[Luis Dias]

I'd argue you are calling him "the lowest common denominator" not very subtly, while it's a bit skewed to "disagree" with how Juno's experiencing WiH act 3. You can't really disagree with a fact...

Mind Aesaar, I am not saying I had the same experience as he had, just that I don't think it's a matter of "denominators" and so on.

Also, been spoiling me some fiction about the worm... very interesting! And I like its pof/texturing quite a lot. Did the idea for it come from a hyperdimensional fractal projected unto a 3D matrix or something? (Sure does look like it)

[Juno75]

:facepalm:

were the first people *ever* to design FS missions, and they had to make more than 30 of them in under a year. Are you seriously suggesting they were better at it than the BP team, who have far looser time constraints and are drawing from a far more sophisticated corpus of mission design?

That's a common misconception of people who've never worked in creative industries. First of all strict time constraints are actually better than loose (or no) time constraints. They help you focus on the key features and key statements that "make" your game or product. Constraints help you in making the hard decisions of simplifying features and ideas, thus streamlining them and creating a better experience that is suitable to a bigger chunk of your player base. Constraints are ensuring that you don't get overindulgent in your own ideas and help yourself in keeping track of the overall objectives. Having no time constraints is for all intents and purposes not a positive feat.

As for your statement about : I think it's fair to say that they did a) market analysis, b) analysis of past titles in the same vein, c) did proper game design and iterative gameplay tests with QA and people trained (!) to judge what they're playing with other people's expectations in mind, ensuring that the biggest target audience possible will like it. This and the fact that Volition wasn't run by amateurs would prove you wrong.

I'm not telling him to shut up, I'm explaining why I disagree.  Ultimately, what Juno75 seeks may not be compatible with what most of us like about BP.

I'd be very careful with such a sentiment - it's a well known fact that communities (especially in online forums) represent a small (albeit very vocal) part of the overall audience. You and I don't know what the silent majority (consisting of players like me, more players like you and even different gamers that came to FS2 Open and BP through other websites, youtube videos, et. al.) thinks.

Rest assured, I don't want to change "your" Blue Planet, I will play episodes 4 and 5 anyway as a testament to the achievements of the team behind it. Alas this is the internet, people will read into my criticism whatever they want of course.

[Phantom Hoover]

I think the fact that FS2 has quite a lot of dud missions should factor into your condescension somewhere.

[The E]

Juno: Even taking into account that there's a big silent majority of players who do not make their opinions heard on these forums, the feedback we get is skewed pretty decisively in the "positive" category.

Also, I am not quite sure what you are criticizing us for. That we're not professional game designers? That the BP team is not a professional game studio? I mean, ultimately, we're making this thing because it's the story we like to tell, there's no paycheck for us except for the occasional piece of insightful discussion.

[Spoon]

The FS2 retail campaign Isn't really all that great mission design wise. (it's also full of little silly bugs that reveal time constraint and little testing)

That's a common misconception of people who've never worked in creative industries. First of all strict time constraints are actually better than loose (or no) time constraints. They help you focus on the key features and key statements that "make" your game or product. Constraints help you in making the hard decisions of simplifying features and ideas, thus streamlining them and creating a better experience that is suitable to a bigger chunk of your player base. Constraints are ensuring that you don't get overindulgent in your own ideas and help yourself in keeping track of the overall objectives. Having no time constraints is for all intents and purposes not a positive feat.

I disagree and call bull****.
Having focused and attainable goals = good
Being put on a forced time constraint (because the publisher only wants to fund so much) = nothing positive about that.
Also notice how that isn't at all relevant to a team of modders that isn't on any payroll and isn't out to make any profit. It's a labor of love.

As for your statement about : I think it's fair to say that they did a) market analysis, b) analysis of past titles in the same vein, c) did proper game design and iterative gameplay tests with QA and people trained (!) to judge what they're playing with other people's expectations in mind, ensuring that the biggest target audience possible will like it. This and the fact that Volition wasn't run by amateurs would prove you wrong.

