Holy crap, if you don't like a single player campaign, just don't play it. There are loads of us who want a single player campaign, don't come and tell us what we want and do not want, it's not a voting contest.

The guy is just wanting to make sure the developers will be doing a campaign at some point. He obviously didn't know that there will be, as an expansion, which for that matter will not be free.

Yes, once they add scripting to the game, we can expect some campaign mods. Until then we're all out of luck. The sandbox mode, in my opinion, is only half or not even that much of what I consider fun in a game.

You should respect that, just as much as we respect that you don't want a campaign.

Just to clarify and make sure things don't get misinterpreted:

Ironclad has not specifically said "We're going to make a campaign in an expansion". Blair has posted several times saying that they do want to tell the rest of the story (and promised he would even if he had to type it up from his mother's basement if Ironclad closes down and he gets a job at a burger joint :P), but for the sake of absolute truthiness, they have not said with 100% certainty that a campaign will be in an expansion.

Expansion campaign is of course the more likely and predictable outcome, but we'll have to wait and see

Holy crap, if you don't like a single player campaign, just don't play it. There are loads of us who want a single player campaign, don't come and tell us what we want and do not want, it's not a voting contest.

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Irony!

i need more story , that is all.....

Not everyone like to play online. And skirmish against comp gets boring. Thats why you need a campain.

Maybe I'm not the typical RTS player but I play (and have played) the campaigns of "classics" quite often. Honnestly, I must have finished each of Starcraft's campaigns a dozen times at least, same thing for warcraft 3 and frozen throne, or the C&C series, etc.

I usually don't really play multiplayer games until I've mastered singleplayer mode against the hardest settings. Hell, I don't even find multiplayer that much exciting (maybe I just lack that "competition spirit")...

However, you're giving a good exemple with UFO/X-COM of the kind of "campaign" I'd like to see in Sins.

Alpha Centauri doesn't have campaign, it's sandbox. Just as Civilization (excluding the scenarios, which we will be able to design with the Forge tools for Sins) didn't have a campaign. Games of this scale simply don't work properly within the confines of a tight storyline.


As for 'not a vote', if this is a petition, we are allowed to speak up on our opinion the same way the pirate issue was (and still is) being discussed. Instead of flaming, bring out your arguments!

If you want more story, I'd rather have an elaborate booklet with background and additional lore, the same way Warhammer armybooks were always done. (The good, old ones, with 100+ pages instead of the 21st century leaflets )

I've never played a campaign on any game I've ever owned including GalCiv2. I don't care for them at all. Just give me a great sandbox single player mode and that's all I need. I was worried for Sins being a multiplayer game but it has a deep and rich single player sandbox and I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to play GalCiv2 again.

Just like to throw in a 'Campaigns would be awesome' and say it's good to hear there are plans for them. Even the most sandboxy game can't be hurt by having a campaign and fleshing out the races and their backstories would make playing them much more fun (right now it's basically play the race who you play best as, with a campaign in place it might be play the race you like most, even if they're not ultra powerful).

And to counter the storm of Sandbox not needing a campaign stories I refer you to Sim City's scenarios, Civilization's Scenarios and Empire at War's (yes that game does count as sandbox) decent campaigns, not to mention Galactic Civilizations (I enjoyed those campaigns quite a bit actually, working on finishing the last of the Dark Avator ones).

I would prefer that they focus on the game itself right now. It's a question of development time tradeoff.

HOWEVER, *later down the road*, I would very much like for them to develop a scripting engine so modders can play around with creating more "alive" scenarios (and campaigns). The only way I see them justifying that much development effort is if they use the scripting engine themselves, which means making a campaign.

So I want them to do a campaign expansion (and expose the scripting commands to the modders, please!), but I'm quite happy to wait until next year.

A campaign would make this game better for me. It would give me objectives to achieve, and would provide a pay-off for achieving the objectives by way of narrative, cut scenes, etcetera.

I've not even looked at the campaigns in galciv. Sandbox allow to play in a lot of different styles: not go there and take this place or build 2X or 8Z boring! Viva sandbox!

If the ironclad team members have not made any campaigns they surely found it uninteresting so why change their mind now!

I want more factions, more research, more ships, more maps, improvements...

Keith,

+1 to you.

I agree, they are a new company, just releasing their first game, they need to fix as many problems as they can (as the game does have a few issues that need to be ironed out), as well as supporting modders and multiplayer.

Can't people just wait?

Who said we want campaigns right now ?

I think most of us understand that the Devs need to focus on correcting whatever bugs and gameplay imbalances there are in the game as it is right now.

We'd just like someone to confirm that they're going to do it "sometime in the not too far future".

Doesn't anyone remember the joy that was Homeworld's single player campaign? It was beautiful - it gave the game so much depth to actually play as the Hiigarans and experience their struggle. Homeworld on its own would have been so stale - just ships in space, with resources. Playing that campaign (even only once) was well worth it. It was like reading a good novel - you read the novel once, but the characters and their experiences stick with you. It even coloured the skirmishes for me - seeing the ion cannon frigates reminded me of trading with the Bentuusi to acquire the technology in the first place.

