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What is your favorite cannon campaign?

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Offline Mongoose

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
I always felt that capital fights in FS1 were boring as hell, mainly because capital ship weapons were woefully inadequate to do much beyond taking out sentry guns.  The blob turrets had abysmal range and did jack-all damage-wise.  When I'm looking at a 2-kilometer-long destroyer, I want it to be able to actually destroy something, not just eat bombs for breakfast.  The fact that the Lucifer was the only destroyer capable of doing something competently certainly helped enhance the sense of fear the player was supposed to feel at encountering it, but it did so at the expense of every other capital ship in the game.

I liked FS1. FSPort would be decent if they hadn't got rid of the red on the scorpion and put beams on the Lucifer.
Um...the Scorpion should look just the same as it always does, at least in the most recent version of the Port.  Make sure you have glowmaps enabled.  And the Lucifer's beams in the Port are identical damage-wise to the Shivan Super Laser weapon; they're essentially what the Lucifer would have done had :v: developed beams before FS1 was released, rather than after.

 

Offline Snail

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
But I liked the suspense as the SSL's traveled through space and hit the Galatea.

 

Offline Androgeos Exeunt

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
I liked the SSLBeam. It looks better than any other beam I've seen so far, even the BFRed.
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Offline Snail

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
Even the Adv. Effects BFRed?

 

Offline Frosty

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
FS2 by far.....


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Offline Snail

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
Oh come on.

FS2's atmosphere was like a turkey shoot or a mock battle compared to FS1's. In FS2 I always felt the situation was under control, and the Shivans never even broke through to Epsilon Pegasi or Vega. In fact they were less of a challenge to defeat than the NTF, their fighters were piss weak and they didn't seem anywhere near as cool as the FS1 Shivans. The tacky nebula and weird color changing effects of the Subach HL-7 gave a really weird "This is just a game" feel.

 
Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
Oh come on.

FS2's atmosphere was like a turkey shoot or a mock battle compared to FS1's. In FS2 I always felt the situation was under control, and the Shivans never even broke through to Epsilon Pegasi or Vega. In fact they were less of a challenge to defeat than the NTF, their fighters were piss weak and they didn't seem anywhere near as cool as the FS1 Shivans. The tacky nebula and weird color changing effects of the Subach HL-7 gave a really weird "This is just a game" feel.

       That's to do with the gameplay than the storyline though. Fighters in FS2 die in droves.

 

Offline Ransom

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
Oh come on.

FS2's atmosphere was like a turkey shoot or a mock battle compared to FS1's. In FS2 I always felt the situation was under control, and the Shivans never even broke through to Epsilon Pegasi or Vega. In fact they were less of a challenge to defeat than the NTF, their fighters were piss weak and they didn't seem anywhere near as cool as the FS1 Shivans.
The Shivans didn't break through to Epsilon Pegasi or Vega because they didn't really try. We all saw the juggernauts - they could have exterminated us if they'd wanted to. FS2's Shivans were, to me, actually far more interesting than FS1's because I got the distinct impression that we weren't their main concern. They had bigger things to deal with and we were just a thorn in their side. That feeling of smallness, of being almost irrelevant, was far more meaningful to me than anything FS1 evoked.

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
Oh come on.

FS2's atmosphere was like a turkey shoot or a mock battle compared to FS1's. In FS2 I always felt the situation was under control, and the Shivans never even broke through to Epsilon Pegasi or Vega. In fact they were less of a challenge to defeat than the NTF, their fighters were piss weak and they didn't seem anywhere near as cool as the FS1 Shivans. The tacky nebula and weird color changing effects of the Subach HL-7 gave a really weird "This is just a game" feel.
And I found the nebula to be an utterly creepy and atmospheric playing field, particularly in missions like As Lightning Fall.  It was pretty evident that the situation wasn't "under control" when the GTVA had to haul out their biggest gun in a last-ditch attempt to destroy a superweapon...only to find out that they were facing such a threat multiplied by 80 soon afterwards.  It's true that FS1 did pull off the "humanity is being overrun" plotline very well, but there was never any doubt as to what the Shivans were trying to accomplish.  The very fact that FS2's Shivans were enigmatic throughout the entire campaign gave it that much more sense of uncertainty; you never really knew what was going to happen next.

(Also, the Subach looks awesome.)

 

Offline WMCoolmon

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
That's to do with the gameplay than the storyline though. Fighters in FS2 die in droves.

That's it. I think that's why Freespace 1 felt so different than Freespace 2.

In Freespace 1, even two fighters are a force to be reckoned with. A cruiser is a big deal. A destroyer is a HUGE threat, no matter what side it's on.