The game industry in 1997 was nothing like how the game industry is today.
Freespace was still made in the day when game developers just loved what they were doing and weren't just an other cog in the giant milk cow machine that the game industry is today. Here, check out http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2011/03/30/the-secret-history-of-volition.aspx this documentary of  (I think there is an other one somewhere out there too). Back then they didn't do the **** that you think they did. None of that business suit 'market analysis' and 'trained not amateurs'.
They made descent and freespace because thats what they felt like doing, thats what they were having fun and a passion for.

What you describe is also what makes the game industry so incredibly ****ty nowadays. "Streamlining" and "people trained (!) to judge what they're playing with other people's expectations in mind, ensuring that the biggest target audience possible will like it." = Aka dumbing **** down so that the the lowest common denominator will be able to understand and play the game. All for the sake of higher sales. This is also exactly why so many studios are running to crowdfunding. They wanna go back to what they love doing. Making games and not milking franchises for the sake of the publishers.

I'm glad that the BP team isn't **** like that and has greatly expanded on Freespace's gameplay with innovation and player choice.

It's fine if that isn't your cup of tea. But don't come in here striding on your high horse telling us in a condescending manner on 'how the pros would have done it.'

[The E]

I'd love for BP to be more accessible, be more open for players completely new to FS to pick up and enjoy, but that was never, ever a design goal for us. We do expect people to have played FS2 at the very least, preferably FS1 and some of the other campaigns like ST:R, Derelict, Vassago's Dirge on top. It's very much made by, and made for, FS veterans who can C31 in their sleep, and while that means that there's a portion of the potential playerbase that's left behind, we feel that by not slowing down to explain stuff the vets already know, we can better concentrate on how to deliver the new things.

[Phantom Hoover]

c31 is for dorks, A3 is where it's at

[Juno75]

Well Spoon, I'm sorry to see that you take so much offense in what I said - it was neither my intention to offend nor to ride a "high horse". But it's quite clear that for the people active here BP is "as good as it is" and that there's no desire to adapt concepts from the schools of "commercial" game design. I voiced my opinion trying to put it into some context and I think we can leave it at that.

[The E]

Look, we are definitely looking at the trends in game design. Most of us on the team are avid gamers, and have more than a passing interest in the trade of making games, but ultimately, we are making the game we want to make, and commercial wisdom be damned. We do not make a commercial game, and have no interest of doing so.

[Crybertrance]

I couldn't agree more with E on this. Also, no one said that BP is "as good as it is", sure there is room for improvement, and not everyone is happy with it, but you are coming at it from a completely different angle.

[Gray113]

There are plenty of other campaigns that allow you to be a traditional alpha 1 guarding convoys and blowing up capships.

What I love about BP is that the team are trying to develop new ways to play using what is a very old interface and they do come up with some ingenious missions. Ok if they had a massive budget and resources I'm sure it could be even better but what they do with what they have is unbelievable. I showed some guys who are crazy Arma modders the video for Icarus and their jaws hit the floor when I told them it was a 14 year old game that had been modded.

The attention to detail and hardwork that has gone into this far surpasses most professional developers products - their only flaw in my eyes is sometimes trying to do too much but even then they make it work.

Edit: that's not just the BP team that deserves credit but the whole HL modder community

[General Battuta]

Good game design (especially in free 2 play titles and this thing here is as free as it gets), needs to focus on emotionally satisfying and engaging player expectations and less so using pure logic.  Even if everything could've happened exactly the way you portrayed it in BP, it's a huge emotional shift in expectations and premises and this cognitive dissonance carries its way through the whole game, diminishing enjoyment (and willingness for experiments). Emotion doesn't mean that the plot uses emotive motifs or tropes, but it's more about the base emotions triggered within the player by your design choices.

So in that regard (and that's the tricky thing about game design), we're both right, because the facts are on your side, but the storytelling failed to bridge the disconnect felt from what FS2 originally was (I'd even go so far saying that AoA was perfect until the disconnect came at the end).

I'm sure this is true for you, but as a trained statistician, I'm at the point where I can say with modest confidence that you have the opposite reaction of most players. We consistently hear that BP is more 'emotionally engaging' than FS2 (I feel like BioWare has that phrase copyrighted  ).

So the facts are on my side in that I think we succeed more often than  not - and in a way that lets people engage with the BPverse in a way they can't with FS2. FS2 is one of my favorite narratives in any medium, but survey players here and I think you'll find that for a lot of them, BP is their preferred 'take' on that universe, largely because of the way BP unpacks and rejiggers things to make them cohere better.

