Mission - hand coded/procedural balance?

[Angus]

Do I mean procedural? I mean missions generated from routines rather than specifically written by a human.

My first encounter with Elite was sneaking into a dark and musty mobile office at work during the lunch hour and playing it basically as a shoot-em-up with a couple of other guys, just running some cargo from Lave to feudal or anarchic worlds and seeing if we could survive the trip. This was prior to BT getting the rights for the C64, Spectrum and Amstrad versions.

When I became more aware of the game's depth, and heard people talk about the missions; the Constrictor, cloaking devices, Naval energy units etc, it elevated the game from being a tremendous 3D shoot-em-up to..... a legend.

While I loved many aspects of Frontier on my Amiga, I felt the missions gradually started to feel like a computer routine that ran:

Intercept ship X at (or take package X to) planet Y for reward of Z credits etc. It felt like I'd seen pretty much everything in the game after a while.


And I remember during the production of First Encounters there was a lot of talk about hand-coded missions.

So after all this waffle, have there been any announcements or discussion about how the "missions" will be generated? My assumption is that the code generated missions will be pretty cool and feel more "special" than those in Frontier etc, but will there be epic hand coded storylines that make you feel you are into something really BIG, and that your actions can actually make a difference?

 

[Fangrim]

You answered your own question, I think.

Several deeper hand-crafted missions, with a good amount of "generic" procedurally generated ones thrown in the mix.

Edit: Misread your question.

I have no idea about the ratio of hand-crafted vs. generated missions.

I suspect that the vast amount of missions will be procedurally generated ones, basic stuff like transport missions, assassinations/bounties, etc.

A percentage/ratio... No idea ;o)

I do think that there will be a lot of cool hand-crafted ones, some that will be part of a storyline.

 

[Angus]

I do think that there will be a lot of cool hand-crafted ones, some that will be part of a storyline.

I certainly hope you're right. I'm not expecting an all dominant story, and I don't think that would be a good idea, but I think an occasional door leading to a mysterious adventure and taking you away from the routine would be very "Elite". And if they are deep and absorbing adventures, so much the better.


When I got Elite on my C64 (which I bought for Elite) nobody really knew how many missions etc were involved, not even Zzap!!64, so every time you docked or approached a new system, or jumped to hyperspace, there was that slight but distinct possibility that you might just encounter something extraordinary.

That was the wonder of it. Obviously if Frontier spelt out what was planned for Elite Dangerous in this regard they would ruin the effect, but have there been any hints about their thinking on the subject, its a pretty serious issue after all?

 

[Zallibik]

Superb post, I totally agree, the ODD hand crafted mission here and there would be excellent, even if you only came across one every month it will still be something to look forward to showing up on the bulletin board.

 

[Karl]

I only know FE2, where I think there were way too little mission diversity, even for back then. I tend to not like handcrafted missions for games without a plot, but its hard for me to imagine what kind of diversity they could come up with given the limited gameplay mechanics in place to support it. Even old bombruns and photoshoot missions seems impossible without planetary landings/lowlevel flybys.

So yeah, I'm against handcrafted, yet I don't see any way to get enough diversity for a pure procedural mission generation system either. So...

 

[Hellhawk666]

...
So after all this waffle, have there been any announcements or discussion about how the "missions" will be generated? My assumption is that the code generated missions will be pretty cool and feel more "special" than those in Frontier etc, but will there be epic hand coded storylines that make you feel you are into something really BIG, and that your actions can actually make a difference?

Short answer: no. We have no idea how small day-to-day missions will be created, but I'd imagine either procedurally or randomly, and I'm sure they would be more sophisticated than such generated missions have been in previous games.

There will be occasional "injected content" from the devs in the form of large world-events like war or disasters that will create a nexus for emergent gameplay, but I don't think they would be scripted storylines.

 

[Rog]

I wonder if we'll get auto-generated missions that involve interaction with or even the destruction of actual *human* players?

For instance:

Notorious felon 'Terrian Joon' has been harassing and murdering traders, he's currently in the Betelgeuse system.

The bounty on his head currently stands at 50,000 credits.

It's high-risk, but we'd like you to retire him permanently. Further updates to his wherabouts will be transmitted to you when available.

Accept mission Y/N?

Or perhaps missions where human player #1 is given half of a mission, and an unconnected human player #2 the other half and they have to meet and swap cargo/secrets/carry out a raid together.

Whaddya think?

 

[Flin]

Reading the Design Discussion Forum I am getting the sense that background simulation triggering PG and human-driven events that spawns missions should be quite sophisticated and much more improved compared to the prior versions.

Do A at B for C is quite basic.

But if you higher magnitude of variables in the PG mission engine + a sophisticated background simulation to drive the "why" and trigger the "impact", then it should be such that manually-crafted missions aren't critical as good amount of variations are already codified.

So my guess is very few manually-crafted missions.