[mjn.mixael]

This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. I make campaigns to tell a story, but also to give you all something fun to play. If there's something about it that's not fun, I want to excise it.

Having to play something again isn't usually fun... But it can be if you enjoy challenge, I think. Finally beating something that's just the right amount of difficult gives me that Hell Yeah! feeling. I enjoy that.

On the other hand, in FSO missions, there are times when I do something wrong either because I didn't understand the objective at first or perhaps didn't follow orders strictly to the letter. In fact, there's one campaign I just never finished because it forced me to fail after I flew directly forward right at the start of the mission for a few seconds. I got too far from or too close to something (I forget the details) within the first 30 seconds of the mission and it failed. I don't find that fun, so I never went back and tried again.

So I'm curious what you all have to say. What are the kinds of mission failures that really make you want to quit? What kinds don't bother you? Give examples if you can! I want to learn.

[Colt]

I chose Other.

I'll try explaining this as best I can. This is fairly rare, but has happened multiple times (I think even FS1/FS2 has done it too). But the mission fails that really peeve me are ones that let me continue the mission after I failed an objective critical to advancing the campaign. Often when an important objective is failed, you're ordered to RTB or the mission ends some other way, so it's reasonable to continue playing when you aren't ordered to leave right? It's pretty common for there to be twists in a scenario that make it impossible to complete a primary objective because of plot reasons.

Nope. You've failed to protect ship X, but Command has forgotten to recall you to end the mission. Now continue playing this mission until you reach the "end", and only then will you be told to retry again. Ugh.

Now when I play I instinctively esc>retry immediately when some critical objective only to discover on the fifth attempt that it's okay to fail.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

My first mission failure was during A Monster In The Mist (FS2). I didn't fully understand the primary goal (scan 4 subsystems) and didn't know scans could be completed from up to 500 metres away, so I parked at as many turrets as I could get close to, attempting to "scan" them. Years after I understood what scanning meant, I died from AAA fire in the same mission. Both failures resulted in the addition of the tip and note on this wiki article about the mission. I still hold a certain level of hatred for that mission to this day.

Playing Judas (FS1) is also highly annoying, and I've never legitimately completed it because Arjuna wing's patrol means I panic way too fast and can never get close enough to the crates to scan them.

I also stopped playing Cardinal Spear when I died to the shockwave of my own plasma cannon projectiles. After over a decade of playing FS2_Open on and off, this still stands as my most embarrassing death in the game.

Death from enemy fire doesn't stop me; when I got pulverised by the Sammael's SRed in and flew a bit too close to the Hyksos' VSlash, neither death stopped me from a quick restart. However, the experience from both is bad enough that I'm now genuinely fearful of flying near any beam cannons. Even on the lowest difficulty level, when friendly beams do zero damage, I'm still unnerved by them.

[Nightmare]

Playing Judas (FS1) is also highly annoying, and I've never legitimately completed it because Arjuna wing's patrol means I panic way too fast and can never get close enough to the crates to scan them.

Most if not all stealth missions trigger me that way, except for 1 or 2 that have static detectors. The one I'm thinking about is actually among the most interesting missions I played in a long time though.

[Nyctaeus]

Tenebra.

With all respect to Battman, Axem, Darius and other BP freders who put tremendous effort to make Tenebra working, I genuinely disapprove it's gameplay. Except Universal Truth and Vindicator mission. Current iteration is much better than the first, but my initial playthrough left me with dire impression.

Overcomplicated, requires several playthroughts of every mission to get familiar with their mechanics, etc. But also Tenebra is extremely unforgiving to player's mistakes and provide you with extremely tight time window to accomplish your goals. In the assasination mission, there is power-off option if you get noticed, but it also require you to fly considerable distance before you can use it. I remember my 2 takes: First I engaged it 2,5 clicks from Myrmidons chasing me and I died anyway. Second time it somehow worked, but I failed anyway because this escape mechanics took too much time. After many attempts, I finally established my way - hack the freaking Mjolnirs.

Carthage mission remain as my least favorite mission I ever played in any mod. I can summarize it with single pharse: How to play this thing?. It's a noise, where everything is happening at once, full of op Alastors and other witchery. I'm just completely lost in the chaos of battlefield. But I was playing. For the outstanding writing and story.

I marked 2nd and 3rd options. I don't like situations, when I just don't know how to follow directives to make effect. I disapprove missions freded "by authors for authors", with badly executed complex mechanics and complete lack of intuitiveness. However various examples of awesome missions with tricky, complex mechanics exist. One notable example is extraction of spy from HoL installation from BtA. Also I like hard missions, requiring me to push my dogfighting skills to my limits and fight for my life. It's okay if gameplay requre effort, but all effort must be rewarded.

