Great game but I refuse to play this without checkpoints

[quote="Hammer7"I remember one mission in IV, you had to undock from the carrier, fly to a planet, kill a few enemy ships in space, and then fly down to the planet and go through 3 waypoints of insanely difficult stuff (ships with Tachyons and constantly firing missiles, and turrets on the ground that also shoot missiles). I died at the last waypoint, and had to start all the way from the beginning again. I was mad, but the second time I got it. There were other long missions like that too, and if you got to the very end of it and died, you had to start the whole thing all over again.

If you want checkpoints, stick with Black Ops and Modern Warfare. The WC games were never about checkpoints (neither was FreeSpace 2 itself), and this one is not either.

I miss games where you were actually given a challenge, games didn't hold your hand, give you hints throughout, tell you when to push a button, and make it easy to win. Darkest Dawn is actually quite a refreshing game in that regard. Minimal hints, no "press Q to kill this enemy", no ship computer telling me what to do every few seconds... I like it.quote]

Hammer, I remember playing the same mission and got so frustrated, I destroyed every missile launcher on the planet I could find, needless to say I didn't have the armament to fight the final battles to win.

One of the great things about games like WC and Darkest Dawn, is that it gives you the opportunity to practice various attack and defensive tactical doctrines. People with a straight forward attack doctrine who never change can find games such as this one and its predecessors daunting. Actually, if you think Darkest Dawn is hard, you should have played it in beta form. Not only are you trying to win missions, you are trying to find ways to get the missions to crash so players later won't have that rough experience.

Yes Darkest Dawn is tough, more so than most games on the market today and that is a great thing. Yes, there are things that could be improved, if the FreeSpace engines the game is based on allowed those improvements. There were lots of improvements we discussed during beta testing that never happened as they were beyond the capabilities of the FreeSpace engine.

The game in its current form is the result of thousands of hours of flying time, incorporated comments from developers, beta testers and comments from general players once the game was released to the public. No it's not perfect even after all that; however, for a fan built game, you'll be hard pressed to find any other that holds a candle to Wing Commander Darkest Dawn. I for one have enjoyed the hundreds of hours of beta testing and the countless hours of replaying the game after it's release as I had sorely missed and lamented the lack of any other recent Wing Commander games.

Darkest Dawn may not have everything you want, but it has more than you need.

Sorry, but I think you are dead WRONG!

Asking for checkopints is NOT asking someone to hold your hand, that was a very stupid statement. And it smaks of fanboyism.

It is simply asking the game to make it FAIR! It is not fair the way it is now, making you start from scratch when you mess up.

You like it? Fine. Go ahead and play it, but don't act like others are wrong simply for asking for checkpoints. The game itself is very hard! That is simply a fact!

Checkpoints would have evened things up, because it IS FRUSTRATING as you posted to have to go back to the beginning and a lot of people quit playing after that!

So don't act like it is a good thing to go back to the beginning...it is certianly NOT!

You sound like nothing more than making excuses for the games shortcomings...which is exactly what not having checkpoints for something so hard is...a shortcoming!

Whenever a player dies, there's players who look for shortcomings in the game and there's players who look for them in themselves...

I personally tried Dark Souls. I find it highly frustrating and I stopped playing (more frustrated with the controls than the game actually). Do I blame the game for that? No. I'm just crap...

Does Saga have sections where it is annoying to start over? Yes, because of the lengthy dialogs. If we had those skippable, which unfortunately wasn't doable in time, it would have been fine. Would we have considered checkpoints just because of the toughness of a mission? No. Simply because the missions were balanced around their difficulty as a whole, not around their difficulty as sections. if we had introduced checkpoints we would have ruined most missions. Where's the tension of flying at 1% hull, blowing up the final enemy and then just so make the landing on the Hermes, pissing your pants while doing it, because you fear you might actually kill yourself on the hangar walls you're so scared. where is all that when you know if you screw up you just start over 2 minutes earlier. And where's the sense of accomplishment of having beat 3 hard navpoints in a row with 5% hull integrity left because you screwed up at the first nav and took a missile hit.

Sorry but that is crap design, nothing else. It's easy mode and hollywood popcorn gaming. There's a place for that, sure, but Saga never wanted to be that. Do we have some missions with crap design? Yes. Sometimes because the vision of the writer just couldn't be translated properly into the engine or because the scripter simply did a bad job at doing so. But overall I think our missions are exiting, thrilling and grab you and keep you on the edge until you finally hit that landing deck. Checkpoints would have completely destroyed that feeling.

