[DireWolf]

Maybe something that contributes to the "Dio is weak" perception is that the player (within the confines of the "fighter combat" genre) does not directly defeat the Dio. The Nyx is perceived as a threat because you need the games primary skill to defeat it. The Dio on the other hand is defeated through other means, either through no action on the part of the player (Valerie) or via a "tactical rather than twitch" mechanic (selecting an appropriate strike package via a menu for the Medea). The "indirect" defeat of the Dio's lessen their impact on the player (but of course its more realistic in that Dio's doesn't solely exist for the player to blow up!)

QFT.
Also most ship types that stick in FS players' minds generally have some kind of narrative and design reinforcement. It doesn't have to be much, like the lines from Command in FS1 talking about how ridiculous the Seraphim is when you first see a wing of them or the Nyxes' entrance (where they're the only enemies in your space). Every time I see a Dio, I'm occupied with more immediate objectives (like killing Fury AIs in Darkest Hour) and can generally rely on someone else to deal with the corvette without ever getting up close. The mission's balance is probably better for it, but still. A comment from a wingmate mentioning quite how dangerous the Medea's AAA is in Aristea, for example, might prompt the player to take increased notice of the ship and maybe even convince them that they'd be better off dealing with its beams themselves instead of their wings (and experience what makes the Dio so scary!)

e: typos

[General Battuta]

I'm confident that would move the Dio farther from, not closer to, the narrative target. Trying to highlight and disambiguate cues is exactly what the narrative frame for the Dio presence in Darkest Hour and Aristeia wants to avoid.

In broader design terms I'm supremely uninterested in the conventional toolbox of 'wow look out, that enemy type is badass!' and 'check this out, this AI is about to do one cool thing, which you'll never see repeated since it was a completely scripted moment!' These are familiar, tired, dreadfully stale techniques in game narrative. They highlight the artificial divide between authored content and systems content.

Dark Souls is an example of a game that I think points the way in a better direction: you screw up, you die, you learn. The player builds a narrative out of their experience with the system.

If there's one reason I think this is such an interesting topic, and I'm so dismissive of the (quite constant for the past several years!) cries to give the Diomedes a big crazy hero moment, it's this: I think people are looking for a simple story about a simple ship. Years of science fiction have taught them to look for the Next Big Thing, the USS Defiant, the Excalibur, the new effects showcase, the hero ship that gets a cool shot and a cool battle. This is part and parcel of the calcified space opera narrative. It's Serkr Team jumping in to blow up your ship while you look on, full of awe and totally empty of agency.

People do not look for a middling ship with complex capabilities, operating against the backdrop of a politically muddled tactical doctrine, dealt with by a tactical situation that is not always centered on the player. They don't know how to read that out of the information they're given; it's just not a schema they're prepared to recognize. And gamers have spent so long thumbing that awkward seam between authored narrative and systems narrative that they do not believe a story which is told in systems narrative. They don't know how to trust 'that ship made me lose the mission' on the same level as 'that ship just got a scripted sequence!'

I'd much rather challenge that than cater to it. BP is not a simple story about simple things. If we wanted everything to be instantly clear and visceral we'd be doing a much less complex story with a lot more respawning wings. And I'd rather have - as niffiwan said - a problem whose solution is not always as simple as 'I shoots it with my bombs' and not always as clearly stated as 'here is the ultimate badass, you must disarm its beam cannons right now, Alpha 1!'

[Lepanto]

Telling a story through gameplay instead of narrative is an interesting and under-explored concept. Do you have any advice for modders who want to tie their campaigns' gameplay more tightly with their story?

[General Battuta]

Well, I think the biggest example in BP is probably Fury Ai. It let us use fewer numbers of much smarter, more challenging opponents - so they felt like well-trained pilots who cared about their own lives, rather than disposable AI fodder with no existence beyond the moment.

[Luis Dias]

It's somewhat difficult to get the player care about subtle tactical concerns and doctrines when they are applied to things that are not "in your face", so to speak, and I don't think this should be demanded of them. I also do not think players are homogeneous, so if most players don't engage with everything there's also no problem, and those who do they will get it, although perhaps they do need some in-game help to understand that there's something to these things (or else one might be inclined, as I do, to rule out something as "not that much thought about", because most of the time most of the things aren't really).

[NGTM-1R]

Seriously curious about this, where are these posts you talk about? In all my 15 years of playing Freespace not once have I ever thought Command as stupid. Brash, maybe. Careless about the lives it sends to fight? Oh my. Confident, hubristic, yes sure... now stupid? That's novel to me.

It was more or less an article of faith until...2011 or so, when I started an argument about it in some thread and laid out that people were holding Command to information it didn't have and couldn't reasonably infer.

[General Battuta]

That is how I remember it too.

[Luis Dias]

Huh. I do remember that discussion vaguely, but was unaware of the previous "status quo". For what is worth, I agree that Command wasn't being stupid and that's one part of why the plot was good.

[Rheyah]

I'm gonna stand by my defense of the Diomedes.  It usually wrecks the Indus when I play that mission.