Author Topic: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1  (Read 201103 times)

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Offline Woomeister

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
The lack of Nemesis in Act 1 is disturbing, hope you will compensate in Act 2 and Act 3 :)
You'll see it before, during and after 'Nemesis' during Act 2 so no worries there.

 

Offline mr.WHO

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
There is one question that keeps bothering me - why EA has so many types of light blob weapons?
They have:
- big Cyan blob with trail
- tiny yellow blob
- bigger green blob
- orange rapid fire blob
- chain gun (that count as blob too)

 

Offline Droid803

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
The EA's main anti-fighter defenses are various types of blobs:
There are regular blobs (kinda harmless), rapid fire blobs (annoying), kinetic blobs (deadly), and EMP blobs (oh god no no NO)
(´・ω・`)
=============================================================

 
Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
You'll see it before, during and after 'Nemesis' during Act 2 so no worries there.

Are we to assume that it is (slowly) being worked on? :D :D :D
Stardust, the Sword of Vengeance[A starship combat addict]

 

Offline theperfectdrugsk

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
Just curious...is Inferno Classic still worth playing now that Nostos is out?  How similar are the two campaigns?  I loved Nostos, but haven't gotten around to Classic yet.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
I replayed Classic after Nostos. It's pretty good and in some respects gets you straight to the fun a lot faster (no lengthy dialogue, no complex scripted sequences, lots of pewpew). It does have a few TRULY awful player ships and very trial-and-error missions.

 

Offline Trivial Psychic

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
Think of comparing BSG Classic to BSG 2004.
The Trivial Psychic Strikes Again!

 

Offline Goober5000

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
I finally finished Inferno: Nostos.  I liked it, but not as much as I thought I would.  As promised, here's my review.



The Good

It was great to finally play a new Inferno campaign, so many years after INFR1.  The new ship models were gorgeous, and the weapons were fun to use - especially the Subach HL-12 and the Corinthos.

The
Spoiler:
return of the Shivans
was done very, very well.  The last three missions of the campaign were the best, in my opinion.  The last mission was excellent in all respects.

The teasing of
Spoiler:
EA experiments with subspace
was a nice subplot that was new, fresh, and unexpected for someone who had already played INFR1.  I'm interested to see where this goes in the next release.

The music was great.  I liked the new tracks very much, and they were very effective in setting the mood.



The Bad

I really did not like the characterization of the EA.  INFR1 had the right approach; the EA was intelligent, strategic, and a credible threat.  Even Blue Planet, for all that I disliked the hand-wringing, moralizing, and second-guessing, at least gave them a consistent philosophy and capable strategists.  Nostos just treated them like Nazis in Space.  And not even believable Nazis, but one-dimensional cardboard strawmen that didn't even rise to the level of mustache-twirling.

The campaign really should have been shorter than it was, or at least paced better than it was.  The early missions felt like doing the same thing over and over, and there were at least three places where the story finally felt like it was going somewhere only for the rug to be pulled out from under you.  Dangling a payoff and then yanking it away, repeatedly, quickly gets tiresome.  And there were too many missions focused on fleet movements that didn't really interest me.  INFR1 did a better job of pacing, both at a mission level and a story level.  Derelict is an example of a campaign that also does a better job even though it has many more missions.

Balance was inconsistent and often frustrating.  Several missions were not only too hard, but ridiculously over-the-top hard, to the extent that I wondered if I may have missed an important game mechanic that would have made them easier.  And a couple missions really deserved checkpoints but didn't have them.  I found myself cheating through missions more often than I would have liked, especially in the middle third of the campaign.  There were also a few mission bugs that were annoying, but not necessarily major.  (The most egregious was the failure to remove the player self-destruct in "The Storm Breaks", long after the relevant event had completed.)

The military jargon was irritating; it was overused and tended to detract from the overall conversation flow.  I've criticized its use in the past; if I find that post I'll link to it here.

The treatment of Karpinsky was too overwrought and not handled as well as the similar subplot in INFR1.

The amount of ships and graphics required me to crank down my detail settings to avoid occasional lag, and I was playing on a fairly well-equipped machine.



