I remember from old version of XWAU and vanilla, that there was first trigger when shields were down, green leader spawned and crashed into the bridge, SSD tilted starting to plunge down and then cutscene played. With upscaled model, tilting stern could easly smash the player.
Interesting, as I can't find video evidence of this on youtube, and also I can only find remnants of this in the mission file from the Steam and GoG versions. I'd be interested to see this version.
Also yes, the loss of the Liberty is a serious gut punch now, we can assume Commander Zaletta and Admiral Yamarus are as good as dead. Kind of wild how they msde the first nameless cruiser zapped by the Death Star the hero ship of this whole game. Don't think I saw that coming as a kid on my first playthrough. But i would have appreciated more time spent with the Defiance or the Home One (Sorry, the "Independence" in this game) during the campaign. The transition from the Liberty to the Independence for the last campaign is kind of clumsy, and the Liberty was destroyed so unceremoniously. It's a big bummer.
@@FekLeyrTarg So that's how it came to be known as the Liberty-type. Sucks that it met this fate, that was always hard to swallow. I kind of appreciate how they tried to take something from the movie canon and magnify its impact in this game, but I feel like it should have felt like a bigger deal since they gave the Liberty a ridiculous amount of screentime in this game.
The first time I played it I was shocked that the Death Star destroyed the Liberty. But I also like this more sad take on the Executor's crash. A few fun facts: -Judging from unused voice recordings, you were originally supposed to witness Green Leader's suicide run into the Executor's bridge -It was the novelisation of RotJ which identified the destroyed cruiser as the Liberty -Acording to the same novel, the Executor crashed into some Rebel ships on her way to the Death Star's surface
Cut content that should be neatly restored for Upgrade. I really need to read that novelization. It's not as good as Episode III's, but still, it's not as non-canon as Episode IV's. Poor ships. Also, some Imperial craft were also hit according to other sources. Hope those players aren't victims of a Mandela effect.
One thing I remember about this level, Green leader only makes his suicide run AFTER Ackbar declares the Executor destroyed, even though that is not the case by level's end (It was usually cut off by the cut scene). I am all for recreating the iconic scene where all it took was one A-wing to bring the Executor down, but man does this game bugger it up hard. It should not have been so difficult to manage. The whole level seriously could have been reserved for the existing third stage instead, just combine them. Especially with the continuity errors already noted on here by the others.
In this version, Green Leader does not suicide into the Executor. At least not enough time for him to do it. I got to know, that in XvT, if an SSD has no shields, and an A-W crashes into it's bridge, the game is hardcoded to explode the SSD. I guess this code is still in XWA, so I don't know why they didn't use it in this mission.
@LPhoenix Hey man if you had to name the five weakest levels from the XWA campaign or yhe five most frustrating for one reason or another, what would you say they are? Would this footnote level be one of them?
This mission would definitely one of them. The continuity error alone would be enough. For the other 4, I can't tell yet. I'll get back to you after completing the game, but please remind me if I forget to do so.
Well, now that I completed the game, I can try to answer to this. In no particular order: - B7M2 and B7M3: The continuity errors... - B0M2: I hated being in the turret - B2M2: For flying a Z-95 and being two shot by the T/E2s. I even remember from back in the day this mission being really frustrating - B4M4: Because the uselessness of your wingmen this is a frustratingly difficult missions. Maybe it's better on lower difficulties - B5M5: Being a boring and too simple mission, though I heard from others that it's a really tight and difficult mission for most of the others, so maybe it was just my experience. - B6M2: For being completely unnecessary, as the Cruisers have so much HP, they are not in danger at all. So mission design in this case is good, execution bad I could add B6M1 on the list for it's difficulty, but I do know that the mission played out pretty differently in vanilla, so it doesn't qualify with my experience :P Also, honorable mention: B6M7 only for the fact that you can't shoot down Uncle Antan, and being the last mission from the family storyline, without a conclusion. Well that's more than 5... oh well...
