[SP] Beheading of State - polished scripted story & open-world mission

[lstor 17]

Overview:

My first real mission has just come out of beta testing by a few friends, and is now available on the Steam workshop! I have put down a lot of effort into making it a high-quality mission, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out. The mission is designed to give the player a wide range of challenges, and careful consideration has gone into the setting and progression through the mission. The mission is also designed with replayability in mind, and there are several different ways to accomplish your objectives. Please let me know what you think!

In this mission, you will assassinate the Tanoan governor and get away with it! You play as an operative of the Mireles cartel, tasked with taking out the popular and bothersome governor of Tanoa all by himself. This will not be easy, however, as the governor has a highly trained police escort. Getting away with murder on a small island crawling with police will not be easy either...
 
Prepare. Kill. Escape. 

New! - The police will now employ a sophisticated response to your actions. The AI units will call in additional patrols to areas they believe you to be, based on when and where you were last spotted, and fluidly update these positions whenever their information is updated with new sightings. The dynamic response includes deploying responder units by car or helicopter from various police stations to an area near you, and also emulates radio communication between officers. 
 
Features:

- A mission combining the best aspects of Arma 3: Carefully scripted story and open gameplay over a large area. 
- A unique setting, playing as the Mireles cartel. 
- Dynamic police response with roadblocks and searches. The police reaction will increase over time.
- Guerilla tactics to evade and overcome a stronger enemy. 
- Randomizing key elements of the mission to ensure replay value.
- Several viable approaches to completing the mission.

 
Other information: 

- Required mods: None. 
- Playtime: 0.5 - 2 hours

Changelog on Steam


Play / Download:

Steam Workshop

Edited July 19, 2016 by lstor

[gaZthme 18]

Cool mission, higly replayable! Thanks.

[Anzu 12]

Sounds like a fun mission! I'm going to check this one out :)  Thanks for sharing!

[lstor 17]

Thanks! Let me know if there's anything that's not working, or anything that is particularly cool :)

I've just updated to version 1.1.0. This latest version comes with a few small tweaks and fixes, and adds briefing notes for getting the most out of replays. But most importantly:

Dynamic police searches! A fairly sophisticated script creates police patrols to search for the player based on his last known location and the time elapsed since he was spotted. The script takes spotting time into account and emulates radio communications account to create an authentic police response. Road vehicles or helicopters are then dispatched from nearby* police station to drop off responders near the player's last known location. The patrols will also coordinate between themselves to fluidly move their search patterns if the player reemerges, and will cycle patrols if some patrols are too far away. The patrol intensity increases over time.

* not that near, this is a fairly unsettled tropical island after all :)

[spotter001 82]

this looks promising, gonna download now.

[cosmic10r 2331]

Looks great will try in the next day or so..

Thanks

[neofit 65]

Nice job, I had fun.

 

Rather short and I'm not sure about replayability though. I never felt threatened by the Police. Once you figure out that there is nothing like Rydigier's "Incognito" script running (I think Antistasi has one too), and that it's the usual Arma all-seeing AI you are against (or, if we roleplay around the issue, they are evil and shooting everyone, friends and family alike), you start to treat it like another Arma war scenario, kill all uniforms, loot, repeat.

 

With an incognito script imho the scenario could become more fun, it will add more options to solve the escape problem. The AI doesn't shoot you on sight if you don't openly carry any weapons. The patrols are not 2 guys but 4+. You may want to hide your weapons and stop at a roadblock and risk passing through peacefully, unless they want to check the car trunk, then possibly a car chase, etc. Shooting your way through a roadblock, if it lasts more than say 10 seconds, or if you leave someone alive, of if they don't respond for 15 mins or more, will probably send a helicopter as support. Remember cop movies and series, as soon as there are shots one of them radioes "shots fired, shots fired".

 

BTW, it's not exactly "open world" if it all happens along 5 km of coastal road + a trip south by boat or chopper ;). As in, why would anyone go anywhere else?

