Campaign Creations

After watching a few of Mr. PrOnogo's LPs. I've began asking the question, "So, what makes a campaign good/enjoyable/praiseworthy?"

See, when people make a campaign, scenario, mission, map, (well at least most, if not all) would think they're making something that will be good. The creator would be limited only to what he/she knows to be good, and thus the outcome of his/her work reflects that set of information (and of course his/her willingness and ability to execute certain things).

Now, after many scenarios and campaigns played, after the smiles and lols, even cringes at times, what have you guys gathered as principles that makes a campaign/scenario to be brilliant or of high quality?

What elements are in there and how are these elements executed so that they come together to produce such a "high quality" and "praiseworthy" map?

I think that mostly what makes a high quality and praiseworthy map is subject a lot to opinion. Pr0, as he's made obvious, is not a fan of Desler's campaigns. While I agree that often Desler's stuff isn't very fun to play for me and there is some stupid logic in the plot sometimes (protoss have no mouths they cannot eat or drink), I don't really hate Desler's stuff with the same intensity as him. I've had fun playing the celestial stories at times, and have found myself engaged in the plot in certain situations in the stories.

That said, what I think is good is made up of a few things. I usually consider it good if it offers challenging but not overly difficult gameplay, first of all. It doesn't have to be unique, but being unique does add a good touch if you do it right. If it isn't unique, you have to keep a good pace and lots of little twists to keep it fun. By good pace I don't mean fast pace - it can be slow paced and enjoyable if done right. Basically, if I'm not bored, the gameplay has been done right.

And the story. It has to actually draw me in and get me attached to the characters. Everybody knows the same old boring 'zerg invade a terran colony' story, so it should be more than that. Something deep hooks me usually. A good example of this is Life of a Marine. It has the most engaging plot of any campaign I've played to date, though, as I've mentioned before, it's all subject to opinion. I love LoaM's story, but I'm sure there are people who don't. (Luckily for me, I haven't met any! ) If there characters are unique and interesting and there are good twists (map seven of The Antioch Chronicles Episode Two comes to mind, that was incredible) I usually love it and I consider it to be noteworthy. Also, make sure that the lore stays logical to the universe, otherwise it's just going to make people confused and upset.

Voice acting also is important for me. You can have a good campaign without it (again, LoaM), but if it is there, it can really add to the experience. However, there is that question of 'is it good?' that should be asked. Often enough, bad voice acting can really ruin a campaign for me. Luckily for me, I have a good voice actor, haha. I guess this goes for other 'special effects', too - modding, sound effects, etc. If it's good, it makes the campaign better. Also HOO DEE makes Pr0nogo's ears bleed and makes me laugh. More opinion!

Theme is great. If your campaign has a strong feeling of something, it boosts the mood. Atmosphere and music can help with the theme.

As for whether or not it's serious, this is not important for me. The Antioch Chronicles is great, and so is The Bob Levels. The humour of it has nothing to do with the quality, in my opinion.

The long and short of it... opinions, have cool stuff, and never ever ever ever make protoss talk about food supplies.

There must be some kind of "public consciousness" on this thing too much like we have on Heroes and Villains or characters, right?

I don't think that's the case with Starcraft. A lot of people like the Celestial Stories a lot, but then there's Pr0 who doesn't like it. Either that or he's just a non-conformist or something, haha.

Very interesting. So, there are elements that people can attach to and make it a personal fav, and then there are those general things which are expected to be there.

It's like what you listed above, and then the fine line you drew when it came to personal satisfaction.

Am I getting you right?...

That's correct. Obviously there's a standard for some things, but with things like gameplay it often boils down to just how much fun you had, and that's different depending on the person.

Random off-topic fact: I was originally cast as Jack Sherall for LoaM SE and recorded every line. Four times.

I don't get it, Lavvz.

I guess the relevance and idea comes from the line, "...and recorded every line. Four times."

Why four times? what happened?

I think you should check out my Armies of Exigo review. It's a full review of the game but I talk a lot about the campaign and its various elements. Since the LP folder got nuked I have to re-upload it, so here you go.

I start talking about the gameplay around 23:50 and campaign around 36:00.

http://www.gameproc.com/meskstuff/deept ... review.mp3

Campaigns are an experience. That experience must be fully fleshed out to begin the road to becoming "good". That means you need custom graphics, audio, story, and gameplay just to qualify as a campaign in my eyes. After that, what constitutes as "good"?

I don't play user campaigns. Not very often anyways. There's a lot of reasons why. They could be, technically, "good". But I don't like the obsessions with a-move RPG maps. I don't like minigames. When I walk into a Starcraft campaign I expect an RTS campaign, preferably one large-scale and more challenging than the hardest vanilla campaigns. Nothing really provided that to me, so I stopped playing user campaigns.

I played the Mekani campaign by RCX and I thought those were decent. They're RTS. The final mission has teamplay elements. That's cool. Custom units and audio with varying degrees of quality, but he put an effort into it.