@@LPhoenix Hey thanks for following up on this one! I was glad to read your answers. The Z-95 isn't your cup of tea, huh? Well I can understand that. Their armor is about as effective as tin foil. B4M4, the one where you capture the Suprosa, right? B5M5......When you rescue the shuttle from the Hurrim? Yeah I personally remember that being kind of run of the mill. But that's me. B6M2.........The cruisers? That's the mission where you board the Redhawk to find the mercenary base, right? Or am I mistaken? UGGH, I will never forgive them for not including a proper conclusion to the Azzameen family's story. It's not like with Keyan Farlander in X-Wing or Maarek Stele in TIE Fighter, these were player characters who were only identified by the official expanded material. The Azzameens are full fledged characters fighting their own war while aiding the Rebels. The Viraxo, Black Sun, that bastard Uncle Antan.....We don't even get the pleasure of killing him. To completely abandon this arc set up very specifically for this game, and to not offer any answers 25 years on......I'll never be over that. I still hope somebody will finally fill the blanks while some of us are still young. I mean I restarted the whole game because they ripped us off on this. Anyway, I very much appreciate that you remembered my question :D
I wonder if they have an accurate lore kill count for this battle? This was the biggest battle in the Star Wars movie franchise. I'm including ground and space and all alien race. Im not including that 7 8 and 9 crap. Im only referring to the first 6 films. It had to be an estimate of at least over 250 thousand casualties.
7 is decent, 8 should have been neatly remedied by side material not unlike Episode II before it. Can agree on 9, though. Either way, this battle will pale in comparison with Yuuzhan'tar.
Always found it strange they had a whole mission revolve around the Executor. For all of Rogue Squadron's weird design choices, I actually prefer their adaptation where you're in the midst of the battle between the cruisers and the Star Destroyers. Maybe they couldn't get it to work well for this game (perhaps the cruisers destroyed each others too quickly or the Rebel fighters died too quickly or something, for example), but to be fair, getting to destroy the Executor is climatic af.
Maybe due to rushed development, phase 2 of the Battle of Endor could have been planned out. I'm very disappointed that this phase of the four-mission battle is not how the original movie goes and provides conflicting technical complications. Simply put, the powerful shield protecting Death Star II is still up and the Executor would have collided into it, leaving the battle station itself unharmed. I don't mean to sound very picky but accuracy of the lore counts and counts by a lot. But you, on the other hand, keep doing things the way you do. 👍
I actually watched the Battle of Endor after editing this week's videos, and so far, the missions in the game are wrong in so many places... And there are still 2 more phases to go! One addition to your points: In the movie, the Executor was destroyed when the Millenium Falcon was already inside the Death Star already!
@@LPhoenix Guess that's a massive continuity error created by the decision to have you fly the Millennium Falcon instead of flying a starfighter as the player character, Ace, should have been. Hell the game isn't even clear if you are playing Ace on board the Falcon. But yes, the Falcon should have already been in the innards of the Death Star before the Executor bit the dust. And we know how the average Star Wars fan reacts when you tamper with continuity like that. Not sure what the problem was with just having you fly a starfighter while the Falcon did its thing.
@@TheAeroAvatar Probably someone higher up decided like this, or with preliminary box art or something, they shot themselves in the foot, as they had to have the Falcon and DSII in it... Anyway, bad decision to do it like this
All this concourse stuff sure is jarring to me. Ace, come on, go back and finish the fight! ...That's some superlaser. At least this game has you charge against the SSD Executor. Rogue Squadron II didn't have that even as a bonus mission, and was instead relegated for the slightly jankier Rogue Squadron III. Great, the dreaded timers are back. Haven't they been gotten rid off in TIE Fighter? Yep, shield generators need a difficulty and bug patch. Also, your turrets need more smarts. Anyways, thanks for the advice, Vanguard! 14:48: Again, sudden. The Executor was still far enough away from the DS2 though. Plus, it exploded in-game. 17:37: But that never happened in the final product, and so far, I don't think Upgrade restored this cut content. Ah, poor Arvel Crynyd didn't even get his dues for this.
