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Introduction
I bid you welcome to my newest Starcraft 2 related hub! The last one touched on the top 5 campaign upgrades. To follow the trend, this hub will list the five hardest campaign missions in Starcraft 2. These missions made me want to pull my hair out, and perhaps you feel the same as well!
Note: I have been playing the campaign at Brutal, so my opinions will be tempered because of this. Keep it in mind when you're wondering why I find certain missions so difficult.
All In (Char)
You probably expected me to start here. :P
All In is the last mission of the Wings of Liberty campaign and also the hardest. Your micro and macro skills will be pushed to their limits as the Zerg assault your base (nearly) endlessly from 5 different angles. The previous mission gives you a choice to prevent the Zerg from using a type of unit on you, but that won't help..much. You see, if you play Shatter the Sky, the Zerg have no air units (except for Overlords/Overseers but those don't attack) but they get Nydus Worms, which spawn reinforcements at a sickening rate until you destroy them. If you complete Belly of the Beast, the Nydus Worms are gone, but they get Mutalisks and Brood Lords (to be fair, the Hive Mind Emulator breaks this mission easily if they send air; I pity you if you got Psi Disrupters instead.)
Welcome to the Jungle (Bel'Shir)
This is part of the Covert storyline, which will net you Spectres or Ghosts (depending on which branching mission you play at the end of the storyline). It's also the hardest one of that line. It's ridiculous.
Basically, you have a base near the lower right corner of the map, and have to collect seven canisters of terrazine gas (it's similar to Vespene Gas, but it's used to create Spectres specifically). Now, this would be easy if the Taldarim Protoss in the area would leave you alone. As you can expect, fat chance of that happening. Essentially, you need to defend your base, harvest terrazine and micromanage your units as they protect the SCV, all at the same time. Oh, did I mention you'll probably have to expand to get more resources? And that the attack groups will start attacking your expansion once you try to set it up? You're going to need a healthy mix of troops just to not get wiped out, and expect to see such beauties such as Colossi (Hard or higher) and High Templars (Brutal only) in the attack groups as well. Oh joy!
Oh, did I mention there's only 13 altars? And that they seal them? Quickly, in Brutal, mind you. Be prepared to hear the message: 'Warning, the Taldarim are sealing a terrazine altar!' a lot!
Engine of Destruction (Valhalla)
From the Covert storyline, we go to the Rebellion storyline for a mission that's hard not because of the layout, but because of your mission objectives. You have to protect an overeager (extremely so on Brutal) Tychus Findlay as he commandeers the Odin (a super-sized and overpowered Thor if you've been playing custom/online games instead of doing the campaign first).
Once you know what you're doing, you can actually trivialize the mission (if you have Tech Reactors by now, the mission becomes several magnitudes easier), but in the meantime you'll probably rip your hair out, again, and again, and again. You see, after the Odin destroys a base (you're supposed to help him by using cloaked Wraiths to destroy Siege Tanks, Battlecruisers and Diamondbacks), Tychus takes a break. On Brutal the break is about 3 minutes, at which time your base will get attacked by Dominion forces (so you're under pressure to do something ALL game.). So, if you somehow still have a base after you get brutalized, Tychus then charges into the next base, where you have to lead with the Wraiths to destroy the units that could give him a problem. It's an even more frantic pace than what it seems by how I write it.
In Utter Darkness (Unknown Location)
This mission, perhaps the hardest mission of the game unless you find All In to be harder, is actually the last mission of the Zeratul storyline. On Brutal, it's almost as if you have a sign on top of your base saying: 'Come destroy me now, for the main campaign is Terran, I have nearly nil experience with Protoss and I have to hold off 2500 of your troops'. Then it gets worse.