But to extend into the realm of tangibly good in my eyes is a harsh task indeed. It's not something that can be addressed by any single element. I must feel engaged and attached to the characters and events at hand. WoL failed to do this because the characters are one-dimensional, boring, predictable, and overly patriotic. The universe of Starcraft is boring and was destroyed in Brood War. So the story elements of Starcraft now have zero value to me. The voice acting in WoL is bland and unengaging, the dialogue is super cheesy and western, offering zero immersion. But the real thing about WoL is that it's all gimmicks.

The lava in the tosh mission is a gimmick. It serves no real purpose other than to give you extra (irritating) actions to do. It doesn't make the map harder. It makes it more costly in multitasking arbitrarily. Much like the macro mechanics, it's a flawed concept, and makes little to no sense on a physical/logical level. Lava doesn't move that fast. It doesn't dissipate that fast. Etc. etc. It's contrived and pointless.

The biggest thing about an RTS campaign is to avoid gimmicks. You want it to be as hard as possible, but hard in a way that makes it challenging and not overly forced. WoL avoided all of the proper ways to make difficulty and did stupid stuff. Spawning units arbitrarily, not allowing the AI to defend itself, weighting stats and upgrades and spawns against you per difficulty instead of giving the AI micro and such. All gimmicks and poorly designed difficulty.

If an RTS campaign is easy, and I'll immediately be able to tell if it's easy or badly designed, the entire feel is lost. With Apex I aimed for a challenge through the traditional sense, introducing teamplay elements, multiple waypoints, very large armies, and "implied" objectives through asymmetrical terrain and resource/buildspace management. In doing so I am changing the way the vanilla game plays dramatically without adding in arbitrary gimmicks like unrealistically rising lava that just instagibs your workers for the hell of it. Does that make Apex a better experience to play? I'll never know. But, to me, it felt important to rely on RTS mechanics to introduce depth to the gameplay than to rely on arbitrary gimmicks and minigames.

RPG missions, especially in BW, are very tough to pull off. 90% chance you will fail outright to make anything original or meaningful. I loathe "installation" maps. a-moving from location A to location B isn't what I signed up for when I booted a real-time strategy game. When designing RPG maps you should keep them brief, using them as a bridge between RTS maps to give the player a breather between tough missions, and open up the opportunity for dialogue and cinema.

Of course, all opinions, and all stuff I'll elaborate on in the Apex segment of my GEC.

IMO, gameplay in a mission for me is what helps tell a story. All about the hype, the excitement. But also how to balance it. Of, course, as Pesky Mesky will be yelling the doack out of me now, I'm talking about those minigames and RPG-esque elements he's talking about.

I've played all sorts of games like Dawn of War and Darksiders to campaigns like Flame Knives, Vile Eggression and Life of a Marine and seen it all and played them all. Despite the fact there should be some RTS element to an extent in a campaign, as an old magazine article once stated, "Building, a-moving and destroying stuff is cool, but makes the player quite a bit lazy". Of course, I'm talking about micro skills, as anyone can macro, unless he's a total retard. But also, after my insanity experience with Flame Knives, you can't make it THAT hard, even for vetties, you just want to make it challenging. In all levels, from boss fights to minigame levels.

That's what it comes to my mind when I designed levels for Infestation: The Pavel Reports. Of course, sadly, there are those missions where you move from point a to point b, but, apart from those, I've made quite some pleasant micro missions as well. Those in the first chapter, which I was already in an advanced stage, fit quite my liking because they demanded quite a lot of work, but also delivered a rewarding experience through basic concepts and fundamentals.

In the first mission of chapter I, you'd have to simply play tug-of-war with Siege Tanks to make a difference with an trigger-spawning army enemy, with the twist I made an AI which only researched tech and upgraded. Mission 2, despite all the boring exploration stuff, had pursuit runs, a base assault and boss fights more advanced than what I've played with in WoL and DoW2. But of course, that's only me creating, because it was my intention to make a campaign that's micro-focused.

B&D can easily involve micro. In sc2 it's possible to give the AI units micro in particular.

I'm still playing it in a loop and trying to list down as much points as I can get from the review. I have a few listed down, and perhaps will post them up here for reference.

Maybe one of these days you could shed some more light and discuss these issues in detail.

Very interesting.

GnaReffotsirk wrote:I don't get it, Lavvz.

I guess the relevance and idea comes from the line, "...and recorded every line. Four times."

Why four times? what happened?

Haha, I just rerecorded as I learnt I was mispronouncing names or I wanted to show more extreme growth-over-time of the campaign. He started off innocent and careless and grows to be strong and commanding. I had to portray that in his voice. Took a few takes.

IskatuMesk wrote:But the real thing about WoL is that it's all gimmicks.

The lava in the tosh mission is a gimmick. It serves no real purpose other than to give you extra (irritating) actions to do. It doesn't make the map harder. It makes it more costly in multitasking arbitrarily. Much like the macro mechanics, it's a flawed concept, and makes little to no sense on a physical/logical level. Lava doesn't move that fast. It doesn't dissipate that fast. Etc. etc. It's contrived and pointless.

The biggest thing about an RTS campaign is to avoid gimmicks. You want it to be as hard as possible, but hard in a way that makes it challenging and not overly forced. WoL avoided all of the proper ways to make difficulty and did stupid stuff. Spawning units arbitrarily, not allowing the AI to defend itself, weighting stats and upgrades and spawns against you per difficulty instead of giving the AI micro and such. All gimmicks and poorly designed difficulty.

