Freespace series

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- remember, your average fighter pilot isn't going to have strong character interactions with many other individuals from other capships (he can't sit down and have a chat with a gunner from a destroyer escorting his carrier, for instance, because they are on different ships in a wartime situation). I think a way around this is to either A.) keep survival of the player's home ship a required objective in every mission (which occasionally might force the player to occasionally blow off other objectives so he has a place to land at the end of the day, but not through scripting) B.) make sure that plot-critical characters rarely fly on your wing in wingman-intensive missions until AFTER they are no longer critical to the plot C.) use the tried and true method of having plot-critical wingmen eject at the drop of a hat.

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 key, as I see it, is simply to keep plot critical characters and ships alive as necessary, and simply making the occasional reference to a loss in your carrier group / fleet. (e.g. "I heard you couldn't save the TCS Coventry yesterday... sometimes there is nothing you can do..." or "We originally planned on a three ship blockade of the jump point, but since we lost our cruiser in the last engagement, we're counting on you bomber pilots to take up the slack. (mission continues as originally planned, absent the cruiser that would have been there otherwise)" plot continues as normal from there on out, minus the Cruiser or Conventry for the rest of the game)
 
Your right you did give a mission with an escape pod in it... and the freespace mission totally eclipses it (hey if your allowed to make blanket statements then so am i!)

Oh, good, another one of those phrases people shouldn't have taught the internet. He said 'blanket statement', everyone take a shot.

Your claim was idiotic and you still haven't backed it up... cutesy internet catch phrases don't count. How does the fact that Freespace has a mission with *more* escape pods in it make it in any way technically or dramatically superior to Prophecy? Do you actually believe Prophecy *can't* display more ejection pods? I'll bet Quarto could make us a mission with five thousand escape pods in it -- and in all deference to Quarto's abilities as a mission designer, I'll bet that mission would be awful. Quantity is not quality, and no game better exemplifies this than Freespace.

Do you really not understand that the point of the mission was to personalize the man in the can, to create an emotional impact -- something Freespace fails to do at every single turn?

This reminds me of being a kid and bragging about how you read so many pages of a book -- it didn't matter what the book was, just that you'd read a lot of it.

I loved flying the wasp but I ask you if you 'didn't' use the booster pack would it change the complexion on the mission? I can play that mission on nightmare and still do alright without using it.

Yeah, you're magic.

And yes, adding something new by definition increases the 'complexion' of the mission.

... and just in case you never figure out what's going on, adding a new mode of gameplay does also enhance the 'complexity' of the mission.

Your right, when I saw a Barracuda lanch a torp I was amazed, I never saw it again after that, if the programmers had done it right it would've been amazing, but the corvettes hardly ever fire their torps even when you want them to, instead they usaually amble about trying to target fighters.

... you want them to?

It's especially funny because you 'forgot' to respond to the argument about seamlessness. Or maybe it's especially funny because you begain your response by whining that capital ships never went near the Midway, and then managed to admit that even in your weird magical version of Prophecy you saw it happen:

Your right, I was excited when I started this mission, but the cap ships didn't even go near the midway, all you had to do was waste the fighters nearest the midway and then do some SEAD on the capships

Your right it was a neat trick (i had the misfortune of reading about this trick before I played Prophecy) but couln't they have thrown in another type of bomber just to keep things interesting?

... another bomber like the Skate clusters, the corvettes, the Stingray Clusters or the Devil Rays? Man, Prophecy sucks -- but it would be great if it had *six* alien bombers instead of five! Your standards are asinine and entirely situational.

(And for the love of cats, I already made fun of somebody in this same darned thread for 'your'... and here you've managed to start four consecutive paragraphs with the same giant neon make-fun-of-me-because-I'm-dumb sign.)

I gotto go, when I get back online on sunday I'll try to read this entire thread (that will be a heck of a read thank you very much) and try to build a more structered and pertinent argument, I just don't have the time the now...... later

I would bet against you learning how to make a structured argument in twenty four hours...

P.S. to everybody arguing for Freespace, keep a civil tongue (or fingers?) theres no need for childishness here...that being said keep on fighting the man brothers!!!!

... but your time would be well spent practicing not to be an asshole.
 
Oh, and BTW, for everyone out there claiming that everyone copies WC... that's not really true. 3D space combat existed years before WC- see Star Raiders (which was made years before WC for the Atari 800) (http://www.sonic.net/~nbs/star-raiders/), and for all we know, WC is a Star Raiders knock off, and who knows, Star Raiders might be copying someone else. In any case, it's not a correct assertion that everyone is copying WC just because WC was ultimately the most commercially successful franchise. An analogy could be drawn to thrash metal, as that's like claiming every 80's thrash metal band copied Metallica because Metallica was arguably the most commercially successful thrash metal band of the late '80s (back when they still were thrash)... even though thrash metal existed before Metallica, and not every thrash metal band was a "Metallica Clone."