The Ugly

I HATED that HUD.

That circle of dots was far too distracting, as it added unnecessary noise which interfered with the already very noisy design.  Many of the gauges that used to be on the periphery were now crowded around the center.  It literally slowed down my reaction time because a) I had to find the relevant gauge, and b) I had to tune out the gauges surrounding it.  Searching for gauges was doubly-handicapped by the fact that not only were they not in their usual spots, they weren't even in a location that was quick for the eye to move to.  The Volition gauges take advantage of the five anchor points of the screen - the center and the four corners - and there is a reasonably even distribution among them.  The Inferno HUD not only made the distribution uneven but also failed to anchor many of the gauges.

Adding to the chaos was the too-clever-by-half message system with the teletype text.  It was a distraction that prevented full focus on what was happening in the mission, and the continual popping up/popping down quickly led to "alarm fatigue".  Furthermore, the popup was usually not visible long enough for the full message to be typed out, as the box would disappear halfway through the typing.

One positive part of the HUD was the treatment of subsystems, with the "health bar" and escort list.  Given the amount of subsystem objectives in the campaign, it turned out to be useful.
« Last Edit: December 15, 2018, 09:52:40 pm by Goober5000 »

 

Offline Goober5000

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
To be fair, I should really have included this in the The Good as well...

The missions were very technically well designed; the FREDders were clearly skilled.  Aside from the uneven balance issues, they were quite fun.  Additionally, nearly every mission was high in complexity and featured multiple stages, which requires no small amount of effort.  I think most of the complaints I had with the missions were not truly the fault of the missions themselves: the repetitive feeling could have been fixed with better campaign design, and the lack of emotional investment was the fault of the story.  And there was so much conversation and chatter that the really important messages tended to fade into the background.  These are all things that could be fixed with some campaign refinement and more beta testing; they don't indicate any fundamental FREDding weaknesses.

  
Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
Quote
more beta testing

OH NO, NOT THE BETA TESTER CELL AGAIN :shaking:

From a technical standpoint the campaign should be pretty much fine; not sure about interrupted messages though (but a part of the story certainly slips by somehow). I've managed to beat the campaign on "hard" - I'm neither an expert on mission balancing nor a master pilot, so I thought this would even things.

 
Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
I agree with Nightmare there. Technically the campaign is perfect.

I think the characterization of EA was not as bad as it sounds, but definitely in the next release, they should be fleshed out more. Same regarding Karpinsky.
Silent Threat Reborn indeed did a great job at this with the officer of the Joutenheim installation. You learnt the motives, why they are fighting for etc. The EA needs this as well and the Nemesis is the perfect opportunity for this one.

By the way, Silent Threat Reborn emphasized the Terran and Vasudan friendship, and basically the plot of this Inferno Release goes against this campaign as well.
Why did the Vasudans help the GTA against the GTI (Regardless of being Anti-Vasudan) if they aren't helping the Terrans now? They actually helped by themselves, they weren't forced at all by anything.

This also needs an explanation for sure in Act 2.

- I don't think the missions were too hard (Played on Medium), well Inferno should provide some challenge. There is a reason why it is called Inferno in the first place I believe.
- The HUD was weird at first, but quickly got used to it. I think it is nice to see that the campaign takes risks and tries something new.
- I agree with the fact that sometimes it was a chaos while reading the text and fighting at the same time, but didn't see any issues with the language itself here either.
- Not sure about lags, didn't have any of that.

Don't really want to spoil it but there is indeed one main piece of reference to the Icanus in this campaign.

Spoiler:
That mission when the Shivans return. Guess that was the Icanus's main cannon which destroyed that Ross 128 planet. The description of the Icanus of the original Inferno release mentioned this.

Just posting a screenshot of the briefing text I was talking about (some sort of proof), this is what I was mainly missing from this Inferno Release right after the Shivans appeared. (Even if that was actually not a Second Great War, but kind of an Incursion  :P) Plus, it was really weird to see the Seleucus being that confident while a confirmed Kismat was still around.

