Grant Reacts: StarCraft 2 Protoss Alpha Gameplay!
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After losing an entire base, a battalion of reapers, about 10 siege tanks, and 3 battlecruisers, the terran commander says "NOW YOU'RE GONNA PAY THE PRICE" and promptly sends in 14 marines.
strongest unit in the game
maybe they're warhammer marines
He had to bring in the big guns😹
yes cause the marines will not activate the shields
if marines don't work... then you just need more marines
Just a little thing that Grant didn't notice in the video.
If you look at that big ass Zealot warp-in at 11:20, you can see on the UI that the Immortal was a gateway unit.
I say again.
The Immortal was a gateway unit.
Oh, man, mech would have been absolutely invalidated by immortal warp-ins!
@@momom6197 Along with every other strategy lol
It was showcased in a PvZ demo match
It won that game for Protoss
Immortal and colossi used to attack air
I had a brainfart and I thought you meant "Immortal could create power fields like the Warp Prism".
Mothership in Starcraft 2 alpha: eat an entire army for breakfast
Mothership now: these tiny manines are bullying me. Send help
also it literally shot down like 4 bcs with its weapons and now the weapon of mothership is like a sprinkler
Legacy of the Demo, Heart of the Beta, Wings of Alpha, what a nice series!
I like theses name xD
On the one hand the mothership abilities would have been awesome... on the other hand, imagine the ABUSE. Vortex, their "little cousin" that doesn't even damage units, got so abused by players that it was removed from the game. Imagine if people could have a button that said "their projectiles do Literally No Damage for like 30 fucking seconds" or "delete all air units nearby from the game" or "delete all ground units nearby from the game". Like holy fuck.
The timestop is just a slightly better PDD, so it's good but not that good. Granted, PDD was removed eventually, but it lasted long enough such that it can't possibly be that OP (I don't follow competitive play enough to really know why it was removed)
The planet cracker would be useless in multiplayer, MS is too slow and it only affects stuff under it, all you have to do is split your army, whichever one the MS try to chase, just run. The other half will shoot it down. It might do decent against structures but that's kind of a waste in and of itself.
Only the blackhole is likely OP, especially given its rather large radius. There is a question of whether the enemy unit on the outer edge of the effect could have tried to escape it (as opposed to stand and shoot as shown). If they could escape, then I think the ability is just fine. But if they can't... then it is OP.
Obviously It has no place in multiplayer, but there's absolutely zero reason for them not to exist in the campaign where you already get increasingly more OP abilities the more you advance towards end-game. Campaigns are for fun not to be competitive. There's zero reason for these things not to exist in there.
I mean, there is probably a way to balance it. Like make the mothership take 40 supply or something
though for the campaign it would have been nice as it is
Black Hole annihilated _everything_
@justanoman6497 PDDs didn't even have to last that long(as they had literally 0 energy regen) and they only blocked 20 projectiles(alas, it was created via a much cheaper unit) while this "Time Bomb" not only deletes projectile units out of existence( *ahem* Marauders, Reapers' bombs, Vikings, Thors, Missile Turrets, Stalkers, Photon Cannons, Roaches, Hydralisks, Brood Lords, Mutalisks(?), Spore Crawlers, Battlecruisers, Banshees, Phoenixes, Queens and, most importantly, Corruptors) but slows down both move _and_ attack speed of *all* enemies under it's effect
It's obscenely overpowered, especially when combined with the "easy to dodge" Planet Cracker(no it's not, it's literally a moving Psi Storm with 2 HP pools of a BC)
And don't even get me started on the Black Hole, it's more OP than you can imagine
You've got an army? Mothership!
You still have something left? Mothership!
You built some AA that is only effective against air? Mothership!
You have an economy? Mothership!
You still haven't left the game? Mothership!
easy, add similar bullshit to the other races. make every race unbalanced and make it fair that way
StarCraft 2 alpha: The marines can’t penetrate the mothership’s thick armor.
StarCraft 2 now: The mothership dies against 8 marines.
wooh what are armor upgrades?
@@xnephysisthere what are weapon upgrades?
I remember how disappointed people were when it first was confirmed that the mothership was repurposed to just be a severely glorified arbiter.
5:27 Those siege tanks look like they'd shout NOOT NOOT any moment now
They got adorable snoots
LAAAAAAaCriIimOOOOsa
13 years and I'm still bitter about not even getting to *TOUCH* this mothership in-game. Grant, you and your modder wizards are the only hope we have to getting even a fraction of this in the Protoss Real scale campaign or even, hell, a SC2 alpha's mod where all the ideas removed from the beta are dumped into a functioning map. Even that would be enough
In the name of Adun, help us GiantGrantGames. You are our only hope
bro literaly starcraft 2 is the only rts that makes the campaigns with broken units i still dont get why people always want more
@@georgegorvaniagerge7077 Dawn of War's Hero Units from dark crusade onward suggest otherwise.