I think you're protesting too much -- or you honestly don't understand the history of game development.

When we say something is a Wing Commander clone, it's literally because Wing Commander changed everything. It's not a matter of sixty "space sims" showing up at the same time and one of them walking away -- it's a matter of Wing Commander being something so amazing and unique and *popular* that it completely changed the face of the industry.

Yes, there were games about blowing up spaceships before Wing Commander. There were games about blowing up spaceships released by Origin before Wing Commander. Wing Commander was different - it was a milestone that caused these later games to be developed.

There's always a precursor concept - but Wing Commander is the one that made everyone develop space sims. Was the 'RTS craze' because of concepts that appeared in the first 'Dune' game? Of course not -- Command and Conquer is the game everyone in the late 90s based their release on. Are all the modern MMPRPGs based on Gemstone or Lord or some other obscure title in the past? Perhaps genetically -- but they exist and are patterend directly after the game that created the market, Ultima Online.

Wing Commander is itself a Star Wars knockoff -- the concept for the game owes itself entirely to trying to make a game out of Star Wars' space combat sequences. Saying this is to explain its history, not to detract from it.

Star Crusader, X-Wing, Freespace, etc. are games that were developed *because* of the original Wing Commander -- and in the case of Star Crusader and Freespace, I'll happily damn them for failing to innovate. Just saying they're based on Wing Commander isn't an insult of any sort, though -- it's a history, and even a complement.. I can't think of anything better to rip off.
 
It's interesting to watch this thread. When the situation seems to be resolved it goes down hill (not that anyone is to blame, thats just the way internet arguments work from what I have seen).
Anyways here is my take on the situation.
I did not like Prophecy. At the time I liked Freespace more. It had the appeal of it being something entirely new and fun. However, I played through them again and I ended up thinking that Prophecy was the better game. It deals with the fact that I wanted real wingmen not Alphas Bets and Deltas. While I love the ammount of ships you get to fly in Freespace they seem to be good for almost every job. I flew most of the game in my good old Athena and never swapped it for anything else (unless I had too). In WC each ship has a porpose. I still think that the loadouts were a bit heavy. Freespace was fun and it still is fun. Howeve it is like playing an arcade game. Like LOAF said in another thread; in most WW2 games you get in a p51 shoot down 38 109s and bailout kill hitler and thats the end of it. Freespace is the Spacesim version. Youre an unnamed pilot who saves the universe and everyone loves you except they can't because they dont reall exist. Meanwhile WC has a few twists for you. Blair gets screwed up, Hawk dies(damn pity too), you lose a mentor and all sorts of stuff. In Freespace you can assume that nothing will ever go wrong ever. Anyways that abouts sums it up
 
Back early, Ian Brown concert wasn't quite the gig I was expecting and the celtic vs rangers game ain't on for another... 8 hours so I may as well try to reply to LOAF

Oh, good, another one of those phrases people shouldn't have taught the internet. He said 'blanket statement', everyone take a shot

I use the internet.... uhm so? Surprisingly enough the term 'blanket statement' can be used (and learned) outside internet usage, outside you know that place outside your bedroom walls (zing:D ) like I said the CIC is the first online community I joined and pretty much the onlt forum I post on.

Your claim was idiotic and you still haven't backed it up... cutesy internet catch phrases don't count. How does the fact that Freespace has a mission with *more* escape pods in it make it in any way technically or dramatically superior to Prophecy? Do you actually believe Prophecy *can't* display more ejection pods? I'll bet Quarto could make us a mission with five thousand escape pods in it -- and in all deference to Quarto's abilities as a mission designer, I'll bet that mission would be awful. Quantity is not quality, and no game better exemplifies this than Freespace.

Well I guess you can make that claim, the mission i'm talking about is when you defend a number of escape pods that are moving from a space station thats just been destroyed and are moving slowly towards a few rescue ships, they are constantly under attack (its pretty much convoy escort except the pods have no shields or defences so its tricky) and when they're all safe you can jump out, mission accomplished. When your playing the prophecy mission all you have to do is destroy the devil ray going for the pod and the pod is safe from abduction and then the mission just becomes a dogfight which you can only leave via autopilot after all the bogeys are dead, so its pretty much just a dogfight mission after the first 20 seconds after you kill the devil ray whilst the freespace mission is all about keeping the pods safe regardless of how many Shivans you shoot down. It just seems better in every respect to me, I can't really say more.


