Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => Topic started by: Lepanto on August 08, 2013, 01:55:29 am
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What do you think should be done to keep missions interesting and engaging the whole way through?
I've been playing some old campaigns recently, and their constantly-respawning waves of enemies just keep bugging me. Don't know about you, and I'm rather impatient, but I feel like the old "guard allied ships from endless waves of fighters and bombers while they do their thing" model of missions is nothing more than a chore. In killing these waved wings, you're performing the same gameplay over and over again, the same gameplay you've already done countless times in other missions and campaigns. Not to mention, these wing slaughters (IMO) don't feel like you're actually accomplishing anything; you're just avoiding failure and marking time while your escort ships do whatever they're doing. Also, it makes the enemy commanders look incredibly dumb for sending their massive force in piecemeal. Admittedly, it is much easier mission-design-wise to just throw in eight waves of Taurus and Cancer wing and have them attack your escort ships, but personally, I'd rather have a few well-FREDded and actually interesting missions than have an entire campaign of wave monotony.
Personally, I think that missions can be kept more fun by switching tasks often mid-mission and not letting any one type of gameplay drag out too long. Dogfight these fighters, de-beam this cruiser, intercept a couple bomber waves, dogfight a few more fighters. By breaking a mission into segments, you're kept continually engaged, avoid boring repetition, and have a greater feeling of accomplishment by clearing each individual segment. A personal rule of thumb is to keep enemy wings to two waves, max.
While it's been a while since I played WiH acts 1+2, I think their gameplay was tight enough that I don't recall being bored. I approve of that model of mission design. Still, IMHO, modern campaigns in general should be careful to avoid repetition; Shadow Genesis and your endless waves of Gualis, I'm looking at you.
I'd like to hear the community's thoughts on this question of mission design philosophy. Are you sick of the traditional FreeSpace mission model, or do you think it's fine and I'm being whiny? If you think it should be improved, how so?
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This is something that has bugged the heck out of me for a while. I am sure I have some paper somewhere around with an idea for a sort of arena mission. Where neither you or your enemy had backup. It was all going to come down to squad effectiveness... I gave up because lol AI.
I might try something after butchering Al-Da'wa for info on how to Sex Pee your wingmates into being FREDasses.
This is literally the one thing that stops me from actually finishing stuff in FRED.
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I think this is an issue where proper planning prevents piss poor performance.
By which I mean that, if verisimilitude is your goal (i.e. building and portraiting a believable world), then you have to put in a lot of planning work. You basically need to figure out the logistics of the campaign you're making, figure out how one side would react to a given action by the other, and work from there. This also ties into the need to define objectives for each major actor in the campaign, what they want to accomplish, and how they want to do it.
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There's a place and time for endless hoards of fighters, but that's usually with Shivans. And sometimes you're stuck with the fact of having your low-number but intricately scripted fighter AI go for naught when they all die in 2 minutes, leaving you with another 3-5 minutes to cram something in there. So like all thing its a balancing act.
I too, like to divide my missions into parts where the player does different things. It allows the player to feel like he's progressing in an action and not running a marathon of pain. But sometimes the hardest part is to go "what new little trick should I use?" I always try to strive for a unique take on a mission, but sometimes that can be tricky since there's only so many ways to try and make an escort mission seem "fun".
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Fortunately for me I'll be able to get away with this in my campaign to an extent. The Cordi and Nordera are not exactly known for their brains, they're as bad as the Shivans when it comes to sending their forces into battle. Since it's also a retreat with the aliens spread all over the place hunting and killing, it's believable to a further extent that forces will be trickling into the battles. I still will try and switch things up though, I don't like lots of waves either.
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But here's a simple question: Why do they keep sending more and more ships, given that all previous sorties against the target have been eaten by the defenders? Why do they keep sending similarly-sized packets of ships out?
If you think about it, that's not what a real commander would do. If you see your force get slaughtered by the defenders, you either pull back, or if the target is valuable enough, gather more forces for a crushing blow. You don't send out wave after wave of attackers in the hope that pure attrition will at some point start working for you.
That's the kind of question that you need to answer in order to make enemy waves work.
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I don't know if that's directed at me or a general comment, but it's okay in my campaign because the aliens are winning. In most cases they are simply hunters chasing down prey. The tactics are working for them.
And of course they have their masters' whips at their backs.
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If they are winning, and if they "have their masters' whips at their backs", why don't they assemble an overwhelming fighter force to take out the target? Why commit to penny-packet assaults that can get beaten back by the target?
I know that part of this answer is "gameplay balance". If the enemy always chose the optimal strategy, the player would be overwhelmed very soon, and no fun gameplay would emerge.
But the question is, how is this tactic justified in-universe? I can think of a few scenarios where it might be made to work, Like, say, a frantic chase with several in-mission jumps, trying to evade enemy scouts and dispatching them if necessary and jumping out before enemy reinforcements arrive, but it's something that has to be thought about if the intention is to create a believable scenario.
