What do I want in the rest of the WIH campaign? Well... in no particular order..
1) GTVA capture of strategic UEF reserves of smug, leading to UEF soldiers suffering crucial shortages of self-absorption, righteousness, and arrogance.
2) Included framerate optimization guide. I dunno what settings you guys are using, but I have to dial it waaaay down from AoA's levels to get >10 FPS in the big fights, which ruins the eyecandy. And makes me die a lot.
3) Total UEF destruction. Carpetnuking Earth, dismantling their bizarre culture, or just unilateral surrender. Whatever, I'm easy, as long as they
cease their whining. My desperate, desperate fear is that Laporte will succeed, destroying the GTVA, and
all of humanity will whinge to the incredible extent that the earthers do.
4) Samuel "Daddy Issues" Bei as the main character. I know his plot arc got wrapped up nicely in AoA, but I was just getting used to being in his boots.
5) The psychic uberbeings choose a much more sympathetic avatar. I thought Sam Bei was goofy...
6) Less Simms/Laporte relationship, more secondary character banter. The trip to Mars was awesome writing that made a solid effort towards reversing my attitude towards the UEF characters. Apart from that I was genuinely astounded by the characterization of the UEF. No human faction I have ever read about in science fiction has ever seemed more alien and more difficult to empathize with.
7) GTVA news broadcasts. Somebody, somewhere needs to get on a space winnebago, cruise through Sol and shout "OF
COURSE THEY'RE SHOOTING YOUR TRANSPORTS YOU MORONS, THEY'RE ARMED AND NOT SURRENDERING!" or "Maybe you forgot but the Shivans burned the Vasudan homeworld to ash, so... them's the stakes."
8) Fewer plot points built on a foundation of entire civilizations with poor communication skills, really... somehow the UEF characters know all the GTVA military history, but ignored or disregarded the enormous loss of life in the 1st and 2nd shivan wars when in the "omg we lost a few thousand mans ;_;" phase.
9) More plausible divergent cultural evolution. The UEF has only had about two generations to evolve away from its GTA roots and has managed to do so to an almost farcical extent. There
has to exist a segment of the population who identifies with the GTA more than the UEF simply because they were born and raised in a time when the GTA existed and was fighting the Vasudans. There have to be even more people who bought into the Ubuntu philosophy in name only, and have history books detailing the GTA's tenure as government-of-choice in a time of threat. Sure, there's Jupiter Hippies and Mars Hippies, but nobody ever said "Screw your hippie nonsense we're making our own miniGTA out here in the asteroid belt losers"? Wouldn't the post-Lucifer political centrifuge have allowed such conservative elements to build their own civilization somewhere, and then run crying into the arms of the GTVA shouting "THANK GOD YOU'RE FINALLY HERE"?
10) GTVA apologists / UEF surrender monkeys: Even though they spend the first half of the campaign going "mmmwaaahhhh we're loooosingggg shipppssss bawhawhawhaw" nobody even
thinks "let's throw in with the Good Guys, as they have beams and beams are hella tight". Except for the Contrivance Terrorists, who are motivated by the opportunity to do comic-book acts of unmitigated villainy. Surely some aspects of the martial planetary governments would say "oh hey, the GTVAs are all about standing face to face with an unbeatable foe and jabbing it in the eye, we have like three wacko battle cries all about that, let's team up". Hell, the GTVA is an alliance! Surely it has clauses for things like degrees of membership and association that would allow cooperation and mutual strategic defense and resource sharing that wouldn't be so intolerable as to instantly force the martians and whatnot into the arms of the UEF.
11) More transparent jargon. I'd love to know what rolling vampires meant - something to do with swarm torpedoes? Military parlance is good for immersion, but only when I know what it means. For all I know the UEF response to Admiral Steele consists of deploying a bacon cheeseburger with fries support to Europa. GTVA pilots occasionally radioing in the middle of battle to comment on the dizzying array of UEF dialects and idioms would be nice too. "What the hell does desperta ferro even mean? We're not trying to be jokers - we actually just don't know!" and "How the heck do you reconcile the 'we die on our feet rah rah' battlecry with 'universal peace pass the reefer man'? You can't get more diametrically opposed!" "It's amazing that my entire squadron is from six different star systems and yet you guys all have crazy different dialects and we all speak the same way!"
