I don't disagree with your point. I just don't think it's as bad as all that. Interestingly, I was just one such player. I had never read Fleet Action (or any of the WC novels) prior to playing Standoff. (In fact, playing Standoff is what inspired me to pick up Fleet Action, my first WC novel). But I think you overestimate the confusion level. Granted, I had played (and more importantly, read the manual for) WC3, so I had a little bit of background; it wasn't like I was approaching Standoff with knowledge of WC1 and WC2 only, but even without that, I think the game actually would hold up OK.
Hey, I said it was our biggest failure, I didn't say it was an unmitigated disaster
. It was ok for WC fans, because most of us kind of understood what had happened even without reading the novels. It's impossible to be a part of this community without eventually picking up the missing bits of the story. But I certainly do think it would have been a very challenging story to grasp for people who are new to WC. But then again, people who are new to WC would be missing such a boatload of references to earlier works that the story would probably be the least of their concerns. Especially given the difficulty curve
.
Didn't know that. That's interesting. I had thought you did Episode 1 as an experiment to try out all the scripting and graphics tricks you intended to use later in the game. That's certainly how it feels.
No, no, you're giving us much more credit for pre-planning than we deserve
. Episode 1 was highly experimental indeed, but it was never a case of "let's try this out, because we'll need something like this later". I think the best way to put it is that Episode 1 was us flexing our muscles after UE - we now had a pretty good idea of the potential tricks that could be pulled in the game engine, and an appetite to see more. That appetite for pushing the scripting to its extremes, I think, is something that stuck with us all throughout Standoff, and... well, there's no way to say this without sounding arrogant, so I'll sound arrogant: it is because of our willingness to experiment that Standoff has far more interesting mission design to something like Secret Ops. It's impossible to compare Standoff to Prophecy, where the mission design was constrained by on-going development, and the things we took for granted were brand new and innovative. But when comparing Standoff to Secret Ops, which was developed with a ready-made engine and a design team who already had ample experience not only in general, but with this engine in particular, then yeah, I do think we were better in terms of innovation. But we were also worse in other ways, because our innovations were often done for innovation's sake -
hey, wouldn't it be cool if...? Let's try it! This meant that often, those innovations were not carried through for later use, because we were busy going after the next shiny thing. So, you pick up an ejected pilot in Episode 1, but then you never use the tractor beam again, because we've already shown that it can be done, so we'd be bored using the same trick again
.
The one thing we did really benefit from trying out in Episode 1, though, was the fighter-counting system. We quickly realised that the system has the potential to fall apart due to the wild divergences in fighter survival rates, so that by the end of the episode, we found ourselves bringing in Militia reinforcements out of nowhere just to get some less fortunate players out of a hole. Because of this, we were later very careful in designing the mission tree to allow for a range of excuses to re-stock on fighters, even on the losing path. I like the end result. The player gets a sense of greater depth by understanding that this time, there really are no little elves "back there" making new fighters for him, but at the same time, the system generally doesn't feel unfair, because it's rare for you to get in really deep trouble just because some stupid wingman crashed your last Rapier into an asteroid.
Still, the problem was it was a Ralatha, and those things are just too easy to kill (the bridge can be taken out from any approach angle from the front, and the engines from any angle behind).
Yeah, unfortunately we never could replicate WC2 flak well enough to convey the idea that if you fire a torp too early, it actually won't get in. Torpedoes in Standoff are far more effective than in WC2, where two torps for one Ralatha actually felt desperate.
Hehe I did most of the Ep3 loosing branch. I recall that back then everytime I suggested a crazy mission design/gimmick Quarto would say "Ok, I'll have it fit in the loosing path" as a way to get rid of me
I loved it !
Hehe, yeah.
Ok, Pierre, I'll add it into a mission design - but only if you're the one who implements it! I think you're the one on the team who most embodied that appetite for experimentation I describe above. I kind of lost that appetite around Episode 2, and only really recovered it towards the end of the project when the end was actually in sight. I utterly loved experimenting with implementation in Episode 5 (oh, that mission without any combat - my favouritest thing ever!
), but prior to that, the overwhelming sense of the scope of the project and the amount that
always still needs to be done completely sapped any joy I felt in coding. I just wanted to write down all the mission designs so that they'd be done and out of the way. At that time, my main source of satisfaction was in sadistically dissecting other people's code and tweaking the heck out of it - the fun of seeing a good thing get just slightly better (...or worse, depending on your point of view
).
The moment I did finish writing the very last mission outline was... a game-changer. There was an end to be reached. Standoff would be finished, and I knew I wouldn't be able to do any more large-scale mods, so I needed to enjoy it while it lasted. Although I do recall that along the way, there was a couple of earlier missions that I would reserve for myself because I wanted to code them personally. So, I suppose the lack of joy in coding in the middle of the project wasn't as complete as I make it out to be
.