 different timelines like it's a Red alert campaign is lame. Especially since for the Tosh/Nova it makes zero sense to trust a mouthpiece of Mengsk over a creepy but proven ally. At least the Tosh death scene is funny...
Something else about the secret mission, that Grant didn't mention is another amazing fact linking to the original Starcraft. Mengsk is studying, experimenting, cloning and building weapons using alien lifeforms, the exact thing he accused the confederacy of in the original, that he used to gather allies, and turn people against the confederacy, and yet here he is, knowingly continuing their work on xenomorphic life to turn it into ultimate weapons to crush all resistance and conquer new planets. Which is fully in character for him, as Grant mentioned constantly throughout the video, he cares about power, not the risks, but it's still an amazing throwback to the very first installation mission, and also the exact brutalness from Mengsk that lead to the Horner mission chain.
I mean Mengsk was also turned into a stereotypical Tyrant trope. Just a power hungry madman. Old Mengsk was basically Tywin levels of villain. Smart, always with a scheme or a plan, and using overwhelming force where needed. An amazing antagonist. Current Mengsk is basically a whole other person. Same as Raynor almost, except Raynor kept his old personality, and instead his motivations got uprooted and turned into a typical goody-two shoes story.
@@stankobarabata2406The guy got his butt kicked by the UED, then by Kerrigan because he genuinely thought Kerrigan held no grudge for his betrayal, then got beaten again. Mengsk was never this mastermind. Just a greedy, cruel asshole. Like all tyrants.
@@stankobarabata2406i remember that he had that arrogant tyrant angle back then. I remember in one of the older books that takes place after he takes power, there's a cutaway to mengsk in his palace just casually signing off on an execution sheet while he enjoys a goblet of fine wine and classic music. He then ponders if he should have another speech that day, mostly to hear his own voice
I may not get to the stream often but I have watched every video you have ever put on TH-cam on both of your channels. This is because you have saved the community I so enjoy and keep people interested in my favorite game I have ever played. Even all of my friends who have not touched an rts in 13+ years have started jamming sc2 and are excited for storm gate in 2024. All I had to do was introduce them to this dope channel and now they’re trapped here with me and these other animals 🎉 Love the work you do sir; almost as much as I love starcraft 2 (but let’s not get too crazy)
I had wondered why you had such hostility towards the doctor in your videos and streams. As a twelve year old kid who started the franchise (and RTS in general) with Wings of Liberty, I saw the option to save the colonists and went "Yeah, that's what good guys do!" and just... never gave the other option a second thought. Since playing Heart of the Swarm and learning more about the Zerg and the lore, it does make a much better story to help the protoss here, and it's wild to me that I had never considered the idea of just... curing a virus older than humanity itself in a few hours (and NOBODY MENTIONS IT AGAIN!) to be absolutely fucking ridiculous
The truly ridiculous part is that HotS lifted into proper canon an old side story from SC1 where Stukov was fully, properly cured of infestation BY THE PROTOSS! And guess what? JIM WAS THERE TOO! Siding with the protoss makes zero sense for how SC2 portrays Jim, and the whole setup makes no sense both with its own reality warping and as of HotS canon even less so. Having something close to the story of Haven's Fall as the only possible outcome would be more in line with the tone of SC1 though.
While Raynor's drinking is definitely an issue, the reason why I didn't think that it effected his leadership during missions is because I thought he was like Ulysses S. Grant. Never drank when he had to be present of mind and when people relied on him during battle, but binge drank when there was nothing for him to do. Also, Tychus' love affair with the Odin reminds me of why I love the big stompy mechs of Battletech and Warhammer 40k. It's just... Mech battle! MECH BATTLE!!!
The 'In Utter Lameness' part really hit home for me. Sure there were time when all you saw was mass Swarm Host or Oracles were completley opressive. But the sanitized competitive games are not memorable at all. What is stuck in my head are the goofy, jank and chaotic games. Husky's Imba League or the late Total Biscuits invitationals with unique maps and actual 2v2 matches. Those were the days I really remember beeing entertained by pro gameplay. To make a none Starcraft comparison: modern pro matches are like those cheap made for tv christmas movies. They all look the same and the story always boils down to basically the same plot structures. You could cut scenes from them together and most people wont really notice. THe whacky TB and Husky matches are like Tarantino movies. They are chaotic, unpredictable and way more memorable.
Speaking of TB, does anyone remember his Clan Wars tournament, which was intentionally designed to have interesting and wacky maps with unusual mechanics. You could tell that half the pro's didn't know what they had been signed up for, having obviously not even looked at the map's let alone practiced on them. I suspect this may have been why the season 2 maps were mostly more typical and less interesting.
@@solaariel2692 Thats what I was thinking off. It was called 'Clan Wars'. Those maps were awesome. Rising lava, retractable bridges and a lot more. Thats the thing with pros. At first when the meta is unclear the creative players thrive. Once the meta has been figured out the guys at the top basically just learn their strats by heart. It's the same with every game. Thats why LoL, Heroes of the Storm, R6 Siege and others had pros play on an older patch. They once wanted the R6 Siege pros to play a new patch in their league, but 4 weeks was apparently to short for 'pros' to adapt.
You forgot what I see as a key feature of The Devil's Playground : the enemy bases give resources. Without this, the mission would massively incentivize to turtle up, limit your losses and avoid the zerg, but having the enemy hatcheries drop resources encourages players to go out and fight, instead of just becoming another defense mission. It also rewards you for going after the enemy's production, thus crippling their future attack waves and demonstrating the power of doing so, which I think is fantastic early campaign design.
That's 100% a legit win. Not being "acclimated" to a balance change is just an excuse. That's part of a professional player's job. If some rando could incorporate a balance change faster than a pro could and that rando won because of that strategy then it's 100% a legit win.
No yeah, that's my take too. Leveraging something like that is still clever, it's still smart play. It's still outsmarting a pro player. The fact that it probably wouldn't work more than once doesn't even really matter, because plenty of strats won't really work more than once.
I'd like to point out that it's much easier to incorporate the cheese strat, than it is to devise the counter to it. And also, pros aren't the ones who incorporate the changes fastest. They're simply the ones who learn all of it to a high degree. It was 100% a legitimate, earned win. But dismissing the situational nature of it isn't fair either.
I love the character analysis in this. Seeing some genuine appreciation for what Doctor Hansen of all people does for the narrative was great, seeing some respect for General Warfield was awesome, and the deconstruction of Tychus was the icing on the cake. One detail I do wish was mentioned during it though was that Jim always had that revolver to kill Mengsk. Seeing it used against Tychus... god it stings so bad. The fact I feel his loss more strongly than Zeratul's (although it too still pains me) probably has something to do with me not playing SC1, but I like to see it as the raw appeal of watching this ruggish outlaw slowly understand what fighting for something bigger than himself can do is so... humanising. It's perfect, and I'm glad to see someone so succiently summarise it. Makes me curious to see what you'll say about Alarak considering he fulfils a similar niche. Oh and the credits scenes on the TV... yeah they're defintely the best part of the video
In that choice with what do with the colonists, I expected I would actually have to do something like the culling. Nothing in the pre-mission dialogue is about how you will just have to defend colonists from the Zerg. So I never sided with Selendis until a few years ago, never even knew what the mission was actually about. They make it seem like you have to kill the colonists, which is a choice I would never make. ... And then when you choose Safe Haven there isn't any sign of infestation is sight!
Basically the story changes depending on what you pick, so that you can't make the "wrong" choice If you side with Hanson the infestation is in the early stages and a cure is possible, if you go with Selendis the colony is already gone Same with Nova vs Tosh, if you go with Nova then Tosh is a lunatic and Spectres are a ticking time bomb, but if you side with Tosh then Nova was lying and they're fine
@creativename1673 yeah but terrazin IS making people (and protoss, but especially people as protoss are more mentally durable) Amon-possessed lunatics because it strengthens your connection with the Void, realm where evil god sits so this have to mean that Nova choice canon but then you have Spectres in LotV epilogue and they not crazy despite being terrazin-high and physically in the Void already wtf i guess Tosh and his men had anime training montage offscreen to make themself more Amon-proof than freaking Protoss with hundreds of years of mental discipline
@creativename1673 I have to disagree with you on the nova vs tosh one. It doesn't change the story at all based on your pick, but rather neither side is telling you the full story. If you side with tosh, you find that they're more dangerous than he let on to, but less do than nova implies
@creativename1673 The Tosh choice doesn't need to warp reality. If Dr. Hanson is still around after siding with Tosh she'll say that spectres are basically just people, not more unstable (keep in mind Amon is not revived yet so any future possession is well beyond this scope), but also still capable of regular cruelty and insanity just like the general population. And if you side with Nova YOU are the one betraying Tosh, so OF COURSE he goes off the rails. The fact his voodoo doll fails in such a ridiculous manner suggests he hadn't exactly planned and prepared it in advance, and his facility existing (or getting destroyed by Nova without your help) if you side with him does not cause any lore issues either. At the same time NCO demonstrates that even without Amon the Terrazine can undo ghost mind wipes, and we know both the training and the work itself is godawful. Add a certainly inhumane experimental spectre program on top of that and it's no wonder the original spectres went crazy, anyone would if you tortured them enough and gave them the means to lash out.
@@Photoloss Something I would like to add-on to this is that if you talk to Dr. Hanson, on siding with Nova, she is muttering to herself about how Jim is not a mass killer and it's Mengsk that is (paraphrasing here). This implies her and Nova talked and was lied too. Most players don't get to see this though because they don't click on her.
If I may offer a theory on why the first bonus objective gives you nothing? I believe it was originally meant to be what spawned all the civilians with molotovs. Destroy all the propaganda and in exchange the people rise up alongside you. However, during testing it might have come up that, unless someone was already a fairly skilled player, it was impossible to defeat the vultures without the mob, so they made the mob happen all the time instead of requiring the bonus. Alternatively, the developers wanted the player to see Jim cause a revolution. To have the big set piece saying "this is Jim. He's a rebel, he inspires people to stand up for themselves" and were worried players unfamiliar with RPG and RTS would just ignore the side objective under some "this is just a dumb tutorial" belief, rushing through it ignoring the side objective and missing the mob. But that's just a theory. Unless Blizzard were to come out and say something, we'll never actually know. Heck, for all we know the side objective giving nothing could have been done on purpose to show the player that you don't need to complete the side objective to advance a mission.
Grant when playing Zero Hour : **yawn* Grant when talking about Zero Hour : *"Epic and intense"* At least Grant still has the same opinion as us when it comes to Dr. Hanson xD
It is epic and intense. First time on the Brutal difficulty. Grant can't avoid yawning playing this mission in a thousand time, even with different changes
For a brand new player that just learned the mechanic of the game after 2 missions, zero hour will slap really hard if you're not prepared for zerg agro. But after several replays, it is indeed a nice pace mission to teach the player how good of a turtle the terran can be.
zero hour is a great mission, but it's not very replayable. you are locked in a defence, defending the same area with nothing much happening to force you to do fun stuff. at the same time, you also don't have any fun terran defence tools, just the utilitarian bunker. it makes sense why they didn't have any other defensive missions before you got the siege tank.
42:46 i love how you basically meet face to face with what I'm pretty sure is supposed to be your personal SC1 adjetant. Still miss the characters calling me Magistrate tho.
To Hanson's credit, she might find out the cure for her people, but Zerg and virus in general are keep mutating every moment, also the fact that the Zerg can just make new one pretty easily(I think), it's a high possibility that the cure she find just don't work after the Heaven's case.
That's what I think as well. The Zerg are masters of evolution and biological warfare. As soon as they notice that there is something that counters one of their viruses, they would adapt and change up the Virus, so the cure doesn't work anymore.
@@Mrcryptidsarereal Lemon is the ultimate weapon against zerg, even the almighty powerful Abathur can't fight against it. May all zerg kneel for my lemon juice.
