Proposal Discussion Procedural story line missions

celludriel

C
Currently each mission is a one shot, go there and deliver x, kill y. It works but only for so long before it gets boring and make the game stale. I'm stealing a bit from EvE at the moment but I'm taking the material with a twist. In eve you had exploration where after a mission you had a chance it would escalate and give you another mission. Now lets take those basics and build on that.

I'm thinking of a mechanic where you start a simple mission for a client and it starts to branch out in all kind of directions. By doing so stringing together a story. For example:

- Rescue a merchants kidnapped daughter by delivering a ransom to a station
- Fly the daughter back to the merchant
- Merchant wants revenge and asks you to figure out who the real kidnappers are, fly to a coordinate and perform a patrol where you get attacked by several ships you destroy them but find in the debris a map to some pirate station.
- You fly to the pirate station and have to clear a minefield
- Now the kidnapper appears and you have to kill him
- Fly back with proof to the Merchant

Now these are all independent tasks strung together to form a short story. Now you could get creative and make 1000 of theses little tasks, give them a meta tag so you don't get weird combinations and start creating hundred of stories. Another fine addition would be that you keep each completed story in some kind of journal so you can have history of all your good/evil deeds. You could create evil stories as well of course.

Being a sandbox and do what you want kind of game is fun for a while but without a goal or destination it usually gets quite stale after a while. Storylines would give a bit more directions and you could earn some creds along the way.
 

Pham Nuwen

Pham Nuwen
I completely agree. Once all the elements of the sandbox are in it shouldn't be too difficult for FD to script in multi-part missions like this. If you think about it, the missions will still be kill this, fly here, deliver this etc. But a little bit of added context would really spice things up.
 

Iskariot

Iskariot
I completely agree Celludriel and I expect them to implement something like you are suggesting. I seem to vaguely remember David Braben saying something to such accord in an interview.
 

Hellhawk666

Hellhawk666
celludriel said:
...
I'm thinking of a mechanic where you start a simple mission for a client and it starts to branch out in all kind of directions. By doing so stringing together a story....
Click to expand...

Yep, great idea - but the mechanic would have to be random within a predetermined set of patterns - if it was 100% procedural then everyone would get the same missions, which would kind of defeat the purpose :)
 

VR jefranklin18

VR jefranklin18
Frontier First Encounters had such inter-linked missions so Frontier have the relevant experience. I fully expect to see it, if not at launch then as an update at some point thereafter.
 

Defacto

Defacto
I think a better word for how (I believe) the mission system will work later on is ''dynamic'' instead of ''procedural'', as in, every action you do in the missions, as well as the missions themselves are based on the simulation of the game world.
If you take a mission to move 5 tonnes of Coffee to Port Zelada, you will not just have 5 tonnes of Coffee spawned into your cargo hold. You are moving assets owned by another party to another place, for this party to sell there.
If a party pays you for doing a mission, the party pays you with its money, you wouldn't just get money transported into your account form the void.

Taxes you pay go to the major factions. A credit the Empire earned through taxation of your Cabbage transports might later go into paying another commander for taking out a target, or into producing and training a new wing of Imperial Fighters. Or, it might go into furnishing the latest Duval's living quarters.

Transporting 30 tonnes of grain to a famished system wouldn't just reduce the ''famine-level'' by a set amount, it would give the delivery point's stock 30 more tonnes of grain, which it could use for distribution to simulation entities that would purchase or take those goods.
 

Count Sarrik

C
Dunno if any of you remember the Escape Velocity series from back in the day, but I found they had some compelling storyline play. Even something this simple would be a good starting point until better, more in-depth content can be created.

Now if I can just find time to actually play...
 

celludriel

C
Hellhawk666 said:
Yep, great idea - but the mechanic would have to be random within a predetermined set of patterns - if it was 100% procedural then everyone would get the same missions, which would kind of defeat the purpose :)
Click to expand...

Yeah maybe procedural was the wrong chosen word. But you get where I'm going with it. Some way to make "meaningful" story line missions , stitched together from single repeatable tasks in a way they make sence to stick together.
 
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