Now in Freespace 2, everything explodes if you so much as sneeze on it with a bomb or beam cannon. Flak provides a new recourse for massacring enemy fighters in droves. Every victory should be a pyrrhic victory, as over half of an entire destroyer's complement of fighters is usually destroyed by the time the mission is complete. By necessity, capital ships and fighter wings are rotated in and out every 3-4 missions because they die so often.

In a way, it's like by Freespace 2, you're so desensitized by death and destruction that you fail to even realize or care that a large city's worth of people died in that last blockade mission. Nothing really has an identity anymore, not even the destroyers, save for perhaps the Bastion, Aquitaine, and Psamtik. Compare that to Freespace 1, where you basically heard about the Galatea, Bastion, Eva, and Lucifer throughout the entire main campaign.

In Freespace 1 it felt like a game of chess, with a finite amount of resources, and even the loss of pawns was felt. In Freespace 2, strategy was mostly "We're going to throw a fleet at it and hope it goes away."

That being said, it's still strangely satisfying watching Shivans get massacred by massed Aeolus fire.
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Offline Droid803

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
Sure, capital ships in FS1 were a big deal...until you get shields. The moment you do, cruisers are worthless. They couldn't hurt you if they tried, except if you're getting hit in a HTL Herc with a faulty shield mesh...
A destroyer is equally pathetic. I mean, I killed the 'fearsome' SD Eva by shutting off my engines, holding down my fire button, and turning on 64x time compression until it died. I would hardly call that a "threat". :doubt:

At least capital ships can hurt your in FS2 with the beams and flak. Noone's going to sit still and pound an Aeolus until it dies with primaries on time compression (barring disarming it with trebs, which I really don't like doing)

However, that comparison was from FSport, and I'm not sure if the original game is any better, as I haven't ever played it. (frankly, I found the FS1 missions in FSPort rather boring...there weren't even pretty lightshows to look at. :nervous:)
(´・ω・`)
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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
In a way, it's like by Freespace 2, you're so desensitized by death and destruction that you fail to even realize or care that a large city's worth of people died in that last blockade mission. Nothing really has an identity anymore, not even the destroyers, save for perhaps the Bastion, Aquitaine, and Psamtik. Compare that to Freespace 1, where you basically heard about the Galatea, Bastion, Eva, and Lucifer throughout the entire main campaign.

In Freespace 1 it felt like a game of chess, with a finite amount of resources, and even the loss of pawns was felt. In Freespace 2, strategy was mostly "We're going to throw a fleet at it and hope it goes away."

That being said, it's still strangely satisfying watching Shivans get massacred by massed Aeolus fire.

      That brings to mind one of the problems with most user-made campaigns. A lot of people want to give ships more character, but in order to have the ship involved regularly they have to throw realism out the window and either have ships repaired very quickly (ie Rogue Intentions I), or simply regenerating on a mission by mission basis (ie Homesick). Though to be fair RI does a fairly good job of making things close to believable.

      And you say that in FS2, not many ships have identity. But the simple fact is you rarely see the same ship twice. So its hard to feel anything for them. Over the course of the campaign for example, there must be what, 7 different Sobeks at least? But I can't remember any of them. The FREDder literally has to invoke emotion or sympathy in the player with only 1 or 2 lines of dialogue and it rarely works. Though for me, there's one notable exception. The what is it. . . 4th to last mission, where Alpha 1 gets his final promotion, the opening scene of a crippled Sobek and a Moloch flailing at eachother in their final death throes is one of my favourite moments in FS2. Though the mission itself, turns out to be not all that memorable.
       Meanwhile other campaigns (my own included) fill missions with minutes of dialogue in order to try and create some story and character for different vessels. But this isn't necessarily interesting either. Creating story and character for vessels and making it believable yet not boring is one of the larger challenges in FS2 campaigns I think.


Sure, capital ships in FS1 were a big deal...until you get shields. The moment you do, cruisers are worthless. They couldn't hurt you if they tried, except if you're getting hit in a HTL Herc with a faulty shield mesh...
A destroyer is equally pathetic. I mean, I killed the 'fearsome' SD Eva by shutting off my engines, holding down my fire button, and turning on 64x time compression until it died. I would hardly call that a "threat". :doubt:

      I wonder if the shields in FS1 were more leaky than others. Because when a fighter got hit by a blob it usually hurt. There's no 64x time compression either. Though in both games, it's really the fighters that are the threat not the ships. With the possible exception of the Aeolus.

 

Offline Androgeos Exeunt

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
Even the Adv. Effects BFRed?

It looks the same as the standard BFRed. EIther that or my adveffects.vp is smoking a different kind of crack. :p
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Offline Droid803

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
Even the Adv. Effects BFRed?