For the computer science nerds: To simulate this, I created a Mission class that holds all of the data for each mission. The class has one method: isPlayable, which does as it says on the tin (by checking if it has already been played, the split choice wasn't done, prereq unlocked, mission count, etc.). I then had a great time defining every mission and its requirements, though I skipped all of the split missions. Because they are all dead ends, those don't have to be simulated, and we can multiply the output by 8 (2^3 where 3 are the 3 split missions: Haven, Ghosts/Spectres, and Char). With all the data defined, it was relatively straightforward to implement a Depth First Search to traverse the tree that was made. Breadth First Search ran into memory issues, so DFS was required. For checking, I printed out every 100,000th run (and when run on the command line, threw it into a text file), and all of our spot checks were reasonable. Printing out every combination would have taken ~532 GB of hard drive space which I opted not to do. If you want to check the code: pastebin.com/FMjsfWx0
Wow, I never imagined how complicated it could have gotten calculating all the missions routes and how unique each campaign would be! I can't imagine how much more complicated this gets when calculating alternative dialogue between mission arcs...
we would multiply by 8 the output only if all the run get the 3 split mission, but only the last one is required (split char). to get the good result we have to make 3 separate case : A) we encounter no split mission outside the endgame → *1 B) we only enconter the split mission of tosh/nova or the split mission of the colony → * 2 C) we encounter both split mission → *4 then we sum A, B and C and multyply this result by 2 Also, the 3 first mission are mandatory to reach completion so you could symplified your code by starting from zero hour. PS : sorry for my bad english, it's not my primary langage
@endermusique1755 You're totally right about the split missions! The code didn't iterate from mission 1 (only when it branched), so it only ran through lib day/outlaws/zero hour once. We did apply that optimization to Char though.
I always interpreted it that the cure for the infestation by Hanson was the cure for whatever kind of sleeper agent zerg infestation was in the colonists, not just a general cure that could neutralise it completely when it's actively happening. It's kind of creative licence interpretation, but it makes a conclusion that doesn't leave the canon in flames
The big problem there is it still flies in the face of everything we know in the setting - Zerg Infestation always uses the Hyperevolutionary Virus. The protoss have never figured out a way to cure said virus - only figuring out a way to *temporarily* hold it at bay - even after years of research using hyper advanced nanotechnology that terrans can't even imagine. Meanwhile, Dr Hanson figured out how to outright cure it with a metaphorical box of scraps and - as grant pointed out - doesn't share how she figured out a cure with anybody, and it never gets mentioned ever again.
There are no coincidences, only signs. ;-) Just recently I finished a complete playthrough of Wings of Liberty. I played all the missions, listened to all the dialogues and watched all the cutscenes. I do that every few years, but only with WoL. Your video came just in time, thank you! There's one thing that you didn't mention and I believe it's worth mentioning; it's another of the many winks and nods the developers had made towards the old players. The first three missions of WoL take place on Mar Sara, the third one is an evacuation mission. The first three missions of Starcraft 1 also took place on Mar Sara and the third one wass also an evacuation mission. This shows that Blizzard could use nostalgia as their tool, but it wasn't their only tool, not even the main one. RIP Incontrol and Totalbiscuit. The news of their deaths had been double shocking. They were both my age and both passed away before reaching forty.
WoL era was truly a magical period in the history of gaming, largely due to the influence of absolutely amazing personalities of Geoff "InControl" and John "TotalBiscuit" Bain, and for me, eventhough I never had the pleasure of personally interacting with any of those great men, my world has felt *much* emptier since they both passed.
For the Haven mission design, imo it will be much better if Raynor and the Daelamm team up to deal with both the infestation and the zerg forces. We can have a choice between purging the infested colonies while the protoss is dealing with the zerg reinforcement; or we can obliterate the zerg bases while the Daelamm focus on the infested stuffs. It feels so awkward to chase our protoss friend away when they just want to clear the infected at their home doorstep.
Starcraft 2 incredible in many ways, single aspect that i was felt lacking is that i want BIGGER fucking maps, with more difficult terrain so reapers and transport ships (medevacs and hercules) can shine more, and more complex in-game choices can be made, like choosing who to help by attacking one of two bases instead of picking one of two options out of the mission so, like Warcraft 3 a bit (it had simpler effects and much smaller unit count, i know, but anyway)
The issue with your proposal is that having a major zerg presence on Haven, including the starting point of vanilla Haven's Fall for that matter, just doesn't make sense in the slightest. Either we catch the protoss right as they're instating a quarantine and it's our job to nip the infestation in the bud, or the planet should be glassed already because they're clearly willing to go that far. And Jim fighting off the protoss while there are active full-fledged hives doesn't make any sense either, at best it'd be a reversed merge of Evacuation and Smash&Grab where you try to get out the non-infested colonists while the protoss and zerg try to destroy each other, but then we'd be back to square one on the narrative side and the whole mission chain would feel meaningless/would need a new finale. Mandatory Haven's Fall is the grim, gritty writing a decent portion of SC1 subscribed to. Mandatory Safe Haven is the heroic Jim SC2 goes for. The choice as present in vanilla doesn't work at all without warping off-screen reality.
@@Photoloss I feel the best course of action would have been to not make it a split mission: Selandris is there to contain the Zerg, but Dr. Hansen has a reasonable belief she can actually cure the infestation. So we end up with a mission with the objective to "Destroy the Zerg Infestation", but Hansen makes it so that instead of safely glassing the planet from Orbit, it has to be a more localized purge of the infestation putting everyone at greater risk. Use Haven's fall map/scenario, and if you beat the mission before a certain number of colonies fall, Hansen gets her antidote made, she stays on Haven, and the cure for Zerg Infestation becomes UNN news (With Mengsk getting credit). If you don't protect enough colonies, Hansen gets hasty and infested, and you get the Haven's Fall ending... but Stenton sees where Hansen went wrong, and develops a cure/vaccine that can't save the people of Haven, but can save others so it's not a complete loss.
On the topic of Stettman's research, there's a blurb in the lab (that you can see in this video at some point) where he discovers that zerg will *never* die of old age. In Heart of the Swarm, Kerrigan is impressed that the primal zerg are so old, and we are promptly told that all things age and die, even zerg. I understand it may just be imperfect research from Stettman but it very clearly reeks of one person having a cool idea for a small lore piece that make zerg even more impressive and alien, while everyone else promptly forgot about it, and later decided that primal zerg should have a cool age factor completely independently of the original idea
You know I'm gonna point this out, the idea of Zerg being biologically immortal (ie, never dying of old age) kinda runs counter to some of their units. Namely the ones with a timed lifespan, aka broodlings. I know gameplay story disconnect is a thing, but I find it a little funny that the game can go: "Zerg can never die old age...except for this specific strain."
@@randomguyblank1616 Considering broodlings explode into a cloud of blood at the end of their timer, Imma say they maybe die of... something else. They probably just use the full strength of all their muscles and rip their own body apart under the strain or something
That might be a timescale issue. If you ask a 3 million year old being about death it'll say: "All things die. My grandpa was taken a little early, only 20 million years old!", and if you ask the 30 year old Stetmann he'd say "Nah the Zerg are fucking immortal"
Thank you for sharing your personal stories with this. We all miss InControl and TotalBiscuit. You're right that we were lucky to have them. We're also lucky to have you. You're huge, truly a Giant of the community. Love you dude.
I disagree that the Mobius Factor is a "simple mission". It feels very chaotic. In most missions, you can carve a path from your base to the objective/s. Here, between Zerg scurrying all over the map, having to transport troops through loads of anti-air with few options for air units, and a time pressure that cannot be pushed back indefinitely unlike something like "Welcome to the Jungle", I never feel comfortable clearing out the Zerg. This mission really sells the feeling of a spec ops team inserting into a mess of a situation and executing a surgical strike.
Yeah, when you play it a few times and understand what is going on Mobius Factor is an extremely short and simple mission. But on your first play through it's a chaotic mess with some decent AI pressure against your base
beautiful done grant! thanks for keeping the SC universe alive with all the challenge runs you have done, not to mention all the people behind you, and the communities you have built! The modders, the players, the viewers, the subs and donators! I love and agree with your entire interpretation of the campaign! as a life long lover of starcraft this was easily one of my favourite videos of yours! and has kept me viewing for hours! the single line the sent chills down my spine had to be... "He ain't alone Arcturus" Have a great day!
I really love how for Bel'shir, you not only get an achievement for defeating the protoss base, but it is also an alternative win condition. It is a shame that only three missions across all of SC2 have alternative win conditions, and that includes Welcome to the Jungle. The Dig has one and Purification from Legacy of the Void. The latter though is kinda silly as by the time you might get around to destroying the last zerg base, you might as well just finish off the last set of locks. And depending on which base that is, you really have to go out of your way not to win the intended way. Edit: I have mentioned this correction in the comments to this comment so I will say it here as well. I did miss one and that was shoot the messager. Destroying the launch bays ends the mission. So there are four missions in total that have alternative win conditions.
Killing all zerg on the redstone? the lava mission also gives you a win if I recall right. there's no achievement, but if you clear the map, and manage to avoid gathering 8k minerials you win.
@ I know certain mods for WoL does that with red stone. However the default campaign does not. In fact you can get yourself soft locked on that mission.
However I will admit that I did miss one. Shoot the messager from HotS. Destroying all the launch bays wins the mission. It is also the mastery achievement for that mission iirc. So there are four missions throughout all of SC2 with alternative win conditions. I’ll take this time to mention some missions I kinda wish had them in some way. 1. Feeding the ancient: I wished killing all four primal hives allowed you to skip the feeding portion and trigger the brakk boss early. With brakk defeated, you can then feed Zurvan uncontested as his pack now fears the broken Zerg (aka the Zerg swarm). For now anyway. 2. Night terrors from NCO. Destroying the Tal’tarim base ends the sealing waves. Defeating all the Zerg bases ends the Zerg attacks when you harvest. Defeating both ends the mission. I really hate how HotS and LotV have missions where the regular attack waves are spawned in. In particular spear of adun where the mastery achievement is to destroy all enemy structures. It makes taking the enemy bases super annoying that the attack waves continue to spawn in even when you have defeated that enemy faction.
I think I remember Grant saying once that a big difference between Starcraft 1's "Zero Hour" (desperate alliance) and _actual_ Zero Hour is that clearing the entire map gives you the win in SC2? and something about SC1 not having that even in Remastered, even though Desperate Alliance in Starcraft 1 on ... the Nintendo something or other _did_ have that win condition? but maybe I'm misremembering some details. It mostly stuck in my head because of the Nintendo console version of Starcraft somehow being better about this, lol.
@@droid-droidsson There are no alt win conditions on zero hour. As the mission continues via spawned in enemies through the nydus worms. iirc Desperate alliances did have an alt win condition in the demo version, but that was removed for the full release. The SC64 version brought it back but the remaster didn't. Spawned in scripted attack waves is one of the reasons why a lot of missions do not have alt win conditions. For example the evacuation. You could clear both bases but you still have to escort the APC's due to the drops and nydus worms events.
To be entirely fair to Jim, I don't think he ever met Duran. Also, putting names backwards is an effective disguise. Had a notorious outlaw help my DnD party out, had his poster up that looked exactly like him nearby, they saw it constantly, same description every time for both the NPC and the poster... "Sadra" doesn't sound like "Ardas" though, so they shrugged and went on. Mind, the highest INT among all five of them is 11, so I might just be overestimating them.
Grant. I just want to thank you again for reigniting my love for Starcraft. Between videos like these and showcasing all the insanely talented modders and their amazing campaigns and helping to make the CCM to make playing them so easy. Can never thank you enough for all the many many hours ive put into the game since finding your channel 😁
"A brief retrospective" that's longer than many of the game's speedruns! Wings of Liberty is a masterpiece of blending storytelling with gameplay. I seriously hope that Stormgate or ZeroSpace will be able to deliver on the promise of giving us more of what made Wings of Liberty so good.
I literally just finished your Warcraft 3 retro and loved it, just to see you just dropped this and I can’t say how happy I was to have another 3 hour video to zone into😭
I know many people love Starcraft 1 to death, and I like that game a lot as well. However, many of the missions on each campaign is just Kill the enemy bases, rinse and repeat. So it can get not just repetitive but tiring when playing continuously as you gotta restart all your economy and base progress each mission. Wings of Liberty has some really good and varied mission objectives which helps mitigate that problem and I find myself easily playing it continuously!
It's somewhat better in brood war compared to the base game. Especially with the terran missions like stealing battle cruisers or enduring nukes or whatnot. But yeah, I agree, mission variety was way better in starcraft 2. But I do appreciate blizzard increasing video game quality from warcraft 1 to legacy of the void.
My conspiracy theory on SC2 story quality taking nosedive after WoL (beside obvious part of Blizzard itself starting to losing talents) is that original story is meant to be upto SC3 but they canned that idea after RTS began to be less popular, resulting everything else being re-written to get crammed in 2 expansions without proper time and attention. Pacing makes so much more sense if SC2's final boss was Narud or Mengsk (or both)and Amon was meant to be reserved for SC3.
