Request: "Restart from last Navpoint"

1) Love the game, used to play WC3 and WC4 so much when I was younger. Wore out at least three 3 joysticks in the process.

2) That nostalgic feel, it's good

3) Having to start missions over from the very start if you die or even fall out of formation... that's not fun

A quicksave function or ability to restart from your last nav-point would be really nice. I mean, I can see others asking how to skip pilot-chatter at nav-points to speed up the game... and being told that that's not possible

So a way to quickly get back to the action without having to sit through five slow minutes of chatter would be really nice

Yes, I'm playing the game on insane but it's unplayable. Not because of difficulty but because every time I die (and you die a lot on this difficulty) I have to go back to the start of the mission and listen to the same pilot banter for the 10th time, and those banters aren't short. It's more annoying than actually dying. I'm also opting for nav point checkpoints.

I also support this. At the ending of one very long mission I was killed by collision with a torpedo - needless to say 😢

I died once via "missile shockwave." Not the missile. The shockwave when it hit my counter measure! This shockwave was definitely not in WC3, but it sure is a neat improvement!

"Restart From Last Navpoint" would be, too. )

God no please.

Saving at nav point is a cod-like idea, where you get a checkpoint every 2 steps. Dumbs down the difficult of the game (the real one), and gives you no real penality for dying.

You die, you start over.

It is supposed to be painful, as well as when you succeed, there is a real sense of accomplishment, gaming wise.

And if you are just dying too much at insane, just lower the difficult no ?

Restart from Nav Point would not be my idea but I can see why people want it.

One thing I would ask for is when you do a quick start mission after you died or failed mission it will place you in space after all introduction has been said after launch.

I have no problem with doing a mission twenty times complete it.

But after three times I can recite every word being said after launch. In some missions this means couple of minutes doing nothing (or getting a drink etc) then start flying.

@TheNeX It dumbs down difficulty because you don't have to waste 5min for banters and pressing alt-A every time you die? Yeah...

In COD you regenerate health between checkpoints so you're always at full health between fights. Nav point checkpoints would not regenerate anything, if you're at 50% hull damage and with only 1 missile at nav point 2 and you die, you also restart with only 1 missile and 50% damage so it also doesn't have anything to do with difficulty.

Who said I'm dying too much on insane? You're meant to die a few times on this difficulty. You rarely can just start a mission and complete it at first go. And just like horizon, even if I die 20 times I don't have any problem with that as long as I can get another attempt without going through the banter for the 100th time. The real satisfaction for me is when you finally complete a difficult stage after dying a lot. Where's the satisfaction if you can beat a mission without any problems.

@Arthandas

It dumbs down difficulty because you don't have to waste 5min for banters and pressing alt-A every time you die? Yeah...

In COD you regenerate health between checkpoints so you're always at full health between fights. Nav point checkpoints would not regenerate anything, if you're at 50% hull damage and with only 1 missile at nav point 2 and you die, you also restart with only 1 missile and 50% damage so it also doesn't have anything to do with difficulty.

Saving at the nav is easily exploitable. Gosh i took too much damage, better suicide myself and restart at nav or ouch i failed to save a frigate, better suicide and restart at nav.

For me, it would change the feeling of the game, knowing i can just respawn at prev nav, i would play less conservative, would feel like less is at stake.

Of course its annoing seeing/hearing the same unskippable intro, but the way i see it, thats the punishment for dying. You dont wanna repeat, just dont die 😊

Like in UOL, you die, you lose items/etc, which also mean you wasted time. Here is the same, and to me its what gives death ingame a meaning.

Who said I'm dying too much on insane? You're meant to die a few times on this difficulty. You rarely can just start a mission and complete it at first go. And just like horizon, even if I die 20 times I don't have any problem with that as long as I can get another attempt without going through the banter for the 100th time. The real satisfaction for me is when you finally complete a difficult stage after dying a lot. Where's the satisfaction if you can beat a mission without any problems

I don't play on insane, unfortunately its a bit too hard doing so on a keyb. As soon as my new joystick arrives, i will give it a try, but believe me, even on a lower diff, keyb only feels very hard 😭

TheNeX wrote: Of course its annoing seeing/hearing the same unskippable intro, but the way i see it, thats the punishment for dying. You dont wanna repeat, just dont die 😊

But so far this issue is the only downside (in so far you can call it like that) to this brilliant fanmade game.

