[ns161]

I was under the impression that FS (either 1 or 2) has some branching missions (outside the SOC loops in FS2), where if you fail certain missions you do different missions than the main "beat all missions" storyline.

Anyone have any outline of the branches?  I'm kind of interested but I don't want to go through and fail every mission just to be told "Game Over", play the mission again, win it, fail the next one on purpose...etc.

[Shade]

The campaigns are linear except for the SOC branches you mentioned. It's easily possibly to make such branching in a campaign, and it is being used by fans making their own, but it wasn't used for the two main campaigns.

[Jeff Vader]

I was under the impression that FS (either 1 or 2) has some branching missions (outside the SOC loops in FS2), where if you fail certain missions you do different missions than the main "beat all missions" storyline.

Where on Earth did you hear something like that? There is slight branchign on a few user-made campaigns but that's it. Maybe if you counted something like the whole taking-out-beam-cannons-of-the-Sathanas thing in FS2, where the results of destroyed beam cannons could be seen in the next mission and the mission briefings and debriefings. But nothing more. If you were thinking about stopping the Iceni at some point, forget about it.

[BlueFlames]

FreeSpace supports branching campaign structures, but Volition did not make use of that functionality, and it is rarely utilized by user-made campaigns.  Some of the reluctance in making branching campaigns is that FREDers wind up having to make missions that the player may never see.  It's typically easier to figure out why your idiot commanders would fire you for failing a major objective, rather than making the extra missions on a failure path.

[Titan]

i think crucible was fully branching...