[Apollo]

Haven't played Tenebra yet (which is why I skimmed over this thread instead of reading everything and spoiling it), so I won't comment on its quality.

Reading this thread makes me sick. Singing praise at the snore feat that was WiH r1 and hating on Tenebra because it had the audacity to be FUN instead of force feeding you walls if text. You people disgust me.

You didn't like WiH1? I thought the sheer amount of messages were a little annoying, but the storyline more than made up for it.

EDIT: Oh and the "flying nightmare simulator" is rather fitting, since Tenebra is Latin for darkness.

[General Battuta]

i'm sure the team are delighted to see you defending them by saying how much better tenebra is than the crap they came out with before

The team is always delighted to see the heterodoxy of human preference in action.  Any piece of criticism has to be taken in perspective of the whole spectrum of responses. Sometimes useful information can be extracted; sometimes the player just didn't connect with the narrative or ludic design; sometimes the player never reached an important realization.

[NGTM-1R]

sometimes the player just didn't connect with the narrative or ludic design; sometimes the player never reached an important realization.

...it does occur to you these can result from failures of the designer, yes? Some of your replies have been a little Anne Rice-y of late and it's worrisome.

[General Battuta]

No, man, at no point in the design of this narratively and ludologically difficult and often opaque campaign did we ever worry, even once, about how to transmit information to the player

[Ryuseiken]

Singing praise at the snore feat that was WiH r1 and hating on Tenebra because it had the audacity to be FUN instead of force feeding you walls if text.

Factoring in the dreamscape (which is admittedly optional), doesn't Tenebra seem to have more reading/dialogue in it than either Chrysalis or Apotheosis?

[Droid803]

Acts 1-2 were not a snorefest.  They were just different.  The problem is judging any of them in a vacuum.  They are all WiH.  They should all be judged as though they were released together.

Acts 4-5 should be released simply as WiH.  Everything together in one campaign file.

The thing is this entire thread is about judging the parts in a vacuum and comparing them to each other.
Which may very well indeed be a flawed analysis.

Reading this thread makes me sick. Singing praise at the snore feat that was WiH r1 and hating on Tenebra because it had the audacity to be FUN instead of force feeding you walls if text. You people disgust me.

You didn't like WiH1? I thought the sheer amount of messages were a little annoying, but the storyline more than made up for it.

Nope, I didn't like it. I admit I did exaggerate a fair bit in my previous post, but IMO saying that WiHR1 was a boring snore fest gameplay-wise is on the order of magnitude is the same as saying that Tenebra had little to no coherent story.
There are about 3 missions with interesting gameplay in the entirety of WiH:R1, being The Intervention (Dating Simm), Aristea, and The Blade Itself. Aristea's concept was pulled off far better in Her Finest Hour, and The Blade Itself wasn't even part of the main campaign. The rest of the missions were essentially run off the mill escort/intercept missions with a ton of in-mission dialogue where I barely had to do anything. It was defined by a complete lack of noteworthy tasks for the player to perform. Hell, you didn't even have to disarm beam cannons until like, the last mission.

WiH:R1 is a nice piece of writing for sure, but it kind of falls flat as a game. However, it's the same gameplay as FS2, except diluted with more text. At times it borders on "fly-through cutscene".

Singing praise at the snore feat that was WiH r1 and hating on Tenebra because it had the audacity to be FUN instead of force feeding you walls if text.

Factoring in the dreamscape (which is admittedly optional), doesn't Tenebra seem to have more reading/dialogue in it than either Chrysalis or Apotheosis?

The fact that it's optional, and that it's punctuated by excellent missions with unique concepts (rather than having the dialogue lodged in mundane missions design-wise) is the defining difference.

Ahh, you mean the asteroid, right?

I'm not sure what the dev team was thinking, but from an outside perspective I would venture the conversation went like this:

"We have a nice model of a hollow asteroid."
"Can you blow it up?"
"Sure."
"GTVA would never use an asteroid to attack the UEF...that'd be too far fetched."
"Uh, ok, lets bring in a third party of fanatics to do that sort of thing. Fanatics always do that sort of thing."
"What does this have to do with BP?"
"Quit asking stupid questions. We have a model of an asteroid, and we are going to blow it up."

