What an AWESOME campaign this is~!!! Can you make more please?

[PLAAF]

I have just completed this campaign a few days back. And I must say, what an awesome campaign this is! What an awesome work this is from Apache600!

The campaign is challenge but not undoable. The story and audio communication allows you to immerse yourself inside, as if you are really a part of this military operation. And with the audio communication, you almost feel like you are communicating with a person instead of the a computer.

The same thing can't be said for some other campaigns. For example, the MiG-19 campaign. In the first mission, the weather is so bad that you can't land. In the second mission, some scripts are missing and you will all get shot down by SA-2 and never get a mission complete no matter what you do. In the third mission, 16 MiG-19 suppose to gather at the Vladivazkav or whatever that place was called. And we were suppose to follow the 22nd wing through the canyon. But 22nd wing just flying in circle on top of vladivazkav until they die of old age, or run out of fuel or some accidentally ran into the mountain, whichever occurs first. After the 3rd mission, I gave up.

So can you guys make more campaigns please? For other planes as well?

Even if you just replace MiG-15 with MiG-19 and re-release the relic campaign, I am willing to pay for it. It is just such an Awesome campaign.

 

Edit: More importantly, in the campaign, you will encounter all kind of situations that will let you familarise with the MiG-19. By the time you completed this, you would learn almost everything about this plane, from combat to emergency procedures. 

Edited July 5, 2022 by PLAAF

[xurelointheocean]

 

I agree. I'm enjoying it a lot so far. The duration of the missions is perfect and I have not found any problem with the triggers and "fighting" against the campaign instead of against the enemies. I encourage you to do some more campaigns. Good work. 

[scoobie]

Phew... finished!
What a fun campaign!
I must admit I was a bit hesitant to buy it... I mean... "Museum Relic", really? What a MiG-15, or an F-86, can do in a modern conflict (modern for DCS time frame)? Those modern fighters, with radars, BVR capabilities, will be shooting their Fox 1/2/3, ground pounders will be dropping their laser-guided munitions, shooting fancy missiles and... there you are, among them, in your MiG-15, with guns and at best 2 sad looking 100 kg bombs. Sounds like a recipe for a disaster campaign, doesn't it?
Well... NO.

This campaign is SMART. Very smart. It took me a while to fully appreciate how much effort was put in designing missions which must take into account all the shortcomings of your vintage fighter and at the same time design the missions in such a way that they feel convincing to the player and are simply fun to fly. Not an easy task, but beautifully delivered!
First and foremost, though, rest assured - you will get your A/A activities, including dogfights (don't ask how), and A/G jobbies including hefty strikes.
Apart from these, you'll get a sweet variety of other missions. See, your commander is not an idiot and won't send you against modern fighters, they'd obliterate you in a second. Instead, you'll often be tasked with less typical missions, special missions let's say. Also, if I understand correctly, Apache is a CPL/ATPL pilot and he took the liberty to smuggle a little bit (not too much) of "normal" flying, such as a little NDB approach procedure in IMC-ish weather, a mechanical failure in the air (well, your plane is old, isn't it?), a dead reckoning mission which... no, isn't boring, it keeps you on your toes all the time. Nice touch! Pretty rare in DCS campaigns.

What I find very special in the Museum Relic is that it also feels like an "interactive book", not just a bunch of fun missions to fly. You read a few pages in a book and jump in the cockpit to fly a sortie. Then you come back, read more and go fly another sortie.
I can't remember any other campaign which would build so much ambience/climate by means of text. Or build it so well. OK, some campaigns are very good in it, too, but maybe there's a special psychological catch here in the Museum Relic? Your country is small, its airforce is small, otherwise they wouldn't accept you with your "ridiculous" ancient plane to join them, right? So maybe that's why you care so much? Because even your little ancient plane seems to make a difference? I don't know myself if that's really the catch, but you do CARE, you feel for your small, attacked motherland.

Interestingly, it's not even a lot of text, just a few pages in the briefing window (which is a rather small window). Yes, some campaigns have dialogues in the briefings, but... maybe it's subjective, the "fiction" in the Museum Relic just felt so coherent and convincing to me. EDIT: Sorry, I forgot! The text is also richly ornamented with photographs, That adds to the immersion, too.