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If they are winning, and if they "have their masters' whips at their backs", why don't they assemble an overwhelming fighter force to take out the target? Why commit to penny-packet assaults that can get beaten back by the target?
The Terrans are in full retreat. It's basically a rout. The aliens are rushing forward to kill as many as they can before they escape. They only face pockets of resistance here and there. That's why they're not organised, for the most part they don't need to be.
Also, funnily enough, I've been thinking. I have three combat missions in my demo release, and a further three combat mission FREDded unreleased, and I haven't used this in any of them! :)
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Okay, but don't they have communication equipment? Is there no point in the chain of command where someone takes a look at the data and says "Gee, seems like whenever we send something out to that location, it gets dead real quick"?
I mean, there very well could be, don't get me wrong. It's just that I like to justify a decision like this in in-universe terms, even if that justification is never communicated to the player, because that sort of thing informs how other parts of the universe work. It gives me an insight into the enemy's thought process, and I can use that to build story hooks around it.
This is part of the process we used to deconstruct Age of Aquarius and build War In Heaven.
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The obvious justification to me is that the enemy are launching fighters as soon as they're fit for combat out of urgency or whatever, something you can indicate in-game by making waves arrive at irregular intervals and with varying sizes and compositions.
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Well, if you were to get really fancy, you could construct a mission where you have to alternate between defending your capital ships and striking out against targets of opportunity yourself in order to keep the enemy off-balance so that he can't mass enough strength to deliver a killing blow.
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Waves of fighters are definitely one thing, I think taking down typhons in the original Freespace was the other. Nothing like blasting at a cruiser with a toothpick while waiting for the supply ship to refill you with bombs for the nth time because somehow you are the only one smart enough to actually launch them...
The best way to make something interesting isn't by making more of it. Waves of fighters are boring? Ok, waves of fighters now with cruisers beaming you? That's even more boring.
Transcend was awesome in a nightmarish sort of way with the ridiculous number of waves of ships you shoot down but the problem is that "waves" of fighters are not even remotely realistic. Nowhere in any military engagement will a commanding officer say "send out two more fighters/soldiers/boats" to replace the ones that just got blown up.
The only reason "waves" of fighters exist in the first place was as a hardware limitation. There was a limit to how many ships could be on the screen without killing the CPU and making the game unplayable. In reality, all ships would be launched before any major operation and be somewhere on the map, and with jump drives, especially within striking distance. Massive waves of enemies getting shot down just mean they are incompetent at taking out one fighter(you.)
So how do you make this more interesting? You have to find a way to make it harder. Make accomplishing one small goal, like killing a fighter, or a cruiser so incredibly difficult that it warrants your attention. You also need to avoid black and white scenarios and move into grey zones, so no clear win/loss situations, but trade-offs.
The biggest problem with Freespace right now, even FSO, is that the ships are too perfect. There are no problems with take offs/landings because there aren't any...there are no engine problems/failures, colliding with ships doesn't kill you outright, shields never fail, missions always end "perfectly" which is to say either you win and proceed or you don't win and repeat. Even if the mission requires you to lose to proceed it's all "planned."
I'll say something odd and I hope it makes sense: in order for the game to feel alive, it needs to be capable of dying. Not just stopping and restarting and taking more time, but dying, with consequences for doing so.
I hope these ramblings provide some useful insight...
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I'm thinking more in terms of the scenario Lorric's presenting, of a fairly disorganised invading force trying to maintain pressure on a retreating enemy with a battle-worn fleet. In that case it seems reasonable that they'd be sending fighter wings in haphazardly as soon as they were repaired.
I'm not making excuses for Transcend's mission design, but it is to an extent excused the burden of verisimilitude, because the world is meant to be deliberately jarring.
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I guess since I haven't actually had to resort to using waves yet, we'll just have to see how it goes if and when I do. I do have one mission in the works that will involve them, and the idea is that your force jumps into a sector, and projects a signal out to the enemy that the force is much larger. It's basically a kick me sign to draw the enemy off the retreating convoys. So the enemy will be coming in from all over. I plan to have the waves set to arrive in some cases after certain waves are destroyed and in other cases set on timers. Of course that's the plan, I just hope it works when I try to implement it. :)
Anyway, I am a soldier in the war on tedium:
You've done well with the timing of the chatter and the missions don't have any 'dead time' in them. So keep it up. :)
Avoiding "dead time" is a strong goal of mine.
:)
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Ok, let me put this another way:
You can sit around making excuses as to why "waves of ships" are a viable and realistic option for the game, then setup a wave and set it to repeat some 5-10 times...
Or you can try to program every wing of ships to be unique and interesting, in addition to worth killing.
The big thing is that the word "WAVE" itself should never be used in this game ever again because wave automatically implies multiple wings of fighters, set to deploy, one after the next, repeatedly, only after the previous wave has been destroyed.
If the levels were programmed properly, you'd quickly have 50-60 swarming you because you didn't shoot them down fast enough. Reinforcements would actually grow in size and number or at least vary from time to time and would occasionally overrun the player.