The timer does somewhat makes sense in the context of Battle of Endor I guess. For this mission, there is already a fix in the works to enable damaging the shield generators on hard. Only specifically for this mission will this function be enabled 17:37: Not yet... Don't know if it's even possible to restore it tho
Man you look at this level, which is ridiculously short when played under normal circumstances, and you realize it really serves no purpose..no reason they needed to dedicate a whole part solely to the Executor's destruction. The whole thibg could have been incorporated much better. But as is, it's an unnecessary level Also I must address the the accompanying cutscenes. The first with the Liberty getting blown up is incredibly lazy. You see the Liberty sitting immobile and alone, with no sign of the battle that was raging around it. And while the Executor's explosion looks a hair more realistic than what you see in the movie, again we don't see the much larger battle raging above, and the fireball created by such a massive ship slamming into the Death Star should have been much more drawn out and covering a much wider area. That thing was gargantuan. Also you can totally see the Star Destroyer "disappear" as the explosion animation plays out. Some really shoddy animation compared to the first two games' cutscenes.
Reading your comment, I realized that even the cutscene file is called Battle7c, so it WAS intended to be the 3rd mission... The SSD "disappearing" is actually true to the game if you think about it :D, but I agree
@@LPhoenix No foolin'! How about that? Well I'm not gonna lie when I say the shot of the Executor slamming into the Death Star in the movie doesn't hold up as well as the rest of the battle. The surface of the Death Star isn't even properly textured. And the scale of everything looks "off". The game could have tried to improve the intended effect. But the cutscenes as a whole really need a lot more work. The 2D cutscenes from the old games just look infinitely more appealing to the eye. I still put them on for nostalgia's sake.
@@LPhoenix Easily. Hell they couldn't even depict the Liberty accurately in the Battle 4 cutscene. And the animation of the human characters in the cutscenes is abysmal.
I remember from old version of XWAU and vanilla, that there was first trigger when shields were down, green leader spawned and crashed into the bridge, SSD tilted starting to plunge down and then cutscene played. With upscaled model, tilting stern could easly smash the player.
Yep, I remember that too. I were expecting that in this playthrough.
Interesting, as I can't find video evidence of this on youtube, and also I can only find remnants of this in the mission file from the Steam and GoG versions.
I'd be interested to see this version.
@@LPhoenix even my CD version has this disabled
Didn't the Executor dive at the end of the mission in vanilla, too? I distinctly remember it that way, but could just be the Mandela effect, I guess.
Also yes, the loss of the Liberty is a serious gut punch now, we can assume Commander Zaletta and Admiral Yamarus are as good as dead. Kind of wild how they msde the first nameless cruiser zapped by the Death Star the hero ship of this whole game. Don't think I saw that coming as a kid on my first playthrough.
But i would have appreciated more time spent with the Defiance or the Home One (Sorry, the "Independence" in this game) during the campaign. The transition from the Liberty to the Independence for the last campaign is kind of clumsy, and the Liberty was destroyed so unceremoniously. It's a big bummer.
Actually, that cruiser was identified as the Liberty in the novelisation of RotJ. 🙂
@@FekLeyrTarg So that's how it came to be known as the Liberty-type.
Sucks that it met this fate, that was always hard to swallow. I kind of appreciate how they tried to take something from the movie canon and magnify its impact in this game, but I feel like it should have felt like a bigger deal since they gave the Liberty a ridiculous amount of screentime in this game.
Either way, none of the ships are as notable as the ships in FreeSpace 1 and 2. A prime example would be the GTD Galatea.
The first time I played it I was shocked that the Death Star destroyed the Liberty.
But I also like this more sad take on the Executor's crash.
A few fun facts:
-Judging from unused voice recordings, you were originally supposed to witness Green Leader's suicide run into the Executor's bridge
-It was the novelisation of RotJ which identified the destroyed cruiser as the Liberty
-Acording to the same novel, the Executor crashed into some Rebel ships on her way to the Death Star's surface
According to some comments here, Green Leader's suicide run was in the first versions of XWA.
@@LPhoenixI can't confirm that as I played that mission on the unpatched retail version. Green Leader's suicide run was missing.
Cut content that should be neatly restored for Upgrade.
I really need to read that novelization. It's not as good as Episode III's, but still, it's not as non-canon as Episode IV's.
Poor ships. Also, some Imperial craft were also hit according to other sources.
Hope those players aren't victims of a Mandela effect.
Well played Lp! Thank you Green Leader for your supreme sacrifice. o7
At least we guess that's what happened somehow offscreen :P
Only in the post-battle simulator debriefing, though.
One thing I remember about this level, Green leader only makes his suicide run AFTER Ackbar declares the Executor destroyed, even though that is not the case by level's end (It was usually cut off by the cut scene).