Agreed.

This has to be the best fanmade game i've ever played, and its on par (if not better, remember sol ?) with some titles with nice budgets 😊

TheNeX wrote:Like in UOL, you die, you lose items/etc, which also mean you wasted time. Here is the same, and to me its what gives death ingame a meaning.

Then click "Restart from Beginning." We'll click "Restart from Nav Point." 😉

Heh, regarding game play experience it is far better then many big budget games as well.

@TheNex How about making a single checkpoint at the first nav point when the banter ends and fight begins? This way you can skip the banter without exploiting the further nav points.

Yes, I don't usually play games like WC but this one is really awesome. I'm just curious how can you stop your ship midair without drifting away like you should in space:)

This discussion is moot. Such a feature will not be added. This is not CoD.

Arthandas wrote:Yes, I don't usually play games like WC but this one is really awesome. I'm just curious how can you stop your ship midair without drifting away like you should in space:)

It's just a space combat game with simplified flight physics. With real Newtonian physics the space combat would be pretty much unplayable.

Edit: If you would try something more serious in space try Orbiter - but prepare yourself for some reading on stuff like apoapsis and periapsis (which is basic stuff useful in correcting your orbit) or major brain melt-down while trying to fly to the Moon or even better Mars.

KeldorKatarn wrote:This discussion is moot. Such a feature will not be added. This is not CoD.

People asked (for at least) to have starting point just after all the talking has ended at mission start. 😉

restating: I do not mind replaying a mission twenty times or more to finally get through, I do love the speech/story at the start of the mission. The first time I play it. After the 2nd time the beginning speech can in some missions be a dragging minute long boring thing. Time to do other stuff (eat, drink, etc). Not because the speech is bad but because you know the story already.

Across all forums in various places this is the issue people raise: listening again and again to mission speech at the start.

Everyone likes it the first time but gets annoyed later on.

And no one dislikes playing a mission twenty times.

edit: don't get me wrong I love the game. 😊

Sorry, that won't happen. That would be a huge amount of work (basically a major redesign) and with very little positive effect in my book. The game was designed like this for a purpose.

And to be completely honest... back in the day when these games were big, when players died, they tried harder. They didn't run to origin and asked for an easier game... 😉

Sorry but you are competely offtrack now.

I did not ask (no one did for that matter) for an easier game.

I said I do not mind playing a dificult game.

I said I do not mind playing a mission twenty times over.

We only asked for a skip the mission start speech when we attempt the mission again and again (quick start mission after dying/failing).

See, a much different question. But if it isn't technical possible then so be it. I just have more time to drink & eat. 😉

KeldorKatarn wrote:And to be completely honest... back in the day when these games were big, when players died, they tried harder. They didn't run to origin and asked for an easier game... 😉

That's because the internet didn't exist yet! 😉

I think tweaking a mission which is very frustrating like the mission with the cloaked missles.. is far better, then ruining the whole game with savepoints. Don't get me wrong I had thoughts like "man why is there no savepoint??" too but that maximized the good feeling when I finished a mission after a few tries at last.

If you played classic wow and later addons and you felt the difference.... Savingpoint would be the first step to this. Please just don't.

One of the main design goals in making this game was to have it "feel" like the old-school Wing Commander games. Part of that means no checkpointing. The devs have been very clear on this; a design decision was made not to implement this feature, because it would change the tone of the game in a way that was incompatible with the design goals. It will not be implemented.

If there's a particular mission you're having a hard time with, you can always lower the difficulty for that mission.

I'm well aware of your goal to emulate the feel of the original game

kudos to that

but since you've opted to have loads of pilot-chatter during missions then starting over all the time makes for eventually very boring repeats of the same banter over and over

checkpointing would fix that

arisian wrote: If there's a particular mission you're having a hard time with, you can always lower the difficulty for that mission.

