With a due sense of trepidation, my thoughts on PowerPlay.
http://www.drewwagar.com/progress-report/elite-powerplay/
Cheers,
Drew.
It's a good point that PP lacks basic characterisation, which would undoubtedly improve it. As a novelist you are qualified to comment. To be honest the writing talent at Frontier is not extensive, as demonstrated by the struggle to establish basic ungarbled grammar and a convincing journalistic style in Galnet. It was eventually improved to its present standard from a low base, so it makes sense to hope and agitate for improvement rather than despair.
No doubt as an 'official' novelist you have back channel access to senior developers, and no doubt if you wrote a few sample biographies it could inspire the limited improvements you suggest.
On the 'we don't want politics' thing I am less convinced. There was considerable interest just after the initial release in systems like Lugh if you remember, where players provided a narrative for insurrection and overthrow of the established political order, but the first implementation was (in my view) badly botched technically for reasons we will never be told. It didn't work for a long time and even the most dogged players became increasingly weary waiting for it to be fixed. It seems likely that on a second pass by designers (Sandro I guess) it was decided to overlay a better system in the hope that it would capture the interest of players who found the pure money grind too limiting. It's arguable whether PP achieves that, but it explains perhaps why no hint of Powerplay was ever seen in DDF - it was a reactive development, and based on players' interest in galactic politics as well as their willingness to provide narratives as part of role play in social media such as this forum.
On 'consolization is baaad' I disagree profoundly. It is surely possible to design good user interfaces for consoles and PCs without compromising either platform and that is surely the only sensible goal. It is, in my opinion, a false either/or choice when both can successfully be accommodated without detriment to either. I hope you will strike it from your list of gripes in future, on the grounds that it detracts from the other good points you make.
My final point (thanks if anyone got this far, I do go on a bit) is that Elite originally never had any integrated narrative of note.
To overlay narrative is not a bad thing, provided it is optional, thought through and done well rather than being a gesture or placeholder. If I was in charge (thankfully I am not) I would be looking carefully at local scale, procedurally generated narratives responding directly to player actions, integrated closely with Galnet, to find out what players are interested in and amplify what emerges from them. It seems this is what PP attempts in some ways, but the injected stories presently lack convincing detail and are not generated in any serious way by players. It's emphatically not the same thing as getting someone to write a 'good' story and bolting it on.
The involvement of a novelist, perhaps you, would be a major factor in any successful system of this kind. Since you care about it, I hope you get the job.
