[Black Wolf]

Thought I'd start a thread that I'm hoping might develop into a sort of checklist for campaign designers especially, but also mission designers too. When you're playing a campaign, what are the things you find most annoying? Be it a gameplay issue, something that jolts you out of the storyline, breaks suspension of disbelief, whatever. Any little pet peeves that we, as mission and campaign designers, can look out for and correct or avoid.

In particular, i'm looking for things that can be fixed with relatively little effort, but might get overlooked. E.G., you might hate campaigns without voice acting, but that's a major job that requires (potentially) dozens of different people helping out and it's not always practical to get it for every campaign, so that's not neccesarily all that useful. I'm more looking at small things. My own personal ones are:

 - At a campaign level, I always hate it when Species.tbl is left alone. If I'm playing a campaign set 10 years after Capella, I shouldn't read about how the NTF rebellion started 18 months ago. I know most people rarely go into the intelligence section of the tech room, but it is annoying when you do wander in, hoping to find some cool backstory, and nothings been changed.

 - I also really dislike when you have a new fighter (your own or hostile) and it doesn't have its own shield icon. There's no HUD.tbl any more, and they're really simple to make, 5 minute job at most. But it looks so much better than the ones the game generates.

 - At a mission level, I hate it when you have long period of nothing to do. The battle where the Vishnans first arrive inmajor combat in Blue Planet is a good example of this -

Spoiler:

four or five minutes while they toast three Shivan destroyers and you just have to sit there waiting. While they're often vital to the storyline, events like this can often be sped up with some clever mission design.

So who else has one? Please don't be afraid to post - the more you tell us what you don't like, the less chance of these little niggles turning up in the future. I can't speak for every FREDder, of course, but me personally, I'm always keen to find out what people do and don't like so I can make better missions.

[TopAce]

- Typos(!!) and misspelling FS ship names (Collossus, Diemos, Aqutane)
- No escort list or clear indication on what you have to do (such as the Blue Planet "Meet the Vishnans for the first time" mission or ST:R's "Can you guess you must jump out now before you get EMP'd?" mission)
- Giving Subachs and Prom Rs as the default loadout while the Kayser is available.
- Ships sending unimportant messages as "Command" after they have left/been destroyed.
- 15-minute-long missions that you will potentially lose in the 14th minute (a la ST:R "Escort the Faustus to the jump node that's being guarded by a Demon")
- Unpredictable things that make you lose the mission you are supposed to win, a la ST:R "Protect the Karnak" mission.
- (RTB) directives coming up as completed; mission goals completing on startup.
- Command saying "All hostile have been neutralized" after the xth wave of a fighter wing is destroyed: How should they know which wave is the last? (Though I must admit I make this mistake myself sometimes).
- Use of Brief7 for regular missions. This is an apocalyptic theme. Don't use it for a regular convoy escort mission.
- Unnamed jump nodes
- Inconsequential use of capitals in directives/mission goals/mission titles/cargo, etc. Look at the mission goals of Paving the Way and you'll see what I mean. In FS1, you can see "Return To Base," "Return to Base," and "Return to base". FS2 is more or less consistent.
- Superficial treatment of the ship/weapon loadout, such as giving the player 5 Myrmidons while all the customizable ships are Myrmidons. In weapon loadout, it makes little sense to give me 500 Helios torpedoes and only 100 Tempests.
- Overpowered primary weapons that take down anything in a few salvos and drain little weapon energy.
- Overpowered ships, such as interceptors with 6 primary gun banks and the secondary capacity of a Hercules Mk I.
- Wingmen without orders or with a simple "Attack any ship" initial order for the whole duration of the mission.
- Getting a "No debriefing for mission: xxx" debriefing after the very first attempt. It's a clear indication of a poorly designed mission.
- No giving any cargo to transports/containers that are supposed to have some sort of cargo. A transport with "Cargo: Nothing" being sent in to capture an Orion is sort of weird.

[Rodo]

Because of the standart reached by the latest campaigns released I say the final product must be either very polished or original in desing/story.

Most annoying things:

-Fighting wing after wing of enemy fighters with nothing else happening between each wave, or at least between 2 or 3 waves. (a simple "YEAH!" from some of the wingmates at least!)
-Virtually no dialogue or complete lack of it.
-Extensive dialogue while in combat.
-No proper red alert usage (Personal taste, I would rather have my ship at 1% hull and completely out of ammo than a misteriously refitted ship in the second mission).
-Getting a campaign released without a master VP file ,it's own folder and mod.ini provided in the download file (kept me from playing a couple).
-No orders for wingmates (should have those on every step of the mission).
-No RTB directive.
-Annoyingly colorfull backgrounds.


hope it helps you.