Do you really not understand that the point of the mission was to personalize the man in the can, to create an emotional impact -- something Freespace fails to do at every single turn?

What was the ejected pilots name (callsign), what does he sound like? I agree that the mission is important storywise for defining Casey as a hero but you just said that personalising the 'man in the can is the whole point of the mission', but you don't even know who he is, you see him for 4 seconds in a cutscene and then never again (he's one of Maniacs pups is all I know).

Yeah, you're magic.

And yes, adding something new by definition increases the 'complexion' of the mission.

... and just in case you never figure out what's going on, adding a new mode of gameplay does also enhance the 'complexity' of the mission.


I misspelled a word, I just can't go on anymore:D So a Booster pack is a whole new mode of gameplay? So prophecy would've been an entirely different game without those booster packs as opposed to a really cool little add-on? hmmmm......


... you want them to?

Well attack the Midway like torpedo boats instead of trying to dogfight with me like really weak heavy fighters, what’s the point of the Barracudas going after fighters when all the other kinds of fighters are already dogfighting? The programmers should've realised that the corvettes going after the midway whilst your distracted would've added to the experience. Its obviously not a simple case of 'the more going on the more fun it is' thats just daft but the need to think about more than just whats in your gunsight does add something to the game.

It's especially funny because you 'forgot' to respond to the argument about seamless ness. Or maybe it's especially funny because you begain your response by whining that capital ships never went near the Midway, and then managed to admit that even in your weird magical version of Prophecy you saw it happen:

Seamless ness is an objective term, yes prophecy was a whole lot more seamless than Freespace but I'm not even making issue of that (read my post about narrative) and anyway Prophecy is the story of one ship trapped behind enemy lines for the most part whilst Freespace attempts (quite poorly) to tell the story of one ace pilot saving his race from extermination during the course of an entire war so its MUCH easier to make a more coherent plot line.


another bomber like the Skate clusters, the corvettes, the Stingray Clusters or the Devil Rays? Man, Prophecy sucks -- but it would be great if it had *six* alien bombers instead of five! Your standards are asinine and entirely situational.

For one thing I never said prophecy sucks, thats not whining thats me correcting you

Actually your right about the rest though, you don't need more bombers you just need the bombers you already have to do what they're supposed to do properly i.e. attack the midway effectively (the bomber A.I. for Freespace also seems quite poor, they only fly in a straight line and barrel right in for they're target, not very sophisticated but effective nonetheless), that being said it was a stupid remark on my part that added nothing constructive to the thread.


... but your time would be well spent practicing not to be an asshole.

You can practice that? (SELF CENSORSHIP)? :D
 
What exactly are you trying to accomplish? You've posted incoherent statements that say one thing and then say another that attack here and then retract there. Look, first define the basics of your argument and then try to make a legible defense on the merits of those fundamentals.

I.E.

The case you are trying to make is:

That Freespace was not a commercial failure due to (insert your arguments here)

or

Freespace is better than Wing Commander Prophecy due to (insert your reasoning here but be specific and name precise, defendable explanations on what made Freespace supposedly better - be aware any explanations are subject to criticism and likely can and will be rendered nullified).

Otherwise all you are doing is blowing figurative hot air in a thread and throwing half based wild "blanket statements."

I would suggest you choose only one argument and stick with that...don't get sidetracked with lots of different material that does not apply in the slightest.
 
Paddybhoy said:
Surprisingly enough the term 'blanket statement' can be used (and learned) outside internet usage, outside you know that place outside your bedroom walls (zing:D )

My computer isn't in my bedroom, it's in the den

Counterzing
 
Bandit LOAF said:
When we say something is a Wing Commander clone, it's literally because Wing Commander changed everything. It's not a matter of sixty "space sims" showing up at the same time and one of them walking away -- it's a matter of Wing Commander being something so amazing and unique and *popular* that it completely changed the face of the industry.

I'd say there are only three space sims that really changed the industry. Wing Commander 1 was the second. And it didn't only really kickoff the space sim market it also did IMHO (co)start a new period of PC games. For the record - the first revolution in space sims would of course be Elite. The game everyone quotes, but noone played ;-) And finally there is WC3, which, while not terribly innovative with regards to gameplay kinda was the killer app for FMV in games.
 
What exactly are you trying to accomplish? You've posted incoherent statements that say one thing and then say another that attack here and then retract there. Look, first define the basics of your argument and then try to make a legible defense on the merits of those fundamentals.

I think he's pretty much already condeded the actual argument in his initial response. The weird, nonsensical rantings about how Prophecy NEEDS MORE PODS are his equivalent of 'peace with honor'.

