quote:Original post by Wavinator
Okay, having played these games, I have to ask: Why is there so little gameplay that the only thing you have to look forward to is a cool ship in order to fight? Why can’t you fight right out of the gate? Why isn’t there a need for shuttles with cheap guns to fight skirmishes among miners, squabbling homesteaders and up and coming gangs?

Judging from two short psychology lectures, I''d say this is due to a natural human need to feel improvement. Most players just won''t be satisfied by flying a cheap one-laser shuttle killing cheap stuff for weeks on end. Granted, there are people who actually want to do this, but I guess the majority doesn''t. This way, you can avoid a lot of actual gameplay by giving the plaer rewards like bigger ships, better weapons and more explosions.

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And why isn’t trade interesting enough to nearly stand on its own? Why can’t there be treasure hunting? Waypoint based ship racing? Rewards for scanning dangerous areas in the midst of tumultous anomalies?

The thing I hate is that we get this choice between a super-scripted, non-replayable game like Tachyon, where you can’t even leave the base without missions holding your hand, or huge empty worlds without meaning because there’s no story placing you at the center of the universe.

The first step to make trade interesting would be to make a working economy system that is fast enough to actually display a natural looking behaviour, but still slow enough for the player. Some examples:

- Privateer 1 and 2 had some kind of pseudo-random economy that actually worked quite well, the player had the chance to know where to buy and sell stuff at reasonable prices. The price spans were specific to the base types, so there always was a chance at profit. Privateer 2 improved on that with public, not mission-bound events like crop disease that would influence price in a predictable way and gave you a reasonable amout of time to react.

- X2 has a full-blown economy system, but it is waaaay to fast. Large quantities of goods are bought and sold so quickly that the player has little chance of making a good deal. Prices are literally ruined while you''re looking at the menus.

- Patrician has a great dynamic game economy. You have to be on your toes, but it is not as frustrating as X2 because trade volumes are smaller. Also, there are many "side-quests" like multi-part treasure maps, pirate hunts, etc. to keep the player busy. This is probably something you''ll want to have a look at.

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But this goes both ways. If a region is pirate infested and generates alot of pirate encounters, will you find it odd that they’re suddenly quiet everytime you get a mission?

Worse, yet, you could easily use this system to powermax: Take a mission you have no intention of finishing just to get to a lucrative trade area. In pirate infested communities, prices would be sky high due to scarcity. So you just take a mission, the game quiets the encounters, and then you make a killing without any risk—which becomes VERY boring.

That''s exactly the problem I thought of when writing the "time critical" special case. There may be story missions that need not be finished anytime soon. During those missions, it''d actually be OK to have any interruptions possible. E.g. if your "mission" is just something along the lines of "talk to A at station X", there is just no reason to decativate the rest of the universe.

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It just is not right when you are on a story mission that requires your presence to save someone from an attack and then head off to save some bozo who couldn''t steer around an asteroid.

Right there I see that as a problem: By creating a bozo who couldn’t steer mission, you lose respect for the other NPCs. But what about someone who’s been disabled in a system filled with dangerous fast moving gas and dust? I’ve changed the situation only to see if that makes any difference in how you feel.

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What if the game told you there would be a tradeoff [fulfilling a mission vs. a random event] via dialog / NPCs. For instance, you get a mission to disable a jumpgate before a main invasion force gets through. Skirmishes already dot the system, though. Your mission giver says to you, “Don’t get distracted out there. If you don’t disable that gate in time, this system is lost.” And it would be, the system would change hands if you failed.

The bozo part was just an exaggeration to clarify the situation. If your story design would allow for the loss of "key objectives", then everything goes. But if you have critical missions, you''ll have to signal that to the player, or (s)he will get pissed. However, don''t you think there would be a metric buttload of distress calls in a war area anyway? The whole concept of event filtering is to prevent uncontrolled "the player has left the storyline" situations.