From what I can tell, mission building in CloDo
will have more options, in terms of how missions are put together and how they can be made to appear and run. And I agree, the more story-oriented elements we've been hearing about are meant to be indicative of the sims new potential. But realistically I don't think the end results will be, overall, a lot different to what can be done in IL2 1946. Mostly because of the inherent limits of the genre itself.
Triggers, I think, are the biggest game-changers I've heard about so far. But it's still unclear what triggers can be applied to. For example, can I build a mission where I can make the players engine fail at a certain specific pre-determined point in time or space, or have something trigger a particular, user-made, in-cockpit radio communication?
I ask this because it reminds me of a mission I was thinking about the other day, based on something I read in one of those interviews with a veteran Russian pilot that FPSOlkor posts on the forums here.
In the interview the veteran pilot mentioned an episode where he was at the end of a runway about to take off on a mission when he noticed his engine behaving oddly. He tried to take off but had to abort and go around to try again. At the same time he had a ground controller who was a non-flying political officer ranting nationalistic rhetoric in his ears and berating him for not taking off. After several failed attempts at taking off the pilot gave up, parked his plane and had to be restrained from shooting with his pistol the clueless ground controller who kept threatening him and insisting he take off in a plane that wasn't running properly. Anyway, the plane was checked and it was found the propellor was about to fall off, and if I remember correctly the political officer who was acting as ground controller was punished for his ignorance.
With the right kind of triggers, you could recreate that episode. In that particular case, you complete the mission by defying orders and
not taking off in your malfunctioning plane, parking it instead. Then at the start of the next mission you're informed of the consequences (as above) of having done so.
That's just one small example of what could be done with the right tools. Obviously there are lots of other episodes, based on actual or fictional events, that could also be depicted.
The other new feature we've been told about is the more in-depth pre-mission briefing screens. I seem to recall seeing something where you could include things like recon photo's. Not sure how in-depth that will go, but that has the potential to be used for the telling of a more engaging story.
To bump it up to a whole other level though, how about cut-scenes?
What if you could trigger cut-scenes during a mission? At a certain moment in time, or upon the players completing of a certain action, you cut to a scene recorded previously using the games track-recording facilities. Now that would open up some possibilities.
Combining the mission-building and movie-making aspects of the game to either tell a story or just set a scene. You could watch air or ground actions taking place at the start of your mission, then go join in. Or see the consequences of your in-game actions from vantage points that would otherwise be unavailable to you while stuck in the cockpit. Could be something as simple as zooming out to show you the ground target you're supposed to go find and destroy. Or watching an enemy convoy get destroyed by other planes after you complete your mission of destroying the bridge they were about to cross. Or watching, instead of just hearing, as your wing-man gets taken out by flak. Or seeing some parallel action type detail that drives the story you're partaking in, forward...
Imagine for example, watching in a series of short cut-scenes, a squad-mate getting chipped away at by an enemy on his tail as you, some distance away, race to the rescue. As you get closer, another cut-scene kicks in and you watch, helpless, wondering if this will be the one where you see your squad-mate get killed. Then, finally, you see them from your cockpit and make the last mad dash to intercept...It's all about keeping you involved in the events unfolding, by showing them to you as they happen, or by providing you with some sort of context that makes you feel like your in-game actions are significant and will have some sort of consequence. Enhancing single missions or a whole scripted campaign. Anyway...
I'm just dreaming out loud really. I'm not asking for it to be done, or if it can be done, and I'll be happy with whatever new things are made available. But in terms of off-line story-telling and/or mission building, triggers for everything, and cut-scenes, would blow the doors wide open on the whole genre.