Besides, if SC2 already appeals to that kind of player, then why would it be surprising that the kind of player that likes that stuff wants more of it?
@@crash3398 i just dont get it why more and more when you already have it
@@georgegorvaniagerge7077 That is a really silly argument. If you have something you enjoy, you literally can not go wrong by having what you enjoy in larger quantities, be it here or elsewhere in life.
@@whodistoodis it depends if it abouts human rights we got so much rights now days that people dont even know what they have and now lets be honest the west is fuck and yea you dont need to remind me that dosent have anything to do with the games but i still think people really cant stop wanting something from finished game
I still remember when they showed preview of wings of liberty campaign and it has a mass effect-ish features and also a lot more info about planets or units, all voiced. Quite a shame it was all scrapped
Man, it would have been really cool if they really did turn the Wings of Liberty campaign into essentially Mass Effect but strategy...
Sadly the closest thing we have is the CoopAI mod for the CCM.
@@JohnTrustworthy Well, if you want RTS Mass Effect, the closest thing you have is, to my knowledge, Divinity: Dragon Commander. So a few differences is that its a fantansy sci-fi rts instead of a more "pure" sci-fi like ME and SC2. The RTS gameplay is...kind of shit, but the way it handled campaign and campaign progression, was very good imo, the story is well-written and the voice-acting is stellar, for that alone I give it a recommendation.
I really do reccomend you give it a try if you ever find a good sale on it, its well worth it.
Also if it's just any kind of RTS, there's a mod for Sins of a Solar Empire too. As there seems to be for nearly any sci-fi franchise. What an amazingly versatile engine, which is why the upcoming sequel looks literally like the exact same thing-
What we got was still really good, so I'm not very salty.
I really wish some of the "boss" motherships in the campaigns had that time bomb and black hole.
Ahhh I remember watching these back in the day lamenting that I couldn't buy the game as a kid!
I can relate
I understand you mate.
Still can't afford it nor play it.
I agree with you, and when the Starcraft Demo version came out, I was just with an Acer Aspire One mini laptop that couldn't run Minecraft and barely resisted Halo Combat Evolved, but damn, I downloaded the Starcraft Demo waiting to see the Thors and wasn't there, at least not like the demo, and was soo disappointed, couldn't even try the Zerg nor Protoss because that Demo only came out with the Terrans as playable faction and the first 3 camping levels of WoL, the ones that takes place on Mar Sara
I still remember being 16/17 and during the burning hot summer 13 years ago exactly as of yesterday, my grandparents drove me around all over the place to get Wings of Liberty, took us hours to find a place where it wasn't pre-order only stuff.
Kinda miss those days.
The Alpha mothership would have been amazing for a Selendis commander.
Grant moving up and down to mimic the photon cannon is now officially one of the things that cheers me up after a bad day
8:00 for anyone wondering
This alpha was so ahead of it's time, it even predicted Giant Grant reacting to it 13 years later 29:31
Interesting that in the battle at the end, you can see the Phoenix shooting at ground units, makes some sense considering it fills the place of Scouts and the current version has graviton to hit ground.
It would be cool to see a mod that added the alpha motherships abilities, the protoss had huge potential here and then they got nerfed into the ground. Its a real shame
WOL: Alpha Edition, HOTS: Alpha Edition, and LOTV Alpha Edition would be FEKKING amazing mods.
Like they haven't been op for at least 10 of sc2s 13 years😂
@@SittingOnEdgeman I second that but god, can you imagine fighting the Purifier Mamaship on Safe Haven and the Tal'Darim Mamaship on Maw of the Void? They would just suck your Viking and BC Fleet into nothingness, and you'd lose all that supply and resources spent.
@@OldSpaghettifactory89 yeah, that's why they've absolutely dominated all the tournaments eh.
@@SittingOnEdgeman Not enough alpha LotV stuff going around that I'm aware of (as in pre-LotV release not playing LotV as pre-WoL-alpha protoss, which would arguably be a massive nerf as vanguards, energisers, nerazim voidrays and fire colossi wouldn't exist...)
And not enough voice acting or writing talent going spare to recreate alpha versions of the HotS campaign. Although I'm sure if we grabbed some random fanfic author the main storyline they cook up would not actually be worse than vanilla canon HotS.
Also the #1 way to fix colossus in modern SC2 is to simply let it attack while moving (this would fix a lot of things in this game). All of a sudden the colossus are actually deathwalkers instead of weird mobile photon canon things that are super vulnerable to everything in the game.
