[Lepanto]

FS campaigns often have at least one "keep X distance away from patrolling fighters while scanning stuff/doing whatever"-style stealth mission. Do you like these missions as a nice change of pace from regular FS gameplay, or do you find them annoying? I personally dislike them, but I'd like to hear others' opinions on the subject.

EDIT: Poll added.

[Lorric]

I very much dislike them. There is nothing fun about them.

[An4ximandros]

 They tend to be pretty bad, since most (MOST) are just about "Stay away from those ships over there." I'd like to see things more in the way of "You are in a Vasudan ship, follow your orders while on patrol and take snap pics and scans when you get an open window (say 5 secs to get into position and if you screw it, no retries), if you try to complete too many objs. you get found out. One could even make it so there is only a small set of objs. doable (Say 5 out of 13 ships scan-able), and it's a red alert mission in which part 2 revolves around giving the GTA Zod ship info (stealthily) while being part of a Zod raiding party. You play a sympathizer or something.

[headdie]

stealth missions provide a useful change in pace/stress type when done well, personally as a player that enjoys action and stealth equally I like them.

problem is because they are so different than the typical mission in a game like freespace they are difficult to set up so that they are interesting to a player who is used to the often highly aggressive nature of said typical mission.

My biggest gripe with stealth missions in general (not just in the FS/FSO engine) is that if you are spotted then typically you have to abort either forcibly by the game, by being hit by such overwhelming force that survival is minimal of you stay or by mission/game design which doesn't factor in the possibility that the player might be able to luck (or skill) their way through the failure point and still achieve the remainder of the objectives.

[Black Wolf]

Well made, and with an interesting take, they can be fun. They're also a great way to relieve the inevitable monotony of constant blasting missions. Boil it right down, and FS really only has a very small number of traditional, core mission types - assault, defence, escort (debatable, could be a subset of defence), stealth and... maybe capture? There have been some innovations lately (capship, RTS - TopAce had a cool ferry mission in his latest campaign), and there are environmental variables (Nebula, atmospheric, interior), but most of these are pretty asset heavy and complicated. Not doing the occasional stealth mission is kind of a disservice IMO, especially over longer campaigns.

[NGTM-1R]

They often damage verisimilitude a bit, because they're something that ought to be the preserve of specialists, and unless you construct an entire campaign of stealth missions...

Actually that's not a terrible idea. A whole campaign based around a recon wing, where combat missions are the rarity. It would be a pain to FRED, though.

[CT27]

Sometimes they can be fun, sometimes they can be a giant pain.


In "Sol:  A History", there was a stealth mission where you had to stay between 500m-1000m from a cruiser you were trailing AND avoid multiple fighter patrols at the same time.  I loved the campaign overall but hated that mission.

[MatthTheGeek]

It's all about execution. Doing something different from the main meat of FS missions can be interesting, but is also a big risk to take.

The amount of people saying they dislike those missions just shows that many of them were badly executed, not that the concept is flawed.

[Piemanlives]

I'm going to agree with MattTheGeek here, stealth missions can be fun, if they are done correctly. For instance, in the Blue Planet mission "Everything Permitted" where you have to assassinate the elder, it was all about timing and precision, doing something stupid would give you away, however, completing the objective would also reveal you depending on your strategy, forcing you to find a way to escape.

And while I don't know if this qualifies, in Ace Combat 6, during the mission where you have to fly through the gorge to destroy a WMD, you would encounter troops and buildings on the ground that would attempt to send a message ahead to the fortress on the other side. You would have to destroy each checkpoint within the allotted time limit or else the message would be sent. However you couldn't fly above a certain altitude or it would be mission failure. I don't know why but I found it quite enjoyable.

[Deepstar]

In "Sol:  A History", there was a stealth mission where you had to stay between 500m-1000m from a cruiser you were trailing AND avoid multiple fighter patrols at the same time.  I loved the campaign overall but hated that mission.

Ah yes, i remember that mission. One of the few missions within campaigns i never played in the regular way.  After 10 retries i had enough and used FS2.com. .


I actually do not like Stealth missions very much. Many of them are just too hard for me.. or too long, because it takes ages before i can remember the flight pattern.
I remember.. i hated the one in Dimensional Eclipse. On the other hand, the stealth missions in Ancient-Shivan War were surprisingly easy. I prefer the latter one... in which the fighters are flying paths, that have some distance to the objects you have to scan.

But i do not miss them if a campaign do not have such mission, i personally prefer standard combat deployments .

[The E]

There is nothing inherent to FS2 gameplay that makes stealth missions intrinsically unsuitable. We have a wide array of tools available to make plausible (and, of course playable) stealth missions, it's just that as far as I can see, the retail examples of those are all kinda terrible.

If you take the time to actually analyze how gameplay in stealth titles works and think about how to apply those mechanics to FS2, then you'll get a much better mission than the retail-style "Stay away from objects X, Y and Z for time T while completing objective O". The thing about the retail missions is that they're very simplistic. If you however give the player an objective, a boundary condition, and a bunch of tools to accomplish said mission, then you're hitting the same sort of sweet spot that stealth games usually aim for. Obviously, this requires a lot of skill on the part of the mission designer, and round after round of iterative testing in order to get it right, and that's something that is a far greater hurdle than anything else when it comes to doing stealth gameplay in FS.

[Lorric]

round after round of iterative testing in order to get it right, and that's something that is a far greater hurdle than anything else when it comes to doing stealth gameplay in FS.

Oh my, these missions are bad enough as it is, I can't imagine having to go through that to make one. I'm sick of them by the time I've beaten one and put it in my rear view mirror for good.

