Best Campaign!

What's the game with the best/your favourite campaign mode? For the sake of discussion lets toss in sim games with campaigns too, like The Sims Bustin' Out Zeus (and other Impressions city builders), Tropico, etc.

 

I really liked ParaWorld. It's a game from 2006, but I think I aged well.
It's very fun to play in campaign mode (as you can play all factions until the end).

 

Dark Omen wins, flawless victory, fatality.

 

"Deus Ex" - omae wa mou shindeiru.

p.s. lol, in strategy it would be Dune 2: Battle of Arrakis, House Atreides; StarCraft - all factions, Myth 2: Soulblighter - light side

 

Age of Mythology is pretty great, men.

 

:terrorist:

 

First time sacrifice campaign is great. Once you realise the AI is worse than a toddler at chess, it loses its luster, though.

 

Age of Wonders campaigns are pretty dope - You can carry over some units, items, resources and heroes, and chosing who and what to carry is big. Generally you carry heroes.
Then at certain points you can choose a branch, with different scenarios and with six endings (Keepers/Cult of Storms loyalist, and two Archons/Undead endings). The campaign ends pretty epically in a Humans/Archons vs Keepers vs Cult of Storms vs Undead free-for-all.

 

Some RTS that come to mind, even if most of the genre lacks memorable campaigns.

Tiberian Sun was pretty good. Optional missions, some pretty difficult scenarios and timed/optional objectives that would trigger new objectives if failed, objective map expanding. Although the last one was also a flaw in one case because there is at least one mission where it should go to mission failed after it becomes unwinnable (guy you need to brainwash evacs from map if you fail to capture him after botching stealth) but doesn't which in that case was bad design. Not sure if that was ever patched. Compared to Red Alert, WC II or Starcraft (even with BW) the scenarios had far better design. There was stealth, there were hidden paths or scripted events that made things easier, missions played out differently if optional missions before them were completed, lots of missions where you had to do your best with limited forces and reinforcements and of course the ability to choose missions (which sadly got ditched with Firestorm and only returned in C&C3, which apart from continuity issues and cutscene cheese was not that bad). The environmental hazards such as ice braking below units, ion storms, tiberium, tiberium veins and mutants added a lot of flavour to the maps.

Starcraft: Brood War. Vanilla campaign was good, basically not that different from what they did in WC2 but with some extra twists to the formula (in engine custscenes, updating objectives). Having the campaigns all happen one after the other (and all canon) was definitely something new at the time though. To be honest after reading yesterday how many issues with SC they had before release, I can't blame them for doing just good. With Brood War the mission design improved and you could see this was more than just warcraft in space, mission-wise. Quite a few memorable moments in BW both in story and mission aspects.

Warcraft III. Optional objectives, lots of little secrets and some missions variation. While I still regret the direction they took with it after WC2 (gold upkeep thresholds? low unit cap? No oil and ships? At least they ditched their original Role Playing Strategy concept...) it is a very solid campaign.

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. It got stale in the expansions sure, they ran out of ideas for missions after WoL and you could see they put in less effort into them and they became formulaic (how many generic "defend for X minutes" missions does LoV have again? 3?). The upgrade buying mechanic was nice, the slight non-linearity as well, although I guess it was too hard for the masses to do a different mission line if a mission was too hard, so they railroaded it more so that a mission was only available when the blizzard approved unit selection was as well. Plot was epic cinematic space opera derp so whatever, but the missions were a proper challenge on brutal without feeling like bullshit and they had enough variety to make you want to play more (something LoV failed to do once again, although I found it better than HotS due to the campaign meta-mechanics with factions).

Earth 2150 and Warzone 2100, while Warzone did the main base and unit dispatching to battle map mechanic first, Earth utilized the concept better IIRC. You had an overall campaign goal, a campaign time limit and absolute freedom as to what missions you take and how much resources you devote to the goal versus the war effort. This sliding scale of overall goal versus resources for completing missions made it challenging, also it had the added bonus of Earth's climate changing the closer it got to the sun as the time limit was running out. Too bad Earth 2160 was forgettable decline.

Homeworld, persistent fleet and persistent resources, the ability to steal enemy ships and a memorable story about travelling the unknown towards home, with some really nice missions. While looking back at the game it is pretty clear how much more could be done with the campaign persistence concept or that branching would fit very well in it, it is still by far one of the best in the genre.

