Hi Undeceived,
First of all: awesome mission, I enjoyed the hell out of it
A very different approach to making a mission, not something I get to see all that much of unfortunately. For that reason alone I'd give this a 5/5
But aside from the good idea itself, the execution is also very skillful, and except for one slight bug the whole LONG mission worked from start to finish.
The bug was the same one HailStorm reported, that Kostya died during the rescue. It was a little funny when his brother said "try to stand up!" and he was lying there obviously dead
I loaded that one though and did it with him alive instead. I really think though you could manage the whole mission with a minimum of changes yet allow Kostya to die. For instance make it so they have to take Kostya's body to the doctor for, like, identification or something (I mean, they're not just going to leave his body out in the woods, are they?) You could, I guess, also just start the Revenge part if Kostya dies right there and then. Kostya dying would of course also change the end talk a bit, but not -too- much I think: it'd make for a nice change of pace, sort of an alternative (bad) ending?
The Revenge part itself, I have to say, was a mix between brilliant and rather annoying. My pal was useless, but others have pointed that out already and it's not your fault. The enemies tended to be rather sharp-sighted and taking them all on alone, even with a scoped rifle, was kind of difficult. For that reason I really appreciated the fact you just had to kill the two, instead of -everyone-. I ended up doing just that: I grenaded Jegerow, and snuck up and sniped the mafia leader, then ran like hell. Worked fine (after a number of retries
). I'm glad I didn't have to wait for Olaf at the cottage either.
One thing: at the end, Piotr says something like "I'll always remember I was saved by friendship" or something: honestly, Piotr was the one doing all the friend-saving, rather than the other way around, wouldn't you say? Unless he's referring to his friendship with Olaf which, maybe, saved him in some other way? I don't know
Just a thought, anyway.
A note on Olaf's hidden weapons: "He just found them one day in the forest" after which he hid them in a chest behind his church.
Furthermore, it was a modern AK-107 PSO and a M4 with all the spec-ops bells and whistles (+ a Russian military automatic shotgun!)! How does this make any sense? How about making it more logical instead? Change it to a hunting rifle and a M104 shotgun (for instance) and make them part of his hunting gear - if you want AKs and other military rifles, there are plenty of badguys with them running around after all. If you want to limit the effectiveness of the sniper rifle, only give the players very few rounds, like 10 or something. The random high-tech weaponry was really kind of...well....random!
And finally, a thought on the addon dependency. What on earth did we need Schnapsdrosel's desert mercenaries for? I didn't see a single desert mercenary anywhere, not a one. That's a pretty big addon pack for a no-show. Secondly: why DAC? Although DAC can be useful in certain scenarios, this scenario was not one of them. The mafia patrols and so on could easily have been made to move around using something non-addon dependent, like say UPS - or why not simple looping waypoints.
I'm guessing Wolle's armed civilians were the mafia (and Piotr + Olaf) - I can totally understand if you didn't want to mess with the other ways of making civilians shoot at one another, also considering they don't have the right combat.fsms, but...myeah. That's fine I guess! MapFact's editor upgrade I didn't really notice, but I bet there was plenty of eyecandy around you used it for
Anyway! GREAT mission, almost no bugs, awesome story - had a lot of fun with it. Good job, Undeceived.
Wolfrug out.