This Is The Golden Age Of SC2 Custom Campaigns

making custom campaigns is freaking hard it takes incredible creativity and a ton of time in starcraft 2 one of the biggest obstacles for modders isn't actually making the campaign but all the support features mission select menus upgrade interfaces loading between maps it takes a huge amount of time and effort to build these things and the average player only spends about 20 seconds on them each mission after all that's done the campaign gets shoved into this mess of an interface and just hopes to be found it's not a good system for players or for modders so i decided it was time to fix it earlier this year the modder mindhawk famous for his reverse wings liberty campaign sent me a message he figured out how to run custom campaigns through the normal campaign client in starcraft 2. things like unlocking planets the armory tracking bonus objectives and evolutions is taken care of automatically all the modder has to do is make the maps and so we gave it a test run and bindhawk's challenge gauntlet was born a series of trials and wings of liberty designed to make me suffer it was a huge amount of fun and even more pain everybody had a good time well mostly everybody but most importantly each map took mindhawk a few hours to make down from the multiple days that normal development calls for with this test being so successful i knew i couldn't keep it to myself i reached out to my friend ace and we got to work a few months later the giant grant games custom campaign manager was born with this free app you can play custom mods for any of the four official campaigns easily i'll give some more instructions on how to use it at the end but it's as easy as drag and drop no digging into starcraft files and folders no messy business but how do you get it the starcraft custom mod manager is available for free for everyone all you have to do is join the official discord server below but of course a mod manager is pointless without any mods so what exactly do we have to offer on this initial launch we currently have six separate custom campaigns that i've tested with an additional four on the way uh right now they're all wings of liberty or heart of the swarm though legacy the void stuff will be releasing soon i promise but a promise of quality isn't enough let's take a look at what each of these campaigns has going on for itself if you're interested in seeing full playthroughs of these you can check out my second channel giant grand games archives it used to be a place where i've randomly dropped my twitch vods but recently i've shifted towards making custom content specifically for the channel including a lot of these runs first up is real scale wings of liberty made by the real rhyme if you've seen my video on it you know exactly what to expect zerglings are plenty altruists are horrifying and the protoss are the size of literal maps when i played through the mod there was a set planet order but with the power of the custom campaign manager you can now pick your own path if you want to charge headfirst into the purifier mothership feel free if soloing uber thor's with tosh is more your style go for it if it's ever too hard you always have the opportunity to pull back and head somewhere else after blasting kerrigan with some real scale battle cruisers maybe you'd like to check out the smaller sidereel scale well now you can with the newly released heart of the swarm made by orca warrior this is where we all collectively learned that the control group size in starcraft is actually capped at 500 meaning that full zerg armies take not one not two but up to three groups to move around it's actually insane because rime had already taken the time to build the base real scale mod orco was able to expand on it creating some truly incredible things warfield's real scale nukes on old soldiers are a thing of beauty and the gorgon battlecruiser yes the gorgon battlecruiser is a sight to behold the primal zerg level up and increases size as they eat through your swarm and of course the shuttles on calder have a bit more of an impressive escort and isn't summoning the leviathan kerrigan's ultimate ability hm well i'm not gonna show that one off you're gonna have to play it yourself to see both real scale wings of liberty and heart of the swarm can be played on all game difficulties but they're not balance tested on anything below brutal but what if you want something harder than brutal well i have just the thing for you designed by me and implemented by the real rhyme is wings of liberty nightmare edition nightmare is not some meme difficulty that warps in motherships to kill you at the two minute mark to pretend that it's hard and it's not a total campaign reversion it's a genuine attempt at creating what would be a blizzard-like difficulty above brutal each of the missions are given small sets of unique tweaks to make things more challenging for example on the devil's playground the enemy now sends drop overlords to attack the player while the lava is raised and on media blitz the enemy no longer sits around after the sneak attack destroys their base and instead slowly starts to rebuild on missions like the dig where you face the tauldrim you now face actual