Campaign Creations

So, HKS threw me a trial key and I had a go at the campaign (only after seeing if the insane AI can still cripple my computer - yes, it can, it can easily make the game unplayable at sub 1 FPS. Seems unchanged from beta.)

So, I got up to like mission 7 or something I dunno. Almost out of HD. Here's some general opinions.

- So far the writing is meh. Not terrible, but nothing unexpected either. Tychus just conveniently shows up, doctor conveniently starts research on a "zerg cure" (I'm sure I know exactly where this is going), ect... everything is so convenient. Just bad storytelling so far. Unit lines are absolutely silly. Almost every unit says something related to "Victory" (just like all of the Protoss units!) Come on... silly.
- I'm playing on Brutal and honestly, it's still too easy. I make a lot of stupid mistakes and do a lot of stupid things like forget to hotkey stuff, sometimes float up to ~1k minerals+, ect. The night of the living dead mission gave me a bit of trouble because I was lazy and negligent of one of the chokes. Well, guess what? Lift my buildings, run around for a bit, easily beat it anyway. I lost once on the defense mission and then consolidated my defenses on the main ramp and basically just waited for the mission to end. When the BC came my guys were still easily holding off the Zerg.
- The mission briefings feel very cheap. Very generic gung-ho dialogue, and the pre-recorded game sequences seem lazily triggered and overall uninspired. Also the star map is GONE? What?! That was one of my favorite things they showed in Blizzcon... and it's gone! What I would have done with that...
- Most of the general unit voice acting and the news guy is absolutely terrible. However, the voice acting for Tychus and the other main characters thus far is really good. Seems like they used employees for the former and actual actors for the latter.
- I'm happy most of the missions thus far are B&D. I don't get bored by them, they don't last too long nor are they too short. I am content with the mission design. Just hope they really start pushing my skills by the end.
- Okay, why do games have this obsession with pretending that you're seeing footage from a camera, but cameras being in really unlikely locations? Why is Kerrigan walking in front of a news guy? (Don't tell me it's because she "wants to be seen" because that was not her expression), Why is it you can conveniently see everything going on, on the planet surfaces, when they're totally overrun? Orbital view? Unlikely with cloud cover, fog, ect. Just seems silly to me and a cheap way out of presenting stuff.
- So, suddenly Raynor and Kerrigan were lovers? I don't recall that in SC/BW.
- I like how there's no official introduction to the new tech like vikings ect... they just suddenly exist, no comments about the Dominion's new developments or anything. They just exist.
- Blizzard did a lot more work with their terraining in this game than they did for wc3 and BW, which is nice. The maps look a lot better and make good use of doodads.

The game's performance seems even worse than phase 2 beta. Without fraps recording I pull at most 30fps. HKS pulls 90fps in such instances, and he's on a CPU that performs worse in sc2 (it's a CPU-dependent game by far). We fucked with my video card drivers and settings and such and could not squeeze out any performance. The next step is to OC the CPU but we're not sure how to safely do that with an i7. Regardless, the performance should be better... even at 30fps I can see the game being fairly choppy. Recording with fraps actually makes it run SMOOTHER. Hard to describe, but very noticeable. Maybe sc2 still has unresolved issues with the i7's.

Although I tried to focus on the bad points as much as possible with the campaign I like it more than any other RTS campaign I've attempted thus far. I also had a go at the Lost Viking and the delayed reactions of key presses on top of my CTS made it challenging but I got late into the second mission after dying horribly on my first try. I'm kind of curious why you go from mass rockets to singular plasma bolts even with a ton of additional weapon upgrades - the upgrades make it much harder once you're only firing one projectile (At the end I had an issue with killing all of the scourge in one line and BOOM, green jizz everywhere). Then I ran into the only scourge on the screen for 10 seconds. n1 bro

I was hoping for high rez textures for terrain but no go. The campaign units look decent thus far, though. As do the portraits.


Best thing I've seen so far is a random colonist body who was mangled and you could see her spine and such. +1 wein points

.e

Okay, I'm on the train mission. Now it's getting difficult. Or gay. I'll go with gay. Christ, 3/3 mega tanks and marauder squads.

There's very few non-melee missions in the campaign-- there's only five of them in the entire campaign, and you can skip two of them, and one of them is completely optional.

The very last mission is pretty difficult.

I was retarded and forgot the game autosaves regularly and did several full playthroughs of the damn train mission doing stupid things like forgetting about the Marauder deathsquads. However, one of my failed run-ins netted me an achievement, and ultimately I ended up winning without losing any trains, giving me another achievement.