I think SC2 is far more mechanically varied and interesting.. but, I must say that the tone of SC1 is far more compelling than SC2. There is something about late 90s presentation thats very difficult to replicate with more modern graphics/sound. SC2 feels fun, slightly toony and cheesy.. which is okay, I dont hate it, but it isnt super gripping. SC1 feels more.. industrial, oppressive and mysterious, all at the same time.
@@allhailderpfestor4839Even WoL was already a nosedive over SC1. Grant pointed out a lot of problems with WoL writing that are often overlooked. One simple and important detail from SC1 missing in SC2 is the framing of who you are. In SC1 you were always a faceless and nameless character with whom the cast would interact. WoL on the other hand has such a convoluted perspective on who are you. Raynor talks as if he is the commander of the forces, but the few times he is out on the field his lines imply he is being ordered around by someone else. This also leada to a bloat of in-mission dialogue where character will be talking to Raynor while stuff is happening and Raynor starts talking back. However, Raynor nor anyone else is a part of the mission per se.
Ahhhhhh maaaaaaan! You forgot to mention that there's different dialogue for some missions: for example after beating the secret mission Raynor would be enraged at about the Hybrid manufacturing, but if you only did 2 out of 4 protoss missions he'd tell Horner how he has seen a Hybrid before, and if you completed all of the protoss missions Raynor would admit in defeat to Horner that Kerigain needs to survive... It's also interesting to get early dialogue from Dr Hansen and Tosh, and Interestingly Stetmen would talk in Dr Hansen's when collecting new artifact fragments!
Grant started with the title, then did the video, looked at the time, looked back at the title, and went "It's not 3 hours, so I'm keeping the title!". I'm so hyped for this!
I remember playing this campaign and really thinking to myself: Goddamn, they really set the bar for campaign rts games A shame that almost no other developer put so much time/effort and detail in their rts campaigns and focus more on the multiplayer aspect
Thank you for this! Starcraft 2 was so very important for me (and alot of other people) so this really brought me back. Miss alot of great people (rip incontrol and TB). You really are among the great remaining in the scene! Hope you have a nice Holiday
I maintain to this day that, unlike the Haven split, where it's clearly changing reality to make your choice the "correct" one, the Tosh/Nova split is straight up just, Nova is lying to you, and you have the option to fall for it. Tosh isn't some bloodthirsty killer, he's upset at you _because you betrayed him._ The Psi Indoctrinator still exists in the Tosh version of the split, but _he agrees_ to only take volunteers. As for the narrative freedom of mission selection... I will admit, personally I think I would have preferred that they had chosen to forsake that freedom and focus on a more tightly woven narrative; there are a number of plot threads that pop out in random conversations that simply never go anywhere because the freeform nature of the campaign means they CAN'T, because any of those plot threads might happen in any given order, or not happen at all. This is _purely_ my own personal taste and opinion, though. I just prefer the stronger narrative, because that's the big thing that pulls me into the game.
I forgot the exact wording, Nova might even _technically_ be telling the truth. Basically from the Dominion's perspective all former spectres probably did go rogue and "crazy", because that's what people do if you torture and mind control them if given half a chance to escape or have their revenge. And to the general public they probably _are_ reckless killers, much like Jim is a "terrorist". But the actual spectre creation process itself doesn't drive you crazy, or at least not without Amon around to take advantage of Terrazine's connection to the Void.
In the end it still does not matter. No matter what choice you make the story going forwards doesn't change. Regardless which side you pick Hots goes the same way and Tosh is never seen again. The only difference is you see him die if you sided with Nova, but if you sided with Tosh you gotta assume Noba killed him off screen. The alternative being the writers assumed nobody ever sided with Tosh and it's not worth remembering him being a character
@@RancorSnpYou can actually see Tosh in the intro cutscene of Conviction in HotS if you choose to help him in WoL. Raynor will even suggest sending Tosh to help Kerrigan break Jim out. If you help Nova, he will suggest sending the ghost squad instead. Unfortunately, both choices only affect the cutscene, and Kerrigan will go alone anyway.
What's cool to see about Zeratul's entrance here... is how it inspired a recreation of that SC1 flair Grant showed as an example in Mass Recall. *The torches going out pair by pair is just a beatifull nod to Zeratul's first appearance in WoL!*
About The Devil's Playground, one has to highlight how far Blizzard has come when it comes to the "stockpile a resource" missions. First, in StarCraft: Brood War, we have "The Kel-Morian Combine", where you have to stockpile 10000 minerals without gold minerals or caches to obtain. It's a SLOW grind, plus, being Brood War, there are massive bases all over the map. Then there's Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos with "The Spirit of Ashenvale", where you have to stockpile 15000 lumber. This time it's the secondary resource what you have to get, meaning your spending isn't as likely to slow you down as much, plus there's the secondary objectives of getting the best lumber gatherer in the game, or destroying the Night Elf Trees to get several thousand lumber at once. And now, with "The Devil's Playground", you have gold minerals for faster gathering, caches everywhere to quickly stockpile minerals, a ton of free units to not spend minerals on, and the requirement is noticeably lower.
I just finished playing through this game for the first time this month. It was so much fun! It absolutely does not feel like a 14 year old game AT ALL!
really really enjoyed this video. i watch a lot of video essays about games that i enjoy but i can't say i've seen many if any that tackle this game or RTS in general. this really just made my appreciation for this game grow even more. thanks for the great content!
29:19 the lava mechanic is also used in a versus map called Burning Tide, a 3v3 layout map where the goal is for one side to reach a mineral quota first the coop map Vermillion's Problem did not start with enemies immune to lava, which is the reason why even today enemy waves race to high ground when lava is about to rise, i believe the immunity was added when they introduced mutators
Another thing to mention is that James Raynor has a great voice actor. Really like him on the mission The Dig and the secret mission. Also, for the second mothership boss fight, I kinda like it because of the little bit of stress that the surrounding base (if you have not completely destroyed it) and the rip-fields cause. That bit about teleporting away is a bit annoying though. All and all, very cool briefspectiving good sir! o7
The funny thing is, Welcome to the Jungle isn't a mission I generally find too tricky and go to asap for the Goliath. Always amused me that it's considered one of the harder ones. edit: the hybrid upgrade system is something I was thinking of for a mod I'm working on. I was also thinking of the possibility of allowing a much cheaper 1-mission version if you don't want it perma, or allowing you to research upgrades in missions and carry a limited number over to the next mission.
The Goliath Upgrades are some of my favorites, so speedrunning towards getting Goliaths as early as possible is my general strategy for campaign too. Funny enough I feel like WttJ got harder after I heard people consider it a hard mission, like a psychological effect.
Certainly not the easiest mission, but I thought it’s comparatively chill too. Even if you pick it asap you can just spam goliaths and take some extra time if you want (by letting a few altars close). There are many more stressful missions where you are on a strict timer, make one mistake for game over, or just have to multitask at 100+ apm to win on brutal. Not so in the jungle!
Thank you for making my 12 hour shift today more bearable. Fantastic video as always. SC2 has so many good memories for me in early HS, and im always excited to replay it every now and then.
About Raynor's drinking problem, I view it as a "When I'm helping people I'm fine, but when I'm not I start to sink back into my depression", so when he's helping the doctor and Tosh/Nova he can temporarily come back to himself but once it's just back to his own rebellion things go bad for him again.
Years of watching this channel, off and on supporting on Patreon, and not until now did I understand the whole plot of this campaign. Thanks Grant, I love this game thanks to you.
I never thought that waking up at 5:30 am with hangover would extend my attention span enough to watch this video, but honestly your storytelling and the fact that you are my favorite RTS youtuber, helps a lot.
Bravo and well done on this main channel video, Grant! I think this is even better than your AoM retrospective you did a while back, and that was pretty good, too! I love how you took such a nuanced look at *every aspect* of WoL, including your own past experiences and a critical look at the PvP/eSport scene past & present, all while incorporating your signature light-hearted attitude and humor. As someone who has watched a lot of your archive videos and challenge runs on YT, I *still* learned new things about the game and its various mission design choices! Similarly, I sincerely enjoyed learning more about your early experiences with WoL and the burgeoning eSport scene during the 2010's! So thank you for including those tidbits throughout this video; it definitely helped break up the long review of the campaign and was well-paced without coming across as jarring or distracting as you transitioned between them.
i remember when i was a kid the reason i always sided with the protoss on Haven wasn't the fact that it made more sense than siding with Hanson, but because as a kid i found fighting the protoss there impossible, sure i can win against them nowadays, but i just prefer purging the infested
Thank you Grant, that was a looooong video but I think it needed to be that long ! It's just so complete, you talked about everything cool and it was a real pleasure to watch ! Thank you a lot !
I am only 1/3 through the video but I want to thank you for refreshing my experience playing this campaign for the first time; it was great because no hand holding and you die exactly as you will expect for not learning; the difficulty was there exactly as I wanted when I played on brutal, having to reload saves on mistakes. Crazy to think that Starcraft was a mostly a monocore/dualcore game for all the things that happens in it.
Thank you for sharing your personal experiences from the starcraft competitive scene. I absolutely adore candid stories from grassroots communities, and I very much appreciate the time you spent on this video. This is truly a delight and I will likely watch it multiple times.
Amazing video! Maybe the only thing that's missing is a discussion on the game difficulty options and how they alter the missions cause I feel like balancing for RTS difficulty is REALLY hard considering the gap between someone making a few units hapazardly and someone with a grasp on macro mechanics building an economy and a composition with a plan. And people always talk smack about the lower difficulties completely forgetting how hard it was for them when they were first introduced to the genre. Sometimes the difficulty is just "more stuff, earlier" but sometimes it's things like "add this unit that adds an extra type of problem to the mission" and I think it's a really interesting part of mission design that doesn't get talked about much.
I love incontrol. Played against him a few times in warhammer and have a few warhammer friends that were really close with him. Dude was a stand up guy
I feel Jim's just a just functional enough alcoholic to know he shouldn't be drinking on the job. but starts drinking the second he's back on the hyperion. and sobers himself up before each mission starts
Even over a decade later Starcraft 2 is still my favorite RTS campaign. I always loved entering dialogue with characters around the Hyperion. Kinda reminds me of Mass Effect where you get to interact with the supporting characters and hearing their opinions about what is happening throughout the storyline. 😇
Hey Grant, I just wanted to say that the way you bring in your own personal history with the game adds a special charm to these videos. All of us have a story to tell about what these games mean to us, and hearing yours just makes me smile :)
In defense of the drunken Jim story line, a lot of alcoholics are able to snap out of it when doing their job/hobby/task and execute it very well only to go back to their drunken misery once that is done
I think my favorite thing about these retrospectives is that so much of your content is about breaking the game or having to manipulate it to overcome the challenges that it's really nice to just see you getting to play the game and enjoy it
@@The-jy3yq The banelings do in fact unburrow, and there's a few in Evacuation as well. Functionally they might as well be cloaked attackers though because you sure aren't reacting in time for the difference to be meaningful. I don't recall any enemy spider mines though. Also Orlan has a cloaked ghost to drop his nuke. And IIRC Welcome to the Jungle has observers too, but nobody cares.
It's been a while since I just sat through a 3 hour long video in one sitting but when Grant releases a "brief" retrospective of an RTS game, I know I have to do it. Keep up the good work, sir.
The fact this man can speedrun the entirety of WoL in less time than it takes him to "briefly" summarize it is hilarious to me. Please, never change Grant, you glorious goof.
Ay offtopic man, but that a Wilson pfp?
@@govt.knives4534 Oh aye it is, my favorite gentleman scientist. If I recall properly, this was a fan art spoof of him taking after Maxwell in the most literal way, black magic and a spiffing suit too.
Speedrun the game, slow run a brief summary
The end with Tychus always gets me, in particular is the trigger control. Tychus, shoot first ask questions never, choreographed it all, gave Jim warning by talking to Arcturus and laser aimed at her forehead, then slowly squeezing the trigger to fire one, solitary shot. He wasn't the character to talk about such things, but he wanted his friend to be happy. So, on the cusp of his freedom which he'd sought and fought for the whole story, he gave his life to save hers, for his best friend.
