Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => Topic started by: FIZ on July 20, 2015, 08:05:41 pm
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If you had to redesign a single FS2 mission with assets available now (especially more powerful PCs) what would it be and why?
High Noon is where I start. I wouldn't completely BOE it, but for such a climax mission, its rather underwhelming. Shivans might still just roll in with just the Sathanas, but I can't see the GTVA unleashing the Collie without a fierce escort.
That said, I think the BP AOA mission against the Sathanas is a tip of the hat to the original High Noon, I'd like to discuss what other missions felt like they were scaled back due to hardware constraints of 1999.
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Their Finest Hour
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Yeah, hard to argue with that one. Is the cut VA in a recoverable state?
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A Lion At The Door. Most of the difficulty, and hence most of the menace of the Shivans, is lost when you realize that it comes from being essentially forced into using the wrong fighter. Turn it into a mission suited to a Herc II and make it hard as such, not a mission poorly suited to one and hence difficult.
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I liked this remake of Their Finest Hour, admittedly I haven't played it many times to see if the balance/challenge is good.
http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.499
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I liked this remake of Their Finest Hour, admittedly I haven't played it many times to see if the balance/challenge is good.
http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.499
I agree. This mission made the Collossus something else than just a shivan target hulk and gave the mission some sense of tactics
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A Game of TAG.
Nebula so you can't see ****. Forced to carry a bank of useless primaries (Prom-R). Forced to use dumbfire missiles (TAG-A) from a trash fighter with secondary points too far apart to use them (Ulysses). Tasked with protecting a ship that dies to being looked at (AWACS) being attacked by uninterruptible weapons (swarm missiles) to which the only defence is relying purely on a luck-based gimmick (ULTRA-AAAs) to kill them before they fire it off.
Just a cluster of annoying limitations to force the player to use the one stupid gimmick of which the effectiveness of is actually quite random (especially since you're essentially forced into relying entirely on it due to the forced removal of every other possible option you could have had) to create difficulty. Artificial as hell. I hate this mission.
If they wanted to sell the TAG system they should have done it by making it an actual option that is effective over existing options, instead of removing every single option which is actually effective to force you into using it. Reeks of terrible weapon design of the TAG system in general and is exactly why identically zero people have actually willingly taken TAG missiles to any other mission, because they're useless.
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Yeah, that mission would get my vote as well. The TAG-A is frustrating to use, with its slow speed and reload time compounded by the Ulysses' crappy hardpoints. The TAG-B is actually better but still needs to have missions designed specifically for it (i.e. with Ultra AAA beams) which don't exist elsewhere in the campaign.
Some missions like Their Finest Hour and Into the Lion's Den are bad from a technical standpoint (broken waypoints and beams, unnamed ships, etc.), but are still fun to play. This one is not.
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Some missions like Their Finest Hour and Into the Lion's Den are bad from a technical standpoint (broken waypoints and beams, unnamed ships, etc.), but are still fun to play. This one is not.
Basically my thoughts. While these missions certainly could have been better, they are still pretty fun to play. Contrast that with missions with genuinely terrible design, such as Game of TAG, Slaying Ravana or High Noon.
Still, if I were to pick one ... I'd say Slaying Ravana. While Game of TAG manages the feat of being godawful to play on any difficulty level, it still has OK dialogue and sees the brief return of Kappa wing's last survivor, who manages to do some ominous foreshadowing before dying. While High Noon gives the player nothing to do beyond poping the Sathanas' remaining beams if it still has any, and the face off between the two ends up being rather anti-climactic, it is still a turning point in the story with plenty of build up (although said build up is arguably what makes the mission rather underwhelming) and again the dialogue manages to elevate things a bit. Slaying Ravana is painful to play through beyond the easy difficulty setting due to poor balance, has next to no dialogue, mission events or build up beyond it blowing up a corvette in the previous mission.
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Sounds like "Freespace2: Reborn" in the wings? ;)
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In relation to A Game of TAG, there was a SCP code change years ago that made that mission substantially harder. The retail behaviour of "turret-tagged-only" was to fire on tagged targets AND bombs; this was changed to be only tagged targets and only recently changed back to retail behaviour. Firing on the bombs is super important as the Ultra AAA's tend to hit the bombers at the same time which draws them on to the Deimos instead of the AWACS. Try the mission again with 3.7.2, it will be a lot easier, less luck based and less frustrating! :)
(naturally that doesn't detract from the other issues raised with the mission!)