Can you imagine a mission 28 (the loki trap) where we save your game after every enemy wave? Can you imagine what that mission would feel like then? It'd be complete crap. No sense of exhaustion, no "oh no, not another wave" feeling and cursing when you're already low on fuel, missiles and health and wingmen...

Yes some missions suck, some missions I'd like to cut or rewrite, but 95% of then are just as we had envisioned them... without checkpoints.

And I repeat my original statement: Yes we are aware that we scare some people off with the difficulty. I personally simply don't care. I don't need everyone to love the game, just as Dark Souls doesn't need me as a fan. it's a great game, but to me it's just frustrating. So I lean back and watch let's plays on youtube instead and have fun watching people die and bite into their controller. if you don't have fun playing this game... go ahead and don't play it. Who the heck is forcing you to?

And demanding change from a game you got for free... spending hours of your life complaining on a forum over and over again... you know what that is called? Entitled, arrogant, "If I can't beat it it's too hard", "i want I want I want" attitude.

Lemme ask you one thing. When you had your first flirt with a girl. Did you piss your pants and have sweaty hands? because that's what makes a fresh flirt so great. Or did you have a checkpoint there too? And what kind of a guy are you when the girl rejects you? Do you blame the girl for just being an idiot for not liking you? Or do you think "well, she's cute and such a great girl, but maybe she's not for me..." and maybe work on your lines a bit more...

Holy cow, is this debate still raging?

@KeldorKatarn....So I guess you are such a prick that you cannot admit that the player may actually have a gripe about this game not having checkpoints?

That says a lot about your ego dude! And none of it is very good. If you think it must be the players fault that is the reason why they are frustrated and NOT any of the game design....then I think you need a reality check!

In the first place people are NOT...I repeat...NOT (Got that?) asking for checkpoints because they want to "make the game easier" as you seem to think. They are wanting them because they have to start all over from the very beginning of a mission just to get back to the point they died at! Then hope they can get through from there. If not rinse and repeat.

But as you seem to ignorantly think it is only the player that is at fault and not the ame design, then that should be your idea of "fun" right? It sure is not mine! And I got another reality check for ya....a lot of people share that same view. Don't care? Well neither do I CARE what you think!

Saying game that have checkpoints in them are crap design, shows exactly how ignorant you are! Checkpoints that are implemented correctly would have the same effect YOU THINK IS HAPPENING when they don't! You don't have to put 10 checkpoints in a mission, but one or two would have been nice! You seem to to think that if you have checkpoints that all you do is make it easy...no... in hard games like this one, you can make it to where the player does not have to throw up his hands and quit because they are tired from playing from the beginning.

But then again it is all the players fault isn't it? Stupid, very stupid.

And as far as you not caring? Do you actually think I am going to listen to YOU when you are acting like a troll?

open up your mind at least for once and see there are other viewpoints besides your own!

And let's also get one other thing straight, because a game is FREE does NOT MEAN IT CANNOT BE IMPROVED! Unless all the developers are absolute idiots that think if someone does not like their game it has to be their fault!

Face it! The Original poster DID HAVE a good point about this game not having any checkpoints. Now YOU come along and act like it must be the players fault. I think you are full of crap!

Calling the people that play this game and want improvements arrogant, is about as stupid as blaming a player when a game design is bad!

And I never had that problem with girls, but you sound like someone who cannot relate to ANYONE unless they agree with YOUR point of view. So I would be more worried about that with you than me.

Maybe...just maybe...you should take a step back and see what the OP was talking about. But I have a feeling you are not that brave.

@webe123: Not that this will help, but here goes: The original Wing Commanders to which Saga pays homage were hellishly difficult at times and also had no checkpoints. I dare you to head over to the Star Citizen website and tell Chris Roberts how unhappy you are with the precedent he set.

I think I only found 4-5 places tops in the campaign where placing checkpoints wouldn't really have much of an impact on mission flow. Let me look at my "upgrade" spreadsheet...

