And I thought I was the only one all these years.
Alternatives to grind?
- Thread starter Crimson Kaim
- Start date
And I thought I was the only one all these years.
I have no meaningful contribution to this thread but I felt compelled to add my name to the list of pen/pen-lid spaceship-makers. The fun I had!
I trade during the week when I can only jump on for a short time. On the weekends I do missions and work on rep while hunting pirates. This game has choices... you have to be able to choose the right path for you.
GAME ON!
P.S. Sometimes I switch it around, just for the fun of it.
GAME ON!
P.S. Sometimes I switch it around, just for the fun of it.
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sort of proving op's point, exploring is boring so switch on radio as an example.
i used to switch on radio at work to pass the time in a boring job.
It's a game, for fun, why switch on a radio, i can do that without the game.
The problem is that in ED thay are even more boring than average. Even an average crappy MMO puts more effort into missions than that, they have at least some missions that are not "fetch X of Y", "give X to Y" or "kill X of Y".
If a game needs outside distractions to not feel like a boring grind, why play it in the first place? Why not make a game worthy of your full attention?
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exactly: and why does this game create competitions, and streamers create races and other challenges or reasons to get together and have fun. Because it is so obvious the game is lacking, so players have to create their own fun.
exactly. just a copy of the most simple mission mechanics a "mmo" could offer. bulletin board missions + uss are a joke.
thats what i was asking myself while playing XCOM Enemy Unknown during E.D super-cruise...
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Grinding is a mindset.. You don't need to have 100 million cr, you don't need to have the biggest or most expensive ship, you need to get out of the typical mmo mindset and simply enjoy the game and have fun.
I've been playing very close to a year now, still flying a Cobra, still having fun. I have no need to make millions or buy a huge ship.
If you think like that and grind and grind for weeks and eventually buy your huge ship.. What next? ..you'll have nothing to aim for and be bored in 2-3 days.
I've been playing very close to a year now, still flying a Cobra, still having fun. I have no need to make millions or buy a huge ship.
If you think like that and grind and grind for weeks and eventually buy your huge ship.. What next? ..you'll have nothing to aim for and be bored in 2-3 days.
Ultimately the game still needs a hell of a lot of work. Bulletin board missions are utterly pointless once you've already made your first million. If, as has been suggested, missions had the prospect of expanding then they'd add so much more value.
I fully understand people's gripes with the game. Players are generally limited to trading, farming bounty or exploring since mining is a total chore and missions haven't progressed since beta.
I fully understand people's gripes with the game. Players are generally limited to trading, farming bounty or exploring since mining is a total chore and missions haven't progressed since beta.
I like the idea a lot - and it'd be great if the game had some more extended missions - but I think you're significantly underestimating the amount of effort required to implement them.
1) They need to test every component, including for players taking actions outside of the implicit arrangement of the mission. What if the player shoots the Asp on sight? What if another player who hasn't taken the mission - and may not even know it's happening! - drops into the station instance just after the Asp arrives? What if a wing is doing the mission? What if the player has a mining laser on their ship and shoots the meteor with it (what if they don't)? What if the player is flying a large ship and can't dock with the outpost (and switched to it after getting the mission)? What if the player has also taken on a smuggling mission and a bunch of NPC Eagles from that mission drop-in while they're nearby having followed the player? Lots of possibilities - and that's just for the initial steps you've set out - all of which are answerable easily enough but have to be thought of and answered before the mission is released for play. The simple one-step low-interaction missions don't have this problem anywhere near as much (and still have bugs around what choices they have)
2) How long should the mission take in total? Is that time measured in real time or in-game time for the principal(s)? If it's in real time, how many hours/day play is "expected"; if it's in in-game time, what do you do if there's any multiplayer interaction involved and one player goes on holiday for a week and leaves their ship in a hangar? (This is also important for "Interesting, Commander. Leave this with me for a few days to investigate further." stages) Are there stages of the mission which can be ignored indefinitely until the player is ready to start them? What are the consequences for the player abandoning the mission?
3) What new AI responses, information displays, etc. are needed? (Even making the station seem "dead" I would expect to require small modifications to art assets, even if nothing major needs adjusting)
I'd guess - depending on how many extra steps there are - that actually building that sort of mission would be at least a few person-months of time (most of it in testing and bug fixing)
Also, who gets to play the mission? If you can repeatedly find abandoned stations in the same state yourself, then that gets weird in a way that a more generic "take some cargo here" mission does not. If you only get to play it once per commander - and how does that apply to someone who shows up to help you with the tough fight in step 8? - that's still a bit weird in that there are all these identical abandoned stations but you only get to do one. If it's only a "limited edition" mission for a few hundred commanders ... that seems a lot like wasted effort compared with the other things which they could be adding.
