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This would have been a good place to make the Tosh/Nova choice relevant again.
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Nov 25, 2023 05:35
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The Queen is a really cool choice for the boss, too. You don't see Queens anywhere else in WoL, and thanks to how funky Starcraft gets with scale it's easy to not think of Queens as much. It's only when she pops up and her name appears that you remember that oh yeah, Queens are air units, like the Science Vessel and Battlecruiser which are big enough to be entire levels. Belly of the Beast is a really good mission.
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Nov 25, 2023 09:05
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I don't really understand why Blizzard felt the need to make the "tech" guy be annoying.. I mean I suppose I do understand why they went with the easy stereotype, but I don't particularly like it. It makes it worse once you see that Stetmann is actually a good unit and is willing to go into a bunch of Zerg infested tunnels with just three other people to lay down charges.
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Nov 25, 2023 09:19
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Is she an old style (SC1) queen or a new style queen? She looks like a SC2 queen. The units are so different I'm not really clear why they are called the same. From the lore SC2 queens are basically the cerebrate substitute, right? With control over far smaller broods on average in case they get ideasTM.
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Nov 25, 2023 09:35
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Cut Content Once again, if you exploited a glitch in early versions of the game, you could get back on the Hyperion and access a couple of cut conversations that were still baked into the game. Horner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJXbbcGdgbA  I know takin' out those nydus canals left y'all in the lurch up here. I'm sorry for that. You did what you had to do, sir. But this last step... Are you sure you know what you're getting into? What if she can't be saved? Have you really considered that? It's real simple for me, Matt. I'll never give up on her. Long as there's a chance of bringing her back, I'll never quit. But what if you fail? Can you live with that? Matt, if I fail, we're all dead men anyway.Swann https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od9au3c78qI So, how'd you enjoy your little 'vacation' dirtside?  Yeah, next time you need a volunteer, you go right ahead and volunteer someone else. Haha, thanks man. You know we couldn't have done it without ya.
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Nov 25, 2023 10:19
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And Stetmann still has zero loving relevancy on the Hyperion.
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Nov 25, 2023 10:24
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You know I think it's telling that I have literally ZERO memory of these final WoL missions.
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Nov 25, 2023 10:49
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To be fair to Belly of the Beast, you might just never have played it. Given the choice of getting rid of nydus worms and all air units, I know I went for the latter without a second thought. Same goes for the Nova mission; you're never given any adequate reason to betray Tosh. The refugee mission is the only one that remotely feel like a balanced choice before you know the game will retroactively justify whichever you pick.
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Nov 25, 2023 12:43
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Yeah, I did the air mission when I played this on release, and I missed out because this one looks like it rules.
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Nov 25, 2023 15:08
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Omobono posted:From the lore SC2 queens are basically the cerebrate substitute, right? With control over far smaller broods on average in case they get ideasTM. Brood Mothers are the cerebrate substitue. Queens are more of a nest support thing. This one might be a middle ground on that count though - we haven't seen any brood mothers in this campaign so the writers might not have come up with them as a distinct thing yet. GunnerJ posted:This would have been a good place to make the Tosh/Nova choice relevant again. Could have done the same for Hanson/Selendis too! Give you some extra support from either the Haven refugees or the Golden Armada. Or put them in the air mission instead. That would have been fun. It is honestly pretty silly that Warfield offers a squad of hardcore vets to join him for the mission and Jim decides that, no, he'll take his middle management guys down instead. Silly but fun though. That particular bit I won't hold against SC2, it's got charm.
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Nov 25, 2023 15:31
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Swann has charm. Stettman does not.
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Nov 25, 2023 16:05
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GunnerJ posted:This would have been a good place to make the Tosh/Nova choice relevant again. Can't you hit Char without ever resolving that quest line?
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Nov 25, 2023 16:05
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Cythereal posted:Can't you hit Char without ever resolving that quest line? Yeah but that would just create a third option where you have neither. Means balancing for the mission might be a bit odd, but they've already got vastly different difficulty levels so that's honestly going to be just another drop in the bucket.