As far as I'm concerned this is a perfectly legitimate way to design missions. Hell, I'll go as far as to say this is how most missions should be designed. It's certainly a preferable alternative to the opposite end of the spectrum. With this method at the end of the day you still have a technically impressive and fun-to-play mission even when abstracted from all context, which as a game, has value in of itself. You don't need a story to have a good game - you just need entertaining mechanics.

Why is Pac-Man eating the little dots and avoiding ghosts.
Why are you arranging those four-block shapes in Tetris.
More importantly, who the hell cares?

Meanwhile if you take the complete opposite end of the spectrum, that is - you purely consider how to use the "mission" as a method of conveying the story without caring for gameplay, you get a cutscene. I don't know about you but cutscenes, while cool to set the stage, aren't very fun to play through. Cutscenes happen to not be games.

I guess this is devolving into game design theory but w/e.


I bet you all love the one on the right? It certainly tells a story better.

[General Battuta]

Game design theory is cool and fun. Droid also has every right not to like WiHR1 and I think his work in FreeSpace modding is an incredible example of succeeding in areas where WiHR1 didn't excel.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Come on guys, let's keep it civil here...

As far as story goes, Carthage made the kill list pretty early in the fiction viewer.  The dreamscape and discussion on bringing the Carthage down seemed important and very Laporte centered.  The fact that it was 'take 2' on the Carthage was even lampshaded.

I remember exactly one passing mention in the Tenebra fiction viewer (the kill list, as you said) before HFH itself. Hardly a climactic buildup...

Well I think you are wrong.

You agree that BP has taken a different direction, or you disagree that this is not a good thing?

It seems absurd to suggest that none of the missions in Act 3 have buildup. Mission 18 is the next mission in the Gef arc that began back in 'For the Wrong Reasons' and continued in 'What Binds Us' and 'Deals in Shadows'. Mission 18 directly causes Mission 20, the Kostadin Cell's last-ditch doomsday effort to drive humanity off Earth - an attack that's been foreshadowed since R1 if you were paying attention.

Mission 19 is the next mission in the 'mole/countermole' arc that's been running since 'The Plunder', particularly prominent in 'Deals in Shadows', 'Pawns', and 'Delenda Est'.

Mission 21 sees the player inserted into the ongoing broader war effort - an 'arc' that barely needs description.

Mission 22/23 are the next missions in the Ken arc that began in 'Ken'.

Does it feel disjointed to get just a couple more missions in each arc? Maybe.

Yes, it felt very disjointed. Laporte seemed to be jumping all over the place. I can see how the missions carry on arcs from previous acts - but I think Tenebra crammed too many arcs into a too compact whole. It feels like chaos.

But we need to see how the Fedayeen alter each arc. Laporte has moved from a place of learning into a place of power over the war - but not yet mastery over herself. Act 3 is practically Laporte Strikes Back - she makes a decisive action in the context of each arc in which she was formerly powerless, but she makes no progress at all in the areas where she was once powerful: her relationship to Simms and to the core ideals of the Federation.

It felt like she was playing Deus Ex Machina in every single story arc. Come on, I'm sure the Fedayeen have more pilots... And she didn't fail a single mission. The entirety of Tenebra didn't have a single setback. Okay, CASSANDRA is good, but do the operators really never make a mistake? Misinterpret some data, under- or overestimate some parameter, spill coffee on the keyboard?

And if the Fedayeen are really *that* good at Deus Ex Machinaing (I'll buy it, given the power of their mainframe), why hasn't there been the slightest hint of their influence in previous acts? Things like destroying the Kostadin Cell and a joint op with Jupiter Fleet would be widely discussed across the Federation, so why didn't Noemi get any rumour of their actions before? I think it would have laid a better groundwork to support the Fedayeen's major strikes in Tenebra.

Everything in Tenebra is about trading humanity for tactical power and exigency. Humanity is subsumed by functionality and the machinery of war. The Fedayeen wingmen each develop as a mirror of some part of Laporte that's broken. The Masyaf is a ship populated by alienated shark people. They're the antithesis of the Wargods.

If you felt that Act 3 gave up something crucial about Blue Planet in favor of wild exploration - consider that in light of what's happening here. What is Laporte learning, and what has she forgotten in the process?

