@@Axel-wo6qu Well the colonist chick was the only doctor that was the person Grant was signaling out, I do not think Stetmann is a doctor he is just a science advisor/scientist, I had a quick look at his starcraft wiki page and there it says he is a scientist but not anything about him being a doctor.
One big thing you missed about the Nova campaign was the lack of a home between missions. All other campaigns you could move around to various locations on your ship and talk to your growing crew to see their perspectives or get to know more about them. Knowing that Abathur hated it when the Overmind died because he turned feral and wasn't "true zerg" for a short while is interesting, the general animosity between Artanis and Alarak that grows into a begrudging respect is great. All of the flavor text of upgrades and Stetmanns' research logs in the Toss and Zerg tanks are really neat. This is entirely missing from Nova's storyline. Sure Rigel might be really flat but learning anything at all about him would've been better, or calling Valarian to give reports or something. Anything might've veen better than the nothing we had.
@@1.-ulysses334 UNN was a lot weaker IMO, without Donny there as a foil for Kate we don't get much. She tells the news, it sets the stage but it's without any wit that WOL had. I can't name a single quote from covert op UNN but WOL i still giggle to myself sometimes getting reminded of them.
Yeah, the story in The Fall is frustrating. I hated winning the Protoss civil war, only for Tassadar to surrender to end the violence, only to force me to win the civil war again. Many, many more Protoss died because he gave himself up, which makes his noble sacrifice seem deranged. A simple fix: Tassadar surrenders but then his prison ship crashes behind Zerg lines. Make it a PvZ mission. Or a PvZvP mission (you have to rescue Tassadar before the Conclave recover the ship). Make his decision to surrender drive the plot forward, rather than telling the same story twice.
Tassadar also doesn’t really accomplish anything after being captured and released. As grant pointed out, we already beat the overmind in the mission. Have Tassadar executed, then have the Protoss attack out of stupid revenge; or, it could have been the catalyst that spurred Zeratul to truly join the cause.
That always also bothered me… I surrender I don’t want to see more of my Protoss brethren die… let’s murder all our Protoss brethren to save Tassadar… makes sense
One thing I noticed about The Fall is it starts in the past relative to the end of Overmind. A significant portion of campaigns 2 and 3 happen at the same time, from opposing perspectives. Given that Grant doesn't seem to know this, I'm guessing it's not well explained and should likely count against them.
@@Quantumironturtle Upon starting Episode Three: "PROTOSS CAMPAIGN: THE FALL The Zerg Overmind has succeeded in invading the Protoss Homeworld of Aiur and has embedded itself into the crust of the planet. Now, as the agents of the sinister Overmind spread chaos and destruction across the face of Aiur, the stalwart Protoss defenders prepare themselves for the coming onslaught. FIRST STRIKE Citadel of the new Protoss Executor Two days after the Zerg invasion" Dialogue from the first mission (First Strike), right before mission completion: "FENIX: You know, Executor, although we two have marched across hundreds of worlds together, I never imagined that we would be fighting on Aiur. The Zerg are indeed worthy foes." No, the game makes it *exceedingly* clear The Fall takes place after campaign 2, not during it.
@falsche921 Well, that's really dumb then, because it would make way more sense if the Protoss campaign happened at the same time as the Zerg campaign. Tassadar looks like a complete moron for not explaining anything otherwise.
The one issue I have with the Queen of Blades campaign is that every character has to be a bit stupider than usual for the story to work. Considering the tone of Starcraft 1 in general, the fact that they all implicitly trust Kerrigan is just odd, even without the Aldaris stuff. If it had been the case that the Mengsk and others thought they could use Kerrigan to beat the UED and then handle her later, that would be one thing, but for some reason they are genuinely surprised when she betrays them. Mengsk literally says that he actaully believed Kerrigan had forgiven him, and I just don't buy that.
I'd argue she has three things going for her. 1 - the UED is by far the biggest threat to everyone. 2 - Kerrigan claims it was the Overmind controlling her which if you wanted to believe your former ally is back, would feel good. 3 - Kerrigan is basically alone with very few Zerg under her control, so her allies don't think she can do much even if she is selfish in her plans to work with them. Kerrigan only gets strong when given significant help from her allies. It's only once they disable the UED's Zerg controls and weaken them that she betrays them. Also she has them expend a lot of their forces against the UED before she hits them in the back. They had together at this point, liberated/retake multiple worlds at that point.
@@tristantully1592 Ad 1. A completely valid point, but it only justifies why they agreed to work with her, not why they seemed to actually trust her. Ad 2. It would explain Jim and maybe even Fenix trusting her, but what about Mengsk? Even if she was only murdering people because of the Overmind's control, Mengsk was still the one who betrayed her which led to said control, so it was quite obvious that even without it she'd still be after him. Perhaps even more so if she hated what the Overmind made her do. Ad 3. Of course she only betrays them once she grows in power. That's exactly the reason why they shouldn't fully trust anything she says BEFORE then. If at the start she had full control of the Zerg and still wanted to ally herself with them, that would at least prove genuine interest in defeating the UED, as opposed to just wanting to boost her own forces. If your weakened enemy proposes an alliance that will help them grow in power, you'd better think really hard before agreeing, as they're probably mostly doing this for their own gain.
The Manual. I think Grant forgot these games came with a manual, a mainstay of the era. The manual explained Mengsk family was killed by ghosts, and because this is a 90s game, you can easily piece together that Kerrigan was one of three. Which of course, was eventually confirmed.
The thing is, most of them old games, like Starcraft, Warcraft 2 etc, came with a manual, and they usually expand on the story. However, when comes to the UED, I agree what Grant said, Stukuv and Gerald have no chemistry, even the manual doesn't mention anything about their friendship. We get a glimce of the friendship they have when Gerald talks to Duran. You can tell Blizzard wanted to make maybe a Starcraft 2 after broodwar immediately, maybe focused on Raynor and Zertual separately? or maybe Just UED earth camgapin, instead of waiting 12 years for the Starcraft we know.
@@beepbop6542 2478-2489 (secret) 2489-2491 (public) From what I remember reading the book. I Mengsk, Arcturus Mengsk was in his mid 20s. I could be wrong
To be fair, the Fall only takes place a few days after the invasion began, so I always just imagined that the zerg hadn't reached every corner of Aiur at that point in time.
I never liked how the UED lost because the writter just made Dugalle become stupid out of nowhere. The point of the UED was that even when they were outnumbered by literally every other race they were still cunning enough to turn their own weapons against them and win at the end, but then, out of nowhere Dugalle starts to trust a stranger over his right hand man and supposedly best friend, and then at the end he didn't even have any contingency plan in case he failed, all because plot didn't want them around anymore. A better plot would be: When Stukov goes missing (this also doesn't make sense, he could contact Dugalle during the mission, so why did he never explained things) DUgalle sends a elite squad to investigate things (a squad that doesn't include Duran), we still play as Duran but now we need to infiltrate where Stukov is before the squad arrives, the rest of that mission would play the same, but now with Dugalle being wary of Duran from the start. And in Omega, Dugalle should copy all the data of what they learned in the sector, put it into one of their ships and then make that ship go radio silent and start going towards earth from the beginning, maybe from the moment Mengsk made the deal with him to ally and fight kerrigan in Omega, that would guarantee that even if they fail the UED would know what happened and be allowed to prepare, after all, it sounds dumb he not only never considered they might lose but also didn't consider the other factions, especially mengsk could just turn on them if they won vs kerrigan. Those 2 changes would make them way more smart, fill the biggest plotholes and even give some leeway for them to maybe return.
He does mention in the epilogue that news of their defeat should have reached Earth by now and was writing an email to be sent to his wife so they still had some form of contact with the rest of the UED. Doesn't really sound like a ship going radio silent and rushing back home would be necessary.
@@toddclawson3619 But at the end of Omega it's said that "As for the UED, none of their ships managed to return, and the earth never knew what happened in that corner of space" or something like that, even in HOTS kerrigan says stukov can't return to earth because they would send another expedition. so the main UED forces are in the dark about what happened, so i think a contingency plan to preserve information would be the most inteligent course of action
Definitely the worst part was DuGalle trusting someone who rebelled already once, over his best friend. It's not even said that his mind was dominated (as with Rashagal) - he was just plain stupid.
I agree, it felt pretty startling but I am a super biased UED fan. A lot of it felt like an abridged version of their original fourth faction plans which may have had a larger scope. Then they decided to remove the faction afterwards. Like they had a great idea, lots to aim for but wrote the UED out of it when they realized the extra complications would be too much to keep up with.
@@Camikio i liked the idea of the UED, it's basically a more advanced faction but with fewer people, so they had to be smarter in onder to win enough ground, in that regard they are similar to the Nerazin, but for terran. but all was scrapped, and the ones with the high tech now are the umojans, even if they barely appear. i really would love a UED returns DLC, but i doubt it will ever happen now
I think one of the main issues Nova covert ops was, is it didn't have an onboard lounger area like the other Campaigns, like you could go to different rooms on the Hyperion/Leviathan/Spear and talk to people and get some character development through convos, Nova's campaign didn't have that option in it
It's kinda pointless to have an opinion on a DEI cash-grab anyway. Not to mention the entire Protoss campaign was basically 'How the Protoss Adopted 21st Century Progressivism'. Whole thing was cringe. "Let's sever our nerve cords because we're all individuals but let's also not let anybody discriminate based on their traditions." They also hammered the 'AIs are people that should have rights' angle that was being pushed in everything at the time, pissing on the grave of Fenix to do so.
@@ComissarYarrick They were streamlined (you could cure biological units with the raven's repair drone and mechanical units by equipping them with the auto-heal or through SCVs), but it annoyed me as well. It's like they wanted to make the missions harder by removing units, which is fine, however there was NO story-related reason for such.
Story-wise, I always felt like SC1 and Brood War were more so about the races (and their various subfactions) as a whole, and the events and conflicts surrounding them, with the main characters being the vessels you experience that story WITH. Yes, there was a lot of interpersonal drama, but it always felt like a story about the Terrans, Zerg, and Protoss as a whole. The fact that many of the cinematics do not revolve around the main characters is a testament to this. The main characters are often experiencing the story just the way you are in the pre-mission briefings. And, you ARE a character yourself, along for the ride just like everybody else. SC2 flips things, with the characters being front and center and the struggles of the larger races/subfactions becoming more of the backdrop. Every cinematic involves major characters, and you are much more directly playing "as" them since you are no longer addressed as an in-universe figure. It is much more about the interpersonal drama than SC and BW were. Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it was a change that allowed some of the weaker writing to manifest in my opinion.
Not that the comparison holds nearly as well, but you see a bit of this between Warcraft 2 and 3 as well. The increase of character drama over overarching plot progression causing narrative stumbles. It's a better story overall but the increase in detail reveals it isn't the writer's forte. Medivh flat out sucked in WC3, and only existed because there had to be SOME reason for characters to randomly sail to a continent that nobody knew about before. And the fact they thought the Stratholme mission clearly painted Arthas as monstrous when... while that might have been their intent, what they provided just made it seem depressingly reasonable. Minus his disbanding the paladins, which was just bad writing regardless. Metzen and whoever else contributed to the writing on these games were pretty good at broad stroke storytelling, but once they started zooming in and getting more personal... it wasn't catastrophic failure by any means but lets just say more than a few hurdles got knocked over.
@Reshapable So, whether or not what Arthas did was reasonable or not isn't really the point there, though. It was that his first thought in that scenario was to basically burn down the city. Even if it had to be done, the sight of it all would still be horrific. Also, Arthas doesn't disband the Paladins. He just tells Uther that he's been decommissioned, and in that literal same scene, Uther just tells him 'shut up, you're not my king, dude'. In fact, Uther was the one who convinced Terenes to order Arthas home from Northrend, which forced him to burn down his own ships. And again, the order was still around in literally the next campaign. ...And still again we see them in the Frozen Throne Undead campaign in the very first mission. You have to kill them to "disband" them.
I think Tassadar probably sums up your thoughts on that campaign best with his quote, "Aiur burns at the touch of the Zerg, and you come all this way to arrest me?" I think that line and that mission really showcases how the protoss government I still believe themselves invincible and how the only one playing 4D chess was Tassadar
The only thing we learn about Nova, is that she likes to bet during missions. Which we learn in her introduction in Wings, and is reinforced in Covert Ops. That's it. That's all her traits, besides "the mission first".
Funnily enough she barely gets any development in comics too. She’s like the most reoccurring from games character in them and there’s still nothing to her.
It is a shame that her original game got canceled. Would have been a good way to set her up and make a lot of people happy to see her when she pops up in Starcraft 2.
@@toddclawson3619 I have a feeling she would have been just as undeveloped in that too given the years it was worked on, it was supposed to come out and what of her still survives to this day. If they had already made her interesting back then it wouldn't be that hard to use those traits in SC 2 and the comics.
On the topic of Tassadar I'd say I never really thought of him as cunning necessarily, and more that he was just supposed to be quite wise. He didn't trick Kerrigan with any elaborate ploys, he just realised that she was overflowing with newfound arrogance and took advantage. That in mind, I'm not particularly disappointed he never resorted to trickery again, though I will always be disappointed in his surrender. Even if it is supposed to be the empathetic, 'human' thing to do, it was also just straight up stupid, counterproductive, and resolved in the next mission using even greater quantities of violence. (otherwise I agree completely so far) On Wings of Liberty, just wanted to say, really good campaign. I don't really like Terran but it's still by far my favourite campaign just because it has so much charm and flavor. My friend that doesn't play RTS at all accidentally did the entire campaign in 2 sittings because he was so sucked in. Heart of the Swarm that came after it was a massive disappointment. It didn't need to have WoL levels of polish, I just really like Zerg - and it couldn't even do that right. The enhanced swarm mod where they just removed Kerrigan entirely and put more upgrades into the actual swarm (kind of WoL-style...) was everything I wanted out of a Zerg campaign. Kind of continuing that tradition, the Spear of Adun wasn't as in your face as Kerrigan but it's stil a large chunk of your power that's not actually invested into your troops that honestly I'd like to see, not minimised for balance reasons, but straight up removed and redistributed into the units like enhanced swarm or WoL. In summation, I guess enhanced swarm was the best starcraft campaign mechanically(?).
Tassadar tried to employ cunning in convincing the Conclave about the need for the Nerazim. He had them attack a Cerebrate to showcase how futile their efforts were, then told them about the Nerazim's ability to kill them, but all of that backfired. Once he showed Zeratul killing 2 Cerebrates, the Conclave finally conceded to his point, albeit too late. Personally, I actually like how desperate Tassadar is, in that he makes poor decisions at times during the campaign.
I don't think the spear should be removed, i honestly like the help it provides, the thing i didn't like was that a lot of the skills were bad, like, you would never want deploy pylon or even reinforcements, and you would never want purifier bean or the stargate warp, because they cost a lot to either use, unlock or are just completely overshadowed by other skills. but nearly every time i saw someone "Balance it" they always nerf the good ones and leave the bad as is, i hates that and i do hope that the new protoss mod that is being made by the enhanced sward mod maker fixes that
@@Ricardo_Rick Honestly, I think the core problem with the Adun really is that you have support options competing for energy and slots with attacking options. Some of the support options *are* weak, yes, and that *is* part of the problem, but there's always going to be a preference for the button that instantly solves the problem as opposed to the button that helps you solve the problem faster/cheaper. (Technically Time Stop is also a support ability, but I feel this also applies to it just by sheer virtue of "freezing everything immediately solves the problem too, just in a different way".)
@@Hexagonaldonut yeah, i would really prefer if the spear skills were all CD based only instead of energy, that way you wouldn't feel like you are wasting energy every time you use a skill that isn't solar lance or shield overcharge
@@Ricardo_Rick The pylon is super useful for reinforcement warp-ins, and it's a free pylon. The reinforcement version is fine and usable. Very nice in some missions and fun. In the defend-the-overloading-temple mission, for example, it's satisfying to drop a pylon with a warp-in on the objectives late in the mission when you're already built out Purifier beam is free and just as good. It's perfect for the last mission on brutal, where I had to optimize everything, and it's just enough and perfect timing to wipe certain waves. Stop time is useless because you don't have an army, bombardment is expensive, overkill, and doesn't offer much more. Stargate/robo warp is useless on brutal, though, because nexus overcharge and auto-vespene are just that good. I imagine more casual players did find it fun, though, as did I, when I first played the campaign. Shield overcharge is a dud in my opinion, not worth either energy or micro, and not fun to use at all.
:D I hope so much that the campaign of ZeroSpace will be good and interesting. It's the reason I backed the game. I do not care for PvP (just like to watch Serral, Harstem, Clem, Reynor...), but I love a good single player campaign. And Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void was such a big disappointment in this regard :(
28:08 Xanthos is the gold standard for what an RTS boss fight should be imo. The Heart of the Swarm boss fights are RPG boss fights. You have a hero fighting a boss with some limited forces that might as well function as summons rather than an army. Xanthos is a super unit that requires actively macroing to defeat. I wish we got an Amon boss fight like the Xanthos.
They sure learned from mistakes of last mission of Epilogue, but now it feels even weirder, Starcraft saga have a cool ass final boss but its not a dark god who is to blame for everyone, but Dominion super-mech stolen by old revanchist
@@LanceOmikron That last mission was so-so in terms of mechanics. It was supposed to be this desperate attempt to kill Space Chtulhu before he eats your base and your allies', but in the end it's just "make 40 upgraded Mutalisks and click on the objective", like Grant himself said.
@@rafaellago172 quite a few different missions can be cheesed with air units in similar ways. The final HotS mission, you don't need to clear all of Mengsk's bases before blowing up the door to the castle. You can just skip right to the end by flying around the top of the map with mutas and destroy the door that way. It's how I beat it on brutal.
I think out of the Starcraft 2 campaigns, the thing that drags the game down for me (besides Kerrigan being too much) is what feels like wasted potential. Evolution missions let you take your guys in interesting directions, but the fact that they're optional mean you never really get to see them shine since they can't be considered in mission design. On top of that, I generally find their introductory missions a little lackluster. When you compare to Wings of Liberty giving us the vulture on a mobile and cheap mission, or the banshee on a hit and run mission. I can call Cutthroat "The Vulture Mission" and it's valid, as it is for most of the unit introductions. Meanwhile, even with the most extreme example I can think of, swarm hosts on The Crucible, it doesn't feel like much of a swarm host mission. I'm sure Kerrigan herself makes this issue worse, since she can handle anything and thus new units aren't as impactful as in WoL.
I think its also a case of each of them feeling very isolated from one another. The protoss being made up of lots of distinct tribes with distinct units and powers is kinda neat until you realize you've fought plenty of them and none of them are special or unique in the other campaigns Why are the purifiers a separate tribe?!
@@adlad1563 You're out of your mind. "Kerrigan mission" is much superior to "Kerrigan mission", especially after you complete "Kerrigan mission" and... C O L L E C T S O M E E S S E N C E
One thing that always bothered me about the Brood War campaign is how much stuff is happening in the background that is glossed over. During Dunes of Shakuras Raynor and Fenix decide to stay on Aiur and close the warp gate to Shakuras. Then they were apparently contacted by Kerrigan somehow, who was last seen on Char killing dark templar in Eye for an Eye, and she tells Raynor to go save Mengsk from the UED, either before or after showing up on Shakuras to participate in the whole Uraj-Khalis-kill-Aldaris storyline. In the meantime, Raynor for some reason lost Hyperion right after Overmind's defeat and somehow regained it by the time he shows up on Korhal. Presumably while Raynor was away saving Mengsk, Fenix stayed on Aiur defending the outpost we attack in Emperor's Flight. And at the end of Emperor's Flight, we see a dropship (again, not Hyperion, but it's likely an oversight) fleeing through a warp gate which then self-destructs. Where did that warp gate lead to? No idea, but next time we see Raynor, Fenix and Mengsk is on Tarsonis during Vile Disruption. Then Kerrigan asks Mengsk to lend her a psi-emitter, which he does. Where did he get one? Did he have one on him all this time? Theoretically one could've been kept on board on Norad III, but if so, why ask Mengsk for it in the first place? And after all of this, there presumably was a second front led by Raynor, Fenix and Mengsk during Liberation of Korhal, of which we know nothing. So yeah, a lot of stuff just "happens" implicitly that we don't know much about, and it's a bit of a shame. Nowadays we have fanmade campaigns to fill in the gaps, but imo it would've been more satisfying to connect all the dots during the main storyline.
You make some good points, but I don't think it would have been hard for Mengsk to secure a psi-emitter. Just because Korhal has fallen, doesn't mean that the Dominion has completely capitulated. Mengsk probably just contacted some of his forces that he knew would have psi-emitters on hand and retrieved them.
@@toddclawson3619 Yeah, I'm not saying he had no way of getting it, just that the game doesn't say anything about how he did it. My point basically is that the game leaves a lot to player's imagination, but it'd be cool if these events were covered somehow.
I think that is actually good storytelling. It means the universe has something going to make it alive. Meanwhile SC2 has nothing of the sort beyond KERRIGAN - Raynor is operating, nothing changes about Mengsk or the terrans, or the protoss Daalaram, the taldarim just are random tribes with no command you find around, and zerg are semi hibernating apparently. Sure... On HotS literally nothing happens anywhere except where Kerrigan is... And in the LotV campaign the only one that is doing her own thing is Kerrigan tracking the hybrid meanwhile the only thing that changed in the terran faction is that horner got a new title but preparing for the hybrid and stuff? What hybrid? The only other character that is active at all while this all happens is zeratul because he is obsessed, not his faction, but a single character. I think the SC1 background stories are fleshed out in novels - and no, SC2 doesn't count in novel form because SC1 had things happening that weren't explained for foreshadowing while SC2 are random prologue stories and so on... I appreciate them but it shows a bad setting at its core for SC2.
It's less aggravating than Precursor simply not being included in the full release at all. On WC3, they included the demo campaign at least (though they cut the voicelines)
Maybe lack of time? You made such good points, and other point that confused me so much, why didn't Kerrgian kill the Overmind on char???? LIKE BITCH WHAT THE FUCK
Gotta say I love your upload schedule; I recently got moved to a shift that means I don't get home until like, 12:30am, so there's almost always a GGG video to watch to get me through the rest of the night before bed. I'm only a few minutes into the video but I love analytical breakdowns of the campaigns and your four checks (especially the vibe check of a campaign) are just so on point, casual, and get constructive. I can't wait to hear more. Keep being awesome Grant
I really enjoy this kind of conversation pieces from you, even on the gameplay channel just hearing you banter makes me keep watching This is definitely a great format, would love a warcraft version of this video or a custom campaign tier list
Zeratul was basically just a plot device in WoL and HotS. He did one thing in LotV and then died... I wouldn't call him a tool, but considering he was literally a tool to move the plot forward, that is a surprisingly accurate statement xD
You mean Blizzard failed to write a good character the second time around? Could this have anything to do with them making Nova's character model ugly? Perhaps they are -ESG- linked.
I have 1 thing to add about LoV campaign. The way how some of the hardest missions are shoved in the begging of the campaign gave me, as someone very mediocre at RTS and also not very invested into protoss in particular, very hard time getting into LoV. While I beat both WoL and HotS multiple times on brutal and did achievements runs, I never did it with LoV. Although it is a niche perspective perhaps.
It was misson 3 lotv for me, not that I couldnt beat it, but that I barely completed it despite feeling like I did everything perfectly, because theres very little you can do in mission 3. Oh and I hate celestial locks both in coop and camapign Skyshield as mission4 was actually alright, blink stalkers are very good, one thing you should learn early on is that all zealot variants are equally useless. And once you unlock voidrays no mission will dare stand in your way again. In terms of difficulty lotv was often times easier than WOL because of the get out of jail solarlance and voidray superiority. HOTS meanwhile felt like I was playing on hard, but im quite certain it was set to brutal, I played completely awfully, still won somehow. And it isnt just kerrigan being op as I played very badly on the crucible too and still beat it first try. Still havent beaten epilogue on brutal. Why does Artanis refuse to defend his base?
@@VladLad mission 3 is not too hard for me, there's no time limit, and I can take time to turtle up and recover the loss. Mission 4 however has a timer breathing down on my neck, blink stalker is the best way to do it. But I think it's too much to ask a new player to do blink micro and decent macro on the 4th mission, given the difficulty.
Honestly, WoL is my favorite campaign mostly because of how it was my first Starcraft game and how it was a great introduction to the Starcraft series as a whole. The characters were amazing, the doctor really was poorly utilized and showed have been done better, the "choose your next mission" thing was super fun, so many fun units to play around with, so many fun missions to play like Breakout, Media Blitz, and especially All In. It's just such a fantastic game and I agree that it's an S tier Starcraft campaign and the best Starcraft campaign of them all.
@@ComissarYarrick no reason to love her + she's bland and basic af + she got no hope of actually curing the Zergavirus so no reason not to burn this poor colony (will get infested sooner or later lmao) + she's a love interest for some unknown reason + she acts like a Karen mom for some reason + she's got the worst missions
@@GerMorden i mean she should yell at you for killing the civvies. He hates her because she basically shoves Stetmann out of the way, has no real personality beyond cares about colonists and in love with Jim for some reason, and makes you sound like a terrible person for doing the smart thing and listening to Selendis.
I think the fall was actually pretty good at mimicking the reality of mid war internal crisis. If you look, for example, at the Judean civil war during the rebellion against the Romans you will see how crazy these things can get, even in the face of an unstoppable invading force. And also how that invading force can take a step back for a while to let their enemies consume themselves from within. I do think there was a certain element of atmosphere missing, but mostly in the non-civil war missions. The 3rd mission is pratically the 1st again with a few extra units, the 9th does not feel sneaky at all, despite being portrayed as a sort of infiltration, and of course, tassadar's sacrifice always annoyed me, and even my 6 year old son found it unrealistic given the destruction he brought upon the zerg.
Yeaaahh, as a kid that ending was probably the best, I'd seen in a while. It felt genuinely epic. It's the difference between gameplay and lore. In lore it's a losing fight and killing the overmind with regular weapons is impossible. Tassadar is the only one who can actually hurt the thing. Then the zerg onslaught is broken - they become feral. For my money, it was the strongest chapter.
