Starcraft 2 Graphics Mod
Posted : admin On 03.11.2019
Feb 14, 2016 - Warcraft: Armies of Azeroth, which is now available for free in the SC2 arcade, brings Warcraft 3 into StarCraft 2, with revamped graphics.
Every other Monday, Dominic gives you a reason to dust off one of your old games and dive into its mods with.remains an RTS esports favourite nine years from launch, but its mod scene never got the love or attention it deserved. Despite Blizzard’s support, an in-game mod browser, powerful editor and even a, a lot flew under the radar. While some mods and standalone missions remain popular in the StarCraft 2 Arcade, we’re going to be diving deep into the biggest, best and newest single-player campaigns available. Whether you’re an RTS veteran or don’t know what a Zerg is, there’s something for you here.The icing on the space-cake is that all of this is completely free. StarCraft 2’s first episode – – has full mod support,. Every one of these campaigns can be played start to finish, fully intact and without a scratch on your wallet.
Impressive, considering one is a full modernised remake of the original StarCraft and its expansion. Not to be too hyperbolic, but I consider the best way to enjoy the original StarCraft’s campaigns.
Possibly the biggest campaign for StarCraft 2, it’s a comprehensive remake of the original game, its demo (which had its own missions), the Brood War expansion and a bit more besides. Or at least, it will be in the next few weeks. While previous releases of the mod included all six campaigns plus extras, the current version only contains the original three.
The rest are coming soon, as they’re currently being updated to include every enhancement that can be borrowed from Blizzard’s own StarCraft: Remastered.While StarCraft: Remastered did little more than polish up the original game (in the name of retaining multiplayer balance), Mass Recall tries to fill in the blanks inherent in porting a 1998 game to a 2010 engine. There are now difficulty settings (StarCraft’s Normal is roughly equivalent to the sequel’s Hard mode), and where lore-appropriate, Brood War units and expanded hero characters are available in the original game’s missions. For the most part, the missions play similarly to their original incarnations, just with a far slicker interface, a slew of quality-of-life improvements, and the occasional new in-game cutscene. It’s still StarCraft, but a subtly modernised version.At its absolute most playful, some hero-only missions in Mass Recall are (optionally) playable as a third-person shooter. It’s a bit rough and janky and not something the engine was made for, but it freshens up some short, otherwise dull missions.
If any of that that turns you off, there’s an options menu that allows you to pick and choose what enhancements to use. Don’t like a specific unit’s retro voice or model? Replace it with the StarCraft 2 equivalent. Remove the extra hero units, the early Brood War tech or any combination. I personally have everything turned on, but it’s up to you.As for playing Mass Recall itself, it’s an interesting contrast against StarCraft 2’s overtly cinematic campaigns.
StarCraft 1’s missions are far less heavily scripted, often giving you simpler, more direct objectives against an AI enemy that’s designed to harass you with steadily escalating waves of units until either you push back, or your defences crumble. It’s not really comparable to playing against human opponents (the AI seldom adapts to your strategies), but it’ll teach build orders and micromanagement better than StarCraft 2, especially on those new, higher difficulties.There’s the occasional rough edge to Mass Recall, such as some slightly awkward dialogue portrait models, but for the most part they’ve gone above and beyond. Where appropriate, factions are (again, optionally) given their own unique unit and building models. To top it all off, when fully armed and operational, Mass Recall will also include Enslavers Redux, another StarCraft 1 user campaign, similarly remade. That alone adds another thirty missions to Brood War’s seventy-ish. You’re looking at weeks (if not months) of strategerising here – not a bad intro to the RTS genre either, and completely free.Installation of Mass Recall is dead easy, and the instructions can be found.
In short: Grab StarCraft 2 (either retail or the Wings Of Liberty free edition) through. Download the, and (highly recommended unless you like missing chunks of the story) and put them all in your StarCraft 2 directory. Run the installer, and when it’s done you’ll have a nice Mass Recall link on your desktop. Of course, if that’s still not enough for you Annihilation. A passion project four years in the making from modder “DudkiSC2”.
