Quick retake

[456820]

you play as a western soldier on a beach landing then clear the town of enemy infantry and armour, after getting news the russinas were killing the civillians.
to me its quite hard and difficult. just a few things i need to know
1. is it to hard
2. does it run smoothly
3. what can be improved
4. does it end alright

the site is
http://www.geocities.com/rob456820/
click on missions/ then on 02. quick retake
then simply extract the pbo into the missions directiory in the ofp folder
ENJOY

[Mikero]

[flash=http://200,200]Overview:[/flash]
none really.

Nice pic, clear, not fuzzy, and for once, I recognised it was St Pierre. You dun good.

Dont forget

briefingName= removes that irritating.title.noe.pbo stuff.

And, pictures are ok for missions but aren't that useful for campaigns (players won't see them)

Intro:

good. I always marvel at how authors manage to use the limited range of music best.

showstopper:

damn thing stalled in blackout at end, with chopper noise. Needed spacebar to continue.

PLEASE DONT SHOUT AT ME

Upper case titletext is pretty awful stuff.

The two sentences flashed by so fast I couldn't read them. but, i got the gist of wrongness.

"While we were attacking Malden, the Russians.....

I've probably got the above wrong, but it's how it read for me.


Breifing:

There's more important things in life than whacking you over the head about sentence structure, it's "ok", i get the gist. A bit of nastiness with split objectives page, which I'm sure you can fix up.

Sugggestion: don't use "here" and "here" they aren't necessary. You don't need to replace them with another word, you just hyperlink what's already there without them. You did this with 'town' in objectives. 'disembark' is the other one (eg)

"at all / any cost"

this is a personal, deeply felt, niggle. I loathe that phrase. I absolutely loathe it. It grates so hard I dont play missions that use it, (beta testing exceptions)

The only cost I'll have is I'm gonna die. What other cost were you thinking of? Please consider getting rid of it.

Misson:

Nice lead in, good visuals (orientation) nice chopper shots, good use of mortars on beach.

Feeling I've played this before against resistance troops?

Nice savegame, I appreciate authors who do this, I dont want the interactive cutscene again.

Splat, I'm dead, retry on beach

slomo death scene with added whiteout. Good. As beta tester I hate them, this is quite ok tho. More on this, slomos are flavour of the month and ridicluous in some missions. This is not one of them. Where you were shot, why you were shot works for this mission.

HA! I can't get off the bloody beach, this is realistic. I would however keep the mortar rounds going up into town, more smoke, more chaos. Target mortars at this point where you know enemy ai is NOT. We want smoke and chaos not dead enemy.

Chopper goes down in a spectacular visual direct in front of me first buildings. BUT something is wrong, it looks more like it's trying to land, there's a sound of rotors starting up again.

I avoid / ignore center beach stuff and leap around right side of buildings / town. Lots of callouts about enemy spotted, but  my leader appears to be dealing with them. A few radio messages I miss about a lost chopper and stuff, too chaotic to take notice of them.

Great visuals of failed parachute drops.

Plenty of 'just right' Armour. I'm no sooner targeting them, than someone else blows them up, or, I get blown up, or, enemy ai gets me. Lots of retries at this point. Realise I took on the armour far too soon (but I am a Law after all)

Decide to sidestep into building centre where ammo boxes are. Plenty of nasties, being nasty.

Get myself into a hopeless pickle. Retry from beginning. This suits me, I wanna check that chopper again.
---

I decide to go center of beach instead (just to test it). The chopper visual is more dramatic, it's quite obvious now, that it's getting clobbered right when it wanted to unload paratroopers. The effect is brilliant.

The rotor restart buisiness is missing here, it's not apparent this time. But, spectacular shot of chopper smacking into building skyline.

The radio messages are cleverly do..

Smack, zap. retry.

Next time, same visual, there's now another chopper that I finally notice, is able to drop it's troops. This is the best paradrop I've ever seen done (as spectator). It's the very best, and OF COURSE one goes down. It's called balance. If it did not get wrecked, this mission would have been all finished in 2 or three minutes.

Please consider moving me to fuel station side where effect is best, where I landed does not have same mountain backdrop.

