"designated mission area"

[Ex-RoNiN 0]

Ok, when I played the original campaign on 1.0, I never saw this cropping up. Now, on 1.3 it showed up a few times, mostly on Red Hammer, in the original campaign only once though.

WHY has this been included in commando missions?? I can understand that this would make sense for a normal grunt or something, but commando missions??? Commando's are supposed to do their job using whatever means necessary. That includes walking around a lot!

And why does this "leaving designated mission area" thing make me lose my savegame (both auto and manual one)

This should be removed from future missions. OFP is so great because you can walk around for miles and miles. This mission area thingy is destroying that greatness

[WKK Gimbal 0]

Well, it's always been there. If you study the 1985 missions, you will see triggers labelled "Enemy territory fire" which will simply kill the player if he walks into them.

I see 3 very good reasons for this.

1: Have atleast a minimum of control over where the player can pop up and engage a target. Leaving the entire island open will give too many variables, and larger chance of mission design bugs.

2: It's only realistic that going too deep behind enemy lines is suicide. As a soldier on the ground, you gotta respect the limits of your abilities. No one-man army penetrates and attacks the heart of enemy territory. Also choppers that enters enemy AAA zones are doomed to die. That's realism for ya.

3: Framerate. If the entire island had to be filled with soldiers and tanks, the game would give you 1 frame per second. If you had access to all of the island, ALL bases and troops should also be there, right?

[dayglow 2]

That's why God made multi ghz cpus and Geforce 4's

Could you imagine a dynamic battle field where your mission was one of many small actions going on in the game. And if you made it to the rear area resupplies moving, etc. Kind of like the Falcon 4 campaigne, but on the ground.

COLINMAN

[IceFire 0]

Yeah, but you shouln't be killed "automatically" when going far.

If it is so dangerous anyways, then a soldier should kill you.

If you can kill all the soldiers before they kill you, then you are lucky or just really good. So what?

The engine is based kinda on real life, so if you can't in real life, then you won't be able to in here. This automatic dying thing is ridiquilous.

It has never happened to me, except for maybe just this one time. I don't know. It was in the SP mission "clear sweep1" where you are the black ops clearing the town.

Well, after we were done, the chopper came for us. I was just wanting to have some fun, so I killed the other guys and the pilot and gunner. Flew the think all over the island, finally landed somewhere way north.

I got out and started running around, and I suddenly died. But from what it looked like, I was killed by the rear fan blades.

[WKK Gimbal 0]

When I design missions myself, I also use other constraints. If the player character is not directly a pilot, I will make sure that there is no chance in hell he will ever be able to get in a chopper's pilot seat. It's totally unrealistic that a black op could fly a Hind and start levelling the entire island. He wouldn't even have the training to turn on the engines, let alone fly the damn thing!

Sure it can be fun to steal a T80 and go berserk sometimes, but I also think it kicks the realism level down to 0.0001%

[Ex-RoNiN 0]

I'm just pissed off that I have to restart "Rage" all over again Took me ages to get into the Mi-17....then I chase a UAZ, fly out of the mission area, and boom, the save game gone

[Konyak-2 0]

I remember before the game came out, way before even the demo came out, a lucky reporter got to try it out at a Codemasters news conference, and the article left the community salivating..  I'm sure many of you remember it.  He talked about getting a simple mission to try out.  It was a navigation mission.  He got a map, a jeep, and a compass.  No GPS thing active for him.  He was only to drive from point A, to point B, using the map, the signposts along the road, and generally IRL stuff.  He quickly got lost, and trying to sort out his situation, he heard the distinct sound of a tank firing over a nearby hill.  He get´s in his jeep, drives off towards the sound, and coming over the hill, he see´s a line of friendly tanks, with their guns trained at a distant target and infantry running around looking for cover.  One of the tanks is on fire, and he gets out of his jeep and joins the infantry.  He finds himself deep in battle and it dawns on him that this wasn't part of his mission.. None of this was supposed to be going on!  This realization of his (and very clever little setup by BIS for this reporter), told me that this game was the one I will play for a long long time.  

Now that we have the game, it hasn't really let us down, but it depends on the mission maker if he allows this to happen.  BIS cannot, of course, make the whole island active, or a large part of it, because many of the buyers will be using low end machines.  But I doubt any of us really want to walk into a automatic kill zone.  This game is about freedom, and I'd want to see many many more missions that give you a real sense of freedom, and a sense that there is more going on than what your mission is about.  If they interact, great, but they don't have to.  But making it too linear is against this game´s nature.

I suppose the real art is to make it controlled to a point, but to do it in a way that the player feels like he did all the things he wanted to be able to do.  A fine line.

Konyak