Author Topic: [RELEASE] Shadow Genesis: 2017 Edition  (Read 177617 times)

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
thx m8, I made it last night. maybe will have to bother you in the next step :D

 

Offline InsaneBaron

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
OK guys, it's feedback time! I beat the campaign earlier today.
Spoiler:
Mission 40, the massed attack on Hiven, was epic. A few notes:
I assigned my fighters to cover the Euryale bombers attacking Hiven's engines. Once the bombers started launching Hegemonia bombs, my fighters got caught in the shockwaves and started dieing rapidly. I started over, this time telling them to form on my wing once the bombs started. Maybe fix this? On the plus side, the Nightmare fighters launching from Hiven's fighterbay got vaporize by the shockwaves too.

I succeeded in disabling Hiven and killing his main beam without loosing any bombers, bagging an achievement in the process. And that's when the fun began. Did somebody say beam spam?

I was pretty surprised to see that we had an entire superdestroyer sitting in Spica the whole time. But of course that gets explained later.

The part where Hiven stated talking to us was... completely unexpected. He calls Ovidiah a "Mae'vir mind in a human body"... is that just a big compliment, or is it... literal? :nervous:

Also, since Hiven had no beams left I was able to prevent both the Merdarion and Impaler from taking serious damage. That gave me my last achievement, for a total of 21.

And of course, the obligatory cutscene of Hiven exploding (the music fit it perfectly), followed by an epic victory speech by Admiral Peters.

At this point (the end of Mission 42) I was feeling pretty happy. We shredded Hiven, the Nightmares had retreated, and we had proved, as Peters said, that we were capable of holding our own in a dangerous universe. We'd just destroyed the most powerful alien warship we'd ever seen.

I gotta say, McKinley was right: I liked being p[art of Wolf's fleet. Wolf's Fleet was well portrayed as a competent armed force. They really felt like a well-organized navy that had a good plan up its sleeve.

Sadly, I ran into a bug after mission 42. I had won 21/32 achievements, but instead of getting to play the Bonus Pack of missions, the game sent me straight to mission 43. I decided to play the bonus mission in the techroom before moving on to the final mission of the campaign. Interestingly, despite the fact that I was playing them in the techroom, my loadout and damage carried over between missions as if I was playing them in the campaign. I didn't know the game engine could do that in the techroom; how did you get it to work?

Spoiler:
And on reading the Command Briefing for the first bonus mission, I almsot fell out of my chair. Ovidiah had tricked us, SOC, and Hiven himself into playing his game... good grief!

The first mission was a pretty intense dogfight. I was pretty happy to see Mairead and her wingmen- my fighter was critically damaged when the warped in right between me and a wing of Banshees.

The third mission of the loop goes down in my list as one of the hardest I ever played. I kept getting killed while trying to download the data from Bowman- usually it was the Nightmare cruisers at the end that got me. Finally I solved the problem by hiding in the Cerberus's fighterbay once I had already been detected... although I had to come out briefly to attack the engine and buy Bowman time (poor Bowman... :( )

Out of curiousity, what's an SCV? Miles seemed pretty upset to see them.

But I finally pulled it off. Two minor bugs in the mission: 1. support ships are available in the comm menu from the start (not sure what happens if you call one in) and 2. there's some ship labelled "scan sensors" or something like that which I can give orders too.

Oh, and on the last mission I took out Bailey with a Scrietzr... whatever you call it :P

All in all, the loop was fun to play and added a lot to the story, while giving some of the characters like Sentinel and Nesbitt some more facetime.

Then I played the last mission of the campaign, where we shut down the Shivan gate, once and for all. Um... I think the conversation between Miles and Grizzly at the end needs some editing. Grizzly acts like he doesn't know what happened to Jadhav (which he would know if you played the bonus loop) but he and Miles do know about the project to control the Nightmares (which they wouldn't know about unless you played the loop). I think this is the only time in the campaign where the English is problematic enough to actually make it hard to tell what the characters are saying.