Waves of fighters are just poor programming. poor programming to keep the player busy in the game because the developers/level designers didn't feel like putting the time in to make the scenario unique and interesting.
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You can sit around making excuses as to why "waves of ships" are a viable and realistic option for the game, then setup a wave and set it to repeat some 5-10 times...
That will never happen with me.
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I didn't mind Diaspora's use of waves, but it may have been due to the novelty of the combat at the time.
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In R1 it fit in with the campaign too. Raiders were being dispatched against the Theseus as they returned from engaging other Colonial targets. The Cylons already had everything in the air, they were refuelling and sending them out against the player as soon as they were available to do so.
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I'd say the method of unleashing fighters also matters on the "context" of your campaign. If its something more like soft-story telling, you can probably get away with outnumbering the player with easy to kill fighters without much context. If you're going for a stark and gritty campaign, you might need to give a bit more thought to how fighters and forces are deployed.
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About "Waves".. i was thinking about it a several times.
I think the reason why the enemy is always in superios numbers is only because it is a gameplay requirement. In FreeSpace you have the waves, because all is based in the same area... in Wing Commander you fight also hordes of Kilrathi and especially Nephilims in Prophecy at every nav point and in X-Wing or TIE Fighter it was mostly the same.
You are always outnumbered, your wing consist of maximum 6 pilots, also the other wings, and they will never get reinforced by an additional wave... also the enemies do not use a craft that is very superior. You are able to bring down even Seraphims with an Apollo and Avenger Cannon. And at least, all other crafts are controlled by an AI. Against them, a human being will be always superior in this game.
I think about, how the retail mission were, if they have a complete other balance. Enemies do not use waves of the same wing instead they use crafts that are harder to defeat. More (shield)hitpoints or weaker weapons for yourself.
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Unfortunately this wouldn't work on Freespace, though I'd like to try this balance myself. I once FREDded up a mission where I put in a few Shivan fighters against a mob of Amazon drones. And the Shivans just flew around trying to evade the drones getting shot up by the drones when it should have been a turkey shoot.
Wait, sorry, need to engage my brain here. You're talking about equal numbers and superior opponents. Yes, I think that would work. It would be interesting.
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The only reason "waves" of fighters exist in the first place was as a hardware limitation. There was a limit to how many ships could be on the screen without killing the CPU and making the game unplayable. In reality, all ships would be launched before any major operation and be somewhere on the map, and with jump drives, especially within striking distance. Massive waves of enemies getting shot down just mean they are incompetent at taking out one fighter(you.)
I'm getting the impression that you think that missions would be improved if there were 40 or 50 enemy fighters and the same number of friendlies. I can guarantee you that (collision issues and CPUs notwithstanding) that wouldn't be the case. It would be more realistic, sure, but remember that we're making missions here - levels for a game. They're meant to be playable - fun, even. Having that many fighters would not be fun (is not, I've tried it). It just becomes an insane scramble just to survive - there's never any question of following your objectives or progressing the story - it's just jink, dive, evade, and hammer X until you run out of countermeasures.
I too dislike the Sync/Transcend/Derelict/lots of other older campaigns model where you just fight wave after wave of identical fighters. But the solution really isn't just putting them all in at once.
So how do you make this more interesting? You have to find a way to make it harder. Make accomplishing one small goal, like killing a fighter, or a cruiser so incredibly difficult that it warrants your attention. You also need to avoid black and white scenarios and move into grey zones, so no clear win/loss situations, but trade-offs.
The biggest problem with Freespace right now, even FSO, is that the ships are too perfect. There are no problems with take offs/landings because there aren't any...there are no engine problems/failures, colliding with ships doesn't kill you outright, shields never fail, missions always end "perfectly" which is to say either you win and proceed or you don't win and repeat. Even if the mission requires you to lose to proceed it's all "planned."
Try Bem Cavalgar - in that, you're expected to fail at least some of your objectives. Major consequences for failure in every single mission though would dramatically increase the number of missions per campaign, for relatively little gain. Outside of RPGs (and even there it's generally very limited) true branching stories like that don't even happen in AAA games, let alone mods. It's just not a realistic expectation. The idea that there should occasionally be equipment failures and stuff like that, sure, that's reasonable, and it happens every now and again already, but again, we're making games here, and telling stories - military realism is all well and good in a Tom Clancy novel, where you want all the grime and failure to be right in your face, but for a FS mod, if it doesn't add fun to the gameplay or advance the story in some way... you really have to ask whether or not it's worth adding it in.
With regards to waves, I think there are situations where they work - they can be made to make sense and be fun to play, but they have to be used sparingly. I find that, in an assault mission which has patrolling fighters present, adding a second wave to some of those initial fighters is often good - it extends the initial furball before the player settles in to try to follow his objectives, and it makes sense (there would be ready fighters standing by somewhere, responding to the initial call for help).