I now follow along why there were boats and choppers in the intro, i tought it was eye candy. Silly me.

Gunners in boats may as well not be there. Hard to decide if they're dumbed down, or they really can't target very much. It's chaotic, marvellous.

Next retry, I end up with about 4 in a squad of my own. Some are wounded, and, it's apparent to me now with the spread of paratroopers that I'm shooting THEM!!!! I decide to lie low with squad and let paras die or regroup, whatever it is they have to do, I can't help them, they are all over the place.

I think my position, there's nasty stuff going on right side, so I head for fuel station, left side. I'm no coward, I want to see what my squad can / can't do in a quiet place, and how many there really are. all, report status.

Lots of AT, good, sounds of Armour up ahead. Still some straggly paratroopers getting in way, a few enemy singles, not getting in the way much longer.

Various retries around here among which,

#5 does / doesn't get shot first.

#5 does / doesn't get BMP first.

we all get T72, first.

Getting quite dark, no further sounds of enemy or paras.

Heal #5 at mash, this, I appreciate. Of course there has to be one, how many times is this detail forgotten in a slugfest?

And then the show stopper kicks in. The dreaded, hunt the last @#*_#@_$@# bad guy syndrome.

I stop the mission there. Sound of chopper in sky, one of me dies, still cant find him. Not interested in finding him. This is fixed by a simple, flee, script.

Think I've played this before, but with resistance troops and an ending mortar exchange from the castle.

----

Overall.

Chaotic and marvellous..

More smoke please, much more grenade and things that go bang.

Nothing wrong with blowing up boats, they've served their purpose.

One more bit of armour would be ok, we are, very heavily armed.

Two showstoppers that need fixing.

[456820]

hey thanks for the review mikero just one thing did t end fine cause you didnt mention that

[Mikero]

hey thanks for the review mikero just one thing did t end fine cause you didnt mention that

I wouldn't know. I get to a place in my game play with betas. where If I'm enjoying what's happening, I dont want it spoilt with bad stuff. Hunt the last soldier did me in. I -endmission there and then.

You need a flee script.

And, yes, I really did want to finish this, I am expecting something rather unexpected at end, BUT, I can't wait 20 minutes or 2 minutes hunting one single idiot loon. If you look at the volume of beta coming into this site, I think you would forgive me.

As far as the mission itself, you have all the chemistry right.

[Tarados Qeng]

Overview - Good for a campaign mission. Keep that pic there, 'coz it's good and people will see it. (After the mission, when looking at campaign menu).

Intro - I didn't like it. There's nothing really wrong with it, but there's nothing stunning either. And I didn't like few fast and long commits at the start. Music is quite ok. I didn't like that Russians were killing civilians. Why do they always have to be monsters?

Edit; The intro didn't end, and I had to press esc to quit it. Fix that.

Briefing - Bad grammar, get someone to make it more undestandable - I had some troubles understanding it at some points. The language is not very professional and the sentences are too long. Objectives would be better in the first page. Nice thing to give additional information, but the grammar is again very bad.

I'm not the leader - good. It's been a while since I last played a mission where I wasn't the leader.

Mission - Starting, closing in... Yeah. When I get to the shore, there are russians just 20-30 meters from me. Friendlies shoot them. I just quite much enjoy the atmosphere - squaddies do the hard job. I kill a BMP with a LAW and shoot a couple of enemies. We move on, leader dies. We take the town and shoot the enemies. Other BMPs get blown by other AT guys. I get injured and go to a field hospital to cure my wounds. It's very quiet already. Nearly all soldiers - enemy and friendly - have been killed. Only one squaddie left. Mission doesn't end. While my squadmate lays on the ground on the Northern end of the town, I go and look for enemy survivors. I run around a while, and detect a Russian officer. I kill him from behind. A radio message, and the mission ends. Not very hard, I think. First try and mission accomplished.

Overall - A nice, short, simple and easy mission. Briefing must be improved. Many little things to take care of, but no big problems, unless you count the difficulty level, which is way too low. The location is good, and I didn't notice very much unrealistic behaviour.

Edit; Oh, it ran very smoothly (CPU benchmark 6880).

