Ancient-Shivan War
Chronology: Ancients
Quick impressions: Stylized, atmospheric, primitive
Short Description: This campaign is the first two parts of the story of how the Ancients fell to the Shivans.
The good: The writing style of the campaign has a lot of unity and works well to create a culture for them. You more or less feel like you are actually being spoken to by the Ancients. It also references to the Ancients Monologues from FS1. The campaign also shows a lot of polish, including command briefing animations and solid sound design.
The meh: The Ancients don't adapt to the shivan's technology, and so you never get shielding, but they handled shockwaves pretty well (by getting rid of most of them). Most of the weapons will deplete your energy stores pretty quickly, so you have to plan around that. The story was never completed, as well, and you will not have any real moments of triumph. At some point, hopefully someone will complete Acts 3-5.
The bad: The story is somewhat rushed, unfortunately. To have a few more missions to flesh out the stories would have been perfect. If this is my biggest complaint you're doing well, and is more just a consequence of Freespace modding. Le sigh.
What else: Some missions can be difficult at higher levels. The modpack is rather complete, though. You can make a lot of different missions with what they created. Yes, it would be nice to have nicer looking Ancients ships with less tile mapping, but it's better to actually have them and be able to use them. Well done.
Campaign length: Long
Credits:FSF - Team leader, jack-of-all-trades
Droid803 - FREDding, model converting, general modding
ShadowGorrath - Ex-team leader, effects, general modding
Starwolf1991 - FREDding, effects, general modding
Stormkeeper - FREDding, website works
FreeSpaceKing - Texturing
Tantalus53 - FREDding
Bigchunk1 - FREDding
Esarai - Modelling
Former team members:
Snail - Original tech descriptions
Maelstrom0511 - FREDding
Mobius - Testing
Special thanks to:
Hunter - Providing a space for ASW to exist: this website, our forum, and all the FTP space we ever needed
Aldo - The Achladia, Odigitria, Vassago and Kythera concepts, as well as the Tylisos model
The Shadow Genesis team - Super Cannon effects
The Blue Planet team - Bugfixing the Akrotiri
The Inferno team - Exclusive Ancient models
Flaming_Sword - Effects, interface templates
Alex Navarro - Gathering sound effects
Nighteyes - Explosion effects
Freeplaymusic.com - Music
Earth Defense - More music
Blackhole - Even more music
Ryan Main - Intro cutscene music
Release Thread:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=82887.0