See, you can get attacked from 3 angles (2 if you retreat to the high ground) and don't get to use Sentries in this mini-campaign at all (which means no Force Field cheese to hold off/trap mobs of opposing units). So, your ability to play Protoss will be severely tested as you have to determine what's the best unit composition against the Zerg waves, which hit you relentlessly, and who will have more and more Hybrids in their ranks as the mission timer ticks on. Once you determine what works, you'll have to keep reloading as your micro slips and you lose more units to a wave than you should have. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Hey! Look at this way: Once you're done with this mission, you're done with this mini-campaign, so push on!
Piercing the Shroud (Castanar)
My final entry in this hub goes to the campaign's secret mission. This mission is unlocked by destroying the Science Facility located in Korhal (you'll go there for Media Blitz).
Anyway, this mission is such a nightmare because it's a micro-fest. Mind you, I enjoy the challenge of having to manage a small army instead of a base and a large army. At the very least, it's a nice change in pace. However, your micro has to be spot-on if you want to clear this beast on Brutal. The second part of this mission can give you problems on Hard, which should tell you something. I'll let you play this mission for yourselves, as I consider that it's pretty fun, difficulty aside.
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Conclusion
Well, there you have it: The five hardest missions in the Wings of Liberty campaign. Feel free to comment on which missions you found the hardest and if you'd like to add something to what I've already said about my hardest five. As mentioned in the Introduction, it is important to keep in mind that I have played through the campaign on Brutal, and so my list is tempered by that fact. Some of these missions are substantially easier at lower difficulties.
Until the next time, take care and have fun! ;)
-Winterfate
- Winterfate, I've heard that building planetary fortreses on both sieds with 10 SCV's and lot of diamond backs works really well, so well you can kill maurauders kill teams with em. As for me I've now done all the Brutal missions now leading up to char except In Utter Darkness (2nd hardest to all in IMO).You no what's better than planetary fortreses? Seige tanks ..if your fortunate enough to finish The Dig mission (wich I think is very hard at first befor you have an army of seige tanks and know how to use the laser gun).I just massed seige tanks on both tracks, about 10 a side with mercenaries and lets just say the maurauder team got blown to smithereens.
- The trick on Welcome to the Jungle really is to be quick. Once the enemy gets collossi and templars, you'll be in a world of pain.The first wave with a templar spawns around 12:00. You can be done with the whole map in less than 8 minutes. The longer it takes you, the harder it gets.
- I didn't really have much of a problem with the Dig on Brutal. Turtle up using bunker's or the previously mentioned Planetary Fortress combined with 7-10 Siege tanks and suppliment that with 7 or 8 missle turrets to the left and right of the laser drill to take care of the airwaves. Make sure you have at least 2 SUV's commited to each of your walls. The key to this mission is to make sure you use the laser drill to take out the enemy Immortals. Although the game puts the highest priority on the Collosi and Archon's it is the Immortals that cause the most trouble because they can quickly take down your siege tanks and soften your defense and can absorb your Siege tanks normally devasting attacks with hardened sheild and eat up damange that should be reserved for the other units. They are the priority with the laser drill as your Tanks/Bunkers/MMM's should be able to handle the archon's and collosi on there own but a single Immortal in the mix can lead to a devastated wall.If you are feeling risky and want to go for the artifacts, build a barracks, lift it off and use it as a spotter for the laser drill to destroy any cannons/troops gaurding them. Land the barracks and build a single marine while the drills chips away at the vaults holding the artifacts. Of course, only do this when the laser drill isn't being used to take down those nasty Immortals.
- I'm only playing on brutal difficulty so far. I bearly scrached a win on Welcome to the jungle using a blitz tactic and taking some times multiple terazine at a time. I come out with a 5-0 lead then I defended the last two while completing the bonous mission. (in the end I had to sack my base and build a new one by the last terazine with my last group of forces.But now I'm stuck on train robery and having more trouble with the dig (level where you control the laser gun). They just come in endless waves and even with 10 tanks seiged and 10 or so units defending each side the endless waves of like 20 or so strong units ultimately just breaks through.
