[Woolie Wool]

Yes there is. At any rate, there are probably only going to be two or three targeting controls (probably equivalents for E, H, and B) with the computer weighing threats and sorting them by which ones are the most immediate threat to your mission objective. There's simply no room for all those buttons on a controller and it's the most expendable part of the control scheme. ETS and shield redirection are more likely to be present in the PC version and computer-managed in the console version. Micromanaging your energy distribution is probably something the computer can do better than you can anyway.

[karajorma]

Well in this case the "instructor" would be a brief popup screen that explains the basics of something, rather than the mind-numbingly, soul-crushing, unbelievably dull voiceovers from the TSM modules, who is easily the worst training instructor dude in any game I've ever played.

I never had a problem with the instructor so this is just you assuming that your issues with him are universal. As far as I'm concerned he was pretty much spot on for what I'd expect from a GTVA instructor.

As for the screen full of keys, how many of them are mostly redundant targeting keys like "target target's target" or "target cargo" or things the player doesn't need to know right away, like shield and energy management (hell, why not just add an option for automatic management?).

And when exactly do you intend to teach them to the player then? If you try to introduce them during the first few active missions the player will miss them or forget them very easily as they're going to be swamped with other new keys while busy trying not to get killed. And if you don't introduce them straight away you run the risk of still being busy breaking immersion halfway into the game because there are controls you've forgotten to tell the player about or which weren't actually necessary until that point.

On top of that, the middle of a mission is not the place to get in-depth explanations of how stuff works. That might be fine for some controls but some of the controls required 2 or 3 messages to explain in full, so unless you're willing to have the player go away with a crappier understanding of what that particular key actually does, an in-game explanation is the wrong choice.

Finally there is an absolutely massive point you are missing. The fact that FS2 put all the boring learning into tutorial missions meant that it could hit the ground running when you actually got to the first mission. This greatly increases the replay value of the mission. Surrender, Belisarius! is a good, playable mission (albeit on the easy side) precisely because the player is expected to have already grasped the basics of dogfighting. By the time you get to The Romans Blunder all the stops have been pulled out and the game is simply running at normal difficulty (as evidenced by the number of people who can't get past it on Insane).
 Ignore the tutorial and the earlier missions become fairly boring and predictable. Taking your example for instance, who the hell is going to want to play that again once they know how to fly? And the following mission is going to be equally boring cause you've not taught the player any of the basics for capship attacks meaning that they either have to be very easy or simply missed out for the first couple of missions.

Are you seriously expecting a set of tutorials for the single player game to prepare people for high-level multiplayer play?

Of course he isn't. Congratulations on missing his entire point.

He was on about the fact that the tutorials are much better preparation for multi than the methods you suggest for the reasons I gave above.

[NGTM-1R]

Personally, I wouldn't mind knowing a few more. Like isn't there a button that lets you target fighters attacking a friendly ship?

g

[QuantumDelta]

Target the ship -> Press G, shows target (targeting)attacking friendlies, works in reverse too (shows you friendlies (targeting)attacking hostiles).

And actually Woolie, I have a mission which does just that, it has no narration though and it's probably a mission that would frustrate people who aren't commited to mastering the game.
I had to ask for a new piece of functionality to be added to the game to do it properly though.

- R is a very useful button too, K as well.

All of the orders can be short-keyed (defaulted to Shift-A/S/D/P/Z/X/C/J/E/W/I)
Nothing is bound to D, yet equalise energy is bound to Alt-D.
V isn't that useful when sniping from long range for a combination of reasons (reticle isn't exactly centred + multi subsystem/turrets in similar places + V doesn't distinguish between nearside and un-hittable targets on the other side of the ship >.>).
Honestly buttons I *regularly* use in a coop on insane;
Ctrl, Space, Tab, 684279(numpad), E, Q, Z, D, H, R, V, K, Y, G, B, N, S, F, Alt-R, Shift-R, the shift combinations mentioned above, 123456789 (above the qwerty part of the keyboard though I tend to only use 3 heavily in that), home, insert, delete, end, page up, page down, arrow keys, F5-12, backspace, /, shift-/, ., ,, and I'll always press L once per mission.
Occasional usage of F4 for important stuff, F3 used to make the other F keys work.
Then 1 for typing to other players and all the external camera angles I use too.
And Shift-End gets a fair bit of usage on some missions too.