Was completed in late December 2018 and consists of 24 long, multi-phase missions featuring all three races. Annihilation attempts to mimic the style of StarCraft 2’s campaigns, including some setpiece boss battles, and a lot of dungeon crawling with small groups of heroes. It has multiple difficulty settings, and in an attempt to imitate StarCraft 2’s campaign tech-trees, you can pick which unit types are available to you on many missions. If there’s one complaint I can level at it, it’s that some of the writing is ham-fisted, with some one-note character personalities.Annihilation’s missions are all separate SC2Map files, which makes launching them a little fiddlier than Mass Recall. You can open them in the StarCraft 2 level editor and launch them from there. Alternatively, you can also make SC2Switcherx64.exe (located in your Starcraft IISupport64 directory) your default application to open SC2Map files.
Now you can launch any mission or campaign just by opening the SC2Map directly. Missions started this way default to Fastest game speed (as used in multiplayer), but a tap or two of the keypad minus key will slow it down some.
The Antioch Chronicles. One of the more narratively impressive campaigns out there. The Antioch Chronicles is a fully voice-acted Protoss-focused campaign split into three episodes., but the third – – was made specifically for StarCraft 2. While I’ve only had time to briefly dabble in this trilogy (as with many of these other campaigns, it’ll take days to play through), the mission design seems clever and varied. Still, be warned – if your Protoss game is rusty you may want to play Mass Recall to warm up. The original two episodes have no difficulty options, but the third does.The first two episodes even feature StarCraft 1-style mission briefings, although the third episode (and its very swish campaign menu) tells its story through lengthy cutscenes book-ending each mission.
While amateur voice acting is a minefield at the best of times, both delivery and the script are surprisingly good in this campaign, although I’m sure Protoss voice post-processing effects hide a litany of cheap microphone sins. While dialogue sequences don’t drag on too long, there’s a little bit of fanfic-esque ‘And I was here doing this not far from this important canon character’ exposition in here. Also lots of George Lucas-style screen wipe transitions. Still, a great excuse to dive deep into Protoss lore and work on your pylon strategies. Odysseyhas been floating around on the StarCraft 2 Arcade for ages, but is best experienced. First debuting back in 2015, this very polished campaign finally wrapped up its first episode in March 2018.
Each of Odyssey’s fourteen missions are sprawling, complex things, sometimes split across multiple maps and almost always with multiple phases of objectives. While mostly similar in structure to StarCraft 2’s missions, it has a few ideas of its own like rocks being usable as cover by infantry in some missions, or special custom units with clever new powers. As with most of the campaigns here, it also supports difficulty settings – Brutal mode lives up to its name.Odyssey doesn’t have much in the way of custom art, music or audio, but it does what it can with basic StarCraft 2 materials. It does stumble at a couple points – its overly self-serious story feels a bit too nebulous to follow and its character names are a bit My First Action Hero’y (Captain Harsh, Stryker, etc), but some serious thought has been put into its world-building. Some of the later missions also suffer from performance issues, although I’m not sure if that’s due to bugs introduced by Blizzard through updates, or the sheer scope of the missions themselves. Thankfully, StarCraft 2’s interface remains smooth and responsive even when the on-screen action chugs, but it does struggle a bit during some of the bigger set-piece battles between multiple factions. Honorable Mentions.
It would be remiss to talk about massive StarCraft 2 mods without mentioning SC Universe, the, World Of Warcraft-inspired pseudo-MMO mod. Featured by Blizzard and found in StarCraft 2’s own Arcade panel, just search for ‘SC Universe’ and you’ll find the prologue missions, plus the game proper. It’s a technical marvel, and a long game in its own right whether played in co-op or solo.
The problem is that I just don’t especially enjoy it. Unlike Mass Recall’s third-person shooter missions, which are brief and amusing distractions, I feel SCU stretches its MMO-lite combat too thinly to make a full game. Still, it remains semi-popular, even though it never got a polished ‘final’ release – worth a look, especially with friends.Also worthy of a quick shout-out is, yet another thirty-mission monster split into three episodes.
