So... once again, it's been quite a while. Out of the blue, I decided to play a little bit of Saga tonight, and I completed two whole missions. I think I have something like 11 missions left now - there's about 50 altogether, right?
Anyway, today's missions were Hyperion 2 and Hyperion 3.
Hyperion 2 was... tiresome. One of the issues I've complained about time and again is the repetitive mission design in Saga. There are so many missions designed to surprise the player with a last-minute new objective, it has long ago ceased to be surprising. In fact, in a typical Saga mission, I'm generally surprised when I find myself returning to the Hermes with no sudden change of plans, no mess of red dots on the radar at the Hermes, et cetera.
The trouble with making this kind of design so persistent - apart from the obvious fact that surprises are only surprising if they're rare enough to be unexpected - is that the player is constantly forced to play with the assumption that there will be more. On most Saga missions, I find myself husbanding my missiles and fuel until what appears to be the last navpoint. There are three possibilities for how this can turn out - one, I can predict correctly what the last navpoint will be, spend all my missiles at the critical moment, and be satisfied. The second option - and let's face it, this is the one that the mission designers are counting on - is that I don't expect the very final battle, and wind up using all my ordnance on the second-last one. When this happens, the mission designers are happy because they managed to surprise the player and forced him to fight the big final fight with no missiles. If done just rarely enough, the player will take this good-naturedly - he'll be excited at the extra challenge. If it happens too often, as it does in Saga, the player gets fed up with it. Which, ultimately, leads to the third possibility - not knowing when the last battle will be, I save all my ordnance all through the mission, and land on the Hermes with a full stock of missiles. Yes, this has happened to me, and this is nothing for the designers to be proud of - if you've managed to persuade the player to reject half of his gameplay options for most of the game, all you're doing is impoverishing your gameplay overall.
So, constant surprises are bad, m'kay? I wonder how many more I will go through before the game is done
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Hyperion 3 was all right - a typical strike mission, lots of combat, lots of big targets, et cetera. Psychopath shows up, which invariably means bad dialogues, but I won't bother complaining - frankly, by this point, I've learned not to give a shit about the dialogues, I let them go in one ear and out the other. This is not a good thing from the game designers' point of view, but it happens. Oh, if it makes you feel better, judging from the reviews, my last game (
Dogfight 1942) had a similar problem. And I wrote most of the dialogues there, so don't think for a moment that I'm picking on you
. In retrospect, I find that I made three mistakes on Dogfight - I wonder if any of these will ring a bell for Saga's writers:
1. I did not interfere too much in the dialogues the mission designers put into the game. I always polished them, sometimes rewrote them extensively, but most of the time, I let the general sense of the dialogue remain unchanged. This resulted in a lot of idiotic dialogues, pilots talking shit and the like. Hey, it worked ten years ago in the Wing Commander series, right? Well, guess what, tastes change, people grow up, and it ain't ten years ago any more. Lesson: if something feels silly to you, don't polish it, dump it.
2. I did not get anyone to give me critical feedback on the dialogues during the production. Being the creative director, I was at the top of the food chain. Well, either I should have gotten another writer to look at them, or I simply should not have written any dialogues myself, so that I could retain a critical perspective when polishing dialogues written by other people. Lesson: always second-guess your own work.
3. I ignored the feedback from the focus tests, because I thought the feedback was ridiculous. Ok, it is ridiculous when people complain about racism in a WWII air combat game (oh, the Americans keep calling the Japanese "Japs"! Oh, how horribly racist!), but guess what - that's your audience, like it or leave it. You won't be able to talk to them to explain how wrong they are. Lesson: get a focus group to look at your game, and then try to address their complaints even if you don't agree (unless it would compromise the product).
The above is something of a tangent, it relates to my experience with Dogfight 1942 - but I suspect that Tolwyn, looking at those three points, may be thinking "uhm, yeah, that's kind of true..."
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But, getting back to Hyperion 3. I do have an issue with the dreadnought: really, it seems to be very underplayed in Saga. Remember how the Nephilim dreadnought was introduced in WCP? That was pretty intimidating. Freespace, of course, did an equally great (sometimes better) job introducing the Shivans' biggest ships. Well, the first time we see the Kilrathi dreadnought in Saga is almost anti-climactic. No dialogues about its size, no terrible slaughter of Confed pilots to show how powerful it is. Yes, the Armageddon pilots failed their strike, but that happens offscreen, and is described in such a way as to imply that it's got nothing to do with the dreadought - they simply "screwed the pooch". This is one major missed opportunity, because as we all know, you only ever get one first introduction
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Oh, and by the way - I suppose, had I been working on Saga at the same time as Standoff, my instinct would have been to treat the dreadnought with kid gloves, keep it exactly canonical, exactly as seen in WC3. Then, when people would have complained that it wasn't impressive enough, I would have said - hey, blame WC3. So, I'm not surprised by your approach. But thinking about it now, I can see lots of good reasons why the dreadnought needed to be revamped. All WC3 capships share one trait - the easiest way to destroy them is to get into the hangar. Once you do that, the rest is no trouble, it just takes time. What I would have done with the dreadnought, therefore, is either provide additional, physical barriers to the hangars (huge hangar doors that you have to blast open, something like that), or simply put a bunch of turrets INSIDE the hangar. You know, something was simply needed to make the dreadnought more challenging than the average carrier. But as I said, I can understand why you didn't try to do this - without the hindsight I gained by completing Standoff and listening to the feedback, it wouldn't have occured to me, either.
So, that's about it for today's missions. Not sure when the next one will be. In all honesty, I'm having trouble motivating myself to play more Saga, and the more I think about it, the more I conclude that it's simply a general problem I have with games that don't put any emphasis on character development. I have yet to complete X-Wing or TIE Fighter, for instance - which probably means I never will. Gameplay, after a while, invariably gets repetitive. When I fly another Saga mission, what could I possibly encounter that I haven't seen before? That's normal, and that's why it's so good to have character development to keep the player motivated. In this aspect, I know Saga was limited by technology/economy issues - you simply did not have the resources to implement more cutscenes with pilots. But you could have done more with the dialogues. A while ago, I pointed out that I'm deep into the game, and my character is still being treated as though he's fresh from the Academy. That's lack of character development. Seeing other pilots increasingly respect me would have been at least some small motivation...
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