Hard Light Productions Forums
Archived Boards => The Archive => Blackwater Operations => Topic started by: General Battuta on December 09, 2015, 05:53:11 pm
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Let me repeat, I'll be really mad if you guys don't release. These assets are way way way too good to be wasted.
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Hopefully we're getting steam back on, but we still need a few more hands on deck. The most pressing concern at the moment is having a couple of Fredders/Designers... experienced ones, with vision. We really need an overhaul on missions (in terms of structure and gameplay. The general ideas are good and have potential, but the execution is lacking, by today's standards. The rest of the help we need is secondary, really.
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I would love to help but I have a lot of commitments on me already. :(
How complex are we talking, mission-wise? On a continuum from, say, retail to Just Another Day or a big BP mission?
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The general ideas are good and have potential, but the execution is lacking, by today's standards.
There are standards? I thought the only "standard" was that the mod can't be as bad as mine.
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How complex are we talking, mission-wise? On a continuum from, say, retail to Just Another Day or a big BP mission?
I hope I'm not giving bad information, because I don't know much about Fredding, and when it comes to today's capabilities, even less. But the gist of it is that complexity would be about halfway retail and BP. We want to modernize and take advantage of new gameplay possibilities, but we also want to keep it well within the realm of what is Freespace. And of course some missions need more work than others.
A couple of years ago, me and BD made a play through of the whole thing and created a document of "problems to solve". I'm sure that I'd I did the same thing again, others issues would arise.
The way I see it, is that now that we're finally going somewhere with asset production, it becomes more apparent that the missions need a facelift, design wise.
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We really need an overhaul on missions (in terms of structure and gameplay.
:wtf: Why? The missions were essentially done back when Ace retired. You guys did a full playthrough, beta-test, and evaluation of every mission!
The way I see it, is that now that we're finally going somewhere with asset production, it becomes more apparent that the missions need a facelift, design wise.
Please don't. I can understand the desire to upgrade the models, even though I don't agree that it's required for release. Ditto voice acting. But if you're going to redo all the missions as well, then you're basically starting the campaign over from scratch.
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I think the community could really use a major release with approximately V-complexity missions. There hasn't been one since ST:R and while I love big elaborate productions we've always thrived on heterodoxy and diversity of content.
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Goober mentioned voice acting. It took the BP team (and that's one of the bigger teams here) a couple years to add VA to part of WIH.
I think people would rather have a BWO release without VA sooner vs. waiting a few years for a 'complete' release. Especially since the revival of the past year or so when people were given hope that BWO may actually get finished someday.
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Yeah, as amazing as the work that Battuta and Axem et al. have done in creating some ridiculously-cool gameplay concepts, there's still a ton of room for more retail-styled campaigns as well. At this point we all know that BWO has been trapped in feature-creep hell for a solid decade or more, and it's been really heartening to see it come back to life over the past year or two. Don't spoil that progress by scrapping half of what's already done, because if you go that route I'm fairly certain that we'll never see any sort of finished product be released.
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You can always do a re-release. Just don't make Greedo shoot first. :P
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:wtf: Why? The missions were essentially done back when Ace retired. You guys did a full playthrough, beta-test, and evaluation of every mission!
How many times do we have to go through this conversation? What is "essentially done" are basically mission skeletons, a rough outline.
Not to mention there's a number of missions that are blatantly bad and boring on most levels.
But if you're going to redo all the missions as well, then you're basically starting the campaign over from scratch.
I'm not talking about redoing the missions from scratch, I talked about giving them a facelift. Different. Taking the missions we have, clean them up, and perhaps add something to them when\if applicable and somewhat easy\fast. Considering that in any case the missions would have to go through a huge balancing pass (including reducing the number of enemy wings, etc), is it that much of an hassle to, for example, replace an enemy wing with Aaru drones, add an AWACS that when interacted with turns the drones against your enemies?!? The way I see it, it's a worthy investment, especially if we could get started ASAP, while the art assets aren't finished.
(in hindsight, I realize I did use the word "overhaul" in my previous post, and that was a mistake)
I think the community could really use a major release with approximately V-complexity missions. There hasn't been one since ST:R and while I love big elaborate productions we've always thrived on heterodoxy and diversity of content.
Indeed, and that's what we're aiming for, in general. I'd still like to add some more options within reason.
