Rodan:
Quote:
I mean almost four years ago the whole community banded together in protest at the announcement that SHIII would have a
scripted branching campaign, and as we all know Ubisoft heeded the protest and we now have a functioning dynamic career system.
However, my interest has been piuqed at the reception the RSRD and now Operation monsun mods have gotten,
especially when you consider that a significant amount of the 'happenings' in these campaigns are scripted. Now I realize there
is a rather large difference between SHIII's original campaign concept and the one found in Lurkers campaigns, but it's still
perplexing to me that campaigns that rely so heavily on scripted elements manage to fair so well in a community that I thought
was so adamantly oposed to script heavy campaigns.
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I just want to touch on this part of your post Rodan. I understand what our saying about scripting the campaign, but for RSRD/OM, this was a call to reduce the ridiculas vessel traffic offered with the stock game. At first it was just reducing traffic here and there. Then along came Tater who started digging deep into the campaign layers only to find it was very lame and basically created to keep you entertained every nm you sailed. As Tater worked on it and made some sense out of it, Lurker picked up the ball and ran with Tater on it. Much study between the two of them created what on the surface looks like scripted game. By definition, it is scripted at this point. Task forces spawn at the appropriate time, major battles take place at the appropriate time. But, as you play, you are not always directed to head that direction with the knowledge that something big is coming up. You could be 1200 nm off dropping supplies when the Coral Sea Battle begins. You could be headed in that general direction for a major battle, get the Ultra alert and completely miss it by days if you are navigating the long way to it, side tracked by a convoy or singleton, a plane drops a DC down your hatch. In short, evertime I play with the exception of the same first patrol area depending on the boat you select, my patrols are never the same. To me, scripted is the same thing over and over. The same ships spawn in the same spot over and over. RSRD/OM was devised in a way were once it has happened, you will never see it again. I remember Tater stating his convoys will pull into a port and will not leave the port for a few days. So, do you hang out and wait for them to come out again or do you carry on looking for other opportunities. So, yes, in a sense, RSRD is scripted but scripted far and beyond what I would hope for in a Pacific submarine game.
To me scripted are game such as COD single player. I played the game three times. By the third time I knew exactly what was going to happen and what I should do. With this type of scripting in both SH3/4, you can have a different script evey time you patrol. Sometimes I blow off a patrol area because the 16 screws I hear sound like much more fun. It is a script that allows the player to write as he plays. This is why I always have said that the SH series requires a lot of imagination from the player. You are the writer of the script once it is layed out on the table. You make the choice of how you want the story to end on any particular patrol. It is this sole part of the game that keeps players like us coming back for more....and I mean countless hours of making my finished script of the rough draft created by Lurker.
Currently games like COD collect dust on the shelve. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. The story never changes. That is all I wanted to say about scripted play in SH3/4. Besides....if we asked the devs to script it who knows what we would get
Carry on!