So I figured I should give you guys an update on where things are at. I'll pretend (I hope) to be schizophrenic for a moment and hold a Q&A session with myself.
What's with the subject?Exactly what it says! 'Wings of Dawn 2: Into the void' has been canceled. No more work on it shall be done.
Why?I'm so glad you asked!
There are several reasons.
Tell us these reasons then.WoD1's campaign was overall pretty decently balanced. It had some difficulty spikes on some missions but that aside it did pretty well for itself. The problem with WoD1's balancing however is that everything is balanced around two things. The campaign itself and the Ray III.
See, when I was starting out creating WoD I didn't really had a clear plan on where I wanted to take things. I just added weapons/ships as I was creating missions and then altered stats based on what I needed them to be for certain missions. With the Ray III with its 6 gunpoint’s as the baseline. While this worked out okay for WoD1 within its self contained campaign, it proved to be... troublesome expanding on it.
The enemy alien races were completely balanced around the campaign too. The Nordera and Cordi being the first ones you fight and thus stat wise are relatively weak (though im sure some of you will argue that the Cordi are the hardest to fight
), with the Fura'ngle and Zy being introduced midway into the campaign and are thus tougher opponents. Again, this works fine for the WoD campaign, but it makes them hard to use outside of it.
WoD2 was going to be a Cyrvan focused campaign but with the Aestival R4 being one of the most powerful ships available in WoD1 it became rapidly clear that I needed to do some serious re-balancing, as the heavier CSA fighters could almost instant gib a Zy Talon. So as I went to work, creating tables and doing math I realized that I was attempting to fix something that was... well broken beyond a 'simple re-balance'. It was starting to head right down the retcon slope.
This brought up a new technical problem too. WoD2 is stand alone, but I wanted to make WoD1 stand alone as well. But if WoD2 is going to have such completely altered stats from 1... How would I release the two? If I release WoD2 first and then the stand alone version of WoD1 after, I would need to either
A.) Re-balance/ReFRED WoD1's campaign as a whole based on the new stats.
B.) Release WoD1 separately... asking players to download two games that share a large amount of assets. Redundant and not a very pretty solution.
C.) Make the WoD1 re-release dependent on having WoD2 installed.
Or redo WoD1 before proceeding with WoD2.
I decided for the moment to go with A. and take the opportunity to tackle some of the things I didn't liked about WoD1's campaign. Mainly the first missions and the last few missions... This then turned into 'let's remake some of the ****tier assets too' into 'let's redo some of the other missions while I'm at it too, to make the story flow better' into Axem saying "If you are going to revise all of this, might as well just do a complete rebuild of WoD!"
So tl;dr WoD2 is canceled because you are going to rebuild WoD from scratch?It basically boils down to that, yes.
Some of the goals I aim for with this:
- Reinforce the strong points of WoD while brushing away the weak points as much as possible.
- Create a richer universe through better story telling in the campaign itself and less 'techroom entry fluff'
- Release WoD in 'Acts' as a continuous war story. Rather than big single campaign releases.
- Make WoD more 'accessible' and not make missions with the assumption that the player has tons of Freespace experience already.
What would you consider the strong points and the weak points of WoD then? And how would you reinforce or improve on them?On weak points:
As I already mentioned earlier in this post: The beginning of the campaign is weak. Part of this is because the story isn't immediately going to grab the player and an other part is that these first few missions are literally the first mission I ever created. The first mission is frankly just plain boring and the assets aren't exactly helping either (Faustus, Ray I being literally the first spaceship I ever made, the star being put together in 2 hours etc).
The last mission drove some players mad because maneuvering through dark narrow corridors on a time limit wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be for everyone.
I also sort of ran out of planned missions and ideas for the last missions and as a result the campaign doesn't nearly have as strong as an ending as it could have had.
-For the rebuild of WoD I will fully plan out each mission from start to finish and hope to make each mission as enjoyable and/or intense as possible!
I already spoke about balance before and how the Ray III was in the center of my (not very planned out) balancing work.
The Ray III is probably the fighter you'll end up piloting the most during the campaign yet is kind of gimped by its single primary bank. Especially unfortunate because WoD makes heavy use of different armors and weapons that have specific weaknesses and strengths. And with a single Pbank, you can't fully exploit this!
The alternatives to the Ray III are the Kaze and the Caliburn...
The Kaze has issues taking down tougher enemies because it only has 4 gun banks (enemies balanced around 6 gun points etc) and is kind of fragile. It also handles in a way that requires some getting use to.
The Caliburn packs a deadly punch but is kind of large and unwieldy and has issues taking down Cordi fighters. Thus isn't suited for some missions at all.
-So in short, WoD's player available fighter arsenal is kind of hit or miss (situationally effective) and will get some serious adjusting and expanding.
On strong points:
I personally consider the character interaction to be one of WoD's stronger points. Despite the majority of characters being faceless and undeveloped.
-In the WoD Rebuild every character will be much more developed with a face to go with it. In elaborate visual novel sections that will keep a lot of chatter out of the missions (and will be skippable)
Unique weapons and opponents to shoot at.
-Well those will of course be in! Only more!
Fun, I think people have called WoD fun on a few occasions.
-There will be Fun.
(Glass half empty look at life, lots of :words: about weak points but hardly any at strong points!
)
So is it just going to be the same story retold through different missions?There will be similarities, some parts might be the same. But overall it will be different enough that you won't be able to predict what exactly is going to happen next if you played the original. The ending definitely won't be the same and the story will contain more plot and with different factions at work.
You've typed a Chinese wall worth of text but no doubt you'll type some more as I inquire about what WoD2 was going to be about and what was done of WoD2 alreadyWoD2's story was going to pick up five years after the end of WoD1 (and as mentioned before) was going to be played from a Cyrvan perspective. A small CSA task force under the command of Isa'emarl Dertanya is tasked with traveling through a newly discovered starlance and finding out what the Zy are up to in this system and to stop them if needed. Based on nothing more but a vague premonition from a winged one.
The campaign's main features were to be:
Choices: The player was going to able to decide on several things, leading to good or bad results and a few branching missions.
Pilot management: Being able to pick which pilots are going to fly on your wing. And each pilot will have a morale status that is affected by your choices and such. Wingmen with a high morale being incredibly deadly on the battlefield whereas they perform sub par if they are feeling down.
Visual novel parts containing all the talky bits.
A whole load of new weapons and fighters
What was actually done so far?This video that would start the campaignThe first two mission and the first large
VN section.A whole bunch of weapon effects and spiffy looking new ships
A large part of the visual novel
portraits and some headani's
And all of this work is wasted then?Hah, surely not.
The vast majority of the assets can and will be used for the rebuild.
The visual novel 'technology' especially (Axem powered™) will be most useful.
So what about all the hard work done by the awesome people that worked on the wiki and tvtropes page? Norbert putting up info found from the ask a character thread and such. Are you ju-Sorry people!
Why isn't Stranded V1.0 yet?Because I haven't felt like working on getting it done yet.
You're lazy, stop being lazyNo.
tl;dr blame Axem