As for Slaying Ravana, on my insane playthrough I took a Medusa as the most maneuverable bomber available and just hid behind the Sobek after firing maybe one set of bombs into the Ravana on my way there. That mission was insanely (haha) hard otherwise.
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Yeah, exactly. I've always remembered that mission as a pretty reasonably exciting power trip.
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Sounds like "Freespace2: Reborn" in the wings? ;)
That's been bounced around a few times on BP IRC. There were a lot of cool ideas going further than just mission tweaks, like a general fighter/weapon rebalance.
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I'm not sure where this hate for the Ulysseys comes from.
She's a fine fighter if you fly her right. The problem what that it was the scenario might not have been the best fit, and the loadout was bad.
Still, I agree, that had to be the worst, most frustrating mission there is.
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For me it is also "High Noon"
Because it was simply dissapointing... a Sathanas that sends only two wings against you... , and a vanished Demon destroyer from Bearbeating (if you could not stop it)... it should be a much better climax.
But i think that "Doomsday" in Freespace 1 was also somewhat underwhelming...
I like Their finest Hour much more than High Noon... because the Colossus killed even a Ravana before it goes down.
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The only major problem I recall having in A Game of TAG was that Alpha 2 got her engines shot out but was guardianed so she just ended up stranded, and it seemed like there was some event trigger that got held up as a result.
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The mission where Aquitanie, Psamtic and some third destroyer was to engage first Sarthanas inside the nebula - I think the Bearbating was the name of the mission. I'd actually want to see how did GTVA planed to execute the conventional Destroyers/Fighters/Bomber strike against Sath.
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The mission where Aquitanie, Psamtic and some third destroyer was to engage first Sarthanas inside the nebula - I think the Bearbating was the name of the mission. I'd actually want to see how did GTVA planed to execute the conventional Destroyers/Fighters/Bomber strike against Sath.
I know the mission you are talking about, but it was not Bearbaiting. I don't remember exactly, but I think it was Return to Babel?
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That would be Speaking in Tongues (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Speaking_in_Tongues).
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Yeah that one!. I wonder if GVD Toeris is Hatshepsut or Typhon?
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Yeah that one!. I wonder if GVD Toeris is Hatshepsut or Typhon?
In Lepanto's "Battle Captains-Lopez" mission, the Toeris is a Hatshepsut. That's not to say it's officially a Hatshepsut, but just thought I'd throw that tidbit of info out there.
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Sounds like "Freespace2: Reborn" in the wings? ;)
I'd rather have a "Freespace1: Reborn". There is so much to improve, from having squadron leader briefings to "correct" jump node physics (In "Tenderizer", the Galatea jumps in and then jumps out of the same jump node, seemingly to/from different systems. However, I prefer this mechanic instead of FS2's 1-1 node pairing).
To answer the question: I'd change "Apocalypse". The mission is designed as a "save as many ships as you can" mission. There is also supposedly a choice at the end to either save yourself or save others. However, both are lacking. Whatever wingmen you have left from "Clash of the Titans II" die pretty quickly, so you're left to defend a bunch of ships by yourself. Sure, you're not meant to save all of them, but it's sad to see many/most of them die. And the "choice" at the end is not really a choice. If you're playing it for the first time, it's pure luck if you happen to be within 30 seconds of full afterburners of the node. Only if you know what will happen is it a "choice".
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Not that I feel that this is the most deserving to be changed, but simply to list one other than the obvious ones...
In "Feint! Parry! Riposte!", the ending with the Colossus and the Repulse facing off head-to-head. I know that its supposed to make it so that the Repulse can ram the Colossus, but the Colly (and the Orion class for that matter) aren't designed to deliver their maximum firepower in a frontal assault. The Colossus would have been better to 'Cross the "T"' of the Repulse, cutting in perpendicular to it, blocking its path and bringing maximum heavy turrets to bare on the target. The Repulse could still try to ram the Colly amidships.
