The BEST mapmaking question?! OPEN WORLD mission design

Syntax for wac is pretty basic: if.. then.. endif

This begs for the question: BUT WHAT IF…??

WHAT IF… players don’t do what I want them to do but do what THEY want to do?

Players really don’t care much about what you want or what you intended! You are God of your world but you should NEVER rob players of their FREE WILL! You’re a terrible God if you declare war on free will!

It’s like going to the grocery store and the shortest route is the mission zone but you don’t even know that! So… you decide to take a different route then God gets totally pissed off and decides to kill you without warning.

Killing the player because your mission design sucks is the most unsophisticated approach to game design ever! It’s not a player fail but a design fail and the biggest one at that!

As a mapmaker you can design your mission in such a way that there either is no path of least resistance or the path of least resistance is how you force players to stick to the plan! This does not require killing the player with commands, just send in some AI to hunt the player down!

The easiest solution is to work with targets in buildings and compounds and keep the doors locked until they completed the preceding objectives, once completed assign a key or entry code and you’re done! It’s very easy and much more fun! So what, if a player does not want to move to objectives and decides to wander around aimlessly? No problemo! If that’s how people want to spend their time on a game, cool. For all I care they can just walk around exploring vegetation for two months and make detailed studies of cloud movement. No reason to kill them!!!