Bonus points for spotting the obvious odd one out.
In TvT this is somewhat simplified since I don't use E, R, V, K, B, N, any of the AI orders (apart from depart) even remotely as much.

Nevermind that all of this is assumed knowledge in multi there are a hell of a lot of anti missile and advanced turning techniques that you need to learn too, as well as shot timings (TvT furballs happen more in jousts amongst skilled players than tail-scampering like flight sims, though to unskilled observers this will still look like LOTS of circles).

And for a lot of people who played the game, for a long time, multi was all there was to the game.
If a proper and well structured mission was made it could save a lot of newbies a lot of embarrassment since a fair few of them come in (even having beaten the game on insane) expecting to be the beesknees, and fewer still - but a significant number of those just wont get it through their heads they're not particularly good until you crush them utterly (though the ones that pay attention when you do that tend to learn fairly quickly, especially if you explain after you beat them 11-0 in a game where 1on1 is intrinsically fair).

You're quite right I could have played through both FS1 AND 2 without the tutorial but it;
A) Made my first playthrough smoother.
B) Introduced me to the style of narration in the game in a natural way.
Quite a lot of subsequent games went on to do this as well.
The most recent I played that made a big thing of it, was CoD4.
A console version of this game would be so stripped down and barren it'd barely be any different to playing freelancer.
It wouldn't be freespace anymore, nor is that the generation a game like this should cater to.

[Mura]

Like Mr. Vowel said, I don't think you can have fast paced and open-ended gaming in the same box. RPGs quite honestly about grinding. Whether your grinding by whacking monsters and getting XP, or whether you're grinding by mining some asteroids or hauling cargo here and there basically you spend a lot of time essentially "levelling up". There's nothing fast paced about that.

And quite honestly, what is there to do in the Freespace universe anyway?? Despite the frequency of pirates in 3rd party campaigns, I don't think most peace time adventures are going to see a lot of action. So what will the player be doing?? When there's no war going on they're just going to be flying around doing jack all and when the war does start then it's going to be mission after mission. So . . .

despite being off-topic now, i want to share the experience of a friend on EVE-online.

Code: [Select]

