Author Topic: How difficult should a mission be?  (Read 8933 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Mathwiz6

  • Pees numbers
  • 27
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
Yep, I always lost the Independance there, so I eventually just whipped out some random beams (though not USilvs) and shredded the stupid Nemisis beams.

Oh yeah, and made the ships I was supposed to be escorting invulnerable.

And me invulnerable.

I can just see trying to beat that mission fairly on insane.  :mad: :ick: :mad: :mad: :mad: :shaking:

 

Offline IPAndrews

  • Disgruntled Customer
  • 212
  • This site stole my work
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
This is a perennial problem in the FSPort internal.  Typically, I upload a mission with what I think is an appropriate level of difficulty.  Galemp says it's too hard, so I tone it down a bit.  Then kv1at3485 comes along and says it's not hard enough.  I'm left unsure of what to do.

 :lol:. Been there with Fury and Darkblade.
Be warned: This site's admins stole 100s of hours of my work. They will do it to you.

 
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
I've seen my share of difficult missions, but the true insanity has to be the Battle of Earth mission of Inferno mod R1. If my memory serves me, it was roughly fifteen minutes of hell. I always lost one of the task force destroyers halfway through, or the enemy fighters shredded me, and last but not least the GTVA supercarrier got blown up at the end because I couldn't get through the fighter cover, because all my wingmen were dead. I had to replay it at least 20 times, which translates into over 300 minutes -- at LEAST 5 hours, just on one mission. Probably even longer than that considering I remember it took me over a day to complete. A mission of that difficulty, thankfully, is (and should continue to be) reserved for absolute final missions. As a finale, a 15 minute apocalyptic mission works.

Still, whoever designed that mission, I both love them, and want a Vasudan to sever their head.

That mission should be the benchmark for The Ridiculously Hard Mission(TM). If your mission is more difficult/repetitive (more opportunity to sit through dialogue and then get blown up 10 minutes later) than the finale of Inferno R1, it's too hard, lol.




hahahaha.
I totally know what you are talking about man. For that same mission I got sick of losing on it so I put it on easy instead to beat it.
All in all, That was still my favorite mission anyway.

 

Offline Mongoose

  • Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
  • Global Moderator
  • 212
  • This brain for rent.
    • Steam
    • Something
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
That's why I play on Easy all the time.  All the great story, with a minimum of the frustration. :p

 
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
It surprises me that you guys have been playing the game for years yet you still have trouble completing a lot of the missions. The challenge in Freespace is using your head- "skills" like marksmanship, coordination, etc. don't matter very much. Every mission is a puzzle, so you should have no difficulty completing the game on Insane difficulty if you've already found the solution to each mission.

I think that the campaign's difficulty should depend on how good the player is. You can do this by branching, having an "easy" campaign path and a "hard" campaign path (if a player looses a mission, he switches to the easy path, if he wins, he goes to the hard one). You might be thinking, "well, then I'll need to make twice the number of missions", but you can just make some minor tweaks to each mission (adding or deleting a few fighter wings, for example) to adjust difficulty and have two slightly modified versions of the same mission. Also, you can set more fighter wings to arrive if the player won the last mission- you can use "is-previous-goal-true" sexps as arrival ques.

But my way of adjusting difficulty is by using secondary and bonus goals. The primary goal should be easy to accomplish- it's just there for people who want to buzz through the campaign and get the storyline. The secondary and bonus goals should be challenging. They're the ones that give you medals and promotions, while the primary goals allow you to advance in the campaign.

I don't give a solid answer to "how hard should a campaign be?" I like to make the difficulty adjustable, the way I said.

 

Offline karajorma

  • King Louie - Jungle VIP
  • Administrator
  • 214
    • Karajorma's Freespace FAQ
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
That's an awful method of doing things. If you're simply going to alter missions based on difficulty settings you should use the SEXPs and do it all within one mission rather than creating a branching campaign with multiple missions all requiring maintainence based just on what difficulty the user set.

For one thing if the user comes across a mission that is too hard, dropping the difficulty will not help them anywhere near as much as expected as they'll be on the wrong campaign path.
Karajorma's Freespace FAQ. It's almost like asking me yourself.

[ Diaspora ] - [ Seeds Of Rebellion ] - [ Mind Games ]

 
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
I don't create branching missions, I just base arrival ques on whether a previous goal was completed or not. There's a few examples of this in the main FS campaigns (FS1 and probably 2).