If an RTS campaign is easy, and I'll immediately be able to tell if it's easy or badly designed, the entire feel is lost. With Apex I aimed for a challenge through the traditional sense, introducing teamplay elements, multiple waypoints, very large armies, and "implied" objectives through asymmetrical terrain and resource/buildspace management. In doing so I am changing the way the vanilla game plays dramatically without adding in arbitrary gimmicks like unrealistically rising lava that just instagibs your workers for the hell of it. Does that make Apex a better experience to play? I'll never know. But, to me, it felt important to rely on RTS mechanics to introduce depth to the gameplay than to rely on arbitrary gimmicks and minigames.

As one who actually enjoyed WoL's gimmicks, I'm not sure I understand the difference. Based off your demo it seemed to me that you've added gimmicks to Apex through terrain instead of triggers. First mission you were fighting in a tight space, second mission was an island-ish map. You're creating new gameplay from the mod itself and its new units (like the mass fabricator thingies), not so much the mission design. In the second mission it seemed that the goals were to: 1) manage your space, 2) advance across the map & float buildings over to new islands, 3) work with limited resources. How is this different than the wall of fire where you're floating your buildings to the next base, picking up left-over resources, and working with time (instead of space). I would say the second approach is superior because there's actual lore behind it (well, when it's not an absurd & unrealistic scenario, but that's a writing issue). If the writing behind them is interesting, gimmicks are not "contrived and pointless," they're relevant to the gameplay and therefore accomplish what a campaign is supposed to.

That being said, gimmicks are only ok when they stick to the core RTS gameplay. I don't want to suddenly get into a tower defense game in the middle of a campaign. So my answer to the OP is both AI and gimmicks (which is what makes a scenario interesting). I don't care how dynamic & responsive the AI is, if I wanted a 30 mission campaign of nothing else to offer but fighting a computer player, I would just save myself the time and go ladder instead.

Gradius wrote: Based off your demo it seemed to me that you've added gimmicks to Apex through terrain instead of triggers......

.......That being said, gimmicks are only ok when they stick to the core RTS gameplay. I don't want to suddenly get into a tower defense game in the middle of a campaign. So my answer to the OP is both AI and gimmicks (which is what makes a scenario interesting). I don't care how dynamic & responsive the AI is, if I wanted a 30 mission campaign of nothing else to offer but fighting a computer player, I would just save myself the time and go ladder instead.

I don't think you know exactly the difference between gimmicks and mechanics. IMO the lines between them are generally very blurry and hard to differentiates. A gimmick could be described in the broadest of sense, a game mechanic that is implemented poorly, or as a game mechanic that do not have a place in the intended gameplay concept. Usually, when you talk about gimmicks you talk about the second definition, something that was added just for the sake of being there and serves no other purposes. Meanwhile, a mechanic is something that is heavily implemented, a core set piece of the gameplay, an element that everything else revolves around. Let us take for example, the 1st map Mesk showed us, it is true that the limited build space could be called a terrain gimmick, but if you look closely, you could see that every single other elements, such as the AI, the new units, placement of bases, and even the tactical AI were tuned to the exact specification of the map, the Medusa for example, being a heavily stylized version of the Siege Tank, has it's strength and weaknesses heavily exaggerated to become a major set piece in the map's design, it could deal alot of damage, but since battles took place in such confined spaces, it could also ended up splashing more of your units/buildings than the enemy, and thus the placement of Medusas became important, and the placement of Siege Tanks to support the Medusas is even more....

Then let us go back to WoL, see the lava? It's a gimmick as it serves too little purpose rather then to be a very bad multitasking challenge, the only thing you have to be doing when the lava rises is lifting up all your expos and SCVs and run to high grounds. It does not make the map more interesting, it does not add in more depth or more varied, it actually decreases variety and depth because you're forced to build only some specific gimmick units like Reapers, which also are poorly implemented. The real challenge of the map itself is the practice of maintaining multiple expansion against the Zerg, and trying to do so felt even more contrived because of the second gimmick: mining X number of minerals. That gimmick limits your unit building EVEN MORE and forces you to build EVEN LESS units, further decreasing variety and depth. My friend is miraculously, able to complete the map on Normal by building no more than 2 medics, he simply abuses the living shit out of the 4 Reapers given to you at the beginning and nothing else... This is basically how abusable the map can become, all thanks to it's very flawed design which the developers didn't put much though into.


As you can see, these gimmicks are not only contrived and forced, they're also counter-productive, abusable, and serves little purpose rather than to incite pain to the player. Mesk on the other hand, created these you called "gimmicks" as certain set pieces, or goals, which he then uses to implement other elements, such as lore, map designs, mods, etc. It's not a gimmick, it some carefully design cockworks which he took a long time envisioning. I know this because my campaign runs in somewhat similar principles, it's not as complex, but the general ideas behind it is the same. (technically, I based some of Mesk's GECs and the map designs of several of my my favorite RTTs when I envisioned Black and Sunny.)