Mission types discussion

marbleman on 17/2/2017 at 23:46

Thanks for the responses, some very good points here. True, city missions allow for more variety and exploration.
What kind of setting do you think could contend with city missions in this regard?

McTaffer on 18/2/2017 at 02:28

I think that something along the lines of The Sword, as Melan mentioned, could contend with city missions in terms of variety. The issue with trying to recreate something like that or a variation of it would be balancing the level of insanity with design sensibilities. Just crazy enough to catch people off guard, but not crazy enough to make them lost and/or frustrated. I personally like a bit of insanity in a mission, but I don't like it to be too off the rails if it's supposed to be a serious mission.

greenie2600 on 18/2/2017 at 04:04

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Do you think mansion missions are overdone? If so, why?

I don't think mansion missions are overdone. They're one of my favorite styles, actually.

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What such a mission has to feature for it to be original?

I'm not necessarily looking for originality. Above all else, I want a mission where the gameplay has been carefully thought out and finely tuned. You can have breathtaking architecture, a skillfully written plot, and top-notch voice acting and custom scripting – but if every guard just walks up and down a hallway or rotates randomly in the corner of a room, it won't be very interesting to play. A good Thief mission, for me, is a puzzle to unlock: how am I going to get through this brightly lit room without being seen? Do I have time to run out, snatch the goblet, flip the switch, and get back to the shadows before that guard turns around? How can I blackjack this guy without his buddies noticing? Can I figure out an alternate route to the second floor (via rope arrows, air ducts, etc.) that bypasses the big dining room full of nobles? Etc.

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How did city missions become so popular and why are they so popular now?

City missions have a few of things going for them, gameplay-wise.

First of all, they make it easier to exploit the vertical dimension. Thief is beloved for its non-linear gameplay, and that extra axis of freedom exponentially multiplies the ways in which a player can approach a mission. City missions which don't exploit the vertical dimension well aren't as fun, IMHO.

Secondly, city missions tend to have interesting topology. One of Thief's designers (as quoted in a recent thread) said that Thief's gameplay is fundamentally about exploring and exploiting space, and I think that's true. City missions just provide a framework that happens to be good for creating spaces that are interesting to explore and which lend themselves to emergent gameplay.

Think of a mission's layout as (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Idea_Networking_Example.jpg) a network of nodes: each room, area, etc. is a node, and the available options for traveling between adjacent nodes (hallways, ladders, rope arrow anchors, etc.) are the lines between them. (Connections are sometimes one-way: e.g., dropping off a building into water.) City missions often have one such network on the grand scale (several districts connected by thoroughfares, sewers, etc.), and numerous smaller networks within each of those areas (alleys, individual buildings, etc.). There are non-city missions where this is also true, but the FM author has to make a more deliberate effort at it (because the city-mission genre kind of has it built-in).

Thirdly, they're a thematically sensible way to provide the player with a variety of different environments to explore.

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Do you think city missions are overdone? If not, do you think they will be at some point?

I don't think so, no. Again, I'm not very interested in novelty for its own sake. I'm more concerned with the execution of a mission, not how unique it is.