I'm just blown away by the Derelict campaign. Everyone involved with it gets my highest praise. I don't usually make threads just to gush about something, but wow is this good. Can't tell how far I am so far, probably 75 or 80% I'd say.
*Love the way it reverses the power creep. I actually caught my breath when that Orion destroyer jumped in, knowing that it could overpower just about everything the GTVA had in that sector. Compare that to the regular FS2 where an Orion is one step up from a joke when you've got Saths and Collosus (or is that colosii
)
*The Lovecraftness is just rad. The references, the dream sequence (that was spooky as hell), and I won't say what else so as not to give away the plot.
*The dialogue was not only well written and free of spelling and grammar errors, but it mostly didn't come up in the heat of combat and be missed.
*Escort missions didn't have to be done over and over with foreknowledge of what would happen to be winnable. Hair pullingly difficult escort missions is one of my biggest pet peeves and seems to be present in every campaign, professionally developed or not.
*Loved the variety of ships you get to fly, especially the segment with the Vasudan ones. Even though I've already flown them all (except maybe the Ares, don't recall ever having flown that one), given the scaled back power level in the campaign it felt new and different.
I only have a few minor complaints that I'll list only for the sake of thoroughness, since I assume the campaign isn't still being worked on.
*The extreme pacificism of the GTVA started to irk me (ie. under no circumstances must that ship full of bloodthirsty pirates hellbent on our deaths be destroyed, they're still civilians dammit).
*Too many pointless babysitting missions. A few near the beginning to set the "You're in the boonies" tone is fine, but I got a little tired of escorting fragile ships after a while. It wasn't a ridiculous number and it wasn't really bad, just a few too many, I think.
*It started to seem a little silly that pirates would continue to be such a threat after all the damage your squad does to them. Out in the boonies like that, 3 out of every 4 ships must have been a pirate vessel!
*A few times I just couldn't think of any motivation pirates could have for throwing wing after wing at certain ships in some escort missions. Any loot they would have gotten wouldn't begin to replace the lost fighters, and they would have had to have known they would have taken those kinds of losses or they wouldn't have allocated so many.
Anyway, great mod, and I would heartily recommend that anyone who hasn't checked it out yet do so immediately. I liked it even better than Inferno, personally! (Although I still have to tip the hat to Inferno for making all those models and those sweet beams, etc.)
