Spertallica said:
I have indeed tried Standoff, and I really think it's a good mod (IMO, a far better game then the original Prophecy, WCP SO, or even WC3), and I appreciate the innovations that the Standoff team has employed in the creation of their mod. The addition of wing losses carrying over missions was really cool, and, at least for me, added to the immersion of actually "being" a wing commander by holding the player responsible for losses under his command.
Great - so perhaps the fact that you like this feature will help you understand my point. You see, I also thought this would be a really cool feature. And it was - in the first episode, which was completely isolated from the rest of the campaign. The moment we started working on the second episode, we also begun to regret introducting this feature.
It just causes an enormous amount of problems. It's fine when you have five missions... but when you have a sequence of twenty missions, you suddenly face the possibility that the player will run out of ships entirely halfway through. Worse than that - you face the possibility that the player will run out of
one specific type of ships early on. It made sense in the first episode to give the player a "game over" screen if he'd ran out of Gladii... but imagine how ridiculous that would seem in the rest of the campaign. There you are, defending Sirius... oh, you're all out of Rapiers? Eh, too bad, game over, your Stilettos, Sabres, Gladii and Crossbows can't do anything if you have no Rapiers. No, it wouldn't work - so what's the alternative? The alternative is to prepare alternative versions of every mission. We did in fact plan on having a lot of missions where you choose which ship to fly... but we never intended
all missions to allow fighter selection, because it's such a huge amount of additional work. If you want to do fighter selection - to do it right, that is - you gotta do more than just make a copy of the mission with the player flying a different ship. It means changing the ship assignments for everyone else, it means rebalancing the mission so that it's still just as challenging to the player (and not
more challenging - which is an important distinction when you consider that one of the ships the player can choose is the afterburner-less Crossbow... and it's used in the biggest, nastiest firefights!). It also means preparing alternative missions for situations that we never anticipated - what happens if you're out of bombers of any kind, and the next mission is a strike? Or what happens if you're out of Stilettos and Rapiers, which always fly on patrol around the Firekka? In both cases, it makes no sense to just end the campaign with a "game over" - we would have to prepare alternative scenarios.
...So, we came up with a solution - at the start of every episode, we would find an excuse to refill the player's fighter compliment. Suddenly, it turns out that your losses no longer matter - so what if you lose half of your Stilettos in the first two missions of episode two, when Stilettos aren't used offensively for the rest of the episode?
This isn't to say that the fighter-counting was a total loss. It still makes an important difference to the game, especially because in one case (going from episode two to the losing version of episode three), the player's fighters are
not refilled, which helps get the point across that he's managed to get the Firekka cut off from the rest of the universe. What I am getting at is that any such innovation dramatically increases the amount of work involved in planning out and implementing the campaign.
Heck, consider another example. I'm sure nearly everyone agrees that Special Ops 1 and 2 were fantastic. They were really great add-ons, and in terms of story, they were frequently more interesting than WC2 itself. Now imagine how these two campaigns would have looked, had WC2 implemented fighter counting. You take Maniac and go out with Paladin to destroy the secret Mandarin base. Maniac ejects in the first mission. There was only two Morningstars, so Maniac is now out. You face the next mission alone, and you end up ejecting. Sorry - that's the end of it. Instead of a dramatic campaign where you penetrate deep into an enemy system to attack an enemy base, you'd have a "dramatic" campaign where you attempt to reach the jump point leading to that enemy system... and fail.
Of course, players would get around this by repeating every mission again and again until Maniac finally manages to come home with them. But forcing players to replay every mission twenty times just to save a wingman's ship (not even his life) is bad game design. It's Freespace-style game design.
Sure, plot certainly adds to the experience, but if the only reason I'm ploughing through missions in a game is to see the plot, then what I'm playing is not a very good game.
Oh, I fully agree. Nonetheless, I would argue (err... actually, I think I already did, two posts ago) that there are some genres were plot is at the very least as important as the gameplay. The space-sim is one of those genres (the RTS is another example - I can't imagine playing an RTS where the only thing that changes between one level and the next is the fact that the enemy is more powerful, and that both sides have been arbitrarily gifted with a new type of unit). You were attracted to WC for its gameplay - but without the plot, you would never have bothered buying the expansions or a sequel. What would be the point? If you wanted more of the gameplay, you'd just replay the original.