[Lepanto]

Well, it seems the community's opinions on the subject are... mixed. Some people, though, like these missions better when they're more detailed than the traditional FS format, which is understandable.

round after round of iterative testing in order to get it right, and that's something that is a far greater hurdle than anything else when it comes to doing stealth gameplay in FS.

Oh my, these missions are bad enough as it is, I can't imagine having to go through that to make one. I'm sick of them by the time I've beaten one and put it in my rear view mirror for good.

Now, I hate stealth missions too, and would rather just ~k all the escort fighters than take the time and effort to complete them properly, but some people do find them enjoyable (and put quite a bit of effort into developing good ones), and we can surely respect that.

Does anyone have a good idea for how to build a stealth mission where you don't lose the mission just by making one error? Regular FS gameplay allows you to make a few mistakes and still win the level; a tactical or piloting slipup might cost you or your escort ships some hull integrity, but you might still be able to pull out a victory. Traditional stealth missions, though, have zero tolerance for any significant error. If you get too close to the patrol ships even once, even if you've scanned 9 out of the 10 ships, everything dogpiles you and you lose, bar cheating or possibly bad mission design. In some missions, you are warned if you're too close to an enemy ship, but it's still unpleasant (IMO) to lose a mission (and maybe a lot of progress) because a patrol ship catches you as you're trying to do your job and scan things. Some of this attitude might just be because I'm an impatient gamer and don't want to put much effort into remembering flight patterns to "solve" missions of a type I already don't like. But would a more error-friendly approach make stealth missions more enjoyable, if it were implemented?

For another solution, do you think that stealth missions in mostly-traditional campaigns could just be shunted into optional SOC loops and such, so that players who don't like them can just avoid them altogether?

[Lorric]

I do respect that.

Heh, to go through what to me would be the torture of making one, I certainly respect that! 

My toys aren't going to be going out of the pram or anything because someone puts a stealth mission or two into a campaign. The problem though is they're simply not fun. They're work. I can actually derive some small enjoyment out of the mission on the first attempt, but unless I one shot the mission, then it's exactly the same mission and not fun, it's just work, not play. At least if you keep getting obliterated in a standard mission, the mission will still flow differently on repeated attempts. The stealth mission is exactly the same.

[headdie]

end of the day Lepanto if you are putting some ideas together then go with what you are comfortable with designing and testing, its like when FS's dubious areas of canon are discussed in terms of making a mod, go with what works for you so if you dont like stealth missions then do something else that does work for you.

[Lorric]

While my opinion is just don't make them at all, I've thought of something.

Maybe instead of something like Mission 8: Stealthy Stuff you could have:

Mission 8a: Stealthy Stuff Part 1
Mission 8b: Stealthy Stuff Part 2
Mission 8c: Stealthy Stuff Part 3
Mission 8d: Stealthy Stuff Part 4
Mission 8e: Stealthy Stuff Part 5

It's a stealth mission, but broken up into 5 short segments. This way you get the best of two Worlds. If you don't like them, this will remove much of the frustrations, if you clear parts 1,2 and 3, then fail on 4, you don't have to start back at 1. On the other hand, if you like these missions and feel you're being babied by this setup, you simply have to clear them, and unless you one-shotted them all, then you go into the techroom and try to clear all five of them without failing at any point, and if you fail, start over at Part 1.

[The E]

Does anyone have a good idea for how to build a stealth mission where you don't lose the mission just by making one error? Regular FS gameplay allows you to make a few mistakes and still win the level; a tactical or piloting slipup might cost you or your escort ships some hull integrity, but you might still be able to pull out a victory. Traditional stealth missions, though, have zero tolerance for any significant error. If you get too close to the patrol ships even once, even if you've scanned 9 out of the 10 ships, everything dogpiles you and you lose, bar cheating or possibly bad mission design. In some missions, you are warned if you're too close to an enemy ship, but it's still unpleasant (IMO) to lose a mission (and maybe a lot of progress) because a patrol ship catches you as you're trying to do your job and scan things. Some of this attitude might just be because I'm an impatient gamer and don't want to put much effort into remembering flight patterns to "solve" missions of a type I already don't like. But would a more error-friendly approach make stealth missions more enjoyable, if it were implemented?

This is something I wanted to mention but then forgot about.

If you look at the gameplay mechanics of "real" stealth games, like the Metal Gear Solid series, Deus Ex, or Dishonored, they always give you tools that'll allow you to slip away from sight, wait a bit for the enemies to switch from an "attacking" to a "searching" back to a "patrolling" state. This doesn't put you into a failure state (although it may make further attempts more difficult!), and allows you to still accomplish the mission.
There's also an issue with the complete lack of a native checkpointing system; nothing is more frustrating than triggering a failure at minute 19 of a 20 minute mission. Thus sexp checkpoints, or use of the checkpoint script, is strongly encouraged.

While my opinion is just don't make them at all, I've thought of something.

Maybe instead of something like Mission 8: Stealthy Stuff you could have:

*something rather complicated*

Why not use checkpoints instead? Much easier.

[Lorric]

Why not use checkpoints instead? Much easier.

I've never played a mission with checkpoints, but if you had to switch off your machine in the middle somewhere, wouldn't you have to start over again? Not a problem with my way. It also allows you to replay specific chunks of the mission in the techroom.

[headdie]

indeed that is where a native save system would be ideal but heck just having WiH checkpoints is better than replaying 15-20 mins of mission when you dont have to

[Lorric]

Ah, it would be nice to be able to savescum. And what a boon it would be for testing purposes.