<NovaJinx> holy ****
<NovaJinx> the most epic adventure ever
<NovaJinx> this is why I started playing games
01<mura> <.<
<NovaJinx> hmm
<NovaJinx> it's not like it matters if I spam for a bit
<NovaJinx> so let me just copy and paste the whole thing
<NovaJinx> 22:27 !NovaJinx • alright
<NovaJinx> 22:27 !NovaJinx • time for some blockade running
<NovaJinx> 22:27 !NovaJinx • wish me luck
<NovaJinx> 22:27 !EvilDango • lol
<NovaJinx> 22:27 !NovaJinx • only 2 hours left in this contract
<NovaJinx> 22:27 !EvilDango • fish is going to get raped
<NovaJinx> 22:27 !NovaJinx • I have to get the goods out there by then or I lose 4 million
<NovaJinx> 22:27 !EvilDango • i mean nova
<NovaJinx> 22:28 !NovaJinx • I don't mind if I get ransomed
<NovaJinx> 22:28 !NovaJinx • I can pay my way out and still profit a million or two
<NovaJinx> 22:29 !EvilDango • lolz
<NovaJinx> 22:29 !NovaJinx • it's just that if there's some fag gate camper who only kills everything he sees
<NovaJinx> 23:26 !NovaJinx • holy ****ing **** guys
<NovaJinx> 23:26 !NovaJinx • this **** was epic
<NovaJinx> 23:30 !NovaJinx • the godforsaken contract was a trap
<NovaJinx> 23:30 !EvilDango • lol
<NovaJinx> 23:30 !NovaJinx • it required me to deliver stuff to a station that was actually owned by private corporation and had no public access
<NovaJinx> 23:31 !EvilDango • nova likes traps
<NovaJinx> 23:31 !NovaJinx • so I arrived at the station and it wouldn't let me dock
<NovaJinx> 23:31 !EvilDango • haha
<NovaJinx> 23:31 !NovaJinx • a bunch of pirates jump in and open fire at me
<NovaJinx> 23:31 !NovaJinx • I take a look at the local channel and it's full of people, usually 0.0 sectors are near empty
<NovaJinx> 23:31 !NovaJinx • I turn around and escape back to the jump gate
<NovaJinx> 23:31 !EvilDango • haha
<NovaJinx> 23:31 !NovaJinx • only to hit a warp-blocking field
<NovaJinx> 23:32 !NovaJinx • and someone on the local chan says "get the badger! [my ship type, a slow hauler] it's in the bubble!"
<NovaJinx> 23:32 !NovaJinx • and I'm like FFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU-
<NovaJinx> 23:32 !NovaJinx • my only path back to high security zone blocked
<NovaJinx> 23:32 !NovaJinx • like 20 people after me
<NovaJinx> 23:32 !NovaJinx • so I quickly make a run for antoher gate, no idea where it leads
<NovaJinx> 23:33 !NovaJinx • they had counted on my noobness and my slow ship that I wouldn't make it to another gate, so it wasn't blockaded
<NovaJinx> 23:33 !NovaJinx • I jump into a system, local chan show's there's only one other player there
<NovaJinx> 23:34 !NovaJinx • I warp to a random planet to examine maps to find another route to safe space
<NovaJinx> 23:34 !EvilDango • lol
<NovaJinx> 23:34 !NovaJinx • the guy on local says "Welcome to 0.0 [the lowest security area in the game]"
<NovaJinx> 23:34 !EvilDango • haha
<NovaJinx> 23:34 !NovaJinx • and I'm like "I hope you're not on my ass like the x^5 people behind me who set me up with a contract"
<NovaJinx> 23:34 !EvilDango • did you get raped there
<NovaJinx> 23:34 !NovaJinx • then I see like 20 people enter the local chan
<NovaJinx> 23:35 !NovaJinx • I choose a random gate and run there, then jump out
<NovaJinx> 23:35 !NovaJinx • I enter a completely empty system
<NovaJinx> 23:35 !NovaJinx • the dude who talked to me before sends a chat invite, I accept it
<NovaJinx> 23:35 !EvilDango • TRAP!!!
<NovaJinx> 23:36 !NovaJinx • asks me where I am and what ship I'm flying and tells me to come back to him, so he can get me out safe
<NovaJinx> 23:36 !NovaJinx • and I'm like "**** you, you're just one of that bunch"
<NovaJinx> 23:36 !EvilDango • haha
<NovaJinx> 23:36 !NovaJinx • and he's like "I'm glad you don't trust anyone out here. But I just hate to see new guys getting scammed"
<NovaJinx> 23:37 !NovaJinx • I consider my chances and understand that there isn't really anything I can lose anymore
<NovaJinx> 23:37 !NovaJinx • so I decide to go with whatever this guy's saying
<NovaJinx> 23:37 !EvilDango • rape?
<NovaJinx> 23:37 !NovaJinx • I jump back to the system where I was before, the pirate bunch is gone
<NovaJinx> 23:38 !NovaJinx • I warp to the guy and well, find out that he's one of the oldest of oldfags in EVE
<NovaJinx> 23:38 !NovaJinx • he has a private station and a ****ing huge-ass carrier
<NovaJinx> 23:38 !EvilDango • lol
<NovaJinx> 23:38 !NovaJinx • he gives me a frigate and tells me to board it, leaving my hauler to him
<NovaJinx> 23:39 !NovaJinx • another guy from his corp come in, apparently gives intel on the system I escaped from
<NovaJinx> 23:39 !NovaJinx • the warp gate to safe area is blocked from all common approach vectors
<NovaJinx> 23:40 !NovaJinx • he heads out and tells me to follow a bit later
<NovaJinx> 23:40 !NovaJinx • somehow he got his ship in the right angle from the gate that's not blocked
<NovaJinx> 23:40 !EvilDango • lol
<NovaJinx> 23:40 !NovaJinx • I warp to him and then to the gate, and I zoom past the pirate blockades
<NovaJinx> 23:40 !NovaJinx • then jump before the pirate guards have any time to react and run for safe space
<NovaJinx> 23:41 !EvilDango • lol lucky you
<NovaJinx> 23:41 !NovaJinx • the guy takes my hauler to the station, he has access to it
<NovaJinx> 23:41 !NovaJinx • delivers the cargo there and tells me to click "Complete" on the scam mission
<NovaJinx> 23:41 !NovaJinx • and BAM, I get 5million reward plus 4mil collateral I paid in advance
<NovaJinx> 23:41 !NovaJinx • mission completed
<NovaJinx> 23:41 !EvilDango • haha
<NovaJinx> 23:42 !NovaJinx • I donate the guy 2.5mil and dock at a safe station
<NovaJinx> 23:42 !NovaJinx • man
<NovaJinx> 23:42 !NovaJinx • I was ****ting bricks out there
<NovaJinx> there
<NovaJinx> you don't see **** like this in WoW
01<mura> holly ****
01<mura> that's awesome
01<mura> i could hear the epic soundtrack in the background playing
<NovaJinx> heh
<NovaJinx> there are two ways to play EVE: like any other MMORPG, which kills you with boredom
<NovaJinx> or like this, risking every damn thing you have and have a ****ing blast at it
It sounds like lot of fun and fast paced to me.