Wow! Grant is so skilled that he can play and absolutely crush StarCraft and StarCraft II campaigns while simultaneously discussing about their enjoyability and gameplay and making hand gestures as well! Amazing skills Grant!!
If WOL had the archive function, it would be perfect. I wish I could try a specific mission with a specific set of units/upgrades without having to start the campaign over
Hi, Grant! I think you are spot on, especially for the Starcraft 1 campaigns. I was surprised you placed the UED campaign into B tier, but listening to your explanations made sense. Still I believe, because of how memorable some of the missions are, like stealing a whole fleet of battlecruisers it deserves A tier. I still remember being 3 year old (I am born 5 years after BW was released) and playing those missions, although when I think about it it is probably mostly nostalgia playing a role here. Another thing to mention is the HotS campaign. While I do completely agree with your takes especially with the one about the advertisement of 27 missions initially, I do think that the Evolution Missions were a good and fresh addition to HotS. They gave us an oppotunity to look into Abathur as a character more and also see how the Swarm was able to evolve biologically. Because of them, and because of the level of unit customization I think that it should be placed in B tier. One final note, maybe it will be more interesting for main channel video to do a proper ranking of all of the campaigns. Tier List is also a great option, but maybe seeing your top 3 favorite campaigns with their exact order could also be interesting.
Would disagree on NCO being forgettable. First set of missions already introduces several Nova-only sections, and even has the side-scrolling vulture biking. Building units to put in the destroyed building garrisons might not be super unique but is a really cool visual having the units interacting with the terrain more. Second set of missions introduces the infested Banshees and Siege Tanks, which shows that the Zerg is still actively adapting and continuing to be a violent force in the galaxy in spite of Kerrigan/Zagara, and is more than just "hurr durr psi emitters" that we got in the first set of missions. Being able to select which Zerg garrisons you fight at which time is also pretty neat. The constant flashbacks between the original city and the infested one are really cool, because you have a reference of how things were and how all-consuming the Zerg can be. Third set of missions does fall a little short in this regard, but the big city defense mission with all the Battlecruisers is an awesome spectacle. I remember it more than the final mission because of the visuals and atmosphere on its own. Final mission by comparison - while much more challenging and fun - is just "big robut". I don't even remember if it takes place on Korhal, another planet, or a space platform. NCO was short, but it did its best to try and introduce something new to the game in every mission, and doing this after ALL the other SC2 missions is pretty impressive for a quick DLC bonus campaign.
Oh, I for my part, like this kind of format. I like to reminisce about the campaigns and remember everything again. Love it. Thank you for making videos ❤
The thing about Rebel Yell that makes it really stand out among the others is that it sets a lowish bar and then wildly clears it. You start off thinking that it's the standard RTS story where you get a couple of objectives and kill stuff trying to harm your people. Then you realize the confederacy is callous and evil, the zerg are seemingly unthinking, locust-like forces of nature consuming everything in their path, and that the Protoss are as enigmatic as they are genocidal. The betrayal does come out of left-field, but is brilliant in hindsight. Then in the very next chapter, you learn that the zerg are not only terrifyingly sentient, but also have a cosmic and long-reaching goal of their own. It's as surprising as it is horrifying, and the landing wouldn't have been nearly as good without the take-off that was episode 1. Episode 1 was really a masterpiece of storytelling with a limited perspective.
This was very pleasant to listen to. Would love more tier lists, whether its here on the archive or if its on the main channel! Looking forward to more!
Extremely hot take: The Wings of Liberty ending ought to have been reversed. Resolve the Tychus angle somehow (maybe there's something more to his bargain with mengsk- some other thing mengsk has over Tychus that we can resolve in a commando mission; the armor-lock and implied kill device is laughably weak in a sci-fi setting. No way that theres not some way to remove that suit safely, internal bomb or no.) and have Matt and Raynor approach human kerrigan at the end there. Have Matt be cued in on the Zeratul angle. Matt begs Raynor to show some compassion- that we need Kerrigan to be a plot device or whatever. Raynor's having none of it. He goes for his revolver, probably invoking Fenix's name, before Matt kills him dead. Credits. This helps HoS a lot- Kerrigan has no personal connection to Valerian or Matt. She's inherently untrustworthy- and rightly so. We cut the Raynor abduction angle from that campaign, and bring Matt back in a little later just like before. Kerrigan's given some time to mourn Jim, maybe even to lash out at Matt. I dunno. Having Raynor decide to try to redeem Kerrigan then watch her lay waste to Korhal in HotS just feels bizarre. HotS in general is woefully... middling, in terms of character studies. I dont even want to talk about the LotV epilogue. Stukov had the only good moment there.
Ok so this started off absurd with Tychus and is rambly as a whole. However, switching Jim and Tychus to Matt and Jim is actually a interesting and simple fix to some of the problems in HOTS, all I really would say different is instead keeping the conclusion to Tychus' character and just moving it around to fit in.
nope, wasn't a good moment just some cheap way of getting nostalgia Narud suddenly revives, materialises out of thin air (or the void ig) and just dies instantly with basically no resistance and then Stukov has his totally warranted totally awesome one-liner and he finishes off this totally worthy enemy Cool, what can I say
This is wonderful! I was so pissed at Raynor for choosing that traitor Kerrigan over his long-time friend and personal favourite Tychus. Plus there is already a setup for Matt taking over the rebellion because perpetually drunk Raynor is in no shape to be in any position of authority whatsoever. His time had come and gone.
9:22 - That`s a really good point! Imagine if zerg were suddenly attacking all the protoss on "Civil War" missions! That will be much more interesting and complicated!
I think only one bad thing about WoL - the small scale of action. I know that it is because weak PCs in 2010 and in later campaigns scale grows up, but still it feels not as great as it could be. Playing as a small squad on low resource map is a nice gimmick for a couple of missions but not for the whole campaign. This also applies to map design. Most maps are either too focused on one main direction with some sideways to protect from almost unclearable bases or place you at some unpopulated static open space which just feels dead and frozen (like Haven's Fall or Media Blitz). I think HotS and LotV got this at least somewhat better on some maps: you build more, you lose more, you constantly fight for map control and have to clear different parts of map not only for objectives but also to reduce enemy pressure and gain more resources. Well, i have some ideas how to improve WoL map design and scale, but for now i just need to get much more editor experience.
9:00 that's exactly the point. overmind was overruning the planet while protoss were clinging to their traditions and rules. they thought tassadar heresy is more dangerous threat than zerg. and that's exactly why first mission of brood war is escape from aiur. even though overmind got nuked there were so many feral zerg that protoss couldn't survive there
I absolutely love the new format you've put down for this ranking systme. I think it's a great way to get a broad base of ideas spread out and ensure that you have full engagement. I will slightly disagree on The Fall being C tier. While I don't disagree with you that the civil war thing in the face of annihilation was pretty dumb, Auir is a big fucking planet and the homeworld of the Protoss. The Overmind was likely coordinating against the Golden Armada and fighting other executors elsewhere. It also highlights the arrogance of the Protoss very well, that even Tassadar to an extent had (at least prior to meeting Raynor.). I feel like the Overmind would have known of this, especially upon learning the memories of the Dark Templar that slew Zasz who would undoubtably have a conscious or sub-conscious begrudgement against the Daleem. Also, on top of this from the Overminds' point of view: Why interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake by in-fighting? I definitely agree on the difficulty being just right on that mission. I feel like if anything the final mission should have been slightly harder, bringing together everything you learned on the prior campaigns but Blizzard still did a good job with it. Finally, Xanthos and N:CO is Garbage Tier and I will fight anyone on this point. How on Earth would the Xanthos project not be one of the first thing locked down upon discovering one of your generals had mutinied against the Emperor? Also PSI Emitters are apparently a dollar a dime now, because what on Earth could go wrong with mass producing a means of summoning The Swarm to your location? Absolute F tier campaign. I would honestly have much rather it focused on the Kel-Morian side faction if anything, they needed development instead of just being "waagh rescue us pls Dominion.".
I loved all of the starcraft campaigns, but to my mind the best thing Heart of the Swarm offered was the cutscenes. That initial cutscene with the Terran fighting the Zerg that ends with the battlecruiser crash is incredible.
I think one of the elements that are often overlooked in ranking is art. I find cinematics, music, cutscenes, conversations and voice acting are extremely important to loving the story of the game and integrating you into its atmosphere. This was a huge factor in Starcraft 1 supremacy and they nailed it again in Legacy of the void, music was phenomenal in Legacy, very emotional makes you feel like a member of a protoss tribe fighting for your survival.
Bad line reads, music cutting out too early, rushed, rushed, rushed. You can tell the team working on the in-game cutscenes hated them and for good reason. I didn't have 'Protoss adopt 21st Century liberal mindset' on my bingo card. Especially not from the same company with the balls to make the Koprulu sector a homage to the American Confederacy and the SCVs all black guys. But hey, if you liked it I hope one day that you genuinely don't. Alarak became the best character in the campaign simply because they were willing to grant him enough personality to have a character, because they wanted him to be a bad guy or anti-hero with some sort of redemption arc (see: more liberal, less traditional). But since they made him a character and not a mouthpiece of the author people like him most, if only for a lack of other options. Ironic. And I say this all as a libertine. The whole campaign was gross propaganda designed for children to imbibe without thinking about it.
I love the format of being slightly edited video in between your devlogs of challenge runs cutting hours and hours of work into thirty minutes and the completely uncut stuff you normally do on this channel. That said, your rankings are also well thought out and fair, this is easily one of the best GGG Archives videos and I'm excited for the main channel release.
My main problem with the Brood War Protoss campaign is a plot hole. You have a mission where you can either clear your way to the rock or smack the new overmind around a bit until it gets a headache.... but you have access to Dark Templar on that mission and Zeratul is also overseeing the mission... So why can't we just outright kill the second overmind right there and then? Zeratul does it in the zerg BW campaign... I mean how many cerebrates did Daggoth throw together to create the baby Overmind? Does he have enough to make a third? While it is nice that the mission does offer a choice on how you approach it, the fact that it gives you a choice that seems stupid so the plot can move on feels bad to me. And the other campaigns (UED and QoB) suffer as a result. Also why is there a random warp gate connecting Auir and Shakuras? My personal ranking would be the following. I am counting the prologue and epilogue of Legacy of the Void as separate campaigns because they kinda are. I mean neither of them are required for the LotV Brutal achievement. Is it cheating? Yes, yes it is. 1. UED campaign. (Terran Brood War) 2. QoB campaign. (Zerg Brood War) 3. Legacy of the Void (just the main campaign) 4. Rebel Yell 5. Wings of Liberty 6. Overmind 7. Nova Covert Ops 8. SC1 base Protoss 9. Prologue 10. Brood War Protoss 11. Epilogue (sadly the first mission does not salvage it). 12. Heart of the Swarm I haven't played the N64 Stukov mini campaign so I am leaving it unranked. Heart of the Swarm honestly was a disappointment. Being able to go to Char straight after the tutorial missions should not have been a thing. Char should've been one of the final planets before Korhal alongside Duran / Naruds main Hybrid lab / Amons Temple. Or do what they did with Aiur in LotV and go to Char first for Ziggy Zags but you have to flee soon after. It is why I always go to Kaldir first. It feels appropriate given the hit and run, using the environment to your advantage and how justified Kerrigan is in fearing the Golden Amanda. Unfortunately going to Char first is canonical... yay. Also the fact that Primal Kerrigan can just solo nearly the rest of the campaign on brutal brings the campaign to the bottom on my list. A hero should be impactful yes, but they shouldn't be invincible. Nova in NCO feels balanced for the campaign. Is she powerful? Yes, but not overpowered. I know who I would bet on if it was the Xanthos vs Nova in a 1v1. The epilogue needed to be longer. You are heading into the Void, the reality that Amon has made his own. And it feels like a quick smash and grab. Stukov getting the true killing blow on Duran is always a delight to see. Stukov nearly ruined everything for Duran back in the Brood War without even knowing it. The rivalry the two had in Heart of the Swarm was also a highlight, even if it was short lived. I feel a 9 mission mini campaign like NCO is would be an ideal length as an epilogue. Maybe explore Amon a bit more though this. Show us what he was before ascending. What was it that made him and his followers (i.e. Duran) feel that the infinite cycle was an outright lie.
Funny, I think UED and QoB campaings are the reasons BW have really weak writing, the introduction of an overall weak and dumb faction and that affected minimaly the campaings before or after despite the supposed great impact they had in the universe and a campaing that basically stupidified to absurd degree the rest of the roaster to make sure a character with the level of writing as a self insert manages to win with villian with a mustache lvl of plotting
I'd like to offer my thoughts on each SC1 campaign: SC1 Terran: I think one of the most interesting aspects of the campaign at the time was how personable Raynor was to the nameless Magistrate (the player). I think it deserves a lot of credit for not just telling the story but also involving the player into it, especially in the final mission where Raynor talks at the start it makes it feel like we both got betrayed together. Another reason I wish Horner was somehow written or retconned into being the magistrate from this campaign because their dynamic together with how much they went thought would have been even more meaningful. SC1 Zerg: I think this campaign gets flak for introducing the protoss as being pretty whatever (after being hyped up and mysterious up until this campaign). The Terran campaign was supposed to introduce the Protoss and Tassadar (and offers an ingame explanation as to why he respected/spared the Terrans) but the Zerg has the first introduction of an actual talking Protoss (you don't "talk" to any protoss in the Terran campaign). It has a lot of heavy lifting to do which makes it feel bad in comparison. Zasz really hating Kerrigan was what made him memorable. The Overmind is one of the best dads ever, he loves all his "children" and never stops praising you for doing your mission of protecting his "daughter" Kerrigan, it brought an unnerving sense of unity in the Zerg when every other faction is all infighting and political drama. SC1 Protoss: Another reason why this campaign fell flat is the absence of the Terran missions from before. All we know about Tassadar is in small summaries between missions, we the player don't really experience why Aldaris and by extension the player hates Tassadar even though we're supposed to be Protoss, like "wasn't he the good guy?". Like, if we actually witnessed Tassadar himself spare us while we were playing Terran, it would be a huge callback and consequence that we have to deal with 2 campaigns later as the Protoss player but that development was completely missed. It's also confusing as to why Raynor's Raiders were buddying up with Tassadar on the Char installation mission for seemingly no reason (if you don't really scour for lore), all you get is "hey, mind if we tag along? (Mr. Hostile Alien who burns worlds?)". Also Tassadar's confrontation with Duke was completely out of nowhere, why was Tassadar regretting sparing Duke again? When did he spare him? How does he even know General Duke's full name and title? What history did they have? We don't know because so much context is missing in the Terran missions. BW Protoss: One thing to mention is that Raynor and Fenix were effectively cut off from the entire Protoss faction after Shakuras. Raynor and Fenix would never know Kerrigan was ever on Shakuras and betraying everyone. Another subtle thing was that Aldaris didn't just know Kerrigan was untrustworthy but he also knew Raszagal was mind controlled by her, so Kerrigan kills him not just because he didn't trust her but he was about to reveal to everyone that she was controlling the matriarch. This campaign also has the first introduction to the UED who we know nothing about other than the opening cinematic, we only know they're here but not the primary concern of the Protoss faction. I liked the UED mission because it's the first time we see Artanis as young and a bit naive, it's a good callback to how Artanis was the executor from SC1 and was equally naive following the conclave to arrest Tassadar, it also makes sense as to why he and Fenix (equally bold) were such good friends. BW Terran: I agree this campaign is way too fast, but still think it's the most exciting campaign that deserves an A. Also the lack of Protoss conflict in this campaign is story-appropriate where they don't really have an immediate reason to antagonize the Protoss, their mission is to arrest Mensgk and control the Overmind, nothing really to do with the Protoss. The only run-in they had was the Protoss force getting through their blockade. Fenix's Protoss force is the only ones they face because he and Raynor are acting together. BW Zerg: This campaign is the ultimate tie-in campaign. Kerrigan being the the Queen B of the Universe also has the quality of having her finger in every pie, drawing literally every character and faction together into an Infinity Wars-esque ultimate gathering. You interact with (and betray) literally everyone which is a huge call back if you've played every campaign so far. Even when you don't expect it she manages to drag Zeratul into the conflict at the last minute. The final mission is even a final stand at unifying against the big bad (ie you) but Thanos wins in the end. This is also the completion of Kerrigan's story arc which was developing since SC1 Terrain campaign, and the pay off here is so good. This is also the campaign with the bonus mission which at the time was extremely unsettling, like something so big that it makes all the current Kerrigan shenanigans less significant.
Regarding the original protoss campaign (The Fall), you said that it doesn't make sense that the Overmind would sit back while the protoss were fighting amongst themselves. But recall that the plan of the Overmind was to escape the Xel'naga's control by infesting Kerrigan and letting her take over the swarm. If the zerg win vs protoss, then the Overmind's plan will fail. The Overmind is doing what they can to suicide by protoss, and this includes sitting back while the protoss are doing political stuff. The Overmind could not exert their will against the Xel'naga's general directives, but they could make small decisions like allowing the protoss to fight one another, since that would technically align with the Xel'naga's general instructions.
great content, i think too many youtubers try content like this and make it drawn out with live chat notes and this is a nice condense version of your notes with that delicious voice of yours about a game i love. thumbs up
Rebel Yell: I think the development of Kerrigan and Mengsk's relationship is implied well to not require the additional missions but primarily I think the lack of additional time leads into Mengsk's mistake backfiring as being something he hadn't completely planned for Kerrigan and hadn't forseen any complications. After that mistake it leads him to being far more paranoid and builds his character better. Overmind: The Cerebrates are underdeveloped, but Kerrigan and Tassadar relationship is good and interesting and feels like it leads into Kerrigan's almost personal attack against the Dark Templar in Brood War The Fall: Wish it was more interesting; wish they had continued that development in the background betwen Kerr & Tass as opposed to the endless civil war chase. You make a lot of great points already about it. If I could change it I would want that campaign to be from the perspective from Tassadar escaping from the Conclave whilst continuing to harrass and slow down the zerg and Kerrigan on Aiur which would explain what was happening on with the zerg whilst still managing the civil war 2nd Protoss Campaign: Liked the campaign but Aldaris didn't show why he would be objective enough to be right about Kerrigan and not understand where Tassadar was coming from. He never felt redeemed and the Protoss suffered so much from Tassadar dying as being the only competent general it felt. Considering their galactic nature, was the Civil War on Aiur really mean no-one of importance appeared other than Tassadar and Aldaris? Iron Fist: This feels like the competence you'd expect from the Galactic Protoss influence from a single strike force from Earth. Wish the idea and references would have continued into SC2 considering they never of them again. Agree that more time was required to explore DeGaulle & Stukov and why distrust was so readily jumped to, would have been interesting to see something where Stukov chose to do something differently but worked out against DeGaulle's orders to setup the reason for doubt Queen Of Blades: Loved this campaign, maybe i'm weird but the pacing for the Kel-Morine mission was nice as a newbee, it entertained the idea of how to macro more instead of 12 drones are all i need mentallity - it spoke to an rts development more than a story but gave you lore and story over destroy all which I thought was unique for the period. Otherwise top tier campaign WOL: Just straight up agree. I think having the Terran do a tough defence mission as the final mission worked so well and had exciting pacing. My only gripe is the Taldarim being apparently useless. Never felt like they were a legitimate threat even though they were build to be, otherwise amazing campaign HOTS: I do believe they did the scale very well for the zerg and the ability to swarm and get the feeling of controlling a massive army, shame they invalidated it with Uber Kerrigan. Almost wished they had Kerrigan remain looking human but acting Zerg to show that dichotomy instead of crazy zerg monster. Those extra missions could have included UED scouts and potential eyes on the Koprulu sector as a potential foreshadowed threat currently outside of Kerrigan's control but they wanted to do the Hybrid as the only threat LOTV: I liked the campaign but I wish they had gone more along a Battlestar Galactica vibe of escape and required to scrap and scrape up the resources for specific systems to bring operational instead of the generic super gem that does everything trope. Considering how the story had built to this point they don't have infinite resources and have not had a break from the back foot since SC1 realistically. It felt a bit of a let down after the story hype and then the Epilogue just left open questions in my head around story which is not what you want. I don't think I could give this campaign an 'A'. Ultimately, I liked the concept but not the execution. NCO: Haha, it doesn't feel canon, I enjoyed the mission designs, story was not bad honestly. Again execution of being 3 missions every so often meant you couldn't get excited and only ever played it 3 or 4 years after it had fully released. Nothing to do with UED so thumbs down :P Just some thoughts, totally Protoss biased as you can tell, and missed some interesting branches that would have been better to explore. Nice video Grant regardless, I liked this video design that can add to a collective feeling. Great vid
*First campaign (Terran)* : Agreed on the betrayal of Kerrigan. To me, it comes out of the left field - the only thing close to dissident she shows is that she doesn't like using the psi emitters, but even that Mengsk manages to justify to her: "We will do whatever it takes to safeguard humanity." - and she is on board with it from that point onward. So Mengsk throwing her to the Zerg after that is.. premature, and the fact they made a book afterwards explaining how she was the one who killed his parents means they were aware of it too - because it comes across as a later justification for the betrayal. But, as a campaign, it's a good setting-setter. Confederacy = Bad. Mengsk = Super Bad. Raynor = Good. Zerg = Nom. Protoss = Bug exterminators, sorry about the collateral. I'd give it a A. It's got flaws, but It's competent. *Second campaign (Zerg)* : By nature of the Zerg being a hive mind as centralized as it is, every character other than Kerrigan and the Overmind is.. there. The Cerebrates being blobs of flesh and blood is good for the alien-ness of it all, but they don't *do* anything, acting through their minions. Which is fine, but their designs really means it is difficult to remember who is who and why they are different from each other, and the campaign suffers as a result. I seem to recall asking myself as a child "Can't the overmind just poop out a new cerebrate? Why is the permanent loss of one so important?" This is not something that I feel can be rectified by another few missions. This is something that you need a design overhaul to get the uniqueness of the cerebrates across - because otherwise, the gameplay and story says "If you lose an overlord, morph another. They are identical." So why aren't cerebrates? Still, it is a solid campaign. Builds upon the first one by showing us the different angle. From the perspective of the Zerg, the Terrans are... there. They're building blocks. The real goal is the Protoss who they *obviously* have a feud with. And the Protoss show themselves worthy of the title by tricking Kerrigan and striking real blows against the Zerg. This is another B for me. It's got that one big flaw, but otherwise it makes it clear that the Terrans' squabbles are peanuts compared to what the Zerg and Protoss have going on. *Third campaign (protoss)* : Aaaand this is where we get to see that the Conclave are a bunch of head-in-the-sanders superiority-fueled traditionalists. The humble pie they get served throughout the campaign is *long* overdue. But it doesn't downplay the Protoss' ability. Nor their alien nature. They've been around for a *long* time, and the Zerg take full advantage of their percieved superiority. They've obviously got history with the Dark Templar, but given that the Dark Templar are still amicable to the Protoss.. Yeah, the Conclave needed to go, yesterday. And to be fair, they do realize just how badly they screwed the pooch. As an introduction to the Protoss and why they've been acting like they have, I can't fault this campaign. It's a solid A-tier for me. *Fourth Campaign (Protoss)* : Turns out that after a civil war, beggars can't be choosers. And this campaign is the protoss coming to terms with that, while at the same time realizing that accepting the devil's offer often means you aid his goals regardless of your intention. It really finalizes the Protoss's transition into a species of "If we don't stand together, none of us stands at all" which we see in LotV, but as a campaign in itself.. it's really casts the protoss as dealing with the consequences of milennia af hubris. Even the ending is them just getting one solid win - Shakuras is disinfected, meaning they have a single planet that is safe, but they have fallen FAR. Long overdue, but necessary. It's a competent campaign, but the Protoss really feel as a stepping stone towards greater stuff at this point. Which is fine; this is them at their lowest. Kerrigan wouldn't get away with half the shit she pulled if they weren't desperate. It also sets up the UED, but at this point their deal is really vague, and I have the feeling that single mission with the million missile turrets was added just so they wouldn't come out of the left field entirely - which I think is a mistake; the UED *is* an outside-context problem. It would be a much stronger start to the Terran campaign that follows if we hadn't seen them pop their heads in for a cup of missile turret puzzle mission. As it is, they feel inconsequential to this campaign So for that, this is another A-tier. Likely would have been S if the UED hadn't reared their heads. *Fifth Campaign (UED Terrans)* Aaaand here we go. It's time for the protoss to get out-contexted and have an armada fly in to wreck the status quo. And they succeed at this. The UED comes in like a wrecking ball with their own agenda and they care not one bit for anyone in the Korprulu sector. If not for Duran being who he is, the UED would have the entire thing on lock. They solidly place themselves as a disruptive force in the korprulu sector, and avoid going into hero territory because they want to *control* the Zerg, not wipe them out. Sorry, but after the confederacy and Mengsk's attempts at this, you know these are the bad guys, and the final campaign showing a boatload of propaganda just makes it clear: these are the guys to beat, but who can stand up to them at present? Mengsk is dethroned, the Protoss are hanging on.. and.. Well hello there Kerrigan. Wait, Kerrigan? Oh noooooooooo... S-tier campaign. The UED is here, and they are making that everyone else's problem. *Sixth campaign: Zerg* Time for the Queen of Blades to show off her planning chops. She is on the back foot throughout the entire campaign up until the betrayal, but she manages to outwit everyone to get everything she wants - she ends it as the Queen Bitch of the Korprulu sector, with only the fact that Duran is who he is downplaying her victory. Which is good, but one thing the campaign lacks is Kerrigan's motivation.. She hates Mengsk, that much is evident. The Protoss are trying to stop her, so that's got to go, and the UED wont abide by her for a single second. She's got reason to fight them all, but.. what then afterwards? She ends the campaign saying "No one will stand in her way", and then she just... doesn't do anything. She allows everyone to rebuild despite being in a position to wipe them out completely. What is making Kerrigan tick right now? That's something that's left for SC2 to answer, but this campaign in itself just.. "Bad guy wins then doesn't do anything." B-tier. Kerrigan gets bonus points for all her scheming, but she really lacks motivation.