In 'StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty,' players can participate in multiplayer missions and battles with friends or complete strangers through the Battle.net system. Players can choose if they want to fight cooperatively with each other against computer-controlled opponents, fight in teams against other players or play in free-for-all fights against each other. The voice chat feature allows players to communicate with each other vocally instead of having to rely on the typed chat function and in this fast-paced game, good communication can mean the difference between victory and defeat.
Launch 'StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty' and sign in to your account by entering the information it requests.
Press the 'Menu' button on the bottom, left corner of the main menu. A small window will appear in the center of your screen.
Click on the 'Options' button at the top of the menu to open a new window.
Click the 'Voice' tab on the left side of the new window to open all the options for the voice chat feature.
Check the box at the top of the window that is titled, 'Enable Voice Chat.' This will turn the feature on and allow it to be used during gameplay.
Check the box on the right side of the window under 'Talking' that is titled 'Enable Talking.'
Press the 'Start Test' button underneath the 'Microphone Test' option and speak into your microphone. If the feature is working properly, it will replay what you say back through your headset or speakers. Press the 'Stop Test' button when you have finished the test.
Press the 'OK' button at the bottom of the window and then the 'Return to Game' button at the bottom of the first menu.
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The StarCraft: Remastered team is small, nimble, and intensely passionate about their source material. Over the past eighteen months, they’ve been hard at work modernizing StarCraft without altering its classic gameplay and “Wild West” atmosphere. Meet the team and peek into the development process through the behind-the-scenes interviews below!
You worked on the original game back in 1997. What’s been the coolest thing for you to revisit as a leading artist on StarCraft: Remastered?
Brian: There were some things that really made me geek out. The new Goliath the team came up with—it’s so awesome, it makes me feel bad, because I made the original one. I was like, “Oh my God, did you see how much detail they put into this thing?”
How did you balance updating the unit models with staying true to the original ones?
Brian: We kept the same silhouettes because we wanted you to immediately recognize them. It’s a double-edged sword; when we were first showing the game to people, if they started by looking at it in HD, they weren’t impressed. It’s StarCraft. In their mind, that’s what StarCraft had always looked like. We had to say, “No no no, we went back to the original units, look: it was only 32 pixels.” Now you can see it in 4K and totally see the difference. The fact that people couldn’t tell the difference shows me that we did our job right—we stayed so true to the original that it mirrors players’ memories.
What drove your decision to keep the original silhouettes?
Brian: In Korea, StarCraft is like chess. It’s timeless. We’re not going to rewrite the rules of chess—we’re not going to change how the pieces move—we’re just going to make it look better.
What about redoing the visual effects?
Brian: The effects in StarCraft: Remastered are being created with the best effects programs we have. The fire looks like fire, the explosions are awesome. The new nuclear explosion is amazing, it looks really good.
Originally, our focus was: “Let’s do the effects 100% true to the original.” But then we started realizing . . . these original effects don’t actually look very good by today’s standards. They’re nice, but, you know, they’re just four colors! We’re not going to make a four-color explosion now, we’re going to use all the colors we can!
What if people prefer the old effects?
Brian: With most of the visual effects in StarCraft: Remastered, you can just turn them off and go back to the originals. We’re trying our best to make everything feel comfortable. And if players don’t turn on the options right away, they might eventually. We showed some pros the game, and they started off playing 4:3. And we were like hey, you can also play 16:9! When they tried it they were like, “No, we can’t do this.” So they switched it back. But by the end of the play session, everybody was playing 16:9.
How did you wind up at Blizzard?
Brissia: Before I got in, I applied to Blizzard every year for twelve years. Every year I got a no. I had started working in the video game industry three years before I started applying to Blizzard. The one year that I was finally like, “Okay, that’s it, I give up”--that was the year a recruiter finally reached out to me. I was like, “Are you freaking kidding me?”
What was the first thing you worked on when you joined the StarCraft: Remastered team?
