Dramatic Missions

[casual1y]

This isn't an idea, just a minor moan.

90% of missions, have the drama of a dead skunk. By drama I don't mean Neighbours, but atmosphere.

Now, is far as i'm concerned, any good game/mission should get you thinking 'Now, who was that on the hill/ What was that strange vehicle
doing there?'

Atmosphere, meaning like in that one mission, (I can't remember it's name ), where you were told that there were Spetz Natz at one objective. There weren't any, but it got you edging along slowly, firing at bushes, ect.

Atmosphere also means like in Half-Life, near the start, when you saw a scientist pulled through a ventilation shaft by an alien.
Of course, you couldn't do this in an OPF mission, but you could emulate it by (if you were in vehicles) all the vehicles around you exploding. You would then all jump out just as your vehicle exploded. Now you are in a small group, deep in the heart of enemy territory, with no radio contact with your base. Then, just as you are getting on your feet, a Hind flys past...

Dramatic missions should also have something completely unexpected happen. The obvious example of this is the opening mission in Medal of Honor: Allied Assualt. In this mission, you are being transported through the desert for a surprise attack on an enemy base. But then, your truck is attacked by the enemy. Now, all surprise is gone, and you are outnumbered.

Going back to Half-Life, and Deus Ex, another important part of games is to get you accustomed to the world that you are in, before the proverbial hits the fan. Deus Ex is the king of this. The first few days of play, you can feel secure, safe, that you know excatly whats going in. Then, well, for the benefit of those who haven't played it, I won't say what happens, but most people should get the idea.

Music is also important for obvious reasons. Music can make or break a mission. Any one ever seen 'A Clockwork Orange'? Near the start, the big fight in the opera house? Normally, that would have just been a load of blokes hitting each other with lumps of wood. But fortunally it was all in time of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Therefore the drama was increased a thousand fold.

ONE mission has done all this. That mission is of course Operation Firelord.
It got you thinking 'Did they make any more of these' or 'If they can make these, think what else they could have made'.
The beeper. As you got closer to the Firelords it beeped louded and faster. You can't get much tenser than that.
Once I killed a Firelord, thinking that I was safe. Then the other two appeared. I popped one, but the other just dissapeared and my beeper went silent.
Of course, the entire mission idea is unexpected, as the Firelords turn bad.
And of course, over half the mission is spent get you used to the world.
The music creates a VERY tense atmosphere.


This is a cry to all mission creators. Pay attention to my rant, and make better missions!

Thanks for reading,

casual1y

[Commando]

Yeah I know what you mean there!
I made a pretty easy butt still dramatic mission where you are thrown into action directly when you start.. NVA forces are overrunning the US airforce base outside la drang valley in the night and 3 US army soldiers have to escape from the base with a cessna...or shot down all the NVA wich is very difficult...because at least 10 of them where human..and its in the night and all you see is flashes and fires and everyhting is all messed.. ;D
I have played to many boring coop missions where you start somewhere far off and have to do everything boring with transports and read long briefings sometimes and see a lot of cutscenes or even played some of the original missions that you played around 30 times already.. :-\
To create things that exploded in the night wasn't hard at all, you only put a trigger in the landing strip and when the plane took off you saw some choppers exploding and lighting up the night and when you hear the firefighst between the us soldiers and the NVA it still gives me the creep.
3 times I even got gunned down when trying to take off with the plane.. ;D

[casual1y]

Cool!

That mission sounds good Commando. Could you email it to me? (sam@accuflight.com)

Does anybody else have an opinion on this?

I just found another example - in PCZONE (www.pczone.co.uk) the first paragraph of the VietCong preview is just what I mean. Just a little less dying.

Thanks,

casual1y

[Uberminch]

Erhem. I have a couple of things to say.

Excitement, gettin tense, and adrenaline pumping is great.


I think a great mission should have some T-T-T-T-RAGEDY!

Think about it. It's hard to get someone to love a character so much (think about a book) that you smash the table with your fist when they die.

Think about Platoon. that Aggregio for Strings or whatever the heck French thing they called it, when Elias dies, it drove me insane. I wanted to grab a gun and start wasting those NVA swine!

Oh well...they came close in the official campaign when you get to the extraction zone and the guys are dead. But it wasn't good enough. It's all in the music.