Then my playtime ran out during my attempts on the mining mission (Oh, Zerg attack from the north, too? Of course they do! *strikes self*).

The Brutalisk has a really terrible attack sound, and is easily killed by a single Diamondback. On the other hand, reapers have a hard time dealing with lava. What screws me here is my shitty multitasking.

I hear the final mission is difficult.

Some levels are stupidly easy because you can bypass the gimmick. (Building multiple CC's for terrazine mining, massive zerg tech transport for the medivac level) I also didn't like the last stand level, but only because I thought I was being original when I did it in my campaign.

IskatuMesk wrote: The Brutalisk has a really terrible attack sound, and is easily killed by a single Diamondback. On the other hand, reapers have a hard time dealing with lava. What screws me here is my shitty multitasking.

Brutalisk is fairly easy to beat with anything once you realize it walks ridiculously slow (tanking it with anything that doesn't rival it in HP is suicidal). I kited it with Reapers myself. The hard part is killing it with the lava, which took a bit of doing since it runs like heck from the lava.

Well, I basically ran circles around it with diamondbacks in close range when I was clumsy (ooh gas in that dead-end! Must grab!). Every now and then it got a shot off but for the most part was harmless

You use the ATI HD Radeon 57/5800 series correct? That card has massive probelms with SC2 at the moment, so I feel you since I'm in the same position. The i7 might affect a bit of it since I seem to have slightly higher than 30 FPS but I know the ATI card is not working properly based on technical forums.

There's very few non-melee missions in the campaign-- there's only five of them in the entire campaign, and you can skip two of them, and one of them is completely optional.

The very last mission is pretty difficult.

Only for bads like me. Proper macro alone will be more than enough since this game is not like WoW where they realize a raid boss should not be stun lockable.

The main part I liked about this campaign is how there are so many choices in how you upgrade/buy units etc etc. The game can go from amazingly easy (choosing the right units doing missions in the right order choosing who to side with) or incredibly frusterating (exact opposite, no upgrades no buying mercs choosing the wrong sides and picking missions in the wrong order) which should give die hards that can do SMB World 1-1 backwards blindfolded something to do. A lot of the upgrades and stuff were very "fun" and the ratio of awesome upgrades (SIEGE TANKS/BANSHEES/ETC) to boring and useless upgrades (DIAMONDBACK) was about 60/50ish and even better the research upgrades usually don't have a strictly inferior choice other than say, turret bunker and attack speed vs life. The only bad choices were PREDATOR (4K ICON IS A ROBO CAT BABY) and Hercules which I've yet to see a practical purpose. Mercs also go by this law though buying all of them nets you an achievement. Some are clearly just damn fail (Marauder is never used except for emergencies) while others like Banshees which get 50% damage upgrade is a god send. Siege Breakers are probably the MVPs if it weren't for the fact that war pigs are so damn cheap and sustainable with super medics.

The Brutalisk has a really terrible attack sound, and is easily killed by a single Diamondback. On the other hand, reapers have a hard time dealing with lava. What screws me here is my shitty multitasking.

The Brutalisk appears multiple times, and is only a threat when you do a certain mission that requires you to not lose a single unit to it on brutal. Even then it shouldn't take more than an hour without anyone giving you hints.

If you wanna talk about disappointing, Leviathan takes the cake. The first mission he's available in and by the time he attacks you I have enough marines/vikings to toast him in 10 seconds or less.

Don't appear to be able to load replays by associating them with the exe anymore. Son, I am disappoint.

Try fighting the leviathan on Brutal.

WB wrote: Try fighting the leviathan on Brutal.

I have the Kerrigan icon dude, that's exactly what I did. He was a joke.

IskatuMesk wrote: - So, suddenly Raynor and Kerrigan were lovers? I don't recall that in SC/BW.

Well you have to feel the character and read between the line, but yeah, it is obvious there was something.

No... not obvious. You get a pair of lines from when they first met in SC vanilla and that's it. All we know is that Raynor is a hick.

Also I'm running a 4870x2.

Performance issues can only be Mesk's i7, My modest 2.6 ghz core 2 duo and HD 4870 apparently outperform his set up on SC2.

All ATI cards do have problems with SC though, mine always gets a bit hot and the mouse icon changes and I know this is a confirmed problem =/ but other than that yeah I guess i7 boned him even harder.

Xelxiuz wrote: All ATI cards do have problems with SC though, mine always gets a bit hot and the mouse icon changes and I know this is a confirmed problem

I also have this issue. At least my quad core is AMD.