riplikash

Sorry to be the downer here. The quality of the writing, voiceovers, and content all seems to be really high. But I'm getting seriously soured to the campaign. I've gotten up to mission 4. So far EVERY mission has been a headache of things not triggering. Especially around startup. Sometimes because of what seems like bugs, sometimes because of poorly designed triggers. I understand that ED sometimes makes breaking changes. But the big issue that seems to come up over and over is that the campaign seems to always assume a perfect happy path. There is little to no allowance for mistakes, misunderstandings, miscommunication, or player confusion. Players are expected to act in PRECISELY a single way or they will need to restart the mission. It gets to the point where before any given mission you have to check online to see what quirks and expectations any given mission might have. The whole experience would be improved a LOT if there was some assumption of players not following the happy path. If the players haven't passed a trigger box or done a certain action after a certain amoutn of time they could be reminded or given more specific instructions. Linked to this is that you really don't KNOW when you're off the rails. Your wingman might not have said anything for 5-10m. Is that because you made a mistake? Or is it because you're off the rails and have broken the mission? Who knows. Guess you're going to have to just keep flying for another 5-10 minutes. If they say something, yay. If not, whelp, it's time to start the mission over. Again. Even though you're now 30+ minutes into it, and have no idea what you did to mess things up. Which makes me think of something else: fail conditions. Let me know if I've failed or I'm off the rails! Or if I've NOT failed. A 5-10m flight between waypoints with NO interaction is VERY disconcerting when I don't know if I'm still on the rails. So, yeah. That's just my thoughts on things. Again, the quality of the experience when working as intended is excellent. But the tight expectations of player actions seem very problematic. And some of the bugs are just experience breaking. I had to give up and mission 3 because it was so inconsistent.

Been in a similar situation. I've tried the mission probably 30 times over 3 days. It's been incredibly inconsistent. I've gotten it to work probably 2-3 times only for my pc to freeze or have something life related come up. Which wouldn't be a problem if I could get the mission to START properly. Sometimes I hear the intro voiceovers, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I get responses when I say I'm ready to taxi, sometimes I don't. Sometimes my wingman leaves his hanger. Sometimes I don't. I've had similar experiences with missions 1 & 2, but it wasn't nearly as bad as with mission 3. Which has been really sad, because I've really enjoyed the quality so far, but I'm really getting soured to the campaign since it's becoming such a time sync.