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The 158th Banshee Squadron is proud to present the release of Exposition, the first episode of the Into The Night series, and a prologue to Act 1! After a long period of hibernation, the team has spent many months of testing, debugging, and polishing to bring this campaign out of development and into the public!
Exposition is a 12 mission campaign that follows the story of Andre Greene, Callsign: Homie, through his time in the Earth Alliance as a fighter pilot in the highly decorated 158th Banshee Squadron.
Things are not looking good for the Earth Alliance. 12 Kiev-class destroyers and countless Andropov-class carriers of the Colonial Confederacy have descended upon the Aleutian Archipelago and established a stronghold near Strongpoint Obsidian. The Earth Alliance barely has enough resources to hold them off, and taking down the strong Colonial war effort will require more than just pilots.
Under the command of Commodore Rowe, your squadron will take part in point defense missions, escort missions, lightning strikes, and massive battles. Whatever your role is, it is always vital to the success of the mission, and I won't kid you, pilot, this won't be easy.
DOWNLOAD HERE! (http://the158th.hard-light.net/project_files/ITNE_Release.7z) (64.7 MB)
Or download the Windows installer here. (http://earthdefence.game-warden.com/random/158th_exposition_setup.exe) (65.2 MB)
Mirrored:
7z Archive (http://freespacemods.net/download.php?view.591)
Windows Installer (http://freespacemods.net/download.php?view.592)
Thanks, Swantz! -TS
To install Exposition, place the files from the 7z into a subdirectory in your Freespace 2 folder, and select the folder as a mod in the launcher. It is recommended that you use 3.6.10 Final to play Exposition.
"No shields, no jumpdrives, no way out, and only two inches of steel between you...and them."
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Seriously? Cool. Downloading . . . .
EDIT - played the first couple of missions. Pretty good. Only complaint so far is that it would be nice to have some intelligence briefs in the techroom so I knew what the sides were and what the conflict was about.
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Wow, it's great to see you guys get a release out there. I think I know what I'll be doing tomorrow. :)
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Oooohh. This is nice. I've been waiting to see this one released a long time. :D
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This thing should be stickied and highlighted :D
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First thing I did was check the date when I saw this. :p
Unfortunately for me I can't play this. :(
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Highlighted. Highlit? Anyway, let me know if you don't like the icon or whatever. :D
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Wow! That definately is good news: This MOD is supposed to revolutionize ground/atmospheric combat under SCP along with shadows of lyat...
Might anyone might making vids of this?
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Somebody should move the project's board from "Hosted Projects - Work In Progress" to "Hosted Projects - Fully/Partially Released".
I'm downloading it now, I cannot wait to check it out.
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Okay, I'm about 12 minutes into the first mission. My problem lies with the dialogue, or lack thereof. Blasting things is only satisfying for so long, the whole attack seems pointless, or rather emotionless. I don't know who these guys are, and I have little motivation to destroy them.
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Highlighted. Highlit? Anyway, let me know if you don't like the icon or whatever. :D
I'm not part of the team so my opinion doesn't count, but 158th looks like 1S9th.
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Okay, I'm about 12 minutes into the first mission. My problem lies with the dialogue, or lack thereof. Blasting things is only satisfying for so long, the whole attack seems pointless, or rather emotionless. I don't know who these guys are, and I have little motivation to destroy them.
I'll plus one that statement. I'll add to it that I have an intense dislike for nebula missions, especially when there's a large friendly object in the area that I have to protect with a geometry I do not know.
The lack of custom assets, like custom interface art or custom music, is something that surprised me when I played this.
Mission 2: "We're flying in a hurricane". No, you're definitely not. It doesn't feel like a hurricane at all.
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Dagnabbit... I just noticed the highlight for this! I must be blind. Can't wait to try this out. DL-ing now! :D
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Somebody should move the project's board from "Hosted Projects - Work In Progress" to "Hosted Projects - Fully/Partially Released".
I'm downloading it now, I cannot wait to check it out.
I note that the "unreleased" projects group is getting smaller. Which can only be a good thing.
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Just had to end mission 3, I've got no idea who I'm fighting or why I'm fighting them. In the first mission I was shooting endless waves of Communists with no explanation or dialogue. None of the friendly fighters lose any health though. In the second I was doing the same after 3 or 4 minutes of waypoint traversing, with the only dialogue along the lines of 'Where are the damn carriers?', which I was already thinking.
In the third mission there was a small dogfight, followed by a conversation and then silence for some time. Suddenly a cruiser starts losing health at a high rate, and I see some blips on my radar. I fly towards them with my wing mates and most of them get wasted by enemy fighters, I get to the Leningrad, and see it spinning away like crazy. It's docked with something called 'Captain's Rig' which I have no chance of seeing because I can't even approach the Leningrad without being smashed by it. Once it gets to 15% Hull (by this point I'm cheating) I can't damage it any more. I kill the Stalingrad, then the Leningrad, and Command tells me it is jumping out because it has enemies to kill. I try to jump out, but can't, and see a flashing red blip on my radar. I fly towards, and discover it's a stealth fighter. I start shooting it, but it is invulnerable.
At that point I pressed shift-esc. Sorry if my review seems a bit brutal but I found this practically unplayable.
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I have to agree with Kie99 really
Mission 1 was just a 10 minute long dogfight and as everyone else already said before me. It feels like a really lifeless attack and hardly inspires motivation to kill the enemy.
The second mission was a boring patrol run with a battle I had little influence over.
The third mission is just... meh...
Cliché redshirt 'colt' gets 3 seconds of spotlight about getting an ace medal and then dies. "Goodbye Colt, I hardly knew ye!" /care.
The turret sound effect of the carrier turrets is really loud and obnoxious.
Then after a bit one of the carriers get wasted from long range with absolutely no mention on the comm channel. Nobody apparantly cares enough that one of the carriers is getting totalled. It just... happens.
Then after 10 minutes in the mission, it just endless fighter waves and 2 enemy cap ships that just won't die. Then I just gave up and didn't felt like playing anymore.
Also, it didn't felt like atmospheric flight... at all. Just a dark greyish nebula in space.
And the lack of custom music just adds to the feeling it all happens in space.
Overal, underwhelming and just no fun to play because of poor mission design.
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I didn't mind the first two missions though as I said a little more backstory would help a lot with connecting the player to what's going on. The player really needs their hand held since they're being dropped into a totally unknown situation. (other than it's pre-FS1)
I am likewise stuck on the third mission. Though I keep getting killed after about 8 minutes. And I agree the carrier's guns are a little obnoxious. The most of the other effects are just fine.
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Jesus, I wasn't expecting to hear this! A big congrats to the 158th team.
Shall hopefully be able to download and give it a twirl this weekend.
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Downloading right now...
In advance, all I can recommend is to wait with advertising the campaign a bit (at ModDB, etc.). Based on feedback that you receive here, re-release a more polished campaign (with Intelligence entries or more story-revealing dialogs).
Ok, I'm currently at mission 5. Here are my comments about the first four missions. I'd like to approach this mod from the different perspective.
My greatest complaint is that my wingmen are invulnerable! I know it's because these aren't nameless pilots such as in the main FreeSpace 2 campaign, but it doesn't benefit gameplay at all. It's bad (but relieving at the same time) that I know that no harm can be done to my wingmen. This leads to the problem of showing off the enemy faction. A faction that loses dozens of fighters without taking down a single enemy fighter doesn't make them look menacing.Is it absolutely necessary for the plot for all wingmen to always survive?
You've heard some complaints about the missions' lengths. I concur with these people. It's not tension building at all to be flying in emptiness for long minutes.