Despite the confusion, I got the basic idea: Miles is going to SOC, Grizzly is taking over the squadron, and they both have a lot of memories from the war.


All in all, Shadow Genesis is officially one of my all-time favorite campaigns, and I'm looking forward to the sequel :)

Positive Elements:

Difficulty. Possibly the hardest campaign I've played yet, but that's due to good mission design rather than bad mission design. Requires quick thinking, strategy, and good aim.

Story. Unpredictable and epic. Despite borrowing a lot of tropes and themes from FS2, it felt fresh and new. Struck a good balance between FS2's cog-in-a-machine story and the heavily character-driven plots of some other HLP mods.

New ships and weapons. They look cool, and some of them rock. My favorites: The Ezechiel fighter, the Excalibur and Titan cannons, and the Penetrator II, Overwhelm, and... the however-you-spell-it missile (I love to use it, I just can't spell it! :P ) And of course, the Vampire super-fighter. These went well with a new and very difficult set of enemies: Avishags are a pain to hit, Phantasms are absolutely terrifying to fight, Gualis JUST. WONT. DIE. and Elihayuses have "nightmarishly" dangerous point defenses. And don't forget Meshulams.

Gameplay in general. SG succeeded at creating a realistic, strategy-driven combat model that was original, fun, and hard, yet felt like a natural outgrowth of FS gameplay.

And Ovadiah. A masterfully done villian. Even now I don't understand him. Is he in it for the power? Is he on the Nightmare's side? Is he actually genuinely interested in helping humanity? All of the above? Whatever he is, he's a genius. Is he even human? :shaking:

Anyway, I'd be willing to lend a hand with cleaning up the English for the next patch- as of the current patch it's not really that bad; like I said there was only one part where I wasn't sure what the characters were saying. I'm a native English speaker with good grades- although I don't always try my hardest to use correct grammar on these forums :P I could take a couple missions- or maybe some techroom entries- and proofread them if you like.

:yes2::yes:
Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — "No, you move." - Captain America

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Offline Nyctaeus

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
Well, that was unexpected :D. Thank you for your review and feedback. It means a lot for us!

And yes, you're welcome as a grammar checker. Also we're making a big list what should we change in 1.2. As the work on SG is currently frozen in favor of our The Mystery Project, when the first act is released, we will start work on SG 1.2 and than we will let you know. After 1.2... Probably SG2: The Silent Eyes :)

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
We were planning to rebalance some of the missions in patch 1.2 to be more decent and noob-friendly :P. But reading your positive comments about SG's difficulty level is slowly drawing me to conclusion that there is no need to make the campaign significantly easier. A few mission will be rebalanced, but much fewer than we initally anticipated. I can see there are a few bugs to fix in the final missions that we somehow missed.

Quote
Sadly, I ran into a bug after mission 42. I had won 21/32 achievements, but instead of getting to play the Bonus Pack of missions, the game sent me straight to mission 43.
Strange thing. There is a condition to enable the extra missions and it seems that there's a bug of some kind. That's funny, we tested the extra loop twice and it worked well.

Quote
I decided to play the bonus mission in the techroom before moving on to the final mission of the campaign. Interestingly, despite the fact that I was playing them in the techroom, my loadout and damage carried over between missions as if I was playing them in the campaign. I didn't know the game engine could do that in the techroom; how did you get it to work?
It's Admiral MS' ship save/load script. When you finish a previous mission, stats of your ships are saved in a txt file and then loaded in another one. Unless you delete the files manually, the mission will automatically load data from the last time you played the previous one. In our future projects we plan to use the same script for checkpoint system, not only to store data between the missions.