It's wild because like everything else in SC2 is made for Maximum Micro Energy (one reason someone told me he doesn't like it and prefers autobattlers like Mechabellum, not having to do the dumb wiggles and stuff, highly understandable tbh) but this one time they presumably feared the Mighty Colossus was too strong? Well, they fixed that.
All turret units should be able to attack while moving IMO.
@@lothar3073 Not just all turrent units, imagine if the banshee rotor upgrade allowed them to attack while moving (like the phoenix), imagine if ultralisks could attack while moving. Units that, in general, can't do what they're supposed to do, solely because they have to stop moving to do it, making it not worth it or that they instantly die.
@@CorwinTheOneAndOnly Ultras attacking while moving would be HILARIOUS, they would just shred through marines like mowing the lawn
"Alright you alien freaks, Now it's time to pay the price!"
"what should we do general?"
"Send a small squadron of infantry against them"
Once again with this alpha footage reaction, I told myself 'I'll put this on Watch Later and check it out'... and then proceeded to watch the whole thing at once.
7:20 It is notable that modern Starcraft 2 maps feel like they have to almost completely restrict the cliff-jumping ability, there's typically exactly one marked 'jump entrance' into main bases and that's what's considered like, 'fair' now, which indicates it's strong asf and probably contributed towards Reapers being nightmares in WOL. And yeah, as you said famously the cliff jumping thing never matters unless it's enforced by design, like raptorlings aren't prized for that jump. Also, I really like the idea of expanding the Reaper jump ability being an upgrade you research later. Although I don't hate the idea of units that are just good at certain times. I think it helps prevent the Firebat 'no niche, never built' thing.
17:00 This environment is close to the finished product, in that it looks great. The like, engine of SC2 might be its biggest accomplishment as a game, and that's saying something, it's just... even in this early footage, or especially thinking about what it was like back then, a strategy game doing all of this was just so unreasonably hype. And as Grant has pointed out in videos, still unmatched to this day. It's not even close.
22:00 "How is this not in the game?!"
Yeah, this was genuinely artistic and beautiful and inspiring even. Obviously some of that is nostalgia, but it's also just a great example of how... games should be.
Do note that Firebats have two niches that get them pulled out. Stopping ‘Ling floods, or brute forcing stacked Lurkers and Dark Swarms.
The real useless unit are Ghosts for being too fragile and difficult to use, and Scouts, paradoxically so good at that niche (anti capital ship) that no one tries contesting them.
@@Appletank8 Yeah, I think we have seen much more Firebats lately in ASL as well. When the Terran does its first move out against Zerg, often 1-2 Firebats are left to plug in the hole in the wall-in against run-by Zerglings. And in late-game, my impression from the ASL was it was treated like a cheesy counter for the longest time, but now it is standard to mix-in some of them.
And yeah, the Scout is so good that no one builds BattleCruisers, so no one builds Scouts! It's like a gentlemen's agreement lol
@@HasekuraIsuna I like thinking about how Scouts compare with Wraiths. Wraiths are cheaper, so their ground DPS is worth a bit more, while their AA is a bit worse. Their fragility against anything that shoots back is balanced by being able to raid areas without detection usder Cloak.
Scouts are just too expensive to justify using them for ground defense outside emergencies, and not meaningfully stronger than Wraiths to actually fight g2a. Wraiths sometimes gets to fight Carriers and BCs, but nobody makes those against Protoss. By the time Guardians come out, Storm/Archon is already out and works just as well.
15:25 Grant, its REALLY useful to go from triangle 3rd to defend a terran drop in your main. Happens quite often too. Stalkers blink, colossi cliff.
This is the first video I watched about Starcraft 2 and it was absolutely what made me want to play it. Oddly enough the only thing I remember was the Mothership and the physics.
I like the warp wraith. I just imagine the protoss were in awe of the supreme might of the SC1 wraith and thougt 'yeah we need this but good'
It''s Warp ray but close enough and sounds cooler
Will you do C&C vids in the future, Grant?
Оооо мне очень хочется что бы ты прошёл red Alert 2 и red Alert 3 :0
The hardened shield had to be sacrificed to bring back the shield battery without being completely overpowered. Sad to see it go even in the singleplayer campaigns though, it's not like it would have been /more/ broken than the Vanguard.
Hardened shields disappeared long before shield batteries came back
@@derfzgrld No it was about the same time, LoTV, unless the battery wasn't part of LoTV release
@@violet9214 As part of LotV, the mothership core received a rework and the barrier replaced hardened shield. However, the mothership core was still too good at its job and even things that werent its job, so Blizzard decided to scrap it like... 2-3 years later iirc? and replace it with the shield battery instead, as both fulfilled the same role of helping protoss against earlygame cheese.