On the plus side, the effects are amazing. The new interface is great. The only one I do not like is the briefing's background image. I can't tell you what's wrong with it, I just don't like it. The skybox in mission 4 is also excellent. I don't know who made that, but he's got some talent.
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Okay I just had a really weird experience.
I'm in the first mission in space.
And when the Leningrad finally decides to flee and activates the afterburners, it's flying backwards....
I can't say if it did that before, since that was inside a nebula and thus outside my visual range.
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Okay I just had a really weird experience.
I'm in the first mission in space.
And when the Leningrad finally decides to flee and activates the afterburners, it's flying backwards....
I can't say if it did that before, since that was inside a nebula and thus outside my visual range.
No that's some scripting that they got going on. It's normal as far as I can tell.
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Error: Verify failure: Vbuf1 != NULL i got this while getting ready to play and also said missing 72 ships wow didnt think it could go that high?
File: 3ddraw.cpp
Line: 452
Call stack:
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Did you install the mod as instructed?
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I've found myself stuck on the third mission for the time being, but I do have a few first impressions I thought were worth listing.
--First off, unlike a few other people have mentioned, I didn't really have any trouble at determining who I was fighting or what I was fighting for. However, I think this was primarily because I went ahead and read some of the background information on the hosted site; if I hadn't, I probably would have been somewhat lost. Since you are essentially introducing a new universe, I think some sort of in-game overview of the current situation would go a long way, whether it's via intelligence entries in the tech room, an extended initial command briefing, some sort of opening cutscene mission, use of the fiction viewer, or whatever. On a slightly-related topic, the lack of debriefings felt kind of jarring; I think they'd help add a real sense of what you're accomplishing.
--I had no real problem with the in-mission dialogue; it got a few chuckles out of me so far, and the characters seem to have some room to be fleshed out as the story progresses. However, I think using the message start and end .wavs would help a lot, since certain sequences had several lines of dialogue flying by at once, which got a bit difficult to follow. I do think that it's the sort of script that would really benefit from voiceacting, if you guys decide to go down that route.
--From an aesthetics standpoint, I really like the ship designs you guys came up with, especially those Earth Alliance cruisers and installations. Giant ducted fans? Awesome. (Except when they manage to splat me. :p) The fighters look very feasible for aerospace craft, though I'd have to assume that they have some sort of anti-gravity action going on, since they don't look like they could support themselves aerodynamically. I didn't mind the thunderstorm effect much at all; it may not be a whole lot like the real thing, but it's certainly closer than FS2's nebulae were to the genuine article. I like the weapon effects, though the capital ships' turret sound is a bit grating. Like someone mentioned before, the background image for the briefing screens was kind of distracting. I do think that coming up with some sort of custom HUD and soundtrack could have helped make the experience feel more immersive, but you guys may not have anyone on the team to handle that sort of thing, so I didn't see it as a huge deal.
--For the missions in general, I think cutting down on the waypoint-following time at the beginning would help matters, because that gets a bit trying to sit through again after dying. Also, I don't think the player is ever specifically ordered to follow Alpha 1 at the start, although that becomes sort of self-evident when you notice what everyone else is doing. I already mentioned the lack of briefings, but even the means by which the missions conclude seems a bit inconsistent: it isn't really made clear that you can't jump out yourself, and I think only one out of the first two mentioned an autopilot engaging. Making that a bit clearer might help matters.
Now, for the missions themselves:
--Mission 1 was, to put it mildly, kind of brutal. I flat-out died my first time through by getting thwacked by said installation fan, but I probably would have anyway from the massive fighter presence; as it was, I only made it through the second time around with all of 7% hull remaining. I don't really mind the hulls being so weak to missile fire, since that feels like it fits in with the pre-FS1 era you're working with, but seeing as how that's the case, I think you guys went overkill on the number of enemy ships in that mission. Cutting out one or even two whole wings of fighters would have gone a long way toward making things less frenetic, and definitely would have felt more plausible. Another element that didn't help matters was that all of your wingmates seemed to remain set to "Guard Alpha Wing/1," without you having the ability to change those orders; the AI seems to fly much better with plain old "Engage enemy," which I think would have helped take some of the heat off the player's back.
--Mission 2 was a welcome reprieve after I just survived mission 1 by the skin of my teeth, but I almost feel like it swung a bit too far in the other direction. You have large fighter superiority in the mission, and after the enemy fighters dispatch, the cruisers become nothing but cannon fodder. Even before the bombers showed up, my wingmates had managed to take out one of the enemy cruisers; after that, it was a flat-out slaughter. I'm not sure exactly how to change that for the better based on your mechanics, but there has to be something you can tweak to make the mission not feel like it plays itself.
--As for mission 3...well, I haven't managed to beat it yet, and I'm starting to suspect that something isn't working as it's supposed to there. The earliest part plays all right, when you're taking out a few enemy fighter wings, but when your friendly cruisers reach the end of their waypoints, they just stop there, with no explanation given. Then, all of a sudden, one comes under attack from an enemy ship that you can't even see yet, and even when it's destroyed, absolutely no one in the mission remarks on it; you'd think that Command or one of your wingmates would be shouting out alarm at the sudden attack and giving the player some clue as to what to do. After that, everything just becomes one big jumbled mess. My wingmen started dropping like flies, which is made all the more conspicuous by the fact that they were protected in the first mission, and the bombers didn't seem to have any real effect against the two enemy destroyers. In the end, I wound up getting killed because I was completely overwhelmed by enemy fighters.
Overall, I really like the concept that you guys have created, but whatever's going on with mission 3 is preventing me from moving forward unless I cheat my way through. I'm going to hold off on playing any further for the moment, just to see if it gets resolved.
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Overall, I really like the concept that you guys have created, but whatever's going on with mission 3 is preventing me from moving forward unless I cheat my way through. I'm going to hold off on playing any further for the moment, just to see if it gets resolved.
Regarding the 3rd mission
If you get the 773rd wings to attack the Stalingrad they will eventually destroy it. The fighters are invulnerable so they'll do it eventually. Or at least I assume so since I managed to get killed when it got pegged down to 2%. I just hung back around the carriers and tried to not die. eventually I just failed the mission 5 times and skipped it
Also. Regarding the sound effects, I think the ship guns in general are too loud. While the AA off the allied carriers can get annoying, when they open up with the big guns in fleet to fleet engagements I can't even hear myself think. I turned the FX down but that didn't help in some ways because warning indicators from incoming missiles etcetera were drowned out. Had to rely on the visual cues.
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OH YES! The Leningrad just used me as a baseball!
Need to fix the Leningrad's erotic erratic spinning, man.
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--From an aesthetics standpoint, I really like the ship designs you guys came up with, especially those Earth Alliance cruisers and installations. Giant ducted fans? Awesome. (Except when they manage to splat me. :p) The fighters look very feasible for aerospace craft, though I'd have to assume that they have some sort of anti-gravity action going on, since they don't look like they could support themselves aerodynamically. I didn't mind the thunderstorm effect much at all; it may not be a whole lot like the real thing, but it's certainly closer than FS2's nebulae were to the genuine article. I like the weapon effects, though the capital ships' turret sound is a bit grating. Like someone mentioned before, the background image for the briefing screens was kind of distracting. I do think that coming up with some sort of custom HUD and soundtrack could have helped make the experience feel more immersive, but you guys may not have anyone on the team to handle that sort of thing, so I didn't see it as a huge deal.