Also Jim's revolver only has 1 bullet, and it is intended to kill Mengsk only (the Buccephalus boarding cinematic did a great job on this). It is not only the bullet that saves Kerrigan, but also the one that frees Tychus from Mengsk's death grip on him.
@@desfoxofthedesert which, consequently, does kill Mengsk, just through Kerrigan
yeah SC2 is a character drama set in space
And kerrigan threw it all away ... still hate the decision for her to go back to be the queen of blades
HOTS/LOTV had so many issues, but WOL was damn near peak fiction. only complain i have is retroactively adding romance.
You have my favorite definition of “Brief” on the Internet.
Ah yes, "Brief".....In mobile phone game terms.
Reporting for duty
Not even 3 hours
Reminds me on the "QUICK" Retrospectives from PatricianTV... every video about 6-8 hours... and every game at least 2-4 videos long...
@@thehidden56 barely anything.
Another note about Tychus's character, there's an interpretation of the cantina fight scene that I read a few years ago and have subscribed to since: Tychus wasn't being drunk and angry, he was trying to do a good thing. He doesn't want to kill Kerrigan, but if he doesn't work toward that goal, he dies. So instead, he tries his absolute hardest to get disqualified from being allowed to go to Char without it looking suspicious. It's perfectly in character for him to start a drunken bar fight, and if he isn't allowed to go to Char, he's able to tell Mengsk that he tried his best and Mengsk has no reason to doubt him.
Manufacturing plausible deniability. I like it.
My interpretation is that that was his last attempt to convince himself. He tells the crew Raynor will just use them and abandon them, refering to the fact that Tychus took the fall for Raynor and Raynor never busted him out of jail or something. He just doesn't believe it enough.
What I do think was him trying to sabotage the mission were the parts where he claims he's scared of Kerrigan. He goes from 'let's kill her and get rewarded' to 'she's too scary let's stay away'. That doesn't sound like Tychus at all. Though you could interpret that as him being afraid of her mind reading powers "she's trying to get in our heads" and fear of her blowing his cover.
Either may have been Tychus’ plan, but I doubt Mengsk would have spared him because "he did his best but oh well".
Unless he gets a better idea to make use of his pet marine, Mengsk would be better off with him dead.
Oh, shit. I hadn’t thought of that.
@@gregoirebasseville4797 Oh, no doubt about it. I'm sure in either case Tychus is VERY aware of that. It's not a good plan, but the alternatives suck even more, so.
I just replayed and found out goofing around that on Sudden Strike, Nova Covert Op's second mission, if you scanner sweep behind the zerg base, there's a bunch of cloaked ghosts and a Psi Emitter, hinting at the overarching plot of the ghosts (like Nova) causing zerg attacks. You can never see this angle unless you waste a scan sweep (was playing an Archepelago run, so was a bit OP at the time and scanning at random). Not terribly related, but just wanted to chorus some fun notes about environmental storytelling, that 10 years down the line, I'm still finding out about things in the games.
thats so cool
That's AMAZING! going to check it out now!
Most of the Nova campaign was pretty good, the ending kinda pissed me off though, since I was -SPOILER WARNING BELOW-
intent on following Emperor Valerian's orders, to capture and not kill the rogue general Davis. Having the kill be forced kinda felt a little wierd.
What I love about Supernova is when you make an attempt and realize you aren't prepared for it yet (like you want to use Vikings but you haven't done Haven yet for whatever reason). So the star politely cools off again and waits for you to come back, before it goes nova again just as it did before.
lol I guess I never had that interpretation bc I never thought of aborted missions as 'leaving,' I always thought of it as simply a cut off timeline and 'returning' would be continuing your correct timeline.
@@hugomendoza5665 Considering the dialogue is identical in the subsequent attempts, this is essentially what happens.
Or the dominion postponing sending out the trains, or colonel Orlean so politely waiting for you to come back before proceeding to collect the minerals.
To be fair, it's a common video game cliché, where they game will give you a super urgent quest and then if you chose to do a bunch of side quests before everyone will wait for the player. Then, the players shows up just in time, as they would have if they went immediately. This goes for the colonist missions and tyrador in WoL.
It will claim to be a real, living, breathing world but in reality just a theatre play for the player to enjoy. Most of us probably like it better that way.
@@jonathanbehrends4796 We don't usually play games to have to deal with the same urgency as real life.
23:30 Grant, that science man has an open bag of cheetos in his lab coat pocket and most of his research notes boil down to
"I poked the Zerg sample with a cool stick I found and it spat acid at me. While I was holding a funeral for Sticky XIV I realised it's probably pretty important that our marines not get melted by acid. Getting poked by sticks, also pretty bad"
And then the game makes you pick between your Barracks units taking less AOE damage or getting an extra point of armour at the start of a mission.
Stetmann is many things, but a rigorous professional scientist with extensive resources is not one of them.
And at the same time the actual "research facilities" seem to be essentially useless, all the benefits we do gain are rooted in stetboi's ...excentric... genius where putting anyone else there (or just being slightly more realistic) would leave Hanson's assessment entirely correct. Heck, Moebius presumably had Narud's help in researching protoss tech and they _barely_ made functioning warp tech with stolen pylons in the LotV Prologue, yet we get it working for autogas while on the run. (Admittedly SC1 terrans had independently developed teleporter tech in structures, but the WoL research explicitly references the protoss version instead)
@@Photoloss It's a mix of Stetmann being a Certified Freak of Nature and the Protoss Crystal doing everything in it's little diamond heart to help the Hyperion in increasingly obvious ways
Ideally, before the Haven missions unlocked, there should have been a scene where Hanson realized that Stetman's bizarre approach is coming up with results that a more proper lab would never have gotten to, and that plus the proximity of the strange artifacts were helping her come up with ways to combat the infestation that they'd seen. Something to pay off her earlier dismissiveness on the subject, while also building up the potential cure that she would eventually be able to create.
I mean, wasn't there that lore bit where Stetman joined the raiders cause he had developed a Terran-made Shielding system that was better than the Protoss's, but realized he can't let it get into anyone's hands?
Then again, it's been years. I could be remember parts or all of this wrong.
This, he kinda lucks his way into success because the artifact is empowering the protoss and zerg samples.
Regarding the end of WoL, in my opinion it's the best ending to a story I've seen. Those 10 seconds between "You have your orders, mister Findlay" and the final shot have so much packed into them.
Tychus was THE man for the job. "Just fucking shoot her", you might say. But yeah, he got softer throughout the campaign, and I think finding out what happened on Tarsonis, what Mengsk did to Kerrigan... he realised his choice was fake. He refuses to kill Raynor and Sara, he dies. He does kill them, Mengsk will kill him anyways because he'd be a lose end and Big M is not going to make the same mistake again. But when shit went down, he saw a 3rd option. Show Jim what is going on. Take the moment of hesitation. Don't shoot the weapon that can punch through a tank on full auto, but take a one stray and well telegraphed shot. Have Jim be his executioner. "We are who we chose to be", and Tychus at that moment chose to be free.
I really like the theory that Tychus decided to go out by his friends hand, instead of Mengsk.
Wishful thinking? Maybe. But I like to think of Tychus getting as happy of an ending as he could.
The comment from Donny about the Zerg watching the UNN broadcasts is a nice nod to the novel, Liberty's Crusade, in which it ends with the reveal that the Zerg, or at least Kerrigan, do in fact, watch Terran news broadcasts. So Donny was actually right, he does know they watch.
i mean, they also infest hundreds of terrans who watch the news every single day. so even if they ont actively watch, they know whats in the news all the time
Kerrigan's inclusion in All In is the thing that makes it a masterpiece. From a narrative perspective including her as a final boss just fits perfectly. But from a gameplay perspective, I think she fits a very important role. Hold out missions are the hardest type of mission to balance in RTS. If you've ever mastered Last Stand in LOTV, you know that once you get the right defense up, the mission practically plays itself. But if you ramp up the attacks too much, then it can become unfair how easily the attacks overwhelm the player.
Kerrigan's role in all in is to be a disruptor. It takes a bit, but once you get the defense set up and the economy going, the attack waves on all in aren't too tough to deal with. Kerrigan's job is to make sure you don't get too comfortable. She comes to throws a wrench in your plan. She puts a crack in your defenses and give the attack wave an opening. Forcing you to scramble to plug the hole.
It's genius. As this occasional attacker, she ensures that passive defense isn't an option while not over tuning the main attack waves.
...except for the fact that her undisclosed bullshit mechanics all perfectly align to be hardcountered by mass marines. The basic, spammable, already stupidly overpowered unit which you're probably only shying away from because they've steamrolled every other challenge at this point (alongside tanks, and not counting Maw's ripfields ofc).
@@Photoloss Pretty sure her true hardcounter are Ghosts lol. Also mass marines? Does your Kerrigan not have Razor Swarm? On brutal it kills like 10-20 marines in one shot if I remember right, and sure I've seen techniques where you bait her out and micro hard, but why? Why even bother? I just get mass ghosts and sniper her till she's dead, far easier to do and more fun too. Or get mass BC. Just make sure you have a sacrificial lamb for the Implode and the BC mass Yamato will obliterate her in seconds.
@@Photoloss except for the fact that on all in marine-based defense effective against 4 whole units (Kerri included)and without 50 SCVs repairing wall will crumble before Kerri show up. And razor swarm
@@stankobarabata2406 Marines are dirt cheap and minerals aren't much of a constraint in All In to begin with. Basically just drop a hercules full of them in front of your bunker line, GO NOVA, and, if you're fancy, build some depots or turrets on the cliff to try and bait the first Razor Swarm. Or if you have drop pods just build like 4+ reactor rax and rally on top of her lol.
Marines are easy, efficient, and don't constrain your options for tackling the rest of the mission nearly as much as investing a huge pile of gas into ghosts or BCs. But if you _happen to have_ ghosts or BCs, because you like them or perhaps because you're playing vs air without HMEs for some reason, then sure just using those probably is easier than making extra marines just to deal with Kerrigan.
@@Photoloss As I said, it's too much work. Building depos then microing marines sounds like a hassle.
Also like you don't really use Gas that much in all in. You're literally building static defense for half of the mission which only costs minerals. I'd rather go for a gas heavy unit to offload the mineral strain on repairing bunkers/planetaries/turrets. Hence why I said Ghost/BC is practically the BiS choice for this misson. Also BC works wonders on ground All in as well. They're one of the best units next to the Banshee to send out to clear the Nyduses as they're well protected with their ability and have the yamato for when you need to be quick. And they're good vs Kerrigan overall. Same with a ton of Ghosts except you can't snipe the Nyduses I think.
I tried using HME but honestly I prefer the disruptor myself, but the HME is really better for air. Even then for Air I just call in some Hel's angels and easily steamroll most broodlords without much issue.
I'm surprised that we didn't get a discussion of what I feel is the best bit of visual storytelling in the SC2 trilogy: the Mengsk bullet.
When they go to meet Mobius and Mengsk's flagship shows up instead, Jim says nothing. Instead, we see him prop up his leg, and pull out an old revolver. He opens the chamber, and we see one bullet. He chambers that round, and that's it. We don't need someone to point out what this gun is for; we know *exactly* what that gun is for.
This is reinforced when he breaks into Mengsk's room and explicitly draws that gun on Valerian, thinking it was Arcturus.
And what happens with that gun? Well, when Jim is over Kerrigan's body, he's put his regular weapon down. So when Tychus confronts him, he only has the Mengsk bullet.
Which he uses to kill Tychus.
Wings of Liberty's story is fragmented and lacks coherence. But if there's a thing that the story is about, it's about revenge. And not taking revenge. And entirely though visual storytelling, we see that Jim gave up on his revenge. That where his character lands is that revenge at any cost is bad.
Which is why it's such a damn shame that Heart of the Swarm's central thesis is that "Revenge is good, actually, even if you have to turn into a monster to get it."
Damn shame…
We all got our choices to make.
WAHH PUHHH
A literal Chekhov's Gun
I was just going to point out the same thing! That being said, I feel like there are different ways to interpret the Mengsk Bullet. To make it line up more with HotS, you could point out that if Raynor wasn't ready to take down Mengsk, he wouldn't have been able to protect Kerrigan. Likewise, Kerrigan killing Mengsk isn't just about revenge, it's about finishing the fight.
I thought the meaning behind heart of the swarm was realizing that with great power comes great responsibility.
At the beginning of the game kerrigan wants nothing but revenge and recklessly puts the one thing she had left, Jim, in danger because of her actions.
