SC2Mapster

I just finished playing the first mission that you guys released. I have to say that I thought it was awesome and was a ton of fun playing. This campaign has a lot of potential and I really hope the rest of the missions are made to the same standard as this one. You can tell a lot of time and thought went into making this map.

- I really like the whole mysterious story, which fits well into the gameplay and learning who you are, gaining abilities, finding the hybrid units to rescue, etc. The dialogue was really well done as well. Also, having it tie into existing lore but still remaining new is a bonus.

- I liked that there wasn't an objective and that you just had to explore the map. Again this fits into the mysterious tone of the mission.

- The terraining was awesome. So props to whoever did that.

- The main hybrid unit model looked really good too. My first reaction was that she looked so cute haha, which I actually said out loud while playing. I guess I'm not used to seeing "baby" sized hybrid.

- I played on Hard diff. and the balance seemed right. It forced me to micro, which I think any Hard micro mission should make you do, but didn't feel overtly difficult at any point.

- There was only 1 beacon that I couldn't figure out how to get to, which was the beacon near the top-left of the map that was on the high ground with a few marines. Now that I think about it though, I think there was a ledge on the other side that could possibly give you vision so you could blink across.

- One small "bug". You can blink across the main gate when it is closed. This is the gate that you are supposed to hit to beacon to open it. I blinked across it when it was closed, realized that I probably wasn't supposed to do that and then just went back. I would just make sure that the player can't blink past any gates that they aren't supposed to, especially the main one.

So yeah, I'm probably missing some stuff, but really well made first mission. I'm excited to see how this continues.

Just finish playing it, here is the review

• Great work on the terrain, it really gives intense felling when navigating the Hero(ine).

• At first I was like "what? how am I suppose to fight all those enemies without any weapon?" and then come the surprise, props to that lol.

• Nice work on the concentration skill add strategic value to gameplay.

• Few minor error, ex : blink skill, the description says teleport stalker while clearly it's a hybrid.

Looking forward to subject 1115 next adventure.

Wow great mission, congrats

• The custom hydralisk is great, love that it has 40 extra HP
• The SCVs are not set on autorepair, so they will stand idle without repairing anything
• After the broken bridge, on the right, there's a closed door, but you can still blink on the other way, cutting by half the mission (potentially)
• Is possible to do that also on the high ground directly ahead the broken bridge, also here closed door that somehow is blinkable

Not entirely sure if I'm the only one with this problem but attached is a screenshot of the start screen. I was still able to play and it was fun but that start screen was just really weird.

In any case, great first mission. It was very atmospheric and fairly challenging, putting me in a number of spots where just a-moving my units through would net me a loss of a unit or two. It forced me to analyze the situation and be very tactical in how I approach a group of enemies. That's always a good thing in maps.

A few comments:

I always wondered, if I had found all hybrids, some kind of counter like "7/10 hybrids found" would have been nice.

Blinking a major group of hybrids over the gap in the middle of the map was, well, annoying, as the distance between both sides was so far, that only the units at the utter edge would be able to reach the other side (I wanted to go back and kill the remaining marauders).

The sentries (the robots) somehow disappeared, after they were activated and I blinked out of that room, I never saw them again, they should be wandering through the corridors, shouldn't they?

Really cool was the northwest of the map, there were higher plateaus where you could blink your hybrids to and ambush the Terrans. Sadly, in regular SC2 campaigns you could hardly use plateaus, they e.g. disabled Overlord transporting in the Zerg campaign, there hardly were any 'closed' plateaus anyways, where you could deploy troops, imo a shame, but well, it was Blizzards decision.

Something that I disliked a bit was killing the SCVs and Medics, sometimes they got killed inadvertently, I'd have liked to spare them, but some of the hybrid hunters got too close to them. I'd like to propose an ability similar to but not as efficient as mind control, the ability would be to convince units to stay neutral towards hybrids. To make it a bit cooler, the unit should only stay neutral until a non neutral enemy unit approaches it and stays around for e.g. 10 seconds (in a process like talking the neutralized unit out of its 'brainwash': "The hybrids are our enemies!", "What is wrong with you?", "Don't you remember what the hybrids have done to us?" etc). That would be cool. I imagine a whole Terran base neutralized that way, then some ghost comes up, decloaks without your notice, un-neutralizes the Terrans and your Hybrids would have to run. Wouldn't that be fun?