It was such a distinctive mechanic. I'm still sad it couldn't make it into the LotV campaign.
Thanks Grant. This was a great nostalgia trip down the memory lane! I still remember the shock and awe me and my friends felt as we saw this trailer for the first time in 2007 (and the hundreds of times we watched it religiously after 😂).
With every expansion and game mode and then commander that was announced I hoped this mothership would be added but to no avail!
If any modder can make this a reality, please do it. You will make a lot of old 20-
30-something people feel like a child again
🙏😊
We don't have the Black Hole graphic or missile dud ragdolls. Everything else is _fairly_ trivial within the editor, probably a day's work if you don't do any balancing or the like.
Ahhh the nostalgia! I used to watch this clip over and over again when I was younger and hyped up for Starcraft 2.
This was the very first gameplay video of SC2, and it shows. The game looked a lot more similar to Starcraft 1 than our current version. The units still had the SC1 style wireframes, the Siege Tanks had the boxy shape the SC1 tanks had, and the Battlecruisers here fired a slow firing singular laser like they did in SC1 as opposed to the rapid-firing Battlecruiser we have now.
Apart from the units and the mechanics, I really liked the lighting, tone of coloring and metallic texture of this version over the actual release (textures in the release are indeed better looking and better detailed, but at times especially the buildings look too blocky and plastic)
Never saw this in english before, only saw the Korean live-reaction one, which admittedly was pretty cool too.
I also remember that the Starcraft2 website had unit showcases, which included the Zealot and Immortal with the Alpha voices shown here, so I had downloaded all their voice lines and put them into Starcraft1.
I always wanted to use the Alpha Protoss units, ever since I saw them.
However, they didn't come out in 2010 - so I studied the Editor for a long time - and created them in my own SC2 Arcade maps. It felt soo good controlling those units, such as the Soul Hunter, the Alpha Mothership, Colossi, etc....
I hope someone makes a campaign featuring the Alpha units in the future, so that Grant could feel the joy of controlling those lovely units.
So where are those maps, now
@@raynortownly7098 Not sure if the reply I gave you was deleted, as it contained RUclips links.
Maybe it was delted by RUclips bot or something. In any case, you can see some videos of those units I've made in my channel's old videos.
As for the maps themselves, they are published in the Arcade as 'Viacre.'
Grant loved that spaghetification.
I honestly want to see a game mode where all the units are capable of the abilities showcased in the alpha. If there’s ever a mod for that Grant needs to play it.
To this day I sometimes wonder what a twilight archon would do. I remember they had a website that listed some of the units that would(maybe) be in the game. Don’t remember the exact details, but one protross unit it showed was something called a twilight archon, made by merging a high templar and a dark templar.
If I recall correctly, it was just named Twilight Archon because it could now be formed with any mix of Dark and High Templars.
I think there was speculation it would get different stats or abilities depending on the mix...
I remember watching this as a kid, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Still remember getting in the car with my mom to go to Walmart and get the box set for each StarCraft game
Man you never notice how gorgeous this game is when you play it at full speed.
Man, what a nostalgia trip!
I definitely had the same feeling you did about RTS games being out of favour back in 2006. I remember being in highschool in the mid-aughts, when the PC gaming scene was so dominated by WoW and FPS games - basically nobody my age that I knew played RTS games at the time, although lots of people slightly older than me were still fans of AoE2 and Brood War.
SC2 was a huge boost in popularity for RTSes, and honestly just having an engine that *worked* made it super hypeworthy. (Control groups of more than 12! Non-insane pathing! Actually being able to see the units!)
With these early SC2 videos (I don't remember which one), the unit that struck me most was the original Tempest, which was a Nerazim carrier whose interceptors did melee damage. I think they ultimately scrapped it because of its similarity to the Carrier (and the love that Brood War players had for that unit), but the development team was clearly overflowing with ideas to play around with.
The literal term for that "bendy thing" in real life is called Spaghettification
Well by the looks of it this was only supposed to be a visual representation of spacetime curvature so _maybe_ it would pass as "gravitational lensing" (that term usually implies the "lens" is a separate object _between_ the observer and the observed target). Spaghettification is when the local _variation_ of gravitational pull is large enough to straight up rip a large object apart, and would very quickly make a battlecruiser not look "bendy" but rather very much not like a battlecruiser at all. It's basically the same effect that turns unfortunate planets into asteroid belts, just even more unpleasant.
I remember watching this video as a kid over and over again. SC2 was the first game i waited for and saved up to buy with my own money and got the special edition which came with that massive strategy book hardcover and other goodies.
