I think that the enormous explosion of creativity we've seen in recent years has been fueled almost entirely by collaboration. Maybe that's something the older mods - Inferno, MT, BWO - never understood. Even on their internal forums they still talk about exclusive assets, holding on to things, beating people.
Because you haven't (and probably never had) access to the MT and BWO private boards, do you mind telling me what made you put Inferno in that list?
Beating...? Do you realize that you're spreading misinformation? First of all, you need to get the difference between pure campaigns and pure mods. Blue Planet started as a pure campaign, using assets someone else made and achieving excellent results at it. Inferno started as a mod, with tons of completely new stuff, and a campaign provided with it. The reason why I think INFR1 is still great has nothing to do with its released Chapter 1 campaign: after all these years, I still look at the models and effects (the fact that they're outclassed now is not relevant) and think "Wow". When a project tends more to the "mod" part, the approach on release policies changes completely and you get stuff like new ships being kept private until release, because it's important to claim full ownership over new ships if you know 90% of the success of mod X depends on them. If you tend to the "campaign" part, exclusive stuff is of secondary importance because the core of the project is - and will be - the campaign. I noticed this difference in the years I spent here; apparently, everything depends on the project leaders' goal, which may vary.
Addressing the other issue... so, new campaigns significantly outweight older ones under many points of view?
But of course! Did the creators of Derelict have 3.6.9 or newer? Did they have the marvellous, content-rich Media VPs we have now? Was FreeSpace modding as much as professional as it is now? If they wanted something new, were they able to ask a coder to add feature X or create a script
ad hoc? Did they have tons of new SEXPs to play around with? Did they have our same computers?
No. I believe some more modesty would be appropriate here - new campaigns are awesome because the SCP and FSU made a lot of things possible,
not because new campaign designers are smarter and/or more skilled than the older ones. I'd like to clarify this because many community members think the halo of sacred awesomeness recent campaigns have is imputable
only to said campaigns' respective FREDders.
I still think that if Blaise Russel had the opportunities we have now, we'd still be talking about S:AH, Homesick, FEP (this one was SCP compatible, but still not meant to rely heavily on new features) and other campaigns. Same thing when it comes to Derelict and its creators. One more thing: the fact that BP is successful doesn't mean that pretty much everyone here wants a talking player character and, more in general, a pure character-based environment. I see people making major assumptions on "changes to the community's tastes" without actual evidence.
