It’s taken 14 years, but an intrepid StarCraft 2 player has finally figured out a way to survive a mission that’s supposed to kill you, even if their solution locks both enemies and allies alike into a never-ending stalemate.
The mission in question is In Utter Darkness, which tasks players with killing a set amount of enemies before their Protoss units are inevitably overrun and go out in a blaze of glory. Over the years, real-time strategy geniuses have tried again and again to challenge fate and be truly victorious, but they’ve never found a way to survive the ceaseless onslaught of enemies, until now. As highlighted on ResetEra, YouTube content creator Davey Gunface has found a way for the Protoss to live forever.
As you’d expect, achieving this isn’t easy, and Davey Gunface has shared a 39-minute video explaining exactly how it’s done if you want to try replicating it. The basics of it, however, involve clever manipulation of the enemy AI, including tricking them into going down certain paths where they’ll be in vulnerable positions.
The thing that really turns the tide of the battle, however, comes in the final wave of ally reinforcements, with Artanis arriving in the Shield of Aiur. Davey Gunface explains that this mothership started as a “meta-defining badass” and transitioned to “utter meme” status, and potentially “one of the worst units in the entire game,” but it certainly proves its worth here. By combining two moves – Vortex, which draws nearby units into a black hole, and Mass Recall, which can recall units – Davey Gunface crams about 24 Templar into a small, but all-important crevice on the side of a cliff, where they can’t be reached by ground units. These Templars can morph into Archons, and 12 of those can easily dispatch the waves of air enemies that’d usually be lethal, and spell the end of the battle.
Davey Gunface continues to lure enemies to their deaths by enticing them to this spot, and while the player still loses units for a while, it eventually gets to a point where there are too many ground enemies on the field for anything else to spawn. This brings the enemies to a standstill – they can’t get to the Protoss, who’re tucked away safely in their hidey-hole. However, things can be taken even further – it’s possible to kill everything that isn’t an Overseer just by staying cloaked. The Overseers (which can’t actually do any damage) then retreat to out-of-bounds edges of the map, which Davey Gunface calls “a very realistic win condition.”
Sure, you won’t get a victory screen from doing this unlike if you just accept your fate, but this is the best possible outcome for the Protoss in this mission. Sure, they’ll be stuck in the same spot on a map until the end of time, but at least they’re still alive and kicking, right?
For more games like StarCraft 2, be sure to check out our roundups of the best RTS games and best PC games.