By the midpoint of the game she realizes that the Zerg she commands are not just tools, but are living breathing animals and that by changing back into the queen of blades she can save the Zerg.
By the end of the game she's going out of her way to help new friends and old, ensuring the protection of civilians and her own race.
I think the story started out about revenge at all costs but eventually she learned that for the Zerg to survive she had to sacrifice her freedom...and that it also involved killing mengsk was an added benefit
1:26:51 "We all know that Tosh is the better waifu"
That is one thing I never expected to hear, but in hindsight absolutely do agree.
Shame we never got Coop Tosh or Tosh's Terrazine Quest campaign...
He's not only the better waifu, but also the best damn bro.
@@simplysmiley4670 exploding military facilities with entire civilian city blocks around not a bro move tho
(and this is from reportage from Kate Lockwell, not Donni, so its not propaganda)
also in real history, every time revolutionaries break open gates of the prisons, its civilians who immediately suffer the most (because most criminals don't want to die to get revenge on the government, but return to their criminal ways against fellow citizens)
Isn't there a fan Co-op Tosh Commander in Nexus Coop?
From videos I have seen, it's VERY dope! You should defenetly try it, because our Tosh-waifu deserves better than this!
Also, could you please scour the internet for custom Tosh factions beyond Nexus Coop? Some of us, primeraly me, want to see how many of and how different each Tosh-factions are!...
...Hmmm, Tosh and Waifu combined together...
*Oh no... It's stuck in my head now!...*
*...FEM-TOSH IS STUCK IN MY MIND NOW, ALONGSIDE THE CONCEPT OF REGULAR TOSH HAVING A SECRET SISTER TWIN, WHICH IS BASICLY AN "OC" OF HIM WITH DIFFERENT SPINS ON HIS CHARACTERISTICS AND TRAITS! I CAN'T UNTHINK IT NOW!...*
A N D I D O N ' T W A N T T O , atleast with Tosh's Twin-sister concept. Just need to dive enough into lore of Tosh for confirmations and inspirations sometime later.
@@taewoosuh9323 tosh's terrazine quest for co op is mist opportunities, which is honesty a lot less fun than welcome to the jungle, but still
I agree that Tosh should've been a co-op commander. He was my favorite supporting character in the campaign. As of now the current character grid looks uneven with one side not being symmetrical with the other corners. 😅
watching this i finally realize why i enjoy these kinds of videos personally. its cause it feels like your listening to a friend that so lovingly hyperfixated on something they love that you can just let them talk and enjoy the thing they enjoy
One thing that always stuck out to me was how despite the Raiders' forces still being capable of deploying hundreds of mechs and small starship fleets, they managed to retain that sense of a ragtag, small-ish (at least in the grand scheme of things) group of rebels doing hit-and-run operations on much larger forces from the Swarm, Tal'Darim to the Dominion. It's especially apparent compared to HotS and LotV, which has you control an entire armada of Zerg/Protoss, and further reinforced by WoL's upgrades being restricted by the Raiders only having so many Credits to go around, while the sequels auto-unlock alternative options as you progress their campaigns, with the restriction being that you can only choose one upgrade for a single unit.
Not to mention in the case of the protoss you can go back and forward between different upgrades, because you ate not on a budjet.
The HotS system doesn't really make sense though, both Evolution options already exist so Abathur could just archive both of them but still only allow 1 per mission because the DNA changes are mutually exclusive.
@@Photoloss That makes sense to me
@@Photoloss Unchosen evolutions flawed, unsuited for mass production, prolonged survival incomparable with principles of evolution. Strands repurposed, reused, swarm growth at expected level, rate of diverse biomass, sustainable.
@@Photoloss If Abathur was the one who made the decision to remove the Defiler and Guardian strains from the swarm I'd strangle him myself. That remains one of the larger reasons I dislike the HotS campaign is you don't get to play with the older units like the Terran and Protoss campaign allow.
Not finished with the video yet but I just finished Grant's section talking about his match against iNcontrol and the segment aboutt the old internet and I just need to say, thank you for including these little memory segments, all your little personal annecdotes add so much to this retrospective and it genuinely would not be the same without them.
I got to the bit about incontrol and just had to stop for a while.
The segment with SotG and realizing two of those hosts have passed away is jarring
>looks at description
>monstrous touhou-ridden name for the lost viking section
this is gonna be good
Geeet Touhoued on!
TOUHOU HIJACK
we love touhou hijacks
Touhou hijacks will survive to the ends of the earth.
The world will NEVER escape Touhou.
Almost 14 years of this game
I was a kid when I started StarCraft 1 in my Step-father´s PC
Waited YEARS for the continuation and saw every small video about SC 2 that primitive TH-cam had to offer
I could not play it when it came out cuz I did not have the PC or money or friends or any chance to do so..
Years later I finally played it on a cyber-cafe (those from Latin America will understand) I never had a computer of my own till 2020
When I finished All in, And after experiencing all the story basically like a novel and having James Raynor as my favorite Character because he is the perfect embodiment of what a leader means ... It just blew my mind , What an amazing epic game
Grant, you did not only made a great video
You spoke about all the feelings about what playing SC2 Wings of liberty meant for so many of us
This was truly the ultimate love letter to those fans, be it casual or pros
I couldn´t help but to cry a bit
Thanks so much Grant, thanks so much Old Blizzard
My headcanon for Safe Heaven is that Hanson did find a cure for the infestation virus, but just specifically for the strain that infected Haven, and since the virus mutates incredibly quickly (which she comments on after the mission on Meinhoff) the cure is completely useless against the rest of the infestations around the sector. Still incredibly convoluted, sloppy storytelling on blizzard's side, but this is at least a thread of logic that somewhat explains what happens
Also Haven declares itself independent and the Dominion probably doesn't even officially _know_ about them, let alone any infestation research there, so really unless you for some bizarre reason believed Dr. Hanson could create an "anti-zerg grey goo" superweapon all of it will only really come into play during or after LotV. With Valerian at the helm, a time of relative peace to invest in large-scale biomedical industry and reclaiming lost planets from the zerg, and through that the resources and incentive to keep developing the cure to remain effective against different strains and future adaptations.
Mind you the protoss _already had_ a cure, which to their knowledge worked perfectly. And not only should Selendis as one of their top leaders know about it, JIM WAS THERE TOO! Admittedly "our facility got destroyed, here's what we have left of our nanobot recipe, see if you and stetboi can make anything useful from it" wouldn't really make for a good mission.
Not as convoluted and sloppy as people make it out to be, because mutation into immunity is a thing that happens in diseases. It's just not as tragic or as hopeless as the other direction that the mission can go, and the timeline shifts slightly depending on which is chosen. Side with the doctor, and we show up earlier so that the infection hasn't taken hold. Side with the Protoss and we show up later after the infection _has_ taken hold.
@@leadpaintchips9461 From a writing perspective the issue there is that the timeline shifts retroactively when you make the decision. You can't define one cohesive state for the colony in the moment right before Jim makes his choice which allows both options as portrayed in the respective missions to be reasonable. The closest I've seen is the argument that the colonists openly collaborate in Safe Haven and resist in Haven's Fall thus causing a delay, but that implies the protoss were willing to let entire hives sprout up during this time period without deeming Jim's attempt a failure and launching their own purification as a result. Which is extremely unlikely when they were willing to torch the entire colony after spotting at most a handful of individual infested with no creep, structures, or zerg combat strains anywhere in sight.
Doesn't this already happen, in that they find a 'cure' for Stukov, but he the infestation just remutates around the cure and he ends up getting re-infested after a while?
@@maximilianv8813 We don't have any info on that because Stukov was in Narud's custody and actively experimented on while the cure failed. It certainly _could_ have been zerg adaptation on its own, I sure wouldn't expect the first-ever attempt to be 100% successful without any refinement or long-term maintenance. But it could also truly have been entirely successful and only brought to failure by Narud's experiments in an effort to improve the Hybrid, or even deliberate sabotage if you believe him to be that callous.
One thing to note about the Tosh story (assuming that I remember it correctly): If you have doctor Hansen with you, she'll comment on the final mission in a way which will always validate your choice.
If you side with Tosh, she'll say that Nova lied and that there were no issues with the Spectres. However, if you aid Nova and kill him, she'll state something along the lines of "the jorium and terrazine were really dangerous, and so were the spectres!"
Not something I particularly liked. The grittier choices (purifying Haven, siding with Tosh) were definitely the best storywise.
Yeah, WoL was intent on having player be the savior, no matter what choice you made in ANY mission you were always correct to make that choice.
And somehow they managed to do even worse in the expansions. (It's funny that when WoL came out a lot of people were3 pretty disappointed with the story, and didn't like how the characters from SC1 got completely changed. But then the expansions were so much worse that no WoL is remembered as that time when SC2 writing was still great ^^)
In Hots the opening missions starts with Nova confronting Jim about the choice between Nova and Tosh. Not only does your choice not matter and the same will happen no matter what you chose. They DARE to imply that your choice did matter.
When I first played SC2 I sided with Nova, then re-played the game and sided with Tosh on the other run. So when I played Hots the game remembered me siding with Tosh. In Hots then Nova says - "Well if you sided with me things could have been different" - I got pissed off, had to go back to WoL, replay the missions for Hots to remember me as having sided with Nova - which was my first pick. And what does the game say? "Thank you for siding with me, but I have to follow orders"
This is one of the biggest fuck you's in the hisroty of gaming. Even TellTale games don't mess up that badly on their non choices
Yeah having the 2 choices be 2 different timelines like it's a Red alert campaign is lame. Especially since for the Tosh/Nova it makes zero sense to trust a mouthpiece of Mengsk over a creepy but proven ally. At least the Tosh death scene is funny...
Not really. If you side with Nova, Hanson will say she doesn't trust Nova, wondering how many people she's killed.
Something else about the secret mission, that Grant didn't mention is another amazing fact linking to the original Starcraft.
Mengsk is studying, experimenting, cloning and building weapons using alien lifeforms, the exact thing he accused the confederacy of in the original, that he used to gather allies, and turn people against the confederacy, and yet here he is, knowingly continuing their work on xenomorphic life to turn it into ultimate weapons to crush all resistance and conquer new planets.
Which is fully in character for him, as Grant mentioned constantly throughout the video, he cares about power, not the risks, but it's still an amazing throwback to the very first installation mission, and also the exact brutalness from Mengsk that lead to the Horner mission chain.
Now I need a recap of starcraft one and brood war
I mean Mengsk was also turned into a stereotypical Tyrant trope. Just a power hungry madman. Old Mengsk was basically Tywin levels of villain. Smart, always with a scheme or a plan, and using overwhelming force where needed. An amazing antagonist.
Current Mengsk is basically a whole other person. Same as Raynor almost, except Raynor kept his old personality, and instead his motivations got uprooted and turned into a typical goody-two shoes story.
@@stankobarabata2406This is untrue. Mengsk has always been a loser. He was smart ONCE. In the first campaign.
@@stankobarabata2406The guy got his butt kicked by the UED, then by Kerrigan because he genuinely thought Kerrigan held no grudge for his betrayal, then got beaten again.
Mengsk was never this mastermind. Just a greedy, cruel asshole. Like all tyrants.
@@stankobarabata2406i remember that he had that arrogant tyrant angle back then. I remember in one of the older books that takes place after he takes power, there's a cutaway to mengsk in his palace just casually signing off on an execution sheet while he enjoys a goblet of fine wine and classic music. He then ponders if he should have another speech that day, mostly to hear his own voice
I may not get to the stream often but I have watched every video you have ever put on TH-cam on both of your channels. This is because you have saved the community I so enjoy and keep people interested in my favorite game I have ever played. Even all of my friends who have not touched an rts in 13+ years have started jamming sc2 and are excited for storm gate in 2024. All I had to do was introduce them to this dope channel and now they’re trapped here with me and these other animals 🎉
Love the work you do sir; almost as much as I love starcraft 2 (but let’s not get too crazy)
I had wondered why you had such hostility towards the doctor in your videos and streams. As a twelve year old kid who started the franchise (and RTS in general) with Wings of Liberty, I saw the option to save the colonists and went "Yeah, that's what good guys do!" and just... never gave the other option a second thought.
