HelloIt's waaaay too late, but I've just spent the entire day consuming this work of art here, and now after reading some of this thread, I've got to leave my $0.02 about what I've just gone through. Some background about where I'm coming from: I'm an ArmA II player, I play that game for it's immersing, demanding, cruel and intellectually intense and often unique challenges. I play a lot of ArmA II, it's probably the game I spend the most time on. As for Blue Planet, I can't really say what keeps me here, because there is no defining feature of Blue Planet that keeps me playing it. I couldn't really care about what country the USMC invades in ArmA II, but the GTVA invading Sol has much more relevance to me.
When I played War in Heaven R1 I was blown away, first by how the smooth, lethal and fast-paced gameplay led me to believe that the GTVA and UEF were truly dueling with next-generation equipment. Uhlans, Nyx and Kentaurois effortlessly screamed around aging Perseus and Myrmidon fighters in a way that felt much more visceral than what vanilla freespace had ever offered me. Layered onto that feeling was the raw mission design, all of the missions were memorable merely because of how much thought and effort went into defining them from the freespace 2 campaign, and those corner-stone missions: Aristeia, Delenda Est, Post-Meridian, The Blade Itself, only helped to define the campaign even further. I never thought that I would get an emotional response outside of excitement from a Freespace game, or much any space-simulator, but I've found plenty of excitement and much more from blue planet, and that's probably one of the biggest things keeping me here.
To be honest, in terms of gameplay, you folks are outmached. You're not Mechwarrior: Living Legends who deals with a fairly new version of Cryengine, you're talking an old, patched-up space game from 1999 and telling it to do things that it was never intended to do. However, despite the obvious hurdles that you must overcome to do what you have to do, you still manage to get it done and create, in my opinion, one of the strongest semi-linear experiences around, and this takes me to Act 3.
When I had found that there was a new release for blue planet I was esctatic, I was expecting more of the same from Act 2 - heart pounding action and lots of reading. I got a lot of that, lots of heart pounding action and some fantastic reading - more on that later - but then I got something that I didn't expect, a flavor of gameplay that I haven't seen in a long time, a lack of repetition. Act 3 took one basic concept, you're a stealth ninja who can blow things up fast, and built an entire doctrine around it. You crafted a campaign where every single mission was unique, where they all - save for two - adhered to this "stealth" concept and executed it in a way that was completely unique from the others. Just as you get used to one concept in time to master it for a mission, it's disposed of and quickly replaced with a new mechanic. In the first mission, we use our stealth to weave between ships in a convoy and rapidly inflict damage; in mission 2, we operate under the mindset that when the enemy finds us, we had better have everything ready; in mission 3, the ninja ship turns from commander, to saboteur, back to commander again in a short span, it's a lot to take in each time, and this is something that, for me, absolutely murders the game's replay value.
However, this isn't a bad thing at all, a huge part of this campaign is simply discovering how things work and putting together a sub-optimal strategy that pulls you to a narrow victory. It's romantic, and replaying the mission kills the romance of having to solve that puzzle. I miss the mechanics of each mission like I miss a TV show that just happened to be of the right length: while I wish there were more of it, it's better to have it show up and shine brightly now than to burn itself out in the future.
I will make one exception to this though, I WILL be playing Universal Truth over and over again to see all of the different endings. I must have intentionally failed it around 7 times now just to see how it all works: first I looked when I was told not to, then I looked with Track IR, then I used time compression to see what happens when I didn't fly into the Dante, and I uplinked to the Simms jump node in the dream, I even played all the way through just so I could see what happens when I refused to "jack out of the matrix" during the Delenda Est scene. I absolutely adore this design philosophy that you guys have taken so far, I really hope to see more of this style in the future. Overcoming the challenges presented by new gameplay features is an amazing thing in my eyes, especially when they're built upon tried and true mechanics - we're still shooting things after all - and it comes with a fantastic story to boot, which leads me onto my next point.
Act 3 had a very strange shooting to reading ratio even when compared to Act 2. For a space-simulation in the modern era, this was unheard of. To me, it was also refreshing, and it made the combat all the better when I had gotten to it. WIHA3 plays more like an interactive novel than a shoot-em-up, more like a simulation than an arcade-game, more like something that's trying to be a book. To me it's riveting, everywhere I went I wanted to learn more about the Federation, the GTVA, and the Fedayeen and the Universe around me. I spent the time to fly to the firewalls in the dreamscape simply to see if there was anything that could be interacted with, and then you sent me to a 15 page briefing written in traditional five-paragraph order. As an ArmA 2 player, this briefing was exceptionally familiar and touching to me - it hit right at home! I write and deliver briefings like this on a regular basis when I play ArmA II, and I found myself getting into the same preparation that I would for a long military simulation in a game with "beam cannons" and subspace jumps. That level of realism and immersion is unmatched in most games nowadays, I bought it, took it home, tried it on and squealed over it.
This is why I can't figure out why I keep coming back to Blue Planet.
As for the reading, I can't say anything bad over it. Not particularly sure that any amount of voice overs could really help at this point. The Vishan-Shivan dialogue was a nice change of pace, but only because they're mindless aliens who are going to murder everyone if they don't fit into their plans. After reading so much text, Ken, Olifumi, Simms, Laporte and Steele all have their own voices now, I've given them voices, I've assigned them tones and I've read out their lines with the choir of voices in my own mind. To be honest, it was a lot to get used to, it took me several playthroughs of WiHR1 to get used to it and hell, I still use the F4 button to go back through that message log after I've managed to evade a missile and have missed dialogue. It doesn't slow down the action for me to delve into the characters, every shot fired, every enemy spaceframe downed, every line of text read has significance, and for me, if it takes me a little bit longer to get through it, then it's only a sign of how well it's been put together, and how much respect I've deserved.
This is been an utterly disheveled rant by a fanboy who's spent too much of his vacation time before school playing this game, I'm just going to conclude with one last bit before I tell more people to buy this game simply so we can talk about it's single player.
I loved this piece. It's excited me, tugged on my heart-strings, tickled my brain, piqued my interest, and sent marines to secure a long-standing place in my memory. Everything was perfect and I hope to see more of this in acts 4 and 5. More careful reading, more decision making, more learning, more misty-eyes.
-Judah
I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be
Perfectly Fine waiting for the next one.
Oh yeah, I managed to blow up the Jupiter spacestation and that GTM Something that was docked to it during Everything is Permitted by hacking into one of the Mjolnirs near the Atreus. Pretty sure that Steele isn't going too happy about that, even though he didn't seem to care. I tried to screenshot it so I could put it in this post but I wasn't running in a window at the time, so I'll have to do it again.
