Talk:Mission balance

Learning Curve and Examples

Giving the intro section of this article a brief once-over, I had to question the use of the first mission of the FS1 and FS2 campaigns as examples of poorly balanced missions. Certainly, on your umpteenth run through either campaign, these missions will be easy, but criticizing them poorly balanced fails to account for their purpose. Either Eve of Destruction or Surrender, Belisarius is going to be the first mission a player flies in the FreeSpace universe, outside of training. It will be the first time the player faces off with weapons that will kill them in missions not scripted to prevent that possibility. The "average" player, on his first run through Eve of Destruction, having less than thirty minutes of gameplay under his belt, doesn't have the same skill set as someone who has finished FS1 and FS2 and is moving onto user-made campaigns. Stacking the beginning of each of the main campaigns with exceptionally easy missions is an example of building a learning curve, not poor mission balance.

A more appropriate example of a mission made too easy in one of Volition's campaigns would be High Noon. Here, the player has been through the first two acts of the main campaign and developed the necessary skills to succeed in a proper mission, yet is given a task that amounts to hanging near the Colossus' AA defenses and taking a nap.

I'm about to give the whole article a thorough grammar-and-word-choice sweep, so I'll address my own complaints along with that, but I felt it was worth bringing up the distinction between the start of a learning curve and a poorly designed mission. -- BlueFlames 18:43, 27 August 2008 (CDT)