Since playing Heart of the Swarm and learning more about the Zerg and the lore, it does make a much better story to help the protoss here, and it's wild to me that I had never considered the idea of just... curing a virus older than humanity itself in a few hours (and NOBODY MENTIONS IT AGAIN!) to be absolutely fucking ridiculous
The truly ridiculous part is that HotS lifted into proper canon an old side story from SC1 where Stukov was fully, properly cured of infestation BY THE PROTOSS! And guess what? JIM WAS THERE TOO! Siding with the protoss makes zero sense for how SC2 portrays Jim, and the whole setup makes no sense both with its own reality warping and as of HotS canon even less so. Having something close to the story of Haven's Fall as the only possible outcome would be more in line with the tone of SC1 though.
While Raynor's drinking is definitely an issue, the reason why I didn't think that it effected his leadership during missions is because I thought he was like Ulysses S. Grant. Never drank when he had to be present of mind and when people relied on him during battle, but binge drank when there was nothing for him to do.
Also, Tychus' love affair with the Odin reminds me of why I love the big stompy mechs of Battletech and Warhammer 40k. It's just... Mech battle! MECH BATTLE!!!
The 'In Utter Lameness' part really hit home for me. Sure there were time when all you saw was mass Swarm Host or Oracles were completley opressive. But the sanitized competitive games are not memorable at all.
What is stuck in my head are the goofy, jank and chaotic games. Husky's Imba League or the late Total Biscuits invitationals with unique maps and actual 2v2 matches. Those were the days I really remember beeing entertained by pro gameplay.
To make a none Starcraft comparison: modern pro matches are like those cheap made for tv christmas movies. They all look the same and the story always boils down to basically the same plot structures. You could cut scenes from them together and most people wont really notice.
THe whacky TB and Husky matches are like Tarantino movies. They are chaotic, unpredictable and way more memorable.
That's why I watch Harstem and UThermal but not pro tournaments
Husky and Total Biscuit... Man... Those were the best years of StarCraft 2 TH-cam
Speaking of TB, does anyone remember his Clan Wars tournament, which was intentionally designed to have interesting and wacky maps with unusual mechanics. You could tell that half the pro's didn't know what they had been signed up for, having obviously not even looked at the map's let alone practiced on them. I suspect this may have been why the season 2 maps were mostly more typical and less interesting.
@@solaariel2692 Thats what I was thinking off. It was called 'Clan Wars'. Those maps were awesome. Rising lava, retractable bridges and a lot more.
Thats the thing with pros. At first when the meta is unclear the creative players thrive. Once the meta has been figured out the guys at the top basically just learn their strats by heart. It's the same with every game. Thats why LoL, Heroes of the Storm, R6 Siege and others had pros play on an older patch. They once wanted the R6 Siege pros to play a new patch in their league, but 4 weeks was apparently to short for 'pros' to adapt.
I still remember Idra doing Idra things.
You forgot what I see as a key feature of The Devil's Playground : the enemy bases give resources. Without this, the mission would massively incentivize to turtle up, limit your losses and avoid the zerg, but having the enemy hatcheries drop resources encourages players to go out and fight, instead of just becoming another defense mission. It also rewards you for going after the enemy's production, thus crippling their future attack waves and demonstrating the power of doing so, which I think is fantastic early campaign design.
That's 100% a legit win. Not being "acclimated" to a balance change is just an excuse. That's part of a professional player's job. If some rando could incorporate a balance change faster than a pro could and that rando won because of that strategy then it's 100% a legit win.
That’s right. May not be able to do it more than once, but for that one time he fair and square and fully legit did outplay that pro.
No yeah, that's my take too. Leveraging something like that is still clever, it's still smart play. It's still outsmarting a pro player. The fact that it probably wouldn't work more than once doesn't even really matter, because plenty of strats won't really work more than once.
Grant tend to be pretty dismissive of his own skill. It’s honestly kind of annoying.
I'd like to point out that it's much easier to incorporate the cheese strat, than it is to devise the counter to it. And also, pros aren't the ones who incorporate the changes fastest. They're simply the ones who learn all of it to a high degree.
It was 100% a legitimate, earned win. But dismissing the situational nature of it isn't fair either.
I love the character analysis in this. Seeing some genuine appreciation for what Doctor Hansen of all people does for the narrative was great, seeing some respect for General Warfield was awesome, and the deconstruction of Tychus was the icing on the cake. One detail I do wish was mentioned during it though was that Jim always had that revolver to kill Mengsk. Seeing it used against Tychus... god it stings so bad.
The fact I feel his loss more strongly than Zeratul's (although it too still pains me) probably has something to do with me not playing SC1, but I like to see it as the raw appeal of watching this ruggish outlaw slowly understand what fighting for something bigger than himself can do is so... humanising. It's perfect, and I'm glad to see someone so succiently summarise it. Makes me curious to see what you'll say about Alarak considering he fulfils a similar niche.
Oh and the credits scenes on the TV... yeah they're defintely the best part of the video
GiantGrantGaming: The last multi-hour length campaign analysis video I made was over a year ago.
Me: Hell, it's about time
I was very impressed with how respectfully he narrated Hanson.
In that choice with what do with the colonists, I expected I would actually have to do something like the culling. Nothing in the pre-mission dialogue is about how you will just have to defend colonists from the Zerg. So I never sided with Selendis until a few years ago, never even knew what the mission was actually about. They make it seem like you have to kill the colonists, which is a choice I would never make.
... And then when you choose Safe Haven there isn't any sign of infestation is sight!
Basically the story changes depending on what you pick, so that you can't make the "wrong" choice
If you side with Hanson the infestation is in the early stages and a cure is possible, if you go with Selendis the colony is already gone
Same with Nova vs Tosh, if you go with Nova then Tosh is a lunatic and Spectres are a ticking time bomb, but if you side with Tosh then Nova was lying and they're fine
@creativename1673 yeah but terrazin IS making people (and protoss, but especially people as protoss are more mentally durable) Amon-possessed lunatics because it strengthens your connection with the Void, realm where evil god sits
so this have to mean that Nova choice canon
but then you have Spectres in LotV epilogue
and they not crazy despite being terrazin-high and physically in the Void already
wtf
i guess Tosh and his men had anime training montage offscreen to make themself more Amon-proof than freaking Protoss with hundreds of years of mental discipline
@creativename1673 I have to disagree with you on the nova vs tosh one. It doesn't change the story at all based on your pick, but rather neither side is telling you the full story. If you side with tosh, you find that they're more dangerous than he let on to, but less do than nova implies
@creativename1673 The Tosh choice doesn't need to warp reality. If Dr. Hanson is still around after siding with Tosh she'll say that spectres are basically just people, not more unstable (keep in mind Amon is not revived yet so any future possession is well beyond this scope), but also still capable of regular cruelty and insanity just like the general population. And if you side with Nova YOU are the one betraying Tosh, so OF COURSE he goes off the rails. The fact his voodoo doll fails in such a ridiculous manner suggests he hadn't exactly planned and prepared it in advance, and his facility existing (or getting destroyed by Nova without your help) if you side with him does not cause any lore issues either.
At the same time NCO demonstrates that even without Amon the Terrazine can undo ghost mind wipes, and we know both the training and the work itself is godawful. Add a certainly inhumane experimental spectre program on top of that and it's no wonder the original spectres went crazy, anyone would if you tortured them enough and gave them the means to lash out.
@@Photoloss Something I would like to add-on to this is that if you talk to Dr. Hanson, on siding with Nova, she is muttering to herself about how Jim is not a mass killer and it's Mengsk that is (paraphrasing here). This implies her and Nova talked and was lied too. Most players don't get to see this though because they don't click on her.
If I may offer a theory on why the first bonus objective gives you nothing?
I believe it was originally meant to be what spawned all the civilians with molotovs. Destroy all the propaganda and in exchange the people rise up alongside you.
However, during testing it might have come up that, unless someone was already a fairly skilled player, it was impossible to defeat the vultures without the mob, so they made the mob happen all the time instead of requiring the bonus.
Alternatively, the developers wanted the player to see Jim cause a revolution. To have the big set piece saying "this is Jim. He's a rebel, he inspires people to stand up for themselves" and were worried players unfamiliar with RPG and RTS would just ignore the side objective under some "this is just a dumb tutorial" belief, rushing through it ignoring the side objective and missing the mob.
But that's just a theory. Unless Blizzard were to come out and say something, we'll never actually know.
Heck, for all we know the side objective giving nothing could have been done on purpose to show the player that you don't need to complete the side objective to advance a mission.
Grant when playing Zero Hour : **yawn*
Grant when talking about Zero Hour : *"Epic and intense"*
At least Grant still has the same opinion as us when it comes to Dr. Hanson xD
It is epic and intense. First time on the Brutal difficulty. Grant can't avoid yawning playing this mission in a thousand time, even with different changes
For a brand new player that just learned the mechanic of the game after 2 missions, zero hour will slap really hard if you're not prepared for zerg agro. But after several replays, it is indeed a nice pace mission to teach the player how good of a turtle the terran can be.
zero hour is a great mission, but it's not very replayable. you are locked in a defence, defending the same area with nothing much happening to force you to do fun stuff. at the same time, you also don't have any fun terran defence tools, just the utilitarian bunker. it makes sense why they didn't have any other defensive missions before you got the siege tank.
Speak for yourself
I have never understood the Dr. Hanson hate....
42:46
i love how you basically meet face to face with what I'm pretty sure is supposed to be your personal SC1 adjetant.
Still miss the characters calling me Magistrate tho.
To Hanson's credit, she might find out the cure for her people, but Zerg and virus in general are keep mutating every moment, also the fact that the Zerg can just make new one pretty easily(I think), it's a high possibility that the cure she find just don't work after the Heaven's case.
Or it's another case of toss "cure" that'll slowly fail and turn you into infested again
That's what I think as well. The Zerg are masters of evolution and biological warfare. As soon as they notice that there is something that counters one of their viruses, they would adapt and change up the Virus, so the cure doesn't work anymore.
Abathur can fix up a new batch of infestation virus to beat the latest Terran cure, but he's still struggling to fix the Zergling lemon juice allergy.
@@Mrcryptidsarereal Lemon is the ultimate weapon against zerg, even the almighty powerful Abathur can't fight against it. May all zerg kneel for my lemon juice.
For the computer science nerds:
To simulate this, I created a Mission class that holds all of the data for each mission. The class has one method: isPlayable, which does as it says on the tin (by checking if it has already been played, the split choice wasn't done, prereq unlocked, mission count, etc.). I then had a great time defining every mission and its requirements, though I skipped all of the split missions. Because they are all dead ends, those don't have to be simulated, and we can multiply the output by 8 (2^3 where 3 are the 3 split missions: Haven, Ghosts/Spectres, and Char).
With all the data defined, it was relatively straightforward to implement a Depth First Search to traverse the tree that was made. Breadth First Search ran into memory issues, so DFS was required. For checking, I printed out every 100,000th run (and when run on the command line, threw it into a text file), and all of our spot checks were reasonable. Printing out every combination would have taken ~532 GB of hard drive space which I opted not to do.
If you want to check the code: pastebin.com/FMjsfWx0
Very cool! Thanks for your effort!
Wow, I never imagined how complicated it could have gotten calculating all the missions routes and how unique each campaign would be!
I can't imagine how much more complicated this gets when calculating alternative dialogue between mission arcs...
Grant providing the number you came up with has made me want to replay Wings to try and find the goofiest mission path possible.
we would multiply by 8 the output only if all the run get the 3 split mission, but only the last one is required (split char).
to get the good result we have to make 3 separate case :
A) we encounter no split mission outside the endgame → *1
B) we only enconter the split mission of tosh/nova or the split mission of the colony → * 2
C) we encounter both split mission → *4
then we sum A, B and C and multyply this result by 2
Also, the 3 first mission are mandatory to reach completion so you could symplified your code by starting from zero hour.
PS : sorry for my bad english, it's not my primary langage
@endermusique1755 You're totally right about the split missions!
The code didn't iterate from mission 1 (only when it branched), so it only ran through lib day/outlaws/zero hour once. We did apply that optimization to Char though.
I always interpreted it that the cure for the infestation by Hanson was the cure for whatever kind of sleeper agent zerg infestation was in the colonists, not just a general cure that could neutralise it completely when it's actively happening. It's kind of creative licence interpretation, but it makes a conclusion that doesn't leave the canon in flames
The big problem there is it still flies in the face of everything we know in the setting - Zerg Infestation always uses the Hyperevolutionary Virus. The protoss have never figured out a way to cure said virus - only figuring out a way to *temporarily* hold it at bay - even after years of research using hyper advanced nanotechnology that terrans can't even imagine.
