Not everything needs to be a mission. I enjoy these tasks, such as retrieving a control chip, but they are impersonal.

I ask you, why have we been playing cortex command for ~20 builds without missions? Because, the best missions are your own.


Let's say you have one unit you have killed at least 15 enemies with, and then he falls into a pit due to a bombing run YOU called in, and you want to get him out. So, retrieving him is you mission at this point. You might call in coalition grunts near him enmasse, or one specialist who will dig him a path. These are the things that make cortex command great. I often find myself narrating the game

Just as will wright said about spore (before everyone realized it sucked), the best missions are the ones you make up yourself, the adventures that relate to you.

I just needed to vent this.

I can relate... recently I've been having fun tooling around with dropships and "rescuing" jetpackless, wounded troops from the cliffs on my Bridge map.

haha I did the same thing on your map but instead I saved a wounded ssquad from a drop ship explosion that buried them under the bridge.

(I bore a hole straight through the bridge and had dropships going down to platforms I made )

I think the fact that things go wrong in this game so often makes it really interesting. You have to learn how to be really good at performing drops, moving around, choosing what to blow up (blowing up an enemy dropship above you might be more damaging than just letting it go: you are probably going to get wiped out by debris) just to survive and operate competently. It's not as hand-holdy as 90% of the games out there; there is real "danger" of sudden death and it's just around the corner, so you are constantly on your toes but still have to think strategically. You have to experiment and find troop loadouts that are the most effective. I find it sort of amusing that in vanilla play, I like to use Coalition troops with Ronin weapons, as they are cheaper, lighter, and usually more effective.

The fact that I don't even bother to medevac any of my wounded units shows that there's an entire "mission" type I am missing out on. If I have an armless, bleeding soldier I usually either try to ram them into the enemy or mercy-kill them with a shot to the head.

Because Data has been focusing on features and not content?

Seriously, this is an unfinished game. The reason for its current state is that its incomplete, not because its meant to be that way. Pull off the nostalgia glasses and try to maintain perspective.

He means why is it still appealing after 20 builds of missionless material.

I don't think the campaign button even appeared until B13.
Maybe earlier, still.
Maybe Data intended this to be a 2-4 player party game
and not a single player game.

I just figured it'd be both, in the finished product. Sounds like the game will have a pretty robust plot behind it, what with all the factions and the weird stuff thats probably buried in "the planet."