The medivac goes pretty close to the ground when they drop troops. That’s pretty cool. Unfortunate that they don’t do it :(
And the building seem to have a crash animation when they die when are in the air.
Seeing these makes me sad 😢
This and the other videos of Starcraft 2 Alpha made me wanting to play the game even more, all this cool stuff? Man I really wanted to play around with everything they showed but of course since this was an Alpha and the people that playtested the game to see what balance changes they needed to do (especially for PVP) but man I would have love to do all that in the campaing or in the more casual content like Coop. Like you can keep all that crazy stuff for the campaing and even Coop and all of us would have been happy
Terran is really good right now because of stim bio. Reapers definitely need a mid/lategame buff, and the long range jump pack honestly sounds perfect, especially with modern reaper speed
It confuses me that the campaign-exclusive U-238 shells upgrade was never implemented as a midgame upgrade for Reapers (the upgrade that gives them +3 anti-light damage and +1 range). They're so useless after their first obligatory scouting + poking opener.
No, reapers are fine as is. They have their role, they do it fine. Believe me, you don't want the reapers turning into adepts.
Sucks that the wire frame was still in game at this point until it was removed in the base game :/
Also scv had a different building look than in the base game(no yellow crane)
Also was the doodads with the machine that was shooting lasers at the mineral fields still in game? I remember back in the day, ppl believed those machines was a new terran unit, like mule I guess
I think they missed an opportunity to make the wrathwalker have the alpha colossus firing animation. It looks so cool.
That would've been even cooler with air units
Something interesting, I've been fucking around trying to learn how to use the editor, and I discovered that the planet cracker ability and animation are still in the game. I'd have to check to see if time bomb is there
Old Siege Tanks looking like Pingu. Noot, noot!
**noot-noot**
(translating from penguin): you're base's are gone
@@somedude4087 your base are belong to us
I have an In Utter Darkness-esque custom map where after the player reaches 3000+ kills they can warp in one or more hovering Colossi-looking units that is armed the equivalent of 4 Protoss MG42s, and an amped Immortal cannon, and has a passive ability/behaviour aura akin to the alpha Mothership time bomb.
Oh also you play as Terran with no base building, but an Alien Shooter-esque turret survival mixed with DotA 1.
It didn't show up in this demo, but a later mini demo showed off the ohase cannons, which even if they were basically just protoss spine/spore crawlers, I always liked and wisjed the showed up again in something.
22:00 thats like a "how to make the purifier boss fight not suck as much" xD
That comment on the RTS falling out around 2006 hit me hard xD my friends and i all grew up with Age Of Empires and Starcraft brood war, and played them almost religiously together. But then almost nothing new came out any good for around a decade. We fell into other genres, and didn't really look back, since there was nothing new to get into. we've all gone our separate paths now, and i miss playing RTS games with them all during our free time. Only found SC2 myself a couple years back when i decided to check blizzard games again.
While i love Sc2, i can't sink myself into it as deeply as i did when my friends and I spent hours on end just playing each other and having fun. it's a great game still though, and i can't wait for SC3 to come out in 10 more years. it's just not as fun playing the games alone anymore when i have so many great memories of playing with my friends as a child.
Yeah, it's hard to fall into things as adults, especially compared to doing so as kids. Part of it is probably responsibility, since we can't necessarily spend 90% of our waking moments doing any one thing for fun. Part of it is also either perspective or variety. As adults, we have far more access to bigger libraries than just whatever we can convince our parents to buy for us. Sure, we could spend 10 hours a day playing RTS, but there's also FPS games we could play, puzzle games, etc. Hard to focus on one particular game or genre when you're so spoiled for choice.
I remember this preview; it was unusual seeing that the portraits for everyone but the Battlecruiser captain remaining essentially the same in the final product despite this being an early demo for the game.
I still think about this video sometimes. It's just so cool and fun looking! And, like I think basically everything else, the Purifier Mothership should have been the alpha-version mothership. THAT would have made it a fun boss fight!
The third Ghost launching a nuke directly into the Terran line with few Protoss present in that area
this was mind blowing back when I saw it, we were fans of starcraft in my school, and starcraft and quake arena were about the most graphically demanding games we could run on the labs PCs so this was awsome
I 'member watching these several times everyday coming home from work in complete and utter hype.
Interesting the Mothership doesn't have the mass cloak here.
Tbh I'd much rather have this mothership than the one we have now.
The cliffwalking ability of the colossus was very strong in wol and hots when protoss were turtling on 3 bases with a pocket third below the main base, you could put your colossi to the side of the main base ramp and they could defend all 3 bases from that position. In fact that was the only reason protoss could defend 3 bases and turtle until they could get enough units out to be able to move out on the map.