On the cerebrates: unlike minions and their overlords, cerebrates are basically the children of the Overmind. Unique themselves, with specialized broods to their names. Even the newbie's brood is specialized in a way - it's special in that it's made very specifically to keep Kerrigan safe, and when that's fulfilled to serve as simply more supply limit. In all their alienness, the zerg are pretty much just a nomadic monarchy of sorts with feudal periods whenever the monarch is eliminated or is otherwise unable to pick up the phone to sort out some Niadra issue that came back to bite the Swarm in the ass and disrupt this whole "diplomacy" thing Zagara's been trying to grasp lately.
In Brood War, her motivation is to be all powerful, to control all the swarm the most powerful force in the sector. This is coming from a perspective of feeling weak, abused and betrayed as a human. She gets infested and suddenly feels in control for the first time ever, but it's false until the death of the overmind.
How is that dumb UEF campaing S? It has some of the worst and overall worthless plots in SC history, not to mention earth taking part of the game kills the immersion on a separated fictional scifi world
@@TYR1139 Earth was always part of the story though. The Terran history in the manual of Starcraft 1 explains that the Terrans in the game were descendants of colonizers sent from Earth as both an attempt to colonize new worlds and get rid of what the United Powers League (UED predecessor) considered to be "undesirables" like political prisoners and criminals without being too blatant about their purges.
@toddclawson3619 oh yeah, the manual, which is not in the game and that explanation neither is, which doesn't exclude them for their horrible writing and mediocre missions regardless. The stupidest leader DuGalle, the plot device Duran, the one that is only relevant for resurrection and a cheap one liner at the end, all worthless introductions. The faction that greatly affected the game yet is barely relevant in campaings after as much as their plot devices the psi disruptor and the new overmind, my coment about they breaking the immersion is already justified by how Blizzard themselves barely references them in the sequels. Perhaps they could have worked, but blizzard never had good writers
19:16 "it might not be the most crazy thing by today's standards but when they were made these were novel things and ended up being replicated a lot because of how good they were." SC1 campaigns look mid today because they were so good at the time and they irreversibly raised our standards sky high as a result. 22:47 So true. Kerrigan in Broodwar was more memorable as a shrewd manipulator than a single unit juggernaut. Her biggest strength was subterfuge, not raw power. In HotS Kerrigan doesn't show enough of her past manipulating side. She keeps scolding Zagara for wanting to solve all problems by hitting them hard, when she is always the heaviest and the most frequent slugger in the Swarm.
I think one factor that also helps Kerrigan in Brood war is that... she is not the master manipulator she likes to think. I mean she is, but she also got duped by Duran. Whom I consider to be the true big bad of Brood War. As everyone got duped by him whether they knew it or not. Only Stukov managed to see through the deception and he was killed because of it. Although he never knew exactly why Duran betrayed him. He believed Duran was infested but as we see in the secret mission, he wasn't. He was faking it and Kerrigan never knew.
Exactly, Kerrigan was pretty bad as a unit in BW. She could do damage while cloaked, but had no chance against a medium force. Also, you lost the mission if she died. In SC2, she can just annihilate pretty much anything AND revives he she dies. There is no reason to ever be sneaky with her.
but it is posed as the morally superior option FOR SOME ODD REASON Kerrigan isn't grey moral and never was (same deal with Sylvanas lmao) she is eveything but good, choosing not to kill civilians is not the same as y'know, not being in position to actually kill them oh yeaaaaah Char oh yeaaaaaah her conquest of the Dominion oh yeaaaaaah mass infestation oh yeaaaaah some of Jimmie's best buddies on that ship prolly got exploded/shredded/shot/infested because of her HotS is bad
SC2 WoL besides Jim/Kerrigan stuff also has general story problems, like inconsequential toy conflicts (and many more). When you pick the doctor over Selendis, allied protoss and terrans kill each other and then just part ways, like it was a chess match. There's no weight to it like conflict with Aldaris in BW had. Also, Zerg transformation would be harder to "cure" than to turn a dog into a person, but apparently doctor did it and of course it was never brought up again (since it doesn't make sense). The whole SC1 and SC2 are like that in relation to each other. In SC1 you gather a lot of resources and carry them over for an invasion, in SC2 you fight with Mira Han in a domestic squabble, using flagships (all drones conveniently). Being silly (which is separate from just bad) is fine if that is either the vibe of the core of the story, or if silliness doesn't affect the core of the story, or if the silly parts affecting the core are consistent and played out deadpan (like in Metal Gear). WoL in terms of story and characters is nowhere near SC1, LotV is further downhill, and HotS/epilogue are just insufferable.
I think in Rebel Yell, the suddenness of Mengsk's betrayal is what gives it so much impact, and I think extra buildup would only take away from that. Using the psi emitter on mission 7 was clever, using them on mission 8 definitely felt off, fighting the Protoss on 9 felt even more off but by then it was too late to stop Mengsk. And as the player, walking right into that trap along with Jim and Kerrigan is a cool feeling. I hard agree on the blitzy nature of the UED campaign being a huge point in its favour, but I think the feeling of shortness of that campaign is only because of how fun it is. Protoss is also 8 missions but feels like it drags on and on, for me. That campaign is personally my S-tier pick, in no small part because of that feeling of military precision. I think B is a bit too harsh - I won't talk you up to S but I think it deserves A as a minimum. Hard agree on how well Blizzard pulled off playing as the bad guy, especially in Brood War Zerg. I think the non-linearity of Wings was a mistake, but a completely forgivable one. I think Blizzard just bit off more than they can chew with that and it just doesn't suit the RTS genre. All the extra mini stories are just empty fluff because none of them are allowed to have any bearing on the main story. Tosh / Doc aren't allowed to have any important contributions to the final missions because they're not guaranteed to still be alive by then - you could even have skipped meeting them in the first place. Have you considered giving each campaign an unofficial ranking in each of the four categories? Like HotS gets D for story, C for Vibe, A for gameplay and F for difficulty? Might add a bit more nuance than just one letter.
While the nonlinear mission chains hurt WoL's story, they really enhance the replayability. Let's take the Great Train Robbery for example. Normally the game expects you to mass Diamondbacks to chase the trains, but depending on the mission order, you can exploit the high ground to place Siege Tanks, or just go for an air force.
Modded WoL is great because it (usually) keeps the fun and diverse mission design while possibly making characters more interesting or replacing them and more importantly dropping the expectation of a greater far-reaching story which is WoL's main weak point (seriously tell me how *ANY* mission other than The Outlaws, In Utter Darkness and All In have *ANY* relevance to the rest of SC2's story, rather than _just_ being characterisation for Raynor specifically)
You said it. I've played like 10 different modded WoL campaigns and I'm still not done having fun with it. I think HotS and LotV have fun game mechanics and mission design too, but compared to WoL they suffer from so much badly written, cringeworthy, pompous in-mission dialogue. It just gets really tedious over time. I'm not saying WoL has perfect writing, but WoL is substantially less annyoing and therefore more fun to play many times over. In WoL we're just robbing trains, mining terrazine and doing whatever, not saving the entire universe and listening to some god-villain talk our ear off all the damn time.
I appreciate hearing more of your unedited thoughts, even if stream of consciousness can sometimes wander or miss details. That might just be me though, as some of my favorite content to turn on is multi-hour long videos of people just talking about stuff they like and analyzing why. For the campaigns themselves, good on you for rewarding Rebel Yell's frankly great tutorialization. If it was able to get 8 year old me to beat it without cheats, who could barely do the same with AoE2's William Wallace campaign and had no hope on any of the others, while STILL being engaging to play as an adult, then it deserves a seal of approval. Tutorials get way too much hate for what they are, and a well made subtle or hidden tutorial deserves recognition.
I can agree to most of the verdicts, but I see a bit of a downside on the SC2 protoss campaign and the nova missions. Starcraft thrives on it's open mission design most of the time, and while a few timegated missions are ok in a campaign (see the zerg missions), it feels like too much in the protoss mission, as if they had problems making the missions difficult only by putting time pressure on you. It is also sad to see defense missions as the big finales of a campaign. The mission just throws massive stuff at you, which I count as a balancing problem. It worked for Wings of Liberty, as you were a small fraction force on the enemy home planet, but in the protos mission, they should have flipped the two last missions, put the defense mission before the host, so you can free your people and then learn of the attempt to reincarnate, gathering all forces in a desperate attempt to stop this, thus leading into theepilogue to get rid of the big bad for good, which again is defense expect the first one. I was kinda disappointed by the nova covert ops missions. The escape: a hero unit micro mission with a surplus dexterity test. it should have been shortened and the nobuild initial section of the second mission. Sudden strike is okay on its own as an easier introduction of the special mechanics of the mission. still, ould have been merged with the first one just as well Enemy Intelliogence is again a defense mission. The split nature could have been done similarly to the last human mission in WC3 where you have to get through a nobuild segment while defending the own base. Over all, a very weak pack. The missions in the second pack feel fine even though it is weired in flashpoint how the mission gets easier the more you explore by taking out difficult unit types. For the last mission pack, it is ok. Still, C tier I guess as it is unfair to judge something by what it could have been.. Though only recommendable on a big discount
Honestly "The Host" was a walk in the park, while the last mission was absurd. I made many attempts, optimized everything, and lost by a fraction of a percent without being able to do anything about it once. At last won with a few percent margin, with two ally bases, almost, and defenses broken from an unexpected direction. It's the hardest mission in SC2, and I'm never playing it ever again, but it was a very fitting end for a replay.
I think it would be quite interesting to split a tier list like this into a story/vibe/characters category and a difficulty/gameplay category. It would be intersting which campaigns differ in that regard an how much (Nova Covert Ops... cough, cough).
I will say, the free-form story-telling in terms of "do the missions in any order you want" of SC2 is interesting from a gameplay perspective, and in HotS/LotV allows you to have different characters present for different story beats that might be absent if you do things in a different order... But overall, it really, REALLY hurts the story's coherency. Any sense of urgency to any of the missions is lost, because you can unlock them, realize how urgent they are... and then fuck off and do five other missions while the urgent one is just sitting there waiting for you to choose it. I remember a lot of people thinking that if you didn't go to Agria right away, the mission would expire and you'd lose out on that entire chain. Nope. The option to unlock Primal Kerrigan before going to one of the first two planets, Char or Kaldir? Holy SHIT does that change things, but is there a canon order to any of these? Hell if we know! There are implications made by some comics later about HotS's planet order, but people are still debating it to this day. Jim's alcoholism comes and goes and situations fluctuate and none of the important story beats introduced in any of the side missions or story chains can be addressed in any sort of coherent, story-affecting fashion, because _you might not even do those missions._ Hell, Horner and Jim discover that Tychus effectively has a gun to his head, Tosh warns Raynor that someone on the ship is working for Mengsk, _and_ tells Raynor that Tychus is hiding stuff from him, but NONE of these pieces can be put together or acted on in any meaningful way, because the missions that unlock these reveals are optional, the conversations with Tosh are optional, hell, _Tosh himself_ is optional, and might be _dead_ when you do the missions these conversations are unlocked by, because you sided with Nova to get Ghosts. Wings of Liberty is FILLED TO THE BRIM with tons of interesting story beats that the story CANNOT DO ANYTHING WITH, because of the completely freeform nature of the campaign structure.
I disagree. It wouldn't have been that difficult to add a Tychus branching point, even if as a non-canon branch. You just make it. And they didn't. End of story.
@@Blazieth What underlying problem? That you can pick the missions in almost any order you want? Or that there are optional missions? I don't think any of that is a problem not from a gameplay nor from a story standpoint. Simply imagine, or realize, because that wouldn't be far from the truth, that the mission choices presented are from the eye of the player. That urgent mission doesn't come up unless you pick it. Take a page from the Haven choice missions, where neither choice is wrong and the story adapts to what you choose.
One thing that was kinda niche even when the games came out, but still holds a special nostalgic place in my heart and enhance the Brood War campaigns even more, was the little fluff packet that came in the original CD case. For anyone too young to remember, video games came on CD's! And also had a packet with an install key, instructions on how to play, and sometimes even game lore! That Brood War packet introduced the new units and also the new cast, which helped me connect to them more when I was a wee little 12 year old playing the campaigns for the first time. Loved that little thing.
I guess the Protoss civil war was so that the campaign wouldn't just be PvZ the entire time Also, i really liked Enemy Intelligence from Nova Covert Ops. It encourages and rewards aggression without putting you on a timer
I think a good addition to the rebel's yell campaign would be if they found a way to explain megsk's betrayal of kerrigan. Having read the books a long time ago, if i recall correctly 3 ghosts had assassinated megsk's parents, and he had decided to hunt them down for revenge, he killed 2 and kerrigan was the last one, but she was being experimented on when he found her without any of her memories of her ghost missions previously, so while he rescued her and used her, he always planned to have her killed in the end to finish his revenge, and maybe a flashback mission somewhere would've been interesting, maybe one focused on her rescue.
So, my thoughts on the ratings/rankings: Rebel Yell: Pretty much agree with you on about 90% of it, especially the points of the Kerrigan betrayal and the cut missions. Only thing I would dock a few points for is that while it is indeed a tutorial campaign to get you to learn how to play Starcraft I can't help but feel like the amount of handholding it does lingers far too long. It could maybe stand to have one of the teaching missions exchanged for a macro mission, but its hardly to the point I'd drop it a tier over. The Overmind: Pretty much hit the nail on the head wholly, only thing that seems a bit off by tone is that they sort of set it up so that the Terrans really just kinda get rolled with little issue even on the small scale battles which contrasts the notion that the Terrans could put up a good fight against the Zerg when united. Protoss get to have their bamboozle win but the Terrans just kinda get dismissed and bullied. (Unless its mission 3), I want to almost say its a C in my eyes, but I can fully admit my bias on this one. The Fall: Aldaris Being Dense: The Campaign. Though while the story is more or less whatever, I did enjoy the actual missions a lot more compared to the previous two campaigns, and actually did a wonderful job of setting up the notion of the interracial collaboration going forward. Personally I think it would deserve a low B myself carried by the gameplay above all. The Stand: Aldaris Being Dense: The Expansion. Design and the like you were accurate on, but holy mother of god the betrayal bit and the Protoss Civil War round two being all because Aldaris cannot use his words and Artanis actually being gullible as heck is just painful in retrospect. Though I think that's a greater critque on early Blizzard story writing as a whole as well: With how many plot points occur because of characters being idiot balled. Still, the rating you gave I agree with. The Iron Fist: God, you are so right with the fact that its so close to being fantastic if it just had a bit more time to cook and flesh out the interpersonal plots. The lack thereof makes the whole Stukov being killed bit really feel more like an idiot ball than anything on DuGalle's end. "Yes I'll gladly take the word of someone I just met recently over my long standing friend since before this invasion." Please. Gameplay is fantastic though, and I love the divergent mission choice in the Korhal invasion. The Queen of Blades: Let me preface by saying I am one of the ones who actually hate this campaign. So many of the missions are either far too gimmicky, or easy, generally making a lot of the campaign forgettable from a mission stance, with the only one that stands out at all being Omega. And the story plot itself really just comes off as 'Kerrigan gets to do whatever because everyone else refuses to talk to each other and Kerrigan just gets to win, win win win.' I was over it before I even got half way through since it just makes everyone else come off as incompetent and incapable and kills off many beloved characters to just prop up this someone who last we played as got completely bullied by the Templar.
I agree with ranking. There is 2 missions however in Nova cover ops that are one of my fav missions. The mission where you have to slot units in positions is incredibly fun to take your time with. You can jump tank on high places. You can play it solo Nova walking around and hiding from zerg waves etc. The second is the mission on the planet with the psi emiters for the same reasons. we now judge the missions cos we have played them 10 + times and we are much better at the game.
I will speak out as someone who thinks the Fall probably deserves a B tier instead of C tier - as much as the Great Offscreen War against the Zerg is annoying (and all the middle missions definitely drag a little), it's precisely Tassadar's point. (I will also say I absolutely agree with almost all of your assessment, the video is fantastic, and even when I disagree with the assessment, the analysis is always interesting, on point, and very much worth listening to, which is honestly in my opinion more important - discussion is a wonderful thing.) A planet is a massive thing - and it feels like Aiur is one of the few planets that gets to be more than a map. Every day they're fighting Tassadar, they are ignoring all the brave warriors on the front line still fighting the Zerg. The Protoss are this ancient, enigmatic people - but the Conclave is very complacent. They're too arrogant and stuck in their high-minded ways, and we're learning that ultimately, the Protoss aren't all that different from the Terrans is very interesting (in spite of the many ways they are). That being said, if one really wants to see the enigmatic aliens as being truly enigmatic aliens, I can absolutely see the disappointment. I think, if the campaign were to properly emphasise the cost of all the Protoss bickering and in-fighting - perhaps by having us play through Fenix's first death, rather than just have it be in a cutscene when his psi blade just randomly FAILS (and yes I know there's a lore reason but I do not care about the lore reason, that cutscene plays it for comedy, and it makes it all look stupid!); and having the Zerg intrude on other major Aiur events (imagine if the Zerg showed up at the Trial of Tassadar as a third faction both parties had to fight off, completely irrelevant to the main action but showing how they just couldn't get along in the face of far bigger problems) would have helped make the campaign more solidly enjoyable. It would also help to actually prove Tassadar's point, which would connect the moral of the campaign together far more. I do wish, however, we got to see Artanis in that campaign, and see him going from a Conclave devotee to a Tassadar supporter, rather than just having that happen with you as silent Artanis - that's one thing I personally dislike about SC1 campaigns. The Fall is in no worlds an A-tier campaign. But for me, it feels like if it just reached out a tiny bit more, it could've been a wonderful B-tier one.
I'd say the Fenix cutscene isn't playing for comedy, you might think that's the result but it's going for symbolism/horror. It's totally unconcerned for any lore explanation for why it happens, it happens because it instantly conveys hopelessness. A lot of the SC1 cutscenes are more trying to convey a general idea than depict plot events, even the ones that have their own little plots.
@felonyx5123 the cinematics were done before they fleshed out the game history. Blizzard writers have never NEVER been good enough foe that kind of thing unless they copied it from someone else
I love hearing your thoughts about StarCraft in terms of its story, characters, or even gameplay mechanics as a whole. So videos like this that dive into your thoughts are great in my book
I think that WOL was so good because of all tuebworld building - pretty much every mission was on a new planet making it feel like a huge universe to explore. The in HOTS there are 5 or 6 planets in the main story, with 2-3 missions back to back on each, making the universe feel so much smaller. It also kind of feels like the zerg just planet hop from place to place and aren't expanding their territory at all. Agreed on the evolution missions - they dont feel like proper missions as they're basically all no build missions. The primal zerg have just been chilling on Zerus for a few thousand years and despite the Zerg being able to planet hop, the primals dont appar to be able to. And they seem to have developed equivalents to all the major Zerg strains as well, so they feel like reskinned Zerg rather than a unique faction that underwent millenia of hyper evolution. Which kind of begs the question on what Amon did to the overmind - presumably he took it off the planet and dropped it off somewhere it would be able to learn space travel on its own. It just seems really stupid.
The primal zerg begin imitating the zerg swarm morphs immediately, Abathur even complains about that. It makes sense, that Zerg swarm strains should be better, as they had a much bigger galaxy to find essences in. Perhaps the reason the primal zerg never learned space flight, is that requires far more cooperation than they are willing/capable to do? It took humans thousands of years to reach space as well. The zerg swarm got a boost from Amon, but the Overmind didn't bother sharing those secrets with the primal zerg it couldn't control
@Ten_Tacles yeah I appreciate that. It just seems a shame that as soon as the Zerg arrive the primal are like "well all our stuff sucks" and we don't really see anything truly unique to them except their mobile hive beasts
I"ve just replayed the SC1 campaign and honestly you don't get the feeling the zerg is this constantly growing, expanding threat either. Like the Kel-Morian combine mission for example, she straight up says that we need to make a pit stop there and mine some minerals so that she's able to build up her primary hive clusters some more for the assault on Korhal. It still really felt like she had to consider her resources and her army position carefully like every other faction as opposed to just slowly becoming everywhere all at once on an exponential growth curve. I think something like SC2 WoL does a much better job as portraying zerg as the latter, probably due to some interesting additions like how there is some sort of zerg virus that can turn entire populations into infested Terran and there's that cool Protoss mission where you make a last stand and get completely overrun by zerg no matter how long you survive. I dunno, just my two cents on the matter.
What I really liked about Brood War is how the UED are only vaguely introduced in The Stand making it unclear if they are good or bad. But in Iron Fist, they are portrayed as if they are going to be the main good guy faction of Starcraft. Halfway through the campaign, you begin to doubt them more and more, especially during their ending where they air a propaganda broadcast claiming to have "saved Earth". In the final campaign, they are revealed yo being the main villains of BW. You strip them of their power peice by peice, and after their last desperate attack on Kerrigan to save face, they are beaten badly. Dugalle, now demoralized and humilated by the defeat admits his mistakes in a dramatic scene before killing himself, and then Kerrigan destroys what is left of the UED. The ending definitely has a King Midas theme to it
Blizzard tried to give Jim more depth with being sad to have to kill Kerrigan but still willing, then Zeratul tells him saving her is the only path to avoid destruction. The way people talk you would think they skipped the entire cinematic. HOTS feels short because it is. I like the power fantasy though, it's well managed for what Kerrigan is supposed to be and feel like. LOTV has this really cool thing with how awesome its characters are and how well they interact between themselves and the story. They feel like active participants instead of background charatcers like WOL's. Nova Cover Ops were all super cool missions. They didnt want to make story missions, they wanted to make fun cool missions. Nova as a unit is weird because half of people want her to be like Kerrigan in HOTS, and the other half wanted Kerrigan to be like her, not a beater of worlds but more as a in army commander or op support unit.
LotV was linear. You're always going to have those characters on your ship by a certain point so it's actually possible for them to contribute. WoL characters are background because you can never guarantee the Doc or Tosh would be part of your crew yet / still alive on any given mission.
@@CorrectHorseBatteryStaple472 We dont even know Swan or Stateman, they are as important to the story as the mercenary guy in the cantina. Those 2 are who I'm talking about.
I always interpreted The Fall to be the Conclave had its forces fighting the Zerg. They weren't making progress, but they were so certain they would win they sent their most promising commander and forces to hunt Tassadar down. The issue I had was Tassadar surrendering just to have us break him out. If we lost the mission he surrendered in sure, but it seemed pointless. Lwt me break the base, have hundreds of carriers arrive so Tassadar surrenders so we can escape.
The thing about the Evolution missions is that I do actually love them a ton and I love how at the end of them you have to take an interesting and permanent upgrade to one of your core units. But they should absolutely not have been the thing Blizzard said counted as part of the 27 missions.
Something I never liked about SC 2 campaign's is the like of in-game upgrades. Sure, it is cool to upgrade units inbetween missioms, but having no upgrades to research aside from attack/defense in-game always felt a wrong for me. It also makes it so that units plateau in power rrally quickly, seeing as a unit is as powerful as the'll ever be the moment you unlock them.
Wow nice idea and I have to agree with you on most of those parts. I think you nailed the descriptions of the gameplay and difficulty aspects, which are less subjective than the other two factors. Regarding the character development I do have some issues that you have not discussed in depth. And especially Kerrigan, who is probably the most important character in the series could use a lot more polishing: When she is introduced in Rebel Yell we basically only get to know her as an idealistic Ghost that abandoned the confederacy. We don't really get to know her own motivation but rather only see her as someone who put her trust in the wrong guy. It also feels like she doesn't share that deep of a connection with Raynor, although some romance aspect is introduced, but it feels exaggerated in the later campaigns for me. In the Overmind campaign Kerrigan is not herself anymore and we can see that immediately. She behaves immature, impatient and is cocky while only experiencing little control from the Overmind. I think the Amerigo could have flashed out Kerrigans time as a ghost more as a way to unlock her psionic abilities and for us to get to know more about her past. And besides here fighting with Tassadar on Char, she does not seem to be of interest to the Protoss, but is still known as a major threat by everyone in Brood War. In the Brood War campaigns it was especially memorable for me to see the cunning and strategic side of Kerrigan. She manages to make unlikely allies and persuade everyone into achieving her goals. Her motivation is just lust for power which she satisfied until she is basically the only major power left in the Korprulu sector. Surprisingly she is then revealed to have done basically nothing until the events of SC2. We then see her only as the basically immortal unstoppable force no one knows how to deal with and she attacks places in search for the artifacts which is (as we later know) probably due to the corruption through Amon. But the problem for me is that she lost everything that made her the charismatic and cunning strategist she was in the Brood war and turned her into a one-dimensional powerhouse in WoL which is the biggest threat right now, but as we know from the prophecies from Zeratul is the key to beating an even bigger threat that is about to appear. Her story in HotS is basically only revenge, with a little side-story which causes her to be re-zergified (which was a huge disappointment for me, seeing the primals made me think we would see a change in the zerg from being the Hive-mind controlled faction towards a more elaborate faction which specialises in rapid evolution, which would have been great for a difference in gameplay between Multiplayer and Singleplayer), which is fun but also lacks the depths the political struggles flashed out in every other campaign. We basically have a campaign in WoL which focuses on cleaning up the mess Mengsk leaves behind and trying to dethrone him but is sidetracked due to the artifacts and the prophecy from Zeratul. In HotS we have several Storyies which don't feel connected at all: Char and Kaldir basically serve no bigger purpose (beating Warfield is nice but it didn't show why the Terrans even stayed on Char after Kerrigan was rescued and Kaldir gives only the cliffhanger with Niadra (which was in my opinion a build up for a new Overmind-like faction (her only purpose is killing Protoss)), Zerus and Skygeirr Station remind us that there is more to come in LotV while the rest focuses on taking revenge on Mengsk. But overall it lacks in most of the storytelling aspects. The thing I liked though was seeing Kerrigan been shown more human letting the wounded escape Char and helping evacuate civilians on Korhal, but still she feels emotionally unstable and not like the type you would trust the fate of the entire universe. In LotV she is seen hunting down Hybrids and trying to fulfill fer role as the savior of the universe, she is a key element to the story here, but we don't see much character progression here. I also didn't understand why everyone teams up in the epilogue to defeat Amon in the Void but not on Aiur. Here I also would have liked a more open ended conclusion to SC2s Story. Again we lack the disputes between the factions which was a key element from SC1. I don't like the fairytale ending the epilogue shows us (but then again the epilogue isn't canon, right?) Some ideas for this have been mentioned in the story but some could have been improved upon: What is the future of the swarm, why would Kerrigan stay as their leader? She saved the people dear to her so the future of the swarm could be fought out between Dehaka and Zagara, with unknown roles for Kerrigan and Stukov. (Btw. Why can't Kerrigan and Stukov be un-zerigied after the Story). How do the different protoss factions get along after Aiur is retaken. Is there still racism towards Dark Templar, how are the Taldarim dealt with? Is Valerian really the ruler people want or is there more fights (which is explored upon in NCO?, how could a human Stukov or Kerrigan play a role in these events? I really love the Starcraft franchise and would like to see a SC3 in the future as there is so much more potential in the story for me. And I'm also looking forward to the final Tier List once it's finished. In the end I just want to thank you GGG for all the content you produce, I really enjoy watching your videos. It's great to see how much fun you have with SC2 and RTS in general and how you incorporate your knowledge into your content. As someone who is more of a casual Singleplayer RTS Player rather than the Pro-player/Multiplayer Try-Hard it's really great to see someone like you!!!!