[IronForge]

Its crap. Trust me I played it. More time spent sitting around waiting and ratting than doing anything.

[Akalabeth Angel]

despite being off-topic now, i want to share the experience of a friend on EVE-online.

Hhahahaha.
Let me share with you my friend's experience, as witnessed by me upon a visit to his house.

Situation:
Friend has just completed a quest. Now his ship has to destroy a defenceless base to collect the booty.


I arrive at my friends house, his ship is firing at the base. We talk for about 20 minutes. Every 10 or so minutes he "reloads" his ammo. We leave his house, go walk down to 7-11. Grab some drinks. Come back to his house. He reloads his ship. We talk some more, he shows me all his little metal spaceship figurines he's spent ****loads of money on. He reloads his ship. He talks about the table top game he's going to teach me. He reloads his ship. Then, after about an hour after I arrived, his ship destroys this base.


This is fast paced???????

[Scotty]

Bonus points for spotting the obvious odd one out.

T?

[IronForge]

Eve is damn boring, playing it is biggest mistake of my life, but somehow I like it. However its just to tie me over till I can find a FPS version of eve. Jumpgate may be promising... Basically I'm looking for mmo freelancer.

[Woolie Wool]

Of course he isn't. Congratulations on missing his entire point.

He was on about the fact that the tutorials are much better preparation for multi than the methods you suggest for the reasons I gave above.

No, it isn't. Nothing in a single-player campaign could be anything close to a decent preparation for multi, especially multi as it is practiced a year or two after release. At best you could have a dedicated multiplayer tutorial but that would only be sufficient for casual pub play and would have to be outside of the campaign because otherwise you'd be wasting the SP players' time.

A console version of this game would be so stripped down and barren it'd barely be any different to playing freelancer.
It wouldn't be freespace anymore, nor is that the generation a game like this should cater to.

You know, except for the 3D flight controls and the subsystems and the bombing runs...

The only things that would have to be simplified are targeting controls (I have the idea of bracketing non-targeted ships in gray and putting red "TGT" markers next to critical targets to make it easier to pick foes out with only two or three buttons) and ETS/shield management. Everything else can more or less be ported directly.

Finally there is an absolutely massive point you are missing. The fact that FS2 put all the boring learning into tutorial missions meant that it could hit the ground running when you actually got to the first mission. This greatly increases the replay value of the mission. Surrender, Belisarius! is a good, playable mission (albeit on the easy side) precisely because the player is expected to have already grasped the basics of dogfighting. By the time you get to The Romans Blunder all the stops have been pulled out and the game is simply running at normal difficulty (as evidenced by the number of people who can't get past it on Insane).
 Ignore the tutorial and the earlier missions become fairly boring and predictable. Taking your example for instance, who the hell is going to want to play that again once they know how to fly? And the following mission is going to be equally boring cause you've not taught the player any of the basics for capship attacks meaning that they either have to be very easy or simply missed out for the first couple of missions.

First of all, one of the ideas behind my tutorial system was that once you finished the game you could and likely would turn the tutorials off. And if the first missions are too easy, you can run them at a higher difficulty level where you'll need all the skills you learned the first time around just to survive (yes, I think that FS3 should give mission designers the option of drastically changing the number and behavior of enemies on different difficulty settings.

Also, why is a difficulty curve a bad thing? It seems rather reasonable to me that The Romans Blunder should be a lot easier than Feint! Parry! Riposte!, which should be a lot easier than Argonautica, which should be easier than Clash of the Titans II.