I'm also working on a TV War era mission right now which uses a couple of waves of Amun bombers (2 per wave) against a Fenris. Without shields, and against a relatively weak capship in a Fenris, the Amuns are very effective, working like little gunships, but more than two at a time would be really difficult (nigh impossible) for the player to deal with. There's a time for realism, but there's also a time for gameplay considerations, and they're both important.
I think the critical thing with waves is to keep them realistic, yes, but also fun. A second wave in is probably fine in some situations, as long as you're not utterly dependent on it. A third wave, you'd need to have a really, really good reason I think. If you're going beyond that, you almost certainly need to look at your mission design.
Beyond the waves, the issue of keeping missions from getting tedious is a pretty important one - and a really, legitimately hard one to do. One thing I've found that helps to keep a mission interesting that hasn't been brought up is the idea of setting - not just "nebula"/"asteroid field" setting, but also the environment of the mission as it's placed in FRED. There's a lot to be said for dogfighting right up close to big things, especially if a mission can be set up so that part of it happens close to the big thing, and part in open space. When you have large, complicated objects around, you can use them as cover, or slip through holes which the AI will inevitably crash into to in an evasive tactic.
They don't even have to be active parts of the mission - hell, it's probably better if they aren't. There are a lot of good models that can add this kind of atmosphere. If you're attacking a cargo depot, bracket it with Polaris (or Shah) pylons. Add a few great big asteroids to your asteroid field, and set you mission around those. I wish we had more derelict models - those would be great for this, but ST:R shipped with some busted up Atens which would work well too.
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The only reason "waves" of fighters exist in the first place was as a hardware limitation.
There is truth in this, but at the same time, the bigger the battle, the less impact the player can have on it.
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The only reason "waves" of fighters exist in the first place was as a hardware limitation. There was a limit to how many ships could be on the screen without killing the CPU and making the game unplayable. In reality, all ships would be launched before any major operation and be somewhere on the map, and with jump drives, especially within striking distance. Massive waves of enemies getting shot down just mean they are incompetent at taking out one fighter(you.)
I'm getting the impression that you think that missions would be improved if there were 40 or 50 enemy fighters and the same number of friendlies. I can guarantee you that (collision issues and CPUs notwithstanding) that wouldn't be the case. It would be more realistic, sure, but remember that we're making missions here - levels for a game. They're meant to be playable - fun, even. Having that many fighters would not be fun (is not, I've tried it). It just becomes an insane scramble just to survive - there's never any question of following your objectives or progressing the story - it's just jink, dive, evade, and hammer X until you run out of countermeasures.
I remember that there was a Bearbaiting remake release that show a real battle... in which the SJ Sathanas starts its complete fighter complement to push into the Capella system...
Good luck in surviving it... and do not forget to take down at least two forward beam weapons ;).
It is the same if the Lucifer would swarming you with all these Scorpions like in one of the CBanims. Now imagine missions like "Running the Gauntlet" or "Good Luck" with it for a "real experience". I do not think that this would be make some fun.
Unfortunately this wouldn't work on Freespace, though I'd like to try this balance myself. I once FREDded up a mission where I put in a few Shivan fighters against a mob of Amazon drones. And the Shivans just flew around trying to evade the drones getting shot up by the drones when it should have been a turkey shoot.
I am not very good in fredding (in fact i can only fix missions, but can not create my own ones :D), but i think, you have to use the different AI Classes for such problems. Shivans should be in fact more intelligent than a handful Drones... so they need a higher AI Class. Even i do not know exactly what is different between the classes.
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I'm getting the impression that you think that missions would be improved if there were 40 or 50 enemy fighters and the same number of friendlies. I can guarantee you that (collision issues and CPUs notwithstanding) that wouldn't be the case. It would be more realistic, sure, but remember that we're making missions here - levels for a game. They're meant to be playable - fun, even. Having that many fighters would not be fun (is not, I've tried it). It just becomes an insane scramble just to survive - there's never any question of following your objectives or progressing the story - it's just jink, dive, evade, and hammer X until you run out of countermeasures.
I too dislike the Sync/Transcend/Derelict/lots of other older campaigns model where you just fight wave after wave of identical fighters. But the solution really isn't just putting them all in at once.
I still think a massive fighter brawl could be awesome, but only if it was tightly FREDded, and done only as an occasional set-piece, and only if technical considerations permit.
One thing I've found that helps to keep a mission interesting that hasn't been brought up is the idea of setting - not just "nebula"/"asteroid field" setting, but also the environment of the mission as it's placed in FRED. There's a lot to be said for dogfighting right up close to big things, especially if a mission can be set up so that part of it happens close to the big thing, and part in open space. When you have large, complicated objects around, you can use them as cover, or slip through holes which the AI will inevitably crash into to in an evasive tactic.
Environmental objects would definitely make missions more interesting, though the FS AI isn't great at navigating around them and tends to bump into things a lot.
About "Waves".. i was thinking about it a several times.