Brissia: Tilesets. I went through thousands of tiles and made sure that they fit. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. There were all sorts of problems. The desert map had an issue where it was so orange that if your team color happened to be between the reds and oranges, your little dudes would just get lost.
How much of the project was wrestling with the old code?
Brissia: Well, for example, the Infested Terran is called “Bug Guy” in the code. Internally, that’s his name. “Bug Guy.” The portrait? “Bug Guy Portrait.” So there were a lot of things that had internal names that left us thinking, “Why would they do this?”
Who’s the best StarCraft player on the team?
Brissia: I’d have to say Mike Dinger, he’s one of our QA fellas. The QA team plays the hell out of the game.
Sounds like they have the most fun.
Brissia: We do have a couple of QA folks who will just burst out into song. They get a quartet going. It’s super funny. They’ll sing Johnny Cash . . . and they love singing the Taco Song from South Park. That’s their most-requested one, I think.
So they’re essentially a jukebox.
Brissia: Yeah. It’s awesome.
Brissia told me you’re the best StarCraft player on the team.
Mike: (Laughs) She did? I wouldn't say that I'm the best, or even average! But I could get you into contact with someone else who’s really good, if you like.
Who’s that?
Mike: The best player we have—who almost always wins in our Friday play-the-game sessions—is Yi Deng.
I’ve heard you’re the best player on the StarCraft: Remastered team. How did you get so good?
Yi: People must have exaggerated a bit! I think it’s just normal play, creating units, and pushing.
Have you been playing StarCraft: Brood War for a long time?
Yi: Very long ago—like, fifteen years?—I played seriously for a while. But I love playing real-time-strategy games. I like to play Warcraft III and StarCraft II too.
15 years ago, would you ever have expected to wind up at Blizzard like this?
Yi: Nope. But sometimes I dreamed about it.
What’s the most memorable part of this experience for you?
Pete: There are two types of personalities on the team. You’ve got folks who were involved in the original creation, and then those of us who grew up playing these games and were like, “this makes me want to work at Blizzard.” That’s the camp I’m in. I watched my buddy play Warcraft [Orcs & Humans], and he would not let me touch it, so I sat behind him for hours and hours.
I started mowing neighbors’ yards with a push mower, and eventually made enough money to buy a computer, and that was when StarCraft came out.
What was the single greatest challenge along the way?
Rob: Early on, I think we underestimated just how #&@!ing difficult it was going to be to find the original game.
Pete: (Rueful laugh)
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To find the game?
Rob: Oh, yeah. No joke. To start with, we had to rip out all the sprites from the final, shipped version of the game. It’s not like we had this great awesome system on the backend where all our assets were saved . . . no no, we basically had to reverse-engineer our own game, to suck out the sprites and build the tooling around it, just so we could then go and find artists who could re-envision, reimagine, and put all the detail to the original structures and units. We had to rebuild all the models—to everything!
Pete: That was our “Stetson and whip” period. (Laughs) We’d talk to some guy in another office, who maybe had some of those original build tools . . . “Ah, crap, I looked through the CDs I had stored in my garage, and I couldn’t find them.” Crazy, crazy attempts to find these things.
And while this was all happening, we were traveling to all these different StarCraft hubs around the world, talking to players and pros, reconnecting with the community. That was hands-down the most important part of the process—and probably the most fun, too.
What did you wrestle with when it came to deciding whether certain new features should be added to StarCraft: Remastered?
Pete: There are a lot of factors there. We want to listen to the voice of the community because they’ve been here, they love the game, and they’re so plugged in that they don’t want to move off onto something else. So we should trust that, right? Run with that. But the community is multifaceted, so when you provide something—like keybinds—you have some people saying, “I don’t want it,” and then when you take it away, you get an even louder voice saying, “Give it back.”
What’s most important is making sure that StarCraft still plays and feels the way it always has. If you look at the pro scene, the metagame is still evolving, it’s still healthy. We don’t want to come in there and mess that up.