Oh, and as to plot developement vs. strategic complexity- I recognize the issue- the less scripting you use, the harder it is to make a tight plot revolve directly around the action. I don't think strategic gameplay precludes having a strong plot though [...].
I see no reason why other ships in a player's carrier group can't be destroyed without effecting the plot immensely (thereby requiring more time to create the fiction) aside from making later missions more difficult... which is something the Standoff Team has done with the # of wingmen allowed per mission. There is no reason a similar system couldn't be used with capital ships or with strategic gameplay.
The reason, mainly, is the additional effort this requires. The only way to do this sensibly is to turn the game into something like Starshatter - and Starshatter has even less in terms of characters and plot than Freespace did. If you don't turn the game into Starshatter, you're going to spend an enormous amount of time just trying to think up all the different variations of every mission. You also shoot yourself in the foot in a number of other, subtle ways. What happens if the story requires a certain pilot from the Rapier squadron to say something in a given mission, and there is no Rapier for him to fly? We do, on some occasions in Standoff, plan for this kind of contingency by having an alternative ship (usually the Stiletto) held in reserve for a plot-critical pilot... but this doesn't always make sense, and it tends to get pretty obvious to the players after a while. This, needless to say, is a bad thing - when players start noticing game mechanics elements that happen
just to allow the plot to proceed, the immersion factor drops very sharply.
The above example was in relation to wingmen, but I can easily think of similar examples for capships. What happens if you want a given capship to play a leading role in a particularly special mission? It's easy to replace a destroyer with bombers in a capship strike... but what happens if the destroyer in question is supposed to stay behind on a suicide mission, heroically holding the enemy off until you jump? I daresay, it would be a downright bad idea to send the player on a suicide mission - and sending off a bunch of wingmen instead only works if your wingmen carry such distinctive names as Alpha Two, Alpha Three, and Alpha Four. Otherwise, it's just too big a deal, and doesn't work narratively. And sure, you can get around it - for every such problem, there is a million possible solutions. There is absolutely nothing that can't be solved with a bit of planning and extra work. But while that's easy enough to do when you're adding one or two branches to the game, it becomes a nightmare when you try to make such branching a systematic part of the game. The work involved becomes so incredibly time and effort-consuming that you risk never finishing the game at all.
And remember, I say this from a position of relative comfort - for us, working on Standoff, adding an extra cutscene or mission just means a bit more time and effort. It might mean pushing the release date back another week... but so what? It doesn't matter to us that much. Now imagine a business situation, where time literally is money. One of the dumbest things ever done in WC was to allow the player to choose from about two dozen wingmen in WC4, for example - suddenly, it turned out that every time you had a plot-critical event happen in a mission and the script called for your wingman to say something,
every single wingman had to record that line. The cost of that is enormous, and that's just one or two lines. Similarly, to have the game react smoothly to fifteen different ways a given mission can finish means extending the planning and implementation phases by several weeks at the very least - and during that time, you are paying every single person on the team. By the end of the project, you're in a situation where the mission designers are still churning out additional variants of missions, while the artists are sitting around on their asses doing nothing - you've got no work for them to do, but you can't just stop paying them, because you want to have them around for the next project. Then, of course, the real bombshell drops - unless you test every single possible branch of the game, you're looking at the possibility of shipping with potentially game-stopping bugs. So you hire twice as many testers as you'd planned (why not use those artists who have no work? Because they're
not testers - I've worked with game artists who do fantastic work... but
hate playing games), you work them like mad for twice as long as you'd planned... and then you
still release the game with a bunch of game-stopping bugs.
In short, you can't just look at the future of the space-sim genre from the point of view of what "would be cool" (although I still say that all this tactical stuff, however cool it might be, would result in a totally different genre, leaving the space-sim dead in the dust). You have to consider the production point of view of how much various things cost and how much time they take. A problem that, to you and me, seems like just something that requires a bit of extra work might, to a game producer, be something that costs him hundreds of thousands of dollars.
) like I said the CIC is the first online community I joined and pretty much the onlt forum I post on.