[casual1y]

Yeah, or like in Mafia.

[restrains himself from giving away ending]

 

casual1y

[Liquid_Silence]

Yeah, the ending of Mafia was brilliant (in it's own way...)

 :'(

[ntstlkr]

Cheers All,

Heh heh, not trying to poke fun at all the mission crafters out there, as we have seen there are plenty of good and bad to go around, but creating "atmosphere" goes a little beyond making a good mission.

So far, IMHO  , and don't take this personal, missions have generally been thought and created in terms of the difficulty of the military objective. This is only natural since this is a combat oriented game, and most of the effort gets directed towards the same.

But in reality war is much more than just the taking or holding of objectives, the destroying and killing of enemy personnel and equipment.
It is a human endeavor unmatched by any other in our experience, in some ways the ultimate expression of our inherent potential as human beings.
Not getting philosophical here but to paraphrase Clausewitz's adage "...war is merely the continuation of policy by other means..." can be viewed in a sociological context. War isn't an end unto itself, but a means to an end. By concentrating on only the fighting, we foget all the other things that take place before, during, and after.

So you want "atmosphere", or how about "drama" ? Then start making missions that include more than just the depiction of combat. Tell the "whole story" so to speak.

A soldiers life is a dangerous one, to be sure. Any veteran can tell you that. They can also tell you that there also seems to be alot of empty space, "hours of pure boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror".

Drama occurs when the unexpected happens (or doesn't).

Being sent out on patrol, expecting to make contact, every noise listened too, every movement watched, every second passes ever so slowly. And then nothing. You get back and everything's fine. Until the next time.

Or, you're manning your guard post, located in some back-out-of-the-way-far-from-the-frontlines supply depot or maintanence shed. Its quiet out at 3 in the morning, your tired, and it just started raining. Thats when you notice your partner standing across the way isn't there anymore. A little looking around and you find his body stuck off behind the dumpsters in the back, his throat cut and weapon missing.

You want "atmosphere", tell more than just the highlight of the battle.

You want "drama", give them the unexpected.

Mull that over some.

NSDQ!!!

[Fishion]

The hard part about the drama is to make it playable.
Because in the end nobody is going to play a mission
in which you have to stand around doing nothing for 3
hours, before any sign of action comes across you.
So the though part is getting those two into something
that does seem to be right.

Other than that I agree...

-Fishion

[Gummi]

reading all this is really helping in mission creating. It's always fun and tense to have some unexpected suprices and some drama that gives you a strange feeling.

missions are not really fun when all things happen 100% like it was suppose to be in the briefing. You know what will happen and get almost nothing out of it.

and yes, stupid music selection have often ruined the atmosphere in many missios. its very often.

So you missin creators out there think before you submit your missions and give the mission a nice toutch and feel, give the players some nice and fitting music while they play, and dont place the script of the mission into the briefing or overview.

happy editing  

[dmakatra]

A soldiers life is a dangerous one, to be sure. Any veteran can tell you that. They can also tell you that there also seems to be alot of empty space, "hours of pure boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror".

"War is boring. Anyone else bored?"

[ntstlkr]

Cheers All,

Heh heh, yeah it goes to show you how many out there don't have any experience at all when it comes to what life in the military is really like.

Ever pull Staff Duty back to back? Or TOC Guard. Motor Pool detail. Or how about the time we pulled a Bn police call in Saudi during DS. 400 guys, on line, looking for trash and cigarette butts in the friggin desert. Or, again in DS, when you pulled the sh#tter burn detail, that was just a load of fun.

Civilians watch movies and they get the impression that thats all there is to military life (in or out of combat). The same goes for movies about cops and law enforcement.
They think Lethal Weapon or US Marshalls.

The truth is far different.

I remember the greatest thing we got back in Saudi was (besides all the pogey bait from home) a big box of books. Books! I never read so much in all my life (and I love to read). Everyone pillaged the damn box looking for something to read.

Heh heh, I even ended up reading a romance novel because everything had been gone over so many times (eh hhmm, not the I actually enjoyed it of course, it was just to fill the time  ).

Your probably thinking, "Well he was probably assigned to one of those logistics or admin units, right? Way behind the lines, what are they gonna do? They aren't gonna get shot at."