Thanks for the input. We're always interested to hear our community's thoughts. However, please understand that implementation of a check point system is highly unlikely and would require a dedicated programming and testing team.

ok no checkpoints, got it, I understand,kudos to you to sticking to your guns, to paraphrase the kinney "in the old days there used to be gamers of simple graphics and mad skill and then it went visa-versa as we entered 3d but its good to know that there still those with mad skillz out there"

but is a "skip dialog" button to much to ask? maybe a new option for the mostly unused wingman comms where sandman shouts "CUT THE CHATTER LETS GET GOING ALREADY!"?

mormon_boy wrote:to paraphrase the kinney "in the old days there used to be gamers of simple graphics and mad skill and then it went visa-versa as we entered 3d but its good to know that there still those with mad skillz out there"

Great paraphrase, unfortunately it is probably all too true.

I can remember playing games in the late 80's and early 90's that if you died, you started over from the beginning. If you won you really felt good, but man was it frustrating if you lost!

there is a modern myth that Japanese games are dumbed down for export or not released in the states at all because they think the stereotypical american wants a game that will play itself. the difference between old school and modern games in terms of challenging a players skill is like flying a Hellcat vs. an Excalibur.

While this is true, I'd also like to point out that one of the reason the really old games were so hard was to make up for the fact that they were so short on content. I mean, you just didn't have enough bytes of memory to make the game actually have lots of interesting content; if you could just play through start to end, you'd be done in an hour, and that would be it. By making you die and start over, it meant that people felt like they got their money's worth, because it took them a long time to beat the game.

I'm certainly not advocating making games "too" easy; otherwise, I probably wouldn't love WCSaga so much! But I do think that modern game devs have more options available to them in terms of content and pacing, and that's a good thing. I think there's a place for games that work more like a book or movie, in that the goal is to tell a story and deliver content, and you don't want the difficulty to impede that goal. But I also think there's still a place for games that reward and develop skill, and those seem to be getting hard to find (outside of multiplayer, which is a whole other ball of wax).

This would've better fit into the original thread, but as it was locked, I'm going to post this here.

My (totally subjective) impression is that the auto pilot scenes are too long compared to the original game, about 1/3. Of course I haven't done any testing with the older games, I just the feeling again and again that "now would be a good time for the cutscene to end", and then it continued and continued... Minor issue, I know. But maybe I'm even going to play the original games again and compare the time it takes. 😁

And concerning the idea of skipping the chatter scenes on a repeated try on a mission: I always have and always will support that idea. Nav point checkpoints however are a bit too much, that just doesn't feel right with the Wing Commander games.

still wondering about skipping chatter unlike nav points there is no skill involved in listening to you wing mates crack jokes. Except for the skill of willing myself not vaporize avataar (I miss greywolf)

There is no easy way to implement a dialogue skipping option sorry. That would take months to implement and test properly.

oh well I'd rather have mod tools and co-op multiplayer I was just curious cause it felt like the question was being avoided and everyone was just focusing on the navpoint discussion

Thanks for pointing me to this thread Arisian.

Like the others, I don't mind the difficulty (having played Wing Commander: Prophecy on the Game Boy Advance - w limited control options, that game was fun but a b$$$$ to beat) but like what the others said, having to hear the same lines over and over can be quite taxing.

I understand that it can't be implemented; no worries. 😊

That aside, this is a very, very impressive game. Thanks for putting this out! (Gonna buy the original three games from www.gog.com once i finish this.)

Ganndam wrote:Thanks for pointing me to this thread Arisian.

Like the others, I don't mind the difficulty (having played Wing Commander: Prophecy on the Game Boy Advance - w limited control options, that game was fun but a b$$$$ to beat) but like what the others said, having to hear the same lines over and over can be quite taxing.

I understand that it can't be implemented; no worries. 😊

That aside, this is a very, very impressive game. Thanks for putting this out! (Gonna buy the original three games from http://www.gog.com once i finish this.)

What do you mean?

EDIT: Oh, the IP thing.

arisian wrote:One of the main design goals in making this game was to have it "feel" like the old-school Wing Commander games. Part of that means no checkpointing. The devs have been very clear on this; a design decision was made not to implement this feature, because it would change the tone of the game in a way that was incompatible with the design goals. It will not be implemented.

