Alright, first off, the script. It is not COMPLETELY done yet... There are small details which still haven't been defined like the name of some of the capships (mostly the Landreich capships); most of the inflight dialogue has been written, but will probably still suffer a LOT of changes (the final version will depend on how the missions turn out and on how many people volunteer to record voiceovers for Standoff). For instance, unless I get help from people with convincent Scottish and Aussie accents, I might have to change Standoff's intro a little bit
However, it's already defined how many missions will be in the mod, what will be the objectives and what scripted events will happen in each mission, and how each mission will affect the outcome of the branching campaign. The most drastic change that may happen here or there is that we might decide that it's best to merge two missions into a single one, because towards the end of the game, some missions may possibly end up as being too short (think of WC4's ending missions).
Almost all missions will still be shorter than UE, though, since the difficulty in Standoff is focused differently: since in Standoff you're the wing commander of a small carrier, you'll have to look out for all your wingmen all the time (there will be a limited number of fighters onboard your carrier thoughout the campaign, so if you and your wingmen lose too many of them, you might be forced to fly a Stiletto solo in the last mission
)
Also, in most of the strike missions, you will be given the choice of leading either the squadron of fighter escorts or the squadron of bombers - makes sense to let you do this since you are the wing commander.
Now, about multiple endings.
They will be there, but they won't be as different as in WC3, for example. Seeing as how the BoT was such an epic battle, the different endings are limited to how much a CVE crew's performance could affect that battle. In other words, no matter how good you are, you will NOT be able to stop the Hakagas from reaching Sol system altogether (that'd take away half of the fun, anyway, right?)
Another thing worth noticing is that your performance in the beggining of the campaign will determine your future assignments: if your crew does surprisingly well, an Admiral will notice that, and you can expect to be placed in the center of the action in future missions, but if your crew does really really bad, you can expect to be assigned to secondary roles, and in the worst case, your crew might even be considered expendable and sent on suicidal missions (completing these missions, though, might earn your crew some prestige again
).
Finally, about fiction.
There will be LESS fiction than in UE, but it will be handled in-game. If you take a look at the screenshots on the Standoff site, on the screenshot of the TCS Firekka's CIC Room, you will notice that the cursor is over a "Comm terminal". That's a place in which you can click between each mission to read the e-mails sent to your character. It works like any other SO menu.
These emails you receive will include orders and assignments (sent to you by the Captain or superior officers from other ships on the fleet), reports on the conditions of your carrier's fighters (sent to you by the Chief Tech), general talk about the condition of the war (between you and the other pilots, like the SO fiction), and occasionally even some newsletters sent to you by the online press.
The ammount of fiction will depend on wheter HCl manages to do something that he was trying to do a while ago (about an idea Pedro gave him, that would reduce the size of the files needed for using in-game fiction) - if he can't pull it off, you can expect MUCH less fiction than UE - only the essential. However, if he can do it, there will be more fiction and more chit-chat.
I think that's about it.
--Eder
.Tell me about it.I really want to help.Its the only way I can,since I m not a programmer or something.
I just saw bits of MI:2 again a couple of weeks ago - the 'Aussie' guy in that sounded terrible!