Keep in mind that we basically raised a campaign built for very, very primitive versions of SCP from the dead, so we didn't have a lot of modern whiz-bang to work with. As for the loud turret sounds, I picked them out to give capital ships a sense of awesome power. Often beam-less ships seem really wimpy in the audio department, so I decided to make turret fire as loud as beam fire and make the heavy turret bolts hit ships with large explosions. Perhaps I went overboard, but it certainly adds to the drama.
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Keep in mind that we basically raised a campaign built for very, very primitive versions of SCP from the dead, so we didn't have a lot of modern whiz-bang to work with. As for the loud turret sounds, I picked them out to give capital ships a sense of awesome power. Often beam-less ships seem really wimpy in the audio department, so I decided to make turret fire as loud as beam fire and make the heavy turret bolts hit ships with large explosions. Perhaps I went overboard, but it certainly adds to the drama.
Well personally I realised that a lot of the models were compartively old though that's not really something to complain about. If you redid the models we wouldn't be playing the game so I'd rather play the game with decent looking models than wait for "better" looking models and not play anything at all. You had some cool stuff going on in .. what is it mission 5 I think? The attack vector bit. I'll have to look into what you guys did and maybe steal it for Renegade Legion if that ever gets to mission building form. . . . har har.
I like the fact that the turrets have power but I think it should be turned down a tad. Like in mission 3 when the Carrier starts getting slammed that's cool. But when you've got like 10 ships and they're unloading every gun they've got for like 5 minute straight it's a little too much. Also remember that beams are loud but there are times when they're not firing.
I also noticed one problem for me. Atmospheric missions with a daytime skybox make it really hard to see the hud. Had to switch colours with something more contrasting.
Still it's cool to FINALLY play one of these so-called atmospheric missions. Even if it's just space with a skybox. Can't complain.
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The sound of the turrets would be fine for slow firing weapons I guess. Remember that most beams in FS2 have a very low fire frequency.
So either reducing the speed at which the turrets fire and increasing the damage accordingly, or making them a bit less loud would be my suggestion.
Oh and congratulations to the move into the "Fully/Partially Released" Forum :)
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The last mission is in a dire need of some revision. In its current form, you better be a modder or of a fight-till-the-very-end spirit. Not everyone knows how to extract a file from a VP and find out for himself that
he must die to progress with the campaign. I kept on fighting the endless waves of enemy fighters until, after some 10-15 minutes, they got my hull down to 30%. This was the moment that I decided to set myself to invulnerable and see what happens if I ~ K everything. I noticed that the Leningrad, in addition to its hull points being increased like mad, is set to invulnerable after it has suffered a sufficient amount of damage.
[EDIT]Reworded, as I have calmed down a bit.
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Not to mention I never liked the way it ended.
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Great to see a release from this project. :yes: Will download and play soon. :)
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Overall, I thought this was a very good campaign, but it did have issues.
First, the Leningrad baseball bat/anti-physics machine, the complete overkill of nebule, excuse me, hurricane, missions, and definately the last one. For the last mission, the outcome needs to become much more clear so the player knows what to do.
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perhaps a future solution will be found for these "hurricane" missions... Could winds be displayed in SCP?
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Earth alliance, sounds sweet. I sure hope it won't be as hard and rough as Sol: A History ;) (Not that it's bad, no!)
Dling now. Thanks, 158's.
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The fact Chelenkov's magic escape button can make the Leningrad accelerate backwards at the speed of fast is incredibly awesome and makes up for every single other flaw.
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So I managed to get past mission 3 and make it a few more missions in, so I have some more impressions to jot down. (I'm hoping one of the team staff comes in here and actually starts reading this stuff. :p) I'm not going to break things down mission-by-mission, since I don't exactly remember which number was which, but instead by what I like so far vs.what's giving me trouble.
What I like:
--The skyboxes. Dear lord, those are gorgeous. The space scenes are great, but the atmospheric content really steals the show. It's amazing just how fresh and different combat feels with the simple addition of a sky and ground. The one daytime outdoor mission, 6 or 7 I think, was a total blast because of that.
--The sense of scale. There are some almost staggering numbers of destroyers and carriers being flung about, far more than we ever saw in FS2. It really portrays the sense of a very heated solar conflict.
--The main guns on the capships. There's something nice and visceral about seeing massive blobs splat against an enemy carrier and tear it to shreds.
--The Hubble. I have absolutely no idea why it's still out there in the 2300s, but I don't really need to have a reason. :p
What I don't like:
--Contradictorily enough, the sense of scale. Way too many of these missions cross the line into Battle of Endor territory, to the point where I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing and have realized that it usually doesn't matter all that much anyway. There are too many wingmates, too many enemy fighters, and too many capital ships for the player to make much of a difference. To add to that, in at least one of the space-based missions, I think the amount of projectiles on-screen exceeded the engine limit, because my shots were disappearing on occasion.
--The lack of context in so many of these missions. As I go further in, the lack of debriefings really starts to hurt one's immersion. As soon as you get done a mission, you're whisked away to the next one, with no real sense of what you're accomplished or what's happened to you. The lack of any command briefings between missions illuminating the larger picture merely adds to the problem. And while in-mission, Command rarely seems to give you a good sense of what you're supposed to be doing; on those occasions when you are told, it's usually Alpha 1 doing the talking. You'd think that Command would comment on the destruction of friendly ships, or order you to protect/take out a certain vessel, or something along those lines, but quite frequently, it doesn't.
--The way the wingmen are handled. From the website, it seems like you guys were trying to give each of them individual characters and personalities, but they don't get to talk amongst each other frequently enough to do so. As a result, as someone mentioned earlier, when they do die, the player doesn't really feel anything at all.
--Those capital ship sound effects. During one or two of the truly big missions, I literally couldn't hear myself think due to the number and volume of sound effects playing at once. I know you wanted to go for meaty-sounding weapons, but I think you went way overboard in the process.
--I don't know if there's really anything that can be done about it, but with the daytime skybox, the default HUD becomes all but invisible. I had to switch to the all-blue option in order to see anything clearly. Again, though, unless there's some hidden SCP feature to change HUD color on a per-mission basis, that's kind of unavoidable.
As it stands, I'm enjoying the experience for the most part, but I can't get myself to truly love it, as much as I try to do so. I'm fully convinced that this has the potential to be an excellent campaign, if you guys are able to tweak and polish a few specific aspects of it.
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The way the wingmen are handled. From the website, it seems like you guys were trying to give each of them individual characters and personalities, but they don't get to talk amongst each other frequently enough to do so. As a result, as someone mentioned earlier, when they do die, the player doesn't really feel anything at all.
Developing personalities and providing your characters with some background information is good, among developers. Every time you, as a FREDder, make one of the characters speak, you have some reference about what they would mention and what sentence structures they'd use. Would you imagine a self-centered, pompous pilot talk about how good it was to save all those people aboard the GTCv XYZ, or would he talk about the number of kills he acquired in doing so? However, putting all that background information onto your website implies that you will discover every bit of their personalities over the course of the campaign, which cannot be the case for a 12-mission campaign.
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Now its just amusing (in a bad way)
'Angel' "Blargh i'm dead!" (not a single shot has been fired yet :lol:)
I cheated my way through mission 3, then ended up in 4(!!!) BOE's in a row. Where my presence didn't make a bit of difference, AT ALL. And then followed by a terrrrible designed escort mission where you spend 10 horrendous boring minutes of intercepting 4 planes at the time. Coming in timed waves.
The skybox on earth is nice though. The mission in the daylight skybox felt a bit like the 360 game, project slypheed. Except here you are stuck in a pityful fighter with pew pew pea shooters with command telling you "An other carrier down! Good job pilots" while I was just laughing out loud in my chair.
