Thoughts on campaign, and 3rd party campaign mods.

[CIA_Yankee_]

Salutations.

 

I've been thinking about the new SPC, and wanted to share my thoughts on the matter.

 

Firstly, I have to admit that I much prefer having a more immersive dynamic campaign, similar to RoF's career mode, EAW, or BoBII single pilot campaign. What BoS offers is cleary nothing like that, and while the simulation itself is very well done, the campaign is very barebones.

 

HOWEVER, I think that the devs have been pretty clear on this: they were never going to devote resources on building a serious dynamic campaign. Based on previous comments (for example their dev update when they unveiled the campaign), as well as one of Jason's recent posts, it is clear that they are depending on 3rd party modders to make the kind of SPC I would like.

 

However, I think we need to keep in mind that this does NOT mean that they don't care about those of us who like immersive campaign. They may not have the resources to devote to making a great dynamic campaign, but what they ARE doing is actually giving us the tools needed to make such a campaign: their whole campaign mode is built around "knobs" that 3rd party modders can play with:

 

1- Different stages of the battle, reflecting passage of time.

 

2- Airfield selection.

 

3- Airplane selection.

 

4- Mission type selection.

 

And I imagine more knobs may be added or may actually exist behind the scenes, used for generating the individual missions.

 

Moreover, since the missions are actually generated server side, I imagine that there are ways to directly call the server with the appropriate parameters to generate a mission, which itself can be encapsulated in a 3rd party mod.

 

Granted, I don't have any real evidence of this, aside from a hunch as a developer when looking at the design, but it's a very compelling hunch.

 

Or, if you prefer, with the current SPC you can clearly see that the elements needed for a more immersive dynamic campaign are actually there. The buttons and knobs are all in place... someone just needs to know how to use them, and integrate them in a mod.

 

Given that, I think we'll have something pretty decent in a few months.

 

Of course, that still means the devs need to fix their mission generation to add more variety and more units (making mission unit density another knob would be a great thing, if it doesn't already exist behind the scenes), but all the ingredients for a good dynamic campaign are there for sure.

 

Thank you.

 

Itkovian

 

[TheBlackPenguin]

I like the campaign mode, but its quite distinct in nature to a career. If you look at ROF you'll see both, and to get a sense of how much work it can take they've still not completed the career mode yet as its still listed as beta.

 

We'll see how BOS is once released, I do actually like the campaign so far and hope too someday to see a career.

[CIA_Yankee_]

I like the campaign mode, but its quite distinct in nature to a career. If you look at ROF you'll see both, and to get a sense of how much work it can take they've still not completed the career mode yet as its still listed as beta.

 

We'll see how BOS is once released, I do actually like the campaign so far and hope too someday to see a career.

 

I think the current campaign is pretty meh, BUT it clearly offers the tools needed to make a career mode.

 

That said, I think the RoF career mode is PRECISELY why they're not making a career mode for BoS in the first place: they spent all this time making a pretty spiffy career mode (note that it took quite a while after release before they did that, too), and ultimately everyone uses Pat's campaign generator anyway.

 

For the devs, this means they wasted time and money making a mode that a third party made better, and their time would have been better spent on the sort of things only THEY can make.

 

Basically, simulators come in two parts: the "core" of the sim, which only the devs can fix and improve, and the outlying features which modders and users can supplement and improve on their own. Given how sims are niche products with limited development resources (we're not talking AAA titles here, after all), it makes total sense for the devs to focus on providing the best core product, and to work with modders and users to handle the outlying features (which Jason basically said is precisely what they're doing).