In the first Protoss campaign, l always imagine Zerg conquering the Aiur and destroying main Protoss forces, while these idiots are fighting civil war. And Tasadar in these missions is like: “IDK, in one hand we should fight the Zerg, but un the other hand Aldaris is a jerk” and I really like his uncertainty about it. And overall vibe, when you want to scream to the screen like “GUYS, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING, STOP PLEASE!!!” Is really cool. So I will move it to B
I feel that having some zerg on those two PvP aiur maps would've helped. Would at least allow the Zerg some presence instead of them being absent. Also I feel that the Overmind would capitalize on the civil war and try and send a strike force to kill the Conclave and especially the Dark Templar.
Not sure if I'm alone in this, but I thought you glossed over the mission quality in Nova CO a bit. I agree with all the other criticism for the campaign, but just from a gameplay perspective I feel like all the missions are really good, some of the most creative in the games. I think they even managed to make the mandatory early game defense mission fun^^
Absolutly. IMO the Nova CO are way superior to LotV and especially HotS. They are not great, but considering how bad the two big campaigns before were, I was extremly pleased to find out that the Nova missions were better than I expected.
just enough proof that this plotline is straight up bad the name, one of the most important and signyfying features of a character, that -Fenix- -Taldarin- this fake half-boot gets through his "complex" arc is not only never used - it can be completely bypassed if you just don't talk to him at the very end and so a very important thing about a character is forgotten completely LotV is a bad campaign and it shows Blizzard's downfall to a great extent
If anyone played Guild wars (original, not Guild wars 2), the nightfall campaign, the legacy of the void epilogue feels like somewhat played it, had a mixed up dream where it took place in starcraft, and made those missions. It takes place through a portal to a scary realm of floating rocks and weird terrain where weird stuff gets made, the first mission is relatively standard (Gate of Pain, Into the void), shows some deception, gets a small victory, helps someone, and introduces you to the setting. The second mission (Gate of madness, Essence of eternity) has a reputation as the hardest of the three missions, and gives you some power to defeat the main bad guy. The final mission (Abaddon's gate, Amon's fall) has you fight a big floating head that looks similar, but you don't fight it directly. Instead, you move back and forth on a floating platform killing some spawning rock like things while other stuff spawns to get in your way, and the person who takes over from the bad guy and becomes the new "god" is somewhat controversial. Would normally chalk it up to coincidence, but all the small and large similarities just look weird. Makes me wonder if there is some other story(ies) I'm not aware of that did something similar, and both Nightfall and Void writers were familiar with them. (Overall StarCraft and guild wars campaign roles are also sort of similar: first campaign is really long and flexible and sets up the world, second and third campaigns are a similar format, third has you beat the bad guy, forth is associated in setting with the first and is treated as less than a full version that the other three are. But these similarities are more coincidental.)
I think for The Fall, it was trying to show the Protoss'es complete arrogance and their fanstical behavoirs on what is an outdated system. And the Zerg are still fighting the Protoss. They just haven't reached Tassadar's location, and that is why you so easily rescue Tassadar, Aldaris and the Conclave are busy fighting a war. Hence the name, The Fall, not the Fall of Auir, but The Downfall of the Protoss. Ironically, the saying "Twice the pride, double the fall." Fits perfectly with what I'm saying and serves as a good TLDR to what I'm saying.
Great coverage! Don't know if I would change anything necessarily, but you may or may not want to mention sound design. I feel like the music specifically is good in original SC, but in both 1 and 2 Terran gets the best jams, and I think that does loads for atmosphere. Sound design of characters is also something you could mention, but I feel like the music is something that you could touch on if you wanted to.
I disagree with Grant with only one thing: the Epilogue's storyline is not a blemish, but an orange-sized tumor. They shouldn't have turned Kerrigan into an orange. (The orange thing is a Korean meme. somebody posted an image of a vertical cross section of an orange, and it is a perfect Xel'Naga Kerrigan. Once you google "케리건 오렌지" in Korean and check the image tab you can never unsee it.)
I am glad you are bringing this type of content back, so all for doing ranking videos again on occasion and this one absolutely makes sense! I agree with most of the rankings, and enjoy your thought process on all of them. Reminders on the story beats for the first 3 really does a good job setting up the rest of your thoughts. My one disagreement is LoTv vs UED campaign. As a more casual player, UED marries political intrigue writing to mission structure in such a way that it creates a memorable campaign, with fun, actually unique, missions. I agree with your assessment that it was too short to develop some of the characters out more or make some of the impacts hit, but it really sets itself up so well to make the parts we all love about Kerrigan's Brood War campaign function. LoTv on the other hand feels a bit repetitive (per your own joke of "super unique") even as someone playing it for the first time. The characters actually are less interesting to me than any of the characters you're praising from HotS, though I agree Fenix's development was handled well and felt like a developing character. I think the problems with Amon started way before LotV, but unlike the other 2 campaigns, it is front and center the entire time. It sucks, because the first mission of the epilogue truly is a fun mission on gaining and holding territory and stretching out supply lines, but if I ever go back to playing that campaign, it will be because of a few engaging missions, not story, or even for the complete experience. Meanwhile, UED does its part for the larger story, and the main criticism is that it needed more missions, but it really packs out all 8 of them and invites replayability. So overall, would knock LoTV down to B or C tier, and put UED either up to A, or keep it at B. LoTV at A tier just throws off the rest of the rankings and the explanations you've established.
To be honest, Wings of Liberty could've been trash and still broken sales records. This was Blizzard at their peak when we all thought they could do no wrong.
One thing Rebel Yell has going for it is the sense of mystery. Like sure if you read the manual you know all the lore (incredibly detailed) about the zerg and protoss. But playing the campaign alone you don't know that, and the Zerg come across as this mysterious force of nature the characters are strugling against.
Seeing this a dau after it was uploaded, having just finished all of StarCraft 2's story for the first time, and pondering on the bittersweet moment of finishing a story full of characters I love, looking forward to hearing Grant's thoughts.
On the gameplay side I find that Starcraft 1s campaign is way more fun if you forget literally everything you know about Starcraft, and even RTS in general. That is after all how they were designed after all. I had loads of fun doing the missions playing it more like I was roleplaying a commander.
Looking forward to the main channel version!! SC1 rankings seem really fair, I agree with the story analysis (though I'd probs give UED an A). I also agree that Wings of Liberty was a total delight mechanically and gameplay-wise, but I was super disappointed with the story and characters. Not just Raynor reversing his stance on Kerrigan (and being rewarded for it), but also the utter lack of complexity in the characters (do people really enjoy Stetmann and Horner and the other supporting cast as much as any non-Cerebrate character in SC1?), and ESPECIALLY the lack of good antagonists (Mengsk, Tal-Darim, and WoL Kerrigan are just so, so, so bland and morally uninteresting to defeat). Agreed that All In is amazing though. Really better than the sum of its parts somehow (same for the Char landing mission, for me)
Agreed with the additional camaraderie needing to be set up between DuGalle and Stukov - and I also feel that the UED didn't really do much wrong for all three as-of-yet known factions to agree to gang up on them. A mission of DuGalle being on the backfoot after Stukov's death also would have helped to improve the weight of the loss, as basically the final mission is them going from losing one of their most prized commanders... to still winning just fine. However, on the complaint of it being too short: I often feel "Its too short" can be interpreted as a compliment - if you wanted more, then clearly there was something attention grabbing or captivating. I think it could qualify as an A tier campaign with the laid out potential additions/corrections being what it would take to become an S tier campaign. Particularly with how the missions that are in the campaign are already good. Beloved if underdeveloped characters, good missions, good story, biggest complaint is it being too short - I think that is plenty to qualify it above the precedents set in B tier and bump it up to A tier. (17:40) Honestly, Fenix being complacent about Aldaris' absence - or perhaps even fine upon hearing of Aldaris' demise - I could see that holding true. Throughout the first Protoss campaign Aldaris and the Conclave basically ignored the Zerg threat for domestic troubles to the point where Aiur, their homeworld, is ultimately lost and Tassadar - whose actions were slowly mending the rift with the Dark Templar - had(?) to sacrifice himself. Now if Fenix learned of what happened with Kerrigan's manipulation of the Dark Templar and the survivors of Aiur? Yeah no chance of co-operation with Kerrigan then. I think Aiur falling in the second Protoss campaign retroactively makes Tassadar's sacrifice more meaningful - if Aiur fell to a Zerg force without the Overmind's leadership (absentee as it was in the first Protoss campagin, I guess he was busy importing his buddies to Aiur) then I can only imagine how badly it would have gone for the Protoss if the Overmind was given more time to mastermind the Zerg invasion of Aiur.
The UED did take control of the second Overmind and were clearly planning to use the zerg to rule the sector with an iron fist. It does actually make sense why the Protoss and many other people would see the UED as a threat that needs to be removed. Being willing to help Kerrigan get back to power and take control of the zerg probably should have had more explanation on why they felt the UED were a worse threat than Kerrigan though.
@@toddclawson3619 On the topic of ruling the sector with an iron fist - and even (to an extent) in regards using the Zerg, what with the psi emitters and all - surely Mengsk qualifies as at an least equal evil. And by helping to prevent Mengsk's capture and assisting Kerrigan, Raynor ultimately not only played a part in Mengsk's rise to power but in reinstating him as what I suppose was considered a lesser of two evils - I may need a reminder though how as to how the UED could be considered so much worse than Mengsk that Raynor chooses Mengsk over them. Sure the Confederacy was bad, but with how bad Mengsk was I think an argument could be made that Raynor was making a practically out-of-character judgement call for the sake of the narrative when it came to rescuing Mengsk from the UED and helping reinstate him.
@@BloodfelX Oh I agree that Raynor helping to dethrone the UED should have had more of a justification. Maybe he did think that Mengsk would be easier to overthrow than the UED would be. Or maybe he was hoping against hope that Kerrigan had changed it would genuinely be a good thing to help her take control of the zerg. It was only after her betrayal and killing Fenix that Raynor lost hope and vowed to kill her. We don't know unfortunately. It is one reason why I liked that fan-made alternate campaign where the primal zerg took the place of the UED. It made sense for everyone to work together with their hated enemies against a foe that wanted to kill everyone and collect their essence.
Although not really considered part of the main plot of the storyline, there were also other 'mini-campaigns' that I feel like are at least worth mentioning here: SC1 'Loomings' a.k.a the StarCraft: Precursor Taking place approximately a month before the 'Rebel Yell', it's an introduction to both the main story, told from the perspective of the 'baddies'. The characters we meet in this scenario are all Confederates, including their 'Black Ops' Cerberus unit, and we even get to control Duke in his little tank. There are only 6 missions in it, but the middle ones are surprisingly well structured and the storytelling aspect, imho, easily rivals some of the most memorable missions of the main Terran campaign. Personally, I would rate easily rate it as A-tier. Given how this mini-campaign is older than more than most of the people watching this video, I'd say it deserved at least an honorable mention, if nothing else. Starcraft: Enslavers. Taking place shortly after the main SC1 story line, this time we get play as a 'Commander' of the newly formed Dominion, chasing after a notorious pirate, Allen Schezar, who apart from having a considerable Terran force of his own, has found a way to control the Zerg, giving the player a very unique and thematically interesting challenge. There are 'only' 3-4 missions in it, depending on the objectives the player *chooses* to complete in order to either help the Protoss who become his allies, or ignore them and skip straight to the main event. The challenge is tough, the heroes are cool and unique, but real deal are the Terran/Zerg allied forces you get to fight either as Terran *or* Terran/Protoss, which makes it so memorable, and again, for me at least, a solid B-Tier here purely because of how short it is, there are no pre-recorded voice lines and even the in-game dialogues are sparse. Thankfully, the difficulty level is a cut above the main campaign, and 2 of the missions are also reused and repurposed maps cut from the original 'Rebel Yell' so it's a little bonus in terms of nostalgia points.
Some issues I didn't see mentioned in the video: WoL goes against quite a bit of preceding characterisation, knocking down Kerrigan from her Queen Bitch status to a taunting cartoon villain, having Zeratul not call out Duran upon encountering Maar, making Raynor an ineffective alcoholic _who somehow still gets access to all the fun toys regardless_ and also outwits his enemies most of the time, and setting a precedent for Mengsk being even less competent in HotS. Lore from other media was largely ignored too although I'm not sure how much we can fault it for that. Still, by LotV we basically end up with *THREE* different factions called "Tal'darim" which kinda sucks. Also a lot of the story is very Raynor-centric, as in specific to his person not just following his perspective, without really showing or changing the broader landscape of war and politics. Most of the missions are really cool to play, and they all are important to Raynor as a person, but let's be honest you could delete every single one of them besides The Outlaws, In Utter Darkness and All In and the world/overall story would be unaffected. That's not good for setting up a trilogy, and can't be blamed on the expansions' sins either. And for such a character-centric story the choice missions are just awful: the reality warping required between the two Haven missions, trusting Mengsk's pet ghost over your slightly shady brother in arms (not Tychus, the other one... no not Stetmann, the one who can actually use a gun!) and the tactical blunder of Shatter The Sky so bad even Tychus calls it out. HotS suffers from all the buildup the zerg have had previously. In SC1 they were nigh unstoppable, requiring a heroic sacrifice to achieve a Pyrrhic victory on Aiur. Then BW almost completely invalidated that, the planet was lost anyway and Shakuras wasn't looking much better. Then the UED enslaved them making themselves the new biggest bad in the sector, and then despite the ferals on Aiur, the UED losses, the death of the Second Overmind and a bunch of other fights Kerrigan *STILL* had enough forces to beat a 3(+?)-way coalition. The zerg also regrow and adapt faster than the other factions, SC2 gave them a nice timeskip for that, and WoL portrayed them as absolutely _crushing_ the Dominion with negligible losses right until the final moment of All In. And after all that HotS tried to pull a "zero to hero", not Kerrigan actually trying to redeem herself (they magicked that away as some weird split personality bullshit?) and try to use the zerg in a "more ethical" fashion, nor her going back to her megalomaniacal ways and finally paying the price for the constant wars and infighting, nah for some reason QoB Kerrigan created a bunch of Orc clans. Then that story got shoved to the background too, probably for the better tbh.
A pretty solid Tier list Grant! However, maybe I have a bit more SC1 bias in me because I feel like the SC1 story is just so much more in-depth. The betrayal of Kerrigan was a long term set up plan by Mengsk because she was 1 of 3 ghosts that murdered his Father and nuked Korhal the first time. The only reason she was spared from execution was because Mengsk had found her abandoned by the Confederates ona fringe world and her memories were wiped but he never forgave her which is why during the campaign his tone is always harsher with her than with Reynor or Duke because he is still bitter but tries to hide it. Rebel Yell for me had S tier storytelling and S tier gmaeplay and difficulty scaling. (I'd bump up to S) The Overmind was more about a superior over arching plot (hostile takeover of the galaxy) and the cerebrates were merely tools to extend control of the swarm, Daggoth was the important one for later storytelling. Similar to HoTS you have all these different broodmothers but only ZiggyZags is the important one. The difficulty was all over the place so B is fair but it is on the cusp of A. Both Protoss campaigns i thought were absolute S tier storytelling, it does require you to know about the Aeon of Strife and understand some weird time factors (i.e. multiple years pass between the Fall of Aiur and the decision to leave and go to Shakuras. The units comps were more varied but I did feel as though they had a lot of short missions (sub 20 minute macro) with the exception of Mission 10 in the OG and Mission 8 in the expansion. I would rank The Fall B and The expansion B but on the cusp of A. I agree with what you said about UED In regard to what you said about Omega. Although not clarified in-game. Fenix and Reynor never knew about Kerrigans betrayal as they never made it to Shakuras before the fall of the warp gate on Aiur. Kerrigan swings in and picks them from Aiur and sends Jim and a handful of Khalai survivors to save Mengsk from the UED and briefs them on the UED threat without mentioning her dealings with Zeratul and the Razagul. I agree on the A tier placement. Your starcraft 2 placements on the other hand... I felt as though Wings was good and brought a lot of nostalgia for sc players but also since Blizzard had moved into WoW thus no more WcIII stuff was happening. Wings stood out as a Massive new RTS and grabbed a lot of new players for the multiplayer more than the story. Also unit diversity was kinda weird because most missions you either spammed the unit you unlocked or just built bio because the Marine was so freaking overtuned. So for me the storytelling was kinda meh and the gameplay was meh but if you are a new player to RTS it definitely is the most friendly of the 3. I'd put it in Low A high B purely based on gameplay and story. HoTS and i understand this might be a hot take but I really enjoyed this campaign, the unit diversity is great, the campaign isn't ridiculously long and the story telling was pretty good but only IF you take into consideration that (not explained in game unfortunately) but Kerrigans mind was undergoing a lot of trauma and being warped by Amon between the end of brood until now and then suddenly overnight she gets changed back into a human and has to deal with that plus shes dealing with her humnan feeelsing for Jim, plus her overwhelming for Mengsk, plus a lot of neuro stimulants in her system from the tests by the Umojan made her to be a very cranky anti-hero. I've introduced many friends to the starcraft universe thanks to the 3 player coop mod and we all have similar sentiments. The fact that she can solo brutal is something you would only find out through multiple playthroughs and an understanding of optimising her perks and upgrades. I'd argue that 90% of the play base just picked what they thought was cool and fun and the fact you could customize the choices between missions unlike in wings made it better for everyone overall. This campaign (hot take i know) was a solid A from me Excluding the epilogue, I feel like the story telling in LoTV was absolute S tier. A masterclass even. I still get choked up when Zeratul says "my life for Aiur" in the cinematic. Something worth noting that is often overlooked in the community is Zeratul spends between 4-5 years in complete isolation on a barren moon as part of his self-imposed exile and is only really brought back into the fold when the Grand Perserver from the Gantirother shows up inside the brain of a human archeologist and she basically has to coerce him to return to the fold or Amon wins and he goes thhrough this whole ordeal of responsibility versus my people hate me and want to kill me and its heart breaking. Excellent introduction of characters, Artanis basically having survivors guilt the whole campaign, Reynor locking eyes with Artansis in the cinematic when he recognizes Zeratuls Psi-blade and can see Artanis's grief is just chef kiss. Gameplay I felt as though the nerazim faction kinda overshadowed the rest as they were basically S tier units for the whole campaign so I agree, maybe some tweaks to the Aiur faction would have been nice but overall not bad. Would also have liked maybe Reynor and Kerrigan to make an appearance on Aiur during the final mission instead of Karax/Vorazun. Storytelling in Epilogue was pretty lame but the missions themselves were fantastic enough for a strong S tier campaign imo. thank you for coming to my T.E.D. talk
I actually don't mind that the first zerg campaign had an easy final mission. By that point, the zerg have broken through the Protoss' defenses and all that is left is a desperate last stand to protect the temple. It makes you feel like an powerful and unrelenting force that can no longer be stopped. It is kind of like the Predator campaign in Aliens vs. Predators Extinction, The earlier missions are really hard as the Predators intentionally sandbag themselves by using weaker weapons and less armor for the sake of a thrilling and challenging hunt. Once the pred-alien queen is discovered though, the predators call off the hunt and bring in the big guns. All their normal hang-ups about having a fair and honorable fight are thrown out the window and they move in to eliminate the aliens and humans with extreme prejudice. At that point, the missions become pretty easy as you curbstomp every threat and it is actually pretty awesome from a lore perspective. It also feels very rewarding after making it through such a tough early game. That game was such a great rts. All three factions were very different and unique, but worked to create a very interesting story and fun gameplay.
I really love the Enemy Intelligence & Flash Point. In RTS I've always loved to turtle and build up unbreakable defenses, those 2 missions allowed me to do that but also gave me something else to do on the map. Also choosing which units to eliminate from the attach waves was a cool idea.
Flashpoint deserves to be knocked down for the asinine decision of shoving large rapidly respawning waves of corruptors down your throat with zero warning, solely because they chose a poor unlock order with giving you liberators in the previous mission and those making mincemeat out of this one otherwise.
Original Terran: They cut too much, leading to plot-hole dialogue. Original Protoss: Tassadar sends his old friends on a pointless mission to fail killing a Cerebrate. Why did they trust him before/AFTER this? The civil war isn't too bad since the Protoss weakness was supposed to be their stubborness. BW Protoss: Kerrigan is known as a chronic backstabber despite not having backstabbed anyone yet (unless you count hurting Mengsk's feelings). Final mission is hyper-memorable. BW Terran: Memorable but short. This is the ONLY Terran campaign in the series where your in-game strength is reflected by the story: you have overwhelming might and guile, unlike the other 3 Terran campaigns where you are a small guerilla group. BW Zerg: Mission 2: Never using your last drone to make a building is obviously a programming limitation, and it should have been fixed rather than spawn this meme instant loss mission. This campaign has some of the most unique missions in the game. WoL: The time skip was what, 4 years? Way too short. Raynor missing Kerrigan should have been done without. Great overall, I just wish the 2 choice missions didn't always portray Raynor as being right no matter his choice. HotS: Forever cursed between the campaign that introduced SC2 and the one that ended it. But also cursed by its own flaws: Raynor impossibly surviving, Kerrigan beaten by a magic rock. Also the dialogue... this campaign has some of my favorite lines in any game, but many were cut (Ishza) and others are glossed over (Zeratul and Kerrigan). LotV: PLEASE turn down the music. Story is a crescendo from hopelessness to victory, decades in the making, and moments such as the Khala's fall, Zeratul, and Shakuras were amazing. All characters are awesome. It stuttered at the end with missions objectives being "Super Unique", and ending with All-In-V2, but it was still fun. Into the Void: Mission 1 is S-tier, Mission 2 is All-In-V3 so soon after All-In-V2, and Mission 3 is simply not worthy of ending the story. I love that they changed their mind on Tassadar's "revival", but then... Kerrigan ascending actually makes some sense, but man everything else is mind-boggling. The plot flip-flops between "Cycles ended!" and "Cycles continue!", the Raynor-Kerrigan romance is given even more needless importance, Artanis randomly kneels to the space whale that manipulated his people, and WHY does Amon have only ONE line hinting at his motivations?! Covert Ops: It's alright. Davis is crazy. Gameplay is great. Seeing Alarak's arrogance get him trashed was satisfying.
"Every character in this game is either beloved or a doctor..."
Wow, way to single someone out XD
Aren't there 2 doctors?
@@Axel-wo6qu To be fair, one of them is a god... :P
@jordanread5829 oh yeah, but I was remembering the colonist Chick. Wasn't she a doctor too?
@@Axel-wo6qu Yeah. You had Dr Ariel Hanson and Dr Emil Narud.
@@Axel-wo6qu Well the colonist chick was the only doctor that was the person Grant was signaling out, I do not think Stetmann is a doctor he is just a science advisor/scientist, I had a quick look at his starcraft wiki page and there it says he is a scientist but not anything about him being a doctor.
One big thing you missed about the Nova campaign was the lack of a home between missions. All other campaigns you could move around to various locations on your ship and talk to your growing crew to see their perspectives or get to know more about them.
Knowing that Abathur hated it when the Overmind died because he turned feral and wasn't "true zerg" for a short while is interesting, the general animosity between Artanis and Alarak that grows into a begrudging respect is great. All of the flavor text of upgrades and Stetmanns' research logs in the Toss and Zerg tanks are really neat.
This is entirely missing from Nova's storyline. Sure Rigel might be really flat but learning anything at all about him would've been better, or calling Valarian to give reports or something. Anything might've veen better than the nothing we had.
That's a really good point. Introducing Hyperion as an actual interactive location was a brilliant idea and they removed it in this campaign.
You get news roport on every mission tho.
Agreed, and the Raven could have been exactly this. Even in its design, it had a strong Normandy-vibe to me and it could have had the same function.
@@Hotdogmayonnaize The ship was called the Griffin.
@@1.-ulysses334 UNN was a lot weaker IMO, without Donny there as a foil for Kate we don't get much.
She tells the news, it sets the stage but it's without any wit that WOL had.
I can't name a single quote from covert op UNN but WOL i still giggle to myself sometimes getting reminded of them.
Yeah, the story in The Fall is frustrating. I hated winning the Protoss civil war, only for Tassadar to surrender to end the violence, only to force me to win the civil war again. Many, many more Protoss died because he gave himself up, which makes his noble sacrifice seem deranged.
A simple fix: Tassadar surrenders but then his prison ship crashes behind Zerg lines. Make it a PvZ mission. Or a PvZvP mission (you have to rescue Tassadar before the Conclave recover the ship). Make his decision to surrender drive the plot forward, rather than telling the same story twice.
Tassadar also doesn’t really accomplish anything after being captured and released. As grant pointed out, we already beat the overmind in the mission. Have Tassadar executed, then have the Protoss attack out of stupid revenge; or, it could have been the catalyst that spurred Zeratul to truly join the cause.
That always also bothered me… I surrender I don’t want to see more of my Protoss brethren die… let’s murder all our Protoss brethren to save Tassadar… makes sense
One thing I noticed about The Fall is it starts in the past relative to the end of Overmind. A significant portion of campaigns 2 and 3 happen at the same time, from opposing perspectives. Given that Grant doesn't seem to know this, I'm guessing it's not well explained and should likely count against them.