What I believe from the DDF archives Frontier are eventually planning is to have mission generation be automated so that the game can produce that sort of complex mission dynamically - which is an incredibly hard programming challenge. I would expect to see much simpler but still multi-stage missions coming up first, as well as mission sources (e.g. distress calls) which don't depend on the bulletin board.
Sure. Designing the mission would take 15 minutes, making it actually work would take way more. But I think, when you already have a solid world base (and Elite has!), then it would be not only worth it, but also it is essential. That's why every other modern AAA sandbox has moderately advanced missions. Not only missions - a whole main plot even!
Elite right now is like Assassin's Creed or GTA V without the plot. All the gameplay features are in there, but there's no story or goal that organizes them together and gives the player a purpose.
Now, more to the point:
1) Those problems are solvable quite easly, when you make a number of restriction and fail-safe solutions. For example:
- only one player or 1 wing can do the mission; other players spawn in their own instance of the mission
- if you screw up deliberately (for example by shooting down the NPC friendly ASP), you can continue, you just don't have the additional plot feedback, but you can still complete the mission. Or just resign from ASP idea, maybe the last surviver talks to you form the station, so there's nobody to shoot really
- make it not outpost, but a station, so even large ships can dock
- if the player jumps to the mission area all NPC smuggling wing parters disappear and the smuggling mission is failed (because time-space anomaly or whatever else)
- what if the player starts mining the strange asteroid? Well, that would be one of the mission goals, right?
I just didn't get to that part yet.- etc. etc...
Generally, it's not hard to think of all those problems and it's not hard to implement the fail-safe solutions. Easiest way is just going "that mission resets all other missions and creates a private or solo instance just for you and your player wing. Mission fails if destroyed or abandoned". That solves pretty much all the problems or stupid things that player could do. And you can design those missions to be "completable" by any ship or wing, even without weapons or cargo hold. For example, by making the necessary modules available for free at the dead station. I mean, it's nothing new - we see that type of missions and fail-safes in all modern sandbox games.
2) As for the time to complete the mission - maybe the clock should not even apply for the "story missions", that create your own instance mission location? You know, a story-driven mission like that can't be "open". You can be in "open" mode, but only you alone (and your wing) can see and jump to the generated mission location.
3) As for new assets and AI - none are needed really! Only the story text, served as messages (like you currently get in current missions). Some coding would be involved of course, but no different then current mission coding. It's just the mission design matter really. For example:
- when you search for assassination mission target, you encounter NPC ships that fly near you and say stuff like "We offer you the same amount of credits for killing the other guy!". So, NPC's talking to player is a working mission mechanic. Just using to send more interesting story dialogues.
- dead station - it's just a model of a regular station with lights off (or the texture glow set to 0, or whatever they did there). 2 clicks and there's a dead station.
- ASP friendly NPC, meteorite, meteor chunks, text, text ,text, enemies... whatever appears in the mission should be thought of "what can we build with current assets that we already have?"
I think making a mission like that would be a 1-2 weeks work for a senior level designer who knows Elite engine well. All mechanics are there, this is just design, no features need to be "invented". Finally, I guess the replayability would be a problem. That mission would need to be custom made obviously, but that's the main point I'm trying to make. Procedurally generated missions are all "kill 10 Vipers" or "Bring us 4 Uranium" and that's the problem, that can be solved by producing a big ammount of hand-made story missions.
You know what? No. You can totally make it procedurally generated. Just with more imagination than "kill x of y in z minutes". You can make stories modular, like this:
I made it up just like that, with no thought, but if mission designer would actually spend 1 week on designing the "web" of procedural story missions, it could be really interesting, unpredictible and epic. Every single combination. This would be huge amount of work to execute and implement it, but they don't have to make it all at once... Why not a quick 2-3 prototype missions, made in 2 weeks, just to test if this would work well? I realize this is an idea for a whole new game mechanic (maye even biggest after combat) though.
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This is very true. I want to do faction missions but find the pay crazy poor. The trade missions don't even scale to the bigger ships.