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Mission Eight has me die over and over again. Uknown cause of death? :warp:
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Mission Eight has me die over and over again. Uknown cause of death? :warp:
that's the escort mission right? If you lose one of the transport it explodes and is supposed to kill anythign in the vicinity (ie you). So don't lose any transports
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Okay, so I finally made it through to the end. Just a few more comments to add to the pile:
--There seems to be some strange graphical issue going on with several weapon shot effects. There are thin bands of color around the edges of the "rectangle" that comprises the weapon effect, as if there's something wrong with the transparency. I'm not sure if that's a general graphical bug or a problem with your media, though.
--To add to what I said earlier about the lack of command briefings and debriefings, the briefings that are there are so short and insubstantial that they do little to nothing to add to the plot. One in particular I remember had a sentence that essentially said, "Whoops, everyone died." No hint of remorse, no description of the consequences to the war effort, nothing. As it stands, there's very little actual story going on over the course of the campaign, not to mention the issues with character development.
--There were several occasions on which a friendly or enemy capital ship was set invulnerable when its hull integrity dropped too low, and they all managed to stick out like sore thumbs. It's one thing to use that trick with wingmen, but when you have a capital ship in your escort list getting pummeled with enemy fire yet holding stubbornly at 1% hull...there's something wrong there. On a related note, some of the missions had capital ships using direct "attack" orders on each other, which is kind of a big no-no since it turns them into baseball-bats-o'-doom.
--Again, there are way too many capital ships in most of these missions, to the point where immersion becomes completely broken. Eight enemy destroyers in one location? How could anyone logistically field that sort of a fleet?
--On a related note, with the large numbers of enemy fighters you have to face, I feel like the missile bank sizes are substantially too low. I know you were probably going for a more realistic treatment, but leveling the playing field by slinging a few missiles was by far the best way to survive a few of those missions...unfortunately, by the time at which I needed to do so, I had usually run out of them. I wound up just cheating myself invulnerable during one mission, just because I didn't feel like putting up with the hassle of half a dozen fighters constantly taking potshots at me anymore.
--One big thing that wore on me over the course of the campaign was how little changes from the player's standpoint. You're always flying the same ship, using just about the same exact weapons, shooting the same few enemy types in mostly straight-firefight missions, and almost all of them take place in the same murky "hurricane" environment where you can't see anything that's going on. Without a compelling story to back it up, that severe lack of variety really hurt things.
--As for the last mission...like someone mentioned earlier, it isn't really explained at all what the player is supposed to do, though the mission ended fast enough that it didn't really matter for me anyway. The big development barely mentioned in the briefing really needed to be expanded on, preferably by something like a command briefing, or maybe even a cutscene. Also, the big twist in-mission was almost laughable in how sudden it was.
Overall, this release left me genuinely disappointed more than anything else. I'm convinced that there's a truly great campaign buried somewhere in here, based on the backstory and the mods, but it's being trampled by all of the in-mission issues, some of which are practically game-breaking. A lot of the points I raised seem to me like things that could and should have been caught in playtesting. I really hope that a few of the team members take the time to read through this thread and respond to some of these comments.
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A crazy campaign from what I read. When I heard that there is this capital ship that bats you like a baseball, I feel like messing around with that myself. It beats shooting ships in my opinion but then again... it has to go since it doesn't make much sense physics wise. That's why I'm downloading it now before that glitch is fixed.
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I'm going to dispense with my usual campaign review procedure. Mongoose made most of the points I might have, had I not come to a very important conclusion.
Exposition is not actually a campaign.
To be a campaign it would actually have to be telling some kind of story, and it goes out of its way not to to do that. Even Second Great War Part 2 was at least the story of how much Alpha 1 rocked. This doesn't have even that going for it.
Instead Exposition is a series of unconnected single missions that appear to have designed mostly for visual effect, and then hampered in it by the overuse of the "hurricane" environment. Numerous assaults were mounted on the FSO engine's limits for no reason other than because the mission designer felt like it.
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There is a story. It's about the 158th Banshee Squadron and how it took part in the war. There are no moral conclusions to take and there is no hidden message in it as far as I can tell, but it's "some kind of" story nonetheless.
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There is a story. It's about the 158th Banshee Squadron and how it took part in the war. There are no moral conclusions to take and there is no hidden message in it as far as I can tell, but it's "some kind of" story nonetheless.
But the thing is, in the sense that NGTM-1R is talking about, there really isn't. There's no real connectivity between the events of subsequent missions, no building on what happens before, no overarching development of particular events or themes or characters. It really feels most like a bunch of stand-alone tech demos strung together, except that some of said tech demos don't function all that well.
I am sort of curious as to how the development process of this went. From the credits, it seems like the original missions were created some time back, with the current team going back and touching them up a bit. Given that, I'm curious as to how the original mission creators could have done things like exceed the projectile limits, since said limits were certainly no higher back then, and could have been even less for all I know. And if the new team did playtest all of the missions, did they just miss things like the player's shots completely disappearing on numerous occasions?
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There is a story. It's about the 158th Banshee Squadron and how it took part in the war.
Which is why it leaves us with no concept of their impact on the war if they had one (not likely from the BoEs), or the war's impact on them for that matter, or why there's even a war in the first place, or how it's going, or what they're trying to do, or tactics, or strategy, or... You get the picture.
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The website and the ModDB entry reveal some background information, but you're right: the team shouldn't have relied on their potential players read through all that before launching FS.
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Interestingly enough, none of the team members of 158th have replied to the comments yet, at all.
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Woolie Wool did, but he only commented on the visual and audio effects, not on the missions themselves. I'd really like the rest of the team to take a look at some of these comments myself.
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Mirrored:
7z Archive (http://freespacemods.net/download.php?view.591)
Windows Installer (http://freespacemods.net/download.php?view.592)
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Too much grey nebula. . .
Not enough reason to interact, ie- I could have just fled, fled like wailing penguin to the edge of a battle area and simply watched from afar while the mission played itself out.
Which I did for the station defencive.
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Which I did for the station defencive.
Really? I almost lost that mission. Maybe it's difficulty setting-related?
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I might replay with fraps and time compression on then yoochoob it. I do tend to play new campaigns on easy nine times out of ten though in all honesty.
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First impressions thus far...
The mission where I had to engage the Stalingrad and Leningrad was pretty damn confusing. I started attacking the Leningrad, not knowing that there was a reason it was spinning around like crazy which made it impossible to damage it; that it would leave and the only one I could really attack was the Stalingrad.
In the mission after that, I can't focus because any and all visual clues about missiles, enemies close to me, or fire grazing me just cannot be heard. Tone down those sound. It's nice to be able to heard the big guns for once, but I can't play like this.
EDIT: Well, completed it now. My only gripes remain the way-too-loud cannon sounds, and my weapons apparently fail to work during big battles. If it matters, I'll hold fire button down, and one measly laser will spew out of one side, then two on both, and then I can't fire for a few seconds and it continues like that. As soon as the action clears up, they work fine again.
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Well i believe a big issue that hampered this mod, was that so much of what was done originally (i was much more involved in the original development, i didn't do much with this later work) was lost over time and various reasons. Including voice work for the entire campaign. I am actually quite surprised this much of it survived, or was pieced together, remade or what have you. I don't mean to make excuses or anything, just trying to offer some insight.
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There is a story. It's about the 158th Banshee Squadron and how it took part in the war. There are no moral conclusions to take and there is no hidden message in it as far as I can tell, but it's "some kind of" story nonetheless.
But the thing is, in the sense that NGTM-1R is talking about, there really isn't. There's no real connectivity between the events of subsequent missions, no building on what happens before, no overarching development of particular events or themes or characters. It really feels most like a bunch of stand-alone tech demos strung together, except that some of said tech demos don't function all that well.