@@Quantumironturtle Upon starting Episode Three:
"PROTOSS CAMPAIGN: THE FALL
The Zerg Overmind has succeeded in invading the Protoss Homeworld of Aiur and has embedded itself into the crust of the planet.
Now, as the agents of the sinister Overmind spread chaos and destruction across the face of Aiur, the stalwart Protoss defenders prepare themselves for the coming onslaught.
FIRST STRIKE
Citadel of the new Protoss Executor
Two days after the Zerg invasion"
Dialogue from the first mission (First Strike), right before mission completion:
"FENIX: You know, Executor, although we two have marched across hundreds of worlds together, I never imagined that we would be fighting on Aiur. The Zerg are indeed worthy foes."
No, the game makes it *exceedingly* clear The Fall takes place after campaign 2, not during it.
@falsche921 Well, that's really dumb then, because it would make way more sense if the Protoss campaign happened at the same time as the Zerg campaign. Tassadar looks like a complete moron for not explaining anything otherwise.
The one issue I have with the Queen of Blades campaign is that every character has to be a bit stupider than usual for the story to work. Considering the tone of Starcraft 1 in general, the fact that they all implicitly trust Kerrigan is just odd, even without the Aldaris stuff. If it had been the case that the Mengsk and others thought they could use Kerrigan to beat the UED and then handle her later, that would be one thing, but for some reason they are genuinely surprised when she betrays them. Mengsk literally says that he actaully believed Kerrigan had forgiven him, and I just don't buy that.
I'd argue she has three things going for her. 1 - the UED is by far the biggest threat to everyone. 2 - Kerrigan claims it was the Overmind controlling her which if you wanted to believe your former ally is back, would feel good. 3 - Kerrigan is basically alone with very few Zerg under her control, so her allies don't think she can do much even if she is selfish in her plans to work with them. Kerrigan only gets strong when given significant help from her allies. It's only once they disable the UED's Zerg controls and weaken them that she betrays them. Also she has them expend a lot of their forces against the UED before she hits them in the back. They had together at this point, liberated/retake multiple worlds at that point.
@@tristantully1592
Ad 1. A completely valid point, but it only justifies why they agreed to work with her, not why they seemed to actually trust her.
Ad 2. It would explain Jim and maybe even Fenix trusting her, but what about Mengsk? Even if she was only murdering people because of the Overmind's control, Mengsk was still the one who betrayed her which led to said control, so it was quite obvious that even without it she'd still be after him. Perhaps even more so if she hated what the Overmind made her do.
Ad 3. Of course she only betrays them once she grows in power. That's exactly the reason why they shouldn't fully trust anything she says BEFORE then. If at the start she had full control of the Zerg and still wanted to ally herself with them, that would at least prove genuine interest in defeating the UED, as opposed to just wanting to boost her own forces. If your weakened enemy proposes an alliance that will help them grow in power, you'd better think really hard before agreeing, as they're probably mostly doing this for their own gain.
1:11 Grant is so good he can play Starcraft handless, using just his psionic power
this is what you can do when you finally have enough additional pylons
may the Khala guide my mouse
He has neuralink
@@conan2096Lmao
The Manual.
I think Grant forgot these games came with a manual, a mainstay of the era.
The manual explained Mengsk family was killed by ghosts, and because this is a 90s game, you can easily piece together that Kerrigan was one of three. Which of course, was eventually confirmed.
The thing is, most of them old games, like Starcraft, Warcraft 2 etc, came with a manual, and they usually expand on the story. However, when comes to the UED, I agree what Grant said, Stukuv and Gerald have no chemistry, even the manual doesn't mention anything about their friendship. We get a glimce of the friendship they have when Gerald talks to Duran. You can tell Blizzard wanted to make maybe a Starcraft 2 after broodwar immediately, maybe focused on Raynor and Zertual separately? or maybe Just UED earth camgapin, instead of waiting 12 years for the Starcraft we know.
But Kerrigan is way younger than Mengsk? How recently did that happen to the game story?
@@beepbop6542 what part?
@@alichallab2705 Like how long before SC1 did Mengsk's parents die?
@@beepbop6542
2478-2489 (secret)
2489-2491 (public)
From what I remember reading the book. I Mengsk, Arcturus Mengsk was in his mid 20s. I could be wrong
In the Fall, the Overmind is too polite to interrupt the Protoss while they are having their civil war.
It'd just be improper!
probably why it rage quit when it got cannon rushed. It was being a good sport then Grant comes along and BM's
Never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake
To be fair, the Fall only takes place a few days after the invasion began, so I always just imagined that the zerg hadn't reached every corner of Aiur at that point in time.
@@yochaiwyss3843 un-civil, if you will?
I never liked how the UED lost because the writter just made Dugalle become stupid out of nowhere.
The point of the UED was that even when they were outnumbered by literally every other race they were still cunning enough to turn their own weapons against them and win at the end, but then, out of nowhere Dugalle starts to trust a stranger over his right hand man and supposedly best friend, and then at the end he didn't even have any contingency plan in case he failed, all because plot didn't want them around anymore.
A better plot would be: When Stukov goes missing (this also doesn't make sense, he could contact Dugalle during the mission, so why did he never explained things) DUgalle sends a elite squad to investigate things (a squad that doesn't include Duran), we still play as Duran but now we need to infiltrate where Stukov is before the squad arrives, the rest of that mission would play the same, but now with Dugalle being wary of Duran from the start.
And in Omega, Dugalle should copy all the data of what they learned in the sector, put it into one of their ships and then make that ship go radio silent and start going towards earth from the beginning, maybe from the moment Mengsk made the deal with him to ally and fight kerrigan in Omega, that would guarantee that even if they fail the UED would know what happened and be allowed to prepare, after all, it sounds dumb he not only never considered they might lose but also didn't consider the other factions, especially mengsk could just turn on them if they won vs kerrigan.
Those 2 changes would make them way more smart, fill the biggest plotholes and even give some leeway for them to maybe return.
He does mention in the epilogue that news of their defeat should have reached Earth by now and was writing an email to be sent to his wife so they still had some form of contact with the rest of the UED. Doesn't really sound like a ship going radio silent and rushing back home would be necessary.
@@toddclawson3619 But at the end of Omega it's said that "As for the UED, none of their ships managed to return, and the earth never knew what happened in that corner of space" or something like that, even in HOTS kerrigan says stukov can't return to earth because they would send another expedition.
so the main UED forces are in the dark about what happened, so i think a contingency plan to preserve information would be the most inteligent course of action
Definitely the worst part was DuGalle trusting someone who rebelled already once, over his best friend. It's not even said that his mind was dominated (as with Rashagal) - he was just plain stupid.
I agree, it felt pretty startling but I am a super biased UED fan. A lot of it felt like an abridged version of their original fourth faction plans which may have had a larger scope. Then they decided to remove the faction afterwards. Like they had a great idea, lots to aim for but wrote the UED out of it when they realized the extra complications would be too much to keep up with.
@@Camikio i liked the idea of the UED, it's basically a more advanced faction but with fewer people, so they had to be smarter in onder to win enough ground, in that regard they are similar to the Nerazin, but for terran.
but all was scrapped, and the ones with the high tech now are the umojans, even if they barely appear.
i really would love a UED returns DLC, but i doubt it will ever happen now
I think one of the main issues Nova covert ops was, is it didn't have an onboard lounger area like the other Campaigns, like you could go to different rooms on the Hyperion/Leviathan/Spear and talk to people and get some character development through convos, Nova's campaign didn't have that option in it
And on top of that, there are som bizzare holes in units roster. Where are medics ? Or sience vessels ?
It's kinda pointless to have an opinion on a DEI cash-grab anyway. Not to mention the entire Protoss campaign was basically 'How the Protoss Adopted 21st Century Progressivism'. Whole thing was cringe. "Let's sever our nerve cords because we're all individuals but let's also not let anybody discriminate based on their traditions." They also hammered the 'AIs are people that should have rights' angle that was being pushed in everything at the time, pissing on the grave of Fenix to do so.
@@Marcara081 lol used DEI for a campaign that came out 8 years ago.
@@jordanread5829 "DEI" is also such a bizarre complaint about a campaign about NOVA of all people lol, her design and personality is "hot chick"
@@ComissarYarrick They were streamlined (you could cure biological units with the raven's repair drone and mechanical units by equipping them with the auto-heal or through SCVs), but it annoyed me as well. It's like they wanted to make the missions harder by removing units, which is fine, however there was NO story-related reason for such.
Story-wise, I always felt like SC1 and Brood War were more so about the races (and their various subfactions) as a whole, and the events and conflicts surrounding them, with the main characters being the vessels you experience that story WITH. Yes, there was a lot of interpersonal drama, but it always felt like a story about the Terrans, Zerg, and Protoss as a whole. The fact that many of the cinematics do not revolve around the main characters is a testament to this. The main characters are often experiencing the story just the way you are in the pre-mission briefings. And, you ARE a character yourself, along for the ride just like everybody else.
SC2 flips things, with the characters being front and center and the struggles of the larger races/subfactions becoming more of the backdrop. Every cinematic involves major characters, and you are much more directly playing "as" them since you are no longer addressed as an in-universe figure. It is much more about the interpersonal drama than SC and BW were.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it was a change that allowed some of the weaker writing to manifest in my opinion.
Not that the comparison holds nearly as well, but you see a bit of this between Warcraft 2 and 3 as well. The increase of character drama over overarching plot progression causing narrative stumbles. It's a better story overall but the increase in detail reveals it isn't the writer's forte. Medivh flat out sucked in WC3, and only existed because there had to be SOME reason for characters to randomly sail to a continent that nobody knew about before. And the fact they thought the Stratholme mission clearly painted Arthas as monstrous when... while that might have been their intent, what they provided just made it seem depressingly reasonable. Minus his disbanding the paladins, which was just bad writing regardless.
Metzen and whoever else contributed to the writing on these games were pretty good at broad stroke storytelling, but once they started zooming in and getting more personal... it wasn't catastrophic failure by any means but lets just say more than a few hurdles got knocked over.
@Reshapable So, whether or not what Arthas did was reasonable or not isn't really the point there, though. It was that his first thought in that scenario was to basically burn down the city. Even if it had to be done, the sight of it all would still be horrific.
Also, Arthas doesn't disband the Paladins. He just tells Uther that he's been decommissioned, and in that literal same scene, Uther just tells him 'shut up, you're not my king, dude'.
In fact, Uther was the one who convinced Terenes to order Arthas home from Northrend, which forced him to burn down his own ships.
And again, the order was still around in literally the next campaign.
...And still again we see them in the Frozen Throne Undead campaign in the very first mission. You have to kill them to "disband" them.
I think Tassadar probably sums up your thoughts on that campaign best with his quote,
"Aiur burns at the touch of the Zerg, and you come all this way to arrest me?"
I think that line and that mission really showcases how the protoss government I still believe themselves invincible and how the only one playing 4D chess was Tassadar
The only thing we learn about Nova, is that she likes to bet during missions.
Which we learn in her introduction in Wings, and is reinforced in Covert Ops.
That's it. That's all her traits, besides "the mission first".
And ass
Funnily enough she barely gets any development in comics too. She’s like the most reoccurring from games character in them and there’s still nothing to her.
It is a shame that her original game got canceled. Would have been a good way to set her up and make a lot of people happy to see her when she pops up in Starcraft 2.
Don’t forget her other three traits: Blonde, woman, Ghost
@@toddclawson3619 I have a feeling she would have been just as undeveloped in that too given the years it was worked on, it was supposed to come out and what of her still survives to this day.
If they had already made her interesting back then it wouldn't be that hard to use those traits in SC 2 and the comics.
On the topic of Tassadar I'd say I never really thought of him as cunning necessarily, and more that he was just supposed to be quite wise. He didn't trick Kerrigan with any elaborate ploys, he just realised that she was overflowing with newfound arrogance and took advantage. That in mind, I'm not particularly disappointed he never resorted to trickery again, though I will always be disappointed in his surrender. Even if it is supposed to be the empathetic, 'human' thing to do, it was also just straight up stupid, counterproductive, and resolved in the next mission using even greater quantities of violence. (otherwise I agree completely so far)
On Wings of Liberty, just wanted to say, really good campaign. I don't really like Terran but it's still by far my favourite campaign just because it has so much charm and flavor. My friend that doesn't play RTS at all accidentally did the entire campaign in 2 sittings because he was so sucked in.
Heart of the Swarm that came after it was a massive disappointment. It didn't need to have WoL levels of polish, I just really like Zerg - and it couldn't even do that right. The enhanced swarm mod where they just removed Kerrigan entirely and put more upgrades into the actual swarm (kind of WoL-style...) was everything I wanted out of a Zerg campaign.
Kind of continuing that tradition, the Spear of Adun wasn't as in your face as Kerrigan but it's stil a large chunk of your power that's not actually invested into your troops that honestly I'd like to see, not minimised for balance reasons, but straight up removed and redistributed into the units like enhanced swarm or WoL.
In summation, I guess enhanced swarm was the best starcraft campaign mechanically(?).
Tassadar tried to employ cunning in convincing the Conclave about the need for the Nerazim. He had them attack a Cerebrate to showcase how futile their efforts were, then told them about the Nerazim's ability to kill them, but all of that backfired. Once he showed Zeratul killing 2 Cerebrates, the Conclave finally conceded to his point, albeit too late.
Personally, I actually like how desperate Tassadar is, in that he makes poor decisions at times during the campaign.
I don't think the spear should be removed, i honestly like the help it provides, the thing i didn't like was that a lot of the skills were bad, like, you would never want deploy pylon or even reinforcements, and you would never want purifier bean or the stargate warp, because they cost a lot to either use, unlock or are just completely overshadowed by other skills.
but nearly every time i saw someone "Balance it" they always nerf the good ones and leave the bad as is, i hates that and i do hope that the new protoss mod that is being made by the enhanced sward mod maker fixes that
@@Ricardo_Rick Honestly, I think the core problem with the Adun really is that you have support options competing for energy and slots with attacking options. Some of the support options *are* weak, yes, and that *is* part of the problem, but there's always going to be a preference for the button that instantly solves the problem as opposed to the button that helps you solve the problem faster/cheaper. (Technically Time Stop is also a support ability, but I feel this also applies to it just by sheer virtue of "freezing everything immediately solves the problem too, just in a different way".)
@@Hexagonaldonut yeah, i would really prefer if the spear skills were all CD based only instead of energy, that way you wouldn't feel like you are wasting energy every time you use a skill that isn't solar lance or shield overcharge
@@Ricardo_Rick The pylon is super useful for reinforcement warp-ins, and it's a free pylon. The reinforcement version is fine and usable. Very nice in some missions and fun. In the defend-the-overloading-temple mission, for example, it's satisfying to drop a pylon with a warp-in on the objectives late in the mission when you're already built out
Purifier beam is free and just as good. It's perfect for the last mission on brutal, where I had to optimize everything, and it's just enough and perfect timing to wipe certain waves. Stop time is useless because you don't have an army, bombardment is expensive, overkill, and doesn't offer much more.
Stargate/robo warp is useless on brutal, though, because nexus overcharge and auto-vespene are just that good. I imagine more casual players did find it fun, though, as did I, when I first played the campaign.
Shield overcharge is a dud in my opinion, not worth either energy or micro, and not fun to use at all.
We follow in the footsteps of one Rames Jaynor and his telepath friend, Kara Serrigan
:D
I hope so much that the campaign of ZeroSpace will be good and interesting. It's the reason I backed the game.
I do not care for PvP (just like to watch Serral, Harstem, Clem, Reynor...), but I love a good single player campaign.
And Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void was such a big disappointment in this regard :(
@@wedgeantilles8575LOTV was pretty good actually.
@@ExValeFor I asked
@@ExValeFor I asked
28:08 Xanthos is the gold standard for what an RTS boss fight should be imo. The Heart of the Swarm boss fights are RPG boss fights. You have a hero fighting a boss with some limited forces that might as well function as summons rather than an army. Xanthos is a super unit that requires actively macroing to defeat. I wish we got an Amon boss fight like the Xanthos.
They sure learned from mistakes of last mission of Epilogue, but now it feels even weirder, Starcraft saga have a cool ass final boss but its not a dark god who is to blame for everyone, but Dominion super-mech stolen by old revanchist
Legit, us not getting a proper Amon boss fight is my only regret about the epilogue.
@@LanceOmikron That last mission was so-so in terms of mechanics. It was supposed to be this desperate attempt to kill Space Chtulhu before he eats your base and your allies', but in the end it's just "make 40 upgraded Mutalisks and click on the objective", like Grant himself said.
@@rafaellago172 quite a few different missions can be cheesed with air units in similar ways. The final HotS mission, you don't need to clear all of Mengsk's bases before blowing up the door to the castle. You can just skip right to the end by flying around the top of the map with mutas and destroy the door that way. It's how I beat it on brutal.
I think out of the Starcraft 2 campaigns, the thing that drags the game down for me (besides Kerrigan being too much) is what feels like wasted potential. Evolution missions let you take your guys in interesting directions, but the fact that they're optional mean you never really get to see them shine since they can't be considered in mission design. On top of that, I generally find their introductory missions a little lackluster. When you compare to Wings of Liberty giving us the vulture on a mobile and cheap mission, or the banshee on a hit and run mission. I can call Cutthroat "The Vulture Mission" and it's valid, as it is for most of the unit introductions. Meanwhile, even with the most extreme example I can think of, swarm hosts on The Crucible, it doesn't feel like much of a swarm host mission. I'm sure Kerrigan herself makes this issue worse, since she can handle anything and thus new units aren't as impactful as in WoL.
As evident by Grant completing the run on brutal without producing anything
I think its also a case of each of them feeling very isolated from one another. The protoss being made up of lots of distinct tribes with distinct units and powers is kinda neat until you realize you've fought plenty of them and none of them are special or unique in the other campaigns Why are the purifiers a separate tribe?!
But I like the "kerrigan mission" and the "kerrigan mission" (personally I think that the "kerrigan mission" kinda sucked, but that's just me)
@@adlad1563 You're out of your mind. "Kerrigan mission" is much superior to "Kerrigan mission", especially after you complete "Kerrigan mission" and...
C O L L E C T
S O M E
E S S E N C E
One thing that always bothered me about the Brood War campaign is how much stuff is happening in the background that is glossed over. During Dunes of Shakuras Raynor and Fenix decide to stay on Aiur and close the warp gate to Shakuras. Then they were apparently contacted by Kerrigan somehow, who was last seen on Char killing dark templar in Eye for an Eye, and she tells Raynor to go save Mengsk from the UED, either before or after showing up on Shakuras to participate in the whole Uraj-Khalis-kill-Aldaris storyline. In the meantime, Raynor for some reason lost Hyperion right after Overmind's defeat and somehow regained it by the time he shows up on Korhal. Presumably while Raynor was away saving Mengsk, Fenix stayed on Aiur defending the outpost we attack in Emperor's Flight. And at the end of Emperor's Flight, we see a dropship (again, not Hyperion, but it's likely an oversight) fleeing through a warp gate which then self-destructs. Where did that warp gate lead to? No idea, but next time we see Raynor, Fenix and Mengsk is on Tarsonis during Vile Disruption. Then Kerrigan asks Mengsk to lend her a psi-emitter, which he does. Where did he get one? Did he have one on him all this time? Theoretically one could've been kept on board on Norad III, but if so, why ask Mengsk for it in the first place? And after all of this, there presumably was a second front led by Raynor, Fenix and Mengsk during Liberation of Korhal, of which we know nothing.
So yeah, a lot of stuff just "happens" implicitly that we don't know much about, and it's a bit of a shame. Nowadays we have fanmade campaigns to fill in the gaps, but imo it would've been more satisfying to connect all the dots during the main storyline.
You make some good points, but I don't think it would have been hard for Mengsk to secure a psi-emitter. Just because Korhal has fallen, doesn't mean that the Dominion has completely capitulated. Mengsk probably just contacted some of his forces that he knew would have psi-emitters on hand and retrieved them.
@@toddclawson3619 Yeah, I'm not saying he had no way of getting it, just that the game doesn't say anything about how he did it. My point basically is that the game leaves a lot to player's imagination, but it'd be cool if these events were covered somehow.
I think that is actually good storytelling. It means the universe has something going to make it alive. Meanwhile SC2 has nothing of the sort beyond KERRIGAN - Raynor is operating, nothing changes about Mengsk or the terrans, or the protoss Daalaram, the taldarim just are random tribes with no command you find around, and zerg are semi hibernating apparently. Sure... On HotS literally nothing happens anywhere except where Kerrigan is... And in the LotV campaign the only one that is doing her own thing is Kerrigan tracking the hybrid meanwhile the only thing that changed in the terran faction is that horner got a new title but preparing for the hybrid and stuff? What hybrid?
The only other character that is active at all while this all happens is zeratul because he is obsessed, not his faction, but a single character. I think the SC1 background stories are fleshed out in novels - and no, SC2 doesn't count in novel form because SC1 had things happening that weren't explained for foreshadowing while SC2 are random prologue stories and so on... I appreciate them but it shows a bad setting at its core for SC2.
It's less aggravating than Precursor simply not being included in the full release at all. On WC3, they included the demo campaign at least (though they cut the voicelines)
Maybe lack of time? You made such good points, and other point that confused me so much, why didn't Kerrgian kill the Overmind on char???? LIKE BITCH WHAT THE FUCK
Gotta say I love your upload schedule; I recently got moved to a shift that means I don't get home until like, 12:30am, so there's almost always a GGG video to watch to get me through the rest of the night before bed.
I'm only a few minutes into the video but I love analytical breakdowns of the campaigns and your four checks (especially the vibe check of a campaign) are just so on point, casual, and get constructive. I can't wait to hear more.
Keep being awesome Grant
I really love how Starcraft story beginns with "train 10 marines 🥰"
To suddenly finish with "eliminate God from existence 👿"
Yeah, it's like "Grrr gotta grow angry with those futuristic dictators" to "AW SHIT SPACE CTHULHU JUST ATE MY ENTIRE BASE"
I love that you gave brief reminders of what the SC1 campaigns were about.
I really enjoy this kind of conversation pieces from you, even on the gameplay channel just hearing you banter makes me keep watching
This is definitely a great format, would love a warcraft version of this video or a custom campaign tier list
SC2 Zeratool is such a tool that I doubt he is the true Zeratul. He's still out there, somewhere.
Zeratul was basically just a plot device in WoL and HotS. He did one thing in LotV and then died... I wouldn't call him a tool, but considering he was literally a tool to move the plot forward, that is a surprisingly accurate statement xD
You mean Blizzard failed to write a good character the second time around? Could this have anything to do with them making Nova's character model ugly? Perhaps they are -ESG- linked.
He's a senile old man, cut him some slack. He drank too much Terrazine.
I have 1 thing to add about LoV campaign. The way how some of the hardest missions are shoved in the begging of the campaign gave me, as someone very mediocre at RTS and also not very invested into protoss in particular, very hard time getting into LoV. While I beat both WoL and HotS multiple times on brutal and did achievements runs, I never did it with LoV. Although it is a niche perspective perhaps.
The worst mission for this matter is Skyshield. It is ridiculously hard for a 4th mission and you don't even get to unlock anything new.
@@ThanhLe-ti8nx Technically if you do it as your 4th mission you do unlock Orbital Strike there.
It was misson 3 lotv for me, not that I couldnt beat it, but that I barely completed it despite feeling like I did everything perfectly, because theres very little you can do in mission 3. Oh and I hate celestial locks both in coop and camapign
Skyshield as mission4 was actually alright, blink stalkers are very good, one thing you should learn early on is that all zealot variants are equally useless. And once you unlock voidrays no mission will dare stand in your way again.
In terms of difficulty lotv was often times easier than WOL because of the get out of jail solarlance and voidray superiority.
HOTS meanwhile felt like I was playing on hard, but im quite certain it was set to brutal, I played completely awfully, still won somehow. And it isnt just kerrigan being op as I played very badly on the crucible too and still beat it first try.
Still havent beaten epilogue on brutal. Why does Artanis refuse to defend his base?
@@VladLad mission 3 is not too hard for me, there's no time limit, and I can take time to turtle up and recover the loss.
Mission 4 however has a timer breathing down on my neck, blink stalker is the best way to do it. But I think it's too much to ask a new player to do blink micro and decent macro on the 4th mission, given the difficulty.
@@Photoloss Oh I completely forgot about that, also you get to unlock dragoon and centurion, though blink stalker is still the best you have.
3:46 *Mission 4 of Rebel Yell is the Jacobs Installation. I know it's totally forgettable and pretty unimportant but it is there.
Same with all non-build missions
Honestly, WoL is my favorite campaign mostly because of how it was my first Starcraft game and how it was a great introduction to the Starcraft series as a whole. The characters were amazing, the doctor really was poorly utilized and showed have been done better, the "choose your next mission" thing was super fun, so many fun units to play around with, so many fun missions to play like Breakout, Media Blitz, and especially All In. It's just such a fantastic game and I agree that it's an S tier Starcraft campaign and the best Starcraft campaign of them all.
21:20 LMAO "Every character is either beloved or a doctor"
I'm still not sure why Grant has such a grudge against Hanson.
@@ComissarYarrick no reason to love her + she's bland and basic af + she got no hope of actually curing the Zergavirus so no reason not to burn this poor colony (will get infested sooner or later lmao) + she's a love interest for some unknown reason + she acts like a Karen mom for some reason + she's got the worst missions
Narud is worse somehow ahahahaha
HotS ain't bad, eh?)))))))))
@@ComissarYarrick Grant is tired from her yelling at you if you kill the civvies on her first mission along with her comments on the second one.
@@GerMorden i mean she should yell at you for killing the civvies. He hates her because she basically shoves Stetmann out of the way, has no real personality beyond cares about colonists and in love with Jim for some reason, and makes you sound like a terrible person for doing the smart thing and listening to Selendis.
I think the fall was actually pretty good at mimicking the reality of mid war internal crisis. If you look, for example, at the Judean civil war during the rebellion against the Romans you will see how crazy these things can get, even in the face of an unstoppable invading force. And also how that invading force can take a step back for a while to let their enemies consume themselves from within.
I do think there was a certain element of atmosphere missing, but mostly in the non-civil war missions. The 3rd mission is pratically the 1st again with a few extra units, the 9th does not feel sneaky at all, despite being portrayed as a sort of infiltration, and of course, tassadar's sacrifice always annoyed me, and even my 6 year old son found it unrealistic given the destruction he brought upon the zerg.
