Why? The missions were essentially done back when Ace retired. You guys did a full playthrough, beta-test, and evaluation of every mission!
How many times do we have to go through this conversation? What is "essentially done" are basically mission skeletons, a rough outline.
Not to mention there's a number of missions that are blatantly bad and boring on most levels.
But if you're going to redo all the missions as well, then you're basically starting the campaign over from scratch.
I'm not talking about redoing the missions from scratch, I talked about giving them a facelift. Different. Taking the missions we have, clean them up, and perhaps add something to them when\if applicable and somewhat easy\fast. Considering that in any case the missions would have to go through a huge balancing pass (including reducing the number of enemy wings, etc), is it that much of an hassle to, for example, replace an enemy wing with Aaru drones, add an AWACS that when interacted with turns the drones against your enemies?!? The way I see it, it's a worthy investment, especially if we could get started ASAP, while the art assets aren't finished.
(in hindsight, I realize I did use the word "overhaul" in my previous post, and that was a mistake)
I think the community could really use a major release with approximately V-complexity missions. There hasn't been one since ST:R and while I love big elaborate productions we've always thrived on heterodoxy and diversity of content.
Indeed, and that's what we're aiming for, in general. I'd still like to add some more options
within reason.
Say, we have this super heavy turreted bomber that is more like a small cruiser than an actual bomber. They shoot SSM bombs.
Right now we have them behaving like a dive bomber pretty much, which is kind of dumb since these bombers are slow, unmaneuverable and in the case of the SSM bombs, it doesn't really matter that the bomber is close to the target ship. So instead of having them behave like any other bomber, we could have each ship of the wing jump in different spots in space around the target, and just do their thing without getting close. It would be a "mini-game" of sorts, it would be different, and I suspect that it would be fast to implement.
Of course, there are certain features that I would think to implement that would be major time sinks. I have no clue about Fredding, and I suspect the rest of the team is the same.
That's why I'm being very specific about those Fredders being experienced and having vision, because I'd expect them to check the possible ideas, and say "X is a trivial feature, fast to do. Y would take a lot of time, better scratch it" and look at the missions we have and suggest features we could implement in a timely fashion, to make those missions more interesting.
Indeed, perhaps 3 or 4 missions could benefit from more complex changes, but those would be the crown jewels of the campaign. But that would be a possible bonus, not a requirement.
Goober mentioned voice acting. It took the BP team (and that's one of the bigger teams here) a couple years to add VA to part of WIH.
I think people would rather have a BWO release without VA sooner vs. waiting a few years for a 'complete' release. Especially since the revival of the past year or so when people were given hope that BWO may actually get finished someday.
I believe I already talked about this in some other post: that's still up for discussion, so I can't really give a definitive answer. But I'm writing more on the "complete" release topic further down.
You can always do a re-release. Just don't make Greedo shoot first.
That's not out of the table. I always imagined that we could do a "Cold Element" pack post release, featuring remastered versions of Derelict, Warzone, Twilight and BWO. But that's so far off in the future that it's not worth talking about.
Finally, about community expectations: I'm very well aware what our decision to go "more public" did to your expectations. That one was one of the goals of that decision. But we also have expectations: motivate the team to be more active (which is working), and to finally get the other resources we need to finally get this thing done.
What perhaps isn't so obvious is that a lot of the internal vision has changed when it comes to the project development process and community relations. While in the past BWO was this super secret project, highly directed\micromanaged and always kept under wraps with the goal of a single "wow" release, now we want to be more transparent, more open, give the team members more input and creativity in their work (this is important, as no one enjoys just following directions, especially when working for free), and finally give you something to toy with. That's why you've been seeing all these WiP posts, and that's why you'll be able to download the Aaru and another asset as soon as they're finished, for example.
We even talked about episodic releases on internal. The plot structure is already quite organized into acts, so we wouldn't have to change anything plot-wise. Asset introduction lends itself to this format as well, to some extent. And this is something that pretty much everyone on internal agrees it would be a good thing to do. But it's all moot if we don't get those Fredders, at least.