Say, we have this super heavy turreted bomber that is more like a small cruiser than an actual bomber. They shoot SSM bombs.
Right now we have them behaving like a dive bomber pretty much, which is kind of dumb since these bombers are slow, unmaneuverable and in the case of the SSM bombs, it doesn't really matter that the bomber is close to the target ship. So instead of having them behave like any other bomber, we could have each ship of the wing jump in different spots in space around the target, and just do their thing without getting close. It would be a "mini-game" of sorts, it would be different, and I suspect that it would be fast to implement.
Of course, there are certain features that I would think to implement that would be major time sinks. I have no clue about Fredding, and I suspect the rest of the team is the same.
That's why I'm being very specific about those Fredders being experienced and having vision, because I'd expect them to check the possible ideas, and say "X is a trivial feature, fast to do. Y would take a lot of time, better scratch it" and look at the missions we have and suggest features we could implement in a timely fashion, to make those missions more interesting.
Indeed, perhaps 3 or 4 missions could benefit from more complex changes, but those would be the crown jewels of the campaign. But that would be a possible bonus, not a requirement.
Goober mentioned voice acting. It took the BP team (and that's one of the bigger teams here) a couple years to add VA to part of WIH.
I think people would rather have a BWO release without VA sooner vs. waiting a few years for a 'complete' release. Especially since the revival of the past year or so when people were given hope that BWO may actually get finished someday.
I believe I already talked about this in some other post: that's still up for discussion, so I can't really give a definitive answer. But I'm writing more on the "complete" release topic further down.
You can always do a re-release. Just don't make Greedo shoot first. :P
That's not out of the table. I always imagined that we could do a "Cold Element" pack post release, featuring remastered versions of Derelict, Warzone, Twilight and BWO. But that's so far off in the future that it's not worth talking about.
Finally, about community expectations: I'm very well aware what our decision to go "more public" did to your expectations. That one was one of the goals of that decision. But we also have expectations: motivate the team to be more active (which is working), and to finally get the other resources we need to finally get this thing done.
What perhaps isn't so obvious is that a lot of the internal vision has changed when it comes to the project development process and community relations. While in the past BWO was this super secret project, highly directed\micromanaged and always kept under wraps with the goal of a single "wow" release, now we want to be more transparent, more open, give the team members more input and creativity in their work (this is important, as no one enjoys just following directions, especially when working for free), and finally give you something to toy with. That's why you've been seeing all these WiP posts, and that's why you'll be able to download the Aaru and another asset as soon as they're finished, for example.
We even talked about episodic releases on internal. The plot structure is already quite organized into acts, so we wouldn't have to change anything plot-wise. Asset introduction lends itself to this format as well, to some extent. And this is something that pretty much everyone on internal agrees it would be a good thing to do. But it's all moot if we don't get those Fredders, at least.
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Derelict SCP had a good, interesting variety of missions without ever drastically altering the toolkit used in retail missions. It's one of my favourite things about it. If you can put out another release with gameplay of that quality it'll be a great mod, up there with the best of them.
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That's why I'm being very specific about those Fredders being experienced and having vision, because I'd expect them to check the possible ideas, and say "X is a trivial feature, fast to do. Y would take a lot of time, better scratch it" and look at the missions we have and suggest features we could implement in a timely fashion, to make those missions more interesting.
I can do this for you without much trouble. Give me a feature list and I'll turn it around for you.
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That's why I'm being very specific about those Fredders being experienced and having vision, because I'd expect them to check the possible ideas, and say "X is a trivial feature, fast to do. Y would take a lot of time, better scratch it" and look at the missions we have and suggest features we could implement in a timely fashion, to make those missions more interesting.
I can do this for you without much trouble. Give me a feature list and I'll turn it around for you.
I appreciate that, every little bit helps :) Give me a couple of weeks to organize my thoughts and speak with the folks, and then I'll shoot you a PM
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How many times do we have to go through this conversation? What is "essentially done" are basically mission skeletons, a rough outline.
Not to mention there's a number of missions that are blatantly bad and boring on most levels.
I often wonder that myself. Let me direct your attention to this post (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=48507.msg1029723#msg1029723) and the one following it.
I am surprised, though, that you're throwing Ace under the bus like that (edit: and IceFire too; look a few posts farther down). The missions are not skeletons, and - judging from their reception during the beta test - they are not "blatantly bad and boring".
