Make the game easier, Please :-(

P

Ph3nix

Guest
Hi, I would like to ask the Standoff crew if they could make available for the final release a patch to make the game less "impossible" to finish. I have played the first 3 episodes on normal mode. The mod is done very well, it shows all the love and care (and time :) you've put in it, but for a ~~~~ like me, its getting hard replaying the same missions 20 time over and over because I get smashed by a swarm of enemyes. Its a bit odd that I have to fight 15-20 enemy craft by myself.,....very unrealistic I think. Can you please make it possible to lower the number of enemy crafts in the missions (say, by 50%).
I really like the story, shame its almost impossible to continue some mission for those of us who dont have a joystick and 10-year skills behind us.
Sorry for this complaint, but I think I'm not the only one having this difficulties.
Keep up the good work. Wish you best of luck with the final release!
 
Thanks for your feedback. But really, no, we couldn't :).

The game already provides some ways of reducing difficulty - you can set a lower difficulty level, or you can even make yourself invulnerable. Changing the missions themselves would be excessive.

In addition, the mission difficulty is balanced specifically to create a specific event - the biggest battle that took place in the WC universe. We've gone through a huge amount of effort to ensure that the missions feature as many ships on both sides as humanly possible, while still being fun to play. You're actually the only one complaining about the number of ships being excessive - but even if there were others, we still wouldn't respond, because we're aiming for a specific kind of experience. We understand that this is not enjoyable for everyone, but that's the case with any game, and we're definitely not sorry for it :).

Besides, failing missions is supposed to be a part of the Standoff experience. We only expect the best players to win every mission in the game. We're actually hoping that most players will fail a mission or eject at some point during the game. That's the kind of battle we're trying to re-create.
 
Some advice to maybe make your experience a bit more enjoyable....

Instead of turning the difficulty setting down, try setting it to Hero, at that level the enemies will be a bit tougher, but your wingmen will also be more intelligent as well. I find that on the lower levels at times it's almost more difficult because of the ineptitude of your wingmen.

As for control scheme, I'm hoping you are using mouse control since you lack a joystick, while not exactly as great, it's still an excellent control device (I did all of the Ep4 testing with a mouse as I only recently got a joystick again).

As for failing missions/ejecting, it's going to happen. Just because you fail a mission doesn't mean the game is over, if you fail certain ones you'll get sent on the losing path for an episode, which is just as enjoyable as the winning path, in some cases even more so. Granted, everybody wants to win every mission, but in Standoff they have provided a really enjoyable losing path that you should also want to explore.

If you are having trouble with a specific mission, just post a question here and I'm sure you'll get tons of responses as how to best complete it.

Good luck.
 
We're actually hoping that most players will fail a mission or eject at some point during the game. That's the kind of battle we're trying to re-create.

And you guys have done an OUTSTANDING job of that:) It can be insanly hard but thats why they call the toughest difficutly setting nightmare right? Keep up the awesome work!
 
Yep, there is. The first and second episodes are pretty much single-path (well, there's some branching in Episode 1). After that, depending on how you finish Episode 2, you get a different path in Episode 3, and so on. And, unlike the branches inside individual episodes, which usually lead to one or two variants of more or less the same missions, the different paths between episodes are really completely different. Essentially, Episodes 3, 4 and 5 actually contain two episodes in one.

...And don't worry too much about getting on the losing path - even in the final episode, you can still win the game (or rather, get the middle ending :) ).
 
This is one of the reasons that I don't plan on releasing the guide until a few months after Ep5...it's much more enjoyable to find out about the other missions through trial and error :p

Yeah, if you have mountains of free time. If you're just playing through casually to have fun when you can, it can be very tedious to hunt stuff like that down. If you're done with it, there's no reason to hold back releasing the guide. People who want to find things on their own can still do so.
 
Through Ep4 the guide is roughly 85-90% done. It still needs numbers checked, a ton of images, and some other minor work. Perhaps if I can find the time I'll finish off those sections and get it out around the time Ep5 comes out. As for the Ep5 section, I'm going to wait a while after Ep5 is released before releasing it.
 
If it's because it's not done/ready at that point, that's perfectly reasonable.
 
Yeah it's a project I really worked on a lot on during the winter when I was unemployed and had plenty of time between searching for jobs. But I left a lot unfinished and I would not want to release it without Quarto at least taking a cursory glance at it and he definitely doesn't have the time for that for a while.

Perhaps when Ep5 comes out I'll release the mission trees for the previous 4 eps as those are basically complete and just need to be double checked. The main guide sections for them though will have to wait until I can find time to polish it up.
 
Also, I'm actually rather apprehensive about the guide. I'm worried that it'll never be completely accurate - going through the missions to compare the original outlines with what actually ended up in the game is gonna be really tedious.
 
Also, I'm actually rather apprehensive about the guide. I'm worried that it'll never be completely accurate - going through the missions to compare the original outlines with what actually ended up in the game is gonna be really tedious.

Yeah that's one of the major pieces I still need to plug in. I've gotten a little better at reading the source code, but definitely need a trained set of eyes to catch everything and make sure I'm getting it right. For now, placeholder data from the outlines is in there and I know it a lot of situations it isn't correct.

It's also one of the reasons that nobody else wanted to start the guide...uhhhmmmm.....Eder :p
 
I'm still not convinced at all that a guide is a worthy investment of one's time, but hey, it's your time now, so who am I to say anything? :p

Me, I don't get how we went from having zero new official Wing Commander stories to play through in the past decade to not having enough time/patience to explore the branching in an unofficial one that takes under 8 hours per play-through.
 
the guide would be nice. I would be happy with a simple, hey fail here go to this series of missions. Its hard to loose all the time .
 
I'm still not convinced at all that a guide is a worthy investment of one's time, but hey, it's your time now, so who am I to say anything? :p

Well I was unemployed for months while originally creating the guide so it's not like I to much else to do...remember that's when I was bugging you, Pete and Quarto on MSN on probably a minute by minute basis :p
 
For an additional CIC bday present to go along with Ep5's release I will throw in the Eps1-4 mission trees...the rest will have to wait until I have more time to make sure it's correct.
 
You could have some people beta-test the guide and check every little thing as they play through...would be pretty effective (though a little tedious).

Errors tend to be missed in just about everything without additional eyes checking it over....games, guides, reports etc.
 
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