OK, here's my list:
-The Kinney mission (Nipheleim 2): right after the destruction fo the Kinney and the first wave, makes you skip over the "fly towards the doomed battlegroup" part straight to the first real challenge of the mission.
-Hyperion 1: right after jumping in, basically skipping the jump sequence. Or possibly after clearing the jump point, before the battlegroup starts warping in.
-I also wrote in Freya 2, after saving or failing to save the Cabot, before the mission's final sequence, but after rethinking about it, the mission's pretty much over at this point anyway, so scratch that one.
-Right before engaging the Wratghar in the final mission: the action before that doesn't affect the rest of the mission and merely serve as a prelude to the big fight, while still taking about 5 unchallenging minutes.

So 3 checkpoints mostly aimed at taking the player straight to the action, out of 50 missions. I'd have to restudy some of the more "marathon" type missions, I'm sure a couple more could be squeezed here and there.
What's funny is that WCS's mission structure is perfect for including checkpoints, thanks to the fact that you have invincible wingmen and the mission division in navpoints.


Compare to Blue Planet 2 (from what I can recall right now), which introduced the checkpoint feature:
-one or two in the cost of war, the first mission of act 1, a lengthy but chatty escort mission, with a rather slow pace, the big factors being the state of the ships you are defending.
-in the first mission of act 2, after your first try, you get the option to skip the dialogue tree, conserving your previous choices.
-one in the middle of aristeia, after fending off the inital attack against the two frigates and logistics ship, the big factors being how much damage your ship has taken (especially if you decided to fly a GTVA fighter), how much damage the Indus has taken and whether or not the AWACS was destroyed. It's a rather lengthy, action-heavy mission, in which the first part has a moderate influence on how the second part goes.
-one in the penultimate mission, after having succesfully disabled and disarmed the Alliance corvette. It's a short mission, with two distinct bursts of action, first dealing with corvette's escort, then the cruiser's. The checkpoint is there mostly because disabling the corvette is a rather tedious and low-challenge task.
-two in the final mission (Delenda Est), a lengthy, action heavy mission in which you barely have time to catch your breath between waves. The first checkpoint is placed right after the last bombers/capships threatening your initial strike force are down, as backup arrives to spearhead the assault afterwards. The second checkpoint has been placed before bombers start attacking your initial strike force again.
Checkpoints are completely absent from act 3.

So basically 5 missions out of 15 (only counting act 1 & 2 or cutscenes), with two not featuring any action. Their use of checkpoint is interesting, in 3 cases, they're here mostly to prevent player boredom over multiple attempts, but in two cases, they're in the middle of extremely action-heavy missions, particularly Delenda Est. Here, the checkpoints are arguably responsible for allowing the mission designer to make the mission harder than usual while limiting player fatigue on their inital playthrough (checkpoints can't be used while playing from the techroom).

Again, keep in mind that these are 2 vastly different projects in terms of gameplay, storytelling, history & development model.

I thought I would quote the man himself rather than argue the point further:

robertsspaceindustries.com/comm ... A-Spaceman

"I hate the current game trend in single player games where the game auto-saves every 2 seconds and if you die you just start a few steps earlier. This makes you a lazy and sloppy player. I bullied my way through games like Mass Effect or Gears of War, running in guns blazing, knowing if I died I would always just re-spawn a few steps earlier. In Wing Commander or Privateer, you had to complete the mission to move on. There were no mid mission saves. This created a sense of anxiety towards the end of the mission if you were badly damaged and your shields were low, but if you managed to limp home successfully, you felt a sense of accomplishment. Without the risk of losing something you’ve worked hard towards, the sense of achievement is cheap."

- Chris Roberts

So devs, from a long-time WC fan, thank you for staying true to the spirit of what made Wing Commander great.

I could care LESS what anyone says....having checkpoints DOES NOT make you a cheater, weaker player or anything else! It simply saves you the frustration of playing it over and over and over again.

For some on this board, that is somehow a CRIME! Not to me it isn't!

All you people that say this idiotic stuff come off to me as gluttons for punishment. Enjoy trying to do something over and over because I SURE DON'T!!

Are you guys trying to tell me you LIKE that? Great. Then go play it! I however, will not be. I think that in itself is simply stupid.

Even though I understand this game cannot have checkpoints because the game engine does not allow it. But that does not make using checkpoints wrong! Sorry, but that is my view and you are NOT going to change it...no matter who you quote! See ya.