Maneuvering through the corridors and micromanaging/fighting was quite hard, the units were always standing in the way. That is probably a general issue in SC2, in a narrow corridor you can hardly retreat a damaged unit, at least not in combat. Of course you can blink out, but I sometimes just blinked in before, ran into heavy resistance and had to wait for cooldown. The hybrids of course are meant to be huge and take a lot of place, so this is probably intentional.

The Hybrid Hunter was somewhat cool, just a Hydralisk with slightly different colors, maybe it should even be a bit bigger, as it is Hybrid. Somehow it reminded me to the Hunter Killers of SC1, similar hit points, similar fun. Imo you probably shouldn't create (draw) a whole lot of new units, just scale up/down existing units, e.g. a worker would be a scaled down Hybrid Destroyer, simply by making it 1/4 of the size of the Hybrid Destroyer, with 1/4 of hitpoints/attack etc. Or make a High Templar twice as big to create a new hybrid unit. Maybe there is a tool that would do that automatically? I'd propose a similar approach with buildings, no need to create completely new buildings, I'd like to have e.g. slightly modified pylons that would neutralize all units within range or another type of pylon that would psionically (or via void energy) damage all units within range (there already is some kind of void energy pylon in LotV, the huge obelisk that produces the red clouds of void energy slowly damaging units, just googled it, they are called "Void corruptions").

Quote from Supernova134: Go

@DEFILERRULEZ: Go

Is it not possible to right click on repair to manually set repair to autocast?

Yeah, but they aren't my scvs, they are enemy SCVs, you should set repair on autocast by default, or maybe they don't repair because they don't have the minerals to do it

Just played the first mission and I loved it! Im a fan of installation missions and this one is blizzard quality.

- Terrain was awesome, the lab had the creepy and mysteryous look that makes the map so wonderful to play, and lets the player get involved on the story himself. Congrats to terrain artists!

- Gameplay was good, the fact that you learn abilities while playing, makes the story better simply by the fact that she just woke up, and she shouldn't have all her powers when she awakes so thats a plus. I also like the feel of exploration that you have at the beggining, not knowing what you are doing there, while some instalation missions are just straight "escape the facility" or "destroy target ???", but in here its diferent. The empathy of the hybrid is something that we had never seen before. We were made to believe that the hybrid were killers, that did nothing more besides causing destruction and obeying Amon, and in this mission, the hybrid have a more human look, actually caring with the lives they must slay along the lab.This is something new, and even the fact that Subject 1115 is a female is also interesting because before, only male hybrids have been seen and we had no idea if there were any female hybrids whatsoever and therefore a plus imo. The SCV's are not repairing, are they meant to repair or just sit like that? The dificulty is just about right, it forces the player to micro a bit and evaluate the situation before engaging, else most likely ending up loosing hybrid. I do not know if it is necessary to rescue all the hybrids, since I think that i rescued all of them but as mentioned above, a counter would be nice. I think that slighly scaling up the Hybrid Hunters and possibly even Subject would be good, they look kinda small for hybrids.

- Lorewise I have some doubts, first are we really on a Dominion facility? The only known experiment that the Dominion conducted with hybrid was on the secret mission "Piercing the Shroud" and all the other research was conducted by the Moebius, and Moebius and Dominion are seperate entities, even before LotV, Dominion founded the Moebius research. The conversation between the scientist and Ma'lash is a bit controversial aswell, because I honestly don't see the Dominion working with Tal'Darim, and a Dominion scientist saying that he only obeys Amon and not the Tal'Darim, that seems more like Moebius style, but ofcourse, this opens a door to many possibilities in the story that you are develloping so im actually curious to see how this will end up.

Looking forward for the next maps, this has alot of potential, and I cant wait to get my hands on that hybrid race you are building :)