My thoughts on the war correspondant mission

[Starkwolf]

So, just attempted the war correspondent mission (I reloaded a save because despite buying more food and moving the extra to the galley twice, the crew still ran hungry which is another topic, but suffice to say buying food in this game is frustrating and confusing when you don't know what you are doing, and tedious when you do know what you are doing).

It really came across as Uboat's "edutainment" mission, which usually is a bad thing. However, I felt it was a good thing here. It is only one mission out of many that feels like you are being tested, and it fit in very naturally. Basically I did feel it was the good, "Oregon Trail" type of edutainment as opposed to the cringey "Typershark" type of edutainment, where what you are doing doesn't take you out of the immersion and it makes sense for the situation. I think it was a pretty good way to slip in more direct teaching to complement the tangential learning that games like these already provide.

As far as what I personally did for the first attempt, when asked about the food I knew the right answer, but in the roleplaying spirit I just directly lied and said it was stored by the officer's quarters. After all, we are proper German sailors, clean and respectable are we not? His publication should only be reporting party propaganda the truth, not some dirty allied lies. I actually didn't get that giving the right answer would further progress, it was once I answered the next answer truthfully and I got the notification about progress made that I realized that the whole bit about confusing him basically meant a failure to make progress on that mission. I answered the remaining questions accurately from that point out.

I did think it was funny that my captain was dead tired, and I kept getting that quest marker to talk to him. I could just imagine the captain being like "Yes, this is how our submarine dives. Now please just go to bed and save your questions until morning please?" But though I highly doubt it was intended, it did give the war correspondent more personality, something that I think could be improved with better writing of his lines, I feel as a character he was a bit bland as designed. This was La Spezia, so if he was made into an Italian war correspondent that could be interesting...

I wasn't sure if you were given just enough questions that if you get them all right you complete the mission, or if the questions are triggered by various actions you take with your sub (for example, he asked about diving the first time I took the sub underwater, not sure if this is coincidence or programmed to trigger on this event). However, it would be really cool if each of his questions were set to be asked based on triggers of the player doing things, and the question matches what you did, i.e. if you dive he asks one of many questions about diving, if someone cooks he asks about the food storage, if you fire a torpedo he asks something about torpedoes etc. Would be much more interesting than a timer, which is the other thing I suspected. If this mission remains timer-based, it would be nice if you have room for at least 1 wrong answer, at least if it is your first time doing the mission.

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Hey, thank you for your feedback :)