Minimal viable single player campaign suggestion

Hi there,

the following could maybe calm down the campaign advocates without costing too much time.

I suggest a reward-based single player mode like in the primarily-multiplayer racing game trackmania.

In this mode, players would get bronze, silver or gold medals for certain achievements in simple preconfigured matches against AI. Like winning in a certain amount of time, under a certain amount of lost units or some other metric.

For context: Trackmania just awards the medals according to the time the player needed to finish the course and to get the gold medal, you usually have to drive the course several times to beat the target time.

New "preconfigured matches"/episodes/scenarios will be unlocked by getting a certain number of medals.

This should be very much less work than a real story based campaign while drastically improving single player motivation (that's only my impression of my own idea, of course).

Yeah I like this. It's more of like a challenge mode. I like challenges

I'm all for challenge modes. The somewhat function as tutorials, and can hint a little bit at story. And they're fun

i don't know... just any type of campaine i think would take away from them game if you think about it every match is part of the campaign there are commanders that fight and have forgoten the perpose... and in every match you fight.... also storylines for rts at least resent ones i find to be a big let down supcom 2 for example xD. i'm not saying that uber would't do a good job of it but i'd prefer to get better gameplay then a short story.... also i do belive i saw that one of the strech goals is a campaign but anyway ya thats my 2 cents...

I can get behind a "Challenge mode" if it's significantly cheaper to do than a single player campaign.

As far as I have read, it was going to be one but because of all the requests its not going to be on any longer.

Well depending on how good the modding support is people will probably make their own single player campaigns. No guarantee on quality though.

I'd like to have a giant official repository for people to submit their mods (including single player content) to so that the community could judge them and highlight the good stuff.

IMO something so transparently 'gamey' doesn't quite 'feel' like a campaign. I still think a 4x-like galactic map that connects skirmishes is the best choice.

What the op is talking about isn't a campaign, really. It's a challenge mode. Like in Starcraft 2 there's challenges, or in Racing game there's timed races on certain maps. It's not a "here's a story you get to play through," it's a "can you do this with this in this amount of time?"

i do like the idea of a galactic conquest game type where you could play vs players or ai over say 8-12 systems of planets and the goal is to gain control over all of them sort of like star wars battlefront did that would be a great turny/campaign/game type in my opinion if anyone agrees please say so

also only thing i can think of with it is if old effects on the map like destroying a planet should remain... perhaps if you destroy a planet or two then the bounus of having that planet is weakened or revoked.... also if you could have more then 2 players play this it would be awesome...

100% agreed. With coop, too. IMO that's the 'minimum viable campaign'. Like Zoughtbaj said the OP actually describes a challenge mode. Not that it wouldn't be nice to have both.

"challenge mode" might be a better name. I was just looking for something that makes the people happy who don't want to play against others.

Co-op multiplayer might be a solution too. Just don't waste developer resources on things like story and dialogue.

Very productive discussion here, thanks for that!

Looking forward to metal planets.

Yeah let us modders waste time on it!

Granted you'll get 100 crappy stories about space ponies or something for every 1 actually good single player mod. That's pretty much the trend I've seen in every game with a lot of mods. Tons of awful with a handful of really amazing creations. I'd rather have that that one, and only one, mediocre single player campaign.

Single player campaign would be great. The community would definitely support it. It'd be easy to implement some sort of campaign. I'd increase my investment if it was there.

How about creating a forum for storylines with a redit upvote style? That'd be a great way to get content for campaigns. I would love to contribute and hear everybody's ideas. The voting would help weed out all of the lame stories. Contributors to the forum could stitch together multiple ideas to create something greater than what they could do on their own. Highly rated posts would identify the most interesting story lines.

The best part is that the impact on developers would be minimal. All they'd need to do is leave hooks for these campaigns. All you'd need is a way to map out planets for each campaign, spawn points for enemy units, and rich-content hooks for campaign setup, failure, goal achievement, and completion. The rich-content hooks would be for textual screens with story line points and/or video files.

For example, the campaign starts by calling the first rich-content file. "Sensors have detected an evil alien horde in the outer rim of the galaxy. Destroy them before they destroy you!" The game starts and sure enough, your scouts finally find aliens in the exoplanets. The goal alien detection is hit and then the rich-content loads up "Our sensors suck, there's not an alien horde - there's an alien armada! Ahhhhh!!" The battle then starts in earnest and crushing defeat or ultimate victory is rewarded with commiserate rich content: "You suck." or "Yabba dabba doo mother trucker."

I'd upgrade my investment if a storyline was one of the stretchgoals with co-op play. I have a son and we love playing together. Portal really sparked this interest, and nothing says father son bonding more than shared Planetary Destruction. It would be awesome to team up and march through the galaxy while battling the forces of evil. The whole effect would be like Ender's Game in that regard - hopefully sans Lord of the Flies affect.

For whatever it's worth, my hope is that the development team would only put in enough support in the modding API to implement campaigns and focus the rest of their effort on gameplay mechanics.

PA is only going to have whatever core engine features the devs have time to create until the funding runs out. On the other hand, the community has unlimited time to implement campaigns after PA is released.

I don't know about the precise implementation as outlined in the OP, however I would very much like to see the addition of persistent stats, achievements, and possibly even rank/levels (with corresponding abilities, etc., unlocked), ESPECIALLY if there isn't going to be a story-driven single-player/co-op mode, as I will then need something else to keep drawing me back to the game and give me a sense of progress and immersion.

Even better would be if that were all somehow also linked in to a fully-fledged story mode.

The game is going to feature Galactic War which is going to be the campaign(replacement) Not much has been disclosed about GW, but so far, from what I've heard, I think it will play a series of skirmish matches linked together by a large star map, in which you will be able to choose in what order you conquer the galaxy. I hope there are also some extra meta-game elements for GW.