I am sort of curious as to how the development process of this went. From the credits, it seems like the original missions were created some time back, with the current team going back and touching them up a bit. Given that, I'm curious as to how the original mission creators could have done things like exceed the projectile limits, since said limits were certainly no higher back then, and could have been even less for all I know. And if the new team did playtest all of the missions, did they just miss things like the player's shots completely disappearing on numerous occasions?
Most of the work was done prior to 2005 the main campaign itself (actually i believe the mod was at 100% completion, voice and all) was completed around 2003 but it was decided to upgrade all of the missions, ships effects etc to scp standards, as 158th was originally done for vanilla, the scp upgrade was almost finished minus some tech room errors, then for whatever reason, real life took a hold and the team kind of fell apart, and as a result of time passing a lot of the data was lost.
A big reason for the upgrade was the vanilla iteration didn't have atmospheric battles, so the entire campaign took place in the "hurricane"/nebulae minus the last mission.
I cant remember the projectile limit being an issue before, certainly not in the vanilla campaign, i dont know what was changed or when, but i imagine it has to do with the gurkov.
Edit: I also remember there was modeled terrain and roads + buildings for the atmospherics before (which were closer to the ground at that tme), don't know if that was taken out on purpose due to implementation difficulties or actually lost.
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Woolie Wool did, but he only commented on the visual and audio effects, not on the missions themselves. I'd really like the rest of the team to take a look at some of these comments myself.
There's two reasons for this. First of all, everything that's been said here is completely reasonable. I don't want to tell people "No, you actually liked the way it ended" and I don't want to tell people things that I'm not altogether qualified to. Second of all, Krackers87 hinted upon how much was done with Exposition such a long time ago. This was a big issue for the team. We had two main goals for Exposition: 1) To stay true to what the original team wanted and 2) To clean everything. Do you see why getting a project that was made a few years back is problematic? It's difficult to tell what the original team was going for when the most we got to converse was the rare moment when we concurrently had free time.
I will start commenting on people's posts, provided that you understand what I just said. (Yes, I know that there's no way for me to verify that :p)
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It all makes sense. Thanks for replying.
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Now its just amusing (in a bad way)
'Angel' "Blargh i'm dead!" (not a single shot has been fired yet :lol:)
I cheated my way through mission 3, then ended up in 4(!!!) BOE's in a row. Where my presence didn't make a bit of difference, AT ALL. And then followed by a terrrrible designed escort mission where you spend 10 horrendous boring minutes of intercepting 4 planes at the time. Coming in timed waves.
The skybox on earth is nice though. The mission in the daylight skybox felt a bit like the 360 game, project slypheed. Except here you are stuck in a pityful fighter with pew pew pea shooters with command telling you "An other carrier down! Good job pilots" while I was just laughing out loud in my chair.
I respect your opinion, but I disagree. Here's why: With this kind of combat, a single pilot's contributions actually don't make much of a difference. Did you notice how in almost every mission, the full 158th is flying with you? Flying slow aircraft without shields like this demands superiority in numbers. Without that, there's not much chance of you being successful. That was the big tactical error commit by the CC in the nighttime escort mission. They didn't want to send large swathes of fighters in because when the succeeded, they would all die because of the explosion. This made them send in waves of ships, causing what happened in the mission: essentially a massacre. If they had really wanted to take out those cargo ships, they should've sent in everyone at once, or tried to engage at long range with capships. But they valued their pilots too much for the first, which is ironic because they ended up losing more pilots than they would've otherwise, and they were to close to the station for the latter to be a viable option.
If you look at every mission from the sole standpoint that it's a game and merely that, of course you're going to be dissatisfied. It's just like when you'd read books in a high school literature class and you ask yourself "Why did I even bother reading that?" but when you get into higher level lit courses, you develop a better understanding of literary theory. But alas, it is still up to the authors to make the message clear.
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Okay, so I finally made it through to the end. Just a few more comments to add to the pile:
--There seems to be some strange graphical issue going on with several weapon shot effects. There are thin bands of color around the edges of the "rectangle" that comprises the weapon effect, as if there's something wrong with the transparency. I'm not sure if that's a general graphical bug or a problem with your media, though.I don't think I've noticed any of that when I was testing the game, but I'm not quite willing to say "it's your fault" or "it's scp's fault." Can we get a screenshot?
--To add to what I said earlier about the lack of command briefings and debriefings, the briefings that are there are so short and insubstantial that they do little to nothing to add to the plot. One in particular I remember had a sentence that essentially said, "Whoops, everyone died." No hint of remorse, no description of the consequences to the war effort, nothing. As it stands, there's very little actual story going on over the course of the campaign, not to mention the issues with character development.
While I can't say much about what the original team was going for in regards to story and character development, I can say that a fair amount of info that should've been in command briefings was compressed into the standard briefings. I guess something for the patch will be to re-expand that. As for the "Whoops everyone died" debriefing, I'd imagine that if everyone had died, there would be no debriefing period, as everyone was dead. But I get what you mean. :p
--There were several occasions on which a friendly or enemy capital ship was set invulnerable when its hull integrity dropped too low, and they all managed to stick out like sore thumbs. It's one thing to use that trick with wingmen, but when you have a capital ship in your escort list getting pummeled with enemy fire yet holding stubbornly at 1% hull...there's something wrong there. On a related note, some of the missions had capital ships using direct "attack" orders on each other, which is kind of a big no-no since it turns them into baseball-bats-o'-doom.Okay, the first is a fair observation, and the second is understandable considering game play, but considering how they'd behave in reality, I've always imagined that it's the person in small ~20somethingTon fighter to stay away from the large 1000000000ton space warship. If high powered lasers barely scratch them, then smacking fighters around is a viable tactic if it's practical. But yes, it is pretty ugly.
--Again, there are way too many capital ships in most of these missions, to the point where immersion becomes completely broken. Eight enemy destroyers in one location? How could anyone logistically field that sort of a fleet? In the same ways that all of the naval fleets were fielded in WWII. Eight is actually a pretty small number of ships to supply. IIRC, Taffey-3 from the battle off Samar had ~8 DD/DEs and 6 escort carriers, and the fleet that they fended off had 4 battleships, 6 heavy cruisers, 2 light cruisers, and 11 destroyers. All that we can assume is that it was strategically worth the hassle to support these ships.
--On a related note, with the large numbers of enemy fighters you have to face, I feel like the missile bank sizes are substantially too low. I know you were probably going for a more realistic treatment, but leveling the playing field by slinging a few missiles was by far the best way to survive a few of those missions...unfortunately, by the time at which I needed to do so, I had usually run out of them. I wound up just cheating myself invulnerable during one mission, just because I didn't feel like putting up with the hassle of half a dozen fighters constantly taking potshots at me anymore. This, too, is a wholly reasonable observation. We were indeed trying to bridge the gap between modern fighter's missile load outs and FS's missile load outs, and were trying to emphasize gun combat, while maintaining an actual missile threat, mostly via Fastreaches.
--One big thing that wore on me over the course of the campaign was how little changes from the player's standpoint. You're always flying the same ship, using just about the same exact weapons, shooting the same few enemy types in mostly straight-firefight missions, and almost all of them take place in the same murky "hurricane" environment where you can't see anything that's going on. Without a compelling story to back it up, that severe lack of variety really hurt things. 'Kay. In most fighter squadrons, you really don't have the opportunity to fly more than one kind of fighter. There's just no need to train you to fly more than one kind of ship. This was supposed to illustrate more precisely when these changes in fighter doctrine happen. But yeah, it really doesn't make for an interesting game. /:
--As for the last mission...like someone mentioned earlier, it isn't really explained at all what the player is supposed to do, though the mission ended fast enough that it didn't really matter for me anyway. The big development barely mentioned in the briefing really needed to be expanded on, preferably by something like a command briefing, or maybe even a cutscene. Also, the big twist in-mission was almost laughable in how sudden it was. Yup, command briefings need to be expanded.
