Dynamic Campaigns: what do you expect?

Flight Sims
21

I guess I better define that term to the extent of my understanding considering that I was the one who paraded it around the other thread. :slight_smile:

“Meaningful Choice” can describe a situation, problem, or decision-point which is any combination of the following:
A) Nuanced enough that there are multiple viable solutions.
B) Critical and challenging enough for neither absolute success nor absolute failure to be a given.
C) Complex or vague enough that an optimal solution either doesn’t exist or is extremely challenging to identify.

Take customization of pilot portraits- they make your decisions feel significant since you’ve now associated emotional ties to the unit (OH NO I’VE KILLED FRED!) but if the game is railroading you, ultimately the experience is still void of meaningful choice.

That said, pilot fatigue, experience, unit cohesion, and other modeling of ‘soft’ attributes and personnel can certainly add dimension to a campaign.

EDIT: The other thing to mention is that complexity alone does not necessarily lead to meaningful choice. Notice how Tetris checks off the boxes for A, B and C with flying colors. Likewise things like munition counts, plane counts, supplies, personnel attributes, morale, blah blah certainly add dimensions to the problem, but won’t save a poor design.

The problem is that when we try to talk and think about simulating some thing with lots of meaningful choice in real life in an attempt to capture what makes the real deal incredible, I think the first cut frequently just copies readily identifiable traits of that experience.

Read: “A real life officer at the theatre level is worried about these things- therefore, our dynamic campaign system must have all the above verbatim in order to capture that experience at the pilot level.” This is hard and easy to screw up, in my opinion.

A better approach might be,

“From a pilot in a campaign’s perspective, missions and life are complex and uncertain for the following reasons. Our campaign should model and simulate the top 5 in order to make the player consider the same challenges a real pilot would.”

3 Likes
22

Some very good points have been identified already.

I would like to stress another topic: User Experience, i.e. how is the player interacting with the sim.

For some reasons, Russian developers seem to struggle with this. Don’t get me wrong, I love ED, Maddox Games and 777 but the UI is very… functional? crude? straight forward?

It does its job of launching the mission very efficiently but it does not emerge the player very well.

Compare that to European Air War or the old X-Wing games. Right from the main menu some kind of positive anticipation was built up. The transition to the cockpit was more smooth.

Sure this effect wears off over time but I always felt thrown into the cockpit and not really getting set up for it properly.

Which brings me to my expectations for a DC:

Briefing

Show me the big picture. Let me drill up or down if necessary. Some questions for guiding:

  • What is the campaigns objective?
  • How will the mission contribute to that objective?
  • What are the success factors for the selected mission?
  • How can the flight lead divide tasks to his pilots to fullfil the mission?

Personally I’m only interessted in Multiplayer campaigns.What I would like to see for those is an interactive briefing screen, with some prepared content, like a map with all waypoints, recon photos or a detailed map of the ground targets. The interactive part should consist of the possibility to move or add waypoints live so that everybody sees the changes immediatetly or define who is going to bomb which target.

Ideally all this information is transferred into the aircraft (Data Catridge, Kneeboard).

Some of this stuff was done in Falcon, but with today’s technology you could make it look so much better, e.g. don’t let it look like Excel. I imagine some nice art work of a squadron briefing room.

Debriefing

This is something which is quite disappointing currently. I would like to get an evaluation of my performance based on the briefed objectives and also see the change of progress on a map or chart.

Add to this some feeling of persistence like a Sierra Hotel Board (who’s the hotshot in the squadron) or some nicely presented statistics from my fellow pilots (Human and AI)

tl;dr: Smooth out the transition into the cockpit. Encourage collaboration for the briefing with built-in tools. Improve presentation of objectives and results.

6 Likes
23

So, people want X-com only then with fighter jets! That’ll be easy :wink:

Lots of interesting idea’s here. Makes me wonder how the DCS backend functions.

1 Like
24

Man, reading and posting in this thread really makes me want to code a little state machine for mission creation…

25

Been having a real big think about this.

Mission creation.

Now i am very basic at making missions. Even for simple ones there is a surprising amount of time investment to ensure things are working right. There are also scripts and coding, its like a hidden and unfathomable pool of dark magic that can add all kinds of groovy stuff to a mission.

I know mission designing can create wonderful bespoke scenarios with nice in depth details where as a dynamic campaign tend be more generic.

Is part of the appeal of a dynamic campaign that it takes the time investment and complexity out of playing the game (mission creation)

26

I liked the DCs in LB2, Jane’s F-15, EAW, and EECH. All 90s sims. I played and won multiple campaigns in each.

The DC’s in IL-2, Falcon 4, CFS3, and RoF were too sterile for me. I tired of them very quickly due to repetition or lack of connection to what was happening. Only Falcon 4 did I ever even finish one, and that was 2 or 3 tops.

27

Mission creation can be an oxymoron. A bad mission creator like myself can get lost in the chain of events to which he wishes to expose the player. The player knows that this as been baked into the cake and so the outcome, even if successful, isn’t all that special. A scripted trigger system is excellent for short coops. And I think that’s what ED always assumed would be the best route for serious study sim enthusiasts. To which I say they were probably right. ED was simply not able to look beyond the glaring weaknesses of the Falcon dynamic campaigns. They seemed a bit incredulous that the very same player who knew the proper number and sizes of the AN fasteners in the A-10 canopy bow would be happy in the player bubble needed by the DC engine to manage computing resources.

I personally don’t think it is possible to replicate Falcon with DCS without writing a whole new game. And I think that trying to capture Falcon’s scale with DCS will yield an unplayable slideshow. If what I am writing is true, then this further means that we must seriously dial back our meaning of the word “dynamic”.

1 Like
28

either that or find a way for DCS to dynamically receive asset placement and scripting from an external application at runtime. That way an external program would drive a strategic/tactical game providing DCS with a bubble of detailed information for the player to exist in. This would then get updated in ticks to ensure it moves along with the player.

2 Likes
29

I like how SF2 did its semi-dynamic mission planning. If you flew a strike mission, you could assume that SEAD would go in first and that you had top cover while you hit your target. You never had to plan anything, but your actions did determine how successful your campaign went.

That said, i fired up SF 2 this evening and was astounded by just how horribly cartoonish it looked and I had to turn it off. I just could not bring myself to fly around in it. I wish that DCS had a little more going for it than it does. Right now, I’m trying to figure if Jane’s F-15 is a viable option for me with Windows 10. I’ve gotten USAF to work, and I’m working on IAF. My WW2 fix is satisfied by CFS3 with the Firepower add on, which is another semi-dynamic campaign whose mechanics work well for me.

1 Like