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Nov 25, 2023 16:08
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Worth noting: If the Omegalisk does break through to that squad of marines, you get one more very scared, very horrified movie reference from the probably-doomed marines. "Oh god... game over, man. Game over!"
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Nov 25, 2023 16:10
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Felinoid posted:Yeah but that would just create a third option where you have neither. Means balancing for the mission might be a bit odd, but they've already got vastly different difficulty levels so that's honestly going to be just another drop in the bucket. You don't even really need that - if you haven't done New Folsom, Tosh is still on your ship, so he can come along. Although I guess there's still the question of what if you haven't done his first mission either, though that is very edge case.
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Nov 25, 2023 16:25
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:To be fair to Belly of the Beast, you might just never have played it. Given the choice of getting rid of nydus worms and all air units, I know I went for the latter without a second thought. I made the opposite calculation, like “ok, I know I can build turrets and wraiths, I don’t want assholes teleporting in though.”
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Nov 25, 2023 16:36
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Tenebrais posted:It is honestly pretty silly that Warfield offers a squad of hardcore vets to join him for the mission and Jim decides that, no, he'll take his middle management guys down instead. Jim knows that if you've got a choice between a bunch of NPCs (even elite ones) and an adventuring party, you take the adventuring party. That was a neat mission, though I also just slammed "gently caress the flyers" instantly when I played.
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Nov 25, 2023 16:49
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Man, if nydus meant assholes teleporting in your base they'd be a complete non-factor. Oh no please mr Zerg, don't appear right in the middle of 20 sieged tanks' kill zone, please. The one or two nydus that spawn in your base get mulched in about half a second, it's the ones chilling in the backlines that become a problem once they start spitting mass ultralisks. (Since we're not seeing the nydus version of the final map: various nydus pop up at regular intervals, they spit a small amount of low tier units on spawn, and then keep spitting increasingly high-tier units if not destroyed)
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Nov 25, 2023 16:52
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I went with killing the worms my first time through because I thought that it was a choice between having to only contend with ground or air Zerg in the finale, and figured that I could just mass Vikings and Battlecruisers to… cruise through the final mission against just mutas and brood lords. Had I known that there are still a lot of ground units and the surprise, I would have gone with the air version without a second thought.
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Nov 25, 2023 17:45
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The air version is by far the harder version of the final battle, especially on Brutal. The Leviathan and non stop waves of Brood Lords demand a lot more to answer then the Nydus networks. You can go all in on Siege Tanks and Bunkers and effectively completely dismantle the ground version of the map even on Brutal as you'll vaporize anything that even remotely comes close to your base, and just Mercenary Vikings will answer the small number of air units. Build a squad of Banshees and you can just erase every Nydus Worm pretty rapidly after they spawn. Brood Lords are a much, much bigger threat to bunker/planetary fortress and siege tank walls then the Nydus networks are, as even if you're slow to kill the Nydus worms you should still be able to just massacre almost everything that comes out of them. You then need to dedicate a lot more supply to Vikings or other anti air, as Missile Turrets don't have the range to stop Brood Lords. Ghosts in bunkers can shoot back at Brood Lords if they're fully upgraded as well as hop out to snipe them though.
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Nov 25, 2023 17:56
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I believe taking out the worms instead of the air support is almost universally considered the harder option for the final mission. Even with mass ultras, it is still very, very hard to get past a fully kitted out and developed tank/bunker line. I always went for taking out air when I was playing. The alterate timeline mission to take out air support is actually really interesting in that it is nearly a straight-up puzzle mission. It is pretty difficult if you play it straight as a "wipe out the enemy bases' mission, but fairly easy if you figure out that a certain unit mix can cheese it. Wasn't there a co-op commander that basically worked like this, your entire army is just a mix of hero units? How did that work? Penetrator Round is cathartic but can it stop five hatcheries pumping an endless stream of leaperlings?