Overall, this release left me genuinely disappointed more than anything else. I'm convinced that there's a truly great campaign buried somewhere in here, based on the backstory and the mods, but it's being trampled by all of the in-mission issues, some of which are practically game-breaking. A lot of the points I raised seem to me like things that could and should have been caught in playtesting. I really hope that a few of the team members take the time to read through this thread and respond to some of these comments. It really seems to me like a lot of the issues point out aren't the issues themselves, just that we didn't illustrate clearly enough the point we were try to make with them. And that's one of the issues with internal play testing. The confusion was compounded by the team change. But all together, I don't see it as impossible to repair these faults.
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But it wasn't fun. :(
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Now its just amusing (in a bad way)
'Angel' "Blargh i'm dead!" (not a single shot has been fired yet :lol:)
I cheated my way through mission 3, then ended up in 4(!!!) BOE's in a row. Where my presence didn't make a bit of difference, AT ALL. And then followed by a terrrrible designed escort mission where you spend 10 horrendous boring minutes of intercepting 4 planes at the time. Coming in timed waves.
The skybox on earth is nice though. The mission in the daylight skybox felt a bit like the 360 game, project slypheed. Except here you are stuck in a pityful fighter with pew pew pea shooters with command telling you "An other carrier down! Good job pilots" while I was just laughing out loud in my chair.
I respect your opinion, but I disagree. Here's why: With this kind of combat, a single pilot's contributions actually don't make much of a difference. Did you notice how in almost every mission, the full 158th is flying with you? Flying slow aircraft without shields like this demands superiority in numbers. Without that, there's not much chance of you being successful. That was the big tactical error commit by the CC in the nighttime escort mission. They didn't want to send large swathes of fighters in because when the succeeded, they would all die because of the explosion. This made them send in waves of ships, causing what happened in the mission: essentially a massacre. If they had really wanted to take out those cargo ships, they would've sent in everyone at once, or tried to engage at long range with capships. But they valued their pilots too much for the first, which is ironic because they ended up losing more pilots than they would've otherwise, and they were to close to the station for the latter to be a viable option.
If you look at every mission from the sole standpoint that it's a game and merely that, of course you're going to be dissatisfied. It's just like when you'd read books in a high school literature class and you ask yourself "Why did I even bother reading that?" but when you get into higher level lit courses, you develop a better understanding of literary theory. But alas, it is still up to the authors to make the message clear.
To shed some additional light on thesizzler's point, which i agree with aswell:
Part of the original idea behind this campaign was to forgo the Alpha 1 Vanquishes all theme (which is why you're not even designated alpha 1 until the last mission) that is persistent in the FS2 universe, a departure from the usual placement of the player. Here its portrayed more as one of the soldiers in a squad, where yes, the game does not force you to turn the tide of the battle, nor does it rest the weight of the mission on your shoulders, it simply makes you part of the team responsible for the success of all goals. If you're playing FS2 vanilla, and you lose a wing man, or he jumps out, it doesn't usually make much of a difference does it? But if he takes out that pesky enemy on your tail, that makes your job a little easier. Well, here in 158th you are that wingman.
Now this basicaly allows the player to choose his level of involvement, bug off and dip out on your friends? No prob, they'll still succeed without too much more effort on their part, but if you want to be balsy and take the lead, you can make a big impact on the battle, if you so choose.
To reiterate, if you want the accomplishment of taking out several wings, earning that ace badge, gaining your promotion to lieutenant, or scoring that cap ship kill, you're going to have to fly on the seat of your pants and pull out some tricky maneuvers (and who wants to be known as the pansy who fled in the heat of the battle?). 158th makes you work much harder to gain kill recognition.
A big part of the original campaign was to work on making the player care about his other wing man, therefore enticing, him to get involved, instead of that reliance i mentioned earlier, where if the player runs off, everything falls apart. However a lot of this effect has obviously been lost, partially due to the voice acting, and how in the atmospherics its much more apparent how your wing men are invincible.
This was an attempt at a significant departure, trying to give a new flavor of combat, and how missions normally play out, and coupled with trying something new, and losing much that was created, has dampered this of course.
Also if my memory serves me right, this idea was mainly just for exposition, where further episodes would blend in more so with FS2 style (ocuring during FS1-FS2 timeline but chronicling unexplored events), albeit with still a focus on the wing man aspect.
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There's two reasons for this. First of all, everything that's been said here is completely reasonable. I don't want to tell people "No, you actually liked the way it ended" and I don't want to tell people things that I'm not altogether qualified to. Second of all, Krackers87 hinted upon how much was done with Exposition such a long time ago. This was a big issue for the team. We had two main goals for Exposition: 1) To stay true to what the original team wanted and 2) To clean everything. Do you see why getting a project that was made a few years back is problematic? It's difficult to tell what the original team was going for when the most we got to converse was the rare moment when we concurrently had free time.
I will start commenting on people's posts, provided that you understand what I just said. (Yes, I know that there's no way for me to verify that :p)
I completely understand, and I am grateful that you guys did respond. :) This was honestly a campaign that I wanted to enjoy, based on the setting and the awesome aerospace-craft-with-big-fans, so when I wound up running into the issues that it had, I wanted to get a handle on how it had been developed. I know from years of observation how these big community projects often gain lives of their own, sometimes to the point where the project dictates the decisions of its team, instead of the other way around. So yeah, anything that you guys feel like commenting on would be awesome.
Aaaand I totally got beat by leaving this post sitting in a tab for an hour, but I'm putting it down anyway. :p
Edit: Now that I went back and read what I just missed, thanks for responding to that post point-by-point, thesizzler. It does sound like the campaign was going for a somewhat different style of overall combat philosophy than in the main FS campaigns themselves, but I'll agree with your observation that the point of said style wasn't conveyed all that well to the player in the campaign itself, which is where the majority of my comments arose from. Also, while I do appreciate the points that you and Krackers87 raised about the pilot in this campaign being more akin to your wingmen in the retail campaigns, I do feel like, from a gameplay standpoint, there does have to be a bit of compromise made. It's one thing to make the player feel like they're not all that important to the outcome of a particular mission, but when you extend that to the point where the player can literally sit still and watch the mission play itself, it's almost to the point where you're allowing that philosophy to run roughshod over the fundamental gameplay, if you follow me.
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All well and good, but to repeat General Battuta: It's not fun.
If, as you say, the player doesn't have to involve himself in combat, what's the point? I could just add cutscene sexps to the missions and watch a piece of machinima. FS2 managed to give the player the impression that he was only a part of a big machine called the GTVA, while at the same time making it clear that your actions did matter. Knowing that my contribution to the battle will be effectively zero, no matter what I do, certainly doesn't inspire me to pick up where I left it.
As someone who is more interested in story and novel gameplay features than scores and promotions, this feels very, very grating.
I would also point out that, in those areas, Exposition failed miserably. The Story, if there was any, went right past me. My wingmen didn't feel personalized at all, just generic fighter pilot, male and generic fighter pilot female in several iterations. And I would submit to you that while voice acting can convey characterization quicker and smoother than just plain text, it all starts off with a good script, which I felt was lacking here.
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All well and good, but to repeat General Battuta: It's not fun.
