Hi mathias, I tested your mission and here is some feedback:
OVERVIEW: - All looks right and nice
- After finishing it, the mission wasn't checked (abgehakt):
INTRO:- The subtitles were too fast for me to read. Maybe you should set them to stay a bit longer.
- The intro stopped very apruptly. Fading out the music and blacking out the screen would help a lot. I saw that you did that in the outro.
- At that camera angle that shows a tank from above: The tank first didn't move for approximately 4 seconds which made me ask myself what would happen now. You should improve this part a bit more (maybe tell the tank group to move already
before you change the camera perspective on them).
MISSION:- Good assortment of weapons in the briefing. Since I knew that this would be a recon mission at night, I switched all of the soldiers to silenced rifles - only Nr. 5 became the DMR. I don't know if it's only me that prefers to go silenced in such missions or if many players would go this way. You could think about giving more of them silenced rifles so that the players don't need to change it by themselfes (in case the majority of the players likes to go silenced - no idea).
- In the radio menu there is the possibility to save the game (0-0-0). But I think it would be good for the player to know, how many saves are left. I thought that I had unlimited saves and used this in the beginning phase of the mission. Something like Save game (1 left) would make it clear.
- The hacking part was a cool thing to use, even though destroying all AA tanks with it made it all pretty easy. I have no idea though how you could improve this part - maybe with a problem with the connection so that not all Tunguskas could be destroyed... No idea.
- Certainly I made use of the self destruction of the AA tanks.
But there I noticed that you waited until all of them were destroyed and only
then removed the action "Destroy Tunguskas". That means that it was available more than once and I (in the fear that it didn't work) used it three times. Correspondingly the radio messages came three times too. You could remove the action right at the beginning of the destruction script and not wait until them Tunguskas are history.
- One thing that you should improve at all costs is the behaviour of the guards near the targets (Tunguskas, radar, etc.). When I used the "Destroy Tunguskas" action I was near the western end of the airfield and saw a group of infantry standing not far from the vehicle. The AA blew up but the infantry would not switch its behaviour. After playing I opened the mission in the editor and saw that you just have put the group but didn't use anything to change the behaviour, etc. You could set a trigger with the condition (not alive Tunguska) and then change the behaviour of the guards that patrol this area. If you want them to go to a certain location after the explosion (which would be a must, in my opinion), you can add waypoints to them via
addwaypoint.
- Other than that you could build in some more reaction when hell brakes lose. For example an alarm sound or maybe a hind which paradrops special forces in the area of the player.
- The friendly Harriers were absolutely useless for me. One of them dropped its bomb way too far from the SUs and the other one only circled around and even when I told him to target the laser target (selecting the plane and pressing 2 (Target)) nothing happened. But I had taken some satchels and blew up the SUs.
- I noticed that the AI shoots further than the view distance (fog), which is very annoying but is not your fault (it's BI's one). My sniper kept shooting enemies that I could not see and consequentially was killed by the enemies, which were shooting back.
- When I blew up the SUs, there came a script error (which I don't know what it means) (
link to screenshot)
- And after blowing up the SUs I made something that might not have been your intention for the player:
Since I was out of satchels but still had to blow up the radar, I just embarked one of the choppers and used it to bring death and fire over the whole island (radar, communications HQ, remaining patrols and Vodniks).
Of course this is the freedom that BI games give us, but if it's not intended by you, you could lock the choppers.
- After completing all objectives, I continued using the MI-17 to extract. I took the group and flew to the pick up point (
link to screenshot ). Obviously the outro with the Osprey carrying the boat didn't fit to the way I finished the mission (with the chopper).
Maybe that's another reason to lock the MI-17s.
OUTRO:- I really loved the camera angle of the outro with the carrier in the background and the Osprey flying to it and getting smaller and smaller. It just looked cool with my viewdistance set to 4000 meters in my settings. But I had this thought: What if another player just has a viewdistance of 800 meters? I don't know how far the carrier is from the camera's position, but you could
set the view distance in the outro script so that the carrier definitely is visible to all players. Not seeing it would just be half as good for this scene.
All in all I enjoyed this mission a lot. It had its frustrating moments (AI shooting further than the fog, Harriers being useless and my own n00bility which often caused my death) but these factors are not your fault. The mission is already pretty advanced in development and if you manage to fill it a bit more with "reaction" of the Russians when things blow up and especially improve the behaviour of guards, it will become a pretty good stealth, recon and destroy mission.
As I said - the hacking part was one of the aspects which I liked very much and also makes the mission particular, and the frame of the mission (intro, outro, overview, loading screen) already are doing their part immersing the the player.
Topic: [SP] Operation Aqua Lion v 1.2 (REVIEW COMPLETE) (Read 11610 times)