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Did they add more missions after the beta test ones or something? Maybe that's the cause for confusion.
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If what the missions need is to be skimmed over, sexed up, and tightened, I can do that for you after my next book is in. That's a lot easier and a lot more fun than building a whole campaign from scratch, and I'm pretty good at it!
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I often wonder that myself. Let me direct your attention to this post (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=48507.msg1029723#msg1029723) and the one following it.
I am surprised, though, that you're throwing Ace under the bus like that (edit: and IceFire too; look a few posts farther down). The missions are not skeletons, and - judging from their reception during the beta test - they are not "blatantly bad and boring".
You're directing me towards threads from 8 years ago. You do realize people's opinions may have changed in that time right?! (and they have) In fact, I distinctly recall having a chat with BlackDove and Icefire when you had your "intervention" a few years back, and IceFire's words to me and BD were pretty much "there's still a lot of work to do, I don't have time or energy for it, so it's your game now". But I guess that's not convenient for your point.
I'm very glad that you're bringing up the past, though, and making accusations of "throwing people under the bus", because that's exactly what you did with me, BlackDove and Icefire when you attempted your "take over".
And to keep this short, because I'm not really up to spending more energy on these discussions with you (because we already had them for ages, it's getting old):
We're the ones who are working on this. We're the ones who stuck with it during the worst times of the project, attempted to pick up the pieces and make something out of it, and we're the ones who are still putting their time on making it happen. And at the moment, I'm the one who's trying to coordinate a change of things for the best, and I like to think I'm having a modicum of success. You might not like it, but it is what it is.
Think it's about time you stop having that chip on your shoulder.
And a mission where all that happens is (literally) the player arriving, a bunch of ships shooting at each other without any kind of sense until the player's side wins (with or without the his intervention), some messages are exchanged, depart. No directives, no target prioritization, no logic. How is that not a skeleton, or boring? And we have other missions in the same vein. Granted, we also have some missions that are very cool, and those will only need some polish to be done.
Derelict SCP had a good, interesting variety of missions without ever drastically altering the toolkit used in retail missions. It's one of my favourite things about it. If you can put out another release with gameplay of that quality it'll be a great mod, up there with the best of them.
That's the thing... what we have so far doesn't even have the variety that Derelict had. It's closer to Warzone's level of variety. And IMO while Derelict aged quite well, Warzone hasn't.
Did they add more missions after the beta test ones or something? Maybe that's the cause for confusion.
As far as I know, no new missions were added after the beta test. The problem, I believe, is one of expectations. The state of the community was completely different when we had the beta test. Certain things (see the mission I described above) were perfectly acceptable back then (and perceptions may also have been skewed also because it was a beta). Now it's not, in my opinion.
If what the missions need is to be skimmed over, sexed up, and tightened, I can do that for you after my next book is in. That's a lot easier and a lot more fun than building a whole campaign from scratch, and I'm pretty good at it!
I'll take you on those offers. You're also kick ass with writing, which is something we are sorely lacking as well. I'll send you a PM in the next weeks, and bring you up to speed!
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I played it recently and enjoyed Warzone (and I loved Derelict too). What was your issue with it?
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No "issue" with it at all. I enjoyed Warzone as well. However, I think that people would expect even more from BWO. I would. :)
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You're directing me towards threads from 8 years ago. You do realize people's opinions may have changed in that time right?! (and they have) In fact, I distinctly recall having a chat with BlackDove and Icefire when you had your "intervention" a few years back, and IceFire's words to me and BD were pretty much "there's still a lot of work to do, I don't have time or energy for it, so it's your game now". But I guess that's not convenient for your point.
On the contrary, it illustrates my point perfectly. Eight years ago the campaign was done, and merely had to be polished up for release. BWO in 2006 was in the same state that ST:R was in 2006. In fact, we were worried that BWO would release before ST:R and steal ST:R's thunder.
What's convenient for you is that you keep redefining what needs to be done. There's always a lot of work to do when you keep moving the goalposts.
And to keep this short, because I'm not really up to spending more energy on these discussions with you (because we already had them for ages, it's getting old):
We're the ones who are working on this. We're the ones who stuck with it during the worst times of the project, attempted to pick up the pieces and make something out of it, and we're the ones who are still putting their time on making it happen. And at the moment, I'm the one who's trying to coordinate a change of things for the best, and I like to think I'm having a modicum of success. You might not like it, but it is what it is.