Well that went completely over my head in the campaign... From the very first mission, Noemi felt a completely different character from who she was in previous acts. Instead of a humane, moral character we suddenly get an emotionless killer, with hardly any time for the player to 'grow with' the change. Come to think of it, that may be one of the reasons why Tenebra felt so disjoint... We're not playing Noemi anymore.

The Gef attack in 'One Future' was outlined since well before Act 1 ever released. They're some of the few clues in the story that the fanbase never picked up on or connected.

What were the clues? The fact that nobody picked up on them could be an indication that they were hidden too deep... To me, the Gefs really felt like a bunch of space pirates (with ideals, but still) thrifting and scraping to survive, like docfu said. Playing nice to whoever pays/threatens them enough (in this case, Steele), just in order to survive out there. I had no idea they had the knowledge or resources to subspace-jump a solid rock that easily shadows a Sathanas, and especially that they were willing to wipe out a good fraction of humanity to accomplish their ideals! Scavenging convoys for supplies, harassing the military, sure, but destroying Earth - that was a surprise to me.

Btw, I don't really get why people are getting all offensive about the new gameplay mechanics and features. If Tenebra had Noemi flying with the Fedayeen and not have the new gameplay mechanics, it would stick out like a sore thumb. You are special forces for petes sake! You are supposed to do stuff that normal pilots can't. Also, haven't we all got outright bored with the standard FS mission styles and gameplay mechanics? The BP team imo have breathed new life into the Space Combat Sim genre...And its my earnest request that the BP team do not return to pure FS style gameplay...please!

"Hey guys, here. We have some exciting news for you: we finally got the go-ahead to develop FreeSpace 3! But, eh, since the space sim genre is dead and all, it's gonna be a first-person shooter."

Come on, that's absurd. New gameplay mechanics are only fun up to a point. Tenebra's assassination mission was cool, and I enjoy mods like Vassago's Dirge and Between the Ashes - they capitalize on what FreeSpace does well, and give an interesting new twist to it. But if I want to command my own space fleet or play turret defence, there are and there always will be games out there that do a much better job at it (no offense to the devs). Rather than trying to be a jack-of-all-trades, I think it would be wiser to focus on being the king of space sim.

Reading this thread makes me sick. Singing praise at the snore feat that was WiH r1 and hating on Tenebra because it had the audacity to be FUN instead of force feeding you walls if text. You people disgust me.

Different people have different opinions of what a good mod should be like, you as an experienced modder should know that What were boring walls of text to you was immersive storytelling to me, and what was fun gameplay to you was quite uninteresting to me. If I have to choose between either playing Pac-Man or Tetris for three hours, or watching a good movie for the same amount of time, I'd go for the movie anytime. And I respect your opinion if you wouldn't.

[NGTM-1R]

No, man, at no point in the design of this narratively and ludologically difficult and often opaque campaign did we ever worry, even once, about how to transmit information to the player

Hey, I'm calling it like you're posting it. You sound Dear Negative Reader and it gets scary for us peons.

[crizza]

Laporte discussed with Thorn how to hit the Tevs and they figured out that Lopez is the weakest part of Steeles gang and so on.
And I think this came up in two dreamscape sessions.

[General Battuta]

A lot of your questions are explicitly answered in the campaign, whether in R1 or here - the scope of previous Fedayeen action or the precise nature of Gef capabilities, for instance. I don't blame you for missing some of it, given the sheer amount of information flying around, but rest assured these are all questions that were carefully considered and answered.

Laporte has certainly become more ruthless, but again, that's an arc that should have been profoundly evident even before you hit Sunglare.

[Droid803]

Reading this thread makes me sick. Singing praise at the snore feat that was WiH r1 and hating on Tenebra because it had the audacity to be FUN instead of force feeding you walls if text. You people disgust me.

Different people have different opinions of what a good mod should be like, you as an experienced modder should know that What were boring walls of text to you was immersive storytelling to me, and what was fun gameplay to you was quite uninteresting to me. If I have to choose between either playing Pac-Man or Tetris for three hours, or watching a good movie for the same amount of time, I'd go for the movie anytime. And I respect your opinion if you wouldn't.