It looks the same as the standard BFRed. EIther that or my adveffects.vp is smoking a different kind of crack. :p

Should look something like this:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,25406.msg1134535.html#msg1134535

(though that's not a particularly good shot of the rippling energy stuff...
(´・ω・`)
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
Oh come on.

FS2's atmosphere was like a turkey shoot or a mock battle compared to FS1's. In FS2 I always felt the situation was under control, and the Shivans never even broke through to Epsilon Pegasi or Vega. In fact they were less of a challenge to defeat than the NTF, their fighters were piss weak and they didn't seem anywhere near as cool as the FS1 Shivans. The tacky nebula and weird color changing effects of the Subach HL-7 gave a really weird "This is just a game" feel.

I disagree entirely, but I don't think it's because you're stupid or anything. I felt that FS1 felt like the turkey shoot or mock battle and FS2 seemed much more urgent. The diversity of perception!

Perhaps because I played FS2 first?

[ause they didn't really try. We all saw the juggernauts - they could have exterminated us if they'd wanted to. FS2's Shivans were, to me, actually far more interesting than FS1's because I got the distinct impression that we weren't their main concern. They had bigger things to deal with and we were just a thorn in their side. That feeling of smallness, of being almost irrelevant, was far more meaningful to me than anything FS1 evoked.

Yes, yes! I agree. Also, the general 'moral' of the FS2 story is about the dangers of hubris. That's why the GTVA had to succeed for a while, from a narrative perspective.

Plus, it's clever, because I think many fans probably expected a bravura counterstrike against the Shivans after FS1, and for a while FS2 seemed set to deliver on that. And then it shoved the cosmic nothingness of mankind right into the player's face.

 

Offline karajorma

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
It also didn't fall into the "The enemy are back, with a bigger weapon. But you'll figure out how to beat that one too by the end" trap that so many sequels fall into. That's something fairly new in comparison with FS1's plotline.
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Offline NGTM-1R

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
In Freespace 1 it felt like a game of chess, with a finite amount of resources, and even the loss of pawns was felt. In Freespace 2, strategy was mostly "We're going to throw a fleet at it and hope it goes away."

But that's not a gameplay issue. It's a storytelling one.

As long as we're waxing long on atmospherics, to be blunt I've seen scenario packs for Harpoon Classic that tear either FS to shreds on this. One I recall in particular was basically the chronicle of the Royal Norwegian Navy during a general war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Even with Harpoon's very serious storytelling limitations (basically, all you got was the scenario-select screen briefing texts) and being unable to really track the status of ships from scenario to scenario, it conveyed the feeling of being overwhelmed that FS1 was reaching for (and admittedly, achieved) far, far better. Some of the official expansions were single set campaigns as well, and they were good; good enough I remember them more clearly than any of the missions for either FreeSpace. (I can probably name more Harpoon Classic scenarios then I can FS missions...and it's no accident a number of my own borrow their names; FS1 and FS2 often took a turn for the too obscure.)

Now, this isn't totally tangential. It brings me to the real problem with FreeSpace in this sense: scale.

FreeSpace, both of them, is trying to tell a story from a viewpoint where you can't see its shape.  The view from your cockpit is a tiny one, encompassing very little space or time. This is partly, or perhaps entirely, its own fault, because FS has the tools to widen the viewpoint. Harpoon Classic does it with nothing more than its own equivalent of command briefings. (And that's all it has!) FreeSpace 1 came closer to the Harpoon model with its CBs the FS2 did, because it kept you more informed on the goings-on outside your tiny viewpoint, and consequently, it better conveyed its choice of atmospherics and scale. FS2 is replete with ships you never see again, cruisers and even destroyers going up in flames, and so on because the designers veered in a different direction in trying to convey the sense of scale and atmosphere. Instead of trying to create the illusion of a war off the screen, they tried to compact the war entirely onto the screen. This was seriously detrimental, as doing so gave the player ridiculous power since they're always present and usually involved and lead to the jadedness WMC aludes to. But there is worse.

Alpha 1's experience was supposed to be, well, everything. But they couldn't make it that way because of the scale of the view from your cockpit; that Alpha 1 missed absolutely nothing in a campaign as large and as long as FS2 portrays is impossible. They tried to make some concessions to this early in FS2, and there was an occasional spasm of it later on (the command brief detailing the NTF's suicide run to Gamma Drac comes to mind), but in the end they simply couldn't accomplish what they set out to accomplish storywise and cram everything into the view from a fightercraft cockpit. Even making the effort seriously damaged conveying the story to the player.



...And I think I've broken some sort of cosmic writer's law by finding a situation where you should have told rather than shown.