[Snail]

All of the above except BW's last one -  I find periods of inactivity can be atmosphere building if done correctly, and TopAce's one about overpowered ships/weapons - Again, if balanced correctly.

Stuff I don't like:

• Things being predicted in a briefing and then turning out exactly how predicted despite there being no logical reason for them to play out in this way. It's jarring and unrealistic. Of course, if it's relatively obvious such as the GTVA luring the Sathanas out using a coordinated system-wide strike, it's alright; however I recall a situation in Neo-Terra Victorious: Emergence (the old demo) in which Bosch says that to build credibility, you have to keep the Iceni's hull integrity >50% or certain ships won't join the cause. And lo and behold, I failed the first time and a bunch of ships turned hostile. Does Bosch have, like, powers of infinite deduction or something?
• Related to one of TopAce's points, use of inappropriate music. In a number of obvious circumstances, like Briefing1 for an important mission.
• Waved wings. It's lazy. It gives me the impression that the mission designer wanted to lengthen his mission with the minimal effort possible. This has the effect of making me feel like the mission isn't progressing for long periods of time. Once again, this can be bearable or even good under certain circumstances, for example forcing the player into killing a destroyer to stop it spewing endless waves of fighters.
• Linked to my first point - Prophetic briefing officers or otherwise the game voice of god-esque things, ie. people who know exactly what's going to happen in a mission and telling you as such. A bit of foreshadowing is k, but if it's even slightly overdone it's bah.
• Cluster**** missions. I know some people like putting chaos into their mission because it's hip or cool or whatever, but I hate them so damn much. Missions in which there are loads of ships to defend and hundreds of fighters/bombers to kill and no indication of what I'm supposed to be doing are so damn annoying.
• Supership trope overuse. Big ships jumping in an vaporizing everything in a second. Overused. Overdone. Annoying. Not fun anymore. Again, if done correctly blahblahblah. But more often than not, it's not done correctly.
• Also related to one of TopAce's points, Cargo: <unknown> for friendly escort ships.

edit - a few more

• Overly cool pilots or whatever. PEOPLE ARE DYING. You do not act like schoolchildren. I absolutely loathe it when people act as if it's high school in a warzone.
• Ships being thrown around like used toilet paper. Each ship is home to more than a thousand people - They won't go down without at least attempting to do something when they know they're dead.
• Also, a ship acting like a collective conscience, as if the person on the communications terminal is speaking for everyone on a ship. 5,000 people don't spontaneously decide to defect to the NTF at the same time.
• Also related to last two points, boarding parties. I often see a ship being boarded and then the entire crew of thousands being killed off by a single Elysium or Argo. It... Doesn't work like that.

[Nemesis6]

* Bad grammar. Not bad as in "I accidentally ended a sentence with a preposition" but rather mistakes caused by using your native language's grammar for whatever reason. It's bad, and it ruins immersion.

* Checking my loadout and seeing rock eyes. Why would I use those when I'm facing giant capital ships with light fighter cover?

* Hearing victory music after a decisive battle, waiting for RTB from command, and then finally jumping out only to be told that I just disgraced the GTVA by deserting the battle and having to play the mission again.

* Random bugs, like a cargo ship I'm tasked with defending finally boarding a station, and suddenly just exploding.

* Having lots of ships to protect. It's a welcome challenge, but I cannot protect a convoy that stretches over 10 kilometers when I'm out-gunned by an entire Shivan armada and all I have is my retarded squad mates.

* Bad dialogue - lol theres a shivan on your plaine lolololol u beleived it. If you can't do meaningful dialogue, just don't.

* The whole "instant mutiny, just add NTF" is indeed a little strange. Theoretically, though, communications could have been sabotaged before the mutiny, allowing a longer battle to take place before the IFF is changed.

* Boardings - How come they work so well? When a ship is boarded, wouldn't defenders pile up at the airlocks, especially when it's the NTF who would rather die fighting?

[General Battuta]

I think one of the assumptions with ship boarding is that your boarding team is a specialized unit of incredibly badass power-armored, exoskeleton-armed marines who are mostly facing comparatively lightly armed onboard security. There may not be enough of these elite boarder types to provide security aboard most ships, although you'd think destroyers would have at least a squad or two.

[Scotty]

- Zero combat dialogue for missions, other than the normal pilot reactions.  To mirror the above, PEOPLE ARE DYING. 
- Missions with zero plausibility.  Looking at you Derelict, with your ****tonnes of pirates.
- Supercap battles.  Just in general.  I want to play a fighter game, defending the Colossus by yourself is a no-go.
- Overused big ships.  "Oh, this destroyer just went down" should NOT be what is said when one of your ships goes down.
- Endless waves.  Come ON people, if you are extending the mission for the hell of it, at least try to vary the ships you will be blowing the hell out of.
- Zero mission dialogue, or bad use of it.  These guys are pilots, not your neighbor out for a stroll.  Maybe it's just me, but when I FRED something to come out near the player or a friendly ship, I have my pilots announce the distance, and, if triggered by a waypoint, bearing.  For example, if your fighters are patrolling waypoints, and a sentry gun activates just as you hit one, your friends should be giving a detailed report, not just "Hey, a sentry gun."
- Ditto the Command reading for dead ships in game.  If your ship dies, FRED it to not play, or have someone else say it.
- Zero wingmen build-up.  It doesn't have to be major, just a couple sentences describing who is DYING next to you each mission.
- Overused wingmen build-up.  They shouldn't be a God Mode Sue.  Basically, I try to create a family almost, and when more than a couple die in mission, I will actually change the debrief to reflect that.
- Bad Escort Missions.  Why the hell is the cargo I'M[/i] always guarding attacked by entire flippin' FLIGHTS of fighters.  Here's a novel concept:  an escort mission that helps build atmosphere, with MAYBE a wing or two of ships, and a fairly short timeframe.

[Mongoose]

- Missions with zero plausibility.  Looking at you Derelict, with your ****tonnes of pirates.

Not to nitpick, but a lot of those weren't actually real pirates.

One or two of these have been mentioned to some extent, but here are a few of my own pet peeves:

• Having every enemy fighter and their mothers be focused almost completely on me, especially when I'm trying to complete a separate objective.  Dedicating the odd wing to going after Alpha wing is all well and good, but when you have endless waves of fighters harassing you, it really kills mission enjoyment.  I'm not exactly the best pilot in the world, so there have been many instances where I've run a real risk of dying, and even done so, simply because I've been numerically overwhelmed.  A good example of this in action was much of Crossing the Styx; all you'd really have to do in one or two of those missions was jump out, but because there were endless waves of fighters on your tail, that became challenging in and of itself.  I wound up having to fly several thousand meters away from a jump node at full engine power, then back again by a roundabout route, just to open up enough distance to complete my warp without getting killed.
  
  (Though I don't think it represents bad mission design at all, a lesser example of the above would be the Hades-disarming mission in Procyon Insurgency.  Killing off the required number of turrets was a feat in and of itself, but on the playthroughs where my wingmen seemed particularly incompetent, it was made even more difficult by the enemy fighter wings seemingly fixated on me alone.)
• Related to the above, those endless fighter wings.  99 times out of 100, they're little more than time filler.  The player should not spend a good five minutes taking on the same enemy wing.
• As was mentioned before, the twenty-minute mission with a very real chance of failing during the nineteenth minute.  These are particularly trying when the first five minutes consist of an extended dialog sequence.  Beyond maybe a playthrough or two, getting the player stuck on a particular mission is the very best way to kill campaign immersion.  If you're going to craft a super-long mission, try to come up with some way of using keypresses on subsequent playthroughs to allow the player to skip ahead to the relevant section of the mission.
• As a few people mentioned, a lack of in-mission dialog.  At this point, given the amount of time I've spent playing FS2, the amount of pleasure I obtain from the sheer mechanics of blowing up enemy fighters is somewhat limited (unless it's something ridiculous like SGWP2, of course).  I'm primarily still interested in FreeSpace because of its immense potential as an in-game storytelling medium, which means that I most enjoy missions that utilize said medium to its utmost.  Going out on a bog-standard escort mission with no dialog beyond built-in messages is the best way to completely bore me.
• Missions that almost require a previous playthrough in order to complete successfully.  Unless he's an utterly terrible pilot, the player should always have the ability to complete all of the main objectives the first time through the mission, as that's the best way to avoid the immersion-breaking that I mentioned earlier.  I shouldn't have to know ahead of time that I need to be X meters in front of ship Y in time Z in order to disarm the forward beam of destroyer Q.  Mission events should be conducive to allowing the player to display his or her own natural skills, not their knowledge from a previous failed attempt.  The obvious exception to this is FS2's "Apocalypse," because the event in question there serves a very effective thematic purpose.
  
  (The ST:R mission gets a pass too, because Goober being mean amused me. )
• I'll completely agree with BlackWolf's point about the non-use of the Intelligence entries and Tech Room.  They're relatively minor details in the grand scheme of things, but they add a whole bunch of immersion for those of us who seek them out.
• My biggest pet peeve is probably misuse of default loadout options, as a few other people have mentioned.  In a perfect world, I should never have to even look at my ship selection and weapons loadout, much less fiddle around with them.  It's one thing if I feel like swapping out my ship or primary weapon due to personal preference, or because I think a different missile will help me complete that one bonus objective I'm having trouble with, but the default ship and weapons options should allow me to complete all the objectives the first time through.  Hell, one could argue that the defaults should be the best choice, since Command presumably knows what sort of mission you'll be performing.  Obviously, red-alert missions are an exception.

That's all I can think of right now, but there are probably one or two other annoyances I'll come up with later.

[Droid803]

- Lack of Directives: Don't make me figure out what to do - I'll probably do the strangest thing (ie. immediately go after the largest enemy ship and disable/disarm it the proceed to slowly drain its health with my primaries).
- Long Missions: Anything over 10 minutes is too long. My arm gets tired my fingers start hurting, in addition to being a complete bore, and annoying PITA when you fail near the end.
- Long chatter before combat: A huge PITA when you die cause even if you time compress, you get a huge backlog of messages and you can't see the new ones, leading you to fail yet again...ugh. I'd prefer silence TBH.

Oh if shield icons are so easy, would you mind doing a few for me? I find them pretty time consuming with the stupid "all pcx's must have same pallete" rule for anis.

[NGTM-1R]

Default loads on your own, friendly, and enemy ships.

STOP DOING THE DEFAULTS YOU CADS. IF THERE ARE BETTER WEAPONS AVAILABLE WE'RE GOING TO LOAD THEM OUT ON US AND OUR WINGMATES.

And default enemy loadouts are not always appropriate to the mission. I recall a particular transport escort where the defaults cause a wing of assault fighters to jump in and spam swarm missiles almost instantly at the 'sport. Mission fails.

[CP5670]

A number of campaigns I have played in the past had stories that simply did not seem realistic and believable. Major story angles are not fleshed out and explained sufficiently well, people have odd, out-of-place dialogue and don't react to events in a plausible way, and there is no sense that anything is happening in the game universe outside of your own missions. These kinds of things are probably the most common issues I see, to varying degrees.

I don't like long strings of similar missions that are either filler or only exist to build up the story, especially if they have minimal combat. The missions in a campaign should all be memorable in some way. They don't all need to add important events to the story (in fact, if they all do, it will usually hurt plausibility), but they should be able to offer interesting gameplay and a unique tactical situation in some way. The main campaign does this pretty well.

Finally, I hate having the throttle pre-set at something above 0%, unless there is a very good reason for it. This affects many Volition missions and gets annoying if you discover it in the middle of a fight. You also have reset it every time you restart the mission.

[Nuclear1]

I agree wholeheartedly with everyone on the NTF InstaMutiny stuff.  I don't know how many campaigns I've played where all it takes is either A) a short little transmission from an NTF ship or, worse, B) just a few NTF ships to warp in to cause ships to defect.  The whole idea has just gotten old and stupid; unless you've built up the atmosphere and characters to the point where defection is believable.  BR did that well in one of the FoEP missions.

Also agree on the one person speaking for everyone on a ship of 5,000.  I'm guilty of it myself, but yet I think that has enhanced a lot of campaigns; Homesick, Sync, and Transcend wouldn't have worked IMO if you didn't see the Custodian, Persistence, and Generation et al. as individual characters in a novel.  As long as it's corvette or below, I can usually forgive someone for doing that.  And still, that may just be because I do it a lot too.

My personal gripes:
- Formulaic stories. I'm getting sick and tired of the same storyline over and over again.  Blue Planet and Ransom's campaigns were welcome departures, but the vast majority of the other campaigns just follow one basic premise:
Shivans return: HAY you guys I'm fighting pirates in GENERIC PODUNK SYSTEM nothing exciting OH WAIT something mysterious WAIT there's SOMETHING BAD GONNA HAPPEN but Command wants to explore further anyway uh oh WE BROUGHT BACK THE SHIVANS again DEPLOY SUPERWEAPON srsly dudes top of its class nothing can beat it YAY "STOPPED" SHIVANS let's keep going OH CRAP MORE SHIVANS but it's ok the superweapon BOOOOOOOOM oops better start running DEUS EX MACHINA wowwee barely survived that one "GENERIC PHILOSOPHICAL STATEMENT" about humanity and our arrogance.

- Filler enemies.  Pirates, Rebellion of the Month, SHIVANS!!!!!! If there's going to be an enemy, give them a purpose, not just to provide cannonfodder and cheap entertainment.

[shiv]

- Use of Brief7 for regular missions. This is an apocalyptic theme. Don't use it for a regular convoy escort mission.

This is a sin! I compleately agree. This track is too epic for regular missions. It was always used before great things that player had to do - Before destroying Ravana, After destruction of colossus, etc, etc

-Annoyingly colorfull backgrounds.

Looks like I have to check my Earth Defense mission and de-saturate some backgrounds...

[FreeSpaceFreak]

- Something very grim happens in the mission (e.g. The Colossus is destroyed in Their Finest Hour) the debriefing mourns the loss of thousands upon thousands of lives... and in the background, there's the victory music happily playing. It's put me off ever since I first played the main campaign, and it still does.
It can be fixed using a failing secondary objective, that's all it needs. Although it would be nice to be able to specify debriefing music in FRED.

[Snail]

It can be fixed using a failing secondary objective, that's all it needs. Although it would be nice to be able to specify debriefing music in FRED.

You can, but you have to use notepad. As I recall there are a few lines which allow you to specify Average, Failure and Success music independently. I guess the effect could be achieved by setting all of them to Failure.

[Spoon]

As a few people mentioned, a lack of in-mission dialog.  At this point, given the amount of time I've spent playing FS2, the amount of pleasure I obtain from the sheer mechanics of blowing up enemy fighters is somewhat limited (unless it's something ridiculous like SGWP2, of course).  I'm primarily still interested in FreeSpace because of its immense potential as an in-game storytelling medium, which means that I most enjoy missions that utilize said medium to its utmost.  Going out on a bog-standard escort mission with no dialog beyond built-in messages is the best way to completely bore me.

This, I cannot stress this point enough

[Uchuujinsan]

Generally, don't make your missions to hard (or at least no fake difficulty):
- I've failed campaigns for unbelievable stupid reasons like a ship jumping in at the very end of a 20 minute mission, and beaming the ship im supposed to protect instantly to death, just because I didn't play on easy, but on medium.
- Fighting against endless waves of fighters isn't only boring and not very immersive, it's imho also one of the main reasons many campaigns are completely unbalanced on higher difficulties.
- It should never be necessary to remember the spawn points of enemies to complete the mission. Spawning enemies close enough to the transport to kill it almost immediatly if you haven't waited at exactly this position already is a stupid idea.

Apart from that, I can only agree with everyone else.

Well, except maybe the part with "Zero wingmen build-up". That's not important for me.

[Sushi]

Missions/campaigns that are broken on higher difficulty levels.

Missions that don't take into account the possibility that the player will shoot out every beam turret on every enemy capship as soon as it appears (given the chance). Also, missions that require you to do exactly that, but never tell you so explicitly.

[CP5670]

- Formulaic stories. I'm getting sick and tired of the same storyline over and over again.

I would rather see a generic story that is presented well (like FS1) than an original premise that is poorly detailed and doesn't feel believable. The latter is a lot more common than the former.

- Something very grim happens in the mission (e.g. The Colossus is destroyed in Their Finest Hour) the debriefing mourns the loss of thousands upon thousands of lives... and in the background, there's the victory music happily playing. It's put me off ever since I first played the main campaign, and it still does.
It can be fixed using a failing secondary objective, that's all it needs. Although it would be nice to be able to specify debriefing music in FRED.

This gets annoying, but it's more of a problem with the way FS2 handles debriefing music than with the mission itself. There are ways to work around it though. In PI, I simply removed the debriefing music out of music.tbl and put in the music files as debriefing voices, so I could specify which music is used on each stage.

[Nemesis6]

No idea how I forgot this:

* I sacrifice half of my wing in an assault on secondary targets of opportunity, only to have these ignored on the briefing in a very strange way. It'll go
"blah blah blah, blah blah blah, as tragic as the losses were, things are looking even more grim in..."
After that verbal beatdown, suddenly the next paragraph starts going - "Along with that, you also helped eliminate the SCv..." as if a paragraph is missing before that one, detailing another positive thing I did.


On the subject of mutiny again, I have one idea of a more plausible scenario - NTF operatives temporarily take over the communications and weapons subsystems and call for support. They could easily sabotage the warp drive, so unless the crew yields, the NTF reinforcements will either kill the crew, replace them, or just destroy the entire ship. Their call.