[Assassin714]

I've seen people do this kind of thing for other games like Doom, so how would you rank the various (canon and fanmade) Freespace campaigns in order of difficulty? Either in terms of average mission difficulty or overall difficulty of completing the campaign

- Freespace 1
- FSPort
- Silent Threat
- Silent Threat: Reborn
- Freespace 2
- Operation Templar
- Derelict
- Sync
- Transcend
- Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius
- Blue Planet: War in Heaven
- Blue Planet: Chanticleer
- Homesick
- Ancient - Shivan War
- Unification War
- Trimurti
- INFR1
- Inferno: Nostos
- Sol: A History
- The Aeos Affair
- Vassago's Dirge
- Windmills
- The Scroll of Atankharzim
- Second Great War Part 2
- Blackwater Operations
- Between the Ashes
- The Procycon Insurgency

Or any others?

[CT27]

In no particular order here are some of the campaigns I've played that I would rank their overall difficulty as at least 'above average'.  (Just to be clear, I'm not saying that campaigns I don't list here don't have individual hard missions...just that overall I didn't find them on the harder side of things).  The campaigns I list here I found to (IMO) have enough hard missions and general difficulty to say I found them on the more difficult side of things.

Series Resurrecta
Shadow Genesis
Between The Ashes
Unification War
Vassago's Dirge
The Procyon Insurgency (from what I read on this forum the creator was thinking about an update to lower the difficulty slightly)
Aftermath 2:  The Blue Guardian (though the current version is noticeably less difficult than its initial release)

[Goober5000]

Aeos Affair is advertised as being difficult, but I didn't find it as difficult as, for example, Procyon Insurgency.

I suspect that you might find a correlation where campaigns released later in time are more difficult than campaigns released earlier.

[ShivanSlayer]

Aeos Affair is advertised as being difficult, but I didn't find it as difficult as, for example, Procyon Insurgency.

I suspect that you might find a correlation where campaigns released later in time are more difficult than campaigns released earlier.

Aeos Affair is hard at first until you learn the right calls to make in each mission, then it becomes pretty fun

[CT27]

Goober, since you're here and we're talking about campaign difficulty...

When classifying Scroll's difficulty, my opinion is that overall it's a medium/standard difficulty (not too easy, but not too hard either) campaign.  Would you say that's a fair assessment and what you intended Scroll to be?

(With the exception of the "Special Forces branch"...the difficulty of that IMO is above average/slightly higher than the overall rest of the campaign)

[Bl4ckj4ck]

Goober, since you're here and we're talking about campaign difficulty...

When classifying Scroll's difficulty, my opinion is that overall it's a medium/standard difficulty (not too easy, but not too hard either) campaign.  Would you say that's a fair assessment and what you intended Scroll to be?

(With the exception of the "Special Forces branch"...the difficulty of that IMO is above average/slightly higher than the overall rest of the campaign)

Absolutely. Overall, it does strike a great balance, offering a medium/standard level that is challenging yet not overly difficult. The variety in difficulty across different branches adds a nice touch, with the "Special Forces branch" standing out as a bit more challenging compared to the rest of the campaign.

[ShivanSlayer]

The Special Forces branch was the one I took on my first playthrough.  That scanning mission in the stellar dust gave me lots of grief and still is a pain

[Goober5000]

Glad to hear it.  That's about what we were shooting for -- a bit more of a challenge than standard FS2, but not excessively difficult.  (Although for the ace pilots, there's always the goal of saving the Arnku.)  Part 2 should be at a similar level.

That scanning mission was actually created by Sesquipedalian himself, although I added checkpoints to lessen the potential frustration.

[Iain Baker]

Bem Cavalgar is still the hardest IMO, although I'm convinced one of the FSO builds released since it was has nerfed the AI a bit. Same with Exile - in both campaigns 'saddling up' on a Shivan's six was a risky prospect since they would flip 180 degrees and start shooting you in the face. They are not doing it anymore in Exile during my playtesting for its recent update, and they don't seem to be doing it anymore in Bem C either which is a shame. I'm going to investigate this further over the next few months to see what's up.

As an aside, there is a world of difference between campaigns that are very challenging but fair about it, and those that are hard to the point of unfairness due to poor mission design - such as overloading the player with info, expecting the player to be in two places at once, bomber spam causing cap ships to die the death of a thousand cuts and missions that are too bloody long and lack checkpoints meaning the player suffers from exhaustion before their pilot does etc etc.

[Mito [PL]]

Grading campaigns by their difficulty is a little bit dodgy IMO - while I don't have anything against having your own personal lists, I'd like to point out that the difficulty of one campaign might vary a lot between FSO builds, player's FPS and even just the viewpoint (I am under the impression that players were far more tolerant of tediousness ingame back in the olden days).

Even with as much attention to not impact balance in any way, SCP is inevitably going to bounce the mods' balance a little bit, which we've seen happen, by rooting out strange edge case behaviours or outright bugs that might've made past campaigns more or less difficult, with some cases even relying on these bugs for their missions to progress (Aftermath Reboot and Homesick are the ones I remember dancing around a little).

Instead, I'd like to give a happy smile medal to every campaign that would normally have a rather steep difficulty unless you pick long range missiles, when it becomes more of a point and click adventure game.

[Colonol Dekker]

Search for bosch and the second great war part 2 are pretty tough.....

[ShivanSlayer]

Glad to hear it.  That's about what we were shooting for -- a bit more of a challenge than standard FS2, but not excessively difficult.  (Although for the ace pilots, there's always the goal of saving the Arnku.)  Part 2 should be at a similar level.

That scanning mission was actually created by Sesquipedalian himself, although I added checkpoints to lessen the potential frustration.

I hope to see part 2 soon, though in the meantime part 1 stands out pretty well on its own

[Goober5000]

Thanks.  Part 2 still requires a fair bit of work, but we should have a major update in the next month or two that adds something special to Part 1.

[Kie99]

I was 8 or 9 when I first played it, but the FS1 campaign gave me by far the hardest time I've had in a FreeSpace campaign.  Playing Judas and Clash of the Titans in particular were nightmares.

I don't know how many times I must have played the latter, but I remember that when I eventually completed it the Bastion survived with 1% health.  I never really figured out how to do escort missions until that training mission in FS2 where they tell you that you need to target the bombers, I spent forever thinking we had to destroy the Tantalus because it was the biggest and letting the bombers run riot.

Tenderizer was another very tough one, although at least in that one it was as simple as kill everything that comes in.