If there's a particular mission you're having a hard time with, you can always lower the difficulty for that mission.

It was a conscious design decision, similar to the Dark Souls/Demon Souls series. If you think Saga is hard, give those games a try. 😊

It's really nothing to do with difficulty so much as the consequences of losing. Most of the people playing this game are probably veteran Wing Commanders, yet sooner or later they're going to have to restart a mission, and when they do they'll be subjected to repeated pilot chatter. The Wing Commander series was about drama and comradery - two things Darkest Dawn absolutely nailed. Every time a player is forced to listen to those lines again, it's like hearing a favourite new song playing on the radio non-stop. Fantastic the first time, great the second, ok the third. By the forth time we can't remember why we liked the song in the first place. Even the original experience gets irreversibly tarnished.

Well finished the game on "easy" now and i felt great about it.

Srsly there have been missions where i liked to destroy my joystick when i died after 28 minutes of playing HRR but i think for me "The Juice was worth the squeeze" if you catch my drift.

Thanks for this awesome game! I just got my FS 1 + 2 CDs from the attic and i think there will be more space to clean up now 😊

The game jusst seems to be "hard" and "old" in its design and difficulty decission because the devs chose to do it this way. At least that was the impression i got from their answers. I think it is awesome the way it is.

Hi folks.

Wanted to thank the dev team for all their hard work - I'm a big fan of the WC series and really wanted to play this game. Unfortunately, I will not be continuing past the second mission. When I have to sit through five minutes of unskippable dialog to get to a fight where you or your escort ship die within thirty seconds, I'm only going to do that three or four times before I give up and move on to another game.

While I can appreciate the idea of "keeping it old school" in terms of not babysitting the user, user interaction techniques have advanced quite considerably since 1994. While I understand the difficulty of implementing a check point system (I haven't seen it in any Freespace based game to date), the simple ability to trigger an auto pilot sequence while your annoying teammates are blathering on would go a long way towards making this particular game much more playable.

Thanks for your input. As stated before, a checkpoint system iis not on our priority list and, as things stand, will not be implemented. There is a simple solution to your woes: don't die. Or you could play Dark Souls - it has a very nifty checkpoint system. Oh wait...

Hi Tolwyn, again difficulty and checkpoint saves is not the issue.

Most people have problems with hearing mission start chatter for zillion of times when they failed a mission. They do not have a problem with the mission being hard itself.

And we acknowledged that. But please also understand that there is no way to change that. We don't have the time or manpower anymore, this project is finished. It was already a nightmare to get it done over past year because we pretty much worked 60-80 hour week shifts with our studies/normal job and this project - EVERY DAY over the course of one year, not having ANY vacation or weekends in that timeframe.

So it was a huge piece of work to even get this done. Doing a major rework of gameplay is totally out of the question and simply not doable. Skipping dialogue was already requested by the beta testers but even then it was already totally unrealistic to do.

My problem isn't that you can't change it. It's not even that you don't think it should be changed. My problem is you don't think it should be changed because:

KeldorKatarn wrote:This is not CoD.

Drake Sigar wrote:Have some respect for the intelligence of your fans.

As an old adage goes, repeating the same request over and over again won't make us change our minds. Yes, we are listening to your feedback but that does not mean that we have to implement it. It would take months to implement and properly test any changes and, as long as we are not being paid, it is simply no longer an option.

the relation ship between fans and volunteer free game devs is usually delicate and complex but involves 1. the devs right to flip you the bird and pull his stuff if you make him mad enough 2. the devs motivation to release mod tools so fans can implement what the dev has no desire to implement this isn't bioware your dealing with drake sigar you did not pay these guys a total of $180 for 3 different games the day they came out and god knows how much for promotional products and DLC's if they did something that made you unhappy they have no obligation to make it up to you if you want it so bad then be patient and brush up on your freespace modding skills as you wait for the modding tools to be released. you may yet have your check points one day but it probably won't be from these guys especially if you insult them on their home turf

horizon wrote:Hi Tolwyn, again difficulty and checkpoint saves is not the issue.