This gameplay looks really cool! I like the atmosphere! It clearly shows everything has its counter. Also, Protoss shields have great visuals there.
I still go back from time to time to look at these original videos. Lot of cool concepts they didn't use.
This video is awesome. I fall in love with SC2 once again. Thank you
MAAAAAAAAAAN MY CHILDHOOD! this is like everything I wanted when I was a kid! I never played starcraft so seeing this for the first time when it was released I was so unbelievably excited for this game I actually could not wait for it to be released! the small little details like the color from the icon changing from green into parts of yellow and red was one of my favorites together with the mothership! I knew the moment I saw that final battle at the end that I was going to love this game no matter what
I definitely recall this video from way back in the day and it got me very hyped for the game. In a way, I feel like multiplayer balancing (and probably performance optimizing too) sapped a lot of the FUN away from StarCraft 2. If you look at this video and then look at a modern pro match with super responsive 200 supply deathballs killing each other at the speed of thought, it's like night and day. I almost wish they had kept this slower game speed as the default too - would have made it a little bit closer to WarCraft 3 and I think more digestible for audiences.
That Terran gameplay trailer also had an accompanying singleplayer video demo if you wanna check that out, the Terran ones were from 2008 I believe
When I saw this video at around late 2007, an older cousin got the video in a CD played it on his PS2, holy moly my mind was blown
The absolute closest I can get to your question if physics in blackhole, if there are any games that do that. Closest (and it's not even that close) would be the Scrin Rift Generator. Buildings will shake when the rift is overhead and pieces will shoot off into the rift. But it's an older game than even this footage so it's not quite at the same level.
I was waiting for this vid. Just like for Grant this gameplay trailer was the reason SC2 entered my life.
Oh the Mothership. SC2 alpha had amazing doom units. That Time Stop actually holding the missles, the planet cracker, and that black hole. Animations were amazing, and easier to appreciate on Normal speed. So so so cool. Its sad that this kind of stuff never made it into the offline game - campaign, arcade, whatever. It would be so fun!!
wow!
I think I saw some of it sometime bakc, but that black hole was INSANE!!!
I guess this was the original idea of the Archon's black hole on the LOTV trailer
14:43 i never realized how cracked these Banelings were. it also looks like a SINGLE Baneling is almost entirely peeling the Colossus's shield off, which means at this stage in development units may have still damaged shields how they do in Brood War, IE doing "full" damage against Shields at all times (so, Siege Tanks would deal 70 damage to a Zealot, completely removing its shield, but then only 35 to the Zealot's hull in subsequent shots). you can also see that once the Shield is gone, the Baneling is only doing 39 damage. im guessing the Colossus had 1 armor and Banelings had at least 40 base damage. they probably had something like 40+40 vs light.
2:44 Zealot 4:57 Tank
5:42 Immotral 6:26 Reaper
8:01 Warp Prism 9:08 Stalker 10:33 Nydus
11:17 Warp Prism 12:23 Colossus(Changed) 14:30 Baneling 15:56 Mutalisk
16:04 Phoenix(Changed) 17:50 Battlecruiser
18:30 Void Ray 19:53 Marine
20:43 Mothership(Changed)
26:17 Summary
4:33 this is likely because the footprint for the barracks is a complete square. most footprints today have half squares for their corners, making a more octagon-like shape than a square. that's my guess, anyway. in which case, this could still be done via modding today.
This is what the stormgate reveal trailer should have been like
I don't know how to explain it, but the visuals/style of the protoss seemed much better in this alpha than the final game.
Terran stuff also looked more SC1-ish, especially the siege tanks.
I don't know if you were around when this video was first released, but the SC fanbase absolutely HATED the way the Terran looked. Blizzard did a full visual revamp of the race which was widely accepted as being an upgrade.
I guess seing the current style now for so long, this alpha look is like a breath of fresh air.
But I do agree, some Terran stuff is... Ugly. (I especially remember the awful bunkers from the Terran preview.)
I think the reason the time field got removed was how inconsistent it was with respect to the projectiles. Like some of the missiles hit the mothership (you see the HP go down) and others don't? Do the projectiles just slow in the middle of the field or does speed go down to 0 over time when they travel anywhere in the sphere? The time warp that's in LotV is a lot less flashy but it's a lot easier to understand.
The video didn't cover much about the Zerg, but here's something I crafted out explaining why the Zerg race is so strong in SC2. The new Zerg units essentially sprung out of Protoss-themed ideas. And where does that leave the Protoss? Either lacking the abilities they previously had in Brood War, having been given to the Zerg, or the Zerg now having similar tools to what was only supposed to be available to the Protoss in Brood War. Examples below.