12) More tutorial missions. In an epic moment of RTFM, I
still have no idea how to reverse thrust or stuff like that, and a few training missions would help out with that. You guys have come up with an awe-inspiring set of story streamlining tools that make mandatory training like that skippable for the vets and non-noobs. An obstacle course you have to slalom around that can be skipped at any time by pressing alt-j or using the checkpoint system would go a long way towards helping me get used to the more in depth piloting and nonstandard controls. Plus, it seems like it's a much more important skill to master now that we're fighting GTF Facewrecker-class fighters so having a few stages presented in the story sequence to practice not dying would be handy as a prelude to the very difficult missions. There's functionality here that is almost totally undocumented and only hinted at in the techroom descrips that would really shine if brought to the forefront. I also think this would help with pacing a bit.
13) Please don't force me to fly the Kentauroi anymore. It's like a paper airplane soaked in gasoline. I'd like at least to be able to choose the Uhlan instead.
I'm one of the rare breed of players who avoids interceptors like the plague.... and, well, I'd like the ability to avoid interceptors like the plague. At least get into a less intercepty interceptor.
14) Reserve the blue shockwave ring for only the strongest of detonations. It has always looked absurd to see a cluster of them from a torpedo volley; now with walls of torpedoes it becomes comical. The cyclops explosion is just as noticeable to the player (so s/he knows to get down to biz and start using B to find targets) and doesn't obscure beautiful capital ships or somesuch.
15) Consistent emotional responses from wingmen. "how can we kill that hecate, it r big" was an arresting moment of realism that brought me into the campaign and helped me get into character after seeing umpteen hojillion Sathanas. Big thumbs up! Now, fastforward to where the wardogs are assaulting a deimos, with a time limit, and have to kill its escort of GTF Fleshreapers and its turrets and its engines and avoid it's big ol' capital beams and do so in a time limit. And nobody even says "Wow this giant freakin' list doesn't even fit on my objectives marker haha!" I realize that the warhogs have massively awesome morale even though all of them die every mission I take them on, but still. I get that they're supposedly hardened veterans while the Navajas were green recruits, but... it is immediately obvious when entering the mission that they're all about to get vaporized by AAA and flak and octuple balor/harpoon spam. I think a few of them should admit this before getting blown to expanding clouds of smugness while I feverishly try and do everything myself in the last minutes.
16) Better anticapital AI. This is real pie in the sky - for some reason, ordering my fighters to disarm a deimos results in almost instantaneous total annihilation, while I can successfully engage on my own. I realize as a player it's because I'm a huge coward and hang about at maximum range plinking at the AAA and so forth but it still seems like my wingmen aren't using their weaponry effectively at all even when they are charging merrily down their gunbarrels.
17) Coarser story granularity. Text segments showing us the minutes of a tense meeting between GTVA diplomats and UEF stoners would be awesome. The GTVA is almost certainly pursing "carrot and stick" diplomacy; the UEFs point of view lets us live out the "stick" bit painfully. It would be nice to hear the GTVA diplomats laying out increasingly outlandish amounts of "carrot" while the UEF morons continuously say "mmmmnnnnahhhh we still think we're right because if we don't look at overwhelming physical evidence of immediate and constant shivan threat, we can pretend to ignore it." More seriously - this war story is currently highly claustrophobic. Trapped in the mind of an amoral lunatic like Laporte is a very bad place to be examining this engrossing conflict; occasionally observing other slices of it would make it much less of one woman's struggle to deal with her emerging identity as a young Shivan adult and much more a
real war.
18) Lower key emotional content.
Wing Commander III also portrayed a losing war against a superior enemy force, but ratcheted up the tension through body language, excellent acting and voice acting, and retreat after retreat. Mark Hamill is clearly unavailable and unfit to portray Laporte, but it is worth examining his performance nontheless. The stress is slowly increased, reflected in worse and worse discipline and fraying nerves. In WiH I feel like I am
told of this same phenomenon but
shown Laporte always being a loonie instead of evolving into one. Similarly, WC3 had withdrawal after withdrawal and retreat after retreat, while WIH has a bunch of rescues, rendezvouses, and insane suicide attacks. Both believable, but the WC3 method used implication to set the tone of the war; Laporte jumps from retreat to attack to rescue to rendezvous to raid to date with CO on the moon... there's less of a trend to imply inexorable defeat. Relatedly I strongly question the decision to tell about Steele's apocalyptic blitz instead of showing it. A montage of bombers and corvettes blowing away freighters and stations, to the HW2 planetkillers theme, would have allowed you to show that
hyper important plot point instead of having a text box say "oh nose fifty nine other places just like the one you were at asploded".
19) And lastly... above all else I would love to see continued relentless commitment to stylized, highly cinematic and thoughtfully constructed universes and stories. I can't get enough of them, even if they are a little goofy in spots and a little rough in others. Thanks for the painstaking effort expended in creating AoA and WiH, and letting me play it and think about it. Its been awesome fun and a huge privelage.