Yeaaahh, as a kid that ending was probably the best, I'd seen in a while. It felt genuinely epic. It's the difference between gameplay and lore. In lore it's a losing fight and killing the overmind with regular weapons is impossible. Tassadar is the only one who can actually hurt the thing. Then the zerg onslaught is broken - they become feral.
For my money, it was the strongest chapter.
Wow! Grant is so skilled that he can play and absolutely crush StarCraft and StarCraft II campaigns while simultaneously discussing about their enjoyability and gameplay and making hand gestures as well! Amazing skills Grant!!
Honestly I can unironically see it being posible. I mean this is the man who beat all of starcraft without losing units.
New challenge run: beat SC 1&2 using only voice commands to keyboard and mouse inputs.
If WOL had the archive function, it would be perfect. I wish I could try a specific mission with a specific set of units/upgrades without having to start the campaign over
Hi, Grant! I think you are spot on, especially for the Starcraft 1 campaigns. I was surprised you placed the UED campaign into B tier, but listening to your explanations made sense. Still I believe, because of how memorable some of the missions are, like stealing a whole fleet of battlecruisers it deserves A tier. I still remember being 3 year old (I am born 5 years after BW was released) and playing those missions, although when I think about it it is probably mostly nostalgia playing a role here.
Another thing to mention is the HotS campaign. While I do completely agree with your takes especially with the one about the advertisement of 27 missions initially, I do think that the Evolution Missions were a good and fresh addition to HotS. They gave us an oppotunity to look into Abathur as a character more and also see how the Swarm was able to evolve biologically. Because of them, and because of the level of unit customization I think that it should be placed in B tier.
One final note, maybe it will be more interesting for main channel video to do a proper ranking of all of the campaigns. Tier List is also a great option, but maybe seeing your top 3 favorite campaigns with their exact order could also be interesting.
Would disagree on NCO being forgettable. First set of missions already introduces several Nova-only sections, and even has the side-scrolling vulture biking. Building units to put in the destroyed building garrisons might not be super unique but is a really cool visual having the units interacting with the terrain more.
Second set of missions introduces the infested Banshees and Siege Tanks, which shows that the Zerg is still actively adapting and continuing to be a violent force in the galaxy in spite of Kerrigan/Zagara, and is more than just "hurr durr psi emitters" that we got in the first set of missions. Being able to select which Zerg garrisons you fight at which time is also pretty neat. The constant flashbacks between the original city and the infested one are really cool, because you have a reference of how things were and how all-consuming the Zerg can be.
Third set of missions does fall a little short in this regard, but the big city defense mission with all the Battlecruisers is an awesome spectacle. I remember it more than the final mission because of the visuals and atmosphere on its own. Final mission by comparison - while much more challenging and fun - is just "big robut". I don't even remember if it takes place on Korhal, another planet, or a space platform.
NCO was short, but it did its best to try and introduce something new to the game in every mission, and doing this after ALL the other SC2 missions is pretty impressive for a quick DLC bonus campaign.
NCO is cool gameplay wise.
But lore-wise? Uhhh...
I forgot what I wanted to say about it.
Oh, I for my part, like this kind of format. I like to reminisce about the campaigns and remember everything again. Love it. Thank you for making videos ❤
The thing about Rebel Yell that makes it really stand out among the others is that it sets a lowish bar and then wildly clears it. You start off thinking that it's the standard RTS story where you get a couple of objectives and kill stuff trying to harm your people. Then you realize the confederacy is callous and evil, the zerg are seemingly unthinking, locust-like forces of nature consuming everything in their path, and that the Protoss are as enigmatic as they are genocidal. The betrayal does come out of left-field, but is brilliant in hindsight.
Then in the very next chapter, you learn that the zerg are not only terrifyingly sentient, but also have a cosmic and long-reaching goal of their own. It's as surprising as it is horrifying, and the landing wouldn't have been nearly as good without the take-off that was episode 1.
Episode 1 was really a masterpiece of storytelling with a limited perspective.
This was very pleasant to listen to. Would love more tier lists, whether its here on the archive or if its on the main channel!
Looking forward to more!
Extremely hot take: The Wings of Liberty ending ought to have been reversed. Resolve the Tychus angle somehow (maybe there's something more to his bargain with mengsk- some other thing mengsk has over Tychus that we can resolve in a commando mission; the armor-lock and implied kill device is laughably weak in a sci-fi setting. No way that theres not some way to remove that suit safely, internal bomb or no.) and have Matt and Raynor approach human kerrigan at the end there. Have Matt be cued in on the Zeratul angle. Matt begs Raynor to show some compassion- that we need Kerrigan to be a plot device or whatever. Raynor's having none of it. He goes for his revolver, probably invoking Fenix's name, before Matt kills him dead. Credits. This helps HoS a lot- Kerrigan has no personal connection to Valerian or Matt. She's inherently untrustworthy- and rightly so. We cut the Raynor abduction angle from that campaign, and bring Matt back in a little later just like before. Kerrigan's given some time to mourn Jim, maybe even to lash out at Matt. I dunno. Having Raynor decide to try to redeem Kerrigan then watch her lay waste to Korhal in HotS just feels bizarre. HotS in general is woefully... middling, in terms of character studies. I dont even want to talk about the LotV epilogue. Stukov had the only good moment there.
Ok so this started off absurd with Tychus and is rambly as a whole. However, switching Jim and Tychus to Matt and Jim is actually a interesting and simple fix to some of the problems in HOTS, all I really would say different is instead keeping the conclusion to Tychus' character and just moving it around to fit in.
nope, wasn't a good moment
just some cheap way of getting nostalgia
Narud suddenly revives, materialises out of thin air (or the void ig) and just dies instantly with basically no resistance
and then Stukov has his totally warranted totally awesome one-liner and he finishes off this totally worthy enemy
Cool, what can I say
That is some interesting fan fiction. Would be curious to read
This is wonderful! I was so pissed at Raynor for choosing that traitor Kerrigan over his long-time friend and personal favourite Tychus. Plus there is already a setup for Matt taking over the rebellion because perpetually drunk Raynor is in no shape to be in any position of authority whatsoever. His time had come and gone.
9:22 - That`s a really good point! Imagine if zerg were suddenly attacking all the protoss on "Civil War" missions! That will be much more interesting and complicated!
I think only one bad thing about WoL - the small scale of action. I know that it is because weak PCs in 2010 and in later campaigns scale grows up, but still it feels not as great as it could be. Playing as a small squad on low resource map is a nice gimmick for a couple of missions but not for the whole campaign. This also applies to map design. Most maps are either too focused on one main direction with some sideways to protect from almost unclearable bases or place you at some unpopulated static open space which just feels dead and frozen (like Haven's Fall or Media Blitz). I think HotS and LotV got this at least somewhat better on some maps: you build more, you lose more, you constantly fight for map control and have to clear different parts of map not only for objectives but also to reduce enemy pressure and gain more resources.
Well, i have some ideas how to improve WoL map design and scale, but for now i just need to get much more editor experience.
9:00 that's exactly the point. overmind was overruning the planet while protoss were clinging to their traditions and rules. they thought tassadar heresy is more dangerous threat than zerg. and that's exactly why first mission of brood war is escape from aiur. even though overmind got nuked there were so many feral zerg that protoss couldn't survive there
I absolutely love the new format you've put down for this ranking systme. I think it's a great way to get a broad base of ideas spread out and ensure that you have full engagement.
I will slightly disagree on The Fall being C tier. While I don't disagree with you that the civil war thing in the face of annihilation was pretty dumb, Auir is a big fucking planet and the homeworld of the Protoss. The Overmind was likely coordinating against the Golden Armada and fighting other executors elsewhere. It also highlights the arrogance of the Protoss very well, that even Tassadar to an extent had (at least prior to meeting Raynor.). I feel like the Overmind would have known of this, especially upon learning the memories of the Dark Templar that slew Zasz who would undoubtably have a conscious or sub-conscious begrudgement against the Daleem. Also, on top of this from the Overminds' point of view: Why interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake by in-fighting?
I definitely agree on the difficulty being just right on that mission. I feel like if anything the final mission should have been slightly harder, bringing together everything you learned on the prior campaigns but Blizzard still did a good job with it.
Finally, Xanthos and N:CO is Garbage Tier and I will fight anyone on this point. How on Earth would the Xanthos project not be one of the first thing locked down upon discovering one of your generals had mutinied against the Emperor? Also PSI Emitters are apparently a dollar a dime now, because what on Earth could go wrong with mass producing a means of summoning The Swarm to your location? Absolute F tier campaign. I would honestly have much rather it focused on the Kel-Morian side faction if anything, they needed development instead of just being "waagh rescue us pls Dominion.".
I loved all of the starcraft campaigns, but to my mind the best thing Heart of the Swarm offered was the cutscenes. That initial cutscene with the Terran fighting the Zerg that ends with the battlecruiser crash is incredible.
The opening of Heart of the Swarm was pretty awesome to watch. Blizzards cinematic videos in Starcraft and Warcraft were always one of the best parts.
I think one of the elements that are often overlooked in ranking is art. I find cinematics, music, cutscenes, conversations and voice acting are extremely important to loving the story of the game and integrating you into its atmosphere. This was a huge factor in Starcraft 1 supremacy and they nailed it again in Legacy of the void, music was phenomenal in Legacy, very emotional makes you feel like a member of a protoss tribe fighting for your survival.
Bad line reads, music cutting out too early, rushed, rushed, rushed. You can tell the team working on the in-game cutscenes hated them and for good reason. I didn't have 'Protoss adopt 21st Century liberal mindset' on my bingo card. Especially not from the same company with the balls to make the Koprulu sector a homage to the American Confederacy and the SCVs all black guys. But hey, if you liked it I hope one day that you genuinely don't.
Alarak became the best character in the campaign simply because they were willing to grant him enough personality to have a character, because they wanted him to be a bad guy or anti-hero with some sort of redemption arc (see: more liberal, less traditional). But since they made him a character and not a mouthpiece of the author people like him most, if only for a lack of other options. Ironic.
And I say this all as a libertine. The whole campaign was gross propaganda designed for children to imbibe without thinking about it.
I love the format of being slightly edited video in between your devlogs of challenge runs cutting hours and hours of work into thirty minutes and the completely uncut stuff you normally do on this channel. That said, your rankings are also well thought out and fair, this is easily one of the best GGG Archives videos and I'm excited for the main channel release.
My main problem with the Brood War Protoss campaign is a plot hole. You have a mission where you can either clear your way to the rock or smack the new overmind around a bit until it gets a headache.... but you have access to Dark Templar on that mission and Zeratul is also overseeing the mission... So why can't we just outright kill the second overmind right there and then? Zeratul does it in the zerg BW campaign... I mean how many cerebrates did Daggoth throw together to create the baby Overmind? Does he have enough to make a third?
While it is nice that the mission does offer a choice on how you approach it, the fact that it gives you a choice that seems stupid so the plot can move on feels bad to me. And the other campaigns (UED and QoB) suffer as a result. Also why is there a random warp gate connecting Auir and Shakuras?
My personal ranking would be the following. I am counting the prologue and epilogue of Legacy of the Void as separate campaigns because they kinda are. I mean neither of them are required for the LotV Brutal achievement. Is it cheating? Yes, yes it is.
1. UED campaign. (Terran Brood War)
2. QoB campaign. (Zerg Brood War)
3. Legacy of the Void (just the main campaign)
4. Rebel Yell
5. Wings of Liberty
6. Overmind
7. Nova Covert Ops
8. SC1 base Protoss
9. Prologue
10. Brood War Protoss
11. Epilogue (sadly the first mission does not salvage it).
12. Heart of the Swarm
I haven't played the N64 Stukov mini campaign so I am leaving it unranked.
Heart of the Swarm honestly was a disappointment. Being able to go to Char straight after the tutorial missions should not have been a thing. Char should've been one of the final planets before Korhal alongside Duran / Naruds main Hybrid lab / Amons Temple. Or do what they did with Aiur in LotV and go to Char first for Ziggy Zags but you have to flee soon after. It is why I always go to Kaldir first. It feels appropriate given the hit and run, using the environment to your advantage and how justified Kerrigan is in fearing the Golden Amanda. Unfortunately going to Char first is canonical... yay. Also the fact that Primal Kerrigan can just solo nearly the rest of the campaign on brutal brings the campaign to the bottom on my list. A hero should be impactful yes, but they shouldn't be invincible. Nova in NCO feels balanced for the campaign. Is she powerful? Yes, but not overpowered. I know who I would bet on if it was the Xanthos vs Nova in a 1v1.
The epilogue needed to be longer. You are heading into the Void, the reality that Amon has made his own. And it feels like a quick smash and grab. Stukov getting the true killing blow on Duran is always a delight to see. Stukov nearly ruined everything for Duran back in the Brood War without even knowing it. The rivalry the two had in Heart of the Swarm was also a highlight, even if it was short lived. I feel a 9 mission mini campaign like NCO is would be an ideal length as an epilogue. Maybe explore Amon a bit more though this. Show us what he was before ascending. What was it that made him and his followers (i.e. Duran) feel that the infinite cycle was an outright lie.
Funny, I think UED and QoB campaings are the reasons BW have really weak writing, the introduction of an overall weak and dumb faction and that affected minimaly the campaings before or after despite the supposed great impact they had in the universe and a campaing that basically stupidified to absurd degree the rest of the roaster to make sure a character with the level of writing as a self insert manages to win with villian with a mustache lvl of plotting
DuGalle may be the dumbest leader in the whole damn franchise
Stukov mini-campaign is pretty fun, it's worth playing if you like SC1.
Nothing ranks lower than covert ops. Go back to the lab again.
I'd like to offer my thoughts on each SC1 campaign:
SC1 Terran: I think one of the most interesting aspects of the campaign at the time was how personable Raynor was to the nameless Magistrate (the player). I think it deserves a lot of credit for not just telling the story but also involving the player into it, especially in the final mission where Raynor talks at the start it makes it feel like we both got betrayed together. Another reason I wish Horner was somehow written or retconned into being the magistrate from this campaign because their dynamic together with how much they went thought would have been even more meaningful.
SC1 Zerg: I think this campaign gets flak for introducing the protoss as being pretty whatever (after being hyped up and mysterious up until this campaign). The Terran campaign was supposed to introduce the Protoss and Tassadar (and offers an ingame explanation as to why he respected/spared the Terrans) but the Zerg has the first introduction of an actual talking Protoss (you don't "talk" to any protoss in the Terran campaign). It has a lot of heavy lifting to do which makes it feel bad in comparison. Zasz really hating Kerrigan was what made him memorable. The Overmind is one of the best dads ever, he loves all his "children" and never stops praising you for doing your mission of protecting his "daughter" Kerrigan, it brought an unnerving sense of unity in the Zerg when every other faction is all infighting and political drama.
SC1 Protoss: Another reason why this campaign fell flat is the absence of the Terran missions from before. All we know about Tassadar is in small summaries between missions, we the player don't really experience why Aldaris and by extension the player hates Tassadar even though we're supposed to be Protoss, like "wasn't he the good guy?". Like, if we actually witnessed Tassadar himself spare us while we were playing Terran, it would be a huge callback and consequence that we have to deal with 2 campaigns later as the Protoss player but that development was completely missed. It's also confusing as to why Raynor's Raiders were buddying up with Tassadar on the Char installation mission for seemingly no reason (if you don't really scour for lore), all you get is "hey, mind if we tag along? (Mr. Hostile Alien who burns worlds?)". Also Tassadar's confrontation with Duke was completely out of nowhere, why was Tassadar regretting sparing Duke again? When did he spare him? How does he even know General Duke's full name and title? What history did they have? We don't know because so much context is missing in the Terran missions.
BW Protoss: One thing to mention is that Raynor and Fenix were effectively cut off from the entire Protoss faction after Shakuras. Raynor and Fenix would never know Kerrigan was ever on Shakuras and betraying everyone. Another subtle thing was that Aldaris didn't just know Kerrigan was untrustworthy but he also knew Raszagal was mind controlled by her, so Kerrigan kills him not just because he didn't trust her but he was about to reveal to everyone that she was controlling the matriarch. This campaign also has the first introduction to the UED who we know nothing about other than the opening cinematic, we only know they're here but not the primary concern of the Protoss faction. I liked the UED mission because it's the first time we see Artanis as young and a bit naive, it's a good callback to how Artanis was the executor from SC1 and was equally naive following the conclave to arrest Tassadar, it also makes sense as to why he and Fenix (equally bold) were such good friends.
BW Terran: I agree this campaign is way too fast, but still think it's the most exciting campaign that deserves an A. Also the lack of Protoss conflict in this campaign is story-appropriate where they don't really have an immediate reason to antagonize the Protoss, their mission is to arrest Mensgk and control the Overmind, nothing really to do with the Protoss. The only run-in they had was the Protoss force getting through their blockade. Fenix's Protoss force is the only ones they face because he and Raynor are acting together.
BW Zerg: This campaign is the ultimate tie-in campaign. Kerrigan being the the Queen B of the Universe also has the quality of having her finger in every pie, drawing literally every character and faction together into an Infinity Wars-esque ultimate gathering. You interact with (and betray) literally everyone which is a huge call back if you've played every campaign so far. Even when you don't expect it she manages to drag Zeratul into the conflict at the last minute. The final mission is even a final stand at unifying against the big bad (ie you) but Thanos wins in the end. This is also the completion of Kerrigan's story arc which was developing since SC1 Terrain campaign, and the pay off here is so good. This is also the campaign with the bonus mission which at the time was extremely unsettling, like something so big that it makes all the current Kerrigan shenanigans less significant.
Regarding the original protoss campaign (The Fall), you said that it doesn't make sense that the Overmind would sit back while the protoss were fighting amongst themselves. But recall that the plan of the Overmind was to escape the Xel'naga's control by infesting Kerrigan and letting her take over the swarm. If the zerg win vs protoss, then the Overmind's plan will fail. The Overmind is doing what they can to suicide by protoss, and this includes sitting back while the protoss are doing political stuff. The Overmind could not exert their will against the Xel'naga's general directives, but they could make small decisions like allowing the protoss to fight one another, since that would technically align with the Xel'naga's general instructions.
great content, i think too many youtubers try content like this and make it drawn out with live chat notes and this is a nice condense version of your notes with that delicious voice of yours about a game i love. thumbs up
Rebel Yell: I think the development of Kerrigan and Mengsk's relationship is implied well to not require the additional missions but primarily I think the lack of additional time leads into Mengsk's mistake backfiring as being something he hadn't completely planned for Kerrigan and hadn't forseen any complications. After that mistake it leads him to being far more paranoid and builds his character better.
Overmind: The Cerebrates are underdeveloped, but Kerrigan and Tassadar relationship is good and interesting and feels like it leads into Kerrigan's almost personal attack against the Dark Templar in Brood War
The Fall: Wish it was more interesting; wish they had continued that development in the background betwen Kerr & Tass as opposed to the endless civil war chase. You make a lot of great points already about it. If I could change it I would want that campaign to be from the perspective from Tassadar escaping from the Conclave whilst continuing to harrass and slow down the zerg and Kerrigan on Aiur which would explain what was happening on with the zerg whilst still managing the civil war
2nd Protoss Campaign: Liked the campaign but Aldaris didn't show why he would be objective enough to be right about Kerrigan and not understand where Tassadar was coming from. He never felt redeemed and the Protoss suffered so much from Tassadar dying as being the only competent general it felt. Considering their galactic nature, was the Civil War on Aiur really mean no-one of importance appeared other than Tassadar and Aldaris?
Iron Fist: This feels like the competence you'd expect from the Galactic Protoss influence from a single strike force from Earth. Wish the idea and references would have continued into SC2 considering they never of them again. Agree that more time was required to explore DeGaulle & Stukov and why distrust was so readily jumped to, would have been interesting to see something where Stukov chose to do something differently but worked out against DeGaulle's orders to setup the reason for doubt
Queen Of Blades: Loved this campaign, maybe i'm weird but the pacing for the Kel-Morine mission was nice as a newbee, it entertained the idea of how to macro more instead of 12 drones are all i need mentallity - it spoke to an rts development more than a story but gave you lore and story over destroy all which I thought was unique for the period. Otherwise top tier campaign
WOL: Just straight up agree. I think having the Terran do a tough defence mission as the final mission worked so well and had exciting pacing. My only gripe is the Taldarim being apparently useless. Never felt like they were a legitimate threat even though they were build to be, otherwise amazing campaign
HOTS: I do believe they did the scale very well for the zerg and the ability to swarm and get the feeling of controlling a massive army, shame they invalidated it with Uber Kerrigan. Almost wished they had Kerrigan remain looking human but acting Zerg to show that dichotomy instead of crazy zerg monster. Those extra missions could have included UED scouts and potential eyes on the Koprulu sector as a potential foreshadowed threat currently outside of Kerrigan's control but they wanted to do the Hybrid as the only threat
LOTV: I liked the campaign but I wish they had gone more along a Battlestar Galactica vibe of escape and required to scrap and scrape up the resources for specific systems to bring operational instead of the generic super gem that does everything trope. Considering how the story had built to this point they don't have infinite resources and have not had a break from the back foot since SC1 realistically. It felt a bit of a let down after the story hype and then the Epilogue just left open questions in my head around story which is not what you want. I don't think I could give this campaign an 'A'. Ultimately, I liked the concept but not the execution.
NCO: Haha, it doesn't feel canon, I enjoyed the mission designs, story was not bad honestly. Again execution of being 3 missions every so often meant you couldn't get excited and only ever played it 3 or 4 years after it had fully released. Nothing to do with UED so thumbs down :P
Just some thoughts, totally Protoss biased as you can tell, and missed some interesting branches that would have been better to explore. Nice video Grant regardless, I liked this video design that can add to a collective feeling. Great vid
*First campaign (Terran)* : Agreed on the betrayal of Kerrigan. To me, it comes out of the left field - the only thing close to dissident she shows is that she doesn't like using the psi emitters, but even that Mengsk manages to justify to her: "We will do whatever it takes to safeguard humanity." - and she is on board with it from that point onward.
So Mengsk throwing her to the Zerg after that is.. premature, and the fact they made a book afterwards explaining how she was the one who killed his parents means they were aware of it too - because it comes across as a later justification for the betrayal.
But, as a campaign, it's a good setting-setter. Confederacy = Bad. Mengsk = Super Bad. Raynor = Good. Zerg = Nom. Protoss = Bug exterminators, sorry about the collateral.
I'd give it a A. It's got flaws, but It's competent.
*Second campaign (Zerg)* : By nature of the Zerg being a hive mind as centralized as it is, every character other than Kerrigan and the Overmind is.. there. The Cerebrates being blobs of flesh and blood is good for the alien-ness of it all, but they don't *do* anything, acting through their minions.
Which is fine, but their designs really means it is difficult to remember who is who and why they are different from each other, and the campaign suffers as a result. I seem to recall asking myself as a child "Can't the overmind just poop out a new cerebrate? Why is the permanent loss of one so important?"
This is not something that I feel can be rectified by another few missions. This is something that you need a design overhaul to get the uniqueness of the cerebrates across - because otherwise, the gameplay and story says "If you lose an overlord, morph another. They are identical." So why aren't cerebrates?
Still, it is a solid campaign. Builds upon the first one by showing us the different angle. From the perspective of the Zerg, the Terrans are... there. They're building blocks. The real goal is the Protoss who they *obviously* have a feud with. And the Protoss show themselves worthy of the title by tricking Kerrigan and striking real blows against the Zerg.
This is another B for me. It's got that one big flaw, but otherwise it makes it clear that the Terrans' squabbles are peanuts compared to what the Zerg and Protoss have going on.
*Third campaign (protoss)* : Aaaand this is where we get to see that the Conclave are a bunch of head-in-the-sanders superiority-fueled traditionalists. The humble pie they get served throughout the campaign is *long* overdue. But it doesn't downplay the Protoss' ability. Nor their alien nature. They've been around for a *long* time, and the Zerg take full advantage of their percieved superiority. They've obviously got history with the Dark Templar, but given that the Dark Templar are still amicable to the Protoss..
Yeah, the Conclave needed to go, yesterday. And to be fair, they do realize just how badly they screwed the pooch.
As an introduction to the Protoss and why they've been acting like they have, I can't fault this campaign. It's a solid A-tier for me.
*Fourth Campaign (Protoss)* : Turns out that after a civil war, beggars can't be choosers. And this campaign is the protoss coming to terms with that, while at the same time realizing that accepting the devil's offer often means you aid his goals regardless of your intention. It really finalizes the Protoss's transition into a species of "If we don't stand together, none of us stands at all" which we see in LotV, but as a campaign in itself.. it's really casts the protoss as dealing with the consequences of milennia af hubris. Even the ending is them just getting one solid win - Shakuras is disinfected, meaning they have a single planet that is safe, but they have fallen FAR. Long overdue, but necessary.
It's a competent campaign, but the Protoss really feel as a stepping stone towards greater stuff at this point. Which is fine; this is them at their lowest. Kerrigan wouldn't get away with half the shit she pulled if they weren't desperate.
It also sets up the UED, but at this point their deal is really vague, and I have the feeling that single mission with the million missile turrets was added just so they wouldn't come out of the left field entirely - which I think is a mistake; the UED *is* an outside-context problem. It would be a much stronger start to the Terran campaign that follows if we hadn't seen them pop their heads in for a cup of missile turret puzzle mission. As it is, they feel inconsequential to this campaign
So for that, this is another A-tier. Likely would have been S if the UED hadn't reared their heads.
*Fifth Campaign (UED Terrans)* Aaaand here we go. It's time for the protoss to get out-contexted and have an armada fly in to wreck the status quo. And they succeed at this. The UED comes in like a wrecking ball with their own agenda and they care not one bit for anyone in the Korprulu sector. If not for Duran being who he is, the UED would have the entire thing on lock.
They solidly place themselves as a disruptive force in the korprulu sector, and avoid going into hero territory because they want to *control* the Zerg, not wipe them out. Sorry, but after the confederacy and Mengsk's attempts at this, you know these are the bad guys, and the final campaign showing a boatload of propaganda just makes it clear: these are the guys to beat, but who can stand up to them at present? Mengsk is dethroned, the Protoss are hanging on.. and..