I think the reason why the enemy is always in superios numbers is only because it is a gameplay requirement. In FreeSpace you have the waves, because all is based in the same area... in Wing Commander you fight also hordes of Kilrathi and especially Nephilims in Prophecy at every nav point and in X-Wing or TIE Fighter it was mostly the same.
You are always outnumbered, your wing consist of maximum 6 pilots, also the other wings, and they will never get reinforced by an additional wave... also the enemies do not use a craft that is very superior. You are able to bring down even Seraphims with an Apollo and Avenger Cannon. And at least, all other crafts are controlled by an AI. Against them, a human being will be always superior in this game.
I think about, how the retail mission were, if they have a complete other balance. Enemies do not use waves of the same wing instead they use crafts that are harder to defeat. More (shield)hitpoints or weaker weapons for yourself.
Making the enemies stronger/smarter is another good way to get more gameplay time/value out of each group of enemies. Fury AI made BP2's enemy fighters notably more competent, so the mission designers could still give you a challenge with fewer enemies on screen.
Would people say, especially in more serious campaigns, that missions should try to have as few enemies in-mission as would still give the player and their allies a challenge?
I'd say the method of unleashing fighters also matters on the "context" of your campaign. If its something more like soft-story telling, you can probably get away with outnumbering the player with easy to kill fighters without much context. If you're going for a stark and gritty campaign, you might need to give a bit more thought to how fighters and forces are deployed.
Seconded. A BP-style detailed tactical model improves some campaigns and also helps their mission design by killing repetition, but for something light-hearted like WoD or absurd like JAD, you don't need to intricately justify the deployment of every enemy on screen as long as the mission is fun.
We've talked about waved wings a lot so far, but does anyone have any other ideas/rules of thumb for keeping missions entertaining in other ways?
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We've talked about waved wings a lot so far, but does anyone have any other ideas/rules of thumb for keeping missions entertaining in other ways?
As short-lived as it was, the introduction to Vassago's Dirge features you getting blown out of your ship and picked up. I much prefer that kind of personalized introduction to a campaign over long and slow panoramic shots. Also, it really breaks the mood when a mission moves to a cut scene and then back especially for something as stupid as a capital ship jumping in. If I wanted to see that, I would play the mission again and look for it specifically but anything that takes control away from the player, unless the player actually loses control for some reason, is a big no-no (in my book, and only I write my book).
Stupid quirks on the other hand can make a normal mission a ton of fun, like a beam disruptor that only works at random and craps out on occasion so that players need to evacuate before getting blown to bits. I've yet to see a mission where you could power down your ship and hide in asteroids then come out to strafe convoys before ducking back in again. Would be cool to have a mission like that combined with Bem Cavalgar where your success gets you more stuff. It also seems like there are very few missions where you get to take out capital ships that aren't guarded by fighters for one reason or another. Not every mission needs a damn dogfight to be interesting. The deep space missions where you fall asleep in derelict were great story telling devices even if you never replay them solo. Let the game tell the story.
It seems like missions that were the most memorable weren't say, Bearbaiting where you take out the Sathanas's front beams. For me it was blowing up the gas miners in the nebula before the Sathanas showed up that was one of the more fun missions. You start off with something nice and easy that goes well until something big jumps onto you. Also, easy missions where your wingman are looking to leave you in the dust for kills are a riot such as Into the Lion's Den where you are clamoring to blow stuff up before your mission window ends. Blue Planet's Forced Entry also comes to mind as "just get your ships from A to B." Hell's Kitchen where you tag stuff for destruction.
Now that multiple in-mission jumping is possible, it might be fun to have a mission where you play cat-and-mouse/hide-and-seek across multiple jump points. This would require a bit of randomization to keep it interesting, hunting a convoy while being hunted by a destroyer, or luring a destroyer into a trap.
Finally, it seems like a lot of the alternate weaponry doesn't get a lot of love. The Shield breaker is something I've never once had a specific purpose of using in game. Would be nice to see a mission that requires it...
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We've talked about waved wings a lot so far, but does anyone have any other ideas/rules of thumb for keeping missions entertaining in other ways?
As short-lived as it was, the introduction to Vassago's Dirge features you getting blown out of your ship and picked up. I much prefer that kind of personalized introduction to a campaign over long and slow panoramic shots.
Technically Vassago did start with long and slow panoramic shots of the Vassago! And I don't think there's anything wrong with panoramic shots if it sets the mood for the campaign or mission. Burning Heaven started off with an amaaaaazing long and slow panoramic shot (which doubled as a intro credits sequence). But I think once you're in the thick of the campaign, cutscenes should be limited to the beginning or ending of a mission (unless there's a super good reason).
(Of course JAD breaks all those rules I just mentioned, but then again, it always did!)
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Would definitely prefer end of the mission and skipable if they have to be in there. WIH was good about having dialog at the end of missions and you could warp out if you'd played it before, but the cutscene in Delenda Est with the cruisers warping in after you disable the Carthage just ruined the flow for me and...this topic is about removing tedium so...
