One FutureThe first two acts of War in Heaven saw the player fight as a spear-carrier in some of the most important battles of the war. Laporte's personal journey took place against the backdrop of massive political and military events - but she was only a soldier, a cog in the machine. More vocal than usual, certainly, but not an agent, not empowered to
change what was happening. She fulfilled her role, won the mission, and gave the story permission to continue.
Act 3 sees Laporte vengeful, ferocious, and empowered. She has one of the finest covert/intelligence apparatuses in Terran space behind her. And we wanted to give the player a chance to hold the war in their hands.
Every mission in Act 3 pays off an arc from Acts 1 and 2 in incendiary fashion, then sets it up for further conflict - first the Terran/Vasudan covert ops arc, then the Elder politics/first fleet arc, and now, the Gef arc. We saw the Gefs develop from scrub-tier secondary antagonists with an odd fixation on Gaia into pawns of the major players. Now, with his back against the wall, Reverend MacDuff rebels against the chessmasters.
The StoryBefore anything else, we knew we'd set this mission at a Gef cometary habitat. We'd had enough of Scimitars leaping in en masse to disrupt our protagonists' plans. We wanted to show the Gaian Effort on their home turf - a rough, radically abnormal lifestyle in the rigors of zero gravity, getting by in the cold and the distant dark.
We knew that FreeSpace lore makes subspace unreliable on the fringes of solar gravity wells. We'd always envisioned Gef territory as the military equivalent of a navy's littoral terrain - dominated by small, agile ships that could go where others couldn't. And we'd built a trove of lore about the Gef cells, focused more on internecine warfare and outward expansion than on Kostadin's regressive and vengeful agenda. Kostadin Cell, we felt, had to be on its last legs.
With so much of the story spent with the Fedayeen, we wanted to give their counterparts, SOC, a chance to shine. Kostadin has been decimated by a systematic, ruthless SOC attack: a reminder that for all their boldness, the Gefs cannot stand up to the likes of Steele. MacDuff, we were certain, would have only his most fanatical or most ruthlessly oppressed followers remaining - and he would resort to his eschatology, the most desperate and apocalyptic of his plans.
The subspace generator in the asteroid gave us a way to introduce a ticking clock into the mission. We were able to draw on established canon about Gef looting and UEF intelligence's failed efforts to buy the Gefs with military technology to equip Kostadin with a subspace gate and an Oculus-class AWACS (though, we were confident, not packed with the sophisticated electronics of a Jovian model). We were sure that nothing as large as the asteroid had ever been jumped before in FreeSpace canon, so we decided that the habitat would shear apart if it ever made a subspace jump - fitting, for a suicidal plan. Lastly, we thought players would pick on the string of clues in Act 1 about the Gefs pursuing subspace components, though ultimately this thread might not have popped well enough.
Would the apocalyptic scale of MacDuff's plan overshadow the rest of the war, we worried? Ultimately, we felt that it was time to remind the player of the stakes of this conflict -
everyone has access to civilization-killing weapons, and most of the players don't
need to jump an asteroid into anything: they have enough firepower in one destroyer air wing to make a planet uninhabitable. Furthermore, we felt that a genuine Gef threat would help explain the value of the Fedayeen over the decades.
To show the fanaticism of some of the habitat's remaining defenders, we added suicide spacesuits that will attempt to swarm the player inside the habitat. To tie the Gefs to previous appearances, we brought back Sergei Gwilym, introduced his son Ivan, and gave the player a chance to settle scores with all of them at once. The Gefs could be defeated and diminished in a way that our Tev antagonists can't - they're a more vincible, less well-prepared foe. We wanted to offer that kind of catharsis to help Laporte move through her fury and enter a purified, exalted state for Act 4.
Gameplay: Stealth or Strength?When we first broke the mission, it was simply an attack on the reactor within a Gaian Effort asteroid habitat. We imagined giving the player a choice: fly a Custos-class patrol combatant, or lead Falcata wing's stealth fighters. The mission and its dialogue would adapt correspondingly.
We added the capture option once it became clear that destroying the reactor was simply too straightforward.
We ultimately decided that the player would, as in many Act 3 missions, face a choice between a more difficult but more ethical path, and a more efficient, ruthless alternative.
The Custos was inspired by John Sheridan's White Star from Babylon 5 - a high-powered, maneuverable command ship bristling with weapons and technology. More than most BP missions, One Future depends on the trait of custom asteroids - the Scarroid from BtRL, the MacDuff's reactor casing, and Cadius' model for the Custos-X. The mission simply wouldn't work without them.
As we developed the Custos gameplay, fleshing out her abilities - we knew we wanted to prevent swarm missiles from being annoying, give the player an 'oh ****' button to survive tough positions and a 'c'mon' button to cross large distances, and provide a quick boost of health for convenience - we started building up the duel between the player and Reverend MacDuff. We loved it: rather than the many-against-one gameplay of traditional anti-warship attacks, we got to build a David and Goliath boxing match between a darting little Sugar Ray Robinson and an erratic, crazed Hulk Hogan carrying the mummified corpse of his own dead wife. Ultimately, I think, it was this more than anything else that killed the stealth fighter branch: we felt that the Custos branch was strong enough to carry the whole mission, and we didn't want to build what would essentially be an entire separate mission to service the fighters.
We loved flying the Vindicator. The abilities, the ship's variable-loadout torpedoes, and the magnified effects of ETS on capships (scripted by FRED) gave the player a lot of tactical options and interesting approaches. Like all Act 3 missions, we wanted to reward replay and build a sandbox rather than a scripted thrill ride. We spent a ton of time taking the Vindicator up against the MacDuff to make sure the duel would be tense but fair.
