Intriguing thread. I've stayed out of it while I worked on finally finishing Act 3, but now that I have...
Anyone who frequents GD will know I'm a scientific rationalist by training and work in the uber-rationality of legislation by occupation. Looking at Tenebra from every angle I can come up with, I'm not seeing any space magic. Certainly not along the lines of the nonsense regularly injected into the ME series by BioWare.
My overarching reaction to WiH, and Tenebra in particular, is immensely positive. The mission design was spectacular, the plot coherent and meaningful (very little in terms of filler, although the Custos mission might qualify), and the experience in general was top-notch. It took me a while to get into it, but Tenebra isn't a traditional dogfight simulation like FS2 retail, and I don't think that's a bad change. We've all played as Alpha 1 enough to be able to do that in our sleep. AoA was an expanded version of that with character-centric narrative design. WiH P1 moved us a little further away from solo tactics into a command realm. Tenebra completes that arc. Tenebra seems to best be played almost like a tactical RTS, orchestrating the battle rather than fighting it. While that may not be for everyone, I think it's a great deal more interesting than traditional FreeSpace missions.
One of the major missing components in typical FreeSpace missions is player identity. BP stories are not driven by an anonymous hero but by real - and fallible - human characters. In fact, the only real objection I have to this method is the introduction of some plot-consequential player agency. My personal preference would have been for a canonical presentation of events, as if the campaign was history retold rather than history made (I just felt like it would have been a better fit with the background materials, but this is entirely a creative decision).
My criticisms of Tenebra are limited to the following:
- The mission difficulty was not something I was prepared for, having not played FS since the last BP release, and I felt they could be a little too unforgiving until they were played a half-dozen times. This was not a complaint echoed by everyone, however.
- The briefings were painful, and - related! - the DreamScape could have been used to at least model beginning mission parameters but was instead used purely for the "talky bits." I really enjoyed the "talky bits," and I know Batts already said time was a major factor, but I sincerely hope any future releases with complex behaviour have their briefing modelled in the DreamScape instead of just text.
- Some of the vocabulary and technical writing was - I thought - needlessly jargon-filled. I do understand why its written that way, but I felt like you didn't need to take that writing step to actually bring that part of the immersion across.
- Technical issue: Unconventional keybinds and their corresponding instructions mostly ended up as trial-and-error. Only a few missions had my non-standard keybinds properly working with correct descriptions in briefing or mission.
Anyway, I think Tenebra can be a really rewarding gameplay and plot experience if people go into it NOT expecting a traditional FS experience, and that is perhaps where people are getting hung up.
Also - loved Universal Truth. The universe is alive, and the Shivans are a nonrational immune system. Oh, and the Bosch tie-in, the retail mysteries cleared up? Fantastic. I really do feel like this could be the continuation of the retail plot with a new storytelling mechanism.