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Nov 25, 2023 21:00
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bladededge posted:I believe taking out the worms instead of the air support is almost universally considered the harder option for the final mission. Even with mass ultras, it is still very, very hard to get past a fully kitted out and developed tank/bunker line. I always went for taking out air when I was playing. Yes, Tychus is this mission but as a co-op commander. The co-op missions work on setpieces and spawns, so you never have the 'endless stream of X' to deal with, but rather set waves based on the composition randomly selected at the start of the mission, and pre-placed enemy bases full of units that you may or may not need to kill to progress. I've never played him, but he seems to work great. You get a handful of juiced-up hero units and they seem to perform just as well as other more traditional armies. No complaints here from a Nova player.
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Nov 25, 2023 21:41
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Yeah, and there's a decent selection of Heroes to choose from to fill out your squad, each with a different ability, and if you select more than one, they actually put all the abilities on a single command card, which is a very nice UI tweak. And of course, you buy upgrades for them as the mission goes on, too, making their abilities even more potent - and there are various options for mobility to move them around the map as needed, too.
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Nov 25, 2023 22:37
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My hot take is that Shatter the Skies is the more fun mission. It feels like the last chance you have to really just go ham with all the cool toys you've unlocked over the course of the campaign.
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Nov 26, 2023 00:15
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RevolverDivider posted:The air version is by far the harder version of the final battle, especially on Brutal. There's actually a pretty simple solution to the air version, even on brutal. I'd argue that solution makes it by far the easier version.
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Nov 26, 2023 00:43
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The Tychus Co-Op Commander is based almost entirely on this mission and it loving rules. Fun Fact: Everything about Commando Raynor's Penetrator Round is insanely, ridiculously kludgy. Its targeting beam is actually done via triggers, and if you have two Commando Raynors on the map (not even owned by the same player, just the same unit), depending on which one loaded first, the "later" one will not have the targeting beam available for Penetrator Round when aiming the skill. As for the actual effect, Wings of Liberty did not have support for linear or rectangular search areas, so its AoE is actually three or four thin ovals stacked in a row, so it's possible to have the ability deal damage twice (or three times) if you line it up just right against a large enemy.
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Nov 26, 2023 00:51
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Intermission 25 Cinematic: Fire and Fury     After the fun times and quips of Belly of the Beast, we go to a big sad montage of a bunch of dead Marines.   It even starts raining.    Plus one Marine in Raider blue.         Warfield's back from his trip to medical.    And he wasn't kidding about having them lop off his arm.  It can turn into a badass arm cannon!  It never gets used in Wings.        And we finally get the completed artifact.         Raynor's speech is also being broadcasted to everyone nearby, because this is also the Obligatory Badass Speech Moment.       And then the rain stops and the clouds part all dramatic like the second Raynor is done talking.   It just feels so forced.  Like the writers are just going down a checklist of emotional moments.       Back at the base camp for one last round of talks. >Talk to Tychus.    Get one thing straight, Tychus - if Valerian's right and this artifact can turn Kerrigan human again, I'm taking her away from this place. You hear what I'm sayin'? I hear ya', Jimmy and I know you wanna' believe she can come back. But after all the misery she's caused... well, let's just say... some folks don't deserve second chances.But some folks are also required for the continued survival of the universe, so you don't really get a say in the matter here. I'll be the judge of that.>Talk to Warfield.    Charging into battle with a stranger - taking enemy fire, holding the line shoulder to shoulder - that's the great equalizer of war. It's an honor to fight at your side. I sure do appreciate that, General.>Examine Artifact.        Watch news.  The implication here is that learning the truth about Tarsonis has been weighing on Donny ever since Media Blitz, and it finally broke him. In a better written game, this could be used as a way to show a man forced to confront the sins of the regime he's been verbally fellating for years.  But this is Starcraft 2, so all they do with it is a 'haha crazy people are so random, amirite?' joke and never bring it up again.  We wish you all the best, Donny, and hope for your speedy recovery. In the meantime, I'll be taking over as chief anchor here at UNN. For UNN, I'm Kate Lockwell.Without Donny around to cut her off whenever she starts talking up the Raiders, I give it about a week before she gets unpersoned.  Oh, and despite the other news segments being tweaked slightly if you've done Media Blitz, this one is completely unchanged if you skipped it and Donny goes crazy for no reason whatsoever.  The time has finally come to cash in that final zerg research.  I did say the Emulator excels against an air army, after all.  But there's just one final trip to the Non-Canon Zone before I can show it off.