I use the internet.... uhm so? Surprisingly enough the term 'blanket statement' can be used (and learned) outside internet usage, outside you know that place outside your bedroom walls (zing ) like I said the CIC is the first online community I joined and pretty much the onlt forum I post on.

It's one of those buzzwords stupid people on the internet use when they don't have an actual argument... in exactly the same way we raged against 'ad hominem' earlier in the thread. Don't have a real argument? Yelp about how the other guy is making 'blanket statements'.

Since wherever we are now is an evolution of you failing to respond to my citing *individual missions* in Prophecy as proof of my point, the claim is so incredibly mute. You don't get more specitic than that.

Well I guess you can make that claim, the mission i'm talking about is when you defend a number of escape pods that are moving from a space station thats just been destroyed and are moving slowly towards a few rescue ships, they are constantly under attack (its pretty much convoy escort except the pods have no shields or defences so its tricky) and when they're all safe you can jump out, mission accomplished. When your playing the prophecy mission all you have to do is destroy the devil ray going for the pod and the pod is safe from abduction and then the mission just becomes a dogfight which you can only leave via autopilot after all the bogeys are dead, so its pretty much just a dogfight mission after the first 20 seconds after you kill the devil ray whilst the freespace mission is all about keeping the pods safe regardless of how many Shivans you shoot down. It just seems better in every respect to me, I can't really say more.

Here's a serious suggestion that may seem a little odd: try playing the game at a setting other than Nightmare (since you've already said that's all you ever play at). Enemy fighters choose their targets based on skill levels -- with more and more being allowed to attack *your fighter* at the higher levels. Since you have such a hardon for escort missions, maybe you should actually play these at a lower difficulty level.

(Mind you, that's the kind of game-guts that I don't think Prophecy ever actually needs to expose -- which is another one of the reasons it's a great seamless experience and Freespace is not.)

What was the ejected pilots name (callsign), what does he sound like? I agree that the mission is important storywise for defining Casey as a hero but you just said that personalising the 'man in the can is the whole point of the mission', but you don't even know who he is, you see him for 4 seconds in a cutscene and then never again (he's one of Maniacs pups is all I know).

The ejected pilot was 'Capp' from the 'party' scene earlier in the game (... although Freespace fans will presumably get more reaction from the fact that he was part of *Epsilon* flight!)

(The 'man in the can' reference was, of course, a reference to the old Life magazine directive on the astronauts, vis a vis the overarching importants of characterizing the game -- the fact that the Wing Commander continuity guy can tell you a million things about Prophecy's background characters that you don't know isn't really relevant to that argument. On the other hand, if you're ever taking an English class, one of the very easy paper theses to support is picking out a character without a name in a story full of them and claiming that he's the conscious central in X manner *because* of this.)

I misspelled a word, I just can't go on anymore So a Booster pack is a whole new mode of gameplay? So prophecy would've been an entirely different game without those booster packs as opposed to a really cool little add-on? hmmmm......

This is another 'internet thing'. No one buys this -- you can't smoosh some kind of crazy claim to a legitimate point like this. We all see through it.

As for "spelling", I'm pretty sure I'm helping you out here. Learning which 'your' and which 'their' is which is a pretty darned essential skill for those who don't want to look like idiots.

Seamless ness is an objective term, yes prophecy was a whole lot more seamless than Freespace but I'm not even making issue of that (read my post about narrative) and anyway Prophecy is the story of one ship trapped behind enemy lines for the most part whilst Freespace attempts (quite poorly) to tell the story of one ace pilot saving his race from extermination during the course of an entire war so its MUCH easier to make a more coherent plot line.

Of course it's an objective term... that's why I chose it, it would be very, very hard to win an argument about a *subjective* term (I could do it, mind you, but that's only because I'm extraordinarily good at arguing things).

Actually your right about the rest though, you don't need more bombers you just need the bombers you already have to do what they're supposed to do properly i.e. attack the midway effectively (the bomber A.I. for Freespace also seems quite poor, they only fly in a straight line and barrel right in for they're target, not very sophisticated but effective nonetheless), that being said it was a stupid remark on my part that added nothing constructive to the thread.

I just told you about the "your" thing. 'You're' is the one that means 'you are'.

The bombers certainly attacked the Midway just fine - two years of explaining to people why they couldn't go on in the game after defense missions at agwc will attest to that (... because bombers would take out the carrier's launch tubes and prevent them from being able to launch on the next mission even if they did make it home).

