I hope the campain has a “begginer” campain, or perhaps a “tutorial campain”. I got a couple friends interested in looking at this game, but since it was one of thems very first RTS”ish” game, he was really thrown into the frying pan trying to learn the game from a skirmish, without the usual gradual learning curve most campains include.
To be generous, most campeigns are
crap, in the Sturgeon’s Law sense and beyond. The best feel like the first third are really “extended tutorials” that really aren’t part of the campeign-story itself, just regurgitations of what’s already been printed in the manual (which a vanishingly small number of people seem literate enough to read). The worst are just a series of bad excuses to bang forces against one another with a seemingly random set of limitations imposed on the Player to artificially extend the feeling they got something for their money.
Most campeigns are of the latter type. Homeworld’s, barely, was not — and as a result is considered one of the pinnacles of the genre. Since the genre’s actual overall quality, if mapped to a sphere, would have the topological qualities of a billiard ball, this is not necessarily high praise.
If I must have a campeign, and it seems fairly obvious something of that ilk will come about, I’d like one of the mold we old-school grognardy types are used to from the hardcore roots: give me a system where there are a sceries of possible set-up situations and have my performance in one impacts the next one I move off to: a true campeign. You can see this kind of staged limitedly-randomized setup in almost every wargame designed from the 30’s on, but almost no RTS or 4X games have used it, and that’s a real blunder, as I see it. There’s even ways to make such a framework extensible with scenarios as you go if it’s designed well so that, say, a tournament could be created which integrated player-made scenarios for various setup situations.
But please, in the name of Hell, no more beat-me-with-your-painfully-contrieved-storyline campeigns.