We went through several models for the Morena MacDuff. The first was based on Shivan Hunter's
TF Ion, scaled up to warship size. It was fun to fight and offered a clean, forward-facing axis of fire which made it very readable - you could get behind it and know you were mostly safe. But it didn't have quite the presence we were looking for. We briefly tried another model BlackWolf had converted, but discovered it had one of the enigmatic all-things-vanish asset bugs that had plagued us with old versions of the Vishnan Sacred Keeper. Finally, we settled on a model by Cadius with UEF-style centrifuges, a crapload of VLS tubes, and loads of turret mounts. After playing with the loadout to prevent it from putting out too much mid-range damage along the flanks and rear, we felt we had a ship that could threaten the player from any direction but still allow players to escape and repair. Her final loadout gave her a brace of forward-firing mass drivers, torpedoes for all-aspect attack, turreted mass drivers for other aspects, and point defense turrets all over the place for short-range anti-subsystem punch. We felt she'd been gradually up-armed from the gleanings of Kostadin salvage, leaving her overgunned and ungainly.
The battle against MacDuff was a lot simpler in earlier incarnations: he was a big ship that you had to blow up with torpedoes while you snipe turrets with primaries. This duel of capships ended up being very very dull. We tried to spice up the combat, but it never managed to reach the heights required for such a climactic showdown (Axem added random AI orders, and, at one point, gave MacDuff a huge mining beam to tear up the Custos if player got too close to his nose). The idea for the reactor came from the enjoyable arcade boss fights from The Antagonist. Luckily Cadius' model for the Morena MacDuff allowed for this mode of gameplay.
Balancing the slugfest required a lot of trial and error. We felt the MacDuff would become boring once de-turreted, so we gave it a damage control system that allowed it to bring turrets back online. Axem played a key role in creating a FRED AI for the mighty warship, allowing it to swap between behaviors rather than brainlessly chasing the player or following predictable waypoints. (We were comfortable with the MacDuff repeating or choosing suboptimal behaviors, since the command crew is clearly not high-grade material.) This disrupted the player's ability to find one degenerate attack strategy and stick to it. We used the MacDuff's reactor subsystem to create a key weak point, playing to the Fedayeen theme of finding vulnerabilities.
Fighter attacks broke up the fight with the MacDuff, forcing the player to reorient and juggle two threats at once. The first attack, by Aquarius wing, was meant to put the player on the receiving end of a classic FreeSpace scenario - fighters devastating a light warship with swarm missiles - and show off our gorgeous new flare spews. Sergei's arrival brings a few sluggers to the table, but mostly allows the player to finally square off with the squirrelly, capable pilot and shred him in a storm of Gattler fire.
Allowing Gef pilots to escape in
Nothing is True puts Ancamna cruisers on station to guard the habitat, which can present a real threat. We wanted to unilaterally punish the morally 'good' decision in the earlier mission in order to drive home the theme that doing good sometimes has costs: it can't always be justified on purely utilitarian grounds. That's why being good is hard, and, sometimes, worthy.
Mercy or MassacreWe established early on that the two paths through the mission would be
capture or
destroy. Since the BtRL asteroid model had paths leading inside, we figured it'd be really cool to penetrate the asteroid's surface and blow up the reactor. Docking Gef habitats to the surface gave us an alternative target, and let us use the cool Fedayeen commando teams, who would otherwise have been stranded offscreen until 'Eyes in the Storm'.
It was a constant struggle to keep the 'capture' choice harder than 'destroy'. We relied on the fragility of the boarding transport, and its relatively slow approach, to keep the player honest. If the transport was lost the player would be forced to destroy the habitat and the Kostadin civilians aboard, but the mission
could continue - though we took pains to reinforce in the debriefing that the soldiers aboard the Andex were spectacularly valuable. Throughout dev, we struggled with bugs in which the transport would dock but the habitat would then warp out, leaving the mission in a weird limbo of failed success.
Tempo was a constant concern throughout the mission. We needed the player to feel under pressure, but give them enough time to explore and learn. We had to space messages carefully so they wouldn't choke the HUD (a
huge problem in
One Future). We wanted to give just enough time for boarding the habitat to be
viable, but not enough for it to be clearly optimal and methodically achieved. The MacDuff had to be tough, but not so gristly that the fight become a dull battle of attrition.
Once we had the balance where we liked it - and once we were confident the mission was possible on insane - we added finishing touches. Most players never see them, but a group of SOC Pegasi will show up to clean up Gef leadership under certain circumstances. Starting the mission before a tactical jump gave us a chance for a quick and dirty tutorial on flying the Vindicator for players who'd skipped
The Blade Itself.
Character BeatsI wonder if we missed an opportunity by not putting the other members of Falcata Wing aboard the
Vindicator. We tried to do as much of our characterization as we could in-mission during Act 3 as part of our drive to move the story into gameplay, but ultimately I'm not sure this was successful. Operator Navarra is a cipher, pure business, and putting Kovacs, Vidaura and Falconer aboard with nothing to do but yell at Laporte could've given them some more lines.
But it felt dubious that Laporte would be put in command of a full-sized patrol combatant without any experienced human infrastructure. The Vindicator fits her skill set well - as an ace pilot she can maneuver the ship and shoot as well as anyone, given the fighterlike controls, and she has Dreamscape bleed helping her out - but all the other business of commanding a larger vessel probably demands a seasoned crew with experience on the hardware.
All in all, I think this is a mission to be proud of. It's sweeping, full of interesting systems to engage with, and it lets the player get on with it however they choose.
Fun trivia: Due to unintentionally good timing, if the player looks behind them when fleeing the exploding reactor, they can see the GEF Oculus attempting to jump out, getting caught by the explosion mid-jump.
