Capture de Fralthi. Doable?

Originally posted by Delance
But to make a mission frustating and irritating is not good design, IMO. Intentional or not.
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That would assume, however, that a good mission should be fun, and I must disagree about that.... take the infamous Save the Ralari mission in WC1. It's not the least bit fun. When you fail it, you fail it not because you did something wrong, but because you didn't do enough - and their definition of 'enough' is a fairly difficult one to reach. Frustrating? Yeah. Irritating? Certainly. Memorable? Very much so.

BTW, I think we forgot to answer your question about the Fralthi... if you lose the Fralthi, you get on the middle path. This path is fairly similar to the winning path (most missions are basically identical, minus the Kilrathi ships), except that it ends with the middle ending instead of the winning ending. On the other hand, if you want to get onto the losing path, you gotta lose the station.
 
Originally posted by Quarto
That would assume, however, that a good mission should be fun, and I must disagree about that.... take the infamous Save the Ralari mission in WC1. It's not the least bit fun. When you fail it, you fail it not because you did something wrong, but because you didn't do enough - and their definition of 'enough' is a fairly difficult one to reach. Frustrating? Yeah. Irritating? Certainly. Memorable? Very much so.
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well said
 
Well, here's my opinion.

Yeah, "Save the Ralari" is fun but it's a non-critical mission. If you lose, you go to Rostov, which is a very cool system, and if you win at Rostov, you go back to victory path on Venice. So, if you lose the Ralari mission, it's even better because you get 3 cool missions with Iceman.

About the other mission, it's just a matter of politics. Some games are made artificially harder because they limit the save game process. Take the original "Dark Forces", for example. A mission could take like 40m, but if you lost after 39m of work you'd still have to replay everything. That mission uses the same trick. It's not that difficult, you just have to replay it a few times... What's hard is to repeat 10m of so-so gameplay so you can get to the hard part.

WC games had a good balance. You have somewhat short missions, and can't save during them. But each time you land, you get a chance to save. So you never have to replay too much in order to get to the point where you are having trouble.

It's not about not making the mission too hard, but to impose a lot of repetition in order to get to the hard part. That mission 3 has 10 minutes of repetitive, moderate combat in order to get to the difficult part. So each time the player loses, it must “autopilot” for 10 minutes until he have another chance. It gets boring very quickly, even for the hardcore gamer. A casual might simply give up after playing those missions. People play game to have fun, you know, not to suffer.

And I do think that good games must be fun. Games that aren't fun generally are bad games. The Ralari mission was fun because you could lose it without any great consequence. Also, it didn’t take much effort to get to the Ralari… In fact, you could even bypass the Salthi on the Asteroid Field and dash for it. If the Ralari mission was necessary to win WC1, people would hate it.

For another example, take a look at X-Wing. It was so difficult people would cheat simply give up. LucasArts ended up making the missions easier for the re-release version. It had a very bad game design. Missions were too hard, and if you didn't win a mission, you couldn't advance on that tour of duty. Also, missions were too hard sometimes. And if your character died, you'd lose all your stats or you'd have to start from scratch.

So for the “harder is better” guys, why not just delete the savegames and start from mission 1 when you lose at any point? That must sound great for you!
 
Originally posted by Delance

About the other mission, it's just a matter of politics. Some games are made artificially harder because they limit the save game process. Take the original "Dark Forces", for example. A mission could take like 40m, but if you lost after 39m of work you'd still have to replay everything. That mission uses the same trick. It's not that difficult, you just have to replay it a few times... What's hard is to repeat 10m of so-so gameplay so you can get to the hard part.
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You are wrongo, a mission in Dark Forces could take 15-20 minutes in medium dificult, you have many Lives so if you loose, the game load the game from a prior *autosave*, so you don´t replay all the mission again, of course if you sux too much and lose all your lives you deserve to re-play the mission :D

And about Mission 3, yes is shit, is hard, it makes you hate Quarto ;), and you want to throw your stick, but it´s fun and you feel like a true champion when you pass it.
 
Menace . . . that's what WC:Prophecy and SO lost somewhere along the way. you could come in from a scrap and not even have your armor knicked. Mission 3 in UE? Now that's menacing. I agree that the mission is long, but its like the mission in itself is a story. You have to conserve your armor for when the fur really starts to fly and the tension buildup is as evident as it is in any movie right before the climax. UE gave me three things that P and SO did not, excitement, suprise and just plain scaring the hell out of me. Especially Mission 3, the mission with the Electronic interference pods, and the final Mission. All of those add up to a very addictive game and a very menacing opponent. If your happiness in fulfilling that long mission 3 didn't outweigh the agony that you put into it, you might want to consider hanging up the joystick.

C-ya
 
Yeah, the mission with the jammers was definitely the most frustrating for me--I was only able to finish it using the Epee, afterburning away from the Nephilim ships and then luring them out and picking them off one by one. When I tried the Scimitar, they would just blow me up while my controls were locked.
 
Yeah I captured the stupid Fralthi. Taking the difficulty level out of the hardest setting did help a bit. But it was strange, this time there was much less Kilrathi fighters around... Like 4 at a time, 40... And the confed guys didn't get blown to peaces in a few seconds, they even cleared most of the turrets.

But boy oh the Epee suck. It's greatest quality is sucking less then the Scimitar. It sucked hard on WC2, it sucked hard on SO, and, because of the excellent model on the vision engine, it suck hard on UE.

This the the BORDER WORLDS. Where are the Vindicators anyway?
 
Originally posted by Delance
This the the BORDER WORLDS. Where are the Vindicators anyway?
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actually, UE2

the reason the Dauntless had such crappy fighters is because it was on its final run to be scrapped and thus had a skeleton fleet.
 
Correct Filler, obviously UE2 will see the Dauntless's compliment of fighters restrocked.
Had we included Vindicators I feel certain someone would have said "wheres the epee? I love the epee its so fast and maneuverable"
 
I doubt that, since everyone seems to whine about the Epee... I prefer to Ferret, but I have no real problems with reguard to the Epee.
 
I agree with TC.Epee will not be missed by anyone.......at least me and some people I know :D

What about some hellcats??;)

Ok I know,there is no possibility for Hellcats :(
 
The UE Epee definitely captured the feel of the WC2 Epee--it has decent attack power, but is so weakly protected that flying it is an exercise in not letting yourself be hit even ONCE. What I always think is weird is that it sports a torpedo, yet cannot afford to sit still long enough for the torpedo to lock on.
 
Sure you can... you just need to learn to play in the little bit of maneuverability you've got...
 
The Epee's torpedo, although it came in useful (it gave us an idea for a neat sim mission, for one thing), started off as a kind of inside joke, really. Angel mentioned in WC2 that there was a variant of the Epee that carried a torpedo, and I think most people found that difficult to believe. So, we threw in a torpedo-carrying Epee :).

Originally posted by Delance
For another example, take a look at X-Wing. It was so difficult people would cheat simply give up. LucasArts ended up making the missions easier for the re-release version. It had a very bad game design. Missions were too hard, and if you didn't win a mission, you couldn't advance on that tour of duty. Also, missions were too hard sometimes. And if your character died, you'd lose all your stats or you'd have to start from scratch.
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Hehe, I was actually going to bring up X-Wing as an example of a highly popular game that does the same thing we do in mission 3 :p.

Look, what it comes down to is that UE is designed for a very specific audience. It's designed for experienced players, and especially the ones that complained about SO being too easy. If you find it too hard... well, hey, that's what the difficulty settings are for :).
 
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