Most people have problems with hearing mission start chatter for zillion of times when they failed a mission. They do not have a problem with the mission being hard itself.

Wait...isn't the time dilation feature still in WC Saga? I must admit I've never tried it, not even back with FS1 and FS2, but I know it did work for those, even later with FSO.

Hit the button, fast forward with the chatter...should solve your problem, shouldn't it? If it's gone then I'm sorry and stand corrected. ^^

It has been disabled and for a good reason. It breaks dialogue and event timing and will tarnish your gaming experience. Events are fast forwarded. Dialogue is not.

IDEA! what about simply adding an option that enables time compression and disables the dialog at the same time? it would be for replays so you already know whats coming

no? not worth your time cause your fixing bugs and making mods tools? its cool i still love this game

Tolwyn wrote:It has been disabled and for a good reason. It breaks dialogue and event timing and will tarnish your gaming experience. Events are fast forwarded. Dialogue is not.

I see. Well, as I said, I stand corrected. Sir. *salutes* xD

BTW: I remember this being a point of discussion during the ongoing development of FSO builds. At some point this was changed if I remember correctly. Where before dialog was timestamped and tight to the gameplay, in was then changed in a newer build, leading to several big mods needing a serious overhaul and several modders to change their methods.

It was a small controverse...or maybe I got this all wrong, since my insight and understanding was rather limited. ^^

mormon_boy wrote:IDEA! what about simply adding an option that enables time compression and disables the dialog at the same time? it would be for replays so you already know whats coming

no? not worth your time cause your fixing bugs and making mods tools? its cool i still love this game

Adding it as a feature in the launcher maybe, flagged as "experimental" and with no debug-support whatsoever...I think that would be an idea. And a solution for those who know the dialogues inside out already.

Though I still think this would probably land at the very end of a to-do-list. 😁

we'll call it the experimental "Shut-up Avataar!" mode 😊

mormon_boy wrote:the relation ship between fans and volunteer free game devs is usually delicate and complex but involves

1. the devs right to flip you the bird and pull his stuff if you make him mad enough

2. the devs motivation to release mod tools so fans can implement what the dev has no desire to implement this isn't bioware your dealing with drake sigar you did not pay these guys a total of $180 for 3 different games the day they came out and god knows how much for promotional products and DLC's

if they did something that made you unhappy they have no obligation to make it up to you if you want it so bad then be patient and brush up on your freespace modding skills as you wait for the modding tools to be released. you may yet have your check points one day but it probably won't be from these guys especially if you insult them on their home turf

Even you're doing it now, it's rather pathetic. You don't know if I buy modern Bioware games (I don't), you don't know if I buy DLC (I don't), and you don't know if I fork out hefty sums for special editions (I don't). You seek to discredit me by making these wild assumptions when all you're doing is discrediting yourself like the obsequious sycophant you so obviously are.

Drake Sigar wrote:I didn't insult them, they insulted us.

I see. Thank you for dragging me into this. 😐

Tolwyn"] Oops, my bad. *Ninja edits* 😉

Drake Sigar wrote:We didn't insult anyone, Keldor insulted us.

Drake Sigar wrote:Once again, I don't mind that it can't be implemented,

Drake Sigar wrote:I just don't want anyone being insulted for making this suggestion ON A FORUM SECTION DESIGNED FOR THESE SUGGESTIONS. Using 'This is not CoD' as a response sidesteps any argument or responsibility entirely and rallies the community through meaningless slogans while heavily implying the original commenter is a tasteless cretin.

Drake Sigar wrote:Even you're doing it now, it's rather pathetic. You don't know if I buy modern Bioware games (I don't), you don't know if I buy DLC (I don't), and you don't know if I fork out hefty sums for special editions (I don't). You seek to discredit me by making these wild assumptions when all you're doing is discrediting yourself like the obsequious sycophant you so obviously are.

also this whole issue will be rendered moot in a few days when the mod tools are released(like tuesday) so you can implement this yourself heck this is a popular subject there are probably many who will help you

We will not implement this. End of story.

Thread closed. Any further threads opened on this topic are going to be deleted and the user banned.