Most briefings start with retrospection of the previous mission. Why does it matter? For 2 reasons. Firstly, it comments on your performance and its impact on your country's war effort, so it's a candy for you, a reward. Secondly, many of us don't fly campaign missions one by one the same day. I typically fly just one every Sunday, so thanks to the briefing structure in the Museum Relic, I recalled what had been going on a week before. It connected me back to the story. To tell you the truth, most other campaigns don't do this trick and when I sit down to play mission 9 (let's say), I can't remember what the campaign was about, what I was doing in mission 8. I'm out of context. In the Museum Relic the first thing you read is a literary piece summarizing the previous mission. You read and go like "Oh, yeah... yeah, there was this (...) there and I did (...). That was a cool mission." It's important because in many cases in the Museum Relic the current mission objectives are directly related to the previous mission's objectives. All this gives smooth experience, the campaign becomes a coherent story sliced into a continuous, logical stream of sorties (mostly, you also get unexpected twists in the story).

The middle part of the briefing is - again - a literary piece about the briefing, a page in a book, it tells you who said what, what the general was doing etc. It teleports you right there into the briefing room, connects you emotionally to the story and soon you're dying to jump in the cockpit already and fulfil your new task.

The last part of the briefing is the briefing itself - the papers you get, a map, your tasks, waypoints, speeds, altitudes, nav aids, all that paperwork. You also get the papers in the kneeboard. I very much liked the format of these papers, all the neccessary info for each leg in the flight plan is contained within a small space on the kneeboard page, no need to jump back and forth through the pages to gather all the data you currently need.

Technically, the Museum Relic went smoothly (note: except 1 or 2 missions which seem to have got broken only now in DCS OB 2.8, I hear the author has already fixed it/them). You can easily understand your every task (no "WT... am I supposed to do now?" moments), you get voiceovers exactly when you need them, telling you exactly what you need, the kneeboard contains everything it takes to get you where you're supposed to get. The only thing that might need refreshing is IDs of some NDB beacons - some of them are either incorrect or come from the older version of Caucasus map (or probably due to the wind are inactive and you hear the NDB for the reciprocal runway). No big deal, though, I just read Morse IDs from F10 map to check if what I'm hearing is the right airfield.

Most missions are "lightweight" in terms of their duration. I wasn't taking notes, but I think on average they take about 45 minutes to finish, a few are shorter, and a few are about one hour long. Something in this range. There are 22 missions in the campaign.

Difficulty level is... always hard to judge. I'd say some missions are easy (especially early missions), some are moderately difficult and only few may pose a real problem, when you really have to wrap your head around the whole situation and think how you can run away from trouble. The point is, due to the fact you're flying a museum relic, you're not on top of the things all the time, not even often. Sometimes you feel and are the underdog and instead of being "brave", you may and perhaps should choose to run for your life. Let me put it this way: if we compiled a list of all DCS campaigns sorted by their difficulty level, I think the Museum relic would fall somewhere below the median difficulty.

All in all, the Museum Relic is a unique and a very fun campaign! While all the campaigns we buy for DCS are called "story-driven" (and most of them actually are), Museum Relic feels "very story-driven". You get a variety of tasks, you get immersed in the story, the story makes sense, your sorties make sense and hey - you can fly the MiG-15! Or the Sabre. So far we've only had one other campaign for the Sabre and none for the MiG... which is a pity as MiG-15 happens to be a very, very good module in DCS.

Big thank you to Apache for the hours of great fun

 

PS. If this was the wishlist topic, I'd vote for adding letters to NDB IDs next to dashes and dots in the kneeboard. Some refuse to learn Morse code - they get dots/dashes. Others know Morse, so they perfer "NL" instead of "-.   .-.." Lastly, some others (myself included) can learn some Morse just by looking at both letters and their codes next to them, e.g. "NL  -.   .-.." It actually works, I've learnt some Morse codes this way.

PS. One last thing. The briefings could benefit from proofreading. There are pretty many typos there. No big deal, but since the written story is so important, I wanted to point it out.

 

Edited January 2, 2023 by scoobie

[MAXsenna]

Just noticed this thread, and I agree with you all!

And @PLAAF, excellent idea! Would be awesome to have the MiG-19 as an option!

Cheers! 