The problem comes when the target audience is all those people who enjoyed being Alpha 1 in FS1/2 so much they're still with the game. Trying to make a mod to a really old game and then not emphasising the parts that those die hard fans liked about it is a risky thing.

Yet it's a risk that seems to pay off! I guess there could be a silent majority out there, but the sample we have - and it's pretty good - suggests that BP is inordinately successful in its design goals. I'm constantly surprised by how well we connect with players given that we break a lot of traditional game storytelling 'rules'.

If anything I think you should've made the opposite critique - that we are too focused on delivering to those die hard fans that have been here for ten years.

To be fair, had more time and experience in refining their missions and game design, it wouldn't be fair to expect that from a user created mod. Hell, I'm not even expecting that - I'm just saying that applying some of the design workflow to good use would make Blue Planet even better. I'm sensing the love and passion that goes into it and I want to like it, but I can't because of many things I explained in previous posts.

Our missions, and in fact I'd daresay our workflow, are significantly more advanced than Volition's. We could make  missions in our sleep. Part of the reason we don't is that we played them already, in 1999; part of the reason we don't is that we're incredibly capable with FRED and we would be bored stiff working at their level.

When you invoke  you also need to remember Jason Scott's opinion on narrative style in FreeSpace campaigns. He always thought heterodoxy would be the great strength of the community, and I think he's right. A monoculture of Volitionesque silent-protagonist minimalist implicit stories isn't better than what we have.

The archetypal "Alpha 1" player wants more content within FS2 and its universe, but he doesn't read lots of text. He doesn't read tech room scripts, skips over long dialog screens and is then served an utterly baffling game. "Don't go and play it then" is what most say, others might say "then this isn't for you". All I'm saying is "you're right, but there's no reason not telling them what it is that makes it »not for me«".

Where, then, is this archetypal Alpha 1 player? An archetype has to be archetypical. We've had years to judge reactions, and our sample of respondents is wide enough that I've even run into BP players, utterly by coincidence, in real life. And in a lot of ways some of your responses are the inverse of what we see the most - people tend to like WiH more than AoA, for instance. I don't believe in your archetypal Alpha 1 player because I can't find enough of that player in the real world to call it an archetype.

I like a lot of your feedback, but part of what you want us to do is actively opposed to what has made Blue Planet so successful. That said -

Well Spoon, I'm sorry to see that you take so much offense in what I said - it was neither my intention to offend nor to ride a "high horse". But it's quite clear that for the people active here BP is "as good as it is" and that there's no desire to adapt concepts from the schools of "commercial" game design. I voiced my opinion trying to put it into some context and I think we can leave it at that.

I think you underestimate the amount of self-critique that happens internally, as well as the attention we pay to design trends in the industry as a whole. Without investors or a publisher, though, we're free to get away with a lot of stuff, including the text-packed maximalist narrative style that can get so obnoxious without voice acting.

[Qent]

Re: new, non-dogfighting gameplay, I feel like BP requires that players have quite a background in FS1/2 and the other user-made campaigns that The E mentioned. This is one of BP's greatest strengths and why it cannot be a "commercial game": each portion builds on the last, starting with FS1 and 2.

AoA is pretty much FS2 gameplay picked up from the end of FS2 (shoot Shivans, kill beams), but with some awesome new tech added with which you'll need to familiarize yourself to understand WiH combat. WiH Acts 1 and 2 are still plenty of dogfighting, but build on many elements of FS2: the player should really already be familiar with Maxims, TAGs, SSMs (might require modding experience in addition to playing), Trebuchets, and beam overcharging. Then there's the neat new stuff: capital ships are smart (and you can fly one!), you don't have to shoot at beam cannons because other fighters can do it, and you can make a few decisions by pressing 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Act 3 actively discourages the player from dogfighting while packing a lot of new gameplay concepts into a few missions. That is why I said in the other thread, rather than as a departure from the tried-and-true FS-style dogfight, I see Act 3 as a tutorial meant to teach you these concepts so that you can use them in Act 4. That is why I fully expect I'll have to upload viruses heh I guess we used them all up and order capships around while I'm dogfighting in Act 4. And thank goodness I didn't have to dogfight in HFH. Then again, each installment of BP has surpassed my expectations, so we'll see.

