>Since the game is close to release I think it's too late to change things in a major way but it's still valuable to know what was done well and what wasn't. … Two missions into the game and the game is already as relentless and unforgiving as the late Brood War campaign.
Well, I was running a much different campaign at Next Fest. The first three missions, you could basically not lose, except out of explicit stupidity. But player retention from 1st to 2nd mission was so abysmal, I wanted to try something new now. I can’t really judge if it has been a success (DD player numbers and sentiment being much different), but I guess toning down the difficulty is in order.
>Here it's about replaying the mission enough times to learn and get around the ways in which it steamrolls you, which reminds me more of a challenge run than it does of any RTS campaign I've ever played.
The interesting thing is, I was replaying Sc1 campaign a few years ago, and while I did play a lot of multiplayer back in the day, I actually failed a few of those missions – not even the hard ones – on my first attempts. Because they are in themselves like puzzles; they are not like the Sc2 campaign where basically every mission is a multiplayer match of varying difficulty.
So this puzzle-like quality has kinda been my goal (idk if there is an audience for it, but whatever). Only gotta see if I can make it more approachable, maybe instead of making sure there are 2-3 good strategies, make sure there are 2-3 bad ones and the rest are good.
>The two weakest aspects of the game are the sound effects and presentation.
Yep, the sound effects are incredibly weak, which interestingly most people don’t seem to notice. It’s just grabs from different sound packs, and yeah, unit confirmation sounds and death sounds would go a long way to improve the experience, but those are even harder to find and match.
At least for the presentation I should be able to get some good improvements in, I’ve barely been paying attention to that part so far.
Thanks a lot for your honest feedback, it’s very motivating.