[The E]

First of all, one of the ideas behind my tutorial system was that once you finished the game you could and likely would turn the tutorials off. And if the first missions are too easy, you can run them at a higher difficulty level where you'll need all the skills you learned the first time around just to survive (yes, I think that FS3 should give mission designers the option of drastically changing the number and behavior of enemies on different difficulty settings.

skill-level-at-least says hi.

[Woolie Wool]

That could work, although doing it for a whole mission would be a rather complicated and inefficient way of going about it, but probably the best you could do in FRED2.

[QuantumDelta]

Bonus points for spotting the obvious odd one out.

T?

Heh, Woolie, you're quite wrong, you should come and play the mission me'n'E have been working on for the last fortnight or so.

As for console portage; Honestly, come play some Multi.
A lot of base level skill comes from micromanagement of the shields and ETS, as well as quick target management.
Also, the way you talk about it makes me think you don't really play on hard/insane even on single player because the energy system is REALLY important in a lot of situations.

[karajorma]

No, it isn't. Nothing in a single-player campaign could be anything close to a decent preparation for multi, especially multi as it is practiced a year or two after release. At best you could have a dedicated multiplayer tutorial but that would only be sufficient for casual pub play and would have to be outside of the campaign because otherwise you'd be wasting the SP players' time.

Again you're missing the point.

The FS2 tutorials are better than your method because they actually teach you the lesser used stuff. Your method either teaches it badly or skips it claiming that there is no need to have it.

First of all, one of the ideas behind my tutorial system was that once you finished the game you could and likely would turn the tutorials off. And if the first missions are too easy, you can run them at a higher difficulty level where you'll need all the skills you learned the first time around just to survive (yes, I think that FS3 should give mission designers the option of drastically changing the number and behavior of enemies on different difficulty settings.

And then at some point you have to go back into the options menu and turn the difficulty back down because the missions have finally become more challenging than the easy ones you started with and now the difficulty is way too high.

Congratulations on the poor game design choice. Any campaign where you have to change difficulty levels halfway through is poorly designed as far as I'm concerned.

Also, why is a difficulty curve a bad thing? It seems rather reasonable to me that The Romans Blunder should be a lot easier than Feint! Parry! Riposte!, which should be a lot easier than Argonautica, which should be easier than Clash of the Titans II.

Again, missing the point.

Difficulty curves are completely different from a flat plateau at the start because the missions were designed to be played as a tutorial.

That isn't a curve, it's just poor game design.

[Blue Lion]

First of all, one of the ideas behind my tutorial system was that once you finished the game you could and likely would turn the tutorials off. And if the first missions are too easy, you can run them at a higher difficulty level where you'll need all the skills you learned the first time around just to survive (yes, I think that FS3 should give mission designers the option of drastically changing the number and behavior of enemies on different difficulty settings.

So instead of having a tutorial mission like we have now which you can turn off, you want to incorporate them into the story missions and have the player ramp the difficulty up and down between missions?

It just seems like a lot of work to avoid something you don't even have to do anyways. Fiddling with difficulty levels during a campaign to get an even toughness is just time consuming and unavoidable in that plan because these aren't tutorials you can just skip. These are needed story missions.

[Woolie Wool]

No, I did not say that the player should ramp the difficulty up and down between missions. I said that if you played the campaign (all of it) on Hard, the early missions would only be slightly less difficult than the rest of the campaign. And hitting "Tutorials Off" in the options menu would make all tutorial boxes go away regardless of skill level.

Games do not generally have an "even toughness". They tend to get progressively more difficult as the game progresses. Early missions are easy, later missions are very hard.

[QuantumDelta]

Hold on, since we're at an empass.
Let me put it another way;

Pop-up tutorials are annoying (first time round let alone on replays, and even if you turn them off .. you still know they're there, still get the mental impression of a "DING" or "SHUUNG" or whatever noise the pop-up makes (or worse, none)), they're THE most annoying style of tutorial ever.
Tutorials in mini-pre-campaign are the best way to handle it, FreeSpace/CoD4's is a nice go-between.

But seriously, Pop-ups that detract from flow of gameplay make me want to BURN designers, from the toes up.
The slow kind of burning that makes them think about their demise for a few hours as they roast.
Pop-ups that grab focus are EVEN worse.
Worst computer mechanic that was EVER invented.
And you want to put it into a campaign? Once-only or not, it's still TERRIBLE.