Well hello there Kerrigan.
Wait, Kerrigan? Oh noooooooooo...
S-tier campaign. The UED is here, and they are making that everyone else's problem.
*Sixth campaign: Zerg* Time for the Queen of Blades to show off her planning chops. She is on the back foot throughout the entire campaign up until the betrayal, but she manages to outwit everyone to get everything she wants - she ends it as the Queen Bitch of the Korprulu sector, with only the fact that Duran is who he is downplaying her victory.
Which is good, but one thing the campaign lacks is Kerrigan's motivation.. She hates Mengsk, that much is evident. The Protoss are trying to stop her, so that's got to go, and the UED wont abide by her for a single second. She's got reason to fight them all, but.. what then afterwards? She ends the campaign saying "No one will stand in her way", and then she just... doesn't do anything. She allows everyone to rebuild despite being in a position to wipe them out completely.
What is making Kerrigan tick right now? That's something that's left for SC2 to answer, but this campaign in itself just.. "Bad guy wins then doesn't do anything."
B-tier. Kerrigan gets bonus points for all her scheming, but she really lacks motivation.
On the cerebrates: unlike minions and their overlords, cerebrates are basically the children of the Overmind. Unique themselves, with specialized broods to their names. Even the newbie's brood is specialized in a way - it's special in that it's made very specifically to keep Kerrigan safe, and when that's fulfilled to serve as simply more supply limit. In all their alienness, the zerg are pretty much just a nomadic monarchy of sorts with feudal periods whenever the monarch is eliminated or is otherwise unable to pick up the phone to sort out some Niadra issue that came back to bite the Swarm in the ass and disrupt this whole "diplomacy" thing Zagara's been trying to grasp lately.
In Brood War, her motivation is to be all powerful, to control all the swarm the most powerful force in the sector. This is coming from a perspective of feeling weak, abused and betrayed as a human. She gets infested and suddenly feels in control for the first time ever, but it's false until the death of the overmind.
How is that dumb UEF campaing S? It has some of the worst and overall worthless plots in SC history, not to mention earth taking part of the game kills the immersion on a separated fictional scifi world
@@TYR1139 Earth was always part of the story though. The Terran history in the manual of Starcraft 1 explains that the Terrans in the game were descendants of colonizers sent from Earth as both an attempt to colonize new worlds and get rid of what the United Powers League (UED predecessor) considered to be "undesirables" like political prisoners and criminals without being too blatant about their purges.
@toddclawson3619 oh yeah, the manual, which is not in the game and that explanation neither is, which doesn't exclude them for their horrible writing and mediocre missions regardless. The stupidest leader DuGalle, the plot device Duran, the one that is only relevant for resurrection and a cheap one liner at the end, all worthless introductions. The faction that greatly affected the game yet is barely relevant in campaings after as much as their plot devices the psi disruptor and the new overmind, my coment about they breaking the immersion is already justified by how Blizzard themselves barely references them in the sequels. Perhaps they could have worked, but blizzard never had good writers
19:16 "it might not be the most crazy thing by today's standards but when they were made these were novel things and ended up being replicated a lot because of how good they were."
SC1 campaigns look mid today because they were so good at the time and they irreversibly raised our standards sky high as a result.
22:47 So true. Kerrigan in Broodwar was more memorable as a shrewd manipulator than a single unit juggernaut. Her biggest strength was subterfuge, not raw power. In HotS Kerrigan doesn't show enough of her past manipulating side. She keeps scolding Zagara for wanting to solve all problems by hitting them hard, when she is always the heaviest and the most frequent slugger in the Swarm.
I think one factor that also helps Kerrigan in Brood war is that... she is not the master manipulator she likes to think. I mean she is, but she also got duped by Duran. Whom I consider to be the true big bad of Brood War. As everyone got duped by him whether they knew it or not. Only Stukov managed to see through the deception and he was killed because of it. Although he never knew exactly why Duran betrayed him. He believed Duran was infested but as we see in the secret mission, he wasn't. He was faking it and Kerrigan never knew.
In brood war all she had was one brood, so kinda had to scheme.
Except not only most of it is Duran, the other characters are noticiable dumbed down to make their little MC kerrigan win
Exactly, Kerrigan was pretty bad as a unit in BW. She could do damage while cloaked, but had no chance against a medium force. Also, you lost the mission if she died.
In SC2, she can just annihilate pretty much anything AND revives he she dies. There is no reason to ever be sneaky with her.
Was actually struggling to fall asleep, perfect timing. Love your content and what you do, GGG
My biggest issue whith SC 2 is that you never really play as the bad guys. Even as zerg you only feel like an Anti-hero.
but it is posed as the morally superior option FOR SOME ODD REASON
Kerrigan isn't grey moral and never was (same deal with Sylvanas lmao)
she is eveything but good, choosing not to kill civilians is not the same as y'know, not being in position to actually kill them
oh yeaaaaah Char oh yeaaaaaah her conquest of the Dominion oh yeaaaaaah mass infestation
oh yeaaaaah some of Jimmie's best buddies on that ship prolly got exploded/shredded/shot/infested because of her
HotS is bad
SC2 WoL besides Jim/Kerrigan stuff also has general story problems, like inconsequential toy conflicts (and many more).
When you pick the doctor over Selendis, allied protoss and terrans kill each other and then just part ways, like it was a chess match. There's no weight to it like conflict with Aldaris in BW had.
Also, Zerg transformation would be harder to "cure" than to turn a dog into a person, but apparently doctor did it and of course it was never brought up again (since it doesn't make sense).
The whole SC1 and SC2 are like that in relation to each other. In SC1 you gather a lot of resources and carry them over for an invasion, in SC2 you fight with Mira Han in a domestic squabble, using flagships (all drones conveniently).
Being silly (which is separate from just bad) is fine if that is either the vibe of the core of the story, or if silliness doesn't affect the core of the story, or if the silly parts affecting the core are consistent and played out deadpan (like in Metal Gear). WoL in terms of story and characters is nowhere near SC1, LotV is further downhill, and HotS/epilogue are just insufferable.
I think in Rebel Yell, the suddenness of Mengsk's betrayal is what gives it so much impact, and I think extra buildup would only take away from that. Using the psi emitter on mission 7 was clever, using them on mission 8 definitely felt off, fighting the Protoss on 9 felt even more off but by then it was too late to stop Mengsk. And as the player, walking right into that trap along with Jim and Kerrigan is a cool feeling.
I hard agree on the blitzy nature of the UED campaign being a huge point in its favour, but I think the feeling of shortness of that campaign is only because of how fun it is. Protoss is also 8 missions but feels like it drags on and on, for me. That campaign is personally my S-tier pick, in no small part because of that feeling of military precision. I think B is a bit too harsh - I won't talk you up to S but I think it deserves A as a minimum.
Hard agree on how well Blizzard pulled off playing as the bad guy, especially in Brood War Zerg.
I think the non-linearity of Wings was a mistake, but a completely forgivable one. I think Blizzard just bit off more than they can chew with that and it just doesn't suit the RTS genre. All the extra mini stories are just empty fluff because none of them are allowed to have any bearing on the main story. Tosh / Doc aren't allowed to have any important contributions to the final missions because they're not guaranteed to still be alive by then - you could even have skipped meeting them in the first place.
Have you considered giving each campaign an unofficial ranking in each of the four categories? Like HotS gets D for story, C for Vibe, A for gameplay and F for difficulty? Might add a bit more nuance than just one letter.
While the nonlinear mission chains hurt WoL's story, they really enhance the replayability.
Let's take the Great Train Robbery for example. Normally the game expects you to mass Diamondbacks to chase the trains, but depending on the mission order, you can exploit the high ground to place Siege Tanks, or just go for an air force.
21:17 "Basically every character is beloved or a doctor" I howled 😂😂😂
wings of liberty is nr 1 hands down. any modded wings of liberty campaign is way better than anything else and i dont know why
For sure. It's not even close.
Modded WoL is great because it (usually) keeps the fun and diverse mission design while possibly making characters more interesting or replacing them and more importantly dropping the expectation of a greater far-reaching story which is WoL's main weak point (seriously tell me how *ANY* mission other than The Outlaws, In Utter Darkness and All In have *ANY* relevance to the rest of SC2's story, rather than _just_ being characterisation for Raynor specifically)
You said it. I've played like 10 different modded WoL campaigns and I'm still not done having fun with it.
I think HotS and LotV have fun game mechanics and mission design too, but compared to WoL they suffer from so much badly written, cringeworthy, pompous in-mission dialogue. It just gets really tedious over time. I'm not saying WoL has perfect writing, but WoL is substantially less annyoing and therefore more fun to play many times over. In WoL we're just robbing trains, mining terrazine and doing whatever, not saving the entire universe and listening to some god-villain talk our ear off all the damn time.
Yes, the story is bland, but the mission design is really good.
*When talking about the Wings of Liberty campaign, i was surprised you didn't even mention the Secret Mission lol*
I enjoyed this episode of GrantDoesBrainstorms
I appreciate hearing more of your unedited thoughts, even if stream of consciousness can sometimes wander or miss details. That might just be me though, as some of my favorite content to turn on is multi-hour long videos of people just talking about stuff they like and analyzing why.
For the campaigns themselves, good on you for rewarding Rebel Yell's frankly great tutorialization. If it was able to get 8 year old me to beat it without cheats, who could barely do the same with AoE2's William Wallace campaign and had no hope on any of the others, while STILL being engaging to play as an adult, then it deserves a seal of approval. Tutorials get way too much hate for what they are, and a well made subtle or hidden tutorial deserves recognition.
I can agree to most of the verdicts, but I see a bit of a downside on the SC2 protoss campaign and the nova missions.
Starcraft thrives on it's open mission design most of the time, and while a few timegated missions are ok in a campaign (see the zerg missions), it feels like too much in the protoss mission, as if they had problems making the missions difficult only by putting time pressure on you. It is also sad to see defense missions as the big finales of a campaign. The mission just throws massive stuff at you, which I count as a balancing problem. It worked for Wings of Liberty, as you were a small fraction force on the enemy home planet, but in the protos mission, they should have flipped the two last missions, put the defense mission before the host, so you can free your people and then learn of the attempt to reincarnate, gathering all forces in a desperate attempt to stop this, thus leading into theepilogue to get rid of the big bad for good, which again is defense expect the first one.
I was kinda disappointed by the nova covert ops missions.
The escape: a hero unit micro mission with a surplus dexterity test. it should have been shortened and the nobuild initial section of the second mission.
Sudden strike is okay on its own as an easier introduction of the special mechanics of the mission. still, ould have been merged with the first one just as well
Enemy Intelliogence is again a defense mission. The split nature could have been done similarly to the last human mission in WC3 where you have to get through a nobuild segment while defending the own base.
Over all, a very weak pack.
The missions in the second pack feel fine even though it is weired in flashpoint how the mission gets easier the more you explore by taking out difficult unit types.
For the last mission pack, it is ok. Still, C tier I guess as it is unfair to judge something by what it could have been.. Though only recommendable on a big discount
Honestly "The Host" was a walk in the park, while the last mission was absurd. I made many attempts, optimized everything, and lost by a fraction of a percent without being able to do anything about it once. At last won with a few percent margin, with two ally bases, almost, and defenses broken from an unexpected direction.
It's the hardest mission in SC2, and I'm never playing it ever again, but it was a very fitting end for a replay.
I think it would be quite interesting to split a tier list like this into a story/vibe/characters category and a difficulty/gameplay category. It would be intersting which campaigns differ in that regard an how much (Nova Covert Ops... cough, cough).
I will say, the free-form story-telling in terms of "do the missions in any order you want" of SC2 is interesting from a gameplay perspective, and in HotS/LotV allows you to have different characters present for different story beats that might be absent if you do things in a different order...
But overall, it really, REALLY hurts the story's coherency. Any sense of urgency to any of the missions is lost, because you can unlock them, realize how urgent they are... and then fuck off and do five other missions while the urgent one is just sitting there waiting for you to choose it. I remember a lot of people thinking that if you didn't go to Agria right away, the mission would expire and you'd lose out on that entire chain. Nope. The option to unlock Primal Kerrigan before going to one of the first two planets, Char or Kaldir? Holy SHIT does that change things, but is there a canon order to any of these? Hell if we know! There are implications made by some comics later about HotS's planet order, but people are still debating it to this day.
Jim's alcoholism comes and goes and situations fluctuate and none of the important story beats introduced in any of the side missions or story chains can be addressed in any sort of coherent, story-affecting fashion, because _you might not even do those missions._ Hell, Horner and Jim discover that Tychus effectively has a gun to his head, Tosh warns Raynor that someone on the ship is working for Mengsk, _and_ tells Raynor that Tychus is hiding stuff from him, but NONE of these pieces can be put together or acted on in any meaningful way, because the missions that unlock these reveals are optional, the conversations with Tosh are optional, hell, _Tosh himself_ is optional, and might be _dead_ when you do the missions these conversations are unlocked by, because you sided with Nova to get Ghosts.
Wings of Liberty is FILLED TO THE BRIM with tons of interesting story beats that the story CANNOT DO ANYTHING WITH, because of the completely freeform nature of the campaign structure.
I disagree. It wouldn't have been that difficult to add a Tychus branching point, even if as a non-canon branch. You just make it. And they didn't. End of story.
@@steelwasp9375 Congratulations, you've solved one symptom out of about 15, without addressing the underlying problem.
@@Blazieth What underlying problem? That you can pick the missions in almost any order you want? Or that there are optional missions? I don't think any of that is a problem not from a gameplay nor from a story standpoint. Simply imagine, or realize, because that wouldn't be far from the truth, that the mission choices presented are from the eye of the player. That urgent mission doesn't come up unless you pick it. Take a page from the Haven choice missions, where neither choice is wrong and the story adapts to what you choose.
One thing that was kinda niche even when the games came out, but still holds a special nostalgic place in my heart and enhance the Brood War campaigns even more, was the little fluff packet that came in the original CD case. For anyone too young to remember, video games came on CD's! And also had a packet with an install key, instructions on how to play, and sometimes even game lore!
That Brood War packet introduced the new units and also the new cast, which helped me connect to them more when I was a wee little 12 year old playing the campaigns for the first time. Loved that little thing.
I guess the Protoss civil war was so that the campaign wouldn't just be PvZ the entire time
Also, i really liked Enemy Intelligence from Nova Covert Ops. It encourages and rewards aggression without putting you on a timer
I think a good addition to the rebel's yell campaign would be if they found a way to explain megsk's betrayal of kerrigan. Having read the books a long time ago, if i recall correctly 3 ghosts had assassinated megsk's parents, and he had decided to hunt them down for revenge, he killed 2 and kerrigan was the last one, but she was being experimented on when he found her without any of her memories of her ghost missions previously, so while he rescued her and used her, he always planned to have her killed in the end to finish his revenge, and maybe a flashback mission somewhere would've been interesting, maybe one focused on her rescue.
So, my thoughts on the ratings/rankings:
Rebel Yell: Pretty much agree with you on about 90% of it, especially the points of the Kerrigan betrayal and the cut missions. Only thing I would dock a few points for is that while it is indeed a tutorial campaign to get you to learn how to play Starcraft I can't help but feel like the amount of handholding it does lingers far too long. It could maybe stand to have one of the teaching missions exchanged for a macro mission, but its hardly to the point I'd drop it a tier over.
The Overmind: Pretty much hit the nail on the head wholly, only thing that seems a bit off by tone is that they sort of set it up so that the Terrans really just kinda get rolled with little issue even on the small scale battles which contrasts the notion that the Terrans could put up a good fight against the Zerg when united. Protoss get to have their bamboozle win but the Terrans just kinda get dismissed and bullied. (Unless its mission 3), I want to almost say its a C in my eyes, but I can fully admit my bias on this one.
The Fall: Aldaris Being Dense: The Campaign. Though while the story is more or less whatever, I did enjoy the actual missions a lot more compared to the previous two campaigns, and actually did a wonderful job of setting up the notion of the interracial collaboration going forward. Personally I think it would deserve a low B myself carried by the gameplay above all.
The Stand: Aldaris Being Dense: The Expansion. Design and the like you were accurate on, but holy mother of god the betrayal bit and the Protoss Civil War round two being all because Aldaris cannot use his words and Artanis actually being gullible as heck is just painful in retrospect. Though I think that's a greater critque on early Blizzard story writing as a whole as well: With how many plot points occur because of characters being idiot balled. Still, the rating you gave I agree with.
The Iron Fist: God, you are so right with the fact that its so close to being fantastic if it just had a bit more time to cook and flesh out the interpersonal plots. The lack thereof makes the whole Stukov being killed bit really feel more like an idiot ball than anything on DuGalle's end. "Yes I'll gladly take the word of someone I just met recently over my long standing friend since before this invasion." Please. Gameplay is fantastic though, and I love the divergent mission choice in the Korhal invasion.
The Queen of Blades: Let me preface by saying I am one of the ones who actually hate this campaign. So many of the missions are either far too gimmicky, or easy, generally making a lot of the campaign forgettable from a mission stance, with the only one that stands out at all being Omega. And the story plot itself really just comes off as 'Kerrigan gets to do whatever because everyone else refuses to talk to each other and Kerrigan just gets to win, win win win.' I was over it before I even got half way through since it just makes everyone else come off as incompetent and incapable and kills off many beloved characters to just prop up this someone who last we played as got completely bullied by the Templar.
I agree with ranking. There is 2 missions however in Nova cover ops that are one of my fav missions. The mission where you have to slot units in positions is incredibly fun to take your time with. You can jump tank on high places. You can play it solo Nova walking around and hiding from zerg waves etc. The second is the mission on the planet with the psi emiters for the same reasons.
we now judge the missions cos we have played them 10 + times and we are much better at the game.
I will speak out as someone who thinks the Fall probably deserves a B tier instead of C tier - as much as the Great Offscreen War against the Zerg is annoying (and all the middle missions definitely drag a little), it's precisely Tassadar's point.
(I will also say I absolutely agree with almost all of your assessment, the video is fantastic, and even when I disagree with the assessment, the analysis is always interesting, on point, and very much worth listening to, which is honestly in my opinion more important - discussion is a wonderful thing.)
A planet is a massive thing - and it feels like Aiur is one of the few planets that gets to be more than a map. Every day they're fighting Tassadar, they are ignoring all the brave warriors on the front line still fighting the Zerg.
The Protoss are this ancient, enigmatic people - but the Conclave is very complacent. They're too arrogant and stuck in their high-minded ways, and we're learning that ultimately, the Protoss aren't all that different from the Terrans is very interesting (in spite of the many ways they are). That being said, if one really wants to see the enigmatic aliens as being truly enigmatic aliens, I can absolutely see the disappointment.
I think, if the campaign were to properly emphasise the cost of all the Protoss bickering and in-fighting - perhaps by having us play through Fenix's first death, rather than just have it be in a cutscene when his psi blade just randomly FAILS (and yes I know there's a lore reason but I do not care about the lore reason, that cutscene plays it for comedy, and it makes it all look stupid!); and having the Zerg intrude on other major Aiur events (imagine if the Zerg showed up at the Trial of Tassadar as a third faction both parties had to fight off, completely irrelevant to the main action but showing how they just couldn't get along in the face of far bigger problems) would have helped make the campaign more solidly enjoyable.
It would also help to actually prove Tassadar's point, which would connect the moral of the campaign together far more. I do wish, however, we got to see Artanis in that campaign, and see him going from a Conclave devotee to a Tassadar supporter, rather than just having that happen with you as silent Artanis - that's one thing I personally dislike about SC1 campaigns.
The Fall is in no worlds an A-tier campaign. But for me, it feels like if it just reached out a tiny bit more, it could've been a wonderful B-tier one.
I'd say the Fenix cutscene isn't playing for comedy, you might think that's the result but it's going for symbolism/horror. It's totally unconcerned for any lore explanation for why it happens, it happens because it instantly conveys hopelessness. A lot of the SC1 cutscenes are more trying to convey a general idea than depict plot events, even the ones that have their own little plots.
@felonyx5123 the cinematics were done before they fleshed out the game history. Blizzard writers have never NEVER been good enough foe that kind of thing unless they copied it from someone else
I love hearing your thoughts about StarCraft in terms of its story, characters, or even gameplay mechanics as a whole. So videos like this that dive into your thoughts are great in my book
I think that WOL was so good because of all tuebworld building - pretty much every mission was on a new planet making it feel like a huge universe to explore.
The in HOTS there are 5 or 6 planets in the main story, with 2-3 missions back to back on each, making the universe feel so much smaller. It also kind of feels like the zerg just planet hop from place to place and aren't expanding their territory at all. Agreed on the evolution missions - they dont feel like proper missions as they're basically all no build missions.
The primal zerg have just been chilling on Zerus for a few thousand years and despite the Zerg being able to planet hop, the primals dont appar to be able to. And they seem to have developed equivalents to all the major Zerg strains as well, so they feel like reskinned Zerg rather than a unique faction that underwent millenia of hyper evolution. Which kind of begs the question on what Amon did to the overmind - presumably he took it off the planet and dropped it off somewhere it would be able to learn space travel on its own. It just seems really stupid.
The primal zerg begin imitating the zerg swarm morphs immediately, Abathur even complains about that. It makes sense, that Zerg swarm strains should be better, as they had a much bigger galaxy to find essences in.
Perhaps the reason the primal zerg never learned space flight, is that requires far more cooperation than they are willing/capable to do? It took humans thousands of years to reach space as well. The zerg swarm got a boost from Amon, but the Overmind didn't bother sharing those secrets with the primal zerg it couldn't control
@Ten_Tacles yeah I appreciate that. It just seems a shame that as soon as the Zerg arrive the primal are like "well all our stuff sucks" and we don't really see anything truly unique to them except their mobile hive beasts
I"ve just replayed the SC1 campaign and honestly you don't get the feeling the zerg is this constantly growing, expanding threat either. Like the Kel-Morian combine mission for example, she straight up says that we need to make a pit stop there and mine some minerals so that she's able to build up her primary hive clusters some more for the assault on Korhal. It still really felt like she had to consider her resources and her army position carefully like every other faction as opposed to just slowly becoming everywhere all at once on an exponential growth curve. I think something like SC2 WoL does a much better job as portraying zerg as the latter, probably due to some interesting additions like how there is some sort of zerg virus that can turn entire populations into infested Terran and there's that cool Protoss mission where you make a last stand and get completely overrun by zerg no matter how long you survive. I dunno, just my two cents on the matter.
What I really liked about Brood War is how the UED are only vaguely introduced in The Stand making it unclear if they are good or bad. But in Iron Fist, they are portrayed as if they are going to be the main good guy faction of Starcraft. Halfway through the campaign, you begin to doubt them more and more, especially during their ending where they air a propaganda broadcast claiming to have "saved Earth". In the final campaign, they are revealed yo being the main villains of BW. You strip them of their power peice by peice, and after their last desperate attack on Kerrigan to save face, they are beaten badly. Dugalle, now demoralized and humilated by the defeat admits his mistakes in a dramatic scene before killing himself, and then Kerrigan destroys what is left of the UED. The ending definitely has a King Midas theme to it
Blizzard tried to give Jim more depth with being sad to have to kill Kerrigan but still willing, then Zeratul tells him saving her is the only path to avoid destruction. The way people talk you would think they skipped the entire cinematic.
HOTS feels short because it is. I like the power fantasy though, it's well managed for what Kerrigan is supposed to be and feel like.
LOTV has this really cool thing with how awesome its characters are and how well they interact between themselves and the story. They feel like active participants instead of background charatcers like WOL's.
Nova Cover Ops were all super cool missions. They didnt want to make story missions, they wanted to make fun cool missions. Nova as a unit is weird because half of people want her to be like Kerrigan in HOTS, and the other half wanted Kerrigan to be like her, not a beater of worlds but more as a in army commander or op support unit.
LotV was linear. You're always going to have those characters on your ship by a certain point so it's actually possible for them to contribute. WoL characters are background because you can never guarantee the Doc or Tosh would be part of your crew yet / still alive on any given mission.
@@CorrectHorseBatteryStaple472 We dont even know Swan or Stateman, they are as important to the story as the mercenary guy in the cantina. Those 2 are who I'm talking about.
I always interpreted The Fall to be the Conclave had its forces fighting the Zerg. They weren't making progress, but they were so certain they would win they sent their most promising commander and forces to hunt Tassadar down.
The issue I had was Tassadar surrendering just to have us break him out. If we lost the mission he surrendered in sure, but it seemed pointless. Lwt me break the base, have hundreds of carriers arrive so Tassadar surrenders so we can escape.
You forgot to mention the fact that you get predators in wings of liberty, which is why it’s meant to be in S+ tier. Not S tier
The thing about the Evolution missions is that I do actually love them a ton and I love how at the end of them you have to take an interesting and permanent upgrade to one of your core units. But they should absolutely not have been the thing Blizzard said counted as part of the 27 missions.
Something I never liked about SC 2 campaign's is the like of in-game upgrades. Sure, it is cool to upgrade units inbetween missioms, but having no upgrades to research aside from attack/defense in-game always felt a wrong for me. It also makes it so that units plateau in power rrally quickly, seeing as a unit is as powerful as the'll ever be the moment you unlock them.
Wow nice idea and I have to agree with you on most of those parts. I think you nailed the descriptions of the gameplay and difficulty aspects, which are less subjective than the other two factors.
Regarding the character development I do have some issues that you have not discussed in depth. And especially Kerrigan, who is probably the most important character in the series could use a lot more polishing:
When she is introduced in Rebel Yell we basically only get to know her as an idealistic Ghost that abandoned the confederacy. We don't really get to know her own motivation but rather only see her as someone who put her trust in the wrong guy. It also feels like she doesn't share that deep of a connection with Raynor, although some romance aspect is introduced, but it feels exaggerated in the later campaigns for me.
In the Overmind campaign Kerrigan is not herself anymore and we can see that immediately. She behaves immature, impatient and is cocky while only experiencing little control from the Overmind. I think the Amerigo could have flashed out Kerrigans time as a ghost more as a way to unlock her psionic abilities and for us to get to know more about her past. And besides here fighting with Tassadar on Char, she does not seem to be of interest to the Protoss, but is still known as a major threat by everyone in Brood War.