Meanwhile, Dr Hanson figured out how to outright cure it with a metaphorical box of scraps and - as grant pointed out - doesn't share how she figured out a cure with anybody, and it never gets mentioned ever again.
There are no coincidences, only signs. ;-)
Just recently I finished a complete playthrough of Wings of Liberty. I played all the missions, listened to all the dialogues and watched all the cutscenes. I do that every few years, but only with WoL. Your video came just in time, thank you!
There's one thing that you didn't mention and I believe it's worth mentioning; it's another of the many winks and nods the developers had made towards the old players. The first three missions of WoL take place on Mar Sara, the third one is an evacuation mission. The first three missions of Starcraft 1 also took place on Mar Sara and the third one wass also an evacuation mission. This shows that Blizzard could use nostalgia as their tool, but it wasn't their only tool, not even the main one.
RIP Incontrol and Totalbiscuit.
The news of their deaths had been double shocking. They were both my age and both passed away before reaching forty.
WoL era was truly a magical period in the history of gaming, largely due to the influence of absolutely amazing personalities of Geoff "InControl" and John "TotalBiscuit" Bain, and for me, eventhough I never had the pleasure of personally interacting with any of those great men, my world has felt *much* emptier since they both passed.
For the Haven mission design, imo it will be much better if Raynor and the Daelamm team up to deal with both the infestation and the zerg forces. We can have a choice between purging the infested colonies while the protoss is dealing with the zerg reinforcement; or we can obliterate the zerg bases while the Daelamm focus on the infested stuffs. It feels so awkward to chase our protoss friend away when they just want to clear the infected at their home doorstep.
Starcraft 2 incredible in many ways, single aspect that i was felt lacking is that i want BIGGER fucking maps, with more difficult terrain
so reapers and transport ships (medevacs and hercules) can shine more, and more complex in-game choices can be made, like choosing who to help by attacking one of two bases instead of picking one of two options out of the mission
so, like Warcraft 3 a bit (it had simpler effects and much smaller unit count, i know, but anyway)
The issue with your proposal is that having a major zerg presence on Haven, including the starting point of vanilla Haven's Fall for that matter, just doesn't make sense in the slightest. Either we catch the protoss right as they're instating a quarantine and it's our job to nip the infestation in the bud, or the planet should be glassed already because they're clearly willing to go that far. And Jim fighting off the protoss while there are active full-fledged hives doesn't make any sense either, at best it'd be a reversed merge of Evacuation and Smash&Grab where you try to get out the non-infested colonists while the protoss and zerg try to destroy each other, but then we'd be back to square one on the narrative side and the whole mission chain would feel meaningless/would need a new finale.
Mandatory Haven's Fall is the grim, gritty writing a decent portion of SC1 subscribed to. Mandatory Safe Haven is the heroic Jim SC2 goes for. The choice as present in vanilla doesn't work at all without warping off-screen reality.
@@Photoloss I feel the best course of action would have been to not make it a split mission: Selandris is there to contain the Zerg, but Dr. Hansen has a reasonable belief she can actually cure the infestation. So we end up with a mission with the objective to "Destroy the Zerg Infestation", but Hansen makes it so that instead of safely glassing the planet from Orbit, it has to be a more localized purge of the infestation putting everyone at greater risk.
Use Haven's fall map/scenario, and if you beat the mission before a certain number of colonies fall, Hansen gets her antidote made, she stays on Haven, and the cure for Zerg Infestation becomes UNN news (With Mengsk getting credit). If you don't protect enough colonies, Hansen gets hasty and infested, and you get the Haven's Fall ending... but Stenton sees where Hansen went wrong, and develops a cure/vaccine that can't save the people of Haven, but can save others so it's not a complete loss.
Finally. Someone said what I've been yelling for years about the state of the multiplayer.
This retrospective is as brief as the lost viking achievement
On the topic of Stettman's research, there's a blurb in the lab (that you can see in this video at some point) where he discovers that zerg will *never* die of old age. In Heart of the Swarm, Kerrigan is impressed that the primal zerg are so old, and we are promptly told that all things age and die, even zerg. I understand it may just be imperfect research from Stettman but it very clearly reeks of one person having a cool idea for a small lore piece that make zerg even more impressive and alien, while everyone else promptly forgot about it, and later decided that primal zerg should have a cool age factor completely independently of the original idea
You know I'm gonna point this out, the idea of Zerg being biologically immortal (ie, never dying of old age) kinda runs counter to some of their units. Namely the ones with a timed lifespan, aka broodlings. I know gameplay story disconnect is a thing, but I find it a little funny that the game can go:
"Zerg can never die old age...except for this specific strain."
@@randomguyblank1616 Considering broodlings explode into a cloud of blood at the end of their timer, Imma say they maybe die of... something else. They probably just use the full strength of all their muscles and rip their own body apart under the strain or something
That might be a timescale issue. If you ask a 3 million year old being about death it'll say: "All things die. My grandpa was taken a little early, only 20 million years old!", and if you ask the 30 year old Stetmann he'd say "Nah the Zerg are fucking immortal"
Thank you Giant Granthony does Gaming ! I cant wait to watch this brief retrospective
Thank you for sharing your personal stories with this. We all miss InControl and TotalBiscuit. You're right that we were lucky to have them. We're also lucky to have you. You're huge, truly a Giant of the community. Love you dude.
Magnum opus tier video.
I disagree that the Mobius Factor is a "simple mission". It feels very chaotic. In most missions, you can carve a path from your base to the objective/s. Here, between Zerg scurrying all over the map, having to transport troops through loads of anti-air with few options for air units, and a time pressure that cannot be pushed back indefinitely unlike something like "Welcome to the Jungle", I never feel comfortable clearing out the Zerg. This mission really sells the feeling of a spec ops team inserting into a mess of a situation and executing a surgical strike.
Yeah, when you play it a few times and understand what is going on Mobius Factor is an extremely short and simple mission. But on your first play through it's a chaotic mess with some decent AI pressure against your base
"And a time pressure that cannot be pushed back indefinitely"
Allow me to introduce you to: Kerrigan in the box!
video on sale! only 2:59:59 time to invest!!
beautiful done grant! thanks for keeping the SC universe alive with all the challenge runs you have done, not to mention all the people behind you, and the communities you have built! The modders, the players, the viewers, the subs and donators!
I love and agree with your entire interpretation of the campaign! as a life long lover of starcraft this was easily one of my favourite videos of yours! and has kept me viewing for hours!
the single line the sent chills down my spine had to be... "He ain't alone Arcturus"
Have a great day!
I really love how for Bel'shir, you not only get an achievement for defeating the protoss base, but it is also an alternative win condition. It is a shame that only three missions across all of SC2 have alternative win conditions, and that includes Welcome to the Jungle. The Dig has one and Purification from Legacy of the Void. The latter though is kinda silly as by the time you might get around to destroying the last zerg base, you might as well just finish off the last set of locks. And depending on which base that is, you really have to go out of your way not to win the intended way.
Edit: I have mentioned this correction in the comments to this comment so I will say it here as well. I did miss one and that was shoot the messager. Destroying the launch bays ends the mission. So there are four missions in total that have alternative win conditions.
Killing all zerg on the redstone? the lava mission also gives you a win if I recall right. there's no achievement, but if you clear the map, and manage to avoid gathering 8k minerials you win.
@ I know certain mods for WoL does that with red stone. However the default campaign does not. In fact you can get yourself soft locked on that mission.
However I will admit that I did miss one. Shoot the messager from HotS. Destroying all the launch bays wins the mission. It is also the mastery achievement for that mission iirc. So there are four missions throughout all of SC2 with alternative win conditions.
I’ll take this time to mention some missions I kinda wish had them in some way.
1. Feeding the ancient: I wished killing all four primal hives allowed you to skip the feeding portion and trigger the brakk boss early. With brakk defeated, you can then feed Zurvan uncontested as his pack now fears the broken Zerg (aka the Zerg swarm). For now anyway.
2. Night terrors from NCO. Destroying the Tal’tarim base ends the sealing waves. Defeating all the Zerg bases ends the Zerg attacks when you harvest. Defeating both ends the mission.
I really hate how HotS and LotV have missions where the regular attack waves are spawned in. In particular spear of adun where the mastery achievement is to destroy all enemy structures. It makes taking the enemy bases super annoying that the attack waves continue to spawn in even when you have defeated that enemy faction.
I think I remember Grant saying once that a big difference between Starcraft 1's "Zero Hour" (desperate alliance) and _actual_ Zero Hour is that clearing the entire map gives you the win in SC2? and something about SC1 not having that even in Remastered, even though Desperate Alliance in Starcraft 1 on ... the Nintendo something or other _did_ have that win condition? but maybe I'm misremembering some details. It mostly stuck in my head because of the Nintendo console version of Starcraft somehow being better about this, lol.
@@droid-droidsson There are no alt win conditions on zero hour. As the mission continues via spawned in enemies through the nydus worms. iirc Desperate alliances did have an alt win condition in the demo version, but that was removed for the full release. The SC64 version brought it back but the remaster didn't.
Spawned in scripted attack waves is one of the reasons why a lot of missions do not have alt win conditions. For example the evacuation. You could clear both bases but you still have to escort the APC's due to the drops and nydus worms events.
That ending was something else, especially for any video you made so far. And I mean both the whole Tychus thing and that little bonus after.
This video is like the pricing in the stores "hey look i'm under 3 hours" xD
Love it
To be entirely fair to Jim, I don't think he ever met Duran. Also, putting names backwards is an effective disguise. Had a notorious outlaw help my DnD party out, had his poster up that looked exactly like him nearby, they saw it constantly, same description every time for both the NPC and the poster... "Sadra" doesn't sound like "Ardas" though, so they shrugged and went on.
Mind, the highest INT among all five of them is 11, so I might just be overestimating them.
Oh boy, 2AM is the perfect time to watch a 3 hour video game retrospective.
Grant. I just want to thank you again for reigniting my love for Starcraft. Between videos like these and showcasing all the insanely talented modders and their amazing campaigns and helping to make the CCM to make playing them so easy. Can never thank you enough for all the many many hours ive put into the game since finding your channel 😁
"A brief retrospective" that's longer than many of the game's speedruns!
Wings of Liberty is a masterpiece of blending storytelling with gameplay. I seriously hope that Stormgate or ZeroSpace will be able to deliver on the promise of giving us more of what made Wings of Liberty so good.
I literally just finished your Warcraft 3 retro and loved it, just to see you just dropped this and I can’t say how happy I was to have another 3 hour video to zone into😭
I know many people love Starcraft 1 to death, and I like that game a lot as well.
However, many of the missions on each campaign is just
Kill the enemy bases, rinse and repeat. So it can get not just repetitive but tiring when playing continuously as you gotta restart all your economy and base progress each mission.
Wings of Liberty has some really good and varied mission objectives which helps mitigate that problem and I find myself easily playing it continuously!
It's somewhat better in brood war compared to the base game. Especially with the terran missions like stealing battle cruisers or enduring nukes or whatnot. But yeah, I agree, mission variety was way better in starcraft 2. But I do appreciate blizzard increasing video game quality from warcraft 1 to legacy of the void.
That's exactly my problem with it
My conspiracy theory on SC2 story quality taking nosedive after WoL (beside obvious part of Blizzard itself starting to losing talents) is that original story is meant to be upto SC3 but they canned that idea after RTS began to be less popular, resulting everything else being re-written to get crammed in 2 expansions without proper time and attention.
Pacing makes so much more sense if SC2's final boss was Narud or Mengsk (or both)and Amon was meant to be reserved for SC3.
I think SC2 is far more mechanically varied and interesting.. but, I must say that the tone of SC1 is far more compelling than SC2. There is something about late 90s presentation thats very difficult to replicate with more modern graphics/sound.
SC2 feels fun, slightly toony and cheesy.. which is okay, I dont hate it, but it isnt super gripping. SC1 feels more.. industrial, oppressive and mysterious, all at the same time.
@@allhailderpfestor4839Even WoL was already a nosedive over SC1. Grant pointed out a lot of problems with WoL writing that are often overlooked.