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I see where you're coming from. JAD (especially the missions I'm making now) has a lot of smaller cutscenes that link together parts of the mission, and replaying those missions a billion times makes it pretty tedious, so I do insert my own little skips that the player will eventually be able to use to get right to the action.
But there's a few different paths to take with having readily skippable cutscenes, and that's if a player skips a cutscene, should we just reset the camera so the cutscene continues to play out but now its from the player POV, or should we skip ahead to where the end of the cutscene would be? One is easy to do, but it gives a skipping player an advantage that a player that doesn't skip get, and can affect the balance. The other way is a lot tricker to do, especially when you need to interrupt a ship warping in.
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And yet some games put neat and interesting twists into these old flawed premises.
I mean, what are some ideas that you have? Talk's cheap, but this being a space sim game, I'm hard pressed to think of things you could do that aren't "fly around and shoot stuff".
No, that's exactly why I'm here and why I still play this game. I want to fly around and shoot stuff. X1-3 and Eve Online(not that I will ever play that mess) took care of trading and simulation for me.
Blow stuff up? Let's make a mission where blowing stuff up is the bad outcome, in which the whole mission revolves around talking and scanning (to, say, find proof) in order to prevent a fight.
Isn't this exactly what happened with the fight between Gallactica and Pegasus when Starbuck showed up with camera footage of the resurrection ship? And yet this mission has already been done in the original Freespace where you scan the Shivan destroyers.
I think the real problem here is that it isn't the missions that need redesigning, it's the ships.
This is going to sound really stupid, but we need:
ships with cockpits and custom startup sequences,
custom loadout screens(different ship, different weapons, different usage)
actually selecting and arming missiles instead of just pushing a button to fire them all off...
different types of countermeasures,
actual window/visibility ports on spaceships to detect stealth instead of just being so close,
blindspots on ships here you can hide,
smart weapons/camera-guided weapons,
dust clouds,
forward dispensing countermeasures to stop head-on missile attacks,
weapons that actually KILL capital ships on the 1st or 2nd hit instead of needing dozens of bombs to do a take-down
actual functioning and malfunctioning radar with scanning limitations
visual target acquisition only, none of this push t-y to scan through everything in the universe.
a universe where the story happens around the game, not where the game happens because the story needs it to
actual technology development in the war...not just excuses to keep using the same WW2 style model over and over
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The missions are never going to change, they've been played out. What needs to happen if Freespace is to evolve isn't evolution of the graphics or storyline, it's actual evolution of the in-game technology. If you make it realistic, add in launching and landing instead of just jumping in and out, and add a ton of technical limitations, you will get a more realistic and enjoyable experience. If you just keep pushing for prettier graphics(which are nice, by the way...) and more intense story plots without admitting that the keyboard interface is effectively flawed to begin with, you aren't going to get anything satisfactory in the long run.
The ships don't feel real. Yeah they shake and vibrate and blow up, but it still feels like you are flying a space sim with toy ships and action figures...
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I believe the real problem here comes from a genre flaw: There is only so many things you can do with the premise of "Dog-fighting."
We have reached the top, there are only so many variations of "Shoot this, stop that from being shot" that we can come up with. Heck, we've seen missions going from fighters to cruisers, but it's still the same premise.
Diaspora felt fresh to me because the combat was different, but it got old eventually once I adapted to the Newtonian movement.
What we need are new ideas. Something that wholly shakes up what we do in a mission. It need to be different from flying a cruiser or a stealth ship. Something that clearly breaks the laws of what we think is possible in this game.
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Well any genre has that flaw if you distill it down that far.
FPS: Move around, shoot stuff.
RTS: Build units, send units to attack.
Puzzle: Throw it out the window.
And yet some games put neat and interesting twists into these old flawed premises.
I mean, what are some ideas that you have? Talk's cheap, but this being a space sim game, I'm hard pressed to think of things you could do that aren't "fly around and shoot stuff".
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We could try playing with these flaws.
Blow stuff up? Let's make a mission where blowing stuff up is the bad outcome, in which the whole mission revolves around talking and scanning (to, say, find proof) in order to prevent a fight.
Make the shooting stuff take place across an entire solar system, (this is way beyond the engine as I understand it, but for the sake of throwing stuff at the wall... and maybe someone gets crazy enough to try... :nervous:) Have finite ship numbers that need to be in different points of a system to combat an enemy fleet with finite numbers as well. With necessary key positions to win/lose the game.
Building something instead of destroying it. Maybe even come back later for a defense/attack mission based on what happens on a story.
Commanding a squad to protect you from enemies after you "space walked" into a station to sabotage the comm system and await extraction.
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Much of the stuff you can do in space sims other than the basic "Fly around and shoot stuff" is, generally speaking, not very exciting. Mining asteroids? Trading? Both possible, with heavy sexping/scripting, but both pretty... dull, really. A detective type mission might be fun every now and again, but how much challenge is there in just flying around? Unless you could somehow take some game mechanics from a point-and-click type game somehow, stripping FS of its combat is likely to make it significantly more tedious.