Actually I was with the 3rd Bn, 160th Special Operations Aviation Group (back then it was still a group). We had aircraft flying up and down the "berm" since we hit the dirt. We made insertions into Iraq to drop off recon units prior to the ground offensive (and extracted them), and flew CSAR for allied pilots shot down (recording the first and only successful nighttime recovery of a pilot in hostile territory).  If we weren't flying missions we practiced and trained.  

That was only the 3rd time I was deployed to a CZ (Operation Earnest Will and Just Cause the first two, Joint Endeavor w/IFOR was my last as peacekeeper).

The point is, there is only so much training, practice, maintenance, and mission you can do. After that theres sleep, chow, and letter writing. That only goes so far.

That leaves alot of time left over.  So basically you look for things to fill the time. Read, listen to tapes (back then heh heh, or cds now) (must go through a million batteries). There's probably more than gameboy over there in Afghanistan (and Kuwait now) to be sure.

Yeah. In War, there is plenty of room for boredom.

NSDQ!!

[Fishion]

I agree with Nightstalker,
though there are 2 things that are on the practicall side
for a mission designer that still pose a problem:

1)

"War is boring. Anyone else bored?"

Unfortunatly Armstrong is right, We cannot let a player sit around for days and let him read a book.
The only way to bring this element in is via a cutscene or the brifing (in the Notes part)

2) If a mission is not just the combat, you'd have to get around the "boring" parts in a nice way, so that the player won't quit. If I play a mission in which I don't have anything to do for 3 hours, I think it's a bug.
Maybe you could use a cutscene sort of thing with time accaleration?

-Fishion

[dmakatra]

But if I take another qoute from the same dialouge, can nightstalker return with a new argument?

"You should learn to appricieate any downtime Kawchzovski, it makes combat more exciting"

I know that guys name isnÂ't that, I just canÂ't remember it completley. Besides that, I know the whole dialouge. ;D

[ntstlkr]

Cheers All,

My comments really aren't meant to suggest that there should be long stretches of tedious detail work, or routine to fill since we are talking about a game. Only that the full depth of what can happen in a day in the life of a troop hasn't been presented very well, and maybe for various reasons, it can't. After all, who wants to play a game where you pull a 12 hour guard shift? Or go on police call? Or any of the inumerable tedious and boring things that happen in real life (during times of peace and war).

As Fishion has determined, the hard part is finding a balance.

You guys are lucky. You play a game for a few hours and wham! You know everything there is to life in the military. Yeah, right.

I've been playing alot of America's Army lately, and you get to know who the other veterans are online. It comes as a constant joke to us, all the civilians who take a game as the end all be all of what the military is all about. That the "game" is real and how its done. Heh heh. So we throw a few jokes in there.."Hey, where's the part where we go assault the motor pool and pull some really heavy maintanence?". Or how about, "man I'd gonna hate to goin back to the arms room after this is over, weapons cleaning detail!!! Pass the Break Free!!!"

As for "You should learn to appricieate any downtime Kawchzovski, it makes combat more exciting".

It was either a joke, or "movieland" stuff again.

When you're getting shot at, all the down time in the world don't mean squat, much less make you think combat is even more exciting than it is. What kind of statement is that? Who really needs to be convinced that combat is exciting? So it was either a joke (sarcasm directed at someone else in the same predicament) or something typically scripted.

Other than that, I can only speak from personal experience, and from observations shared with other veterans. As for argument. What argument? The point is clear, and an argument doesn't have to be provided because we're talking about something universal.

Either you've "been there and done that" or you haven't.

There'll be more to add on this soon.

NSDQ!!

[dmakatra]

What I meant was that with that qoute the combat in that map could be perhaps more exciting to play if you were adding some boring patrol or somethin. And I understand that war is boring. The army isnÂ't a rambo movie all the time(and when it is, you donÂ't wanna be there) but the combat is what the player looks for. I donÂ't really understand why a player wants to play a game where you are a soldier, is just is so. Actually, if you think about it, itÂ's really sick! I was talking about map editing and OFP, you was talking about the real life, and you canÂ't connect those together. You can never connect a game and real life togheter. Yeeez! Did I say that? I sit in front of the screen 8 hours a day! ;D