I'm just bothered that people are almost demanding that a game be more like a movie.
If you want to watch a movie, by all means, go watch a movie. That's totally fine to prefer one over the other, or to have a preference towards one side, and I accept that some people would much rather be engaged in a good story than be engaged with gameplay.

It's just that I'm exceptionally confused as to why people are upset by there being (more) gameplay in a game.
I don't even feel that it came at the cost of any story depth, it's just that the story that is there is buried deeper within the optional texts and subtext and not presented to the player on a platter, so to speak. I feel that's the mark of a well-made game, where a rich story is there if you look for it, without getting in the way of the core gameplay.

Everything in Tenebra is about trading humanity for tactical power and exigency. Humanity is subsumed by functionality and the machinery of war. The Fedayeen wingmen each develop as a mirror of some part of Laporte that's broken. The Masyaf is a ship populated by alienated shark people. They're the antithesis of the Wargods.

If you felt that Act 3 gave up something crucial about Blue Planet in favor of wild exploration - consider that in light of what's happening here. What is Laporte learning, and what has she forgotten in the process?

Well that went completely over my head in the campaign... From the very first mission, Noemi felt a completely different character from who she was in previous acts. Instead of a humane, moral character we suddenly get an emotionless killer, with hardly any time for the player to 'grow with' the change. Come to think of it, that may be one of the reasons why Tenebra felt so disjoint... We're not playing Noemi anymore.

Seeing all your friends die tends to have an effect on your personality. Indeed, we're not playing Noemi anymore.
In Universal Truth, she contemplates that she should have died at Saturn with her friends. In some ways, that has already happened.

Disclaimer: I am terrible at reading the plot/characters, despite having read most/all of the walls of text. I may be horribly wrong.

[Kobrar44]

I'm just bothered that people are almost demanding that a game be more like a movie.
If you want to watch a movie, by all means, go watch a movie. That's totally fine to prefer one over the other, or to have a preference towards one side, and I accept that some people would much rather be engaged in a good story than be engaged with gameplay.

My 2 cents. Game doesn't need to have simplified gameplay to have a rich story. Difference between good gameplay with good story and good gameplay without story is basically the difference between Delenda Est and HFH. I read the dreamscapes so I know what has been said and what hasn't, but the background and the feel of this mission is incomparable to DE. Some missions felt almost like beta-testing. Replaying DE, I'm like "IMMA KILL YOU, *****" every-single-time.

[Phantom Hoover]

I bet you all love the one on the right? It certainly tells a story better.

please tell me how any freespace campaign more than 5 years old in any way resembles the one on the left

[Shivan Hunter]

I'm just bothered that people are almost demanding that a game be more like a movie.
If you want to watch a movie, by all means, go watch a movie. That's totally fine to prefer one over the other, or to have a preference towards one side, and I accept that some people would much rather be engaged in a good story than be engaged with gameplay.

My 2 cents. Game doesn't need to have simplified gameplay to have a rich story. Difference between good gameplay with good story and good gameplay without story is basically the difference between Delenda Est and HFH. I read the dreamscapes so I know what has been said and what hasn't, but the background and the feel of this mission is incomparable to DE. Some missions felt almost like beta-testing. Replaying DE, I'm like "IMMA KILL YOU, *****" every-single-time.

I'm just curious: when was it you last played WiH p1?

I ask because it seems several people in this thread were emotionally moved by p1 but not p2. A lot of the impact of p2 is riding on the events of p1; it visits several plotlines but spends so little time on each one, some players don't return to an emotionally-invested state. So someone who has just played p1 would have that feeling of "IMMA KILL YOU, *****" (indeed, it would be magnified by the fact that they had just lost the battle a few missions ago), but someone who has picked up the campaign without replaying p1 will have been zipping through several different aspects of the war, and this one is presented as quickly as the others.

Would WiH acts 1-3, by any chance, be better off as a single campaign? (and when WiH is all finished, would a 1-3 and 4-5 split be better than a 1-2 and 3-5 split?) I appreciate the gravity of the Sunglare cliffhanger, and it would be terrible to lose the "we were sent for her" -> rise.ogg -> BP title -> aney.ogg -> Bei conversation which was so awesome in Sunglare, but the evidence shows that the split may not work well for some players, as Tenebra may not be a good place to pick up after a period of inactivity. This should be tested experimentally using science.