tall durham units the vanguard wrath walker and ascendant are horrifying the drill's gonna have to do a bit of overtime to keep you safe there are also more general ai tweaks enemy units properly use their abilities marines will stim templar will feedback on energy users and battle cruisers will fire their yamato cannon enemy attacks have been slightly offset with a random modifier so players cannot just memorize when and where everything hits instead being forced to dynamically defend this makes things like the sensor tower significantly more valuable and the later stages of enemy attacks have been beefed up wings liberty had a problem where enemy attacks stop improving pretty quickly and then they hit with the same thing over and over now they'll keep growing and improving as time goes on there are a few balance changes specifically to try to make horrible units like the wraith predator and firebat more viable choices while bringing down the absolute absurdity of the siege tank and finally are the boss fights no longer will you be disappointed by an inept purifier mothership who can't fight back heroic and elite enemies are truly obstacles to be overcome oh and removed all the cheeses from the missions no drop pods and new gimmicks to win now you gotta play it legit but maybe nightmare is a bit too much what about something a bit sillier well the wings of liberty randomizer might be right up your alley are you tired of marines and siege tanks being too strong of a defensive line how about loading your banelings and quilgore into a bunker see how they'll do the wings liberty randomizer made by synergy works on a pretty simple principle i took every unit in the game divided them into different groups and those groups replace your normal units when you build when you order a cheap unit you might get a marine some zerglings or a veinling need some more firepower head over to the factory and you might find yourself building a ravager an archon or even a warhound but of course the spiciest stuff can only be found in the mercenary compound you might get some narazim dark templar a torin marine or maybe even something a bit more hybrid the wings liberty randomizer is not a heart mod but it's absolutely a blast somehow the mod manages to simultaneously have zero strategy and unlock incredible potential for impromptu plays at the same time it's a wonderful romp and a lot of fun and as it should be the heart of the swarm randomizer takes this idea and evolves it made by kit this mod takes everything that was fun about the previous entry and dials it up to 11. every swarm needs a queen and today our swarm is going to be led by tikus nice each mission rolls from a pool of 16 heroes all who level up just like kerrigan would gaining increased health armor and damage in addition to all your forces being randomized the enemy is getting a little bit in on the action as well the eradicator and lab rat is looking a bit funny today and the gorgon battle cruiser sure got a fancy paint job my favorite part about the heart of the swarm randomizer is finding out which hero you get a disproportionately large amount of the time for me it was stukov which was honestly pretty great sorry to whoever keeps getting stepman though i feel really bad for you i honestly do and finally we have the mod that started it all mindhawks challenge gauntlet just a fair warning mindhawk does not take the term challenge lightly while this mod is designed to work on all difficulties brutals often dips its toe into nightmare difficulty levels each mission in wings of liberty is given a unique twist sometimes the hero rhames jainer has the statistics of a normal marine sometimes the draken laser drill is just not operating today and sometimes menks remembers that he's totally cool with nuking his own planet and sometimes zeratul just won't shut up the gauntlet is an even split between memes twists on missions and pain i love each and every one of these custom campaigns and i'm incredibly excited to be able to share them with you in order to play all you have to do is head over the giant grand games custom campaign discord below download the campaign manager and follow the index to whatever mod you'd like to play unzip and run the manager then drag and drop the zipped campaign onto it that's it you're done it should pop up as the active campaign right here and if it does you can now open starcraft head into the campaign interface and it'll play if not it'll be in this drop down menu pick it click select to activate and you should be good to go and when you're done and want to convert back to normal all you have to do is close starcraft click the restore to unmodified button and everything will be back to normal that's it thank you for watching and i hope that you have a wonderful time with us we put in a ton of effort and i'm really proud of what we came up with if people like this there will be a ton more to come good luck and have fun peace

Channel: GiantGrantGames

Views: 165,839

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Id: a_m-ftMVY9g

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/HellStaff]

I wish there were custom campaign achievements. They don't have to provide any points, just for looking at.