« Last Edit: September 03, 2008, 01:13:12 am by NGTM-1R »
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Offline eliex

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
So is FS1 the introduction of a new race that could destroy the GTA/PVN in a blink with the Lucifer with the objective of "SAVE YOUR RACE, OR YOU'LL END UP LIKE THE ANCIENTS", superior forces etc, but FS2 is more of a information campaign, with missions implying Shivans have a bigger enemy, or they have some hidden objective hidden up their sleeve.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
In Freespace 1 it felt like a game of chess, with a finite amount of resources, and even the loss of pawns was felt. In Freespace 2, strategy was mostly "We're going to throw a fleet at it and hope it goes away."

But that's not a gameplay issue. It's a storytelling one.

As long as we're waxing long on atmospherics, to be blunt I've seen scenario packs for Harpoon Classic that tear either FS to shreds on this. One I recall in particular was basically the chronicle of the Royal Norwegian Navy during a general war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Even with Harpoon's very serious storytelling limitations (basically, all you got was the scenario-select screen briefing texts) and being unable to really track the status of ships from scenario to scenario, it conveyed the feeling of being overwhelmed that FS1 was reaching for (and admittedly, achieved) far, far better. Some of the official expansions were single set campaigns as well, and they were good; good enough I remember them more clearly than any of the missions for either FreeSpace. (I can probably name more Harpoon Classic scenarios then I can FS missions...and it's no accident a number of my own borrow their names; FS1 and FS2 often took a turn for the too obscure.)

Now, this isn't totally tangential. It brings me to the real problem with FreeSpace in this sense: scale.

FreeSpace, both of them, is trying to tell a story from a viewpoint where you can't see its shape.  The view from your cockpit is a tiny one, encompassing very little space or time. This is partly, or perhaps entirely, its own fault, because FS has the tools to widen the viewpoint. Harpoon Classic does it with nothing more than its own equivalent of command briefings. (And that's all it has!) FreeSpace 1 came closer to the Harpoon model with its CBs the FS2 did, because it kept you more informed on the goings-on outside your tiny viewpoint, and consequently, it better conveyed its choice of atmospherics and scale. FS2 is replete with ships you never see again, cruisers and even destroyers going up in flames, and so on because the designers veered in a different direction in trying to convey the sense of scale and atmosphere. Instead of trying to create the illusion of a war off the screen, they tried to compact the war entirely onto the screen. This was seriously detrimental, as doing so gave the player ridiculous power since they're always present and usually involved and lead to the jadedness WMC aludes to. But there is worse.

Alpha 1's experience was supposed to be, well, everything. But they couldn't make it that way because of the scale of the view from your cockpit; that Alpha 1 missed absolutely nothing in a campaign as large and as long as FS2 portrays is impossible. They tried to make some concessions to this early in FS2, and there was an occasional spasm of it later on (the command brief detailing the NTF's suicide run to Gamma Drac comes to mind), but in the end they simply couldn't accomplish what they set out to accomplish storywise and cram everything into the view from a fightercraft cockpit. Even making the effort seriously damaged conveying the story to the player.



...And I think I've broken some sort of cosmic writer's law by finding a situation where you should have told rather than shown.



I loved Harpoon.

Again, though, I have to say that I thought FS2 succeeded perfectly in storytelling. The fact that the cockpit presents only a tiny slice of the war was perfect in making the player feel small, almost insignificant. And I thought the chaos -- 'cruisers and destroyers going up in flames' -- just implied that the war at large was furious. I also thought the command briefings were much better than FS2.

It's easy to become jaded and believe that the player has too much power in FS2 -- but when playing on Hard or Insane it's simply not true. Even a Fenris is dangerous.

So, yes, I just want to say that a lot of this analysis is obviously a matter of opinion.

 

Offline Joey_X

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Re: What is your favorite cannon campaign?
I remember getting both games when they first came out. I was a fanboy of FS1 for the longest time but FS2 pretty much conquered in superiority. Graphics, beams, squads, bigger ships, and the music - all had me sold on FS2 being overall the greater one.

Aside from the Lucifer, anything bigger than a bomber was pretty much rendered useless in FS1 (other than playing a role story-wise). FS1 secondaries were crap. I probably wasted 80% of my secondary firepower on fighters and bombers because of the lack of maneuverability of each missile. I was really glad Volition improved this in FS2.

Also, I'm really glad FS2 actually had humanistic characters as an element of the story: names that were referenced throughout the campaign and playing a major role. (Petrarch, Bosch, Snipes, and Khafre - to an extent)

In FS1 it's like "I'm so and so... here's what you're doing in this mission. And you'll never hear mention of my name again." In FS2 it's like "I'm so and so and you know who is up to no good. Or they might be in trouble." etc.



Might I add, the Ancients' cutscenes initially did not make sense to me until the campaign actually made reference of "an extinct race known as the 'Ancients'". So then I found myself replaying those cutscenes, trying to figure out what part of the story I have been missing because I didn't understand who the Ancients were.