Who knows if key bindings will do that one way or another. We’re looking at methods to safeguard against that while still offering keybinds. It’s a good feature, it allows new people to come in, it allows people who love StarCraft II to come over without having to retrain their muscle memory. You’re at your best when you’re in the flow of the game and things are just happening because your hands know where to go, right? You don’t have to stop and go—wait, was it P? Oh, damn, it’s way across the keyboard. Microsoft mappoint 2013 free trial. Those are things that gate a new generation from coming in to learn what it’s all about.
Rob: But then your pro players are going to look at it and go, “Hey, man, that travel time, moving your hand from here to here—that’s part of the game.”
Pete: Yup. “That extra millisecond is what makes it balanced.”
Rob: So you ask the question, “what are you struggling with,” it’s like, well, where do you draw the line? We want to reach new players. The game’s been loved and enjoyed for the past twenty years, and we want it to be loved and enjoyed for the next twenty, if not longer. And the littlest of changes are things that we wrestle with, because it’s equally important to respect the foundation that the current community expects.
What inspires you to pay such close attention to mechanics that some might call subtle or relatively unimportant?
Rob: Well, we’ve said for a long time, we’re working with a classic painting here. And we’re not looking at the painting, starting a brand new sketch, and trying to copy it—we’re actually messing with the original. So every little detail matters. If a color is even slightly wrong, we’re going to stop and talk about it. “Okay, do we need to add some more yellow, some more green?”
How’s the community response felt?
Pete: It’s great. We came into this wanting to hear as many voices from the community as we can, understanding how passionate they are. Yeah, there are days when you’re getting hit with a sledgehammer in the face, and you’re like, please stop. (Laughs) But that’s also what makes it worthwhile.
Rob: We want to be responsible citizens with respect to the game, because at the end of the day, it’s really the community that owns this game, and gives it life. This is something where we’re coming in, and every little tweak has the potential to overturn the apple cart.
Do you get the feeling that fans are excited for the release?
Pete: Mh hmm! And those are the things that drive us. It was . . . pure elation when we put the PTR up.
Rob: Oh, yeah.
Pete: Or the moments when we put it in front of the pros for the first time and they didn’t immediately freak out and start throwing chairs or something.
Rob: I think that was one of the few times I’ve actually been sort of nervous—when we were like, “God, what are they going to think, what are they going to think, please don’t let them be disappointed—” And their reaction was . . . unexpected. I mean it was expected, but also a huge joy—and a huge relief—coming from a position where we’d always kind of expected the worst.
Pete: Or at the announcement—we have that announcement video, it’s in Korean, we’ve seen it eight hundred times, so we know exactly what each of the little beats are. . . .
I’ve played sports, I’ve been in crowds. There is a visceral roar you get when a crowd is really behind something, that’s different from “Eh, we scored a goal, it’s early in the game, it doesn’t matter.” This was a winning-the-Stanley-Cup-in-overtime kind of sound, that the crowd made.
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Rob: And it was funny, because on the live stream--
Pete: (Horrified) Oh God, yeah.
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Rob: They were sitting in the office—the crew that wasn’t in Korea—and the stream was totally silent. And they were texting us going, “Do they hate it? What’s going on?” Because they cut away to the actual pre-roll of the trailer—meanwhile in Korea, we’re sitting there, I’m tearing up, thinking “OH MY GOD, I’M SO #!&@ING EXCITED, the crowd loves it!”
When did you realize what this game really meant to people?
Pete: When we heard about chat channels, and the friendships people had. We went to Korea and met a guy sitting in a gaming café who’s our age, in his 30s or 40s, still goes there for an hour a day to chat to some guy down in Busan, when he’s in Seoul—you know, he’s never met the guy in person, but they’re amazing friends through this game, through that connection, and they still play together—that’s unbelievable.
You want to know why we’re so passionate? It’s people like him. That’s why we can’t #&!@ it up.