Don’t let its first mission (set in an industrial sewer system) put you off, as they’re quite tightly balanced missions – good, considering there’s no difficulty settings here. Once more its writing is a little overwrought, and it makes do with ‘vanilla’ StarCraft 2 assets, but it has the occasional bit of clever new stuff.
Metal Gear music is used especially well during a stealth segment, for example. It’s among the older campaigns here, so parts of it may misbehave with present-day StarCraft 2, but I’ve not found any issues yet.One final nod goes to, a short but very polished story-driven scenario. While its single-hero combat isn’t especially thrilling (although it does escalate into a nicely challenging pair of final boss fights), it’s polished and tells a decent self-contained Protoss story, which manages to imbue its small cast of characters with distinct personalities despite a lack of voice acting. I’d love to see more in the vein of this, hopefully expanding beyond just having a single hero unit. With potentially mod-breaking updates to StarCraft 2 finally slowing down, I reckon there’s a few big new stories still yet to be told, and The Antioch Chronicles and StarCraft Universe prove there’s voice talent available too.Just this handful of mods should take months to get through, but if you’ve got any more personal favourites to recommend, by all means share with us below.
Sadly, some older mods are partially or even completely broken thanks to Blizzard’s sweeping updates to StarCraft 2, a possible reason for the mod scene never quite finding the footing it might have otherwise. Still, 2018 ended with a flurry of modding activity – I’ll be surprised if 2019 doesn’t have a surprise or two left in store.
Contents OverviewStarCrafts Mod is a graphical remake of StarCraft II. All zerg, protoss and terran units, including structures, obstacles and environments, are remade to 2D sprites using CarBot-styled skins, replacing 3D-modeled animations and doodads. These sprites are designed from the cartoon series, most probably the final design changes in the beginning of (For example, 's detailed design is simplified in to be ball-shaped with an 'eyelid' part).New features have been included in the mod. 'Throwing cheese' ability button literally throws slices of swiss cheese, 'cheesing' people when a player would instantly win the game under first five minutes. 'Flag of triumph' is another feature that when the new expansion is built the flag will rise along with the trumpet of triumph. These commands are shown to be part of StarCrafts Plus, but in initial way.Blizzard has yet to recognize the design overhaul, but instead CarBot installs the demo version of StarCrafts Mod in Arcade available in battle.net for everyone to play. The mod limits to basic infantry such as marines, zerglings and zealots, including overlords, and also basic structures such as spawning pool, gateways and barracks.It is because the more advanced units are yet to be created, animated and added in the mod.
But, in every update, the availability of new StarCrafts-modded units and buildings should be chosen wisely in order to maintain the balance in StarCraft II's gameplay (however, protoss in the demo mod is currently low from balance due to only zealot included).DevelopmentDue to the popularity of StarCrafts series that has been active for three years, has set up Patreon.com around August 2013 before the release of episode ' on season 2. It was intended to gather support from fans due to his work and time usage in creating new episodes that people expect for.At the beginning of September 2014, Burton announced that the Mod for StarCraft II based on his animated series would be created, so he uploaded the new video of 'working progress' (version 1.1) on September 24, 2014 after the Season 3 episode '. The video features basic infantry with redesigned units whose in-game animations are revealed to be accurately following the game's mechanics and AI in the StarCraft II arcade.On late May 2015, Burton uploaded the beta mod on battle.net with new graphical user interface, icons, portraits, and few units and buildings. Most importantly, he set up the funding campaign on indiegogo.com. This campaign illustrates that $70,000 was required for Burton and his team of six creators including himself: 2 animators, 3 developers and 1 project manager.
Starcraft 2 Graphics Card
The funding goal was needed in the way that Patreon.com was made for Burton's animating career. Reaching the goal would make the mod possible to be completed and played for free in 2016, and it was a flexible funding of which, even the goal would not reach, the funds could be received.After the season finale of Season 3 at the end of June 2015, while the Season 4 was on planning stage, Burton might be free to continue animating new units for three races, reusing unit animations from older episodes, and creating new structures.On June 24, 2015, the funding goal has been reached. Burton expressed more than a mere appreciation towards his supporters and fans for funding him in indiegogo.com.