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I'd rather have a "Freespace1: Reborn". There is so much to improve, from having squadron leader briefings to "correct" jump node physics (In "Tenderizer", the Galatea jumps in and then jumps out of the same jump node, seemingly to/from different systems. However, I prefer this mechanic instead of FS2's 1-1 node pairing).
Have you played SF-Junky's "What If - Another Great War"?
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I'd rather have a "Freespace1: Reborn". There is so much to improve, from having squadron leader briefings to "correct" jump node physics (In "Tenderizer", the Galatea jumps in and then jumps out of the same jump node, seemingly to/from different systems. However, I prefer this mechanic instead of FS2's 1-1 node pairing).
I'm glad someone else noticed this.
In Fs1, you could have a single node that connected to multiple systems.
To paraphrase: "we don't know where the Taranis will jump, but there is only one node out of Ikeya..."
And: "there are dozens of systems off the Ribos subspace node..."
Fun concept, also explains why the jump nodes in the command briefing animations did not have lines drawn between them.
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High Noon. So damn lame.
Game of Tag. Although honestly I'd remove the entire Barracudas segment.
And the one where you find the Trinity, don't know the name of it. Dragons in the nebula. **** that. TBH, I hated the entire nebula concept. Except for the one where you save Snipes, the nebula just seemed like a contrived annoyance. Even in that one though the lightning was a bit much. Way back in the day on retail with the old rig, it only struck every minute or so. With SCP, I'm literally ALWAYS scrambled.
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I am rather fond of the Barracudas-segment, it was a good atmosphere: The GTVA trying to adapt to Nebular warfare but Shivans are still orders of magnitude better at it - it kinda hammers home of the point that it is not a question of tech anymore. ... A Game of TAG only issue is that you are forced into the most sub-optimal fighter for that particular mission (take a fighter with better secondary placement so you can aim at something and it would be swell)
High Noon does its job rather well for the standards of way back then - putting the action in a cutscene (considering the mission is actually just a big cutscene by today's standard) would defeat the sense of scale you get from the Sathanas and the Collossus. I makes you feel tiny in comparison to the forces arrayed by either side and it helps scale the action in the later half of the campaign.
Their Finest Hour suffers from a problem that the Collossus doesn't scale well to engagements, other than providing a quick killiing blow, with targets other than a de-fanged Sathanas. It's just too overpowering, so :v: made it completely useless. If you found a way for the Collossus not to dominate the mission and keep it consitent with the rest of the campaign, that would be change worth seeing.
As for a mission I would really change, it's Slaying Ravana. The original is supposed to be the end of protracted battle, with the Raven's doing the final bombing dive because the GTVA's forces are spend. Sadly nothing really feels that way about the mission; that part a fault of these dive-bomb bomber missions really not being that great (tons of understandement here).
Personally the initial segment of the battle would be far more interesting, with the Ravana engaging a GTVA task force with a ship of it's own weight at the centre. Maybe not fully base the mission on an attack run on the Ravana but on how the GTVA task force has to scamper away from the Shivans while the Delacroix and the Ravana are locked in deadly close quaters combat at the end of which both ships deliver the each other the killing blow.
(it would also work for a tactical standpoint since as soon as you have closed out of the firing arcs of the LReds the Ravana get's kinda toothless with its 2 SReds on top)
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A good fix to Their Finest Hour would be 'oh, the Colossus had another global malfunction in fire control, you need to TAG targets for her main beams.'
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A good fix to Their Finest Hour would be 'oh, the Colossus had another global malfunction in fire control, you need to TAG targets for her main beams.'
From a purely gameplay-centred point of view, I agree. But as far as the story telling goes, I have to disagree.
I made the condition that it had to be consitent with the rest of the campaign and the only time the Collie has a malfunction in fire control is during Endgame.
There it appears as a plot device for the ETAK-subplot of the main campaign. Pulling that stunt again might not only be a disconnect for the rest of the campaign's plotting - as it is a plot device of an unrelated part of the plot - and also deminish the effect of the instance in Endgame retroactively.
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I'm pretty sure it was a specific result of GTVI sabotage on Endgame. You could attribute it to the mauling the Colossus took from that Ravana in this case.
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Yeah, it's quite easy to find
excuses justifications to force or encourage players to use TAGs, as long as you are willing to go the extra FREDing mile.