 

A small idea:

That high bridge that we pass below on our way to the safehouse island, it may be nice to have some a couple of patrols there to try and shoot us up from above.

[lstor 17]

Thank you, that is very helpful. I'll give more detailed replies below.

 

Nice job, I had fun.

Glad to hear!

 

Rather short and I'm not sure about replayability though. I never felt threatened by the Police. Once you figure out that there is nothing like Rydigier's "Incognito" script running (I think Antistasi has one too), and that it's the usual Arma all-seeing AI you are against (or, if we roleplay around the issue, they are evil and shooting everyone, friends and family alike), you start to treat it like another Arma war scenario, kill all uniforms, loot, repeat.

Which version did you play on? 1.0.0 or 1.1.0? In 1.1.0 the police responds more dynamically if you're spotted, making them a much bigger threat. Balancing may not be perfect, though, and I may have to up the difficulty a bit.

The shooting thing was actually more or less what I was going for, but with a different setting than the ubiquitous 'special forces go destroy something' scenario. Regarding replayability, I don't mean that there are infinite options (like in patrol ops kind of missions), but that there are several different approaches and places to see before you've 'exhausted' the mission.

 

With an incognito script imho the scenario could become more fun, it will add more options to solve the escape problem. The AI doesn't shoot you on sight if you don't openly carry any weapons. The patrols are not 2 guys but 4+. You may want to hide your weapons and stop at a roadblock and risk passing through peacefully, unless they want to check the car trunk, then possibly a car chase, etc. Shooting your way through a roadblock, if it lasts more than say 10 seconds, or if you leave someone alive, of if they don't respond for 15 mins or more, will probably send a helicopter as support. Remember cop movies and series, as soon as there are shots one of them radioes "shots fired, shots fired".

That's definitely interesting, and I considered trying to implement something like it. Since this is my first mission I decided to keep it simple and keep complexity down.

The problem would be avoiding that you can just run away. I'm not sure how I would script the AI into trying to 'arrest' you rather than just shoot on sight. Besides, if you're colored and in America the shoot-on-sight is more realistic anyway :-) I also don't see car chases happening with the Arma AI in any interesting way.

 

A small idea:

That high bridge that we pass below on our way to the safehouse island, it may be nice to have some a couple of patrols there to try and shoot us up from above.

Good idea, I'll look into adding that. I actually considered cutting the boats altogether, as it's very hard to make the boat ride interesting. Ultimately I decided to leave them in to avoid forcing the player through the airport battle. Firefights with hand weapons from boats can only really be done from the big, armed boats which would kind of break immersion, and I don't really want to have the player shot at if he's unable to shoot back. Police placed on the bridge could be an exception, though.

[neofit 65]

re car chases: I went a bit overboard with that, I didn't mean proper movie car chases. Most AIs wouldn't go past a wall by a turn in the road, and honestly I'm not a much better mouse+keyboard high speed driver either. Yet, say you are stopped and being checked. A dice roll decided you were suspicious. In vanilla Arma3 they open fire on you within 0.1 sec with 100% accuracy. You may want them to first say "please step out of the car" to give the player a few seconds to floor it and run. Then they may jump into their car and follow you, like AI usually does, by driving you off the road.

 

Besides that, with an Incognito mod, I can't see how one can avoid the usual Arma military playthrough. I got killed a couple of times at the beginning while making sure that they were in a kill-on-sight mode, after that I supersoldiered my way through all the roadblocks :).

 

re: boats, maybe some patrol could spawn on the shore of various islands to take some shots at a player who'd come too close?

[lstor 17]

Definitely good suggestions here, I'll see what I can do :)

Since I'm primarily making this mission to get 'warmed up' with A3 editing before starting a campaign idea I have, I'll probably try to write an incognito script myself instead of borrowing from others. Shouldn't be too hard, I think. Being searched by police with possibly some dialogue does indeed seem like a cool idea. I'm thinking something along being asked questions with multiple possible answers, where some have a higher probability of getting you in trouble than others.