And you don't get my idea about the campaign path. Have you ever played Microsoft Close Combat? Here's how it works:

/* = mission failed
/- = mission accomplished

Start mission
/*                  \-
easy mission  hard mission
\*               /*\-    \-
easy mission  hard mission

If you can't understand that diagram, it's hard to explain. If you win a mission, you go to the hard branch, if you loose THAT mission, you go the easy branch, and you just keep going back and forth. If you keep winning missions, you stay on the hard branch, if you keep loosing, you stay on the easy. It wouldn't be hard to change a mission's difficulty, just add a few more fighters here or there or increase AI skill, or give the player a time limit somehow. You're not making two whole different branches, you're just slighlty modifying missions for difficulty purposes. The real advantage of this system is that the player dosen't have to replay any missions, although you may have to make him repeat key storyline missions if he misses them.

But my favorite way of adjusting difficulty is by using secondary and bonus goals like I said before.



 

Offline karajorma

  • King Louie - Jungle VIP
  • Administrator
  • 214
    • Karajorma's Freespace FAQ
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
I don't create branching missions, I just base arrival ques on whether a previous goal was completed or not. There's a few examples of this in the main FS campaigns (FS1 and probably 2).

That's fine. It's basically what I said you should do. Use SEXPs (or in this case arrival cues) rather than mission branching to determine what goes on in a mission.

Quote
And you don't get my idea about the campaign path.


Oh I got it. I just hate it. :D

Quote
You're not making two whole different branches, you're just slighlty modifying missions for difficulty purposes. The real advantage of this system is that the player dosen't have to replay any missions, although you may have to make him repeat key storyline missions if he misses them.

Now you see if you were making two different branches depending on how well the player did in a mission I'd be all for it. If the missions were very different then you have an interesting branching campaiugn and I'm all for that.

 But having two copies of a mission that differ only in difficulty is a maintainence nightmare. If someone finds a bug in one mission it's almost certainly present in the other one meaning that you have to fix and playtest both missions to see if bug is gone. Maybe it's the programmer in me that hates duplication of code like this but as far as I'm concerned you should only have one mission that adjusts itself depending on previous events and the player's choosen difficulty level. That way you can have a graduated and even adaptive level of difficulty not simply hard mission\easy mission branches.

For instance by using persisent variables you can have the mission actually get easier if the player has failed it a couple of times.
Karajorma's Freespace FAQ. It's almost like asking me yourself.

[ Diaspora ] - [ Seeds Of Rebellion ] - [ Mind Games ]

 

Offline CP5670

  • Dr. Evil
  • Global Moderator
  • 212
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
Quote
I don't create branching missions, I just base arrival ques on whether a previous goal was completed or not. There's a few examples of this in the main FS campaigns (FS1 and probably 2).

And you don't get my idea about the campaign path. Have you ever played Microsoft Close Combat? Here's how it works:

I think the real problem with what you're suggesting is that it essentially rewards poor performance. There would be no incentive to do well in a mission if it's only going to make things harder later on. It makes more sense to have it go the other way (a good performance makes a later mission easier) or to just leave the difficulty of each mission independent of any others. The best way to do things is to use the difficulty level settings, which are under the player's control, to make slight adjustments to the mission. As far as having separate missions goes, you can do it but it wouldn't really be necessary given how much small things like having an extra enemy wing (on a higher difficulty) can completely alter the balance and difficulty of the mission.

Although I certainly agree with you that missions should provide some sort of a challenge. Missions that are too easy are frankly no better than ones too hard.

 
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
"Incentive?" It confuses me how so many people want their game to be as easy as possible.

 

Offline Mongoose

  • Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
  • Global Moderator
  • 212
  • This brain for rent.
    • Steam
    • Something
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
Because some of us don't want to be frustrated by games to the point where we wind up breaking expensive peripherals. :p

 

Offline CP5670

  • Dr. Evil
  • Global Moderator
  • 212
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
Quote
"Incentive?" It confuses me how so many people want their game to be as easy as possible.

I never said that. I said I want some reward for completing a particularly hard mission, which likely took several tries and some time commitment. That could come in the form of points or medals, but I don't want to see increased difficulty in a future mission for my work unless I'm getting compensated in some other way for it.

In fact, even the built-in difficulty system works like this. You get a lot more points for getting kills on insane than on medium and can go through promotions much more often.

 
Re: How difficult should a mission be?
If its difficult at normal, easy to beat at easy, very easy to beat at very ease, and hard to beat at hard... its good

It should be as difficult as the missions of act 3 of the campaign, and then increasing difficulty