In short, just because you only play the campaign once doesn't mean it's of no or limited value. It gives a richness and depth to the game world that carries over to all the rest of your play sessions, well after the campaign itself is over.

I COMPLETELY agree. It's nice playing in random maps and opponents, but I would have loved the following:

1. Add minor races to trade or ally with
2. Add campaign with goals/objectives and a story line

A campaign will make more people interested in the game.

If its already planned for then Im happy!

If not, then it should be!

We can go into great detail why an interactive story is important:

a) more people will buy the game to play through the story
a story makes people more interested in the game!
c) People care more about games that they feel connected to.

right now the game is pretty much skirmishes only against an AI opponent. storyline is similar, but, expanding on the detailed backdrop of the solar empire wouild be nice.

I certainly understand each viewpoint, the desire for an interactive story as well as the open sandbox. For me though, a campaign is something totally different than just an interactive story. It's an interactive tutorial, exposing various gameplay elements over time, assisting with the learning of how the game works, how the battles should flow, where you should concentrate your efforts. Currently the available tuturials don't flow, they take an individual aspect of the game, and tell you about it, but not how it fits into the overall game. Playing a campaign, gives new players to the game a sense of what to expect, and how to counter certain things so that when they start playing skirmishes or sandbox mode, they're not completely lost as to how to proceed. Jumping straight in, with only the manual and some basic gameplay knowledge isn't enough for some to come to grips with the complete game. I know there are others that absorb this kind of stuff by jumping right in, but not everybody. I need more methodical guidance when learning to play something completely new. ala campaign...

Thanks for all the replies! Keep em coming!

There are just 3 races which makes knowing things about them that much more interesting.
In GalCiv2 there were almost a dozen races and it had a single player campaign, great but I didn't gave a rat's ass about them because the races were all alike (in one way or another). With this game they have created a much more (for lack of a better term) "realistic" setting (just 3 races with differences) which can lead to a great and interesting story.
Most Fps games have a story too. Like the recent hit COD4, but I did not care about it because it wasn't told like it should be told and that's what happens allot. You have a game but the story sucks so people say it useless to have a story, what about halo (which has one heck of a background story) or Bioshock, it's these games that prove that a story can add to the game if told properly. Yes there will always be people who never like a story but most of them never really paid attention to it in the first place, this however does not mean stories are obsolete it just means people should put more time into creating them and into understanding them.

A single player campaign would be terrific, but they're hard to develop for 4X games.

Okay, I'm a little late to the party here, but let me through in my two credits:

Initially, I was all for a campaign, and do kinda miss the fact that it's not there. But as i also mentioned in a post yesterday, no matter how much I find it lacking in this game, the fact remains that I never played through the GalCiv ones. I also barely touch the Civ ones. C&C and AoE, I play through once and that's it for the most part. The more I think about it, the less I think that would buy an expansion if it was only a campaign add-on. New races and techs? sure.

As someone stated above, I think that the Alpha Centauri plan is bang on! I would love to see something like that implemented, and would certainly pay for it. It was great how you could play through a sand-box game, but bits of the story would pop up as you discover things. Done with current tech and video cut scenes, that would be very impressive, indeed.

Of course...I've long been saying that Sid needs to get on the stick and just release Alpha Centauri 2 already...

I'm with Wizaerd. I'm a fan of these games, but I don't pick new ones up too easily. A campaign really allows one to get the game fed to them in pieces, and gives the player time to understand each piece.

I went through the tutorials, and while they're ok, they don't have enough cohesion. So when I started my first sandbox game, I really felt out of sorts. A first mission of the campaign could be a really tiny map, with only a few ships and tactical items at my disposal to build. Then I could get used to those things, go on to the next mission, and that would throw a few more items and upgrades for me to work with. Eventually you'd work up to having to use research and the Black Market.

The more I think about it, the more I realize how much more I'd like this game off the bat if it worked in this way. And this is BECAUSE I'm not a hardcore strategy gamer. But I am a gamer, and all the aspects of the game interest me, so what harm does it do to spoonfeed me a bit in this way?

Actually GalCiv2's campaign could've benefited from this as well. I believe it did do it to some degree (if I recall, not all options on the tech tree are available in the early missions), but locking out more things early on would make it even easier.

At its heart, this game is still RTS, and RTS games truly benefit from this sort of model. It simply isn't enough like Civilization or Master of Orion to work in a pure sandbox-y sort of mode.

-HM

i say campaign should be very very low on the list..i say add some more units techs abillitys balance tweaks etc. further perfect the game first now dont get me wrong im a huge rpg. simulation. strategy. fan for pc games but honestly even though i love a emmerseive story this game wasnt made for a campaign you make your own story ever head of rp games or rping you can make your own story in this and play it out its alot of fun. now i do agree great games tend to have big story lines but honestly i think the best games of all time were open ended rpgs and strategy games that had numerous quests and you set your own goals in instead of having to follow a campaign.

so in short my view is campaign is a maybe only if they have nothing else to work on for awhile and should be easily pushed down the list if bugs and/or errors problems glitchs or multiplayer exploits occur.

That post made my punctuation hurt.