One simple and important detail from SC1 missing in SC2 is the framing of who you are. In SC1 you were always a faceless and nameless character with whom the cast would interact. WoL on the other hand has such a convoluted perspective on who are you. Raynor talks as if he is the commander of the forces, but the few times he is out on the field his lines imply he is being ordered around by someone else. This also leada to a bloat of in-mission dialogue where character will be talking to Raynor while stuff is happening and Raynor starts talking back. However, Raynor nor anyone else is a part of the mission per se.
Ahhhhhh maaaaaaan! You forgot to mention that there's different dialogue for some missions: for example after beating the secret mission Raynor would be enraged at about the Hybrid manufacturing, but if you only did 2 out of 4 protoss missions he'd tell Horner how he has seen a Hybrid before, and if you completed all of the protoss missions Raynor would admit in defeat to Horner that Kerigain needs to survive...
It's also interesting to get early dialogue from Dr Hansen and Tosh, and Interestingly Stetmen would talk in Dr Hansen's when collecting new artifact fragments!
Ladies and Gentlemen, this means Uploads on the archive channel will be resuming shortly!
Can't wait for more episodes of the Purifier campaign
Grant started with the title, then did the video, looked at the time, looked back at the title, and went "It's not 3 hours, so I'm keeping the title!". I'm so hyped for this!
I remember playing this campaign and really thinking to myself: Goddamn, they really set the bar for campaign rts games
A shame that almost no other developer put so much time/effort and detail in their rts campaigns and focus more on the multiplayer aspect
Thank you for this! Starcraft 2 was so very important for me (and alot of other people) so this really brought me back. Miss alot of great people (rip incontrol and TB). You really are among the great remaining in the scene! Hope you have a nice Holiday
Been waiting on a Starcraft retrospective after the beautifully done Warcraft 3 Retrospective. Well done!
I can't believe the WC3 video is over a year ago.
I maintain to this day that, unlike the Haven split, where it's clearly changing reality to make your choice the "correct" one, the Tosh/Nova split is straight up just, Nova is lying to you, and you have the option to fall for it.
Tosh isn't some bloodthirsty killer, he's upset at you _because you betrayed him._ The Psi Indoctrinator still exists in the Tosh version of the split, but _he agrees_ to only take volunteers.
As for the narrative freedom of mission selection... I will admit, personally I think I would have preferred that they had chosen to forsake that freedom and focus on a more tightly woven narrative; there are a number of plot threads that pop out in random conversations that simply never go anywhere because the freeform nature of the campaign means they CAN'T, because any of those plot threads might happen in any given order, or not happen at all. This is _purely_ my own personal taste and opinion, though. I just prefer the stronger narrative, because that's the big thing that pulls me into the game.
I forgot the exact wording, Nova might even _technically_ be telling the truth. Basically from the Dominion's perspective all former spectres probably did go rogue and "crazy", because that's what people do if you torture and mind control them if given half a chance to escape or have their revenge. And to the general public they probably _are_ reckless killers, much like Jim is a "terrorist". But the actual spectre creation process itself doesn't drive you crazy, or at least not without Amon around to take advantage of Terrazine's connection to the Void.
In the end it still does not matter. No matter what choice you make the story going forwards doesn't change. Regardless which side you pick Hots goes the same way and Tosh is never seen again. The only difference is you see him die if you sided with Nova, but if you sided with Tosh you gotta assume Noba killed him off screen. The alternative being the writers assumed nobody ever sided with Tosh and it's not worth remembering him being a character
@@RancorSnpYou can actually see Tosh in the intro cutscene of Conviction in HotS if you choose to help him in WoL. Raynor will even suggest sending Tosh to help Kerrigan break Jim out. If you help Nova, he will suggest sending the ghost squad instead. Unfortunately, both choices only affect the cutscene, and Kerrigan will go alone anyway.
What's cool to see about Zeratul's entrance here... is how it inspired a recreation of that SC1 flair Grant showed as an example in Mass Recall.
*The torches going out pair by pair is just a beatifull nod to Zeratul's first appearance in WoL!*
About The Devil's Playground, one has to highlight how far Blizzard has come when it comes to the "stockpile a resource" missions.
First, in StarCraft: Brood War, we have "The Kel-Morian Combine", where you have to stockpile 10000 minerals without gold minerals or caches to obtain. It's a SLOW grind, plus, being Brood War, there are massive bases all over the map.
Then there's Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos with "The Spirit of Ashenvale", where you have to stockpile 15000 lumber. This time it's the secondary resource what you have to get, meaning your spending isn't as likely to slow you down as much, plus there's the secondary objectives of getting the best lumber gatherer in the game, or destroying the Night Elf Trees to get several thousand lumber at once.
And now, with "The Devil's Playground", you have gold minerals for faster gathering, caches everywhere to quickly stockpile minerals, a ton of free units to not spend minerals on, and the requirement is noticeably lower.
Also, because of how the timings worked out in the first mission, I first assumed that the bonus objective caused the mob to help you.
I just finished playing through this game for the first time this month. It was so much fun! It absolutely does not feel like a 14 year old game AT ALL!
Holy shit I autoplayed into this despite it being only 23 mins old. Thanks grant!! Love you, love starcraft!!
really really enjoyed this video. i watch a lot of video essays about games that i enjoy but i can't say i've seen many if any that tackle this game or RTS in general. this really just made my appreciation for this game grow even more. thanks for the great content!
29:19 the lava mechanic is also used in a versus map called Burning Tide, a 3v3 layout map where the goal is for one side to reach a mineral quota first
the coop map Vermillion's Problem did not start with enemies immune to lava, which is the reason why even today enemy waves race to high ground when lava is about to rise, i believe the immunity was added when they introduced mutators
Another thing to mention is that James Raynor has a great voice actor. Really like him on the mission The Dig and the secret mission. Also, for the second mothership boss fight, I kinda like it because of the little bit of stress that the surrounding base (if you have not completely destroyed it) and the rip-fields cause. That bit about teleporting away is a bit annoying though. All and all, very cool briefspectiving good sir! o7
The funny thing is, Welcome to the Jungle isn't a mission I generally find too tricky and go to asap for the Goliath. Always amused me that it's considered one of the harder ones.
edit: the hybrid upgrade system is something I was thinking of for a mod I'm working on. I was also thinking of the possibility of allowing a much cheaper 1-mission version if you don't want it perma, or allowing you to research upgrades in missions and carry a limited number over to the next mission.
The Goliath Upgrades are some of my favorites, so speedrunning towards getting Goliaths as early as possible is my general strategy for campaign too.
Funny enough I feel like WttJ got harder after I heard people consider it a hard mission, like a psychological effect.
It was pretty hard for me, but i never struggled at Supernova at the slightest so was surprised to hear its also considered hardcore
Its probably hard on brutal but yeah on normal its nice early mision especialy if you have upgraded marauders.
Certainly not the easiest mission, but I thought it’s comparatively chill too. Even if you pick it asap you can just spam goliaths and take some extra time if you want (by letting a few altars close). There are many more stressful missions where you are on a strict timer, make one mistake for game over, or just have to multitask at 100+ apm to win on brutal. Not so in the jungle!
Thank you for making my 12 hour shift today more bearable. Fantastic video as always. SC2 has so many good memories for me in early HS, and im always excited to replay it every now and then.
You know its a good day when theres a GGG 3 hr upload
About Raynor's drinking problem, I view it as a "When I'm helping people I'm fine, but when I'm not I start to sink back into my depression", so when he's helping the doctor and Tosh/Nova he can temporarily come back to himself but once it's just back to his own rebellion things go bad for him again.
This is a nice early Christmas present!
Years of watching this channel, off and on supporting on Patreon, and not until now did I understand the whole plot of this campaign. Thanks Grant, I love this game thanks to you.
I’ve wanted someone to do one of these longform analyses for WoL, glad to see it’s you doing it!
What do you mean Long form? This is brief
I never thought that waking up at 5:30 am with hangover would extend my attention span enough to watch this video, but honestly your storytelling and the fact that you are my favorite RTS youtuber, helps a lot.
Didn't quite get the 3:33:33.
Never mind! You're still awesome! Looking forward to watching this!
Bravo and well done on this main channel video, Grant!
I think this is even better than your AoM retrospective you did a while back, and that was pretty good, too! I love how you took such a nuanced look at *every aspect* of WoL, including your own past experiences and a critical look at the PvP/eSport scene past & present, all while incorporating your signature light-hearted attitude and humor. As someone who has watched a lot of your archive videos and challenge runs on YT, I *still* learned new things about the game and its various mission design choices! Similarly, I sincerely enjoyed learning more about your early experiences with WoL and the burgeoning eSport scene during the 2010's! So thank you for including those tidbits throughout this video; it definitely helped break up the long review of the campaign and was well-paced without coming across as jarring or distracting as you transitioned between them.
i remember when i was a kid the reason i always sided with the protoss on Haven wasn't the fact that it made more sense than siding with Hanson, but because as a kid i found fighting the protoss there impossible, sure i can win against them nowadays, but i just prefer purging the infested
Thank you Grant, that was a looooong video but I think it needed to be that long ! It's just so complete, you talked about everything cool and it was a real pleasure to watch !
Thank you a lot !
2:02:25 hit like a rock, Legends gone too soon
It's a very good in-depth video showing how much you appreciate the game. Well done man.
I am only 1/3 through the video but I want to thank you for refreshing my experience playing this campaign for the first time; it was great because no hand holding and you die exactly as you will expect for not learning; the difficulty was there exactly as I wanted when I played on brutal, having to reload saves on mistakes. Crazy to think that Starcraft was a mostly a monocore/dualcore game for all the things that happens in it.
Thank you for sharing your personal experiences from the starcraft competitive scene. I absolutely adore candid stories from grassroots communities, and I very much appreciate the time you spent on this video. This is truly a delight and I will likely watch it multiple times.
nice upside to the night, good to see another essay doc! loved the wc3 one
What an amazing video!!! I love your retrospectives so much, and I can't wait for (hopefully) another one one day!
Amazing video!
Maybe the only thing that's missing is a discussion on the game difficulty options and how they alter the missions cause I feel like balancing for RTS difficulty is REALLY hard considering the gap between someone making a few units hapazardly and someone with a grasp on macro mechanics building an economy and a composition with a plan. And people always talk smack about the lower difficulties completely forgetting how hard it was for them when they were first introduced to the genre.
Sometimes the difficulty is just "more stuff, earlier" but sometimes it's things like "add this unit that adds an extra type of problem to the mission" and I think it's a really interesting part of mission design that doesn't get talked about much.
I absolutely love these video essays and i hope you keep doing them
I love incontrol. Played against him a few times in warhammer and have a few warhammer friends that were really close with him. Dude was a stand up guy
I feel Jim's just a just functional enough alcoholic to know he shouldn't be drinking on the job. but starts drinking the second he's back on the hyperion. and sobers himself up before each mission starts
Even over a decade later Starcraft 2 is still my favorite RTS campaign. I always loved entering dialogue with characters around the Hyperion. Kinda reminds me of Mass Effect where you get to interact with the supporting characters and hearing their opinions about what is happening throughout the storyline. 😇
Hey Grant, I just wanted to say that the way you bring in your own personal history with the game adds a special charm to these videos. All of us have a story to tell about what these games mean to us, and hearing yours just makes me smile :)
In defense of the drunken Jim story line, a lot of alcoholics are able to snap out of it when doing their job/hobby/task and execute it very well only to go back to their drunken misery once that is done
Apparently he’s only sober enough to participate in 3 missions.
I think my favorite thing about these retrospectives is that so much of your content is about breaking the game or having to manipulate it to overcome the challenges that it's really nice to just see you getting to play the game and enjoy it
1:33:09
I’m pretty sure the only cloaked enemies are the Ghost who EMPs Tosh in Breakout, and the Protoss under the mothership in Maw of the Void
Observers on The Dig if you count that as enemies.
Technically Banelings on Devil's Playground, since they don't unburrow and instead just explode from underground
Also aren't there some spider mines?
@@The-jy3yq The banelings do in fact unburrow, and there's a few in Evacuation as well. Functionally they might as well be cloaked attackers though because you sure aren't reacting in time for the difference to be meaningful. I don't recall any enemy spider mines though.
Also Orlan has a cloaked ghost to drop his nuke. And IIRC Welcome to the Jungle has observers too, but nobody cares.
Isn't Orlans nuking ghost invisible too?
@@Cyber_Cheeseit is
It's been a while since I just sat through a 3 hour long video in one sitting but when Grant releases a "brief" retrospective of an RTS game, I know I have to do it. Keep up the good work, sir.