If, as you say, the player doesn't have to involve himself in combat, what's the point? I could just add cutscene sexps to the missions and watch a piece of machinima. FS2 managed to give the player the impression that he was only a part of a big machine called the GTVA, while at the same time making it clear that your actions did matter. Knowing that my contribution to the battle will be effectively zero, no matter what I do, certainly doesn't inspire me to pick up where I left it.
As someone who is more interested in story and novel gameplay features than scores and promotions, this feels very, very grating.
I would also point out that, in those areas, Exposition failed miserably. The Story, if there was any, went right past me. My wingmen didn't feel personalized at all, just generic fighter pilot, male and generic fighter pilot female in several iterations. And I would submit to you that while voice acting can convey characterization quicker and smoother than just plain text, it all starts off with a good script, which I felt was lacking here.
Towards your first point, it follows the line of thinking that no one made you put in the free space disc to play the game, yet you did and chose to involve yourself in it for the fun, if you do decide to get in the fray, the battles themselves can be incredibly hair raising, just don't get lost or chase an enemy away from your group or your screwed (wing man mentality concept here)
And again, i merely come to convey the original idea, being one of the few lurking original devs. Not to convince you to like the mod.
And yes the story-line was a primary victim of the whole transition of devs, lost material, and vast time in between.
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A further note on characters:
I mentioned in my review that you simply wanted all my wingmen to have personalities. Now that I think of it, in retrospect, it could have helped immersion if there had been fewer - 2 or 3 - characters throughout. Make these characters well-developed, give them characteristics that make them memorable and distinguishable from each other. Say, make one of them an old, disillusioned pilot who complains all the time, but does so in a humorous, self-ironic and sarcastic manner. Make him confront his younger opposite, the overambitious rookie who barely knows anything about the origins of the conflict.
This is what I suggest for a potential future release.
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Towards your first point, it follows the line of thinking that no one made you put in the free space disc to play the game, yet you did and chose to involve yourself in it for the fun, if you do decide to get in the fray, the battles themselves can be incredibly hair raising, just don't get lost or chase an enemy away from your group or your screwed (wing man mentality concept here)
I think there's a difference there. When playing FS2, you always have a clear sense of what you need to do to make the story go forward. Giving the player the option of saying "Screw it, I'm gonna sit this one out" undercuts any sense of dramatic urgency your story creates. In FS2, the player wants to do everything he can to win a mission, either because there's something awesome to be had in the next one, some new Weapon or ship to play with, or a cutscene, or even just a new chapter of the story.
Choosing my level of involvement is a part of the whole tactical thinking process you go through when playing a mission (Can I really take out that Cruiser? Or should I stick to hunting fighters? Can I call in support?). Point is, Sitting it out is never an option if you want to win the mission or survive it.
Here, on the other hand, I can do just that and still get rewarded for my efforts by seeing the next chapter. That, to me, is just wrong. As I said before, I might as well be watching a piece of machinima.
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That's a really good way of putting it. The reason I play through FS campaigns at this point, or really just about any sort of game that I play, is to see the story progress and get to partake in the new and exciting experiences that it enables. It's why I'm willing to skyrocket my blood pressure and bash my head repeatedly against the wall in the process of repeatedly trying to beat a particularly difficult mission...I want the payoff of finally beating it and seeing what happens next. But when you eliminate that requirement of having to complete certain tasks by your own two hands in order to move that story along, the whole exercise seems kind of pointless.
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One small thing to add, I understand the whole idea about launching the entire squadron for each mission but I think that would have been better to have a little more diversity and have more missions where the whole squadron isn't necessarily involved. A lot of people decry the escort mission as not very fun but I actually liked it because it was different, and had a nice skybox. Maybe the combat itself wasn't as interesting but it wasn't horrible either.
As a campaign designer myself, the problem I've found with giving wingmen personality is that ultimately those craft have be invulnerable. And because they're invulnerable, the missions tend to become easier, or the player maybe actually cares less about his wingmen because he knows that nothing he does will affect whether they live or die? Not that I tend to help out my wingmen anyway. If the player can give orders often he might say "okay invulnerable wingmen, go attack this cruiser, you won't die but I might so better than you than me".
Also I understand the team's desire to stick the original vision, but if the information isn't there I'd suggest you simply run with it and create your own stories. I don't think there's any real debt that needs to be fulfilled with regards to the original designers.
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I've found with giving wingmen personality is that ultimately those craft have be invulnerable.
What I did for ITHOV is to add a SEXP that regenerates X amount of health for a given wingman every Y seconds. That ensures that they *will* die if you send them on a suicide mission, but they'll very likely survive most dogfights in which you're helping them.
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I've found with giving wingmen personality is that ultimately those craft have be invulnerable.
What I did for ITHOV is to add a SEXP that regenerates X amount of health for a given wingman every Y seconds. That ensures that they *will* die if you send them on a suicide mission, but they'll very likely survive most dogfights in which you're helping them.
The problem with that though, is that if the wingmen have names and characters and they DO die then what happens in the next mission? If the campaign is very scripted they're alive again and then there's a big disconnect with reality. That problem happened to me with the BWO demo. There's some mission where one of the wingmen dies and it's supposed to be a big deal but that guy already died in one or two earlier missions so when it was actually scripted I didn't care at all.
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At a certain point, if you want your wingmen to be actual characters, I think you have to eat the lack of realism that making them invulnerable implies and just run with it. Like I said in my Exposition comments, while the player may notice a wingman hovering at 17% hull integrity, he's far more likely to notice a capital ship in his escort list doing the same thing. One interesting variant on the concept might be to automatically disarm (or maybe even disable) your wingmen when they reach that protected hull percentage; that way, while they still survive, the player can't use them as a shield by sending them on suicidal orders.
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At a certain point, if you want your wingmen to be actual characters, I think you have to eat the lack of realism that making them invulnerable implies and just run with it. Like I said in my Exposition comments, while the player may notice a wingman hovering at 17% hull integrity, he's far more likely to notice a capital ship in his escort list doing the same thing. One interesting variant on the concept might be to automatically disarm (or maybe even disable) your wingmen when they reach that protected hull percentage; that way, while they still survive, the player can't use them as a shield by sending them on suicidal orders.
In one of my missions I had my wingmen withdraw from battle when they reached a certain threshold. May not work depending on the dialogue.
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Perhaps you might ensure the "character" survives if you add a conveniant piece of current technology to the environment... ejection seats.
...if only in the story-telling/SEXP-text aspect, not an actual ejected pilot...
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It doesn't work, because the character probably still has dialogue that would seem silly if they'd ejected.
The best solution is probably the guardian-at-random-threshold with a brief disable or (best yet) disarm at the threshold.
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Towards your first point, it follows the line of thinking that no one made you put in the free space disc to play the game, yet you did and chose to involve yourself in it for the fun, if you do decide to get in the fray, the battles themselves can be incredibly hair raising, just don't get lost or chase an enemy away from your group or your screwed (wing man mentality concept here)
I think there's a difference there. When playing FS2, you always have a clear sense of what you need to do to make the story go forward. Giving the player the option of saying "Screw it, I'm gonna sit this one out" undercuts any sense of dramatic urgency your story creates. In FS2, the player wants to do everything he can to win a mission, either because there's something awesome to be had in the next one, some new Weapon or ship to play with, or a cutscene, or even just a new chapter of the story.
Choosing my level of involvement is a part of the whole tactical thinking process you go through when playing a mission (Can I really take out that Cruiser? Or should I stick to hunting fighters? Can I call in support?). Point is, Sitting it out is never an option if you want to win the mission or survive it.