[PLAAF]

30 minutes ago, MAXsenna said:

Just noticed this thread, and I agree with you all!

And @PLAAF, excellent idea! Would be awesome to have the MiG-19 as an option!

Cheers! 

 Not just the MiG-19, I hope we can have the upcoming MiG-17 in the campaign too.

[MAXsenna]

41 minutes ago, PLAAF said:

 Not just the MiG-19, I hope we can have the upcoming MiG-17 in the campaign too.

Excellent point! 

With the F-100 perhaps...

Edited July 8, 2023 by MAXsenna

[PLAAF]

1 hour ago, MAXsenna said:

Excellent point! 

With the F-100 perhaps...

 

Yep, that would also be a great idea 

[Scatterbrain]

I agree. I haven't played many paid DLC Campaigns yet, but I did the F-86 "version" of Museum Relic and it's absolutely a blast. 

I also found it to be beginner-friendly. The mission called "Cloak and Dagger" kicked my butt for a bit, but all the other missions were more easily achievable for someone who's only just got started on the F-86. I just completed the campaign yesterday and it's the only one I've completed in DCS thus far. I get we're playing a hardcore, realistic sim here, but sometimes I do like to feel like a bad-ass pilot, and this campaign gave me the opportunity without needing to put in 100 hours of training first. I might be an outlier for liking that, but go on, sue me! The campaign still had it's challenges, It wasn't brain-dead easy, and I came out of it a better F-86 pilot. 

I loved the story too. I am one of those people who like when DCS is used to explore the fictional possibilities, and not just fixate on historical stuff all the time. The concept of using an old F-86 or Mig-15 in a modernish war is an awesome one. I'd love to see more campaigns like this in the future. Though, I think if Apache600 made -any- new campaigns, I'd buy them at this point. 

Heck, I'll likely be buying the Mig-15 next just to replay the Campaign with a new aircraft.

[MiG21bisFishbedL]

Replaying this, I think it's easily my favorite campaign.

Getting a sequel with the MiG-19 or the upcoming F-100 would be amazing.

[PLAAF]

6 hours ago, MiG21bisFishbedL said:

Replaying this, I think it's easily my favorite campaign.

Getting a sequel with the MiG-19 or the upcoming F-100 would be amazing.

That's what I have been saying. We definitely need a MiG-19 version of this campaign.

[Mettigel]

I just finished the campaign as MiG-15 and it's really awesome! Great storyline and missions. Still worth playing in '25

Also a great one for newbies like me. I just skipped one mission that seemed too difficult for me at the moment.

Edited June 25 by Mettigel

[Boyezee]

I also just finished this campaign and agree it is awesome!  

I must admit I was reluctant to try it at first due to the fictional nature of the campaign but I shouldn't have worried, the whole experience was so immersive and well put together it was a great experience, I thought a 22 mission campaign would be a bit of a slog but not at all, I couldn't wait to play the next mission and the whole thing flew by (no pun intended!), also loved the way you finished it with the final mission.

The missions are clever, well laid out and offer a mixture of challenges that keep the whole thing fresh, the storyline and sense of purpose work really well, the briefings are clear and easy to understand.

I also liked the fact that it used modules (F-86 and Mig-15) that are fairly easy to get to grips with and ones that don't have much other campaign content, I really would recommend it to anyone regardless of experience and ability.

Well done Apache, a brilliant campaign and hopefully you can do more in the future. 

[Apache600]

Really appreciate the kind words!   I'm plugging away really hard at the next one (I know ... I've been saying that for a while now).  But the end is insight.   I am adding a feature to the new campaign where if the triggers that detects what radio freq you have selected breaks for some reason (i.e. from an update or something) that you can have the game "auto-tune" the freqs so it doesn't kill the campaign in it's tracks.  (or, if you just don't feel like tuning the radios you can utilize this new feature).  It's a lot of work to add the system to an already basically finished campaign, but I figure it's worth the trouble if a future update to the DCS core may upend the radios.  
Even though the next campaign is going to use modern jets, you're not going to have to learn super in-depth procedures and whatnot.  I'm trying to make it so all calibers of players (hardcore, weekend warriors, and new folk) can pick it up and enjoy it.  It's a challenging balance, but I think I did it.