I am all for recreating the iconic scene where all it took was one A-wing to bring the Executor down, but man does this game bugger it up hard. It should not have been so difficult to manage.
The whole level seriously could have been reserved for the existing third stage instead, just combine them. Especially with the continuity errors already noted on here by the others.
In this version, Green Leader does not suicide into the Executor. At least not enough time for him to do it.
I got to know, that in XvT, if an SSD has no shields, and an A-W crashes into it's bridge, the game is hardcoded to explode the SSD. I guess this code is still in XWA, so I don't know why they didn't use it in this mission.
Totally Games suffered in making this game quite hard.
@LPhoenix Hey man if you had to name the five weakest levels from the XWA campaign or yhe five most frustrating for one reason or another, what would you say they are? Would this footnote level be one of them?
This mission would definitely one of them. The continuity error alone would be enough.
For the other 4, I can't tell yet. I'll get back to you after completing the game, but please remind me if I forget to do so.
Well, now that I completed the game, I can try to answer to this. In no particular order:
- B7M2 and B7M3: The continuity errors...
- B0M2: I hated being in the turret
- B2M2: For flying a Z-95 and being two shot by the T/E2s. I even remember from back in the day this mission being really frustrating
- B4M4: Because the uselessness of your wingmen this is a frustratingly difficult missions. Maybe it's better on lower difficulties
- B5M5: Being a boring and too simple mission, though I heard from others that it's a really tight and difficult mission for most of the others, so maybe it was just my experience.
- B6M2: For being completely unnecessary, as the Cruisers have so much HP, they are not in danger at all. So mission design in this case is good, execution bad
I could add B6M1 on the list for it's difficulty, but I do know that the mission played out pretty differently in vanilla, so it doesn't qualify with my experience :P
Also, honorable mention: B6M7 only for the fact that you can't shoot down Uncle Antan, and being the last mission from the family storyline, without a conclusion.
Well that's more than 5... oh well...
@@LPhoenix Hey thanks for following up on this one! I was glad to read your answers.
The Z-95 isn't your cup of tea, huh? Well I can understand that. Their armor is about as effective as tin foil.
B4M4, the one where you capture the Suprosa, right?
B5M5......When you rescue the shuttle from the Hurrim? Yeah I personally remember that being kind of run of the mill. But that's me.
B6M2.........The cruisers? That's the mission where you board the Redhawk to find the mercenary base, right? Or am I mistaken?
UGGH, I will never forgive them for not including a proper conclusion to the Azzameen family's story. It's not like with Keyan Farlander in X-Wing or Maarek Stele in TIE Fighter, these were player characters who were only identified by the official expanded material. The Azzameens are full fledged characters fighting their own war while aiding the Rebels. The Viraxo, Black Sun, that bastard Uncle Antan.....We don't even get the pleasure of killing him. To completely abandon this arc set up very specifically for this game, and to not offer any answers 25 years on......I'll never be over that. I still hope somebody will finally fill the blanks while some of us are still young. I mean I restarted the whole game because they ripped us off on this.
Anyway, I very much appreciate that you remembered my question :D
I wonder if they have an accurate lore kill count for this battle? This was the biggest battle in the Star Wars movie franchise. I'm including ground and space and all alien race. Im not including that 7 8 and 9 crap. Im only referring to the first 6 films. It had to be an estimate of at least over 250 thousand casualties.
At minimum!
7 is decent, 8 should have been neatly remedied by side material not unlike Episode II before it. Can agree on 9, though.
Either way, this battle will pale in comparison with Yuuzhan'tar.
Always found it strange they had a whole mission revolve around the Executor. For all of Rogue Squadron's weird design choices, I actually prefer their adaptation where you're in the midst of the battle between the cruisers and the Star Destroyers. Maybe they couldn't get it to work well for this game (perhaps the cruisers destroyed each others too quickly or the Rebel fighters died too quickly or something, for example), but to be fair, getting to destroy the Executor is climatic af.