Here, on the other hand, I can do just that and still get rewarded for my efforts by seeing the next chapter. That, to me, is just wrong. As I said before, I might as well be watching a piece of machinima.
If the goal is to progress and the idea is to only involve yourself as much as necessary, what stops you from cheating your way through the game in FS2 using the codes? Is that not the same premise? One game you cheat by typing the words in, the other you find a safe place to sit away from enemys?
Just trying to understand your point of view is all, as i find it difficult to understand myself, as i seek enjoyment in getting in the fray/watching havoc envelop me/killing EVERYTHING (or trying to):p
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The approach used here was less fun. Without directed activity it was impossible to enter a flow state.
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The existence of the cheat codes has nothing to do with my point. Yes, I can cheat my way through FS2. No, I don't particularly want to, because the story is engaging enough to give me the impetus I need to go out there and do things, and the basic gameplay entertaining and challenging enough that I want to be able to do it right.
FS2 gives you the impression that, while your overall contribution does nothing much to affect the story's outcome, your actions are still important on a local scale (Save that transport, Protect that cruiser, Gather Intel about big bad space flea from nowhere).
In Exposition, I know that even locally, my actions matter little to nothing.
You are missing a basic challenge/reward feedback loop here. If I do nothing in a mission, I don't want to go on to the next, I want to be reprimanded for my failure.
Now, Gameplay: In Exposition, at no point does it really feel like you are flying in atmosphere, much less a storm, or a gravity well. The only indication I have that I am not in some awful black-and-grey nebula somewhere in space is my wingman's word for it. I realize that, at the time these missions were created, the features necessary to implement gameplay changes like this wasn't implemented, but it added to the feeling of total underwhelmingness here. The point here is that it is not different enough from standard FS2 gameplay to keep me entertained long enough. TBP, for example, had Glide as a new feature. TVWP introduced ships with an awful lot of inertia. Some alteration of the basic physics might have gone a long way here.
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The existence of the cheat codes has nothing to do with my point. Yes, I can cheat my way through FS2. No, I don't particularly want to, because the story is engaging enough to give me the impetus I need to go out there and do things, and the basic gameplay entertaining and challenging enough that I want to be able to do it right.
FS2 gives you the impression that, while your overall contribution does nothing much to affect the story's outcome, your actions are still important on a local scale (Save that transport, Protect that cruiser, Gather Intel about big bad space flea from nowhere).
In Exposition, I know that even locally, my actions matter little to nothing.
You are missing a basic challenge/reward feedback loop here. If I do nothing in a mission, I don't want to go on to the next, I want to be reprimanded for my failure.
I agree with this sentiment. A person who's using cheat codes knows full well that they're introducing elements into the gameplay that were never intended to be there in the first place. I generally only wind up using cheat codes either to fool around or for testing purposes. When I'm actually playing the game to play it, however, I want to have the satisfaction of knowing that my own skills are making the difference within the context of the mission as it's presented.
But that's entirely different from the situation that Exposition presented. Deciding to hang back and let my wingmen essentially complete the mission themselves wasn't introducing anything foreign into the mix like a cheat code would; it was a legitimate strategy based on what was present in the mission itself...a rather dull strategy, mind you, but a legitimate strategy nonetheless. The retail FS campaigns, as well as the best fan-made ones, did an excellent job of conveying the feeling that your own skills as a pilot were the sole tipping point in whatever mission you found yourself in; that knowledge is truly what gives me the motivation to test my skills against the mission and attempt to accomplish its goals. When that feeling is removed, however, I might as well put my joystick down and watch a cutscene play out.
I just finished a play-through of the wonderfully terrible Second Great War Part II, and one of its biggest mistakes reminded me a whole lot of Exposition. There are so many missions when, due to the sheer number of fighters and bombers present, the player can just sit back and let things play themselves out, because his wingmen will prevail 99 times out of 100. Exposition felt the same way to me...why should I risk getting myself killed and having to sit through the whole mission all over again when my presence isn't even required?
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Some alteration of the basic physics might have gone a long way here.
Bear in mind that the VAST majority of the resources we were working with were well over two, or possibly even three years old. Simply getting them to function with modern SCP builds were a nightmare, and implementing even somewhat convincing in-atmosphere flight physics, while highly desirable, was less practical than simply re-writing the entire game to take place outside of the atmosphere.
why should I risk getting myself killed and having to sit through the whole mission all over again when my presence isn't even required?
This is why there are no semi-accurate US Civil War first person shooters, and that is one of the reasons why Exposition seems so dull. It's only stupid in the context of the game, which is saying a lot because this IS a game.
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Well, I actually think kinda fun flying around shooting at #@%@ in huge climactic battle, even if what you do doesn't mean crap.
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I ran into a problem with mission 3. The auto pilot never disengages. I replayed the mission several times and had the problem every time. I Finlay went in and modified the event to disengage the auto pilot after 10 seconds and that seemed to work.
Update: Finished the Campaign. It was the closest thing I have experienced to being involved in sustained combat operations. I read the back story information on the website that gave the timelines and pilot bios before playing so I came in knowing a little about the campaign. I felt like a replacement pilot. I knew a little about my wingmates but not a lot. There was the real feeling of being a newbie in a combat unit that had suffered losses. There is a tendency in combat units after they begin to take casualties to not get close to replacements because they are usually the first to die. The sense of not having the big picture and only limited direction was very realistic. There was a constant personal battle between wanting to help your wingmates, achieve the goals and survive. I played straight through so there was a sense of going from one combat mission to another with little time off. From the story it is apparent that the campaign takes place in a short time frame. I thoroughly enjoyed the campaign and was totally immersed in the story.
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I feel obliged to respond on behalf of the original team.
As has already been stated, the mod was originally conceived in mid 2000 along with the original outline for the story. Early work progressed at a good clip and most of the mod itself had been completed and balanced by 2003 (parts of this were lost since). By the time FSOpen started producing some of their more impressive and stable builds, our staff had taken a rather substantial blow due to other time commitments, like work and college. This is about the point where we sank into inactivity.
Exposition remained in an incomplete and unreleased state until the new team decided to pick it up. I should clarify that by incomplete, I am referring to writing, mission scripting, voicing, and quite a bit more. I commend them for putting forth such a valiant effort to get the mod into the state that it is in.
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In the mission with Colt, the player can tell her to jump out before she dies. Also, the tech room gives us an estimate of how many fighters and bombers the enemy can carry. Yet despite that, I feel like I'm fighting an endless wave of them. Might also resolve some of the issues presented.
EDIT: Oh, the skybox's resolution looks a bit low.
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Perhaps you should increase your FOV a bit. The skybox resolution is fairly high (6 x 1024x1024), it would be a waste of VRAM to raise it significantly. Skyboxes eat up a ton of memory.
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That might explain it. :)
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I've been playing through this, but I have a question: Is there some tweak I can do to make the fog less... pervasive? Or more realistic?
When attacking capital ships, I try to fly close pass it so I don't get shot up, and usually end up smacking into some part of them because I literally cannot see it because of the fog!
In the original Freespace, the fog is made of loads of 2D planes which move, and the closer you are to something the less foggy it is. Unfortunately, the intersection of the fog with any surfaces spoils the effect a bit.
In SCP, they fixed that, but now (And I never realized this before!) the fog is completely static, like there's just a fog texture covering the camera and I could be right next to a capship and still see thick fog where you'd expect it to thin out or... something!
Can we somehow copy Freelancer's fog? That had some pretty awesome fog effects. :)
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It's been a while since I played Freelancer but isn't the nebula usually just one color with very light, whispy puffs?