Building something, now that's interesting. Enormously challenging though - it would need a bunch of specifically made parts in the vein of the MCK, but probably more complex, and some heavy, heavy sexping to get it to work - probably you'd be better off going straight for scripting. But it would be cool, especially in mercenary or pirate campaigns, if you could build basic stuff (like defence platforms, or addons for ships) from scrap and seeing how they went in combat.
I think that the most interesting thing we're likely to see in the near future is the integration of the RTS fuctionality (when it's finalized) with traditional first person gameplay/campaigns, and the opportunity to do things like take control of turrets, which is already in the engine via scripting.
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Your ideas are neat, An4ximandros, but they still mostly amount to "fly around", you've just removed the "shoot everything" part from most of it, which like BW said, might even make things worse. :p
I mean I've thought about all these different campaign/mission ideas too. The most outlandish and "doesn't at all belong in a space-sim" ones go to JAD (see buying Tacos). The rest sit around in my notebook of "make it one day", but they're more campaign-wide ideas rather than specific mission ideas. (Which in the spirit of getting back on topic, I'll try to get back to)
It can be real hard to come up with a fun mission sometimes, I'll rack my head for days or weeks trying to come up with something new and unique. And sometimes my new and unique idea have already been taken. I've now counted 2 other campaigns that did the artillery-beam tag-spotter concept before I thought I was being so original with it in Vassago. All I did was massively increase distance between the firing points and the ultimate target. People still seemed to like it anyway.
If you've got a mission and you find it a little stale, having things go wrong is the best way to spice things up. A hostile corvette arrives that you can't really handle. Weapons malfunction on the cruiser you're assigned with. Misjumpings, surrendering ships, mistaken identities, false intel. There's lots of quirks you can add to a mission to make it stand out a bit and not be "Just Another Escort". Just don't use the same trick twice, or else it becomes tedious again.
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If you've got a mission and you find it a little stale, having things go wrong is the best way to spice things up. A hostile corvette arrives that you can't really handle. Weapons malfunction on the cruiser you're assigned with. Misjumpings, surrendering ships, mistaken identities, false intel. There's lots of quirks you can add to a mission to make it stand out a bit and not be "Just Another Escort". Just don't use the same trick twice, or else it becomes tedious again.
The keyword I think here is "how" you do the mission, not what you do in it. In order for new missions to be interesting to veteran players, you need more ways of "how" and less "whats."
I was working on a training campaign to have Blue Planet ships fly the original Freespace campaign to show what kind of difference they would make versus the original Freespace craft, but I deleted it because I thought nobody would want to play Freespace again (That and warhammers and Durgas seemed to do jack vs the Eva). Maybe I'll start it again. Every mission in that series should have an original so you can see the difference between fighter generations/hardware, and then a rebalance to make it difficult.
Of course, I'm guessing that UEF hardware vs the Shivans is going to see the light of day rather shortly now...so...what's the point?
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I should have put this in earlier, but let's not forget - people play Freespace because they enjoy Freespace. There's fun to be had with traditional missions and traditional mechanics, if they're well designed, well balanced and tell a story people can get involved in. Gimmicks and tricks and surprises can be great - they can make missions really fun and interesting. But so can a well designed capship strike mission, even if we've played a variation on it a dozen times before.
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Well like it or not, your mission is going to be based off an archtype where you go around shooting stuff. Be it escort, attack, or sneaky stealth. You can do neat stuff like building station or playing detective, but unless you're going to be real post-modernist/avant garde here, half your missions are still going to be "typical". And there's nothing wrong with that.
I think the execution of a mission is more important than what the mission really is. Escort missions tend to be terrible because there's usually little variation. So you think about ways to make it interesting. It's an escort mission, but half the convoy mis-jumped. So you can only save one half of it, one's got weapons, one's got civilians. Which are you going to save? Can you actually save both? What if you could talk your way out of it? We still have an awful escort mission, but we're trying something new with it. And if it can be pulled off well, then we've solved the problem with it being tedious.
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The reason 'fly around and shoot stuff' becomes boring is that the player's higher brain functions have nothing to do. The solution to this is not to mess with the formula of flying around and shooting stuff (which, in the end, is a refined and basically fun experience), it's to add meaningful tactical decisions or an engaging story on top of that.
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I am not a champion fredder but i am new and ive been giving this some thought. I came up with a series of guidelines I am following:
1. Everything has value. Eventually a force will decide it is no longer worth engaging and will cut its losses. A wing of 4 scout fighters sent in as force assessment will bug out. An assault force will bug out if their main strike targets bug out or their mission is no longer viable.
2. Have a bigger goal. WHY are they attacking/defending. What do they want to accomplish?
3. Be realistic about how enemies engage and how big a role you want the player to play.
4. Have hard choices. In one mission ive designed the pc gets to decide whether to activate the guns on two freighters they have captured or send one of them into the enemy formation rigged to explode. Hopefully that will be what people remember :)
We will see how much of this I can actually do!