Spoiler:
The third mission of the loop goes down in my list as one of the hardest I ever played. I kept getting killed while trying to download the data from Bowman- usually it was the Nightmare cruisers at the end that got me. Finally I solved the problem by hiding in the Cerberus's fighterbay once I had already been detected... although I had to come out briefly to attack the engine and buy Bowman time (poor Bowman... :( )
Well, this is something most players hate - lots of enemies around and you're told to just stay in the shadow and download data... :P

Spoiler:
Out of curiousity, what's an SCV? Miles seemed pretty upset to see them.
Uhhh... never played Starcraft, right :P? That's an easter egg. That scene with drones reminded me of Terran workers (SCVs) from Starcraft so much that I couldn't stand adding this dialogue :).

Spoiler:
Then I played the last mission of the campaign, where we shut down the Shivan gate, once and for all. Um... I think the conversation between Miles and Grizzly at the end needs some editing. Grizzly acts like he doesn't know what happened to Jadhav (which he would know if you played the bonus loop) but he and Miles do know about the project to control the Nightmares (which they wouldn't know about unless you played the loop). I think this is the only time in the campaign where the English is problematic enough to actually make it hard to tell what the characters are saying.
This is connected with the previous bug. There are two versions of the dialogue. One took place if you had played extra missions and one if you had not. Because for some reason the game did not detect you had enough achievements, you saw the other (older) version of a dialogue. It was written quite a long ago and apparently it still needs some work. You can open a mission in FRED or Notepad so as to find an alternate dialogue (the one that should be displayed after you completed extra missions).

Quote
Anyway, I'd be willing to lend a hand with cleaning up the English for the next patch- as of the current patch it's not really that bad; like I said there was only one part where I wasn't sure what the characters were saying. I'm a native English speaker with good grades- although I don't always try my hardest to use correct grammar on these forums :P I could take a couple missions- or maybe some techroom entries- and proofread them if you like.
We will gladly accept your help. Before patch 1.1 release we had all missions corrected by native English-speakers who volunteered to improve the language a bit. Some of them reworked most of the dialogues, while the others did only minor changes. That's why there is still room for improvements in several places before we release patch 1.2.

EDIT: oops, Betrayal was first :).

 

Offline CT27

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
On a hypothetical scale of 1-10, if SG's difficulty was a 9...

I'm not saying knock it down to a 3 or 4, but maybe a 7 or 8.

 
Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
We will gladly accept your help. Before patch 1.1 release we had all missions corrected by native English-speakers who volunteered to improve the language a bit. Some of them reworked most of the dialogues, while the others did only minor changes. That's why there is still room for improvements in several places before we release patch 1.2.

Hey, if you need someone to do some very thorough and extensive proof-reading/improvement work for version 1.2, whether Tech Entries or Mission Dialogues, hit me up, guys. I'll gladly volunteer if needed.  :D
Previous Projects: Ancient-Shivan War | GTF Durandal

Current Projects: Exile: Into The Dark Waters (Proof-editing/misc)

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
HLP is rife with proofreaders, but a proofreader is no substitute for a good writer. I'd suggest hunting for the latter.

 

Offline Nyctaeus

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
Problems with language actually doesn't mean we are a bad writers at all. We will search for proofreaders when we start working on 1.2, but essentialy our dialogues, descriptions and other stuff will remain the same.
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
I'm not saying you're bad writers; I'm just saying that if you want good writing in English, you will need a good English writer.

 

Offline InsaneBaron

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
I'm not saying you're bad writers; I'm just saying that if you want good writing in English, you will need a good English writer.

I'd say I'm a pretty good writer, or at least my professors think so. You're right though; the biggest problem is not so much grammar mistakes as things that just sound kinda clumsy in English.
Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — "No, you move." - Captain America

InsaneBaron's Fun-to-Read Reviews!
Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius - Silent Threat: Reborn - Operation Templar - Sync, Transcend, Windmills - The Antagonist - Inferno, Inferno: Alliance

 
Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
I'm sorry, writing dialogues is too much fun to us to give this task to someone else, especially someone who did not create the plot and characters himself. Some dialogues still need some work, I know, I hope to find and correct all of them in patch 1.2. Our problem was that there was really, really large amount of text, some was written in very early stage of SG's creation - about 3-4 years ago when our English was much worse than now, and some of them we (and volunteers working on 1.1) missed or did not improve enough. Well, we're still learning and I hope our writing will get better and better in our future campaigns. Most people admit there is a huge difference between dialogues in the first missions and for example in extra loop.
« Last Edit: May 10, 2014, 09:38:51 am by Macielos »