Think it's about time you stop having that chip on your shoulder.
What you are suffering are the consequences of your own decisions. I'm actually delighted that BWO is making progress with HTL models, and I think some of the changes that have been made in the past several months are good. But when I see you talk about an "overhaul" of the missions (which I took as a Freudian slip rather than a typo) I see the same mistakes happening all over again. You'll note that I said not a word against your efforts during this most recent restart until you started talking about redoing the missions.
As for having a chip on my shoulder, I've produced a campaign where I made all the wrong decisions (Unification War) and a campaign where I made all the right ones (ST:R). I know the characteristics of each.
As far as I know, no new missions were added after the beta test. The problem, I believe, is one of expectations. The state of the community was completely different when we had the beta test. Certain things (see the mission I described above) were perfectly acceptable back then (and perceptions may also have been skewed also because it was a beta). Now it's not, in my opinion.
Every time you've gotten feedback from the community on its expectations, they have consistently said that BWO is worth releasing even if it does not have the features you think are mandatory.
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This isn't going to achieve anything useful.
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So nice, i guess we can *beep* them if decided to join with *beep*. But all the models, upgraded and new ones are looking really good! :)
I remember knowing there was a big branching choice, presumably joining the GTVA or the SCP?
Well it is slightly more complicated than that, i do think people who have played warzone and derelict are going to enjoy the twist
On the contrary, it illustrates my point perfectly. Eight years ago the campaign was done, and merely had to be polished up for release. BWO in 2006 was in the same state that ST:R was in 2006. In fact, we were worried that BWO would release before ST:R and steal ST:R's thunder.
What's convenient for you is that you keep redefining what needs to be done. There's always a lot of work to do when you keep moving the goalposts.
''Beta'' started around 2004 and most of the missions were playable at that point but i guess the whole higher poly model stuff changed pretty much everything.
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This isn't going to achieve anything useful.
Perhaps not. I've said my piece; I will leave it at that. I'll split off the thread digression if Raven agrees.
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I'm just a fan of FS and have little experience in designing games, I hope it's okay if I give my opinion on the matter since I like and respect both Goober and Raven.
BWO is something I've been looking forward to for a long time and I hope it's released in the relatively near future. All I can really say is an observation. Raven, I'm not demanding you release BWO right now or anything like that (and some of the new models made look great)...and as project leader if you feel something is absolutely vital for BWO then do it but just a observation from a fan (and you probably already know this as it's fairly obvious)...just remember any new stuff added to BWO will delay the release date most likely. If I was a game designer I would ask is it worth it (like I said before, if it is go for it).
If there's stuff you want to add later, you could always do a "BWO Deluxe Edition" or something like that. I'm hoping that the renewed community enthusiasm in BWO due to BWO's recent revival doesn't fade away like slightly was before the revival.
If/when it does get released, I will be one of the first to play it. It's in my top 3 of campaigns I'm looking forward to. :)
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What's convenient for you is that you keep redefining what needs to be done. There's always a lot of work to do when you keep moving the goalposts.
(...)
What you are suffering are the consequences of your own decisions. I'm actually delighted that BWO is making progress with HTL models, and I think some of the changes that have been made in the past several months are good. But when I see you talk about an "overhaul" of the missions (which I took as a Freudian slip rather than a typo) I see the same mistakes happening all over again. You'll note that I said not a word against your efforts during this most recent restart until you started talking about redoing the missions.
Of course they are consequences of our decisions! There were plenty of bad decisions done in the past (not by me personally, but I still chose to continue on board nonetheless).
And of those decisions, I think that the worst ones were:
1. Excessive micromanagement, have the project be centered around the vision of 1 or 2 people in all matters (breaks team motivation, since they don't have creative input). This one we fixed, as this OP shows, and it's paying dividends in the assets front.
2. Secrecy. The community stopped caring about the project, since they had no idea what was going on. We didn't share anything while the project was in development. This one we are already taking care of: you see more about what is going on, you know the project is coming back to life. You'll even have access to certain assets as soon as their done (one of the Aaru versions, the HTL Ceres, and perhaps others in the future)
3. Waiting for the HTL assets before dealing with the missions (I mean at whatever capacity the missions would be touched). This one was bigger than apparent, IMO, because it allowed most of the team to just throw it in the corner, move on to other things and lose interest. The assumption that we needed to have all the assets finalized before polishing the missions and make them connect into a coherent whole (which they don't at the moment) was a very bad one from where I'm standing, especially since we have all the placeholders we need. Which brings me to my final point...