I praise Solaris for it's cloak system. It's easy to use, but hard to master. Darius carefully introduces one to it's extremely powerful mechanics with simple turret strike. It provides excellent base for experiments and encourage to try different things like ambushes, risky maneuvers and other shinenigans. And unlike Tenebra, cloak applies to half of the campaign. I learn one thing and I can master it to the end of my days.

Ad meritum: Freders: Make complex things working simple way. I play for story. Lemme enjoy story :].

[SL1]

Any kind of failure can make me want to quit if it happens often enough. I've had my moments of frustration with every option in the poll. But in general, there are two types I can think of that really irritate me:

1. Failure due to the mission requiring you to be perfect to a degree that can only really be accomplished by trial and error and knowing everything that happens in advance

2. Failure due to not sniping all of a capship's main beams in the five seconds between its arrival and its obliteration of whatever you're protecting

[themaddin]

Playing Judas (FS1) is also highly annoying, and I've never legitimately completed it because Arjuna wing's patrol means I panic way too fast and can never get close enough to the crates to scan them.

Most if not all stealth missions trigger me that way, except for 1 or 2 that have static detectors. The one I'm thinking about is actually among the most interesting missions I played in a long time though.

I feel similarly about stealth/scout missions. (I don't get the logic of scanning some big ships while avoiding fighters -
wouldn't the big ships notice something strange is going on and scan me back, or at least call the fighters in if unable to do so themselves?)

That aside, there's one mission where you're to scout out something - a Shivan mining op IIRC.
You have to stay hidden from fighters, but you get help from a cool custom feature - gauges on your HUD telling you how close each relevant baddie is.
I'm not sure which mod this is in, might be Scroll.

Anyway, that was the only stealth mission I found actually enjoyable. So if you're planning some of them, that'd be one cool feature to have.

[Rhymes]

Crossposting this from the discussion on Discord about this topic.

My theory regarding failure in Freespace (and in games generally) is that failure feels demotivating when the player fails for reasons outside their control, whether that happens because of mechanics that the player can't influence, or because there wasn't any way for the player to have known about something (at least in gameplay terms) ahead of time, causing their success or failure to basically be predicated on whether they just happened to have the right tools on hand (in other words, luck). It creates a sense of "well what was I supposed to do about that? That's bull****."

Failure is motivating when it happens for clear, understandable reasons, where the player knows about the source of the failure before running afoul of it. When the player knows what the problem is, what generally needs to be accomplished to beat it, and possibly even how to do it before actually attempting the challenge, then any failure creates a feeling along the lines of "okay, I zigged when I should have zagged. My bad. Let me try that again." It feels fair (even if the odds are stacked against the player) because the failure arises purely from an inability to execute. The key is that, in theory, the player should have enough information that they can complete the challenge perfectly on a blind playthrough if they're skilled enough.

As for "planned failures," I think that frustrations with those tend to arise more from issues of narrative structure--whether or not the failure is justified or reasonable based on what information the player has with respect to the story. A similar analysis works here too--does the failure make sense given what the player knows about the forces at work here? Scripted failures fall flat when it feels like there isn't sufficient narrative justification for it, so it feels like the author just said "too bad, you lose now." As far as gameplay goes, every planned failure in canon FreeSpace has neon signs pointing to it to indicate that it's scripted and not the result of player action. In addition the mission almost always has a secondary objective of some kind (to give the player a certain sense of agency so they're not just idle spectators) that is potentially a mission ending failure, even if it's as simple as "survive long enough to escape." Once the mission ends, the player still gets to move forward, so as a gameplay mechanic, I don't think it runs into the same issues.

[potterman28wxcv]

Playing Judas (FS1) is also highly annoying, and I've never legitimately completed it because Arjuna wing's patrol means I panic way too fast and can never get close enough to the crates to scan them.

I'm an ace on that mission, done it so many times without failing.

The key is to use the Wing menu to assign a hotkey to all Arjunas - then when you press that key, you will get on your HUD the distance of your ship from all Arjuna fighters. It then becomes much much easier to stay out of range from them.

As for the end of the mission (the one where your jump drive fails), just sit in Lucy's fighterbay waiting for your jump drive to recover. Then once you're ready, aim for the exit, jump out and tadaaa! Done

Back on topic, Silent Threat Reborn has quite a few missions that make me ragequit. For context I always play on Insane because i just love the fighting there - the very first mission is super tough to do on Insane not because of getting blown up, but because it's just super hard to kill all these ships in the limited time! And the avenger "instahit sniper" turrets are real annoying.

Another mission that made me ragequit on Silent Threat Reborn is the one where you have several transports to identify to tell which of them is a pirate, then you got loads of terran fighters that are hard to deal with, and if a single transport escapes it's game over. Oh god I absolutely hate that. Why is it so bad if 1 transport escapes out of the 10 or so?