In the Brood War campaigns it was especially memorable for me to see the cunning and strategic side of Kerrigan. She manages to make unlikely allies and persuade everyone into achieving her goals. Her motivation is just lust for power which she satisfied until she is basically the only major power left in the Korprulu sector.
Surprisingly she is then revealed to have done basically nothing until the events of SC2. We then see her only as the basically immortal unstoppable force no one knows how to deal with and she attacks places in search for the artifacts which is (as we later know) probably due to the corruption through Amon. But the problem for me is that she lost everything that made her the charismatic and cunning strategist she was in the Brood war and turned her into a one-dimensional powerhouse in WoL which is the biggest threat right now, but as we know from the prophecies from Zeratul is the key to beating an even bigger threat that is about to appear. Her story in HotS is basically only revenge, with a little side-story which causes her to be re-zergified (which was a huge disappointment for me, seeing the primals made me think we would see a change in the zerg from being the Hive-mind controlled faction towards a more elaborate faction which specialises in rapid evolution, which would have been great for a difference in gameplay between Multiplayer and Singleplayer), which is fun but also lacks the depths the political struggles flashed out in every other campaign. We basically have a campaign in WoL which focuses on cleaning up the mess Mengsk leaves behind and trying to dethrone him but is sidetracked due to the artifacts and the prophecy from Zeratul. In HotS we have several Storyies which don't feel connected at all: Char and Kaldir basically serve no bigger purpose (beating Warfield is nice but it didn't show why the Terrans even stayed on Char after Kerrigan was rescued and Kaldir gives only the cliffhanger with Niadra (which was in my opinion a build up for a new Overmind-like faction (her only purpose is killing Protoss)), Zerus and Skygeirr Station remind us that there is more to come in LotV while the rest focuses on taking revenge on Mengsk. But overall it lacks in most of the storytelling aspects. The thing I liked though was seeing Kerrigan been shown more human letting the wounded escape Char and helping evacuate civilians on Korhal, but still she feels emotionally unstable and not like the type you would trust the fate of the entire universe. In LotV she is seen hunting down Hybrids and trying to fulfill fer role as the savior of the universe, she is a key element to the story here, but we don't see much character progression here. I also didn't understand why everyone teams up in the epilogue to defeat Amon in the Void but not on Aiur. Here I also would have liked a more open ended conclusion to SC2s Story. Again we lack the disputes between the factions which was a key element from SC1. I don't like the fairytale ending the epilogue shows us (but then again the epilogue isn't canon, right?)
Some ideas for this have been mentioned in the story but some could have been improved upon: What is the future of the swarm, why would Kerrigan stay as their leader? She saved the people dear to her so the future of the swarm could be fought out between Dehaka and Zagara, with unknown roles for Kerrigan and Stukov. (Btw. Why can't Kerrigan and Stukov be un-zerigied after the Story). How do the different protoss factions get along after Aiur is retaken. Is there still racism towards Dark Templar, how are the Taldarim dealt with? Is Valerian really the ruler people want or is there more fights (which is explored upon in NCO?, how could a human Stukov or Kerrigan play a role in these events?
I really love the Starcraft franchise and would like to see a SC3 in the future as there is so much more potential in the story for me.
And I'm also looking forward to the final Tier List once it's finished.
In the end I just want to thank you GGG for all the content you produce, I really enjoy watching your videos. It's great to see how much fun you have with SC2 and RTS in general and how you incorporate your knowledge into your content. As someone who is more of a casual Singleplayer RTS Player rather than the Pro-player/Multiplayer Try-Hard it's really great to see someone like you!!!!
In the first Protoss campaign, l always imagine Zerg conquering the Aiur and destroying main Protoss forces, while these idiots are fighting civil war. And Tasadar in these missions is like: “IDK, in one hand we should fight the Zerg, but un the other hand Aldaris is a jerk” and I really like his uncertainty about it. And overall vibe, when you want to scream to the screen like “GUYS, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING, STOP PLEASE!!!” Is really cool. So I will move it to B
I feel that having some zerg on those two PvP aiur maps would've helped. Would at least allow the Zerg some presence instead of them being absent. Also I feel that the Overmind would capitalize on the civil war and try and send a strike force to kill the Conclave and especially the Dark Templar.
Agree with you. You have such a great channel. You really helped me to improve my English. Thanks
Not sure if I'm alone in this, but I thought you glossed over the mission quality in Nova CO a bit. I agree with all the other criticism for the campaign, but just from a gameplay perspective I feel like all the missions are really good, some of the most creative in the games. I think they even managed to make the mandatory early game defense mission fun^^
Absolutly. IMO the Nova CO are way superior to LotV and especially HotS.
They are not great, but considering how bad the two big campaigns before were, I was extremly pleased to find out that the Nova missions were better than I expected.
1:23 Criteria for Judgement: Storytelling, The Vibe, The Difficulty, the Gameplay.
25:55 "Fenix/Taldarin Storyline-"
Isn't it... Talandar?
just enough proof that this plotline is straight up bad
the name, one of the most important and signyfying features of a character, that -Fenix- -Taldarin- this fake half-boot gets through his "complex" arc is not only never used - it can be completely bypassed if you just don't talk to him at the very end
and so a very important thing about a character is forgotten completely
LotV is a bad campaign and it shows Blizzard's downfall to a great extent
If anyone played Guild wars (original, not Guild wars 2), the nightfall campaign, the legacy of the void epilogue feels like somewhat played it, had a mixed up dream where it took place in starcraft, and made those missions. It takes place through a portal to a scary realm of floating rocks and weird terrain where weird stuff gets made, the first mission is relatively standard (Gate of Pain, Into the void), shows some deception, gets a small victory, helps someone, and introduces you to the setting. The second mission (Gate of madness, Essence of eternity) has a reputation as the hardest of the three missions, and gives you some power to defeat the main bad guy. The final mission (Abaddon's gate, Amon's fall) has you fight a big floating head that looks similar, but you don't fight it directly. Instead, you move back and forth on a floating platform killing some spawning rock like things while other stuff spawns to get in your way, and the person who takes over from the bad guy and becomes the new "god" is somewhat controversial.
Would normally chalk it up to coincidence, but all the small and large similarities just look weird. Makes me wonder if there is some other story(ies) I'm not aware of that did something similar, and both Nightfall and Void writers were familiar with them. (Overall StarCraft and guild wars campaign roles are also sort of similar: first campaign is really long and flexible and sets up the world, second and third campaigns are a similar format, third has you beat the bad guy, forth is associated in setting with the first and is treated as less than a full version that the other three are. But these similarities are more coincidental.)
I think for The Fall, it was trying to show the Protoss'es complete arrogance and their fanstical behavoirs on what is an outdated system. And the Zerg are still fighting the Protoss. They just haven't reached Tassadar's location, and that is why you so easily rescue Tassadar, Aldaris and the Conclave are busy fighting a war. Hence the name, The Fall, not the Fall of Auir, but The Downfall of the Protoss. Ironically, the saying "Twice the pride, double the fall." Fits perfectly with what I'm saying and serves as a good TLDR to what I'm saying.
Great coverage! Don't know if I would change anything necessarily, but you may or may not want to mention sound design. I feel like the music specifically is good in original SC, but in both 1 and 2 Terran gets the best jams, and I think that does loads for atmosphere. Sound design of characters is also something you could mention, but I feel like the music is something that you could touch on if you wanted to.
after watching the whole video yeah i fully 100% agree
Lol it was published 10 mins ago
I disagree with Grant with only one thing: the Epilogue's storyline is not a blemish, but an orange-sized tumor. They shouldn't have turned Kerrigan into an orange. (The orange thing is a Korean meme. somebody posted an image of a vertical cross section of an orange, and it is a perfect Xel'Naga Kerrigan. Once you google "케리건 오렌지" in Korean and check the image tab you can never unsee it.)
I am glad you are bringing this type of content back, so all for doing ranking videos again on occasion and this one absolutely makes sense!
I agree with most of the rankings, and enjoy your thought process on all of them. Reminders on the story beats for the first 3 really does a good job setting up the rest of your thoughts.
My one disagreement is LoTv vs UED campaign. As a more casual player, UED marries political intrigue writing to mission structure in such a way that it creates a memorable campaign, with fun, actually unique, missions. I agree with your assessment that it was too short to develop some of the characters out more or make some of the impacts hit, but it really sets itself up so well to make the parts we all love about Kerrigan's Brood War campaign function.
LoTv on the other hand feels a bit repetitive (per your own joke of "super unique") even as someone playing it for the first time. The characters actually are less interesting to me than any of the characters you're praising from HotS, though I agree Fenix's development was handled well and felt like a developing character. I think the problems with Amon started way before LotV, but unlike the other 2 campaigns, it is front and center the entire time. It sucks, because the first mission of the epilogue truly is a fun mission on gaining and holding territory and stretching out supply lines, but if I ever go back to playing that campaign, it will be because of a few engaging missions, not story, or even for the complete experience. Meanwhile, UED does its part for the larger story, and the main criticism is that it needed more missions, but it really packs out all 8 of them and invites replayability.
So overall, would knock LoTV down to B or C tier, and put UED either up to A, or keep it at B. LoTV at A tier just throws off the rest of the rankings and the explanations you've established.
To be honest, Wings of Liberty could've been trash and still broken sales records. This was Blizzard at their peak when we all thought they could do no wrong.
One thing Rebel Yell has going for it is the sense of mystery. Like sure if you read the manual you know all the lore (incredibly detailed) about the zerg and protoss. But playing the campaign alone you don't know that, and the Zerg come across as this mysterious force of nature the characters are strugling against.
Seeing this a dau after it was uploaded, having just finished all of StarCraft 2's story for the first time, and pondering on the bittersweet moment of finishing a story full of characters I love, looking forward to hearing Grant's thoughts.
I do like watching these types of videos!
On the gameplay side I find that Starcraft 1s campaign is way more fun if you forget literally everything you know about Starcraft, and even RTS in general. That is after all how they were designed after all. I had loads of fun doing the missions playing it more like I was roleplaying a commander.
Looking forward to the main channel version!!
SC1 rankings seem really fair, I agree with the story analysis (though I'd probs give UED an A).
I also agree that Wings of Liberty was a total delight mechanically and gameplay-wise, but I was super disappointed with the story and characters. Not just Raynor reversing his stance on Kerrigan (and being rewarded for it), but also the utter lack of complexity in the characters (do people really enjoy Stetmann and Horner and the other supporting cast as much as any non-Cerebrate character in SC1?), and ESPECIALLY the lack of good antagonists (Mengsk, Tal-Darim, and WoL Kerrigan are just so, so, so bland and morally uninteresting to defeat).
Agreed that All In is amazing though. Really better than the sum of its parts somehow (same for the Char landing mission, for me)
Agreed with the additional camaraderie needing to be set up between DuGalle and Stukov - and I also feel that the UED didn't really do much wrong for all three as-of-yet known factions to agree to gang up on them. A mission of DuGalle being on the backfoot after Stukov's death also would have helped to improve the weight of the loss, as basically the final mission is them going from losing one of their most prized commanders... to still winning just fine.
However, on the complaint of it being too short: I often feel "Its too short" can be interpreted as a compliment - if you wanted more, then clearly there was something attention grabbing or captivating. I think it could qualify as an A tier campaign with the laid out potential additions/corrections being what it would take to become an S tier campaign. Particularly with how the missions that are in the campaign are already good.
Beloved if underdeveloped characters, good missions, good story, biggest complaint is it being too short - I think that is plenty to qualify it above the precedents set in B tier and bump it up to A tier.
(17:40) Honestly, Fenix being complacent about Aldaris' absence - or perhaps even fine upon hearing of Aldaris' demise - I could see that holding true. Throughout the first Protoss campaign Aldaris and the Conclave basically ignored the Zerg threat for domestic troubles to the point where Aiur, their homeworld, is ultimately lost and Tassadar - whose actions were slowly mending the rift with the Dark Templar - had(?) to sacrifice himself. Now if Fenix learned of what happened with Kerrigan's manipulation of the Dark Templar and the survivors of Aiur? Yeah no chance of co-operation with Kerrigan then.
I think Aiur falling in the second Protoss campaign retroactively makes Tassadar's sacrifice more meaningful - if Aiur fell to a Zerg force without the Overmind's leadership (absentee as it was in the first Protoss campagin, I guess he was busy importing his buddies to Aiur) then I can only imagine how badly it would have gone for the Protoss if the Overmind was given more time to mastermind the Zerg invasion of Aiur.
The UED did take control of the second Overmind and were clearly planning to use the zerg to rule the sector with an iron fist. It does actually make sense why the Protoss and many other people would see the UED as a threat that needs to be removed. Being willing to help Kerrigan get back to power and take control of the zerg probably should have had more explanation on why they felt the UED were a worse threat than Kerrigan though.
@@toddclawson3619 On the topic of ruling the sector with an iron fist - and even (to an extent) in regards using the Zerg, what with the psi emitters and all - surely Mengsk qualifies as at an least equal evil.
And by helping to prevent Mengsk's capture and assisting Kerrigan, Raynor ultimately not only played a part in Mengsk's rise to power but in reinstating him as what I suppose was considered a lesser of two evils - I may need a reminder though how as to how the UED could be considered so much worse than Mengsk that Raynor chooses Mengsk over them.
Sure the Confederacy was bad, but with how bad Mengsk was I think an argument could be made that Raynor was making a practically out-of-character judgement call for the sake of the narrative when it came to rescuing Mengsk from the UED and helping reinstate him.
@@BloodfelX Oh I agree that Raynor helping to dethrone the UED should have had more of a justification. Maybe he did think that Mengsk would be easier to overthrow than the UED would be. Or maybe he was hoping against hope that Kerrigan had changed it would genuinely be a good thing to help her take control of the zerg. It was only after her betrayal and killing Fenix that Raynor lost hope and vowed to kill her. We don't know unfortunately.
It is one reason why I liked that fan-made alternate campaign where the primal zerg took the place of the UED. It made sense for everyone to work together with their hated enemies against a foe that wanted to kill everyone and collect their essence.
Although not really considered part of the main plot of the storyline, there were also other 'mini-campaigns' that I feel like are at least worth mentioning here:
SC1 'Loomings' a.k.a the StarCraft: Precursor
Taking place approximately a month before the 'Rebel Yell', it's an introduction to both the main story, told from the perspective of the 'baddies'.
The characters we meet in this scenario are all Confederates, including their 'Black Ops' Cerberus unit, and we even get to control Duke in his little tank.
There are only 6 missions in it, but the middle ones are surprisingly well structured and the storytelling aspect, imho, easily rivals some of the most memorable missions of the main Terran campaign. Personally, I would rate easily rate it as A-tier. Given how this mini-campaign is older than more than most of the people watching this video, I'd say it deserved at least an honorable mention, if nothing else.
Starcraft: Enslavers.
Taking place shortly after the main SC1 story line, this time we get play as a 'Commander' of the newly formed Dominion, chasing after a notorious pirate, Allen Schezar, who apart from having a considerable Terran force of his own, has found a way to control the Zerg, giving the player a very unique and thematically interesting challenge.
There are 'only' 3-4 missions in it, depending on the objectives the player *chooses* to complete in order to either help the Protoss who become his allies, or ignore them and skip straight to the main event. The challenge is tough, the heroes are cool and unique, but real deal are the Terran/Zerg allied forces you get to fight either as Terran *or* Terran/Protoss, which makes it so memorable, and again, for me at least, a solid B-Tier here purely because of how short it is, there are no pre-recorded voice lines and even the in-game dialogues are sparse. Thankfully, the difficulty level is a cut above the main campaign, and 2 of the missions are also reused and repurposed maps cut from the original 'Rebel Yell' so it's a little bonus in terms of nostalgia points.
Some issues I didn't see mentioned in the video: WoL goes against quite a bit of preceding characterisation, knocking down Kerrigan from her Queen Bitch status to a taunting cartoon villain, having Zeratul not call out Duran upon encountering Maar, making Raynor an ineffective alcoholic _who somehow still gets access to all the fun toys regardless_ and also outwits his enemies most of the time, and setting a precedent for Mengsk being even less competent in HotS. Lore from other media was largely ignored too although I'm not sure how much we can fault it for that. Still, by LotV we basically end up with *THREE* different factions called "Tal'darim" which kinda sucks. Also a lot of the story is very Raynor-centric, as in specific to his person not just following his perspective, without really showing or changing the broader landscape of war and politics. Most of the missions are really cool to play, and they all are important to Raynor as a person, but let's be honest you could delete every single one of them besides The Outlaws, In Utter Darkness and All In and the world/overall story would be unaffected. That's not good for setting up a trilogy, and can't be blamed on the expansions' sins either. And for such a character-centric story the choice missions are just awful: the reality warping required between the two Haven missions, trusting Mengsk's pet ghost over your slightly shady brother in arms (not Tychus, the other one... no not Stetmann, the one who can actually use a gun!) and the tactical blunder of Shatter The Sky so bad even Tychus calls it out.
HotS suffers from all the buildup the zerg have had previously. In SC1 they were nigh unstoppable, requiring a heroic sacrifice to achieve a Pyrrhic victory on Aiur. Then BW almost completely invalidated that, the planet was lost anyway and Shakuras wasn't looking much better. Then the UED enslaved them making themselves the new biggest bad in the sector, and then despite the ferals on Aiur, the UED losses, the death of the Second Overmind and a bunch of other fights Kerrigan *STILL* had enough forces to beat a 3(+?)-way coalition. The zerg also regrow and adapt faster than the other factions, SC2 gave them a nice timeskip for that, and WoL portrayed them as absolutely _crushing_ the Dominion with negligible losses right until the final moment of All In. And after all that HotS tried to pull a "zero to hero", not Kerrigan actually trying to redeem herself (they magicked that away as some weird split personality bullshit?) and try to use the zerg in a "more ethical" fashion, nor her going back to her megalomaniacal ways and finally paying the price for the constant wars and infighting, nah for some reason QoB Kerrigan created a bunch of Orc clans. Then that story got shoved to the background too, probably for the better tbh.
A pretty solid Tier list Grant! However, maybe I have a bit more SC1 bias in me because I feel like the SC1 story is just so much more in-depth.
The betrayal of Kerrigan was a long term set up plan by Mengsk because she was 1 of 3 ghosts that murdered his Father and nuked Korhal the first time.
The only reason she was spared from execution was because Mengsk had found her abandoned by the Confederates ona fringe world and her memories were wiped but he never forgave her which is why during the campaign his tone is always harsher with her than with Reynor or Duke because he is still bitter but tries to hide it.
Rebel Yell for me had S tier storytelling and S tier gmaeplay and difficulty scaling. (I'd bump up to S)
The Overmind was more about a superior over arching plot (hostile takeover of the galaxy) and the cerebrates were merely tools to extend control of the swarm, Daggoth was the important one for later storytelling. Similar to HoTS you have all these different broodmothers but only ZiggyZags is the important one. The difficulty was all over the place so B is fair but it is on the cusp of A.
Both Protoss campaigns i thought were absolute S tier storytelling, it does require you to know about the Aeon of Strife and understand some weird time factors (i.e. multiple years pass between the Fall of Aiur and the decision to leave and go to Shakuras. The units comps were more varied but I did feel as though they had a lot of short missions (sub 20 minute macro) with the exception of Mission 10 in the OG and Mission 8 in the expansion. I would rank The Fall B and The expansion B but on the cusp of A.
I agree with what you said about UED
In regard to what you said about Omega. Although not clarified in-game. Fenix and Reynor never knew about Kerrigans betrayal as they never made it to Shakuras before the fall of the warp gate on Aiur. Kerrigan swings in and picks them from Aiur and sends Jim and a handful of Khalai survivors to save Mengsk from the UED and briefs them on the UED threat without mentioning her dealings with Zeratul and the Razagul. I agree on the A tier placement.
Your starcraft 2 placements on the other hand...
I felt as though Wings was good and brought a lot of nostalgia for sc players but also since Blizzard had moved into WoW thus no more WcIII stuff was happening. Wings stood out as a Massive new RTS and grabbed a lot of new players for the multiplayer more than the story. Also unit diversity was kinda weird because most missions you either spammed the unit you unlocked or just built bio because the Marine was so freaking overtuned. So for me the storytelling was kinda meh and the gameplay was meh but if you are a new player to RTS it definitely is the most friendly of the 3. I'd put it in Low A high B purely based on gameplay and story.
HoTS and i understand this might be a hot take but I really enjoyed this campaign, the unit diversity is great, the campaign isn't ridiculously long and the story telling was pretty good but only IF you take into consideration that (not explained in game unfortunately) but Kerrigans mind was undergoing a lot of trauma and being warped by Amon between the end of brood until now and then suddenly overnight she gets changed back into a human and has to deal with that plus shes dealing with her humnan feeelsing for Jim, plus her overwhelming for Mengsk, plus a lot of neuro stimulants in her system from the tests by the Umojan made her to be a very cranky anti-hero. I've introduced many friends to the starcraft universe thanks to the 3 player coop mod and we all have similar sentiments.
The fact that she can solo brutal is something you would only find out through multiple playthroughs and an understanding of optimising her perks and upgrades. I'd argue that 90% of the play base just picked what they thought was cool and fun and the fact you could customize the choices between missions unlike in wings made it better for everyone overall.
This campaign (hot take i know) was a solid A from me
Excluding the epilogue, I feel like the story telling in LoTV was absolute S tier. A masterclass even. I still get choked up when Zeratul says "my life for Aiur" in the cinematic. Something worth noting that is often overlooked in the community is Zeratul spends between 4-5 years in complete isolation on a barren moon as part of his self-imposed exile and is only really brought back into the fold when the Grand Perserver from the Gantirother shows up inside the brain of a human archeologist and she basically has to coerce him to return to the fold or Amon wins and he goes thhrough this whole ordeal of responsibility versus my people hate me and want to kill me and its heart breaking.
Excellent introduction of characters, Artanis basically having survivors guilt the whole campaign, Reynor locking eyes with Artansis in the cinematic when he recognizes Zeratuls Psi-blade and can see Artanis's grief is just chef kiss. Gameplay I felt as though the nerazim faction kinda overshadowed the rest as they were basically S tier units for the whole campaign so I agree, maybe some tweaks to the Aiur faction would have been nice but overall not bad. Would also have liked maybe Reynor and Kerrigan to make an appearance on Aiur during the final mission instead of Karax/Vorazun.
Storytelling in Epilogue was pretty lame but the missions themselves were fantastic enough for a strong S tier campaign imo.
thank you for coming to my T.E.D. talk
I actually don't mind that the first zerg campaign had an easy final mission. By that point, the zerg have broken through the Protoss' defenses and all that is left is a desperate last stand to protect the temple. It makes you feel like an powerful and unrelenting force that can no longer be stopped.
It is kind of like the Predator campaign in Aliens vs. Predators Extinction, The earlier missions are really hard as the Predators intentionally sandbag themselves by using weaker weapons and less armor for the sake of a thrilling and challenging hunt. Once the pred-alien queen is discovered though, the predators call off the hunt and bring in the big guns. All their normal hang-ups about having a fair and honorable fight are thrown out the window and they move in to eliminate the aliens and humans with extreme prejudice. At that point, the missions become pretty easy as you curbstomp every threat and it is actually pretty awesome from a lore perspective. It also feels very rewarding after making it through such a tough early game.
That game was such a great rts. All three factions were very different and unique, but worked to create a very interesting story and fun gameplay.
I really love the Enemy Intelligence & Flash Point. In RTS I've always loved to turtle and build up unbreakable defenses, those 2 missions allowed me to do that but also gave me something else to do on the map. Also choosing which units to eliminate from the attach waves was a cool idea.
Flashpoint deserves to be knocked down for the asinine decision of shoving large rapidly respawning waves of corruptors down your throat with zero warning, solely because they chose a poor unlock order with giving you liberators in the previous mission and those making mincemeat out of this one otherwise.
Original Terran: They cut too much, leading to plot-hole dialogue.
Original Protoss: Tassadar sends his old friends on a pointless mission to fail killing a Cerebrate. Why did they trust him before/AFTER this? The civil war isn't too bad since the Protoss weakness was supposed to be their stubborness.
BW Protoss: Kerrigan is known as a chronic backstabber despite not having backstabbed anyone yet (unless you count hurting Mengsk's feelings). Final mission is hyper-memorable.
BW Terran: Memorable but short. This is the ONLY Terran campaign in the series where your in-game strength is reflected by the story: you have overwhelming might and guile, unlike the other 3 Terran campaigns where you are a small guerilla group.
BW Zerg: Mission 2: Never using your last drone to make a building is obviously a programming limitation, and it should have been fixed rather than spawn this meme instant loss mission. This campaign has some of the most unique missions in the game.
WoL: The time skip was what, 4 years? Way too short. Raynor missing Kerrigan should have been done without. Great overall, I just wish the 2 choice missions didn't always portray Raynor as being right no matter his choice.
HotS: Forever cursed between the campaign that introduced SC2 and the one that ended it. But also cursed by its own flaws: Raynor impossibly surviving, Kerrigan beaten by a magic rock. Also the dialogue... this campaign has some of my favorite lines in any game, but many were cut (Ishza) and others are glossed over (Zeratul and Kerrigan).
LotV: PLEASE turn down the music. Story is a crescendo from hopelessness to victory, decades in the making, and moments such as the Khala's fall, Zeratul, and Shakuras were amazing. All characters are awesome. It stuttered at the end with missions objectives being "Super Unique", and ending with All-In-V2, but it was still fun.
Into the Void: Mission 1 is S-tier, Mission 2 is All-In-V3 so soon after All-In-V2, and Mission 3 is simply not worthy of ending the story. I love that they changed their mind on Tassadar's "revival", but then... Kerrigan ascending actually makes some sense, but man everything else is mind-boggling. The plot flip-flops between "Cycles ended!" and "Cycles continue!", the Raynor-Kerrigan romance is given even more needless importance, Artanis randomly kneels to the space whale that manipulated his people, and WHY does Amon have only ONE line hinting at his motivations?!
Covert Ops: It's alright. Davis is crazy. Gameplay is great. Seeing Alarak's arrogance get him trashed was satisfying.
I liked it a lot. I think this can give devs a little bit of an extra checklist of what to think about while designing a campaign.