I only played the first Rogue Squadron, so I can't comment on that
Maybe due to rushed development, phase 2 of the Battle of Endor could have been planned out. I'm very disappointed that this phase of the four-mission battle is not how the original movie goes and provides conflicting technical complications. Simply put, the powerful shield protecting Death Star II is still up and the Executor would have collided into it, leaving the battle station itself unharmed. I don't mean to sound very picky but accuracy of the lore counts and counts by a lot. But you, on the other hand, keep doing things the way you do. 👍
Wow, valid points all across the board. I agree, this middling second stage leaves a lot to be desired.
I actually watched the Battle of Endor after editing this week's videos, and so far, the missions in the game are wrong in so many places... And there are still 2 more phases to go!
One addition to your points: In the movie, the Executor was destroyed when the Millenium Falcon was already inside the Death Star already!
@@LPhoenix Guess that's a massive continuity error created by the decision to have you fly the Millennium Falcon instead of flying a starfighter as the player character, Ace, should have been. Hell the game isn't even clear if you are playing Ace on board the Falcon. But yes, the Falcon should have already been in the innards of the Death Star before the Executor bit the dust. And we know how the average Star Wars fan reacts when you tamper with continuity like that.
Not sure what the problem was with just having you fly a starfighter while the Falcon did its thing.
@@TheAeroAvatarAccording to Prima's Strategy Guide for XWA, Ace and Emkay were aboard the Falcon during the battle by Lando's request.
@@TheAeroAvatar Probably someone higher up decided like this, or with preliminary box art or something, they shot themselves in the foot, as they had to have the Falcon and DSII in it...
Anyway, bad decision to do it like this
15:42: "with *a* single shot."
16:02: "the" is redundant.
All this concourse stuff sure is jarring to me. Ace, come on, go back and finish the fight!
...That's some superlaser.
At least this game has you charge against the SSD Executor. Rogue Squadron II didn't have that even as a bonus mission, and was instead relegated for the slightly jankier Rogue Squadron III.
Great, the dreaded timers are back. Haven't they been gotten rid off in TIE Fighter?
Yep, shield generators need a difficulty and bug patch. Also, your turrets need more smarts. Anyways, thanks for the advice, Vanguard!
14:48: Again, sudden.
The Executor was still far enough away from the DS2 though. Plus, it exploded in-game.
17:37: But that never happened in the final product, and so far, I don't think Upgrade restored this cut content. Ah, poor Arvel Crynyd didn't even get his dues for this.
The timer does somewhat makes sense in the context of Battle of Endor I guess.
For this mission, there is already a fix in the works to enable damaging the shield generators on hard. Only specifically for this mission will this function be enabled
17:37: Not yet... Don't know if it's even possible to restore it tho
Man you look at this level, which is ridiculously short when played under normal circumstances, and you realize it really serves no purpose..no reason they needed to dedicate a whole part solely to the Executor's destruction. The whole thibg could have been incorporated much better. But as is, it's an unnecessary level
Also I must address the the accompanying cutscenes. The first with the Liberty getting blown up is incredibly lazy. You see the Liberty sitting immobile and alone, with no sign of the battle that was raging around it. And while the Executor's explosion looks a hair more realistic than what you see in the movie, again we don't see the much larger battle raging above, and the fireball created by such a massive ship slamming into the Death Star should have been much more drawn out and covering a much wider area. That thing was gargantuan.
Also you can totally see the Star Destroyer "disappear" as the explosion animation plays out. Some really shoddy animation compared to the first two games' cutscenes.
Reading your comment, I realized that even the cutscene file is called Battle7c, so it WAS intended to be the 3rd mission...
The SSD "disappearing" is actually true to the game if you think about it :D, but I agree
@@LPhoenix No foolin'! How about that?
Well I'm not gonna lie when I say the shot of the Executor slamming into the Death Star in the movie doesn't hold up as well as the rest of the battle. The surface of the Death Star isn't even properly textured. And the scale of everything looks "off". The game could have tried to improve the intended effect. But the cutscenes as a whole really need a lot more work. The 2D cutscenes from the old games just look infinitely more appealing to the eye. I still put them on for nostalgia's sake.
@@TheAeroAvatar Agreed. The intro cutscene looked the best by far so far in this game
@@LPhoenix Easily. Hell they couldn't even depict the Liberty accurately in the Battle 4 cutscene. And the animation of the human characters in the cutscenes is abysmal.
Granted, said 3D cutscenes were first used for TIE Fighter's endgame, so that's a "Franchise Original Sin".