Roach - Is so strong because it's essentially a ranged Zealot. Why even? Isn't Zerg early tech about cheap units mass produced? Why have a new class of unit?
Ravager - Due to its association with Roaches, I saw them as upgraded Dragoons.
Viper - Parasitic bomb is essentially Psi Storm which follows the target like Irradiate. Abduct is a single unit recall. Add on blinding cloud which is mass-version of Medic's Optic Flare. That's how it's strong.
Swarm Host - Like a budget Reaver.
Baneling - Scarabs available right out of recycled basic units.
Infestor - Having the Dark Archon's mind control.
All these are cheaper and budget versions of their Protoss equivalents, at the same time being so practical hence increasing the effectiveness of the Zerg race. They have too many copies of what another race has and in more practical versions, better packaged to adapt and handle any challenges from opponents.
HTs *do* have blue shades in SC2, and always had them! Maar has them too.
*ALL* siege tanks with folding treads look really derpy to me. The SC1 version with just the stabilising legs looks much better. Both SC1 and these alpha graphics photon cannons look a lot better than the ball pit we have now too :(
I can tell you why Time Bomb isn't in the game: ragdoll models for missiles. How do you even _design_ one for e.g. the photon cannon? And having to add new ones for e.g. ravagers and liberators. Honestly I don't recall WoL even launching with *any* actual ragdoll physics like what they showcased here, the proper system in use today was implemented (in terms of assets and data) in HotS. Also PDD was horrible enough for visual vs gameplay discrepancies, imagine having to explain why a _giant freakin' time-distorting field_ doesn't work on marine bullets or lurker spines but does work on phoenix pewpew.
And yes I am still incredibly pissed we didn't get the OG Black Hole graphic. We do have the fire.png, Time Bomb, the central beam quartet of Planet Cracker, the mothership spawn _sound_ but not the exact animation, and the phoenix Overload recovery animation.
To any prospective modders: good luck making the colossus beam both look and play even halfway reasonable. I tried back in WoL and the result was super janky, hopefully newer tech can do something better.
I remember watching this video over and over
Lol I'm watching this at work, and the microsoft outlook notification had me scrambling to find what meeting I was about to be late for.
cliffwalking can actually be really great though, especially in the campaign, where the AI doesn't usually replace any air spotter support quickly.
the Nexus Coop custom map that's just the coop maps with custom commanders has a planet cracker mothership in it. IIRC that faction fills the calldown bar buttons with units passively and has to deploy one of its two heroes to be allowed to call down those units, one adept hero who allows you to deploy your ground units & one mothership hero who allows you to deploy your air units.
the mothership gets flipped into "planet cracker" mode & begins firing a beam downward that grows in size & damage until the beam is as wide as the mothership is, making it basically an AOE super-void ray, but in exchange it cant use its defensive immortal shield ability.
so you charge up the beam & then roll your mothership over the enemy alongside your air army, turning the beam off to activate its immortal shield when it's taking too much fire, and then right before it dies you hit the button on the calldown bar to recall your army and the mothership and its attending fleet jumps away, and then you call down the ground army to mop up what's left while the fleet recovers in orbit.
its good stuff. also has a faction where you build barracks that produce units but instead of deploying them each unit they train gets put into the merc compound as a charge, & from the merc compound you pick where each unit is instantly orbitally dropped combining the best parts of Raynor's orbital deployment & merc compound with the best parts of the Protoss's Warp-ins
22:22 all of the missile models in the game no longer have any kind of physics test (i dont remember exactly what it's called) to them from what i can tell, so that makes doing this exact effect really tricky nowadays, since the model file on disk itself has to have the correct data in it for the engine to properly simulate physics for it. ive had the idea of attaching an invisible physics barrel to missiles to get the effect that way, and in theory this would work, but the actor work is really tricky and i havent totally figured it out yet. the only other way would be to modify the models of each and every missile you'd want to have this be done to in order to give them a physics test. i do one day want to have this effect in my mod, though.
Soo awesome seeing Starcraft 2 veterans reacting to these time capsule videos. 😇
"they took down the skytoss but at what cost"
every single TvP match
The "bendy thing" at the end is accomplished with non-linear mathematical transformations on some of the coordinates of the textures and interpolating between them. You can do this in pretty much any engine, the equations arent that complicated.
22:50 That is truly amazing. I want that.
However, I have a feeling this was done just to create absolute hype - as that hype can be generated even today - and in practice they already knew it is impossible to pull off for the immense load this, combined with the physics, would put on everyone's system. Look how many extra units those rockets make up. They would at least have to limit the number of projectiles would be rendered in this, removing the oldest once the threshold is reached.