 

Offline Nyctaeus

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
I'm sorry, writing dialogues is too much fun to us to give this task to someone else, especially someone who did not create the plot and characters himself. Some dialogues still need some work, I know, I hope to find and correct all of them in patch 1.2. Our problem was that there was really, really large amount of text, some was written in very early stage of SG's creation - about 3-4 years ago when our English was much worse than now, and some of them we (and volunteers working on 1.1) missed or did not improve enough. Well, we're still learning and I hope our writing will get better and better in our future campaigns. Most people admit there is a huge difference between dialogues in the first missions and for example in extra loop.
...not to mention out current missions :P
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Offline InsaneBaron

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
I'm sorry, writing dialogues is too much fun to us to give this task to someone else, especially someone who did not create the plot and characters himself. Some dialogues still need some work, I know, I hope to find and correct all of them in patch 1.2. Our problem was that there was really, really large amount of text, some was written in very early stage of SG's creation - about 3-4 years ago when our English was much worse than now, and some of them we (and volunteers working on 1.1) missed or did not improve enough. Well, we're still learning and I hope our writing will get better and better in our future campaigns. Most people admit there is a huge difference between dialogues in the first missions and for example in extra loop.

You know, come to think of it, you're right. The dialogue got better as time went on.
Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — "No, you move." - Captain America

InsaneBaron's Fun-to-Read Reviews!
Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius - Silent Threat: Reborn - Operation Templar - Sync, Transcend, Windmills - The Antagonist - Inferno, Inferno: Alliance

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
Yeah, I totally hear you guys there. I think writing for FreeSpace is a very unique and very particular skill set, and there's always something new to learn.

 
Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
I went ahead and played the campaign a second time feeling that I hadn't done justice to it the first time.
I'm glad I did. I love the campaign and the difficulty. I suggest you don't change the difficulty since it is one of the selling points of this campaign. MAYBE rework the first few missions but not the later missions.
Kudos for the music choice. What is the music that plays around the ancient planet?
I'm willing to beta test any advances you make towards the sequel and check the dialogues for any errors.

 

Offline Nyctaeus

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
We appreciate it and of course your help is welcome :). We will PM you when we start working on SG 1.2. As for the Ancient planet, which mission do You have in mind? The cutscene about the Nightmares?
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Offline bigchunk1

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
I could never get past the first mission. I tried it a few times and kept losing the transport so I put the campaign down. Maybe worth a revisit if you all say it gets better later.
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Zacam: Uh. No, using an effect is okay. But you are literally using the TECHROOM ani as the weapon effect.

 

Offline InsaneBaron

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
I could never get past the first mission. I tried it a few times and kept losing the transport so I put the campaign down. Maybe worth a revisit if you all say it gets better later.

Are you sure that was the 1st mission? I don't think that mission had you escorting transports.
Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — "No, you move." - Captain America

InsaneBaron's Fun-to-Read Reviews!
Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius - Silent Threat: Reborn - Operation Templar - Sync, Transcend, Windmills - The Antagonist - Inferno, Inferno: Alliance

 

Offline Nyctaeus

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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
Do you mean the transport [Corsair-class] that is going to dock with disabled civilian liner? What exactly destroys your transport?
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Re: The Shadow is coming... SHADOW GENESIS: RELEASE
I can only say what I've already said many times: read dialogues, choose targets wisely and, most important - THINK about what would be the best strategy for the mission.
Spoiler:
There is only one attack that can destroy the transport. You have to deal with 3 bombers and 3 or 4 Hercs (as far as I remember). Destroy Hercs first, then target Zeus bombers. Alpha should destroy the third wing of enemies quickly and aid you then.