The most ragequitting mission though is the one where you have to save the super fragile escape pod against waves of shivans - unless you know by heart where the shivans jump and destroy them before they even get to fire an auto aim missile, it's just not possible to complete that mission. On Insane that is.

The last example that comes to my mind is the FSport mission where you have to save the shield prototypes - so many waves of shivans, and then the icing on the cake with Hammer of Light trying to take the cargo down as well. Given the crucial importance of the mission, why are there only 4 fighters to defend it? I'd have sent at least a Cruiser with it or something. Oh and why is it so bad if the cargo doesn't make it to the node? Surely they can send some new prototypes if they still have the plans. But that's more of a storyline issue i guess

[Mongoose]

I know the failure mode that usually annoyed me the most was when the default mission loadout was absolute dog**** at completing the required objectives.  I almost never customized my loadout, and there was nothing worse than getting into a mission and realizing that I didn't have the tools to accomplish my objectives. I'm not saying the default loadout should be completely min-maxed (though on the other hand, why not?), but it should at least be a good choice. If you want me to disarm a Ravana in a matter of seconds, you'd damn well give me Trebs by default.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

As far as gameplay goes, every planned failure in canon FreeSpace has neon signs pointing to it to indicate that it's scripted and not the result of player action. In addition the mission almost always has a secondary objective of some kind (to give the player a certain sense of agency so they're not just idle spectators) that is potentially a mission ending failure, even if it's as simple as "survive long enough to escape." Once the mission ends, the player still gets to move forward, so as a gameplay mechanic, I don't think it runs into the same issues.

Mystery of the Trinity's neon sign can be a bit blur, though, since the mission relies entirely on the overwhelming stopping power of several waves of SF Dragons to proceed. There's no script to blow it up like how there is for The Great Hunt. I do agree that the planned failures in FreeSpace all have secondary goals tied to them, however, and because the mission gives these secondary goals near-equal weightage as the primary goal, post-mission doesn't feel like a total loss.

Also, Recommendations help.

[Sandwich]

It's a lot like raising children, where the mission maker is the parent, and the eventual players are the children.

You need to discipline them when they do something bad, but it's vital that they understand why they're being disciplined. If you suddenly make the player fail a mission because they got too far away from something, you'd darn well better have explained to them that they need to stay within X distance in the first place. It's also wise to issue a fair warning before the failure point.

Speaking of fairness, that's the other important thing. Children hate when things "aren't fair", and I've found that taking the time to explain to them why something happens or needs to be a certain way goes a long way to them understanding, and being understanding. The parallels with mission objectives should be apparent.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

For me, frustration tends to build up when :
- a mission doesn't provide the proper tools to complete certain critical objectives, or only provides a single way to complete said objectives
- when it wasn't properly balanced beyond medium difficulty (unless of course the mod explicitly tells you what difficulty it's been balanced for)
- when success depends more on luck than anything else
- when you have to sit through unskippable dialogue, or go through some lengthy routine (like "go to A, then B, then scan C & D") every single time
- when you have no margin for error completing certain objectives
- using mission-end to abruptly end the mission when reaching a failure state --> unlike the death dialogue, the debriefing screen lacks "quick start mission" button, which I am susceptible to find annoying if I have to restart often

So basically, I don't mind overwhelming dogfights, or difficult mission objectives, or even tough escort missions as long as it doesn't feel like the mission design did a half-assed job in testing, balancing or taking into account the vast diversity of playstyles in the player base.

[Nightmare]

End-mission is one of the most underrated SEXPs ever.

[Col. Fishguts]

1. Failure due to the mission requiring you to be perfect to a degree that can only really be accomplished by trial and error and knowing everything that happens in advance

2. Failure due to not sniping all of a capship's main beams in the five seconds between its arrival and its obliteration of whatever you're protecting

This. When a mission is built in a way that precognition of all major events/timings is required to win it, it get's annoying fast.
There should be at least a slim chance that a veteran player beats a mission on the first try, if he/she follows the briefing orders and whatever in-mission orders appear, accounting for human reaction times. If that's not doable, the FREDder should reconsider how the win conditions are set up.

[SL1]

Here's another one: Failing the mission because of mental shutdown due to all the ships having long, exotic names.

"Alpha, the SD Vindrikanaranya just jumped in and it's heading for the GTD Etra'la Ixtrosium! Forget about the SC Varunakelaba for now!"

[ShivanSpS]

Failure to protect a target wins hands down for me. I cant be on every place at the same time and the AI always need hand holding that i cant give if im engaged.
Killed by enemy fire must usually happens for me on hard and insane, mostly due to have my own wing killed.

[Mito [PL]]

That's definitely one, too. Failing/dying because all your wingmen decided to simply die on you. Friendly FS AI is so annoying.