(The above also applies to the story, although as BP is user-made post-Capella campaigns, that goes without saying.)

Act 3 does not stand alone. It is built on Acts 1 and 2, AoA, and FreeSpace. A new player picking it up as his first taste of FS ought to be completely overwhelmed.

[ehlijen]

I never meant that BP should be the same kind of game as FS1/2. What I am saying is that FS1/2 for the most part focused on a select few similar types of gameplay whereas Tenebra doesn't seem to.

If you focus well on one gameplay type, fans of that type will love you.
If you don't focus, there is something for everyone but few people will love all of it.

That doesn't mean you should focus too narrowly or focus on groups you don't want to cater to, but without some kind of focus, you run the risk of most people thinking of your work as average overall, and BP deserves better (I say based on WiH acts 1 and 2 which were amazing).

[MatthTheGeek]

I never meant that BP should be the same kind of game as FS1/2. What I am saying is that FS1/2 for the most part focused on a select few similar types of gameplay whereas Tenebra doesn't seem to.

Probably because those same few similar types of gameplay have been remade and remade over and over again by about a hundred user-made campaigns for the past 13 years. People are getting bored of it.

[An4ximandros]

 I despise the whole "We need more campagnia genericae" attitude. It's terrible, there are hundreds of campaigns that stick to the original (and flawed as they may be) formulae.

 I, for one, welcome our new textual narrative/content providing overlords.

[Qent]

I never meant that BP should be the same kind of game as FS1/2. What I am saying is that FS1/2 for the most part focused on a select few similar types of gameplay whereas Tenebra doesn't seem to.

I'd say it is focused, actually. Not focused on a specific gameplay mechanic, but the overall mission structure: Tenebra is a series of puzzles. Each is to be solved with whatever tools -- other than your fighter pilot prowess -- are at your disposal (varying from mission to mission).

[ehlijen]

I never meant that BP should be the same kind of game as FS1/2. What I am saying is that FS1/2 for the most part focused on a select few similar types of gameplay whereas Tenebra doesn't seem to.

Probably because those same few similar types of gameplay have been remade and remade over and over again by about a hundred user-made campaigns for the past 13 years. People are getting bored of it.

I'd find it odd if people keep a modding community alive for 13 years for a game that they're bored with.

I despise the whole "We need more campagnia genericae" attitude. It's terrible, there are hundreds of campaigns that stick to the original (and flawed as they may be) formulae.

 I, for one, welcome our new textual narrative/content providing overlords.

There are hundreds of such campaigns because hundreds of people feel the need to make them. And they're not wrong if they enjoy doing so.

The Alpha 1s are not the enemy of BP.

I never meant that BP should be the same kind of game as FS1/2. What I am saying is that FS1/2 for the most part focused on a select few similar types of gameplay whereas Tenebra doesn't seem to.

I'd say it is focused, actually. Not focused on a specific gameplay mechanic, but the overall mission structure: Tenebra is a series of puzzles. Each is to be solved with whatever tools -- other than your fighter pilot prowess -- are at your disposal (varying from mission to mission).

Hm fair enough, I guess I hadn't looked at it that way. In that case, I have to say I'm not sure this is a particularly good use of the FS2 engine.

But most fans seem to be happy, so let's wait and see what act 4 and 5 bring.

[MatthTheGeek]

I'd find it odd if people keep a modding community alive for 13 years for a game that they're bored with.

They are getting bored with the basic gameplay that FS2 offered, which has been replicated by a hundred user-made campaigns. But FSO can do so much more. As proven by Tenebra, Antagonist, DE, WoD...

There are hundreds of such campaigns because hundreds of people feel the need to make them. And they're not wrong if they enjoy doing so.

There is a hundred of such campaigns because that's the only thing people knew back then. And people weren't completely, utterly bored of it yet back then. Circumstances have changed, and thank unexistant god for that.

[General Battuta]

BP1 is basically core FS2 gameplay with more competent capships and a focus on an elite unit executing good tactics against a not-super-smart foe.

BP2 is a pretty significant departure at the fundamental level due to the AI changes. The way that missions were conceived and designed (particularly the way enemies were presented) is quite different.