[karajorma]

No, I did not say that the player should ramp the difficulty up and down between missions. I said that if you played the campaign (all of it) on Hard, the early missions would only be slightly less difficult than the rest of the campaign. And hitting "Tutorials Off" in the options menu would make all tutorial boxes go away regardless of skill level.

You are talking about someone who has just completed the game on the default setting of easy having to ramp the game up to hard or even insane just to get some fun out of your non-tutorial, tutorial missions and then after a few missions hitting the real hard/insane difficulty level.

That's idiotic. The first missions would be challenging and then the later ones would be impossible.

[Woolie Wool]

What makes you think the missions with tutorial boxes in them won't themselves get harder as the story progresses? Do you think the game's just going to let nothing happen when it's not in the middle of teaching you something? I don't think a campaign at a fixed or very limited range of difficulty throughout its entire length (or worse, a sudden and severe jump in difficulty right in the middle with no curve at all) is desirable. Players gain skill with continued playing and the difficulty should rise slowly but constantly as the game progresses. The early missions would be actual missions with real combat and real danger (the lack of danger being one of the principal features that makes a lot of people hate training missions), not a Simon Says instructor routine with a few more ships as window dressing. Play it again on Medium and every mission is a bit harder than it was the first time around. Play it on Hard and you'll get Hard, with the difficulty curve becoming more unforgiving as the difficulty level rises.

Half-Life 2 took this to the extreme of diguising its tutorials as something else entirely (like the ball minigame with DOG or the helicopter gunship scene in New Little Odessa) but it still retains its replay value even though it's a lot easier at the beginning than near the end--it actually makes learning things entertaining rather than simple repetition of commands (and it can still be entertaining even if you have the hang of it because it's presented as part of the game and the plot and world are still developing around you). You're told how to do something, then you do a fairly easy version of it, and then harder and harder scenarios are presented as the game goes on.

[Blue Lion]

You are all over the place now. I'm not even sure you even know what you're trying to argue anymore.

What makes you think the missions with tutorial boxes in them won't themselves get harder as the story progresses? Do you think the game's just going to let nothing happen when it's not in the middle of teaching you something?

No one said they wouldn't get harder. What they did say is that the missions that are tutorial are going to have to be easier than they are currently because instead of teaching someone something in a tutorial mission and then sending them off into the real mission to try it, you're cramming both together.

I don't think a campaign at a fixed or very limited range of difficulty throughout its entire length (or worse, a sudden and severe jump in difficulty right in the middle with no curve at all) is desirable.

You're suggesting players learn a new technique in a mission that is specifically designed for players who already know that technique. A mission that teaches you aspect seeking missiles while shooting down ships with said technique is going to be very hard because they're teaching it to you right now!

The difficulty level is going to ramp up because you've been thrown into a mission to use something you haven't used before. This is exactly what you've asked for.

Players gain skill with continued playing and the difficulty should rise slowly but constantly as the game progresses.

Except when you introduce a new feature midgame. If the missions get harder as time goes on, any new feature you bring in will be taught on the hardest mission they've played.

The early missions would be actual missions with real combat and real danger (the lack of danger being one of the principal features that makes a lot of people hate training missions), not a Simon Says instructor routine with a few more ships as window dressing. Play it again on Medium and every mission is a bit harder than it was the first time around. Play it on Hard and you'll get Hard, with the difficulty curve becoming more unforgiving as the difficulty level rises.

Who plays the training missions on medium or hard?

Half-Life 2 took this to the extreme of diguising its tutorials as something else entirely (like the ball minigame with DOG or the helicopter gunship scene in New Little Odessa) but it still retains its replay value even though it's a lot easier at the beginning than near the end--it actually makes learning things entertaining rather than simple repetition of commands (and it can still be entertaining even if you have the hang of it because it's presented as part of the game and the plot and world are still developing around you). You're told how to do something, then you do a fairly easy version of it, and then harder and harder scenarios are presented as the game goes on.

Emphasis mine. You've just described a tutorial mission as they stand now. Your only concern is they flat out tell you it's a tutorial mission. After the 10th time playing Half Life 2, I don't need to do the little tutorial missions no matter how fun you think they are.