Yes, of course we keep redefining what needs to be done... the fact that we didn't in the past, was mistake nº4 (and perhaps the worst of all): we stuck with a final goal (good), but we also stuck with the methods to achieve that goal (wrong, because obviously it wasn't working). We were basically stuck in time.
We've been redefining what we need to do in all fronts, and the result is what you've been seeing in the past few months. A positive result. I fought tooth and nail to make this happen, including countless discussions with BlackDove to give me the green light to do it.
And it's connection with problem nº3 is that I don't think there's a point waiting for all the assets to be done to start working on the missions again. Yes, they might need a final, quick polish/balance pass when all the assets are done, but while we wait for those assets, we can spend that time to actually make the missions better. It's not like the HTL assets will be done quicker if we don't work on the missions, so why not take the time we already have? The idea, is that in the end, we don't spend a single extra day on the missions besides that final balance pass, after the HTL assets are finalized.
I feel that what you think I was saying was "we want to spend more time after the HTL milestone is met, to work on the missions", when what I've been advocating is to "spend the time we have working on missions while the HTL milestone isn't met". It would be a perfectly good waste of time if we didn't do that.
This isn't going to achieve anything useful.
Perhaps not. I've said my piece; I will leave it at that. I'll split off the thread digression if Raven agrees.
Yes, by all means.
I'm just a fan of FS and have little experience in designing games, I hope it's okay if I give my opinion on the matter since I like and respect both Goober and Raven.
BWO is something I've been looking forward to for a long time and I hope it's released in the relatively near future. All I can really say is an observation. Raven, I'm not demanding you release BWO right now or anything like that (and some of the new models made look great)...and as project leader if you feel something is absolutely vital for BWO then do it but just a observation from a fan (and you probably already know this as it's fairly obvious)...just remember any new stuff added to BWO will delay the release date most likely. If I was a game designer I would ask is it worth it (like I said before, if it is go for it).
If there's stuff you want to add later, you could always do a "BWO Deluxe Edition" or something like that. I'm hoping that the renewed community enthusiasm in BWO due to BWO's recent revival doesn't fade away like slightly was before the revival.
If/when it does get released, I will be one of the first to play it. It's in my top 3 of campaigns I'm looking forward to. :)
First, of course you can give your opinion on the matter. Second, I'm not project leader :P I'm just on of the most senior project members who is still active and trying to put everything back together.
Check my reply to Goober: we are changing things internally in terms of development, and the release method. I don't think we're ready to just "release everything, and make a deluxe edition later", but we're ready to to release it in an episodic format, which is already a big change and will speed things up :)
If we didn't think it was worth it, we wouldn't have stuck to this goal for so long. Releasing in 5 mission chunks, or the whole 40 missions at once, the directive will still be to have quality releases. There may be some concessions we might choose to do in the first few episodes (no voice acting, no weapon models in loadout screen, for example), but when it comes to missions, gameplay, story and visuals, we're still not ready to lower the bar especially now that there's a fair amount of productivity going on :)
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I'm curious about something if you can talk about it:
One of the major plot points I remember from years ago with BWO was that you could choose at some point to fly for the SCP or GTVA.
How can you have a major branching point like that if BWO is going to be released in episodes?
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Because there's actually 2 branching points. The campaing structure is basically like this:
/---------------->\ /----------------> finish
start-----------> branch reconnect, 2 missions ---> branch
\---------------->/ \----------------> finish
So we can have one episode before the first branch (it's 5 or 6 missions), second episode can have both 1st branch options and the first mission after they merge, 3rd episode can have the 2nd mission after the merge and second branch options. It fits even from a plot perspective, actually.The first act would be smaller than the other 2, though, which is good in a way, since it also doesn't have a lot of the new assets. There may be some other way to divide the campaign into episodes, but so far, this is the best solution I can see.
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Big day. :)
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Big day. :)
Can you say what you mean by that? :)
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Think he's referring to all this talk and recent developments
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Because there's actually 2 branching points. The campaing structure is basically like this:
That looks familiar...
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What do you mean?
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:nervous: