Derelict had one mission that was just shooting down waves after waves of pirates. Then one of your cruisers jumped in and MORE pirates jumped in, wave after wave. It was just a filler mission that had nothing to do with the main story too.
Because pirates are best known for their vast numbers of ships and their suicide tactics. ...right?
I'd tell you the mission name/number but Derelict has a lot of missions and the names are nothing to go by, also it has been a while since I played it.
But that pretty much sums up my beef with Derelict as a campaign, 'filler' missions and suicide pirates waves. More is not always better, Derelict would go up in rating for me if it would have just focused more on the story missions.
Uh...you apparently missed a rather large story point in Derelict's plot. For the sake of the five people out there who haven't yet played it, I'll spoiler-mark my explanation:
Most of the pirates you face throughout Derelict's campaign weren't actual pirates. Instead, they were mercenaries hired by Morgan Technologies, or even MT forces themselves, operating under the guise of pirates to destabilize the region in an attempt to further MT's goals. The reveal of this is sort of a major plot point in the campaign, and its implications are far-reaching. For instance, the mission you're talking about featured a large number of MT drone fighters (drones, not actual pirates), to the point where even your fellow pilots were commenting on the fact that no pirate group could have these sorts of resources, a foreshadowing of later events. In-mission, the drones were serving as a diversionary tactic to cover the theft of several Ares-class fighters by mercenaries, and in a more general sense, the mission served as a plot mechanism to get the player into the subspace node between Tau Sigma and Altair, where the big reveal of the Nyarlathotep could take place. You may not have enjoyed the actual playability of the mission, but it definitely fit in with the story as a whole and served to set up later events.
And if you're going to fling about the term "filler" to any mission that doesn't directly advance the plot, then you might as well levy it at a good third of the missions in the FS1 campaign, and a decent chunk of those in FS2 to boot...unless, of course, you can find some overwhelming significance in hunting down Vasudan wings in an asteroid field, or protecting a few fleeing Vasudan transports from NTF fighters. Not every mission in a campaign has to irrevocably advance the plot; good design also leaves room for more mundane missions that help contribute to the development of the campaign's characters or the further fleshing-out of its atmosphere.
(Nice to know that that word isn't only horribly misused in the anime-manga community, though.
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