„You already got the cheese when playing Protoss so you get the planet cracker to go with it. Crackers and cheese - amazing“. That really... you know... cracked me up. ( 23:55 )
5:29 siege tank lipstick paint job
Grant you need to hunt down the PC gamer cd that gave a ton of demonstration with none of the narration, as far as I can tell, it was an August issue, 2011 or 2010, it was awesome as hell and sold me on Wings of Liberty but I cannnnnnnot find the footage anywhere! There was a video where you could see tons of units fighting the Zerg, terran on one side, protoss on the other and both sides eventually used all their forces, it was really damn cool.
The Protoss had Photon cannons that could reloate permanently, called Phase CAnnons.
You sure about that? Was it like a magazine bundle? Must have been 2010, as the game was long out by 11. Hell, even 2010 would have been release footage. This Vid is from late 07, or whatever, so very early build.
2230: it is in the game, the raven's anti-projectile drone. the rest is just vfx :)
The data remians on the editor but shattered, incomplete but many has revived this alpha planet cracker skill
I imagine the Mothership timestop got removed because it just completely broke the engine in some manner (if it even truly existed and wasn't just a hardcoded trick for the trailer)
My guess is 'projectiles being an actual tangible thing breaks game engines in half even now'. A shame tbh.
@@RoyalFusilier kb0289338: Seeker Missile Stuck Inside Command Card
kb02377371: Marauders Able To Attack Air Units While In Time Stop
kb0296847: Mothership Can Intercept Medic Heal Beam To Repair In Time Stop
Actually the mechanics tech for Time Bomb still exists in the editor and is quite trivial to use. Basically if you can make a stacking DoT or move/attack speed debuff you can make this. Projectiles already are tangible units and check impact collision by default (side note: marines do NOT use such actual projectiles). The dropping duds are _conceptually_ simple too and we could totally do that if the "missiles" were jumping zerglings, but we do not have any compatible "missile dud" models to my knowledge so those would need to be made in a 3D model editor first.
Missile turret missiles specifically do have a unique "dud drop" animation however and I am not sure how functional it truly is. The ragdolls we see today were added in HotS so these pre-WoL relics might not be compatible, and this video showcase may in fact have been fake. I don't think actual missile reflection/redirection existed in WoL either, that would be another way to pull this off with existing missile graphics nowadays but they would explode upon hitting the ground instead of rolling around (could still be harmless but would not have proper collision physics).
C&C generals actually had some cool things
like chinese ECM tank that was deflecting some rockets (but not all of them) or disable vehicles
laser point defence for US that also still can be overwhelmed by the number of rockets
aurora bomber that could go "supersonic" and cannot be hit while dive mombing
bomb trucks taht can change appearance to look like enemy
I'd watch you going through the campaign, interesting what u'd say about it
What was the release date on Generals?
Didn't RA3 have this on Assault Destroyers? The Black Hole armor or something?
@@The-jy3yq I was sure generals are older even prior googling
though google says that:
Generals released in 2003
RA3 2008
I’m glad you said you learned what GG was from this video, because I’m pretty sure that’s true for me too
I think it would be fun to look at old unit trailers and discussing how they would fit in modern Starcraft 2.
those banes were dealing 45 damage to the colosi
Is it bad that when the Immortals came into the video that I noticed the holodancer was using animations from I believe the Night Elf female in World of Warcraft?
Imagine being a marine in a space war and you commander tells you to go out and fire your rifle at the giant alien space ship in the sky......
and it works.
Alphastar didn't have infinite apm, it was limited by apm per minute at first. So it would use it's actions as a resource, purposefully sitting back or kitting slowly to save up apm then to use it all in a burst of micro spiking to really high amounts. Since it was fighting itself it grew in a way built around that, trying to waste the actions of the other ai etc. That's why many of the things it did seemed odd to normal players.
Regarding the Mothership's time bomb ability, I think you can consider C&C Generals: Zero Hour's ECM tank also has a fun ability to temper with rockets. It creates a small dome around it that changes the trajectory of every missile that gets into its field. It made some cool looking moments when a dozen of rockets were trying to hit your army but a couple of ECM in the front would render those attacks useless. (Ofc the Mothership's ability is still much cooler)
In titanfall 2 you can catch enemy projectiles and fling back at them. it was pretty dope cause it would routinely jib enemy grunts.
That planet cracker and cheese pun at the end...
I don't know if it's true, but I heard they dialed back on certain effects because of lag. Like how you see bits and pieces of Battlecruisers and blown-up buildings for a while. The Timebomb ability collecting shots from a big army sounds potentially quite taxing. Would be really cool to have, though.
The reason the cliff walking is not viable is that the Colossus is a backline support unit, so using its mobility to engage enemies just gets it killed after it leaves the army behind. If the immortal had it, it would of course be OP.