[Spoon]

I think Droid hits the nail on the head on most parts.

My 2 cents. Game doesn't need to have simplified gameplay to have a rich story. Difference between good gameplay with good story and good gameplay without story is basically the difference between Delenda Est and HFH. I read the dreamscapes so I know what has been said and what hasn't, but the background and the feel of this mission is incomparable to DE. Some missions felt almost like beta-testing. Replaying DE, I'm like "IMMA KILL YOU, *****" every-single-time.

DE was so bugged for me that not even with cheats I could complete it properly!
HFH is so much better in so many ways its not even funny. Replaying DE, I'm like "**** THIS MISSION WHY DO THESE FRIGATES KEEP DYING WHAT THE HELL" every-single-time.
Replaying HFH, I'm like "Oh hell yeah in what way am I going to skin this cat this time. Options options, lets do this." every-single-time.
HFH is fun

I don't mean to smack talk act 1 and 2 too much, but I'm mostly with Droid on it. Gameplay wise it only had a few highpoints and otherwise wasn't terribly exciting. Act 3 does almost everything better in its mission design.

Well I think you are wrong.

You agree that BP has taken a different direction, or you disagree that this is not a good thing?

What do you think?

I bet you all love the one on the right? It certainly tells a story better.

please tell me how any freespace campaign more than 5 years old in any way resembles the one on the left

Looks like you are missing the point.

[Phantom Hoover]

WiHR1 did not sacrifice freedom and player agency in gameplay for the sake of lazy storytelling. It did spend proportionately more time on storytelling, but I don't see how the actual combat sections are any more restrictive or linear than retail quality.

I actually only managed to complete Delenda Est without cheats and constant bugfixes half an hour ago. It was... cathartic. DE is a pretty good example of why you should be very careful when mixing gameplay and story, actually: putting the climax during an arduous, buggy, do-it-again-stupid segment which is liable to become unbalanced at any change in the engine saps all the momentum from the player.

[manwiththemachinegun]

Simple game design does not equal bad. There is nothing inherently wrong with designing highly polished missions that Freespace is known for. Not every campaign needs to be a total genre redefining experience.

The BP has, for the most part, done a good job balancing classic Freespace gameplay with new features. I happen to be of the opinion the team may have gone a bit overboard with features in WiH part 3, but as I have said previously, this does not reflect poorly on the entire experience.

So yeah, I strongly disagree that any new mod campaign HAS to be completely innovative, the devil is in the details.

[Apollo]

I'd agree with that. Innovation is nice and can greatly enhance something, but ultimately it comes down to the basic level design. For example, Silent Threat Reborn manages to be an excellent campaign despite having few mods, no SCP-exclusive features, and gameplay that is basically a very competent clone of FS1's.

[Spoon]

WiHR1 did not sacrifice freedom and player agency in gameplay for the sake of lazy storytelling. It did spend proportionately more time on storytelling, but I don't see how the actual combat sections are any more restrictive or linear than retail quality.

(I actually only managed to complete Delenda Est without cheats and constant bugfixes half an hour ago. It was... cathartic.)

Actually it did. There were a bunch of missions that had very little player agency and 'forced plot failures' of missions for the sake of storytelling.
The BP realized this and gave the player a LOT of agency in Act 3 while still telling an awesome story through the dreamscape (and the last mission is 5 missions worth of story telling). Big ****ing improvement if you ask me.

Simple game design does not equal bad. There is nothing inherently wrong with designing highly polished missions that Freespace is known for. Not every campaign needs to be a total genre redefining experience.

The BP has, for the most part, done a good job balancing classic Freespace gameplay with new features. I happen to be of the opinion the team may have gone a bit overboard with features in WiH part 3, but as I have said previously, this does not reflect poorly on the entire experience.

So yeah, I strongly disagree that any new mod campaign HAS to be completely innovative, the devil is in the details.

Nobody here is arguing that 'every campaign HAS to be innovative'. We're arguing how wierd it is that people are seemingly getting offended by the fact that Act 3 doesn't offer the same old retail mission design again.

It's down right depressing for a dev to have put in weeks of effort into making a mission that contains loads of gameplay, only to be met with a "I don't like it, I just want to shoot fighters with some dialogue to fill the gaps between the waves."