Part 8: Harbinger - Part 2
Harbinger, Part 2Lord Commodore Seigfast: Shield and torpedoes, with Ember Lance equipped destroyers as escort.
Lord Commodore Ganuun: Standard Traitor Flagship with a carrier escort.
Traitor Admiral Anruns: Railguns and torpedoes, shielded with Ember Lance equipped destroyer escort.
Enemy Starfighter - Campaign
The campaign was the greatest betrayal from the original idea of Enemy Starfighter, and it really was a betrayal atop betrayal. In its original form, it was very much Rainbow Six crossed with Homeworld. Your initial job would be that of the Flight Officer in TIE Fighter, carefully assigning a meticulously planned strike package to complete missions. Missions would be randomly generated, and losses would be permanent. This initial hook in 2012 would take a radical turn in February 2014, which is when Kairo switched his plan from Rainbow Six in space to, as he described it, 'Grand Theft Starfighter'. He can describe it better than I:
Grand Theft Starfighter - Feb 13, 2014 posted:
Battle-planning has been replaced with hunting and hiding. Before, each battle was fed to you via a simple mission generator and menu. It wasn't dynamic, lacked tangible persistence, and it certainly didn't fulfill the fantasy of being a starfighter harassing the enemy deep in their territory. I can go into this in detail if people want, but I won't bore you with that here.
Now, when you enter a system you are told what flagship to destroy and are given free rein to hunt and deal with it as you see fit. Do you build up your forces and take out the flagship head on? Do you misdirect their escorts to a bogus landmark and then jump the vulnerable capital with a small group of beam frigates, knowing full well that you will lose them?
Once combat begins, gameplay is structured very much like a police chase with your fleet at the center of it. If you've ever played GTA or if you've ever done small-scale skirmishes in a game like EVE, you should have an idea of what to expect. In fact, a lot of what makes this game tick comes from countless hours I've spent running around in EVE's Syndicate region in an interceptor.
While a few of these systems are super rough, they are at least functional. They mainly need passes on readability and polish, which will happen soon.
There were also separate factions, including on the enemy side (System patrol craft defending certain targets, Lane Marshalls which would defend jump gates and investigate disturbances and the Nobles that would fortify themselves at the jump gate, and IIRC some would proactively hunt you). It's a damn shame the stream VoDs are gone now, but I'll try my best to describe the starmap gameplay from memory:
You would strike supply locations and the such, undefended and weak depots, and you'd have a time limit to take out enemy ships in the area. Go beyond that time limit, and enemies can call for reinforcements and alert the main enemy fleet. As you were fighting, the music ramped up and either calmed down or went full you've fucked up the entire fleet is after you run like hell. You'd then go back to the Warren, use the dread you accumulated by smashing enemy outposts to build up a fleet strong enough to take out the enemies guarding the jump gate, and your goal was to eliminate the High Kings, or High Lords of the region. During that time, Kairo likened it to MGS' alert system.
You'd also pick a noble house within the Empire, which would determine starting gear. You'd find and purchase upgrades. You would feel an increase of power throughout the game, tangibly, through the process of the game.
It was around September 2015 that things began to change. Kairo states that he received "consistent feedback" as to the "campaign mode framework". In November, he said:
"Kairo - November 29th, 2015 posted:
Early in September, the game was the equivalent of a film studio getting a 4 hour first edit of a film. There were a lot of good ideas mixed in with a lot bad ones, and mostly it wasn't cohesive and it lost a lot of my playtesters. So I'm trying to edit that meandering 4 hour cut into 80 minutes of focused awesome which is really tricky.
In February, it was:
"Kairo - February 27th, 2016 posted:
The campaign has received considerable iteration and simplification based on the feedback I received. It's where I've been spending 90% of my time, and I'm hitting a milestone with it very soon.
Over the course of four years, a whole game was shelved, made, scrapped, and then made from the patchwork resulting from all of that a linear campaign was made. 14 missions. Upgrades purchasable before missions. The results of each mission are totally negligible. Now, Kairo cites TIE Fighter, a game that was 22 years old at that point, and still delivered a game with less content than its smallest expansion pack, Defenders of the Empire, which was released in 1995. Furthermore, unlike these two old games, there is no way to make your own missions in House of the Dying Sun.
Originally, Enemy Starfighter would have infinite content with a narrow scope. Kairo decided to widen that scope, still with infinite content. That widening required the game to be narrowed further (no variety in strike craft loadouts for example, no bombers etc.) to be a streamlined experience for its new nature. Then, the game was re-narrowed to generate "memorable encounters" a la TIE Fighter and Dark Souls.
Kairo posted:
Some kinds of combat are great with the volatility of randomness, like Diablo. But compare that with something like Dark Souls, which is superficially similar, but utterly dependent on level design. But IMO, it has WAY better combat. Bloodborne was interesting because they tried to RNG with the the chalice dungeons and it fell kinda flat. TIE and Freespace have similar combat sandboxes, which is why they require someone to actually do the work and design fun combat.
Now, I've LP'd TIE Fighter and I've played Dark Souls. I can tell you for a fact that I can only recall three missions: One because it was fucking bullshit, and the other two because they have memorable dialogue. Dark Souls is not remembered for its "memorable encounters" outside of certain bosses or bullshit enemy placement (especially 3, fuck the gold guys on the bridge). It's remembered for the world and writing. I remember Anor Londo because that place was cool, I don't remember Blighttown because of where they put a zombie.
I only remember four of 14 levels in Dying Sun and I'm playing through it presently. Those are the first one (because of the rocks), The Cleric (because of that massive rock), The Masters at Arms (because of the rocks), and the last one (because of the genocide). This is a minor detail, but Kairo wanted to change the colours from Red vs Blue (and the player being Red) because of confusion in focus testing. There was minor outrage when it was changed to be more generic, but then Kairo settled on Orange vs Blue. The changes to the campaign map happened because:
Kairo posted:
This. You were essentially be spending a minute or two doing the equivalent of sneaking around a box in Metal Gear while a guard checks out a noise. In MGS, that takes 4-5 seconds. It's one of those things that sounds great on paper, and even when you're first working on it. It could still be neat, but I also think a lot of these mechanics are just way better in something that's not an action space game.
Kairo posted:
Also, the warping around is a nice fantasy, but it utterly failed all sorts of playtesting. People had a hard time mastering it, and even then they thought it was boring. One of my testers literally turned around and asked if they could go back and play the PAX demo level. Ouch.
Kairo posted:
Friends, family, colleagues.
They are pretty hardcore PC and console gamers so they do represent my core audience (and me) pretty well. Quite a few play games like Elite but many don't. They do play the shit out of stuff like Souls, Destiny, DotA, League, XCOM, etc. It's not like they are my grandmother.
And so Kairo cut out the old Campaign to appease his testers. The same ones who couldn't tell themselves apart from the enemy because the colours deviated slightly from the norm. I'm never going to argue that QA isn't an important aspect of game design, it is, but we lost a fantastic game because of it.