This kind of attitude is present for the GTVA throughout the original campaign, which makes sense and kind of the first step of defeating the Shivans: to overcome arrogance.
Hopefully Act 2 gets this corrected as well.

Here is the screenshot:



(I know I have partially got the answers in this thread already but should be definitely added to the campaign)
« Last Edit: December 26, 2018, 09:30:09 am by FearofthedarkHU »

 
Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
By the way, Silent Threat Reborn emphasized the Terran and Vasudan friendship, and basically the plot of this Inferno Release goes against this campaign as well.

I think since the beginning of INFs development there was a rift between Vasudans and Terrans, while looking through the webarchive there was a side campaign ("Vega wars") that dealt with a narrowly averted Terran-Vasudan war prior to INFR1; so while I don't understand it entirely it's nothing new to INF.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
Silent Threat Reborn isn't necessarily canon, and anyway it's been something like 50+ years.

 
Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
While this is correct, I was just talking about from a storytelling perspective.

I just find it a little bit hillarious without any particular and confirmed reason inside the campaing story that:

Vasudans: "Oh, These terrans are fighting against the EA, let's not help them, because we believe this is their issue entirely, who cares if they are defeated and let's assume that the EA doesn't come for us"

1 week later:

*Shivans Return with a Super Destroyer (and later on with the SSJ Gigas):*

"Let's suddenly help our Terran allies even against the EA(?) because otherwise we will be destroyed by the Shivans".

 :lol:

This is the same regarding the GTVA being ignorant again. (EA as an acronym also sounds funny, but of course this is not a problem.)


 
Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
Quote
without any particular and confirmed reason inside the campaing story that

Well, so far none has been provided. But Rampage said that EA (there's also one in B5) also didn't start the war to conquer more Lebensraum, so that's open too.

INFs storytelling focusses mostly on the military aspects of warfare, without any political implications, but the authors probably have that aspect in mind (atleast I hope that).

 

Offline Nyctaeus

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
GTVA isn't and it never was administratively and politically consistent. Although terrans and vasudans are bonded by alliance, political institution of Vasudan Empire still exist and it's diplomacy is indepentent from terran. Although terrans weren't fine with decision of the Emperor, they have no power to force him to take actions.
 
What really concerns vasudans are shivans. Majority of their forces are assigned to so called Shivan Watch and they are ready to take actions anytime, also providing logistics backup for occupied terran fleets.

Neither EA or Vasudan Empire want the war with eachother. Emperor does not want to spare his forces for purely terran case and weaken his fleets. Shivans may return anytime. EA sounds fascist, but they are in fact - a military oligarchy. They never were racist nor hostile towards vasudans, and they don't want another enemy. VE and EA surely maintain diplomatic relationship. I guess the ultimate goal of EA is replacing current terran ruling body, seize control of all terran space, and continue the alliance with vasudans as replacement for their terran-GTVA predecessor.

Perhaps the Emperor is not sure which terran faction would be better ally? He maybe estimate swift and forthcoming ceasefire? And he want to wait and see... Vasudan race suffered enough during both Great War and Capella to get engaged in bloodshed again so easily.
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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
Indeed, For example, it would have been nice to see something a conversation between the EA representatives and the Vasudans, now that would make this more beliavable.
I can see the points, but the storyline could have presented this in such ways.

In the end waiting for Act 2 to make up for it. Sorry for having high expectations, it can definitely feel bad at some point due to lack of time to actually get this story together.

 

Offline Nyctaeus

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
Act I is introduction, Act II is explanation. So far we decided to further explore EA methodology and ideology in Act II, and also put emphasis on more detailed storytelling. Don't expect too much complexity anyway. Inferno is going to keep FS2-style level of plot and lore depth.
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
All the Act 1 EA material was written last minute without any discussion or drafting, and in fact the campaign launched mid-writing, with some of the missions still using earlier placeholder/leftover dialogue. So there’s plenty of room for improvement.

That said, the EA is plainly fascist and probably needs to be written in line with historical fascist governments, which are not known for their sensible strategic policy.

 

Offline CT27

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Re: RELEASE: Inferno Nostos: Act 1
How many fighters is the Lindos able to carry?