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Nov 26, 2023 04:27
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Worth noting: the name on that dead marine's dogtag that Raynor grabbed during his Big Emotional Speech, "M. Koiter" was not random. It was a Blizzard Staff member that died young in 2004. In addition to this tribute here, he also has a tribute in World of Warcraft.
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Nov 26, 2023 04:45
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Not going to wade into the spoiler zone too much, but not a bad guess by Tychus here about a stupid plot point to come. One wonders if it was planned at this point - probably not, I imagine.
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Nov 26, 2023 05:40
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Nov 26, 2023 06:00
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BisbyWorl posted:
Sometimes you get the impression that someone is literally using all of the entries for a specific genre on tvtropes.org as a to-do list, but I think that the actiblizz writers of this era were just really, really big on movie trailers. Every line in the cinematics sounds like it was made for a trailer highlight reel. I've seen a couple scattered cinematics from World of Warcraft and it is exactly the same style. Now, if anybody wants to see what a game script that was actually written using a tvtropes checklist looks like, I'm sure someone in the history of this forum LP'd Xenosaga Ep.2 at some point.
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Nov 26, 2023 06:10
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I've been reading through this LP and have only gotten to page 47 so far, but I think it's one of the best LP's I've seen. Fantastic work! It's also inspired me to replay the campaign, since watching the abysmal writing is a guilty pleasure of mine, and the actual gameplay is usually fun enough to waste some time, rock-pondering Protoss missions notwithstanding. I also decided to check on HotS and LotV to see how much of each I'd played, and... apparently I finished HotS???? I legitimately have no memory of finishing it, just an incredibly vague feeling of severe disappointment.
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Nov 26, 2023 06:29
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“just an incredibly vague feeling of severe disappointment - Let’s Play StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm”
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Nov 26, 2023 07:37
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 Title drop.
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Nov 26, 2023 08:07
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Nov 26, 2023 08:44
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Thanksgaming > Let's Play! > This thing gives me the willies somethin' awful - Let's Play Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty
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Nov 26, 2023 09:33
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Regalingualius posted:“just an incredibly vague feeling of severe disappointment - Let’s Play StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm” I think we found the HotS thread title Bisby.
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Nov 26, 2023 09:45
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So one thing that strikes me about this Xel'naga artifact is that it can ostensibly de-zergify a zergified creature, which is fine, but... considering that zergified humans did not exist when the Xel'naga did, it seems odd that it would specifically target them. I could maybe buy that the Xel'naga had it as a testbed for messing with the Zerg infestation during their own experiments,so that it might AoE de-zergify a LOT of creatures, whipping them back to their OG DNA and out of Overmind control, but I can't really believe it only affects humans or that it's laser-targeted at one person. I think it would be way more interesting if it had some big, unrelated effect that coincidentally could also de-zergify people. Like maybe it separates things of alien nature, so it would also rip out a cyborg's augmentations, or maybe it literally rolls back time for an area/creatures, or something.
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Nov 26, 2023 10:17
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"We need a dramatic speech in the rain." "They are on a volcano planet with no visible water anywhere." "In. The. Rain."
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Nov 26, 2023 12:07
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To be fair, volcanic climates actually experience frequent rainfall due to constantly boiling off every bit of moisture in the area. that cutscene sucks real fuckin bad though
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Nov 26, 2023 12:36
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