For the record - the first revolution in space sims would of course be Elite. The game everyone quotes, but noone played ;-)

Well, I think you hit on the problem right here -- Elite was a great game... but it had no impact on the industry. There was no 'Elite craze' and so it didn't inspire anyone to clone it. Dune 2 is at least as great a game as Command and Conquer, System SHock is at least as great a game as DooM -- but without the sales, they're only objects for academic discussion.
 
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.
 
I think he's pretty much already condeded the actual argument in his initial response. The weird, nonsensical rantings about how Prophecy NEEDS MORE PODS are his equivalent of 'peace with honor'

I didn't make the issue of the number of pods an important issue it was only a small part of my argument, I just said that one pod being targeted by only one fighter (the devil ray) isn't really that great mission when compared to the Freespace equivalent (and your the one who wanted a direct comparison made between the two). The whole NEEDS MORE PODS issue is something you have focused on because you can't really argue on anything else, your just a big Sophist LOAF :D
 
Paddybhoy said:
The whole NEEDS MORE PODS issue is something you have focused on because you can't really argue on anything else, your just a big Sophist LOAF :D

That would be an excellent statement for someone who was stupid/silly enough to have not bothered reading the rest of the goddamned thread - as you have obviously ignored everything stated previously.
 
I didn't make the issue of the number of pods an important issue it was only a small part of my argument, I just said that one pod being targeted by only one fighter (the devil ray) isn't really that great mission when compared to the Freespace equivalent (and your the one who wanted a direct comparison made between the two).

And my reply was, and is that the Prophecy mission is better because the number of pods is immaterial - that Prophecy's mission is better because it signifies everything that is great about Prophecy, the integration of the story, the emotional impact and the .

Freespace's mission, on the other hand, is everything that's wrong with Freespace - an awkward mission which sticks its jagged edge outside the game and poorly confuses sheer numbers for quality.

The whole NEEDS MORE PODS issue is something you have focused on because you can't really argue on anything else, your just a big Sophist LOAF

Do you really believe this? You're the one who cut this issue out - I've responded to every single line of your argument (adding in the process various unresponded-to meta-claims that you haven't actually had an argument since your first post). It's insane to think you honestly believed you could quote one line of my long response and pretend this. I mean, there's no hard way to say this: you're the one who's doing this. You have cut out broad arguments, you have cut out specific arguments - hell, you have cut out broad and specific arguments *relating to this point* - I have not.

(I would make some plithy comment about virtue and payment, re: the accusation of sophistry... but given the poor form in which the initial reference was made, the response would probably not be appreciated.)
 
LOAF how about we change things a bit, since your the guy thats attacking freespace as a game I think its encumbent upon you to present a logical argument about why you think freespace is a poor title because I like freespace and I have gone on quite a bit over why I like it, all you have done is compare it to Prophecy and even then you haven't been very detailed in your analysis (also this is a long thread and it might help people just tuning in if they can have a summary of whats going on instead of reading through the entire thread) because I just can't be arsed looking through every post to look for the inconsistencies, spelling mistakes 'blanket statements' or any of stupid insults that have peppered this discussuion.
 
So, you're not competant to argue the points you've specifically maneuvered into the forefront... so you'd like me to start over? I'll grant you leave to go back and respond to any post I've made in this thread a second time. That's more than kind.

And you don't understand why the thread is about comparing Freespace to Prophecy? That's interesting, as you started the comparison yourself.

And I "haven't been very detailed in [my] analysis"? Did you again forget the elephant in your room, the list of specific Prophecy missions cited to disprove your argument, to which you never managed to reply? And did you just pass over all my bulleted lists and long commentaries about exactly this matter?

I understand that you've been backed into a corner and don't know what to do, but it would be a lot more noble just to concede or make an honest attempt than it would be to post offensive inanities like your last "claim".
 
Listen LOAF your obviously way more emotionally involved in this than I am, I have responded to all your queries you just didn't like what I was saying, I think it would make more sense for you to actually say something I can reply to because right now your just attacking me with vague jabs like 'your not being specific enough', your being to specific' 'you see this one little thing that was only a small part of your argument i'm just going to hit you over the head repeatedly with it'. Right now I'm just not impressed with anyone of your arguments (they scattered over a dozen or so posts, mixed in with rhetoric and few pointless insults) so for the sake of a good debate and the continued relevance of the thread why don't you just clearly state all your issues in one post so I can get a proper handle of where your coming from.

Or you can PM me, your call.
 
To borrow an appropriately obnoxious expression from the boys over at SpaceBattles, concession accepted.
 
It is kind of remarkable how suddenly he went from trying to claw onto one or two entirely irrelevant points to blathering nonsense generically.

I think I broke his mind.
 
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