here's what i'd love to see:
- that dude's orrery map (ya'll know what i mean) - more cool mappy things that would be meaningful for co-pilots, basically.
- that dude's scientists and scanning ideas (ya'll know what i mean) - more ways to scan and see planets in order to find things and make science more interactive
Trade Routes/Guided Tours and a CMDRS LOG:
- trade route maps and ability to create trade route maps and then sell them (and players to be able to mark ones that fall out of date or are bad routes)...
- with that, give me explorer maps, where you can buy routes, create and sell routes (including waypoints/stopovers) with narrative text tied to locations (like a tour guide)
- to go with that, an "Explorers Log"... every time I scan something new, give me the option to "Record a log" and let me write a tweet-sized log entry in my chat log... so at the end of the journey, i can go back and review my "thoughts" of certain locations, in my "LOG Entries" tab that has "General", "Trade Routes", "Expeditions"... and maybe "Tracked Bounties" (though that idea's for another post), but you'd use your explorers log to publish a "guide" which would be a list of all the systems that you made notes for - call it... oh.... "a CMDRs guide to the galaxy". Towels included. Point is, I can chose to "start/end expeditions" and then record "logs" about anything I've just scanned for later review, and then go through, maybe delete the logs that weren't interesting and then publish the entries of that expedition to a community market place. Then someone else wants to say, find a guide, so they input the destination system into the market and it pulls up any logs that include that system, with a player rating system... they buy the log with in-game currency and then they program it into their ship, so it plots the course for them by using each note's location as the next route destination. Each time you reach a location, the note will play out in the chat log, so I could warn/joke about a dangerous binary star ahead, or tell them to check out this system's gas giants for a good time. With a player rating system, (git) good guides could swell to the top and make their creators fortunes (in-game)!
- so "start trade route" and "start expedition" with little notes i can write myself for later, but also put on a "market" so people can sell this data in a way that is meaningful for other players.
edit: oh, and the guides could only be purchased from the starting location of the expedition - so if I do "Sol to Merope", you'd have to buy it in Sol.
Camera Drones
The game is SO pretty, but the debug camera feels limited. Why not have "camera limpets" that can be piloted like ship-launched fighters. I could launch and then pilot from a first-person wide-angle view for a limited time- maybe zoom, or be able to display no HUD or a camera HUD?... maybe even with a combat modification version to make them manually guided missiles, but if only for the purpose of being able to get wider, sweeping footage, I'd love to see this. Also would be cool if you could jump back to your ship and see the camera feed pop up in a PIP window... but just having an "in-game" camera mode that tied into the realism would be very cool for making videos... of the dangus kind.
Exploration Events
And finally, I'd love to see more "events"... like you enter an system and might get:
- This system has a comet passing through it, you have exactly 5 minutes to find it and rendezvous
- This system is going Supernova in 5 minutes, either get to a distance of xlight seconds or jump away to avoid certain death
- This system has a gas giant turning into a white dwarf / getting hit by a small planet / experiencing a polar shift and you have 5 minutes to get there to witness something cool
- You intercept a signal - somewhere in this system there's a signal... the audio signal is getting louder as you approach a planet.... you find a historic explorer's final resting place / stranded explorer who needs help / large unknown facility
- An asteroid has been detected heading towards an Earth Like World you just discovered - it will impact in 10 minutes, unless you stop it... will you save the dinosaurs? Or just stick around to watch the fireworks?
Even if these were RNG events that would reset if I left and came back (ie. planetary destruction reversed) it would be awesome to just stumble on some rare events that were semi-scripted and showed off some BIG cosmic craziness.
That way, even if you start to get stuck in that repetitive grind, every rare occasion the game would throw in a wrench to get you checking something out that would be too hard to pass up.
Anyway, that would be some cool stuff, but I'll take any improvements I can get!