Tiberian Sun, Warcraft III, SC2 and Homeworld all share one good feature regarding mission design, they did scenarios that went well beyond the scope of "skirmish with a lower tech level and maybe some cinematics/story tacked on" or a "10-20 mission tutorial for multiplayer" with a story tacked on which are the usual approaches (Grey Goo comes to mind, but also vanilla DOW, vanilla COH, C&C: Generals, Supreme Commander and others). If you are making a single-player campaign there is no need to stick to the "competitive-friendly" unit roster for the AI (or for the player), throw challenges/puzzles at the player other than just being severely outnumbered or outgunned, create obnoxiously imbalanced enemy mechanics, make him think beyond cookie-cutter build orders out of online multiplayer or the multiplayer meta-game.

 

I love AoW SM and AoW 3 and on a good day I might even not totally hate AoW 2 TWT but none of them can hold a candle to AoW 1's campaign.

 

Dark Omen and Myth were by far my most memorable RTS campaigns.

As far as turn based goes.. I actually enjoyed Fantasy Wars a lot. Well the story was not much, but damn that was some good turn based combat

 

Dark Omen would be my pick, yeah. Not only for the fact that the game itself is good and the mission intros were cool, with p great characters. But mostly for the fact that it had a lot of branching and choices that resulted in different missions, different units joining and even scenarios changing completely, like for example the Helmgart mission being either a defense or laying a siege depending on whether you decide to stay and help the village in a previous mission.

From the games that were not mentioned yet - Incubation.

 

I remember enjoying the Starcraft ones, Warcraft 3, Age of Mythology, Call of Duty 1 and MoHAA. AoE3 was ok too even.

AoE2 campaigns were cool, but I went back and tried to play some of them a few years ago and the AI was fucked, or maybe I'm just really bad now.

 

Unreal World, escape slave scenario.

My character ran and squeel like a chased virgin, which she should be. And she continue to run and squeel for a month until she gather enough stuffs to not squeel anymore. Only until winter when she hunted all the camps of those rapist bands in the region does she not run anymore.

OKay, okay. Strategy. So.

Warzone 2100! It's awesome. The end.

 

Emperor: Battle for Dune was probably peak C&C style campaign with the risk map. Depending on the missions you chose to do it would affect what minor factions would ally with you and change the troops you got. Also some fun special missions taking down worm monstrosities and infiltrating the enemy house's homeworlds.

 

Emperor's campaign was ok, but in the end it was mostly a series of skirmish maps with the option to ally or piss off a minor faction and not much else. You always got an MCV first and you always had to force the other house to retreat by blowing up their whole base. Sometimes a minor faction attacked you. All of the maps with the exception of the story missions (intro, heighliner, homeworld defence, enemy homeworld invasion, the final mission) were skirmish maps with some special buildings added to the minor faction objective but as far as single-player missions go, they were pretty bland.

Practically the campaign only allowed you to choose from 3 out of the 5, it did everything it could so that even if you picked Tleilaxu they would break the alliance, the Guild was not available in the campaign.

Neither the missions themselves nor the risk-map mechanics felt really fleshed-out. I expected a bit more from Westwood in regards to missions after RA2 and Yuri's Revenge which had very good missions. Maybe not as good as Tiberian Sun or Firestorm.

 

Never played Myth I, but the Myth II campaign was spectacular. Replayed it 2 years ago and it was awesome.

 

Why Dune 2? Iirc it was just map painting with every mission about destroying the opponent's base.

As for me, from the top of my head, HOMM2 and AoW1.

 

"Random Map -> [Largest Size offered] -> [Most AIs supported] -> Generate" is the only strategy game campaign worth playing

 

Now it may sound silly but back then, as a kid, i was a big fan of "Dune" movie and had strong imagination... go figure.

 

I liked Men of War Russian campaign.
Myth 2 and Dark omen are also brilliant.

 

Civil War Generals 2, Homeworld, and Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far are my favorites.

 

Damnit!
I forgot about that!
Close Combat 3 with it's whole eastern front in few dozen maps and changed force organization was a major disappointment after A Bridge Too Far.

 

Outpost 2.
- Two campaigns
- Time-limit
- Cumulative research
- Mission objectives that go beyond "kill enemy base"
- Interesting missions
- Random events and such shaping the game.


I think the Plymouth campaign has a better ending, the Eden ending feels a little anti-climax:

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Having to a) fight a HUGE Eden base b) Get the rocket c) get the children and d) do it all before THE BLIGHT IS APPROACHING

The Eden ending is just like the other usual colony stages, even if the attacks are harsher

 

Damn straight! Well, not the only one worth playing, but the best.

Wait wait wait, there was an Outpost 2? As in, a sequel to one of the most legendarily bad strategy games ever made? And it's actually playable?