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One other mission idea I had involved a transport being stuck behind a ring of powerful active sentry turrets. You then duck between three stations, collecting the digits of a randomised number at each station.
then you have to figure out (yourself) how to enter the code using clues in the mission within the time limit.
All doable with just fred and training messages I think.
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Here are my two cents; make campaigns/missions unpredictable for replay factor, and have campaigns/missions that work around the player's choices. If I play through the original freespace campaign, I know who is going to die, what ships will be attacking me , and how the game will end. However; if there was a chance that an enemy wolfpack is lurking around and has an X chance to jump in and hasn't been destroyed on previous missions, and my wing has just been pulverized, I might be a little more anxious. Or what if in the Freespace 2 campaign, I decided to defect to Admiral Bosch's fleet to fight for the NTF? A nightmare to fred and re-work, but this is a choice that has a lot more meaning than "save X ship, X ship returns in Y mission."
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Here are my two cents; make campaigns/missions unpredictable for replay factor, and have campaigns/missions that work around the player's choices. If I play through the original freespace campaign, I know who is going to die, what ships will be attacking me , and how the game will end. However; if there was a chance that an enemy wolfpack is lurking around and has an X chance to jump in and hasn't been destroyed on previous missions, and my wing has just been pulverized, I might be a little more anxious. Or what if in the Freespace 2 campaign, I decided to defect to Admiral Bosch's fleet to fight for the NTF? A nightmare to fred and re-work, but this is a choice that has a lot more meaning than "save X ship, X ship returns in Y mission."
I think you just might be on to something, with randomizing missions. It would be hard to FRED, and I personally wouldn't want to go through the effort of making full branching storylines, but a little randomness in terms of enemy wing/minor capital ship/ally wing arrivals would help keep the player on their toes and kill some of the tedium of replaying missions. Also, you'd have to take balance into account, of course.
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Maybe you could have two campaigns. One with rigid settings and one where things get shaken up a bit...
It could certainly add some replayability to individual missions.
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Randomising missions reduces the player's ability to iteratively plan out a strategy. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but combined with certain design decisions (some of which are basically hardcoded into FSO) it can make for a very frustrating experience.
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In a similar mind (improving the experience by having the mission behave differently when you replay it), keep in mind you can have events tied up to the difficulty level :)
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Randomising missions reduces the player's ability to iteratively plan out a strategy. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but combined with certain design decisions (some of which are basically hardcoded into FSO) it can make for a very frustrating experience.
Totally agree with this, even as a FREDder who likes to torture his players. If a mission rolls some bad dice for the player, the player's just going to restart the mission until he gets some better rolls, making that extra work put in a mission to be totally useless.
Randomizing arriving ship classes or dialog lines is about as far as I like to go.
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The trick is to use persistence to make it so that when the campaign is replayed the missions are different, but each replay during the same campaign is the same. That way the player can plan for what happens in the mission if they get killed, but can't use that knowledge when replaying.
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Then you have to make absolutely sure there aren't any configurations of the mission that end up being abnormally difficult, because if a player gets stuck with that halfway through your campaign...
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The trick is to use persistence to make it so that when the campaign is replayed the missions are different, but each replay during the same campaign is the same. That way the player can plan for what happens in the mission if they get killed, but can't use that knowledge when replaying.
But how many playthroughs should a FREDer have to plan for? I have a story to tell with BtA... how much effort should I put into making that story work with so many different options going on? I guess what I'm trying to ask is.. at what point should the player just play... a different campaign? :)
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It depends a lot on what you're aiming at. BtA wants to tell a story while having fun gameplay, it doesn't need to go in all the ways proposed in this thread to slightly improve replayability, especially if it goes in the way of balance.
Something in the spirit of Ben Cavalgar, on the other hand, could benefit from such ideas.
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In general this thread's more about the problem of keeping missions fresh as a campaign goes on, not replay value.
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It's something that would be very situational in where and how you use it.
Maybe the variables don't have to be random. You could produce several versions of the same mission. Difficulty within difficulty...
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Then you have to make absolutely sure there aren't any configurations of the mission that end up being abnormally difficult, because if a player gets stuck with that halfway through your campaign...
I never said it was easy to do. :p
But how many playthroughs should a FREDer have to plan for? I have a story to tell with BtA... how much effort should I put into making that story work with so many different options going on? I guess what I'm trying to ask is.. at what point should the player just play... a different campaign? :)
I think the point is to make sure that the game remains fresh if replayed. If you look at the big RPGs, how many replays do you need to see all the content? Not many people will try, but the fact that you find new stuff for the first few time you do so, makes them more interesting to replay, even if you only do it once or twice.
But I never felt that this is something a FREDder needs to do. I know lots of games which are very linear, completely unchanging on a second playthrough and are still hugely fun. I really think it's up to the individual FREDder. I add this sort of stuff to my missions because as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as a game with too much replayability. I don't think I've ever had a player complain about a mission being different the next time they played it. So I build in as much as I think I can before it gets to the point that my energy would be better spent making something new.