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Old 02-04-2011, 04:01 AM
Blackdog_kt Blackdog_kt is offline
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My personal preference would be a mix between a dynamic and a scripted campaign.

Missions would be generated dynamically and the player's actions would have an effect in his area of operations but not the entire front, while at the same time the end result would be predetermined (eg, the axis forces would never be able to get the invasion underway) and you'd get some scripted historical missions thrown in at the relevant dates and/if you were flying for the appropriate squadrons that took part in the action.

Something like this has been done as early as the 90s with sims like aces over europe and aces of the pacific: you got a random string of campaign missions and even some encounters with aces, but at the relevant times you would get a scripted historical mission that was exactly the same as those listed under the "historical missions" tab in the "single missions" part of the main menu.

It has also been done in silent hunter III . I'm not sure if it hapened with a modded version, but the stock engine did have built-in support for that kind of thing. In fact, one of the modding teams edited text files and by input of historical dates they recreated an exact schedule of wartime convoys and even capital ship appearances in famous battles.

The most amazing thing i saw was a forum post on subsim.com where a player posted some of his screenshots from one of his patrols. He was returning to his home base and suddenly the game started running a bit slower and the sonarman calling out contacts like crazy. The guy goes into the plotting table view, snaps a screenshot of a bunch of contacts and then it strikes you: the date on the bottom right of the interface reads June 6th 1944.
So, in a sim with a totally dynamic creation of ship traffic, you were still able to stumble upon the D-Day invasion fleet among other scripted historical events.

Such an approach would be good because it's not as canned as a fully static campaign, yet it's also not as ahistorical as a fully dynamic one. Just throw in the well known actions in a scripted format and keep the rest of it dynamic to have the best of both worlds

In any case, as far as CoD is concerned that's going to be down the line and not on initial release, so maybe we should take advantage of the delay and keep suggesting things.

Just because the initial version only has a static campaign doesn't mean it will stay that way. The original IL2 was similar to that, the dynamic campaigns came with an expansion later on. Let's take advantage of the time window and give some ideas for the campaign modes we'd like to see. I proposed something, someone else might propose something different like a falcon4 or a bob:wov style campaign that merges strategy elements into it and the player plans out the actions for the entire theater. We can do that you know, because apparently they are still working on it and it's not finished

We can give some ideas and run some polls to formulate a community opinion on what a dynamic campaign should be when it comes in a few months, or we can just use these months to complain that we didn't get a bug-ridden and poorly done version of it immediately.

Just keep a positive outlook on things is all i'm saying, especially since there have been other simulator releases that were far more incomplete than CoD. It's not like we're lacking the dynamic campaign AND the flyables AND an easy way to make missions of our own with the relevant AI units. Sure, we're missing some stuff but the majority of the content is there and the rest is already done up to a point and not still on the drawing board, which is more than can be said about the state of silent hunter 5 or the slow pace of RoF during its initial months of circulation (a very similar case, since they too were forced to release RoF early for financial reasons).

I hate having a potentially perfect yet incomplete game prevent me from really enjoying it just as much as the next guy but let's be reasonable here, if you managed to have a good time with 4 flyables and almost no AI units of note or a single U-boat type for the past year, you should have no problem having fun with a dozen flyables and a bunch of AI units to smash in all their physics calculated glory in CoD for a similar amount of time until the dynamic campaign comes along. In fact if you managed the above you're less picky than i am (i own neither RoF nor SH5 because of these reasons) and CoD seems an imperfect but well balanced release to me content-wise
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