To increase the funding in order to achieve stretch goals (see 'Goals' below), he used YouTube livestreaming program to broadcast the production of new units such as ghost, queen, ultralisk, high templar, etc. He aired, recorded and uploaded sixteen fundraising videos, several hours each, overall until the end of Indegogo goal deadline.On June 25, 2015, major change on stretch goals has been made. New skins for basic infantry units were merged with the new environment. These skins include the spawn of, and, also the previously shown in the episode, '. These new environments also included desert lands, winter lands and space area. Soundtrack for StarCrafts Mod was also planned. After that, random chances to spawn new skins for one dark templar, infestor, marine, queen and zealot will be made.
Damaged structures will be added for realism, and StarCrafts Plus is the final stretch goal. StarCrafts Plus is an additional mode whose environment fits to StarCrafts cartoon series with commands and conditions.Around June 26, 2015, the mod has been updated to version 1.3. This version adds three new CarBot-styled units: marauder, stalker and roach.
Also, two new buildings and an add-on have also been included for their prerequisites: cybernetics core, roach warren and tech lab.YouTuber LowkoTV, the zerg player, uploaded the new video on June 29, 2015 to feature new units and structures as part of support and promotion for the StarCraft Mod's funding. He also had uploaded three videos that featured three races since the older version.
Surprisingly, his video have received more than 200,000 views after seven months due to his reaction on concussive shell upgrade that suddenly plays '.On July 3, 2015, the funding has been ended with beyond $90,000 but couldn't reach $100,000 tier. It ended with the inclusion of Legacy of the Void units and space environment map. (See below)On September 9, 2015, Burton's live stream video of creating thor revealed new sprite sheets for different units, including two new Legacy of the Void terran units, liberator and cyclone.On December 2, 2015, Burton revealed new and fully-completed structures and updates on recently-added structures, while the units and arsenal for each race are still in process. The StarCrafts Mod was scheduled for completion and estimated release date, on July 2016. On January 6, 2016, he also introduced six units, including two newest units, and.Screenshot of protoss gameplay in StarCrafts Mod.On April 1, 2016, Burton uploaded the newest update on his YouTube channel. It showcases the completed protoss units, but some abilities, animations and effects are yet to be fixed significantly due to their bugs, 'black' sprite transparency, size difference, and visible sprite placeholder.
Also, some protoss structures are still yet to be edited due to animated parts out of reach.Screenshot of zerg gameplay in StarCrafts Mod.On June 13, 2016, Burton uploaded another update, revealing completed zerg units and buildings. But, like the previous update report, most of the units (their abilities on effect) and few of the buildings will be fixed significantly.On June 24, 2016, Burton uploaded the third update of completed terran units and buildings. They are, however, still needed to furnished like two previous update videos, such as turning into an original 3D animation when loading on the.On July 30, 2016, when ' was aired, Burton wrote that the Mod is 99% complete. Playing the Mod fully in beta testing for bugs and glitches, he added that the release date will be announced very soon, although it was originally scheduled around July 2016.On October 7, 2016, Burton then revealed the release date and the of the final version. At the same time, LowkoTV uploaded the multiplayer gameplay video of StarCrafts Mod beta and played as in desert map.
Starcraft Mods
The mod features all units and buildings available in normal play. However, minor bugs were found: the missing tileset beyond the area, flickered cocoons when compacted, and graphically dissected creep tumor. He also uploaded the full in lava environment as well (revealing a cartography error where the building cannot be build on vespene geyser due to being too near to the cliff).
Starcraft 2 Wiki
On next day, he uploaded the.GoalsFunded GoalsBy reaching $70,000, the StarCrafts Mod will be fully available once it is finished and released in 2016. Initially, the map layout will be grasslands only.By continuing to financially support the mod, stretch goals are planned by the creators:These stretch goals explain that, when the said goal is reached, StarCrafts mod will feature new map layouts and environments besides grassland tileset such as lava, desert and snow environments.