If anything this equals less control because you are forcing players to drop missions.
No? If the player can
choose which mission to take and which to drop, it's control over what they do by default. Unlike doing all the missions, where the only control is over the order in which the missions get done. If that, since many of them aren't active simultaneously.
You're arguing about the
degree of control, at most, and coming from what I see as a highly idiosyncratic view of what control means. Game design is all about constraining what the players can do, in a manner the designer thinks is interesting and/or fun. And all too often these days, even a moderate degree of freedom leads to players being paralysed with indecision.
Players also do not necessarily have to drop anything, depending on how well they manage the strategy part, as evidenced by many if not most people never noticing this issue in the first place after
years of development and 'month 0' mission bloat.
There is no real "choice" here because you have no control over when and what missions spawn...
Mission-gating research exists, so you're wrong even about that.
And not having
total control over which mission types you do in a given month is hardly total
lack of control.
If a player is prevented from attending a newly spawned mission because of a prior mission spawn there isn't a valid choice being made.
Only the first time. Next time, or next game, either the player has prepared for this by upping their transport game, or has
chosen to remain in the previous situation.
And you're almost never in such a position. The only time this line of thinking applies is when all your transports are on return trips back to base. In almost any other situation, barring range/speed issues, you're free to choose to do the new mission instead.
Never mind all the games that pride themselves on '
choices and consequences' by giving you basically conditionally branching mission trees.
What you are referring to here is an illusion of choice that does not actually benefit the player because you can't retroactively pick out missions you want to attend or not.
If you're so concerned about picking the exact lineup of missions, enable savescumming, save at the start of the month, check out all the missions and reload. Because beyond that, I don't think many games even allow such a degree of freedom. The original certainly didn't. It's always been about limited information and living with the consequences of your choices made within the fog of war.
You were never given control over where and when UFOs spawn on the Geoscape. Even nuCom's 'choose one of three terror sites' thing, which is much closer to what you're criticising here, had choice and control. It was
artificial choice, but by no means an illusion of one.
Illusion of choice means the
outcome doesn't depend on the choice, not that the choice is constrained in some way.
The thing is that the missions don't actually reflect this because they behave like regular newly spawned missions, not ongoing stuff you are catching on to. It simply isn't consistent with with subsequent months.
Yes, and your first day on the job isn't consistent with the rest of your career.
Quelle surprise.
Solarius already said that he views
all missions (or at least all missions of the general sort) as 'ongoing stuff you are catching on to'. We don't have total penetration of cults/backwater villages, we don't become aware of things as they happen. There are conceivably hundreds of these things on the globe every month, and the ones we see are the ones we've found out about. We get a boost to the 'finding out' part in the beginning, that's it.
This is by no means game breaking or anything, but it does stand out for me (and apparently others as well).
Sure, it's only been what, several years, until
one person actually pointed this out? You admitted yourself that your own problem with mission overload wasn't really 'month 0', but rather ghost missions and general mission overload. Which are valid criticisms, the latter having been made plenty of times before, and my impression is that Solarius has made a conscious design choice about this being so. So it's either live with it, or make a submod. Maybe publish it if you want to convince others that this is the better way.
For the record, I haven't played the ghost stuff, but I've watched some others and I also don't really like this arc, nor its prominence with high-probability mission spawns compared to regular 8*3% stuff.
