A Rant on Modern Gaming

[Kheldarson]

Kewl. Too bad it got pulled.

[Chromatix]

As an example of an older game that gets this right, I present Freespace 2. Actually, Freespace 1 had a similar structure as well, but FS2 is better known.

First, the title cutscene gives you a pretty good idea of what the game is about and what you'll be doing. As if the box art didn't give that away. It's a starfighter game - the last of it's kind before the big publishers gave up on the genre. (Apparently FS2 was extremely poorly marketed, so it didn't sell - despite rave reviews and very good player loyalty to the genre. Publishers saw the bad sales numbers and decided that the genre was dead.)

The next thing you get is a couple of welcome briefings from your Admiral and your squadron commander, so you get your bearings in the universe a bit. The commander mentions the ship and basic weapons that you're currently allowed to use, then says "If you need to review your training, now would be a good time to do so."

Then the first three missions are skippable tutorials, walking you through the basic controls and giving you a bit of dogfighting practice against very dumb and weak drones. They are extremely tedious for experienced players to sit through, so the fact that they can be skipped is excellent.

The following three missions are very much on the easy side, focusing on establishing the early plotline. In fact they are well balanced - novices only need to survive to progress while their AI wingmen are capable of completing the mission themselves, while experienced players find a decent array of stretch goals to provide some challenge.

This is then followed by a ship and weapon upgrade, triggered by transfer to another squadron, which in turn triggers another pair of tutorial missions. These are also skippable - in fact *all* tutorials can be skipped.

After that, the real action begins, as the fresh wave of alien invasion is revealed - who are a much tougher foe than the terrorists from the early missions. There are a couple more tutorials later in the campaign, covering more advanced tactics, but these appear just before you need to use them.

Cutscenes appear occasionally, but cover storyline information between missions rather than interrupting one already in progress. They are certainly not used as tutorial material.

Overall, it definitely earned those rave reviews I mentioned. I'm just glad that two very well-known developers from the genre are getting back into it now as independents.

[Dilorenzo]

Publishers saw the bad sales numbers and decided that the genre was dead.)

They said the same thing for adventure gaming. Then Kickstarter kicked that idea right in the nadgers.

[Chromatix]

Which is also what's happening for space games now - with both Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous breaking crowdfunding records. Star Citizen (with it's unfortunate initials from this forum's point of view) broke the overall crowdfunding record with over $7M, and Elite: Dangerous broke the Kickstarter record with over $1.5M.

Neither of those are, strictly speaking, pure combat sims like Freespace, but Star Citizen does have a single-player submode, named Squadron 42, which should be pretty close to the Wing Commander tradition.