[Sir Test-A-Lot]

Overview

Fine. Good picture. I don't really care about the text of the OV as long as it is spelled right and not too long. BTW.

Intro

Good, but previous reviewers said all the right stuff already. Don't put the text all in CAPS like that, it feels like shouting.   In fact, the briefing tells us all we need to know and the text doesn't add much to the intro, IMO, so maybe you should just remove the text.

Also, the Intro doesn't end. It just stops blacked out near the choppers. Otherwise, good.  

Briefing

Well, you need to add some line breaks and make that one long sentance at the end shorter. Also, check your briefing out with a translator, there are many on here, I undestand, who help out with that sort of thing. I think some of your sentences are out of whack a bit.  

An Objective Circle is at the bottom of page 1 but without and text.

Also, mark the positions that the helo troops will disembark at on the map.

Notes good, maybe add a name?

Mission

Thanks for the savegame after hitting the beach.  ;D

Weather was good, good conditions for this mission.

Beach assault was satisfyingly hectic and chaotic, however I never came under fire. All tanks were killed by other AT dudes. All waypoints seemed to work.

Loved the Helo crash. Nicely done.

However, the Westies pretty much swept the Russians aside. The one BMP up on the hill was taken out before I even noticed it. This wasn't a very hard mission. Finally, i had to quit the mission once things got quite. I assume there was a lone Red somewhere. I didn't feel like looking for him.

Suggestions

Besides what I already said:

1. Make a fleeing script so that the town is "captured" without the player having to do a loon hunt.

2. The mission was too short. I'd add another objective, like "Once St. Pierre is secure, defeat counter-attack, then move north and secure Durras" or something.

3. The mission was too easy, unless your target players are fairly new to OFP (maybe they are- in which case don't change the difficulty, it's good.) Maybe think about taking away some West AT guys or reducing the West squads from seven to four or five.

Finally, the mission ran fine. However, it might not on lower-end computers. Taking away some West squads would help this.

Cheers! I enjoyed playing.  

[Mikero]

@Tarados

Keep that pic there, 'coz it's good and people will see it.

This is not a slap at you, this is an opinion.

Campaign overviews are not the same animals as mission overviews.

For a start, the centred title is quite pointless, It's repeating what's already on the notepad above it. Not true of mission Ov's.

Secondly, a campaign Overview is a memory jog, it's what has happened, not what will happen.

As a device, both cases, you use an Overview to attract the player to play THAT mission. You advertise with eye candy in a mission ov, you remind the player how good it was, in a camapign ov.

Jpegs blow a package out by a mimimum of 10 fold, mostly much more than that. A big campaign becomes a should I want to bother campaign, at a few meg or greater. Jpegs hit this barrier quickly.

It is exceedingly rare for a picture, at those dimensions, to tell much of the story. The more you have of them, the more, they confuse the player whether it's the Houdan attack, the Houdan defense, the Houdan black op, or the Houdan retreat. They're all, pictures of Houdan from different angles.

The biggest, and quite possibly the best,  campaign, out there, PMC Fury, comprising 253 missions plus intros, has one, single, overview pic.

If a picture is to be used, within the missions of a campaign, it should be the thematic badge, the common denominator, the logo, of the entire campaign.

Check most campaigns out there and see if I'm right or wrong.


BUT, right wrong or otherwise, if the author wants to make that effort, well, why the hell not.

[Tarados Qeng]

Yep, the centered title is pointless. I agree on that, just didn't notice it when first looked at this.

(Yep, this is an opinion, too )

But I think that the images are important as some sort of 'memories' of the mission. If a pic is good, you remember right away what was the mission about. And pics look good and they make the campaign tree more professional, if you do them properly. That's what they did in BIS campaigns.

About the size, I don't think it's too much, 'coz if the campaign is uncompressed and has 20 missions or so, we have approx. 600 kBs (my overview pics are around 30 kB in size) due to the overview pics. It ain't so much, when you think how many people have broadband connections. And when you compress the thing, the extra size is much less.

Of course, if you have 200 mission on the campaign, then it would be 6 MBs, and that's quite much.